(Personal note: Have a brief break from the big project, time to write one column that I promised months ago. Gods only know when the next one will go up, though, sorry. No, I still can't talk about it.)

I'm surprised that I haven't taken more grief now that Michael Devlin has plead guilty to literally everything that the world was accusing him of. Over the course of October 8th to 10th, Devlin appeared in four different courts, and between them, here is the story that he told under oath, as I'm sure most of you heard at least some of. He says that during the fall of 2002, he drove around rural Franklin County looking for a kid who was alone. When he saw then-11-year-old Sean Hornbeck riding his bicycle alone with nobody around, Devlin deliberately ran into the bicycle, got out to pretend to help, and forced Sean into the truck and drove off with him. (And we are assured that somehow, despite the fact that the area isn't that rural, nobody heard or saw any of this.) He says that over the next month, he kept Hornbeck tied to the living room sofa with his mouth duct-taped shut and raped him repeatedly. Then, a month later, Devlin told Hornbeck he was going home, drove him out in to the woods, and instead attempted to strangle him. Hornbeck persuaded Devlin to let him live, so long as he stayed with Devlin willingly and never attempted to escape. Devlin plead guilty to having sex with Hornbeck many times over the next four-plus years, occasionally photographing and videotaping them having sex. Devlin says that in January of this year he "got bored with Sean" and went out looking for another kid, ending up kidnapping 13 year old Ben Ownby at gunpoint. 4 days later, because Ownby made enough noise while he was being kidnapped to attract attention to the kidnapper's truck, Devlin was caught and both boys were reunited with their families.

Since then, multiple journalists and columnists and experts have demanded that those of us who suggested that the most likely reason that Sean Hornbeck was living with Michael Devlin was that he chose to do so owe Hornbeck's family an apology. They'll get none from me. The account above may be all that we'll ever know about the case, and yes, it does make the Akers family (Sean's mother remarried) account the official account that is on the record and sworn to under oath. But there's one gaping hole in this story. For an entire month after Hornbeck's kidnapping, he wasn't living with Devlin. Devlin was flat on his back immobilized with severe complications of diabetes, at his own parents' house on the far side of town. I'm having trouble finding my links that gave the dates of that enforced bed rest, but it seems to line up with the time that Hornbeck was supposedly duct-taped and tied to the sofa. If so, who is supposed to have fed him during that time, and why hasn't Hornbeck accused that person? If my memory is wrong and the time that Devlin was laid up was after that, then we don't need to lock up Devlin anywhere nearly as much as we need to study the heck out of him. Because the best minds of the big-three Cold War powers spent what must have come to roughly a billion inflation-adjusted dollars over the course of six decades trying to find a way to compel someone against their will to take your side even after they've left your physical control, and it has never worked. Brainwashing only works as long as you stay with the subject to keep reinforcing the conditioning, whether you're an American airman shot down over North Korea or young Patty Hearst in the clutches of the Symbionese Liberation Army. We're being asked to believe that a middle aged not-terribly-bright diabetic assistant manager of a franchise pizza restaurant with only his hands, duct tape, and a little bit of rope was unable to improvise better mind control than what the top scientific minds of the CIA's MKULTRA program were able to do with thousands of man-hours of research involving hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of torture techniques and experimental drugs. If he did, then we need to know for the love of the gods how he did it. But I still don't think he did.

Because as multiple witnesses have verified, over the next four years Sean Hornbeck spent a lot of time on his own, walking up to four blocks from the apartment, dating at least two girls over that time, playing with other kids on various parking lots, and even illegally driving Devlin's pickup truck. If Hornbeck were famously retarded, or even stupid, then it would be possible to imagine that at no time when he had that much control over his life was he able to persuade himself that his parents and the cops would thrown Devlin in jail for the rest of his life, that there was no way for Devlin to threaten him if he went for help. But Hornbeck's famously an A student. I'm sorry, it just doesn't wash. I saw (or heard about, memory is fuzzy) a bumper sticker back in the 1970s that said, "You can believe in the laws of physics, or you can believe the Warren Commission Report." Well, you can believe in the laws of physics, and in thousands of years of recorded human history, or you can believe what Michael Devlin plead guilty to in court in early October of this year.

Yes, maybe it's possible that all the witnesses who contradict Hornbeck's and Devlin's account of this story are confused about chronology. Maybe Hornbeck has some undiagnosed mental illness that renders him exceptionally susceptible to mind control. Yes, it's theoretically possible that I was wrong and that Hornbeck really wasn't expecting Devlin to pick him up on that road. But you know what? That's what Devlin would say whether it was true or not. Because let's face some facts about this case. The police absolutely did catch him with two teenage boys living in his house without their parents' permission, in an entirely different county. That's aggravated kidnapping of a minor. He was already going to go to jail for a very long time. But the police also found, when they searched the apartment, photographs and videotapes of him having sex with Sean Hornbeck when Hornbeck was 15 or younger. At that point, even if he was convicted of nothing else, he was going to go to jail for the rest of his life. Period. Nothing that any fancy lawyer could do was going to change that fact. So if I'm right and Sean really was his boyfriend, or even by that point ex-boyfriend, Devlin had every incentive to plead guilty to whatever would make Sean Hornbeck's life easier. And if Sean Hornbeck admitted to having run away from home at age 11 to move in with his boyfriend, a middle aged overweight diabetic assistant manager at a franchise pizza place, that was a stigma that was going to stick with him for the rest of his life. And since both Hornbeck and Devlin would say what Devlin said under oath a couple of weeks ago whether it was true or not, what they said (whether under oath or not) proves exactly nothing to me.

Why do I care? Why am I wasting your time with this?

In May of this year, the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee gathered together almost the only four researchers on the entire planet who've done any research on sex crimes against children that involve the Internet: Dr. David Finkelhore of the Crimes against Children Research Center, Dr. Michael Ybarra of Internet Solutions for Kids, Amanda Lenhart of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, and UC Berkeley researcher danah boyd (her preferred lack of capitalization, not a typo). You can read the (PDF) transcript of their presentation at NetCaucus.org: "Just the Facts about Online Youth Victimization." Please do. Now observe from their presentations something that literally everybody has found out about this subject, including research that goes back to the early BBS days as far back as 1977. When you ask kids if they've ever been sexually solicited over the Internet, nearly all of them say, "yes," but it turns out that they're misunderstanding the question. When boyd explained to them what they were really being asked, has any adult unknown to you contacted you over the Internet for the purpose of persuading you to have sex with them, all of them said "no." (They were thinking of the definition of "solicitation" that means "advertising," it turns out; the actual sexual exploitation of children by adults that really ticks them off is non-stop spamming of ads for sexual dysfunction aids and pornography web sites. It's the real reason, Ybarra says, that kids have abandoned email altogether for SMS phone text chat.)

Of the ones that have been sexually solicited over the Internet, all cases so far known have the following facts in common. The youngest was 13. And every single one of them was specifically hanging out in a sex-related Internet chat room or forum at the time, specifically hoping to meet an adult who'd have sex with them. None of the top four researchers on the subject, whether studying criminal case files or surveying thousands of kids, were able to find a case of a total stranger approaching a kid; the kids are the ones approaching total strangers. Contrary to the impression they always leave, you can tell that Perverted Justice, the Internet vigilante group behind NBC's "Dateline: To Catch a Predator" specials, adopts this specifically as their MO: volunteers log onto sexually themed chat rooms, announce that they're underage, and see who responds. They're trying to address the problem of teenagers who run away from home to be with their adult boyfriends (and, very very rarely, girlfriends) by making sure that every adult who might even consider saying yes when a kid offers sex over the Internet is afraid that it's a police sting. The researchers who spoke to the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee all felt that it might be more useful to try to identify which kids are likely to do that and intervene in their lives, persuade them how stupid that is.

Probably some mix of both efforts needs to be tried, with the understanding that as long as kids get horny and have nothing they can do about it, some very tiny minority of kids are going to seek out sexually active adults and there isn't going to be any way of stopping all of them from hooking up. If we're going to continue to structure society so that this is seen as a Very Bad Thing, that's what we're absolutely going to have to do. But we're not going to do this as long as almost all adults in America keep insisting that no kid would ever have sex with an adult willingly, and all of the prevention efforts are spent on trying to hunt down the roughly one molester per generation who forcibly abducts teenage strangers and rapes them. Not just because it's a waste of time, but because it perpetuates this myth that none of the kids are going willingly. Whether or not Sean Hornbeck went with Michael Devlin willingly, we know for a fact that almost all of the ones found with strange adults did.

