It’s Always About The Children, Isn’t It?

There are two stories that came to my attention that prompted today’s post:

1. Via Instapundit, Perry de Havilland finds an interview of a UK official, who discusses his interest in creating a “child-safe” Internet in conjunction with the Obama administration.
2. Scientists discuss the effects of “third-hand smoke” on children and how it may lead to universal indoor smoking bans, even in private residences.

Emotional manipulation is a powerful thing.  If you want somebody to do something for you or give you something they might not ordinarily be inclined to give you, one of the easiest ways to facilitate that is to prey on their emotions.  It usually starts with fear (”There’s a market for pictures… pictures of your children…naked!“).  You overblow it, make it seem like a common occurence (”This market is everywhere. Your neighbor could be trying to find these pictures!”).  After letting the fear sit just long enough to make the target uncomfortable, the next step begins - offering the solution.  You’ve reminded your intended victim that fear is unpleasant. You’ve shown them that what they fear could be just around the corner.  Now you give them an out.  You comfort them.  You let them know that you - and only you - can make that fear disappear.  Then you tell them how.  By getting them to fixate on that fear, they become consumed by it, or at least consumed by it just enough to not question the solution.  Stunted child development?  Toxins?  We have to make them stop! Never mind that we’re effectively talking about criminalizing one more common recreational drug, something which will invariably hurt far more children far more directly than third-hand smoke.  You think light contact to carcinogenic toxins is harmful to children?  How about watching family members end up in jail?  How about foster care?  The important thing is that you consider the cure in an empty vaccuum, one in which there’s no such thing as an unintended consequence, where the phrase, “The cure is worse than the disease” is never uttered.

Whenever somebody mentions children, you can almost universally guarantee that somebody wants you to do something you wouldn’t ordinarily do.  Children are the easiest way to get adults to experience fear.  We don’t have a financial offender registry - if you embezzle money from work, you’re not put into an online-accessible database, nor are you forbidden from living within 1,000 yards of a bank.  We do, however, have a sex offender database, Megan’s Law, Amber Alerts, laws that restrict where sexual offenders can live, and so much more.  Why?  The answer is simple:  fear.  We fear that our children will be harmed and we will do just about anything to make sure that feeling goes away, no matter how many people we hurt in the process.  Politicians know this and happily use this both against ourselves and against each other - after all, if you’re running against a politician, do you want to be the sane one talking about preserving freedom of speech and balancing the need to protect our children with the need for a free and open communication medium, or do you want to be tough on crime?  Do you want to talk about balancing the need to prevent exposure to harmful chemicals versus the damage that would be caused to children by inflicting the legal system against their families, or do you want to be tough on toxins and big tobacco corporations?  As Frank Herbert once put it, “fear is the mind-killer”.  He wasn’t kidding.

UPDATE: It’s a bad day to be a sex offender, that’s for sure.  From Slashdot:

“Privacy advocates are questioning an aggressive Georgia law set to take effect Thursday that would require sex offenders to hand over Internet passwords, screen names and e-mail addresses. Georgia joins a small band of states complying with guidelines in a 2006 federal law requiring authorities to track Internet addresses of sex offenders, but it is among the first to take the extra step of forcing its 16,000 offenders to turn in their passwords as well.”

From the news article:

State Sen. Cecil Staton, who wrote the bill, said the measure is designed to keep the Internet safe for children. Authorities could use the passwords and other information to make sure offenders aren’t stalking children online or chatting with them about off-limits topics.

Staton said although the measure may violate the privacy of sex offenders, the need to protect children “outweighs a lot of the rights of these individuals.“

There it is, folks.  The need to protect children is more important than the Bill of Rights and due process.  The need to keep the Internet “safe for children”, even though it isn’t, never was, and never will be justifies any abuse we choose to heap on those who were committed as sexual offenders.

I want to be clear about something here:  I don’t have any pity for sexual offenders.  What they did is incredibly heinous.  That said, we are setting an extremely poor precedent here.  If we don’t believe they can be trusted to conform to society’s legal norms of sexual behavior, why are we letting them out of prison?  If it’s due to some sort of mental illness, why aren’t we putting them in asylums?  Either they’re in or they’re out.  Otherwise, we’re setting ourselves up for all kinds of circumnavigations of the Bill of Rights.  How long will it be until we come up with another class of crimes that, even after their sentencing is completed, will lead to lifelong probation with severely reduced rights?  After all, if smoking is harmful to children, couldn’t we just as easily justify tracking all credit card purchases of smokers to “protect the children”?  Cigarettes are addictive, after all - we can’t be too careful.  They might relapse at any moment.

Strawmen aside, we need to make a decision:  If we believe that somebody shouldn’t be trusted in public around children and shouldn’t be trusted online, they shouldn’t be put in a position where they could be around children or online. That means increasing the terms of incarceration or possibly labeling them “criminally insane” and locking them up in a psychiatric ward somewhere.  It does not mean we pretend that our Constitution doesn’t apply to them - the instant we start doing that is the instant we decide it’s okay to do that to others, and that’s not a precedent I can get behind.

TMQ: You disappoint me.

I rarely agree completely with what Gregg Easterbrook has to write in his articles, but that’s understandable. TMQ is long. Easterbrook is a liberal that doesn’t shy away from government solutions to problems. Put the two together and you’re going to get some disagreement here. I’m fine with that. In fact, I frequently read his column because it’s one of the better reasoned explanations of the “other side” and it has the advantage of being sugarcoated with sports and cheerleader pictures.

How can you go wrong?

Then he posted this:

Belichick’s cheating could lead to dark days for NFL

The situation with the National Football League is a lot worse than people realize, and the only one who seems to grasp this fully is commissioner Roger Goodell. You don’t issue emergency orders backed by threats on Sunday morning of a game day, as Goodell just did regarding the New England Patriots’ files of cheating information, unless the situation is a lot worse than people realize.

