Depending on how you define "pedophile", you can come up with a figure of almost zero percent, 1 to 3 percent, 10 to 30 percent, or 90 to almost 100 percent.
Oddly enough, according to the statistics of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies around the world, the vast majority of child molesters are NOT pedophiles in any way, shape or form. Most child molesters are heterosexual, adult-attracted men who (a) can't find a woman, (b) got drunk or high, (c) are under stress, or something else along those lines.
Besides all this, there is no reliable evidence that children are harmed by sexual activity which they desire (in and of itself - STDs and such are a separate issue), regardless of the age of their partners.
In short, something is rotten in the western world, and this subject has not received an honest discourse.
For those who are interested in learning more, look up boychat and girlchat - though you can't find girlchat on google, since they delisted it.
Difference 1: If I graze my cattle on your ranch, you will not be able to make use of your ranch - but if I sing a song that you wrote, you will still be able to sing that song.
Difference 2: If you sell me your ranch, the ranch is mine to do with as I please. If you sell me your song, shouldn't the song be mine to do with as I please? After some profitability, songs and other intellectual property should go into the public domain, especially if a large portion of the public have paid for it.
Recent events make me think that Google is no longer keeping its pledge not to be evil.
Considering turning over information to the Chinese government about dissidents . . . OK, we say, necessary to do business in China.
But then Google prevented search results for inquisition21.com for a while, a site which brings to light abuses by law enforcement agencies, primarily in the United States and the United Kingdom. That was reversed, but now Google appears to be preventing search results bringing up GirlChat, at http://www.annabelleigh.net - another site which those in the government and the media would like shut down.
That, combined with obvious censorship at Wikipedia of late make me wonder about the fairness of some of these large internet companies, and just how much pressure the US government is illegally putting on them.
Tie that in with this recent decision, which basically puts into the hands of a private company a compendium of the viewing habits of millions of innocent people, and I am very glad that I have been using a proxy.
Consider that this information will likely lead at some point to a private or public entity producing "profiles" of the American public, in order to identify potential dissidents - or at least soft targets for scapegoating - to the detriment of the public interest.
As a member of a minority that is concerned about genocide in the United States (and being the target thereof), this concerns me a great deal.
This is serious stuff, and Google should no longer be given a free pass.
Actually, I would call that "illegal child touching" rather than "child abuse", if the touching is desired by the child.
"Child abuse" is what the people do who treat children with contempt and deny them the right to decide for themselves who should or should not touch them and how. You may recall hearing about experiments in which monkeys were deprived of touch, and recall how badly that went - so considering how important touch is to primates, to deny children the affection they desire and need is probably one of the greatest abuses routinely committed against children in the Western world.
As for the laws in the United States - they have virtually nothing at all to do with what is right and wrong.
You talk about the pedophiles out to get you, but from the perspective of us pedophiles, it's all of YOU who are out to get US. We have a fucking RIGHT to be paranoid. There's a lot of insane psychopaths out to destroy us - recently with backing from the Nazi Broadcasting Company in collusion with various governments.
Heh. Our persecutors include people like Wendy Murphy, a former prosecutor from Boston who has claimed on national television that parents who let their children voice political opinions are guilty of "the worst kind of child abuse", Phillip Eide, a.k.a. Xavier von Erck, a Hitler-worshipping loser whose only success in life has been as a leader of a hate group, and religious nuts who believe in magical pictures that murder children's souls. And you're worried about US?
If the US wants to know why its surrendering the production of scientists to other parts of the world, they only need to look at all those small-minded, anti-intellectual twerps that manage to get on school boards and state Boards of Education, with their Bible in one hand and hatred of knowledge in the other.
On one occasion I had reason to look through the Bible for a passage affirming the value of knowledge and education. I figured I could find something - after all, there's a passage in the Bible to justify just about anything: in favor of genocide and murder, against genocide and murder, for prostitution, against prostitution, in favor of marriage, against marriage - just about anything can be justified by the Bible.
