FriendOfDeSoto

There are certain crimes you will never be able to fully eradicate. You can only try to get them down to the bare flawed human minimum. For pretty much as long as there are laws and courts, killing in cold blood has been illegal. But to this day humans kill humans in cold blood. All we can do is make good laws, prosecute perpetrators, and increase awareness. If the latter is what you mean by grassroot change, then sure. If we stay within the hypothetical, I don't think a mass accident (like an accidental gas leak) or mass murder (a gas leak made to look like an accident) of the whole bunch on Epstein island would bring about a cultural change. My personal fear is that this whole exposé of this particular case only served to make the rich fuckers even more careful when they do it, not do it less.

At the root of the Epstein case is money. Billionaires should not exist. The quality of legal representation should not depend on one's bank account. If you want a grassroot cause, tackle that one.

I'm afraid that pedophilia is prevalent everywhere. We only hear about the rich people more because journalists take an interest and rich people think - not unjustifiably - that money is a good protective shield and therefore take more risks.

In this hypothetical scenario, if all these people were pedophiles or turned a blind eye to it, were assembled at the same time, and all punched their ticket to a delightfully shitty afterlife, I don't think the problem would be gone. There will be willing successors standing by to fill all of these positions. And it would be a stroke of luck if the waiting successors were suddenly more moral beings.

Not to worry! And thank you for this civilized exchange that managed to stay clear of Godwin's Law:)

Does a nation cease to exist after it is conquered? All the efforts to that effect by the English notwithstanding, it's still there.

[Angry Welsh noise, probably involving a lot of consonants and a few double L's]

Is this déjà-downvote I feel?

Nach dem Verständnis von Fritze gilt die ja nur für europäische Menschen und Afghanistan liegt ja bekanntlich nicht in Europa ...

[seufz]

IT'LL GO PLACES WITHOUT YOU THEN. THANKS FOR PIPING UP.

We should not start accepting manipulated images as a replacement for real images

My point was that it is already too late for that. I understand how your feel. I also think that you'll be part of a minority.

There is no such thing as a real image.

[Redacted], [redacted], or maybe [redacted]. We would all benefit if we just didn't hear from him ever again and then his name or title really don't matter.

It was Samsung and they were just ahead of the time. Consider that in the field of photography we've gone from a photograph being a big and often expensive black and white deal to snapping pictures willy nilly on a device everybody carries around in their pockets. We had already accepted retouching of photos even before Photoshop. Photoshop or similar applications are now also available to more people on the same devices they carry around to snap ask these pictures. Photographs today are an artifice of human intervention and/or computer processing. No image is just what happened. The RAW data has probably been heavily edited by the photographer to get the final effect they wanted. Even before so-called AI they have gone in and changed shit around. And they've become so masterful at it that most of us cannot tell the difference. They have probably, on occasion, replaced a whole sky or the moon on shots before they ended up in a brochure. This is nothing new. So if these tricks get automated now, that shows me more how widespread they already were. And I think we are not talking about this as much because we as a society like being cheated like that because it looks good.

I used to be more judgmental about this stuff too. Having little terrorists of my own has mellowed me. I do prefer a kid watching YouTube videos on a tablet over the kid throwing a temper tantrum at the cafe. All parents need a break. And I feel like if my parents had had the opportunity to let me watch sesame street on a handheld device in the 80s at a restaurant, they would have in a heartbeat. There were for sure other grownups heavily judging my folks for allowing me to play Tetris on the Gameboy in the 90s while we waited for our food! And I still managed to get a bachelor's degree.

At the same time, they thought watching too much TV wouldn't be good for you and I don't think that has turned out the way they feared. All gamers would automatically become sociopathic killers and they didn't. I do think "social" media has proven to be detrimental. But the internet is vaster than that BS. Most pacifying tablet use will not turn kids' brains into a rotting mess.

And as they get older you need to have numerous talks. The sex one, the online predator one, now the weird AI/chatbot one, the one that contextualizes pornography and other disturbing shit on the internet one. And at a certain point, maybe 16 or thereabouts, you have to let go and hope for the best. They will find all this stuff anyway. You probably did as well. I know I did. The only thing that has changed is ease of availability for most of this stuff. So that's what we need to prepare them for and then cross our fingers.