Fighting back against “creep-shot” culture, cyber-vigilantes are now “naming and shaming” men who take photographs of women..and in some cases under-age girls…solely to ogle and pass around on the Internet, reports Jezebel.

Yes, that Jezebel, the magazine that published the “no-kiss-but-plenty-of-tell” account of a supposed encounter between some John Q. Trashbag and conservative politician and continence advocate Christine 0’Donnell, an account that was so vile that even left-wing magazines that mainline manure for a living managed to wrinkle their noses.

“One afternoon in late September, Coweta County Sheriff Investigator Jason Fetner asked Christopher Bailey, a 35-year-old substitute teacher at East Coweta High, to meet with him regarding a school theft. But when Bailey arrived, Fetner told him the real reason for their meeting: he knew that Bailey had been posting photos of his students — “Hot senior girl in one of my classes,” read one charming caption — on the subreddit r/CreepShots, some of which had been viewed thousands of times.

Most of Bailey’s CreepShots contributions were relatively “innocent” (for example, you couldn’t see the senior girl’s underwear) and therefore legal, but the content Fetner subsequently found on Bailey’s cellphone — including multiple texts and nude photos that he sent to girls as young as 16 — were not, and police are now pursuing charges. But how did Fetner know that the substitute teacher with a clean record was a secret sexual predator? Thanks to a tip from a group of anonymous Redditors who are sick of seeing the CreepShots community gleefully post teen upskirt photo after teen upskirt photo while telling the “internet morality police” to “fuck off” and stop ruining their fun.

Fetner told us that the tipster’s anonymity made it extremely difficult for him to convince a judge to sign a search warrant for Bailey — it took “several hours of arguing” before he conceded — but that he sees no real alternative for the time being. “In my personal opinion, not all speech deserves to be protected,” he said. “But until the laws in this country catch up to technology, we’re going to continue to see these types of problems. There’s nothing wrong with people looking out for this sort of thing and taking legal efforts to do something about it.”

One of the leaders of these “people” is Samantha*, a 25-year-old Redditor who recently launched Predditors, a collection of incriminating personal information — photos, social media accounts, screencaps of CreepShots posts — that she plans on using to “out” Redditors whom she considers sexual predators. One day, she hopes, the site will allow users to report men to a select group of moderators, who will then investigate and verify claims and report the worst offenders to the appropriate local authorities.”

Cosmopolitan has an excellent piece describing the perils and pain of cyber-harassment and cyber-rape.

Victims experience exactly the same feelings as rape victims do, including post-traumatic stress disorder, severe social anxiety, depression, and paranoia.

The piece describes five things you can do to fight back against a cyber rapist:

“5 WAYS TO SHUT IT DOWN

When Charlotte Laws’ daughter was a target of revenge porn in 2012, the social ethics PhD and former California councilwoman began a crusade to end what she calls cyber rape. She tells what to do if a photo leak happens to you.

COPYRIGHT YOUR PICS: If you took the photos, you can send take-down notices to any site using them, including hosts and search engines. To strengthen your case, register the snaps at Copyright.gov.

TAKE IT TO THE TOP Even if you don’t own the photos, contact the web host for the site. Large or U.S.-based companies don’t want to get sued, says Laws. She worked with the company hosting the site with her daughter’s photos to block the pics within days.

GET BACK OUT THERE: “The first thing girls want to do is shut down all their accounts,” says Laws. She says to do the opposite: Join online groups, make profiles, blog. The more material you post, the further down your photos get buried.

STAY ALERT: Set a Google Alert for your name: If a pic pops up, you’ll be ready with a take-down notice.

GET PAYBACK: Visit ArmyOfShe.com for a list of attorneys and advocates. Lawyers building a class-action suit may represent you for free.”

For all the clueless people who still think cyberharassment is some kind of imagined “victimology,” here’s the kind of thing going on:

Washington Post:

“The first man who knocked on the Fauquier County woman’s door told her they had been e-mailing and he was there for sex. Shocked and perplexed because they hadn’t corresponded, the woman sent him away.

But the men kept coming. They arrived on her doorstep as many as six times a day, sometimes traveling from other states. One had a crowbar. Others refused to leave. Another rammed his car through a security gate that she installed.

In all, there were about 100. Each said he had communicated with her. All expected sex.

The unrelenting onslaught was organized by an angry ex-boyfriend, who had assumed the woman’s identity online and crowdsourced his harassment to dozens of unwitting accomplices he lured to her home, prosecutors say in court papers.”

