The Evil Empire's Latest Boylove Scandal

Once again, Catholicism is in deep shit in regards to child molestation charges. This time, people are pointing their fingers at the Vatican, especially since Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican Secretary of State, let this little nugget out:

"Many psychologists and psychiatrists have demonstrated that there is no relationship between celibacy and pedophilia. But many others have demonstrated, I have been told recently, that there is a relationship between homosexuality and pedophilia. That is true. That is the problem."

I find this hard to believe. Especially since the dude doesn't actually give any details beyond "That is true." I'm sorry, but that doesn't prove anything except that Cardinal Bertone is VERY selective about what his mental filters allow him to see. As Arthur G. Broadwell has pointed out, celibacy might not cause pedophilia, it doesn't exactly make it go away. For fuck's sake, humans are on the whole, sexual creatures.

Even Pope Palpatine....

In effect, we're being told, "this is true because I said so." The logic being followed, as far as I can recognise it, is that since it's mainly been priests abusing choirboys, it's a gay problem. The Saarlac sized hole in this logic is that while there are many gay men that enter the priesthood, it is not only males that are being molested, which the SNAP Network are working their arses off to show.

I'm not arguing that paedophilia is caused by celibacy, mainly because that would be stupid, but I will argue that a person with a sex drive, when forced into a situation that is not natural, will find that their sexual urges will often be warped. Unnatural conditions will create seriously fucked up results.

It really is that simple.

We know it.

They know it.

Hell, Marvel Comics has been using that logic in superhero origin stories since the 1960's.

Pictured: Warped Sex Drives.

There is also the logic that paedophiles, recognising that they are morally unable to act upon their sexual compulsions, join the church to help them combat these urges with the help of others living a celibate lifestyle. This is where the issues begin, as they are placed in a position of privilege and are protected by an international organisation that has a long history of shit being swept under the table. While trying to overcome paedophilia is definitely taking the high road, following the high road into a place full of choirboys is not really conducive to a penitent paedophile's goals, is it?

1930's Germany had a similar stance in regards to gays, but at least no one in this particular clusterfuck is blaming the Jews.

Oh wait...

The worst thing about all this is how many folks are going to be hurt by this. Catholics, on the whole, have a tendency to be good people, but something like this shakes the entire church, which is going to hit they laypeople hard.

More Crappola about the Filter

Once again, I'm blogging about the Australian Government's idea to filter Australia's Internet.

Recently, we were told that it won't be a crime to circumvent it.

Fan-MidgetFisting-Tastic!

So tell me, boys and girls, who is this actually protecting again?It's been claimed that this filter will only block out certain topics from "inadvertantly" being shown to kids. There aren't too many things that kids are going to accidentally wander into, although if the Google safe search filter is turned off, then the results could be unfortunate if they're looking for pictures of "girl on horse."

That being said, there isn't too much that you can "accidentally" walk into. The viewing of material on the internet is largely intent-driven, which means that maybe if Mr Stephen Conroy keeps on "stumbling" into inappropriate material online, then maybe he should be a little more honest about his viewing habits and actually stroll into a pornographic site like a mature adult!

Amid the bullshit though, there is a teenaged beacon of hope.

Behold! The Leader of the Revolution!

Tom Wood, the lad who managed to bust John Howard's sad attempt at a filter in less than half an hour, has spoken up and stated that he's gonna get around it and frankly, that it didn't protect anyone from a damned thing.

So, we have a filter that we can freely navigate around, that will slow our internet speeds down, that tackles none of the real issues that are posing a genuine problem, such as internet addiction. Pictured: Internet use.

So while the peer to peer swapping of kiddie pictures and trolling myspace for teen boys continues, we can all sleep knowing that at least the process of downloading pictures of Little Orphan Annie to whack off to is going to be abysmally slow. Is it any wonder that people are convinced that Mr Conroy doesn't know how to do his damned job?

Folks, for all that it will take to get around this filter, I'd suggest going here for the info. This person's done their research and I think that they have a lot of valid points. I personally will be going around the filter as an act of dissidence and I'd like a lot more people to get involved as well.

Brain Damage for Wisconsin Students...

I've not written anything for a little while due to having a six year old running around like a madman, but he's gone back to his mother's house, so I'm back. I also have a Wisconsin induced headache.

