Fionn, I um. Okay. I can see how you might take the implication that I think pedophilia has risen, but I don't have any idea about that. I'm sure the rates of pedophilia you cite aren't a poll of people who checked the pedophile box on a survey. I'd guess they reflect reported and therefore countable assaults or abuses or rapes in that category?

The correlation I was making though was including these things among other stupid derelictions of basic social responsibility, community life. I also would call these things uncertainties rather than risks, a fine distinction, but it means something. I'm quite sure that parental attitudes are most directly what undermine childhood freedoms, and on top of that, childhood responsibilities--one wouldn't be all torn and conflicted if they felt right or good about the limits they sometimes impose. I'm pro-child labor, and if it weren't that you can't trust a capitalist society to have the requisite basic decency, the community culture, we wouldn't have to make that legal restriction either.

Parents are at fault, certainly, for imposing too many restrictions, and also, simultaneously, as we have heard above, for not imposing enough. And I wouldn't even complain that these comments undermine the morale of parents in the trenches, as they say. It's just the nature of the job.

   My point was more that focusing on judging victims opens the door to every sort of social bias, that it's not really nicer to take advantage of a messed-up kid--I'm sure it's probably easier, and people seem more likely to want to forgive you for it. I think it's more of the white-collar bias of our legal ideas, that if a person has the means and resources to openly avoid the law, and it's consequences, we start to want to forgive them. He's ducked it so long, let's forget it. I think that's why corporate scandals get drawn out so tediously, to quell outrage with sheer boredom. Success would seem to counterbalance derelictions of responsponsibilty somehow, with directors, ceo's, whatever. Michael Moore does very well with clearing holes in this fog, the shiny corporate facade of community connectedness.

    It sounds just a little pissy to me if you want to make it out I'm saying Polanski's a baaaad guy. I'm saying he's just like anyone else who made the same mistake, despite the pianist, or pirates, or that awful mcbeth, or that he ran away, or whatever. I may find movies of his I love, but it just doesn't matter.