Self publishing as an option is certainly a great thing. That doesn't mean that publishers are inherently evil, greedy bastards, or that the internet means we can dismantle the publishing apparatus post-haste.
For one thing, the reason that publishers tend to take the biggest part of the pie as far as book sales go is because they need to recoup the expenses of production, which are almost all theirs; add the costs of promotion and advertising and distribution... well, you see what I'm getting at.
Also, most editors come from the publishing side of the fence, and there's nothing quite so valuable to an author's work as a good editor.
Even with print-on-demand and internet distribution, we can't entirely eliminate the publishers; their role just changes (or potentially narrows). Their promotional duties don't change; in fact, since we're throwing the physical browsing experience away, it becomes more vital. The manuscript still needs to be made ready for publication. Ideally, we want the same quality control we had in the previous system, if not better, so they still have to be edited and proofread.
Basically, I'm just saying that altering the distribution chain doesn't automatically cut out all the other steps between manuscript and "book on my shelf."
My first experience with Linux was with circa-1995-6 versions of Red Hat and Suse. Red Hat lasted merely minutes, due to my inability to get sound or internet working at all. Suse lasted a few days, sound but not internet and then I decided that it was fascinating, but not worth it.
My first extended experience with Linux was also Suse, in 2002. I got a professor to let me teach myself how to use Linux for an independent study project; this time I got everything working except for printing (printers, amirite? Seriously, I looked it up later, and the problem was that the HP model I had wasn't supported through cups until a year and a half after the ISP was over;-). Then I went back to Windows.
Then, in the middle of my thesis, I essentially went mad and decided that the best thing to do in the middle of my thesis was to switch operating systems. Originally I ran a Knoppix hard drive install, and have since poked at various Debian-based distros (Debian, Mepis, and (X|K)ubuntu, sticking on Kubuntu.)
Oooooh snap. I remember that one, although I think the safer solution is to make yourself part of the sound group and chmod it 660. Of course, my solution AT THE TIME (this was lateish 90s) was to chown the entire dev directory to my user account.
Actually, there is. It's called business regulations and monopoly laws. Ma Bell was broken up, not by the magic forces of the impartial market, but by monopoly laws. Prior to that, they WERE charging more than the market could bear, and they were refusing to budge. Ditto for the railway companies during the Gilded Age; that's how the big rail companies squeezed out competition and captured other infrastructure; they banded together and jointly raised prices to something that the owners couldn't pay, and then bought them out.
Face the facts of the past. The laissez-faire capitalist economy has been tried. These aren't new, exciting ideas that will fix the world; they're old, terrible ideas whose damage took years and lives to reverse. Unions didn't spring up as some evil plot to funnel wealth away from the almighty, benificent fountains of industry that are CEOs; they started because of things like company stores, incredibly insufficient pay, and, let us not forget, rampant corruption and violence directed at workers by management.
The guy upstream would simply have to ferry stuff over the Mississipi baron, by air or land, to the more reasonable fellow downstream.
It's a ridiculous outcome, but I hope you'll agree that the premise was equally so.:)
Assuming that he had the capital to do so at an unfettered rate, and that the portion of the river controlled was small enough to get around without spoilage being a problem. Especially considering that, in the main, this would be corporate ownership, and in imaginary libertarian paradise, the limits on corporations power and what they can do with their held properties are largely removed.
There's nothing to stop people from charging obscene crossing fees to ferry over or pass the river. There's nothing to prevent someone buying the land all around someone else's property, and literally starving them until they sell or abandon or die. And these aren't ridiculous premises, they're logical, probable premises; because being rich and owning property doesn't actually make a person morally sound, and that problem is compounded tenfold by corporate behavior.
Then why is well-regulated militia" language attached to it? The sole statement we have that gives state-of-mind context to the 2nd amendment points toward it being with greater concern toward external threats than internal. Don't argue your rationales through other (dead, influential) people's mouths.
Also, anyone who claims that "The Founders" as a group thought/realized anything coherently; well, you're not actually paying enough attention to history. Almost every line of the Constitution was hard-fought over, and not by mythical founder-figures; by men, with constituencies. It's an important document, but not a magical one, and not one designed by perfect accord between supermen.