And they don't even make up any but the tiniest minority of kids who are sexually abused by adults. Maybe the most extreme estimates (one in three women, by some accounts) are exaggerated, there are untold thousands of children in America who get sexually molested, thousands more every year. And all but a half dozen or a dozen of those are molested not by strangers, but by adults who have been put into a position of authority over the kid: parents, step-parents, adult relatives, adult neighbors, teachers, coaches, priests and ministers, babysitters, any adult who has alone-time with kids and the power to threaten the child with consequences if they talk is statistically far, far more likely to be the one who molests a child than J. Random Pedophile with a gun and a pickup truck. The children so molested are raped far younger than the ones who end up having sex with strangers, and much more violently, and never in known history at the instigation of, or even with the permission of, the child. And the tens of millions of grown-up victims of that kind of rape as children did not just spend 100 years trying to get society to do something about that problem only to see all of their efforts sidelined by yet another diversion, by yet another circus freak sideshow that distracts Americans from who it is that really rapes the most children.

There's something about the Larry Craig scandal that makes exactly no sense to me. Let's be absolutely clear here. Idaho Republican and Senator Larry Craig plead guilty to a lesser-charge version of one misdemeanor count of seeming as if he were attempting to hire a gay prostitute. That's all, and that much is not even vaguely in dispute. So why in the heck are so many Republicans, including two or three of his fellow Republican senators, rushing to jump immediately and instantly to the political death penalty, immediate resignation? They've given reasons, yes. But each and every one of the reasons they've given is just plain flatly not true!

It's being claimed that you can't plead guilty to a crime and serve in the US Senate. Not only is that not true, there have been senators who were convicted felons. Maybe not lately, but there is absolutely nothing in the Senate code of conduct that says you can't plead guilty to a misdemeanor. It's being claimed that being involved in "moral turpitude," such as prostitution, casts the Senate in a bad light, but nobody's demanding that Senator David Vitter resign after being implicated in the "D.C. Madam" scandal. It's being claimed that Republicans won't tolerate the kind of innuendo and scandal that are likely to follow this accusation, but Mark Foley was followed by not merely innuendo and scandal but widespread knowledge of illicit sex with young boys for ten years, and not only did the Republicans not demand his resignation when the rumors started, they ran him for re-election twice after that. It's being claimed that the Mark Foley scandal taught Republicans that if they don't over-react to minor sex scandals, they lose elections. Does anybody think that this scandal will be in anybody's memory 14 months from now?

They're claiming that it was a violation of Senate rules for him to attempt to use his Senate rank to intimidate the cop out of arresting him. That's total BS; on the contrary, the US Constitution is 100% clear that as a sitting senator while the senate is in session, he would have been absolutely within his right to invoke near-total immunity from arrest. When he showed his business card to the officer, he almost certainly was thinking of doing just that. There was no legal impediment to him doing so. Of course, doing so would have made the news, because there's no way the police would have been at all quiet about it. That's almost certainly why he didn't invoke his Senate immunity, to avoid that publicity, not for fear that the Senate would do the only thing that would allow a Senator who's invoked Senate immunity to be arrested, namely expel him from the Senate first. He can't possibly have been thinking that they were going to do something the Senate basically never does. Nor does the excuse I've heard from some Republicans, that he should be expelled from the Senate for threatening a police officer by invoking his Senate rank, hold water. What exactly was a US Senator from Idaho supposed to be threatening to do to a Hennepin County vice squad cop?

Even the supposedly cynical explanations don't work. I've heard it claimed that Republicans are afraid that if he runs for re-election after this, people in Idaho will vote for a Democrat instead for his Senate seat. Oh, please. Larry Craig's senate seat is one of those that's so safe that, to quote something once said of a Louisiana politician, he could only be unseated if they found him in bed with a dead girl or a live boy. Idahoans haven't voted for a Democrat for that Senate seat since the Ford administration. I've also heard the theory that if he steps down, the governor gets to appoint a Republican to fill out his term. That much is true. But the supposed advantage to doing this now is that it lets that interim Senator run for re-election in '08 as an incumbent. Wait, how is that supposed to be an advantage, considering that the next couple of months are going to have some of the most contentious votes in the history of the Senate, votes that are scaring the heck out of Senators from both parties for fear that whichever way they vote history might make them look stupid by the next time they come up for re-election? Is anybody thinking that it would be to some hypothetical replacement for Larry Craig's advantage to have to vote on the Iraq War in September? No, even if they were going to write off Larry Craig, it'd be smarter to let him take the flack for the next six months' worth of unpopular votes and have him resign a lot closer to the election than to demand that he step down now.

No, no matter which of their so-called explanations for why they're reacting the way they are that you hear, even a trivial examination of this case and of the history shows that it's just not true. Which raises the question that very few journalists have had the guts to ask, because to wander into this territory is to tiptoe up to the edge of libel bait: what, exactly, are they afraid of? (The closest I've seen is this AP wire story: Larry Margasack, "Nothing in code matches Craig conduct," 8/30/07, and it sticks strictly to the history that disproves some of these claims.) You'd have to be crazy, or so poor as to be completely lawsuit-proof because you have nothing to lose, to even speculate about this.

Fortunately for you, I'm both.

Larry Craig, in his press conference about this the other day, went off on a long tirade about how he's sick of the Idaho Statesman newspaper being on a "witch hunt" to prove that he's gay. Actually, the one news article they've run on the subject came to no such conclusion; all it reported was that some very shady sources, none of whom the Statesman considered to be reliable, had claimed to have either had gay sex with Larry Craig or to have been propositioned for gay sex by him; they merely reported that the rumor existed. But here's the interesting thing: if after a lengthy investigation they concluded that no credible source was saying so, why did they even report on it at all? There does turn out to be a reason, and while the Republicans' over-reaction can't plausibly have anything to do with Mark Foley, this sort of indirectly does. You see, when the Mark Foley scandal started to break open, started to come to the attention of the broader public, Larry Craig was the first, and almost only, politician to rush directly to the nearest microphone and proclaim in a loud voice that nobody had ever accused him of any impropriety with a page. Which left the reporters from his home town newspaper scratching their heads. Not because he was wrong, but because he was right -- nobody had ever accused him of any impropriety with a page, and even people who didn't like him, even people who'd investigated him in some depth, had never thought to do so. Why was he in such a big hurry to deny something that nobody was ever going to accuse him of? That, they say, is why they were willing to even look into it when dodgy sources came to them with dodgy stories about Larry Craig's supposed homosexuality or bisexuality; because Larry Craig acted like a guy who had something really spooky to hide.

They didn't find anything. And you know what? For all I know, for all anybody who's looked into it much harder than I ever will knows, there isn't anything. It could very easily be the case that Larry Craig isn't really gay in the same sense that lots of men who want anonymous free or cheap sex and turn to male prostitutes don't think of themselves as gay when they resort to men because women are too hard to get. It may be even less than that. And if Larry Craig had stayed shut up about it, had refused to comment when the story broke in Roll Call, or at most issued a very brief written or emailed statement sticking to his story that this was really just the equivalent of a "no contest" plea, that he wasn't really guilty but admitted that a jury would probably convicted him so he just paid the fine, voters back in Idaho would have believed him in more than sufficient numbers to re-elect him, and the rest of us would have forgotten about it. Most of us are likely to forget about it in at most a week or two, anyway, even as badly as he's handled it.

No, what I'm thinking is this. I'm thinking that he's acting so guilty that Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Norm Coleman, Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, and so forth think that he is guilty of something worse. Maybe he is guilty of something worse and everybody in D.C. knows about it. But I doubt it. No, what's much more likely is that he's acting so guilty that they think that if they all shut up about this and he shuts up about this, it will all go away ... until 12 to 13 months from now, when some reporter digs up whatever the real scandal that they're afraid is hidden somewhere is, and then it'll be Mark Foley in 2006 all over again.

