Yeah. This board format really encourages carrying to the top of the index every half-day or so. :p Should probably come up with an "expandable thread" bit - but oh well. Simple flags; an array of boolean var corresponding to each top-level post in the tree, but...

...back to the topic.

Albeit bluntly (but too sharp to miss), you've...

I hear it's a curse of mine. ;) Sorry for any inconvenience.

I am now entirely undecided on this matter--that is, whether abstinency makes an important political statement...

Routinely, web polls et alli have shown that 50% of the populace will identify as bi/ped when given a comforting illusion of anonymity.

About 1/5th of the populace is heavily slanted towards paederotic orientation; about 90% of the populace could logically be described as bi/paederotic.

Every single western government - except, to the best of my knowledge, the UK - and several independent studies have shown that only 10-15% of those who engage in sexual activity with those under the various local AoC are paederotic.

So, I guess the question is - has it worked yet?

...and whether action is currently an impossibility.

Well, the easiest way to answer this is the literality. Drawing breath is an action. Its direct effect is to oxegenate bloodflow to the brain.

If you're not dead, you have taken at least one action. ;)

...if one seeks additional effect, find the action which would precipitate this. ;)

You've also forced me to question my notion of "acting", and my notion of how "points" in politics are really made.

Hallelujah!

Tragically, world democracy has been subjugated into a model of action from a paradigm of dependancy. We petition those we percieve as being "in power," almost exactly as a toddler whines for ice cream. If we're feeling really into this false 'resistance' bit? We stand on the doorstep and beg - "mommie, can I please smoke pot/vote/etc?"

And yet in contrast, the Gulf hurricanes have shown us that this alleged governance we foolishly petition is neither powerful, nor competent, nor even particularly capable of action.

Using the metaphor of the Gulf hurricanes, one has options. One is to continue the model of dependancy upon the unethical and incompetent. One can wait for the local government to show up at your doorstep and just give you drinkable water, for instance.

...alternately, you can rinse the toxic white paint from the inside of a lightbulb, tape a hollow rod - such as a sawed-off automotive antanna - to the aperture, clean out another lightbulb as a recieving vessel and plant it in the coolest mud you can find...

...and you can distill your own damned water.

If you wait for government to baby you, well - in this example, you'd be dead in about 3 days. The parties distributing bottled water were NGO - red cross, Xian churches, etc.

Writing on paper and sticking it in your mailbox would've given you... a plea from after the grave. I humbly believe postal service is still out... and that's presuming the letter wasn't ruined by the floodwaters.

Writing letters and waiting for a government to take care of you may be the paradigm we were told to believe; in the example given, you would be dead already. The second option - taking direct action to a desired effect - would have gotten the job done.

Care to add political action to direct action? Network with your neighbors, trading distilled water for distillation equipment. ;)

Now, dragging this back to the topic...

...let's say I define a goal; perhaps, say, ground-level media integration. I can either :

(a) Petition my government, perhaps going so far as to do a one-person "stand in front of a government building and shout alot" event.

(b) Petition the local corporations, or...

(c) Get off my ass.

...well, (a) would have either one of two effects. Either (1) the government would just say "this is not a nation of government-controlled media... and by the way, we don't care about you, either," or (2) all your shouting would get you on the 6 o' clock news on a day in which news was hard to come by.

...so, let's look at (b). You're either going to get the response of "you're not paying us," or if you're lucky and people are inordinately willing to walk you through this, you'll get the response of "pay us."

This could get you somewhere...

...now, (c). Shall we frame (c) in the worst-case scenario, just for fun? Ok!

...let us presume for the purpouse of discussion that I am versed in three magic phrases : "I do not consent to contact, officer," "Am I under detention? Am I under arrest? Am I free to go? I do not consent to this contact," and finally "No weapons, no needles, and no consent."

Huzzah! ;)

Okay. So, let's just randomly decide that the ground-level media I want would happen to be, umm...

...I know! An entertainment & erotica guide for the man/boy babylove community!

Why? Well, in this instance - because the spectre of homoeroticism tends to piss people off inordinately... and I, for one, figure this example could use a little "extreme adversity" contrast, here. ;) Honestly, tween girls wouldn't meet with hardly any resistance - and where's the fun in that?

Okay... so, I exploit the hell out of free webhosting and an obscene redundancy of gateways to permanently and anonymously embed this thing in the 'net in such a way it's practically impossible to remove. There's looootttssss of people in our community which can help you with that. Seriously. Anonymous media publishing is one of our strengths.

