Sigh. For example, Scott Ritter, who was a senior member of the "UN" inspection team (the UNSCOM) on the ground in Iraq, tell his experiences in an interview here. Note that after Ritter voiced his objections in the run-up to the war, a US-based police "sting" operation, by a miraculously-timed poof of magic, claimed to have caught him talking to an officer pretending to be a teenage girl on the Internet, for which he was arrested. The arrest was most effectively used to ensure that most US media did not try to ask his opinion. Naturally, all charges were dropped after the war started as the "evidence" against him, also by magic apparently, evaporated completely.
The poster before me already pointed you to the statements by Hans Blix who managed the overall UN inspection process.
As to the Neocon designs, they proudly published them as part of The Project For New American Century, as far back in the 1990s. Note the "signatories of the statement of principles", amongst them: Wolfowitz, Rumslfeld, Cheney etc.
As to the non-US media, I have no time to dig up the articles from 2002/3 for your pleasure, but there is plenty of them on Google if you have the inclination. But one hint that should be immediately obvious to you is the size of anti-war demonstrations that occurred in Europe before the war. The head count was into millions.
In fact...if he had simply FULLY cooperated with the sanctions and inspections, and quit trying to appear he was hiding nuke asperations...he'd likely still be breathing, and in power.
Bullshit. The Neocons in the US were absolutely determined to invade (as a step in their Grand Plan of restructuring the world to their liking) no matter what Saddam did. In fact every time he tried to comply, they just changed their demands, each time more belligerent and each time more humiliating. It is in no doubt whatsoever that if he kept doing what they told him to "comply", eventually they would have demanded that he runs around naked at some market in Baghdad's to "demonstrate that he is not hiding any WMDs in his underwear".
The invasion of Iraq was a done fact, no matter what anyone but the Neocons and the ruling elites behind them thought, the moment Bush II was elected, and very likely even if Gore were, as the Neocons had monopolized the national US discourse and established a firm hold on the media in the US, a position which was greatly enhanced by the events of 9/11. The only thing in doubt was when the invasion were to occur.
This is an obvious fact to anyone who was not watching the self-censored US corporate media spin, as the US-instigated machinations were very, very crude and quite transparent to most independent media in the world. In the US people were presented an image of "UN" inspections, while in fact the UN was continuously undermined by the US efforts at scuttling the whole process, complete with CIA planting their agents amongst the US contingent of the UN "inspectors", who promptly engaged in blunt, belligerent activities aimed at ensuring that the "inspections" fail.
Actually Japan is rather famous for its truly byzantine governmental bureaucracy. The same is also true for large corporations, which are essentially a never-ending battle-field of competing factions engaged in subtle, covert, ambiguous and sometimes directly brutal dance of influence peddling and general back-stabbing all revolving around grabbing more power and avoiding any responsibility at the same time.
So the thing to wonder about is not how do they do it without the red tape, but how do they do it despite of mountains of it.
As much as "politically incorrect" this seems to some, the demand that foreigners intending to come with an intention of living in a nation learn that nation's language is quite reasonable.
I cannot understand all those mis-guided Mother Hen types who insist that this will somehow damage the immigrants or destroy their "culture". The requirement is purely practical and in fact an absolute necessity for a functioning society. Otherwise all you are doing is promoting a ghetto mentality whereby all immigrants from a particular country concentrate in some area complete with their own commerce, governance and what-not, effectively forming a mini-nation within the target nation. And while not physically isolated, such mini-nations are in effect what a military would call a "beach-head" for these immigrant's original nations. It then takes generations, if ever, to get rid of them as no "melting" or "assimilation" occurs between the host country and these "beach-heads".
Err, what emotion precipitates those two? Fear, you think?
No. Greed is also a base emotion, or in simpler organism a basic mechanical behavioural pattern. Fear is a parallel, complimentary circuit to greed. Greed causes animals to overpower fear and to begin fighting over resources, despite being fearful of injury or death. A similar relationship between fear and hate exists, a hateful individual will instigate aggression on the target of hate despite of fear, sometimes even knowing that doing so will result in the hater's own destruction.
Fear is simply remembered pain. Most of the rest operate on higher levels.
Not at all. Greed is also one of base reptile emotions and is not simply "remembered fear", unless by "remembered" you mean an evolutionary process that embedded its circuitry there to further the competitiveness of the gene set of the animal. You seem to forget that the ultimate "purpose" of the evolution is simply to guarantee the propagation of the genetic data and that all life is simply a multitude of clever disposable vessels to carry the process on. Pain, pleasure, fear, greed all these things are simply props to aid the effectiveness of the process by diversify the gene carriers' behavioural patterns, leading some to cooperate, some to viciously compete, some to be parasitic etc.
Why do you think religions play so adroitly on our most unresolvable fear, fear of death? It's the best way to hobble rationality, and then slip in programs of insane activities.
Of course religions play on fear. They also play on hate, greed, jealousy, vindictiveness, and a host of other base emotions. But this has nothing to do with your assertion that fear is somehow the root cause of all other base emotions, like hate. The relationship is more complicated then that.
Incorrect. Fear is primary. Hate is secondary. Hatred stems from fear, not vice versa.
Err, a hated enemy, hatred of whom originated, say, out of greed and jealousy instead of fear, against whom the hater took some action, might become also an object of fear when the hater realizes that the enemy happens to be powerful, knows the hater's identity and is willing to retaliate for these hatred-motivated actions. So clearly a hate->fear order of events is possible, and since you stated your claim in absolute terms, just one example invalidates that claim.
Well, some argue that fear and hate are very closely related emotions, hate stemming directly from fear, and vice versa. But this is splitting hair, really.
Seriously? You think that laws shouldn't be enacted because it's possible for a malevolent sociopath to fake evidence?
That is not the reason. Laws shouldn't be enacted which allow for perfect (not to mention remote) fabrication of sufficient "evidence" (as is the case with computers as opposed to paper-based photos), not to mention laws which cast huge nets intended to snare random hapless accidental goofuses and utterly destroy them before they have any chance of defence whatsoever.
That is why laws criminalizing mere "possession" of some banned "icky" item, rather then requiring a credible evidence of a series of purposeful actions combined with clear indication of intent of acquisition of that item and which actually are based on some objective harm that the item causes not being clearly outweighed by the cost of banning it, are utterly bogus and only serve as a tool of fascists. And incidentally it is precisely why you like them so much.
In short what you propose is to arrest and prosecute for murder any unlucky dolt into whose backyard some murderer tossed a bloody murder weapon, with no heed paid to the fact if the yard owner was actually involved in the deed in any way. Your "standard of proof" in case of these "icky pictures" is so low as to be precisely equivalent to snatching semi-random people off the street and charging and then convicting them of whatever you find annoying to you, based solely on them "looking suspicious" or "wearing a suspicious hat".
My "singular experience" (you mean noone else ever recognises someone they've not seen for a while?) was simply a counter to your experience of not recognising yourself in childhood photos. Yes, *shocking revelation* strangers don't recognise people as easily as those familiar with them, who knew!
No, you attempted to present yourself as some sort of counter example, when I merely indicated that my research of the situation was initiated by my own experience. Apples and oranges. But then again you appear to view all problems of the universe as revolving around a central focal point of your own ass.
How does the law _helping_ you protect your private life, particularly with respect to personal photos, equate to killing people? You'll notice I said "propagated".
