Dio the ballbag

The BBQ Pit
121

Can you think of an example? I can’t remember a single time he’s yielded and accepted when he was obviously wrong.

The thing about getting pregnant or getting an STD from sex is just that they happen. You can take reasonable precautions like wearing condoms (which I would say is analogous to checking ID) and reduce your risk greatly, but it’s not utterly reliable, so sometimes it happens anyway. But here’s the thing - no one is judging you, no one is deeming that you should have an STD, it just happens. It’s cause and effect.

The thing with statutory rape is a social construct. Going to jail for having sex with a 17 year old is not a natural consequence of the action in the same way that sex with someone that’s HIV positive can give you aids. We have people in the loop who can judge circumstances to determine whether or not the punishment should be the result of the activity. Or at least that’s how it should be. Strict liability goes away from that, and it tries to make the consequence natural effect from the cause, but there’s no reason it needs to be this way, not like way HIV spreads.

In most crime, intent is a factor. What a reasonable man would believe in that situation is the guiding idea of a jury in so many circumstances. Strict liability is just one of those unthinking zero tolerance policies that makes it pretty much necesary the justice is miscarried sometimes.

Otherwise, what is your solution? Should no one under the age of 25 or so have sex? I mean - to live up to the standards set forth in this thread, no one from the age of 18 until some arbitrary age that you can declare won’t be mistake for being under 18 can’t have sex with people.

If they they look of age, and they have ID, what other reasonable steps can you take? Do you go meet her parents and ask them if it’s okay to fuck her? But wait! Maybe the people she’ll take you to aren’t her parents at all but adults she knows who will help her trick people into having sex with her! So you can’t trust that! Maybe you should demand a picture of her birth with someone holding a contemporary newspaper in the background. But that could be photoshopped!

The only reasonable steps you have in front of you are what she looks like and maybe some ID. I guess at a bar or something, you have the knowledge that someone who’s knowledgable about checking for fake IDs also found hers credible enough. What reasonable steps can you take beyond that? If none, then are young adults basically forbidden from having sex?

Are there other crimes out there where a guy can take reasonable steps to ensure that he’s not doing anything illegal, and in good faith, and still end up facing serious consequences for it?

122

Imbibo caveat emptor, or something like that.

123

This is an amusingly horrifying image.

124

I would have thought they were 11, 5, and 2.

Regards,
Shodan

125

Your doin it wrong.

126

Win.

127

I wish I could, but I barely remember context. I just remember him holding a completely intractable position for many pages, then finally, grudgingly admitting he might be wise to revise his stance a little.

So it theoretically would be in this situation. The main thrust of his stance is that fucking little kids is bad. That’s not really a debatable point, I think we’re all in agreement. The sticking point is that he refuses to shift off a zero tolerance stance, that no matter what kind of circumstantial evidence there is, someone who has sex with a minor they mistakenly believe to be legal should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. If he accepted that it’s possible, however improbable, for corner cases to happen that don’t justify forcing the adult to register as a sex offender and be castrated, at least 3 of the 7 pages in the GD thread wouldn’t have happened.

128

I don’t think the fact that STD’s and pregnancy are the result of “nature” and the age of consent laws are social constructs makes much difference to my point about having to deal with the consequences of your actions. “Murder”, “theft”, heck any criminal charge is a “social construct”, but they are still consequences of actions taken.

No doubt. Strict liability, by its very definition, does not take into account intent. But you do have intent to have sexual contact, you just don’t know the age of the person (a mistake of fact). But if these examples keep up, perhaps in one we can add one in which a poor 19 year old who has an erection and accidentally slips on a beer in a bar and lands on a 16 year old who looks like she’s 35 and, as her ID falls out of her purse (Gucci) showing her to be 28, he accidentally penetrates her.

I’m guessing you didn’t read all of my posts (which is not a problem), because this point has been beaten to death over and over. And I find it fascinating that the examples keep getting more and more extreme, more and more out of touch with reality, to make it.

Once again, I do not think child sexual assault laws should severly punish these poor, entrapped imaginary men. In almost every example given in these threads, the guy should be given a deferred judgment and not convicted. And in many of these laws, the sexual assault crimes fitting those examples, are treated as lesser crimes.

129

I dunno. Ever since I’ve been here, I could tell that he was vastly overstating the extent of his knowledge and expertise in various matters. And yes, he still used the same debating style, though to a lesser degree.

130

He’s been on that “Expert” schtick for much longer than that. It’s just a lot more obvious nowadays.

131

You know, the *first *time you bumbled into some else’s pitting and threw yourself on the grenade, it seemed like bravery. Gets a bit less gallant with each successive martyrdom.

132

Sorry, that distinction fails – it’s perfectly possible for a liquor store to conduct its business while selling only to people who look at least 30-35 years old, and thus could not possibly be mistaken for minors by any reasonable and prudent person (i.e. the standard Dio implicitly proposes for one-night stands).

133

Well, now, I’m glad you’ve come around to the rational view that defendants should be permitted to introduce evidence that they reasonably and prudently believed that they were dealing with an adult partner.

