"Child porn is defined by what it is, not who has it."
Er, no.
Some years ago, in Pennsylvania (the same state as this case), a man was successfully charged with possession of child pornography because he owned a cheerleading video that was completely legal for others to own. He was successfully prosecuted because he admitted to being turned on by the cheerleaders.
More of a child pornography ring than most reported cases.
The typical widespread child pornography ring you hear about consists of three people, and is only "widespread" because one of the guys sometimes visits his native Bulgaria.
"Psychologically, I say this is the extreme conversatives who would really like to outlaw nudity, masturbation and while we're at it, even thinking about sex."
That's only half of it. The liberals are also idiots, especially the feminist faction.
There have been at least two cases where women have been put in prison for being raped by teenage boys. Yes, you read that correctly, they were put in prison for being the victims of actual, honest-to-god, forcible rape. Because their rapists were less than 18 years old, the victims were convicted of statutory rape of a minor. Unlike Saudi Arabia, where the public was outraged when a woman was convicted for being a rape victim, nobody cared much. And where did this happen, some conservative bastion in the backcountry? No. It happened in Madison, Wisconsin - a famously "liberal" enclave.
This idiocy is coming at us from right and left, and frankly I think the feminists on the left are worse. The conservatives at least have some moderating influences like a belief in the power of forgiveness and millennia of history.
This has been happening for a while now, with or without pictures.
In one case, one poor girl got put on the sex offenders registry for playing doctor. She was TEN at the time. She was playing doctor with her step-siblings, their biological father found out and decided to punish his ex-wife by taking it out on the girl. She's a woman now, and can't get a job because she's a registered sex offender.
But the pictures thing has been happening too, in a number of jurisdictions. Seems like I hear of a case every few weeks. There's no end to the stupidity. Kids are too young to consent to sex, but old enough to be held criminally accountable for the rest of their life if they TRY to consent to sex.
"these are not adults making a rational decision about these pictures"
When I saw this, my first thought was "Yes, that principle and the prosecutors obviously are not adults, and are obviously not making a rational decision about these pictures.
Then I realised you were talking about the teens.
The United States has been heading this way for a long while now, at least since Anita Bryant started her "Save Our Children" campaign, when she was under the impression that homosexuals could only increase their number by "recruiting" innocent children. Then John Walsh turned his personal tragedy into a national, and now a global tragedy with his movement that deceived the nation into believing that the thousands of children who run away from abusive homes each year were in fact millions of children who were being raped and murdered by strangers each year. (The quasi-governmental organization Walsh founded, the National Center for Misusing and Exploiting Children, is the king of dubious statistics - at one point they were telling Americans that over a million kids went missing annually. More recently they have been claiming that the non-existent child porn industry is larger than the legal pornography industry and Hollywood, combined.) What started out as an anti-homosexual movement has turned into an anti-child and anti-man movement, and in fact an anti-everything-good-about-the-world movement.
(As a curious aside: Anita Bryant made a name for herself as a singer, and one of her hits was a tune from the 1950's musical "The Music Man", which was set in the early 1900s. "The Music Man" was about a charlatan who deceived parents into believing their children were in danger so that he could sell them the cure. Sound familiar?)
So now we have reached the point where we are putting children who are "doing what comes naturally" in jail, or blacklisting them for life, in the name of "protecting them". Protecting them from what, exactly, no one has been able to satisfactorily explain, but protect them we will, by God, if we have to kill every last one of them!
I feel for both the boys and girls who have been caught up in this situation, in which the only real crimes were those committed by the principal who violated their right to be safe from unreasonable search and seizure and those committed by the police and prosecutors who pursued charges.
When combined with such things as The Drug War, it is getting harder and harder every day to do anything but laugh at the notion that the United States is home to the free or the brave.
"And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the fear and the home of the slave!"
Play ball!
Parent post is a good one, but just to inform the engineers on this board . . . plenty of people think you're pretty stupid. As tradesmen would say, "book smart" but not practical.
As it happens, I can stroke your ego a bit and say that on average engineers are a good deal smarter than the average tradesman - but the religious belief in the stupidity of engineers is not entirely without merit. Frequently engineers may know how things physically work, but are not familiar with things beyond their narrow specialty - so, for example, a civil engineer may not realize that their perfect design has just violated the fire code, the building code, and the electrical code. Naturally, this can delay things and cause accusations of stupidity all around.
That said, I am heartened by the general tone of the conversation here, and the realization that all of us are idiots to some degree. I would only add that average news reporters, psychologists, and sociologists really are a bit more idiotic than the rest of us. Oh, and a recent survey in the U.S. found that U.S. lawmakers are significantly below average (for the entire population) in their understanding of the law.
Life is a healthy respect for mother nature laced with greed.
