That's an excellent idea. Cause kids might log on to something to them that sounds kool and if they know sex at their age is bad, than they don't have to see any of it before logging off. They just hit cancel and it logs out for them and they dont have to see one wrong thing that they dont want to. If they are idiots, then oh well, they can sexually amuse themselves even if it is wrong.

It's a bit big if u ask me(not like my opinion matters) and if one post is added to it, all the other threads go away to the next page. A bit annoying if u ask me.

Maz is completly right. I never knew that there was some kind of porn game on Byond. and most other kids had no clue either but now that you guys posted up a gimungous topic on it I'm sure they know now!

And kids aren't gonna bother watching little naked icons when they much rather play a DBZ game!

And lets say there is a perverted kid out there... (S)he wont be looking for anything naked on Byond.

Who you talking about?

I think you should stop and cut your losses. Just a suggestion.

If it is as you say, then it is the adult that is in the wrong. Who is worse, the one who engages in ignorance, or the one who knows the consequences yet engages anyway? If the adult knows the consequences, that only furthers the idea that the adult is to be held more accountable. If someone murders, then pays the consequences, you do not say that the murderer knows the consequences and therefor should be allowed to murder while everyone else is not. Rather, it is the one that knows the consequences, and ignores them, that should be targetted with restraint.

Deadron wrote:

Definitely -- as soon as you explain how 3 year olds should be allowed to have guns and 2 year olds should be allowed to talk all the pills they want, since maturity and brain development are not relevant factors in deciding what people are allowed to do.

Hey, at least I am putting forth a factual debate. Those sort of comments of yours merely distort what I have said and attempt to refute me while they are only a perversion of my argument, while I said that you should cut your losses because I have actually taken your arguments and used them against you in a factual manner, showing that they actually support my argument.

Loduwijk wrote:

Hey, at least I am putting forth a factual debate.

My argument that you aren't responding to is exactly on target: If maturity and brain development are not factors, then anyone of any age, including 1, 2 or 3 should be allowed to do anything an adult can do.

If not, please explain why not.

Also, please explain how sex is as beneficial to a 2 year old as an adult.

Hint: The reasons are the same reasons for older kids.

Deadron wrote:

Loduwijk wrote:

Hey, at least I am putting forth a factual debate.

My argument that you aren't responding to is exactly on target: If maturity and brain development are not factors, then anyone of any age, including 1, 2 or 3 should be allowed to do anything an adult can do.

If not, please explain why not.

Your argument? I was the one that innitiated this debate with my remark to the person who started this thread, so I think that you should be trying to prove me wrong with the "holes" you seem to have found in my argument. Instead you bring up something about maturity and brain development. But to answer it anyway: like I said in my last post, if you are mare mature, and can therefor make a consious decision, then that only makes you all the more immature for choosing the wrong path anyway. As for people being so young that they cannot possibly make a decision for themselves at all, (And that has nothing to do with older children, as they can make a decision, even if you think that they do not have the willpower to withhold.)they would have to be extremely young. So young, in fact, that they can barely tell you what their decision is, much less know what they are doing if someone tries to have sex with them, and even much less operate a computer to access pornographic pictures. (Which was what the original post was about.) So, if someone is 1 or 2 years old, then of coarse they should not have access to such things. They would not even know what you were doing to them if you did try to have sex with them, in which case they would not be consenting. That is an entire different thing than someone that is 10 or 15.

Also, please explain how sex is as beneficial to a 2 year old as an adult.

Hint: The reasons are the same reasons for older kids.

I never said that it was beneficial to a 2 year old. (In fact, I never said that it was beneficial to anyone. At least not that I recall.)

DarkView wrote:

Ok, I think you need to cut out adults from this conversation completely, since weather an adult is mature enough is irrelivent.

My point was not that it is relivent. Rather, my point was that maturity is irrelivent to this entire debate. Brain capacity and ability to make a concious decision, on the other hand, are relivent, but as I said in another post: to be so young that you cannot make a consious decision, you would have to be so young that you do not know what sex is (In which case it would be rape if someone had sex with you. Also, you would not even be able to operate a computer to access the pictures that started this thread in the first place.)

Its like saying well a robot is mature enough, so a pig cant be.

It is nothing of the sort. What you just said makes no sence, whereas, what I said made perfect sence. I was not talking about two totally different things, but rather, two humans. The two groups in question have only their age to define them, since they are the same things (both human)

Lets say two 5 year olds get together, look at a porno magazine, then decide too try what they see. Do you think they will regret it when they are old enough to understand what they did?

Absolutely not. I know of people that have done exactly that, yet I know of no instance where it was regretted. Rather, it was held as an enlightening experience that gave knowlege in a field that would have humiliated them later in life if they stayed ignorant in the subject.

Its not about weather an adult is mature enough, its about a child NOT being mature enough to fully understand what they are doing.

