The Wiki process, because it deals with many issues outside of the realm of science, simply is incapable of that level of accuracy or neutrality.
Science is a system for producing models that increasingly accurately approximate reality in the long run. It is often slow to advance or unreadable to the typical layman. If I want an explanation of the current state of nanotechnology, I don't read Nature, because I won't understand a lot of what is being said -- I don't know much about nanotechnology.
Wikipedia is a system for condensing knowledge from many people and making it easy to transfer that knowledge to new people.
Most of the time I look something up on WP in my day-to-day life, I am not trying to do academic research -- to have hard boundaries on accuracy. I'm trying to get a reasonably accurate explanation. It's like asking someone who knows something about the area, and having them answer from memory. WP handles doing this well, and lets me easily research more in-depth the things that I want to know more about.
You might try toning it down, or maybe choosing your words to be more neutral-sounding -- like the other respondent, I've had no problems with people complaining about lack of NPOV.
WP's diff system is nice -- I think that the reason that a lot of vandalism gets caught is because the average Joe out there still doesn't understand the concept of an SCM with version history and diffs. This leads to a technocracy by the WP "good guys", who understand how WP works. Average Joe doesn't realize that it's easy to roll back blatant vandalism. That won't last -- Joe's going to get more subtle. I think that the first thing that amazes every WP contributor is how stupid and childish most of the vandalism is at the moment -- it's very easy to identify and remove.
I'd still like to see improvements, though.
It would be nice if WP understood the concept of a "revert". Currently, reverts are *really* ad-hoc things that can be done by aid of looking at some diffs and copy-pasting, but they aren't that great. Given how common of an operation reverts are, it'd be awfully nice to make it easier to make WP grok reverts.
Right now, you could probably write some clever frontend to WP to do reverts, but there's still benefit to making WP understand reverts
Basically, what I'm talking about is the ability to check a checkbox next to a history log entry to add a revert that backs out those changes. WP adds a history entry for you saying "backed out vandalism from N", colors it differently, etc.
There are a bunch of reasons that I'd like to see this. First, sometimes a page gets vandalized, some positive contributions are later made, and it's a real pain in the ass and a waste of precious time to undo the vandalism and then re-apply the positive contributions manually. It would be easy for WP (at least when later changes don't overlap) to just eliminate one diff from the middle of a history. If the later changes overlap...well, oh well, the revision will have to be manual.
Second, it would ensure that it isn't extra work to nicely mark up history entries as "reverted change from Foo from version Bar" -- WP could automatically do this for everyone.
Third, it would allow a number of important abuse-related things to be automated. If an IP/account's changes are being reverted with a high degree of frequency, it would be easy to automatically flag that account to make it easy for editors to examine any other possibly bogus changes. It would also allow revert wars to be easily detected (though, of course, someone could be manually applying revisions). It would allow the gathering of more data useful for research purposes ("How long does typical vandalism last before being reverted? How does our most recent policy/feature change improve this?")
Fourth, at least in theory, it could allow more efficient storage of the change history of WP -- there's no need to store the article over again, just tiny bit of information indicating that the article was reverted from version foo to version bar.
While this is true (and interesting), it doesn't address the grandparent's point, which is that rape compared to rape + murder is not necessarily distinguishably lighter in punishment. You were arguing about the penalty of muder compared to rape + murder.
Frankly, I disagree with the grandparent, at least in the specific instance he used -- rape isn't going to get you a life sentence, but murder could.
On the other hand, child sex offenders never really are allowed to be treated as rehabilitated by society in the US; this is different from any other crime. Pretty much anywhere they go, their names and addresses must be publically available from the local sheriff's office, and many states simply make them available online. Maybe it would be worthwhile to take the risk of a murder conviction to avoid wearing the scarlet 'A' for the rest of your life [shrug]. For example, here is the registry showing the information for Pittsburgh.
Just so you know, I've been educated by experienced psychologists. If what I say is wrong, then to hell with all of their reputations and experience.
That is an argument by authority. That is acceptable in the event that two people are making assertions based purely on their reputation, but not when someone asks specifically for factual support. If the authority is justified, one should be able to support these claims.
It's also true that in other cultures they mutilate genitals.
Okay, this is actually goes against your point. There was a significant social push in the US to eliminate female circumcision in other countries. Why? Because it offended US sensibilities.
