How sad and pathetic your miserable life must be that you have to gain satisfaction by being a "tough guy" on an internet forum. Do you beat your girlfriends to make yourself feel better too?
Just because you had the right to take such a photograph doesn't mean you should have done it, or should have ignored the guy who asked you to delete it. It'd have been the respectful and courteous thing to do, you stupid brute.
These are the people that write stories about raping little boys and argue that since no one was hurt, these stories should be perfectly legal. Isn't that your exact argument?
How about if I go to the mall and take pictures up little girl's skirts as they ride up the escalator?
You can simply that to "How about if I go to the mall and take pictures up skirts?". That's illegal because the act violates the privacy of the person photographed. A fictional character has no privacy rights to infringe.
How about if I take video of a 3-yr-old's ballet recital and post them on the web...
Don't parents do this, perfectly legitimately too? Are you proposing that we ban all pictures of children in case one might titillate a pedophile?
The fact remains that child porn is illegal whether a child was harmed in making it or not....Now, please tell me how banning that is somehow not bad for society but banning cartoon rape pics of children is.
That's a good issue to raise.
Actually, the bans on both types of work are bad for society. The former is only tolerable because it has a clear a net benefit for society: 1) the ban is very limited in scope, 2) relatively unambitious in what's banned and what isn't, and 3) eliminates commercial justification for the production of child pornography. The ban on real child pornography is still on shakier ground than banning of the production, but I (and most people) think it's still a net win, so long as massive censorship infrastructure isn't built to enforce it, as that censorship infrastructure can also be used to ban anything targeted by the moral panic du jour.
On the other hand, banning fictional work satisfies none of the above three criteria, and almost certainly does nothing to actually protect children, all the while still incurring the costs of censorship.
You seem to think that the point is the harm done to the kids in making the porn. No, as I've pointed out, that is not why it is illegal.
The potential harm to children, direct or indirect, is the sole tenable justification for banning child pornography. If you support a ban on certain fiction too, you need to couch it in terms of potential harm. (Which you do below.)
There will be a time in [a pedophile's] life when he tires of the cartoons and sees the opportunity for the real thing.
If I can restate your point a bit, your premise here is that fictional crime causes real crime. If child pornography is somehow special and that premise applies only to it, then I'd like to see some data on that. I've seen absolutely no claim this is true in the special case of child pornography. If it turns out to be the case (which I highly doubt), then I'll reconsider my position.
The other possibility is your premise, fictional crime causes real crime, applies to all crime. In that case, wouldn't it be fair to apply it to all creative works? If we accept this premise, we should ban adult rape pornography, bank robbery films, war movies, drug movies, and many other works. But if we did that, we would have to remove quite a few works literature (granted, the loss wouldn't be great in most cases), but don't you agree that literature depicting crime has been a net boon for society?
How many strawmen will you build? Nobody is advocating legalizing real child pornography. What some of us are suggesting is that fake porn, while repulsive, harms nobody and should be allowed. The reason it should be allowed is not that it's a good thing, but that the harm to society in censoring it is far too great.
Can I make myself any clearer? Reasonable people may disagree with my conclusion, but your linking the discussion we're having to NAMBLA reflects a profound misunderstanding of what we're even talking about.
An oppressive police state is one where we can't access pictures of children getting molested?
That's a strawman and you know it. We're talking about measures that go far beyond banning pictures of children actually being molested: we're talking about outlawing certain kinds of fiction that we happen to find disgusting; no child is actually harmed.
This stuff is disgusting, granted. But, threats to free speech never begin with the conventional. Instead, it's far easier to attack speech on the margins of good society and then using that precedent as a beachhead, attack more legitimate and important speech.
We all have an interest in prevent the production and dissemination of true child pornography. But fictional material, however distasteful, is different. Allowing it is essential to preserve our larger principles and liberties. The Neo-Nazi march on Skokie was also distasteful, yet when we upheld the fundamental right that allowed the Neo-Nazis to march, we all won.
So you're prepared to live under an oppressive government for your child's "safety". What else are you prepared to do? Don't keep knives or forks in the house - kids might poke themselves. Don't use electricity - kids might stick things in the outlets. Never go out in public - you never know when the next serial killer will come around the corner. Let's ban churches - that priest never did look right. Oh, and let's not forget to ban cars - more kids are killed and injured by cars than anything else.