I merely demonstrated the fallacy you were presenting by escalating the "stakes" but maintaining your overall "logic". The societal cost of attempting to "protect privacy" up to your standard, i.e. as arbitrarily defined by whomever wants to keep whatever secret, in practical terms, is far greater then the cost of its loss. I pointed out some outrageous examples of such possible "costs", which illustrated quite clearly how ridiculous, self-centered and arbitrarily chosen on this scale of costs your demand for a police-state truly is. It's that simple.
If something is in your web-cache, fine,
Police makes no distinctions about CDs, caches or any other sort of media. They follow your inane "Carte Blanche" reasoning which inevitably leads to its only possible outcome: "zero tolerance" crap. Also backing up thousands upon thousands of pictures (most of them unseen) is apparently a common practise amongst porn aficionados. So odds are that many of them, as far removed from paedophiles as possible, have child porn (by someone's arbitrary definition) somewhere on their backups.
If you email it on, post it on the web, drop it on an FTP server, you're propagating it.
Real life translation: You downloaded 12.5GB zip file named "50000 Photos of World's Hottest Chicks.zip", which your P2P client automatically shared (i.e. "distributed") during the download process. The file contained amongst the other 49,980 pictures 20 images of underage girls in various sexual acts. 20 years of jail, life-time registration on "sexual predator" lists and what
IT would even be reasonable to say that if the police discover that someone is distributing cp, or for that matter, similar evidence of any other crime, that the accessory laws be used if they do not properly report the evidence to the local authorities. for an analogy, if I were to film a mugging in the street, which I had nothing to do with, and were then to sell the video, the police would have some rather awkward questions for me.
That is assuming that you can prove that the person in question actually knows that they have the pictures. But on the Internet people download whole "collections" of literally tens of thousands of pictures in one huge archive, named like "p012312402a.jpg", never actually getting to view most of them, never you mind all. And then somewhere within the thousands there is a "set" of some kid getting molested...
Then there are the confused Windows PC owners, an easy target for malicious operators and a convenient remotely accessible "distributed" archive for all sorts of stuff...
In practical terms the Crusaders appear to demand that all Internet users be either clairvoyant or extremely diligent. But actually the opposite is true, the Crusaders would rather have lots and lots of hapless, befuddled, confused, terrified and otherwise helpless victims ripe for the picking. They really like it that way. Their entire claim to power depends on it. That is why some of these Crusaders often blabber about how 60% (or some such) of all men are paedophiles, just waiting to get the screws turned on them....
If the reason for the murder was to take the pictures to satisfy the lusts of the consumer (whether they pay money or not) then by prosecuting those who possess the images you're combating the further murder of people to satisfy that consumer.
And here is where you failed the test of logic. If all pictures available on the net were a) all coming from "Murders for Pictures Inc." or some such and b) all the people caught with them were buyers whose funds could be traced back to the source, you would have a point.
As soon however as you have millions of 3rd, 4th... 101th hand copies, many of them embedded in huge bulk transfers of "collections" of pictures with general themes of "porn", you've lost this argument. It is because the relationship between "supply" and "demand" is not a straightforward one in case of digital data, where duplication and transmission costs are negligible.
That is why I pointed out that financial transactions, rather then the data (pictures in this case) are the thread leading back to the crime and it is those transactions which should be the object of scrutiny.
I went to a concert once and unbeknown to me a friend of the family that I hadn't seen since she was about 7 was singing. After 11 years I picked her out of the 200 choristers about 5 mins into the
concert - from maybe 50 metres or so.
Congratulations. Your singular experience brought on by your uncanny memory and eagle eye-sight shall from now on be the gold standard by which all of us, lesser mortals (that is something like 99 out of a 100 of us), shall be now judged! Says you, The Ultimate Standard of Long Term Facial Memory In Chorus Setting At 50 Paces.
Back on planet Earth however: is facial recognition possible at a later age? Sure. Is it easy or common, particularly for strangers. Err, no.
I suspect you have an atypical blindness to static facial features? Those further along the scale towards autism, I hear, have problems with facial recognition - so much so that it is proposed as an early indicator. Bi-polar disorder is also reported to reduce facial recognition.
No, I actually depend on research and statistics on this, not just anecdotes. The research shows that we memorize people's faces not based on their static features but instead of associations of events with partial feature topology across time. That is why it is extremely difficult for strangers to make the connection between childhood pictures and adults (incidentally the same problem computer software has).
Personally I don't think it matters whether you're traumatised or not the law should help you to protect yourself from intrusion into your private life in instances such as unwanted nude photos being propagated by others.
Yes, and to achieve that, you should be allowed to nuke North America back into the Stone Age... no? Too radical? How about executing just every 10th person until they all deny they ever saw the pictures? No, why then you only want a little police-state, complete with jackbooted thugs confiscating data equipment, total monitoring of all information, persecution of all who ever came in contact with those oh-so-precious pictures of yours irrespective how they got them, general witch hunts and the like. Not too much to ask, compared to nuking everyone, surely!
The problem I see with your scenario of not chasing those who chose to keep child porn &c. is that this would curtail any future prosecutions under the claim "i downloaded it from the 'net so you can't prosecute me for it" - that's/carte blanche/ to establish a legally uncontested trade that promotes more child abuse.
It seems that you do not comprehend the implications of that "modest proposal" of yours. How about this then, I get a trojan on your PC, stuff it full of child porn, fa
I'm sure there's a reason why in some cultures/religions there are "coming of age" ceremonies at ages around 12-13 instead of at 18... Where did our modern concept of 18 come from (other than perhaps
Hebrew numerology, being that the word for "life" is the number 18)?
You are absolutely right, the number 18 has been scientifically determined by extracting it out of some "think of the children" Holy Crusader's rectum. In many places in the world the "magic" number is 16, then in some 13, and yet in some others 21. Eons old biological mechanisms and itsy bitsy things like logic or reason have been a general nuisance and a veritable thorn in the Glorious Religious Crusaders' sides for years, so it is of little wonder that they've tried to ban logic when they were at the apex of their power. Things however did not turn out so hot back in the Dark Ages and so Enlightenment happened and these sickos have been resenting being overthrown ever since, working their way relentlessly and tenaciously back into every facet of our societies. Now they sense another chance to seize, at least some, power, they feel their day might yet come, they see their spiritual brethren the Taliban making inroads.... and so we see them getting bolder and bolder by the day.
I was mostly you up until your last point, about how the after-effects of the pictures being in "the wild" aren't all that bad.
It is all about relative harm. Sure, the pictures can cause harm, particularly in the rare case where the victim is recognizable as adult. However that harm can be mitigated (i.e. changes of identity - which is done in many crimes, offer plausible deniability to the victim) but attempting to stomp out any and all knowledge of the crime from the general public has far greater impact on far many more people then the original crime. So in relative terms, the harm of letting the pictures be and the harm caused by maniacal attempts to do the impossible are not even comparable, the latter being orders of magnitude greater.
I hear you, but the old counterargument is that by possessing it you're creating a demand for it, which provides incentive for people to continue producing it.
Which is demonstrably bogus. Financial motivation arguments can be made if the abuser is selling the pictures directly, which is related to money changing hands, not pictures, but for a picture that floated on the net for 10 years the argument is laughable. There is also repeatedly demonstrated lack of any strong casual effect between perverts looking at pictures and actually committing crimes depicted (which is by the way true of all sorts of pictures of other stuff like rape and murder - which attract their own perverts).
The other counterargument is that viewing it may induce someone to go out and actually harm a child -- rather like the argument that playing violent video games might induce someone to shoot up their school.
