Right you pesky feminists, which sort of rape is *worse* <Dawkins related>

I think it is a very different thing to consider rape differently according to the vulnerability of the victim be that age or disability because the damage done purely by the rape alone to those victims is potentially much higher. What Dawkins is doing is pronouncing, as a man (which yes does make this more galling), how women should feel about their rapes based on who the perpetrator is (and random aggravating factors) not the victim.

1) She has foreplay with her long term boyfriend. This develops into having intercourse, which she enjoys. Part way through, she realises that she has been forgetting to take the pill. She tells the boyfriend she has changed her mind and he should withdraw. He continues to orgasm before withdrawing.

Sorry this was from a few days ago..but if my long term boyfriend decided he would risk my health and get me pregnant against my will because he "couldn't stop" I'd find that pretty horrific actually. And yes men CAN stop before orgasming inside you, the withdrawal method is used by quite a lot of people actually

"Similarly a rapist of an 80 year old will get a higher sentence than that of a 40 year old.
Therefore we do have rape and worse rape - as a society we do not treat all rape as equivalent, regardless of aggrevating factors."

The age of the victim in the first scenario is an aggravating factor.
The rapes themselves are both rapes ie penetration without consent as per the law which defines rape.

Aggravating factors on your link include "vulnerable victim targeted". That is likely an aggravating factor in most / all crimes. Your "elderly and frail" victims would certainly fall under that header. Is there a reason you think they would not?

Age not an issue for robbery (including mugging) here

"It isn't the age that's relevant though, it's the fact that the attacker has purposefully targeted someone vulnerable because of their age."

Yes, that's rather how I read the guidelines too. There's nothing specific in the paragraph about when old age "starts" (and I'm not sure if it should be read as "old age" or "extreme old age").

I haven't read guidelines for eg mugging but I can imagine a gang deliberately targeting the elderly and frail vs a hang targeting 20 somethings leaving a pub may be sentenced differently too.

Reference please, Dadwashere - your interpretation is contrary to my understanding of the situation

I am more interested in the behaviour of light, optics and photon mapping than quantum mechanics. But I personally feel an interpretation of the results of the experiment were debunked a few years back in work done hmm … google...

physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2011/jun/03/the-secret-lives-of-photons-revealed

Defenders of wave function collapse said that such weak measurement did not count because the level of interference via measurement was not sufficient to collapse the field. I think saying something like that was predictable, in as much as people will search for any bolt-hole that allows them to escape having ideas shot down. But I think in doing so they may well have retreated to a philosophical viewpoint that can never, ever, be assailed by any experiment, because any experiment that would disprove their interpretation is invalidated as soon as it disproves it... if that makes sense.

For anyone not knowing what on earth is being talked about here (assuming you care) the link that follows may help.

In terms of empowering girls, it was showing my daughter this and other things that got her interested enough to start studying physics and top level math at school.

You can do an even simpler version to see the effect by replacing the apparatus he makes with a black plastic fine tooth comb, but not a metal one because you dont want it reflecting laser light back at you, which is why he uses black plastic tape. You can also use an upright pin but for safty dull the surface first with a black felt marker. The comb gives you multiple slits, the pin two infinitely wide slits(paths) around the pin.

It isn't the age that's relevant though, it's the fact that the attacker has purposefully targeted someone vulnerable because of their age.

Haven't RTFT but he's an utter prick.

abland yes, all other things being equal, the rape of an 80 year old is worse than the rape of a 40 year old - the crime is the same, the only thing different is the age of the victim.
The age of the victim is not considered in most other crimes.

Carol, when you are talking about the age thing, do you mean this bit?

"The extreme youth or old age of a victim should be an aggravating factor. In addition, in principle, the younger the child and the greater the age gap between the offender and the victim, the higher the sentence should be. "

"as a society we do not treat all rape as equivalent, regardless of aggrevating factors."

Carol, I disagree with that, I still think the rape itself is being treated as equal (ie a five year starting point sentence) and then the aggravating factors (ie endangering life with HIV) are additive when it comes to sentencing,

Lurcio - good point about the knife, but, as mentioned above, English sentencing guidelines do differentiate between types of rape - for example a rapist who knows he has an STD is given a higher sentence than one who doesn't, regardless of whether the victim is infected.
Similarly a rapist of an 80 year old will get a higher sentence than that of a 40 year old.
Therefore we do have rape and worse rape - as a society we do not treat all rape as equivalent, regardless of aggrevating factors.

Just -

Hope the court case is not too awful for you and that they nail the bastard.

That is a good explanation, lurcio.

Certainly that is what struck me as flawed about his argument - it treats rape as the whole event, when it isn't. It's just that one physical act.

I think so, Just - I think they are aggravating factors.

Agree, Lurcio - if Dawkins wanted to say that rape at knifepoint was worse than rape without a knife involved, he would have made his point about logic without his crappy subjective judgement about the rape part of his statement.

He's also somewhat missed the point that a woman (or man) being raped is, realistically, in fear of further violence, given that physical dominance and profound disregard for the victim has already been expressed by the act of rape.

As a parallel, If someone is on the floor being kicked in the stomach, I expect they are in fear of their life whether or not the attacker has a knife.

