Or, y'know, completely irrelevant, since pedophilia is adult attraction to children.

Rape is perhaps a more direct, physical form of harm, that evokes a visceral reaction because of its associated violence, but the basic premise w.r.t. underage sex (and I believe it's largely correct), is that children/tweens are incapable of giving informed consent. Even ignoring the complicated power dynamics that come with large age differences and focusing on two underage (but beyond the age of "playing doctor") kids having sex, the chains of reasoning and long-term thinking that are a prerequisite of informed consent simply elude most kids.

See above. Children's "consent" is not the same as your consent.

No, it seems pretty clear what the question means, but I can concretize it a bit more for you: would you want bluelucidfox teaching your 12-year-old daughter about sex?

I said this in reply to one of bluelucidfox's points; your (hypothetical?) 12-year-old's choice isn't free and informed the same way yours or mine is. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you were convinced that you had successfully explained to her why you didn't want her to have sex. Then she comes home one day and the following (exaggerated-to-make-a-point) dialogue takes place:

Her: "I had sex with that 18-year-old, Tommy, who lives next door."
You: "Dang, I asked you not to do that, and explained what the long-term consequences are. Why'd you do it?"
Her: "Well, it felt pretty good. Plus he gave me an iPod."

Would you not feel like Tommy had somehow "taken advantage of" your daughter? Well, "taking advantage of" is tantamount to coercion, which is tantamount to rape. Coerced (whether by carrot or stick) consent, is not consent.

Sure, if you're talking about "too many snacks before dinner", or "shoplift", or "skip class". Not, crucially, in the cases under discussion.

No, not lightly, but the issues warrant deeper thinking, and a willingness to "ruin someone else's life" if we feel it's warranted.

Amen to that.

Yeah, so clearly I didn't make the point I meant to (or else you're being willfully obtuse). I was not agreeing with your assessment of child/teen/adult sexual dynamics...

Coercion is coercion; rape is coerced sex. The latter two are basically the same w.r.t. the level of moral repugnance they typically engender. In fact, the last seems to be worst, if the treatment of child molesters as compared to "garden variety" rapists in jail is any indicator.

Someone else already called you on it, but this really doesn't happen anywhere near as often as you think it does, and perhaps more to the point, hypersexualised behaviour in kids is often a symptom of prior abuse. Also, something I was clearly too implicit about is that this kind of behaviour is licensed and even somewhat encouraged by many current sociocultural portrayals/expectations of tween/teen girls. It doesn't help that onset of puberty is going down, and so the "odd hormones [...] showing up and messing with shit" is happening at an age when girls are even less equipped (cognitively) to reason their way through.

Huh? People talk about kids playing doctor all the time. Typically it's relatively innocent exploration, and there are usually clearly identifiable signs when it's symptomatic of something more nefarious.

Newsflash: they are effectively the same. The reason we have age of consent laws is that we recognise that people under a certain age are typically (obviously absolutes are impossible in a situation like this) incapable of the kind of long-term thinking necessary to actually reason through the consequences and implications of making this kind of decision. Evidently, there's a lot of responsibility on parents' shoulders here to have frank discussions with their children exactly about this, and as a society we are collectively failing our parental duties on this score. The best thing we can do is to help our children through the reasoning.

You're thinking short-term here. Victims of rape don't typically go on to become rapists, but victims of abuse/coercion often go on to become abusers/coercers. It's exactly these long-term implications that I'm saying are at issue.

Again with this. These lolitas that you seem to think are ubiquitous are in the overwhelming (underwhelming?) minority; I can assure you that you are not surrounded by them. Tweens who act this way are often in thrall to peer pressure or other forms of social coercion. They are, in some sense, not even fully consenting to their own behaviour.

Argh, no mod points. Why was this modded Troll?

Parent (and to a lesser extent Parallel Parent) makes valid points. The difference between

1. the consenting behaviour of children playing doctor (to the extent that children can give consent),
2. the non-consensual nature of molestation (whether by a stranger or not) as it's standardly understood, and
3. the power dynamic that can result in coerced "consent" in e.g. relationships between 14 and 22 year-olds

are hugely different.

For my money this is one of the most exciting "terminal Masters" degrees out there right now (of course, I'm a linguist, so probably biased).

It will serve you in bioinformatics should you choose to continue in that field subsequently, will definitely tax/challenge your coding chops, and will teach you some cool stuff about language. Also, some of the people who run this program are affiliated with MS Research (you know, the cool arm of MS), and doing this degree is plausibly some kind of foot in the door there.

1. Made my freakin' day
2. "Yestermorrow" is the new best word ever

Thank you, good sir/madam.

Re: your sig...Try reading this one, instead...

Structured Procrastination

I think what you're shooting for is a set of measure zero, although IANAM.
 

That's when you say, "What's wrong, fuckface?"

I'm interested in the possibility of getting myself arrested and posssibly sent to jail for violating the proposed laws in the most asinine way possible and then drumming up some kind of media coverage in order to help the public understand just how backwards this legislation is/would be.

So: what's the most vanilla-white-bread-everybody-does-it-I-can't-believe-he-got-sent-to-jail-for-that public outrage inducing way in which I could violate these laws badly enough to get sent to the klink?

I dunno, man. Some friends and I were taking some sweet jumps on our BMXs as a kid, and this one dude beefed pretty hard and took out a tooth on his handlebars. Blood everywhere. Tears. We definitely all laughed before going to check if he was alright. We may all be sociopaths, but I'm betting no...we're just down with the schadenfreude, like lots of others.

+$\infty$

Best quote ever.

I was going to post something about that statement maybe being valid in North America and Western Europe, but not for the bulk of the world's population, but it turns out that a few minutes' Googling hasn't given me anything to back my position up with...go figure.

OK, I only read the summary, and haven't followed the whole story that closely, but if these people were arrested in February, why are they not still in jail?

This is an interesting point, and I guess something I'd never taken the time to think about before. Now, I'm no economist, but it seems to me that with the advent of digital media and the easy reproduction of perfect copies, along with various and sundry online distribution channels, anytime a piece of music[*] is created, digitised, and makes its way to the Net, supply is for all intents and purposes instantly driven to infinity, thereby reducing the value of said piece to zero.

Now, I am of the opinion that the artists[**] who create the music I enjoy SHOULD be remunerated. So what means are available of doing this fairly?

As an aside, for those who have posted something about downloading as a form of pseudo-protest against overlong copyright terms (not the parent post), it seems to me that your argument is basically null if you're downloading anything that isn't older than whatever you consider to be "fair" copyright.

[*] In principle this applies to any digital media, but the ease with which a 5MB mp3 can be shared (cf. a 700MB movie), makes this argument particular relevant
[**] This includes the knob-twiddlers and producers who get great in-studio performances out of artists.