Liberal Arts Major
http://www.khou.com/news/state/stories/khou081008_ar_porntext.f31234e3.html
NEWARK -- A 15-year-old girl is accused of distributing nude photos of herself to other minors, and one state legislator is questioning whether she should be labeled a sex offender.
SANGER - A controversy has arisen out of Denton County involving a 13-year-old boy, a cell phone and a text message. That message has landed the middle schooler in juvenile detention on child pornography charges.
Let me begin by saying WHAT THE FUCK?! WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK?!
Now that that's out of my system, I can calmly consid - WHAT THE FUCK, MAN?! SERIOUSLY, WHAT THE FUCKING SHIT?!
Right, so it seems state legislators all over the nation have taken to criminalizing the mind-numbingly - emphasis on "numb" and "mind", in that order - insidious act of taking a picture of yourself. To quote from the first article:
"Clearly it was in an illegal act," he said Tuesday. "Clearly it was an unacceptable act, and there needs to be consequences from that, but we need to make sure the punishment is a reasonable punishment."Clearly.
The case with the fifteen-year-old girl is laden with the most outrageous rhetoric, so I'll discuss that one at length and summarize my thoughts afterward.
After spending the weekend incarcerated, she pleaded deny Monday to both charges: illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material, a second-degree felony; and possession of criminal tools, a fifth-degree felony.
That's right - throw the little runt in jail with the rest of the thieves and whores! Human slime, all of them! But more importantly, let's have a look at these charges. Illegal use of a minor? "Use", by any non-retarded-as-fuck legal standard, implies some action performed on an individual by an external agent. This is why you don't go to jail for sexual molestation if you're a 13 year-old caught masturbating. (Yet.) The second charge is laughable in the extreme, equipped with the sort of ambiguity that lets the police department ratchet up the number of charges filed on virtually any case just to see if one of them sticks (i.e. if you ever use anything while committing a crime, like say a knife, you're in possession of criminal tools) - and it has the added bonus of being unfalsifiable, so if you're guilty of one charge, you're guilty of that one as well. Although, perhaps the law has a point: cellphones and breasts are the greatest threat to Western Civilization.
"There's a part of juvenile section of Senate Bill 10 (Ohio's version of the federal Adam Walsh Act) that says if the child is a first-time offender and age 14 or 15 that the judge can decide not to make her register," she said.
That's reassuring. The legislature foresaw this sort of thing and put a loophole in there to allow an out against a portion of the insanity, but didn't find it necessary to rule out the insanity altogether. Ballot or bullet, indeed.
...and said this case was not something the legislature envisioned.
Woops, looks like the legislature didn't foresee anything but just decided to put that clause in for the giggles. If only all policymakers paid such close attention to the laws they were passing.
"Clearly it was in an illegal act," he said Tuesday. "Clearly it was an unacceptable act, and there needs to be consequences from that, but we need to make sure the punishment is a reasonable punishment."
It only takes a modicum of intelligence to see through this bullshit. First, "illegal" means "there exists a law that prohibits this" and nothing else, no moral implication whatsoever. You don't see Mr. Hottinger defending the stoning of adulterous women in backwater shit-holes on the basis that adultery is "illegal". It's a blatant non sequitur to follow that up with a proclamation that the act was also "unacceptable". Unacceptable to who? Clearly it wasn't on your mind when you were drafting the law to end the unspeakable distribution of child pornography - after all, you didn't "envision" this scenario at all. No, it's made unacceptable because your shitty-ass law just so happens to make it so. It must be nice to be so fucking amoral that you feel free to make ethical decisions with material implications on the rock-solid basis of "woops, my bad".
During assemblies, Oswalt talked about the dangers, both in personal embarrassment and contribution to child pornography on the Internet.
Right, "personal embarrassment" justifies the the use of coerced funds - your tax dollars at work! - to deprive the embarrassed of their liberty, right to vote, etc. It's all about protecting people. By internationally publicizing the fact that they embarrassed themselves.
What's this now about child pornography? Why is that illegal again? Is it because it harms the children involved? What happens when the child is also the pornographer? In order to protect her from harm, we have to throw her in jail and make her register as a sex offender? No, that's fucking stupid. Is it because the thought that somebody out there is really enjoying his child porn makes us feel icky? Not sure that justifies throwing the kid in the porn in jail. So that leaves the argument that the proliferation of child porn results in the viewer of said child porn going out and sexually assaulting people, a thought lacking in empirical justification with the added bonus of being theoretically bankrupt. Quite the basis for this case, the argument being that the girl in question is using her breasts to spread misery and sexual molestation indirectly on the off chance that the people who receive her picture put it all over the internet and that alone then turns otherwise perfectly normal individuals into child molesters. Clearly, this is an unacceptable act. No doubt there.
According to Ohio law, 2907.323(A)(3) states anyone possessing material that shows a minor in a state of nudity is guilty of a fifth-degree felony. The violation also might qualify the juvenile as a Tier I sexual offender, which requires annual registration for a decade. The section of the law the girl, who is a foster child, was charged with allows parents or guardians to take photos of their unclothed children for a list of acceptable purposes but does not provide an exemption for the child themselves.