Note that your argument for powerless government falls apart upon the Articles of Confederation. It's a cold, hard truth that you can't actually dismantle government and maintain the benefits thereof. In your privatized rivers system; well, who enforces the torts? And if someone decides to take his balls and go home, well... if he's taking the middle of the Mississippi with him, what do you do? What happens when someone owns a section of the highway, and then, through illness or injury, becomes unable to maintain it, but is unwilling to sell it?
So, any particular reason that, rather than address actual, concrete issues, you chose to just attack entire cultures and nations in single-line bursts?
It might, indeed, exclude Israel. What can I say, it's a theocracy with a terrible human rights/civil rights record. However, Israel != all Jews.
Hindus and Muslims... well, as neither of those groups are actually nations, but are rather heterogeneous groups of people spread across nations, some of which would be eligible based on this criteria, some of which would not, this is basically you talking out of your ass in order to say something provocative and generally dismiss whole, enormous cultures.
As for Japan... are you even bothering to go as far as wikipedia for research? Japan isn't run by the Mikado; he serves a ceremonial purpose, much like the British Monarchy.
Communism... well, even a busted clock gets the time right twice a day. But even there, it's not actually connected in any way to the likelihood of Communist countries being atheist; it has to do with the value of control of citizens being considered more valuable that citizen's rights and lives.
Your effort to turn this into a religious issue is baffling. These could have been turned into decent points about Israel, about the Muslim faith's relationship with various governments (France being a particular problem at the moment); basically, into something about specific, real problems, instead of coming off as an uninformed smear campaign.
Also, P.S.: The U.S. has been pretty bad at separation of church and state AND citizen's rights lately, and we're an overwhelmingly Christian nation.
I'm mostly with you, except that PHP does have a fantastic amount of brain damage. It is actually a problem that there are multiple escaping and sanitization functions, all of which look like the right thing, but most of which are dangerously flawed.
Sure, it's the security-conscious programmer's job to know the difference; but it's still dumb as hell of the language designers to add an unneeded potential gotcha for no good reason.
I think, actually, it is. Not by a huge factor, but it changes from being simply the possible failure rate across one disk, to being the possible failure rate across both disks. The likelihood of any one disk failing within X is slightly lower than the likelihood of any one of two disks failing. Additional, ultra-tiny failure chances are added by the addition of other points of failure (the RAID controller could fail, etc) and two hard drives in a laptop certainly stress the cooling system more;-)
That said, it's a really, really small difference.
Habit, or the dominance of right-handed mousing;-)
I know that every time I've had multi-monitor set up, it's the left-hand monitor that I use as my primary monitor, and my right-hand that I use for overflow/constantly up things.
I've had to ramp up the font size on my desktop, just to be able to run it at a fairly sensible 1280x1024. I'm getting more content on screen than in the olden days, but not much more than someone with regular-sized fonts on 1024x768. And this is all on a 17'' screen. I can't even read stuff on my girlfriend's Macbook.
The worst part is, I'm 26. Not looking forward to when I start losing vision due to age.
Yes, Baen 'embraces' the e-book market; with a subscription model, and with texts that have been in print for a long time, as a promotional tool to drive paperback sales (The Baen Free Library).
This isn't meant as a stab at Baen, by the way; I'm a big fan of them in general. But that's one of the more forward-looking companies, and they're still not genuinely moving into real, honest to god, "We sell you an e-book" sales.
Here's an article I found really interesting by someone who was on the inside of the e-reader market the first time around. Link.
Amazon is Paying e-book prices and selling them as audiobooks. Sure they may sound crappy at the moment but this is likely to change.
Audiobooks are a performance. No matter how good a text-to-speech program is, it's not a recorded performance in any way, shape, or form; it's a software program interacting with the content you paid for.
As far as the writers go; well, actually, a number of authors (including, for example, Neil Gaiman) are against the Author's Guild here.
