Considering the legal framework for abortion

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Now hold your horses PVC; if you think I crossed a line by debating your views and my replies are harassing you, I honestly apologise. I do not find you disagreeable, I simply disagree with you. If you request my personal impression of you, I can at most say I find you a tad backward, but certainly I do not dislike you.

Moreover, the emoticons I add to my introductions are never, ever ironic. I greeted you and then gave you the ok sign, it was a polite and friendly way to start.
Writing that you show contempt is not an insult PVC, you do hold moral relativists in contempt, you have done everything but use the exact word to show it. I was simply stating that your passionate contempt towards them is leading you to bias, which was my impression.

Telling me I show contempt is one thing, you said I have contempt. You are not qualified to say that, because you aren't inside my head. I find your view of morality disagreeable, and I think you use it to justify a type of behaviour I find distasteful, but that does not mean I hold moral relativists in contempt. It is simply the fact that I believe you are profoundly wrong and therefore I resist you profoundly.

Your last remark is though very personal. How do those chaps who like to fancy themselves as cultured debaters without having ever read Rhetoric in school never fail to polish it? Ad hominem I think. I forgive the rudeness, but it shows lack of character and such a feeble attempt at showing a grasp of basic psychology that I am now suspecting you do, in fact, have profound empathy issues.

You have included two Ad Hominems here, that I am uneducated and that I may be a sociopath. The worst that I have said of you is that you are refusing to engage with my point that if you have a one night stand you cannot know the other person's social situation other than by their report. You are obviously an intelligent and educated man, so you must realise this. Accusing you of a deliberate lack of self reflection is, admittedly, an Ad Hominem but a very mild one. I am not accusing you of a genuine failure of character.

On the other hand, accusing me of a lack empathy - I can now accuse you of a lack of empathy, and we can go around and around until I get on a plane to Romania, or you get on to one to England and we end up with someone skewered on the end of a rapier; but I'd rather not, and not because the flight is expensive.

As regards education in rhetoric, Cicero is one of my favourite Latin authors.

You’re a Christian who thinks sexual liberty is sinful.

Did I say that? I think you'll find I said that I was opposed to casual sex between strangers because it was irresponsible.

I'm not Saint Augustine, I'm actually ok with sex.

I’d be in the same situation if I’d try to convince a Muslim about the existence of the female soul. I’ve never wanted to cause you to stray from your path, I simply wanted to insert a different viewpoint in the thread. The merits of which are to be decided by our readers, towards whom I’ve already done my utmost to be understood.

I do not understand the concept of debating as a spectator sport, and I do not, generally, play to the crowd.

It must be said that claiming to understand Richard Dawkin’s points of view better than himself is really taking it to the next level. Simply stating that he believes goodness exists in the world does not imply that he does not think goodness is developed from empathy. It is what he actually says in those quotes I provided you with after all.

If you read Dawkins carefully you will see that he often, if not always, refers to "good and evil" in the abstract, this is not a matter of his personal opinion only, it is very clearly something he believes to be embedded in reality.

Well we were talking about Richard Dawkins’ views, and those of the New Atheists. You claimed they understood good and evil in the same way you did. At no point were we discussing their scientific positions, but their opinions on morality, I was showing you that they place themselves on the complete opposite side.

The problem is that this view is presented as "scientific", but it is really a blending of natural and moral philosophy. Read Dawkins and you see that he believes everything stems from our genes, but he consistently make imaginative leaps to try and connect his, essentially quite duelistic philosophy, to his monistic scientific realism. For example, he has claimed that belief in God is an inherited survival trait independent of any deity, but he also claims we have now outgrown this belief - we can transcend our genetics. On the one hand man is as he should be, because he follows his deterministic genes, on the other he should be more than he currently is and change his nature, in contravention of his genes.

There is a logical and philosophical canyon there.

