"It's better to be ignorant than misinformed."
Well now, in Texas, it's possible to be both. And these people call OBAMA a fascist?! (Well, I guess when you re-write history, anything's possible!) It's unbelievable. If you have to go THAT FAR to INDOCTRINATE CHILDREN into you ideology, at what point does it become easier to just admit YOU'RE WRONG?! RELIGION doesn't even take indoctrination this far!
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Speaking of which...Here's one for Steve: The Devil is in the Vatican, according to chief Exorcist.
Dude, it's MADNESS. MADNESS, I say! And this ins't some wierd sect or cult, it's the ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH. The single largest Christian denomonation IN THE WORLD. Are people responsible for their own shortcomings? Nah. It's the DEVIL. And of course it's GOD that's responsible for all GOOD. B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T. PEOPLE should be held accountable for their fuck-ups and PEOPLE deserve CREDIT when they do good things!
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Paul Krugman should be the Fed Chairman. Or head of the SEC. Or treasury Secretary. Or just run our WHOLE DAMNED ECONOMY. But what does HE KNOW, right? While Libertarians were busy bringing about the biggest economic meltdown since Herbert Hoover all THIS pinko liberal did was win the NOBEL PRIZE in economics.
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Here's a sexty one from SLATE. And I think it typifies their Conservtaive bias, or at least their tendency to fall into the trap of framing issues from a conseravtive POV. Here's what I mean...
from SLATE:
A teenager in Wisconsin named Anthony Stancl set up a fake Facebook profile, pretending to be a girl. Seventeen or 18 at the time, Stancl used the profile to lure 30 of the boys he went to high school with to send him nude pictures or videos of themselves. Then Stancl threatened to post the material on the Internet unless they performed sex acts with him. Seven of them say they did—and that Stancl took pictures of them with his cell-phone camera.OK, the CRIME here... has NOTHING whatsoever to do with SEXTING! Since when are rape and blackmail not illegal? The sexting is completely IMMATERIAL to the crime being committed! They go on to give the following insane false-equivalency:
How can states draft laws that protect against Anthony Stancl without sweeping in more innocent behavior, like that of the students in Valparaiso?
Umm, sorry... WHY would we need NEW LAWS to protect people from BLACKMAIL and RAPE?! Especially when the rape was coerced by the blackmail, and largely perpetrated on MINORS?! Last time I checked that kind of behavior carried some of the strictest penalties allowed for non-lethal crimes! What the hell are they TALKING ABOUT?! In the words of my good friend, Jules Winfield: It's aint in the same ballpark. It ain't in the same league. It ain't even the same fucking SPORT!
Should sexting be a felony? NO, morons.
Should blackmailing minors into letting you rape them be illegal? Um... YES, but it already, most profoundly, IS, morons.
Is sending someone a naked picture of your 16 year old ex-girlfriend a crime? Arguably, but it falls under "general harrassment." Is it a SEX CRIME? NO. FUCKING. WAY. Is is CHILD PORNOGRAPHY? In the words of Gorobei Katayama: Are you kidding me?
The difference between sexting and kiddie-porn is the same as the difference between 16 and 6. I'm not saying that a victim doesn't have some right to redress, but, OTOH: You GAVE the other person the picture. It's THEIRS NOW. They can do anything they want with it, unless they're making money, and then you're just entitled to your cut.
EDUCTAION, not CRIMINALIZATION is what's needed here. There is a very easy way to not have your naked ass posted all over the internet: DON'T SEND SOMEONE YOUR NAKED PICTURE. It's pretty easy actually. I'm 37 years old and the olny picture of me naked, ANYWHERE was taken in 1976, when I was three and sitting in the tub. Oh... and maybe another one from about a year later of me taking a leak behind a tree in our back yard.
The other real answer here is that we need to stop being so hung up on nudity and teenaged sexuality. Someone see you naked? Guess what? Despite what you might have been told, it's NOT THE END OF THE WORLD. Embarassing? Sure. But you DID distribute naked pictures of yourself, so...
I'm sorry. While I'm not a nudist/naturist myself, I've read a lot of their literature and I'm convinced that they've got it right when it comes to the human body. Our hangups are largely societally conditioned. I'm strongly convinced of that.
But EDUCATION. Give people the infomration they need, and let them make their own choices. Good or bad, there's no reason AT ALL to be talking about jail-time and sex offender lists! Civil suits, for invasion of privacy or harrassment maybe. And you'd have a pretty steep burden of proof even then.
That Jefferson "quote" seems to be a paraphrase of a line from Jefferson's book on Virginia: "Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong." Though I can't definitively rule out that other wording as a Jefferson quote (he said similar things at different times), it's unfamiliar to me, and I doubt it.
ReplyDeleteWatch yourself on that Slate story. In my entire long history of taking up unpopular causes, my opinions about matters related to teens and sex have drawn more outright visceral hatred than all but one other thing I've written.
I'd get rid of age-of-consent laws. Wipe 'em out. If a child is abused, that's a child abuse case, not a matter of "statutory rape." The idea that consent can be removed as an issue in a matter of a charge of rape, and that a "victim" can be said to be a "victim" against their will is very offensive to me. In almost every prosecution, the case involves either actual rape, where lazy fucking prosecutors who don't want to have to go with the more significant and harder-to-prove charge take the easy way out, or cases where some adult or even the state itself doesn't approve of a consensual relationship and decides to stick their nose into it, instead of minding their own business.