Utter stupidity of which is self-evident since the volumes of sales of violent games run into billions of copies, which by this logic should have resulted in every school being shot up every second day all year long.... or the "inducement" is so weak that only infinitesimal percentage of the players is affected... less so then, say, by being hit on the head while slipping on soap...
The first one is somewhat legitimate -- it's hard to say that getting child porn isn't helping stoke the fire by creating demand for it.
Actually it is not hard at all. This is particularly evident in the case of 3D graphics and cartoons, where no children at all are involved. If what you say were true, the obvious solution would be to promote realistic computer images, which by your logic, would then cut down on the cases of actual molestation significantly by reducing demand for real children... in fact there is no obvious casual relationship between the pictures and the molestation, pictures are simply a side-effect (assuming no money was involved, which case I already covered).
The second one is as absurd as blaming Doom for the Columbine shootings, of course.
Actually all of the "arguments" for outlawing pictures (of any kind) are in this mental-midget class.
... unrelated diatribe purporting to show an inconsistency where there is none - skipped...
The argument was not that the pictures of a crime are the same type of crime as the portrayed crime itself, the argument was that the pictures themselves cannot be logically made criminal. That is because they are themselves not inherently a crime (which is the part of the argument to which you objected) and the alternative reasonings based on "encouraging" crime are bogus, which is the part you studiously chose to ignore. This completed of course by practical considerations such as the very nature of information, communication networks, personal computing and the like, which render the whole notion utterly ludicrous.
The law isn't making the strawman argument that you want to attribute to it.
Actually it does. It just makes a different one, on wholly fabricated premises, which I addressed in many of the other posts on this very thread.
Child pornography isn't a crime because child sexual abuse is a crime and depiction of crimes is a crime; it's a crime because the depiction of child sexual abuse is judged to promote serious crimes against children. (The depiction of car theft, on the other hand, is not judged to lead to crime serious enough to prohibit it.)
And which "judgement" is a wholly fabricated conjecture, multiple studies having shown no causal relationship between the two. The dogmatic maniacs were not however swayed by wee little things like cause and effect, and keep shopping for more... err... accommodating "researchers". So while the supposed cause and effect "reasoning" is utterly bogus, the actual reason is that the a large segment of the populace finds the pictures "icky" and wants the politicos to "do something about it". Unfortunately outlawing of "some pictures some find icky", or even pictures for which some psychological encouragement arguments could be honestly made (i.e. pictures of terrorist attacks aiding in recruitment of terrorists) leads to wholesale, wanton censorship of pretty much anything not fitting the prevailing standard of "decency" (read: religious and political gobbledygook). And after that, the ensuing havoc, witch hunts and totalitarian assholes riding to prominence and power on the back of "protecting our children from monsters" are just, as they say, history.
Hm, I don't know... google Masha Allen some time. She's pretty upset about her pictures floating around out there.
Well, here is the problem: if no one can recognize her in those pictures, her assertion has no basis. The fact that she herself is purposefully attempting to create, by public statements on the topic, the connection in people's minds where none existed, leads me to rather uncharitable thoughts involving narcissism, media spotlights, attention, and "permanent victimhood" syndrome, possibly also money. You should realize that not all of these children who were molested are themselves instances of snow-white innocence abused, nor do all develop into upstanding adults....
It is far more likely that some, rare, cases exist where the recognition is easy, but attempting to censor the entire Universe by the means of installing a jack-booted totalitarian police-state just to stop these few cases is somewhat, let's say, "counter-productive".
But one thing that I am rather certain of is that the true victims of abuse who can be, against their will, recognized would seek the exact opposite of what Masha is doing: obscurity.
ok, laws are frequently bad, religion too, what can we do ?? "moral" ??
Logic. Empiricism. Reason. Those are unlikely to fail us in this.
Our "morality" is, in the end, a set of rules to create a palatable society. "Do not kill" makes sure that you in turn are not wantonly killed. "Do not steal" guarantees (in a material possession-based culture - which by no means is the only blueprint possible) that you yourself do not loose all your stuff. Etc and so on. The better thought out, which usually means simpler and clearer, these rules, the better off everyone is. A truly fair and just society would not have a need for lawyers as the existence of a priesthood dedicated to "interpreting" the law is a clear indication of the failure of the law itself, since it precludes the average citizen from being able to understand the rules he/she is supposed to follow. But that is of course whole other discussion.
Except that if you are looking at that kind of thing, you are creating a market for the abuse
Well, by this logic war pictures create a market for war reporters.... so we should put them all in jail. Call up any tin-pot dictator, he probably has a job for you.
We're talking pedophiles and human traficking, folks.
We are talking brutal, bloody wars, complete with mass rapes and slaughter of children, folks.
Pictures of the aftermath of terrorist attacks probably give boners to quite a few would-be terrorists, thus creating a "market" for more terrorists... incidentally, stolen car pictures are probably essential in trade of stolen cars... so lets ban those too while we are at it. And soon we have no pictures of any kind left because somewhere out in the big wide world there is some sicko who would think of some even most remotely related crime when seeing the picture in question and so the "argument" could be made that the picture "encouraged" the crime.
If you get off on pictures from that, you are, indeed, part of the problem and a criminal.
See above. Also see the posters who "get off" on the pictures of bananas, which remind them of these objects inserted in the vaginae of their, then, 15 year old girlfriends, and thus are now, being middle-aged men, certified paedophiles, by your standard. No? A blanket ban on pictures of bananas, cucumbers and the like is coming right up as soon as you manage to call your local politico idiot elect, surely.
If you use an illegal drug, you are guilty of a crime.
And here we have, folks, the all-too-expected attempt to tie-in the other epic idiocy, the so-called "War on drugs" with the particular witch hunt we were discussing. No, actually, the drug use should not be a crime of any kind, or at least not in any sanity based universe, it is only a "crime" because certifiable religious imbeciles enshrined their sick religious dogma as "law". That is actually the entire point: the religious wackos disguising their particular barking-mad lunacy as the "law of the land" and pretending that this has anything whatsoever to do with justice, reason, logic and the like.
Drug use should be an educational and medical problem, to be dealt with by the medical and teachings professions, instead of being an excuse to erect a police state.
You didn't make the drug. Well, in this case s/drug/'traficked young people'/.
Ignoring the point that "trafficking" in people is a crime of slavery and has nothing whatsoever to do with pictures of the boats in which they are being smuggled, the "crime" of "trafficking" in drugs is a result of the various "prohibitions" rooted in religious stupidity, not the cause of it.
In short, yours is a total failure to offer any sort of logical reasoning, but you do indeed demonstrate the gonads-based "thinking" of the various witch-hunters quite admirably.
No one gets gratification from the pictures of stolen cars.
Which you are, of course, willing to prove. I am awaiting the evidence with held breath, don't be too long...
Pictures of war might cause testosterone dumps in some people, but child porn is known to 'get off' some people, and it requires the participation of children to make.
Err, wars also require "participation" of women, children and elderly, otherwise there would be no one to donate the torn-of-limbs and the intestines hanging from the trees... and as to "getting off", you should peruse some of the memoirs (and these days Internet posts) of the soldiers...
It must be wonderful to have such an... uhm.. uncomplicated mind.
Now explain the contributory to the creation of child porn role played by scores of people who will soon be in jail after the Conficker worm loads their PCs with child porn, complete with creation of an - oh soooo easy if one knows what he is doing - "irrefutable" (as in indistinguishable from the real thing) "track record" in their web browsers and temp files....
