As for you not having seen the claims, if you still haven’t after I posted a link, you’ve reached what we like to call “willful ignorance.”

Uh, nope, if that was to me, this is false.

I haven’t seen people suggesting the rape charges are false because one of them posted about revenge.

I HAVE seen people saying that the rape charges are false because they are not the charges Assange is charged with.

This really is *quite* different.

What makes a charge of rape impossible to make (one has not been made by the involved parties) is that one of them posted a bragging tale after the event.

Rather hard to claim post-coital rape when you posted about how you’re going to do it again…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/25/undercover-sex-police-climate-activists

Nor has your response to other commenters (desalpins) given the impression that you are arguing explicitly that sexual jealousy is not a human universal.

So, some clarification. The term “sexual jealousy” as it is used in the context of, say, the blogosphere, is a western concept that refers to a widely observed behavior that is probably linked to deep limbic responses that humans may well have, but that must be understood as something much more nuanced and subtle. I’m pretty sure the extent, nature, and details of sexual jealousy in typical humans is culture-dependent, even if this behavior makes use of deep limbic emotions. I’m also pretty sure that sexual jealousy is shaped in some cultures to enhance certain behaviors (and allow them by others not directly involved but who know about them) that are abhorrent. The fact that there are societies in which women are routinely tortured or killed over issues of sexual access gives sexual jealousy a rather bad name. But that is humans, and human culture, making the worst of it as often happens. There is a good argument that a certain degree of sexual propriety and it’s concomitant emotional bells and whistles makes good sense for human beings in cultural contexts where these emotional tools can be used sensibly, which to me includes both egalitarian foraging societies and progressive middle class European subcultures (which are very similar to each other in many ways).

25% of your post was a digression about a hypothetical case in which you ask the reader to introspect about their own feelings if they were different sexes and had different sexual preferences. I assume you are conceding that this digression did not communicate anything useful, especially since your hypothetical was not very well aligned with the actual case under discussion.

Assuming that “I’m conceding” something is just another form of telling me what I’m thinking. You really have to stop doing that.

No, my “digression” was relevant to helping someone understand what I mean. Perhaps your assuming it is not important is part of the reason you are not getting what I mean.

You seem to assume the exercise would reveal to the reader that the double standard “my sexual jealousy is good, your sexual jealousy is bad” (which you assume Assange supporters unconsciously agree with)(which argument seems to assume sexual jealousy is a universal) exists. I’m sure you could have communicated that idea more clearly.

I am referring to a double standard, but I’m not sure why my guessing that there is a double standard here somehow is adduced (by me) as evidence that sexual jealousy is a human universal.

By the way, we’ve not touched on what a “human universal” is. I doubt we have the same thing in mind when we use that term, but I’m not going to assume what is in your mind.

Thank you for clarifying the antecedent of “that” in your conclusion. The context was not too subtle, just ambiguous.

Not even a little ambiguous. I suppose I could have put the two sentences in a paragraph by themselves or something, but really… perhaps you were just skimming.

You haven’t connected the reasonableness of sexual jealousy in any meaningful way with the reasonableness of filing a police complaint on the man that raped you.

Actually, I did. The problem here is that you’ve not understood what I’ve said. But that’s OK, this is hard. You are not understanding something that is difficult to get, quite understandable.

I can try to help you a bit but it is going to involve an analogy and will probably cause more rather than less confusion given the way you approach these things, but others may find it useful. Let me know if this helps you.

I do not believe that human minds act in the manner one would assume if they were “rational hypothetical deductive” machines. Not even if you want them to, will they act this way. I think CS Peirce had it essentially right (as right as one could in those days) when he talked about inference as a process of comfort and discomfort.

Think about this: You have a conversation with someone you don’t know all that well, and you understood the overt meanings of things, but you walk away from the conversation with a sense of discomfort that you can’t put your finger on. Later, you meet someone you do know very well, and that person relates a conversation she had with that first person. This conversation causes you to suddenly understand the meaning of some cue, statement, symbolic act, something, from that first conversation, and now you get what the true (or at least “truer”) meaning of that first conversation was all about. Your sense of discomfort goes away your sense of comfort increases, you perceive that you now understand what was really being said.

It is quite possible for humans to have that sort of experience and be MORE rather than less wrong about their understanding (of the first conversation, in this case). But that is not really how our brains work. When the context is reasonably normal, when the premises are sound, when we are not being misled craftily by others or by ourselves due to some neurosis or whatever, we tend to go from understanding less towards understanding more, from fuzzier understanding to a more clear understanding, of things in concert with an increased sense of comfort.

Which can mislead us, but generally can also work.

