I've come to the conclusion lately that a significant portion of the population is just crazy (or rather, completely fascist and oppressive idiots is a better description. Crazy suffices most of the time though).
I'll offer the word unthinking. I'd describe thought as the process by which we question our instinct (genetics + conditioning) and social structures (including laws) that have evolved over the great span of time and decide if they are still beneficial. And these people aren't using it.
Ok, let me rephrase that: If he considers the idea of overpowering someone and having sexual intercourse with them against their will sexually stimulating...
You mean, like when your wife says she has a headache so you go take care of yourself in the shower? Would you kindly tell the court what you were fantasizing about at the time?
You are literally talking about thought crime. It's not long before we can read minds and see dreams and don't worry we'll hook you up to the same machines and if any questionable content floats between 2 of your synapses you're gonna burn.
I agree with most of what you're saying insofar as we both think CP is a very bad thing. Beyond that I would challenge your definition of what a fantasy is:
things we'd really like to do (if only we had the pulling power).
Following that logic I would really love to stalk through some desert wasteland shooting raiders and slavers in the head, stealing stimpaks off unsuspecting merchants while trying to find my wayward Dad (yeah I've been playing Fallout 3 all weekend).
I would posit instead that fantasies are much more about the things we really don't want to do, but would like to simply run the thought experiment of doing (ever wonder what it would be like to rob a bank or had a dream that you did?). Oh good, me neither.
Unless you're talking about real crime you're talking about thought crime. There's no two ways about it. Why is it not against the law to think about robbing a bank. Or to fantasize about it? (No banks were harmed in the writing of this post). Why is it not even against the law to talk about the idea of it with your friends?
In short, you're a hypocrite unless you also advocate banning all violence and any other glorified abridgments of any law in games, TV, and movies immediately because some people really seem to get off to that shit in that they seek it out and spend a lot of time doing it. It's only a matter of time before they'll want to do it in real life, right?
Oh, and getting back to sex, why are rape fantasy websites ok? That's depictions of sexual abuse and I think it's pretty messed up! But it's still legal? Think of the children... oh wait since they're not children it's ok? Can you tell my why that is?
Good point. We wouldn't want our kids to be conditioned in any questionable fashion. Who gets to decide, btw? We must act immediately to remove all kids from their homes, schools, nature, and if possible from reality itself. They may develop all manner of bad conditioning.
Or, and here's a really wild idea, how about we only prosecute people for actually doing bad things?
Oh wow I feel so stumped... How about simply include a provision in all these abuse codes that excludes minors within 4 years of age of each other? Or bring porn laws into sync with the age of consent? Ask some teenagers maybe what they would consider agreeable? Oh wait a sec we can't do that because children can't think for themselves.
Children can't handle any responsibility so we must shelter them all we can until they reach a magic age and then BINGO! We throw them to the wolves. No wonder we have so many adults still behaving like children we never gave them any responsibility or legal need to account for their own actions.
Come to think of it, my older siblings should really have criminal records since they engaged in child abuse (punched me in the arm and ridiculed me till I cried) when we were kids.
Amber and Jeremy were arrested. Each was charged with producing, directing or promoting a photograph featuring the sexual conduct of a child. Based on the contents of his e-mail account, Jeremy was charged with an extra count of possession of child pornography.
So now these kids have criminal sex offender records? That's not a bad thing? What will these kids grow up to believe about the sanity of our society? Many psychologists would say being charged unjustly can easily turn good people bad, or maybe i've just seen too many Hollywood movies.
Next step I say we start locking kids up for masturbating and charge them with pederasty (they're exposing themselves to... themselves!!) Doesn't sound so far fetched anymore. Welcome back to the 1800s, we sure missed ya. At least this time around we can profit by buying stock in a chastity belt company!
No flamebait intended (some hyperbole ahead), but parents are idiots when it comes to their kids, and often kids in general. They will abandon the pursuits and benefits of a free society to "protect the children" at all costs. The problem is nowadays they don't actually know what the real threat is and so they are ripe to be manipulated.
There is nothing wrong with the protective emotion in that nature has selected people with this tendency to survive, as this emotional/instinctive reaction was probably exactly what was needed to actually "protect the children" from an attacking tribe. It's the emotion that causes you to cast aside your fears when something real is attacking but it's now being used to fuel fear of an unknown enemy.
