Well, I'm no longer at a serious risk of dying from a kidney infection. What do you think? And you know, it would've been nice if somebody figured this shit out and treated it when I was a child. It'd have been nice to grow up to have two fully functional kidneys.

You don't describe precisely what's the boy's condition, but hey, you're missing the point, which is that medical conditions that are minor at birth, if left unchecked, may compound over decades and threaten your life (or just outright kill you!) in adulthood. We are now increasingly able to detect, monitor and treat such issues early in life. This does lead to a lot of children receiving minor treatment for issues that wouldn't even be in the radar 30 years ago, but hey, better safe than sorry.

I'm going to quote from a reference page on what I had:

So, 0.06% of children born (presumably in the USA) show some evidence of antenatal kidney problems similar to what I had. In the end only about half of those in the end are diagnosed with the condition. Most of these are monitored periodically to make sure that complications aren't developing, and given conservative treatment, with an eye on whether the issue corrects itself—and it often does as the child grows.

All this shows is that today we can detect a lot more than we could 30 years ago, we can detect it earlier, and we can better keep an eye on it. Where's the bad?

Well, when I was 29, I had a major health incident. The first warning was a serious kidney infection. The doctors had sent me to get my kidney scanned in a few different ways (ultrasound, nuclear, CAT) and discovered that I had a "stricture in the ureteropelvic juncture": i.e., the junction between my left kidney and the tube that connects it to the bladder was deformed and narrowed, making it hard for liquid to drain from it. This stricture most likely was there before I was even born, and 29 years of living with that had caused my left kidney to become an infection-prone rock garden that was only about 25% as functional as the healthy right kidney. Thankfully with today's tech they didn't have to open me up to fix me; they stuck a tube into my kidney (without anesthesia!) and then shot it with lasers (with anesthesia during the lasers bit).

But guess what? Today they discover this sort of stuff prenatally, with routine ultrasound scans during pregnancy, and thus can treat it during childhood before it becomes as complicated as that.

Well, for starters, there are objections to your premise.

Then the second problem is your assumption that physical laws "govern" how objects interact. We don't have to accept that assumption; we can assume instead that physics is a collection of predictive theories about the world, which we accept because they meet some statistical criteria.

The experiments that support your typical physical theory don't produce the exact numbers that the theories' equations predict. We don't reject the theories because of this; rather, we use statistical tests to see how well the numbers fit the theory if we assume that they are the result of random deviations from the prediction.

In this case, then, we can support a deterministic physical theory without having to conclude that the world must be nonrandom, because we cannot prove that the deviations that we observe from the theory are deterministic. Such a proof would require yet another theory to predict the deviations, and the experiments to support that second theory would in turn have the same random deviation from our predictions.

But of course, it's also possible for a predator to get a good defender to sell the idea that the prosecution is just inventing fantastical veiled threats for what was just an innocent situation. I just don't think that argument has any weight.

We haven't touched the larger problem in these cases, which is that society at large just blames the victim when it comes to rape. I can build the best circumstantial argument ever that the defendant clearly and repeatedly showed a systematic disinterest on whether the accuser consented, and too many juries are going to come back and say that the accuser is a slut and it's her own damn fault, or worse: case in point. (Though the prosecution did retry that case and win.)

I'm skeptical of the value of having some seemingly precise number here. It's not like people are going to wear stopwatches during sex so they can time whether the man pulled out quickly enough. Or, more perversely, how many rapists who hear of a "5 second rule" or "30 second rule" would simply exploit this to not stop in a timely fashion? ("Ok, she said 'stop,' so I'll just keep going for 30 seconds, and maybe by then she'll stop saying 'no.'")

If your partner asks you to stop you should stop as soon as you can. If you're not doing anything particularly kinky, in the practical sense that really just means "immediately." Contrary to what whiny rape apologists would like you to believe, if you treat your partner with respect, are attentive to what she's experiencing and you stop when she asks you, she will be satisfied that you stopped "immediately" even if the stopwatch says 5.7 seconds.

In the real world, when a woman accuses a guy of not stopping immediately, there's a much better than even chance that the guy just didn't care about her continued consent. And that makes him a rapist.

The Reasonable Person Standard doesn't mean "most," and if by "subjective" you mean "anybody

There is evidence accompanying the allegations. For example, one of the accusers' exes has testified that he never had condomless sex with her over the course of a two-year relationship. The implication here is that it's very unlikely that this lady would now consent to this with a guy she barely knew. One of the accusers also claims that Assange wouldn't leave her house, that she stayed over at a friend's house one night to avoid him, and eventually had to call the cops to get the guy to leave—the cops' testimony about what happened then is third party evidence. There's also expert judgement that a condom that Assange used was torn on purpose.

