Letters to the Editor
achilleselbow
Published Letters: 294 Editor's Choice: 17
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@mizbinkley
[Read the article: Rape kits for "Jane Doe"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]When only the victim is too drunk/drugged to give consent, it's clearly rape. If you think she meant yes while she was saying no, that's rape. If you've been dating her and had sex before and she says no this time, it's still rape. Rape is about force, threat and proceeding when consent is denied. Just plain regrettable/bad sex isn't rape. Most mainstream feminists don't think it is.
And what if the guy is drunk as well? I knew that people's instincts to misinterpret each other would flare up, no matter how balanced and nuanced you try to make your points. So let's start again.
Nowhere did I say that "wearing a short skirt" or "crossing a parking lot" should count as actions that make one partly responsible. That's absolutely ridiculous. But how about choosing to consume alcohol to the point that you might give consent without intending to? Stumbling with a guy back to his dorm room and engaging in everything leading up to sex only to quietly murmur "no" when he's already on top of you? Being so drunk that you're not exactly sure what happened?
I'm not pulling this out of thin air by the way. I wrote for the campus newspaper and a lot of the testimonials we collected for a story on campus rape were pretty similar to the above. No one is saying that the standard for rape should be a stranger jumping out of the bushes. But perhaps some standard of physical force wouldn't be unreasonable. If the only resistance put up is a whispered 'no' and she doesn't even attempt to push him away, I have serious doubts as to whether that should be considered rape.
My larger point is not that anything short of full-out assault should be legal, but that there should be room for finer distinctions, just like the law distinguishes between murder and manslaughter. I understand that chanting "rape is rape is rape" makes the complexities of life easier to process, but it does not reflect reality.
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A pity
[Read the article: Edwards endorsing Obama]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I watched Edwards' TV appearance where he all but endorsed Obama, and I still can't understand why he didn't do it earlier. The lame reason he gave was "I think it's important to wait and let the people have their say." Um...are the two mutually exclusive? It's not like endorsing Obama would have somehow prevented people from voting - it would have given them more information in making their choice.
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Whose homeland?
[Read the article: On armies, war and an aging Israel]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Historically, the Israel-Arab conflict is similar to many territories the British Empire left during the last century, most fell into never ending battles
There's one important difference that makes Israel stand out. In all the other colonies the British Empire abandoned, control was given back to the people who had inhabited the land prior to their arrival. Yes, maps were arbitrarily carved up and there were sectarian/ethnic conflicts but it was largely the same conflicts that had existed in the region beforehand.
What you had with Israel was that Britain, during its administration, effectively allowed and encouraged European Jews to colonize a land that was something like 90% Arab, and to force the Palestinians who had been there for generations out of homes and jobs, all on a flimsy Biblical pretext that their ancestors lived there 5000 years ago (In contrast, the Palestinians who were driven from their homes by the massacres at Der Yassin and other such places are still alive today). Then when it came time to discard Palestine like the other colonies they gave more than half of it to the Jews, who only made up 30% of the population at that point and had only made up 5% of it before the British colonization.
So basically, it was Imperialism by proxy. The people who try to paint it as some sort of age-old religious conflict are flat-out wrong. There is little similarity between the Middle Eastern Jews, who for the most part lived in peace with their neighbors, and the European Jews who form the bulk of Israel, and there has in fact been almost as much animosity between the two as there has between Jews and Arabs. The fact is that Israel is a European nation imposed on the Middle East, and to call that anything but colonialism is a lie.