I find it odd that your list includes mail. Mail delivery is something private entities are perfectly capable of so why would a small-government advocate ask for the government to be put in charge of it?
The chances of lapses from pedophilia therapy sound intolerable to me.
More intolerable than dehumanizing all pedophiles? Yeah, the ones who do rape a child do something extremely disgusting there but does that justify stripping all of them of any dignity they have and a good deal of their rights, to boot?
Also, your argument is inconsistent. Effectively, you are advocating that we should MAXIMISE the risk to the children. Because self-help groups are not fully effective, you argue that we shouldn't have them at all. Unfortunately that means trading off a safety net with 50% reliability for no safety net.
It's the same old spiel all over again: If you simply ban something people are unlikely to give up you lose all control over it and you certainly aren't going to make it go away. In fact, you're only making it worse. It didn't work for alcohol and it didn't work for drugs. It definitely won't work for a sexual orientation. So please let's stop the War on Pedophilia and try to find a somewhat rational approach.
In case you wonder: I don't have children but my brother does. I'm not too happy about my nephews and potential own children growing up in an environment that doesn't offer any protection from child rapists besides having them locked up after the fact.
I don't and neither does German law. The point of contention is that the law says that all children have the right to a decent education, which is defined (among other things) as being administered by trained professionals. The whole problem is that neither of the parents is a certified teacher (which in Germany involves a Master's-equivalent university course).
We have a baseline standard on what constiutes an education and the parents don't fulfil it as they can't guarantee to have a certain knowledge about pedagogy, child psychology etc. that is expected of teachers. Yes, they seem get good results but it's hard to write a decent law that allows "they seem to get good results" without also allowing in people who are unfit to teach children.
The law definitely appears to be a bit rigid in this case but I don't think it should be changed. It does its job well and in most cases where people are at odds with it, those people aren't able to home-school their children effectively (in fact, most don't even try).
To sum it up, it's a certification problem. Teaching children is one of the things we expect certified professionals to do and the parents aren't that.
How would you like it if a government started banning voluntarily, consensual sexual behavior between consenting adults because it was seen as "degrading"?
Counter-sue, pointing out that the ban is violating my dignity. Well, if I could get past the demonstration blocking the streets.
Every human should have the freedom of not exercising their rights for exactly as long as they wish. If I want someone to utterly degrade me then I see a ban on that just as offensive as when I retract my consent and the degradation continues.
We can take all human rights ad absurdum, as one can do with anything. We can point to instances of abuse with just about all of them. And we can argue a lot about this stuff but in the end it boils down that our core values are different ones. You base yours on "freedom is good" while I base mine on "don't hurt others"*. We will agree on many things but we're never going to agree on everything. Therefore, I won't even get much further into this discussion. I've had it before and at the end we have a situation where we stare at each other and both yell "EXACTLY!" while making points we consider insane and the other considers natural.
Just in case you want to make a point on how "don't hurt others" means I must hate freedom because freedom allows people to hurt each other: No. Taking away one's freedom is an instance of hurting them and I will only agree to it if doing so serves to minimize the total amount of hurting done.
* Note that hurting oneself is generally fine, although one should consider the implications of one's actions (killing yourself is okay but often bad style). Also, with "hurt" I mean inflicting damage on people or animals, whether physically or otherwise; consensual BDSM is A-okay. Of course animals can't consent to BDSM, no matter what the sentence structure implies.
Well, over here teaching credentials are essentially a university degree with a standardised test at the end. You need some seriously bad standards if you want people to be completely inept after that. Of course the States are more lax about this; we Germans are more deeply in love with little slips of signed paper you need to have to be considered qualified for a job than most. Sometimes that's actually useful.
As for German law becoming irrelevant: Yeah, of course. If the laws of a country don't appeal to you, you can always pack your bags and emigrate and then you'll be free of them. The family in question did so with a certain dramatic flair but in the end it boiled down to Germany having a different opinion than them on how to handle education. Because the family found that our law is religiously offensive to them and the States have a very soft spot for people who feel their faith to be oppressed the States granted them fugitive status. We're fine with that; it's not like we're trying to hunt them down.