On the other hand, in the US, it's just fine to circumcise males. Why? Because there is Biblical support for the practice. Now, both practices involve slicing up someone's (usually a baby's) genitals with the intent of making sexual sensation less pleasurable later in life. Granted, female circumcision involves more significant surgery, but it's a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one. To a culture that does not accept male circumcision, this is also "mutilation of the genitals".
There is no advantage to having any kind of sex with children.
Nor is there an advantage to masturbation, post-menopausal heterosexual sex, sex while using condoms, homosexual sex, sex where a chemical or hormonal contraceptive is being used...
If you're going to take this route, you need to argue why these other forms of sexual gratification are acceptable.
This is clear evidence that sex with children is wrong and damaging. If it was ment to be, then it wouldn't hurt. It is not a cultural phenomenom.
The age at which we set as minimum for sexual activity is most definitely a phenomenon that changes as a function of culture -- it varies based both on time and physical location.
And at least a naive reading of that argument is patently absurd -- by that logic, no woman should ever have sex for the first time.
Check out this site for more information
I did. I was really more interested in debating the legality of pornography than the problems associated with sexual abuse, but I figured, hey, might as well address this too. I was hoping for something that described physical issues, but it started out "Do you have any idea of the damage to a soul..."
The problem is that most of the arguments used in the paper seem flawed or to avoid the question. For example:
Are the negative effects of child sexual abuse due solely to societal disapproval of pedophilia?
Now this is an interesting question. However, after raising the question, the author never seems to actually answer it. He gave an example where the variable was whether or not a child was sexually abused rather than whether or not the child was raised in a culture with or without societal disapproval of pedophilia, which clearly does not answer the question. He then addresses varying the reaction of a mother. This is not varying the societal values, this is varying a single reasonse. If the problem is an inability to reconcile major conflicting inputs (as would seem most likely to me), the study has not addressed the question.
Isn't it true that some children desire and initiate sexual contacts with pedophiles?
Frankly, I don't think that this is relevant to whether or not sexual behavior in children is a problem or not. Children will initiate all sorts of activities that can be harmful to them -- I don't think that the author even need treat this as an argument that sexual behavior in children is acceptable. However, the author again ignores the question, and instead starts a tirade on how pedophiles "court" children.
Shouldn't children be permitted to engage in sex with adults if they so choose?
This was listed under "morality", and while I'm looking for pragmatic arguments and almost skipped it, it did address informed
Pictures of 17 year olds in lingerie is not what gives child porn the bad name. That's a strawman you've set up to ignore the evil child porn, which is intercourse with 3 year olds.
Okay, 17 year olds in lingerie is definitely on one end of the spectrum. On the other hand, I'd like to point out that intercourse with 3 year olds is decidedly on the other.
The law recognizes pornography containing 17-year-olds as child pornography, thus I think that it is reasonable to debate this based on that example.
I also pointed out in my post that sexual abuse and pornography need not be tied together legally. Your counterargument rests upon this assumption.
If you are sexually abused as a child, the chances that you end up ALSO experiencing any or all of the above problems increase considerable due to the incredible psychological trauma that comes with sexual abuse.
Can you (a) support this and (b) demonstrate that this is a causual link and not simply a correlation?
A. Looking at porn makes people want more porn. The link between porn and sexual conduct is quite controversial, but the effect of viewing porn on the demand for porn is not. Viewing porn makes people want to view more porn. So far so good. This brings us to....
I wish one of the people posting this would actually support this with a reference, but okay, it at least sounds plausible, so we'll assume it for the sake of argument.
B. The demand for child porn causes some child sexual abuse. Some abuse would occur anyway, but some of it is profit-motivated. Increased demand for child porn means a stronger incentive to make the stuff. Note that this is true even if no buying or selling is involved (ie trading). Open and free distribution might undercut the market to some extent -- but given that music companies continue to thrive despite widespread file-sharing, I doubt that market saturation will make child porn unprofitable.
I'm dubious.
Let's hypothetically suppose you decriminalize child porn, but keep sexual abuse of children illegal (thus, one could photograph a seventeen-year-old posing, but not having sex).
Assuming that the existing laws against child pornography are effective (which would be necessary to support them, presumably) in the suppression of production of child pornography, I would imagine that the laws against sexual abuse would be equally discouraging against the production of child pornography containing sexual abuse.
This would seem to nullify (B).
C. Viewing child porn violates the privacy of the kids. It's like reading someone's diary or peeking in on them in the shower.
It's a thought, but then why does it only apply to pornography? Why doesn't it apply to anything else that someone might not want leaked (like the abovementioned diary contents)?