We need to balance our emotional response. Children need protection from real threats. Looking at the child abuse stats from 2006 (most recent on the USDHHS site) only 10% of all child abusers are non-parental (and half of that 10% are relatives, with almost half of what's left after that foster parents/relatives).
If we stick with sexual abuse statistics, parents and relatives still account for 60% of that, with friends, neighbors, daycare providers and other professionals making up 10%. Under 25% of sexual abuse is "other", which I guess is your classic "child predator" that we hear about on the news. I was always lead to believe that parents never hurt their children and we really need to pass laws against the people "out there" who are stalking our kids. The enemy is in the home already.
A purely emotional reaction ignores these facts and might put resources in the wrong places than it would really be needed to help more of the kids getting abused.
Fevers are only scary because people don't bother learning about them. Most people will never "get" a fever from a pathogen. You get a fever when your body decides to crank up it's own internal thermostat in certain situations. Our bodies are a lot smarter than we are most of the time. Too much fever and for too long in a person who isn't in good health is a bad thing, but a little fever when you get a cold or flu virus is valuable to your body since your immune system goes into overdrive with warmer temperatures. Cellular metabolism increases and you can make more white blood cells faster to fight off the infection.
Certainly there are some exceptions to this where body temperature increases without the consent of the body's temperature control center (see hyperthermia), and that's a bad thing when it happens but very rare.
A fever is always a reason to be aware, but not to be alarmed.
We have this thing called a brain. It helps us decide how to apply our resources (our time, money, etc) to what we value. Sometimes we're good at applying our resources and sometimes we aren't. Sometimes we are a little wasteful.
We have this thing called a government. It's notoriously wasteful when applying our resources. And it is more and more defining the things that we should value for us. How about we get to keep our money and decide what is good or not good for our own families?
In general, I have seen my friends who are women do what they like to do in regards to their career, as evidenced by your friend. Even if it makes less money they're ok with that because they don't expect to be the primary provider.
My friends who are men in the same situation as your friend have more often than not stuck it out even if they didn't enjoy it as much as they'd like. This is because they knew they were good at it and it would make them more money than jobs they might prefer. The bottom line (in more ways than one) is that allows them to be more marketable to females.
I'd guess that 0,0,0 is Sol. The earth being at 0,0,1 means that 1 unit of measure in this co-ordinate system is the distance from the earth to the sun.
Let me clarify my position. I am absolutely not saying that we should make heroin, meth, cocaine, etc freely available to people. I just think our government's drug control policy has failed. They've spent so much money on trying to stop a supply of drugs that cannot be stopped. If they spent the money on education and public rehab I think we'd be in a better spot.
But to your other points, much of what you say is true (not the part where I am a drug user). It seems that we both have very different experiences of drug use. I have known many people who were fully functional, work all week, party 1 night on the weekend kind of drug users. I have known a very few who let their drug use get the better of them and it devolved into daily use and dependence. But even those maintained jobs because they knew it was better to finance their habit while working for a solid wage than being left on the street and at the mercy of the pushers. So point number 1 is everyone is affected differently by drugs. I guess we're talking about addictive vs not-so-addictive personalities here. Like many people can try cigarettes and not get hooked, but to others it's just as addictive as hard drugs.
One thing I feel you're downplaying is will power. Who is being held down and fed meth again? I've heard this has happened with forced sex workers and such but it doesn't seem like this is the norm. Most people who use meth freely take the first hit, then freely take the second, and yes it gets harder and harder to resist as the body develops physical dependence but what is the point of our intellect? Do you believe there is such a thing as will power which can overcome physical dependence, or at least allow one to choose the right thing after coming down from the drug (like go to rehab)?
I have known many people who tried some drug and then said "I don't think I'll do that again because I think I'd like it too much." That is a very intelligent response to an addictive drug. Or the people who get addicted and realize they need help to quit. That's why we have rehab and people who voluntarily go to drug rehab usually get clean and stay clean. I'm not saying substances aren't addictive. I'm just saying your solution is untenable. Reducing supply is not working.
