Oh yes, how I must hate women to even think to say that annoying a woman disequals rape. I'll turn myself into a sensitization camp immediately. Thank you for showing me the light.

I agree that if they only used those two videos, then the study doesn't tell us very much. I imagine they used more than just those two videos, though.

Why would the woman you are dancing with want to lower her value by being seen to dance for you, and why would she have fun dancing with you if you are just standing there? It seems to me that that kind of behavior only lends itself to not having fun in itself and also pretty soon to not have any dance partners.

The article we are talking about here says that keeping your upper body and head still and moving the rest of the body only is exactly the opposite of what will make you look like a good dancer to women - at least if their perception has not already been influenced by a statement about what is considered the correct way to dance according to some dance school.

Wikileaks is not in the business of acquiring information. Wikileaks is in the business of publishing information that other people are sending to them, but that those people don't dare to publish themselves. So they have no special capability to investigate this matter beyond what you or I have.

What impacts his reputation in this instance is the mere fact of having been accused. Everything else is largely irrelevant.

Not only does it take "a bunch of research scientists creating a bunch of avatars to determine that women don't find flailing arms attractive," it even still isn't established having done that! This is just one data point and in future we might find a different way to interpret it. You are confusing on one hand having an expectation (we've all got that) and on the other hand having confirmation of that expectation (much more difficult).

E.g. if I showed you a study saying that being cold causes you to have a cold, would you say that nothing new had been discovered? If you said yes, you'd be wrong (and for argument's sake suppose you did say yes, even if you already knew this), because in fact the research has been done and being cold does not cause a cold! That people tend to get more colds in winter is due to other factors that are indeed caused by the colder weather, but not by way of cold directly making you more susceptible to getting infected. So avoiding being cold will do nothing to help you not get a cold. So in this case your expectation was shown to be wrong (we are assuming for the sake of argument), and in this instance we can agree that you learned something new. Now what if the study had shown that being cold causes a cold? Since it is abundantly clear that you didn't actually know that being cold causes a cold (since in reality it doesn't), you would have learned something new from this information - you would have learned information that increases your confidence in what you already suspected to be true. So when research comes out saying something you already suspected, you will now know, I hope, that you are still learning something new.

Back on the concrete topic: asking women what they find attractive in male dancing is a perfectly reasonable thing to also do. It is a good way to generate hypotheses about the subject, and it can corroborate information gained in other ways. Yet what if what women say don't match what this experiment comes out with? I know that I certainly place much more stock in this kind of research than I would a questionnaire. The point is to approach a matter in as many different directions as possible, because in that way you can get a much higher confidence about what is actually true, instead of just discovering what people's expectations are. That's good science. It's not common sense, because common sense is about just assuming that your expectations are true. Surely being cold causes colds, right? It is common sense not to investigate "obvious" things, and that is why science trumps common sense.

Yes, I believe that your point was the point the OP was making. I don't agree with it because Wikileaks isn't publishing just anything - they publish what they see as having a purpose in being published. In any case the police should look out for the interest of everyone equally, even to the point of keeping appropriate secrets about a man whose job it is to reveal the secrets of other people. The police shouldn't be lax in protecting people they may not like. In the same way it is a failure of the US military that they allowed their secrets to be uncovered, and that is the case independently of whether or not those things should have been kept secret in the first place or whether Assange is evil for having uncovered them. So I don't agree with the conclusion you and the OP are drawing, namely that Assange has forfeited part of his right to being dealt with by the police in a professional manner due to what he does for a living - but it a position a reasonable person could hold so it certainly isn't flamebait.

I must bow down to your mastery of argument. The error of my ways are so clear to me now. No mere moron like me could survive the briefest ray of your shining genius in the ways of logic.

I'm shocked that I can't tell if you are a feminist or a parody of a feminist.

That's not how it works. The feminist position is that the notion that false accusations of rape occur enough to take the notion too seriously is part of the oppression of women. The hypothetical false accuser gets no support, but the actual false accuser gets lots of support on the presumption of being sincere.

INTERPOL is not a Swedish organization, as you must know. You might as well have listed the US definition of rape. Here is something that actually has to do with Sweden:

http://www.thelocal.se/19376/20090511/

Doesn't go into detail, but it does mention that the Swedish definition of rape is broader than in other countries. That's what I found on the first page of Googling for "rape definition sweden". If you really care about the matter you can probably find something more specific.

That Hitler quote is interesting, and it makes me wonder why general education does not generally involve reading the speeches of evil people who were never the less skilled at persuasion. I would want such a thing as a way to immunize the citizens against demagogues, but then I realized that another outcome could be that we'd have a lot more nazi's in the world today. Though perhaps even that price would be worth it as long as the average citizen got a bit wiser to political manipulation.

So the damning evidence of his crime is that he annoyed a woman while being male. Lock him up and throw away the key, yes ma'am!

I don't agree with the parent, but he was clearly making a valid point that is nothing like flamebait. Shame on you, mods!