Also, I don't know where you get the idea that publishers love the e-Book market, and want to expand it. There's a lot of kicking and screaming and "ONLY WITH THE MOST REPRESSIVE DRM" and "ONLY AT TWICE A REASONABLE PRICE" for something with the wide support you claim.
One of the entries involved processing through Nth-dimensional mathematic constructs. When the judges ran it, a quantum differential between our spacetime and that of certain elder influences was generated. A portal, luckily one-way, to the den of a million screaming chains was opened, and it swallowed all of the judges, who will be consumed for ten cycles of our universe expanding and contracting, and then spit out as the final weapon in the Old Ones' war on our reality.
Actually, the employer is NOT the customer, because we don't actually sell labor here, we contract labor. The employer and employees are involved in a non-sales contract, which should be honored equally and involve consideration for both sides.
And it doesn't matter if they pay for it in the good times, sadly; it's the bad times that give companies the power to chain people to their desks, or to pay below a living wage. Or, as is currently in vogue, to hire people for multiple part-time shifts, to avoid paying overtime.
That is stupid, and a gross miscarriage of justice... on the other hand, it's also not what we're talking about. They are being tried under child pornography laws, not under violations of age-of-consent.
Again, not that this isn't a big problem, or that I think it's the correct way to handle the situation. But it's not actually a valid counter-example.
So, if no 12 year old could ever pass this test, then what's the problem setting the age of consent, oh, at least above twelve? Your argument reveals that you do believe that, at some ages, it's just impossible to be able to give informed consent.
Also, the laws structured as we were discussing them (18 with a 16-21 rider) are actually structured to deal with sex between people of differing ages. There's a world of difference between a sixteen year-old screwing a fifteen year-old, and a forty-year-old doing it.
Again, it is a problem that people abuse these laws to punish people for sex within their age-range. It's utterly ridiculous that fourteen year olds that send each other sexual pictures are tried for child pr0n. There are many abuses of the law, and many bad sections of the law, for that matter. But your unworkable test solution isn't better than having an age of consent.
Just saying that it's a strawman argument doesn't actually make it so. And, speaking of straw men, I didn't actually say that you were advocating child abuse. I brought it up because age of consent laws are intrinsically tied to child abuse by their very nature; and it would be disingenuous to only examine the abuses and failures of the law, without also looking at its intended purpose and primary use.
So, you don't think an invading force would impinge on your liberties? Want to share what you're smoking? WRT fraud, fair exchange is one of the most important liberties in any free society; fraud trashes that, and so should be punished harshly. Your idea of "liberty" appears to be seriously deficient.
That's actually my point, dude. You make a false and rigid separation of what constitutes safety and what constitutes liberty; then put anything that you see as important on the side of liberty, and anything that you see as unimportant/bad on the side of safety. Saying doesn't make it so.
Also, as far as your "the government only applies for liberties" argument, the constitution says otherwise in its preamble, and our law's descent from English common law means that, oh gosh, we inherited a bunch of stuff dealing with the common good and wellbeing of the citizenry.
se. I brought it up because age of consent laws are intrinsically tied to child abuse by their very nature; and it would be disingenuous to only examine the abuses and failures of the law, without also looking at its intended purpose and primary use.
So, you don't think an invading force would impinge on your liberties? Want to share what you're smoking? WRT fraud, fair exchange is one of the most important liberties in any free society; fraud trashes that, and so should be punished harshly. Your idea of "liberty" appears to be seriously deficient.
That's actually my point, dude. You make a false and rigid separation of what constitutes safety and what constitutes liberty; then put anything that you see as important on the side of liberty, and anything that you see as unimportant/bad on the side of safety. Saying doesn't make it so. Many things that appear to be safety issues impinge upon vital human freedoms.
Also, as far as your "the government only applies for liberties" argument, the constitution says otherwise in its preamble, and our law's descent from English common law means that, oh gosh, we inherited a bunch of stuff dealing with the common good and wellbeing of the citizenry. Since the Supreme Court has existed, it has recognized the States' rights to police powers to promote the health, wellbeing, safety, and morals of the population. Seriously, check it out some time.