Aiding and abetting is a crime, hence the notion that possession of child porn is a crime.
Which is, of course, an apex of gonads-based, foaming-at-the-snout "thinking" exhibited by so many of these "think of the children" morons. By the same token, pictures of stolen cars are "abetting" car theft... or pictures of gruesome war carnage are "abetting" war...
Sure, if you paid for the pictures and the money actually made it back to the child molester, one can make a case for financial motivation and thus accessory to crime, but once they are out there in the wild spread by P2P networks, bot-nets and what-not it is nothing but just an excuse to a merry witch hunt.
A certain subsegment, however, can get sexual gratification...
Yes, Mr. Puritan. There are some people out there who would get sexual or some other kind of gratification out of pictures of anything, including those of banana peels. Lets make pictures of bananas illegal because it does not bear thought that someone out there is having unapproved by you dirty emotions...
It might come as a shock to you but all the most idiotic and harmful sex "laws" ever conceived are based upon this very principle, of some pervert assholes trying to stop someone else from feeling what they themselves secretly do. And that includes most of the lunatic monuments to hate called "religions".
The logical, reason-based conclusion is on the other hand rather obviously consistent: images of (and other information about a) crime is not a crime itself. A picture of an armed robbery is not the robbery itself. A picture of a car theft is not the car theft. A picture of a murder, no matter how torturous and bloody, is not the murder itself. A picture of a child being molested is not the molestation itself. It is rather simple, no?
True, a picture can be an evidence of a crime, and - particularly if the distribution channel was restricted and involved monetary exchange - the buyer can also be an accessory to that crime, but once the picture is out there on the nets in digital form, attempting to prosecute anyone who ever came in contact with it is merely an excuse for mass witch-hunts in the name of stupidity, money, inflated egos etc. In fact such persecution becomes a crime greater the the child molestations which it is supposed to prevent and the police, prosecutors and the politicians responsible greater villains then the paedophiles, as their activities bring great, devastating, irreversible harm to far many more innocents then the molestations do. And all for the sake of these "crusader's" own personal power trips, delusions of grandeur and general "gratification". And these villains cannot even make an "excuse" anymore that their victims are adults (as if that somehow lessened their villainy) because as this very Slashdot article shows, their victims are increasingly also children.
But this is nothing new, history teaches us that this always happens when some band of religious lunatics takes over and manages to disguise their sick dogma as "law and order". Witch hunts are an just one element of the inevitable outcome.
Oh, and you can also forget any "arguments" about the child being somehow additionally traumatized by the existence of these pictures in the wilderness of the net as facial features change so rapidly in growing children that most unrelated by blood people are unable to identify adolescents, never you mind adults, from childhood pictures. Hell, most people cannot recognize themselves in them, which came as a surprise even to me when I could not identify myself in my elementary school photos. So much for "secondary" trauma mumbo-jumbo. Just more excuses for keeping up the witch pogroms for fun and profit.
Completely OT now, but I hope I live to see the day when we can manipulate gravity like we can electromagnetism. Imagine you could build a box that on the flick of an electrical switch, it would
suddenly gain or lose weight. This is what a theory of everything might just lead to.
Well, according to this dude called Einstein, gravity is in essence bending of the space-time continuum. So if you get to manipulate gravity you also, automatically, get to manipulate the gradient of time. Which in itself makes me suspect that the thing, if ever feasible, is not likely to be performed by a battery-powered gizmo.... try more like an astronomical class energy output.
Well, the Dark Ages were all about "heresy", or more precisely accusing your neighbour of one and then butchering him/her/their infant children. Note that despite of your claim, anything to do with sex and nudity were violently repressed. Public nudity was seen only as a punishment, usually right before getting publicly skinned alive or burned on the stake. For "heresy" de jour of course.
So don't you whine that some sub-sub-section of the lunatics had found a particular self-contradictory exception in their tangled, confused and logic-free dogma, for the same foaming-at-the-snout band of lunatics would gladly burn you on the stake, laughing at your screams of agony, for even saying some things they disliked. Or having been supected (by them) of saying them. Or maybe just thinking them. And whatever their blood-soaked, twisted dogma said, chief amongst these "sins" was anything to do with sex outside some dark room where the married couples were supposed to do it, out of "duty" while making damn sure that no pleasure was involved. That was the practical impact of the religious lunacy, rendering the never-ending, always-in-flux twists-and-turns of the dogmatic mumbo-jumbo irrelevant.
The Taliban of today is a perfect throwback to those times, with pretty much the same attitudes.
Err, in other "primitive" (I get to wonder these days about that) cultures, sex was often in public. A phallus was a "lucky charm" and often sculpted or carved above house doors. In fact in some of these cultures, during the "consummation" of (equivalent of) a wedding, the young couple would do it in the centre of the village, to the cheers of merry onlookers, some of these onlookers held in the arms of their mothers because they could not walk yet.
So the argument that seeing other young/old/middle-aged people naked, never you mind having sex, is some new phenomenon is as phony as it gets. As to old-young, it was not uncommon for, say, 40 year olds to marry 14 year olds, or so the anthropologists and historians tell us.
So as someone else pointed out, this all has changed with the spread of religion, or more precisely a particularly repressed, bigoted and hypocritical one, i.e. Judeo-Christian flavour, which deems all sex as evil and human body as grotesque, shamefully inciting to "sin". This became the dominant philosophy during the European Dark Ages (not surprise there). And is has ever since been the dominant neurotic societal psychosis in the Western society, which these societies have now exported along with their military dominion and economic power to places where it did not exist until recently, such as Far East.
I personally think that the West is too far gone down this rabbit hole of authoritarian self-hatred and religious mind-control to undo easily. Since the mental state of the people making these "laws" is pretty much certifiable, I should expect the excesses of stupidity to multiply as rapidly as new technologies expose the depths of this lunacy. But as it is with all lunacies, the lunacy will survive until the lunatics obsessed by it die out or are made powerless, which with religious lunacies is, as history teaches us, usually only possible via violence. And so I expect great many kids with ruined lives and a vast number of victims of witch-hunts (some of the "think of the children" crusaders "estimate" that 60% of men are child molesters) to be sacrificed on the altar of religion-induced mental disease disguised as "law" for many, many years to come.
I simply deny your interpretation of the importance of the connection to the overall structure. Besides even if you are correct about the chemical channels being more than they seem, I still don't see that the natural neuron is more complicated than the corresponding artificial one. Eventually synapse count will be similar and it sounds to me like the artificial neuron, in addition to its raw speed, will have at its disposal a more sophisticated way of mixing its inputs and outputs.
The synapse count has nothing whatsoever to do with the problem. As I keep pointing out, the issue is attempting to simulate the superficial in hopes of somehow compensating for the lack of the significant. I already talked about this analogy: you are trying to simulate a LAN of micro-controllers while insisting that neither the firmware, nor the contents of the packets on the LAN (all chemical in our case) are of any significance and only the volumes of traffic between the micro-controllers matter (a mere statistical average represented as a frequency of electrical pulses, one for each group of packets transmitted on a particular data bus - an axon with its terminal synapses). And you absolutely refuse to concede that the software on these computers, and the processing it applies to the data contained within the packets, resulting in new packets and new data, is in any way significant, instead insisting that you will somehow compensate for this lack of depth by adding more "wires" (representing the connections) and "speed" to your "simulation". Needles to say that any such attempt is doomed from the outset. That is because such a gross over-simplification precludes any meaningful "simulation".