Cruelty can be displayed by ordinary people and empathy helps you understand pain and thus, how to cause it. And then, which is the absolutely mind-reconstructing & society-defining action which empathy sears into our brains as a seething need? Justification. Empathy forces us to justify ourselves; to explain to ourselves why we’ve acted as we did, because we know, we understand intimately the pain we’ve caused and cannot live with it without reasoning it as part of a Moral standpoint. Croatian ustashas threw Serbian two-year olds in the air and caught them in their knives before hitting the ground in front of their mothers, but they would’ve first blown their brains out before doing that to a random Italian family. The Serbs were Orthodox. Blasphemers. You had to torture them for their sins against your God. Justification. Empathy requires it before suppressing your humanity. And when this rationalisation creates an entire System of Justifications, we have Morality. We draw a straight line.

So your morality can be used to justify causing suffering? Mine can't. To be clear, if you justify something you are say it is good. I do not agree that vicious cruelty requires the "suppression" of humanity, that implies a transcendent quality to human nature that is at odds with an avowedly secular and realist worldview. I sounds like nothing so much as the sort of thin a religious man says about his God-given conscience.

It is also generally true that the decision comes before the rationalization. Croatians kills Serbs because they hate them, they justify that hate on religious grounds, but it is obvious that Romans and Greeks can coexist, and generally have across history. The fact is, our capacity for empathy is not a "moral" faculty, it is merely something we use to justify some of the decisions we make - it represents out affective preferences, how we feel, and in that sense it is no more a justification for action than Divine Edict, which claims to be God's preference.

Odd to see you agreeing with my previous point where I stated that:

While morality is abstractly presumed good, the fact that good is itself defined by each society means that it simply encompasses the principles of a community, be they righteous or destructive. Since a cohesive group naturally agrees with its own set of morals, being described as a moral person is always accompanied by a misleading positive connotation. In fact, morality goes both ways and being immoral stands only for disagreeing with the community, the value of your impact is irrelevant.

That different societies have different moral codes is not in dispute, their relative value is.

Finally, I got something right according to you as well, societies do define their own good and evil after all.
I know I know, while you agree on that, you also think that there is some actually genuine notion of good and evil out there which is the only one worth being adopted by human beings.
Yes. There is. I've never disputed that. I just think we are able to sometimes grasp what it truly means to be Good due to the mind-altering effects of empathy which haunts us to justify in any way, even by deluding ourselves, actions we’d be horrified to experience ourselves. It leads us to develop secular principles.

OK, you have completely lost me. Objective values require a valuator. To say that:

You just think that’s God.

Just indicates that you have not considered what "God" is, philosophically speaking. Further more, to argue for objective values invalidates your argument viz empathy because an empathetic moral system requires that at least one person in a society to apprehend the objective moral good before empathy can operate on the given question. For example, if everyone thinks infanticide if fine there is not empathetic element to whether or not it is moral. Infanticide first has to upset someone before empathy can be used as a justification for not killing babies, because it upsets their parents.

The amusing part is that those good-and-evil-defining-societies combine our viewpoints marvellously: their delusion is that their empathy is to be suppressed because that woman's rape is justified by God. Opposing the rape thus makes you immoral, a point I was making in an earlier reply.

This implies they don't want to rape the woman, I contend that they do want to rape her because she threatens their masculinity; the hatred is a result of their emotional response and using "Divine Will" to justify it is just a sideshow. The point is that human being are inherently capable of cruelty, and their empathy alone does not prevent them acting out their malicious desires. In order for empathy to come into play those men must first acknowledge that the woman is of equal value, and not sub-human because only then will they empathize with her.

Her value must be recognised.

Uhmm empathy is a lot more complex. It does not only employ emotional recognition, it creates self-reflective perspectives through imagination. It’s a fairly well researched phenomenon.
But that was merely to address your inaccuracy when presuming that one needs to have previously experienced an emotion in order to understand it. What bothers is that you think empathy is irrelevant because it doesn’t explain the foetus. It does explain to us the gravida.

What you are really talking about, then, is empathy and sympathy. Empathy is the understanding of another's emotions, sympathy is sharing them. Empathy is the tool you use to engage sympathetically, one can have one without the other, both ways.