I never touched on that. I mentioned that we assume that children have a right to a decent education. Yes, we take away their right to never go to school and end up homeless (as in Germany you have no chance of getting even a job picking up trash without a school certificate). It's seen as an acceptable tradeoff.
Quite seriously, how do you determine which rights exist without positive protection? The most simple way to go about it is to look at the Declaration of Human Rights but is it really complete? Germany maintains that there is a basic human right to dignits, which other countries don't. And how do you interpret it? The USA take "freedom of religion" to mean much more than other countries do. What do we include? Are we permissive or restrictive? What do we do when we encounter conflicts? Which human right trumps which?
In the end human rights are one of those things we just can't agree on. We can agree on certain basic foundations like "killing is bad" but we certainly can't agree on whether it's more important to uphold one's ability to say what one wants or to protect one's dignity. And thus we end up with human rights that only exist in certain countries like the right to a good education.
Well, what about the childrens' human right to a decent education? Yes, we consider that a human right over here and it trumps parents' rights to force their views on the children. As I already pointed out, this is a diagreement over which human right is being violated and it's unlikely to get people from different side of the pond to agree.
Well, at my school they didn't comment on the veracity of any religions. Note that religion is a part of many Federal Lands' curricula (with a neutral ethics or "values and norms" courses for those who either aren't of a compatible religion to those the school offers or who don't feel like attending religion class). It's kind of hard to do "ethics in the context of Christianity" at the same time as "why the Bible is bogus".
I do admit, though, that my school has good funding and is a Gymnasium, which means that it teaches at a high level.
Again about the religion stuff: Note that this is not supposed to hammer the Bible into students' heads. I rmemeber it as always being about the religion in the context of something else; values are not really commented on. Likewise, "values and norms" could better be described as "a primer on religion in various contexts".
Essentially, it's once again a disagreement over who has the basic right. The USA say parents have a basic right to teach their children how they want. Germany says children have a basic right to an objectively good education. And no, that doesn't mean "no home schooling", it means "teachers with a Master of Education or an equivalent degree".
Of course citizens of both countries are going to maintain that their country's position is obviously right.
Yes, but you can't guarantee that any random person makes for an effective teacher. Since German children have an explicitly stated right to an education by trained professionals, home schooling is only accepted in Germany if at least one of the parents qualifies (the relevant title would be Master of Education* or the roughly equivalent First State Exam for teachers).
By not providing your children with a professional teacher you are infringing on their rights, at least under German law. I don't see much of a problem with that. Granted, there are problematic corner cases (there always are) but still, it ensures that we don't have a lot of uneducated hicks running around.
* Yes, a Bachelor isn't enough. Before we introduced Bachelor/Master courses a few years ago we didn't have anything that took less work that a Master's degree. Hence, anything that short doesn't get a whole lot of respect.
The German government doesn't give a shit about home schooling. However, every German child has the right to a good education and the law defines that as an education by federally tested and approved* teachers (after all, how else do you ensure that a teacher fulfils basic quality criteria?).
Had one of the two parents passed the First State Examination (there are two but the second applies only if you want to teach at a public school) everything would've been okay. But none of them has and thus the law can't verify that they're actually fit to teach. Since it's not certain that the children are getting an adequate education the usual procedure applies and the police enforce that the children are getting educated by a qualified professional; a public school is the usual place for that so that's where the children go.
The argument behind the whole issue is that the education of our children is too important to leave it to someone who has no idea what he's doing. I tend to agree.
* Apparently, a Master of Education also applies so if you think German universities are going to brainwash you into a slave of the government you can also get your qualification elsewhere.
That's the one thing the parents did right (well, apart from actually teaching the right subject matter): They sent one of their children to get his GCSE and he passed. Of course it's only a GCSE, which means he won't be able to get a good job or attend university; that would require a higher-level certificate called Abitur (he could spend some time at school to upgrade to the Abitur, though) and given that he passed the GCSE with very good grades, the Abitur seems to have been more appropriate. But still, at least they did that.