No. The software as it were is composed of a mix from DNA and normal physiological development all the way to highly developed knowledge that requires a great deal of training and effort to learn and retain. To elaborate on the last part, we have to learn how to learn hard things.
Now you've gone and moved the goalposts completely. No one is even suggesting that any of the discussed topics are as far reaching as the macroscopic behaviour of sentient beings. We were discussing small-scale computing capabilities of groups of neurons, not the whole of brain activity of humans! There is a very, very long road from even the most perfect simulation of selected groups of neurons to such things as simulating the operation of the neocortex!
As I mentioned earlier, I see the chemical part as not that essential as opposed to the connectivity.
Which is, as I pointed out multiple times now, where you are wrong. A knowledge of a topology and a traffic pattern of a network, while important, does not replace the knowledge of the data that is being transmitted on it, nor does it replace the knowledge of the software running on its nodes.
It appears to me that they have already solved the problem of transmitting signals between neurons..
No, we have no real clue as to the actual chemical communications between cells. We have some rough ideas, general clues, and a lot of electrical activity measurements from which we attempt to formulate wild guesses as to what is going on there. We identified a number (nowhere near all) of neurotransmitters and we even have a totally rough idea what they might be doing. Some of the time. The complete picture would have to wait until pretty much the same time when we decode all the functionality of the DNA and all the internal workings of cells become clear to us... which is to say a rather long time from now.
Merely having complex connections between neurons doesn't in my view mean that there's some significant hidden feature that a silicon device of similar complexity can't simulate or even ignore
I never said that all neuronal activity pertaining to the data processing a
In practical terms the Church plays no significant role in Canadian politics, which is the exact opposite of what is going on with all the religious wackiness (complete with war on teaching of the evolution theory in schools) down in the US. None of this is going on here.... well maybe amongst some really far-gone "Conservatives".
We can be prosecuted for thought crimes and "hate speech" in courts which do not follow any traditional legal structures, where you are presumed guilty until proven otherwise, and where truth is no defense.
The "hate speech" and "thought crimes" parts are sadly true. The rest is bullshit.
We have no right to defend our homes. We have no right to own and employ firearms in self defense.
I am not sure what you speak of. Yes, you have to register the thing, have a pile of permits to transport it back and fro to the shooting range (the only place you should really need it outside your home) and can only use it a there or keep it at home, but in a case of a home invasion when the attacker is armed and likely to maim or kill you, if you use it, it would be no different if you used any other weapon at hand.
We don't even have the equivalent of the fifth amendment, let alone the Posse Comitatus!
We have the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, section 7, which is pretty much equivalent in most respects to the 5th amendment. As to Posse Commitatus, true, not that it helped the US any in this regard, I seem to recall the National Guard shooting people for demonstrating....
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Sigh. For example, Scott Ritter, who was a senior member of the "UN" inspection team (the UNSCOM) on the ground in Iraq, tell his experiences in an interview here. Note that after Ritter voiced his objections in the run-up to the war, a US-based police "sting" operation, by a miraculously-timed poof of magic, claimed to have caught him talking to an officer pretending to be a teenage girl on the Internet, for which he was arrested. The arrest was most effectively used to ensure that most US media did not try to ask his opinion. Naturally, all charges were dropped after the war started as the "evidence" against him, also by magic apparently, evaporated completely.
The poster before me already pointed you to the statements by Hans Blix who managed the overall UN inspection process.
As to the Neocon designs, they proudly published them as part of The Project For New American Century, as far back in the 1990s. Note the "signatories of the statement of principles", amongst them: Wolfowitz, Rumslfeld, Cheney etc.
As to the non-US media, I have no time to dig up the articles from 2002/3 for your pleasure, but there is plenty of them on Google if you have the inclination. But one hint that should be immediately obvious to you is the size of anti-war demonstrations that occurred in Europe before the war. The head count was into millions.
Bullshit. The Neocons in the US were absolutely determined to invade (as a step in their Grand Plan of restructuring the world to their liking) no matter what Saddam did. In fact every time he tried to comply, they just changed their demands, each time more belligerent and each time more humiliating. It is in no doubt whatsoever that if he kept doing what they told him to "comply", eventually they would have demanded that he runs around naked at some market in Baghdad's to "demonstrate that he is not hiding any WMDs in his underwear".
The invasion of Iraq was a done fact, no matter what anyone but the Neocons and the ruling elites behind them thought, the moment Bush II was elected, and very likely even if Gore were, as the Neocons had monopolized the national US discourse and established a firm hold on the media in the US, a position which was greatly enhanced by the events of 9/11. The only thing in doubt was when the invasion were to occur.
This is an obvious fact to anyone who was not watching the self-censored US corporate media spin, as the US-instigated machinations were very, very crude and quite transparent to most independent media in the world. In the US people were presented an image of "UN" inspections, while in fact the UN was continuously undermined by the US efforts at scuttling the whole process, complete with CIA planting their agents amongst the US contingent of the UN "inspectors", who promptly engaged in blunt, belligerent activities aimed at ensuring that the "inspections" fail.
Actually Japan is rather famous for its truly byzantine governmental bureaucracy. The same is also true for large corporations, which are essentially a never-ending battle-field of competing factions engaged in subtle, covert, ambiguous and sometimes directly brutal dance of influence peddling and general back-stabbing all revolving around grabbing more power and avoiding any responsibility at the same time.
So the thing to wonder about is not how do they do it without the red tape, but how do they do it despite of mountains of it.
As much as "politically incorrect" this seems to some, the demand that foreigners intending to come with an intention of living in a nation learn that nation's language is quite reasonable.
I cannot understand all those mis-guided Mother Hen types who insist that this will somehow damage the immigrants or destroy their "culture". The requirement is purely practical and in fact an absolute necessity for a functioning society. Otherwise all you are doing is promoting a ghetto mentality whereby all immigrants from a particular country concentrate in some area complete with their own commerce, governance and what-not, effectively forming a mini-nation within the target nation. And while not physically isolated, such mini-nations are in effect what a military would call a "beach-head" for these immigrant's original nations. It then takes generations, if ever, to get rid of them as no "melting" or "assimilation" occurs between the host country and these "beach-heads".
No. Greed is also a base emotion, or in simpler organism a basic mechanical behavioural pattern. Fear is a parallel, complimentary circuit to greed. Greed causes animals to overpower fear and to begin fighting over resources, despite being fearful of injury or death. A similar relationship between fear and hate exists, a hateful individual will instigate aggression on the target of hate despite of fear, sometimes even knowing that doing so will result in the hater's own destruction.
Not at all. Greed is also one of base reptile emotions and is not simply "remembered fear", unless by "remembered" you mean an evolutionary process that embedded its circuitry there to further the competitiveness of the gene set of the animal. You seem to forget that the ultimate "purpose" of the evolution is simply to guarantee the propagation of the genetic data and that all life is simply a multitude of clever disposable vessels to carry the process on. Pain, pleasure, fear, greed all these things are simply props to aid the effectiveness of the process by diversify the gene carriers' behavioural patterns, leading some to cooperate, some to viciously compete, some to be parasitic etc.
Of course religions play on fear. They also play on hate, greed, jealousy, vindictiveness, and a host of other base emotions. But this has nothing to do with your assertion that fear is somehow the root cause of all other base emotions, like hate. The relationship is more complicated then that.
