X. Benedict

That's news. It's been a long while since I've thought the Sabres were among the best conditioned teams. Good luck to him though.

Okay. This brings it home for me best. The idea that there are boundaries, very real ones, but not always clear, that women have to navigate to protect their own safety is what we are talking about here. In an ideal society. Everyone should feel safe all the time. Especially in their reproductive organs. This reality, that it is not always safe, is not hard to understand, nor does it involve hyperbole. Thanks, Josie. ,

This idea. Blaming the victim. The "she must have deserved it" idea. What was she wearing. Or slut-shaming. Calling a victim a "gold-digger'? Is this what we are really talking about when we say "rape culture" ? The metalanguage used to discuss the sexual assault? If so, I think a case could be made for "pervasive," at least in terms of comments like that being widespread. I was hung up on the idea, (and maybe still am) that "normalized" means that sexual assault is socially acceptable. I'm still balking there.

You think rapes start in the locker room? Is that what you are saying? Is that what rape culture means? The toleration of the objectification of women? I don't think it is anti-feminine at all to suggest that rapes are acts well beyond linguistic or even pornographic objectification. (As objectionable as those things may be). They are much more to do with disordered acts of violence and domination than with sexual gratification or even prowess. If every locker room in America adopted a code of silence where athletes were not allowed to speak at all, I think you would find the change in the country in sexual assaults would be statistically insignificant.

I don't mean to demean Amy Moritz's by writing my reaction. .(or to her, especially, I've met her more than once and she's really a fine person and a solid journalist) If anything, I think it is as good a starting place as any to have a conversation. Looks like Cambria is the lawyer to have if your jury is chosen on Facebook. :blink:

I think you'll find poverty and sexual violence are related. Sports programs tend to take in more at-risk kids. Whatever that leads to on the professional level, who knows? But I think it is deeply flawed to think that the privilege that comes with high level sports makes rape more or less likely as to call it a "culture". A culture is a "way of life," right? Rapists prey on the vulnerable. Most rapists are known by their victims. (But those mock UN kids. They are a bunch of sickos.) Is the Bill Cosby story really about comedy? Or if you are Donald Trump, (watch out for the Mexicans) is it really about ethnicity? The idea that rape is a product of locker-room jokes, conversations, and actions is confusing correlations with cause. Kids in Steubenville, Pat Kane, Vanderbilt all have been in locker rooms where "rape culture" breeds by permitting jokes and objectifying women creating rape as a way of life. That seems way too easy to me.

Amy Moritz writes: "Rape culture involves conversations, jokes and actions that normalize rape." Apparently this is part of our sports culture. Really? Normalize? Has rape ever been the norm? Do conversations and jokes about war, murder, and genocide "normalize" those things? Do "mama" jokes normalize ? Sexual braggadocio has long been part of the locker room (yes, both the male and the female locker room), but I think it is a long shot to say that any of those things "normalize" rape. The rapist has the urge to have sex with someone that does not want to have sex with them. The rapist acts on that impulse to the indifference and suffering of a protesting victim. The rapist has a psychology that is deviant and disordered. Every empirical study I've read suggest that the "Culture of Rape" starts in childhood, often one that has been sexually abusive or physically abusive and grows to repeat the cycle on others. Often it is learned behavior. There is your "culture of rape." It essence, rape is fundamentally a non-sports story. In sports you may find metaphors for life. But I really think the idea that this is a sports story needs to stop. If anything, sports probably clouds any useful discussion about rape.

A fine career.

"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time." I found it on the take a book leave a book shelf of a bed and breakfast. I left Larry McMurtry's "The Last Kind Words Saloon."

There should be a word that describes the miraculous repetition of the mundane. Like a driver never hitting a red light in a month of commuting on Transit road.

It doesn't. You are a gentle traveler.

Fascinating thing to ponder, isn't it?. Time being an accident or experience of relativity as I understand it. It is almost a Zen koan: What was the moment before time?

There is no obstacle to Catholics in matters of faith and science (or evolution for that matter) from the Big Bang onward, unless you consider the moment before the Big Bang. Big Bang theory, after all, came from priests at the Vatican Observatory. But preceding the Big Bang? Who knows. What's the data say?

When I fish I chant over and over: "The power of bait compels you,"

Sometimes humans suck.

That's shameful. And awful. And who would do such a thing?

Here is my bit of condescension. I have a hard time believing we are providing any service to anyone it actually impacts. But we can still be kind to the people actually here. Opinions here will evolve. Or as the drunks say, identify don't compare. Or as I say, there was a kinder way to express your reaction to his emotion. (calling him a victim, demands for retraction, really?) (And geez I just now notice that you are 22,000 posts in, not something I usually follow, and I have no idea who you are because of all the name shifting. ) Anyway. I'll go away now. That's my piece.

Worth a look. Yale Climate Opinion Maps http://environment.yale.edu/poe/v2014/

:lol:

:ph34r: Diarrhea Mouth.

I'm just getting used to the idea that people in their late 20s see me as old. ......wait a second......I just got it. The 90's!? You scoundrel. :lol:

Is this really necessary? The fact is almost all hockey discussion has been subordinated to a rape discussion. I don't think it is selfish to say that our hockey oasis has been overtaken by an alleged crime and at the very least it is okay to miss what we've become accustomed to. We've lost a few things in this affair: our hockey conversation, admiration for one of the game's best players, a certain hometown pride in the fact he was presumed to be one of us, the idea someone from WNY can compete at the highest level. There is a bit of cognitive dissonance. It takes time. I had pictures of OJ and Pete Rose in my locker in high school. It is not nothing. It is not inhuman to wish the entire subject away. Let's not lose our decency over this too. Carry on.

It has been the best part of the offseason.

Wrestling with this issue. (And by no means do I mean to diminish anyone's perspective here.) Rape is an awful crime, but I am somewhat disturbed with its pedestal at the moment. I know someone raped and murdered. The murder half seems the harder part.

Diarrhea Mouth?