Of course in most Federal Lands the Abitur requires you to take a number of tests spread out over two years, which of course neccessitates spending two years at a school, and they were already loathe to have their child spend the one semester neccessary to attain the GCSE.
Actually, the parents in question did a good job teching their children - one went in to get his GCSE and wpassed with an A grade average. What I find questionable is that they don't want their children to attend a school because the children might be confronted with values the parents don't agree with. Yes, that's their official reason.
Counseling also can't make an alcoholic non-alcoholic. It can make them abstinent, however. The idea isn't to make the pedophiles non-pedophile but to enable them to deal with their urges without molesting minors.
You're essentially arguing that unless pedophiles can fundamentally change their personality in ways currently believed impossible we shouldn't even bother trying to work with them. That's not a useful attitude as it just promotes the head-in-the-sand mentality we see today: Pedophiles can't possibly be helped in any way we deem acceptable ergo they're always violent rapists ergo we need to take any reasonable or unreasonable step to ensure they all get locked up as soon as possible as it's a given they're going to harm someone sooner or later.
Quite frankly, it's no wonder humanity isn't getting anywhere with attitudes like that.
(Note that I'm using terms as used in the west; I'm aware that the Japanese don't use "hentai" like we do.)
Mangas are as much kiddy porn as comics in general are. The term "manga" describes Japanese-style comics; it doesn't say anything about the content. Even "hentai" doesn't qualify; that's just Japanese comic porn. Not any more child porn than all porn is. "Lolicon" and "shotacon" are the terms you're looking for; the former is an abbreviation of "lolita complex" and the latter is a portmanteau of the former and a popular first name for boys. Those two do explicitly describe child porn.
In short:
"Manga" describes all Japanese-style comics. Examples would be Dragonball or Sailor Moon.
"Hentai" describes all Japanese-style porn comics. Examples would be, er, I can't think of any non-animated ones at the moment, so I'll use one of those. Urotsukidoji comes to mind.
"(Loli|Shota)con" is the child porn stuff. I sure as hell won't research particular titles for you.
In shorter: Nobody is going to arrest you for reading The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and those late-night ads asking you to subscribe to their service so "horny mangas can come to your mobile" can't distinguish between fictional characters and print media.
Not that I'm TOO surprised to hear about something that idiotic... but could you please provide a source? It seems like a bit of an overreaction even for the Save-Our-Kids fanatics.
You were lucky. My brother was shot in the leg by a burglar and when the police came in to look at the scene they found some pot. Big deal, except they also found plastic bags which to them clearly indicated that he must be a big-time dealer. (Yes, our village cops (without any drug crime experience!) explicitly told us that a few grams of pot and twenty 50 ml plastic bags must absolutely, positively mean he is at the center of a drug ring that supplies all of North Germany with hard drugs.)
So he ended up being under close investigation by the police while the gun-toting burglar, uh, somehow couldn't be found. Yeah. No clues at all, sorry; the witness reports were somehow inconclusive. Anyhow, they go and confiscate some things of his: His mobile (understandable). His computer (again understandable). His wallet (also okay). Some papers (okay...). A shrink-wrapped blank CD-R (wait, what?).
It took months of his lawyer writing them nastygrams before they gave back his wallet - sans an old telephone card, which they somehow determined they had to keep even though they admitted it wasn't evidence. The mobile came a bit later, the papers a bit earlier. The computer and the CD-R, however, were only returned after the lawyer started to threaten to sue them for drawing out the investigations. Of course they didn't find anything of interest but it was somehow important that they kept the computer for over a year even though they didn't do anything with it for most of the time and the forensic expert (probably just the local IT guy) had already looked at it long ago. On of the investigators admitted that it just sat in a corner of his office (and here I thought that they have special rooms for evidence...).
A speedy mirroring of the hard drive might happen if you are under investigation by CSI $BIG_CITY but if you're under investigation by the local village cops you can be lucky if they figure out how to open the case before the processor architecture has become obsolete.
Well, to adapt the argument brough forth by other posters: Tobacco "normalizes" the market for drugs and is clearly a gateway drug for stronger drugs. Therefore it's just adequate that he gets convicted, especially because he already did pot before, which means he's a bona fide drug fiend.