But that's not what we're talking about here. In many cases, we're talking about "you, an 18-yo, can't have sex with that 16...17-yo." Right here in my little town, we had a young man sentenced to 12 years suspended (that's a felony conviction) with registration on the sexual offenders list for life, wherever he goes. Because he had sex with his long-term, but a bit younger girlfriend; he broke up with her, and momma promptly went after him. There's that stupid fragging age line again, ruining lives to absolutely no purpose whatsoever.
That is in fact a problem. It's why there are 16-21 laws in most states. Not in Georgia, but, well, Georgia kind of blows when held up against most human decency standards. I'm in no way arguing that the system is perfect; I am the first to point out that the registration system is a horrible injustice in many cases, and that sentencing standards are overly harsh. I just fail to see what horrible wrong we're committing in assuming that 15 year olds shouldn't be having sex with nineteen year olds. I certainly can't think of a good reason for even a precocious high school sophmore to be having sex with a college sophmore.
I put to you this challenge. Produce this magical te
Liberties which are certainly impinged upon by child abuse. Childhood sexual abuse, even that which never involves force or the threat of force, can render an individual incapable of exercising their right to the pursuit of happiness.
Also, honestly, it's nice that you think safety isn't a valid function of government, but according to that logic, we shouldn't have a military. Also, fraud shouldn't be punished; it's a damages issue, not a liberties issue.
The truth of the matter is, wellbeing and a certain baseline of safety are necessary components of being able to exercise your basic liberties. Now, certainly, we should not trade these liberties for safety. But imposing laws that say "You can't sell rat poison and label it sugar!" or "You can't fuck that 12 year old boy!" don't destroy liberties, and guarantee (or at least improve the odds) of citizens being able to enjoy the liberties they possess.
And, at least in my experience, how someone behaves in terms of sexual maturity can vary wildly depending on their emotional and mental state. And that is true for people who are outside of the mind-altering hormone bath that is puberty.
Similarily, it makes no sense to slap sex-offender on one (or both) parts in a sexual relationship between two consenting people of similar age. If two 15 year olds decide to sleep with oneanother, you may or may not be ok with that, but in any case, it certainly is neither pedophilia, sexual child-abuse or statutory rape. (okay, so some jurisdictions, like Texas have exceptions where sex with a minor is not considered statutory rape if the age-difference is 3 years or less)
While I agree in the main with what you say, in what jurisdictions is a 15 year old prosecutable for sex with another 15 year old? All of the instances I've seen of that sort of charge have been with one teenager who's reached the age of consent, and one that hasn't.
Slashdot Mirror
I had actually read that one, although it had not percolated to the forefront of my head. Very apt link to throw in.
I'm still monumentally pissed off that I was sick unto immobility when he did the signing at Pandemonium; le sigh.
Self publishing as an option is certainly a great thing. That doesn't mean that publishers are inherently evil, greedy bastards, or that the internet means we can dismantle the publishing apparatus post-haste.
For one thing, the reason that publishers tend to take the biggest part of the pie as far as book sales go is because they need to recoup the expenses of production, which are almost all theirs; add the costs of promotion and advertising and distribution... well, you see what I'm getting at.
Also, most editors come from the publishing side of the fence, and there's nothing quite so valuable to an author's work as a good editor.
Even with print-on-demand and internet distribution, we can't entirely eliminate the publishers; their role just changes (or potentially narrows). Their promotional duties don't change; in fact, since we're throwing the physical browsing experience away, it becomes more vital. The manuscript still needs to be made ready for publication. Ideally, we want the same quality control we had in the previous system, if not better, so they still have to be edited and proofread.
Basically, I'm just saying that altering the distribution chain doesn't automatically cut out all the other steps between manuscript and "book on my shelf."
My first experience with Linux was with circa-1995-6 versions of Red Hat and Suse. Red Hat lasted merely minutes, due to my inability to get sound or internet working at all. Suse lasted a few days, sound but not internet and then I decided that it was fascinating, but not worth it.
