ozoneocean
There is no burden of proof on my part here- I can see that you are both well aware of what I speak. I'm simply struck with disbelief at the blase ignorance affected by both of you over this aspect of the subject.

I’m afraid there is a burden of proof on your part, and you’ve failed miserably. When you go about telling people they’re “arguing from a position of ignorance,” it strongly suggests both that they don’t know what they’re talking about and that you have some superior firsthand knowledge of which they are not aware. I can see clearly now that is not the case, so I figure you just get a boner out of calling people “ignorant” without cause. Nothing either Isukun or myself has said suggests we’re not well aware of the subject matter being discussed here, and none of the examples you provided help your case.

First of all, your example of terrorist beheadings is self-contradictory. Terrorists create those videos to intimidate people. How then is their being viewed for amusement or shock value of benefit to them? It actually runs counter to their aims, and clearly these are violent men who have been and always will be in the business of committing hideous murders whether they’re videotaping it or not. That’s a pitiful example. And interestingly even with happy slapping, the most arguably accurate example of what you’re trying to describe, no one was ever prosecuted under an obscenity statute. Those who were tried were put on trial for manslaughter and crimes arising from the actual acts of violence committed, which is pretty much what we’ve been recommending this whole time. There was no need to resort to an “obscenity” witch hunt to bring those fiends to justice.

That you chose to bring up historical imagery just demonstrates to me that you still have no idea what this discussion is even about. Obviously Hitler did not gas all those Jews because he figured he could get a lot of hits by posting the vids on his Youtube page, and your continued shrill cries of “watching it makes you no better than a pedophile” amount to nothing more than toothless gaybashing. There is no threat to the fabric of society here, and your personal distaste for something is not good grounds for criminalizing it. Look up the term “moral panic.”

I will now diverge entirely from the cogent points I've been trying to make repeatedly:

Obviously you are not following the thread of the discussion points I'm making throughout all my posts or the contexts in which I've made them. You take others out of their contests and put them in others in order to try and make them sound weaker. Interesting but it doesn't change the original points, it just makes you feel better.

You're saying I'M not arguing this correctly? All you doing is flubbing bill O'Riely style the whole thing rather than addressing the spirit of the argument.
We can all argue things in a Fox News entertainment sort of way, but it doesn't produce any useful result. ;)


Your agenda from the start has been to claim that all censorship and obscenity laws are not needed and nobody likes them and they're useless and nothing anybody could say can change that because they're all bad and not needed at all.
This is your belief and I can't see that you are resolute in it. Fair enough.
But in THAT I've learned something here for myself: I have begun debate threads in a similar way to this (stating a dogmatic position, no matter that I thought it well intentioned), and then proceeded to bulldog against anything I saw as dissenting views to that original post. Having experienced that from the other end here, I see now what a pill I've been in the past and it humbles me T_T
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I don't mean to sound offensive to you here. I'm glad you're vigorously defending your beliefs and contributing here to this part of the forums! :)
But it does make me see myself in another light now and it's not an entirely favourable one.

Not sure what to say to that. I've read and considered everything you wrote in this thread, and I don't believe I've taken anything out of context. I will admit that I do have strong opinions on the subject and can be boorish at times, though I try not to be, but I'm always willing to have my ideas challenged or be proven wrong. I just honestly do not believe the points you were trying to make here were valid and have tried my best to express my objections... perhaps a bit too emphatically.

El Cid
Pedophilia is a sexual orientation. A weird one, at least in modern civilized society, but I'm pretty sure those people are born with it.

Actually you're wrong about it being an sexual orientation. a lot of pedophiles were sexually abused and molested as kids themselves... and then groomed to think that was normal.

Some also grow up with an deep-seated distrust of all other adults in general even when they become adults themselves, as an result. So then they're unable to form sexual attraction to other adults, and end up being sexually attracted to children because those adults see the children as being the same as them in some way.

Some also just want others to suffer like they suffered as children...that kind of bitterness that they were the ones who got sexually abused for years by adults yet they did nothing... while other normal children out there got to live their lives unmolested.