Of course, an angry person can calm down and get counseling.
And a pedophile can't? Counseling and self-help groups help alcoholics stay dry. Why can't they help pedophiles? Is pedophilia really stronger than alcohol addiction? Yes, it's a sexual urge but there are ways of handling urges. In fact, we could even issue child porn (drawn/rendered and produced by tightly controlled studios to ensure no actual children are harmed) to help them let off some steam. Have them police each other - they're likely very motivated to help each other stay clean.
The reason that nobody does anything to help pedophiles is that nobody wants to help them. They don't want to (attempt to) solve the problem, they just want the problem to go away if they close their eyes to it. That clearly doesn't work but still people think that somehow outlawing pedophilia will magically make it disappear.
I just hope that society gets its act together before someone discovers a gene that might create a predisposition to pedophilia and the scaremongers start demanding a mandatory eugenics program to be instated.
Depends on how you define "pedophile", I guess. Many people "like 'em young" without wanting to do children. Youth is simply attractive - I mean, just look at all the rich and/or famous old people who take on younger partners. The younger partners are attracted to fame or money and the older ones, well, to youth.
You just need to have the law amended so that surface-to-air missiles count as small arms. Try to get your hands on some IRIS-T/SL units; I'm fairly certain that the drones won't fly too high for those.
The fact that I cut out part of your sentence doesn't change the fact that you applied "probably don't qualify as 'human' in the first place" to "most people in prison". You're entitled to your opinion that some people are unworthy of being part of our species but that doesn't mean I'm wrong for pointing it out.
I'm shocked by how many people in this discussion seem to think that prison inmates are subhumans who don't deserve any rights and should be driven to suicide.
How does that help? The only thing you'd ensure would be that those who do make it out have a justified hatred towards society and will definitely commit more and worse crimes. And, of course, everyone who does commit a crime would have a strong incentive to kill all witnesses as prison would be designed to crush the inmates' soul and capital punishment wouldn't offer much of an additional threat.
And all of these observations are besides the fact that the very statement that inmates don't deserve to be called human is a sign of complete moral bankruptcy and nothing short of appalling.
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I find it odd that your list includes mail. Mail delivery is something private entities are perfectly capable of so why would a small-government advocate ask for the government to be put in charge of it?
More intolerable than dehumanizing all pedophiles? Yeah, the ones who do rape a child do something extremely disgusting there but does that justify stripping all of them of any dignity they have and a good deal of their rights, to boot?
Also, your argument is inconsistent. Effectively, you are advocating that we should MAXIMISE the risk to the children. Because self-help groups are not fully effective, you argue that we shouldn't have them at all. Unfortunately that means trading off a safety net with 50% reliability for no safety net.
It's the same old spiel all over again: If you simply ban something people are unlikely to give up you lose all control over it and you certainly aren't going to make it go away. In fact, you're only making it worse. It didn't work for alcohol and it didn't work for drugs. It definitely won't work for a sexual orientation. So please let's stop the War on Pedophilia and try to find a somewhat rational approach.
In case you wonder: I don't have children but my brother does. I'm not too happy about my nephews and potential own children growing up in an environment that doesn't offer any protection from child rapists besides having them locked up after the fact.
I don't and neither does German law. The point of contention is that the law says that all children have the right to a decent education, which is defined (among other things) as being administered by trained professionals. The whole problem is that neither of the parents is a certified teacher (which in Germany involves a Master's-equivalent university course).
We have a baseline standard on what constiutes an education and the parents don't fulfil it as they can't guarantee to have a certain knowledge about pedagogy, child psychology etc. that is expected of teachers. Yes, they seem get good results but it's hard to write a decent law that allows "they seem to get good results" without also allowing in people who are unfit to teach children.
The law definitely appears to be a bit rigid in this case but I don't think it should be changed. It does its job well and in most cases where people are at odds with it, those people aren't able to home-school their children effectively (in fact, most don't even try).
To sum it up, it's a certification problem. Teaching children is one of the things we expect certified professionals to do and the parents aren't that.
I said "citizens", not "all citizens". To say it with LaTeX, I used \exists, not \forall.
