In the movie Arthur, Liza Minelli tells Dudley Moore that when she was ten, she thought the moon was in love with her because, no matter where she moved, the moon always followed her. When I saw that for the first time, I was outraged. Not being much older than that myself, I thought it preposterous that a ten year old would think such a foolish thing. What I didn't realize at the time was that I was a really fucking smart ten year old and as a result of being really fucking smart, I knew that Minelli's scenario was impossible. Most people, however, aren't really fucking smart and don't understand things that aren't explained out to them in simple details.
This is a crab. This has sex with kids. Genetically, paedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than they do with you and me. Now that is scientific fact. There's no real "evidence" for it but it is scientific fact.
I recently saw the DVD for Capturing the Friedmans. It's a documentary about papa Arnold and son Jesse Friedman who were wrongly convicted of child molestation in the late 80's. The film has been marketed (link grace a Goldtoe) as a Rashomon about child abuse. The film's tagline is "who do you believe," and this is the question the audience is meant to ask upon seeing the film. The Friedmans strenuously object that they're innocent of all the charges, which is set against the investigators' opinions of their guilt and the fact that Arnold was a pedophile. The DVD release is quite amazing, in that the second disc makes it absolutely clear that the Friedmans are innocent, presenting information not in the theatrical release that's quite damning of the prosecution.
But today, the number of children having sex with adults is beyond belief. If you define a child as anyone under 30, the figure is over 86%.
For some historical context, back in the 80's, there was quite a hysteria about large-scale child molestation. There were multiple prosecutions alleging that small groups of people would regularly and fantasticalyl involve groups of children in bizarre sex practices. This is not unlike the hysteria over the nonexistent ritual Satanic child abuse. For some reason, lynch mob/witch hunt type mentalities develop whenever there are suggestions of child molestations. The UK does the same thing. Most famously, an angry mob confused about Greek word roots spraypainted a pediatrician's office with the epithet "pedo." This hysteria was well satirized by Chris Morris in a Brass Eye special, the transcript for which is here and is the source for the italicized quotes. Another more serious depiction of the problem is the HBO movie Indictment: The McMartin Trial, which features James Woods and Henry Thomas as a boy accused of touching more than ET's finger and thereby America's heart. Indictment, which deals with an unsuccessful conviction for child abuse, is a good backgrounder on the problems involved with these types of cases.
Even our most drastic measures don't work. Last month the notorious paedophile Sydney Cook was blasted into space to spend the rest of his life aboard a one-man prison vessel posing no further threat to children on Earth. But it was revealed that an 8-year-old boy was also placed on board by mistake and is now trapped alone in space with the monster. A spokesman said "This is the one thing we didn't want to happen."
There are two big problems with the witness testimony. First, children are terrible witnesses. When interviewed, they want to please the authority figure interviewing them and so, if they sense an agenda, they'll try to conform to it. An interviewer will ask a kid, "Did so-and-so touch your such-and-such?" and the kid will respond, at first, "no." And then the interviewer will ask something like, "Come on, we know something -or somebody- went down, you can tell us. Didn't he diddle your doodle?" and so on, so that the kid understands that he's meant to answer "yes." Even if it means disregarding reality, the kid will give the answer that he knows the interviewer wants. Plus, kids just have terrible senses of reality. They think there are monsters that live in closets and moons that are in love with them and all sorts of crazy shit. They're little kids, so making stuff up isn't quite a leap for them.
We even have footage that would be too alarming to show you of a little boy being interfered with by a penis shaped sound wave generated by an online paedophile.
But what's worse is that they'll often, and certainly in the Friedman case, use hypnosis to "recover" memories. Hypnosis is bad news. It doesn't really work to "recover" memories, and more often than not creates new tales in the hypnotized person's brain that the mesmerized thinks to be valid memories. The brain is not a perfect, tivo-like recording of what happened. Events are processed by the brain and stored in a quirky manner that is both unreliable and open to tampering by techniques such as hypnosis.
You are a paedophile. You are a nonce. You're a perv. You're a slot badger. You're a two pin din plug. You're a bush dodger. You're a small bean regarder. You're a unabummer. You're a nut administrator. You're a bent ref. You're The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. You're a fence vole. You're a free willy. You're a chimney bottler. You're a bunty man. You're a shrub rocketeer.
Now, I know about all this shit because I make it my business to know lots of shit about dopey random subjects like this. I've seen Indictment and I've read the Brass Eye transcript and I've read about "recovered" memories and hypnosis and I've seen that one Frontline about the Florida pedophilia cases prosecuted by Janet Reno. But lots of people don't know this, and the extremely abbreviated presentation of these issues in Capturing the Friedmans may not be persuasive enough to these individuals. They may leave the film thinking that there's an issue concerning the innocence or guilt of the Friedmans when there is none.
