Pedophile Ephebophile
I’ve seen a number of people complain that the word, pedophile, should not be used to describe Mark Foley because the victim was a teenager, and not a pre-pubescent child, the use of the term in the social sciences and psychology.
Update: thanks to the Pensacola Beach Blog we have located the correct term: Ephebophilia.
It might surprise people, but the penal [criminal] law generally breaks the population down to two groups, adult or child, and the age of differentiation is 18. The age of consent is almost always limited to the definition of a specific crime, statutory rape, and not a determining factor in other crimes where the 18 year-old standard is used.
From the stand point of this former member of law enforcement, when one party is legally defined as a child, if you divided the other party’s age by the child’s age and come up with a number greater than 3, you have a pedophile ephebophile. An age difference of more than 4 years is sick, and a ratio between 2 and 3 is perverted, but when you get to three: it’s pedophilia ephebophilia. Foley could be that kid’s grandfather!
The Republicans can try to spin this any way they want, but they are the ones who have been passing laws restricting the choices of 16 and 17 year-olds. They are the ones who upped the drinking age to 21.
Terry at has a nice piece on the Democratic leadership’s response to the 1983 page scandal.
While on this topic, what in hell is wrong with the mothers and fathers of Niagara County, New York who would permit their children to be used to shield a man who, not only protected a pedophile, but took money from him, and encouraged him to run again for Congress? According to currently available information, Reynolds is may be charged as an accessory to the crime and assisting in the cover-up. When did political loyalty outweigh the responsibility to protect your children? The fact that he asked you to do it should have given you all of the information needed to determine he was bottom-feeding scum. This is the same thing Saddam Hussein did in the run-up to Gulf War I.
10 comments
I’m pretty sure that we are going to see conservatives coorelating pedophilia and homosexuality as a way to spin their anti-homosexual (or rather their anti-sex with the exception of child birth) agenda.
Mark my words, Gingrich will be on the Sunday morning shows taking about how bad the gay agenda is as he conflates mental illness with human sexuality.
Newt Gingrich should learn to keep his pants zipped before he starts talking about sexual morality. When you tomcat around as much as he does you should stay off the topic.
In light of the latest Republican strategy of hiding behind crowds of children to avoid press questions, it’s time to re-vamp the vocabulary of the Fourth Estate. Take a leaf from the Good Parent book and use words unfamiliar to the young; words unlikely to have been repeated 500 times or more and so already be part of their vocabulary.
Here’s a start:
Once that’s answered, go on to the next question:
Of course, the main trouble with this strategy is that too many Republicans in Congress are uneducated buffoons with nothing more on their resumes to recommend them for office than being a bugman or a fat, failed football coach. Most of them don’t have a vocabulary much larger than an eight year old, either
Now, John, Denny was a wrestling couch, but I shall edit for Ephebopilia to get the social science grads off my back.
If you haven’t learned out to talk about forbidden subjects around children, you haven’t spent much time with children, but, as you say, we are dealing with decidedly child-like minds when talking to congresscritters.
Ephebophilia – new word for me. Sixteen is considered a child.
In most states, OWL, 17 and under is considered a child for almost everything.
Whoever informed you of that was just showing off his encyclopedophilic knowledge of the subject…
He’s not bad, for a guy crazy enough to live on a barrier island. [Yes, I’m ignoring the pun, you should be ashamed of, if they weren’t your stock and trade.]
you should be ashamed of, if they weren’t your stock and trade.
While I wasn’t paying attention, JavaScript turned from a simple scripting tool into a powerful object-oriented language in which clients expect one to write real event-driven applications. Add XMLHttpRequest, with its callback functions worthy of anything I saw and did in my telephony programming days, and also add JS’s natural type-unsafeness (not typelessness, which would be tolerable; JS has types, you just don’t get to see them nor can you predict them), and you have a recipe for a mind-warping experience. Punning and rhyming become part of a body’s natural defenses. Can you tell I’ve been doing a lot of that sort of stuff lately? 🙂
One of the best unused languages available is ADA, which is generally only used on DoD embedded applications. You are supposed to use it when you write code for the Dod, but exceptions are more common than the rule. It has very strong typing features as well as superb matrix manipulation and piping.
The real weakness in OOPs is the reliance on the authors of the objects to have been logical and consistent. I have generated some very odd results while using 4GLs because of the vagueness in the description of input. I can remember one where encountering a lower case L or a comma in what should have been a number field would cause the input to be pulled in as character and then converted to binary for the calculation. It wasn’t a fun time.