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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (6552)	12/10/2005 7:59:26 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542192

. . . as Lincoln said, saying a dog has five legs doesn't make it so. Did he really? I'm going to quote you on it. It's worth a special moment in the next argument I have with my wife. Worth more than a giggle. Will certainly lower the tension level.

To: Ilaine who wrote (6552)	12/12/2005 1:35:35 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 542192

Some feminists say that consensual intercourse is always rape, because men are stronger than women. I suppose if you define rape as having sex when you are in the weaker position there might be something to that statement but It would be a stupid definition that would not be accepted by more than a tiny minority. Also women are hardly always in the weaker position. The usually have less physical strength but power in a relationship is not primarily about physical strength. In actual rape physical power might be the primary factor in determining the outcome but I doubt even most of the "all sex is rape" people would actually claim that all hetero-sexual sex is the result of a man applying physical force to a woman. When I call taxes extortion I am not using some oddball non-standard definition of extortion. Taking money (or perhaps other things) by force or threat of force is a very mainstream definition for extortion. What I am not doing is cariving out a specicial exception for governments. The exception is so deeply assumed that most people don't even recognize that they are making it. I don't just think the unstated assumption should be stated, I think it should be justified. Note justifying taxes as beneficial isn't quite the same as justifying the exception from the definition of the term extortion. Tim