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Old 09-27-2007, 07:09 AM   #81
shasarak
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Re: Sex & Violence

Oh, right. That I heard about.

Another odd feature of British age-of-consent law that I've just remembered is that is one of the few instances where you can be prosecuted for doing something in another country that is completely legal where you're doing it. For example, it's illegal to smoke cannabis in Britain, but it's legal to smoke it in certain coffee shops in Holland. If someone smokes cannabis in a Dutch coffee shop, he is not committing any sort of crime anywhere. But if a British 18-year-old travels to a country where the legal age of consent is 15 and has sex with a 15-year-old girl who lives there, he is actually committing an offence under British law, even though he is thousands of miles away from Britain and what he is doing is legal where he's doing it.
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Old 09-27-2007, 07:12 AM   #82
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Re: Sex & Violence

Sorry Shadowfyr I'm not quite sure that I got all your points clearly- first off you say that we need to do something because everybody thinks they're fighting the cranks alone: fair enough. I don't know much about this so you'll have to tell me:
Would muds showing support for this particular cause be a unifying factor that all other people fighting the cranks on this particular issue would rally round?
Would muds showing support for this particular cause be a unifying factor that all people fighting the cranks on every issue would rally round?
If the answer to either of these questions is yes then you've convinced me (though that would mean very little)- even though I still would one or two concerns- and you'd have only another few hundred of the right people to convince and some sort of action could be taken!

Now there's the bit after that, it seems to be yet another attack on the cranks, very similar to some of your earlier posts. Not that I'm comparing you as how you describe these cranks of course just that you may already be falling to one of the 'unethical' ways to fight back.

By the way, I may not have made this clear but I would have supported any move in that direction as soon as it had gone through even in my earliest post, it wouldn't even have been because I support the cause. It would have been because the irreversible (after a couple of weeks) would have been done and if anything was to be lost it would already beyond me bringing back so I would stick by the cause that I said as I believe because (selfishly) I would feel that they was nothing more for me to lose in this fight. But never the less I will do my utmost to stop any MU* from taking such an action.

Oh by the way Romans didn't stop killing Christians because they martyred themselves in the thousands- it was because an Emperor had a dream, so sometimes just being a martyr for a cause isn't quite enough- and yes I'll find something to back that last bit up just as soon as I have time.
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Old 09-27-2007, 02:28 PM   #83
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Re: Sex & Violence

The media isn't overly happy to report on that, nor are people happy to read about it, because it doesn't fit into the modern day worshiping and western state agenda of cultural diversity. Hallelujah.

Of course the claim that 'all morality is subjective' is in itself an objective law defining morality, and hence a logical fallacy. Logic and objectivity doesn't seem to appeal to the masses however as of late. So what's your logical motivation for trying to reason with an illogical person? In my opinion it's a tiresome and very unrewarding activity.
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Old 09-27-2007, 10:35 PM   #84
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Re: Sex & Violence

It can be an accurate description based on actual factual evidence actually. All morality *is* subjective, because despite lots of people that insist there is some objective and undeniable morality, when you can manage to get them to describe to you the means by which they concluded it was moral, instead of merely spouting assertions, you find that a) none of it just landed in their laps, but they learned it by practice, and b) not one of the various groups that claim an objective morality can agree among themselves precisely what the boundaries are for it, never mind between two different groups, who insist *they* are the only ones that know what the one true universal moral code is.

Morality is a label for two things, 1) instinct driven behavior, which makes it possible, unless we have a defect in our brains from birth, to process information in predictable ways and specific ages. I.e., a 6 year old can't tell you mean him to say that the "doll" represents him/herself, and thus ask him what happened to him/her, by using a doll as an example. A younger child may not even understand that the doll is an inanimate object, or meant to represent something that normally *is* animate. Teens, as a rule, lack the gut level reactions to things that adults have, so, as many studies have shown, actually *overthink* situations, leading them to make logic based choices based on if the benefits from doing something risky *seem* to outweigh the risks. Adults tend to already have clear emotional concepts of what risks are too high, compared to benefits, so act based on what they "feel", not what they logically assess. Its seems contradictory, but brain scans and detailed studies of how teens make choices don't lie.

