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Fraud in Internet Dating Prompting Regulation
anaesthetica writes "According to the Washington Post, an increasing tide of fraud in internet dating is prompting lawyers and lawmakers to examine possible regulations and consumer protections. Wire fraud scamming, plane ticket ripoffs, fraud perpetrated to fund trysts, fake "date bait" messages -- these are just a few of the issues the courts are beginning to deal with. Dating websites were immunized from lawsuits over false statements by the recent Communications Decency Act. Other attempts to regulate internet dating, such as the 2005 'mail-order bride' legislation, are already being challenged in court, but an increasing number of states are sponsoring their own legislation."
What's being described here is already covered by existing fraud statutes, isn't it? What's with the call for more regulation?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
existing anti-sexual assault, anti-fraud, anti- laws more than cover this.
this is yet another potential grand stand style red herring politicians can use to distract you from real issues.
I hope I saved you a lot of time you would have spent inquiring further into this.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
The little heading under the title should sum it up, plain and simple: it's from the "you-mean-i-shouldn't-believe-everything-i-read dept." Do a little homework, and think things through. Common sense... the world is losing it all too fast in my opinion. Being uneducated is one thing, and not a bad thing, but is this what we're coming to? People make their own decisions without doing any homework and stubbornly stick to that no matter what? :\
Whatever, me just blowing off steam I guess...
Reminds me of the proposition 2 crap that happened down here in Texas. While us citizens were busy screaming about adding proposition 2 to the Texas constitution (it would ban gay marraige), despite the fact that gay marriage was already illegal under state law, our loving congress and our wonderful governor Rick Perry slipped by some amendments that allowed them to spend the principle of the education budget (normally legislature can only spend the interest on things other than education) to give Wal-Mart a multi-million dollar loan to build a distribution center in south texas.
And to think there is still no budget for the public school system down here (we've been bickering about it since our supreme court struck down the curring Robin Hood system about... 1, 2 years ago?)
http://www.andrewsmcmeel.com/godsdebris/
A-Bomb
Who would want to date when you can play Dungeons and Dragons?
Anyway, doesn't everyone here know that all the cute pictures online are fake and you are talking to somebody who weighs 300 pounds and whose real name is "Bubba"?
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
"A piece of trickery; a trick.
1. One that defrauds; a cheat.
2. One who assumes a false pose; an impostor."
Interestingly I think these are the exact same definitions for "Date" as in an event, and "Date" as in a person.
--
Music should be free
My Computer Music Tutorial Videos
His Qualities
Your Qualities
So that MILF is really a MIDWTF? Time for a lawsuit!
More useless hype to distract you from the real world.
after reading the title, and skimming the summary, i read "14 comments yro.slashdot.org" as "14 yr old.slashdot.org"
for a minute there, i lost myself...
Back in February, I consulted with a law firm on a dating site fraud case.
3 0813.asp) and the case was dropped. I can see
The client sued a dating site because he saw a profile (faked), joined, chatted for 2 hours,
then "she" gave him a get lost jerk phone number.
In discovery, the email address given by this "woman" was phony.
While the dating site is protected under the CDA (see http://www.techlawjournal.com/topstories/2003/200
a case against a site for failing to do a basic check of the email address and removal of a phony profile. That by not checking, the dating site gets an unfair benefit from the deceptive information posted -- a person being tricked into paying a fee to contact the person in the fake profile.
Fight Spammers!
You'll have to consider all the anime / manga "specialists" who are looking for an Asian gal (and possibly something like "must like shibari, nosehooks and tentacles" (not that anything is wrong with that). /. crowd.
There seems to be a great many of their number in the
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
That way I can be sure that I am corresponding with a virgin who just turned 18.
Here is a noble idea:
Let the free market figure it out!
For example, if Yahoo dating service is able to block 98% of scammers, while Match.com is only able to block 75%, then who should win?
The answer lies within filtering technology, and innovating approaches to improving the quality of service. The market will sort things out on its own; that will force innovation (progress) and foster competition.
Regulation and legislation usually stifles competition and innovation. If people can't get good service at one place, they will go to somewhere else that meets their needs. That is called the free market!
Libertas in infinitum
Wise, benevolent legislator seeks voter to guard and protect. Will keep you safe from all harm. My turnons are exotic travel, tax hikes and campaign contributions. LTR preferred.
Welcome to the Internet, where men are men, women are men, and 16 year old girls are FBI agents.
(Paraphrased)
Mommy my stomach hurts...
What is this "dating" of which you speak?
A rolling stone is worth two in the bush!
So who is the legislation supposed to protect? People from themselves? ...Because they don't realize that "find your perfect soulmate for $39.99 a month" or "find a hot chick to bang tonight" are too good to be true. Let people live in their fantasy world where everyone has a soulmate and there are plenty of hot local babes" willing to please, just a few mouse click away and $5.99 registration fee.
Nobody ever got prosecuted for wire fraud for embellishing to potential dates over the phone or by any othger means. Using the internet does not really change anything.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
common sense is quite a valuable tool, it is free and available to all, just have to reach for it and use it - simple as that!
The problem here in Thailand is not that most Thai girls are bad. It is that most are so nice, and shy, and not very open about showing their photo on the internet, or too shy to actually make contact with a foreigner even if they really want to. The scammers are a small but aggressive and active fraction of the population. So the scammers end up being a large fraction of the Thai ladies meet-able online.
The typical westerner vacationing in Thailand cannot easily tell the difference from a nice local girl and a scammer. But I can spot them instantly as can every other Thai person.
But even without local knowledge the average foreigner can just use their head a little. When that sweet little thing you met online starts asking for money, or plane tickets, or other big ticket items then it is pretty obvious you are being scammed, isn't it? What's the point of yet more legislation?
Actually, it's 35, not balding, $90k base or $150k+ if you include the options (not even close to underwater, even with tech stocks declining) and stock purchase plan, college educated, my own apartment only because I just finished a messy divorce (had a townhouse, sold it in the divorce, still have half of the resulting sale), savings, retirement, and haven't lived with my parents in 15 years.
Doesn't help, because of the football part and the introversion. And maybe the football part wouldn't be a problem without the introversion, who knows. However, with dating sites as they are (regulated or no), my odds for the rest of my life are non-existent unless I buy a bride overseas or find a low-aiming gold digger.
After all, all those damn profiles out their say "must not be into playing games".
Dammit.
Curse you, WoW!
obligatory... man woman No manual entry for woman.
Mod others as you would have them mod you.
now women are starting to get bit.
That's the fastest way to get Congress to act on something: show that it affects women as well as men.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I want to see regulation against using photos that were clearly taken BEFORE YOU STARTED EATING LARD BETWEEN MEALS!