Unlike grown-ups, kids didn't consent to being displayed for sexual purposes.
That's an interesting concept, but I'm not certain that I agree (at least WRT an eighteen-year-old age limit -- I think that you'll find that most teens have an understanding of sexuality).
These kids are already traumatized; how do they feel moving into adulthood, knowing that people are viewing their abuse?
Well, that probably all kind of depends on whether they're taught that being seen nude is a catastrophic event, I'd say. [shrug]
Yes, child porn is one of the most evil things there are
Okay, "evil" is pretty much a subjective term. I can call anything I want to attack "evil", and there's not much anyone can do to convince otherwise. A lot of people do exactly this. However, I'm going to have to say that child porn just doesn't rate that highly on my list of things that damage happiness.
Murder is pretty darn awful. Someone gets killed, they are gone. All the time they've spent learning things is suddenly wiped out.
Arson is pretty bad -- maybe a lot of people die, definitely a lot of work to repair the thing, and so forth.
But child porn? Don't shift the question to one of sexual abuse -- I'm talking strictly about child porn right now. Say a seventeen-year old girl is posing in lingerie. Where is the damage? Taking pictures of someone, young or not, in the buff, just does not rank anywhere near murder, arson, and similar crimes by any kind of a sane standard. What actual damage is caused? Oh, sure, you can say that by a Victorian standard, someone's honor is stained and so forth...but seriously, it just isn't something that is going to stop anyone from potentially living a happy and full life.
And *if* horrific damage is caused by child porn, then how exactly does this differ from, say, the pictures taken of tribal kids in the nude sitting around a cooking fire somewhere in National Geographic? Can you explain why *this* is just fine and your hypothetical pornographer is horrible? I certainly can't.
Now, all that pornography in general need entail is that the purpose be to produce sexual arousal. That in and of itself isn't going to hurt anyone. Okay, we can reasonably say that "perhaps children will be sexually abused in the *making* of pornography". We have laws against sexual abuse. Why does there need to additionally be laws against child pornography? It would seem that it is pretty straightforward to prosecute sexual abuse of children as easily as prosecution of pornography -- you have pictorial evidence of someone committing a crime. What then makes the simple classification of "pornography" need be illegal?
Finally, child pornography is one of the very few things for which possession is, in and of itself, a crime (controlled drugs and unlicensed firearms are the only other two things that I can think of). I would guess that the idea is that someone found the possibility that child pornography might lead to sexual abuse potentially too high of a risk, and then followed that up with the idea that making possession of the data illegal would help cut the legs out from under the market, thus making the market illegal. I see that as a pretty long stretch (and if that is the rationale, non-commercially produced child pornography should be legal).
What's more, if you want to argue based on some kind of absolute ethical standard, that sexually idealizing someone below eighteen is simply *evil*, you have to also explain why somehow, this invisible and global balance of good and evil mysteriously shifted in the last couple hundred years. Juliet was *thirteen* years old. How is it that in a single heartbeat of the long, long history of mankind, that Good and Evil have so abruptly taken a rapid adjustment?
Frankly, I can see (adult) prostitution having a lot more problems associated with it (disease vectors, despite the precautions), and even that is legal in some places in the United States.
But everyone likes to have their demons, the things that everyone can comfortably sit back and agree are bad. We happen to like hating Nazis (They were monsters! Monsters! Not just an xenophobic and nationlistic time of history in a country! That couldn't ever happen to anyone else, because *those people were monsters*!"), drugs (watch Reefer Madness for an example of the propaganda that led to marijuana being criminalized -- it's downright alarming), and child porn ("Won't somebody think *about the children*!")
Because educated, tech-savvy Internet users disproportionately dislike Bush. See Slashdot, Usenet, K5, etc. Granted, the DNC would plausibly astroturf on major forums if it didn't already have lots of people pissed off at Bush...
c) Al Jazeera is not popular in Iraq. Iraqi's often complain that Al Jazeera encourages terrorists.
For all I know, you are familiar with the issues involved; however, I remember when the Bush Administration cherry-picked some Baghdad poll to claim that the majority of Iraqis were grateful that we were occupying them and enthusiastic about Saddam being kicked out.
Seriously, if you don't know that our military (and to varying extents, other branches of government) interface through the public through very ruthless PR machines (both with external PR firms and internal work) that are willing to do almost anything if they think that it will help them with their current policy objectives, you've not been paying attention.