Err, a hated enemy, hatred of whom originated, say, out of greed and jealousy instead of fear, against whom the hater took some action, might become also an object of fear when the hater realizes that the enemy happens to be powerful, knows the hater's identity and is willing to retaliate for these hatred-motivated actions. So clearly a hate->fear order of events is possible, and since you stated your claim in absolute terms, just one example invalidates that claim.
Well, some argue that fear and hate are very closely related emotions, hate stemming directly from fear, and vice versa. But this is splitting hair, really.
That is not the reason. Laws shouldn't be enacted which allow for perfect (not to mention remote) fabrication of sufficient "evidence" (as is the case with computers as opposed to paper-based photos), not to mention laws which cast huge nets intended to snare random hapless accidental goofuses and utterly destroy them before they have any chance of defence whatsoever.
That is why laws criminalizing mere "possession" of some banned "icky" item, rather then requiring a credible evidence of a series of purposeful actions combined with clear indication of intent of acquisition of that item and which actually are based on some objective harm that the item causes not being clearly outweighed by the cost of banning it, are utterly bogus and only serve as a tool of fascists. And incidentally it is precisely why you like them so much.
In short what you propose is to arrest and prosecute for murder any unlucky dolt into whose backyard some murderer tossed a bloody murder weapon, with no heed paid to the fact if the yard owner was actually involved in the deed in any way. Your "standard of proof" in case of these "icky pictures" is so low as to be precisely equivalent to snatching semi-random people off the street and charging and then convicting them of whatever you find annoying to you, based solely on them "looking suspicious" or "wearing a suspicious hat".
No, you attempted to present yourself as some sort of counter example, when I merely indicated that my research of the situation was initiated by my own experience. Apples and oranges. But then again you appear to view all problems of the universe as revolving around a central focal point of your own ass.
I merely demonstrated the fallacy you were presenting by escalating the "stakes" but maintaining your overall "logic". The societal cost of attempting to "protect privacy" up to your standard, i.e. as arbitrarily defined by whomever wants to keep whatever secret, in practical terms, is far greater then the cost of its loss. I pointed out some outrageous examples of such possible "costs", which illustrated quite clearly how ridiculous, self-centered and arbitrarily chosen on this scale of costs your demand for a police-state truly is. It's that simple.
Police makes no distinctions about CDs, caches or any other sort of media. They follow your inane "Carte Blanche" reasoning which inevitably leads to its only possible outcome: "zero tolerance" crap. Also backing up thousands upon thousands of pictures (most of them unseen) is apparently a common practise amongst porn aficionados. So odds are that many of them, as far removed from paedophiles as possible, have child porn (by someone's arbitrary definition) somewhere on their backups.
Real life translation: You downloaded 12.5GB zip file named "50000 Photos of World's Hottest Chicks.zip", which your P2P client automatically shared (i.e. "distributed") during the download process. The file contained amongst the other 49,980 pictures 20 images of underage girls in various sexual acts. 20 years of jail, life-time registration on "sexual predator" lists and what
That is assuming that you can prove that the person in question actually knows that they have the pictures. But on the Internet people download whole "collections" of literally tens of thousands of pictures in one huge archive, named like "p012312402a.jpg", never actually getting to view most of them, never you mind all. And then somewhere within the thousands there is a "set" of some kid getting molested ...
Then there are the confused Windows PC owners, an easy target for malicious operators and a convenient remotely accessible "distributed" archive for all sorts of stuff ...
In practical terms the Crusaders appear to demand that all Internet users be either clairvoyant or extremely diligent. But actually the opposite is true, the Crusaders would rather have lots and lots of hapless, befuddled, confused, terrified and otherwise helpless victims ripe for the picking. They really like it that way. Their entire claim to power depends on it. That is why some of these Crusaders often blabber about how 60% (or some such) of all men are paedophiles, just waiting to get the screws turned on them....
And here is where you failed the test of logic. If all pictures available on the net were a) all coming from "Murders for Pictures Inc." or some such and b) all the people caught with them were buyers whose funds could be traced back to the source, you would have a point.
As soon however as you have millions of 3rd, 4th ... 101th hand copies, many of them embedded in huge bulk transfers of "collections" of pictures with general themes of "porn", you've lost this argument. It is because the relationship between "supply" and "demand" is not a straightforward one in case of digital data, where duplication and transmission costs are negligible.
That is why I pointed out that financial transactions, rather then the data (pictures in this case) are the thread leading back to the crime and it is those transactions which should be the object of scrutiny.
Congratulations. Your singular experience brought on by your uncanny memory and eagle eye-sight shall from now on be the gold standard by which all of us, lesser mortals (that is something like 99 out of a 100 of us), shall be now judged! Says you, The Ultimate Standard of Long Term Facial Memory In Chorus Setting At 50 Paces.
Back on planet Earth however: is facial recognition possible at a later age? Sure. Is it easy or common, particularly for strangers. Err, no.
No, I actually depend on research and statistics on this, not just anecdotes. The research shows that we memorize people's faces not based on their static features but instead of associations of events with partial feature topology across time. That is why it is extremely difficult for strangers to make the connection between childhood pictures and adults (incidentally the same problem computer software has).
Yes, and to achieve that, you should be allowed to nuke North America back into the Stone Age... no? Too radical? How about executing just every 10th person until they all deny they ever saw the pictures? No, why then you only want a little police-state, complete with jackbooted thugs confiscating data equipment, total monitoring of all information, persecution of all who ever came in contact with those oh-so-precious pictures of yours irrespective how they got them, general witch hunts and the like. Not too much to ask, compared to nuking everyone, surely!
It seems that you do not comprehend the implications of that "modest proposal" of yours. How about this then, I get a trojan on your PC, stuff it full of child porn, fa
You are absolutely right, the number 18 has been scientifically determined by extracting it out of some "think of the children" Holy Crusader's rectum. In many places in the world the "magic" number is 16, then in some 13, and yet in some others 21. Eons old biological mechanisms and itsy bitsy things like logic or reason have been a general nuisance and a veritable thorn in the Glorious Religious Crusaders' sides for years, so it is of little wonder that they've tried to ban logic when they were at the apex of their power. Things however did not turn out so hot back in the Dark Ages and so Enlightenment happened and these sickos have been resenting being overthrown ever since, working their way relentlessly and tenaciously back into every facet of our societies. Now they sense another chance to seize, at least some, power, they feel their day might yet come, they see their spiritual brethren the Taliban making inroads .... and so we see them getting bolder and bolder by the day.
It is all about relative harm. Sure, the pictures can cause harm, particularly in the rare case where the victim is recognizable as adult. However that harm can be mitigated (i.e. changes of identity - which is done in many crimes, offer plausible deniability to the victim) but attempting to stomp out any and all knowledge of the crime from the general public has far greater impact on far many more people then the original crime. So in relative terms, the harm of letting the pictures be and the harm caused by maniacal attempts to do the impossible are not even comparable, the latter being orders of magnitude greater.
Which is demonstrably bogus. Financial motivation arguments can be made if the abuser is selling the pictures directly, which is related to money changing hands, not pictures, but for a picture that floated on the net for 10 years the argument is laughable. There is also repeatedly demonstrated lack of any strong casual effect between perverts looking at pictures and actually committing crimes depicted (which is by the way true of all sorts of pictures of other stuff like rape and murder - which attract their own perverts).
Utter stupidity of which is self-evident since the volumes of sales of violent games run into billions of copies, which by this logic should have resulted in every school being shot up every second day all year long .... or the "inducement" is so weak that only infinitesimal percentage of the players is affected ... less so then, say, by being hit on the head while slipping on soap ...
