They passed on naming Osama bin Laden in 2001. The original intent was to name the person with the greatest impact. In 1938 Hitler was Man of the Year; in 1939 it was Stalin, just because the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact gave Hitler breathing room to invade the rest of Europe.
In 2001 bin Laden was obviously the personage with the most impact, but people have come to see Person of the Year as laudatory, so now Time is constrained to pick popular figures rather than infamous ones, even if it's the infamous who mattered more.
No kidding. It's not enough to wade through interstitial ads to get to a page that's 60% ads sprinkled randomly throughout the text of the article; the article itself has to be a marketing blowjob for MS.
Or it tells you that the police didn't want to stop in the middle of an arrest in which they were using force to subdue someone, to provide their badge numbers to a lot of bystanders. If I was trying to subdue someone, I wouldn't want to, whether or not I believed I was in the right.
One of the reasons that tasers are popular among law enforcement is that they give the cop leverage without getting physical, because an endless variety of small and large injuries happen to both the cop and the ne'er-do-well in any altercation. Right or wrong, tasers leave no lasting effects (assuming death doesn't result, and I've never seen a good cite of a taser being directly responsible for a death).
You're aware, aren't you, that cops are required to receive a tasing as part of the training to use it? This is so they'll understand the effect of taser on the receiver. Likewise with pepper spray.
Cops I've seen comment on this video have said that, when they were tased, they were fully physically and mentally capable within seconds of it stopping, FWIW.
To be in the library you're required to present student ID on request by staff. He said he didn't have his on him. He refused to leave when staff told him to, so they called campus security, who told him to leave. He still refused, and the police were summoned.
According to other articles, at the time the video starts, he'd stood up and starting walking towards the door. One of the cops grabbed his arm to escort him, he yanked his arm away and yelled "don't touch me!" Whether or not he then passively resisted leaving by going limp, or was simply thrown down and tasered, depends on who you ask.
Oh for fuck's sake. Have you never heard of a word having more than one meaning? Has it really been unclear by the context whether I'm referring to the non-criminal-tendency vs. the criminal act?
Let me clue you in on the basic freaking vocabulary that you think I'm having a problem with. Here's the six dictionary definitions of "pedophilia" that dictionary.com comes up with, listed with their sources. Note that four of them refer to the act:
No, I imagine to someone like you, who signed up just to post to this story, presumably because of all the attention boylove.com was getting, you have quite a different perspective on the matter.
Have I called them babyrapers? Childfuckers? Destroyers-of-innocence? I've called them pedophiles and nothing else. If that word has a perjorative meaning to it, perhaps it's because of what they tend to do.
"There is no requirement for sexual activity."
And the absence of a requirement means that none ever will? They'll all abstain?
"no amount of acceptance of a pedophile's condition will convince anyone that a child won't be damaged through sexual contact."
Really? Look upthread, or through the whole story, at the number of accounts signed up just to post to this story, presumably from boylove.com. Do you think they believe that children are damaged through pedophilic relationships? leBonHomme specifically wants pedophilia to be mainstreamed just because he thinks that, like homosexuality, the mainstreaming of pedophilia will be beneficial for society. If he's a poster from boylove.com, do you think that he means "pedophiles will get the help they need", or that "pedophilic relationships will be seen to be non-harmful"?
"Of course it is [plausible that a pedophile could go his whole life not acting on his urges]. Perhaps it's not plausible for you..."
No, it's not plausible for me. I don't doubt that there'd be some who would never act, perhaps even a non-trivial number. But as you bring up AA, I'll ask this: How many members of AA fall off the wagon from time to time?
"Are you calling all pedophiles 'sexual offenders'? What the recidivism rate for non-offenders? The problem is that you view pedophiles as criminals."
I'm calling sexual offenders "sexual offenders", meaning someone who's broken the law through their actions. I don't view pedophilic attraction as criminal in and of itself, but the data on sexual offenders shows them to be mostly unreformable. As child molestation is a sexual offense, I'm including them in that tendency towards high recidivism, meaning that I believe (and I believe the data shows) that pedophiles are likely to act on their urges, and I see public acceptance of pedophilia as a neutral sexual identity as furthering those likely actions.