It is supposed to be illegal for Voice of America, as a federally-funded military psyops tool, targetting American citizens...yet somehow, I can browse the VOA website.
If nothing else, the lack of present role models for women in scientific fields gives them the message that women can't go into those fields. Yeah, there are some, but they're far outnumbered by men.
Oh, whatever. My sister just picked up a chem engineering degree. She didn't sit down and say "Gee, there are more men than women in this field. I probably can't do it." If I got an English degree, I sure as hell wouldn't be thinking "Wow, I don't have a chance in this field -- there are so many women."
What *does* screw over competent women in the field is when standards get lowered specificially for women. Now those women who do well are faced with an uphill battle because they have to fight against a (legitimate) notion that women aren't doing as well.
I mean, good grief. I'm inclined to let the chips fall where they may. Just provide accurate information about the fields, don't try to propagandize, and if women want to show up, they will.
I'm not even worried about the boys. I just want to know where the benefit is in pushing girls into tech. I mean, why specifically girls, as opposed to, say, left-handed albino Africans?
It's very clear that girls currently don't go into tech as much as guys. We can sit down and demonstrate that the percentage of females in the sciences is lower than the percentage of females in society. Maybe there's a biological reason for this. Maybe it's purely social reasons. Heck, I don't really know. All I know is that I can't see a definite benefit to trying to lock the percentage of any particular group (including women) in tech to the level of their percentage of the total population.
Now, I *do* have a problem with actually preventing someone from entering the tech world. If you do that, you might be missing out on some very good technologists. But I am not aware of any bar that forces women out of tech -- they just choose not to enter. It just seems that it is mostly an unfounded ideology that is driving the "equal proportion" movement.
"Fahrenheit 451 was the product of five short stories. One short story that was used was inspired after Bradbury and a friend were walking around Los Angeles late one night. A police officer stopped and questioned them. A smart-alecky Bradbury told them they were just walking and explained how illogical it was for them to be planning a robbery, especially on foot. The police officer said, "Just walking? Well, don't do it again." Afterward, Bradbury wrote "The Pedestrian," a story about a future time when all pedestrians are treated as criminals. A political magazine called The Reporter published it after numerous rejections. "The Pedestrian" became the foundation on which Bradbury built his protagonist, Montag, of Fahrenheit 451."
What I'd like to know is that even if the law somehow has to be secret, why can't we at least hear a real justification of *why* it has to be secret? I cannot buy that *that* can't be released.
Besides, I can understand keeping *policy* secret -- say, plans to respond to someone trying to hijack an airplane. But that isn't law. It's policy. What possible benefit can there be from keeping people from knowing what the rules of their society are?
1: Exxon get Billion(!!) dollar fine 2: Exxon negotiates Billion dollar fine over umpteen years 3: Exxon pays less than 1/2 the published number in real dollars.
Given that your implied point seems to be that Exxon would be willing to smack another tanker into the bottom and lose $500M, I don't think I agree with you.
Oh, one more thing: disclosure of security breaches should be mandatory (with some latitude for delaying until the problem can be fixed, but not much). Failure to disclose security breaches should be a felony.
Hmm. My initial response was going to be "but then they have lots of incentive to hide it"...this is an interesting idea.
I dunno, though. You have to ask exactly what constitutes a security breech, and what is reasonable to not defend against. For example, I don't expect my bank to be proof against a team of commandos dropping in with assault rifles on a helicopter into their data center.
Sure. But how much of it is good content, the kind that a skilled artist has worked hard on and it shows, and how much of it is the WWW equivalent of the latest teenie lip-synch group?
Percentagewise? Probably a minority. But I don't care about percent -- I care that in absolute terms, there is far more good content available than I can consume. I have a huge reading backlog. I certainly would not trade the ability to get at documents that have gone missing (sever mistake, no more funding to make document available, someone thinks that something is "obsolete", domains expire, etc) for even more content.
Your argument is that we need to shift more money into content creators (presumably because we lack content).
There are thousands of lifetimes worth of content on the Internet. Our problem is in it going down and becoming stale. Google and Wayback solve that problem. This was the right decision for society.
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The Wiki process, because it deals with many issues outside of the realm of science, simply is incapable of that level of accuracy or neutrality.
Science is a system for producing models that increasingly accurately approximate reality in the long run. It is often slow to advance or unreadable to the typical layman. If I want an explanation of the current state of nanotechnology, I don't read Nature, because I won't understand a lot of what is being said -- I don't know much about nanotechnology.