Really? The emotional and psychological damage they provoke to the owners of the vandalised joints who willingly rent them to them beforehand while fully aware of the club’s reputation? Hmm, nice touch there.
Very similar emotional and psychological damage to the one lower-class english hooligans inflicted upon the Italian spectators on the Heysel Stadium when their attack caused 39 people to be crushed to death.

This is a rationalisation of the Bullers, they do vandalise randomly as well. In any case, they are just a more recent manifestation of the callous young aristocrat, the lord's son you rape the farmer's daughter and then pays the father for the "whore".

[Papewaio]

I do not understand the concept of debating as a spectator sport, and I do not, generally, play to the crowd.

Wasn't rhetoric developed for debates with spectators?
Why teach one when you can teach many. Also if you wish to see your viewpoint prosper surely having spectators helps. Last point PMs are for one on one conversations so you have implicitly acknowledged that you are debating infront of spectators.

=][=
As for genes and moral/ethical systems one just has to consider emergent systems. Genes are a starting point but once a system emerges that can self program you get a whole sleuth of consequences that include stepping beyond mere instinct.

[Scienter]

High numbers of single teenage mothers are caused by moral degeneracy and poor sexual habits, not ignorance. The people know about condoms and the Pill, often they choose not to use them. What is lacking is the ability and or willingness to take responsibility for ones actions.

Don't you mean "teenage parents?"

Also, while you are right that some people have poor habits when it comes to safe sex, there is a great deal of ignorance and also lack of access to contraception. Many abstinence-based sex education programs convey inaccurate facts about the efficacy of condoms such that a lot of teens get the message that using it is a pointless exercise. Or they don't teach about birth control at all. Then, it's up to the parents to teach it, and they choose not to. So, in some places there are groups of teens who are either ill-informed about safe sex.

There are also problems with access to contraception. In very conservative areas, or for teens with conservative parents, it's not an option for a girl to ask her parents if she can go on the Pill, or for a teen of either gender to ask for condoms. If a teen's family's attitude about premarital sex is shame-based, they're going to be a lot more reluctant to go into a store to buy condoms, especially if they are behind the counter and they have to ask for them.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Don't you mean "teenage parents?" Also, while you are right that some people have poor habits when it comes to safe sex, there is a great deal of ignorance and also lack of access to contraception. Many abstinence-based sex education programs convey inaccurate facts about the efficacy of condoms such that a lot of teens get the message that using it is a pointless exercise. Or they don't teach about birth control at all. Then, it's up to the parents to teach it, and they choose not to. So, in some places there are groups of teens who are either ill-informed about safe sex. There are also problems with access to contraception. In very conservative areas, or for teens with conservative parents, it's not an option for a girl to ask her parents if she can go on the Pill, or for a teen of either gender to ask for condoms. If a teen's family's attitude about premarital sex is shame-based, they're going to be a lot more reluctant to go into a store to buy condoms, especially if they are behind the counter and they have to ask for them.

What you said is 100% true for the US, but I wasn't under the impression that the UK did such backwards abstinence only policies since they are more liberal in general. Maybe someone can correct my ignorance, are the chavs being taught that crap?

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Don't you mean "teenage parents?"

While it takes two to tango in a lot of cases the mothers don't idetify the fathers after the fact and in all practical and legal senses they are not aknowledged to exist. So in this country we have teenage mothers.

Also, while you are right that some people have poor habits when it comes to safe sex, there is a great deal of ignorance and also lack of access to contraception. Many abstinence-based sex education programs convey inaccurate facts about the efficacy of condoms such that a lot of teens get the message that using it is a pointless exercise. Or they don't teach about birth control at all. Then, it's up to the parents to teach it, and they choose not to. So, in some places there are groups of teens who are either ill-informed about safe sex.

