Ye gods, you need to be restrained from every using analogy. In your hands it is a dangerous weapon for confusion.
If the watch volunteers “…saw a guy dressed in black carrying a crowbar walking down the street…” and, without more, attacked him, that would be bad. But that’s not a valid analogy to what’s going on here. The PJ volunteers have much more solid evidence against the people they target. The “…guy dressed in black carrying a crowbar walking down the street…” has done nothing wrong. Who have the PJ people targeted that have done nothing wrong?
And, lest anyone leap to click “Report This Post”, I will reiterate most clearly:
** I am not in any way shape or form supporting or advocating the idea of targeting any member of SDMB or anyone else on the Internet with this kind of misplaced accusation. The instance I used was just that - an example made up out of whole cloth and not meant as an incitement or encouragement.**.
I have to disagree with this. There are no victims here. They highlight people who actively solicit sex with underage kids. That’s not a victim, that’s a perpetrator.
You’re saying that someone could fake a chat log, and with NO OTHER CORROBORATING EVIDENCE, utterly destroy your life, and you’d have no recourse at all?
I’m sorry. I don’t buy it.
And in these cases, there isn’t an allegation that the logs are faked… just the concern that they COULD have been faked. Again - for the reasons above, I don’t buy it.
In EITHER sense. The PJ targets have done something wrong in the moral sense. And they have actually, factually, done something wrong in the legal sense.
Accused perpetrator. Alleged perpetrator. “Charged with” whatever (except that most of them don’t get charged with anything). “Held in connection with” whatever (ditto).
<—Smiling. Ahhh, Bricker. Yes, thank you EVER so much. I actually DID think carefully. You might want to read again, everything I wrote in that post.
What I SAID was that being able to sue for defamation is meaningless- and it’s disingenuous for you to say it’s not- because the accusation made is so heinous, and in the environment and mood of the US at this time, proving yourself innocent a few years down the line at the end of a defamation lawsuit will do you ( the group you, of course ) exactly no good.
What would one do? Stand in the courtroom, alone and still villified, pumping one’s hand in the air and proclaiming loudly, See? By god I didn’t try to lure a 12 year old girl( Detective In Hiding ) into a face to face sexual encounter !!.
You are an attorney, yes? You have presented yourself here as one. You are going to sit there and insist to all reading this thread that an accusation- this kind of accusation- is easily brushed aside once made? One needs no corroborating evidence to wreck a person’s personal, family and business life. One only needs a single loudly proclaimed accusation. One needs evidence to prosecute and convict in a court of law, but we are not only discussing a court of law.
The public court of moral opinion won’t turn on defamation suits. It will (sadly) turn on, " Oh, that guy- always so nice to the kids on the block. Makes a big deal about Halloween, and all. Never see him with a girlfriend, though. No kids either. Hmmm…"
Considering that they paid perverted justice to put on the show, I have no reason to believe it was anything other than ‘We’re paying you, so get us some good ratings by putting on a good show.’ It has lost any claim to being credible when it became paid entertainment.
Read their forums.
Most of them were sexually abused or raped as children and they now believe they have a personal mission to be the masked vigilante bat-men who go out and protect the public. They also get jollies out of calling the person into a chat room and shredding the hell out of them. While they’re doing that in one chat room, there’s another where they congratulate each other and throw around virtual high-fives cheering each other on when a particularly good dig is made. When asked about how they’d feel if one of their targets committed suicide, for example, they pretty much said ‘good.’
Don’t believe me? Join and watch for yourself.
Another perverted justice tactic. Call your opponents fans of pedophiles in order to discredit them.
So now I am a collaborator with pedophiles because I oppse perverted justice and find its tactics disgusting?
Same recommendation I make to everyone else: join, lurk, read. If it doesn’t open your eyes, then nothing will.
I rely on those principles to protect me too, Bricker. In my opinion, they should not be set aside when it comes to scum because every time we do abandon our principles for a piece of scum, it becomes that much easier abandon them for the next ‘piece of scum’ and the next, and the next, and the next until they mean nothing.