Recently a state law was introduced to ensure that Wisconsin teens can receive age-appropriate sex education and information on how to not get infected with sexually transmitted infections. You'd think that it'd be pretty cut and dried, right?

Nope.

It appears that the education has come too late for somebody as Juneau County District Attorney Scott Southworth has already caught stupid. Now I don't want to sound harsh, (Oh hell, yes I do. This schmuck has it coming) but this chump is effectively trying to sabotage the efforts of the schooling system, who are trying to ensure that the school isn't full of knocked up teenage girls.

The chump in question

The gist of this guy's argument is that the new law apparently promotes "sexualization and sexual assault" of minors, which many people (myself obviously included) are loudly calling bullshit on. There is already plenty out there that is sexualizing children, but the schooling system isn't on that list.

This new law dictates that sex education shouldn't only teach children about birth control, but also how to use it. If I'm reading this correctly, previously it was okay to teach high schoolers about the Pill as long as you didn't point out "You swallow it." Apparently, this is akin to "teaching children about alcohol use, then instructing them on how to make mixed alcoholic drinks."

This is why people are calling bullshit.

I hate to break it to ol' Scotty, but abstinence based programs haven't worked. Hell, the only study that has shown any evidence of abstinence only programs working showed that students that underwent abstinence-only sex education had sex one to two years later than expected, which you'd think is a success until you look at the details:

1. Given to 12 year old African Americans
2. Held on a Saturday
3. Delivers the message of "abstinence until ready," as opposed to the government-funded and woefully ineffective "abstinence until marriage"

VIRGIN!!!

Sorry, but I've gotta say that if you're willing to go to school on a Saturday voluntarily, I'm not sure of your chances of getting laid in the first place. Also bear in mind that the control group was TWELVE! Apparently, because a bunch of kids waited until they were fourteen to bone, this study was seen as a success.

So... getting back to ol' Scotty.... He's also claimed that the new sex ed removes parents and teachers from the decision making process of what's best for their children. The thing that a lot of people seem to ignore is that sex is EVERYWHERE.

And I DO mean everywhere

What this means is that the kiddlywinks are going to catch glimpses of it all over the place, but without the proper education, their explorations are going to be a lot more dangerous and probably end with more teen pregnancies and high schools rife with STIs. While I agree that parents should have more of a hand in their children's education, the sad truth is that the result of this is often one of three results:

1. Little, as the parents assume that their kids're gonna learn this stuff at school...
2. None, as the kids are gonna be told "Jesus doesn't want you to do that..."
3. None, as parents are going to assume that the kids are gonna learn from somewhere else any way, so why bother?

Very few parents give their kids the "Birds and the Bees" talk anymore and the result is that schools are taking over. Now I could see some of ol' Scotty's points, although a lot of them I disagree with, but when he claims that adopting these mandates will make his job as a District attorney more difficult by "converting objective human growth and development programming into a radical program that sexualises our children as early as kindergarten" I have to say that this guy is not trying to protect children but push his own moral agenda. He uses phrases such as "high moral standards" and appears to be claiming that anybody that wants their child to undergo a comprehensive sex ed class apparently doesn't have the same "high moral standards" as he and other evangelical folks.

Look, one way or another, teens are gonna find out about sex and hiding information about how to protect themselves from STI's and pregnancy is NOT going to stop them from getting down and dirty. All you can do is educate your kids and hope to hell that you raised them to be smart enough to know when they're ready.

Or introduce them to World of Warcraft.

The Joy of ...WTF?!!! Pt 2: Pillars of Manhood and other propaganda

In the previous installment of The Joy of ...WTF?!!! I commented on the rather...interesting... conclusions that Alex Comfort came to in regards to the vulva in his book, The Joy of Sex. I have to say, that Dr Comfort has well and truly followed in Freud's footsteps in regards to it all being about the penis. While apparently, the vulva is a devourer of manhood and the stuff of children's nightmares, the penis is both aesthetically pleasing and also more magical than Dr. Strange and Merlin combined.

More magical than Ron...