2) Learned social behavior, which can enhance, undermine, replace or distort the instinctual behaviors. This means that if your instinctual behavior is to make friends, someone *can* warp your perceptions sufficiently to make you distrust other people and avoid friendships. It means that if "normal" behavior is to trade favors (and I mean that in all senses of the word), social constraints can introduce learned aversions to some *kinds* of trades, or even warp your perceptions so badly that you take from everyone, because the world owes things to you, or refuse any help or offers, because owing anyone something is abhorrent. One could easily argue that "both" of those extremes are unreasonable, but its not impossible to find societies where having one of those extreme traits, within a small subset of societies, is considered a sign of sanity, even while the rest of society considers you weird or crazy.

What morals are not is some ingrained, preprogrammed code of conduct. One can have "general" codes, like sharing is good, and what neurologists call "plasticity", where that can be *shaped* to say anything from, "Sharing everything, to the extent that you have no money or possessions is good.", to the opposite extreme of, "Sharing is only good if you can see a direct and obvious personal benefit from it." The irony is, we call the later sociopathic, while the former is simply considered an odd religious view some small number of people practice... Its literally *unacceptable* to suggest, as far as most people are concerned, that *both* extremes are fundamentally irrational, not evolved, and basically deviations from the baseline behaviors that "do" exist in the brains genetics, which only "allow for" such drastic differences, rather than making them happen.

Worse, one could argue, and it can be shown, that how you use language can effect what things you "can" perceive. Basically, a program can only do what it has been taught to do with new data, even if the data implies something different than the program was ever intended to handle. That's a simplistic way of looking at it of course, we program ourselves, so its "possible" to learn different language, and with that different concepts, which can lead to a reexamination of our perspectives. But, its probably pretty dang accurate when describing the sort of people that, as an example, only listen to evangelical preachers, only watch Fox news, only read news papers that present right wing views, etc., just as those people on the other side of the fence, who only read rag magazines, horoscopes, Hollywood opinion magazines, alien abduction accounts, etc., etc., are *not* going to learn how to think any differently about their perceptions of what is really going on. To do that would require learning *how* to think like their opposite number, or, at least, why, in what way, and to what extent they mean different things, when using the same words we do.

But that is sort of the point. We are not trying to reason with the illogical and irrational people. They are impervious to it. Most people are not that far gone though, and can have their opinions changed, because they use language in ways that allow them to understand both sides arguments (well, most of the time). The point is to make it very clear that the only real difference that **should** exist between something that thinks god personally gave Pat Robertson a TV show, so he could bash gay people, talk about assassinating foreign dignitaries and help prepare the true believers for the end of the world (possibly by convincing them to cause it), and someone that think that Jesus was a space alien from Cignus Prime, who used lost Atlantian technology to broadcast healing rays into people's bodies is that there must be a shortage of tin foil hats to go around. lol

And to answer Mithras' questions, If you want to wait around until you are "sure" someone will rally to your cause, then you have already lost, but seriously, its not like nudity or sex in muds is some unique and specific thing, devoid of all connection to anything else, and thus must stand or fall on its own. Its not. Such content on muds is just the smallest corner, and probably silliest, of a much bigger problem, which ranges from people insisting that schools ban books about the "risks" of sex for teens, based on the fact that the book "describes" teens having sex, and the consequences of it, all the way up to the absolutely absurd fact that we once had a strip club here where I live, and it was driven out because "some" land owners thought it might impact the number of old people that would retire here, where I am sure they all want to, instead, spend their last years complaining about the thousands of 20-30 year old boaters that drink beer, play loud music and, in the case of the women, get by with not being nude by using pasties (a small decal like object, which you glue over the nipple and its darker surrounding parts, which if anything makes **more** people stair at them.

I am not advocating every muds introducing stuff into them. I am not even advocating them doing so in a way that will "immediately" get them into trouble. I am just saying, if you have a fracking Sistine Chapel in it, don't cave in so badly that when everyone types, "look adam", you get a description that says, "complete with fig leaf". Its insulting to a) the intent of the design (both the mud and the original art work, b) the intelligence of the players and c) any sense of ethics that demands respect for truth, intended meanings or other people's work. Mind you, I could make a good argument that none of those three things are of any value at all to anyone who thinks that they have a strangle hold on right and wrong, let alone any absolute concept of what those *must* be.

