Tag: pornography

How useless can an American lawyer be?

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A lawsuit has been filed against Apple asking for damages because Apple didn’t protect an idiot from porn. AboveTheLaw reported that a Nashville man named Chris Sevier is suing Apple for not installing filters on the company’s Macs that would prevent him from accessing porn.

The depths to which some people in my country will sink to avoid any and all personal accountability and/or make an unearned buck unfortunately never ceases to amaze me. This suit might represent a new low.

Snippets from the suit include:

The Plaintiff is a victim of Apple’s product that was sold to him without any warning of the damage the pornography causes. “But for” the Plaintiff’s use of the Apple product, the quality of the Plaintiff’s life would have been much better and injury would have been avoided. The Plaintiff sustained these unwarranted damages in the course of using Apple’s product as designed. Apple’s product was not adequately equipped with safety features that would have otherwise blocked unwarranted intrusions of pornographic content that systematically poisoned his life…

In using safari, the Plaintiff accidentally misspelled “facebook.com” which lead him to “fuckbook.com” and a host of web sites that caused him to see pornographic images that appealed to his biological sensibilities as a male and lead to an unwanted addiction with adverse consequences.

According to AboveTheLaw, the man filing the suit is himself an attorney…He’s not only seeking damages, he is asking for Apple to install porn-proof filters on all of its Macs sold to everyone (in the U.S.). Customers who are above the age of 18 can contact Apple for a form that acknowledges the ills of pornography. After signing that form, Apple would send them a code to unlock the filters.

It’s impossible to know whether Mr. Sevier filed the suit because he bored, because he truly believes in the merits of his case, or because he is delusional enough to think he can actually get some money out of it. It’s hard to believe he think it has merit, but it is possible that he is willing to go to extreme lengths to avoid responsibility for his own actions.

Frivolous lawsuits have become acceptable in American jurisprudence exactly for the reason you would expect. Most judges are cowards. The number of judges across the American landscape who would chance a progressive decision is as tiny as the mustard seed often quoted in the courtrooms of the Confederacy. Decisions are made to satisfy local bigotries, custom and fashion. Especially if the fashion is a leftover from the 19th Century.

We have a local nutball who kept his next door neighbor in court for months because the neighbor owned a cellphone which “endangered” lives. His most recent suit was filed against a hotel which allowed a new cell tower to be placed on the roof which was now radiating death and destruction in the direction of his home. The fact that the tower wasn’t hooked up to power, not yet in use – though he claimed radiation was already present – didn’t keep a local judge from allowing the suit to proceed.

This cretin’s lawsuits kept the main branch of the local library from installing wifi access to the Web for years. Science has no credence whatsoever in a nation where law and custom are still under the thumb of superstition.

Muslim scholars say women driving will end virginity

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I have a special pocket for my driver’s license

Allowing women drivers in Saudi Arabia will tempt them into sex, promote pornography and create more homosexuals, according to some conservative Muslim scholars.

Academics at the Majlis al-Ifta’ al-A’ala, which is Saudi Arabia’s highest religious council, said the relaxation of the rules would inevitably lead to “no more virgins”.

Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world where women are banned from driving.

The academics, working in conjunction with Kamal Subhi, a former professor at the conservative King Fahd University, produced the conclusions in a report for the country’s legislative assembly, the Shura Council.

It warned that allowing women to drive would “provoke a surge in prostitution, pornography, homosexuality and divorce“. Within 10 years of the ban being lifted, it claimed, there would be “no more virgins” in the Islamic kingdom.

It pointed out that “moral decline” could already be seen in those other Muslim countries in which women are allowed to drive…

The Saudi government is currently considering a proposal to ban women – already forced to cover up most of their body in public – from even displaying their eyes, if they are judged too “tempting”.

It’s useful once in a while to be reminded how completely useless and backwards a theocracy can be. Like monarchies. Or Congressional fact-finding committees.

New government job title: Minister for Pornography

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Shane Jones is among several members of Helen Clark’s Labour government, which lost power in the November 2008 election, to be embarrassed by new revelations about their spending while in office.
Mr Jones, who was Minister for Building and Construction, blamed being “a red-blooded male” for spending taxpayers’ money on pay-per-view “blue” movies while staying in hotels.
 
“It shouldn’t have happened, it has happened, and it doesn’t make me feel particularly worthy but I’m not going to hide from it,” he said.

“My wife is threatening to kill me.

“Not surprisingly, this has injured her. She’s enraged and, you know, I’ve got a very formidable mother, she won’t be happy.”

His other spending included chartering a private plane on his ministerial credit card after a scheduled flight was cancelled.

Analysts say the revelations are likely to damage the prospects of Mr Jones, who had been regarded as a possible future leader of the Labour party but is being dubbed “the Minister for Pornography”.

Anyone in public service had better live a straight arrow life. Between Puritans, teabaggers and opportunist journalists – someone is going to report on the least step away from sainthood.

Throw in taxpayer dollars and you’re cooked!

What’s obscene? Google could have an answer for the jury…

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Judges and jurors who must decide whether sexually explicit material is obscene are asked to use a local yardstick: does the material violate community standards?

That is often a tricky question because there is no simple, concrete way to gauge a community’s tastes and values.

The Internet may be changing that. In a novel approach, the defense in an obscenity trial in Florida plans to use publicly accessible Google search data to try to persuade jurors that their neighbors have broader interests than they might have thought.

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data are vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm…

“Time and time again you’ll have jurors sitting on a jury panel who will condemn material that they routinely consume in private,” said Walters, the defense lawyer. Using the Internet data, “we can show how people really think and feel and act in their own homes, which, parenthetically, is where this material was intended to be viewed.”

Or the judge may eventually rule that the hypocrisy which defines so much social law should prevail.