The girl did something stupid, and she's already been punished enough by the natural consequences of her actions. She let something she did get out of control, and hopefully she'll learn from it.
But the boys who distributed these pictures without her consent, why do you even ask whether or not their actions were malicious?
I'm well past 21 and still haven't. I'm a computer programmer; my brain is my livelihood. Why in the world would I ever want to do something that will screw it up?
...and the perpetrators (and the victim, for that matter) in this care were not children. Child psychologists tell us that by 7-8 years of age, children are indeed old enough to understand the abstract concepts of right and wrong and that their actions have repercussions. The people involved here were (apparently) all around twice that age and pubescent. That makes them no longer children in actual fact, if not in legal classification.
Have you ever been to a bar mitzvah? Today, it's just a fancy birthday party, but originally it was a celebration with a very specific meaning: this is when a boy officially becomes a man, and from that point on he was both held to higher standards and given greater freedom in his life, as befits his adult status. And it's not just a Jewish thing, (or a boy thing, for that matter; they had a bat mitzvah for girls,) most ancient cultures had very similar customs.
They understood a concept that popular culture today calls "with great power comes great responsibility." But today we've forgotten that that works both ways. As children grow and mature, we expect them to act like responsible adults long before giving them any of the power of adulthood that should accompany it.
And then we wonder why teens are so screwed up! We ask why they have such a bad attitude. You would have a bad attitude if you were forced to wear shoes that were too small or clothing you've long since outgrown; how much more chafing is it to be forced into a psychological and social status that no longer fits you?
Adolescence is the most common form of child abuse in America: only a very small percentage of kids are beaten or molested, but every last one is forced to remain a child well past their time. It's a ridiculous and harmful invention of the modern age, and we'd be well served by getting rid of it.
No, these "kids" are old enough and mature enough to know exactly what they were doing, and that they were doing it maliciously and causing lasting harm. They fully deserve the ton of bricks that's about to come down on them.
putting teens on a sex offender list for life, for sharing pictures of another teen, is ridiculous.
As in most things, context makes all the difference. Add in three all-important words, and it makes a world of difference. Would you tolerate this behavior from the same kids if they (and the victim) were twice as old? If not, then why let them get away with it as teens?
"Putting teens on a sex offender list for life for sharing pictures of another teen without her consent is..."
Here's where we all have to take a big, deep breath and figure out if we're really going to allow our compassion for the young lady in this story cause us to permanently brand 3 young boys for life with the stigma of a sex offender's mark. Don't get me wrong, there can be punishment here. I have no problem with that. But we're way too intelligent a nation to simply throw up our hands and say, "The law's the law," without making even a minor effort to create some kind of subtlety where lessons can be learned without the torching of entire futures.
...because the futures of the criminals in question are the only ones that would be affected by such an act. Right.
As I've mentioned before on here, this is the sort of horrible "logic" that comes from a failure to think beyond a single degree of cause and effect.
Since corporations are people too, my friend, let's draw a simple comparison to a scenario that everyone recognizes is highly problematic. EvilCorp, Inc. provides Internet access to millions of users across the nation. One day, it's discovered that they've been surreptitiously injecting spyware onto their users' computers, uploading their private data, and selling it to advertisers. They made $50 million off this illicit practice before security experts noticed and reported it to media and law enforcement.
Don't get me wrong, there can be punishment here. I have no problem with that. But past experience tells us what happens next: the "punishment" may, at the very worst, involve an "enormous" fine of $2-3 million or so... and EvilCorp, Inc. laughs all the way to the bank with the rest of the $47 million they pocketed off of screwing their victims over. And then a few years later, when people stop paying attention, they modify the system slightly and do it all over again.
You know what would keep that last part from happening, but never seems to actually get invoked? Fining them $100 million over illegal profits of $50 million. Sending executives to jail. Ruining the criminals' lives. Making it painfully clear that crime really, truly does not pay.
Calling the criminals in this case "young boys" is exactly the sort of disingenuous, cynical appeal to "think of the children!" that Techdirt usually abhors, and it's quite disappointing to see it being trotted out here. It's also factually incorrect, as are comments about them not being mature enough to understand what's going on.
Child psychologists tell us that children are mentally mature enough to understand the abstract concepts of "right and wrong" as young as ages 7-8. These are high school kids, somewhere around twice that age, and I respectfully submit that anyone here who does not believe high school kids are capable of fully conscious, mature, malicious cruelty must necessarily have fuzzy memories of their own time in high school.