And no, I don't think its something that all of them are going to rally around, certainly not if you insist on defining it as some narrow thing only involving muds, but more to the point, what part of "herding cats" did you not get. But, sometimes you can get all the cats to agree that they really truly don't like some more generic things, like stuff that makes loud noises, even if *your* can doesn't have a problem with a vacuum cleaner, but does with the engine noise from large trucks. The point is to find to larger issue and make it clear that your issue is just one in a long list of stupid BS effected by that "one" larger issue. Some might think it quite silly, by itself. As one of 900 idiotic things that wackos don't like, because they think they *might* do more damage to some kids psyche than leaving them stupid and ignorant, its an entirely different matter. But yeah, one has to assess the risks "individually", and consider if its better to push the barrier, or just make it a point to rather loudly protest that it exists in the first place.
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Old 09-28-2007, 06:23 AM   #85
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Re: Sex & Violence

It's the same kind of fallacy as the question 'Can God create a stone he cannot lift'. Regardless of the answer it proves that God cannot be all mighty. In the same manner 'all morality is subjective' is an objective moral law if true, and hence a fallacy.

In a mutual fashion 'all truth is subjective' is a fallacy as well, and it's probably easier for most people to see why it's illogical to state so.

Just because various groups claim their often awkward and contradicting objective moral laws are correct isn't an argument for the non existence of objective morality.
It at best proves that the subject of morality is a highly complex matter.
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Old 09-28-2007, 08:28 AM   #86
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Re: Sex & Violence

I've never had much sympathy with that argument. I realise that what you're supposed to say is along the lines of "if the answer is 'yes' then there is something God cannot do (lift the stone) and therefore He is not omnipotent, but if the answer is 'no' then there is something He cannot do (create the stone) and therefore He is not omnipotent". But frankly I think that's rubbish.

The answer to the question is clearly "no", and that doesn't set any limits on God's omnipotence because the concept of "a stone that is too heavy for an omnipotent God to lift" is meaningless. It's like suggesting that God is not omnipotent because He can't create a triangle with 4 sides. Clearly, He can create triangles, and He can create things with four sides, and He can even simultaneously amend every single person's grasp of English in such a way that the phrase "four-sided triangle" actually makes sense. But to say that He can't create a four-sided triangle is no different from saying that He can't create a habbityglabbityglibbityglotchet. It is possible to string together individually meaningful words in English in a way that is grammatically consistent but which makes the whole phrase semantic gibberish; "four-sided triangle" and "a stone too heavy for an omnipotent God to lift" are prime examples.

While we're at it, obviously the egg came before the chicken - unless you're a creationist, in which case the chicken came first.

(Actually that reminds me of a cartoon: chicken and egg in bed together, chicken happily smoking a cigarette, and the fed-up looking egg muttering "well, I guess we figured that one out.")
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Old 09-28-2007, 01:09 PM   #87
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Re: Sex & Violence

What you're saying is that God is bound by the limits of logic. If that's the case omnipotence is an illogical concept since it implies transcending the boundaries of logic.
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Old 09-28-2007, 03:29 PM   #88
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Re: Sex & Violence

True, as far as it goes. But the problem isn't that many groups have mutually contradictory views on what it is. The problem is that its a linguistic construct, layered on top of a system (the brain), which is 500 times more universal a machine than any computer. And trying to claim that there is a single objective moral code is a bit like insisting that there is one true operating system, of which all existing systems are just weak copies. Worse, with the brain, the hardware changes "as" the OS is built, so the only claim you can logically make about moral codes, and how objective they are, end up being 100% based on the "current" state of the brain, at the time you examined the moral code inside it. Otherwise, its quite meaningless with respect to any other living person.