Wikipedia is a system for condensing knowledge from many people and making it easy to transfer that knowledge to new people.
Most of the time I look something up on WP in my day-to-day life, I am not trying to do academic research -- to have hard boundaries on accuracy. I'm trying to get a reasonably accurate explanation. It's like asking someone who knows something about the area, and having them answer from memory. WP handles doing this well, and lets me easily research more in-depth the things that I want to know more about.
You might try toning it down, or maybe choosing your words to be more neutral-sounding -- like the other respondent, I've had no problems with people complaining about lack of NPOV.
WP's diff system is nice -- I think that the reason that a lot of vandalism gets caught is because the average Joe out there still doesn't understand the concept of an SCM with version history and diffs. This leads to a technocracy by the WP "good guys", who understand how WP works. Average Joe doesn't realize that it's easy to roll back blatant vandalism. That won't last -- Joe's going to get more subtle. I think that the first thing that amazes every WP contributor is how stupid and childish most of the vandalism is at the moment -- it's very easy to identify and remove.
I'd still like to see improvements, though.
It would be nice if WP understood the concept of a "revert". Currently, reverts are *really* ad-hoc things that can be done by aid of looking at some diffs and copy-pasting, but they aren't that great. Given how common of an operation reverts are, it'd be awfully nice to make it easier to make WP grok reverts.
Right now, you could probably write some clever frontend to WP to do reverts, but there's still benefit to making WP understand reverts
Basically, what I'm talking about is the ability to check a checkbox next to a history log entry to add a revert that backs out those changes. WP adds a history entry for you saying "backed out vandalism from N", colors it differently, etc.
There are a bunch of reasons that I'd like to see this. First, sometimes a page gets vandalized, some positive contributions are later made, and it's a real pain in the ass and a waste of precious time to undo the vandalism and then re-apply the positive contributions manually. It would be easy for WP (at least when later changes don't overlap) to just eliminate one diff from the middle of a history. If the later changes overlap...well, oh well, the revision will have to be manual.
Second, it would ensure that it isn't extra work to nicely mark up history entries as "reverted change from Foo from version Bar" -- WP could automatically do this for everyone.
Third, it would allow a number of important abuse-related things to be automated. If an IP/account's changes are being reverted with a high degree of frequency, it would be easy to automatically flag that account to make it easy for editors to examine any other possibly bogus changes. It would also allow revert wars to be easily detected (though, of course, someone could be manually applying revisions). It would allow the gathering of more data useful for research purposes ("How long does typical vandalism last before being reverted? How does our most recent policy/feature change improve this?")
Fourth, at least in theory, it could allow more efficient storage of the change history of WP -- there's no need to store the article over again, just tiny bit of information indicating that the article was reverted from version foo to version bar.
No, Wikipedia is more like anarchy, where any one person can shout over anyone else, overwhelming the majority with rhetoric.
Unless the article gets protected or they get banned. Repeated reverts and complaints will generate action. [shrug]
I would argue that this is a short-term solution. Right now, it's novel and thus entertaining, so newspapers will carry it.
While this is true (and interesting), it doesn't address the grandparent's point, which is that rape compared to rape + murder is not necessarily distinguishably lighter in punishment. You were arguing about the penalty of muder compared to rape + murder.
Frankly, I disagree with the grandparent, at least in the specific instance he used -- rape isn't going to get you a life sentence, but murder could.
On the other hand, child sex offenders never really are allowed to be treated as rehabilitated by society in the US; this is different from any other crime. Pretty much anywhere they go, their names and addresses must be publically available from the local sheriff's office, and many states simply make them available online. Maybe it would be worthwhile to take the risk of a murder conviction to avoid wearing the scarlet 'A' for the rest of your life [shrug]. For example, here is the registry showing the information for Pittsburgh.
Before that ruling, however, it was often assumed to be illegal.
Just so you know, I've been educated by experienced psychologists. If what I say is wrong, then to hell with all of their reputations and experience.
That is an argument by authority. That is acceptable in the event that two people are making assertions based purely on their reputation, but not when someone asks specifically for factual support. If the authority is justified, one should be able to support these claims.
It's also true that in other cultures they mutilate genitals.
Okay, this is actually goes against your point. There was a significant social push in the US to eliminate female circumcision in other countries. Why? Because it offended US sensibilities.