Counter-sue, pointing out that the ban is violating my dignity. Well, if I could get past the demonstration blocking the streets.
Every human should have the freedom of not exercising their rights for exactly as long as they wish. If I want someone to utterly degrade me then I see a ban on that just as offensive as when I retract my consent and the degradation continues.
We can take all human rights ad absurdum, as one can do with anything. We can point to instances of abuse with just about all of them. And we can argue a lot about this stuff but in the end it boils down that our core values are different ones. You base yours on "freedom is good" while I base mine on "don't hurt others"*. We will agree on many things but we're never going to agree on everything. Therefore, I won't even get much further into this discussion. I've had it before and at the end we have a situation where we stare at each other and both yell "EXACTLY!" while making points we consider insane and the other considers natural.
Just in case you want to make a point on how "don't hurt others" means I must hate freedom because freedom allows people to hurt each other: No. Taking away one's freedom is an instance of hurting them and I will only agree to it if doing so serves to minimize the total amount of hurting done.
* Note that hurting oneself is generally fine, although one should consider the implications of one's actions (killing yourself is okay but often bad style). Also, with "hurt" I mean inflicting damage on people or animals, whether physically or otherwise; consensual BDSM is A-okay. Of course animals can't consent to BDSM, no matter what the sentence structure implies.
Well, over here teaching credentials are essentially a university degree with a standardised test at the end. You need some seriously bad standards if you want people to be completely inept after that. Of course the States are more lax about this; we Germans are more deeply in love with little slips of signed paper you need to have to be considered qualified for a job than most. Sometimes that's actually useful.
As for German law becoming irrelevant: Yeah, of course. If the laws of a country don't appeal to you, you can always pack your bags and emigrate and then you'll be free of them. The family in question did so with a certain dramatic flair but in the end it boiled down to Germany having a different opinion than them on how to handle education. Because the family found that our law is religiously offensive to them and the States have a very soft spot for people who feel their faith to be oppressed the States granted them fugitive status. We're fine with that; it's not like we're trying to hunt them down.
I never touched on that. I mentioned that we assume that children have a right to a decent education. Yes, we take away their right to never go to school and end up homeless (as in Germany you have no chance of getting even a job picking up trash without a school certificate). It's seen as an acceptable tradeoff.
Quite seriously, how do you determine which rights exist without positive protection? The most simple way to go about it is to look at the Declaration of Human Rights but is it really complete? Germany maintains that there is a basic human right to dignits, which other countries don't. And how do you interpret it? The USA take "freedom of religion" to mean much more than other countries do. What do we include? Are we permissive or restrictive? What do we do when we encounter conflicts? Which human right trumps which?
In the end human rights are one of those things we just can't agree on. We can agree on certain basic foundations like "killing is bad" but we certainly can't agree on whether it's more important to uphold one's ability to say what one wants or to protect one's dignity. And thus we end up with human rights that only exist in certain countries like the right to a good education.
Well, what about the childrens' human right to a decent education? Yes, we consider that a human right over here and it trumps parents' rights to force their views on the children. As I already pointed out, this is a diagreement over which human right is being violated and it's unlikely to get people from different side of the pond to agree.
Well, at my school they didn't comment on the veracity of any religions. Note that religion is a part of many Federal Lands' curricula (with a neutral ethics or "values and norms" courses for those who either aren't of a compatible religion to those the school offers or who don't feel like attending religion class). It's kind of hard to do "ethics in the context of Christianity" at the same time as "why the Bible is bogus".
I do admit, though, that my school has good funding and is a Gymnasium, which means that it teaches at a high level.
Again about the religion stuff: Note that this is not supposed to hammer the Bible into students' heads. I rmemeber it as always being about the religion in the context of something else; values are not really commented on. Likewise, "values and norms" could better be described as "a primer on religion in various contexts".
Essentially, it's once again a disagreement over who has the basic right. The USA say parents have a basic right to teach their children how they want. Germany says children have a basic right to an objectively good education. And no, that doesn't mean "no home schooling", it means "teachers with a Master of Education or an equivalent degree".
