Excellent news for the Irish.

Cute kid but this is all wrong for her. Rihanna too, in kid’s defense. Everyone too, in Rihanna’s defense.

That’s very true. Apparently he wrote letters of apology to the victim and her family in this case in addition to his confession, so that detail makes it sound a little less like Capturing the Freidmans and a little more like he actually did it, but people confess to crimes they didn’t commit all the time — and not…

Dude I usually hate you because you are trash but you are spot on here.

It’s not the Internet liberalism that any of us signed on for; it’s one that we created by eschewing the responsibilities of self-examination, but retaining the unchecked power of populist rage.

I would agree with that, which is why, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I probably wouldn’t go forward with this as a prosecutor. But I think there are two different propositions we’re arguing here. One is no DNA equals lousy case, which I’d agree with. The other is no DNA equals alleged victim must be lying, which I…

So where rapes kits turn up no DNA evidence the alleged victims is definitely lying? I’m not saying that’s definitely what happened, just that it’s possible. I mean, people shave their pubes.

Yeah, that’s also a possibility, but I think the evidence for that is as good as for just about any other scenario people have asserted.

Well, I’m not making an ideological choice to back the victim no matter what, just saying I can’t know either way. I don’t know if he’s guilty, I don’t know if she’s lying, I don’t know if she was raped. But I know that having sex with multiple partners doesn’t cancel out the possibility of rape. I know that rapists…

Yeah they did. But even if they did find his DNA in her underwear, people would say, “well, maybe it was consensual” see:DSK.

His DNA was under her fingernails. Just not in the vaginal swabs/her underwear.

Well, isn’t it unclear if the alleged victim was involved with that? I thought that was more on her mom. I’ll definitely concede it undermined her case, and if I was prosecuting it it’d be an obstacle, and maybe fatally defective, but I’m not sure that speaks directly to the accusers credibility, though it doesn’t…

A rapist can use a condom. Who knows what happened here, but the lack of DNA doesn’t point definitively in any direction.

I’m not suggesting it does. I don’t think measures intended to benefit white people that also might have the effect of dismantling a racist system morally absolves white people, but the effect could still be positive.

Yeah, it’s no secret that white and black people use drugs at similar rates, but black people are several times more likely to go to prison for it. Though it would be nice if the government ended the war on drugs because they acknowledged it as a racist, if not in conception then certainly in impact, but if the rising…

But if I can’t judge, how am I supposed to parade my sense of superiority??? Being sanctimonious is hard too!!

I think part of the issue is the difficulty of getting hard medical evidence on these things due to how unethical it would be to do a study. Even with fetal alcohol syndrome, no one’s really sure what the threshhold is. Some alcohol is probably fine, lots of alcohol is probably bad, but the line isn’t entirely clear.…

Anything that is likely to make you pee blood afterward is probably not a good idea. Someone on here told me a few months ago that your benefits max out at running 20 miles/week and I’ve read that at 35 miles/week it starts to be bad for the average person. I think you have to be doing it for a while though before you…

Yeah. I think for most people it’s not a healthy thing to put your body through. There are exceptions, of course.

I agree somewhat, but since there doesn’t seem to be a clear nexus between the offense she caused here and her criticism of the halloween costume, other than what she did being on halloween (the offense wasn’t integral to the costume, if it was an extension of the character), then we might be getting into…