You know what would be great? If the Duke Lacrosse team had taped their accuser and tried to use that evidence in court and the judge threw it out because the accuser was not informed of being taped.
So rather than dismiss the case and moving on, let’s put the men through the wringer for no purpose. Oh and the icing on the cake would be if everyone developed convenient amnesia about the Duke case in future arguments where the case does not help the debater’s side.
You know what else would be great? If the Duke Lacrosse trial was the top news story for months on end, making the men look guilty and they are finally exonerated only to have an accuser make up a new set of accusations. Using knowledge of evidence presented during the trial, the new accusations are tailored to be impossible to disprove so the men are convicted and sent to prison.
Oh, but a liar would never use this sort of knowledge to their advantage, so they would never abuse such knowledge if someone had to point out all the cameras for the purpose of consent, right?
Would a sign stating “Premises monitored by security cameras” be sufficient, or do we need a signed consent form with an attached diagram of all cameras and their viewing angles?
Der’s entirely practical objection to obtaining consent is that the very type of person it would protect you from is the type who would object to being taped.
Further, people you don’t need protecting from would also object, making even the asking for consent useless as a barometer for warning you of ill intent. The devil’s in the details.
As usual, it’s amusing to see people’s reactions when, for once, the target of Der’s ravings is not something like religion, pro-lifers or the military. The point is that Der is amusing, informed and insightful company when the subject is science fiction, fantasy, role-playing games and so on. It’s just that he’s not fit to be out in the real world.
No, I’m pretty sure they’re from entirely different planets. Ones that are at war with each other, and fight it out in big finned Flash Gordon-style space rockets.
It’s not useless–it just means you are going to kick out a lot of otherwise okay people. It’s still going to protect you against those who want to harm you, just not by actually catching them on camera.
Der Trihs seems perfectly okay with throwing out a lot of good people with the bad in all of his other ravings, like with soldiers and theists, so it doesn’t surprise me that he’s okay if his paranoia winds up meaning he never gets to have sex, as long as it means he can’t be accused of rape.
Of course, the flaw is that the other person can claim they were together when they weren’t, and that he didn’t record or threw out the recording. He’s not really any safer from those who are okay with making up rape accusations.
But what I mean by “useless as a barometer…” is that it doesn’t distinguish those who have evil intent from those who don’t. And I suppose that at least a false accuser who says they had sex when they didn’t will find it harder to produce evidence that sex took place, rather than agreeing that sex took place but consent was not given.
As usual, Der is annoyingly difficult to argue with in places. DianaG suggests at one point that a woman could sign a standard boilerplate as evidence of consent, but I’m sure she wouldn’t consider for an instant that if a woman wishes to withdraw consent after signing that she should be contractually forbidden to. Bit like the whole marital rape thing really - there was a time when that was legally a standard boilerplate, but it sure ain’t now.
Well, actually, I disagree. I can imagine somebody rigging a house (or a business, or any private property, really) with security cameras and incidentally capturing a sexual encounter. There’s no indication in the hypothetical as stated that the homeowner was collecting or reviewing these recordings for gratification after the fact (let alone publishing or distributing them), and I’m disinclined to make that leap automatically.
Your closely-reasoned and well-supported “It’s sleazy, period” argument is one I can’t embrace.
What if the homeowner has forgotten about the cameras? What if he only ever reviews the recordings if something unusual happens like suspected burglary or vandalism? Or, in this case, a false rape accusation?
Is sleaziness solely in the results of one’s actions, or is it a state of mind?
So…how easy is it to forget that your house is set up like it was designed by William Baldwin in Sliver? Is all of this video going to some million terabyte server somewhere that doesn’t require regular maintenance?
That’s kind of like saying “What if the homeowner has forgotten he owns a house?”
DianaG, I read some of that thread. The ultimate impact in your eyes seems to be that DT and ZZZ are “sleazy” or “a sleaze” or are advocating doing something “sleazy.” Well, so the fuck what? Why spend so much energy defending your opinion that they are or are advocating doing something “sleazy”? Why can’t you just post “that is/they are sleazy” and move on down the road with your bad self?
Seriously, how hard would it be to get consent in the real world? You bring up videotaping sex as part of your preamble, telling her how it gets you so hot and you’d love to make a film of the two of you (and she says yes or no). When she gets in your bedroom, you point to the camera, have her look into it and you say, “See, there’s the camera. Taping this is okay with you, right?”
It’s not like women have never consented to be videotaped during sex. I call bullshit on the primary claim that a man would never get sex if he informed his parter of videography on the premises. Hell, for some chicks, that’s a bonus.
I can picture it - some rich guy has a McMansion built and he thinks high-tech stuff is cool even if he has little to no understanding of how it works. He hires a company to rig up a extensive but unobtrusive camera network, the technical details of which he leaves to them. The data is stored at the security company and automatically deleted after a week without review unless somebody reports an incident needing investigation.
The bedroom cameras are not focused on the room as such, but on its windows. They might capture some aspects of a sexual encounter, including its audio, that will prove useful in challenging a rape accusation but need not be have the qualities of an amateur porn-movie.
After a few years living there without incident, the homeowner doesn’t pay the security system much mind any more.
Ultimately, though, I’m just personally disinclined to automatically jump to the “sleaze” conclusion, especially with such a lightly-written hypothetical as given in the OP of the other thread. Without more detail, I’m willing to give the homeowner the benefit of the doubt, since I can imagine innocent interpretations.
No, you’ve got it backwards. If A then B does not imply the reverse. The implication is that if **DianaG **were intending to falsely accuse someone of rape then she would object to being taped. It is also the case that **DianaG **would object to being taped even though she had no malicious intention, which means you can’t conclude anything about her intentions from her refusal.
What is amusing is to see the hasty generalising going on. Der would not obtain consent for the recording, because innocent and guilty alike are sure to refuse. Therefore Diana assumes that Der would have sex without consent, full stop. It’s perfectly possible to consider Der’s notions lunatic without applauding the logic of his opponents.