I fully understood the entire subject before I was 10 (the age I used as an example). I am not saying that everyone understands it fully at that age, but that does not mean that you bar them all from it, just because a few children have parents that are unwilling to be a parent, witholding information from them, forcing them to find out for themselves. If you do not educate your child properly, then you only have yourself to blame for the consequences. (I was not educated properly, but, thankfully, I learned young how to do my own research. After educating myself, I was fully able to make my own concious decision.)

I drank poison when I was 5 because I wasnt mature enough to fully understand what I was doing.

That was either stupidity on your part, or a failure of your parent/guardian to inform you what it was. At the age of 5, most children understand well enough that they are to stay away from poisen. The ones that don't/can't understand should have the poisen kept out of reach. The same goes for sex, if your child is unable to comprehend the subject then keep him/her away from it. Just because little across the street doesn't understand that poisen is bad, forcing his mother to keep it out of reach, that does not mean that I don't, and because of that I do not need to keep the poisen out of reach.

More to the point of this post, what a child does on BYOND is harder for a perent to moniter then just normal browsing. Also as someone of age I find it offencive to see pornographic material on the hub, simply because its not the place for it.

I also think that pornographic material should not be on the hub. My first post (and all subsequent ones) were about sex, not whether it should or should not be here at byond.

Loduwijk wrote:

What I was getting at with that statement was that I was not being sarcastic with perversions of Deadron's posts.

No, but you should be, because it would be a lot more productive than your current tactic of saying "I'm right and you're wrong" over and over again. Deadron took your argument--that 10 year olds are no less mature or mentally capable than 20 year olds--to its logical extreme. It's a debate tactic that attempts to examine flaws in an argument by stretching it, enlarging it, magnifying it. In this case, your argument breaks down because you have presented no evidence (other than your say-so) that development somehow occurs only at very young ages and at no other point. One of your earliest arguments was that there weren't "magic ages" when maturity suddenly kicks in--so how is it that 18 isn't a magic age when people suddenly become mature, but 3 (or whatever) apparently is a magic age when infants suddenly become self-aware? Development occurs across the entire human lifespan, generally in small steps, although the rate varies from person to person and doesn't stay the same over their respective lifetimes. The fact that the individual steps are small does not mean that they do not exist; even though there's not much difference between the average person at age 17 and the same person at age 18, there's still a very large degree of difference between them at 10 and them at 20.

Even so, I have no more conjecture and hearsay than everyone else responding in this thread. (In fact, I have noticed that most of the people that seem to disagree with me supply no factual debate whatsoever, not even an argument. They simply state their oppinion as if that is enough.

I agree wholeheartedly. This whole huge sub-thread is just a group of people telling each other their opinions and presenting them in the manner of irrefutable facts. But you're the only person who has actually gone so far as to explicitly claim this.

Actually, I'm too lazy to go through and read everyone else's posts over again, so I could be wrong on that point.

(The one that I cannot get off my mind is "The world should be safe for our children, but not our children's children, because our children shouldn't be having sex.")

It's a joke, son.

But besides that, even my "conjecture and hearsay" is easily observable if you simply take the time to do an unbiased questioning into people's lives.

Oddly enough, this is exactly what many massive research programs have done (except for the fact that they're capable of doing such on a much larger and more statistically significant scale), yet you simply dismiss such findings outright.

I do not take any "experts" findings to be any better than my own.

Translation: "I'm better than everybody else, therefore their opinions are irrelevant."

(If you notice, many of the "experts" facts that people seem to get ahold of for their argument come from someone who has performed a biased research, because most people get these facts from radio/tv media that brings in experts who have the same biased views as they do.)

Too bad only your observations can be trusted to be unbiased, o great and mighty one. It would speed up progress so much if people other than you were capable of doing valid research.

-The more people have sex, the more STDs get spread, and the more unwanted pregnancies occur.

-Effective use of contraceptives can mitigate, but not eliminate, the risks involved in sex.

Those 2 facts have nothing to do with this argument.

Translation: "LA LA LA, I can't hear you!" These two points illustrate one simple fact: sex is always risky. That's not relevant to a discussion of whether sex is healthy for a particular demographic?

I do realize that your argument is primarily that adults are given free reign for self-destructive behavior, but even so it's a good idea to outline a foundation for one's argument. You see, unlike The Amazing Loduwijk my words are not automatically true, so I am building an argument step by step.

-Adolescents are less likely to make effective and consistent use of contraceptives, and rates of contraceptive use have been shown to rise with age. As people gain sexual experience they begin to use contraceptives more and more, but those that wait until a later age to begin having sex are more likely to use contraceptives from the start.