If what you say is true (that addicts will do anything for a fix) then why do you think that making and keeping drugs illegal is going to help anything? They don't care if they're breaking the law. They don't care if they're using drugs cut with all kinds of dangerous additives. Today in America drugs are in every nightclub, every school, every neighborhood in the country. Why not learn and spread the knowledge that people can choose to not do drugs instead of saying the state will keep us safe by making things illegal? The state has failed. We are the only defense against allowing ourselves and our friends to get hooked on drugs.
Contrary to what our high school health classes teach us, many people who try or end up using these "highly addictive, highly inebriating" substances you refer to have no problem holding a job, relationship, or anything else. Legal drugs cause way more impediments to our freedom such as the freedom of life.
You sound like you either never tried drugs but are biased against them for some reason or you did try drugs and were immediately addicted to them. Either way I would suggest you do more research and see how all drugs, substances, etc are affecting people. If it's too much temptation then don't be around drugs. We all can choose not to put a substance into our bodies. Anything less and we are a slave, and our freedom doesn't matter anyway.
If life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are truly inalienable rights (incapable of being alienated, surrendered, or transferred), then it seems to follow that the responsibility for using and maintaining these rights should also lie with the individual.
So to take what you said about the television media and society one step further, it follows that "we the people" have already ceded our responsibility to maintaining our "inalienable" rights to the government. Otherwise wouldn't there be some TV networks that focus on the rights and responsibility of the individual, instead of the idea that the government should be solving all our problems?
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I've come to the conclusion lately that a significant portion of the population is just crazy (or rather, completely fascist and oppressive idiots is a better description. Crazy suffices most of the time though).
I'll offer the word unthinking. I'd describe thought as the process by which we question our instinct (genetics + conditioning) and social structures (including laws) that have evolved over the great span of time and decide if they are still beneficial. And these people aren't using it.
LOL, so true! You know in most horror movies the axe is about to drop just as soon as the [clearly over 18 year old actors] start having fun.
I think the south park episode Child Abduction Is Not Funny goes over this in depth, and is pretty +insightful and +funny.
Oh wait, they're all ACs. I mean the OP AC..
I believe the AC was using sarcasm, fellas.
Ok, let me rephrase that: If he considers the idea of overpowering someone and having sexual intercourse with them against their will sexually stimulating...
You mean, like when your wife says she has a headache so you go take care of yourself in the shower? Would you kindly tell the court what you were fantasizing about at the time?
You are literally talking about thought crime. It's not long before we can read minds and see dreams and don't worry we'll hook you up to the same machines and if any questionable content floats between 2 of your synapses you're gonna burn.
Let me know if I misinterpreted you.
How about pictures of underage girls with full grown male genitals? How about non-sexual underage vorarephilia? How about underage furry?
How about concentrating police time and effort capturing the REAL pedophiles? Remember? Those that actually DO illegal stuff!
Are you crazy? Catching real criminals involves a lot more work and is much, much more dangerous.
One of the most insightful posts in this thread.
things we'd really like to do (if only we had the pulling power).
Following that logic I would really love to stalk through some desert wasteland shooting raiders and slavers in the head, stealing stimpaks off unsuspecting merchants while trying to find my wayward Dad (yeah I've been playing Fallout 3 all weekend).
I would posit instead that fantasies are much more about the things we really don't want to do, but would like to simply run the thought experiment of doing (ever wonder what it would be like to rob a bank or had a dream that you did?). Oh good, me neither.
Unless you're talking about real crime you're talking about thought crime. There's no two ways about it. Why is it not against the law to think about robbing a bank. Or to fantasize about it? (No banks were harmed in the writing of this post). Why is it not even against the law to talk about the idea of it with your friends?
In short, you're a hypocrite unless you also advocate banning all violence and any other glorified abridgments of any law in games, TV, and movies immediately because some people really seem to get off to that shit in that they seek it out and spend a lot of time doing it. It's only a matter of time before they'll want to do it in real life, right?
Oh, and getting back to sex, why are rape fantasy websites ok? That's depictions of sexual abuse and I think it's pretty messed up! But it's still legal? Think of the children... oh wait since they're not children it's ok? Can you tell my why that is?
Good point. We wouldn't want our kids to be conditioned in any questionable fashion. Who gets to decide, btw? We must act immediately to remove all kids from their homes, schools, nature, and if possible from reality itself. They may develop all manner of bad conditioning.