Some gay men and some lesbians will tell you that they've always known that they only people they were romantically and/or physically attracted to were the same gender as themselves. Some of them. Not many. Heck, most heterosexuals never think very much about who or what they're attracted to much before junior high school, and their orientation is the one that everybody assumes in the absence of evidence to the contrary. So, plain and simply, a large majority of homosexual Americans grew up just naturally assuming, as a matter of course, that they weren't gay. And, doubtless, once they first started thinking about it they breathed a sigh of relief that they weren't gay.

It's been over 30 years since the American Psychiatric Association declared that being gay isn't a mental illness, almost 40 years since the Stonewall riots, and almost sixty years since Albert Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, and a hundred and twenty years since the first scientific psychologist to study the subject came to the same conclusion and published it in his book, Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis. You'd think that some time in the last 30 or 40 or 60 or 120 years society would have come to terms with the fact that being gay is just a random and essentially uninteresting fact about some subset of the population, no weirder or sicker or even more or less rare than having blue eyes or being left handed, wouldn't you? Hasn't worked out that way yet. There are places where homosexual women and men can find reasonably safe, almost normal lives. There are jobs and industries where there are no barriers to a normal, productive career. There are families that don't disown and cast out their children, don't cut them off from all help when they get in trouble, if they find out that their child is a gay man or a lesbian. Such places, such careers, and such families are, however, still more the exception than the rule. For everybody else, finding out that you're gay means that you've suddenly got no family, no home, and your career is over before it even began. Even before you factor in the incredible amount of violence aimed at them, it's no surprise that the suicide rate is dangerously high.

Even those who do face the prospect of losing everything because they're not as heterosexual as they hoped they would be often experience grief over the life they had imagined for themselves, the life that is forever lost to them. And that very definitely begins with denial, anger, bargaining and depressing, before reaching acceptance -- and some of them never make it as far as acceptance that their fantasy heterosexual normal life is dead. Denial: "I'm not gay!" Anger: "It's those evil gays who are tempting me, I wish they were dead!" Gods help us, bargaining: "God, I'll dedicate my life to your service if you'll cure me of being gay." And, unsurprisingly, depression: "How much longer can I keep up this charade, and why do I even bother when my life is so ruined?"

Yeah, about that bargaining phase? There are pretty much only two religions in America that promise that they can pray away the gay: (fake) fundamentalist Christianity and the Church of Scientology. And people who desperately need their lives to be normal don't join the Scientologists. And fundamentalist (anti-)Christians have added a blasphemous 11th commandment to the laws of Moses: upon pain of damnation, thou shalt support the Republican Party. And that, my friends, I think is why when you hear about a married nationally famous politician being caught propositioning an undercover police officer that he thinks is a gay male prostitute in a men's room with a reputation as a gay hangout, it is such a safe bet that the politician in question is a Republican from the religious-right wing of the party. That is my theory as to why the Republican party has such a long-standing and severe "bathroom problem."

A couple of quick follow-ups to earlier blog posts:

First: Eris forfend that I re-open the Strikethrough '07 shouting match now that it's finally quieted down (after a mind-numbing 393 comments so far). But I was following up on a news story after seeing that the local prosecutor has dropped all of the cases that came out of the Dateline/PervertedJustice snuff-film episode; he won't come out and say it, but it's pretty clear that he has a moral objection to accepting evidence collected by vigilantes. While glancing to see what Perverted Justice had to say about this, I saw a link that they've spun off an entire second website: CorporateSexOffenders.com. And as I warned, who should happen to be at the very top of their hit list but our own LiveJournal.com and its parent company Six Apart. And if you read their entire beef with Six Apart, it's even worse than I thought.

What I predicted was that what they wanted was one change and that would be enough to make them go away, for LiveJournal to hire a full-time member of the abuse team whose job was to do nothing all day but run site searches for pedophiles and boot them off the service; even if that didn't get all of them, even if everybody knows it never could, that would be enough to convince Perverted Justice that they were making a good faith effort. That is, after all, what they settled for from MySpace and Blogger. But no, now they've got their sights set higher. They also want LiveJournal to boot off of the service anybody who in anyway suggests that teens having sex with adults is not the end of the world. In other words, they not only want LiveJournal to boot users who confess to crimes, or who attempt crimes. They also want LiveJournal to ban users who do anything to suggest that the law ought to be changed, or who defend the fact that the law hasn't always been this way.

See, that right there is enough to explain why civilized people and nations don't tolerate vigilantism, isn't it? Mission creep.

Second: A while back I recommended you tape or TiVo a new USA network TV series called Burn Notice. What I said at the time was that we'd need to see how good the writing was going to turn out to be to tell whether or not this was going to suck. Well, after tonight we're 3 episodes in. And in fact, the last two episodes weren't written by the series creator. According to the writers blog, USA threw a demand at them that sounds to me less like how business executives deal with a million-dollar investment than like some kind of reality-TV initiation stunt: with no warning they told him they wanted him to crap out 3 episode scripts in 10 days, including in that time the time needed to hire at least two more writers and bring them up to speed. The second episode, "Identity," suffered a little from being a little too obvious, not least of which because the main plot was lifted intact from several classic caper films and detective films. But taken as a whole, the 3 episodes are a solid body of work, certainly a better 3 opening episodes than in a lot of other successful series I could name. (*cough* ST:TNG *cough*)

Burn Notice is violating one of the cardinal rules of network television, the rule that says "show, don't tell." The industry is almost as violently allergic to voice-over narration as they are to foreign-language subtitles. And in fact the reason why almost every detective or spy show these days has a less-experienced partner, or one with different expertise, is so that they have an in-character excuse for expository dumps. The problem with that is that that bucket has been to the well too many times, the gag has gotten tired. No, the character of Michael Westin does his own voice-over narration ... but only of the "spy" parts of his job and life, not his actual personal life. And here's what I noticed about that. For one, it does a great job of giving the series a very literary feel, making it feel more like a great book than like a cheesy detective show, not least of which because the lead character is a lot more literary-sounding in his own head than he is in real life. In real life, as you'd expect of a professional spy, he's very laconic. Considering how much time he spends with nobody to talk to, if he weren't narrating the show it'd be very nearly silent. But just as interestingly, I started paying attention to what parts of what he's explaining, and how he explains them. Michael is explaining to some invisible bystander what being a spy is really like, and explaining it in the slightly condescending tone of someone debunking movie myths. This lets him say things like, "International spies are drawn to aid conferences for the same reasons that hookers are drawn to conventions. You can do a lot of business, and the drinks are free." Or to say things like, "If you have to deal with an angry drug dealer, give me a hardware store over a gun any time. Guns make you stupid. Duct tape makes you smart." Or to say things like, "Modern electronics makes it very easy and inexpensive to conduct remote surveillance on anyone. This is less glamorous than it sounds," as we're about to see him crawl over some business's filthy tar-paper roof to duct-tape a cheap camcorder to their gutter.

Or this one, from the pilot, that I think gives away the gimmick of the narration: "Hardly any spies come from happy families. People who grow up in dysfunctional families make great spies. They don't trust anyone, they learn to lie like a pro, and they're good at taking a beating." Michael clearly hates his late father for being abusive, and despises his mother for not protecting herself or the kids; he flatly admits to everyone but his mother that the reason he joined the Army at 18 was to run away from home, and the reason he became a spy was to have an excuse to be on the far side of the planet from his family. But as I was musing to myself about who in the heck does Michael imagine that he's narrating his life to? My first thought was that he's composing future mission debriefings for after he gets his job back, but no, he explains the wrong things. I considered the possibility that he's writing a book about his adventures in his head, but he doesn't seem like the kind of guy who'd do that. I considered the possibility that he's just seen too many spy movies himself, and absorbed the narrative device. But then it hit me: the parts of his life that he narrates are the parts that he can never tell his mom about. I strongly suspect that what the writers are doing here is that in his head, he can't help thinking how he would explain these things to his mom, if he could.

Third: Three quick notes about my new Nokia n800. One, it does chime when I get an incoming instant message, I just wasn't hearing it over the music player. Second, it turns out that the hosting provider for my vanity domain, DreamHost, lets you set up your own Jabber server, including gateways to ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, and MSN. Once my friend who takes care of the domain for me set it up, I was able to log into every instant messenger service account I have from my n800, very nice. And finally, the last piece of it came today: my iGo (was Think Outside) brand Stowaway Bluetooth Keyboard. It's a lot bigger and heavier than I was expecting, as in slightly bigger than and about twice as heavy as the n800 itself. On the other hand, it is a full-sized laptop keyboard, and a big chunk of the weight comes from the fact that when folded it's completely encased in solid metal; no fear for this thing while it's rattling around your briefcase or luggage! And boy does it make writing emails or instant messages or text notes a lot quicker as long as I have a flat surface to unfold it on. Definitely worth what I paid for it.