There are also problems with access to contraception. In very conservative areas, or for teens with conservative parents, it's not an option for a girl to ask her parents if she can go on the Pill, or for a teen of either gender to ask for condoms. If a teen's family's attitude about premarital sex is shame-based, they're going to be a lot more reluctant to go into a store to buy condoms, especially if they are behind the counter and they have to ask for them.

This is adaquately answered by this:

What you said is 100% true for the US, but I wasn't under the impression that the UK did such backwards abstinence only policies since they are more liberal in general. Maybe someone can correct my ignorance, are the chavs being taught that crap?

We have the NHS, and our national socialised healthcare provides free condoms at all family planning clinics and I'm pretty sure a fgirl over the age of 16 can go on the pill, on the NHS, free without her parents knowing. Yes, we have religious abstinence-only people but they have no effect on national policy and they are only concentrated in very small numbers. You won't find a town utterly without free contraception in the UK, and you can also get condoms in every high street chemist and pub toilet. Accidents may happen, but you don't have any excuse for being completely stupid over here.

[Nowake]

Hello gang
Yay, I have not missed much!

A small request PVC, you lately tend to forget to address the main point of the passage you quote and engage a lengthy reply on some vague side-issue I am not necessarily disputing. Please, for the sake of brevity and format, lets pace ourselves a bit, we can’t get everything in if we want this to remain readable. And apropos of readers, lets start with:

I do not understand the concept of debating as a spectator sport, and I do not, generally, play to the crowd.

That’s a novel argument. I have to ask at this point if you ever thought why this place is called a Forum? It always was the declared goal to imitate the ancient public squares dedicated to popular assemblies.
As a personal observation, if you are not writing this for the audience and if you are not, hopefully, writing pages upon pages just to develop some atrophied debating skills, are you actually dedicating all this time to me? In all honesty, I’d feel rather guilty. I admit, almost none of my comments on your views were meant for you, but rather for the handful of undecided readers who follow the thread. That is how you affect opinion after all; you rarely can approach people after they commit themselves to a cause; you show the flaws to those with an open mind.

If you read Dawkins carefully you will see that he often, if not always, refers to "good and evil" in the abstract, this is not a matter of his personal opinion only, it is very clearly something he believes to be embedded in reality. (...)

I have to recapitulate this argument for you because you’ve completely lost track.
First you defined yourself as a moral absolutist. You then claimed persons such as Richard Dawkins and movements such as the New Atheists share your moral absolutism because they believe in the existence of good and evil. Thinking you knew what moral absolutism means, I voiced my disagreement on their adherence to moral absolutism and argued that we do not debate the existence of good and evil when I wrote:

I know I know, while you agree on that, you also think that there is some actually genuine notion of good and evil out there which is the only one worth being adopted by human beings.
Yes. There is. I've never disputed that. I just think we are able to sometimes grasp what it truly means to be Good due to the mind-altering effects of empathy which haunts us to justify in any way, even by deluding ourselves, actions we’d be horrified to experience ourselves. It leads us to develop secular principles.

But then Dawkins is considering good and evil to be discoveries made by our empathic brain – for which I provided a crystal clear quote.
At this point, you continue to argue your initial position through: “[Dawkins] refers to "good and evil" in the abstract, this is not a matter of his personal opinion only, it is very clearly something he believes to be embedded in reality.” which is such a total non sequitur to all I have written.
To conclude, you simply do not understand that believing in the existence of good and evil does-not-a-moral-absolutist-make. The nuance you fail to recognize lies in the fact that Dawkins believes good and evil to be free of social mores, but not free of the empathy-dictated understanding of one’s action’s impact. Or, if you want the taxonomy laid out, you are a moral absolutist, while he, the New Atheists and I are moral objectivists. Please stop and at least ask for clarifications instead of just typing away the same reply.
I don’t know how this could be explained more clearly. But for example, if Dawkins would read that appalling side-debate you had with Vuk over the righteousness of having Hitler murdered, he would never side with you. Both he and Vuk would consider the context changes the valuation of Hitler’s murder as an evil act, making them moral objectivists.