Some of the apparent penis worship:
"More that the essential piece of male equipment, even if it is often and expressively described as a 'tool', the penis has more symbolic importance than any other human organ, as a dominance signal and, by reason of having a will of it's own, generally a 'personality'. No point in reading all this symbolism back here, except to say that lovers will experience it, and find themselves as treating the penis as something very like a third party. At one moment it is like a weapon or a threat, at another something they share, like a child "

I'm going to ignore the reference to the sharing of a child here as it seems a little out of sorts in a paragraph about penises. So between the vulva being some sort of monster and the penis apparently being a weapon, the act of having sex went from being a taboo subject to some sort of bizarre fantasy novel where the monster must be slain in order for male to survive....

Classic erotica?

After that, I'm pretty lure that I don't need to comment any further about that. On to the issues he seems to have with homosexuality.

I'd like to draw people's attention back to Pt 1 for a moment. Consider this statement:

'Luckily, few of these biologically programmed anxieties survive closer acquaintance, but are the origins of most male hangups including homosexuality.'

Now I'll ignore the implication that men have issues with sex because they're afraid of vaginas (as opposed to, oooh I dunno, incompatible personalities?) but I have to ask: did he just claim that homosexuality was a "hangup"? I thought that I'd read too much into that statement until Dr Comfort also commented:

'Straight man-woman sex is the real thing for most people - others need something different but their scope is usually lessened, not greatened, by such needs.'

That particular statement concludes the section marked Bisexuality and seems to imply that if you are not heterosexual, then there is something wrong with you. I understand perfectly that this is a book for heterosexual couples, but every so often it seems that Alex is trying to defend heterosexuality to the reader. Seriously Alex, I don't think it's necessary.

All in all, I can see how The Joy of Sex would have shook the world of 1970's folks, but it is far from the be-all-and-end-all that people claim. There are many other books out there that answer the questions that today's reader wants answered. I'm reserving judgment for the New Joy of Sex until I've read it.

Stephen Conroy

Warning! Rant ahead with many links!

Anyone that is familiar with the proposed filtering of Australia's Internet will recognise the name of Communications Minister Stephen Conroy. Well, he's made the news again on ninemsn, after an interview with Fairfax Media. He's once more defended the filter, referring to an internet without a filter (Such as, ooh, I dunno, the one we're using now?) as "a recipe for anarchy."

After they take our Anarchy, who's next? V? Red Bull?

Ummmmm....

No....

An internet without a filter is a recipe for free speech. That's just one of the reasons that people are against the filter. I suspect that this may also be the main reason that many politicians are for it.

Although free speech is a large issue, it isn't the only one by any means. There are also a few other issues that are being raised such as:

1. The filter will slow down Australia's already laughable internet speed. We have one of the slowest networks in the developing world and yet Conroy and Co. want to slow it down even further. One of the figures being thrown out there is seventy percent.

2. It will not stop the people that truly want to find the banned material. If the paedophiles, militant supremacists (of all stripes) and other criminals/nutjobs/sickos aren't put off by laws that stop them from engaging in these acts in the first place, do you honestly think that a second-rate filter is going to stop them from putting stuff on the internet?

3. The list of banned material will not be made public, which means that the Australian public has no idea of what they are REALLY being "protected" from.

4. We've been misled to in regards to what is being blocked. The "Refused Classification" line that is being spouted isn't quite true, it seems. According to The Age, of 1370 sites blocked, 506 would be be rated either X18 or R18, which means that they are still legal to be viewed in Australia. The Australian public was told that the filter was to stop illegal content.

I won't go into all of the reasons that there is for Australians opposing this filter, but if you're interested, I'd head here and here.

It's been made clear that Australia doesn't want its internet filtered, but Mr Conroy, with a sense of righteousness only previously seen in Magneto, isn't listening

See? We don't want it.

This kind of singlemindedness is not what protects children. This is the kind of bullshit crusade that ensures people that don't know any better are lulled into a false sense of security by a government that, unable to actually target the REAL threats, goes after something else in order to deflect recognition of the fact that they are powerless against the REAL threats.

MySpace. Facebook. Social Networking sites are where the genuine threats to children come from, but going after something that huge is just too much hard work. That's where half-baked ideas like the internet filter, marketed at parents too busy to raise their own damned kids, comes into play.

In closing, my thoughts to Mr Conroy are rather simply conveyed, so here's Mr John Constantine to express them.