If you do get one of these, one word of advice: throw away the driver CD, the drivers are built into the n800's OS. And throw away the installation instructions, which are incomplete and completely useless. Here is what you need to know. First, when you unfold it, you have to push the sliding bits together in the middle to turn it on. Second, there's a tiny concealed "on" button, that tiny white dot above the hyphen key that you need your stylus to hit the first time. Once you do that and see the LED next to it start blinking, go to the Control Panel on your n800. Set Hardware keyboard to "generic 105 key," then go to Bluetooth, turn it on, and hit Devices, then New. Now the tricky part: when it tries to sync with your keyboard, the non-obvious step is that you type the numeric password from the keyboard and hit enter. That should take care of it; everything else is automatic.

Friday morning, harmfulguy responded to what I'd wrote about Dick Cheney's refusal to comply with a presidential order by asking, "Why would I suddenly be having nightmares about trying to escape a fascistic police state?" It was probably a rhetorical question, but in classic Aspie fashion, I'm going to answer it anyway ... not for him, but for the benefit of my few right-wing readers who think that a question like that is symptomatic of mental illness, who can't see where in the world that kind of irrational fear could come from. While thinking about how to phrase the answer, it occurred to me that the answer I'm going to give is important, though, because it is almost exactly the same answer I would give while trying to explain to the liberal majority among my friends and readers if they asked me the similar rhetorical question about why social conservatives are so afraid that the American government and way of life are in imminent danger of crumbling.

I worry that this answer isn't going to be terribly convincing to either side, that both sides are going to reply that there's no fair similarity between the two fears. I suspect that an awful lot of you, no matter which side you're on, are going to say that your side's fear is rational and sane and grounded in historical fact, but the other side's argument is just horse excrement. But I stand by what I say when I say, no, it really is the same fear, with equal amounts of historical grounding. And by equal amounts of historical grounding, what I mean to say is, "not very much." It's pretty common to fear that the republic is doomed. A certain amount of that fear is probably healthy. But both of the "threats to the republic" that I'm about to document are threats that America has faced over and over again, roughly every couple of generations, and yet the republic still stands. Sometimes it is possible to stampede the American public dangerously too far in any one direction, but it's almost impossible to keep them there. There's a hard core of pragmatism, of belief that we can make this thing work, of belief in reform and in fixing things at the heart of the American self-identity, in the hearts of pretty nearly the entire American population, for them to let things slide all the way into anarchy and chaos, or into any kind of harsh and/or lasting dictatorship.

(Those of you who are relatively new may also, before I go on, want to quickly review three short essays I wrote back in 2004 that I refer back to constantly: April 23rd, 2004's "For Liberals from an Ex-Conservative: The First Principle of Conservativism," August 2nd, 2004's "What Conservatives Don't Grasp about Liberal Economics," and September 9th, 2004's "For Conservatives: The 1st Principle of Lifestyle Liberalism.")

Liberal Fear: What scares harmfulguy, what scares a lot of liberals, heck what has scared me at certain times is this. We know that many US Presidents have broken the law before. We know that many US government agencies have done truly awful things before, sometimes even much worse than anything that has gone on under George W. Bush. But what terrifies us is that we have in our minds a short list of lines that we believed would never be crossed. We believed that as long as these lines were never crossed, then no matter how bad things got, America would survive. In particular, we believed that no US government would ever even discuss the possibility of canceling or postponing a presidential election. The election might be held under jerry-rigged rules as in 1864, or there might be widespread cheating as in 1876 or 1968 or 2000, but at the very least we always knew that nobody appointed by the President of the United States would even float as a trial balloon, let alone seriously suggest, that there were circumstances under which the government might cancel a national election. And then, in late 2003 through mid 2004, President Bush's chairman of the Election Assistance Commission, Pastor DeForest Soaries, kept going to the press to argue just that, that in the event of a terrorist attack any time near the election the US government might do just that, and he scared the holy hell out of all of us. My god, man, if someone in Bush's administration could seriously suggest that an election might be canceled, why should we even consider believing that he'll ever step down? Once we cancel one election, why should we believe that there'll ever be another one?

November 2004 came and went with no suspension of the Constitution, and we began to think about breathing a sigh of relief ... only to have our noses rubbed in one scandal after another, all through this term, demonstrating to us that this President has not only crossed another of those bright lines that must never be crossed, he does so routinely. He not only crossed that line, he blazed right through it as if it weren't even there. And that line was that we thought we knew that, no matter how bad things got, no matter how evil or corrupt our government temporarily became that no President would ever cross, was this: surely no President would ever declare himself above the law, immune to legislation. But this President has repeatedly declared himself to be above the law, that neither he nor anybody he designates are in any way bound to obey or even respect Congress. That cuts to the heart of what America means to us, the proverbial "nation of laws, not men." My god, if he thinks he doesn't have to obey the law, what makes us think that he'll obey the law that requires him to step down on January 20th, 2009? This is almost certainly an irrational fear. There really is a difference not merely of degree, but of kind, between disobeying even a hundred individual laws and declaring one's self President for Life. But our reaction is one of irrational fear because we really and truly thought it would never come to this, that no President would ever go this far. And if we were wrong to believe that these lines would never ever be crossed, is it so irrational of us to at least briefly contemplate the fear that the last line that was crossed is America's Rubicon, the point of no return? Even if it probably isn't, that fear is impossible to completely dismiss.

Social Conservative Fear: No social conservative, not even going all the way back to the origins of the Puritan movement of the late 1500s, not even the most ardent Victorian proto-fundamentalist of the mid 1800s, has ever been so socially isolated as to think that there is any sexual sin, or any kind of drug-fueled decadence, that never happens in our society. Trust me, whatever it is, they know that somewhere out there there's at least one person who's doing it. They're probably right, too. And as early as the Puritan Revolution in England, they've known that there were social movements within society pushing towards greater public acceptance of decadence and perversion. And over hundreds of years, they've seen the level of protection that public morality gets from public law rise and fall, rise and fall. But even during times of national decadence, like the 1890s or the 1920s, they've always been 100% confident of two things. There are certain lines that society would never cross, a level of perversion and/or decadence that would never be accepted by the public. And because such lines exist to save our society from spiraling down into greater and greater decadence, they have always been 100% confident that however sinfully bad America gets, it would always draw back from the brink of tolerating things that gross, and thus would always recover.

As a result, they could watch hemlines go up to the point where skirts were mere belts drawing attention to the exposed festive underwear beneath, as happened in the 1920s and again in the 1960s and as happens in clubwear occasionally now, and decry such things, but without expressing any fear that the trend would continue indefinitely. They could lose the battle on divorce and threaten that this was just the beginning of the end for the family without sounding like they really meant it. They could, when all was said and done, write off any level of public acceptance of sin and/or lax prosecution of morals laws as a symptom that they were living in a particularly sinful generation, not as a sign of the beginning of the end of the American republic. After all, just to give an example, they knew for a fact that nobody would ever advocate making it legal for a man to put his penis in another man's anus. Well, no, they knew that there would be a few people who would advocate for legalization of anything, but certainly that was a fight that such perverts were guaranteed to lose. What I often dismissively jokingly refer to as "teh buttsecks," their great fear, is something that even most people who consider themselves tolerant of homosexuality get squeamish if they're made to think about it. So however far America slid into tolerance for sin, surely as soon as it got anywhere near considering legalizing that the backlash would begin. Surely it would never get that far.

So imagine what anybody who thinks this feels when they're forced to contemplate the fact that as of next Tuesday it will have been four years since that line, the one that they thought would never be crossed, was crossed, that the door that they thought had been nailed shut once and for all in 1986 (Bowers v Harwick), was thrown wide open via the Supreme Court's June 26th, 2003 decision in Lawrence v Texas? Or that the same year Canada went even further, going beyond the previously unthinkable legalization of "teh buttsecks" into making it legal for "teh buttseXX0rs" to marry? And for at least one US state to do the same thing three years ago?

