Most people become completely proficient at their jobs.
No, most people become good enough to get by at their jobs. Work is an annoying necessity for most people, not something they take any great interest in.
Religious prohibition on sex is what makes kiddie porn and other perversions an issue.
Cool, a new excuse for paedophilia. You fuckers certainly are creative.
Here's a clue, brainiac. I'm an atheist, and object to "kiddie porn" (or as we adults say "recordings of actual child abuse and rape") and sex with children on purely secular/humanitarian grounds. They are an exploitation of power, a profound abuse of trust, an attack on the most basic of human rights, and a cowardly act perpetrated by weak and degenerate idiots.
A nine month old baby cannot give informed consent to being beaten and raped, that is the simple truth.
The problems with religion and sex are an entirely different issue.
It reminded me of the over-the-top, paranoid fantasies and fallacies that were popular during the time of SOPA.
Saying that a law will most likely harm innocents is hardly a fallacy (if that's what you were referring to). The government is made up of imperfect human beings; given that, it's not far-fetched at all to suggest that such a law would be abused.
You can't not do something because it isn't 100% perfect and foolproof, or else you'd never be able to do anything. It's why you design checks and balances into political systems.
Punishment is always a removal of human rights, the right to liberty, property heck in some places even the right to life. Why should free speech be different?
Nothing should be allowed to remove human rights for any individual in society because removing it for them removes it for us all.
In which case you can't have any punishment for any crime, because whatever it is will infringe on their absolute freedom somehow, therefore anyone can do what they want unless you have enough friends/guns to stop them.
It's called libertarianism, and it is ugly unless you're a rich psycopath.
Consider this: if you stumbled across some child pornography, whether on the internet, or if you found a tape in the desert, or CDs in the attic of the house you bought a few years ago, you would be guilty of possession of child pornography. Say that these images depicted the brutal torture, rape, and murder of some number of toddlers. ANYONE would want to turn these over to the police so they could track down the monsters who hurt those children. But you realize that you are criminally liable, with the potential to wind up on a sex offender registry, lose your job, your family, your home, EVERYTHING, if the police or prosecutor decide that you might have wanked off while watching them or something. Rather than trying to help catch those monsters, you instead destroy the evidence, with tears in your eyes, because you aren't willing to endanger yourself or your family.
If you were that worried I'm sure you could work out a way of copying it to the police or dropping it off anonymously.
So do not defend the producers of child pornography, because if you spent even one hour looking at the evidence in child pornography cases, you would be scarred for life. The people who produce that material are torturing children, plain and simple. They deserve no sympathy, and I hope they are caught and imprisoned. The people collecting that material are another story; only those who can be shown to have paid for it or otherwise directly encouraged its production should be charged with any crime.
You might feel comfortable with people getting sexual satisfaction from watching those recordings of actual torture. I don't, I'm afraid. Those are real live human beings
It would be a good idea to confront some of these paedophiles with some victims, but then I suppose I don't suppose they'd care if they were now grown up and still suffering, would they?
if you're upset or pissed off because of what happened to you then seek therapy like everybody else who has had a difficult childhood or a difficult adulthood.
If you have been sexually abused as a child you have every right to be pissed off with people who appear to be defending child rapists.
In fact, even if you haven't been sexually abused as a child you have every right to be pissed off with people who appear to be defending child rapists.
I don't feel like we need to think in good and evil. It's not about morals it's about consequences and an action can be perceived by society to be morally good and produce horrible consequences. We cannot objectively measure good and evil but we can measure consequences. Utilitarianism ethics would say child pornography possession and distribution is good because it produces happiness in a large segment of the population without harm, but it would also say child pornography creation is bad because it produces miserable consequences for the child.
You mischaracterise utilitarianism by assuming the distribution of child pornography causes no harm.
Do you really think that if you were raped as a child and your abuser photographed it, there would be no unhappiness created in its subsequent redistribution?
You seem to be under the misapprehension that watching child abuse images and videos is some sort of rational lifestyle choice, like deciding to pay to watch football instead of a movie on TV.