At best, one could say that there is a **statistically** objective moral code of some sort, which maximizes freedom of action, while allowing for acceptable risks. The problem of course being that some people don't see some things as risks, including the imho damage caused by forcing strict patterns of thought on them, others consider some risks irrationally higher than they truly are, and more time gets spent either justifying those positions (by making up fake research based on the "current" state of things, which doesn't say anything about if that state is valid to start with), or argue against other positions. One of the fundamental ironies of having morals and ethics is that most everyone agree that creating experiments to **actually** test if changing a particular moral stance has a negative or positive impact is unacceptable, so in the rare cases someone does come up with a vague test, like for the effects of violence on kids, you get the equivalent of, "If someone eats, do they stop being hungry?", to which the only answer you can arrive at logically is, "Yes, until they get hungry again." Yet, when discussing something like violent behavior, the fact that only a fraction of people in real life *act* in such a manner, despite similar levels of exposure in their lives, is ignored, in favor of, "Do kids get violent after watching violent stuff?", to which they *project* the delusional answer, "Yes, and it isn't just temporary." Huh??? How do you know, without breaking your own code of ethics, by running long term tests? You can't.

And, just to be clear, its worse with nudity, porn, etc. Its considered, by the vast majority, unacceptable to even *try* to run a simplistic experiment on those subjects, so **all** of the so called studies are little more than made up rubbish where some clown asks leading questions of adults, then extrapolates what they "think" it did to them, while, again, ignoring the **huge** number of people exposed to either the same thing, or more (nudists/naturists anyone...) with no negative outcome at all. But then, this is what can be expected. The sort of people pushing the idea that nudity is worse than violence have shown not the slightest abhorrence to the idea of lying outright, misquoting real science, or just making up a mix of unprovable (never mind simply verifiable) anecdotal stories and statistics based on nothing but numbers they "imagine" are true, based on their personal level of fear about the subject.

Oh, and just wondering, why is it that both the web sites and emails from these sorts of people almost always in Comic Sans and/or using nearly random font sizes and clashing colors? If that isn't a sign of insanity in and of itself, I can't imagine what is. And they manage to show their insanity through this sort of stuff *even* when they manage to write coherently (which in the case of email from them is rare indead). lol I am serious, they really do this, though I can't find one of the examples at the moment. Its just nuts.
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Old 09-28-2007, 04:57 PM   #89
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Re: Sex & Violence

So if the universe is such a logical place, why has logic failed to explain morality clearly?
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Old 09-28-2007, 06:46 PM   #90
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Re: Sex & Violence

Here is the thing about why having thoughts of pedophilia, rape, or beastiality etc, are repugnant - antisocial behavior escalates. Before someone goes out and rapes children, they fantasize about raping children. Eventually, the fantasies become compelling. Many child rapists feel very bad after.
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Old 09-29-2007, 08:43 AM   #91
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Re: Sex & Violence

I've no doubt that murderers have violent thoughts before they actually commit murder too. The problem is, if you lock up everyone who has ever had violent thoughts, you'd have to lock up the entire population. The vast majority of people who have violent thoughts do not go on to commit murder, and to treat everyone who has ever had violent thoughts as a future murderer is not only stupid, it is profoundly wrong and unfair.

It also makes an absolute nonsense of the whole concept of individual responsibility. Have you ever looked at something in a shop that you couldn't afford and wished you had it? Would it make sense to lock you up for shop-lifting just because you've had those thoughts? Clearly not; wanting something and actually taking it are two completely different things. If you treat wanting something and stealing something as equally morally reprehensible, that means that actually stealing it is no worse than wanting it. Surely you don't believe that?

Similarly, virtually every human male on the planet has, at one time or another, had sexual thoughts about a person who is not, and could not ever be, attracted to them, and would therefore be upset if the male in question actually made sexual advances towards them. Most of those males have not gone on to actually commit rape. Again, it would simply be daft to lock up every single person who has ever had a sexual thought about someone who would be harmed if they acted on those thoughts; the difference between fantasising about someone and actually trying to rape them is rather an important one.

My suspicion is that an equally tiny minority of those who have sexual feelings towards children ever actually act on those feelings, and it is wrong to condemn someone as a future rapist, either of adults or of children, simply because they have fantasies. If they ever try to act on those fantasies and rape someone, fine: lock them up and throw away the key. But you're on a very slippery slope indeed if you start to lock up people because of their thoughts.

A person's thoughts are his own and no one else's; and should remain so.
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Old 09-29-2007, 09:11 AM   #92
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Re: Sex & Violence

Most likely for the same reason few people truly understand the theory of relativity, especially the math that is involved.