"It's funny since you advocate such a simple solution. Treat all pedophiles as criminals and give them no quarter."
Did I suggest arbitrarily locking them up? Forced chemical (or real) castration? Internment camps? No, I specifically expressed deep scepticism about the usefulness of such ideas. What I've been arguing for is loudly denying rhetorical tricks aimed at mainstreaming pedophilia.
"So you recognize that they form these networks anyway, so why do you fear them forming support networks in public?"
Because as a practical matter underground networks are limited in scope and suffer constant attrition. I think that while the networks are underground, and with constant police investigation, they're far smaller than they would be in public.
"The analogy you've chosen says it all. You view all pedophiles as inherently criminal and the mere attraction as proof that they molest children."
I never said that pedophilic attraction is inherently criminal. I said that it's inherently dangerous.
"Perhaps you have no control over your sexual urges, but don't project your weaknesses onto others."
You know what? Fuck this. You've stopped reading what I'm saying and started your own brand of projection.
"I do accept the sexuality as 'morally neutral'. I do not accept that child molestation as normal. It absolutely does not follow."
Logically, no, it doesn't follow. Rhetorically it does, especially when one looks at history and sees the acceptance of mixed race and homosexual relationships. If we view pedophilia as just another variant of human sexuality, we open the door to allowing the expression of that identity for those exact reasons.
"I don't think there's any reason to believe that a pedophile inherently desires to harm any more than anyone else does."
No, they're not inherently desirous of harming others. But what they're inherently desirous of doing, is inherently harmful. Is it plausible to you that a pedophile could spend his whole life refusing to act on his basic sexual desires?
There's a reason that sexual offenders have such high recidivism rates. The impulse we're talking about is basic to the psyche.
"Since you brought it up, Ted Haggard is a prime, and very current, example of what happens when you force someone into the closet under the greatest possible oppression."
Yes, and I think we agree that closeting someone creates a destructive force. However, I'm not so sanguine that uncloseting pedophiles is the best strategy for minimizing child molestation. They may be cut off from help, but they're also cut off from the like minded, from fellow conspirators, from pedophilia encouraging groups, and from a political lobby that can push for expansion of their rights as pedophiles. Yes, they form underground networks as a result, but like terrorist networks, they're hampered and hounded and their organizational efforts are at least curtailed.
I don't pretend this is an easy issue to resolve. If the War on Terror has accomplished nothing else, it's made me endlessly more suspicious of government detention for reasons of prevention or public safety. But the alternative of mainstreaming pedophilia as a sexual identity seems to me far worse.
Let me suggest a different analogy that I think is less questionable: a portion of rapists are compulsive rapists (meaning let's ignore, for the moment, date rape and wilding and all the other sorts of volitional rape that are about miscommunication, misunderstanding, or just not giving a damn). Those rapists can likewise argue that they are driven to rape by their fundamental sexual makeup, yet we would never accept 'coercion attracted adults' as a morally neutral sexual identity. So why does the argument seem more plausible in the case of pedophilia?
I think the point is that when you get past hate and fear of homosexuality, you can see it as a healthy expression of sexual identity between consenting adults that has nothing to do with you. When you get past the hate and fear of pedophiles, you're still left with an exploitative and unhealthy sexual relationship that's unacceptable in its own terms.
That said, this is an argument of public persuasion and not logic. I'm not saying that we have to continue to hate and fear pedophiles. I'm saying that once you're past that emotional reaction to it, we can and should deny the status of oppressed sexual minority to pedophiles that's inherent in terms like 'minor attracted adult'; if we do so, we allow just the argument that you're making, that in the past oppressed sexual minorities have come to be viewed as normal and healthy, so pedophilia should be as well.
