DMOZ Supports Child Porn?

Right or wrong. On virtually every issue there are conflicting views - there are even apologists for Saddam and holocaust denial sites. And in listing alternate view sites it often exposes the weakness of the arguments and makes the proponents look fools. When it comes to alternate views on things like climate change it is educational and gives people an opportunity to consider all sides of an argument.

But where does this desirability to reflect all sides of an issue end. There are lots of places where I would personally draw the line. And in the DMOZ model if you object to abortion for example you simply don't edit in that section. Removing it because it grossly offends a proportion of the population is wrong - another substantial proportion of the population believes abortion is acceptable. Same with suicide - if I had terminal cancer these sites may help me, whilst others would declare them to be abhorrent. In other words, even on subjects this contentious it is legitimate to list such sites.

But then we move to other topics. Sexual deviances - at one time homosexuality was considered a most heinous deviance, prohibited by law universally. Now, in most countries it is legal, socially acceptable, and gradually being firmly brought into the Establishment as an alternative "norm". Other things loosely defined as fetishes are victimless and cause a chuckle more than disgust and calls for the proponents to be jailed.

Then one more step - sexual deviances where there are victims, unwilling participants. The worst of those, because the victims are children, is pedophilia. It exists, so sites that explain and educate are legitimate for listing. Even sites that attempt to excuse it by saying it is a medical condition and pedophiles are to be pitied and treated have a place.

But you then have sites that say it is OK, it is fine and normal, join in you'll love it - Affirmative Views. And sites where pedophiles can get together online and chat to one another - networking, building rings. The only people who believe such sites are legitimate are pedophiles. Criminals who rape children. The rest of the world is trying desperately to stamp out pedophile rings and to catch and punish pedophiles. Even if you want to take the most liberal view, catch and take them out of society to treat them and protect children.

So should DMOZ list sites which promote the most heinous of all crimes, child rape, as being fine and dandy? Should DMOZ have a category to point pedophiles at fellow pedophiles so they can chat and network?

Here is one argument that might be used. Guns kill people, DMOZ lists gun shops and sites promoting gun ownership. Therefore DMOZ promotes gun murder. It doesn't, people kill people, guns can be used to defend oneself and to hunt legitimately. Police use guns, the military use guns. DMOZ lists pedophile support sites and sites promoting pedophiles. Therefore DMOZ promotes pedophilia. It does. There is no legitimate use of pedophile material, there are no circumstances where it can be useful to anyone other than child rapists. Such sites promote nothing but criminal activity of the very worst kind.

Had I listed a gun shop site and someone had seen it, visited the shop, bought a gun, and murdered their wife. Would I feel guilt? No. The gun shop traded legally, the gun was purchased legally, the killer could have found the gun shop by driving by, and the killer's wife could have been holding a knife to his throat when he shot. So why does DMOZ has any responsibility when it comes to pedophile/pedophilia promoting sites? Because the gun shop is a legitimate business, DMOZ does not list the sites for the benefit of killers but for people with a legitimate use for guns.

So someone with pedophile leanings finds a listed site that tells them that child abuse/rape is fine. And another site where he can network with other pedophiles and be encouraged to go from leanings to practising. And a child is raped and must live with that pain forever. In those circumstances, DMOZ is directly providing the materials to commit child rape, there being no other purpose for those materials, and as an enabler it has a responsibility.

So Wikipedia lists these sites too. So what? That is something for Wikipedia and I dare say there are an entirely different set of circumstances applying there. For example, Wikipedia is primarily educational text not an uncommented list of sites. And since when has a listing on another site been a go-ahead for DMOZ to list a site.

Let's get technical. DMOZ exists to serve it's customers who are not webmasters but surfers and downstream data users. Which surfers benefit from pedophilia promotion sites. Only pedophiles. Does DMOZ seriously want to provide data for child rapists? Are they considered equal with all other surfers? What about the downstream data users. What about putting on the RDF download page a warning - this data dump contains listings of websites supporting pedophiles. That would be honest, and how many of those data users would take the next dump? I thought maybe that category, being so isolated, would be a very old legacy one. But it was last maintained in November 2005. Don't know what that means other than an editor knew a couple of months ago it was there and said nothing.

