This is all a red herring to avoid substantiating your claims of "Backpage running an underage prostitution ring" but I'm going to thoroughly stomp it down anyway.
You cited the definition of ephebophilia so you know that referring to teens below the statutory age of unlimited sexual consent in some jurisdictions as "children" to imply that any desire to have sex with them is "sex with children" is dishonest. You have no other way to win this argument than to fire off ad hominem attacks and appeals to your own personal morality. You know that the paraphilia discussion is a giant red herring because the post you responded to was calling you out for trying to insert "underage" into the discussion without substantiation. You still haven't substantiated any of those claims.
You still have not supported your assertion that "[Backpage was] running a[n] underage prostitution ring" nor your curiously revised version "[Backpage] made aggressive moves to break into the underage prostitute ad market" (emphasis mine) so you're pushing really hard to play the "b-b-b-but if I call you a pedo apologist and swing my moral nuts in the air I can automatically win!" card instead. We're not talking about the difference between paraphilias (red herring) and we're not talking about the political support for bill in question (appeal to popularity and appeal to authority); we're talking about your assertions regarding Backpage and underage prostitution and how you have posted a lot of junk that has nothing to do with supporting those statements.
Don't like the models as an example? Fine. Here's Angelina Jolie at age 16, modeling underwear, published on a major U.K. website. The age of unlimited sexual consent in many parts of the world floats around 16 while the United States (where Backpage is operated) has a lot of states with a minimum age of 18, meaning they're illegal in those states but 100% legal in other states and several European countries. These older teenagers are within the age of consent in huge chunks of the modern Western world, are capable of bearing children, have developed secondary sex characteristics, have strong sexual drives, are already expected to take "correct" actions that will put them on career paths and shape their entire futures, yet you're attempting to liken them to five-year-olds.
Support your original assertions with some facts or toss off. You've been given several opportunities and chosen not to substantiate your arguments thus far. I'm not letting you worm your way out of substantiating your original claims no matter what you try to use as
I didn't "concede" anything. You presented a situation where people were charged with a crime and a judge said they were not in violation of the law. There is nothing to "concede." The facts are plain: the law was not violated.
You have still failed to substantiate your original claims many, many posts back. This part of the discussion is an attempt to distract from that so you don't have to provide proof that those claims are truthful and not just something you made up.
There is no such thing as "virtual pimping." Either you're pimping or you're not. They weren't pimping, or if they were it was not illegal to do so. The allegations even went in front of a judge and the judge said that they didn't violate the law. People not breaking the law is a good thing. I don't see why you have such a big problem with lawful conduct.
Except Backpage is not running a prostitution ring. You said they were but you have provided nothing to substantiate that claim. You even refute your own claim with your own citations in that post; the charges of pimping where dismissed, so the legal system has already tossed out that claim completely.
It's not "hiding behind" the law. If someone is protected by the law, they're acting within the bounds of the law which is what we all should be doing. You are saying that they have committed no crime when you say they're "hiding behind" the law; you're also saying that you don't want what they're doing to be legal which is an ENTIRELY separate issue from what the statutes currently say and whether or not the law as written at the time of alleged offense was violated.
They won because they were not violating the law. What's the problem with not violating the law and having a court find that you didn't violate the law and that vigilante actions taken by public law enforcement officials when you weren't violating the law were not okay? That's what the courts are for. The cops can't try to shut your business down "by any means necessary" just because they dislike your business, all while operating your business lawfully. That's the kind of shit that you'd expect in Soviet Russia, not in the United States.
All of that is a red herring. We're talking about adult prostitution, not child sex trafficking. You have made the same erroneous conflation as the last post. What does this have to do with whether or not adults choose prostitution as a career?
Probably because "children" implies something very different from "teens" and is an implicit logical fallacy of appeal to emotion. Hmm, I wonder why someone would want to have a discussion where the facts are clearly stated instead of implied...how odd...wait, no, that's how rational discussion works.
Irrelevant. You cannot conflate adult prostitution and child prostitution. The post I replied to said nothing of child prostitution other than a passing mention of "underage" as one of the criteria used by the UK to consider prostitution to be illegal. We are exclusively discussing adult prostitution in this thread.