I came across this useful quotation from Etienne Gilson about the limits of reasoning, in a piece at First Things criticizing  Princeton University’s star utilitarian, Peter Singer, who, it seems, has been wondering out aloud what the exact harm in necrophilia and bestiality is:

“A third way of recognizing the false sciences which idealism generates is by the fact that they feel it necessary to “ground” their objects. That is because they are not sure their objects exist. For the realist, whose thought is concerned with being, the Good, the True and the Beautiful are in the fullest sense real, since they are simply being itself as desired, known and admired. But as soon as thought substitutes itself for knowledge, these transcendentals begin to float in the air without knowing where to perch themselves. This is why idealism spends its time “grounding” morality, knowledge and art, as though the way men should act were not written in the nature of man, the manner of knowing in the very structure of our intellect, and the arts in the practical activity of the artist himself. The realist never has to ground anything, but he has to discover the foundations of his operations, and it is always in the nature of things that he finds them: operatio sequitur esse.”

Comment:

Why should reason always trump something like, say, experience or tradition, which embodies the collective reasoning AND practical experience of generations of communities spanning the globe?

I don’t fault Singer for wanting rational grounds for moral assertions. That is fair.

I fault him for thinking that because one cannot always find the rational grounds for a moral position, one must therefore abandon the position, even though it may be advocated and defended by tradition, experience, and instinct.

It should be the burden of those wanting to upend traditional morality to make persuasive arguments for their position, rather than the reverse.

I got a long critical comment responding to my blog post on First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh’s support for a narrowly defined anti-cyberstalking law. The comment deserves thought, so here goes, with my response in italics:
M. Terry said…

(Quote)

“Consider someone who takes a picture of her body, for medical reasons, and, by accident leaves a copy on her computer. Say someone gets hold of it and tried to pretend the person sent the image to a porn site. It is easily done.”

(End Quote)

Now that’s like the non-sequitur of the year.

Lila: Not at all.  It shows the same principle at work. A private image was created.  Someone misused the image. In both cases, there was NO CONSENT.

M. Terry :A woman, along with sexual partner, or perhaps with a photographer present, engages in photographing herself

Lila: I DELETED some words you wrote. Knock off the graphic text, please.

Also, you made up that bit about a photographer to make it look as if she had the intention of making the images public. But even her boyfriend hasn’t said there was any  such photographer.

M. Terry: And complains later. She should have had the sense to obtain a contract for the images, or videos.

Lila: It was her boyfriend of 3 years, remember. And she was 23 at the time. Do people usually enter into legal contracts with their boyfriends?

By the standards of modern America, this is what a lot of younger people do. It’s Internet culture. She is not all that exceptional. Just Google sexting.

What you are arguing is that if a close friend comes to your house as a guest and then walks away with your watch, you’re to blame, because you didn’t get your friend to sign a contract not to take anything. Is that reasonable?

M. Terry: What next? Ban literature that includes the worn out N word?

Lila: Now, that really is a non-sequitur.

There’s no similarity at all between the two instances.

Literature is created with  the intention that someone will read it. It is intended to be public

Also, to be deserving of the legal protection given to art/literature,  a  piece of writing usually has to have some verifiable artistic content, even if slight.

Porn, especially unintended porn, is a different category altogether.

A private picture becomes porn only when it’s made public.  Porn (at least, the kind that is adjudicated) is a sexual act that is spectacular –  that is, created for public viewing.

So you are eliding the legal and moral difference between a PRIVATE and a PUBLIC act. And  the difference between a CONSENSUAL and a NON-CONSENSUAL act.

M. Terry; Sorry, but this idiotic concept is far removed from anything regarding Article I of the Bill of Rights.

Lila: Name-calling is an admission that you don’t have arguments.

Eugene Volokh  is well-qualified  to judge  and he has written that the Framers would have regarded much of what is called free expression on the net merely libelous, even though the Framers also didn’t create a right of privacy.

M. Terry:

Good taste is one thing. Producing porn, then complaining about it is another thing.

Lila: Her good taste or judgment or lack thereof is irrelevant, because it doesn’t rise to the level of contributory negligence.

One more time. She didn’t produce porn. She was engaged in a private sexual interaction.

Porn is for public viewing. She sent it privately to a boyfriend.

It might not be to your taste, but it’s not , by definition, pornographic.

Her private actions might offend your moral sensibility, but that does not give you a right to deprive her of the legal protection of her life and property (and being able to hold a job is included in that word).