Blaming the victim is an ugly thing, but just as ugly is making excuses for a clearly malicious perpetrator. Kids who would commit an act of virtual rape like this are on a path that's going to take them to some very dark places later in life. Best for everyone involved (including the criminals, if it keeps them out of even worse trouble, but especially for the people who they don't end up victimizing) if this behavior is caught early and nipped in the bud.
Remember, as the branch bends, so grows the bough.
I do understand why. Obamacare makes a lot more people insured, and that feeds into the status quo narrative. We have this idea (pushed by the financial industry "insurers") that coverage = health security, and as long as you accept that premise, it logically follows that being insured is a good thing.
Unfortunately, that's the point where most people stop thinking. Thinking in a single degree of cause and effect is easy. It's hard-wired into our brains, and even infants can do it. (A lot of what we see as the most frustrating behaviors of young children is them simply experimenting to work out causal relationships in the world around them, things that are obvious to us because we don't have clear memories of the time when we established those relationships by doing the very same things!)
The problem is, the rest of the world isn't that simple. Effects are causes too, like a train of dominos falling one after another. And not only is thinking about later effects difficult, it is actively discouraged. Seriously. Think back to high school. Remember learning about logical fallacies? Remember how they taught you about the slippery slope fallacy, that trying to predict consequences several steps down the road is officially invalid if the consequences you predict are negative? With that one simple concept, we are actively discouraged from thinking through the long-term negative consequences of our actions!
A conspiracy theorist could make all kinds of hay from that one simple fact. I simply point out that it is a fact. I don't know the reasons behind it. But as long as that's as far as we're willing to think, Obamacare looks like a very good thing to a very large number of people, when in reality all it does is make the fundamental problem worse.
Yes. It sounds crazy, but remember that people are irrational.
A rational person takes the long view over a short-term benefit in all but the most urgent of conflicts, because the long-term benefits are greater and last longer. But irrational people controlled by primitive drives "live in the moment."
Well, eating right and exercising are "long view" issues. They involve self-denial and self-discipline. The Natural Man, the irrational self, hates such things. (Why do you think so few people do them now that modern technology has advanced to a point that they're no longer strictly necessary?) But money is a short-term issue. You need money to pay the bills and put food on the table.
Fix the conflict of interest between the Natural Man and the rational, long-term goals, and you'll see more people behaving in their own best interests.
The problem is--in a bizarre bit of meta-circularity--they don't get their wages and benefits set by their bosses (us!) like every other job; they set their own! So fixing it is a chicken-and-egg problem.
Oh, I agree entirely. That's the other side of the moral hazard: when people don't pay for their own health care, they take their own health less seriously. It cuts both ways.
The single most significant thing we could do to improve health care in the USA would be to do away with fake health insurance and replace it with real insurance--disaster coverage.
The #2 most significant thing we could do would be to smack down pharmaceutical companies and their abuse of patents to charge obscene amounts for drugs that cost them next to nothing.
Fix those two things, and the rest of the system would fix itself in short order.
(Argh, why oh why do we not have an Edit button on here?)
I meant to end with this:
We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.
The healthcare industry in the US is crazy, and it's not a simple task to assign blame.
Actually, it's an exceedingly simple task.
Many patients aren't paying out of their own pockets because they rely on insurance,
...and there's the problem right there.
First off, let's get one thing straight. What we call "health insurance" is not insurance, not by any other standard of insurance with which we are familiar. If auto insurance worked like "health insurance," I'd have to submit a claim every time I filled up with gas or took my car to the car wash. If homeowners' insurance worked like "health insurance..." just imagine Lowe's and the Home Depot billing like hospitals.
Real health insurance would do what insurance does: cover disasters. Broken bones, cancer, heart attacks, assault victims, etc. What we have is not a system that does that. In fact, when actual disasters come up, our "health insurance" system does everything possible to avoid paying out!
No, let's call it what it really is: a financial industry takeover of the health care system. Let's start with a very simple axiom: if you pay all the bills for Organization XYZ, this gives you a tremendous degree of influence over Organization XYZ's agenda and priorities. And ever since the rise of the health insurance system, which President Nixon set into motion, that's exactly what's happened. Insurers have taken over the funding of health care, until they control the system.