Nebraska had a particularly heinous example of the latter a few years ago. An utterly unscrupulous attorney general, a creature of the religious right with his eyes on a Senate seat, prosecuted a 22-year-old man for having sex with his wife, who was 13. The two had been involved in a relationship for some time, and, with the approval of both of their families, had gone to Kansas to get married.
Enter the very publicly self-righteous AG John Bruning, who declared that the marriage "doesn't matter," was the product of a "ridiculous" law in Kansas, and declared "I'm not going to stand by while a grown man... has a relationship with a 13-year-old--now 14-year-old--girl." It didn't matter that the law, the couple, and both families were united against him. Bruning pressed ahead mercilessly, first taking the case out of the hands of the local district attorney, after the D.A. showed reluctance to proceed (an unprecedented move), then filing first-degree sexual assault charges (which could have meant up to 50 years in prison). The families economically broke themselves trying to defend the husband, and he was forced to plead guilty. By then, the couple had a child (the wife had been pregnant when Bruning had become involved), and the husband was sentenced to prison. He served 14 months, and was released earlier this year.
Think of the situation in which everyone finds themselves after this. Because of a scumbag right-wing politicians' desire for higher office, a family with a new child is economically destroyed, the husband sent to prison for over a year (which all the nightmares that entails for someone convicted of such an offense), and branded, for the rest of his life, as a sex offender.
(The only good things to come of it: Bruning lost his bid for the U.S. Senate.)
My basic position is the standard liberal one, that it isn't the job of the state to regulate our intimate interactions with others. Further, I'd argue that the people who WANT the state to regulate such things are, by definition, totalitarians. If the state can dictate who has sex with who and how, on what logical grounds can it be denied the power to dictate ANYTHING?
But when people read an argument like that, they see images of lecherous 50-year-old Svengali-ist men putting a spell on their 14-year-old daughters, and they react in a crazed, visceral, but utterly brain-dead manner, and I get pelted with it every time I bring up issues related to it. So watch out--you're right, but that sort of talk can make you the most popular guy to find unpopular.
And, btw, the thing I wrote that won the World Championship Most Hated prize was when I used one of the early anniversaries of Sept. 11th to point out that there are a lot of real problems about which we should be more concerned than Bush's mostly made-up terrorism problem, and suggested that, when it came to Sept. 11th, and the persistent reliving of the event, people should get over it. TONS of hate-mail over that one.
ReplyDeleteClassy,
ReplyDeleteI'm more than willing, HUNGRY in fact, to get some hate mail from conservatives over this. I'd actually have a harder time arguing with someone taking a more liberal approach the the issue - I don't think the necessarily IS a "standard liberal position," but I certainly don't disagree with the way you state it. In any case, I say: BRING. IT. ON!
As for your claims that terrorism is mostly a "made up issue"? Sounds like a case I was making to a conservtaive friend of mine a few years back. I can't remeber the exact numbers, and I'm not going to re-figure them all right now, but I added up the number of Americans killed in terrorist attacks, anywhere in the world - EVER. It came to something like 5000. (And no, I didn't count fatalities of US Troops on foreign soil. Those deaths were avoidable: Don't send them.) That was over a roughly 30-35 year time period, 1965 or 1970 to 2002 maybe? (This would have been about 6 months after 9/11, as the case for invading Iraq was starting to form.) Then I pointed out that around 40,000 people die EVERY YEAR in just THIS COUNTRY ALONE in traffic accidents. So... EIGHT TIMES as many Americans die every year in this country DRIVING THEIR CARS, as have been killed WORLD WIDE by Terrorists in the past 30. He didn't appreciate the implication, but it's sure hard to argue with the sheer numbers. LOL
Again, I say: BRING IT ON. Facts are on my side, and they do have a rather pesky liberal bias, don't they?
Thanks for your comment.
When I said "standard liberal position," I was speaking in the more general sense of "liberal," not necessarily the contemporary political sense. I probably should have been clearer on the point. A lot of those who call themselves "liberals" gave me as much grief as did the conservatives on those matters!
ReplyDeleteIt looks as if we were thinking in the same direction on Sept. 11th. The piece I wrote (and rewrote several times over the years) dealt with other things that kill us--auto accidents, smoking, even murder.
I also noted that terrorism was disappearing pre-Bush. Sept. 11th wasn't some bold new front of a terrorist upsurge--it was the last gasp of a dying way of doing business. Terrorist incidents hit a record low just before it. Thanks to Bush's War On Terrorism, terrorism shot back up to it's previous historical peak (sometime around 1986, as I recall).
The Bush administration, post-WOT, initially published incomplete numbers indicating a drop in terrorism, and made a big show of taking credit for it. When they were caught on the phony numbers, they claimed it was a bureaucratic accident. The actual numbers showed a huge upsurge in terrorism, and the administration immediately announced it would no longer be publishing terrorism numbers anymore (the government had published them for decades).
LOTS of hate directed at me over these things.
On your last item, I agree that sexting is not the problem. Criminalizing relatively innocent teen behavior is an overreaction to the misuse of technology by predatory individuals in desperate need of intervention and therapy.
ReplyDelete