My first extended experience with Linux was also Suse, in 2002. I got a professor to let me teach myself how to use Linux for an independent study project; this time I got everything working except for printing (printers, amirite? Seriously, I looked it up later, and the problem was that the HP model I had wasn't supported through cups until a year and a half after the ISP was over ;-). Then I went back to Windows.
Then, in the middle of my thesis, I essentially went mad and decided that the best thing to do in the middle of my thesis was to switch operating systems. Originally I ran a Knoppix hard drive install, and have since poked at various Debian-based distros (Debian, Mepis, and (X|K)ubuntu, sticking on Kubuntu.)
Oooooh snap. I remember that one, although I think the safer solution is to make yourself part of the sound group and chmod it 660. Of course, my solution AT THE TIME (this was lateish 90s) was to chown the entire dev directory to my user account.
Le sigh. The stupid of past me.
There was a way to survivably jump with a heavy nuke?
Whoah.
It's not detailed; I strongly urge you pick up a book on it, but this is partly what I'm talking about: The Gilded Age.
Actually, there is. It's called business regulations and monopoly laws. Ma Bell was broken up, not by the magic forces of the impartial market, but by monopoly laws. Prior to that, they WERE charging more than the market could bear, and they were refusing to budge. Ditto for the railway companies during the Gilded Age; that's how the big rail companies squeezed out competition and captured other infrastructure; they banded together and jointly raised prices to something that the owners couldn't pay, and then bought them out.
Face the facts of the past. The laissez-faire capitalist economy has been tried. These aren't new, exciting ideas that will fix the world; they're old, terrible ideas whose damage took years and lives to reverse. Unions didn't spring up as some evil plot to funnel wealth away from the almighty, benificent fountains of industry that are CEOs; they started because of things like company stores, incredibly insufficient pay, and, let us not forget, rampant corruption and violence directed at workers by management.
Assuming that he had the capital to do so at an unfettered rate, and that the portion of the river controlled was small enough to get around without spoilage being a problem. Especially considering that, in the main, this would be corporate ownership, and in imaginary libertarian paradise, the limits on corporations power and what they can do with their held properties are largely removed.
There's nothing to stop people from charging obscene crossing fees to ferry over or pass the river. There's nothing to prevent someone buying the land all around someone else's property, and literally starving them until they sell or abandon or die. And these aren't ridiculous premises, they're logical, probable premises; because being rich and owning property doesn't actually make a person morally sound, and that problem is compounded tenfold by corporate behavior.
Then why is well-regulated militia" language attached to it? The sole statement we have that gives state-of-mind context to the 2nd amendment points toward it being with greater concern toward external threats than internal. Don't argue your rationales through other (dead, influential) people's mouths.
Also, anyone who claims that "The Founders" as a group thought/realized anything coherently; well, you're not actually paying enough attention to history. Almost every line of the Constitution was hard-fought over, and not by mythical founder-figures; by men, with constituencies. It's an important document, but not a magical one, and not one designed by perfect accord between supermen.
Note that your argument for powerless government falls apart upon the Articles of Confederation. It's a cold, hard truth that you can't actually dismantle government and maintain the benefits thereof. In your privatized rivers system; well, who enforces the torts? And if someone decides to take his balls and go home, well... if he's taking the middle of the Mississippi with him, what do you do? What happens when someone owns a section of the highway, and then, through illness or injury, becomes unable to maintain it, but is unwilling to sell it?
So, any particular reason that, rather than address actual, concrete issues, you chose to just attack entire cultures and nations in single-line bursts?
It might, indeed, exclude Israel. What can I say, it's a theocracy with a terrible human rights/civil rights record. However, Israel != all Jews.
Hindus and Muslims... well, as neither of those groups are actually nations, but are rather heterogeneous groups of people spread across nations, some of which would be eligible based on this criteria, some of which would not, this is basically you talking out of your ass in order to say something provocative and generally dismiss whole, enormous cultures.
As for Japan... are you even bothering to go as far as wikipedia for research? Japan isn't run by the Mikado; he serves a ceremonial purpose, much like the British Monarchy.
