OK, now THAT was nicely put and makes more sense then spouting “depraved, sick and psycho.”
Lo, I am whooshed. I’ll have to send my Reference Detector to be recalimabrated.
Just to clairfy.
You used four words as adjective to describe fantasies.
One was the word Evil.
Another was sexual.
Another was deviant.
The fourth was illegal.
In any list of adjectives you do not change the basic meaning of the sentence if you remove any of them. So if you simply wrote “shouldn’t a thread that discusses a person’s illegal fantasies get erased?” that would basically be the same sentence.
Do you now see where you called a fantasy illegal?
It may be that you ment that he was thinking of illegal things. Many people on this board do that. We’ve had revenge fantasy threads where people dream of everything from vandalism to assorted crimes and misdemeanors. But to me, your sentence seems to indicate the the act of thinking about sex with children is in itself illegal. At least that is how I read it.
One of the other things that bothers me about this thread are the people who, to me, seem to be patting themselves on the back while patting other people on the head with the “Oh, that was obviously a troll” comments.
After threads of “Ask the woman having an affiar” and “Can I get out of paying Child support”, the idea that this thread could be legit seems reasonable.
Of course I’m one of those sillly people who didn’t spot the troll right away.
This is perhaps in the top ten most stupid things I’ve ever read in my life.
Heh. I suppose it would be futile to ask a Mod to fix the coding in that last post, what with the slamming their leader and all…
Otto, Otto, out of kindness towards your host, couldn’t you at least have put it in the top 11? This is indeed a black day for us all.
If I have one regret, I would have NOT made my remark about long-time posters not spotting this guy as a fake.
I’m just so used to the veteran admins and mods here who have a pretty good nose for this kind of thing.
Ed said
The behind the scenes emails, the discussions, and the fact that most of us have a full-time job, mean that an instant solution to such a problem can sometimes take days. Not what we’d like, but real life.
Well, you see, Otto, there’s different ways of asking a question and of discussing a topic… even about an illegal activity. For instance, “What are the health consequences of heroin addiction?” is substantially different from “Where can I score some crack?”
Serious questions about the psychology of pedophilia, for instance, would be permitted: can it be cured? is it genetic ? etc. A confessional thread that’s asking for encouragement and support and endorsement, like this and the prior “Ask the pedophile” threads, are different.
Try a thought-experiment: think of the opening statements in those “Ask the Pedophile” threads, and change them to “Ask the Rapist” or “Ask the Person who would like to be a rapist but is afraid of getting caught” or “Ask the person who would have orgasm from beating a homosexual with a baseball bat but refrains.”
It’s not the topic that’s forbidden, it’s the way the topic is brought up. And that’s the same for all discussions of illegal activities.
Now, in this specific case, we had just faced several individuals from a pedophile-support board who invaded us with their political agenda. They were not interested in our boards or our community, they were not interested in anything beyond convincing people that pedophilia is OK because they think it’s consensual. (If you want to discuss that with them, feel free to go to their boards.) But we don’t want them bringing their agendas to our boards.
We have had the same reaction in the past to other groups that invaded us with the sole purpose of spreading their political agenda or their holy word or whatever and advertising their websites. We have reacted the same way: we banned the offenders and disappeared their threads.
Thus, when we saw another such thread, we immediately went to “red alert,” thinking it was better to call a stop first and investigate after. We have used this process frequently. Very few Moderator actions are irreversible. If we have wrongly banned a suspect or disappeared a thread, we can always restore them. But since investigations can take hours or days, we frequently prefer to freeze (or eliminate) suspect threads/persons until we have the time to look more carefully.
Why, thank you TYM! 
Dex, I’m not even talking about the current situation (I’m assuming that the disappeared thread was the one called something like “ask the non-molesting never acted on it pedophile”). If the guy was a sock and he was here just to stir the shit or foment a board war, fine, ban him and burn his thread to the ground (or leave the thread and lock it since it was IMHO informative).