Oh, you mean that society should do everything possible to protect children except the things that would personally inconvenience you?
This isn't about the "rights of deviants" (though even convicted criminals have human rights!). It's about the health of society as a whole.
Reason is the only way we make progress. With all the art in the world and no reason, we would never have left those caves in Lascaux.
Before you eviscerate me, consider that the arts really don't make any progress. No painting has fed a hungry child, discovered a new molecule, built a bridge, or cured a disease. Dance doesn't solve real-world problems, and music isn't played in congress to make policy.
Encouraging the arts is worthwhile for other reasons, but the whole subject has nothing to do with what we're talking about here, which is the use of disinterested reason instead of inflamed passion when making policy decisions.
the line does need to include some scope of cartoons or other drawings within its boundaries.
This statement is a non sequitur and is not supported by your otherwise reasonable post. By your own reasoning, we need to establish that these cause harm in excess of that caused by the abrogation of free speech banning them would involve.
In this matter, one must consider not only the direct cost of prosecution and incarceration, but also the opportunity cost of what the convicted could have contributed to society, and on a larger scale, the potential societal damage caused by censorship itself. Granted, the latter is very difficult to quantify, but it's a small step from banning certain types of pure speech to banning many types of pure speech. In purely economic terms, oppressive nations are not competitive with free ones: banning speech can be viewed as a "misallocation" of intellectual resources, with all the economic penalties that word entails.
Of course, there are non-economic cost of censorship: the chilling effect on legitimate discussion, the danger of society slipping into an even more oppressive regime, and the concentration of power leading to its abuse.
On the benefit side, I have grave doubts as to the effectiveness of our current and proposed measures: ostracizing sex offenders after they are released from prison has not stopped a single incident of recidivism. National internet firewalls are easily bypassed by determined users and give the government the infrastructure is instantly block any other speech, instantly and in secret. Furthermore, as another poster mentioned, it's likely that such pornography satiates sexual urges instead of exacerbates them, actually making society safer (so long as we're talking fiction here, of course.)
Essentially, those proposing stringent laws against fictional child pornography, and those proposing intrusive electronic monitoring of everyone, are imposing a giant cost on society in exchange for a tiny increase in safety. I believe Benjamin Franklin had something to say about that.
Every public policy has a cost side and a benefit side. The cost of ever more stringent child pornography laws, in terms of both fiscal impact and damage to our society, far outweighs the marginal increase in safety to children.
Emotionally, cost-benefits analysis is repulsive. Emotionally, we want to do everything we can to protect children, and any other policy has all the emotional impact of actual child abuse. But fortunately, society is not based on pure emotion. Reason, which is the only mechanism through which we ever make progres, dictates that we take reasonable steps to ensure children are safe, but not to the point where we sacrifice other principles for which we stand and create an oppressive police state.
After all, we want to bring children up in a free society, don't we? We want them to safe after they turn 18, too!
Interesting, but it's fundamentally the same as the Paypal-web-service model, except less convenient for the user. Also, users will want some kind confirmation that their orders "went through". Doing that asynchronously is problematic.
From the point of view of the average used, they absofuckinglutely will break. And we sure are hell shouldn't be training users to bypass certificate warnings. That road leads to absolute disaster: what's the difference between a MITM attack and a self-signed certificate from the point of view of the user?
No. Comodo's trust needs to be revoked, and it needs to be revoked now, web breakage be damned, or a horrible precedent will be set.
That's why you grant the government the ability to accredit CAs, not be a CA. If multiple governments do the accreditation, then we gain all the benefits of a web of trust without disrupting our current infrastructure.
I hope the article author understands that unless he's really lucky, he is in deep legal trouble already.
What law, exactly, has he violated? We are a society of laws. Not every "bad" action is automatically illegal because some powerful person doesn't like it. That's what makes us a free country and not a despotic nightmare land.
Yes, but SSL certificates also protect against DNS spoofing and other man-in-the-middle attacks. "Control of the domain" is a far fuzzier concept than you think.
The issue here is a conflict of interest. I've been screaming that something like this would happen, but I was treated like Cassandra. Look - it's in the CA's financial interest to sell as many certificates as possible, and competitive pressure will invariable reduce the verification process to joke unless there is a balancing force.
I sincerely hope that the Mozilla project and everyone else removes the Comodo CA from the trusted list and pushed out an urgent security update. Doing anything else would set a terrible precedent and only encourage this kind of behavior.
