oaf@mit-vax.UUCP (Oded Feingold) (09/10/86)
> Personally I have no plans to read the [Meese Commission] report. > The reason is I don't really care wether their is a link between > violence or anything else and ponography. If people commit violence > of any sort quite simply it is their fault. [Brian Mahoney] ------------------------------ I will not accuse Brian Mahoney of having the scholarliness of Ri- chard Carnes, the crude cynicism of Oded Feingold, the fanatic liberalism of Tim Sevener, the blind dogmaticism of Jan Wasilewski, or conversely the moral turpitude of Ken Arndt. He commits the occasional spelling error, and his sentences are a bit too long for my taste. But that guy has a warm, decent heart and an unwillingness to be led astray by dialectical bullshit. I'm as hard-bitten and byzantine as the next gazebo, but I admire Mr. Mahoney, and recommend him as a role model. If everyone had his honesty, politics would be boring in- deed. -- Oded A. Feingold MIT AI Lab 545 Tech Square Cambridge, Mass. 02139 {allegra|ihnp4!mit-eddie}!mit-vax!oaf OAF@OZ.AI.MIT.EDU 617-253-8598
salem@sri-unix.ARPA (Bruce B. Salem) (09/11/86)
The catch in Mr. Mahoney's remark, with which I agree, is the notion that a crime is the fault of the person who does it. For a long time people with liberal politics have argued that social forces cause crime, and that if we clean up a person's environment, he does not commit the crime. The Meese Comission has tried to use this argument, but on behalf of people who think liberal causes have gotten out of hand. If we had not been making excuses for criminals in the first place, maybe the Commission wouldn't have met. Sex Offenders would have gone to jail under existing law, as they will anyway. That is NOT to say that the anti-porn people wouldn't have been raising hell, but they wouldn't have got to such a prestigious forum. In saying this, I believe that the Meese Commission had little credibility for objectivity from before the day it released its report, nor can I see that it has had any lasting effect beside causing debates like this one. Bruce Salem (default disclaimers)