But, no, I couldn't find anything affirming the value of education and/or knowledge. On the contrary, lots of stuff about knowledge being worthless and the wisdom of men being an affront to God. That sort of thing.
Re:Do you also own a cat with a diamond collar?
on
Failing Our Geniuses
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· Score: 1
In my cynical moments I imagine that it's a plot to keep the country stupid and docile while they turn the Republic into a fascist shadow of its original promise.
I've kept up with this issue for years, and I can't think of anyone who wants to abolish copyright outright.
Ensure Fair Use? Sure.
Restrict copyright to a reasonable 20 or 30 years (even though 5 years would probably be sufficient for most purposes)? Sure.
Abolish it entirely? Well, it probably wouldn't hurt as much as some people think it would, but it wouldn't be especially useful either, as long as Fair Use is allowed and it expires after a reasonable 20 or 30 years.
On the one hand, I am impressed with both Obama and Edwards for keeping up with the times. They are at least aware of Creative Commons, which means that they are aware of copyright issues and the net - which puts them way ahead of the other candidates in terms of relevance to the modern world.
However, in Obama's case I wonder about his motives. Considering his authoritarian tendencies, I am inclined to think that this is more about politics than genuine interest in an open political discussion.
Other posters have mentioned a situation where the Obama campaign decided to forcibly take over a fan site that it wanted, and I also know that the Obama campaign wrote a rather nasty letter to Lindsay Ashford demanding that he remove a photo of Obama and family from his website, Puellula ( http://hfp.puellula.com/Press/2007-02-27.html ), and - more incredibly - demanding that Lindsay should not LINK to the Obama campaign website. His interest in open political discussions seems rather tenuous, when it comes down to it.
If this is how Obama (or at least his campaign) treats his SUPPORTERS, it certainly gives me pause for thought.
Verizon cut the phone lines to an ISP that hosted sites that offer community support to MAAs. Much discussion is devoted to self-acceptance and living within the law.
On the other hand, the group making the complaint to Verizon, Perverted Justice, has long been involved in entrapment schemes, and recently was involved in the death of one of their victims in Texas. Perhaps the funniest thing is the rumors that PJ founder "Xavier von Erck" got involved with a 14yo girl a few years ago.
Don't know if that particular rumor is true, but there have been a number of reports that he has made use of minors as young as 13 (IIRC) to go into sex chats with older men, and try to get those men to visit them as part of his entrapment operations.
If the article had not been slashdotted, you would know that in this particular case Verizon had instructed its subsidiary, MCI Canada, to cut the connection.
Epifora is the ISP in question, MCI Canada just provided the physical connection.
IANAL, but as far as I can tell, common carrier status applies in this case.
I looked at the ballot for this year's elections, and guess what? There was no one I wanted to vote for. No one. Frequently, the two candidates in a race are competing to see who can screw me over the worse: Candidate A says he wants to revoke my U.S. citizenship, for example, and Candidate B says he wants to throw me in jail for life (in both cases, for thought crimes).
Why would I want to vote for either one?
My ballot will be nearly blank this year - and even the one person I'm voting for, I'll have to hold my nose while I do it.
The two parties in the US have collaborated to deprive the people of any real choice. Surely there is a reason why voter turnout rarely exceeds 50% - everyone knows that they are not going to get any real representation, whatever choice they make.
I like the idea of "absolute representation", where each person gets their own personal representative, and that representative serves both as an ombudsman, and casts a number of votes in Congress equal to the number of persons they are representing. Besides the obvious question of whether we could actually get this enacted, the question comes up, how could the voter and the representative verify their connection, while keeping this information sufficiently confidential?
Also, if we could do this, we should also return the election of senators to the respective state governments, in order to regain the system of balances that has long been lost.
I'm tired of not having any representation in government.