You're right, I was assuming some things in my post, namely that child molestation is wrong (something someone in larger thread has already disagreed with), and that homosexuality (and gay sex) is not. Elsewhere in the larger thread, I've articulated reasons for that view that I think justify it outside of a mere statement of current mores. Regardless, if every post had to start with an argument for every underlying assumption,./ threads would be even more turgid, something I think we all agree is not in our interests.
Are you conflating homosexuality with pedophilia, or arguing by analogy? Meaning that the mainstreaming of homosexuality didn't lead to the breakdown of society; likewise the mainstreaming of pedophilia?
What the mainstreaming of homosexuality did lead to was a lot more gay sex, and a lot more gay relationships. Following your analogy, the mainstreaming of pedophilia may not lead to the breakdown of society, but it would lead to a lot more adult-child sex and adult-child sexual relationships.
Because my post wasn't about why pedophilia's wrong, it was about the use of language to normalize something that's widely considered to be wrong (and how we should fight that normalization). FTR, pedophilia's wrong because it's an essentially exploitative relationship, not because it's against God's law. But thanks for seizing on an irrelevent aspect of my post to dismiss the whole thing.
I don't understand what you mean by 'emotional... and not physical'. And no, parents can't consent to a pedophilic relationship for their child--it would be just as abusive as if they were the pedophiles.
Who said I wanted them to stop talking? I want them to talk, so I can call bullshit on the attempt to recast pedophilia as an oppressed sexual identity.
Did the preceding 200 words just blur by you? You leap right for the summary, ignore everything else I wrote, misconstrue my point to be about the difference between homosexuality and pedophilia, and then accuse me of not supporting my case?
Where did I suggest that we jail the participants of these message boards? I advocate engagement, namely by calling bullshit on the whole attempt to normalize it through the adoption of sexual identity politics.
I offer no reason for the difference because my post wasn't about the mainstreaming of homosexuality. But as I said below, pedophilia is an inherently exploitative act, which is sufficient reason to damn it. Homosexuality, on the other hand, is between consenting adults and harms no one outside of the relationship (at least, no more than any heterosexual relationship might).
We can say that fucking kids is RIGHT OUT because it's an inherently exploitative and damaging relationship. In other words, if the argument was that homosexuality is abnormal but okay, but pedophilia is abnormal and not okay, you're blurring the issue rather than clarifying it.
BTW, cook up whatever fevered libertopia dreams you want, but saying that pedophilia would be a cause the Democratic party would champion is just fucking loony.
Here's the 'two' in the one-two punch that starts with terms like 'minor attracted adult': "you just hate and fear us because we're different."
No, I simply don't want children to be molested. The parent suggests that the problem isn't the sexual identity of pedophiles and ephebophiles, it's the actions that are the expression of those identities. Like you can separate the two, and treat one as a heinous crime while being accepting of the other. If you accept the validity of the identity as morally neutral, then the normalization of the expression of the identity is the next step.
The religious right's "love the sinner, hate the sin" approach to homosexuality should show how successful that approach is. Ask Ted Haggard how successful it's been.
I do have a degree of sympathy for pedophiles, because I agree that their condition is outside their choice. That doesn't mean they aren't public hazards, in the same way that a plague carrier is. In light of that, they can be dealt with humanely or not (and it should go without saying that humanely is my choice), but dealt with they must be.
What I'm reacting to emotionally is co-opting the queer identity rhetoric in an effort to emulate the gay community's mainstreaming and acceptance. To me, it's a bright line, and exactly the place to stop the effort; not by suppressing their freedom of speech, but by loudly calling bullshit on such terms as 'minor attracted adult'. I'm suggesting engagement, not suppression.
I agree with your analysis of why pedophilia is wrong while homosexuality is not: because pedophilia is inherently exploitative. Grant ever other facile comparison between the two (e.g., minority sexual identities, biological sexual orientation), you're still left with pedophilia being essentially wrong on that fact alone.
Slashdot Mirror
They passed on naming Osama bin Laden in 2001. The original intent was to name the person with the greatest impact. In 1938 Hitler was Man of the Year; in 1939 it was Stalin, just because the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact gave Hitler breathing room to invade the rest of Europe.
