coupla notes!
Sep. 10th, 2006 02:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexr_rwx- The cast comes off on Wednesday. Soon, it's time for lots and lots of running and great strengthening-of-forearms-and-wrists...
- The man who taught my highschool chemistry and physics classes is up on charges for posession of child pornography. I'm not sure how I feel about this. It brings up interesting questions about societal taboos and how they come about... of course, it's hard to talk about at all, because you feel like bringing up the topic is going to make people think you support pedophilia -- which is, of course, taboo. For very good social-stability reasons, I imagine. *sighs* Poor Mr. Saunders. He never seemed like a very happy dude.
- But now, it's time for frantic coding! I'm a little disconcerted about this project that's due at midnight, eep! (that one system call that you need to do that thing that I'm doing? It's one thing on Linux, another on FreeBSD, and not-available-at-all on OSX. Go figure. But I think I've got a handle on it, I think. We'll see...)
- The man who taught my highschool chemistry and physics classes is up on charges for posession of child pornography. I'm not sure how I feel about this. It brings up interesting questions about societal taboos and how they come about... of course, it's hard to talk about at all, because you feel like bringing up the topic is going to make people think you support pedophilia -- which is, of course, taboo. For very good social-stability reasons, I imagine. *sighs* Poor Mr. Saunders. He never seemed like a very happy dude.
- But now, it's time for frantic coding! I'm a little disconcerted about this project that's due at midnight, eep! (that one system call that you need to do that thing that I'm doing? It's one thing on Linux, another on FreeBSD, and not-available-at-all on OSX. Go figure. But I think I've got a handle on it, I think. We'll see...)
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Three notes, plus one
Date: 2006-09-10 07:10 pm (UTC)# Sucks.
Think I know how it goes. There was a teacher by the name of Nunnelee at my junior high school. Most students thought he was gay and made fun of him as they deemed appropriate (including joking allegations of sexual harrassment; what fine taste we have as fourteen-year-olds). A few years ago I heard a rumor that he had been arrested on sexual harrassment charges after a failed suicide attempt. Tried to remind folks that it was nothing but a rumor. Didn't really get a lot of success on that front, as you might imagine.
# Code, boy! Code like the mammal you are!
$ Did you know that it's now frowned on to follow a sentence with two spaces?
Re: Three notes, plus one
Date: 2006-09-10 08:52 pm (UTC)Re: Three notes, plus one
Date: 2006-09-11 02:59 am (UTC)I was never a fan of that practice, the two-spaces thing! (where'd you hear about this?) Perhaps one day -- one day -- the world will come to the realization that I'm right about "quote marks as balanced delimiters around quoted text" as well! Everybody'll be like "hot damn, Alex sure was right". (closequote-period)
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Date: 2006-09-11 02:40 am (UTC)He is being held in jail without bail.
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Date: 2006-09-11 03:03 am (UTC)So there's either a life of super-duper-repression... or ostracism-and-jail. Unless you can hide it, I guess.
Oy vey.
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Date: 2006-09-11 03:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-11 03:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-12 05:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-11 06:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-11 12:41 pm (UTC)Ahem.
From your post, it seems like you may disagree with some of those particular societal taboos . . . would you mind elaborating?
It's weird, though. I don't know if you read about this - people putting up bait ads on craigslist, then posting the info people sent them (http://www.waxy.org/archive/2006/09/08/sex_bait.shtml) - but that was one of the things that unsettled me most about the whole exercise, whatever you think about the tactics. These are pictures of perfectly normal-looking guys, the kind of guys who would hold the door for you and join your gaming group, and they're talking about having quasi-legal, often explicitly adulterous sex with a total stranger.
Anyway, it's an icky situation all around.
(In any case, yay for casts coming off!)
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Date: 2006-09-11 02:38 pm (UTC)Like, my immediate thought was "well, he's a nice-enough guy, and he taught a good physics class". He never hurt anybody or actually took advantage of children (that'd be a different thing altogether). It's just that he has a weird position on sexuality. Is that so bad, if you don't act on it? What do you do? ... What does he do, given that he's pretty much stuck with the mind that his genes-n-environment formed for him? ...
But then I thought about the repercussions of the actual production of child porn, right? One can see why that's harmful -- children clearly can't consent to be involved in the same way that adults can, so they need to be protected. And furthermore, I can see why, if you put yourself in the shoes of a culture as a whole, why you'd want to exclude/punish/discourage people with this sort of tendency... I mean, if you know that somebody at least has that train of thought...
On the other hand!
Some of us spend a whole lot of time thinking about punching people. Or hitting them with swords. Or even practicing to do so. And we're a nation of folks-with-guns, and we laugh about the idea of shooting trespassers and burglars. Is considering-the-crime the same as the crime itself? Adultery or murder in your heart sends you straight to hell?
Also: Japan, pretty much as a whole, full of criminals?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolicon
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Date: 2006-09-11 03:26 pm (UTC)As for "just has a weird position on sexuality" . . . okay, here's the thing. I'm part of a fandom based on books about children. When this fandom gets into the genre of erotica/porn, it falls into three rough categories: people who only write/draw adult characters getting it on; people who write romantic, non-exploitative stories about teenagers exploring their sexuality; and people who write/draw things that are sexually fetishizing children. And frankly, they, and the Japanese with them, have every right to do it. People's norms of what's erotic shouldn't be illegal.
But. Child porn involves the exploitation of actual children, and the viewer is benefitting from that exploitation, and that's what's wrong. It's like saying that, just because you didn't kill the white rhino yourself, it's perfectly okay to buy its ivory. The products of an illegal activity (sexually exploiting children) ought to be illegal. (And yes, imho, that should probably also apply to goods made abroad by child labor, but that's another story.)
Does that make sense?
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Date: 2006-09-11 03:35 pm (UTC)(unless there's some more subtle point you're getting at that I'm not catching?)