Larry Flynt said that if the First Amendment protects a smut peddler like him, then it protects all the rest of us too. I hate his magazine, and agree with his point 100%.
When the person becomes the target of threats of violence, harassment and stalking, they become a victim. If we won’t stand up for the rights of the lowest, who will stand up for ours?
Money can’t get your life back. It can’t stop the people who see you in the grocery store and the post office from remembering nothing other than the word ‘pedophile’. It can’t get back your career, or the respect of your colleagues. Money cannot fix the damage that can be done by these accusations. That stigma, that stain, never goes away no matter how innocent you are.
[QUOTE=CartooniverseWhat I SAID was that being able to sue for defamation is meaningless- and it’s disingenuous for you to say it’s not- because the accusation made is so heinous, and in the environment and mood of the US at this time, proving yourself innocent a few years down the line at the end of a defamation lawsuit will do you ( the group you, of course ) exactly no good. [/quote]
I don’t agree.
I think that winning such a suit would go a long way towards rehabilitating your image. The public is not a bunch of brain-dead sheep, repeating the last accusation they heard over and over again and immune to any new information. They are well aware that false charges can be made, and disproven, and that a lawsuit is the way to go about doing that.
You ought to know that unless they have been convicted they are presumed to be legally innocent. I don’t give a damn whether PJ or you think they aren’t.
The yelling is hardly necessary. Calm down.
No. It’s that their credibility after having paid for good ratings is in the shitter.
And I’m not going to waste bandwidth trying to explain it to you again.
Yes. But that presumption refers to who has the burden of proof in a courtroom, at a criminal trial. It does not mean that if I witness someone commit a crime, I cannot tell the whole world that the guy is a criminal.
OK, yelling isn’t necessary. So what method would you suggest will work to teach you what “presumed legally innocent” means? I explained it once, above, and it didn’t seem to make any mark on your understanding, since you trotted out the phrase again and used it incorrectly.
So tell me – how can I explain to you what “presumed legally innocent” means - and, more importantly, what it does not mean?
I understand what it means. You have a different opinion as to the tactics of perverted justice, and you’re not going to be able to sway me to your opinion that their tactics of harassment, stalking and threats are anything but morally repugnant.
I do have another question for you, though. Why would these people go to such lengths to hide their real identities, including the leader going by an alias (Xavier von Erck) in all their dealings, and spend so much time on their site discussing how to make it more difficult to find out who they really are if not out of a reasonable belief that what they’re doing is something they could face legal repercussions for?
Joe Stevens is accosted in an alleyway by a man with a gun. The man points the gun at Joe and demands his wallet. Joe complies. The man takes the wallet and flees.
Joe reports the crime to the police, and goes home. The next day, visiting a friend, Joe sees the man that mugged him. Joe calls the police, and they respond and arrest the man, one Carl Simmons.
Question: is there any legal principle or prudent practice that requires Joe to refer to Carl as his “alleged” mugger? Must Joe give Carl some sort of “presumption of innocence?”
Question: is there any sort of legal principle or prudent practice that requires the newspaper writer who reports the story to refer to Carl as an “alleged” mugger?
And finally, question: is there any sort of legal principle that the court trying Carl for the armed robbery of Joe must apply regarding Carl’s presumption of innocence?
I think the answers to these questions will help expose the disconnect we seem to have here.
No. What you’ve said has nothing to do with the phrase “presumed innocent.”
I think the questions I asked above will help clarify this, though.
I imagine they are frightened of extra-legal consequences. Pedophiles exposed by their tactics may well decide to exact revenge on them without recourse to the law.
I actually have no interest in your quiz because it doesn’t relate to what the people from perverted justice do.
So they’re trying to aviod being treated in exactly the same manner as they treat others?
Also, why are they so specific about telling their members to refer to the target or ‘bust’ as they call it as a ‘wanna be pedo’? That is something that I noticed very often - an admonishment to call the ‘bust’ a ‘wanna be pedo’.
You might as well save your effort if you’re trying to make me think that what they do is acceptable, or hoping that someone finally has the balls and information to take Phillip Eide (aka Xavier Von Erck) for all he’s worth.