I see nothing to substantiate that claim either. Trying to get market share for prostitution ads is not the same thing as trying to get market share for underage prostitution ads. Also, look at the thing you quoted: a team of "over 100 people" have to review each entry before it's posted for a website that receives so many posts that "about a million ads per month" are blocked. Scrutinizing ad wording is a subjective task and they've got a staff in the hundreds on a website that's receiving posts in the millions per month. None of what's in that Wikipedia article quote is a surprise with that kind of context. They remove fake law enforcement ads faster than they remove ads advertising "children?" (Note: teenagers are not children as in "pedophilia" so there's already some seriously loaded wording by describing underage post-pubescent adolescents this way.) Why is this a surprising thing to anyone? The poster for "jailbait" prostitutes only needs to convey "I'm REALLY young, yo" in a coded way and as one code-word is grey-listed a hundred more euphemisms can be created to replace them, whereas the law enforcement official making shit up will be using up-to-date well-known code words that are on the list of phrases that raise red flags. If Backpage is using data analysis akin to spam email scoring to assist in moderation and they don't know who is and isn't law enforcement, doesn't it make perfect sense that LE posts get red-flagged sooner?
As for TPB, they don't turn a blind eye to torrents that violate copyright. TPB outright doesn't give a damn about copyright. That's kind of their schtick.
Nothing you quoted in that reply says anything about "running an underage prostitution ring" so that claim remains unfounded. The only uses of the word "underage" are in your own text and the text you quoted from my question. Referencing youth is not the same thing as "underage." If you don't believe me, see the search results for yourself and start clicking those "report" buttons.
Was Backpage actually running an underage prostitution ring or were third parties running underage prostitution rings and using Backpage as a place to post ads? The rhetoric around "sex trafficking" is full of logical fallacies, anecdotal evidence, and opinions-as-facts appeal-to-emotion presentations by law enforcement officials and politicians. It is difficult to trust that what is presented is actually truthful, especially when the facts run counter to the prevailing narrative.
Partial quote: "Both law enforcement and nonprofits such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) routinely use sites like Backpage to search for teenagers reported missing. The cross-country nature of the site allows authorities to track potential victims who may move around a lot, and provides tangible evidence for prosecutors to use against their exploiters. Police also use Backpage extensively when conducting sting operations ostensibly targeting the recovery of minors. Backpage itself has, at least historically, reported suspicious ads (such as those featuring pictures of people who look underage) to NCMEC or local law enforcement."
I'm not saying that Backpage is a company run by angels, but I am definitely saying that there's so much propaganda and lies by omission out there about the Backpage prostitution situation that facts are hard to come by without scooping through truckloads of bullshit and ignoring the moralistic crusaders screaming in your ears that they're right. In any case, the people posting underage prostitution ads are the ones committing the heinous act and going after Backpage won't do a damn thing but shovel a bunch more of the prostitution ad volume onto Tor and I2P. Driving the information further underground and further from the legal reach of law enforcement will only make matters worse.
That's fine, but Microsoft's forced and/or deceptive auto-"yes" Windows 10 upgrades didn't give people a choice to accept the EULA and install only if they agree. If they didn't want to be liable, they shouldn't have been so hugely aggressive in forcing the upgrade on people.
The other thing is that some niche software is very expensive and very tightly controlled, requiring the company to remote into the machine to acquire and install it. It may not be a simple matter of backing up, restoring a system image, and installing the software again, and even if it was it's not likely that a normal user can do all of that themselves. If an unwanted forced Win10 installation had a serious process defect that killed a really important laptop in a crucial period leading up to a multi-million-dollar contract, for example, it's not at all unusual to demand damages of this size. People sometimes forget that computers can be used for actual work and that work can have dollar amounts attached that they'll never see in their entire lives.
Nothing wrong with gun culture. Murder with a gun, perhaps, but gun culture is no different than any other hobby here. Non-US people and US people in large cities with ultra-strict gun control and higher rates of violent crime don't really understand that people can appreciate and enjoy guns and not be stupid with said guns. Europeans hear about high-profile mass shootings and assume that we're all blowing each others' heads off over here, but that's not the case at all. The vast majority of gun deaths in the US are suicides.
Well, it's pretty easy to "not have an issue" when you oust people that disagree with you politically and you had a large enough user base to remain open. Drupal is a prime example of the shitstorm that comes with stupid codes of conduct and their enforcement and the inevitable rules lawyering that the CoC pushers engage in that grossly violates the spirit of the rules. Make no mistake, Codes of Conduct are a cancer on open source communities and the adoption of them is a sign of imminent slow decline as identity politics and manufactured bad faith butthurt overrides good faith efforts to make better software. Such projects that succeed do so in spite of the Code, NOT because of it.
I have one of those too. I emailed Slashdot to get rid of it. They said they can't remove it. Rather than make a new account, I said "fuck it" and rolled with it. I changed my login from my Gmail one a looooooooong time ago. I don't even know if I still have access to that defunct account. Don't blame him for the stupid G+ logo; it's basically a useless scarlet letter.