Communism... well, even a busted clock gets the time right twice a day. But even there, it's not actually connected in any way to the likelihood of Communist countries being atheist; it has to do with the value of control of citizens being considered more valuable that citizen's rights and lives.
Your effort to turn this into a religious issue is baffling. These could have been turned into decent points about Israel, about the Muslim faith's relationship with various governments (France being a particular problem at the moment); basically, into something about specific, real problems, instead of coming off as an uninformed smear campaign.
Also, P.S.: The U.S. has been pretty bad at separation of church and state AND citizen's rights lately, and we're an overwhelmingly Christian nation.
I'm mostly with you, except that PHP does have a fantastic amount of brain damage. It is actually a problem that there are multiple escaping and sanitization functions, all of which look like the right thing, but most of which are dangerously flawed.
Sure, it's the security-conscious programmer's job to know the difference; but it's still dumb as hell of the language designers to add an unneeded potential gotcha for no good reason.
I think, actually, it is. Not by a huge factor, but it changes from being simply the possible failure rate across one disk, to being the possible failure rate across both disks. The likelihood of any one disk failing within X is slightly lower than the likelihood of any one of two disks failing. Additional, ultra-tiny failure chances are added by the addition of other points of failure (the RAID controller could fail, etc) and two hard drives in a laptop certainly stress the cooling system more ;-)
That said, it's a really, really small difference.
Habit, or the dominance of right-handed mousing ;-)
I know that every time I've had multi-monitor set up, it's the left-hand monitor that I use as my primary monitor, and my right-hand that I use for overflow/constantly up things.
Assuming that your eyeballs don't suck like hell.
I've had to ramp up the font size on my desktop, just to be able to run it at a fairly sensible 1280x1024. I'm getting more content on screen than in the olden days, but not much more than someone with regular-sized fonts on 1024x768. And this is all on a 17'' screen. I can't even read stuff on my girlfriend's Macbook.
The worst part is, I'm 26. Not looking forward to when I start losing vision due to age.
Yes, Baen 'embraces' the e-book market; with a subscription model, and with texts that have been in print for a long time, as a promotional tool to drive paperback sales (The Baen Free Library).
This isn't meant as a stab at Baen, by the way; I'm a big fan of them in general. But that's one of the more forward-looking companies, and they're still not genuinely moving into real, honest to god, "We sell you an e-book" sales.
Here's an article I found really interesting by someone who was on the inside of the e-reader market the first time around. Link.
Audiobooks are a performance. No matter how good a text-to-speech program is, it's not a recorded performance in any way, shape, or form; it's a software program interacting with the content you paid for.
As far as the writers go; well, actually, a number of authors (including, for example, Neil Gaiman) are against the Author's Guild here.
Also, I don't know where you get the idea that publishers love the e-Book market, and want to expand it. There's a lot of kicking and screaming and "ONLY WITH THE MOST REPRESSIVE DRM" and "ONLY AT TWICE A REASONABLE PRICE" for something with the wide support you claim.
One of the entries involved processing through Nth-dimensional mathematic constructs. When the judges ran it, a quantum differential between our spacetime and that of certain elder influences was generated. A portal, luckily one-way, to the den of a million screaming chains was opened, and it swallowed all of the judges, who will be consumed for ten cycles of our universe expanding and contracting, and then spit out as the final weapon in the Old Ones' war on our reality.
Or I've been reading too much Charles Stross
Actually, the employer is NOT the customer, because we don't actually sell labor here, we contract labor. The employer and employees are involved in a non-sales contract, which should be honored equally and involve consideration for both sides.
And it doesn't matter if they pay for it in the good times, sadly; it's the bad times that give companies the power to chain people to their desks, or to pay below a living wage. Or, as is currently in vogue, to hire people for multiple part-time shifts, to avoid paying overtime.
That is stupid, and a gross miscarriage of justice... on the other hand, it's also not what we're talking about. They are being tried under child pornography laws, not under violations of age-of-consent.
Again, not that this isn't a big problem, or that I think it's the correct way to handle the situation. But it's not actually a valid counter-example.