That said, it's not necessarily in the browser's best interest to remove the CA. (It's the right thing to do, but that's beside the point.) Nobody wants to "break the web", and browser creators are concerned that if major sites fail to work, users won't blame the sites: they'll blame the browsers. Therefore, corporate management types may very well decide to not remove flawed CAs.
However, if there were a third party that verified certificate authorities, and all the major browsers consulted this organization instead of their internal CA lists, sites would fail across all major browsers simultaneously, giving no competitive advantage to ones with lax security.
I cannot see how such an organization could make a profit, however. Money changing hands for verification would only lead to exactly the same corrupting effect we see in the primary CA market. (Or Moody's, for that matter.) The rating organization ought to be a government agency that simply publishes a list, signed with a well-known public key.
There could be more than one of these organizations, perhaps run by several independent national bodies, non-profits, and so on. A web browser would check all the CA verifiers and if a majority of them reported that a CA is problematic, would disable that CA. That way, no one body can extort CAs by threatening to revoke their accreditation, but collective, bad CAs will be rooted out.
Actually, it ought to be that the law morality, i.e., the law is a subset of morality. We can encode morality into the law, but never comprehensively and absolutely, because to some extent, morality is ambiguous. But the law should never be a superset of morality, because that means we're criminalizing things that common morality doesn't consider wrong. A big problem is that morality is fuzzy, while the law is binary: an act is illegal or not, whereas some group or other might hold that what the majority considers wrong is in fact right, or vica versa. We resolve the problem by majority rule.
The problem is that the drug war is a result of minority rule, putting into the absolute, binary law something only a small portion of the population opposes. That's called tyranny.
Nice troll, but I'll bite. The one crucial aspect you're missing has to do with the word "arrested". It's justifiable to store somebody's DNA after he's been convicted. But an arrest is just an accusation. There is no due process, no judge, no jury, nothing of the sort. There ought to be no penalty for an arrest alone. That's what "due process" means.
And since we noticed the elephant in the room... Exactly WHY doesn't CA have a law against pushing to commit suicide?
Because it'd run afoul of the first amendment? The freedom of speech also applies to speech that is rude, crass, classless and derogatory. There are exceptions for "clear and present danger", yes, but I'd have a hard time seeing how "the world would be better off without you" would qualify. Most cases ought to be covered under conventional harassment, another legitimate exception to free speech.
In fact, I think any law banning the encouragement of suicide would be at best useless, overlapping with harassment law, and at worst, have a scope far outside its original intent and ban, say, discussion of euthanasia.
<snark>But such a law feels good, right? So let's pass it. It's the American Way. </snark>
If you're willing to suppose that the text of the bible is a flawed translation of an even earlier text, then the whole text becomes meaningless. What if the whole bit about parting of the Red Sea, or of Jesus' resurrection, is also just a bad translation?
Granted, I think the whole work is fiction, but hey...
Incidentally, Emacs suffers from exactly the disease you describe. Consider the result of parse-partial-sexp:
(parse-partial-sexp from to &optional targetdepth stopbefore oldstate commentstop)
Parse Lisp syntax starting at from until to; return status of parse at to. Parsing stops at to or when certain criteria are met;
point is set to where parsing stops. If fifth arg oldstate is omitted or nil,
parsing assumes that from is the beginning of a function. Value is a list of elements describing final state of parsing:
0. depth in parens.
1. character address of start of innermost containing list; nil if none.
2. character address of start of last complete sexp terminated.
3. non-nil if inside a string.
(it is the character that will terminate the string,
or t if the string should be terminated by a generic string delimiter.)
4. nil if outside a comment, t if inside a non-nestable comment,
else an integer (the current comment nesting).
5. t if following a quote character.
6. the minimum paren-depth encountered during this scan.
7. t if in a comment of style b; symbol `syntax-table' if the comment
should be terminated by a generic comment delimiter.
8. character address of start of comment or string; nil if not in one.
9. Intermediate data for continuation of parsing (subject to change). If third arg targetdepth is non-nil, parsing stops if the depth in parentheses becomes equal to targetdepth. Fourth arg stopbefore non-nil means stop when come to
any character that starts a sexp. Fifth arg oldstate is a list like what this function returns.