Former US senator from Pennsylvania Rick Santorum got the nickname Rick "Man-on-Dog" Santorum, and got his name turned into a dirty word via a national media campaign, because he asked a question that really does seem like a fair question to a lot of people. America legalized no-fault divorce. America legalized all but the most disgustingly perverse pornography. America stopped (mostly) enforcing laws against sado-masochism and related kinks. America stopped enforcing laws against same-sex sexual conduct in private among people who had the good sense to be discreet. All of these things were scary enough, but people like Rick Santorum could still convince themselves that as long as no unthinkable to cross lines got crossed, it could be thought of as a passing fad or a generational crisis. But if even gay marriage isn't unthinkable, if even that line gets crossed, what confidence should they have that there is any line that can't be crossed? How can they be sure that Lawrence v Texas wasn't America's moral Rubicon?

Advocates for gay marriage, or for other forms of "sin and decadence" whose national tolerance would have been unthinkable ranging from nudism to BDSM to polygamy, insist -- not unreasonably -- that this is a ridiculous fear. As Margaret Mead pointed out, throughout the whole world and all of history the one universal sexual taboo is "thou shalt not have no sexual taboos." They draw fine distinctions, not always convincing ones but at least some distinctions, between gay marriage and further forms of decadence that they're sure will never be accepted, like Dahlia Lithwick (whose writing I'm otherwise quite fond of) and her entirely unconvincing argument that there's a major difference in kind, not merely degree, between legalizing gay marriage and legalizing polygamy. (Can't find the citation, sorry.) But when push comes to shove, the same devotion to pragmatism and the same confidence in the possibility of national reform that immunizes America against anarchy or dictatorship almost certainly insulates America from a permanent slide into the level of indulgence where it might, for example, threaten the economy or public devotion to Christianity or our national way of life. So it is an unrealistic fear, one that arises only from the fact that prior to 4 years ago, they literally never thought that our country would go this far. So even if most of them do admit that it's an unrealistic fear, it's one that's impossible to completely dismiss.

And that, I insist, is the exact same source of the exact same level of fear for the future of this country from liberals.

(Apologies if this is a little bit even more sloppily edited than usual, I had to shove this on the spike before heading out the door for the local showing of "Can't Stop the Serenity" because I know I'll be too tired to write it when I get home.)

(Warning: I'm annoyed enough to drop my written journal language filter. The following post contains dirty words.)

In the (insanely long) comments thread for yesterday's journal entry, wickedgameff wrote, "The only reason that any kind of expression or speech should be ruled against is if the words are meant to incite violence or crime. And since the yaoi I write is only meant to express love between two (or more) characters, I know it doesn't fall into that category." technosage, concurring, went further: "the DJ and yaoi and fan fiction generally can be so beautiful it takes your breath away." It's funny you should say that so poetically, because you remind me of someone. Over on the polyamory community, there's apparently a guy who's a regular source of amusement to the cynics on dot_poly_snark who writes just as poetically about the sublimity and spiritual beauty of his happy, loving poly triad: himself, his wife, and his horse. The poly snarksters aren't buying it. I know of no reason to think he's not sincere, but, dude, you're talking about fucking a horse. And I'm sure that WickedGameFF and Technosage are just as sincere, and are convinced that their fantasy lives aren't anything like that guy's real life, because what they love is spiritual and pure and he's just a horse-fucker. But dude, you're writing or collecting pornography about fucking little boys. Frankly, if it were up to me, I wouldn't give a rat's ass what you're writing or reading. But you know what? It's not up to me. And it's not up to you. You can go out there and make your case that it should be up to you and me, that people shouldn't give a rat's ass what fiction you write and you read because "it's just fiction." But at least here in the US, I flatly guarantee you that you will not win that fight in your lifetime.

Right now, no prosecutor or police chief that I know of is so bored or so fired up about boy-love animé, boy-love manga, cartoon-character child porn cartoons, or Harry Potter pornographic fanfic to devote the resources to tracking down the writers, artists, importers, distributors, and collectors of that material. The resources in question would be relatively trivial. Internet anonymity is a fig leaf, not an impregnable vault. But right now, nobody in law enforcement cares enough to move it ahead of the thousand other things they have to care about. But people a lot more reputable and a lot better connected to law enforcement and the media than those moronic cranks at Warriors for Innocence are determined to change that. If you acquire any kind of a public reputation for involvement in those scenes and they win, you're in a lot of trouble. You may think that what you're doing is perfectly legal under the First Amendment, but I'm telling you right now, you're wrong.

My prediction is that it will probably never come to that. Groups like Perverted Justice aren't, so far as I can tell, sufficiently determined to push it that far. What they want the most is zero tolerance for the stuff you like on the big public Internet services, and for every one of those Internet services to dedicate at least one full time employee to enforcement of that policy. And having seen MySpace and Blogspot cave on that, I predict with absolute confidence that many of the journals that were reinstated after Strikethrough '07 will be deleted again in the near future. If you're determined to keep writing and keep collecting this stuff, back it up to your local hard disk now, and make plans to move it to a website that is dedicated to your particular kink. And as long as that website makes at least a token effort to keep minors out and as long as that website doesn't come to major media attention at the hands of somebody like Geraldo Rivera back in 1983, that is where it will probably end.

But I could be wrong. And if I am? Then welcome to the world that I've lived in since 1983. You won't like it.

As I've written about before, in 1983, a local cop concluded that I was "obviously" a pedophile. In his opinion, no adult would set up a BBS like Weirdbase, the one I was running, if he wasn't looking to cruise teenage and pre-teen boys for sex, and nobody would set up a world-wide network of BBSes like MagickNet, the one I was running, if he wasn't looking to network with other pedophiles so that we could help each other gain sexual access to pre-teen boys to rape and then kill in Satanic sacrifices. I lived with that guy intermittently following me around, and interviewing every contact he could find to try to find even one child that I had ever been alone with, for eight fucking years. And I learned very early in the Satanic Panic just how dangerous that was, as people in my same predicament all over the country found out that if you take almost any child and hand him or her over to the "tender mercies" of coercive child psychologists hand-picked by the prosecutors, if you give them even 18 hours to convince that child that since everybody "knows" that some particular adult "obviously" raped him and the only reason he doesn't remember it is that he "blocked it out," almost any child will testify to that abuse eventually. And even though the means of obtaining that testimony are pseudo-scientific bullshit, and even if the testimony that results contradicts important laws of physics as happened in the McMartin case, that child will be believed by a judge and a jury, both of whom have been repeatedly (demonstrably wrongly) assured that no child has ever lied about sex, that no child has ever made a false accusation.

So for eight god damned years I felt a perceptible rush of panic, an urgent need to look over my shoulder and to flee the room, if the situation presented itself where I was at any risk of being in the same room with a child and there wasn't at least one neutral adult witness present to testify that nothing happened, should any anti-occult cop pick up that child for questioning about what I might have done to him or her. The Satanic Ritual Abuse hoax was debunked and dropped off of radar, into the misty depths of cranky right wing conspiracy theory, all the hell the way back in 1991 or 1992. And you know what? Fifteen fucking years later, I still panic if there is any risk that I will be alone with a child. Habits die hard, especially when you know that your life depends on those habits when you're forming them. I will probably go to my grave pathologically terrified of children.

And if the cops single you out because of your collection of boy-love manga, or because the found your user name on the list of people reading pornish_pixies and therefore you're "obviously" sexually attracted to children, so it's "obviously inevitable" that if you've ever had a chance to molest one you probably did? Then you'll have to develop the same paranoid habit that I did. Because it's either that, or simply accept the fact that there is a cartoon piano hanging over your head by a fraying rope at all times, that at any time your entire future could be snuffed out whether you ever really did anything to a child or not. Is there anything you can do about it now? Nope. Oh, you can try. But too many of you have made the mistake of discussing this stuff on, or posting this stuff to, the Internet. And trust me, because I know this of my own experience, too: the net never fucking forgets. Just a few months before the Satanic Panic began, I happened to write a short pro-Wicca propaganda piece called "A Little Less Misunderstanding." People loved it. A few years later, I found out that one of my primary sources was horribly biased, and I had passed along one of his particularly obnoxious slanders. I've been trying, off and on for more than 20 years, to erase that piece of shit from the Internet. Well, frankly, not trying very hard lately, because I gave up. If you wrote or drew or scanned something and posted it to the Internet and anybody liked it, the odds are that somebody has a copy saved to their hard disk. Some day somebody will be wanting to populate yet another Internet archive of stuff like it, and that copy will be re-uploaded. Once they do, more people will see and like it, and download backup copies of it to their hard disks too. Ad infinitum.