Actually it is not hard at all. This is particularly evident in the case of 3D graphics and cartoons, where no children at all are involved. If what you say were true, the obvious solution would be to promote realistic computer images, which by your logic, would then cut down on the cases of actual molestation significantly by reducing demand for real children ... in fact there is no obvious casual relationship between the pictures and the molestation, pictures are simply a side-effect (assuming no money was involved, which case I already covered).
Actually all of the "arguments" for outlawing pictures (of any kind) are in this mental-midget class.
The argument was not that the pictures of a crime are the same type of crime as the portrayed crime itself, the argument was that the pictures themselves cannot be logically made criminal. That is because they are themselves not inherently a crime (which is the part of the argument to which you objected) and the alternative reasonings based on "encouraging" crime are bogus, which is the part you studiously chose to ignore. This completed of course by practical considerations such as the very nature of information, communication networks, personal computing and the like, which render the whole notion utterly ludicrous.
Actually it does. It just makes a different one, on wholly fabricated premises, which I addressed in many of the other posts on this very thread.
And which "judgement" is a wholly fabricated conjecture, multiple studies having shown no causal relationship between the two. The dogmatic maniacs were not however swayed by wee little things like cause and effect, and keep shopping for more ... err ... accommodating "researchers". So while the supposed cause and effect "reasoning" is utterly bogus, the actual reason is that the a large segment of the populace finds the pictures "icky" and wants the politicos to "do something about it". Unfortunately outlawing of "some pictures some find icky", or even pictures for which some psychological encouragement arguments could be honestly made (i.e. pictures of terrorist attacks aiding in recruitment of terrorists) leads to wholesale, wanton censorship of pretty much anything not fitting the prevailing standard of "decency" (read: religious and political gobbledygook). And after that, the ensuing havoc, witch hunts and totalitarian assholes riding to prominence and power on the back of "protecting our children from monsters" are just, as they say, history.
Well, here is the problem: if no one can recognize her in those pictures, her assertion has no basis. The fact that she herself is purposefully attempting to create, by public statements on the topic, the connection in people's minds where none existed, leads me to rather uncharitable thoughts involving narcissism, media spotlights, attention, and "permanent victimhood" syndrome, possibly also money. You should realize that not all of these children who were molested are themselves instances of snow-white innocence abused, nor do all develop into upstanding adults ....
It is far more likely that some, rare, cases exist where the recognition is easy, but attempting to censor the entire Universe by the means of installing a jack-booted totalitarian police-state just to stop these few cases is somewhat, let's say, "counter-productive".
But one thing that I am rather certain of is that the true victims of abuse who can be, against their will, recognized would seek the exact opposite of what Masha is doing: obscurity.
Logic. Empiricism. Reason. Those are unlikely to fail us in this.
Our "morality" is, in the end, a set of rules to create a palatable society. "Do not kill" makes sure that you in turn are not wantonly killed. "Do not steal" guarantees (in a material possession-based culture - which by no means is the only blueprint possible) that you yourself do not loose all your stuff. Etc and so on. The better thought out, which usually means simpler and clearer, these rules, the better off everyone is. A truly fair and just society would not have a need for lawyers as the existence of a priesthood dedicated to "interpreting" the law is a clear indication of the failure of the law itself, since it precludes the average citizen from being able to understand the rules he/she is supposed to follow. But that is of course whole other discussion.
Well, by this logic war pictures create a market for war reporters .... so we should put them all in jail. Call up any tin-pot dictator, he probably has a job for you.
We are talking brutal, bloody wars, complete with mass rapes and slaughter of children, folks.
Pictures of the aftermath of terrorist attacks probably give boners to quite a few would-be terrorists, thus creating a "market" for more terrorists ... incidentally, stolen car pictures are probably essential in trade of stolen cars ... so lets ban those too while we are at it. And soon we have no pictures of any kind left because somewhere out in the big wide world there is some sicko who would think of some even most remotely related crime when seeing the picture in question and so the "argument" could be made that the picture "encouraged" the crime.
See above. Also see the posters who "get off" on the pictures of bananas, which remind them of these objects inserted in the vaginae of their, then, 15 year old girlfriends, and thus are now, being middle-aged men, certified paedophiles, by your standard. No? A blanket ban on pictures of bananas, cucumbers and the like is coming right up as soon as you manage to call your local politico idiot elect, surely.
And here we have, folks, the all-too-expected attempt to tie-in the other epic idiocy, the so-called "War on drugs" with the particular witch hunt we were discussing. No, actually, the drug use should not be a crime of any kind, or at least not in any sanity based universe, it is only a "crime" because certifiable religious imbeciles enshrined their sick religious dogma as "law". That is actually the entire point: the religious wackos disguising their particular barking-mad lunacy as the "law of the land" and pretending that this has anything whatsoever to do with justice, reason, logic and the like.
Drug use should be an educational and medical problem, to be dealt with by the medical and teachings professions, instead of being an excuse to erect a police state.
Ignoring the point that "trafficking" in people is a crime of slavery and has nothing whatsoever to do with pictures of the boats in which they are being smuggled, the "crime" of "trafficking" in drugs is a result of the various "prohibitions" rooted in religious stupidity, not the cause of it.
In short, yours is a total failure to offer any sort of logical reasoning, but you do indeed demonstrate the gonads-based "thinking" of the various witch-hunters quite admirably.
Ah, yes, the ever popular argumentum ad populum ....
Wake me up when you stop using logical fallacies to try to advance your "cause".
Which you are, of course, willing to prove. I am awaiting the evidence with held breath, don't be too long...
Err, wars also require "participation" of women, children and elderly, otherwise there would be no one to donate the torn-of-limbs and the intestines hanging from the trees... and as to "getting off", you should peruse some of the memoirs (and these days Internet posts) of the soldiers ...
It must be wonderful to have such an ... uhm .. uncomplicated mind.
Now explain the contributory to the creation of child porn role played by scores of people who will soon be in jail after the Conficker worm loads their PCs with child porn, complete with creation of an - oh soooo easy if one knows what he is doing - "irrefutable" (as in indistinguishable from the real thing) "track record" in their web browsers and temp files....
Which is, of course, an apex of gonads-based, foaming-at-the-snout "thinking" exhibited by so many of these "think of the children" morons. By the same token, pictures of stolen cars are "abetting" car theft ... or pictures of gruesome war carnage are "abetting" war ...
Sure, if you paid for the pictures and the money actually made it back to the child molester, one can make a case for financial motivation and thus accessory to crime, but once they are out there in the wild spread by P2P networks, bot-nets and what-not it is nothing but just an excuse to a merry witch hunt.
Yes, Mr. Puritan. There are some people out there who would get sexual or some other kind of gratification out of pictures of anything, including those of banana peels. Lets make pictures of bananas illegal because it does not bear thought that someone out there is having unapproved by you dirty emotions ...
It might come as a shock to you but all the most idiotic and harmful sex "laws" ever conceived are based upon this very principle, of some pervert assholes trying to stop someone else from feeling what they themselves secretly do. And that includes most of the lunatic monuments to hate called "religions".
The logical, reason-based conclusion is on the other hand rather obviously consistent: images of (and other information about a) crime is not a crime itself. A picture of an armed robbery is not the robbery itself. A picture of a car theft is not the car theft. A picture of a murder, no matter how torturous and bloody, is not the murder itself. A picture of a child being molested is not the molestation itself. It is rather simple, no?