On the other hand, in the US, it's just fine to circumcise males. Why? Because there is Biblical support for the practice. Now, both practices involve slicing up someone's (usually a baby's) genitals with the intent of making sexual sensation less pleasurable later in life. Granted, female circumcision involves more significant surgery, but it's a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one. To a culture that does not accept male circumcision, this is also "mutilation of the genitals".
There is no advantage to having any kind of sex with children.
Nor is there an advantage to masturbation, post-menopausal heterosexual sex, sex while using condoms, homosexual sex, sex where a chemical or hormonal contraceptive is being used...
If you're going to take this route, you need to argue why these other forms of sexual gratification are acceptable.
This is clear evidence that sex with children is wrong and damaging. If it was ment to be, then it wouldn't hurt. It is not a cultural phenomenom.
The age at which we set as minimum for sexual activity is most definitely a phenomenon that changes as a function of culture -- it varies based both on time and physical location.
And at least a naive reading of that argument is patently absurd -- by that logic, no woman should ever have sex for the first time.
Check out this site for more information
I did. I was really more interested in debating the legality of pornography than the problems associated with sexual abuse, but I figured, hey, might as well address this too. I was hoping for something that described physical issues, but it started out "Do you have any idea of the damage to a soul..."
The problem is that most of the arguments used in the paper seem flawed or to avoid the question. For example:
Are the negative effects of child sexual abuse due solely to societal disapproval of pedophilia?
Now this is an interesting question. However, after raising the question, the author never seems to actually answer it. He gave an example where the variable was whether or not a child was sexually abused rather than whether or not the child was raised in a culture with or without societal disapproval of pedophilia, which clearly does not answer the question. He then addresses varying the reaction of a mother. This is not varying the societal values, this is varying a single reasonse. If the problem is an inability to reconcile major conflicting inputs (as would seem most likely to me), the study has not addressed the question.
Isn't it true that some children desire and initiate sexual contacts with pedophiles?
Frankly, I don't think that this is relevant to whether or not sexual behavior in children is a problem or not. Children will initiate all sorts of activities that can be harmful to them -- I don't think that the author even need treat this as an argument that sexual behavior in children is acceptable. However, the author again ignores the question, and instead starts a tirade on how pedophiles "court" children.
Shouldn't children be permitted to engage in sex with adults if they so choose?
This was listed under "morality", and while I'm looking for pragmatic arguments and almost skipped it, it did address informed
Pictures of 17 year olds in lingerie is not what gives child porn the bad name. That's a strawman you've set up to ignore the evil child porn, which is intercourse with 3 year olds.
Okay, 17 year olds in lingerie is definitely on one end of the spectrum. On the other hand, I'd like to point out that intercourse with 3 year olds is decidedly on the other.
The law recognizes pornography containing 17-year-olds as child pornography, thus I think that it is reasonable to debate this based on that example.
I also pointed out in my post that sexual abuse and pornography need not be tied together legally. Your counterargument rests upon this assumption.
If you are sexually abused as a child, the chances that you end up ALSO experiencing any or all of the above problems increase considerable due to the incredible psychological trauma that comes with sexual abuse.
Can you (a) support this and (b) demonstrate that this is a causual link and not simply a correlation?
A. Looking at porn makes people want more porn. The link between porn and sexual conduct is quite controversial, but the effect of viewing porn on the demand for porn is not. Viewing porn makes people want to view more porn. So far so good. This brings us to....
I wish one of the people posting this would actually support this with a reference, but okay, it at least sounds plausible, so we'll assume it for the sake of argument.
B. The demand for child porn causes some child sexual abuse. Some abuse would occur anyway, but some of it is profit-motivated. Increased demand for child porn means a stronger incentive to make the stuff. Note that this is true even if no buying or selling is involved (ie trading). Open and free distribution might undercut the market to some extent -- but given that music companies continue to thrive despite widespread file-sharing, I doubt that market saturation will make child porn unprofitable.
I'm dubious.
Let's hypothetically suppose you decriminalize child porn, but keep sexual abuse of children illegal (thus, one could photograph a seventeen-year-old posing, but not having sex).
Assuming that the existing laws against child pornography are effective (which would be necessary to support them, presumably) in the suppression of production of child pornography, I would imagine that the laws against sexual abuse would be equally discouraging against the production of child pornography containing sexual abuse.
This would seem to nullify (B).
C. Viewing child porn violates the privacy of the kids. It's like reading someone's diary or peeking in on them in the shower.