There are good and responsible editors up to the very highest level of DMOZ who will be utterly disgusted with this and will do their best to put things right. I hope they succeed internally because this won't drop externally until something is done and in the meantime it damages the non-Adult branches which already contains many editors thoroughly fed up with Adult and the knock-on effect of the embarrassing problem that it is.

 

All I can say is I would love to be a fly on the wall watching some dmoz editors scramble to justify what has been exposed here to Google, AOL and the congressional committee on child pornography. Maybe my statement about Dmoz being around another 1 to 2 years is wrong.

 

Another real gem:

Here's a great little tidbit of information from "Zoophilia"

 

The answer is yes. Possibly even more. An extreme example is http://www.botany.hawaii.edu/faculty/carr/natives.htm (Hawaiian Native Plant Genera), which has 1,134 listings.

Now I will try to do something interesting and productive, but please let me know when the first post appears saying that Hawaiian plants are pornographic and should be banned.

 

Okay. Supplementary question #1: Why? Why does ANY site merit that many DMOZ listings? That makes no sense whatsoever. What a waste of time and database space. No wonder it takes some editors months to review submissions...

Supplementary question #2: Can we assume then that you see nothing wrong with porn sites like the ones mentioned here having 100 or more listings?

Take it back to the Resourceless Zone, orlady...

 

So it is an exclusive club at DMOZ

Look, when they get all the porn out of DMOZ maybe Bush will get off of Google's back

 

OK, one thing I don't get is..

well just digitalpoint forums for example

that's about 51 000 threads

let's say 20% of those are dups so 40 000 threads. that means digitalpoint is eligible for 40 000 submissions because each of these threads are on seperate pages, and contain different content?

 

I saw this as an opening for a DMOZ editor earlier.

But we still don't have a justification for
1. spanking pre-teens for sexual pleasure
2. using language that promotes sex with boys
I found that stuff in 5 minutes. I'm pretty certain sex with animals and dead people is an illegal activity also, but moreso it shows that DMOZ editors support the listing of such sites, and that the ownership allows it.

Let's make one things very clear. The porn industry is very profitable, and DMOZ is clearly in partnership with it, including the outright repulsive stuff that goes along with it. By helping DMOZ, you as editors are helping DMOZ continue to partner and profit from its relationship with the porn industry (whether you like it or not).

 

Sex with animals is, in fact, illegal in most countries of the world. By the way, they also have a GREAT section devoted to the recreational use of drugs (marijuana, cocaine, heroin, LSD, meth, prescription drugs, etc..). This would be illegal in most parts of the globe as well. DMOZ is just setting itself up for a major lawsuit.

 

For information, orlady is an Administrator, the highest level of DMOZ editor.

How Hawaiian plants have any relevance at all to the listing of sites for affirmative views of pedaphilia I have no idea but the views of an Administrator on those listings would be interesting. Referring only to that single question about nature image photos is blatent skirting of the issue. Are you going to do something interesting and productive about that category and those sites, or interesting and productive as in dismissing the whole thing and moving onto something else?

Some sites are considered excellent informational resources e.g. imdb.com and this Hawaiian plant one too clearly. No problem with that. Information is one thing, a couple of hundred galleries of porn images is something else entirely. Also the Hawaiian plant site is not an affiliate content provider.

Editors aren't there to review submissions and if someone wants to spend their own time, unpaid, populating plant categories, good luck to them.

No, please come back here and give an official statement on the actual issue. Orlady, you are in a position to actually take action, this one isn't going to die.

 

Brizzie, I meant "take the pointless condescending sarcastic attitude back to the Resourceless Zone".

 

brizzie;

You must be very naive by nature or by design.

Do you honestly believe these affiliate door way sites, pedophile sites,...could have survived for so many years if the support for these type of sites was not in the highest level of DMOZ such as Administrators, Metas, or/and staff?

Orlady has already given an official statement, the only problem is that you either don't get it or you refuse to get it because you don't like it. Orlady gave you the same answer that I gave many pages ago; the power in DMOZ finds this type of sites profitable and wants it to be there and nothing that a former editor like you or other present editors will say can change that. The best you can achieve is to get 1 site deleted and then the editor simply buys a new domain and add all the links for that domain.

