Registered Sex Offenders

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I've said before that Facebook is kind of like a social event...a cocktail party attended by basically everyone you've ever known, and occasionally crashed by people you don't. LiveJournal, on the other hand, is more like being with close friends. Close friends are people to whom you can occasionally admit the TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE things that

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[gram_negative]

1) Yeah, it would definitely be a little different if someone were at least compiling signatures and sending congressional petitions, or something, but most of these groups seem to have agendas that go no further than...starting a Facebook group.

2) I actually agree with you, pretty strongly. Expressing sympathy for sex-criminals isn't an activity that will make you a lot of friends, I realize, but seriously: most offenders (excluding date-raping jackasses and unlucky 19-year olds with 17-year-old significant others) seem to be sad, lonely, tortured people...often the victims of abuse, themselves. It's a very gray issue, to me: on the one hand, the statistics for rehabilitation (at least according to the limited reading I've done) don't seem to be very good. The kind of intensive medication and therapy that seem to be required to break someone of that kind of deviant behavior requires a huge voluntary commitment on the part of the patient.

On the other hand, justice demands that, at some point, you have to be considered to have paid your due. It almost seems as if the current system is begging for vigilante justice. "We're going to let everyone in prison know what you did, and then publish your name, when you get out, and maybe we'll get lucky and someone will curb-stomp you the way I'd like to, scumbag." This is not an America I'd want to inhabit, not least because sometimes a jury of your peers is WRONG.

3) ...That cheered me up, quite a bit. Also: fuck giving up on your dreams.