So your argument isn't based on any real evidence and if it were then you'd show at least a few cases where there is an active child porn eco-system on the internet because I've never seen that and I've been on the internet for almost 15 years.
You are aware that just possessing child porn is illegal mostly everywhere, results in both jail time and social pariahdom and that you're not exactly going to get a facebook invite to join your local paedo-ring.
Despite the "I accidentally downloaded one million child abuse images while browsing AdultsOnlyHonestlyGuv.com" defences you hear from people, it's actually really really unlikely you will ever accidentally stumble upon, child abuse images by accident on the internet.
By definition, the child abuse eco-system is going to be secretive, so whether you or I are aware of it doesn't prove much.
The point about child porn leading to actual child abuse (compared with violent porn leading to rape) is that it is a lot easier physically to become a paedophile than a violent rapist.
This is especially true when most paedophiles don't think they're doing anything wrong in the first place.
just how the fuck did the child get in the photograph in the first place.
CP covers a lot more that actual photographs of criminal acts. Depending on where you are, photos of merely naked children, photos of adults that look or are make to look young, CGI renderings, drawings/paintings, stick figures with captions, and even pure text can legally be counted as CP.
I think that one of the main problems with discussing this issue is that one side hears "child porn" and thinks "actual video of someone anally raping an unwilling, kidnapped 8-year-old", and the other side is also including "topless pix my first girlfriend sent me when she was 16", "xkcd-style drawings with creepy captions", or "that Der Spiegel cover from the 60's".
That is a problem to do with having too wide a legal definition, and not an argument for de-criminalising images of actual child abuse.
Possession of CP gives pedophiles an outlet that doesn't harm a child.
Yes, and if you ever read any testimonies from children who have had their sexual abuse photographed/filmed, they are all overjoyed that the images of them are now floating around the internet, so obviously there's no harm there.
Furthermore instances of child abuse would be easier to track and stop.
If it was legal to possess images of child sexual abuse why would any paedophile care about helping the police catch the original criminals? Do you really think that anyone would think to themselves "sure, I love whacking off to child porn, but obviously I want to help catch the evil bastards who provided my jollies in the first place"?
For instance as a young male driving a powerful car, i was screwed by insurance companies
You do know that there's a good reason for that, namely that young males driving powerful cars tend to have the most accidents?
Any sort of insurance can only be based on statistics, rather than the individual. The number of 25 year olds who take out life insurance and then drop dead the next day is presumably extremely small, but the insurance companny still has to pay out even though they only got one premium rather than 50 years worth.
People should gain civic rights gradually and at an individual pace, much like your car insurance premiums.
There is one major problem with this and other suggestions for ways of "earning" the right to vote. There's gotta be people who determine who passed and who doesn't, and those people will inevitably yield to corruption. And because their victims can't vote, there's no way to get rid of them.
Obviously the only fair way is to go full retard like Starship Troopers and make getting the vote conditional on doing x years in the military.
I'm thinking it's a mistake to give everyone full civic rights at 18 and then see where that leads. People should gain civic rights gradually and at an individual pace, much like your car insurance premiums.
Personally I buy organic food from local markets for the taste. Being organic probably has less to do with this than other factors: locally produced, bred primarily for taste, picked when ripe vs. produced wherever production is cheapest, bred for shelf life and appearance on supermarket shelves, picked early to lengthen shelf life.
The key world there is "local". I live in the countryside in the UK, and have access to cheap but very fresh eggs, vegetables, fish and meat. The problem lies with the big supermarkets in towns who push bland, shiny, tasteless products of uniform size to people who don't know any different.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people become completely proficient at their jobs.
No, most people become good enough to get by at their jobs. Work is an annoying necessity for most people, not something they take any great interest in.
Religious prohibition on sex is what makes kiddie porn and other perversions an issue.
Cool, a new excuse for paedophilia. You fuckers certainly are creative.
Here's a clue, brainiac. I'm an atheist, and object to "kiddie porn" (or as we adults say "recordings of actual child abuse and rape") and sex with children on purely secular/humanitarian grounds. They are an exploitation of power, a profound abuse of trust, an attack on the most basic of human rights, and a cowardly act perpetrated by weak and degenerate idiots.