 

For goodness sakes gworld, your ranting is the best possible way to let the Adult branch of DMOZ off the hook. I've been an editor, I know how it works inside, and I assure you that the accusations you make are complete and utter fantasy based on nothing more than drawing incorrect conclusions from what you selectively see. It is simply not conceivable or possible for there to be some kind of widespread conspiracy going on involving priests, students, teachers, retirees, housewives, students, military, postal workers, doctors, nurses, and all the other professions represented amongst editors. Without some of them noticing and producing conclusive evidence (as opposed to unsubstantiated crap produced by a small number of malicious individuals).

Yes I do. That category is a remote twig on the DMOZ tree. It is highly likely never to have been noticed before - I was there 3.5 years most of that time as an editall and I never noticed it. As for affiliates I spent much of my time identifying and removing them permanently and they seep through anyway by bait and switch. UGAS did not used to be an affiliate content provider. I'll bet one or two Adult editors knew that it had changed but the vast majority, 99.9% of editors will never have heard of UGAS, not known they had affiliates listed, and be too concerned with eliminating other affiliates trying to spam the directory. The time to be concerned is if those affiliates are not now removed - it would be another departure from normal DMOZ guidelines.

Orlady gave no such answer, nor is it conceivable that she would. I know a little of her background and the suggestion that she would be somehow embroiled in corruption is so far off the mark it is laughable - for starters she has been involved of the removal of numerous abusive editors including Adult webmasters who have abused their positions within DMOZ. Besides pedophile supporting sites hardly have any commercial value do they and that was my concern - the 104, 165, or whatever the number of cherryboys sites was, is (a) primarily an affiliate quality control issue; and (b) an issue about galleries in Adult which is all about poorly worded guidelines and their interpretation by Adult editors, something many editors are concerned about and which many have tried to link to corruption. And where evidence has been produced the editor has been ejected. I would not expect an Administrator to make any official statement on either of those points.

I am no fan of the Adult branch and have been involved in heated internal discussions about it. The image galleries, IMO, are a disgrace. And there is evidence of abuse traceable to editors who have been removed. I would pull the whole lot down given my way. But you do that by coherent logical argument not by imaginative ranting. Coherent logical argument will eventually win the day, false accusations actually provide a defence the Adult branch can use.

 

brizzie why not send some emails to the CEO of AOL since you have information that can help out

Time Warner has a lot to lose, their stock is already at lows and needs help, another scandal can't help them at this time!

 

I have no more information than anyone else that would help with the subject of why DMOZ has a category with listings for affirmative views on child rape. No apologies for using a more emotive term. AOL have staff assigned to DMOZ; if they are not aware already they will be soon.

 

It's good that you are in support of removing this part of DMOZ. But even as you continue to aid DMOZ, you are making yourself a part of the very thing you are against. Many people here have spoken out against policies on DMOZ, only to have their editor status removed. Would you risk your own status for the betterment of DMOZ? Or do you have too many financial interests that you can't afford to lose?

Why is the "spanking pre-teens" site still listed after multiple DMOZ editors have read this thread?

What is the official position of DMOZ on sites that use language that leads the user to believe child pornography is contained therin?

It's time to stop putting "spin" on the issues and do something about this!

 

David, brizzie is a retired editor. He resigned about a month ago I believe. Believe me, he is one of the good guys - no need to attack him. His goals are probably very similar to yours at this point.

 

How is admitting that there is a problem versus sweeping it under the carpet and calling it mistakes is letting the adult branch of DMOZ off the hook?

How do you know that priest, postal worker, housewife and the student are not the same person with different accounts? Who is really in charge of editor selection and how easy is it to get rid of those who are too curious?

It seems you are still so in love with DMOZ that you can not imagine any changes from outside and you believe that this organization should be only changed through internal work. May I ask after 3.5 years of working inside of DMOZ and being editall and discussing these subjects; what have you achieved, except being an ex-editor coming to DP and still be confused where you stand on the question of DMOZ?

 

gworld, as I've said before, you are attacking the wrong person here, and each time you do that you reduce not only your own credibility but the credibility of the point you and others are trying to make. That's what brizzie is saying: If you are indiscriminantly negative and terminally attached to conspiracy theories, you give ammunition to those you seek to discredit - they will simply say, "there goes that crackpot gworld again on another one of his rants".

Look at Daniel Brandt. No one anywhere takes him seriously now no matter what he says. That's what you're risking.

 

That pretty much sums up just about every post he makes Brizzie. Arguing with him on this subject is pretty much a lost cause. I've come to the conclusion that his lot in life is to argue a point on any subject just for the sake of arguing.