Or, and here's a really wild idea, how about we only prosecute people for actually doing bad things?
Oh wow I feel so stumped... How about simply include a provision in all these abuse codes that excludes minors within 4 years of age of each other? Or bring porn laws into sync with the age of consent? Ask some teenagers maybe what they would consider agreeable? Oh wait a sec we can't do that because children can't think for themselves.
Children can't handle any responsibility so we must shelter them all we can until they reach a magic age and then BINGO! We throw them to the wolves. No wonder we have so many adults still behaving like children we never gave them any responsibility or legal need to account for their own actions.
Come to think of it, my older siblings should really have criminal records since they engaged in child abuse (punched me in the arm and ridiculed me till I cried) when we were kids.
However, the arrests are not necessarily a BAD thing.
Let me try to find a nice way to put this... Are you fucking nuts!?
A 16 and 17 year old gf/bf were prosecuted AND the prosecution was upheld 2-1 in appeals court under child porn laws for taking pictures of themselves naked. From the linked article:
Amber and Jeremy were arrested. Each was charged with producing, directing or promoting a photograph featuring the sexual conduct of a child. Based on the contents of his e-mail account, Jeremy was charged with an extra count of possession of child pornography.
So now these kids have criminal sex offender records? That's not a bad thing? What will these kids grow up to believe about the sanity of our society? Many psychologists would say being charged unjustly can easily turn good people bad, or maybe i've just seen too many Hollywood movies.
Next step I say we start locking kids up for masturbating and charge them with pederasty (they're exposing themselves to... themselves!!) Doesn't sound so far fetched anymore. Welcome back to the 1800s, we sure missed ya. At least this time around we can profit by buying stock in a chastity belt company!
My inner child is in time out right now.
No flamebait intended (some hyperbole ahead), but parents are idiots when it comes to their kids, and often kids in general. They will abandon the pursuits and benefits of a free society to "protect the children" at all costs. The problem is nowadays they don't actually know what the real threat is and so they are ripe to be manipulated.
There is nothing wrong with the protective emotion in that nature has selected people with this tendency to survive, as this emotional/instinctive reaction was probably exactly what was needed to actually "protect the children" from an attacking tribe. It's the emotion that causes you to cast aside your fears when something real is attacking but it's now being used to fuel fear of an unknown enemy.
We need to balance our emotional response. Children need protection from real threats. Looking at the child abuse stats from 2006 (most recent on the USDHHS site) only 10% of all child abusers are non-parental (and half of that 10% are relatives, with almost half of what's left after that foster parents/relatives).
If we stick with sexual abuse statistics, parents and relatives still account for 60% of that, with friends, neighbors, daycare providers and other professionals making up 10%. Under 25% of sexual abuse is "other", which I guess is your classic "child predator" that we hear about on the news. I was always lead to believe that parents never hurt their children and we really need to pass laws against the people "out there" who are stalking our kids. The enemy is in the home already.
A purely emotional reaction ignores these facts and might put resources in the wrong places than it would really be needed to help more of the kids getting abused.
I think I'm the only person that actually exists and you are all automatons. Go screw yourselves you damn robots!
Goodness knows i'm not getting much play from your 'female model', in fact i somehow tend to become enlisted to serve them...
Why don't people seem to like the Soviet Russia thing that much anymore? I think it's hilarious every time even though I'm not really sure why.
Fevers are only scary because people don't bother learning about them. Most people will never "get" a fever from a pathogen. You get a fever when your body decides to crank up it's own internal thermostat in certain situations. Our bodies are a lot smarter than we are most of the time. Too much fever and for too long in a person who isn't in good health is a bad thing, but a little fever when you get a cold or flu virus is valuable to your body since your immune system goes into overdrive with warmer temperatures. Cellular metabolism increases and you can make more white blood cells faster to fight off the infection.
Certainly there are some exceptions to this where body temperature increases without the consent of the body's temperature control center (see hyperthermia), and that's a bad thing when it happens but very rare.
A fever is always a reason to be aware, but not to be alarmed.
Mod parent up.