True, a picture can be an evidence of a crime, and - particularly if the distribution channel was restricted and involved monetary exchange - the buyer can also be an accessory to that crime, but once the picture is out there on the nets in digital form, attempting to prosecute anyone who ever came in contact with it is merely an excuse for mass witch-hunts in the name of stupidity, money, inflated egos etc. In fact such persecution becomes a crime greater the the child molestations which it is supposed to prevent and the police, prosecutors and the politicians responsible greater villains then the paedophiles, as their activities bring great, devastating, irreversible harm to far many more innocents then the molestations do. And all for the sake of these "crusader's" own personal power trips, delusions of grandeur and general "gratification". And these villains cannot even make an "excuse" anymore that their victims are adults (as if that somehow lessened their villainy) because as this very Slashdot article shows, their victims are increasingly also children.
But this is nothing new, history teaches us that this always happens when some band of religious lunatics takes over and manages to disguise their sick dogma as "law and order". Witch hunts are an just one element of the inevitable outcome.
Oh, and you can also forget any "arguments" about the child being somehow additionally traumatized by the existence of these pictures in the wilderness of the net as facial features change so rapidly in growing children that most unrelated by blood people are unable to identify adolescents, never you mind adults, from childhood pictures. Hell, most people cannot recognize themselves in them, which came as a surprise even to me when I could not identify myself in my elementary school photos. So much for "secondary" trauma mumbo-jumbo. Just more excuses for keeping up the witch pogroms for fun and profit.
Well, according to this dude called Einstein, gravity is in essence bending of the space-time continuum. So if you get to manipulate gravity you also, automatically, get to manipulate the gradient of time. Which in itself makes me suspect that the thing, if ever feasible, is not likely to be performed by a battery-powered gizmo .... try more like an astronomical class energy output.
Well, the Dark Ages were all about "heresy", or more precisely accusing your neighbour of one and then butchering him/her/their infant children. Note that despite of your claim, anything to do with sex and nudity were violently repressed. Public nudity was seen only as a punishment, usually right before getting publicly skinned alive or burned on the stake. For "heresy" de jour of course.
So don't you whine that some sub-sub-section of the lunatics had found a particular self-contradictory exception in their tangled, confused and logic-free dogma, for the same foaming-at-the-snout band of lunatics would gladly burn you on the stake, laughing at your screams of agony, for even saying some things they disliked. Or having been supected (by them) of saying them. Or maybe just thinking them. And whatever their blood-soaked, twisted dogma said, chief amongst these "sins" was anything to do with sex outside some dark room where the married couples were supposed to do it, out of "duty" while making damn sure that no pleasure was involved. That was the practical impact of the religious lunacy, rendering the never-ending, always-in-flux twists-and-turns of the dogmatic mumbo-jumbo irrelevant.
The Taliban of today is a perfect throwback to those times, with pretty much the same attitudes.
Err, in other "primitive" (I get to wonder these days about that) cultures, sex was often in public. A phallus was a "lucky charm" and often sculpted or carved above house doors. In fact in some of these cultures, during the "consummation" of (equivalent of) a wedding, the young couple would do it in the centre of the village, to the cheers of merry onlookers, some of these onlookers held in the arms of their mothers because they could not walk yet.
So the argument that seeing other young/old/middle-aged people naked, never you mind having sex, is some new phenomenon is as phony as it gets. As to old-young, it was not uncommon for, say, 40 year olds to marry 14 year olds, or so the anthropologists and historians tell us.
So as someone else pointed out, this all has changed with the spread of religion, or more precisely a particularly repressed, bigoted and hypocritical one, i.e. Judeo-Christian flavour, which deems all sex as evil and human body as grotesque, shamefully inciting to "sin". This became the dominant philosophy during the European Dark Ages (not surprise there). And is has ever since been the dominant neurotic societal psychosis in the Western society, which these societies have now exported along with their military dominion and economic power to places where it did not exist until recently, such as Far East.
I personally think that the West is too far gone down this rabbit hole of authoritarian self-hatred and religious mind-control to undo easily. Since the mental state of the people making these "laws" is pretty much certifiable, I should expect the excesses of stupidity to multiply as rapidly as new technologies expose the depths of this lunacy. But as it is with all lunacies, the lunacy will survive until the lunatics obsessed by it die out or are made powerless, which with religious lunacies is, as history teaches us, usually only possible via violence. And so I expect great many kids with ruined lives and a vast number of victims of witch-hunts (some of the "think of the children" crusaders "estimate" that 60% of men are child molesters) to be sacrificed on the altar of religion-induced mental disease disguised as "law" for many, many years to come.
"Think of the children" indeed!
The synapse count has nothing whatsoever to do with the problem. As I keep pointing out, the issue is attempting to simulate the superficial in hopes of somehow compensating for the lack of the significant. I already talked about this analogy: you are trying to simulate a LAN of micro-controllers while insisting that neither the firmware, nor the contents of the packets on the LAN (all chemical in our case) are of any significance and only the volumes of traffic between the micro-controllers matter (a mere statistical average represented as a frequency of electrical pulses, one for each group of packets transmitted on a particular data bus - an axon with its terminal synapses). And you absolutely refuse to concede that the software on these computers, and the processing it applies to the data contained within the packets, resulting in new packets and new data, is in any way significant, instead insisting that you will somehow compensate for this lack of depth by adding more "wires" (representing the connections) and "speed" to your "simulation". Needles to say that any such attempt is doomed from the outset. That is because such a gross over-simplification precludes any meaningful "simulation".
Now you've gone and moved the goalposts completely. No one is even suggesting that any of the discussed topics are as far reaching as the macroscopic behaviour of sentient beings. We were discussing small-scale computing capabilities of groups of neurons, not the whole of brain activity of humans! There is a very, very long road from even the most perfect simulation of selected groups of neurons to such things as simulating the operation of the neocortex!
Which is, as I pointed out multiple times now, where you are wrong. A knowledge of a topology and a traffic pattern of a network, while important, does not replace the knowledge of the data that is being transmitted on it, nor does it replace the knowledge of the software running on its nodes.
No, we have no real clue as to the actual chemical communications between cells. We have some rough ideas, general clues, and a lot of electrical activity measurements from which we attempt to formulate wild guesses as to what is going on there. We identified a number (nowhere near all) of neurotransmitters and we even have a totally rough idea what they might be doing. Some of the time. The complete picture would have to wait until pretty much the same time when we decode all the functionality of the DNA and all the internal workings of cells become clear to us ... which is to say a rather long time from now.
I never said that all neuronal activity pertaining to the data processing a
In practical terms the Church plays no significant role in Canadian politics, which is the exact opposite of what is going on with all the religious wackiness (complete with war on teaching of the evolution theory in schools) down in the US. None of this is going on here .... well maybe amongst some really far-gone "Conservatives".
The "hate speech" and "thought crimes" parts are sadly true. The rest is bullshit.
I am not sure what you speak of. Yes, you have to register the thing, have a pile of permits to transport it back and fro to the shooting range (the only place you should really need it outside your home) and can only use it a there or keep it at home, but in a case of a home invasion when the attacker is armed and likely to maim or kill you, if you use it, it would be no different if you used any other weapon at hand.
We have the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, section 7, which is pretty much equivalent in most respects to the 5th amendment. As to Posse Commitatus, true, not that it helped the US any in this regard, I seem to recall the National Guard shooting people for demonstrating ....