So it's actually more of an mental illness than sexual orientation. The pedophiles who were never molested in the past is actually a very tiny minority within the circle of pedophiles... around 2%. And even though this small minority was never molested, they still have an massive amount of other mental illnesses which may have worked in conjunction to give them pedophilic feelings.

Aurora Moon
...So it's actually more of an mental illness than sexual orientation. The pedophiles who were never molested in the past is actually a very tiny minority within the circle of pedophiles... around 2%. And even though this small minority was never molested, they still have an massive amount of other mental illnesses which may have worked in conjunction to give them pedophilic feelings.

First of all, I’d just like to thank you for zeroing in on one of more minuscule points of this thread and trying to make a big deal out of it. Way to move things forward, thank you. This is a topic about OBSCENITY LAWS, and whether or not they’re of benefit to society. While pedophilia will inevitably come up in such a discussion, it is not the focus and really I’m not all that interested in talking about it. If you are, I’d suggest you start a new thread. I likely will not be participating in it.

But since you took the time to type that I will waste some more of my time writing a response: First of all, just for clarity purposes, let’s try to get out of the business of using the terms “pedophile” and “child molester/abuser” interchangeably. They are not the same thing and it’s helpful for us to know what’s being talked about. Pedophilia is a sexual preference for children. It is considered by many a form of mental illness because of its potential detrimental effects, but the same has been and in some circles still is said about homosexuality. The pertinent point, whether you approach from a “sexual orientation” or “mental illness” perspective, is that it’s not something anyone chooses to be, which makes vilifying them on principle rather reprehensible. Child molesters, those who actually abuse children, have earned our contempt. Pedophiles, whether mentally ill or born with a bizarre sexual preference, have not.

As for this “98 percent of them were molested” business, I sure hope you fact checked that, because taken at face value it sounds ridiculous. If you’re really interested in this subject, here’s a pretty good study conducted by the GAO on whether or not there is a “cycle of sexual abuse,” as you’ve described: http://www.gao.gov/archive/1996/gg96178.pdf [gao.gov]. In short, they found the reported prevalence of sexual abuse among child sex offenders varied widely among studies (from 0 to 79 percent, though this variance is in part due to the differences of offender groups studied and definitions applied). Their conclusion, however, is that childhood sexual abuse is not what causes people to become child predators in adulthood. I'll quote from their brief:

GAO
Therefore, childhood sexual victimization would probably not be sufficient to explain adult sexual offending. While some studies indicated that sexual victimization in childhood may increase the risk that victims will become sexual offenders as adults, other studies found that many other conditions and experiences might also be associated with an increased risk. For example, one prospective study we reviewed found that children who were neglected were even more likely than children who were sexually abused to commit sex offenses as adults.

It was also found to be absolutely clear that most children who are abused do not grow up to victimize others, which right away should tell you there is something else going on with that small minority who do, and which they have in common with the many other offenders who were never abused.

Also importantly, the VAST majority of actual child sex offenders (93 percent, according to at least one study http://www.childmolestationprevention.org/pdfs/study.pdf [childmolestationprevention.org]) were found to be nonexclusive opportunists of one sort or another, so many of the people who commit sex crimes against children are not exclusively pedophiles, if they are pedophiles at all. They victimize children because children are easy targets, not because they have a sexual preference for them. The single most telling factor then in whether or not someone is going to take sexual advantage of a child is not whether he was abused as a child or is a pedophile. It’s whether or not he’s a sociopath. And those people get into all types of other trouble as well. Personally, I believe anyone who has pedophilic urges and feels he may act on them should seek help and that the "witch hunt" attitude so many people automatically take on the subject prevents this from happening as often as it should.

Sorry for that wordy response, but there are a lot of points to be made there. I didn’t cover everything, but I’m tired of typing. Now, like I said, if you really do wish to discuss pedophilia as opposed to obscenity issues, please go start a Fun Facts About Pedophiles thread. Just make sure you’re actually dealing in facts. But like I said before, that's not something I care to discuss and it was not the intended focus of this thread.