It is used to initialize the state of the parse. Elements number 1, 2, 6
and 8 are ignored. Sixth arg commentstop non-nil means stop at the start of a comment.
If it is symbol `syntax-table', stop after the start of a comment or a
string, or after end of a comment or a string.
It doesn't help that RMS doesn't believe in keyword arguments.
Slashdot Mirror
How sad and pathetic your miserable life must be that you have to gain satisfaction by being a "tough guy" on an internet forum. Do you beat your girlfriends to make yourself feel better too?
Just because you had the right to take such a photograph doesn't mean you should have done it, or should have ignored the guy who asked you to delete it. It'd have been the respectful and courteous thing to do, you stupid brute.
Yes.
You can simply that to "How about if I go to the mall and take pictures up skirts?". That's illegal because the act violates the privacy of the person photographed. A fictional character has no privacy rights to infringe.
Don't parents do this, perfectly legitimately too? Are you proposing that we ban all pictures of children in case one might titillate a pedophile?
That's a good issue to raise.
Actually, the bans on both types of work are bad for society. The former is only tolerable because it has a clear a net benefit for society: 1) the ban is very limited in scope, 2) relatively unambitious in what's banned and what isn't, and 3) eliminates commercial justification for the production of child pornography. The ban on real child pornography is still on shakier ground than banning of the production, but I (and most people) think it's still a net win, so long as massive censorship infrastructure isn't built to enforce it, as that censorship infrastructure can also be used to ban anything targeted by the moral panic du jour.
On the other hand, banning fictional work satisfies none of the above three criteria, and almost certainly does nothing to actually protect children, all the while still incurring the costs of censorship.
The potential harm to children, direct or indirect, is the sole tenable justification for banning child pornography. If you support a ban on certain fiction too, you need to couch it in terms of potential harm. (Which you do below.)
If I can restate your point a bit, your premise here is that fictional crime causes real crime. If child pornography is somehow special and that premise applies only to it, then I'd like to see some data on that. I've seen absolutely no claim this is true in the special case of child pornography. If it turns out to be the case (which I highly doubt), then I'll reconsider my position.
The other possibility is your premise, fictional crime causes real crime, applies to all crime. In that case, wouldn't it be fair to apply it to all creative works? If we accept this premise, we should ban adult rape pornography, bank robbery films, war movies, drug movies, and many other works. But if we did that, we would have to remove quite a few works literature (granted, the loss wouldn't be great in most cases), but don't you agree that literature depicting crime has been a net boon for society?
How many strawmen will you build? Nobody is advocating legalizing real child pornography. What some of us are suggesting is that fake porn, while repulsive, harms nobody and should be allowed. The reason it should be allowed is not that it's a good thing, but that the harm to society in censoring it is far too great.
Can I make myself any clearer? Reasonable people may disagree with my conclusion, but your linking the discussion we're having to NAMBLA reflects a profound misunderstanding of what we're even talking about.
IMO, freedom to draw pictures harms no one and has NOTHING to do with a safe society, your rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding.
That's a strawman and you know it. We're talking about measures that go far beyond banning pictures of children actually being molested: we're talking about outlawing certain kinds of fiction that we happen to find disgusting; no child is actually harmed.
This stuff is disgusting, granted. But, threats to free speech never begin with the conventional. Instead, it's far easier to attack speech on the margins of good society and then using that precedent as a beachhead, attack more legitimate and important speech.
We all have an interest in prevent the production and dissemination of true child pornography. But fictional material, however distasteful, is different. Allowing it is essential to preserve our larger principles and liberties. The Neo-Nazi march on Skokie was also distasteful, yet when we upheld the fundamental right that allowed the Neo-Nazis to march, we all won.
So you're prepared to live under an oppressive government for your child's "safety". What else are you prepared to do? Don't keep knives or forks in the house - kids might poke themselves. Don't use electricity - kids might stick things in the outlets. Never go out in public - you never know when the next serial killer will come around the corner. Let's ban churches - that priest never did look right. Oh, and let's not forget to ban cars - more kids are killed and injured by cars than anything else.
Oh, you mean that society should do everything possible to protect children except the things that would personally inconvenience you?
This isn't about the "rights of deviants" (though even convicted criminals have human rights!). It's about the health of society as a whole.
Reason is the only way we make progress. With all the art in the world and no reason, we would never have left those caves in Lascaux.