There is also the secondary effect of taking the responsibility for payment completely out of the customer's hands: moral hazard. It's an economics term that means that when a person (or a hospital, in this case) is insulated from the risks of their behavior, their behavior becomes worse. If a hospital no longer has to keep their care affordable to its patients, because the patients aren't paying for it out of pocket, they end up not doing so.
One last thing to keep in mind: Medical costs have skyrocketed in the last few decades, far more quickly than inflation, when their increasing use of improving technology should have been pushing the cost down. As proof, look at one common medical procedure that's not covered by insurance: laser eye surgery. Patients have to bear the cost out of pocket, and it's come way down while the price of insured medicine has gone up.
No, it's not at all difficult to accurately place blame for the nightmare of our medical system in the USA. It lies squarely at the feet of the financial industry, specifically the medical insurance companies. Remember this next time you hear some politician talking about the uninsured. We don't need 30 million less uninsured people in the US, or whatever number they're bandying about; we need about 300 million more.
No. The courts have already let the bad guys get away with it, setting a very narrow, very bad precedent that the "penalty of perjury" bit only applies to one thing: that the person issuing the DMCA notice is authorized to issue DMCA notices on behalf of the rightsholder in question. It specifically does not create liability for bogus, fraudulent, or malicious takedowns.
There's a very valid point to having a driver's license, though. Even the smallest cars weigh thousands of pounds, and when used in a reckless manner, can easily kill or severely injure someone, even completely by accident.
When the consequences of someone screwing up can be that disastrous, we require licensing to prove basic competence, to head off potential problems down the road. We have it for doctors, lawyers, and teachers, and we have it for people who wish to operate heavy machinery in public at highway speeds.
But that same problem scenario doesn't really exist for Internet users. I've never heard of someone getting killed or maimed in a computer crash; have you? Yes, people have gotten badly hurt and even killed by malicious Internet users, but licensing does next to nothing to stop that particular problem; it's the wrong tool for the job. This is what Senator McInnis and Inspector Naylor don't understand.
It's not an investing site. They make that perfectly clear right up front. Kickstarter is not an investing site, and project owners are prohibited by Kicksterter terms from offering shares, bonds, or any similar securities as backer rewards.
Kickstarter backers are not investors; a more appropriate description would be the rather old-fashioned term "patron of the arts."
I, for one, don't want flying cars, at least not until Eric Schmidt's famous bug gets fixed! Every day I'm surrounded by idiot drivers who are just barely, somehow miraculously capable of getting around in two dimensions without bringing property damage and severe injury to those around them. No way, no how do I want to put a third dimension in their hands!
On the post: High School Kids Staring Down Child Porn Charges In Sexting Scandal
Re: Re: Re: Re:
But the boys who distributed these pictures without her consent, why do you even ask whether or not their actions were malicious?
On the post: High School Kids Staring Down Child Porn Charges In Sexting Scandal
Re: Re:
On the post: High School Kids Staring Down Child Porn Charges In Sexting Scandal
Re: Re:
Have you ever been to a bar mitzvah? Today, it's just a fancy birthday party, but originally it was a celebration with a very specific meaning: this is when a boy officially becomes a man, and from that point on he was both held to higher standards and given greater freedom in his life, as befits his adult status. And it's not just a Jewish thing, (or a boy thing, for that matter; they had a bat mitzvah for girls,) most ancient cultures had very similar customs.
They understood a concept that popular culture today calls "with great power comes great responsibility." But today we've forgotten that that works both ways. As children grow and mature, we expect them to act like responsible adults long before giving them any of the power of adulthood that should accompany it.
And then we wonder why teens are so screwed up! We ask why they have such a bad attitude. You would have a bad attitude if you were forced to wear shoes that were too small or clothing you've long since outgrown; how much more chafing is it to be forced into a psychological and social status that no longer fits you?
Adolescence is the most common form of child abuse in America: only a very small percentage of kids are beaten or molested, but every last one is forced to remain a child well past their time. It's a ridiculous and harmful invention of the modern age, and we'd be well served by getting rid of it.
No, these "kids" are old enough and mature enough to know exactly what they were doing, and that they were doing it maliciously and causing lasting harm. They fully deserve the ton of bricks that's about to come down on them.
On the post: High School Kids Staring Down Child Porn Charges In Sexting Scandal
Re:
As in most things, context makes all the difference. Add in three all-important words, and it makes a world of difference. Would you tolerate this behavior from the same kids if they (and the victim) were twice as old? If not, then why let them get away with it as teens?