A nine month old baby cannot give informed consent to being beaten and raped, that is the simple truth.
The problems with religion and sex are an entirely different issue.
It reminded me of the over-the-top, paranoid fantasies and fallacies that were popular during the time of SOPA.
Saying that a law will most likely harm innocents is hardly a fallacy (if that's what you were referring to). The government is made up of imperfect human beings; given that, it's not far-fetched at all to suggest that such a law would be abused.
You can't not do something because it isn't 100% perfect and foolproof, or else you'd never be able to do anything. It's why you design checks and balances into political systems.
Everyone has nudes somewhere in digital form. Everyone has a sex tape floating around.
No, they don't.
Punishment is always a removal of human rights, the right to liberty, property heck in some places even the right to life. Why should free speech be different?
Nothing should be allowed to remove human rights for any individual in society because removing it for them removes it for us all.
In which case you can't have any punishment for any crime, because whatever it is will infringe on their absolute freedom somehow, therefore anyone can do what they want unless you have enough friends/guns to stop them.
It's called libertarianism, and it is ugly unless you're a rich psycopath.
Consider this: if you stumbled across some child pornography, whether on the internet, or if you found a tape in the desert, or CDs in the attic of the house you bought a few years ago, you would be guilty of possession of child pornography. Say that these images depicted the brutal torture, rape, and murder of some number of toddlers. ANYONE would want to turn these over to the police so they could track down the monsters who hurt those children. But you realize that you are criminally liable, with the potential to wind up on a sex offender registry, lose your job, your family, your home, EVERYTHING, if the police or prosecutor decide that you might have wanked off while watching them or something. Rather than trying to help catch those monsters, you instead destroy the evidence, with tears in your eyes, because you aren't willing to endanger yourself or your family.
If you were that worried I'm sure you could work out a way of copying it to the police or dropping it off anonymously.
The huge flaw in your argument is your assumption that all human transactions are financial ones. They're not.
People don't just make child abuse films for the money.
So do not defend the producers of child pornography, because if you spent even one hour looking at the evidence in child pornography cases, you would be scarred for life. The people who produce that material are torturing children, plain and simple. They deserve no sympathy, and I hope they are caught and imprisoned. The people collecting that material are another story; only those who can be shown to have paid for it or otherwise directly encouraged its production should be charged with any crime.
You might feel comfortable with people getting sexual satisfaction from watching those recordings of actual torture. I don't, I'm afraid. Those are real live human beings
It would be a good idea to confront some of these paedophiles with some victims, but then I suppose I don't suppose they'd care if they were now grown up and still suffering, would they?
I wouldn't put it beyond some prosecutor to try to jail a guy who accidentally filmed a child rape then took it to police as a producer of child porn.
I am really struggling to imagine how you could "accidentally" film a child rape.
if you're upset or pissed off because of what happened to you then seek therapy like everybody else who has had a difficult childhood or a difficult adulthood.
If you have been sexually abused as a child you have every right to be pissed off with people who appear to be defending child rapists.
In fact, even if you haven't been sexually abused as a child you have every right to be pissed off with people who appear to be defending child rapists.
I don't feel like we need to think in good and evil. It's not about morals it's about consequences and an action can be perceived by society to be morally good and produce horrible consequences. We cannot objectively measure good and evil but we can measure consequences. Utilitarianism ethics would say child pornography possession and distribution is good because it produces happiness in a large segment of the population without harm, but it would also say child pornography creation is bad because it produces miserable consequences for the child.
You mischaracterise utilitarianism by assuming the distribution of child pornography causes no harm.
Do you really think that if you were raped as a child and your abuser photographed it, there would be no unhappiness created in its subsequent redistribution?
executive summary: here's another paedophile apologist
You seem to be under the misapprehension that watching child abuse images and videos is some sort of rational lifestyle choice, like deciding to pay to watch football instead of a movie on TV.
So your argument isn't based on any real evidence and if it were then you'd show at least a few cases where there is an active child porn eco-system on the internet because I've never seen that and I've been on the internet for almost 15 years.
