I think Carl Sagan expresses this idea well:

I think it's probably really important to distinguish between wanting something to be true and actually believing that it is true.

There are a lot of people who very desperately want certain magical propositions to be true, but I would probably argue that they don't actually believe them. You can't choose to believe…

No, that's part of the same bullshit mantra that this entire website rails against. To then passively condone it by intimating that this is somehow less than rape is bull. Hell, they aren't even being charged with rape.

I wouldn't be outraged if he was tried as a juvenile. I am outraged every time a young offender is "upgraded" to adult, in fact. Every time.

It's not about whether 16 is an adult or not, it's an abuse of power. Full stop.

Umm.... other than the photos and videos?

Only one use of the word "rape" in an article about two people raping someone. It's not even in the headline of the article.

Yes.

Exactly. This is what I'm trying to nail down. We *know* and also believe that some insect is not dangerous, and yet our skin is still crawling. This is not because of an irrational belief we possess, but because of instinctual or culturally instilled responses. There needs to be a distinction between these two things.

The fear of going into a "haunted" house is fundamentally derived from the same kind of "fight or flight" instinct that prevented your ancestors from getting eaten by lions. Believing the position of Mercury has any influence on your meaningless life is just plain ol' gullible ignorance perpetuated by halfwits.

Ok, but there's believing and then there's believing. I think it's simply untrue that everyone believes in something crazy.

I'd say I'm an open-minded skeptic. I went to an energy healer once to get my aura cleared.

I personally don't think I just "believe" in anything. I think there are a lot more of the hard core skeptics like myself out there than you'd think. Maybe it's just LA that makes you think otherwise.

I know what the sentence says. No need to be condescending. I didn't say anything about you putting responsibility on the girl. Where did you get that from? I'm saying that trying to avoid racism by moving from one town to another isn't possible. Full stop.

Ok, but the topic at hand is racism which only people of color go through.

It's still gonna happen no matter how much any person of color tries.

"Cramblett and Zinkon are planning on moving to a different, more diverse area to try and protect their daughter from intolerance and racism."

Criminal Laws should not be passed for advocacy and awareness. There are other avenues for that.

I'm pretty sure you just described Don Draper, except the rapist on Mad Men was an adult...yet still, only few articles about the episode noticed that a rape had happened that episode. No wonder, in real life, especially with such a young rapist, this guy was so confused.

Oooof. This hits really close to home. A few years ago, I went through a period where nearly every man I dated had some story about the much-older woman he had sex with while he was a very young teen. On the surface, it was always told as a tale of their virility and impressive masculinity, a story meant to make me…