The International Marriage Broker Regulation Act of 2005 has the following requirements
on websites that bring American men and foreign women together:
Some of those requirements are reasonable - but (1) and (2) are absolutely nuts. Simply chatting with, or even sending a simple note to, a woman means that a guy has to give out way more information than he would ever give out to a woman he just met in a bar or other similar 'dating' situation.
The background information includes things like details of part marriages, names and ages of any children, his current address and full name, etc. The kind of information that fraudsters and identity thieves would just love to get their hands on.
Furthermore, there is no recriprocation - the woman are under no obligation to provide any verifiable information at all to the men.
The law goes so far as to try to impose itself on all 'international' dating websites, even if the ownership is 100% non-American and are hosted outside of the US. The enforcement mechanism is to deny marriage visas to any woman who admits to meeting her American husband or husband-to-be through a website that has not officially adopted the rules and been certified by some sort of quasi-governmental certification authority.
Unfortunately, it really doesn't help all the honest Joes out there that most of the websites that discuss the IMBRA are laden with misogyny, using terms like "feminazi" that are really self-labels for the writers as probably not being fit to marry a woman - American or otherwise.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
As long as this does not mean that I will have to walk away from this screen to meet my next wife I don't care.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
They were pretty quick to regulate---
---wait---
---no, actually, the government has never been quick to regulate anything. Just point fingers.
The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.
How many were "burnt" (=shot) by easy to get fire arms?
How many were "burnt" by the RIAA / MPAA?
How many were "burnt" by DRM?
How many were "burnt" by software companies that are not liable for the damages their software caused?
I mentioned weapons, the big media, DRM, BigSoft Inc., did I miss someone or something? Healthcare and education are missing.
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
The problem with most internet regulation is that it just doesn't work, unless we're talking about the Chinese goverment. It's much more productive to let customers decide if they like a service with the help of reviews. Any decent service does filter for most basic fraud and has some sort of honesty system in place. Better match sites let members describe themselves in the kind of detail that makes fraudsters apparent. A site that is a good example of this is: http://www.personio.com/
And what's wrong with that? Just do a good prenup (or better yet, skip the marriage part) and when you wear out the first one, move onto the next. Never actually let her spend much of the money pot - just let her think she can later!
This really is a noble idea, but like many such ideas, it is far too simple to work all by itself. There is nothing inherently wrong with regulation; it's just mindful engineering. Many systems, if you don't apply intelligence and sculpting to their growth progress, will just end up being wild free-for-alls which do not necessarily favor humans. This is why farmers try to discourage weed growth among their crops. Our intelligence is a tool designed to give us an edge in the wild; ignoring it needlessly strips us of that advantage. Sorry, but I don't have claws and fur, so why on earth would I want to handicap myself?
--I remember while visiting Orlando, and Buffalo and a few other U.S. cities, and being amazed at the apparent lack of zoning laws. The cities were a total mess. Industry and housing and retail sectors were all mixed together. I saw nasty chemical plants next to schools, next to gun shops, next to more housing, next to burned out housing. . . It was insane and stressful and totally unnecessary. --Yes, it made the ideologues happy because some high-minded theory about evolution or something was being adhered to, but the result were stupid cities which were uncomfortable and stressful to live in.
Humans have the ability to measure the effectiveness of systems and employ tactics to increase efficiency. --Yes, free market economies are a good base-line for allowing natural efficiencies to take hold, but so are implementing required standards, -for example, the the legally imposed engineering standards placed on boiler manufacture during the steam age when faulty or stupidly made engines exploded on a regular basis. --The free market may have in time have come around to building safe boilers all on its own, but things got a lot safer for the populace almost immediately when the public decided to make it illegal for companies to build lethal steam-bombs masquerading as engines.
Free market economics is one tool, and while it sometimes works, as with all tools, it also sometimes fails miserably. Why get upset when other tools are suggested? You can't solve every problem with a hammer. Sometimes a drill, or a screwdriver, or a piece of sandpaper are better fits for a problem. More often than not, all the tools used in concert in an intelligent manner turn out the best results.
I for one am glad that bridge designs need to meet certain critical standards before cars are allowed to cross and that we don't have to wait around for the stupid companies to be weeded out through economic failure due to their bridges collapsing some percentage of the time.
Of course, it is true that regulation through government bodies can and does also cause big problems, but those problems stem from stupidity and greed rather than an inherent flaw in the style of solution. Regulation can stifle creativity, but the Free Market model allows for unnecessary dangers to the population. Human Intelligence is the stuff we use to balance out the difference.
-FL
I've been on the internet dating sites before.
:)
Anybody who decides to MARRY somebody they've never met before, ESPECIALLY if they are outside of driving distance is an idiot.
A "little" and I mean "little" common sense can go a LOOOOONG way. Most bogus profiles can be spotted a mile away. Also..anybody who is from Eastern Europe, Russia, is HOT and writes you an email that has non-specific information riddled through it can go in the trash.
In my experience when internet dating potential partners have only two of the following three qualities: Attractive
Single
Mentally stable
Fraudsters will never die :( It's like the whole nation of Nigeria is a Scammers paradise, It's exuberantly GAY for us to tolerate such behavior, I think its high time the lawmakers did more than saying they'll do more! It's really becoming a bore to have to see everyone being fooled into fruitless business opportunities. Fraudsters really piss me off, I think its high time we actually did things ourselves regarding the matter.
----
There are two things I hate more than anything, and thats nigerian scammers and muzlims.
----
Follow me..
One piece of wisdom I learned from dating and running a couple sites is that men add an inch to their height, and women drop 20 lbs in online profiles. I never ran into any real scams, but I sure did meet some crazy people.
I thought it was a good idea
I use dating sites. I do not want regulation of content on them. Stay the fuck out of my life. I will decide whether somebody is a fake, whether the site is putting up garbage, etc. (and it's not *that* difficult).
Go back to your home towns and find a school's bake sale to help run. Stop legislating your way into every goddamn nook and cranny of everybody's lives. While you're at it, how about repealing some other regulations, since you've already gone too far?
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
Well, how about this? There are TONS of signs near where I live by the side of the road that say something like "Single? www.fairfaxsingles.org" or "Single? www.oaktonsingles.com". I went to one to see what was up, and it asks for a name and phone number so they can "verify" who you are and find out what you are looking for. I did a whois on the domains, and it came back to a marketing company that gathers data for telemarketing to potential mortgage purchasers. Nice scam.
I have lots of girl/friends and I have met a number of women from using the Yahoo, Match.com, and eHarmony personals. Generally, what I have found is that the women who are on internet personals (and are legit) are there for a reason.
... with the average women saying they are average and actually being overweight.
... I published a story on my BLOG back in March that all of my friends have been begging me to write down for years. If, after reading it, you don't think there should be regulation of these sites ... well ... let's just say ...Maybe we should have YOU investigated and regulated.
Women most often lie about weight
Men, it seems, most often lie about being married.