It's a thought, but then why does it only apply to pornography? Why doesn't it apply to anything else that someone might not want leaked (like the abovementioned diary contents)?
Unlike grown-ups, kids didn't consent to being displayed for sexual purposes.
That's an interesting concept, but I'm not certain that I agree (at least WRT an eighteen-year-old age limit -- I think that you'll find that most teens have an understanding of sexuality).
These kids are already traumatized; how do they feel moving into adulthood, knowing that people are viewing their abuse?
Well, that probably all kind of depends on whether they're taught that being seen nude is a catastrophic event, I'd say. [shrug]
If you ignore the fact that mass producing of Child porn only fuels the interest for more child porn, adding 'fuel' to their proverbial 'fire'.
That's quite a claim. Can you support it?
Does this apply to only child porn, or also to adult porn?
If it applies to both, does it apply to other things too, and if not, why?
Yes, child porn is one of the most evil things there are
Okay, "evil" is pretty much a subjective term. I can call anything I want to attack "evil", and there's not much anyone can do to convince otherwise. A lot of people do exactly this. However, I'm going to have to say that child porn just doesn't rate that highly on my list of things that damage happiness.
Murder is pretty darn awful. Someone gets killed, they are gone. All the time they've spent learning things is suddenly wiped out.
Arson is pretty bad -- maybe a lot of people die, definitely a lot of work to repair the thing, and so forth.
But child porn? Don't shift the question to one of sexual abuse -- I'm talking strictly about child porn right now. Say a seventeen-year old girl is posing in lingerie. Where is the damage? Taking pictures of someone, young or not, in the buff, just does not rank anywhere near murder, arson, and similar crimes by any kind of a sane standard. What actual damage is caused? Oh, sure, you can say that by a Victorian standard, someone's honor is stained and so forth...but seriously, it just isn't something that is going to stop anyone from potentially living a happy and full life.
And *if* horrific damage is caused by child porn, then how exactly does this differ from, say, the pictures taken of tribal kids in the nude sitting around a cooking fire somewhere in National Geographic? Can you explain why *this* is just fine and your hypothetical pornographer is horrible? I certainly can't.
Now, all that pornography in general need entail is that the purpose be to produce sexual arousal. That in and of itself isn't going to hurt anyone. Okay, we can reasonably say that "perhaps children will be sexually abused in the *making* of pornography". We have laws against sexual abuse. Why does there need to additionally be laws against child pornography? It would seem that it is pretty straightforward to prosecute sexual abuse of children as easily as prosecution of pornography -- you have pictorial evidence of someone committing a crime. What then makes the simple classification of "pornography" need be illegal?
Finally, child pornography is one of the very few things for which possession is, in and of itself, a crime (controlled drugs and unlicensed firearms are the only other two things that I can think of). I would guess that the idea is that someone found the possibility that child pornography might lead to sexual abuse potentially too high of a risk, and then followed that up with the idea that making possession of the data illegal would help cut the legs out from under the market, thus making the market illegal. I see that as a pretty long stretch (and if that is the rationale, non-commercially produced child pornography should be legal).
What's more, if you want to argue based on some kind of absolute ethical standard, that sexually idealizing someone below eighteen is simply *evil*, you have to also explain why somehow, this invisible and global balance of good and evil mysteriously shifted in the last couple hundred years. Juliet was *thirteen* years old. How is it that in a single heartbeat of the long, long history of mankind, that Good and Evil have so abruptly taken a rapid adjustment?
Frankly, I can see (adult) prostitution having a lot more problems associated with it (disease vectors, despite the precautions), and even that is legal in some places in the United States.
But everyone likes to have their demons, the things that everyone can comfortably sit back and agree are bad. We happen to like hating Nazis (They were monsters! Monsters! Not just an xenophobic and nationlistic time of history in a country! That couldn't ever happen to anyone else, because *those people were monsters*!"), drugs (watch Reefer Madness for an example of the propaganda that led to marijuana being criminalized -- it's downright alarming), and child porn ("Won't somebody think *about the children*!")
Because educated, tech-savvy Internet users disproportionately dislike Bush. See Slashdot, Usenet, K5, etc. Granted, the DNC would plausibly astroturf on major forums if it didn't already have lots of people pissed off at Bush...
c) Al Jazeera is not popular in Iraq. Iraqi's often complain that Al Jazeera encourages terrorists.
For all I know, you are familiar with the issues involved; however, I remember when the Bush Administration cherry-picked some Baghdad poll to claim that the majority of Iraqis were grateful that we were occupying them and enthusiastic about Saddam being kicked out.