Children today often have mobile phones but so too do paedophiles using text message slang. And because they're on edge they dial wrong numbers so watch out for these. (holds mobile phone showing P2PBSH) Pipe to pipe bushman - code for two paedophiles having sex with each other while watching children from a shrub.
For a demonstration, go to the imdb comment pages for Indictment and for Capturing the Friedmans. On the Indictment page, you'll see comment after comment about this horrifying miscarriage of justice, about how depressing what happened was. This case, let me remind you, did not result in a successful prosecution. That is, justice was correctly served. Now go to the Capturing the Friedmans comment page. Notice a difference. For one, there are actually comments that talk about the film being horribly biased against the legal system. One nutjob even lobs in some bullshit "why do they hate America" style rhetoric. That's plenty fucked up. But what really gets my goat are the comments like "clearly something went on, but we'll never know..." These are people who are taking the normally quite sensible approach of finding some middle ground between the presented perspectives. The only problem is that they're wrong, there is no middle ground in this case, it's a clear-cut hyped hysteria charge.
DBL means dusty blonde lulu and that's a male paedophile disguised as a lion.
While these people are ultimately to blame for their error, the filmmaker had a much more convincing case to be made in favor of the Friedmans' innocence. He made the mistake of assuming that people knew about the problems of child confessions, about the hysteria of child abuse cases in the late 80s. He knew about the police tactics of piling accusation on accusation. On disc two, it's revealed that the prosecution began picking up random people and threatening them with prosecution if they didn't turn evidence against Arnold and Jesse. The second disc of the DVD release has further information about unreliable witness interrogations and the poor credibility of the child witnesses. This was footage left out of the documentary in favor of more salacious but less informative shots of David Friedman tearfully confessing to the camera that...well...he's upset. Quite the revelation.
We're after your help too. (points to monitor) Security footage of a paedophile disguised as a school. He's been getting away with it in Sheffield for 12 years. Do you know him? Have you seen him? Please call.
Another shot depicts the father of one of the supposedly abused children assaulting Jesse at the courthouse. Interesting? Sure, I guess. I mean, I've seen brawls break out on film before, but I guess it's still neat to see. Is it substantive or does it pertain to the real issue, the innocence of the defendant? No. Then it's wasted film time.
So, who is Jes North? In 1986, Jes North was convicted for multiple acts. We believe his story is too upsetting to transmit. We only do so now with that proviso.
For an example of how to do things correctly, you can trust Errol Morris. First of all, his documentary The Thin Blue Line is about the best bit of wrongful conviction filmmaking you'll ever see. Second, but more interesting for this case, is his film Mr. Death. That film deals with a fellow who designed state execution equipment and then went on to become a Holocaust denier. Early versions of the film had little material refuting the testimony that Mr. Death gave regarding the Holocaust. Morris just assumed that people would know Mr. Death to be wrong and would dismiss his evidence out of hand. But when he discovered that this was not necessarily the case, he added more strong rebuttal information to the film so that the viewer was left with no conclusion other than the Holocaust's reality.
He was allowed to write articles for a magazine edited by a man who, at that time, had a 9 year old nephew with a nice pink arse and no hair on his balls. The orgy of slywinking usery was only brought to an end by a stairwell noncebashing which left North braindead and quadraspazzed on a life-glug.
The director and, oddly enough, creator of Moviephone, however, saw that the audiences were divided by his film and decided to make it into a marketing gimmick. Instead of fulfilling his ethical obligation to make a strong film supporting the innocence of the Friedmans, he slapped the grammatically incorrect tagline, "Who do you believe?" on the movie and brags about how they would edit the film to make the audience wonder whether the Friedmans were innocent. It's a shame that in making an incredibly significant contribution to the public discourse about the Friedmans' case, he pulled his punches. Plus, it's "Whom do you believe," not "Who." And moviephone sucks dick, too.
There is a parent riot currently in Leeds which started after a paedophile in a microlight committed an overhead perversion at Headingly stadium. But police helicopters soon chased him into pylons where he crashed screaming like a pig in a war.
Oh, and I had another Star Wars: Episode 3 dream last night. In this one, C3PO was being sent off to live in a colony of gay robots. I compiled a list of the five most ludicrous things about episode 3 and was ready to confront George Lucas with the list, but he ran off quickly after the press conference.
And you - leave the kids alone - or else. Now a quick recap for you :- paedophiles, crabs, simple. Hold that thought.
Posted by mattb at February 01, 2004 04:37 PM