If you want to read the worst internet date ever
The Worst Date Ever For An Apple Tech
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Ok which senator got scammed by some fat ugly gay man pretending to be a shy 18 year old virgin chick?
You know that's probably the reason this bill is being introduced.
eTrade SUCKS
...you can't legislate it away, either. It is not the government's job to protect your from your own dumbassitude. :-)
If you don't have the sense to sniff out a phony, you shouldn't be dating at all, much less attempting long-distance hookups over the internet.
~Philly
PS - I'm glad the government won the war on terror, cleaned up the mess in Iraq, and finished rebuilding New Orleans so we can finally focus on the evil-doers who lie in online personal ads.
Maybe we don't need to try libertarianism on a large scale to know what a horrible disaster it would be.
More seriously, I think that libertarianism should be tried. Let a state like Montana or South Dakota secede from the Union and adopt a libertarian government. Release its residents from all federal laws and taxes. Let any American who wants to be free of big government move there. I'd be very interested to see what their society is like once free of the tyranny of public education, public roads, FDA regulations, environmental protection, and antitrust laws.
AlpineR
I think there should be a law against laws/etc which protect the mentally inept.
Survival of the fittest etc..
Unfortunately most of the electorate of any democracy seem to fall into the 'mentally inept' category, so they'll vote for people who claim they'll be able to protect them from having to use their brains.
Any politician who says 'people should think for themselves and be responsible for their own stupid actions' has no chance of being elected nowadays.
"Democracy means getting the government you deserve"
I think I've tried all of the online dating sites, and in my personal opinion, they are all worthless.
Not only does everyone lie, but you also have spammers posting fake profiles to fish e-mail addresses. Of course, those fake postings are easy to spot. If you see a profile for a super hot half naked chick (and on some sites, completely naked chick) with a description of "e-mail me at hotchick@spamrus.com", then it's most likely a fake post.
Then there are the online dating sites where you must pay to reply to any e-mail sent to you. For some reason, right before and again right after your subscription runs out, you get an e-mail from a really hot chick who likes your profile, and is just looking for a f**k buddy. If you renew your subscription and e-mail the chick, you'll never hear from her again.
If you can avoid all of the scams, you still have social problems of online dating. If you've read any "good" books on human courtship, you should know how important body language is. With online dating, you completely lose the subtle dialog of body language, to the misspellings and poor grammar of e-mail.
My suggestion would be to get out of the house, and meet people. You don't have to go to bars. In fact, I would strongly suggest not going to bars, and instead seek out group activities where you'll get a change to meet potentially single women or men.
That said if I had to recommend an online dating service, eHarmony.com would be my choice. They seem to have the least fraud, and with all the steps you must go through to make contact, you tend to only meet people serious about dating.
Perhaps the mail order bride legislation should reflect it. In a CBS news article on the subject, Natasha Spivak, founder of Encounters International, a Bethesda, Maryland-based service, said she had "no objection to mandatory background checks", but felt it would not totally prevent abusive from getting a foreign wife. O n the other hand, she contended that, "male clients, not the women, are the most likely to be victimized in mail-order marriages. Some women, she said, enter such marriages solely to gain U.S. citizenship, then falsely complain of physical abuse as a ploy to remain in America despite divorce. Some of these women are sharks". Although the legislation is promoted with the noblest of intentions (to get votes), it's unlikely to make any great impact. Let the buyer beware!
I have lots of proof of internal fraud at Match.com !!
hundreds of faked profiles created over a year ago when they paid someone to create and upload them.
(yes match.com pays contractors to create fake female profiles)
And the files I have include all details and fake photo proof and dates of upload entry.
For sale to the largest law office bidder of class action lawsuit against match.com
I am talking about hundreds of PROVEN fake profiles all created in one day by contractors for match.com
So some guy thinks he's chatting with (hot girl), but it turns out to be the proprietor of the Android's Dungeon instead. Welcome to the internet. We all look like him. If we didn't, we could get dates in the real world instead.
Check out the cave on the east side of lake Hylia. Strange and wonderful things live in it.
Anyway, I'm on OkCupid as it is free, and thought I'd see if True was free. IT IS NOT! They indicate in no way shape or form that it costs money until after you enter personal information at which time they will spam the living hell out of you. Your profile will get tons of winks or whatever the fuck system they use in an attempt to lure you to pay them money to respond, but these people are not real! It is nothing but a scam and you should all stay away.
Can anybody recommend a good dating site review site that points out things like this before I test them out and learn the hard way?
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
rather than issues like balancing the budget, fixing levees, or fixing the immigration problems we have.
Immigration sticks out as the crossover from your list. Pretty clearly the Repubs were trying to pony up immigration reform as this year's Gay Marriage Amendment: the social wedge issue that would continue to let them play Nixon's "southern strategy" this time around. The "illegal immigration should be a felony" thing was all about that. The grenade went off in their hands a bit, and now they're back to the gay marriage thing as a fallback position.
My Southern Baptist relatives down in Oklahoma would vote for any politician who passed legislation about some sort of "fraud" involving white girls being misled by black men. Seriously. All you have to do is throw them a bone like that, and they're motivated. Politicians know it, just take a look at their Senator Coburn. It's spooky.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
slashdot ladies always want to get with me. I have to fight them off with a stick sometimes. They always want to score.
Believe it.
Dude, I always score at the laundrymat. No, but seriously.. if you want you can get a dog and train him to run up to girls on your signal and then appologize to them and tell them you are a sensitive poet.
Join one of those Museum Members Societys. It's probably a couple hundred bucks and there are TONS of single people that go and the atmosphere is much friendlier than [bar|park|class|dating service|church{"get the f*^k away from my pew you a$$^@!e!"}]. Use your creativity. Geeks are good at this. Don't use the norms, they are tired.
Believe it.
I mean, common sense has never been that common, but it seems that lately it's damn near extinct.
I still can't believe people thought the Iraq war and rebuilding of Iraq was protecting the USA, that it was even possible to pull off and that it was ethical.
Blar.
Seems to me that dating fraud is something that isn't really amenable to regulation and that attempt to prevent through law is just going to result in pain and headaches all around.
all the time really, look at the current immigration nonsense. We have a plethora of perfectly adeqate laws on the books to cover any aspect of legal or illegal immigration-yet we have these "new shiny and improved" bills being debated in congress. Like, what for? Look at the drinking laws, there isn't a single instance of a drinking and driving "crime" that isn't covered under something else already, from speeding to manslaughter to driving to endanger, etc, yet they had to throw a new one on top of it to show they were "getting tough" on this or that.
It's the system that is broken, we have no otside limit on new laws that may be passed, a serios IMO problem with the constitional sstem.
(spelling nazi note,sorry, keyboard broke last night, an obvio""s letter doesn't work anymore)
So to a large extent, you are left with dregs (of both sexes), fortunately refreshed by ~one-half the people from breakups. But these "better" partners also tend to hook up fairly quickly, while the dregs just don't quit.
