I completely agree with you on that — viewing child porn is child abuse, period. It seems like there is solid evidence, however, for treating child porn consumption and pedophilia differently from a clinical perspective. I don’t think it should be in terms of the severity of criminal penalties.

There was a really interesting article a couple years ago in the New Yorker about child porn and sex abuse which, given the topic of this article, might be interesting to commenters here:

Um. I believe he publically condemned the 9/11 attacks. He did, however, suggest once that the fatwa against Salman Rushdie was totes legit, which is pretty shitty.

Pegs, you say?

Hm, I imagine this is fairly rare?

Would that be under RICO? Or is there another way? RICO doesn’t seem to fit here.

I would think it’s because you can’t bring a criminal charge against an organization in the way you can a civil suit, but I’d agree though that the higher ups in the church that failed to report abuse should be pursued like this guy was:

psst ... it’s a simpsons reference.

I can see that. To be fair to your point, I do think the threshold of dickishness is higher for the person in the relationship, since the person you’re hurting doesn’t exist as an abstraction. It’s shitty to hurt other people, but you have to be more dedicated to doing something shitty to hurt someone you’re close and…

Eh, I see this reasoning a lot and I’m not sure I buy it. Obviously, he’s the one who betrayed his pregnant partner (they weren’t married), which is massively shitty, but I think it’s also pretty shitty to get involved with someone who you know to be in a relationship, unless you have a compelling reason to believe…

Apologies if my first comment went through and this is redundant, but I don’t think it did.

Eh, I don’t think it’s bad faith if being with someone of that faith offers you a compelling incentive and you make a good faith attempt to learn about it and understand it to see if you’re on board, even if you might not have otherwise. There are many ways people come to faith. I mean, it is bad faith if your…

Eh, I think automatically assuming it’s icky is icky. Hell, it might have been her idea. I have a friend who is converting to her fiance’s religion, not because he demanded it or put strings on the proposal or anything, but because she doesn’t want to do an interfaith thing with their eventual children and since his…

Blue is the new orange.

It would be pretty badass if all the promo leading up to this series was a huge misdirection (a la the rock and sam jackson in the other guys), Lopez and her partner go to jail at the end of the first episode, and the rest of the series is about some other dudes.

You said ibrain, therefore:

I should have been clearer that by “free for everyone who attends” means “free for everyone who completes the program and their committment” (which is almost everyone) but, a few additions to your other points:

The mandatory 4 (ETA: or is it 5? going off memory, not 100% certain it’s 4) year active duty military committment after graduation sweetens the deal for them.

Yeah, it is. I suppose it’s possible that someone suggested to him that if he applied they’d offer him a spot, but that’s not the same thing as a scholarship.

The thing that’s hilarious about this to me is that West Point is a service academy, so it’s free for everyone who attends (plus a stipend, I believe). So, like, not only is this a lie, it’s impossible.