You are aware that just possessing child porn is illegal mostly everywhere, results in both jail time and social pariahdom and that you're not exactly going to get a facebook invite to join your local paedo-ring.
Despite the "I accidentally downloaded one million child abuse images while browsing AdultsOnlyHonestlyGuv.com" defences you hear from people, it's actually really really unlikely you will ever accidentally stumble upon, child abuse images by accident on the internet.
By definition, the child abuse eco-system is going to be secretive, so whether you or I are aware of it doesn't prove much.
A pedophile is someone sexually attracted to prepubescent children.
The incidence of pedophilia is estimated to be around 1%
Estimated by a bunch of self-justifying paedophiles, maybe.
The point about child porn leading to actual child abuse (compared with violent porn leading to rape) is that it is a lot easier physically to become a paedophile than a violent rapist.
This is especially true when most paedophiles don't think they're doing anything wrong in the first place.
just how the fuck did the child get in the photograph in the first place.
CP covers a lot more that actual photographs of criminal acts. Depending on where you are, photos of merely naked children, photos of adults that look or are make to look young, CGI renderings, drawings/paintings, stick figures with captions, and even pure text can legally be counted as CP.
I think that one of the main problems with discussing this issue is that one side hears "child porn" and thinks "actual video of someone anally raping an unwilling, kidnapped 8-year-old", and the other side is also including "topless pix my first girlfriend sent me when she was 16", "xkcd-style drawings with creepy captions", or "that Der Spiegel cover from the 60's".
That is a problem to do with having too wide a legal definition, and not an argument for de-criminalising images of actual child abuse.
Yet we aren't arguing to bane all violent or extreme porn
Speak for yourself, I would be in favour of banning all porn which features actual non consensual sex and/or violence.
Or do you think that the children in child porn films are really enjoying it?
Possession of CP gives pedophiles an outlet that doesn't harm a child.
Yes, and if you ever read any testimonies from children who have had their sexual abuse photographed/filmed, they are all overjoyed that the images of them are now floating around the internet, so obviously there's no harm there.
Furthermore instances of child abuse would be easier to track and stop.
If it was legal to possess images of child sexual abuse why would any paedophile care about helping the police catch the original criminals? Do you really think that anyone would think to themselves "sure, I love whacking off to child porn, but obviously I want to help catch the evil bastards who provided my jollies in the first place"?
For instance as a young male driving a powerful car, i was screwed by insurance companies
You do know that there's a good reason for that, namely that young males driving powerful cars tend to have the most accidents?
Any sort of insurance can only be based on statistics, rather than the individual. The number of 25 year olds who take out life insurance and then drop dead the next day is presumably extremely small, but the insurance companny still has to pay out even though they only got one premium rather than 50 years worth.
I like the way you've thought this through. Baggsy I work for an insurance company!
People should gain civic rights gradually and at an individual pace, much like your car insurance premiums.
There is one major problem with this and other suggestions for ways of "earning" the right to vote. There's gotta be people who determine who passed and who doesn't, and those people will inevitably yield to corruption. And because their victims can't vote, there's no way to get rid of them.
Obviously the only fair way is to go full retard like Starship Troopers and make getting the vote conditional on doing x years in the military.
I'm thinking it's a mistake to give everyone full civic rights at 18 and then see where that leads. People should gain civic rights gradually and at an individual pace, much like your car insurance premiums.
Cool troll, bro.
We have to do away with the concept of good and evil.
Fine, as long as that doesn't mean doing away with the concept of right and wrong.
I agree that good and evil are theological terms with no useful meaning if you don't believe in God.
Personally I buy organic food from local markets for the taste. Being organic probably has less to do with this than other factors: locally produced, bred primarily for taste, picked when ripe vs. produced wherever production is cheapest, bred for shelf life and appearance on supermarket shelves, picked early to lengthen shelf life.
The key world there is "local". I live in the countryside in the UK, and have access to cheap but very fresh eggs, vegetables, fish and meat. The problem lies with the big supermarkets in towns who push bland, shiny, tasteless products of uniform size to people who don't know any different.