If theoretical morality is as complicated to grasp as theoretical physics you'll find very few people capable to formulate moral laws. They could pass their practical moral knowledge on to the masses, but the masses wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the real deal and bullocks.

Not to mention that if someone came forward with a solid logical foundation for morality he'd be ridiculed as much as Darwin was when he first published his theories, especially when the conclusions are completely different from main stream religious and political believes.
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Old 09-29-2007, 09:58 AM   #93
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Re: Sex & Violence



1 in four girls are sexually molested , and 1 in six boys. So, if those who are abusing children are only tiny minority of those fantasizing about, almost everyone must be fantasizing about it.

Additionally, some of those fantasizing about it are supplementing those fantasies with pornography, so while they may not be personally molesting anyone, but they are monetarily supporting the abuse.

I agree, that thought should not be legislated. But to say that people are entitled to think what they like, and there's no harm in thought is disingenuous. People should censor their own thoughts. Then maybe they'll stop touching their little nieces in nephews in inappropriate places. (30-40% of abused children are abused by family members.)

Thought leads to deed. We're responsible for our deeds and our thoughts. The correlation is direct.
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Old 09-29-2007, 10:06 AM   #94
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Re: Sex & Violence



The link above was the first on the page when I did a google search for statistics on sexual abuse. Lest you think I hunted to find the figures, take a look at the other 2,150,000, links. The numbers above are not out of line with the sites I checked - actually lower than I expected. I remembered the figure 1 in three. Though, granted, I only checked ten of the links. not all two and one eighth million.
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Old 09-29-2007, 02:28 PM   #95
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Re: Sex & Violence

Yeah. Its a cycle. I once heard someone that was not that far gone (they would have never had thoughts of those three things, but where into a range of things that are fringe). They described it like this - If you have problems having normal relationships, then you start imagining abnormal ones. Once you are finally able to have a normal one, for most people, the stranger and less accepted fantasies get replaced with normal ones. Now, obviously for some people, who have impulse control issues, or other problems, this can escalate out of control, but no more so than any other such behavior, nor in stable people. Just as some people can hunt all their lives and never go wacko, but some people start with pulling legs off insects, escalate to killing the neighbors cat, and *eventually* end up killing people. Its only a fraction of the populace that does that, and usually there are either issues of abuse in their childhood background, or literal physical defects in their brain, which result in them mis-processing the behavior in the first place. You don't generally hear of someone with a normal childhood, unless they later suffer certain types of head injuries, one day deciding that they like the sound people make when being killed, and starting a murder spree, for example.

While you are correct in how things tend to escalate, its more complex than that, and not any where close to as black and white.

Oh, and just to be clear, the one reason that I don't think Beastiality "fits" in the category you put them in is that, quite frankly, there are quite a lot of people that engage in it, and the number of people that get caught humping the neighbors poodle isn't that huge. Most engage in the behavior in closed environments, with their own animals, etc. One might compare them with people that go to S&M clubs, more than with the other types of behaviors. And yeah, I know that some people consider S&M anti-social too, but that's beside the point.
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Old 09-29-2007, 02:46 PM   #96
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Re: Sex & Violence

I don't know if s&m counts as anti-social. I mean whatever adults want to consentually do with one another, is pretty much their own business. What they do with their pets, their children, their family's children, theier neighbor's children, that's a legitimate concern for society.
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Old 09-29-2007, 05:11 PM   #97
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Re: Sex & Violence

From a biological perspective a human female becomes an adult at age 12-15 when the periods start. So sexual attraction can be expected and while you could call it child molestation you don't need to be a pedophile to rape a 15 years old.

As should also be obvious humans have many neonatal features. A baby chimp and a baby human look a lot alike, but when the chimp matures it loses neonatal features while humans retain them. This indicates that pedophilia plays a role in human sexual selection, and given that infants have a large head to body ratio that makes sense since selecting for neonatal features would result in larger brains upon adulthood. So humans are pedophilic by nature since men like women who look like babies.

