[Discuss] RMS

[Seth Gordon]

On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 5:55 PM Steve Litt <slitt at troubleshooters.com>
wrote:

> On Mon, 23 Sep 2019 12:55:13 -0400
> Seth Gordon <sethg at ropine.com> wrote:
>
> > The English word “cancer” can refer to anything from a skin tumor
> > that a doctor can remove as an outpatient procedure, to metastatic
> > pancreatic cancer that is certain to kill you within six months. But
> > both of these things are still cancer.
>
> OK, let's go with that analogy. Can you imagine if every cancer,
> including a minor skin tumor, were treated with heavy chemotherapy and
> radiation?
>
> That's what we have when we define everything from taking a leak in a
> woods where, unknown to you, a child was watching, to jumping out from
> behind bushes and raping an 80 year old woman, are defined as sex
> crimes, and the sheep like public is inclined to having a zero
> tolerance policy on sex crimes. There are plenty of people forever on
> the sex offender registry whose crime was having sex with their 1 year
> younger than them girlfriend.
>

I agree that this is a problem, but the solution to that problem is to
change the law so that not all forms of sexual assault get treated with
this “zero tolerance” policy, not redraw the boundaries of “sexual assault”
itself.

One of the things that anti-rape activists in the 1970s did was actually
lobby their state legislatures to *reduce* the criminal penalties for rape.
They wanted to do this because as long as rape was punishable by a
mandatory 20-years-to-life prison term, or some such, defendants in rape
cases were more likely to simply be acquitted.

Minor skin tumors shouldn’t be treated with chemotherapy, but if you just
ignore them because “oh, that’s not *real* cancer,” that’s not good either.