Posted on 08/09/2002 8:59:43 AM PDT by NYer
WASHINGTON (AP) _ Ten Americans and six foreigners were charged Friday with taking sexually explicit photographs of their own children or children in their care and sending them over the Internet to an international child pornography ring, the U.S. Customs Service said.
Forty-five children, including 37 in the United States, were victims and have been removed from the care of those indicted, Customs officials said. Most of them are in the custody of another parent or relative.
The defendants include nine people from seven states who were indicted in Fresno, Calif., along with six residents of Denmark, Switzerland and the Netherlands. The indictment alleges that members of the ring, referring to themselves as ``the club,'' traded messages across the Internet requesting photographs of specific sexual poses. One man asked for an audiotape so he could hear a child crying while being spanked, the indictment said, and another posed naked with an underage girl.
The Customs Service coordinated the U.S. investigation that began last November with a request for help from the Danish National Police, who were acting on a tip about an international child pornography ring. ``I congratulate the investigators whose ingenuity and perseverance brought these people to justice,'' Customs Commissioner Robert C. Bonner said in a statement.
The Americans charged include: Lloyd Alan Emmerson of Fresno County, Calif.; Paul Whitmore and Brooke Rowland, San Diego County, Calif.; Tracy Reynolds, Texas; Leslie Peter Bowcut, Idaho; Michael David Harland, Florida; Harry Eldon Tschernetzki, Washington state; John Zill, South Carolina; Craig Davidson, Kansas. The identity of the tenth American was not immediately available.
The foreigners were identified as Eggert Jensen and Bente Jensen of Denmark; Jean-Michael Frances Cattin, Marcel Egli and Peter Althaus of Switzerland; and Dirk-Jan Prins of the Netherlands.
On the Net: Customs Service: http://www.customs.ustreas.gov
AP-ES-08-09-02 1114EDT
Ok. Deal. And you call in your pro-porn pals and we'll see if you have the b*lls to take the moral high ground.
The golden rule is not at all self-evident. If it were truly self-evident, everybody would follow it.
False reasoning. -- Reasonable, sane people do follow it. - Criminals do not.
But in fact there are alternatives that have been proven to work as well, or maybe even better for those who can pull it off.
You've made these same examples before. Criminal conduct is not an 'alternative' lifestyle.
For example, I can also avoid getting hurt by becoming King, and killing or enslaving all who might harm me. If I'm a successful king, I can even pay people to do my dirty work for me. And even if one is not capable enough to be king, one can get very nearly the same effect (not being hurt) by being one of his loyal henchpeople.
So? You're a criminal tyrant that dies in bed. Big deal.
-- Your example is just an absurd denial that the golden rule is a reasoned basis for morality, and needs no religion to justify its existence.
I think you're wasting your time. There are those who assert absolutes and ignore the ability of humanity to exert free-will and instead confuse it with freedom of speech. There are those who see the assertion of moral laws as a violation of their free speech and fail to recognize that where there's smoke there's fire. Essentially there are those who's ideas, although well meaning, are thoroughly in denial of human nature and fail to recognize that although there is a moral code at work in our lives there is that capacity within man to ignore it at the expense of others and for their own personal gratification.
Frankly - political, social or moral ideals are worthless if the full range of what humanity is capable of (both good and evid) is not recognized and addressed. Otherwise we'll just continue to learn from the same mistakes so many others have made in the past. I guess history just really is destined to repeat itself.
I'll tell you what's rediculous - to assert a moral law is compared to being a fascist because it limits the "obviously" perverse from their ?fundamental right? to free-speech. Does anyone not see the contradiction in all of that or is it just a juxtaposition?
Probably closer to the latter -- though I prefer to think of it more along the lines of substitution due to pridefulness and denial. Look at the verbal gymnastics we've seen in this thread -- some of it quite remarkable. It pretty much all traces back to one an assumption that God either doesn't exist, or doesn't matter.
I was taking issue with your use of the term "self-evident" as it applies to the Golden Rule. Yet it is clearly not self-evident when approached from your rationalist point of view. "Self-evident" implies that it needs no proof; the ready availability of excellent counter-examples demonstrates the need for proof. Hence, it is not and cannot be self-evident to the rationalist.
A truly rational person would note that the king has a better chance of not being harmed than does the man who counts on his fellow man to obey the golden rule. You yourself don't do that -- IIRC you're a big gun rights supporter. Why? Because you don't trust your fellow man to invariably follow the golden rule, and are instead relying on a show of force to avoid being harmed.
If you were rational, you'd conclude from this that the king is right: force is the only way. You'd also have to conclude that the golden rule was for chumps, as it requires a tremendous degree of trust that is not necessarily warranted. Instead, you've given the golden rule a tremendous weight that cannot be justified on rational grounds.
So we're back to our original and long-standing argument, which you're still avoiding.
FYI -- Pedophilia Documentation
By the way, kiddy porn is thriving here as well, if our law makers were serious about it, there would be a lot less of it, don't you think.
We come back to the same old thing, "Sweep your own stoop, before you tackle someone elses."
What a good idea.
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