Ah, so the State has the power to regulate what you can and can't do with your family photos. That makes perfect sense.
Hottinger said the portions of the juvenile section of Ohio's Megan's Law, enacted in 2002 and replaced Jan. 1, were crafted to resemble their adult counterparts for good reason.
Whoa there! I thought you had no idea this sort of thing could happen. What's this now about writing a section in the law specifically to address this sort of thing? So, now that you realize how depraved this law is, you want to save face by saying "I didn't see this coming!" but you're not willing to give up your "tough on sexual predation perpetrated by the targets of sexual predators" stance on the off chance that your constituents are as intellectually expendable as you are? Sorry man, can't have it both ways.
"What we're aiming at was a growing problem that we were seeing amongst juveniles and that was they were committing some very serious adult-like crimes," he said.
Now you're just confused. You see, the crimes are crimes for adults because they're assumed to be cognizant of the full moral register of their actions whereas a minor (a legal category arbitrarily set by the legislature with no psycho-biological foundation, mind you) is presumed to be as dumb as... as... well, as dumb as you are, and therefore incapable of making the judgment not to have sex with the middle-aged actuary displeased with his home life. When a minor performs an action which was criminalized specifically because of the difference between children and adults, you better have something better than "it's adult-like" in order to justify criminalizing it for them, too. Otherwise you're just a douchebag. Or maybe the "adult crime" isn't the distribution of child pornography. Maybe it's the distribution of photos of yourself naked. Maybe Mr. Hottinger just doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about.
If the girl charged Monday is classified as a sexual offender, Brindisi said as a juvenile in this instance she would not be subject to publication on the public Web sites maintained by the Licking County Sheriff's Office or the state but would have to register for 20 years as the law states.
What was that about minors being utterly incapable of rational decision-making? With this lofty declaration at hand, how is it acceptable to brand this girl as a sex offender - a title that comes with a comfy package of restricted liberties and diminished quality of life - for twenty years for one of those irrational decisions she made in her teen years? How is the idea that the quote-unquote mistakes of your teen years should carry on well into your adult life reconcilable with the premise that teens are too dumb-as-shit to be responsible for themselves at all?
A status conference in her case is scheduled for Oct. 20. She is on house arrest and may not have a cell phone or access to the Internet without adult supervision and for no purpose other than school work.
Of course. Why wait until she's actually convicted of something to start eroding her freedom? Cute, though, that she still has the privilege of doing her State-assigned school work. I'm sure she prizes that education.
The case of the 13 year-old boy is less outrageous, but deserves a couple of notes.
He doesnt know what a felony means. He doesnt understand what pornography means, said one parent.
So... he's retarded?
Hes a 13-year-old child. Hes in middle school. Hes supposed to be out there having fun, hanging out and playing football, which he loves to do. Instead, hes having to sit at home with mom and dad, said his mother.
Hm, what other governments are well-known for throwing around house arrest orders like nobody's business? I don't know why, but the names "Mao" and "Stalin" keep floating into my head.
In sum, there are a few points that stick out here:
- If you want to see some "criminal tools", look no further than the DA's office that came up with that gem.
- Criminal charges don't even have to pretend to make sense.
- Legislators don't know what the fuck they're doing.
- Their constituents also don't know what the fuck they're doing. Whoever believes representative democracy produces fair and equitable outcomes clearly hasn't factored in the sheer idiocy of the demos.
- In one state, a boy gets prosecuted for receiving a picture of a classmate naked. In another state, a girl gets prosecuted for distributing a picture of herself naked. The reason for both of these isolated prosecutions is, without a word of additional explanation, "child pornography", as if child porn is an entire field of jurisprudential thought in and of its own. If Mr. Hottinger, the architect of this oh-so-impressive law, is any indication, nobody even knows why "child pornography" is criminal, anyway. This joins the wide swath of rhetorical devices propagated solely for the concentration and preservation of political power - a category which includes "drugs", "illegals", "poverty", "price gouging", and other monsters hiding in the closet - that have become nothing but a means to an end and have long since lost any shred of meaning. It's easy to defend inanity when it's the gospel truth.
- The public and lawmakers are so desensitized to jail and the deprivation of liberty that nobody ever even bats an eye anymore when teenagers are put under house arrest for no tangible reason.
- Time has no meaning to lawmakers and police. What's 10, 20 years of psychological torture between friends?
Oh, and
NEWARK
I suppose that's all you need to know.
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~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Editor
http://www.newsarama.com/comics/100810-CBLDF-Manga-Case.html
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"I'm not perverted! I'm just immensely fascinated!" ~Lisa Yadomaru, Bleach
"Speed is... weight. Have you ever been kicked at the speed of light?" ~Admiral Kizaru, One Piece
"There's a pony in the shop, but don't buy it. It might do something unfortunate to you." ~from the first Summoner's Seal topic
Liberal Arts Major
No.
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~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu