Denise, Jeff is right that beautiful women must take more care for modesty. You're reading into Jeff's argument something that's not there.

Beauty isn't innately immodest or shameful. But beauty is innately attractive, no? Women who are more beautiful tend to attract more attention, which includes unwanted attention. And unwanted attention that isn't repelled before things get too heated can have terrible consequences.

A beautiful woman who is not adept at repelling unwanted attention by other means might consider whether modifying how she dresses could reduce the amount of unwanted attention she receives in the first place. That's not a moral judgment, merely prudent risk analysis.

Read up on the Sahara when it was green. That's prehistory, so there's just archeological evidence. But it's interesting.

The warm weather did help, though it was also unpredictable:

[B]etween 800 and 1300 AD, the regions around the fjords of southern Greenland experienced a relatively mild climate... with trees and herbaceous plants growing and livestock being farmed. Barley was grown as a crop up to the 70th parallel.... [T]he ice cores indicate Greenland has experienced dramatic temperature shifts many times over the past 100,000 years. Similarly the Icelandic Book of Settlements records famines during the winters in which "the old and helpless were killed and thrown over cliffs".

Well, I am. Or would be if I thought that's what they were.

I'm no stranger to visionary fervor, though it's inevitably riddled with doubt. If poets have a lover's quarrel with the world, perhaps my faith life is best described as a lover's quarrel with God.  I don't naturally have a happy medium -- being halfway between visionary ecstasy and acedia is medium, maybe, but hardly happy.

I attribute this to an over-vivid imagination. I don't need drugs to take a head trip (one reason, perhaps, I'm not attracted to them), my mind just works that way. Having visions straight out of a mystic's diary is not hard for me. But that, by itself, doesn't mean these visions have moral weight.

So, in the end, the moral content of my faith comes down to cold conviction, though perhaps conviction is the wrong word, as it suggests absence of doubt.

When I was about nine, and my gran took me to communion for the first time, the pastor's injunction to "Go and sin no more" influenced my behavior for months afterwards. Oh, I was sickeningly good during that time!

Now that I'm older, communion doesn't change my behavior as easily. Sometimes I'm afraid to take communion because I doubt my sincere resolve to sin no more. Oh, I  feel  repentant, all right. But if that feeling doesn't lead to a significant change of habits, how sincere is it, really?

Does that count?

That's very sad, since laws that are vague or over-broad usually hurt the people they're supposed to help.

Suppose I can prosecute something as a sex crime when it's not a sex crime. How does that help my credibility if, God forbid, I should ever have to report a real sex crime?

Thanks for answering.

(Dumb as such questions sound, they can help people figure each other out.)

I don't think you don't share those goals. I supposed you must share most of these goals, actually, to be here.

My question wasn't about your goals or your sincerity, but what you make of the sincerity of others. Do you think we're being dishonest with you? Or do you just think we're being stupid? Or what?

In that respect, you're most likely in agreement with the majority of libertarians.

And many here on Ricochet agree with that -- I would. A perfectly free market has never existed, and given the nature of politics, is unlikely to ever exist.

Nonetheless, some countries approximate a free market better than others, or approximate the free market in differing respects.

Is it unreasonable to think that, though a perfect free market will never be achieved, approximating a free market makes life better for the average Joe?

Is protectionist economic policy the only way for someone to prove his concern for the American worker?

If a person claims to support a simpler tax code, or a lower tax burden, because he thinks our current tax burdens hurt the American worker, can he be sincere?

If a person claims that abolishing the minimum wage and removing burdensome licensing requirements will help the American worker (especially the less privileged American worker), can he be sincere?

Or is such a person only sincere if he also supports protectionism (American mercantilism)?

What distinguishes a belief in  thoroughgoing  spontaneous order from an ordinary appreciation for spontaneous order?

And what is so deterministic about thinking that spontaneous order is a fact of life?

Do you honestly think that the only goal of many Ricochetians is to make the world outside the United States more prosperous?

(At the very least, you're forgetting self-interest.)

Noooo........ Not................. Tiny Dancer....

Every  time I go to the pharmacy, that song is playing.  Every  time.  I think I trigger it when I walk through the door.

And  why  is the tiny dancer in his hand? What is she, a Christmas tree ornament?

Guys do tend have the mechanical advantage.

I eventually talked to a campus policewoman. She said I could file an informational report without pressing charges, so that if I, or another woman on campus, had further trouble from this guy, there'd already be some history on him. So I did.

What happened to me was too bad to leave unreported, but I also didn't want to ruin a young man's life over what  might... maybe... have been some sort of disastrous misunderstanding.

Social signals are enigmas for us  nerds.  When Captain Subtext is transmitting, we're not receiving.

In retrospect, perhaps all the guys who surprised me were sending signals in advance that I just didn't pick up on at the time.

I have never, thank God, been raped. But I was assaulted once, and groped more than once, and in retrospect, there are cues I could have picked up on, decisions I could have made, that may have avoided some of these outcomes.

In the case of the assault, I had offered to lend a fellow college student something stored in my room, and because we were passing my room at the time, I invited him to follow me as I got it. I was too innocent at the time to think he might take this invitation as... that  kind of invitation, but he did. He surprised me before I could react.

I was innocent, but stupid. There are reasons a girl doesn't invite a guy she don't know very well to her room when she's alone: I was a fool for not realizing those reasons applied to me.

No, I saw it. I also think that perhaps your intent has been obscured by some unlucky word choices:

None of us can be 100% sure that we  could  have avoided a robbery by locking the door. While most robberies are crimes of opportunity, it's possible that this particular robber would have smashed through a window anyhow if the door were locked. What we can say is that there's a decent chance locking our door  may  have prevented the robbery.

It's hard to make an appealing case for prudent risk-reduction using words that make prudent risk-reduction sound like outright prevention.

I won't judge. Dating yourself can be the beginning of a lifelong romance.