We have this thing called a brain. It helps us decide how to apply our resources (our time, money, etc) to what we value. Sometimes we're good at applying our resources and sometimes we aren't. Sometimes we are a little wasteful.
We have this thing called a government. It's notoriously wasteful when applying our resources. And it is more and more defining the things that we should value for us. How about we get to keep our money and decide what is good or not good for our own families?
In general, I have seen my friends who are women do what they like to do in regards to their career, as evidenced by your friend. Even if it makes less money they're ok with that because they don't expect to be the primary provider.
My friends who are men in the same situation as your friend have more often than not stuck it out even if they didn't enjoy it as much as they'd like. This is because they knew they were good at it and it would make them more money than jobs they might prefer. The bottom line (in more ways than one) is that allows them to be more marketable to females.
An interesting book that talks a lot about all this stuff is The Myth Of Male Power.
I'd guess that 0,0,0 is Sol. The earth being at 0,0,1 means that 1 unit of measure in this co-ordinate system is the distance from the earth to the sun.
Still about as earth-centric as it gets.
Let me clarify my position. I am absolutely not saying that we should make heroin, meth, cocaine, etc freely available to people. I just think our government's drug control policy has failed. They've spent so much money on trying to stop a supply of drugs that cannot be stopped. If they spent the money on education and public rehab I think we'd be in a better spot.
But to your other points, much of what you say is true (not the part where I am a drug user). It seems that we both have very different experiences of drug use. I have known many people who were fully functional, work all week, party 1 night on the weekend kind of drug users. I have known a very few who let their drug use get the better of them and it devolved into daily use and dependence. But even those maintained jobs because they knew it was better to finance their habit while working for a solid wage than being left on the street and at the mercy of the pushers. So point number 1 is everyone is affected differently by drugs. I guess we're talking about addictive vs not-so-addictive personalities here. Like many people can try cigarettes and not get hooked, but to others it's just as addictive as hard drugs.
One thing I feel you're downplaying is will power. Who is being held down and fed meth again? I've heard this has happened with forced sex workers and such but it doesn't seem like this is the norm. Most people who use meth freely take the first hit, then freely take the second, and yes it gets harder and harder to resist as the body develops physical dependence but what is the point of our intellect? Do you believe there is such a thing as will power which can overcome physical dependence, or at least allow one to choose the right thing after coming down from the drug (like go to rehab)?
I have known many people who tried some drug and then said "I don't think I'll do that again because I think I'd like it too much." That is a very intelligent response to an addictive drug. Or the people who get addicted and realize they need help to quit. That's why we have rehab and people who voluntarily go to drug rehab usually get clean and stay clean. I'm not saying substances aren't addictive. I'm just saying your solution is untenable. Reducing supply is not working.
If what you say is true (that addicts will do anything for a fix) then why do you think that making and keeping drugs illegal is going to help anything? They don't care if they're breaking the law. They don't care if they're using drugs cut with all kinds of dangerous additives. Today in America drugs are in every nightclub, every school, every neighborhood in the country. Why not learn and spread the knowledge that people can choose to not do drugs instead of saying the state will keep us safe by making things illegal? The state has failed. We are the only defense against allowing ourselves and our friends to get hooked on drugs.
Contrary to what our high school health classes teach us, many people who try or end up using these "highly addictive, highly inebriating" substances you refer to have no problem holding a job, relationship, or anything else. Legal drugs cause way more impediments to our freedom such as the freedom of life.
You sound like you either never tried drugs but are biased against them for some reason or you did try drugs and were immediately addicted to them. Either way I would suggest you do more research and see how all drugs, substances, etc are affecting people. If it's too much temptation then don't be around drugs. We all can choose not to put a substance into our bodies. Anything less and we are a slave, and our freedom doesn't matter anyway.
If I had mod points i'd give you +1 insightful.
If life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are truly inalienable rights (incapable of being alienated, surrendered, or transferred), then it seems to follow that the responsibility for using and maintaining these rights should also lie with the individual.
So to take what you said about the television media and society one step further, it follows that "we the people" have already ceded our responsibility to maintaining our "inalienable" rights to the government. Otherwise wouldn't there be some TV networks that focus on the rights and responsibility of the individual, instead of the idea that the government should be solving all our problems?
Sweet Logan's Run reference.