Her private action might be repugnant to you. But so are most contemporary sexual practices repugnant, and most contemporary fashions obscene, to traditional observers.

The average modern woman in the west, at least, would be considered obscenely dressed by most traditional cultures.

So I ask you, do you consider women like that to be voluntarily participating in their degradation and therefore not deserving of legal protection should someone threaten their professional and personal lives?

Because that is what you’re arguing.

If your wife or daughter got raped when she went into a traditional culture, should I tell you that it was their own fault for dressing in short skirts and form-fitting clothes and making “porn” out of themselves?

Bikinis and swimsuits, halter tops, crop-tops, shorts, low necklines, tight clothes, make-up – all look pretty slutty to traditional cultures.

So I guess Western women should take responsibility for it if they get raped because someone else’s cultural standard is different from theirs.

Personally, if you take off most of your clothes in public on the beach, I don’t see how that’s different from stripping in a night-club. Seriously.

So does that mean women on beaches are also porn stars in the making?

Stripping in PUBLIC is surely more offensive to other people by definition than photographing yourself in PRIVATE where other people aren’t involved.

So Holly Jacobs, in my view, did something far less provocative than millions of Western women do daily, when they take their clothes off in public on beaches, and let themselves be photographed by strange men (and women).

But their actions are perfectly acceptable and not offensive to you, even though they are done in public.

Personally, I consider books like Naomi Wolf’s recent one,  describing the author’s sexual history and  body parts,  a kind of soft- core porn, yet no one would argue that the author doesn’t deserve the protection of the law if someone cyberstalks her.

So it’s a matter of cultural standards. And it’s a matter of differentiating between private acts and public ones.

M. Terry: Fuck personal responsibility, right? Everyone is a “victim.”

Lila: Personal responsibility has nothing to do with it. If I forget to lock my house one day and a neighbor decides to walk in and beat me, it’s still assault, regardless of my carelessness.

If she doesn’t want some image on the net and didn’t enter into a contract, it’s both fraud and force to put them on the net.

M. Terry:

BTW – I did a Google search for the images after I read an article about “victim.”

My thought was – she wanted everyone to search for the photos. If she’d kept quiet, few people would know.

Lila: And I guess when women are raped in the third world and they complain, it’s because they wanted it and wanted to star in their own “native” rape fantasies.

Strictly speaking, one shouldn’t look at such images any more than one should buy stolen goods.

Do you also Google child porn – the children didn’t object to their pictures or demand contracts, did they?

Do you also download copyrighted material?

Same thing.

This case isn’t hard.

Did she agree to put it out there? No.

Was she foolish?  Yes.

But no more foolish than thousands of teens and twenty-somethings these days.

Do foolish people deserve crimes committed against them?

No.

Otherwise, each time you exceeded the speed limit, ate too much sugar, lost your temper, or did any of the foolish things we all do, you would deserve to have a crime committed against you.

Case closed.

From Dr. Mom’s Herbs:

Overcoming cancer is a process of reversing the conditions that allowed the cancer to develop, and going after and killing cancerous cells. What you need to do is to strongly and dramatically interrupt and reverse the cancer-causing conditions in your body so that it becomes healthier, and stops breeding cancer.
Hit cancer hard. This is one fight you don’t want to lose.

1.Stop eating processed, refined, sugary foods. Eat simply, whole grains, beans, lots of vegetables and fruit. Cut out animal protein – Replace it with legumes.   Cut out all sugars, cookies, chips, etc. Diets loaded with sugar and refined carbohydrates speed cancer’s growth. Refined carbohydrates digest so fast they act like sugar, and cancer cells love sugar. They have about 15 times more receptor cells for capturing sugar than healthy cells. So clean up your diet!

2.Eat mostly fresh food with the enzymes intact. This includes LOTS of fresh greens. These help you to fight the cancer.

3.Drink Lots of pure water. NO chlorinated water. You will need about 1 gallon of water and ½ teaspoon of sea salt. This will help to maintain cell health and flush out the toxins in your body.

4.Exercise at least three times daily on a mini trampoline to move the lymph in your body. Also walk at least ½ hour daily. This is especially important for breast cancer. Bounce at least 3 -5 minutes each time.

5.Adjust pH levels using the baking soda and water protocol. At least 1 teaspoon half an hour before meals to as much as 2 teaspoons per quart of water, and drink 5 quarts a day. Test with ph strips.

