Clearly people who drive cabs still commit crimes so the background check isn't a panacea. When they do, the victim is less likely to be able to identify the assailant. How often do you write down the driver name and taxi ID? On the other hand, with Uber there is a record of who the driver was, what they were driving,…

Before drawing conclusions on the relative danger of riding in an uber et al it would be useful to know how crime rates in uber compare to crime rates in cabs. Do you have any data on that? Obviously the degree of media attention is not a reliable indicator.

Looking more into this, it looks like FMR is exactly what was applied. The driver of the car is the one that actually shot the trooper (also convicted of murder). The conviction included a conviction for murder of the other passenger in the car, which is also consistent with the Felony Murder Rule where you can be…

Isn't shooting at a cop trying to arrest you a felony? I'm sure a clever prosecutor could argue that having guns with them as wanted individuals meant that a shootout was foreseeable.

Does the Felony Murder Rule apply to a shootout during an arrest? In which case, she could be found guilty of murder even if she didn't shoot anyone.

It seems to me that it doesn't have to be federally protected information (e.g., HIPAA) to still be private communications that should not be thrown into the public square. I can probably buy your argument that emails about Obama are newsworthy as the go to issues of race. But reporting that Pascal doesn't like…

As someone who is also conflicted, thank you for acknowledging you are as well!

We'll set aside the fact that simplifying an argument does not equal a strawman. I think we should be able to agree that feminism can have many flavors. People can find some issues more important than others without invalidating the others. I agree that "people have it worse" is a trope that tends to silence…

you are right..oops!

referring to someone with a different point of view as simple minded is always a great way to foster discussion on the different (and valid) ways people can view feminism.

A bit of my response is the tone of the story, sorta like "A new allegation against Bill Cosby, but now by someone with credibility"

What really concerned me was how this was framed by a lot of the media. NBC Nightly News last night seemed to couch it as a story to be believed because she was a supermodel. As if the other accusers were less worthy of belief for some reason.

Fair enough, especially the last phrase!

true, but then they said "here are texts and photos of "drew" " and then WaPo found Drew who was never a student at UVA. That is a lot more than just denying they were a-holes to a rape victim.

I'd probably avoid most classical literature and history if you can't separate out modern contexts from period contexts.

and there is the point that keeps getting missed by others.

I don't think the actual meaning of the song changes because we now interpret the words differently from how they were intended. That is not how it works.

Given that Jackie apparently was carrying on texts with her friends as "Drew," it doesn't seem farfetched at all. If that weren't the case I would have said "yeah, right, fake contact"

The evidence appears to be that the person/image of "drew" sent to friends prior to the event occurring was false and that is the anchor to everything. Maybe something did happen to her during her fake date, maybe she met up with some bad people and something terrible happened. However, since the whole evening was…

In general, if it were just them trying to refurbish their reputations (thought they weren't named), I'd agree with you. People often don't want to look like heartless jerks even if they are. However, there seems to be a lot more details that could be checked out (texts, photos, names) that give their story more…