In 2001 bin Laden was obviously the personage with the most impact, but people have come to see Person of the Year as laudatory, so now Time is constrained to pick popular figures rather than infamous ones, even if it's the infamous who mattered more.
No kidding. It's not enough to wade through interstitial ads to get to a page that's 60% ads sprinkled randomly throughout the text of the article; the article itself has to be a marketing blowjob for MS.
We've reached the advertising singularity!
Or it tells you that the police didn't want to stop in the middle of an arrest in which they were using force to subdue someone, to provide their badge numbers to a lot of bystanders. If I was trying to subdue someone, I wouldn't want to, whether or not I believed I was in the right.
One of the reasons that tasers are popular among law enforcement is that they give the cop leverage without getting physical, because an endless variety of small and large injuries happen to both the cop and the ne'er-do-well in any altercation. Right or wrong, tasers leave no lasting effects (assuming death doesn't result, and I've never seen a good cite of a taser being directly responsible for a death).
You're aware, aren't you, that cops are required to receive a tasing as part of the training to use it? This is so they'll understand the effect of taser on the receiver. Likewise with pepper spray.
Cops I've seen comment on this video have said that, when they were tased, they were fully physically and mentally capable within seconds of it stopping, FWIW.
To be in the library you're required to present student ID on request by staff. He said he didn't have his on him. He refused to leave when staff told him to, so they called campus security, who told him to leave. He still refused, and the police were summoned.
According to other articles, at the time the video starts, he'd stood up and starting walking towards the door. One of the cops grabbed his arm to escort him, he yanked his arm away and yelled "don't touch me!" Whether or not he then passively resisted leaving by going limp, or was simply thrown down and tasered, depends on who you ask.
The Scouring of the Shire was filmed, but didn't make the final cut. Christopher Lee was pissed because that cut halved his screen time.
Oh for fuck's sake. Have you never heard of a word having more than one meaning? Has it really been unclear by the context whether I'm referring to the non-criminal-tendency vs. the criminal act?
Let me clue you in on the basic freaking vocabulary that you think I'm having a problem with. Here's the six dictionary definitions of "pedophilia" that dictionary.com comes up with, listed with their sources. Note that four of them refer to the act:
No, I imagine to someone like you, who signed up just to post to this story, presumably because of all the attention boylove.com was getting, you have quite a different perspective on the matter.
Have I called them babyrapers? Childfuckers? Destroyers-of-innocence? I've called them pedophiles and nothing else. If that word has a perjorative meaning to it, perhaps it's because of what they tend to do.
"There is no requirement for sexual activity."
And the absence of a requirement means that none ever will? They'll all abstain?
"no amount of acceptance of a pedophile's condition will convince anyone that a child won't be damaged through sexual contact."
Really? Look upthread, or through the whole story, at the number of accounts signed up just to post to this story, presumably from boylove.com. Do you think they believe that children are damaged through pedophilic relationships? leBonHomme specifically wants pedophilia to be mainstreamed just because he thinks that, like homosexuality, the mainstreaming of pedophilia will be beneficial for society. If he's a poster from boylove.com, do you think that he means "pedophiles will get the help they need", or that "pedophilic relationships will be seen to be non-harmful"?
"Of course it is [plausible that a pedophile could go his whole life not acting on his urges]. Perhaps it's not plausible for you..."
No, it's not plausible for me. I don't doubt that there'd be some who would never act, perhaps even a non-trivial number. But as you bring up AA, I'll ask this: How many members of AA fall off the wagon from time to time?
"Are you calling all pedophiles 'sexual offenders'? What the recidivism rate for non-offenders? The problem is that you view pedophiles as criminals."
I'm calling sexual offenders "sexual offenders", meaning someone who's broken the law through their actions. I don't view pedophilic attraction as criminal in and of itself, but the data on sexual offenders shows them to be mostly unreformable. As child molestation is a sexual offense, I'm including them in that tendency towards high recidivism, meaning that I believe (and I believe the data shows) that pedophiles are likely to act on their urges, and I see public acceptance of pedophilia as a neutral sexual identity as furthering those likely actions.