The solution to these poor odds is just numbers: scan quickly and without expectations that will cloud your judgement. Dating sites & their email systems make this very easy.
... there aren't zillions of athletic, pretty, tanned and barely legal chicks that just want to get f*cked by me in my neighborhood? Talk about blown illusions.
You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your Prince/ss. So practice "Safe Kissing". A first date is never more than coffee at Starbucks.
I used to try to use match.com, but decided that it was evil and just shy of fraud when I got notification that I had an e-mail from another user, but it wouldn't tell me who without paying. The area I live in is only moderatly populated, so there weren't enough interesting women on there to justify paying all the time -- I had paid in the past but just happened to not be paying at that moment. They may have changed their policies since I had originally started using the site or maybe I just made a faulty assumption, but I felt that that was dirty. I would never have paid for their services if I had known that it would require the person on the other end to pay to get my e-mail.
Since I never got any replies through match.com I don't know if anyone ever even recieved my e-mails. That was the service I thought I was paying for when I was a paying member in the past.
I tried to retaliate against them by sneaking some ugly statements into my profile about how much of a douche Dr. Phil was (they were running a promo w/ him at the time) and also about how match.com actually worked, but even though they sent me the "your profile changes have been approved" e-mail, they edited that back out.
Ticketmaster (which owns match.com) is evil, IMHO.
I can't believe people are trying to sue dating sites over what the people on the site are doing. If they did enough to stop some of this from happenning the sign up process would be so intensive no one would continue to sign up. What is the site doing that is harming these people. Next time someone begs for money on the sidewalk I'm bringing suit against the city I'm in because they aren't kicking all the homeless out. This is so dumb. You are on an online dating site, you are already putting yourself at risk by meeting these people. Suck it up and move on. We don't need more laws. There are already too many out there anyway. Why don't we just move to a socialist government. That way tey can tell us our every move and kill anyone who disagrees.
The greatest of all weaknesses is the fear of appearing weak. ->JB Bossuet, Politics from Holy Writ. 1709
That sounds suspiciously to me like the argument that a crooked, over-reaching legislator would make in order to justify sitting around and churning out reams of new laws, figuring every once in a while he could sneak something through without the public noticing until it was too late.
Where are these "activist judges" of which you speak? I haven't seen many; but the knee-jerk stupidity of Congress seems pretty much limitless.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I met my girlfriend on line. We went to a wedding in March of a couple who met online. At the table we were at, all 4 couples had met online.
In the younger generation (20somethings and below) it is THE way to meet people for dates, and there's no social stigma attached to it.
And frankly, condemning it is awfully myopic. I've been online dating since 2000, off and on. It's frustrating as hell at times (but so is hustling for numbers in real life) but the bottom line is you do get a greater compatibility baseline. Naturally you have to know what you're looking for. (hint: Nice Cans shouldn't be the priority) You get the benefit of seeing a glimpse of their value system, know immediately if they share interests, and you can weed out the vapid. Which is difficult to do in the bar scene, or any other type of method for meeting women.
Veering back on topic, I think some regulation is necessary, but not necessarily legislation. Fraudulent sites are what peeve me. For example: Match.com had a well publicized case where an employee's job was to write members to keep them on the hook with their dating site, as it's one of the worst out there at this point.
The big question is whether additional legislation is necessary, or if simply enforcing the laws already on the books would cover it. (Fraud and the like) Frankly, I'd like to see them give a run at using what we've got, then determining (through case law) that the laws aren't adequate. If that's the case, then sure, legislate.
Politicians need to be put up against the wall. Maybe I'll run on that platform.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Actually, I find it somewhat interesting and amusing that people take such a negative stance on "Internet dating". The types of fraud this legislation is concerned with are obvious scams, much like the Nigerian email scams circulating the net. Either you've got supposed foreign women looking for a guy in the U.S. (usually someone so new to a dating site that their profile and description hasn't even been approved yet by the moderators), and they immediately "fall in love" with you after 1 or 2 emails -- or you've got cookie-cutter template "dating sites" that mysteriously happen to have hundreds of photos of extremely attractive women in your zip code or city, and you can't email any of them until you pay a $40 or more monthly "subscription fee".
If you exercise a little common sense and caution, you should be able to avoid being taken by any of these schemes. In my opinion, they do practically nothing to invalidate the concept itself of net dating.
Going back to the "common sense" thing again, of course people want to believe they've met the "perfect" person for them online when they start chatting it up with someone new. The sensible people arrange to meet in person as soon as it's reasonably possible, and find out if the photos are old/fake or not, etc. If they're not honest in their personals ad, then you can bet they're not going to be honest and straightforward with other things either. So cut things off right there and move on!
Done sensibly, I don't see why Internet dating should be any less "useful" than any other form of dating. I know one of my "requirements" for a partner is someone intelligent and educated enough to enjoy doing a little bit of reading and writing. The people who can't put together a complete sentence (or who hate reading) don't typically bother with (or fare well at making ads on) Internet personals sites, so voila - some "pre-screening" is done for me!
I understand this is a meat market, but I don't think we need the USDA's regulation!
Nihilism means nothing to the dancing peasants
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/09/30
The reason the immigration grenade went off in the collective hands of the Republican party, is because the half of them that thought toughening up the laws would make a good campaign issue, evidently didn't consult the other half, who were all funding their campaigns with dollars donated by the agribusiness or construction lobbies. Oops.
Grenades work better when you can agree which direction you're going to throw it in before you pull the pin.
On the bright side, it made it abundantly clear who was actually listening to their constituency and who was listening to their donors, though. It's good to get an issue every once in a while that clarifies things like that.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Man, I think you qualify for Troll, Redundant and Nazi all at once!
Fraudsters don't die because there's a sucker born every minute.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
The dating sites themselves are committing fraud, and the fraud they commit obviously isn't illegal. TFA says that Match and Yahoo are both being sued for posting bogus profiles themselves, and sending bogus messages to subscribers to keep them from leaving.
Is there any corporation anywhere that isn't slimily irresponsible? Is such a corporation even possible? Is there a CEO anywhere that wouldn't kill babies and allow his grandmother to be sold to slavery for money? Is it possible to be a CEO without being a sociopath?
The Iraq was was "killing people and blowing stuff up." We do it every few years, and then watch reruns on the History Channel in between.
Iraq just happened to be convenient -- it's nice and flat, we have some pretty good maps from the last time we blew stuff up there, and the country's leadership was suitably unsympathetic. Plus they had a lot of nice rusty military equipment to shoot up. Way more impressive than bombing some cave.
In all frankness, I think the real reason we went into Iraq is because the war in Afghanistan didn't last long enough. Everyone was saying it was going to take a while, but in reality the whole place caved in like a house of cards within a few months. This was somewhat unsatisfactory to an American public who were really hoping to see a whole lot of brown-skinned people get the shit kicked out of them in retaliation for 9/11. (Note that an actual connection between 9/11 and aforementioned brown-skinned people not required, although if they're of the same religion as hijackers and also dislike the U.S., it helps.)