Seriously, if you don't know that our military (and to varying extents, other branches of government) interface through the public through very ruthless PR machines (both with external PR firms and internal work) that are willing to do almost anything if they think that it will help them with their current policy objectives, you've not been paying attention.
I haven't seen these recently...
It is supposed to be illegal for Voice of America, as a federally-funded military psyops tool, targetting American citizens...yet somehow, I can browse the VOA website.
If nothing else, the lack of present role models for women in scientific fields gives them the message that women can't go into those fields. Yeah, there are some, but they're far outnumbered by men.
Oh, whatever. My sister just picked up a chem engineering degree. She didn't sit down and say "Gee, there are more men than women in this field. I probably can't do it." If I got an English degree, I sure as hell wouldn't be thinking "Wow, I don't have a chance in this field -- there are so many women."
What *does* screw over competent women in the field is when standards get lowered specificially for women. Now those women who do well are faced with an uphill battle because they have to fight against a (legitimate) notion that women aren't doing as well.
I mean, good grief. I'm inclined to let the chips fall where they may. Just provide accurate information about the fields, don't try to propagandize, and if women want to show up, they will.
I'm not even worried about the boys. I just want to know where the benefit is in pushing girls into tech. I mean, why specifically girls, as opposed to, say, left-handed albino Africans?
It's very clear that girls currently don't go into tech as much as guys. We can sit down and demonstrate that the percentage of females in the sciences is lower than the percentage of females in society. Maybe there's a biological reason for this. Maybe it's purely social reasons. Heck, I don't really know. All I know is that I can't see a definite benefit to trying to lock the percentage of any particular group (including women) in tech to the level of their percentage of the total population.
Now, I *do* have a problem with actually preventing someone from entering the tech world. If you do that, you might be missing out on some very good technologists. But I am not aware of any bar that forces women out of tech -- they just choose not to enter. It just seems that it is mostly an unfounded ideology that is driving the "equal proportion" movement.
"Fahrenheit 451 was the product of five short stories. One short story that was used was inspired after Bradbury and a friend were walking around Los Angeles late one night. A police officer stopped and questioned them. A smart-alecky Bradbury told them they were just walking and explained how illogical it was for them to be planning a robbery, especially on foot. The police officer said, "Just walking? Well, don't do it again." Afterward, Bradbury wrote "The Pedestrian," a story about a future time when all pedestrians are treated as criminals. A political magazine called The Reporter published it after numerous rejections. "The Pedestrian" became the foundation on which Bradbury built his protagonist, Montag, of Fahrenheit 451."
From here.
What I'd like to know is that even if the law somehow has to be secret, why can't we at least hear a real justification of *why* it has to be secret? I cannot buy that *that* can't be released.
Besides, I can understand keeping *policy* secret -- say, plans to respond to someone trying to hijack an airplane. But that isn't law. It's policy. What possible benefit can there be from keeping people from knowing what the rules of their society are?
1: Exxon get Billion(!!) dollar fine
2: Exxon negotiates Billion dollar fine over umpteen years
3: Exxon pays less than 1/2 the published number in real dollars.
Given that your implied point seems to be that Exxon would be willing to smack another tanker into the bottom and lose $500M, I don't think I agree with you.
Oh, one more thing: disclosure of security breaches should be mandatory (with some latitude for delaying until the problem can be fixed, but not much). Failure to disclose security breaches should be a felony.
Hmm. My initial response was going to be "but then they have lots of incentive to hide it"...this is an interesting idea.
I dunno, though. You have to ask exactly what constitutes a security breech, and what is reasonable to not defend against. For example, I don't expect my bank to be proof against a team of commandos dropping in with assault rifles on a helicopter into their data center.
Sure. But how much of it is good content, the kind that a skilled artist has worked hard on and it shows, and how much of it is the WWW equivalent of the latest teenie lip-synch group?
Percentagewise? Probably a minority. But I don't care about percent -- I care that in absolute terms, there is far more good content available than I can consume. I have a huge reading backlog. I certainly would not trade the ability to get at documents that have gone missing (sever mistake, no more funding to make document available, someone thinks that something is "obsolete", domains expire, etc) for even more content.
Your argument is that we need to shift more money into content creators (presumably because we lack content).
There are thousands of lifetimes worth of content on the Internet. Our problem is in it going down and becoming stale. Google and Wayback solve that problem. This was the right decision for society.