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Tannin wrote:I hope you can summon beter arguments than this weak-as-water nonsense with which to defend your academic work.
Lol, 'academic'? I'm quoting from Wikipedia for gawd's sake!
I simply meant that I hoped that your academic writing was based on better evidence than your Nickstering stuff.
Then again, come to think of it, aren't you studying journalism? In that case, cancel my remarks and carry on just as you are. Try for a job at the Australian. (Don't bother applying at the Herald-Sun, you'd pass the make-huge-claims-without-good-evidence test OK, but you write properly and can nearly read, so they'd throw you out.)
Nicely posted, David. But let's return to the debate....
1: "The fact is that people did get jail terms for consensual sex in Australia right up until the early '80s." Yes, but very, very few. Prosecutions for sodomy have always been rare. This was so even in Victorian times.
2: "A bad law is a bad law, no matter how sparsely it is applied."
Yes, but a bad law that is mostly not enforced is better than a bad law that is strictly enforced. Lesser of two evils.
3: "I'm not really sure how sure how oppressing and ostracising a minority gets you more moral brownie points in the scheme of things. And don't all laws have a 'wholesale all-of-society sweep'?"
To your second point, sure, but as to your your first point, aren't you the dedicated utilitarian? If oppressing 5% of the population is bad, oppressing 50% of the population is worse. As a good utilitarian you would say ten times worse!
4: "Our laws oppressed gay people and Emirates law oppresses people who have sex outside of marriage (and, it seems, rape victims)."
This is a distortion. You have found ONE example, and a poor one, to set against a society where there are many many examples, each one worse than the one before.
5: "But so was the punishment in the case that prompted this discussion in the first place!"
Bullshit. Jail for being raped is mild? What would you call "severe"?
5a: "Of course there are more extreme applications of Sharia Law throughout the Islamic world".
Too right there are! We are discussing just the tip of the iceberg. It gets lots worse.
6: Cherry picking. Yes, a fair point, I am indeed also cherry picking in a sense. But for every small cherry you can find to pick in Western law, we could find a bloody great bunch of big ones in Middle-eastern law.
7: "You and Jezza are rightly outraged by one of Dubai's most odious laws, but rather than acknowledging that it is merely part of a complex system of modern/old-fashioned, progressive/oppressive, equal/discriminatory law, you've both chosen to demonise the whole lot as 'evil'."
It is evil at its core, no doubt at all about that. It is barbaric and (as I said earlier) lags roughly 500 years of human progress behind Western law. Of course it is a complex mixture of many things. However, at the core it has two great festering faults: (a) it is based on blind obedience to stupid fairy tales which are elevated to have greater weight than any factual, rational, or evidence-based decision making rules, and (b) it lacks the complex, subtle, and very hard-won web of rights and checks and balances that Western law has evolved. (I listed some of these earlier.) Show me an Islamic country which has successfully addressed these two massive issues and I'll show you a legal system which cannot be considered together with the systems of the places we are talking about - it would be different not just in degree but in kind.
8: Great rant! But your claim that "this legal ruling is [not] somehow indicative of a fundamental 'evil' on the part of the UAE legal system" is completely contradicted by your admission that "even late 19th century UK and Australia were possibly still on balance better places for women to live than countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia today". And cross out that ridiculous "possibly". Hell, cross out the "on balance" too - the differences are massive and profound.
9: As regards Matthew 7:3, "So, about those boat people... "
You mean the ones who are fleeing in terror for their lives from regimes with Islamic legal systems? Or are we talking about some other boat people now?
WTF? otherwise referred to as "Butt Chugging" People using a funnel to pour booze up their clacker as it gets you drunk quicker.
Maybe it originated when someone offerred someone a drink they didn't like and got the response "yuck, that stuff is horrible, I'm not drinking it, shove it up your arse"
Messed up as that is, my mind is also spinning at the idea of soaking tampons in vodka then inserting as an alternative to just drinking the vodka.
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down.
People using a funnel to pour booze up their clacker as it gets you drunk quicker.