If his behavior is not criminal, why does it not at least earn him the punishment of being called a “gentleman” on boingboing?
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What’s so intrinsically wrong on insufficient clothing to deserve “earning a punishment”?
Nothing. But “being called a gentleman” is not exactly a harsh punishment either.
Is that the same Judge Pickles who was a rape apologist?
I find myself agreeing with him (Not about the rape apologism!) whilst also being concerned about why he believed that being a jerk isn’t necessarily a crime.
From the picture I infer that this is a pale skinned person. Well, that and the assumption that if it were a dark skinned person the cops would have shot him and only paused to work out why later.
As far as I can tell, he’s definitely not a smooth criminal.
Being part of a neighborhood social group – unless you live in one of the reprehensible covenanted communities – involves checking out your neighbors houses and yard to see if trees have fallen, 6 months of mail has piled up, chimney is on fire, clumsy trespassing neighbor kid is impaled on the wrought-iron fence, etc.
And you can’t unsee something you’ve passed over in the course of a responsible walk (scanning the surroundings to see you are neither endangered, nor endangering), either on the sidewalk or a beach.
It’s like not thinking of a white elephant wearing pearls and trying to dance the rhumba to Hey Ladies!. If you say you’re not thinking of it, you’re lying (or a stateless meat-bag of logic).
No, they’re looking at him because he’s in the doorway of his house. People look at people – we’re hardwired that way. We also look at movement. Part of the reason that TVs over somebody’s shoulder in the background are such a distraction. And he’s standing in the doorway, naked, because he knows people will look, not because he’s a special type of nudist that can only be naked in doorways.
Yeah, we’ve got some self-control. But we’re meat. We can’t rewrite our programming and become stateless bags of digital logic. At best, we’d be meat-logic. Made of meat. Flapping our meat together. Meatily. Wetly. Messily. A-logically.
Seriously. Stop trying to blame other people.
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ISTC a college student, somewhere on the left coast (of course) who went about his day starkers- even to classes. I think it was ruled that it would only be indecent were he to be sporting wood.
Now see what you made me do - I’m probably on some CSIS perverts watchlist now.
Canadian Criminal Code, section 174:
174. (1) Every one who, without lawful excuse,
(a) is nude in a public place, or
(b) is nude and exposed to public view while on private property, whether or not the property is his own,
is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.
http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section-174.html
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How is hanging a toilet seat on a stupid-ugly fence* (complete with simulated shit smear) on your own property being a jerk? You’re annoying your neighbors, and you know you’re annoying them, and wish to persist in annoying them to… what? Make a point about nudity? I’m assuming that’s it in this case. You can be nude pretty much anywhere, including a back door. I’m assuming the guy is doing it to piss people off. Generally deliberately pissing your neighbors off falls under the category of “asshole-behavior.”
*From Indiana case-law. The fence was legal under IN law, but you could practically hear the judge mutter “asshole” as he wrote the opinion.
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NC is already an open-carry state. That, plus public nudity (or semi-public, in this specific example), brings us one step closer to Utopia, i.e.:
Copulating with and ejaculating into one’s firearm in public
If this offends you, don’t come to San Francisco, where we had to pass an ordinance stating that if you’re sitting down naked in a public place, you have to put down a towel on the seat.
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Or this:
Or he gets his jollies being looked at. Which is more creepy.
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No. He made some odd decisions at the end of his career (he sentenced someone to probation for a sexual assault on a 6 year old but it isn’t clear what the assault was, and he was over-severe with a minor criminal in 1989 - behaviour encouraged by the government after the 2011 riots, so political involvement can’t be ruled out.) but he was a socially liberal judge who argued for the legalisation of cannabis, and yet wanted deterrent sentences for serious crimes against the person.
Amanda F Palmer: “my entire body is currently trying to escape this kimono!”
All of these public morality laws tend to invite the question what constitutes a lawful excuse, and what constitutes public view, but the Canadian one reminds me of the woman who complained that her neighbour used to shower with the blind up and the light on. “The police said he wasn’t visible from a public place even when I showed them the place I could see him with my binoculars”.
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Having researched it a bit, I think that all of those reasons are essentially “religious”. If people are conditioned with religious injunctions against nudity for thousands of years, and then those injunctions are removed, then the conditioning has merely found other mechanisms for perpetuating itself. It seems to be religious baggage even if it’s not still a directly religious observation.
It’s the same with these examples. No, you don’t need to look. The hypocrisy is that people who are fixated on these things want to look, and then blame the other person or person for their own shame. Otherwise it would really take no effort to not notice these things any more than anything else. If people treat it as “wrong”, then they will recognize it as a violation, even if it is not actually doing anything to them or anyone else. When the ethics of law are indirectly based upon religious ideas, then the separation between church and state (as in the US) has failed - which it regularly has done. Just because I think that modesty is a religious idea doesn’t mean that I am opposed to it, rather, people should apply it within their own chosen group rather than makes it everybody’s problem.
Sure, like those based upon actual hygiene issues. I support nudity, but I think it’s demonstrable that people benefit from wearing shoes in stores, and sitting on pants or at least a towel to keep their sweaty ass off of a bench or bus seat. Likewise, people should use clean dishes and utensils, and each use their own toothbrush. The human body really can be “dirty” at times - but not for the faux-moralistic, hand-wringing “hide your shame” reasoning which many impose upon each other.
Maybe that’s a more accurate description - not that people want to look, but they want to unsee. But I’ve got to say it still sounds crazy to me that people would choose to unsee something which didn’t involve them. My point wasn’t that people shouldn’t look or see, but that don’t need to fixate upon what they do see. Fixation says more about the looker than what they are looking at. How many old television antennas are on your neighbors roofs? What is the ratio of male to female squirrels? How many footsteps is it to the adjacent street? There are countless things people see and simply don’t dwell upon.
It’s a bit more “meta” than that. What I’m saying is that this is a case of blamers who are creating their own problem. When people blame others and insist that some issue represents a deeply troubling social problem, I have some burden of evidence to overcome precisely because I don’t believe in blaming people. I think that trying to reasonably explain to people that they have essentially created themselves the social problem they pass blame for is not the same process.