6.Do hydrotherapy – Raising the body temperature to 102 – 104 daily and keeping it there for an hour or more, will kill cancer cells – Find someone who is qualified to help you with this.  Call Wildwood Lifestyle Clinic in GA.  They do this for less than most centers.  They also administer Vitamin C therapy which is proven to reverse cancer. Check them out

7.Get enough restful sleep. DID YOU KNOW?  Research shows that the immune system needs 9 1/2 hours of sleep in total darkness to recharge completely.

8.Clean up your bowel. This is so incredibly important that it cannot be missed.

9.  Lymphatic drainage massage. This helps eliminate the toxins you are flushing.

10.Have a good attitude. Lovingly forgive and release all of the past. Remember to choose to fill your world with joy. Remember to love and approve of yourself. God made you and He loves you.

This is simply a place to begin. If you do these things your body will become more healthy and cancer cannot live in healthy bodies.

Need help in doing this – try a clinic that specializes in helping you.
C.J. Patton Clinic in Millersburg, PA is a helpful place. Call 717-362-2067 to find out if a clinic is located close to you.
Or go to herbdoc.com and order their 30 day kit that will aid you in cleaning up your body.

Home invasions are on the rise, according to some sources.

Here’s one where a thug tried to take advantage of a senior, only to get his come-uppance (H/T to Jennifer Cruz, LRC blog):

“Last month, Frances Ward, 72, hired Richard Keese, 54, to fix her car last month, but when Keese showed back up at her house on Monday, he had ill intentions.

As Keese forced his way through the front door, Ward’s friend, who does not wish to be identified, grabbed a baseball bat for protection. But once inside the home, Keese simply snatched the bat from the friend and proceeded to beat her with it, throwing her up against a window and breaking the glass in the process.

But the 4-foot 10-inch tall Ward wasn’t about to stand by and watch her friend get beaten to death, so she grabbed her revolver and fired at Keese.

“If he hadn’t of been standing up, I would have hit him right here with the gun because I was aiming for his forehead to kill him, because he was beating the daylights out of her with that ball bat and I wasn’t going to let that happen,” the feisty grandmother told reporters.

When police arrived a few minutes later, they found Keese walking away from Ward’s home.

Both Keese and Ward’s friend were taken to a local hospital. The victim was treated for non-life threatening wounds and released the same day. Keese was treated and remained in police custody. It does not appear that Ward was injured during the incident.”

Comment:

Here’s a perfect example of when it’s correct to shoot to kill. Your target is actively trying to injure someone else.  The defense is proportional.

Especially when the victim is older or incapacitated, there is a good argument that he or she should try to kill, since the attacker is less likely to be able to escape.

But sometimes, killing might not be the best course of action.

I know someone who shot and killed a stranger who was in his garage. My friend was, naturally, afraid that the intruder was a criminal, but, it turned out the dead man was just homeless and looking for shelter.

That would have made me sick, but I don’t know if I’d have done anything different.

Home break-ins are simply a more dangerous type of confrontation than ones on the street.

At home, there is a presumption of safety and privacy. And there is a presumption that an uncalled-for entry is badly intended.

So, yes, shoot.  But always remember, the life that you take might be your own…

An intruder can always grab a gun and use it on you, as the man in the incident grabbed the lady’s bat and hit her.

Meanwhile, where are the feminists when you need them?

Elderly women being victimized, most often, by men. (See here and here and here).

Surely it’s a feminist issue.

Surely the thugs are relying on their physical strength and relying on their victim’s frailty.

And these are biological and gender-related, are they not?

How many forty-something women break into the homes of male seniors?

Not as many, I’m sure, although the phenomenon of girls-gone-wild extends to youthful female violence, where girl-gangs are now perpetrating mayhem on the populace.

Then, of course, there is the issue of race. 

How many of these home invasions are black-on-white?  Are these cases the overflow of  ghetto violence…or are they something else?

Naturally, newspapers don’t see fit to delve into such unseemly questions.

No, it’s enough that they report such incidents as “news”….then on to the next episode….

Next question, please….

Individualists believe in liberty, not license.  And they believe in individual reason, not slogans, whether “libertarian” or otherwise. You can call yourself a “libertarian” all day long, but if you subscribe to dogma, you are no individualist. You belong with the herd. And that has always been my position. That’s the only libertarian card I ever carried. And I still carry it:

“Saving Private Enterprise” (LRC 2009):

“Liberty holding up the torch of reason to guide the state became liberty torching reason in abject service to the state.