Before you eviscerate me, consider that the arts really don't make any progress. No painting has fed a hungry child, discovered a new molecule, built a bridge, or cured a disease. Dance doesn't solve real-world problems, and music isn't played in congress to make policy.
Encouraging the arts is worthwhile for other reasons, but the whole subject has nothing to do with what we're talking about here, which is the use of disinterested reason instead of inflamed passion when making policy decisions.
This statement is a non sequitur and is not supported by your otherwise reasonable post. By your own reasoning, we need to establish that these cause harm in excess of that caused by the abrogation of free speech banning them would involve.
In this matter, one must consider not only the direct cost of prosecution and incarceration, but also the opportunity cost of what the convicted could have contributed to society, and on a larger scale, the potential societal damage caused by censorship itself. Granted, the latter is very difficult to quantify, but it's a small step from banning certain types of pure speech to banning many types of pure speech. In purely economic terms, oppressive nations are not competitive with free ones: banning speech can be viewed as a "misallocation" of intellectual resources, with all the economic penalties that word entails.
Of course, there are non-economic cost of censorship: the chilling effect on legitimate discussion, the danger of society slipping into an even more oppressive regime, and the concentration of power leading to its abuse.
On the benefit side, I have grave doubts as to the effectiveness of our current and proposed measures: ostracizing sex offenders after they are released from prison has not stopped a single incident of recidivism. National internet firewalls are easily bypassed by determined users and give the government the infrastructure is instantly block any other speech, instantly and in secret. Furthermore, as another poster mentioned, it's likely that such pornography satiates sexual urges instead of exacerbates them, actually making society safer (so long as we're talking fiction here, of course.)
Essentially, those proposing stringent laws against fictional child pornography, and those proposing intrusive electronic monitoring of everyone, are imposing a giant cost on society in exchange for a tiny increase in safety. I believe Benjamin Franklin had something to say about that.
Every public policy has a cost side and a benefit side. The cost of ever more stringent child pornography laws, in terms of both fiscal impact and damage to our society, far outweighs the marginal increase in safety to children.
Emotionally, cost-benefits analysis is repulsive. Emotionally, we want to do everything we can to protect children, and any other policy has all the emotional impact of actual child abuse. But fortunately, society is not based on pure emotion. Reason, which is the only mechanism through which we ever make progres, dictates that we take reasonable steps to ensure children are safe, but not to the point where we sacrifice other principles for which we stand and create an oppressive police state.
After all, we want to bring children up in a free society, don't we? We want them to safe after they turn 18, too!
Interesting, but it's fundamentally the same as the Paypal-web-service model, except less convenient for the user. Also, users will want some kind confirmation that their orders "went through". Doing that asynchronously is problematic.
From the point of view of the average used, they absofuckinglutely will break. And we sure are hell shouldn't be training users to bypass certificate warnings. That road leads to absolute disaster: what's the difference between a MITM attack and a self-signed certificate from the point of view of the user?
No. Comodo's trust needs to be revoked, and it needs to be revoked now, web breakage be damned, or a horrible precedent will be set.
That's why you grant the government the ability to accredit CAs, not be a CA. If multiple governments do the accreditation, then we gain all the benefits of a web of trust without disrupting our current infrastructure.
What law, exactly, has he violated? We are a society of laws. Not every "bad" action is automatically illegal because some powerful person doesn't like it. That's what makes us a free country and not a despotic nightmare land.
Yes, but SSL certificates also protect against DNS spoofing and other man-in-the-middle attacks. "Control of the domain" is a far fuzzier concept than you think.
The issue here is a conflict of interest. I've been screaming that something like this would happen, but I was treated like Cassandra. Look - it's in the CA's financial interest to sell as many certificates as possible, and competitive pressure will invariable reduce the verification process to joke unless there is a balancing force.
I sincerely hope that the Mozilla project and everyone else removes the Comodo CA from the trusted list and pushed out an urgent security update. Doing anything else would set a terrible precedent and only encourage this kind of behavior.
That said, it's not necessarily in the browser's best interest to remove the CA. (It's the right thing to do, but that's beside the point.) Nobody wants to "break the web", and browser creators are concerned that if major sites fail to work, users won't blame the sites: they'll blame the browsers. Therefore, corporate management types may very well decide to not remove flawed CAs.