Before you protest, note that I'm not claiming that the allegations are true. My point is that's up to a court to decide whether the whole body of evidence and argumentation presented by the prosecution and the defense merits a conviction. But your claim that there is no evidence is false.

I'm sick of having to remember so many complicated passwords. Now that Hotmail is going to force me to change my password to something I can't remember, I'm just going to have to migrate to another email company. Hopefully I can get the same user name part as I have now (ron_damon).

Nah, there's actually a few, and they're very loud. They don't post to Slashdot, though.

So let's assume you an argument of this form:

• If P, then Q.
• Not P.
• Conclusion: not Q.

I answer with an argument like this one:

• If R, then S.
• S.
• Conclusion: R.

Both of these arguments are, of course, invalid; the second one is the fallacy of affirming the consequent. Yet by what I quoted, you are fallaciously claiming that by making this argument I would lend validity to yours, when it does not such thing.

There's some good news for you, though by providing the logical fallacy that the GP has proven your point by providing a logical fallacy, you have not proven the GP's point, which is you what you would've if he'd had.

Glad I can help clear this up.

Or, in other words, yes.

So, if the original cost of building the road was $n, and there were zero homes next to it, what was the average cost per home? (Oh, crap, I just divided by zero!!!!!)

Econ 101: this does not hold if there are externalities. Excessive energy use leads to pollution (among other things), which is usually a textbook example of a negative externality.

Yup. We can add to that list, and here's one: it would be really strange and self-servingly convenient for me if it was really true that I walked into the home of a stranger like you with a gun (which we both agree that you saw!) and you just happened to be such a swell guy that not only was it OK with you that I did so, but you also gave me a really valuable object as a gift. I.e., no reasonable person would think any of this is likely.

And hell, even if I was telling 100% the truth as I experienced it I should still be convicted of something, because a reasonable person should have known that strangers who give you extremely valuable gifts when you enter their houses while armed actually believe I'm robbing them.

Rape allegations should be judged similarly to how we're judging this imaginary scenario; a combination of facts about the situation and "reasonable person" standards that either rule out fanciful explanations, or still blame people when they act out of recklessness or criminal negligence. The fact is that most of the rape apology bullshit you read in this thread is more akin to the unreasonable story that my imaginary defense is concocting, where I take your Picasso without showing any reasonable regard for the possibility that, gee, you might not actually want to give it to me.

Likewise, if a woman tries to reach for a condom right before you are going to penetrate her and you use force to hold her down and prevent her from doing so, gee, perhaps maybe she doesn't want to have sex with you like that, and, shikes, you should ponder whether at that point she's still consenting to what you're about to do.

PS, those two links above are important. A lot of rape apology scenarios, when you read them carefully, basically boil down to excuses for recklessness or criminal negligence about consent. The apologies repeatedly argue that in some scenario the man is justified in "going ahead" with a woman that might not actually want to. I.e., they're trying to construct a justification for sex that does not rely on whether the victim actually consents, or trying to find "tricks" to avoid the responsibility of figuring out whether she wants it or not.

If you watch The Implication video, that's also what's going on; boat guy is saying that that in certain situations a woman "will" or "has to" have sex with him, and systematically avoiding the crucial issue of whether she really wants to.

We'll set aside the fact that you insist on talking about sex like a commercial transaction.

The answer is yes. Some transactions are over the second that both parties make them, like the donut purchase. Some transactions are ongoing and can be broken at will at any moment. Like, for example, at-will employment. Then there's all sorts of cases in between.

Let's leave aside the fact that you are wrong about what the accusers' testimony is. Explicit verbal refusal is not necessary for rape. The thing that's relevant is whether the accused party had sex with the alleged victim in spite of a lack of consent. There are many ways this can happen; one of them is disregarding explicit refusals, but another is showing a clear disregard for whether the victim consents.

I.e., the criminal law standards of recklessness and criminal negligence apply to rape.

It's physically impossible to pull out during sex? Damn, I must be doing it wrong.

And in Assange's case, there is one allegation that he used force to overcome resistance before starting—and another that he started while the alleged victim was asleep.

Right! Just like in this video.

Yes, because the critical question in these cases isn't whether she wanted it, but rather which other aspects of the situation make it OK for a guy to have sex with a woman despite the fact that she might not actually want to.