Regarding the statistics, they seem biased. They claim that somewhere around 90% of the molestations aren't reported and that hence 1 in 4 girls are molested. Next there's a rather large age grouping of age 1 to 17, and little information whatsoever about known factors that correlate with sexual abuse.
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Old 09-29-2007, 06:56 PM   #98
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Re: Sex & Violence

Some notes on this, specifically about "Reported cases of child sexual abuse reached epidemic proportions, with a reported 322 percent increase from 1980 to 1990." It was in the 80s that they started to get *a lot* of cases of claimed abuse by uncles, grandparents, etc., and in which the methods used, since no physical evidence existed in most cases, was precisely the sort of, "Here is a dolly, what did uncle Buck do to the dolly? Did he do this?", type stuff. Much of the 322 percent increase was false positives and innocent people being sent to jail, based on questionable testimony from psychologists that where 10-20 years *behind* the curve with respect to cognitive development models and what that said about the viability of *asking* a small child, especially one you just told to "pretend" as part of the interrogation, what if anything someone did to them. There are not *huge* waves running through the system now, as the validity of those tests, the court cases and even the statistics derived from them are called into universal question.

Then you get things like the 1 in 3. Sure, everyone knows they heard it or read it some place, but the fact that you can't has to make you seriously question what the source was. It sounds **very** similar to the statistic used in the TV commercials, referring to child solicitation online. The problem with such statistics is that they are usually traceable to one of those "family values" groups that like to fudge numbers. In the case of the TV commercial, the real statistics where not bad enough when *limited* to solicitation from adults, so they hacked up the study, in order to present a number that, more truthfully, should have said, "One in five children are solicited by other children, or asked if they have had sex yet with their boy friend, or talked to about if they are still virgins, by other kids, while a much smaller number where *actually* approached by an adult playing an being their age." But you know, that just wouldn't create the necessary unrealistic panic they where looking for. lol



"(A "sexual solicitation" is defined as a "request to engage in sexual activities or sexual talk or give personal sexual information that were unwanted or, whether wanted or not, made by an adult."

Using this definition, one teen asking another teen if her or she is a virgin—or got lucky with a recent date—could be considered "sexual solicitation.") Not a single one of the reported solicitations led to any actual sexual contact or assault. Furthermore, almost half of the "sexual solicitations" came not from "predators" or adults but from other teens."

However, given who is currently in charge of "policy" about the sort of information (you know, the guy that ordered the national health organizations to *remove* info on condoms and safe sex, and instead push abstinence on their online websites...), false or not, that we get, its not surprising that finding the real data is far harder than finding an endless run of pages that insist that the made up, exaggerated, out of context or just plain intentionally misinterpreted claims are all accurate. And the news media... When in the last 50 years have they ***ever*** checked their facts beyond determining "if" someone said it, rather than, you know, if the people saying it are telling the truth or not.

Yeah. We have a serious problem, but instead of dealing with the "real" predators, and using all our resources to deal with them, we are wasting time and money going after everyone from uncle Fred, whose niece just got ****ed off at him that week because he forgot to buy her a birthday gift, to some harmless guy doing physical studies for art, who had the bad taste of picking someone under 18 to take pictures of, to people *gasp* drawing pictures that, if these people where right, would make 99% of the anime artist and buyers of manga in Japan and the US pedophiles (which would probably be 80% of the entire population of Japan and 50-60% of the nerds in the US). Mean while, the nice guy down the street, who doesn't let his kids go to normal school, and never seems to date much, despite being single, and what ever other warning signs no one is paying attention to, because they are more worried that some 30 year old might put "panties" in the same sentence with "13 year old" on a web page some place, while writing a story or designing a mud, etc.

Yeah, we are going to get *real* far in reversing the trend, when all the real predators need to do is keep their heads down and go unnoticed, while the "family values" people are dunking the rest of us in the local river, to see if we will float like a duck, or sink and drown like an innocent.
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Old 09-29-2007, 07:15 PM   #99
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Re: Sex & Violence