And you know what? Now you need to learn what every actual pedophile, and every horse-fucker, and every corpse-fucker, and everybody else with a kink that isn't legal, will never be legal, and which will end your fucking life if you get caught even feeling that way learns early or learns the hard way: shut the fuck up about it. At the very least, shut the fuck up about it any time that there is any risk whatsoever that any journalist or any infiltrating cop or any private investigator or any vigilante will find it, and let me tell you right now, there is nowhere online that doesn't meet that definition, nor should you assume the physical mail is safe. Because if a moral panic starts, no fancy digital anonymity will guarantee your safety. Only two things will: that nobody anywhere with even the slightest grudge against you knows that you're interested, and that you have the extreme luck not to be one of the people picked by the cops to be made an example of when they bust anybody in your network and then subpoena your Internet provider. I mean, you could actually be that lucky. There are probably thousands of people in the US who read or watch boy-love Japanese-style porn or who read or write pornographic stories about fictional teenage characters. Even in the event of a nation-wide moral panic, they probably won't socially crucify and legally destroy more than a couple of hundred of them, and probably won't jail more than a few dozen, the few dozen they were able to (honestly or dishonestly) convict of molesting children. Maybe those are good odds, by your standards. Maybe your love for this stuff is so "breathtaking" that it's worth that risk to you. But know this: you will never be safe in this country, never truly safe. And you're going to have to learn to live with that, so start getting used to the idea.

OK, let's start on getting this written down, even though my thoughts are by no means finalized.

First of all, for those (few) of you who have no idea what I'm talking about when I refer to Strikethrough '07, and who don't want to take the time to read stewardess's full essay "How Six Apart's Greed Allied Them with Neo-Nazis (Revised)," let's start with a minimal summary. ( Read more... )

Quite a few of my friends and my readers want to know what I think about all of this, and have expressed disappointment to me, in writing and in person, over the fact that I didn't say anything about it while it was happening. They assumed that I was waiting for more facts to come out, as I often do. But their disappointment has risen now that the controversy is completely over, or almost completely, and I still haven't commented. They know that, as someone who's been the victim of a pedophilia panic before (the Satanic Ritual Abuse hoax of 1983-1991), I know better than many of you do the pain of having been wrongly accused of being a pedophile in a very public way. They know that I'm a constitutional law and First Amendment law otaku, an obsessive fan and collector of trivia about censorship and other constitutional law topics. They know that I'm famous for having opinions about nearly everything. And they know that I could easily have ended up in the cross-hairs of this persecution myself, for my handling of the question of what it meant that the very first democracy was built upon a foundation of sex between adult men and teenage boys, my February 3rd, 2005 essay "Do it the Greek way." So yeah, the pressure on me to get off the fence and say something has been growing.

Yeah, I have some opinions. Some of them, some of you aren't going to like. I know some relevant facts that some of you don't know, too. Some of you are going to like those even less. But the main thing that has kept me from writing about this for almost two weeks now is that it has taken me this long to be able to write even vaguely coherently about it. See, to me the key that opens the lock to what this all means was when I noticed two things. The first clue was that an awful lot of the protests were coming from people who write pornographic Harry Potter fanfic. The clincher was when I noticed that at least some of the users were deleted for listing in their interests, or in one case having in their user name, the Japanese manga/animé porn sub-genre called yaoi. In fact, rather more accounts were deleted for these reasons than were deleted for any actual pedophilia or defense thereof, and that's what all the controversy is about. LiveJournal has since backed down and reinstated all, or at least nearly all, of the Harry Potter porn communities and journals and all or nearly all of the yaoi fans' journals and communities. But this isn't over, not even vaguely. Because what they have in common is that both are porn about teenagers' sex lives. And the blunt fact is that there is neither yaoi or Harry Potter slashfic is legal in the US, no way in hell. Not legal to write, not legal to possess, not legal to read.

Let's review. The defining law on what constitutes obscenity is the 1973 US Supreme Court ruling Miller v California. It said that 1st Amendment protection does not apply to, and states and the federal government can outlaw, any material that relates in any way to sex or to private parts, that is meant to arouse or gratify sexual feelings, that is patently offensive, and that is completely lacking in any historical, medical, scientific, educational, artistic or literary merit. All of those facts are to be weighed by a jury, and the jury is to be instructed to judge whether all of those facts are true as measured against "contemporary community standards." There is a metric ton of case law that says that any porn that involves actual or fictional children in any way is by definition "patently offensive" and not even vaguely protected. And the 1994 case Florida v Mike Diana established two other facts, both of them relevant to this issue. First of all, it doesn't count as a defense that no actual children were harmed or involved, it doesn't help if it's 100% fictional. And second, to the deep shock of those of us who followed the case at the time, and contrary to the perception that many of you have, something can be drawn and still be ruled to have no artistic merit, something can be written and be found to have no literary merit.

Harry Potter slashfic is all about sexual encounters between fictional under-aged students at Hogwarts, whether with each other or (mildly worse) with their adult teachers. Yaoi is all about romantic and sexual encounters between fictional teenage boys. Absent a jury ruling of literary or artistic merit, these things are clearly defined under US law as child pornography. Period. Possessing or producing such child pornography is a federal crime, one that gets you listed on the sex offender registries as a predator on children. Period. End of sentence. No disputing it. If that's true, then why does it take neo-Nazi nutcases like Warriors for Innocence to make a big deal out of it? Where are the prosecutors? Please. We know where the prosecutors are. They're hiding from the fact that slashfic and yaoi have something in common: they are both genres that are primarily popular with middle aged heterosexual women, particularly white middle and upper class women. (Which is why gay romance and gay sex in those genres is almost completely and entirely unlike actual descriptions of romance and sex from gay men, whether talking about their lives now as adults or then as teens. It's not about gay sex, it's about gay sex the way that women wish it was, the way they think they'd be if they were gay teenage boys or gay men. Not that het-male porn about lesbians is any more realistic, I know, but we're talking about yaoi and slashfic here.) Respectable middle aged women are not exactly the defendants that most prosecutors are eager to go after; juries are too sympathetic.

But what makes this not even vaguely over is that moral panics have pressured prosecutors to take cases they didn't want to take before. And there is an argument being made, including by people perceptibly saner than Warriors for Innocence, that things like yaoi and slashfic produce more pedophiles by encouraging adults to fantasize about sex with (or even just between) children, by encouraging adults to think of teens and even pre-teens as sex objects. And while I think that that argument is a load of horse manure, even I have a harder time arguing against an even saner, even stronger argument than that: the existence of Harry Potter slashfic legitimizes the idea of adult/teen sex. Whether any actual pedophiles are pointing their would-be victims towards archives of slashfic and saying, "see, there's nothing wrong with it" or not, that's what's got some people worried: not the legitimizing it to the potential victims, but legitimizing it to prospective jurors.

About a month ago I linked to a New York Times article about the dispute in their neighborhood over the fact that BDSM website Kink.com bought a historic building to be their new office and film studio, Jon Mooallem's "A Disciplined Business," and there was only one thing that the reporter left out that I wish had made it into the article. In reviewing the history of the Kink.com website, founder Peter Acworth mentioned that he was a BDSM aficionado himself who was annoyed by the fact that BDSM porn that was available to him didn't look anything like the sex lives of BDSM lifestylers like himself and his friends. So he asked a lawyer why not, and the lawyer told him that it was legal to show people having sex, and it was legal to show people tied up and/or being beaten, but it was illegal to show people having sex while being tied up and/or beaten. Acworth asked his lawyer to show him the law that says that, and the lawyer couldn't find it. So Acworth decided to risk opening Kink.com, and to show people having sex during BDSM, and see what happened. What happened was "nothing."