I am saying that what people are calling a sense of sexual jealousy, and labeling as an emotional irrational reaction, leading Miss A and Miss W to come to a conclusion about what they had experienced post hoc, is a normal, expected, and often effective process of human inference.

25% of your post was a digression about a hypothetical case in which you ask the reader to introspect about their own feelings if they were different sexes and had different sexual preferences. I assume you are conceding that this digression did not communicate anything useful, especially since your hypothetical was not very well aligned with the actual case under discussion. You seem to assume the exercise would reveal to the reader that the double standard “my sexual jealousy is good, your sexual jealousy is bad” (which you assume Assange supporters unconsciously agree with)(which argument seems to assume sexual jealousy is a universal) exists. I’m sure you could have communicated that idea more clearly.

Thank you for clarifying the antecedent of “that” in your conclusion. The context was not too subtle, just ambiguous. My quotations were not randomly assembled, they were all from your concluding paragraph, and aimed to show that it could be understood in two different ways. You have two antecedent sentences, of very different force. That is your problem as a communicator, not mine as a reader.

My point was that everything you wrote about sexual jealousy aligns with the first of those sentences, but not the second. Since you confirm that you meant the second, you confirm my opinion that this is a badly argued post. You haven’t connected the reasonableness of sexual jealousy in any meaningful way with the reasonableness of filing a police complaint on the man that raped you. Because of this, you haven’t succeeded in your stated aim of contradicting those Assange supporters that want to make sexual jealousy an issue.

My message is sloppily reasoned? Pot. Kettle. Black. Please do show where instead of trash talk and sarcasm. I agree with you and Stephanie and every other reasonable person that these women did the right thing. That doesn’t mean I think you’ve done a good job communicating.

@wow – my speculation about jealousy makes no-one a hypocrite. Unwanted sex of any flavor is rape. The issue is coercion, not jealousy. The fanbois are trying to tell a story where jealousy (of each other) is somehow transmuted into revenge (against Assange). How would the women’s conversation go, in that story?
A: I’m jealous of you, and want Julian for myself!
W: I’m jealous of _you_, and want Julian for myself!
Then a miracle occurs…
Together: Let’s file a complaint against Julian!
You need to be more explicit in step 2.

2) The charges are in the second link Greg posted.

3) What exactly about contingent consent is BS? If a woman’s consent is based on their being a condom, then there isn’t a condom, there is no longer consent. Not difficult. However, that comment from you misrepresents what is being said to have happened. See (2).

4) WTF does being “sex mad” or not have to do with anything? Are you trying to tell me everyone is always consenting to sex of any kind with anyone? If that were true, it might be relevant here, but it’s way the hell off-base.

“The jealousy factor would therefore seem to be low in discovering that one of their multiple partners had multiple partners.”

OK, hypocrisy isn’t unheard of, but it does make the hypocrite’s position untenable. And, since the charges are serious enough to get Interpol involved, isn’t this appropriation of state threat also a violent reaction and therefore itself rape? After all, not all rape is physical…

You mean “You’d point it out to me but you don’t want to risk being shown where you’re wrong”.

1) Nope, never seen anyone (apart from setting up the argument to knock it down) people proclaiming that the rape charges were wrong because the women are bad people.

2) I have seen people say that there were NO RAPE CHARGES therefore the charge of rape is wrong. Not even the two women charged him with rape.

3) “It split whilst in me so I said stop” is BS. ‘fraid there’s NOTHING HERE that counters that.

4) Women are just as sex mad as men. Get over it.

Don’t be shy of going all evo-psycho on us if you’ve got the link handy to a study of sexual jealousy as a human universal.

Here’s a link. It’s to a book. Those paper things where most of the pertinent literature actually exists:

Human Universals

Sexual Jealousy as a human universal is so basic in the literature it predates Evolutionary Psychology (thus the Brown reference instead of something post Tooby and Cosmides). But, I’m not arguing that sexual jealousy per se is a human universal. I’m arguing explicitly that it is not. Perhaps this is not my finest hour in blogging. But it may also be something less than your finest hour in reading!

If you want to understand the meaning of “That’s what any reasonable person would do” consider placing it in the perhaps too subtle context in which it is written:

“…I’d say they acted in an entirely appropriate manner when they thought of making a case after finding out about each other, if that is in fact what happened. That’s what any reasonable person would do. ”

It’s hard to agree or disagree with your points since they are pretty much based on a random selection of incorrectly assembled bits of my post.

Sorry, you usually do better than this.

Well, gee, thanks for the backhanded approval. I can’t believe you put your NAME on a comment so sloppily reasoned and presented. Jeesh. Let me know if you want me to delete it.