What I think is stupid is the idea that Dopers would aid and abet child rape by giving a “group hug” to a potential child rapist. I’ve been here going on five years and while I’ve certainly not read every thread I don’t recall ever seeing a single Doper, let alone a whole threadful of them, speak out in support of rape, child or otherwise, or offer comfort or encouragement to a potential rapist. Thinking that we would is insulting.
Totally anal nitpick:
FTR, IIRC, it was called, flat-out, “Ask the pedophile.”
Some might argue that anything other than a strict condemnation of a pedophile is tacit approval.
Well, I’m sure if you condemn him, he’ll stop being a pedophile.
It was “Ask the (non child-molesting, non-illegal-activity-condoning) pedophile!”
I wonder if the title was edited at some point; I remember it as simply “Ask the Pedophile”.
Good point – I think there’s a distinction to be made between what that sock, if he had been “real” in his goals, was (would have been) attempting to do, and the actual act of child molestation.
Very charily, because I’m trespassing on what could be taken as highly offensive ground here, let me draw the classic gay/pedophile parallel, for a good purpose:
Prior to Lawrence, a number of states, including North Carolina, Texas, and Idaho, considered any homosexual physical relations as being illegal. It was not illegal to be gay in those states; it was merely illegal to act on it in certain specified ways – i.e., anything in which two men or two women could bring each other to orgasm.
No thread was closed, nobody banned, for “advocacy of illegal behavior” in that circumstance – there was common consent that those laws needed to be changed, and that the emotional feelings associated with being gay in a homophobic place were the thrust of the topics at hand, not the sexual acts in question.
If a longtime poster, or even a new poster who’s not a one-trick-pony but interested in the various topics we discuss, outed himself or herself as attracted to children or adolescents but emphatically unwilling to molest one in order to gratify his/her libido at the cost of the child’s mental health, I’d say, that person needs understanding and support in holding to that resolve and in relief from feeling very much ostracized by people who don’t understand his/her orientation and moral values.
I’m not drawing a gay/pedophile parallel in any other way than the idea that it’s an orientation which can be handled morally (or not) and which can induce phobic reactions.
Don’t think I said anything remotly like that.
I saw it as soon as it was posted. I don’t recall the thread title being edited.
In the thread under consideration, we had people saying “I sympathize with you”, and “You’re dealing very well with a bad situation” and describing the supposedly non-active pedophile as being “courageous.”
In a prior thread, we had several people arguing that the laws on pedophilia are too strict, and should be loosened, and we even had people arguing that it shouldn’t be illegal if a teen gives consent. Some of the most emotional supportive arguments, it turns out, were present by another member of the pedophiliac-support boards who did not so identify himself. (This was the “invasion” I was talking about earlier, which has been all deleted. The point is that there was a political agenda behind those people.)
While no one is speaking out “in support of rape”, people were being supportive of a self-confessed pedophile. Hence, Ed (and the moderators) were concerned that an “Ask the pedophile” thread would lead to “a group hug atmosphere that … might encourage this guy to act on his impulses.” Not that anyone here would be directly encouraging him (I hope!) but that “we’re supportive of your courage” can easily be taken as “we’re supportive of you” and so on.
You may think that the risk is small, but however small it may be, how would you feel if you read a later post that the person had indeed had sex with a pre-teen, because he thought the Straight Dope Message Board told him it was OK? It’s too late to say, “No, that’s not what we meant.” And it’s too late to discover that some of the encouragement came from his own socks (say.)
The fact is that these boards stand pretty firm in their condemnation of certain acts which violate human dignity: rape, murder, pedophilia, and similar outrages. While we’re willing to allow discussion on any of them, there are certain types of discussion that are not permitted, because they might encourage breaking a (U.S.) law.
BTW, a quick search on “pedophilia” in the Message Boards will turn up several discussions (General Questions and Great Debates) that were NOT closed or deleted. It’s not the topic per se, it’s the way the thing is presented.