As it so happens, I do know where that law is, and why nothing happened. See, many years ago I remember seeing a documentary about the history of pornography prosecution that actually had this information. What happened was that when the justices wrote Miller v California, what they specifically didn't want to do was come up with a Hayes-Code-like list: this, this, and this are legal, but this, this, and this aren't. But let's say that you're either Peter Acworth, or you're a prosecutor looking to maybe make an obscenity case against Peter Acworth. You don't want to bet your freedom, or your career, on your vague sense of what a jury will find. You want to know in advance what a jury will find. So separately the porn prosecutors' bar and the porn defense lawyers' bar commissioned statistical studies of at least 10 years' worth of verdicts in porn cases after Miller v California. They came up with separate lists that concluded that juries are only willing to find something "patently offensive" if it includes at least one of the things on the list. It's not as odd as it sounds that the defense attorneys' list was longer; their clients have more to lose than a prosecutor does, so they erred on the side of saying "no."

And one of the things that both sides agreed upon was that any bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, or sado-masochistic porn that showed actual sex was something that juries were highly likely to convict over ... from 1973 to 1983. But Peter Acworth wasn't opening his website in 1983. He was opening it in 1998. The law didn't change in those 15 years, but contemporary community standards did. In particular, amateur porn informal distribution networks made it possible for all kinds of people whose kinks were legally obscene to share their photos with each other, and for those photos to leak out of their networks into the broader public; everybody with a 14.4k modem and an ISP that supported Usenet access to alt.binaries.pictures.erotica could find any fetish imaginable, legal or illegal. Some of those fetishes continued to gross out the general public, and still do. But after repeated exposure, BDSM porn not only came to be accepted, it even went through a brief fashion fad.

And that, whether you like it or not, is why the issue of yaoi and slashfic on any part of the Internet, including LiveJournal, is not going to go away. There are people out there who are deeply troubled by the idea that slashfic, especially slashfic involving such nearly universally known and loved characters as those from the Harry Potter books, will encourage people to imagine that even some of their favorite people, even highly sympathetic characters, have underaged sex or worse, sex between adults and the underaged, and more to the point, that this doesn't make anybody involved seem any less likeable. And if that leads to a world in which child pornography is as hard to get criminal convictions for as BDSM pornography is now, they will be quite unhappy, to say the least. And I am not even vaguely sure that, no matter how many respectable and supposedly entirely safe middle aged middle class white women wallow in the stuff without doing themselves or (so far as we can tell) any children any harm, I'm not sure that the public isn't going to side with them on this and against the yaoi fans and the slashficcers. Because if there's anything that the American public are in very near agreement about it's this: if you're adult, you are not supposed to be thinking about teenagers' sex lives at all, unless you're the parent or a medical professional, let alone getting off on the idea.

I'm tired, and distracted by the fact that issue 9 for City of Heroes/Villains comes out in about 10 hours, so I want to get to sleep. Fortunately, I have some Quicktakes saved up.

Happy 4th Anniversary of Peace in Iraq. Presumably all of the cool bloggers today will have something to say about the fact that today is the 4th anniversary of the day that George Bush landed on an aircraft carrier in order to stand under a giant White House provided banner that read "Mission Accomplished" to announce "the end of major combat operations in Iraq." I wanted to be one of the cool bloggers, but what's the point? Besides, pretty much everything I felt like saying, Greg Palast said perfectly adequately well. See his column, "May 1st - Mission Accomplished."

Couldn't Have Said it Better. Some of you are under the mistaken impression that I'm really, really good at explaining current events. Enh. I'm better than average. And I judge myself against the best. You want to see an example of what I judge these journal entries against, something substantially better than I almost ever come close to managing? See Jon Mooallem, "A Disciplined Business," New York Times Magazine, April 29th, 2007. It's about a story I've been following through tinynibbles, the LJ syndicated feed of San Francisco sex educator and columnist (and robotics artist) Violet Blue's blog. One of the big names in Internet porn, Kink.com, just bought a giant building that happens to be on the National Register of Historic Places, and their neighbors want them out. This article does exactly the kind of job that I would have tried to do if I had wanted to explain to you what happened, why it happened, and why it matters.

This, On the Other Hand, is What they Call News? Michael J. Sniffen, "Minorities fare worse in traffic stops," Associated Press, April 29th. A careful study has shown that blacks are pulled over while driving at roughly the same rate as whites, but are almost three times as likely to be searched for drugs and at least twice as likely to be arrested. In other news, a careful study has shown that water is wet. I mean, come on. We've known for at least 20 years now that the NIDA SAMSHA study shows that blacks use drugs at the same rate as whites, but any casual survey of prison data shows that blacks are five times more likely (per capita) to go to jail for it. Is there any remaining doubt about this? Cops "know" that cars with black men in them are more likely to have drugs in them, so they search only those cars, and then take the results as proof that they were right to search all those cars driven by black men. It's worth repeating over and over and over again until we do something to make it more fair, like searching the same percentage of white-driven cars as black-driven cars for at least a while. (Boy, wouldn't that get the drug laws changed in a hurry, you think?) But it doesn't even vaguely qualify as news, now, does it?

Meanwhile, In Other News that Distracts You from the Real News. If you ask people right now about the scandal in Washington, they think you're talking about the DC Madam. If I were to talk about the scandal in Washington, it would be the fact that a Clinton-era program showed that, contrary to libertarian dogma, it really is fairer and less costly for the government to offer student loans than it is to (supposedly) take advantage of the "magic of the markets," that far from saving costs through intense competition, the corporate student loans backed by conservatives are actually more expensive to the government. So it shouldn't surprise you that conservatives are trying to quietly kill the program, or that those same high-cost, highly inefficient institutions have been caught openly paying bribes to college administrators to not tell students about the cheaper loans, to steer them towards the corrupt and high cost corporate loans. (And this, my friends, is why I cringe every time I hear the words "public/private partnership" even worse than when I hear the words "invisible hand of the markets.") To me, the real scandal isn't even that Bush's abstinence czar, his point man against prostitution, was the first person to lose his job in the prostitution scandal. The real scandal is that the student loan scamming isn't considered scandalous enough to be particularly newsworthy. See Jonathan D. Glater and Karen W. Arenson, "Lenders Sought Edge Against U.S. in Student Loans," New York Times, April 15th, 2007.

On a Happier Note: See Ellen Barry, "New Bank Courts in Queens Neighborhood Where Many Have Long Trusted Only in Cash," New York Times, April 26th, 2007. "In January 2006, Mr. Gioia and the Rev. Mitchell Taylor, of the East River Development Alliance, led a march of several hundred residents through the neighborhood, chanting: 'We don’t need a liquor store! We don’t need a check casher! We need a bank!'" And amazingly, they actually got one, one that's determined to sign up the 5,000 or more un-banked people living in a nearby high-rise public housing project, people who've had to depend on check cashing scammers and payday loan scammers for their banking needs. Let's hope it's the first shot in a war on those scumbags, and dream of a day when those blots on our neighborhoods are wiped off of the map.

cunningminx just posted the text overview that goes with her podcast of the Polyamory Roundtable she hosted at Conflation this year. And it reminded me of something that, in hindsight, probably wants more clarification than I had time to give it during the roundtable. Because we were each asked who we were (or at least, how we wanted to be identified for the podcast), how long we've known we were poly (for those of us who were), and the single most important thing we've learned about polyamory so far. And one of the things I'm a little disappointed in myself for is that I was doing one of those verbal tics of mine: when I'm talking about something that's very important to me, and I feel like it's very important that I be heard, I don't sound persuasive. Instead I sound angry and combative. I also sound rushed, but that's because I was rushed; we were up against our time limit when she got to me (at the 45 minute, 45 second mark she says). So here, if you don't mind, is what I think is the single most important thing I've learned about polyamory in my life.

Heterosexual monogamous couples don't usually end up putting a lot of thought into what are the rules of their relationship, as to what's allowed and what's not. They hardly need to. Within broad limits of social class and region and religious denomination, they're all taught from the time they're old enough to even notice relationships what the rules of a relationship are. Polyamorists subvert those rules, inherently. Most of us, myself included, have no powerful inclination to subvert the rules for people in their own relationships that they're happy with; as the_geoffrey said of himself during the roundtable, he doesn't understand monogamy, but he tries to be broad-minded about other people's kinks, including monogamy. (It's not a universal rule. I know another guy who, when he was much younger, long before he got shot, used to tell me and others that, "Enforcing other people's marriage vows is not my responsibility." But I gather he outgrew that.) But even those of us who tiptoe around monogamists, and who provide them all the verbal support and reassurance they could possibly ask, still end up subverting their default relationship contracts by providing an example of a non-default one, by making the unthinkable thinkable. And, of course, back when I was but a wee small child we had this thing in Western Civilization that was (with various degrees of straight face) called the sexual revolution, which set out to make the unthinkable thinkable across the board. And where you still find traces of counter-cultural attitudes, you sometimes find monogamists who want to at least write their own wedding vows, and in extreme cases to write their own relationship contracts, to treat the expectations for the relationship as an agreement to be negotiated, just like polyfolk pretty much have to.