Now that we've vented our spleen to the tune of a few trillion bucks, played with our new toys and gotten our war heroes, we'll retreat back to Fortress America for a few years and bitch about the price of gas and how the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Then, a few years down the road when we've mostly forgotten all the bad parts, we'll start developing an itchy trigger finger again, and start looking for a new target.
Every generation has to have its war, lest it fail to stack up to the generation before; thus the ego of the United States is continually refreshed by the blood of foreigners in strange, far-away lands.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I didn't online date in college either; it's damned easy to meet people and the shared experience makes the whole "dating game" trivial.
But it's still happening online - not with formal dating services but Facebook, and (for younger) MySpace and its amalgams are how many people are meeting at this point.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
so how can someone tell by looking at your website that it's all legit instead of all fake?
Or, perhaps more to the point: You say all the girls on your site are genuine. Is there a process we can go through to verify this?
This is a serious question, even though I'm posting AC.
Well I think you said it pretty well - it is the "common sense" thing. Common sense should be "common" but is becoming extinct for some reason. Sure there are legitimate dating sites that verify identities and such, but for any one of those there are 20 that will do anything to get that $39.99/month fee from you. I just don't see why people need to be babied and protected if they don't have common sense. Just like in the Nigerian scams, if people would just not be so greedy and really believe that "king Ahmed's son will give you $40,000,000" they would be fine.
The second rule of the Internet Dating Club is that EVERYBODY lies.
The third rule of the Internet Dating Club is that if it's your first date, you MUST confess. Besides, at that point it becomes obvious that you really have more years, more weight, less hair and fewer teeth than you claimed online.
As near as I can tell from my own experiences and the tales told by the women I've met online, dishonesty is about equally distributed between men and women. The sites with the highest level of honesty are the free ones like plentyoffish.com and okcupid.com. I'm not sure why this is--maybe because the people there have less invested in the whole process and realize that the net is a great way to make contact and and a lousy way to get to know anyone.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Our law is based on the Common Law of old England, which originally came from the church. A judge who respects judicial history and continuity will obviously rule that marriage is defined in the Common Law as the union of one man with one woman. Anything else is legislating from the bench.
And if you actually knew anything about the subject you're spouting insane nonsense about you wouldn't have wasted those electrons.
The fundamental difference that set America apart from England and all other countries is the separation of Church and State. England has a state church, we don't. Out laws are not based in any way whatsoever on any sort of religious beliefs. That's what made us so cool back in the day.
So now, we have these extremist fundamentalist nutjobs shoving this historical revisionism asshattery because they're too cowardly to deal with a free society.
If you want to live in a theocracy, move the Saudi Arabia. That's where they live under your desired system.
If you choose not to do so, think about why exactly that is and quit trying to bring that diseased type of system here.
For a 300-pound woman to put "petite" as body type in their profile.
Yeah, my karma sucks....but so do the mods.
Go to Wikipedia. Read about Common Law. Learn.
Like it or not, US law is directly descended from religeous courts in England. Like it or not, we inherit this. Except where overridden by new laws, the Common Law is enforcable in the USA.
It is from the Common Law that we get our Fair Use concept. You like that, don't you? It is from the Common Law that we get all sorts of interesting right-of-way issues with well-trod paths over private property. (yep, you can lose your right to put up a fence if someone has the nerve to sue you -- it has happened a few times)
Just look for a hard working girl on the other side of town. You are obviously living in the well-to-do part and the girls there are the ne-er-do-well Victoria's Secrets kind. So change the pubs and clubs that you attend to an area 10 miles east and you'll soon find a beautiful, muscular, down to earth girl that won't believe her good luck and who will adore you forever...
Oh well, what the hell...
Try PlentyOfFish.com-it's free and has a lot of people actively looking for their special someone... I've had good luck there so far-no "soul mate" yet, but plenty of great dates...
The interesting thing is that it let you also see which Democrats were listening to their constituencies vs the Democrats courting future voters.
I married someone I met online. I also met her in person a couple days after the online introduction (as I think "dating" on a computer is downright stupid.) She had one of those 'too good to be true' pictures. I also dated online pretty extensively for a couple years (as well as people I met in real life). MOST people on the major dating services, including the women, are actual, legitimate people. Some of them I even recognized just from seeing by chance in daily interaction.
There are definitely also fakes and people trying to scam you on dating sites. Most of them are really, really, really obvious if you're not an idiot. But there are also people who will scam you in "real life" dating - and those scams can cost you a lot more than a few bucks, and can be a lot less obvious. It's not like it's unheard of for women to meet men who scam them out of their entire bank account. You just have to excercise some judgement - people who have extensively filled out their profiles and have something SPECIFIC to say are almost certainly real; people with very generic 'please most people' profiles or photos that were taken on a set are probably not.
Some people DESPERATELY want to be 'loved' and will do almost ANYTHING to do that. No amount of legislation is going to make these people not be suckers. All legislation will do is make things harder for the legitimate people.
paintball
First of all, in order for it to be "murder", the fetus would need to be a "person". Now, there may be CL precedent on point for this, but I doubt it. Also, you might want to do a *little* more research so that you don't sound like a mouth-breathing imbecile. You're thinking of the Fourth (not First) Amendment.
Nope,
UK, france and many other countries have seperation of church and state.
In the UK its a peculiar seperation in the the head of state, the queen, is the head of the church of england. However the government of the UK is not beholden to the head of state in any real way. In theory the queen could sack the prime minister or any other member of parliment. She also has the right to refuse to apoint the prime minister (and therefore the government) however doing this would remove her as head of state. There is along standing agreement that the monarchy keeps its nose out of government.
How is a girl who asks for money becuase she wants money a "scam"?
Because she's not white. If she were white, she'd be a trophy girlfriend/wife.
paintball
Which, as I recall, is decended from the Roman law. Perhaps the judge should go all the way back to the days of Ceasar when making decisions? Or perhaps you can admit "Decended from" is quite another thing from "Is exactly equal to". Some of those minor modifications are fairly substantial, such as the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" and "all men are created equal". We've already declared "all men" includes women as well (which may have been another break from historical common law). So if men = women, wouldn't a law against men marrying men specifically contradict that foundation our system of laws was founded on by legislating that man != woman?
you can lose your right to put up a fence if someone has the nerve to sue you
You can lose your property altogether if you fail to enforce your ownership. Its happened more than a few times. What the hell does that have to do with anything?