I have been there, and seen that, first hand. I know for a fact that many adolescents try, and are unable, to aquire contraceptives. For instance, where I was raised, the convenience store that sold such things would not sell them to anyone under age. One reason that adolescents use them less consistently is that they are not easily obtained by them. Even so, there is not much of a difference, as many adolescents that I know are actually more responsible and will not have sex untill they can finally get ahold of the contraceptives, whereas many adults that I know wouldn't give unprotected sex a second thought if there was some minor inconvenience.

Yes, a contributing factor here is lack of availability; however, if adolescents possess the superior judgement you claim they have, this should not be an issue. If adolescents are smart enough to know that having unprotected sex is a bad thing, why do they do it anyways? According to your argument, they couldn't possibly be having sex out of a lack of willpower, because adolescents are possessed of an indomitable force of will which they somehow lose when they grow up--so what's the deal?

Did it ever occur to you that you're drawing your statistical sample here from a small and likely fairly homogenous pool? Here's an interesting, unbiased observation: all of the kids I went to high school with were Caucasian. Obviously, this must mean that the U.S. has a vastly smaller black population than those so-called "experts" at the Census Bureau claim, right? The fact that you know 1 kid, or 10 kids, or 100 kids who are bright enough to stick to "safe" sex does not have any bearing on the millions that are not--and neither does the fact that you might know 1 kid, or 10 kids, or 100 kids who seem or claim to be bright enough.

-Teen pregnancies are much more likely to have health complications for both the mother and the child than pregnancies in mature women.

The whole debate here is "pleasure sex", not child-bearing sex. Make the contraceptives more available, thus fixing the last argument you made, and that will begin to solve this one as well.

I would bring up the first two points I made (specifically, the second one), but apparently they are irrelevant. Naturally, they are irrelevant on the sole basis that you said so, but that's to be expected by this point.

Not only that, but why don't you tell women that are leaving the age of childbearing that they can no longer have sex anymore because they are too old?

They're considerably less likely to need being told. Some of them could use a refresher course, though; aging women sometimes stop using contraceptives out of the belief that they can no longer bear children anyways, only to find themselves pregnant in their fifties.

Moreover--and this, of course, is the point that has been made it every single counter-reply in this thread, which you adamantly refuse to even entertain as a possibility, despite the lack of any concrete evidence on your behalf--people do learn, mature, and change over time. People have vastly more experience at age 50 than they do at age 15, and are correspondingly more qualified to make decisions, even if you assume that their decision-making process is unchanged over that period.

Taken together, these imply that 1. even ignoring any physical and psychological implications of sex itself, sex is riskier and less healthy for adolescents than it is for more mature men and women, and 2. these increased risks are at least in part caused through the adolescents' own poor decision-making.

Taken together these do not imply any such thing.

You're right, how silly of me. They do not imply such a thing--they stand up and yell it. They erect a gigantic billboard with the facts spelled out in 20-foot-high letters, clearly readable by anyone--except those who conveniently don opaque sunglasses.

The only thing that it implies is that you make it hard on the adolescents, then you seek to punish them when "they screw up". It sounds like circular reasoning to me.

Where exactly do I imply any punishing? Are you suggesting that I'm going around with an infected hypodermic needle and injecting promiscuous teenagers with STDs like some sort of psychotic vigilante figure? They punish themselves when they screw up, and have nobody else to blame. No one is making them have sex, and much of the pressue to do so comes from their peers (you know, all the other infinitely mature adolescents they hang out with). If teens are really capable of making their own rational decisions, then why shouldn't they be held accountable for themselves? If a bad decision is made, the blame primarily falls on the person responsible for making it. If you blame society for the bad decisions of individual teenagers, that's saying that society should be responsible for making teenagers' decisions for them. If I want to go sky diving but there aren't any parachute salesmen around, and I jump out of a plane without one, does that mean my next of kin can sue the parachute manufacturers?

What you are making is purely a philosophical argument, and not a particularly airtight one. And that's fine--you are entitled to your own opinion. But no matter how strongly you believe in it, or how tirelessly you repeat it, or how adamantly you refuse to consider anyone else's input on the subject, it won't change the facts.



Parting note: one of the major fallacies of adolescent reasoning often cited in discussions of psychology is a sort of "Superman complex", the irrational belief that one is invincible, completely protected from the consequences of one's own actions. No matter how well one knows about a risk, they also "know" that that's just something that happens to other people--"A beer or two won't hurt--only raging alcoholics get into drunk driving accidents." (Obviously, this isn't a mistake exclusive to adolescents, but it does have a pretty good concentration there). I find it refreshingly ironic that in championing the superiority of adolescent reasoning, you have taken one of its most visible (or at least most publicized) flaws and applied it on your part to the group as a whole: you go on and on as if adolescents truly aren't capable of being harmed by their decisions, and on the very, very few ocassions that you admit that adolescents are even capable of making bad decisions in the first place, you blame other people--another tendency that's likely to pop up in youth psychology literature.