The Rare Currents Event Foray...

[mallorys_camera]

The arrest of Roman Polanski after 33 years is beyond insane. What is this -- some kind of federal stimulus package for federal marshals & the CA penal system? The US is the most repressive culture in the world outside of Islam.

(If they were going to go after anybody, they should have gone after the girl's mother -- she essentially pimped her daughter out.)

Comments

[jdquintette.livejournal.com]

Check the comments thread on this article.



http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/b146269_director_roman_polanski_arrested_in.html

The villagers are gathering with torches and farm implements. And a rope.

Some of them seem to want his balls on a stick too, but the consensus seems to be that either Obama the Child Molester Commie or Ahnold the Hollyweird Liberal will pardon him.

A lot of scary people in this country.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Fuckin' amazing. I used to write for EW -- fairly sophisticated stuff too. I see the brand IQ has sunk in the decade since I last loaned them my byline.

[chaotic-nipple.livejournal.com]

When WILL our culture realize that drugging and raping crying teenagers is a matter of personal choice? Honestly, what prudes! :-P

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Oh, Polanski is a scumbucket. No argument there.

I just think the money spent extraditing him could be put to better use. Sexual assault is a horrible thing but I think it's a better use of money -- particularly in times of scarce resources -- to put that $10 million into public campaigns against violence towards women. I suppose the media attention the Polanski case is getting might qualify as one except that I suspect some significant portion of the male population is actually jacking off to that Smoking Gun transcript.

I also think since the girl's own mother practically gift wrapped her daughter with a sparkly pink bow, they really ought to have gone after her as well. In cases where the father acts as they panderer, it seems to me charges are brought although I admit I'm not up up on the case law here.

I'm also going to say -- and probably draw yr ire by saying it -- that the girl's age doesn't matter to me so much as the fact that she told him to stop. Why? Because thirty years ago young teenagers were legitimate sexual objects. That was the culture of the time. Check out the album art for Blind Faith's album some time. Yes, it was against the law. But the social boundaries there were very malleable. I'm not saying that was a good thing. Just that it existed.

It's also been the culture of other societies at other times -- in fact it still is for a large part of the world today. Judging people's behavior in the past for moral standards that are operative today just strikes me as revisionism. I don't like revisionism.