"It's funny since you advocate such a simple solution. Treat all pedophiles as criminals and give them no quarter."
Did I suggest arbitrarily locking them up? Forced chemical (or real) castration? Internment camps? No, I specifically expressed deep scepticism about the usefulness of such ideas. What I've been arguing for is loudly denying rhetorical tricks aimed at mainstreaming pedophilia.
"So you recognize that they form these networks anyway, so why do you fear them forming support networks in public?"
Because as a practical matter underground networks are limited in scope and suffer constant attrition. I think that while the networks are underground, and with constant police investigation, they're far smaller than they would be in public.
"The analogy you've chosen says it all. You view all pedophiles as inherently criminal and the mere attraction as proof that they molest children."
I never said that pedophilic attraction is inherently criminal. I said that it's inherently dangerous.
"Perhaps you have no control over your sexual urges, but don't project your weaknesses onto others."
You know what? Fuck this. You've stopped reading what I'm saying and started your own brand of projection.
I didn't say your speech should be banned. Don't expect me to keep quiet about the idiocies you spew, though.
"I do accept the sexuality as 'morally neutral'. I do not accept that child molestation as normal. It absolutely does not follow."
Logically, no, it doesn't follow. Rhetorically it does, especially when one looks at history and sees the acceptance of mixed race and homosexual relationships. If we view pedophilia as just another variant of human sexuality, we open the door to allowing the expression of that identity for those exact reasons.
"I don't think there's any reason to believe that a pedophile inherently desires to harm any more than anyone else does."
No, they're not inherently desirous of harming others. But what they're inherently desirous of doing, is inherently harmful. Is it plausible to you that a pedophile could spend his whole life refusing to act on his basic sexual desires?
There's a reason that sexual offenders have such high recidivism rates. The impulse we're talking about is basic to the psyche.
"Since you brought it up, Ted Haggard is a prime, and very current, example of what happens when you force someone into the closet under the greatest possible oppression."
Yes, and I think we agree that closeting someone creates a destructive force. However, I'm not so sanguine that uncloseting pedophiles is the best strategy for minimizing child molestation. They may be cut off from help, but they're also cut off from the like minded, from fellow conspirators, from pedophilia encouraging groups, and from a political lobby that can push for expansion of their rights as pedophiles. Yes, they form underground networks as a result, but like terrorist networks, they're hampered and hounded and their organizational efforts are at least curtailed.
I don't pretend this is an easy issue to resolve. If the War on Terror has accomplished nothing else, it's made me endlessly more suspicious of government detention for reasons of prevention or public safety. But the alternative of mainstreaming pedophilia as a sexual identity seems to me far worse.
Let me suggest a different analogy that I think is less questionable: a portion of rapists are compulsive rapists (meaning let's ignore, for the moment, date rape and wilding and all the other sorts of volitional rape that are about miscommunication, misunderstanding, or just not giving a damn). Those rapists can likewise argue that they are driven to rape by their fundamental sexual makeup, yet we would never accept 'coercion attracted adults' as a morally neutral sexual identity. So why does the argument seem more plausible in the case of pedophilia?
I think the point is that when you get past hate and fear of homosexuality, you can see it as a healthy expression of sexual identity between consenting adults that has nothing to do with you. When you get past the hate and fear of pedophiles, you're still left with an exploitative and unhealthy sexual relationship that's unacceptable in its own terms.
That said, this is an argument of public persuasion and not logic. I'm not saying that we have to continue to hate and fear pedophiles. I'm saying that once you're past that emotional reaction to it, we can and should deny the status of oppressed sexual minority to pedophiles that's inherent in terms like 'minor attracted adult'; if we do so, we allow just the argument that you're making, that in the past oppressed sexual minorities have come to be viewed as normal and healthy, so pedophilia should be as well.