The more the engineer attempts to account for such things, the worse the actual implementation will get, as the contractors in question do even more shoddy, substandard work in order to make as much money as possible at the expense of the customer. After all, it's already accounted for in the design, right?
I can vouch for the fact that this is how most construction workers think.
While there are a few decent and capable tradesmen that manage to keep things working, the sad fact is that no matter what you do, the other workers and managers will manage to fuck things up.
If you provide detailed instructions, they will not be read.
If you provide illustrated, simplified instructions, they will not be looked at.
If you provide fool-proof designs, they will design a better fool.
If you provide the best materials and tools, they will be stolen or ignored for the sake of expediency.
If you provide ample time to finish a task correctly, they will take an extra long break and then cut corners to finish the work quickly.
The average contractor and the average construction worker do not care if they do the job right, they do not care if their negligence leads to injuries, and they are too stupid to recognise long-term dangers (and often, short-term dangers too). They only care if their work is good enough to last through warranty (and not even that if they can blame any problems on someone else), that they get paid, and that they don't have to work very hard. A failure past the warranty period just means repeat business.
Of course, while the specifics may differ, the general attitude remains the same in all industries, including government.
BTW, I have a friend who is going to be forced to register for life because of a "crime" he committed 15 years ago - a "crime" which did not have any victims (except my friend, a victim of the government). This is because recently the federal government passed an ex post facto law which increases the penalty for past crimes - and no one in America is making noise about it (except to applaud it).
Seriously - anyone who cares about their lives or their freedom, get out of the USA as soon as you can. Germany, 1936 . . . America, 2006. The similarities are striking. I don't think there's any saving America, other than an eventual invasion by Chinese or Indian troops in the endgame of the next world war.
I think his 3 year old son is still in the custody of the state, though it's possible that custody has gone to his ex-wife since the last time I talked to Kevin about that.
Incidentally, it was one of Kevin's great-grandparents, I think, who pushed for the child protection laws in Indiana in the first place, a century ago. The attraction and concern for children seems to have some genetic basis, and there's some reason to believe that many of the venerable institutions that help children were founded by pedophiles. Unfortunately, human nature and bureaucracy being what it is, many of those institutions have become as oppressive as those they replaced, and it looks like pedophiles must step up once again in their role as protectors of children.
First off, NAMBLA is an entirely legal organization. It advocates changing the law, but does not advocate breaking the law as it stands. Above all it advocates tolerance. Likewise, Kevin never advocated anything criminal - he simply tried to promote tolerance.
As for your assertion that "losing one's child, wife, and job" due to government reprisal is not "a violation" of the Right to Free Speech and Freedom of Association - what in hell are you smoking?
You say that Free Speech is not regulated when it comes to political matters - I'm thinking you're pointing out that free political speech is the most important type, and that this is what the framers of the Constitution were most concerned with. Which brings me to my point: which part of advocating for tolerance and for changing the law is NOT political?
You also seem to have an unhealthy interest in persecuting religious minorities and polygamists. While I do have a problem with the way some religious communities and some polygamists conduct their business, we should concentrate on making sure no one is forced into behavior they don't want to take part in, rather than promoting a blanket ban of polygamy or unconventional relationships. The Federal Government's repression of the Mormon Church is one of many sad episodes in American history, and is the cause of many of the problems associated with polygamy today. That is, the secrecy causes much of the problems, because no one will report minor abuse if it means the forced breakup of their family and community.
In any case, you have proven once again that anonymous speech is necessary as long as bigotry endures.
True enough - no system is infallible. All the more reason to demand that there be ways to modify the system - and truly anonymous speech is surely less costly than war.
I might not understand how important this is, if I hadn't woken up one day to discover that a large number of my countrymen would like to kill me simply because I love the wrong people.
Slashdot Mirror
no, a warrant is required is the government wishes to publicly acknowledge that they have been opening your mail. Slight difference.
Depending on how you define "pedophile", you can come up with a figure of almost zero percent, 1 to 3 percent, 10 to 30 percent, or 90 to almost 100 percent.
