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New York Culls Sex Offenders From the Online Gaming Ranks
SternisheFan writes with a story at PC Mag that New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman has announced that more than 2000 registered sex offenders have been kicked off various online gaming platforms, in an cooperative effort involving both the state and various gaming companies. From that article:
"Earlier this year, the accounts of 3,500 additional offenders were removed from platforms operated by Microsoft, Apple, Blizzard Entertainment, Electronic Arts, Disney Interactive Media Group, and Warner Brothers. New York State's Electronic Securing and Targeting of Online Predators Act (e-STOP) law requires convicted sex offenders to register all of their email addresses, screen names, and other Internet identifiers with the state. Schneiderman's office then makes that information available to certain websites so they can make sure that their communities were not being used by predators. Operation: Game Over, however, is the first time e-STOP has been applied to online gaming platforms, he said. Since many online gaming platforms let users send messages to other players anonymously, it's unsafe to have convicted offenders using these services, Schneiderman said."
rationality doesn't really come into play with "sex offender" laws.
p.s. you can be put on a sex-offender registry because you "sexted" with your gf/bf when you were both in high school!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I would be much less worried about this, if it weren't for the fact that the label of "sex offender" is used for everything where genitalia are involved.
Did the cops follow you 20 yards into the thick forest along the interstate to catch you peeing? Sex offender.
Did your top get ripped off and carried away in the surf at Jones Beach? Sex offender.
Did you scratch yourself when a cop was looking? Sex offender.
[End Of Line]
Exactly. This law isn't about keeping kids safe, it's about piling increasing the punishment ex post facto. See, it's an administrative response, not a punishment as far as the courts are concerned.
This is a good step, along with other such measures that do their best to prevent people convicted of sex crimes from having a chance of living a happy, productive life once they've served their time. We must continually tighten the screws on them and make sure they can't have lives that are worth too much to throw away in a moment of stress, rage, and frustration.
Because a dog that's constantly beaten and scolded is the one that behaves best, right?
When someone says, "Any fool can see
I can understand the comfort thing, but at some point we have to decide either that people are so dangerous that they must be removed from the population, or that we have punished them enough and need to let them alone. The alternative is that the state gets to persecute and hound people forever, once convicted, continually piling on new punishments without court action, merely to assuage people's desire to "do something." And any time there are crimes that are so stigmatized (terrorism and "sex crimes" being the current boogymen) that anything can be done to punish the offenders, the natural tendency is to expand the original, horrible crimes beyond all recognition. It's the same thing as calling a handgun a "weapon of mass destruction," which originally meant chemical, nuclear and biological weapons that, when used as intended, could kill thousands at a single use. I simply think it's a bad idea to turn over to government the ability to persecute people indefinitely and infinitely, because that power will always be abused, and eventually I (or you) will be the victims of that abuse.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
you sound hot.
Or maybe you Christian-right nannies should fuck right off.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Or maybe you Christian-right nannies should fuck right off.
They're going to need an instruction manual to do that. Just sayin'.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
More like, what good is a list to protect kids if it's populated by people who are of no threat, and never have been?
you can be put on a sex-offender registry because you "sexted" with your gf/bf when you were both in high school!
Meanwhile the TSA can scan/grope children to their hearts content because the same government that passed this law passed some other ones too.
The TSA is a dream job for a pedophile.
No sig today...
You are preventing them from engaging in commerce and public life.
It's basically Amish shunning or Hawthorne's Scarlet letter but without the obvious initial "buy in" of joining an extremist religious cult first.
The sacred cow will ensure the precedent is set in general so that it can be applied to YOU next time.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If you read tfa, a 12 year old boy was 'groomed' for a period of months by a sex offender using a Playstation. After gaining the youth's trust the sexual assaults began. Sex offenders do not belong around kids at all, it's too big a damn risk to take.
Then you'll just have to keep them locked up forever, unless you're willing to better define "around kids," because the damn things are everywhere (kids, not sex offenders).
The standard cliche (in the UK, at least) is that paedophiles groom children with the promise of puppies - better ban sex offenders from keeping pets!
A few months ago two men seriously sexually assaulted a child in a shopping centre - better ban sex offenders from shopping!
Forfty percent of all sex offenders have jobs and eat bread - well, you see where I'm going with this.
PS You've conflated sex offenders with paedophiles. Not all of one are the other.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It's the prison you go to after you get out of prison.
You are preventing them from engaging in commerce and public life.
It's basically Amish shunning or Hawthorne's Scarlet letter but without the obvious initial "buy in" of joining an extremist religious cult first.
The sacred cow will ensure the precedent is set in general so that it can be applied to YOU next time.
I believe the intent is to prevent pedophile pedators from clandestinely communicating with potential underage prey. However, since sex-offender status is applied to more than just pedophiles, I would think that this is overly broad.
But since creepy and pervy is so creepy and pervy and decent people don't want to be associated with creepy and pervy and doing so may alert law enforcement, I doubt anybody will actually object to this treatment. They basically adopt the "don't do kiddie porn, don't fark teens and kiddies, don't rape or grope anybody and don't expose yourself in public if you want to play online games" attitude.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
How exactly is a lifetime of being treated as a leper proper punishment for drunken public urination? The problem is not that the treatment is inappropriate for some individuals based on their past crimes, but that many people are put on these all-powerful lists who really shouldn't be, given the consequences.
You do realize what these lists ACTUALLY are, right? Yes, they include rapists and molesters. They also include people who got drunk and pissed in the bushes that one time on college, or went streaking, or skinny-dipping (basically any form of public nudity) or sent topless pictures of themselves to their significant other when they were 17......
Lots of ways to end up on these lists. Some are not even in your control.
No, the intent is to show the public the current rulers are "tough on crime", children and citizens be damned.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
A clue you may have missed: not all people with the title "sex offender" was caught doing bad things to children, or even to other human beings.
If the label were applied only to those who sexually assaulted children, then you might have had a point.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
- H. L. Mencken
I believe the intent is to prevent pedophile pedators from clandestinely communicating with potential underage prey.
It's an attempt to prevent people that have been convicted of a crime and paid their dues / served their time from participating in legal activities on the basis that they *might* commit the same crime with new victims.
Are car thieves prevented from owning/driving cars? Are bank robbers prevented from having bank accounts. Are rapist prevented from dating and/or getting married and/or having children? Nope, but as a sex offender, they can't play WoW - along with a whole bunch of other things they must do, like register themselves everywhere, avoid schools and parks, etc...
I understand that sex offenders have an unusually high recidivism rate and the laws are intended to "protect the children" (or others) but isn't this simply shifting the responsibility of parents to teach their children, and for the children themselves, to act safely and responsibly and for parents to monitor their children properly?
You know the financial industry gets away with the disclaimer, "Past performance is no guarantee of future results," and their failure rate is probably worse than the sex offender recidivism rate. But, I guess it's okay to ruin people financially, just don't show them your winky.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I understand that sex offenders have an unusually high recidivism rate
This is a common misunderstanding as two minutes on Google will show. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_offender#Recidivism sex offenders have a recidivism rate of 5.3% (or 43% when considering any crime rather then sex crimes) compared with 68% for non-sex crime recidivism.
The way it's done in Canada is at sentencing the judge can include things like being put on the sex offender registry and being banned from certain activities if appropriate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
As a parent, I have more fear that my child will be seriously harmed by these laws than I am that my child might be harmed by a pedophile. Interestingly enough, if my next door neighbor had been convicted of being a cannibal that particularly enjoyed the taste of children, they wouldn't need to tell me that they were a danger. On the other hand, if they got caught streaking through a bar, they would need to notify me about how much of a danger they were to my child.