Reference please, Dadwashere - your interpretation is contrary to my understanding of the situation (e.g. the Aspect experiment). If by "Pilot Wave' you mean Bohm theory then the point about that is that the pilot fields are explicitly non-local, which is fine till you try to produce an extension to relativistic physics. AFAIK, no-one's produced a relativistic extension of Bohm. Though there were some recent experiments reported in Science (I think - may have been Nature) to the effect that one could set up a beam-splitting experiment such that the neutron "went one way" and all its properties "went the other way" - which means that one of the philosophical objections to Bohm theory (that you end up loading all the properties of "things" onto the pilot field rather than the particles themselves) seems to apply to mainstream quantum theory too.

Caillin - it's infuriating isn't it? And I suspect done quite deliberately in some instances. "Hey, let me pick this particular illustration which won't push my buttons so I can pretend it's all an academic game, but will push yours so I can dismiss you as 'over emotional' for pointing out that it's not just an academic game."

If I were to try to explain the flaw in Dawkins' absurd pronouncement (I don't want to dignify it with the term "argument") to a male lurker (or indeed a female lurker who was of the "well she was asking for it" school of thought) who hadn't got the distinction, I'd proceed thus. (Apologies and trigger warning to some of our nicer male posters - this will, I'm afraid, discuss a situation very similar to one I think one of you has actually been in. The difference, I hope, between me and Dawkins is that at least I can see that the situation is utterly horrific.)

Take the knife out of the argument for the time being. (Since Dawkins insists on it being relevant, I will put it back into the story later, but by then I think you'll be able to see it's irrelevant). Two scenarios, both start the same way: you (a man in this instance) are out socialising with friends, some of whom you know well, others who probably count as acquaintances, and you realise you've missed the last train home. In one scenario, you walk home. Half way, you're caught short, nip down an alley for a pee, and get forced to the ground and anally raped by a man (we will assume, for the sake of argument, bigger and stronger). In the other scenario, one of the "acquaintances" in your social circle offers to let you sleep on the sofa at his place. You wake to find him anally raping you (again, assuming him to be bigger and stronger). I hope it would be clear to anyone of either sex that both scenarios are rape, and both would be extremely traumatic - it makes no sense to say the first is worse because you'd vaguely known the perpetrator of the second attack before hand.

Now add the knife back in. Arguably the overall situation is worse because now in addition to the rape itself (which is utterly traumatic either way round) you now fear for your life as well. But it's not the rape that's got worse - that was always every bit as bad as a rape could be, because that's the nature of rape - it's the situation as a whole that's worse. And that's reflected in English law (as I understand it) - the perpetrator, assuming they were caught, charged and brought to trial - would be charged with rape and assault/GBH/wounding with intent/whatever the appropriate charge was.

Only men have the arrogance to pronounce on things and then say any objection is invalid because of "emotion."

An interesting statement.

I didn't know the double slit experiment had been debunked, Dad - when was that? Have you got a link, would love to read it.

Dawkins reminds me a lot of my father. That isn't a compliment. My father has such conviction about what he says that it's almost impossible to discuss anything with him - his self-belief is absolutely staggering. It is a powerful force and if he had more social skills he could have gone far. As it stands he just sits in his home office and writes page after page about astrology. He is also and out and out misogynist.
Only men have the arrogance to pronounce on things and then say any objection is invalid because of "emotion."

The double slit experiment results that supposedly demonstrated wave function collapse were debunked using instrumentation of sufficient sensitivity and delicacy to detect passage through a specific slit without causing the diffraction pattern to be destroyed completely by the observation. Parallel universe theory survived that, since it was not a branch of quantum mechanics that subscribed to wave function collapse anyway, but its still 'spooky science' that is an imagined leap to explain why the math gives the results it does. I think pilot wave theory seems more the go and it has no need for parallel universes.

Well, as one of FWR's resident theoretical physicists (and an ex philosopher), I'd say the following:

Quantum mechanics is weird. There are all sorts of whacky attempts to make sense of it (many worlds, many minds, Bohm-type hidden variables) many of which seem to me largely driven by desperation. And of course there's the council of despair - "don't try to make sense of it, just do the maths" (otherwise known as instrumentalism). Happy to supply book titles to anyone who wants (David Albert's Quantum Mechanics and Experience is probably the closest to a chatty version).

Atheism/agnosticism/theism. As an ex philosopher, until someone can give me (a) a theory of truth for natural languages (b) an account of how truth and knowledge work in mathematics and (c) an account of the scientific method which enables us to sort the successful theories from the unsuccessful ones upfront (not tell Whig history about them after the fact) then frankly I'm going to say anyone who says outright that they can come up with a watertight argument as to why one ought to believe in/ ought not to believe in god is talking out their arse.

Oh and Dawkins is being a total knob on the actual issue under discussion, but then that's (as has been pointed out upthread) not entirely surprising as he has form for being a misogynist.

Oh, and am I alone in thinking the beginning of the "God Delusion" has the most delightful unintentional moment of irony, when he gives a list of evils that would not have been perpetrated had there been no religion, including the Taliban blowing up centuries old statues of Budda (conveniently ignoring the fact that the statues were only there in the first place because of... erm... religion. And yes, I know Dawkins gives Buddism an exemption on the grounds that it's a religion without god - but it's still about the intangible, uneffable, etc. and involves lots of things - Nirvanna, reincarnation, etc. which surely lie outside the scope of his scientific world view).

It's a long time since I studied it, but there are more logical arguments to be agnostic than to be either religious or atheist.

I personally don't care what people believe as long as people don't use their beliefs to put others down. There's certainly plenty of religious groups that use it as an excuse for misogynist behavior, but I don't think atheists are exempt from that. There have been plenty of people who have used their super science focus in ways that are just as casually oppressive and damaging imo.