1. I cannot believe that people fervently line up in some stupid Facebook "support" group to defend a guy who embarrassed himself looking at nudie pictures at work and then being caught on camera.  It's obvious in the news footage that he could see the first picture he looked at was a nudie, and he still went on and clicked on the rest.  Therefore it's irrelevant that he may have been "set up": he still made the choice to go look at inappropriate pictures at work. 
   
   I have no doubt people defend this guy on the basis of some sort of "He's only human, like all of us!" bullshit, thereby implying that "all of us" are useless at self-discipline and cannot obey a simple imperative to not do X in particular-setting Y.  You.  Are.  Weak. 
   
   It's so ridiculous how people these days get all boo-fucking-hoo over their "right" to do anything at any time.  Fuck you and your "right" to look at porn at work.  Fuck you and your "right" to wear pyjamas in public.  Fuck you and your general rebellion against standards.  The public world is not your fucking living room.
   
   I hope all of these people get fired for doing retarded things at work, as it might actually free up some jobs for competent people in this tough economy. 
   
   
   
2. Thank you Bruce Sterling:

   Joris Peels: If everyone had replicators would people that were able to speak quicker be happier than those that spoke slower?
   
   Bruce Sterling: Look, "everyone" is never going to have anything. The human race includes infants, the senile, the mentally retarded, the disabled, people in clinics and prisons, the illiterate, the totally broke, dropouts of all descriptions, refuseniks... This is like asking what happens when "everybody has a car." Everybody's not gonna have a car, even in an imaginary world where cars cost less than nothing. If replicators were as cheap as cellphones we wouldn't be any "happier." Are guys who yak really fast on cellphones any happier than the rest of us? Hardly.

   Thank you.  Thank you thank you thank you.  I hate it when people talk about technology changing the face of humanity whilst totally ignoring that said technology is unlikely to be adopted by everyone - in part because of glaring inequalities that spoiled first-worlders seem to like to ignore - and in so doing, imply that everyone in Sterling's list is not a "real" human being whose experience counts in making up "the face of humanity."  How about not trying to compensate for nobody liking you in high school with "geeks will inherit the earth" garbage?
   
   
   
3. Obviously, considering certain things I've had to deal with in my past, I have sympathy for someone who feels hurt by pictures of themselves being posted on the Internet.  (My case was a worry rather than an actuality of this situation, but still, I have been through relevant emotions is what I'm saying)  And all the more so when it's pictures of something far more horrific than in my case. 
   
   However, I think idea of suing everyone who downloads said pictures is a really bad one.  Here is why:
   
   A) The implicit message of such an arrangement, when the victim is so broken as to have never had a normal social life, held down a job, or etc., is "look how much richer you are because of people seeing you in non-consensual sexual activities that you were forced into as a child.  Look at all the money you have that you would never have had otherwise!" 
   
   I fail how this is in any way conducive to someone's self-esteem or pride in themselves.  By all means, if they have all kinds of issues that prevent them from being a productive member of society, therapy and some kind of social support so that they don't have to work is a great idea.  Obviously, they should have a decent standard of living (i.e. not just a minimal one) established for them by some sort of social services.  But for Satansakes, don't make the amount of money go up at the same rate as the rate of humiliation the person experiences.  That seems so self-evidently fucked-up to me.
   
   B) I have empathy for people being upset by things that remind them of past situations of abuse, as I'm sure a recent journal entry made clear.  I do think it's a matter that other people should be sensitive about.  However, at the same time I would also assert that encouraging and aggravating such sensitivities is not a good thing. 
   
   To put a finer point on what I'm getting at: it may feel like every time the topic of the pictures comes up, the violation is happening again, but in reality, the abuse is in the past - the tragedy is not that the same time in the person's history keeps recurring, the tragedy is that they think that it keeps recurring when actually it is done.  That whole existentialist "you can always make a new choice" principle is relevant here. 
   
   Likewise, if a person is constantly paranoid about whether someone sees and recognizes them from the pictures, that is a fair concern to a point, but if you were 4 in the pictures and 19 now, I think such a worry also entails a certain amount of self-absorbed paranoia and/or psychologically-ill reduction-of-one's-entire-life-to-one-single-incident - i.e. failure to recognize that just because the incident looms large in one's own mind does not necessarily mean it looms equally large in that of everyone else one meets.  Such a person, in my opinion, does not just need money, as if money is some kind of magic instant cure-all: they need sufficient psychological/existential/spiritual support to enable them to move beyond and say "that one incident is not all I am, I am more than that."
   
   This probably sounds like blaming the victim, but that's not quite what I'm getting at.  My point is not that the victim is at fault for feeling victimized.  Obviously it's understandable to feel that way - which is why, in reference to my previous entry, people reacting to what may be a situation of vicitmization with "huh huh huh duh why don't you find this black humor thing as funny as I do?" is offensive to me.  At the same time though, while there is that one extreme of not acknowledging the victim's experience, there is also an opposite extreme of over-acknowledging the victim's experience, i.e. implying that their broken way of seeing the world reflects the factual, objective way that the world really is. 
   
   That a person feels imprisoned by their past experience is, of course, tragic.  But by throwing money at it, to me this is saying "yes, you are right, the abuse does happen again and again and will continue for the rest of your life" when really, what the victim would need to come to realize in order to heal is precisely that her experience is not on infinite repeat. 
   
   I guess there are certain assholes in the world - people who would rather trumpet about "free speech" than develop any useful empathy or social skills - who will take this to the far other end and act as if they are doing someone a favor by being insensitive and "forcing" them to get over something sooner, but I personally think anyone who acts that way is even more misguided than the person who wants to throw money at the problem.  I find it easier to believe that wanting the victim to get damages from offenders is well-meaning than berating someone for not sharing your sense of sick humor.  Like, what right is being transgressed in the latter case - the victim is violating your "right" to engage in casual stupid monkey humor and/or Schadenfreude?  Fuck off with that.
   
   To paraphrase a comment I made on someone's journal awhile back: if the traumatized state is conceived of as a cocoon, of course it's not desirable to stay in the cocoon forever; putting more layers on it (throwing money at it) is not a healthy solution.  But forcing the cocoon open before the person is ready is also not useful, and I think is far more likely to cause the person to retreat further into themselves with a sense of "nobody understands me and my experience."  I don't see how anyone in that situation could be blamed for reacting that way either.
   
   Oh, and to clarify before moving on: that previous entry was NOT about the same topic I'm talking about here presently.  (In the previous one, I had no "proof" that the person with the hurt feelings was actually abused, but since the rest of the Internet regularly acts on their own "intuition" I thought I was within my rights to do likewise once in awhile:  I just thought it was a strong possibility and was offended that possibility seemed to be overlooked by others commenting.)  I made a connection between the two not because I think there is any sort of real comparable damage done, but because on the level of principle, I could see a potential seeming-contradiction between calling for more sensitivity there and "less" here, so I wanted to explain how what I'm calling for here is not less sensitivity, but rather, sensitivity that produces positive change and healing rather than just a million dollar bandaid.
   
   C) When the lawyer himself says openly in one of the related articles that "this is a lawyer's dream," uh, might want to be a bit suspicious there about who's really exploiting who.  Yeah.
   

Well, that got longer than I was intending, so I'll cut it short here.