Of course citizens of both countries are going to maintain that their country's position is obviously right.
Yes, but you can't guarantee that any random person makes for an effective teacher. Since German children have an explicitly stated right to an education by trained professionals, home schooling is only accepted in Germany if at least one of the parents qualifies (the relevant title would be Master of Education* or the roughly equivalent First State Exam for teachers).
By not providing your children with a professional teacher you are infringing on their rights, at least under German law. I don't see much of a problem with that. Granted, there are problematic corner cases (there always are) but still, it ensures that we don't have a lot of uneducated hicks running around.
* Yes, a Bachelor isn't enough. Before we introduced Bachelor/Master courses a few years ago we didn't have anything that took less work that a Master's degree. Hence, anything that short doesn't get a whole lot of respect.
The German government doesn't give a shit about home schooling. However, every German child has the right to a good education and the law defines that as an education by federally tested and approved* teachers (after all, how else do you ensure that a teacher fulfils basic quality criteria?).
Had one of the two parents passed the First State Examination (there are two but the second applies only if you want to teach at a public school) everything would've been okay. But none of them has and thus the law can't verify that they're actually fit to teach. Since it's not certain that the children are getting an adequate education the usual procedure applies and the police enforce that the children are getting educated by a qualified professional; a public school is the usual place for that so that's where the children go.
The argument behind the whole issue is that the education of our children is too important to leave it to someone who has no idea what he's doing. I tend to agree.
* Apparently, a Master of Education also applies so if you think German universities are going to brainwash you into a slave of the government you can also get your qualification elsewhere.
That's the one thing the parents did right (well, apart from actually teaching the right subject matter): They sent one of their children to get his GCSE and he passed. Of course it's only a GCSE, which means he won't be able to get a good job or attend university; that would require a higher-level certificate called Abitur (he could spend some time at school to upgrade to the Abitur, though) and given that he passed the GCSE with very good grades, the Abitur seems to have been more appropriate. But still, at least they did that.
Of course in most Federal Lands the Abitur requires you to take a number of tests spread out over two years, which of course neccessitates spending two years at a school, and they were already loathe to have their child spend the one semester neccessary to attain the GCSE.
Actually, the parents in question did a good job teching their children - one went in to get his GCSE and wpassed with an A grade average. What I find questionable is that they don't want their children to attend a school because the children might be confronted with values the parents don't agree with. Yes, that's their official reason.
Counseling also can't make an alcoholic non-alcoholic. It can make them abstinent, however. The idea isn't to make the pedophiles non-pedophile but to enable them to deal with their urges without molesting minors.
You're essentially arguing that unless pedophiles can fundamentally change their personality in ways currently believed impossible we shouldn't even bother trying to work with them. That's not a useful attitude as it just promotes the head-in-the-sand mentality we see today: Pedophiles can't possibly be helped in any way we deem acceptable ergo they're always violent rapists ergo we need to take any reasonable or unreasonable step to ensure they all get locked up as soon as possible as it's a given they're going to harm someone sooner or later.
Quite frankly, it's no wonder humanity isn't getting anywhere with attitudes like that.
(Note that I'm using terms as used in the west; I'm aware that the Japanese don't use "hentai" like we do.)
Mangas are as much kiddy porn as comics in general are. The term "manga" describes Japanese-style comics; it doesn't say anything about the content. Even "hentai" doesn't qualify; that's just Japanese comic porn. Not any more child porn than all porn is. "Lolicon" and "shotacon" are the terms you're looking for; the former is an abbreviation of "lolita complex" and the latter is a portmanteau of the former and a popular first name for boys. Those two do explicitly describe child porn.
In short:
"Manga" describes all Japanese-style comics. Examples would be Dragonball or Sailor Moon.
"Hentai" describes all Japanese-style porn comics. Examples would be, er, I can't think of any non-animated ones at the moment, so I'll use one of those. Urotsukidoji comes to mind.
"(Loli|Shota)con" is the child porn stuff. I sure as hell won't research particular titles for you.
In shorter: Nobody is going to arrest you for reading The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and those late-night ads asking you to subscribe to their service so "horny mangas can come to your mobile" can't distinguish between fictional characters and print media.