"Putting teens on a sex offender list for life for sharing pictures of another teen without her consent is..."
On the post: High School Kids Staring Down Child Porn Charges In Sexting Scandal
...because the futures of the criminals in question are the only ones that would be affected by such an act. Right.
As I've mentioned before on here, this is the sort of horrible "logic" that comes from a failure to think beyond a single degree of cause and effect.
Since corporations are people too, my friend, let's draw a simple comparison to a scenario that everyone recognizes is highly problematic. EvilCorp, Inc. provides Internet access to millions of users across the nation. One day, it's discovered that they've been surreptitiously injecting spyware onto their users' computers, uploading their private data, and selling it to advertisers. They made $50 million off this illicit practice before security experts noticed and reported it to media and law enforcement.
Don't get me wrong, there can be punishment here. I have no problem with that. But past experience tells us what happens next: the "punishment" may, at the very worst, involve an "enormous" fine of $2-3 million or so... and EvilCorp, Inc. laughs all the way to the bank with the rest of the $47 million they pocketed off of screwing their victims over. And then a few years later, when people stop paying attention, they modify the system slightly and do it all over again.
You know what would keep that last part from happening, but never seems to actually get invoked? Fining them $100 million over illegal profits of $50 million. Sending executives to jail. Ruining the criminals' lives. Making it painfully clear that crime really, truly does not pay.
Calling the criminals in this case "young boys" is exactly the sort of disingenuous, cynical appeal to "think of the children!" that Techdirt usually abhors, and it's quite disappointing to see it being trotted out here. It's also factually incorrect, as are comments about them not being mature enough to understand what's going on.
Child psychologists tell us that children are mentally mature enough to understand the abstract concepts of "right and wrong" as young as ages 7-8. These are high school kids, somewhere around twice that age, and I respectfully submit that anyone here who does not believe high school kids are capable of fully conscious, mature, malicious cruelty must necessarily have fuzzy memories of their own time in high school.
Blaming the victim is an ugly thing, but just as ugly is making excuses for a clearly malicious perpetrator. Kids who would commit an act of virtual rape like this are on a path that's going to take them to some very dark places later in life. Best for everyone involved (including the criminals, if it keeps them out of even worse trouble, but especially for the people who they don't end up victimizing) if this behavior is caught early and nipped in the bud.
Remember, as the branch bends, so grows the bough.
On the post: DailyDirt: Healthcare Nightmares
Re: Re: Re:
Unfortunately, that's the point where most people stop thinking. Thinking in a single degree of cause and effect is easy. It's hard-wired into our brains, and even infants can do it. (A lot of what we see as the most frustrating behaviors of young children is them simply experimenting to work out causal relationships in the world around them, things that are obvious to us because we don't have clear memories of the time when we established those relationships by doing the very same things!)
The problem is, the rest of the world isn't that simple. Effects are causes too, like a train of dominos falling one after another. And not only is thinking about later effects difficult, it is actively discouraged. Seriously. Think back to high school. Remember learning about logical fallacies? Remember how they taught you about the slippery slope fallacy, that trying to predict consequences several steps down the road is officially invalid if the consequences you predict are negative? With that one simple concept, we are actively discouraged from thinking through the long-term negative consequences of our actions!
A conspiracy theorist could make all kinds of hay from that one simple fact. I simply point out that it is a fact. I don't know the reasons behind it. But as long as that's as far as we're willing to think, Obamacare looks like a very good thing to a very large number of people, when in reality all it does is make the fundamental problem worse.
On the post: DailyDirt: Healthcare Nightmares
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
A rational person takes the long view over a short-term benefit in all but the most urgent of conflicts, because the long-term benefits are greater and last longer. But irrational people controlled by primitive drives "live in the moment."
Well, eating right and exercising are "long view" issues. They involve self-denial and self-discipline. The Natural Man, the irrational self, hates such things. (Why do you think so few people do them now that modern technology has advanced to a point that they're no longer strictly necessary?) But money is a short-term issue. You need money to pay the bills and put food on the table.
Fix the conflict of interest between the Natural Man and the rational, long-term goals, and you'll see more people behaving in their own best interests.
On the post: DailyDirt: Healthcare Nightmares
Re: Re: It's been said before, but:
On the post: DailyDirt: Healthcare Nightmares
Re: Re: Re:
The single most significant thing we could do to improve health care in the USA would be to do away with fake health insurance and replace it with real insurance--disaster coverage.