So having known that I was polyamorous since at least the Nixon administration, it shouldn't astonish you to hear that I've seen a lot of Relationship Contracts in my day. Some could fit on an index card. The longest I've seen yet ran to I think somewhere around 40 pages, single spaced. And yet I've learned, from watching how those various contracts played out, that the presence or absence of one line in the contract, of one informal agreement in the absence of that line, tells me everything I need to know before I place any bets in the betting pool on whether or not that relationship contract is doomed from the start. And that is this:

When ... not if, but when ... any of the rules gets broken, what are the consequences? Specifically, is it explicit or implicit in the contract that breaking the rules of the relationship means that the relationship is permanently and irretrievably over? If so, you've just told me that your relationship has a projected lifespan of not over 4 years, probably closer to 2. And you've given me the list of things that you'll accuse each other of having done, whether it was true or not, when the relationship is dead. I have yet to see an exception to this general observation.

Am I saying that there should be no "death penalty on first offense" rules for the relationship? I don't know if I am or not. Even Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt, who make it clear in their (in my opinion, boring and execrable) book The Ethical Slut that they doesn't believe that any romantic or sexual relationship should ever end, ever, that we should use our highly evolved communication skills to stay in love with each person we love until death do us part, makes two exceptions: violence, and drug addiction. It's hard to argue about that first one. There aren't many circumstances, probably nothing short of fever delirium, where I'd encourage someone to forgive and stay in a relationship with someone who'd struck them in anger, let alone attacked them with any kind of a weapon. But short of that?

Look, what's really going on here, okay? For just about every other circumstance, what you're saying is, "I have to threaten to leave you if you do this (or this, or this, or this, potentially ad nauseum, ad infinitum, or even ad litem) because I don't trust you to respect my desires, wishes, or emotional needs in this area (or these areas, or all gazillion of these areas) unless I threaten you with something at least this severe." If you don't trust them to try with all their might to try to satisfy your desires, to honor your wishes, to respect and protect your emotional needs without threatening them with that level of emotional blackmail, how much grounds for a real relationship do you really have?

Other people at the poly roundtable described the alternative as a commitment to work at the relationship. They talked about the need to have the necessary determination and perseverance to repair the relationship, to shore up any broken trust, when (again, not if) it gets worn, damaged, or gods forbid actually broken. And I won't criticize that formulation too strongly, except to say that it sounds a little grim to me. Here's how I prefer to think of it, and that is that loving someone and committing to them requires you to estimate just how much you can trust them, and ask yourself before you go into that relationship if you can live with their level of trustworthiness. There's a great discussion of the subject of trust in Peter Benchley's original book Jaws, and the metaphor that the old fisherman used was that determining whether or not to trust someone is like determining whether or not to trust a 10 pound fishing line. Can you trust a 10 pound fishing line to hold a 5 pound weight? Almost certainly. A 10 pound weight? It's expected to. A 20 pound weight? Oddly, yes; any rational safety rating understates the maximum possible stress it can survive because if it doesn't have at least a 50/50 chance of surviving twice the load, you can't really count on it to hold the rated load. But can you trust a 10 pound fishing line to carry 100 pounds? No. It might fool you, and actually survive the load; sometimes the universe is surprising that way. But there's no point in being disappointed that a 10 pound fishing line breaks under a 100 pound load.

Benchley's point was that people are like that fishing line. Everybody on earth has, really, a "rated upper limit" on how far you can trust them. Some last far beyond what any reasonable person would expect of them. Some do no better and no worse than you'd expect. Some break earlier than you'd expect them to, and it's fair to treat that as a disappointing surprise. But, I'd add, it's worth remembering that sometimes things, like people, break. That's not proof of the existence of evil. It's just life. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again. And look, for polyfolk rebuilding after a broken trust ought to be easier. Let's go back to that analogy of the fishing line. If you're going to hang yourself off of a cliff edge with your life at stake, you never tie yourself by one line. You might weigh 200 pounds with all of your equipment, but even if you have a line and pitons that are rated to 400 pounds you still use more than one of them. Why? Because, as I just said, sometimes things just plain break. Sometimes the world is disappointing that way. But at least, if you're polyamorous and someone in one of your relationships fails a test of trust that they should have passed, you have other people to support you emotionally while you repair that broken trust. You don't have to freefall to your own personal doom, and neither does the relationship.

That's how I see it, anyway. Go ahead and accuse me of making excuses for shifty dishonest immoral and/or lazy people, if you'd like; I won't mind. I see it as having compassion for humans, as giving them credit for being as good as they are instead of being disappointed with each individual who fails to be what almost nobody ever is.

I'm back from Conflation, and exhausted even after sleeping most of the day. Capsule summary: all of the news is good news, oh ye of little faith. My estimate of total attendance: 80-90. Jason Carter and cunningminx were excellent guests, always out with the fans rather than holing up in private and clearly having the time of their lives. No major crackdowns or hassles, despite ample reasons for things to have gone wrong; minor hassles easily dealt with. Both of my parties went well. Hospitality very well designed and (from what little I saw of it, admittedly) apparently well run. Dance no worse than usual. Dealer's room screwed over slightly worse than usual. All scheduled program events seem to have gone well, or at least well-enough. And there are substantial signs of good news for the future of this event. Now, more details about the parts of this that I saw with my own eyes:

Friday: Opening Ceremonies. ( Read more... )

Friday: Polyamory Panel. ( Read more... )

Friday: Toga Party. ( Read more... )

The one costume hassle I heard about was Friday night. ( Read more... )

Saturday late morning/early afternoon: Hospitality. ( Read more... )

Saturday afternoon: Pr0n Panel. ( Read more... )

Saturday late afternoon, dealer's room. ( Read more... )

Saturday early evening, private: event setup. ( Read more... )

That brings up a question I thought to ask a lot of people, and I wouldn't mind more feedback. Between the Brad Party days and a trip to Burning Man and my own inclinations, I don't think of designing and decorating for a themed party as anything that simple. I think of it as "constructing site-specific installation art using found materials and re-purposed cultural icons." Is that unbearably pretentious of me?

Saturday evening: Tiki Party. ( Read more... )

Oh, and I want to say one thing about the shortage of topless women in paint, compared to what some of you would have liked to have seen or to the numbers from "back in the day" when it might have been three times as many. Kukla talked to many women who might have volunteered, and ran into two obstacles, only one of which is the one you might think of. The other, bigger obstacle turns out to relate to the increasing levels of professionalism in St. Louis's costumer's guild scene; many women had planned their outfits for Conflation hour by hour up to a year in advance, long before they knew what Kukla and I were planning, and had made enough committments to each other's group (and group-fetish) costuming ideas that they didn't have the flexibility to change. There was also, I think, some nervousness over whether or not we'd get away with it, people still stinging from the past "new direction" to want to know what would happen to them if they did take their shirts off. Our cheerful (and, at least on Saturday night, cheerfully un-harassed) models almost certainly cleared ground for future fen to feel comfortable wearing less next year.

(But not as much ground as LdyAlia did by egging on CunningMinx, who turns out to be a cheerfully bubbly enthusiastic exhibitionist. As she mentioned in her own convention review, she was delighted to discover that at some of her programming events there were often women who out-raced her to be the first one naked or nearly so. Still have doubts about the pendulum swinging back?)

Sunday: Closing Ceremonies. As usual, a snore-fest on a par with opening ceremonies. How could it not be; everybody's exhausted! But there were some useful announcements. Both Jason Carter and CunningMinx committed to coming back some time in the future. Next year's theme: Firefly. And most importantly, we are going back to a hotel that has been very good to us in the past, the former Day's Inn, former Doubletree Inn, now Comfort Inn at Natural Bridge and Brown Road by the airport.