Was in a discussion a while back about the issue and I still don't see a rational explanation for why pets *do* fall into a category of "society needs to care about it". Seriously, the only arguments that hold water at all are a) harm to the pet, b) harm to the person doing it and c) lack of consent. A is absurd, as is C, in the case of any animal of sufficient size to survive an attempt. Why? Because animals are, in general, less likely to allow something they don't like and far more well equipped to point this out to you, in a very painful and possible lethal way, than people are. IF your doing it to an animal too small to survive, you are way sicker than just being into animals. As for B... Any damn fool that wants to try to force themselves on something that can bite, scratch, kick or even strangle them to death, when it gets ****ed off at what is going on, deserves what happens to them imho. I suppose one could call it, "protection of idiots from endangering themselves", but there are about a billion other far stupider things that people legally do all the time, and we don't stop them from doing those things. The animal rights people know that B isn't a valid argument at all, which is why they never use it. Their argument is always that the "poor helpless animal that usually outweighs the person, is naturally armed, and lacks the self control to not lash out when they don't like what is being done to them, is going to be hurt in some fashion, because they can't 'consent' to it." Well, I don't know about you, but being able to refuse violently *sounds like* lack of consent to me. lol

Any other argument just amounts to "Ewe yuck! Well of course people *should* have some say in if you do *that*in your home." Same argument once used, and still used in some parts of the country, to declare certain sexual positions and/or toys illegal to use, or in the later case, buy or own (if you do something dumb, like having a house fire, so the *authorities* stumble across the collection you snuck in from the store in the next state).

"Ewe yuck!", is not a valid qualification for something to be, "important for society to stop people doing.", if it was, (and there are those that would have such be the case), damn near everything from what paintings you where allowed to have on your walls to how many feet from the shower you walked before you had to be dressed would be on the list of, "Ewe yuck!", stuff you where not allowed to do. All you have to do is look at existing and defunct state laws to see the kind of insane BS you get when that becomes the criteria.
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Old 09-30-2007, 11:16 AM   #100
shasarak
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Re: Sex & Violence

You'll note the absence of small-print at your link. If you find figures like that on sites where there is small-print, you'll find that the figure is calculated by including things like boys at school trying to look up your skirt in class or (particularly) your parents obliging you to kiss an elderly relative when you don't want to as part of the family gathering at Christmas. Of course the latter is not exactly a joyous experience, but it isn't exactly life-destroying either.

There is some debate on this point, naturally. From wikipedia (link: ):

(emphasis added)

You also need to remember that, even in cases of genuine sexual abuse, this is including a large number of cases where the abuser is roughly the same age as the child at the time - or at any rate well below adult age. I'm not sure to what extent it makes sense to lump cases like that into the same classification as cases where the abuser is an adult. An abusive 11-year-old boy may grow up to be an abusive adult, but that doesn't mean that the victims of his abuse will still be 10-year-old girls; they're more likely to be adults.

On top of that, as shadowfyr has explained at some length, certain investigative techniques result in a vast number of false positives being reported when it comes to child abuse. There was a famous case in England in 1987 (in Cleveland, specifically) where a doctor named Marietta Higgs decided that Reflex Anal Dilatation (i.e. the spontaneous opening of the anal sphincter in response to gentle spreading of the buttocks) was a completely reliable indicator of anal abuse. She, a fellow doctor, and social services managed to get over 100 children taken into care as a consequence, without ever stopping to ask how many of them might simply be constipated.



In 1991 there was an even more absurd scandal in Orkney where a large group of children were supposed to have been subjected to "ritual satanic abuse". It was subsequently demonstrated that there was not a single shred of evidence to back the claims. A supposed hoodd rope, for example, turned out to be someone's graduation gown. One memorably "non-leading" question asked by a social worker of a child in that case was "when were you given the orange drink that made you sleepy?" - this despite the fact that the only thing the child had said about the drink was that it was "orange".



What if they don't pay for it? More importantly, what if the pornography doesn't actually involve any real children?

Another thing to question is the rather curious notion of child sexual abuse being performed on an industrial scale purely in response to financial demand - i.e. the idea that people who have no sexual interest in children suddenly decide to abuse to children solely because there is money to be made from doing it. I find this idea rather questionable. I think it's much more likely that when children are abused on film they are children who would have been abused anyway; the fact that there might be money to made might encourage someone to capture the act on camera rather than keeping it secret, but I doubt that it results in more children being abused. The only difference is that it makes it easier to catch the abusers.

It's a lot more than 40%.

Last edited by shasarak : 09-30-2007 at 11:31 AM.
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