Oddly enough, according to the statistics of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies around the world, the vast majority of child molesters are NOT pedophiles in any way, shape or form. Most child molesters are heterosexual, adult-attracted men who (a) can't find a woman, (b) got drunk or high, (c) are under stress, or something else along those lines.
Besides all this, there is no reliable evidence that children are harmed by sexual activity which they desire (in and of itself - STDs and such are a separate issue), regardless of the age of their partners.
In short, something is rotten in the western world, and this subject has not received an honest discourse.
For those who are interested in learning more, look up boychat and girlchat - though you can't find girlchat on google, since they delisted it.
Difference 1: If I graze my cattle on your ranch, you will not be able to make use of your ranch - but if I sing a song that you wrote, you will still be able to sing that song.
Difference 2: If you sell me your ranch, the ranch is mine to do with as I please. If you sell me your song, shouldn't the song be mine to do with as I please? After some profitability, songs and other intellectual property should go into the public domain, especially if a large portion of the public have paid for it.
. . . Who are the pirates?
Well, as I said - there are certainly those trying to silence the truth.
Recent events make me think that Google is no longer keeping its pledge not to be evil.
Considering turning over information to the Chinese government about dissidents . . . OK, we say, necessary to do business in China.
But then Google prevented search results for inquisition21.com for a while, a site which brings to light abuses by law enforcement agencies, primarily in the United States and the United Kingdom. That was reversed, but now Google appears to be preventing search results bringing up GirlChat, at http://www.annabelleigh.net - another site which those in the government and the media would like shut down.
That, combined with obvious censorship at Wikipedia of late make me wonder about the fairness of some of these large internet companies, and just how much pressure the US government is illegally putting on them.
Tie that in with this recent decision, which basically puts into the hands of a private company a compendium of the viewing habits of millions of innocent people, and I am very glad that I have been using a proxy.
Consider that this information will likely lead at some point to a private or public entity producing "profiles" of the American public, in order to identify potential dissidents - or at least soft targets for scapegoating - to the detriment of the public interest.
As a member of a minority that is concerned about genocide in the United States (and being the target thereof), this concerns me a great deal.
This is serious stuff, and Google should no longer be given a free pass.
Obviously a dystopian future if it's based around Microsoft products.
Well, what do we expect from the Nazi Broadcasting Company?
Actually, I would call that "illegal child touching" rather than "child abuse", if the touching is desired by the child.
"Child abuse" is what the people do who treat children with contempt and deny them the right to decide for themselves who should or should not touch them and how. You may recall hearing about experiments in which monkeys were deprived of touch, and recall how badly that went - so considering how important touch is to primates, to deny children the affection they desire and need is probably one of the greatest abuses routinely committed against children in the Western world.
As for the laws in the United States - they have virtually nothing at all to do with what is right and wrong.
You talk about the pedophiles out to get you, but from the perspective of us pedophiles, it's all of YOU who are out to get US. We have a fucking RIGHT to be paranoid. There's a lot of insane psychopaths out to destroy us - recently with backing from the Nazi Broadcasting Company in collusion with various governments.
Heh. Our persecutors include people like Wendy Murphy, a former prosecutor from Boston who has claimed on national television that parents who let their children voice political opinions are guilty of "the worst kind of child abuse", Phillip Eide, a.k.a. Xavier von Erck, a Hitler-worshipping loser whose only success in life has been as a leader of a hate group, and religious nuts who believe in magical pictures that murder children's souls. And you're worried about US?
If the US wants to know why its surrendering the production of scientists to other parts of the world, they only need to look at all those small-minded, anti-intellectual twerps that manage to get on school boards and state Boards of Education, with their Bible in one hand and hatred of knowledge in the other.
On one occasion I had reason to look through the Bible for a passage affirming the value of knowledge and education. I figured I could find something - after all, there's a passage in the Bible to justify just about anything: in favor of genocide and murder, against genocide and murder, for prostitution, against prostitution, in favor of marriage, against marriage - just about anything can be justified by the Bible.