134

It’s kinda funny that I would have guessed Dio’s daughters’ ages pretty close to the facts, just judging by the progressive widening idiocy of The Dio Zone. In these matters, he’s pretty much acting like every stereotypical angry conservative I went to school with–party hard as a youth, then as your daughters approach the age where sexual activity is looming, get increasingly hard-line about any sexuality that might touch them ever.

It should have been obvious to everyone that Dio’s eldest daughter was at/near the cusp of puberty, just judging by the acceleration of his insanity.

135

And yet Dio is as far from a conservative as can be, and the conservatives have taken a pretty reasonable stance on that issue.

I’m amazed that anyone gives any credence to anything that he says anymore.

136

I honestly don’t understand the difference between having this de-facto stance with a strict liability law and just having the law have statutory affirmative defenses.

I’m going to repost something I posted in the other thread because I’d like your take on it.

I would say that around 30-35% of the guys I know have a similar story, in large part due to the propensity of local school districts to send high school juniors/seniors for some college classes in towns up to an hour away (a fact none of us were really aware of), and mixed in with one of the colleges our performing group sang with taking girls as young as 13-14 to start as college freshmen (it was an all-girls school with a specific advanced program, which none of us really knew the extent of until we road tripped to perform as guests at their concert after two years of them road tripping to perform with us). It therefore doesn’t strike me as odd that you’d see a preponderance of support for affirmative defenses without needing to theorize that people who want one are pedophiles all, as **Dio **does.

137

Dio’s got a point about the “fake ID” bit. Just because some kid has a fake ID, that doesn’t give you permission to fuck her.

I know lots and lots of people who had fake IDs. If you have to check someone’s ID before you fuck them, maybe you shouldn’t fuck them in the first place.

Thing is, if a girl is going to bars with a fake ID and hooking up with older men, what are the odds that you’re going to be charged with statutory rape for fucking her, anyway? How does law enforcement get involved? The girl doesn’t want the cops involved. And heck, if she’s going out and sleeping the adult men, then calling the cops on them, she could just as easily allege forcible rape.

I’ve seen plenty of whining from guys about the scenario of taking some drunk skank home, having consensual sex with said skank, and when the skank wakes up in the morning and feels all skanky, she’ll call the cops and say you raped her.

In other words, you take a risk every time you hook up with some random skank in a bar. Especially if the skank is so fucked up that she’d hook up with a loser like you. There’s got to be something wrong with her, right? You just don’t know what it is yet. Maybe she’s gonna steal from you when you’re asleep. Maybe she’s gonna claim rape. Maybe she poked a hole in the condom. Maybe she’s 14. Maybe she’s packed full of horrible diseases. Maybe she’s a stalker and thinks that because you had sex with her, you love her. Maybe she’s an alcoholic. Maybe her pimp will demand $300 afterwards. Maybe she’s a serial killer. And so on.

138

Is it your position, then, that it is necessary to hunt down and prosecute everyone who bought pictures and images of Traci Lords recorded while she was underage in order to protect the other 99.999-ish percent of child pornography cases?

139

My point was that you made it sound like it should be an inevitable, and inseperable cause from sex, and I’m saying that doesn’t hold true. Having sex with a HIV+ person incurs a natural risk, whereas being jailed is not inherently a risk of accidentally having sex with someone underaged.

As far as murder goes - that’s a social construct too, in as far as the law applies. And imagine how much it would suck if murder was a strict liability crime - some guy in a ski mask breaks into my bedroom in the middle of the night and I shoot him - now I’m a murderer. Sure, it doesn’t matter what my intent was or what information I had, did I kill a guy or not?

I did read all of your posts in this thread. I haven’t seen anyone address the issue of what could constitute reasonable proof of age to someone if looking at a government issued ID is inadequate. I made the examples silly because dismissing IDs entirely as a proof of age is kind of silly. You can say the IDs are fake, and well you could say the parents or the pictures are fake too. Using these standards at what point can you be sure that someone is the age they claim?

I mean - for pretty much every purpose we need an age for, a government issued photo works. Signing a contract, buying alcohol, probably even stuff like joining the military. Yet this ID is insufficient for gauging someone’s age to have sex with them?

What’s the alternative? Never have sex with anyone you estimate to be under the age of 30, just in case?

This seems contradictory, but it may be my ignorance of the legal system. It seems like the purpose of making a crime strict liability is exactly so you don’t have discretion to take circumstances into account and adjust the punishment (and whether to convict in general) in account of them. It’s either you did it (and hence full punishment) or you didn’t. You seem to be advocating to me a policy of analyzing the whole situation before rendering judgement, which is in agreement with my main point.

140

The purpose of “zero tolerance”, “strict liability”, etc, is to protect decision-makers from the brain strain of having to actually take decisions and the spinal stress of having to stand behind them afterwards.

If that’s how they want it, fine – but they should be paid minimum wage like anybody else in a job that could be performed more or less equally well by any other emitter of greenhouse gases and 310K background radiation, and their tailored suits, judicial robes, etc should be replaced by button-up striped shirts with “HI MY NAME IS (name)” embroidered on the breast.