Until very recently, the notion of marriage being a union between man and woman wouldn't even have been considered a religious question, just a matter of common sense. You can be very sure that the founders of this country would never, in their wildest imaginations, have dreamed that the 1st Amendment would be used to justify legalization of gay marriage. As with so many other vociferously dogmatic leftists, you've fallen prey to the fallacy of projecting neo-liberal values and interpretations onto the classical liberals who designed the system of Constitutional government.
Most people in this country don't want legalized gay marriage. Most people don't wish to live in that kind of society. The "extremist fundamentalists" are the majority of adults in this country, their viewpoint is extreme only in relation to the that of the relatively small number of urban liberal elites who are attempting to re-engineer society to their liking. You may not like that fact, but it's the inconvenient truth. Good luck convincing such people that you're "setting them free" by corrupting and spitting on their fundamental moral values.
There are basically two fundamentally different things that could have happened there:
1. That the site itself created false profiles to seem populated. That's fraud.
2. That some member put in a false address on their own profile just because they _don't_ want to be stalked, spammed, or have their identity stolen for character assassination purposes as retaliation by some cretin who can't deal with rejection. This is just having a brain. The sheer number of idiots out there is truly frightening, and these sites _also_ act like the wrong kind of a filter by mainly attracting those who are too socially-retarded to find a date any other way. So anyone who put any true personal info on a site that'll give it unquestioningly to every horny Tom, Dick and Harry, I'd consider them genuinely and truly retarded.
So is it some guy that was scammed by the site owners, _or_ some socially-retarded guy who's angered that he can't stalk the girl who dared refuse him? They're very very different cases. So as long as we aren't told which of them it is, I won't hurry to join in the angry mob with torches and pitchforks.
In fact, the way the original post was phrased, it sounded like getting a false email was _the_ grand fraud. Not even "proof" of fraud, but as being the grand despicable act of deception itself. That the site should have made sure the guy only gets genuine email addresses for his money.
In which case, I'm left scratching my head: exactly what the fuck was he actually expecting to get on that site? Did he think he was buying a list of verified email addresses, like on some spammers' sites? Or what? The site only promised to put him in contact with another person, nothing more. As long as they did that (or at least he can't prove that they didn't), it seems to me like they're perfectly in the clear. They didn't promise to sell him someone's verified personal data.
On the whole, it looks more and more like an idiot who can't deal with rejection than anything else. Read the whole thing again. Starting with the whole flipping out and trying to sue the site after the very first rejection. There is no mention of trying to gather more proof or anything. (E.g., you know, trying to chat to more than one person just to see if all conversations follow the same bait-and-dump script or what. Or trying to see if more people run into the same kind of a problem. Surely he's not the only one who talked to a staff member in disguise, if that's the case.) And continuing with the not-so-veiled quotes all over the place ("she", "woman", etc) implying that it must have been a guy, although, again, there was no finding or even an actual case.
Seriously, the more I look at it, the more it looks like a very good possibility that it's just a clown who'd do anything rather than admit that someone rejected him. He's scream fraud, he'll scream that it must have been a man in disguise, anyting. Because god forbid admitting that maybe, just maybe, a woman could have actually rejected him.
Of course, I can't know that either, but it's a distinct possibility.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Seriously. Every time ANYTHING comes up about ANY kind of regulation, the drones come out and start blathering "let the market sort it out!" as if no one else has heard about this alien concept. Well, some things the market DOESN'T sort out, or in doing so, the market suffers great harm, possibly involving a lot of people ending up hurt or killed.
...lovely, my captcha was "audited."
This is certainly a case where many people would have to be defrauded over a great period of time before enough information would enter the market to shutdown the fraudster. That's why we have laws against fraud that shut them down _before_ the market is damaged enough to respond. Further regulation may not be necessary, but this incessant bullshit about the free market panacea is just insipid.
I suppose we should just allow everything to reach Enron proportions and just sit there waiting for that invisible hand to come around and slap you in the ass.
Perhaps we should amend the bill to fight the following sorts of fraud:
* Passing rejection hotline numbers as real phone numbers
* Willfully misrepresenting relationship status or sexual persuasion
* Transporting STDs across orifice lines
* Beeing sweet in a bar but an asshole in the morning
Me, I married a fabulous woman I met on OK Cupid, a dating site by nerds full of interesting people.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Like it or not, US law is directly descended from religeous courts in England.
BULLSH*T
If you go to wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law , as you suggested, it states that Common Law is derived from Roman and Germanic Tribal Laws and Customs. In fact, the creation of the Common Law, along with a strong Court system, ran in direct opposition the Church's courts. Not only are you a troll, you are a complete and utter moron.
Here is an experiment you can do in the comfort of your own home. It won't work with any of the established "serious" dating sites liek yahoo, Match.com, eHarmony... but try it with one of the newer, agressively marketted sites, like... i don't know... true.com, basically any place that does not allow you to reply to "winks" with a self-written email unless you pay will work:
1. Create a free profile. Do not accept the offer for a "free trial period", just join, put in your age and city, etc. Fill out as much of the rest of the form as you like, but to get the most out of this experiment, I recommend that you do not upload a photo.
2. Wait.
3. After about a week, you will start getting "winks" or "smiles" or whatever they call them on your chosen website. They will all be from women at or near the minimum age you put in your "who I'm looking for" criteria, they will have cute but not unbelievable pictures, and may or may not have their profile information filled out. Occasionally, despite not having your own picture uploaded, you will get a wink that says, "I liked your photo" or something similar.
In order to reply to these "winks", you have to join the site. Sound fishy?
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
UK, france and many other countries have seperation of church and state.
You might want to look into this thing called "The French Revolution". Pay particular attention to the date.
Similarly for changes in British law. The simple fact is that there is still a state religion in England. It's called....let's see now.... no don't tell me.... oh yeah.. The Church of England.
Go to Wikipedia. Read about Common Law. Learn.
Yes, and English common law sprang full fledged out of the ground on the 8th day.
Idiot.
How about you read and learn
Most people in this country don't want legalized gay marriage. Most people don't wish to live in that kind of society. The "extremist fundamentalists" are the majority of adults in this country, their viewpoint is extreme only in relation to the that of the relatively small number of urban liberal elites who are attempting to re-engineer society to their liking. You may not like that fact, but it's the inconvenient truth. Good luck convincing such people that you're "setting them free" by corrupting and spitting on their fundamental moral values.
And you've fallen into the trap of thinking that the constitution is designed to *give* rights.
What you and your morally bankrupt ilk always fail to do is come up with one possible constitutional justification for allowing such a ban.
I know your type doesn't want to live in that type of society. The real problem is that "that type of society" is one in which people are allowed to live their lives in their own way wthout extremist religious zealots sticking their noses in other people's business. This is known as a "free society" and I'm well aware of your hatred and contempt for it.
People like you, in fact, are the reason we are not a democracy and that we have a separation of Church and State.
The fact is that the constitution and bill of rights exist to tell you to fuck off or leave if you don't want to live in that sort of society.