The problem is that this view is presented as "scientific", but it is really a blending of natural and moral philosophy. Read Dawkins and you see that he believes everything stems from our genes, but he consistently make imaginative leaps to try and connect his, essentially quite duelistic philosophy, to his monistic scientific realism. For example, he has claimed that belief in God is an inherited survival trait independent of any deity, but he also claims we have now outgrown this belief - we can transcend our genetics. On the one hand man is as he should be, because he follows his deterministic genes, on the other he should be more than he currently is and change his nature, in contravention of his genes.

For this I direct you to Pape’s reply, he did a much better job of presenting the same argument than I would’ve, as my pedantry for explanations would’ve prevented me from being as terse as he was.

Uhmm empathy is a lot more complex. It does not only employ emotional recognition, it creates self-reflective perspectives through imagination. It’s a fairly well researched phenomenon.
But that was merely to address your inaccuracy when presuming that one needs to have previously experienced an emotion in order to understand it. What bothers is that you think empathy is irrelevant because it doesn’t explain the foetus. It does explain to us the gravida.

What you are really talking about, then, is empathy and sympathy. Empathy is the understanding of another's emotions, sympathy is sharing them. Empathy is the tool you use to engage sympathetically, one can have one without the other, both ways.

No, I’m really not talking about that PVC. We are again having to return to definitions. Case in which I find it impossible to confuse employing imagination to create self-reflective perspectives with sympathy. Perspective-taking is re-creation. It’s also known as cognitive empathy and it is the farthest component (of empathy) from sympathy. It is, if you like, the empathy you demonize as cruelty-inducing and morally neutral, and yet, at the same time, it is the side of empathy enhancing our brain’s imagination the most; it is perspective-taking which allows us to establish good and evil jointly with emotional empathy , and thus a lot more than a useful social tool.

In other words, you can't demonstrate that your one night stands haven't been with persons who were already in relationships, but you're too proud to admit you might be the dirty secret in someone else's marriage? (...)
Ulterior reply: The worst that I have said of you is that you are refusing to engage with my point that if you have a one night stand you cannot know the other person's social situation other than by their report. You are obviously an intelligent and educated man, so you must realise this. Accusing you of a deliberate lack of self reflection is, admittedly, an Ad Hominem but a very mild one. I am not accusing you of a genuine failure of character. (...)
As regards education in rhetoric, Cicero is one of my favourite Latin authors.

I don’t know PVC, is that the worst you have said of me? Because your first phrase really makes some rather creepy allegations about my sexual conduct and asks me to justify choices which could only be explained by delving into personal details that are none of your business. A rather vulgar approach. Your ulterior spin shows a lack of will to assume responsibility for your own words, rather a pity, you were passing for such a cerebral chap.
To clarify my Ad hominem remark, I discovered the Internet to be a trove for berks exercising petty forms of sciolism. These sciolists relish in slamming Ad Hominem all over the place; since I find them a tad repulsive, the term now shares the taint in my head, yet it was very fitting on this occasion so I grudgingly used it without being able to help myself to grumble on the side. Thus the comment itself did not target you.

Really? The emotional and psychological damage they provoke to the owners of the vandalised joints who willingly rent them to them beforehand while fully aware of the club’s reputation? Hmm, nice touch there.
Very similar emotional and psychological damage to the one lower-class English hooligans inflicted upon the Italian spectators on the Heysel Stadium when their attack caused 39 people to be crushed to death.

This is a rationalisation of the Bullers, they do vandalise randomly as well. In any case, they are just a more recent manifestation of the callous young aristocrat, the lord's son you rape the farmer's daughter and then pays the father for the "whore".

So modern lower-class English hooligans were now brought about by the rapist son of the lord. Hey, nicely done though, it takes a special kind of cognitive dissonance to be able to deny any Skinhead heritage to the Chavs while considering the House of Lords to have fathered the English ultras. Tallyho bruv?!

[Rhyfelwyr]

it takes a special kind of cognitive dissonance to be able to deny any Skinhead heritage to the Chavs

What does chav even mean? A lower-class person?