You're right, I was assuming some things in my post, namely that child molestation is wrong (something someone in larger thread has already disagreed with), and that homosexuality (and gay sex) is not. Elsewhere in the larger thread, I've articulated reasons for that view that I think justify it outside of a mere statement of current mores. Regardless, if every post had to start with an argument for every underlying assumption, ./ threads would be even more turgid, something I think we all agree is not in our interests.
Are you conflating homosexuality with pedophilia, or arguing by analogy? Meaning that the mainstreaming of homosexuality didn't lead to the breakdown of society; likewise the mainstreaming of pedophilia?
What the mainstreaming of homosexuality did lead to was a lot more gay sex, and a lot more gay relationships. Following your analogy, the mainstreaming of pedophilia may not lead to the breakdown of society, but it would lead to a lot more adult-child sex and adult-child sexual relationships.
Is that a fair summary of your position?
Because my post wasn't about why pedophilia's wrong, it was about the use of language to normalize something that's widely considered to be wrong (and how we should fight that normalization). FTR, pedophilia's wrong because it's an essentially exploitative relationship, not because it's against God's law. But thanks for seizing on an irrelevent aspect of my post to dismiss the whole thing.
So do you think that homosexuality shouldn't have been mainstreamed, or that pedophilia should be?
I don't understand what you mean by 'emotional... and not physical'. And no, parents can't consent to a pedophilic relationship for their child--it would be just as abusive as if they were the pedophiles.
Who said I wanted them to stop talking? I want them to talk, so I can call bullshit on the attempt to recast pedophilia as an oppressed sexual identity.
Did the preceding 200 words just blur by you? You leap right for the summary, ignore everything else I wrote, misconstrue my point to be about the difference between homosexuality and pedophilia, and then accuse me of not supporting my case?
Where did I suggest that we jail the participants of these message boards? I advocate engagement, namely by calling bullshit on the whole attempt to normalize it through the adoption of sexual identity politics.
I offer no reason for the difference because my post wasn't about the mainstreaming of homosexuality. But as I said below, pedophilia is an inherently exploitative act, which is sufficient reason to damn it. Homosexuality, on the other hand, is between consenting adults and harms no one outside of the relationship (at least, no more than any heterosexual relationship might).
We can say that fucking kids is RIGHT OUT because it's an inherently exploitative and damaging relationship. In other words, if the argument was that homosexuality is abnormal but okay, but pedophilia is abnormal and not okay, you're blurring the issue rather than clarifying it.
BTW, cook up whatever fevered libertopia dreams you want, but saying that pedophilia would be a cause the Democratic party would champion is just fucking loony.
Here's the 'two' in the one-two punch that starts with terms like 'minor attracted adult': "you just hate and fear us because we're different."
No, I simply don't want children to be molested. The parent suggests that the problem isn't the sexual identity of pedophiles and ephebophiles, it's the actions that are the expression of those identities. Like you can separate the two, and treat one as a heinous crime while being accepting of the other. If you accept the validity of the identity as morally neutral, then the normalization of the expression of the identity is the next step.
The religious right's "love the sinner, hate the sin" approach to homosexuality should show how successful that approach is. Ask Ted Haggard how successful it's been.
I do have a degree of sympathy for pedophiles, because I agree that their condition is outside their choice. That doesn't mean they aren't public hazards, in the same way that a plague carrier is. In light of that, they can be dealt with humanely or not (and it should go without saying that humanely is my choice), but dealt with they must be.
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
What I'm reacting to emotionally is co-opting the queer identity rhetoric in an effort to emulate the gay community's mainstreaming and acceptance. To me, it's a bright line, and exactly the place to stop the effort; not by suppressing their freedom of speech, but by loudly calling bullshit on such terms as 'minor attracted adult'. I'm suggesting engagement, not suppression.
I agree with your analysis of why pedophilia is wrong while homosexuality is not: because pedophilia is inherently exploitative. Grant ever other facile comparison between the two (e.g., minority sexual identities, biological sexual orientation), you're still left with pedophilia being essentially wrong on that fact alone.