{"id":177,"date":"2008-09-15T13:27:00","date_gmt":"2008-09-15T21:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=177"},"modified":"2009-05-09T05:23:22","modified_gmt":"2009-05-09T13:23:22","slug":"pedophilia-in-a-pill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=177","title":{"rendered":"Pedophilia in a Pill"},"content":{"rendered":"

You may remember the case<\/a> a few years back of the Floridian hypersexual pedophile whose depravity hailed from a brain tumor; the dude (rightly) got off, since he wasn’t culpable for the wiring in his head. You may even remember me taking the next step (scroll down to June 30th on the right-hand side<\/a>), and remarking that the tumor didn’t really make a difference\u2014 nobody<\/em> is responsible for the way their heads are wired, and the legal system had taken the first step (again, rightly) towards acknowledging that the very concept <\/em>of culpability, while convenient, is neurologically unsound.<\/p>\n

Exhibit B<\/a>*: Phillip Carmichael, a former Oxfordshire headmaster and pedophile, exonerated after a court decided that his extensive collection of child porn had been amassed while under the influence of prescription drugs. Once again we see evidence that we are mechanical. The very phrase “control yourself” is dualist at its heart, a logical impossibility. It conjures up images of a driver fighting to stop a careening car with bad brakes. But the fact is, there is no driver. There is only the car\u2014 we<\/em> are the car\u2014 and when the brake lines have been cut, careening is just what cars do<\/em>. Medical professionals prescribed a bunch of pills to this man, and they literally turned him into someone else.<\/p>\n

You might think that this would make people feel a bit more kindly towards natural-born kiddy-diddlers. After all, if it’s a chemical that turns you into a pervert, you’re not really culpable, are you? You’re taking the same drugs Carmichael was; the only difference is that they’re not being produced by the factory Pharm down the road, they’re being produced in your own head. If anything, natural-born pedophiles have even less choice in the matter than did our Exhibit B; at least Carmichael could have chosen more competent medical council.<\/p>\n

I would be willing to bet, though, that most people would not<\/em> think more kindly of pedophiles after performing this thought experiment, and in fact most people would vilify and shout down anyone who dared <\/em>to make excuses for these monsters. Anything to do with kids is, by definition, a motherhood issue; and motherhood issues by definition turn us into irrational idiots.<\/p>\n

But our legal systems generally define culpability in terms of whether offenders know that their acts are against the law, and by that standard I guess some kind of punishment is called for. Still. Let’s at least be consistent about it, shall we? We know that a human system called Phillip Carmichael deliberately broke the law; it just wasn’t the same Phillip Carmichael who ended up in court after the drugs were withdrawn. That<\/em> Carmichael had been rebooted back into a benign, Linux sort of personality. The evil child-molesting Microsoft OS had been wiped. So if you want to be consistent about this, put Carmichael back on drugs until the guilty iteration reappears. Then<\/em> put him in jail.<\/p>\n

At least you’d know you have the right guy.<\/p>\n

*Thanks to Nas Hedron for the link<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You may remember the case a few years back of the Floridian hypersexual pedophile whose depravity hailed from a brain tumor; the dude (rightly) got off, since he wasn’t culpable for the wiring in his head. You may even remember me taking the next step (scroll down to June 30th on the right-hand side), and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-just-putting-it-out-there","category-neuro"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=177"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":434,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177\/revisions\/434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}