How can you compare them to a violent subculture like Skinheads?

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

A small request PVC, you lately tend to forget to address the main point of the passage you quote and engage a lengthy reply on some vague side-issue I am not necessarily disputing. Please, for the sake of brevity and format, lets pace ourselves a bit, we can’t get everything in if we want this to remain readable. And apropos of readers, lets start with:

I address my point to what I feel is relevent, this may or may not be the primary text of your reply.

That’s a novel argument. I have to ask at this point if you ever thought why this place is called a Forum? It always was the declared goal to imitate the ancient public squares dedicated to popular assemblies.

Having a crowd to judge the debate does not mean that the debate is for the crowd. It's not a very novel idea to engage in disputation in order to resolve a philosophical question; it is the foundation of the medieval university system and the principle survives today. Playing to the crowd is demegoggy.

As a personal observation

, if you are not writing this for the audience and if you are not, hopefully, writing pages upon pages just to develop some atrophied debating skills, are you actually dedicating all this time to me? In all honesty, I’d feel rather guilty. I admit, almost none of my comments on your views were meant for you, but rather for the handful of undecided readers who follow the thread. That is how you affect opinion after all; you rarely can approach people after they commit themselves to a cause; you show the flaws to those with an open mind.

Atrophied debating skills? And you're complaining about other using Ad Hominem, seriously? If your comments on my views, and my writing style, are meant for the rest of the Backroom and not me then you are engaging in an extended attampt at character assassination, aren't you?

we might as well have a penis measuring contest.

To extend one of our favourite sayings here: Play the ball, not the man or the audience.

I have to recapitulate this argument for you because you’ve completely lost track.
First you defined yourself as a moral absolutist. You then claimed persons such as Richard Dawkins and movements such as the New Atheists share your moral absolutism because they believe in the existence of good and evil. Thinking you knew what moral absolutism means, I voiced my disagreement on their adherence to moral absolutism and argued that we do not debate the existence of good and evil when I wrote:

I know I know, while you agree on that, you also think that there is some actually genuine notion of good and evil out there which is the only one worth being adopted by human beings.
Yes. There is. I've never disputed that. I just think we are able to sometimes grasp what it truly means to be Good due to the mind-altering effects of empathy which haunts us to justify in any way, even by deluding ourselves, actions we’d be horrified to experience ourselves. It leads us to develop secular principles.

But then Dawkins is considering good and evil to be discoveries made by our empathic brain – for which I provided a crystal clear quote.
At this point, you continue to argue your initial position through: “[Dawkins] refers to "good and evil" in the abstract, this is not a matter of his personal opinion only, it is very clearly something he believes to be embedded in reality.” which is such a total non sequitur to all I have written.
To conclude, you simply do not understand that believing in the existence of good and evil does-not-a-moral-absolutist-make. The nuance you fail to recognize lies in the fact that Dawkins believes good and evil to be free of social mores, but not free of the empathy-dictated understanding of one’s action’s impact. Or, if you want the taxonomy laid out, you are a moral absolutist, while he, the New Atheists and I are moral objectivists. Please stop and at least ask for clarifications instead of just typing away the same reply.
I don’t know how this could be explained more clearly. But for example, if Dawkins would read that appalling side-debate you had with Vuk over the righteousness of having Hitler murdered, he would never side with you. Both he and Vuk would consider the context changes the valuation of Hitler’s murder as an evil act, making them moral objectivists.

For this I direct you to Pape’s reply, he did a much better job of presenting the same argument than I would’ve, as my pedantry for explanations would’ve prevented me from being as terse as he was.

Obviously, I read Dawkins differently to you. Regardless of the label you wish to apply, my point remains valid, that an objective morality includes arbitary "goods" and "evils" and this requires an arbiter, which leads one to some form Deism and is not compatable with Atheism, which is what modern "secularism". That is modern seculaism abmits no religious or philosophical position beyond the use of deductive logic.