Aks and ye shall receive: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/07/02/10/1752233/Teens-Prosecuted-For-Racy-Photos
You were lucky. My brother was shot in the leg by a burglar and when the police came in to look at the scene they found some pot. Big deal, except they also found plastic bags which to them clearly indicated that he must be a big-time dealer. (Yes, our village cops (without any drug crime experience!) explicitly told us that a few grams of pot and twenty 50 ml plastic bags must absolutely, positively mean he is at the center of a drug ring that supplies all of North Germany with hard drugs.)
So he ended up being under close investigation by the police while the gun-toting burglar, uh, somehow couldn't be found. Yeah. No clues at all, sorry; the witness reports were somehow inconclusive. Anyhow, they go and confiscate some things of his: His mobile (understandable). His computer (again understandable). His wallet (also okay). Some papers (okay...). A shrink-wrapped blank CD-R (wait, what?).
It took months of his lawyer writing them nastygrams before they gave back his wallet - sans an old telephone card, which they somehow determined they had to keep even though they admitted it wasn't evidence. The mobile came a bit later, the papers a bit earlier. The computer and the CD-R, however, were only returned after the lawyer started to threaten to sue them for drawing out the investigations. Of course they didn't find anything of interest but it was somehow important that they kept the computer for over a year even though they didn't do anything with it for most of the time and the forensic expert (probably just the local IT guy) had already looked at it long ago. On of the investigators admitted that it just sat in a corner of his office (and here I thought that they have special rooms for evidence...).
A speedy mirroring of the hard drive might happen if you are under investigation by CSI $BIG_CITY but if you're under investigation by the local village cops you can be lucky if they figure out how to open the case before the processor architecture has become obsolete.
Well, to adapt the argument brough forth by other posters: Tobacco "normalizes" the market for drugs and is clearly a gateway drug for stronger drugs. Therefore it's just adequate that he gets convicted, especially because he already did pot before, which means he's a bona fide drug fiend.
And a pedophile can't? Counseling and self-help groups help alcoholics stay dry. Why can't they help pedophiles? Is pedophilia really stronger than alcohol addiction? Yes, it's a sexual urge but there are ways of handling urges. In fact, we could even issue child porn (drawn/rendered and produced by tightly controlled studios to ensure no actual children are harmed) to help them let off some steam. Have them police each other - they're likely very motivated to help each other stay clean.
The reason that nobody does anything to help pedophiles is that nobody wants to help them. They don't want to (attempt to) solve the problem, they just want the problem to go away if they close their eyes to it. That clearly doesn't work but still people think that somehow outlawing pedophilia will magically make it disappear.
I just hope that society gets its act together before someone discovers a gene that might create a predisposition to pedophilia and the scaremongers start demanding a mandatory eugenics program to be instated.
Depends on how you define "pedophile", I guess. Many people "like 'em young" without wanting to do children. Youth is simply attractive - I mean, just look at all the rich and/or famous old people who take on younger partners. The younger partners are attracted to fame or money and the older ones, well, to youth.
You just need to have the law amended so that surface-to-air missiles count as small arms. Try to get your hands on some IRIS-T/SL units; I'm fairly certain that the drones won't fly too high for those.
The fact that I cut out part of your sentence doesn't change the fact that you applied "probably don't qualify as 'human' in the first place" to "most people in prison". You're entitled to your opinion that some people are unworthy of being part of our species but that doesn't mean I'm wrong for pointing it out.
I'm shocked by how many people in this discussion seem to think that prison inmates are subhumans who don't deserve any rights and should be driven to suicide.
How does that help? The only thing you'd ensure would be that those who do make it out have a justified hatred towards society and will definitely commit more and worse crimes. And, of course, everyone who does commit a crime would have a strong incentive to kill all witnesses as prison would be designed to crush the inmates' soul and capital punishment wouldn't offer much of an additional threat.
And all of these observations are besides the fact that the very statement that inmates don't deserve to be called human is a sign of complete moral bankruptcy and nothing short of appalling.
I hope for your country and its inhabitants that you never take up a political office.