Well, you are in the minority then. I am staggered by your ability to submarine your emapthy for both affected parties.

The reality is that most people disagree with you. This doesn't make them right, but it does give them some credence which you can't easily wash away with a snort and a wave of your hand.

Keep thinking really hard.

Heh... you did SORTA accuse some random coward that he was into kiddie porn with no evidence.

I recognize the aim of your post, but that seems rather baiting to me :-)

Personally, I think the issue with celebrities is not one of some sort of conspiracy cabal of rich and powerful, but one of human nature.

Someone who is famous and well known is a HUMAN. Their fans and friends identify with them and recognize their humanity.

Some guy from the news doing exactly the same thing is very very easy to dismiss as "DISGUSTING MONSTER".

It's a simple fact that in child sex cases, the family of the offender often feels the trial and sentencing are too harsh, but it is much less known that the victim often feels the same way.

Some people file this under something strange like Stockholm Syndrome, but in my opinion, it's simply the fact that the victim almost always knows the offender and sees him as a human. It is then hard to demonize him to the extent that society at large is capable of doing.

Think about it, if your brother/cousin/bestfriend were found tomorrow with 600 images of naked children on his computer, could you really feel the world was a better place if he was given 18 years in prison?

No, you would probably like to see him punished, but in a humane and justifiable way... say... with a year's house arrest.

In my opinion, that's what's happening here, not some right-wing conspiracy junk.

Agreed. Child porn is pretty unique in this regard. It's the cultural/legal equivalent of yelling "FIRE" in a crowded.... society.

This has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the government?

Did you read the case studies in the linked PDF? I didn't think so.

These people had clearance because of the rooms they needed to walk through but didn't have any real access to data. One was a telephone repairman at a military base. Others were mid-level office workers who had to be in secured areas for office work.

These weren't high level operatives. Just the low-hanging-fruit of the justice system.

All this proves is that there are A LOT of pedophiles in the country, and some of them tend to get caught now and then. Nothing else to see here, move along.

OR, there is an extremely large number of closeted pedophiles and it IS, IN FACT, a very small percentage of them that are dumb enough to get caught.

To be honest, I think that is the most likely case. There is nothing about being a pedophile that would make someone stupid or ignorant of the law and stigma, or the risks, and there is nothing to indicate that this is some sort of government conspiracy to screw over innocent people.

Research indicates there are likely approx 1.5 million pedophiles in the US (around 0.5% of the population based on several recent studies). That's about the same number of people as there are Muslims in the United States and about twice as many as all Buddhists in the US.

Food for thought.

Let me point out one thing that you might be partially correct about.

More than half (the FBI estimated around 60% in a paper in 1999) of child abuse that goes to trial IS, in fact, situational. It is an otherwise normal person doing something bad that they normally wouldn't do, under unusual circumstances.

However, the group "pedophiles" and the group "child molesters", while overlapping, are not equal. Many pedophiles never abuse children. Many who abuse children are not pedophiles (by a strict diagnostic criteria). Some pedophiles view child porn, some do not and keep their thoughts to themselves.

I'll leave the rest of the conclusions to you.

Frankly, the people in the linked PDF were folks like telephone repairmen and low level office workers. I doubt this was some sort of big publicity stunt. We're talking a dozen or so people here, nobody who really means anything to the organizations they represented....

I think there's reasonable evidence from a series of population surveys that around 0.5% of the population is attracted to kids, exclusively or primarily. That's about 1.5 million in the US, 35 million in the world.

Most manage to live a pretty normal life without doing illegal stuff, but even if 10% of those people do get porn at some point, that's still 150,000.

How many get caught? :-)

Well, research shows that you're an idiot. :-)

Just because you want it to be different doesn't mean it is. Simply accepting the fact that pedophilia is a sexual orientation like many others doesn't automatically make it acceptible and justified. It simply underscores the fact that humans who find themselves attracted to kids aren't "fundamentally broken". Research doesn't back that up at all. In fact, research indicates that the majority of them are profoundly normal in almost every way.

The image of a drooling pervert with low self-esteem and poor impulse control is based on studies out of the 1970s and 1980s that used population samples from high-security prisons and mental institutions. When you take people out of prisons and mental hospitals, wouldn't you expect them to be a tad off, from the norm?

There is shockingly little study on non-offending pedophiles, because of the social stigma of the topic, but what research there is indicates that something over 70% of exclusive pedophiles claim to have never abused a child and within that group, MMPI inventories and other social adjustment standards seem to lead us to believe that these people are very normal, well adjusted people, many of whom indicate they would remove those sexual feelings if they could, but they can't, so they have to learn to live with them.

I would also point out that the most common kind of child porn, according to a talk I heard a few years ago, are images and videos of teens that they take of themselves, alone in their bedroom, often on a webcam. These apparently outnumber other types of images by a notable factor.

But then again, feel free to continue to believe what makes you comfortable.

I was just thinking this.

The GP said "even an accusation" and I was thinking "someone doesn't have to be guilty in order to accuse them!!!"

So the problem isn't the people downloading it, so much as the way that it's perceived.

I recall India is currently voting on legislation to make child sexual abuse the only crime in the country that sets a "guilty until proven innocent" precedent.

Frightening!

It's pretty interesting that a couple of random phone calls "Mr xxx is a pedophile" would pretty much destroy most people's lives.

Doesn't that underscore a fundamental breakage in our social system?

You can be banned from several of those things for even being ACCUSED of abusing a child, even if it's absurd and false.

But I do agree, this is hardly a felony. I'm sure they simply shoehorned it into some existing law like "interrupting government operations" which is intended for a variety of uses.

The oil spill covers over 10,000 square miles.

Why must a photographer run over containment booms in order to get a picture of a small section of oil slick?

Besides, all the good pictures are from helicopters anyway. You can't obtain the scope of this from the surface.

I'm not sure why you're arguing this so strenuously, other than to pretend to toss around your (air quotes) expert knowledge.

Haha.

Win.