No, I’m really not talking about that PVC. We are again having to return to definitions. Case in which I find it impossible to confuse employing imagination to create self-reflective perspectives with sympathy. Perspective-taking is re-creation. It’s also known as cognitive empathy and it is the farthest component (of empathy) from sympathy. It is, if you like, the empathy you demonize as cruelty-inducing and morally neutral, and yet, at the same time, it is the side of empathy enhancing our brain’s imagination the most; it is perspective-taking which allows us to establish good and evil jointly with emotional empathy , and thus a lot more than a useful social tool.

That's just a thought process then. What actually affects you is the sympathetic sharing of emotion, you do not merely understand what someone else feels, you share the experience with them and therfore you are able to share, to internalise that emotion as your own. Most of this can be included in a general definition of "empathy". If I read back what you wrote I see no difference between the affective responise of a normal person and the intellectual working-out that we see in psychopaths. A psychopaths are capable of understanding someone's emotional respose intellectually and "re-creating" it logically, what they lack is the ability to internalise affectively, to actually share a feeling.

I don’t know PVC, is that the worst you have said of me?

Yes. You still refuse to self-reflect on your sexual activities, for all that you quoted me.

Because your first phrase really makes some rather creepy allegations about my sexual conduct and asks me to justify choices which could only be explained by delving into personal details that are none of your business.

You are the one who valourised casual sexual experience, and then tried to sidestep the example I gave of why I find such activities distasteful, namely that in my experience one party is married or otherwise unavailable. As you repeatedly failed to engage with that, and tried to sidestep the issue in the example I provided (that it was immoral because of infidelity) I accused you of a lack of self reflection due to evasion. If you had just said, "yes, it is immoral to have casual sex when you are already in a monogomous relationship" the debate would have gone in a different direction.

I then would have said, "how do you know your partners are not being unfaithful even if you aren't?" and you might have replyed something like, "because I know who they are, even if I don't have a personal relationship with them."

Then I would point out that they aren't exactly "strangers" and this is a different social arrangement to the casual bedhopping many people engage in, which is where we started. I would also point out that these sorts of liasons are profoundly atypical outside small exclusive communities.

Or some such.

A rather vulgar approach. Your ulterior spin shows a lack of will to assume responsibility for your own words, rather a pity, you were passing for such a cerebral chap.

It's quite possible to be both a deeply dissagreeable person and highly cerebral, but a Berk is a fool. There is no ulterior spin in my point, and I'll quite happily be explicit:

The more one night stands you have with people (I'm assuming women, but I don't know) whose social situation you do not actually know, the more likely who have slept with someone's partner. The only way you could avoid this it by only sleeping with people whose social situation you know by independant report. That implies an unusual social situation though, and a comparatively small community - cocktail part vs nightclub, really.

If you want more agrrable discourse you might refrain from phrases such as, "rather a pity, you were passing for such a cerebral chap." I do not respond well to condecension.

To clarify my Ad hominem remark, I discovered the Internet to be a trove for berks exercising petty forms of sciolism. These sciolists relish in slamming Ad Hominem all over the place; since I find them a tad repulsive, the term now shares the taint in my head, yet it was very fitting on this occasion so I grudgingly used it without being able to help myself to grumble on the side. Thus the comment itself did not target you.

You cannot accuse me of Ad Hominem and then say the comment is "not directed at" me, it obviously is.

So modern lower-class English hooligans were now brought about by the rapist son of the lord. Hey, nicely done though, it takes a special kind of cognitive dissonance to be able to deny any Skinhead heritage to the Chavs while considering the House of Lords to have fathered the English ultras. Tallyho bruv?!

Not what I said, I said moral corruption tends to percolate down the social strata because it makes it easier for the lower class to justify behavious if the upper class are already doing it. As to Chavs and skinheads, I'm not saying they have nothing in common, but skinheads are not inherrently anti-social, nor do they form an underclass. Like Mods and Rockers Skinheads were a youth movement - Chavs are a social strata all their own, it denotes a way of living not a concious lifestyle choice.