However, if there were a third party that verified certificate authorities, and all the major browsers consulted this organization instead of their internal CA lists, sites would fail across all major browsers simultaneously, giving no competitive advantage to ones with lax security.
I cannot see how such an organization could make a profit, however. Money changing hands for verification would only lead to exactly the same corrupting effect we see in the primary CA market. (Or Moody's, for that matter.) The rating organization ought to be a government agency that simply publishes a list, signed with a well-known public key.
There could be more than one of these organizations, perhaps run by several independent national bodies, non-profits, and so on. A web browser would check all the CA verifiers and if a majority of them reported that a CA is problematic, would disable that CA. That way, no one body can extort CAs by threatening to revoke their accreditation, but collective, bad CAs will be rooted out.
Actually, it ought to be that the law morality, i.e., the law is a subset of morality. We can encode morality into the law, but never comprehensively and absolutely, because to some extent, morality is ambiguous. But the law should never be a superset of morality, because that means we're criminalizing things that common morality doesn't consider wrong. A big problem is that morality is fuzzy, while the law is binary: an act is illegal or not, whereas some group or other might hold that what the majority considers wrong is in fact right, or vica versa. We resolve the problem by majority rule.
The problem is that the drug war is a result of minority rule, putting into the absolute, binary law something only a small portion of the population opposes. That's called tyranny.
Nice troll, but I'll bite. The one crucial aspect you're missing has to do with the word "arrested". It's justifiable to store somebody's DNA after he's been convicted. But an arrest is just an accusation. There is no due process, no judge, no jury, nothing of the sort. There ought to be no penalty for an arrest alone. That's what "due process" means.
Because it'd run afoul of the first amendment? The freedom of speech also applies to speech that is rude, crass, classless and derogatory. There are exceptions for "clear and present danger", yes, but I'd have a hard time seeing how "the world would be better off without you" would qualify. Most cases ought to be covered under conventional harassment, another legitimate exception to free speech.
In fact, I think any law banning the encouragement of suicide would be at best useless, overlapping with harassment law, and at worst, have a scope far outside its original intent and ban, say, discussion of euthanasia.
<snark>But such a law feels good, right? So let's pass it. It's the American Way. </snark>
I'd gladly live next to a nuclear plant.
Like OMG, terrorists! Quick, somebody ban knives, toothbrushes, aircraft, jagged rocks, and pillows: all potential terrorist weapons.
If you're willing to suppose that the text of the bible is a flawed translation of an even earlier text, then the whole text becomes meaningless. What if the whole bit about parting of the Red Sea, or of Jesus' resurrection, is also just a bad translation?
Granted, I think the whole work is fiction, but hey...
Incidentally, Emacs suffers from exactly the disease you describe. Consider the result of parse-partial-sexp:
(parse-partial-sexp from to &optional targetdepth stopbefore oldstate
commentstop)
Parse Lisp syntax starting at from until to; return status of parse at to.
Parsing stops at to or when certain criteria are met;
point is set to where parsing stops.
If fifth arg oldstate is omitted or nil,
parsing assumes that from is the beginning of a function.
Value is a list of elements describing final state of parsing:
0. depth in parens.
1. character address of start of innermost containing list; nil if none.
2. character address of start of last complete sexp terminated.
3. non-nil if inside a string.
(it is the character that will terminate the string,
or t if the string should be terminated by a generic string delimiter.)
4. nil if outside a comment, t if inside a non-nestable comment,
else an integer (the current comment nesting).
5. t if following a quote character.
6. the minimum paren-depth encountered during this scan.
7. t if in a comment of style b; symbol `syntax-table' if the comment
should be terminated by a generic comment delimiter.
8. character address of start of comment or string; nil if not in one.
9. Intermediate data for continuation of parsing (subject to change).
If third arg targetdepth is non-nil, parsing stops if the depth
in parentheses becomes equal to targetdepth.
Fourth arg stopbefore non-nil means stop when come to
any character that starts a sexp.
Fifth arg oldstate is a list like what this function returns.
It is used to initialize the state of the parse. Elements number 1, 2, 6
and 8 are ignored.
Sixth arg commentstop non-nil means stop at the start of a comment.
If it is symbol `syntax-table', stop after the start of a comment or a
string, or after end of a comment or a string.
It doesn't help that RMS doesn't believe in keyword arguments.
Also, it's :-)
(best-part-p 'lisp)
you insensitive clod.