But, no, I couldn't find anything affirming the value of education and/or knowledge. On the contrary, lots of stuff about knowledge being worthless and the wisdom of men being an affront to God. That sort of thing.
In my cynical moments I imagine that it's a plot to keep the country stupid and docile while they turn the Republic into a fascist shadow of its original promise.
It is a plot. Check out what John Taylor Gatto has been doing.
I've kept up with this issue for years, and I can't think of anyone who wants to abolish copyright outright.
Ensure Fair Use? Sure.
Restrict copyright to a reasonable 20 or 30 years (even though 5 years would probably be sufficient for most purposes)? Sure.
Abolish it entirely? Well, it probably wouldn't hurt as much as some people think it would, but it wouldn't be especially useful either, as long as Fair Use is allowed and it expires after a reasonable 20 or 30 years.
some idiots at MSNBC, eh?
Oh, I can understand why Obama would want to distance himself.
What I don't understand is the threat of <i>legal action</i> against a website for linking to his campaign website.
If not Obama himself, someone in his campaign has some pretty authoritarian impulses that need to be curbed.
On the one hand, I am impressed with both Obama and Edwards for keeping up with the times. They are at least aware of Creative Commons, which means that they are aware of copyright issues and the net - which puts them way ahead of the other candidates in terms of relevance to the modern world.
However, in Obama's case I wonder about his motives. Considering his authoritarian tendencies, I am inclined to think that this is more about politics than genuine interest in an open political discussion.
Other posters have mentioned a situation where the Obama campaign decided to forcibly take over a fan site that it wanted, and I also know that the Obama campaign wrote a rather nasty letter to Lindsay Ashford demanding that he remove a photo of Obama and family from his website, Puellula ( http://hfp.puellula.com/Press/2007-02-27.html ), and - more incredibly - demanding that Lindsay should not LINK to the Obama campaign website. His interest in open political discussions seems rather tenuous, when it comes down to it.
If this is how Obama (or at least his campaign) treats his SUPPORTERS, it certainly gives me pause for thought.
Verizon cut the phone lines to an ISP that hosted sites that offer community support to MAAs. Much discussion is devoted to self-acceptance and living within the law.
On the other hand, the group making the complaint to Verizon, Perverted Justice, has long been involved in entrapment schemes, and recently was involved in the death of one of their victims in Texas. Perhaps the funniest thing is the rumors that PJ founder "Xavier von Erck" got involved with a 14yo girl a few years ago.
Don't know if that particular rumor is true, but there have been a number of reports that he has made use of minors as young as 13 (IIRC) to go into sex chats with older men, and try to get those men to visit them as part of his entrapment operations.
If the article had not been slashdotted, you would know that in this particular case Verizon had instructed its subsidiary, MCI Canada, to cut the connection.
Epifora is the ISP in question, MCI Canada just provided the physical connection.
IANAL, but as far as I can tell, common carrier status applies in this case.
I looked at the ballot for this year's elections, and guess what? There was no one I wanted to vote for. No one. Frequently, the two candidates in a race are competing to see who can screw me over the worse: Candidate A says he wants to revoke my U.S. citizenship, for example, and Candidate B says he wants to throw me in jail for life (in both cases, for thought crimes).
Why would I want to vote for either one?
My ballot will be nearly blank this year - and even the one person I'm voting for, I'll have to hold my nose while I do it.
The two parties in the US have collaborated to deprive the people of any real choice. Surely there is a reason why voter turnout rarely exceeds 50% - everyone knows that they are not going to get any real representation, whatever choice they make.
I like the idea of "absolute representation", where each person gets their own personal representative, and that representative serves both as an ombudsman, and casts a number of votes in Congress equal to the number of persons they are representing. Besides the obvious question of whether we could actually get this enacted, the question comes up, how could the voter and the representative verify their connection, while keeping this information sufficiently confidential?