Why is it that no one using the word "contrast" here seems to understand what the hell that word means? Light colors, dark colors...neither of those alone provide contrast. Contrast is the difference between high and low luminance areas in the same image. If someone has dark skin or light skin then the skin itself doesn't provide much contrast because it's mostly the same color anyway. However, lighter skin DOES provides very strong contrast against darker lips, shadows caused by light not being uniformly projected such as under nostrils or under eyebrows or in the contours of the ears, dark eyebrows and eyelashes and hair, a pair of dark-framed eyeglasses, and so on. Dark skin reflects significantly less light which means that these areas of contrast for light skin have far less contrast against the dark skin. Black beside dark brown will be harder to see than black against peach or olive or pink or yellow.
Face-detection software relies on the simple contrast of several facial features mostly around the eyes to lock on to a face; facial recognition requires vast amounts of information beyond that which are more likely to be too lacking in contrast for dark-skinned faces to make out. It doesn't take very much underexposure in typical indoor shooting conditions for a black face to look mostly like a noisy macroblock-mangled oval with eyes and teeth to facial recognition software. That's not racism, that's just how light works, and given that most pictures to be recognized are likely to be casually shot I see no way to magically code around such problems.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder when The Pirate Bay will begin enforcing Rhode Island's porn fee. That is definitely a thing that will happen if this passes.
This is all a red herring to avoid substantiating your claims of "Backpage running an underage prostitution ring" but I'm going to thoroughly stomp it down anyway.
You cited the definition of ephebophilia so you know that referring to teens below the statutory age of unlimited sexual consent in some jurisdictions as "children" to imply that any desire to have sex with them is "sex with children" is dishonest. You have no other way to win this argument than to fire off ad hominem attacks and appeals to your own personal morality. You know that the paraphilia discussion is a giant red herring because the post you responded to was calling you out for trying to insert "underage" into the discussion without substantiation. You still haven't substantiated any of those claims.
You still have not supported your assertion that "[Backpage was] running a[n] underage prostitution ring" nor your curiously revised version "[Backpage] made aggressive moves to break into the underage prostitute ad market" (emphasis mine) so you're pushing really hard to play the "b-b-b-but if I call you a pedo apologist and swing my moral nuts in the air I can automatically win!" card instead. We're not talking about the difference between paraphilias (red herring) and we're not talking about the political support for bill in question (appeal to popularity and appeal to authority); we're talking about your assertions regarding Backpage and underage prostitution and how you have posted a lot of junk that has nothing to do with supporting those statements.
Plus, you keep trying to push for older teens to be regarded as equivalent to five-year-olds. These model twins are 16 years old, one year beyond the age of consent in Denmark where they are from and above the age of consent in the U.K. as well as several U.S. states. You are asserting that they are "children." Psychology and the law both say otherwise. It doesn't matter how many times you say the phrase "pedo apologist," it won't make you any less incorrect. Don't like it? Petition to have the laws changed to raise the legal age of sexual consent in those jurisdictions.
Don't like the models as an example? Fine. Here's Angelina Jolie at age 16, modeling underwear, published on a major U.K. website. The age of unlimited sexual consent in many parts of the world floats around 16 while the United States (where Backpage is operated) has a lot of states with a minimum age of 18, meaning they're illegal in those states but 100% legal in other states and several European countries. These older teenagers are within the age of consent in huge chunks of the modern Western world, are capable of bearing children, have developed secondary sex characteristics, have strong sexual drives, are already expected to take "correct" actions that will put them on career paths and shape their entire futures, yet you're attempting to liken them to five-year-olds.
I wonder how hard your panties will twist over [super NSFW] tiny and petite (but adult and legal) porn stars that are petite enough to have the Feds go after viewers for "child pornography" even though the photos are watermarked with an 18 USC 2257 compliant company's name and the photographed model is in their early 20s.
Support your original assertions with some facts or toss off. You've been given several opportunities and chosen not to substantiate your arguments thus far. I'm not letting you worm your way out of substantiating your original claims no matter what you try to use as
I didn't "concede" anything. You presented a situation where people were charged with a crime and a judge said they were not in violation of the law. There is nothing to "concede." The facts are plain: the law was not violated.
You have still failed to substantiate your original claims many, many posts back. This part of the discussion is an attempt to distract from that so you don't have to provide proof that those claims are truthful and not just something you made up.