...and, of course, I do the research. "Hey, this movie's good for quite a bit of naked-baby-boyhood! Yay!" "hmm, y'know - these two people were awfully close in this one." Etc, etc. Toss in an article about Geddess' last work, maybe various other infant photography artists...

...and best of all, a TV guide! Which episode of what is gonna have a baby boy! Yay!

...throw in a little eratta to flesh things out - which babyfoods taste the best, what are safer-sex tips for man/boy infant sex, and which digital camera is best for creating felony babyporn - oh, btw, did I mention this example is here to illustrate "adversity?"

Okay... so, what happens?

...the entire community is saturated with hand-posted ads, flyers etc for this and the 99 other resources created for the project. Excellent graphic design, tasteful artistic balance, quality crafting - this is now the main stream.

"Worst case scenario" crap? "Pedophiles vandalize city; news at 11."

Meh. The advertising's still going up.

"Pedophile vandalism a continuing problem; news at 11"

Well, I don't consent to search, ossifer - but since the pig broke the law, I found that at a bus stop. Yippie shit.

"Community meeting to deal with pedophile vandalism; news at 11"

Well, shit buddy. You may have a vigilance squad, but lobbying the mayor won't do squat.

"FBI cracks down on free speech, pedophile ring suspected. News at 11"

Yeah, well - samizdat can be operated frightfully well, even under martial law.

"pedophiles integrated in media for the last 5 years; news at 11"

...umm - they'd stop reporting the story - or doing things about it - shortly before the populace has had time to realize that they don't really give a fuck.

...15 years later...

...every high-school student has grown up in a world in which the straight-up babyboyfuckers have had absolutely integrated media, the best resources, the entertainment guides, et al - and remember, the majority of them happen to be paederotic anyways. The news media has gotten really bored of moral outrage; you can't run the same story for 365 consecutive nights without saturation burnout. The governance has come to accept that the populace is just going to publish, no matter what... and the stoners et al got really pissed at that martial law crap.

Sure, there was some idiot who was "mortally offended" at first... and in this hypothetical, we gave them the media, government, police, community - every form of political 'power'... but the outcome was still the same. Their 'power' couldn't stop a damn thing... the media, government, police and community all did - or will - get bored of jumping through hoops for one mortally offended idiot in about a year or less... and an entire generation has grown up in a paederotically-integrated (or actually, baby-boy-assfucking) world.

...this is the sort of shit I mean when I point out that power doesn't care, and need not compromise...

...and yet? The only powers used in this example were a little graphic design, a little HTML, and the ability to hit "print."

These three are, of course, not the end-all of "all possible things which can be done." In fact, anything you can imagine, do. Wanna ship CLogo-branded MRI to third-world hospitals? Okay. Get up and do it. :p et al...

...and yet, this little nothing is enough to illustrate one of the foundations of order : order cannot be stopped. Period. There exists no such power. ....which, incidentally, is the axiom from which 'power doesn't care' derives.

Let's use "shooting people" as an example of an action. The cops can't stop you from shooting people; they can only arrest you afterwards... and correpsondingly, one cannot efficiently stop the cops from arresting someone - even if you liberate them, the cops'll just arrest them later. All you can do is shoot the cop if they arrest the person... (or, for that matter, sponsor third-party lawsuits on the cop, or set up a mass petition for the cop's removal, or burn the word "fuck" into the cop's lawn with salt, or a thousand other things).

Order - even that which you give yourself - is unstoppable. It is in the negotiations of unstoppable power which is politics. Petition and demonstration, OTOH - while usable - are in and of themselves fundamentally worthless. Rephrased, petition without action is nothing.

...it tends to result, historically, in things like black people getting brutalized with a firehose, stoners getting laughed at, that sort of thing. It does not, however, result in change.

In summary?

You've also forced me to question my notion of "acting", and my notion of how "points" in politics are really made.

Good. To opt out of the politics of dependancy is to have won. ;)

...it's really all it takes.

That said, you haven't put to question my belief in abstinency as the most moral course of "action".

Meh. That's not my job, that's the job of any random jailbait that wants to jump your bones. The challenge? Explain as equals your decision without giving honor or credence to "but you're a kid." :p

...my part is merely to point out your errors in language; that the terminology you use allows for an interpretation of abstinence as a stand-alone ethical higher path... which, as a philosophy major, you should be able to see through. :p If you were a media major as well, you would know that such language was thus utterly unconscionable, whatever you were trying to express. ;)

Now I must apologize for ranting on for several pages. Good day. ;)