Also, if we could do this, we should also return the election of senators to the respective state governments, in order to regain the system of balances that has long been lost.
I'm tired of not having any representation in government.
The more the engineer attempts to account for such things, the worse the actual implementation will get, as the contractors in question do even more shoddy, substandard work in order to make as much money as possible at the expense of the customer. After all, it's already accounted for in the design, right?
I can vouch for the fact that this is how most construction workers think.
While there are a few decent and capable tradesmen that manage to keep things working, the sad fact is that no matter what you do, the other workers and managers will manage to fuck things up.
The average contractor and the average construction worker do not care if they do the job right, they do not care if their negligence leads to injuries, and they are too stupid to recognise long-term dangers (and often, short-term dangers too). They only care if their work is good enough to last through warranty (and not even that if they can blame any problems on someone else), that they get paid, and that they don't have to work very hard. A failure past the warranty period just means repeat business.
Of course, while the specifics may differ, the general attitude remains the same in all industries, including government.
I like my wording better.
BTW, I have a friend who is going to be forced to register for life because of a "crime" he committed 15 years ago - a "crime" which did not have any victims (except my friend, a victim of the government). This is because recently the federal government passed an ex post facto law which increases the penalty for past crimes - and no one in America is making noise about it (except to applaud it).
Seriously - anyone who cares about their lives or their freedom, get out of the USA as soon as you can. Germany, 1936 . . . America, 2006. The similarities are striking. I don't think there's any saving America, other than an eventual invasion by Chinese or Indian troops in the endgame of the next world war.
Baldur
I think his 3 year old son is still in the custody of the state, though it's possible that custody has gone to his ex-wife since the last time I talked to Kevin about that.
Incidentally, it was one of Kevin's great-grandparents, I think, who pushed for the child protection laws in Indiana in the first place, a century ago. The attraction and concern for children seems to have some genetic basis, and there's some reason to believe that many of the venerable institutions that help children were founded by pedophiles. Unfortunately, human nature and bureaucracy being what it is, many of those institutions have become as oppressive as those they replaced, and it looks like pedophiles must step up once again in their role as protectors of children.
Yup. Thought that was interesting. It's not like I hid the fact, and this guy has to jump in and "reveal" that I'm a pedophile.
Well, not like the kranks are known for their intelligence, eh?
Centuries later we know the names of the dead lions, but we are descended from the living dogs.
First off, NAMBLA is an entirely legal organization. It advocates changing the law, but does not advocate breaking the law as it stands. Above all it advocates tolerance. Likewise, Kevin never advocated anything criminal - he simply tried to promote tolerance.
As for your assertion that "losing one's child, wife, and job" due to government reprisal is not "a violation" of the Right to Free Speech and Freedom of Association - what in hell are you smoking?
You say that Free Speech is not regulated when it comes to political matters - I'm thinking you're pointing out that free political speech is the most important type, and that this is what the framers of the Constitution were most concerned with. Which brings me to my point: which part of advocating for tolerance and for changing the law is NOT political?
You also seem to have an unhealthy interest in persecuting religious minorities and polygamists. While I do have a problem with the way some religious communities and some polygamists conduct their business, we should concentrate on making sure no one is forced into behavior they don't want to take part in, rather than promoting a blanket ban of polygamy or unconventional relationships. The Federal Government's repression of the Mormon Church is one of many sad episodes in American history, and is the cause of many of the problems associated with polygamy today. That is, the secrecy causes much of the problems, because no one will report minor abuse if it means the forced breakup of their family and community.
In any case, you have proven once again that anonymous speech is necessary as long as bigotry endures.
True enough - no system is infallible. All the more reason to demand that there be ways to modify the system - and truly anonymous speech is surely less costly than war.
I might not understand how important this is, if I hadn't woken up one day to discover that a large number of my countrymen would like to kill me simply because I love the wrong people.