There is no such thing as "virtual pimping." Either you're pimping or you're not. They weren't pimping, or if they were it was not illegal to do so. The allegations even went in front of a judge and the judge said that they didn't violate the law. People not breaking the law is a good thing. I don't see why you have such a big problem with lawful conduct.
Except Backpage is not running a prostitution ring. You said they were but you have provided nothing to substantiate that claim. You even refute your own claim with your own citations in that post; the charges of pimping where dismissed, so the legal system has already tossed out that claim completely.
It's not "hiding behind" the law. If someone is protected by the law, they're acting within the bounds of the law which is what we all should be doing. You are saying that they have committed no crime when you say they're "hiding behind" the law; you're also saying that you don't want what they're doing to be legal which is an ENTIRELY separate issue from what the statutes currently say and whether or not the law as written at the time of alleged offense was violated.
They won because they were not violating the law. What's the problem with not violating the law and having a court find that you didn't violate the law and that vigilante actions taken by public law enforcement officials when you weren't violating the law were not okay? That's what the courts are for. The cops can't try to shut your business down "by any means necessary" just because they dislike your business, all while operating your business lawfully. That's the kind of shit that you'd expect in Soviet Russia, not in the United States.
All of that is a red herring. We're talking about adult prostitution, not child sex trafficking. You have made the same erroneous conflation as the last post. What does this have to do with whether or not adults choose prostitution as a career?
You said "the idea that people tend to chose it or even that the majority of prostitutes start out choosing it as a career is specious in the extreme." It seems that a majority of prostitutes do, in fact, choose it as a career. Half of the prostitutes in a new survey say they became prostitutes because of sexual curiosity, and 68 percent consider their line of work as part of their sexuality."
Probably because "children" implies something very different from "teens" and is an implicit logical fallacy of appeal to emotion. Hmm, I wonder why someone would want to have a discussion where the facts are clearly stated instead of implied...how odd...wait, no, that's how rational discussion works.
Irrelevant. You cannot conflate adult prostitution and child prostitution. The post I replied to said nothing of child prostitution other than a passing mention of "underage" as one of the criteria used by the UK to consider prostitution to be illegal. We are exclusively discussing adult prostitution in this thread.
I see nothing to substantiate that claim either. Trying to get market share for prostitution ads is not the same thing as trying to get market share for underage prostitution ads. Also, look at the thing you quoted: a team of "over 100 people" have to review each entry before it's posted for a website that receives so many posts that "about a million ads per month" are blocked. Scrutinizing ad wording is a subjective task and they've got a staff in the hundreds on a website that's receiving posts in the millions per month. None of what's in that Wikipedia article quote is a surprise with that kind of context. They remove fake law enforcement ads faster than they remove ads advertising "children?" (Note: teenagers are not children as in "pedophilia" so there's already some seriously loaded wording by describing underage post-pubescent adolescents this way.) Why is this a surprising thing to anyone? The poster for "jailbait" prostitutes only needs to convey "I'm REALLY young, yo" in a coded way and as one code-word is grey-listed a hundred more euphemisms can be created to replace them, whereas the law enforcement official making shit up will be using up-to-date well-known code words that are on the list of phrases that raise red flags. If Backpage is using data analysis akin to spam email scoring to assist in moderation and they don't know who is and isn't law enforcement, doesn't it make perfect sense that LE posts get red-flagged sooner?
As for TPB, they don't turn a blind eye to torrents that violate copyright. TPB outright doesn't give a damn about copyright. That's kind of their schtick.
Nothing you quoted in that reply says anything about "running an underage prostitution ring" so that claim remains unfounded. The only uses of the word "underage" are in your own text and the text you quoted from my question. Referencing youth is not the same thing as "underage." If you don't believe me, see the search results for yourself and start clicking those "report" buttons.
Yes, people choose prostitution as a career and many do so independently and enjoy doing it. Read up on the subject. https://www.washingtonpost.com... and the many posts at https://bebopper76.wordpress.c... and https://www.theguardian.com/co... and http://www.slate.com/articles/... are good places to start on your journey to not blindly buying into the prevailing narrative of bullshit.
Was Backpage actually running an underage prostitution ring or were third parties running underage prostitution rings and using Backpage as a place to post ads? The rhetoric around "sex trafficking" is full of logical fallacies, anecdotal evidence, and opinions-as-facts appeal-to-emotion presentations by law enforcement officials and politicians. It is difficult to trust that what is presented is actually truthful, especially when the facts run counter to the prevailing narrative.
https://reason.com/blog/2017/0...