If you'ree too cowardly to live in a free society then move to saudi Arabia where thay already live under your ideal system.
http://www.coderoshi.com/
In this instance, I actually don't believe that political or legal intervention is a good idea. The internet is a target of fear-mongering by news agencies, and the government would dearly love to clamp down on it. --I was commenting primarily on the unrelated broad strokes of the parent poster with regard to free market systems, which as I have already expressed, I believe to be filled with various pitfalls and that there is nothing inherently wrong with using human intelligence and adaptability to fill those holes by way of regulations.
Also, I fail to see how a company not willing to invest in a better service isn't motivated by greed.
What people really want is for prices to stay the same but fraud protection to increase, which is impossible.
No it's not. --Sometimes, (read, nearly always), when a successful company does the minimum amount of work and investment and thus provides shoddy, over-priced goods and services, it is not because it cannot afford to do a better job or charge less, but rather it is that the owners and shareholders are unwilling to give up their profit margins. The seven-figure income is the American dream and a primary goal for many businessmen and CEO's. That is, after a certain point is reached in a company architecture, prices and service levels become very flexible. I don't know about the company in question, but the basic assumption that companies must raise prices to include honest services is totally erroneous. Particularly when filtering, (or in the case of some of the date services, stopping from engaging in fraudulent practices on their own boards), is not so terribly difficult.
So let the market determine how much fraud protection people are *actually*, not theoretically, willing to pay for. They can do it much more quickly and effectively than politicians. In fact, it's already been done.
Market forces are generally going to be in effect regardless, but to rely entirely upon them is short-sighted and unnecessary. Politicians are not a great solution to any problem, it is true, but some laws just make sense; there are lots of good examples. Michael Moore summed it up well: according to free market logic, it would make most sense for McDonald's to sell crack cocaine. --Crack is enormously profitable and the customers would be locked through addiction into coming back for more. Let the Free Market reign! --Except we don't allow this because of the negative impact it would have on our society.
Market forces are a neat and powerful idea, but so is balance. That's all I'm saying. It's not a Black & White universe out there, and neither should be one's world view or philosophy.
-FL
People looking for dates try to make themselves look better than they really are. News at 11.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Of course she grossly lied about her weight. She was 300+ lbs with a very cute face. The worst part was she was wearing a sparkly, pink shirt showing her midriff. It was really embarassing, so I did the only thing a gentleman would do. I made an excuse to go to my apartment (so i wouldn't be seen in public with her), then I had sex with her and never called her back.
Word up!
I continue to realize how fortunate I am to have found such a beautiful wonderful amazing fiancee online. Her parents even paid for a plane ticket so I could meet her that fateful day in Orlando.
Granted, many of the "scams" listed in TFA are common sense "well, duh" situations - your late-30s, balding, overweight profile netted a hot supermodel who is just dying to meet you but needs some $$$ for travelling money? Yeah.
But I did have a brief stint with a few online dating sites, and can corroborate the following sly goings-on by the sites themselves:
1) Free-as-in-beer (glass only; beer extra) : A number of sites claim out the ass that they are "completely, totally, absolutely free"...only after wasting two hours filling out exhaustive profiles and personality surveys is one informed that to actually send/receive/make contact with another user requires a paid membership. That should be disclosed up front. When the canonical Hot Chick signals interest in the hapless user (see #2 below), the options are a) pay for a membership, or b) wait for her to pay for a membership. I can't speak for everyone, but (a) is not an option on principle (I consider this undisclosed membership requirement deceptive, and as such, am NOT supporting it with my dollars), and (b) is also a no-go because... well, have you seen some of the women who have to pay for memberships, rather than let the guys pay for them? I think I'd rather take my chances at the pub, much as the typical "bar girl" is not my type.
2) The quite plausible scenario of "date bait" profiles/inquiries created by non-users (i.e. the site itself) : Mentioned by a few previous posters and the article blurb. For some services, people have definitely noted a "statistically significant" correlation between the number of "winks" / hits / etc. (and corresponding low skew in age, etc.) and the expiry date of a paid membership to a site as described in (1). It's not that other users are rushing to get it in before the deadline; I don't suppose a real user would have any way to know when another real user's membership expires.
2) "Woohoo, free Google keywords!" : Sites that retain one's profile (for the benefit of search engines) in perpetuity, even if a user cancels their membership, delete their profile, etc. (Americansingles.com, I'm looking in your direction.) I made the mistake of using the same username there as I use in a few other places; now any search on it returns a dating profile deleted two years ago, marked "deleted" (though full contents still intact), and has the audacity to assert that it was probably deleted because I "found that special someone" through that service. (In reality, the service fit criteria (1) above and I said, "fuck that"...)
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
Check it out! You too can participate in the fraud! :-pt ml
http://www.scriptlance.com/projects/1148952527.sh
Based on separation of Church and State, the government should never have conferred benefits and administrative differences onto marriage to begin with; you do believe it is a religious matter, do you not? If so, it is none of the government's business.
If you believe that there is no separation of church and state or should not be, then you are theocratic like the terrorists. (And therefore, are no patriot.)
Otherwise you must abolish governmental involvement or allow gay marriage. Pick one.
That is likely true since the two have nothing to do with each other. That is probably also the reason you are the first person I have ever seen attempt to tie this issue to the first amendment. Perhaps you should try taking a look at the 14th amendment which says:
This thing you derisively call 'legislating from the bench' actually stems from one of the most important splits between the US legal system and the British one that served as the foundation. In the 1937 Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (and actually the earlier Field Code...wikipedia Federal Rules of Civil Procedure), equity and common law were merged into the same court, so that these same judges can hear suits in equity and overturn precedent (they are not bound by the writ of stare decisis). It's still controversial, and leads to a lot of the uncertainty stemming from the juducial branch these days, but this change also gave us Brown v. Board. That, too, was 'legislating from the bench'.
Just remember that a fraud doesn't require an internet dating site involved to happen. While I agree that rich bitches sometimes are too snob, you should remember that honesty levels probably follow a normal distribution across all the spectrum of social classes. Then, just because a girl is poorer than you, that doesn't turns her automatically into some kind of saint.
Your ad could be here!
Just in case you really think that what sets "America apart from England and all other countries is the separation of Church and State"?
;-)
s _without_any_state_religion
You might want to note that my country (New Zealand) also has no state religion, and clearly seems to have less issues regarding interference of the religion in politics; gay marriage in the form of 'civil unions' is legal here.. and we have not been smote from the earth, and married hetro's like myself have not yet fallen victim to the 'evils' of those gay folks
Quick list of other countries that seperate state & religion for you:
# Australia
# Azerbaijan
# France
# India
# Japan
# Nepal
# New Zealand
# Romania
# Singapore
# South Africa
# South Korea
# Turkey
# United States of America
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_religion#State
This reminds me of the passage of the PATRIOT Act. It was like 1000 pages, too long for legislator to have had time to read it in the short time it took them to pass it. So after they passed it, they found out that there were some things in there that nobody liked, and nobody would have voted for.
