The Myspace debate revisited......

More than 100 million people have myspace pages. Grandmothers have them. When I was a preps writer I would go to myspace to see if an athlete I was about to interview had a page, in order to find out something about them. I'd guess that 90 percent of the time, the athlete had a myspace page, had pictures up, etc.

So not to completely resurrect an argument from a couple months ago, but saying that Stokke invited it herself by having a page and posting pictures ... sorry, doesn't wash. If that was the case, we would have about a million situations like the one involving Allison Stokke.

And by the way, more and more people are setting their profiles to private. It's usually an easy fix to stopping online predators, as long as the person is careful about the type of message he/she responds to.

 

You argued that the girl was at fault because she put up pictures. None of the pictures came from her MySpace account. This is a fact.

As to the father... well, he's looking for legal loopholes based on the pictures generated from the school's website.

 

A yearbook can make a kid a target for pervs. A newspaper article for the honor roll can make a kid a target for pervs. Being in a park can make a kid a target for pervs. Existing and breathing can make a kid a target for pervs.

Obvious solution: Kill your kid before a perv gets to him or her.

 

Rolling Stone had a great article this week about the psychopath computer geeks who run the Dateline operation from the attic of the houses they use. Complete idiots. Unreal that law enforcement is outsourcing justice to these people.

And it made a great point - all this hysteria over Internet stalking is giving people a false sense of security about the people around them every day, where 90 percent or more of the sexual abuse comes from.

That being said, you have to be cautious. There was a tremendous narrative series in an Arkansas paper a few years back about a girl who was murdered by a chat room stalker.

 

And that's the point. You have to educate your children on how to be safe online, and how to be safe in real life. It's up to parents. It's not up to society to remove all possible (no matter how remotely possible) dangers.

 

How very Swiftian of you, dools.

 

Merely a modest proposal.

 

Pass the ketchup.

 

BTW, have you looked at them today?

 

I could right now if you like.