I always thought Fiction was a great person. No arguments from me there.
I've also thought/think opiate is a good person that was mostly guilty of being a sympathetic devil's advocate on issues where there is little to no gray area. Even if his arguments were sound, sometimes they were arguments not worth making. At least, they were the kinds of arguments that were they to be made, they should be made outside a place like Neogaf.
I spent a silly amount of time playing D3 back in the day with Opiate. He seemed a bit more human there and never have off any weird vibes. He talked about his girlfriend a bit back then and even made a few jokes about the moderation policy of GAF circa 2012-2013.
I guess I'm just not convinced of the pedo accusations made against him and I don't know how one could reasonably prove that they're not. Maybe he can clarify the Flickr thing but what can be done to prove a person with the same username is someone else?
What does working at Toys R Us have to do with being a pedophile?
Some of the reaching to lunch the guy is absurd.
But if I end up being wrong about the guy well fuck I'm a fucking idiot.
I don't really have much to say about Flickr, other than that it's not me, and it's amazing how convinced (some) people are that it is me. Once again, I've never been to Flickr, and if I had put child pornography on Flickr I'm reasonably confident the police would have found me already, because they can find child porn distributors and purveyors who are using
much more covert means. If a couple of internet "sleuths" think they can catch me so easily, then surely people with much more sophisticated IP tracing tools (i.e. Police, FBI) could do much better. Perhaps I'm just
so good that I'm able to hide like this in the open and not get caught: these conspiracies are getting awfully convoluted, if so.
I will reiterate that one of my points
from the beginning of the conversation, now years old, was that people are so emotionally driven by this topic that any hint of sympathy is viewed with deep suspicion and contempt -- which is why there are literally no outlets of any kind for pedophiles to be treated in America, including the fact that a pedophile cannot even confess his urges to a therapist (
http://www.vocativ.com/315929/pedophiles-seeking-help-put-therapists-in-ethical-catch-22/index.html), usually a position bound by very strict confidentiality. Many of the comments in this thread only reinforce that initial point.
My goal, as always, is to have sympathy for everyone, or at least almost so. Even pedophiles, who as far as we can tell did not "choose" their predilections. Even sociopaths, who never made a choice to ignore other people's feelings because they were intellectually incapable of appreciating other people's feelings from birth. And again, it's possible to have sympathy for someone without necessarily saying you condone their behavior, just as I have sympathy for a homeless person who steals food but who may nevertheless need to go to prison.
Lastly, I absolutely agree that Fiction is a wonderful, intelligent person.