When I found out about that, I thought that surely the Constitution would have mentioned that the legislators would have to have known what they were voting on and agreeing to. Unfortunately, there's no such wording in the Constitution. I suppose our founding fathers never contemplated that things could digress to such a point.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
I haven't fished out the credit card for a dating site in a while (I do however have several inactive limited memberships) but I'm getting some incredibly hot women messaging me out of the blue. I'm like "Um no, there is definetely something wrong with this scenario"... and it seems I was right all along! Think about it:
a) women as hot as the ones I'm being propositioned by are - "in real life" - never single (for very long anyway).
b) women don't - "in real life" - say the stupid things they say to me on these dating sites (eg: "do you think you can handle me?") k, whatever BAIT!!
c) hot women are too busy responding to flirts and messages to look at and proposition vanilla, no name, also rans like myself.
I'm just being realistic here. I don't have an overblown perception of self. I'm an average guy and I'm cool with that, and I know when somethings outta whack. I really don't trust these dating sites and I hope the gov is gonna crack down.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
Fine. We all get equal protection of the laws. (except maybe the unborn people) So...
The law protects me from assault. It protects you from assault.
Wait a second... it's a hate crime if I assault a gay person. WTF? Why do you get extra protection of the laws?
Perhaps the 14th ammendment can be abused to mean equal privileges. OK. Any person, gay or not, can marry a person of the opposite sex. Oh, you want to marry something else? Fine, me too. I'll marry a Mac Mini, a goat, 3 bananas, and a waterfall. Maybe I'll marry my mom after she dies, or my unborn son.
What sets us apart is WHEN we freely chose not to have our churches directly involved with our government, and crucially, not to have our government involved with our churches.
Modern Turkey was formed from the remains of the distinctly Muslim Ottoman Empire by Ataturk in the early 1920's. He despotically forced his new country to be secular (looking around the region, this was a relatively benign, perhaps benefical, action).
Modern France went back and forth on this several times between 1789 and beginning of the 20th century (the appalling behavior of right-wing Catholic agitators during Dreyfus Affair sealed the deal for separation in 1905).
Australia and New Zealand were British colonies, which of course, had the Church of England and its non-trivial influence.
The US is special because we eschewed official religious involvement in our government from the get-go, and did so in an age when no other nation seems to have thought of it (France started on the project a decade later, I'll grant) We had the first intentionally secular government. Sure, many of the individuals in it were personally religious, but one of our early treaties, during the Barbary Wars, assured the "Mussulmen" (Muslims) of Tunis that our government was "not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion" and didn't have anything against any "Mahometan" (Islamic) nation.
Amazingly, we Americans are far more religious in our private lives than most other free countries with established (officially acknowledged by the government) churches. My German friends tolerated their Catholic or Lutheran classes at school once a week as kids, but have gone on to very secular adult lives. I, on the other hand, have chosen to be as active an Episcopalian as one can be in rural Bavaria. There are a few countries with established religions and devout populations, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in any of them (think Saudi Arabia). The one possible exception I can think of is Ireland, and even they're personally secular compared with us.
I know what I believe and I don't need the government to force me to observe what someone thinks is "Christianity". And anyway, Episcopalians tend to be slightly more interested in what people are doing to our environment or not doing for the poor than what they're voluntarily doing to each other at home.
Grüß Gott aus Bayern!
"Where are these "activist judges" of which you speak? I haven't seen many; but the knee-jerk stupidity of Congress seems pretty much limitless."
If these activist judges actually existed, I might understand our judicial system but as it stands, it looks like "High Finance" to me.
Pork for polititians states lead to friendly golf partners of Law Firms, become judges, who become polititians whoese sons & daughters become more lawyers, big business mogols and require more schools, roads, etc. To pay for all the necessary infrastructure (Lord knows big business IE DR.'s, Lawyers, Big Business doesn't want to pay for it) so we create more IGNORANT little laws to tack on to the imortant ones we Won't get if we Don't... Break the law, hire a lawyer, pay a judge's salaries, law enforcement, build more prisons, hire more guards and last but not least.....Imprision more citizens then any 3rd world country while we shout at the top of our collective voices.....Follow our example! We are offering the world Democracy!
Sound like another Rant? Guess it is! I just don'y get it anymore!
"Never try to teach a pig to sing. It simply wastes your time and truely annoys the pig"
Of course not, but an honest hard working blue collar girl is going to be a lot easier to find than an honest hard working upper middle class girl. One simple reason being that there are a 100 times more of them. So by looking at a lower socio-economic group, you increase the odds of finding a soul mate enormously.
Oh well, what the hell...
There is nothing in the consitution regarding religion. Freedom of religion was the first amendment, ratified in 12/15/1791
:P
France abolished its state and therefore the role of religion in it on Aug 4th 1789. By July 1790 religious orders where being suppressed and the clergy where required to swear to adhere to the state-controlled Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Note there was no freedom of religion in france but there was a definate seperation of chruch from the state (and the state from it's head)
They beat america to it, admittedly on a technicality
As for The UK having a State religion. It does, however as I said in my earlier post; in the UK the government IS NOT THE STATE. There is no government endorsed religion (which is what having a state religion normally means).
matfud
I must disagree with your .sig. Fishing is an excuse for men to see if they can get away with saying "It was THIS BIG" to other men as an exercise on the way to see if they can get away with saying to women, "It's THIS BIG".
I'd presume someone with the nick HungWeiLo would understand that. On the other hand, perhaps you see casting as merely an exercise to build up certain arm muscles useful for solo activities.
This guy is an asshat troll!
Libertas in infinitum
You're right, america has separation of Church and State. That's why it says "In God we Trust" on your money and your president/senators/congresspeople swear on a bible before taking office. Uhuh.
Just in case you really think that what sets "America apart from England and all other countries is the separation of Church and State"?
Perhaps you should have read what I said rather than what you wanted to think I said.
New Zealand gained independence from England on September 26, 1907. The US constitution went into effect on March 4, 1789.
Hence the US implemented separation of church and state about 118 years before New Zealand even existed as a nation.
I'm not a rabid jingoistic idiot, and I know full well that there are plenty of other countries that actually enjoy freedom from religious oppression. My point was just that *at the time it was instituted* the most fundamental and radical idea which was implemented was the idea that the church has no place in the government of a free society.
Now, if you'd like to go over your list and come up with a country that had it *before* America did, then you'll have demonstrated a counter to my point, but not until then.
. That's why it says "In God we Trust" on your money
This was forced in fairly recently by religious extremists who despise the freedom this country ostensibly stands for.
your president/senators/congresspeople swear on a bible before taking office.
Yeah, this has always been there and it is contradictory, but I never claimed that we perfectly implemented the ideal.