This new liberty was not liberty at all but license. The regulations it effectively dismantled were mainly those that applied to businesses feeding off government contracts that were large enough to rule out the rule-makers. The rest of America was hog-tied with rules. Here, too, employing the slogans of the mob misleads: It turns out you can have too much regulation and too little — simultaneously.

So, while ordinary individuals and businesses are persecuted at every turn by ham-handed bureaucrats, a handful of corporations, especially those connected to the military, banking, finance, and energy, have become a rentier class, deriving their profits not from genuine free enterprise, from value added, innovation, foresight, and risk-taking, but from their special relationship to the government. Entrepreneurs have been displaced by over-paid technocrats, experts, and managers every bit as bureaucratic and wasteful as the state enterprises they claim to be stream-lining.”

From the Other MacCain, The Secret Sell-Out of Pro-Sex Feminism:

“The leaders of the feminist anti-pornography movement tended to be radicals like Dworkin and Catharine McKinnon, who saw porn as a violation of women’s rights. Among those who continued that radicalism was Nikki Craft, whose work exposing child pornography advocate Lawrence Stanley was helpful to me in my 2002 coverage of Stanley’s arrest (see “Porn lawyer charged in Brazil girls case“).

If you talk to radicals like Craft — who carried out civil-disobedience protests against Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler — they will tell you bluntly that so-called “pro-sex feminists” sold out. Women Against Pornography co-founder Dorchen Leidholdt demonstrated that the Playboy Foundation helped fund the ACLU as well as various front groups, such as the National Coalition Against Censorship, that fought to keep pornography legal. This is a chapter of history that contemporary feminists are eager to suppress, the way Stalin had Trotsky airbrushed out of photos of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The Left must constantly re-write its own history to create the appearance of consistency in its advocacy of progress, but the Left’s definition of progress is itself constantly changing, and feminism’s embrace of pornography — celebrating objectification as “empowerment” — is but one example of this re-definition project.

UPDATE: Linked by Ann Althouse, who remembers anti-porn feminism, and cites a 1990 book by Dorchen Leidholdt and Janice Raymond, Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism, which I’m sure is omitted from “Women’s Studies” curricula nowadays.”

Comment:

I should make it clear that I’m on neither side of this Western feminist divide – anti-porn (Dworkin-McKinnon-Dines etc.) or pro-porn (Young, Wolf, and most third-wave feminists today).

I’m not a fem-inist per se, but a human-ist.

Update:

A reader asks how squirrels can pop their heads OUT of a window and don’t I mean INTO?

Well, they mostly pop INTO windows, but I was thinking of a recent experience chasing critters from my attic: When I stuck a 20-ft pole into a ventilation hole in the gable of the attic, guess whose furry head popped out indignantly from the hole next to it?

ORIGINAL PIECE

From LRC blog:

“Only when the ability to anticipate touch and move with intention – for example opening the mouth to suck – has developed is a baby ready to leave the safety of the womb, they added.

Psychologist Dr Nadja Reissland explained: ‘Increased touching of the lower part of the face and mouth in foetuses could be an indicator of brain development necessary for healthy development, including preparedness for social interaction, self-soothing and feeding.’

The discovery comes after a previous study found babies make faces in the womb, potentially as practice before coming in to the world.

Dr Reissland and a team of researchers led by Durham University used ’4D’ ultrasound scans – 3D scans that can be seen in real time – to image eight girls and seven boys once a month between the 24th and 36th week of pregnancy.”

Comment:

Babies making faces in the womb – that surely registers on the cuteness meter up there with kittens grooming their whiskers and squirrels popping their heads out of a window.?

This type of finding inevitably argues for the “personhood” of the baby, if not his/her citizenship.

It also argues that the pro-choice movement’s relegation of the question of even late-term abortions to the mother is due for a serious re-think.

It would be consistent for those feminists to go the whole hog and consider infants up to one year in the same category as the foetus. That would be logically sound, since it would take infanticide out of the realm of the state and leave it up to the mother. However, while this is a position that is intellectually coherent, it is publicly indefensible.

Thus, even from the point of view of the optics of the matter, it makes more sense to extend our thinking about infanticide backward into the womb. That is to say, late-term abortions should be banned.

The idea is not keep women bare-foot and pregnant, as many hard-line feminists suggest. The babies, after all, would be be offered for adoption and the mother would be free to move on, if she chose to.

The idea is to reduce human suffering.