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Most people who have heard about the Craig’s list rape by proxy of the Wyoming woman that occurred in December have been shocked by not only the brutal rape of a woman who was an innocent victim of an ex boyfriends sick mind, but also by the rapist who actually committed the crime. Many people believe that both men should get what they deserve. But what exactly does that mean in the case of Ty Oliver McDowell? Should the man be convicted of a Rape? Or is he perhaps a victim in the diabolical scheme of Jebidah James Stripe?

Posing as the victim, Stripe placed an ad complete with picture on Craig’s list. He stated in the ad that he was the woman and that she wanted to fulfill a sexual fantasy in which she was raped. Stating specifically in the ad that she was looking for an aggressive male who had little regard for women.

If McDowell is telling the truth, he saw the ad and emailed the woman, who was stripe posing as the woman, and they communicated by messenger back and forth as she detailed her fantasy and exactly what she would like done. After, discussing the fantasy. McDowell then on December 11, 2009 broke into the woman’s home, tied her to a chair, held a knife to her throat, and raped her. Thus fulfilling what he claims he believed to be the woman’s fantasy. At this stage we have no reason to disbelieve his story. But, was his belief and actions based on that belief reasonable?

The respectable media’s war against “trolling” continually mixes together prejudicial spite with political thinking, as if there is no difference between them. So feminist bloggers who rail against misogynistic trolling wring their hands over everything from threats of rape, which are very serious and potentially illegal, to ridicule of feminism, which is just a form of political criticism – often not very sophisticated criticism, but so what? One news report on the problem of misogynistic trolling lumped together commenters who make “threats of rape” with commenters who are “strongly and personally antagonistic towards feminism”. That is outrageous. Feminism is a political ideology and thus must be open to criticism, even stinging, hurtful criticism. To compare ridicule of feminism with the threat to rape a female writer is a kind of censorious moral blackmail, where the aim is clearly to demonise critics of feminism by associating them with foul blokes who get off on writing emails about rape.

Web-surfers who criticise Islam and don’t like the ideology of feminism, or respectable media outlets that now denounce pretty much everything they disagree with as “trolling”? The war on trolling is starting to look less like a demand for civility, and more like a demand for conformism.

What can make tens of millions of people – who are in their daily lives peaceful and compassionate and caring – suddenly want to physically dismember a man for drawing a cartoon, or make excuses for an international criminal conspiracy to protect child-rapists? Not reason. Not evidence. No. But it can happen when people choose their polar opposite – religion.

people can begin to behave in bizarre ways when they decide it is a good thing to abandon any commitment to fact and instead act on faith. It has led some to regard people accused of the attempted murders of the Mohamed cartoonists as victims, and to demand "respect" for the Pope, when he should be in a police station being quizzed about his role in covering up and thereby enabling the rape of children.

One otherwise liberal newspaper ran an article saying that since the cartoonists had engaged in an "aggressive act" and shown "prejudice... against religion per se", so it stated menacingly that no doubt "someone else is out there waiting for an opportunity to strike again".

conflict minerals are helping fuel the deadliest war in the world since World War II, the conflict in eastern Congo in which 1,100 women are raped every month, and 1,500 people die every day. The main armed groups that orchestrate the violence make hundreds of millions of dollars by trading in four minerals - the 3 Ts of tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold. These minerals are then bought by electronics and jewelry companies and are used in our cell phones, laptops, and gold necklaces.

According to the Basic Argument, it makes no difference whether determinism is true or false. We can’t be ultimately morally responsible either way.

It may be that we stand condemned by Nietzsche: The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far. It is a sort of rape and perversion of logic. But the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for “freedom of the will” in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Baron Münchhausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness … (“Beyond Good and Evil,” 1886).

the novelist Ian McEwan, who wrote to me: “I see no necessary disjunction disjunction between having no free will (those arguments seem watertight) and assuming moral responsibility for myself. The point is ownership. I own my past, my beginnings, my perceptions. And just as I will make myself responsible if my dog or child bites someone, or my car rolls backwards down a hill and causes damage, so I take on full accountability for the little ship of my being, even if I do not have control of its course. It is this sense of being the possessor of a consciousness that makes us feel responsible for it.”

society's answer to the question “Is it acceptable to hurt animals for our pleasure?” isn't always “No.” Odds are that most of the people who objected to the dog fighting and crush videos are frequent consumers of meat, milk, and eggs from industrialized farms. And the life of an animal in a typical industrialized farm is notoriously punishing. Many spend their lives in cages so confining they can barely move; ammonia fumes burn their eyes; their beaks or tails are chopped off to prevent them from biting each other out of stress; and the farm's conditions make many of them so sick or weak that they die in their cages or on the way to slaughter. As a society, however, we apparently believe that the pleasure we get from eating those animals makes their suffering worth it.

many people will object that eating animals isn’t a matter of pleasure at all, but of the need for sustenance. While that may have been true for our ancestors who survived by hunting wild animals, I don’t think it has much relevance to our current situation. First, it's questionable whether we actually do need to eat animal products in order to be healthy; the American Dietetic Association has given the thumbs up to vegetarian and even vegan diets. But even if you believe that some amount of animal product consumption is medically necessary, we could still buy from farms that raise their livestock much more humanely. It would cost more, but we could always compensate by cutting back on other luxuries, or simply by eating less meat. By any reasonable estimate, Americans could cut their meat consumption drastically with no ill effects on their health (and likely with many positive effects). Buying the sheer amount of meat that Americans do, at the low prices made possible by industrialized farms, is a luxury that can’t be defended with a “need for sustenance” argument. It’s about pleasure — the pleasure of eating more meat than strictly necessary for health, and the pleasure of saving money that can then be spent on other things we enjoy.

there are several reasons why people regard consumers of industrial farming differently than consumers of crush videos and dogfighting. The first has to do with the types of animals involved: pigs, cows, and chickens simply aren't as cute as dogs, bunnies, and kittens. I don't know how many people would explicitly cite that as the reason they're willing to inflict suffering on the former and not the latter, but it seems to play a role, even if people won't admit as much. People who have no qualms about a pig spending its life in a small, dark crate would nevertheless be outraged if a dog were treated in the same way.

Breaking the cultural code damages a person’s reputation, and perhaps one’s career. Britain’s Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke recently had to apologize for saying that some rapes were less serious than others, implying the need for legal discrimination. The parade of gaffes and subsequent groveling apologies has become a regular feature of public life. In his classic essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill defended free speech on the ground that free inquiry was necessary to advance knowledge. Restrictions on certain areas of historical inquiry are based on the opposite premise: the truth is known, and it is impious to question it. This is absurd; every historian knows that there is no such thing as final historical truth.

It is not the task of history to defend public order or morals, but to establish what happened. Legally protected history ensures that historians will play safe. To be sure, living by Mill’s principle often requires protecting the rights of unsavory characters. David Irving writes mendacious history, but his prosecution and imprisonment in Austria for “Holocaust denial” would have horrified Mill.

the pressure for “political correctness” rests on the argument that the truth is unknowable. Statements about the human condition are essentially matters of opinion.  Because a statement of opinion by some individuals is almost certain to offend others, and since such statements make no contribution to the discovery of truth, their degree of offensiveness becomes the sole criterion for judging their admissibility. Hence the taboo on certain words, phrases, and arguments that imply that certain individuals, groups, or practices are superior or inferior, normal or abnormal; hence the search for ever more neutral ways to label social phenomena, thereby draining language of its vigor and interest.