From: Valence (valence10@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Jun 19 2003 - 04:05:08 BST
Take 3 - pt. 4/5
JOHNNY
But yeah, I
> believe you that when it is denied that intercourse took place,
> circumstantial evidence such as that is enough to get juries or judges to
be
> incredulous and assume the witness is lying.
RICK
Well, it's more a rule of necessity. Adultery is an act that almost
exclusively occurs in private, beyond the view of witnesses and prying eyes.
Direct evidence can often be hard to come up with (a pregnancy would be
direct evidence, maybe you can get a private eye to snap some photos, or
maybe your dumb enough to, oh say, leave your 'calling card' stained on her
dress).
JOHNNY
That happens in juries
> sometimes, right, if the defendent doesn't have a good lawyer? And I bet
> sometimes, people get the adultery charged dropped if it can't be proven
> that anything more than a succession of short dates occured, if they have
a
> good lawyer.
RICK
Sure. The jury is entitled to draw any reasonable inferences and
conclusions from the evidence (a virtually impossible standard to appeal).
> JOHNNY
> Just want to make sure that everyone realizes this. People who support
gay
> marriage, relaxing divorce, abortion, etc, don;t always realize that they
> will have to support human genetic engineering when the question is put to
> them.
RICK
I don't think so. But I think that marriage has numerous social and
personal benefits that have nothing to do with child-bearing or
child-rearing.
JOHNNY
> Not so much the stability, but the staticness.
RICK
What do you see as the difference between "stability" and "staticness"?
JOHNNY
It's the equivilent of
> society messing with the atom. Oh hey, we did that, didn't we? Nuclear
> explosions generally don't happen on planets. Does fission happen in
nature
> anywhere? Suns are fusion, right?
RICK
Damned if I know.
JOHNNY
> Kids with step parents are usually messed up. Kids with bickering
fighting
> parents are often messed up. Kids with perfect parents are almost always
> messed up. Messed up kids are often become the happiest people. None of
> that matters anyhow to me, I'm not a Utilitarian, nor am I a believer in
the
> "best interest of the child". I just believe in morality.
RICK
I'm glad you're not my dad :-). But seriously J, you're unrelenting
allegiance to "expectation" seems to have caused you to lose the ability to
distinguish between options on the basis of Quality. "Best interests of the
Child" means the highest Quality environment.
JOHNNY
(Did I tell you it's our twentieth anniversary
this
> year? Twenty years of sober, faithful, normal coitus. That's the Morals!
> Yes indeed.)
RICK
Congratulations J.
> >Nobody will get divorced due to
> >fatness if getting heavier doesn't make people seem less attractive.
JOHNNY
> True. Now think about Rueben's era of Rubenesque women (I wonder if he
> likes to have fat women named after him?).
RICK
They say an publicity is good publicity :-)
JOHNNY
Attraction itself is a matter
of
> social norms (and intellectual, and biological, and i guess inorganic
> pheremones are important too).
RICK
But that doesn't make the attraction (or lack of it) any less real... I
think that's one of the driving points of the MoQ. Just because something
is a social pattern doesn't mean it's not REAL.
> >RICK
> >Now you just have to agree to what I actually said, which was that
> >sometimes, people shouldn't STAY MARRIED to someone they aren't attracted
> >to.
JOHNNY
> Oh, but I think they should, they should stay attracted.
RICK
And if they don't?
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