The #2 most significant thing we could do would be to smack down pharmaceutical companies and their abuse of patents to charge obscene amounts for drugs that cost them next to nothing.
Fix those two things, and the rest of the system would fix itself in short order.
On the post: DailyDirt: Healthcare Nightmares
Re:
I meant to end with this:
-- C. S. Lewis
On the post: DailyDirt: Healthcare Nightmares
Actually, it's an exceedingly simple task.
...and there's the problem right there.
First off, let's get one thing straight. What we call "health insurance" is not insurance, not by any other standard of insurance with which we are familiar. If auto insurance worked like "health insurance," I'd have to submit a claim every time I filled up with gas or took my car to the car wash. If homeowners' insurance worked like "health insurance..." just imagine Lowe's and the Home Depot billing like hospitals.
Real health insurance would do what insurance does: cover disasters. Broken bones, cancer, heart attacks, assault victims, etc. What we have is not a system that does that. In fact, when actual disasters come up, our "health insurance" system does everything possible to avoid paying out!
No, let's call it what it really is: a financial industry takeover of the health care system. Let's start with a very simple axiom: if you pay all the bills for Organization XYZ, this gives you a tremendous degree of influence over Organization XYZ's agenda and priorities. And ever since the rise of the health insurance system, which President Nixon set into motion, that's exactly what's happened. Insurers have taken over the funding of health care, until they control the system.
There is also the secondary effect of taking the responsibility for payment completely out of the customer's hands: moral hazard. It's an economics term that means that when a person (or a hospital, in this case) is insulated from the risks of their behavior, their behavior becomes worse. If a hospital no longer has to keep their care affordable to its patients, because the patients aren't paying for it out of pocket, they end up not doing so.
One last thing to keep in mind: Medical costs have skyrocketed in the last few decades, far more quickly than inflation, when their increasing use of improving technology should have been pushing the cost down. As proof, look at one common medical procedure that's not covered by insurance: laser eye surgery. Patients have to bear the cost out of pocket, and it's come way down while the price of insured medicine has gone up.
No, it's not at all difficult to accurately place blame for the nightmare of our medical system in the USA. It lies squarely at the feet of the financial industry, specifically the medical insurance companies. Remember this next time you hear some politician talking about the uninsured. We don't need 30 million less uninsured people in the US, or whatever number they're bandying about; we need about 300 million more.
On the post: Roca Labs Issues Bogus DMCA Takedown Notices To Google To Try To Hide PissedConsumer Reviews
Seen on Techdirt's advertising
Hooray for irony!
On the post: Roca Labs Issues Bogus DMCA Takedown Notices To Google To Try To Hide PissedConsumer Reviews
Re: Fits Roca's pattern?
On the post: Ontario Police Inspector Says He Wants A 'Driver's License For The Internet'
Re: Re: Driver's License is a flawed analogy
When the consequences of someone screwing up can be that disastrous, we require licensing to prove basic competence, to head off potential problems down the road. We have it for doctors, lawyers, and teachers, and we have it for people who wish to operate heavy machinery in public at highway speeds.
But that same problem scenario doesn't really exist for Internet users. I've never heard of someone getting killed or maimed in a computer crash; have you? Yes, people have gotten badly hurt and even killed by malicious Internet users, but licensing does next to nothing to stop that particular problem; it's the wrong tool for the job. This is what Senator McInnis and Inspector Naylor don't understand.
On the post: DailyDirt: Flying Cars Are Here!
Re: Re:
Kickstarter backers are not investors; a more appropriate description would be the rather old-fashioned term "patron of the arts."
On the post: DailyDirt: Flying Cars Are Here!
On the post: Federal Judge Says Public Has Right To Know About FBI's Biometric Database, Awards $20,000 In Legal Fees To FOIA Requester
Colorable? I've heard plenty of strange legalese before, but this one totally stumps me. What exactly is (supposed to be) being colored here?
On the post: Deer Hunter Vs. Killshot: Why Specific Expression Matters More Than Similar Shooter-Genre Staples
Why in the world would anyone want to use an assault rifle when hunting deer?
On the post: Asset Forfeiture Is Just Cops Going Shopping For Stuff They Want
Re: Re: Re:
Elizabeth Warren. One of a very few who is trying to get the country back on track.
On the post: County Prosecutor Looking To Arrest Housing Official After Agency Demands $16,000 To Fulfill FOIA Request
Re: Re: Negligent?
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