So, if no 12 year old could ever pass this test, then what's the problem setting the age of consent, oh, at least above twelve? Your argument reveals that you do believe that, at some ages, it's just impossible to be able to give informed consent.
Also, the laws structured as we were discussing them (18 with a 16-21 rider) are actually structured to deal with sex between people of differing ages. There's a world of difference between a sixteen year-old screwing a fifteen year-old, and a forty-year-old doing it.
Again, it is a problem that people abuse these laws to punish people for sex within their age-range. It's utterly ridiculous that fourteen year olds that send each other sexual pictures are tried for child pr0n. There are many abuses of the law, and many bad sections of the law, for that matter. But your unworkable test solution isn't better than having an age of consent.
Just saying that it's a strawman argument doesn't actually make it so. And, speaking of straw men, I didn't actually say that you were advocating child abuse. I brought it up because age of consent laws are intrinsically tied to child abuse by their very nature; and it would be disingenuous to only examine the abuses and failures of the law, without also looking at its intended purpose and primary use.
That's actually my point, dude. You make a false and rigid separation of what constitutes safety and what constitutes liberty; then put anything that you see as important on the side of liberty, and anything that you see as unimportant/bad on the side of safety. Saying doesn't make it so.
Also, as far as your "the government only applies for liberties" argument, the constitution says otherwise in its preamble, and our law's descent from English common law means that, oh gosh, we inherited a bunch of stuff dealing with the common good and wellbeing of the citizenry.
se. I brought it up because age of consent laws are intrinsically tied to child abuse by their very nature; and it would be disingenuous to only examine the abuses and failures of the law, without also looking at its intended purpose and primary use.
That's actually my point, dude. You make a false and rigid separation of what constitutes safety and what constitutes liberty; then put anything that you see as important on the side of liberty, and anything that you see as unimportant/bad on the side of safety. Saying doesn't make it so. Many things that appear to be safety issues impinge upon vital human freedoms.
Also, as far as your "the government only applies for liberties" argument, the constitution says otherwise in its preamble, and our law's descent from English common law means that, oh gosh, we inherited a bunch of stuff dealing with the common good and wellbeing of the citizenry. Since the Supreme Court has existed, it has recognized the States' rights to police powers to promote the health, wellbeing, safety, and morals of the population. Seriously, check it out some time.
That is in fact a problem. It's why there are 16-21 laws in most states. Not in Georgia, but, well, Georgia kind of blows when held up against most human decency standards. I'm in no way arguing that the system is perfect; I am the first to point out that the registration system is a horrible injustice in many cases, and that sentencing standards are overly harsh. I just fail to see what horrible wrong we're committing in assuming that 15 year olds shouldn't be having sex with nineteen year olds. I certainly can't think of a good reason for even a precocious high school sophmore to be having sex with a college sophmore.
I put to you this challenge. Produce this magical te
Huh. Well, your insult-based rhetoric strategy sure makes me want to consider your point and accede to your argument.
Excellent persuasive skills you have there, guy.
Liberties which are certainly impinged upon by child abuse. Childhood sexual abuse, even that which never involves force or the threat of force, can render an individual incapable of exercising their right to the pursuit of happiness.
Also, honestly, it's nice that you think safety isn't a valid function of government, but according to that logic, we shouldn't have a military. Also, fraud shouldn't be punished; it's a damages issue, not a liberties issue.
The truth of the matter is, wellbeing and a certain baseline of safety are necessary components of being able to exercise your basic liberties. Now, certainly, we should not trade these liberties for safety. But imposing laws that say "You can't sell rat poison and label it sugar!" or "You can't fuck that 12 year old boy!" don't destroy liberties, and guarantee (or at least improve the odds) of citizens being able to enjoy the liberties they possess.
And, at least in my experience, how someone behaves in terms of sexual maturity can vary wildly depending on their emotional and mental state. And that is true for people who are outside of the mind-altering hormone bath that is puberty.
While I agree in the main with what you say, in what jurisdictions is a 15 year old prosecutable for sex with another 15 year old? All of the instances I've seen of that sort of charge have been with one teenager who's reached the age of consent, and one that hasn't.