This is most shocking. I wrote a story a while back about how “To Catch a Predator” was losing itself to the overzealous, fever-fueled media sensationalization drive that promotes and sells the witch-hunt that counter-pedophilia initiatives have become. The article was a response to a YouTube video titled “Sex Crimes Sell: To Catch a Predator” in which Daniel Guiditta had made some well-grounded points against the show and the way the vigilante group, Perverted Justice, does business and seeks to silence detractors
These children are being exposed to issues far more destructive than penis or sex at any age.
I wrote about it, posted what I thought was a pretty funny image with it — a cover image of a facetious magazine called “The Gentleman Pedophile”, sort of a Playboy parody — and now that story has become my number one hit-producer. As a test I installed a hit-counter for people who view full pages on my own site (not all the ones who see my writing either plagiarized by the rampant army of feeders or previewed by legitimate feeders) and in a few days its nearing 200. Not a stellar amount, but the fact that I’m on the top of the Google results for strings like “pedo” has to count for something!
The number one search word to find my site is “pedophile”, “pedo”, or something similar. At first this was a little alarming to me, because it certainly seemed that there must be heaps of pedophiles out there searching the internet. But when I looked over the search data by search string (the whole search phrase) an interesting thing was uncovered, and this is perhaps even more alarming. By phrase about 80% of the search strings are things like “string up the pedophiles” or “evil pedophiles burn in hell” and things like that, about 10% of them are “to catch a predator” by itself, and the remaining 10% are either people looking for kiddy porn (its easy to tell when a string is something like “kiddy pr0n picz!!1!”) or perhaps people who are legitimately curious about the story itself (strings like “is to catch a predator justified?”).
So of all the creepy search hits I get, about 80% of them are people who are out for blood. I can understand this to a degree because this is a very emotionally charged issue, but what I don’t get is that I get 3 to 4 times the hits from this group as I do from people who are genuinely curious about the way things are going between Saudi Arabia and Iran or want to know what Cold War II might look like. The world is wrapped in an ever shifting mass of overwhelmingly important issues which impose massive change across entire societies — changes which result even in genocidal extremes — but the folks who are searching the Web seem to be focused more on the evils of a deviant segment of the population than massive existential threats to the society itself.
It is small wonder that with this sort of thinking being so prevalent the Americans and Europeans still think that the U.S. invaded Iraq because of oil, despite the absolute lack of massive Iraqi oil production over the last five years and the rising oil cost which is hurting the U.S. as much if not more than anyone else. Such shallow thinking. It reminds me of a video my brother recommended to me a while back called Idiocracy. A badly produced movie by any account but at once insightful and appropriately shallow.