Why is the situation worse than people think? Because the NFL is on the precipice of blowing its status as the country’s favorite sport. The whole NFL enterprise is in jeopardy from that single word: cheating. It’s the most distasteful word in sports. And now the Patriots have brought the word into the NFL.

Two paragraphs in and I’m already riled up. Let’s take a look at how the NFL’s competition is holding up, shall we?

- Baseball has suffered from almost fifteen years of problems. The most serious one today is that baseball has a drug problem. Many players have tested positive for steroids. Other players have been linked to HGH sales; HGH, by the way, can’t be tested for. Meanwhile, they have a player’s union that absolutely refuses to cooperate with anyone on this subject or any other subject that management might have any opinions on, which ties into the problems that baseball was experiencing in the mid-90s.
- Basketball had a referee get caught fixing games and involving himself in a gambling ring. Cheating is one thing; teams can stop that anytime. When referees start fixing games, though, you might as well call yourself “organized wrestling”. Meanwhile, the NBA’s best personality, best player, and most marketable asset is playing in Cleveland in a weak division with a lousy team.
- Hockey so completely overplayed their hand with the American people that it’s not even funny. The only reason they’re more relevant than professional soccer in this country is because professional soccer is completely irrelevant here.
- Boxing? You’re kidding, right?
- Speaking of a drug and credibility problem, wrestling is starting to slip past boxing in irrelevancy.
- College sports are only relevant to those that went to college, and only to those that went to those colleges where sports are relevant. That’s not most colleges. This does not necessarily apply in places like Nebraska and most of the South, but that’s because they’re the only game on in those places. Plus, if you want to talk about crookedness, it doesn’t get much worse than “amateur” sports.
- NASCAR might be the one sport that has the capability to at least sniff the NFL’s behind in ratings and popularity if things go horribly wrong. However, though NASCAR’s appeal has been broadening, I suspect it has a long way to go to get up there. Plus, NASCAR has had its fair share of cheating problems as well, mostly related to arcane car configuration rules and the like. Also, if you think people have a problem with players getting concussions, how do you think people are going to feel about the one of the strongest personalities in the sport dying in a high-speed crash? These are people driving cars in excess of 200 MPH. I don’t care how much safety equipment you put them in, sooner or later, somebody’s going to die out there. It’s called physics.
- Golf is pointless without Tiger Woods and everyone knows it.
- Women’s sports are only interesting to most sports viewers when incredibly attractive women in skimpy outfits are involved. Think women’s tennis and the LPGA. For further proof of this rule, think of the complete lack of popularity for the WNBA.

Of those on the list, who is going to compete against the NFL? With the possible exception of NASCAR, every other sport on that list has far bigger problems than the NFL right now. That alone led me to disagree with Easterbrook. The following paragraph, however, damn near made me want to throw something across the room:

Michael Vick tried to deny and stonewall, but at the last owned up and admitted what he did. That’s dignity. Belichick is now using weasel words to deny responsibility for his own choices. What kind of example does that set for the young? “Make good choices,” football coaches constantly preach to the young. Now, caught, Belichick wants a special exemption to responsibility for his own choices. Belichick also is trying to close the matter by saying he won’t talk about it anymore. So he cheated and now unilaterally declares the matter closed because he doesn’t want to face the consequences of his own choices. But this is not over and not going away. Before the cheating scandal, Belichick had a reputation for being heartless but a really good coach. Now, he seems little more than a creepy con artist, and it’s the refusal to act like a man and take full responsibility that’s really offensive. Goodell’s draft-choice penalty against the Patriots – either a first or a second and a third – is the highest draft penalty ever imposed in the NFL. The severity of this sanction shows how seriously Goodell takes the violation. If more disclosures are coming, there might be a lot more punishment of the Patriots. And unless Belichick comes clean and stops lying about his cheating, this event should disqualify him from consideration for the Pro Football Hall of Fame – it is, after all, not the Hall of Cheaters.

Wait a second. Michael Vick owned up to what he did only after his lawyers told him that, if he didn’t, he’d be spending more than a year or two in prison for committing felonies. He owned up because it made good legal sense to do so. Belichick did not commit a federal felony. Belichick also did not raise animals to fight for the amusement of himself and his friends. Belichick also did not run an illegal gambling ring designed solely to wager on the actions of said animals. Furthermore, Belichick did not kill any animals after they failed to perform in illegal fighting rings run by him to support an illegal gambling ring run by him. So, comparing Vick to Belichick is ridiculous.

As for Belichick’s impression on the young… oh, why won’t somebody think of the children? In the spirit of Godwin’s Law, I’d like to create the Colborne Corollary. It goes a little something like this:

As a discussion about a mistake or action exhibiting poor judgment grows longer, the probability of someone expressing concern about how the mistake or error in judgment will affect children approaches one.

Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve reached it! There’s just one problem - Belichick doesn’t coach children. He coaches grown adults. He’s not a developer of talent, a la your traditional high school or college coach. His job is to retain talent, keep it from injury, and harness it to win football games. That’s it. I’d be more concerned if it was a college or high school coach pulling something like this. That said, Easterbrook may have a point here - Belichick may not get into the NFL Hall of Fame, at least not on the first ballot. We’ll have to see how the Patriots do this year. Furthermore, I always was fuzzy on why being truthful and confessing to wrongdoing would absolve you of any of the consequences of what you did. If it’s wrong, it’s equally wrong whether you owned up to it or not. Consequently, at least from where I’m sitting, the punishment should be identical whether Belichick is honest about his involvement or not.

That’s enough for now.