Partial quote: "Both law enforcement and nonprofits such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) routinely use sites like Backpage to search for teenagers reported missing. The cross-country nature of the site allows authorities to track potential victims who may move around a lot, and provides tangible evidence for prosecutors to use against their exploiters. Police also use Backpage extensively when conducting sting operations ostensibly targeting the recovery of minors. Backpage itself has, at least historically, reported suspicious ads (such as those featuring pictures of people who look underage) to NCMEC or local law enforcement."
I'm not saying that Backpage is a company run by angels, but I am definitely saying that there's so much propaganda and lies by omission out there about the Backpage prostitution situation that facts are hard to come by without scooping through truckloads of bullshit and ignoring the moralistic crusaders screaming in your ears that they're right. In any case, the people posting underage prostitution ads are the ones committing the heinous act and going after Backpage won't do a damn thing but shovel a bunch more of the prostitution ad volume onto Tor and I2P. Driving the information further underground and further from the legal reach of law enforcement will only make matters worse.
And that's why different nations exist. We can all live in harmony...separately!
That's fine, but Microsoft's forced and/or deceptive auto-"yes" Windows 10 upgrades didn't give people a choice to accept the EULA and install only if they agree. If they didn't want to be liable, they shouldn't have been so hugely aggressive in forcing the upgrade on people.
The other thing is that some niche software is very expensive and very tightly controlled, requiring the company to remote into the machine to acquire and install it. It may not be a simple matter of backing up, restoring a system image, and installing the software again, and even if it was it's not likely that a normal user can do all of that themselves. If an unwanted forced Win10 installation had a serious process defect that killed a really important laptop in a crucial period leading up to a multi-million-dollar contract, for example, it's not at all unusual to demand damages of this size. People sometimes forget that computers can be used for actual work and that work can have dollar amounts attached that they'll never see in their entire lives.
Nothing wrong with gun culture. Murder with a gun, perhaps, but gun culture is no different than any other hobby here. Non-US people and US people in large cities with ultra-strict gun control and higher rates of violent crime don't really understand that people can appreciate and enjoy guns and not be stupid with said guns. Europeans hear about high-profile mass shootings and assume that we're all blowing each others' heads off over here, but that's not the case at all. The vast majority of gun deaths in the US are suicides.
Could you post the text of your rules so we can see what you're using and perhaps learn from it?
It's like a really indirect form of Holocaust denial. Those who ignore history...
Someone please mod this post up aggressively. Well said.
I'll just leave this here. Hugs! :) https://github.com/ciafwywcoc/...
Well, it's pretty easy to "not have an issue" when you oust people that disagree with you politically and you had a large enough user base to remain open. Drupal is a prime example of the shitstorm that comes with stupid codes of conduct and their enforcement and the inevitable rules lawyering that the CoC pushers engage in that grossly violates the spirit of the rules. Make no mistake, Codes of Conduct are a cancer on open source communities and the adoption of them is a sign of imminent slow decline as identity politics and manufactured bad faith butthurt overrides good faith efforts to make better software. Such projects that succeed do so in spite of the Code, NOT because of it.
I have one of those too. I emailed Slashdot to get rid of it. They said they can't remove it. Rather than make a new account, I said "fuck it" and rolled with it. I changed my login from my Gmail one a looooooooong time ago. I don't even know if I still have access to that defunct account. Don't blame him for the stupid G+ logo; it's basically a useless scarlet letter.
Why is it that no one using the word "contrast" here seems to understand what the hell that word means? Light colors, dark colors...neither of those alone provide contrast. Contrast is the difference between high and low luminance areas in the same image. If someone has dark skin or light skin then the skin itself doesn't provide much contrast because it's mostly the same color anyway. However, lighter skin DOES provides very strong contrast against darker lips, shadows caused by light not being uniformly projected such as under nostrils or under eyebrows or in the contours of the ears, dark eyebrows and eyelashes and hair, a pair of dark-framed eyeglasses, and so on. Dark skin reflects significantly less light which means that these areas of contrast for light skin have far less contrast against the dark skin. Black beside dark brown will be harder to see than black against peach or olive or pink or yellow.
Face-detection software relies on the simple contrast of several facial features mostly around the eyes to lock on to a face; facial recognition requires vast amounts of information beyond that which are more likely to be too lacking in contrast for dark-skinned faces to make out. It doesn't take very much underexposure in typical indoor shooting conditions for a black face to look mostly like a noisy macroblock-mangled oval with eyes and teeth to facial recognition software. That's not racism, that's just how light works, and given that most pictures to be recognized are likely to be casually shot I see no way to magically code around such problems.