Friday, June 16, 2006

 
You Are Here: The Blogger Remembers Being Idealistic, Once...

Jean. Fuckin' Jean. I am so in love with you, hon. Someday I & mine will share steamed crabs with you & yours under the big silvery moon, god willing.

all-a-y'all go there, read that, feel less dirty.

I wonder if all this sturm und drang speaks more to all our own individual boogeymen lurking under our own individual beds than to actual solutions to the problem of sexual predators weighed against constitutional rights.

Some of us have jackbooted hoodlums with big shiny badges goosestepping through our nightmares, busting down doors and swinging blackjacks. Others of us have stickyfingered trenchcoated phantom perverts creeping up on us through a dreamscape of sexual horror.

Sometimes the jackbooted hoodlums are real, and sometimes the perverts are real. There's no getting around that from either side.

I do think of the children, and their inalienable civil right to grow up free from molestation and exploitation, their right to physical inviolability, their right to their own sexual development free from the interference of dangerous perverts. I get that. I'd even go so far as to say that every good and decent human being should stand for that.

I just don't think that these sorts of internet dragnets capture the actual evildoers, but instead waste lots and lots of time and resources "flagging for further interest" and "establishing patterns of behavior" that amount to a lot of sound and fury but ultimately signify nothing, THEREBY ALLOWING THE ACTUAL EVILDOERS TO CONTINUE DOING EVIL while at the same time creating a climate of fear for people who aren't actually doing evil.

Me, for example. I'm not searching for child porn on the internet, and yet I'm afraid. I'm afraid some mischievous 12-year-old will port-spoof my ass and I'll never recover from the shame. I'm afraid that something I say will be taken out of context and evil-ized and rumor-ized and I'll spend the rest of my life like Andrea Dworkin going "I never said that I never said that I never said that..." I'm afraid of the jackbooted goosestepping hoodlums with badges, and those who support them.

Wanting to save the children - not idiotic at all. Noble, brave, commendable.

Thinking that reporting sitemeter statistics to some kind of credit bureau of perverts will save the children without harming innocent people - idiotic completely. Stupid, ineffective, condemn-able.

If I could be absolutely rocksolidcertain that some real flesh and blood child was saved by the alert citizen who reported an internet search, I could support such actions with a whole heart.

But nobody has mentioned even one instance where a conviction has been made, or even an arrest, based on sitemeter stats.

If I'm gonna play Junior G-man, I want to make sure that my efforts actually catch actual criminals and actually save actual children.

Otherwise I have better uses for my Genuine Real Police-Style handcuffs...

Comments:
But, but, it's cheaper and less societally disruptive to overhype the risk of stranger danger than to actually take steps to deal with overlooked dangers in our midst.

Just as it's easier to implement a guilt-inducing ad campaign to shame non-breastfeeders, rather than institute any actual changes to make breastfeeding easier

I think you hit the nail on the head by describing it as a false sense of "fighting injustice". Such an easy way to make one's heart swell with pride. [Just look at all the yellow ribbon bumper-stickers on SUVs, or Duhbe's indignation when we aren't impressed by hir actions.]
 
FWIW - here are the comments on the retraction; I'm posting here because I'm not expecting to get through over there.

I'm glad you did. I was really worried about that.
Ken | 06.15.06 - 3:16 pm | #

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Me too. Imagine confusing crypto-fascist with proto-fascist. It's just not done!
delphyne | 06.15.06 - 8:19 pm | #

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Me three. Imagine it really making a huge difference in the point being made. What a relief!
manxome | Homepage | 06.15.06 - 10:31 pm | #

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phew, thank goodness you corrected that, Dubhe! Otherwise we might have had completely the wrong idea about The Certain Blogger...
Laurelin | Homepage | 06.16.06 - 7:22 am | #

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And my reply, which I will submit to The Den -

With all due respect, I think you're missing the point of why it was important to ALL OF US to make that correction.

The issue was this - Dubhe said originally that a "PRO-KIDDIE-PORN FEMINIST" called The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children "cryptofascist".

It's not the "cryptofascist" that was really the problem. It was the fact that somebody somewhere was calling hirself a "pro-kiddie-porn feminist" and at the same time, this person was heaping scorn upon a reputable, good-intentioned non-profit organization.

Unfortunately, no such person was doing any such thing. there was no direct quote from ANYONE (pro-kiddie-porn or not) which alleged such things against NCMEC.

The "Certain Blogger" was dangerously misinterpreted. It reminded me of another time a feminist was dangerously misinterpreted.

I'm sure we're all familiar with the phrase "all sex is rape" being attributed falsely to Andrea Dworkin. She (and her supporters) had to waste all manner of time and energy refuting the claim that she said that. Her critics wasted all manner of time and energy ripping her apart over something she never even said, time that could have been used in the furtherance of greater understanding between her supporters and her critics.

Think about the damage done to the feminist community, radical and otherwise, by the mischaracterization embodied in that statement, "all sex is rape" - damage which never would have been inflicted if someone hadn't started the nasty rumor that Dworkin said WHAT SHE NEVER DID SAY.

My point is - there's plenty of real stuff to argue about, and as a result of that, plenty of opportunities to grow and develop as feminists in the world, but only if what you're arguing about is REAL and TRUE.

What Dubhe said about this particular blogger was neither REAL nor TRUE. Nobody is helped by that. Not you, not me.
 
BL, you actually called the Cybertipline? I love it! Thanks for the transcript.
 
It was a bullshit apology, and bullshit responses. I don't respond at Teh Den because I know my comments will be moderated away, so I won't even bother to point that out to them over there. All that said...I'm always up for crabs and beer, anti.
 
w00t! CRABS AND BEER!

Yeah.

And you know, too, there's more than one way to abuse a child. It doesn't *have* to be as dramatic as sexual abuse. There is for example such a thing as emotional abuse, and verbal abuse. Fairly certain that exposing your kids to an environment where one parental figure is screaming and bellowing at the other all night would qualify as the one; assuming the parental figure doesn't also extend the all-nite screaming and bellowing to the kids as well.

Oh, no agency's gonna step in for that sort of thing, certainly. Probably even your kids won't tell you they think it's abusive. Because chances are *you're scaring the crap out of them.*
 
"I called Cybertipline..."

BAHAHAHAHAHA

(drying eyes)

Oh, but, um. Uhm. Why should we believe you? Aren't you that woman who once said "fuck feminists?" I suppose that's how you get YOUR jollies. You're probably a man, anyway. And a fraud. A fraudulent man. Stop pretending to be a man, you faker! RAPE FANTASIES!!! CHILD PORN!!!!! Why do you hate America so much?
 
Crabs and beer?

Where?

I think i'm a little young yet to remember my idealism. But i don't really feel like i have any now. Guess i'll make some up in retrospect.
 
not sure yet. possibly the Group W bench.
 
"It all started to go downhill at recess one morning. Still spitting sand, I reflected bitterly that that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; nor yet the swings to the first in line; but time and chance happeneth to them all."
 
slippage
 
agh. yet another convention that is apparently only from the Vee Cee. it just means: someone else's posts "slipped" while you were responding to the one directly above.
 
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
 
wrong topic, sorry
 
VC?
You were with the VietCong!?!?

[Seriously, just curious what the acronym stands for.]
 
"virtual community"
 
okay, now *I'm* feeling like a cultist. loading the language!
 
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