How to Justify Pedophilia

If you read the topic of this post and immediately said "there is no fucking way to justify that," then you and I are in total agreement! But let's talk about how I've witnessed this actually happen, thanks to the 'ol internet.  It's actually a topic I've started writing about in the past but never got around to finishing.  This worked out fine, because there's recent news.

You see, I used to be a big fan of this Youtube channel called Dave's Farm.  Primarily there were lots of car stunts and stuff out on his farm full of dirt roads and hills, which honestly wasn't really my cup of tea.  But he also had mechanical repair and building videos, including some specifically devoted to explaining how something worked.  He'd cover topics from refrigerators, to microwaves, to car transmissions.  Plus he'd put together some crazy mechanical contraptions.  I'd never really had a lot of mechanical interest beforehand, and I learned a lot by watching these things, to which I honestly have to credit him with improving my knowledge and confidence enough in this stuff to be a catalyst in eventually learning what I know today.  Combined with my existing electronics knowledge, I do most of my own car and lawn equipment repairs now, and am able to help friends and family at times as well.  Money has definitely been saved.

Then eventually I came to find out that Dave himself is a convicted pedophile, involving his own children.  It had happened years beforehand, but the revelation kind of exploded across Youtubers who knew him or knew of him.  I was pretty shocked myself.  A news article came out in a Canadian newspaper about it, since by that point Dave was kind of a local name where he lived I guess, making lots of money and views from Youtube by that point.  The fan base fractured, with some believing Dave's side of the story, that he simply was suffering from untreated manic depression and supposedly wasn't really a pedophile.  Others totally shunned him, unsubscribing and/or bringing down negative attention on him when possible.  Then you had the third group of people who didn't necessarily like what he did, but wanted to watch his videos anyway.  But this led to lots of arguing in the comments.

Well, regardless of why people still watched, it didn't last for long.  His ex-wives had gotten together with some of his "hater group" to push Youtube to close his channel, citing that he was using it to attract young boys to his farm.  And they weren't really wrong, because people visited him all the time, including kids, so it was rather easy for one to make the accusation.  Dave himself admitted that his target audience was teen males.  So his channel got shut down.  Then it came back, and got shut down again.  I can't remember how many times it happened, to the point that eventually he was trying to get everyone to come to a different video site altogether.  Then he essentially disappeared for a while.

Well, sometime later, a news program interviewed him, doing the story in a negative light.  Dave came out in defense mode over it, making new videos to respond to everything he felt was wrong about the report, and I think threatening a lawsuit.  Shortly following that, Dave cooperated for a documentary about himself, by a guy who actually turned out to just be an opportunistic creep.  He let Dave think he was on his side to get the gig, then turned it around on him and dumped a bunch of dirt, some related to Dave's father potentially molesting him as a boy.  It was just a big debacle, with that guy raging at people who torrented the documentary and everything.  I think Dave compared the whole situation to blackmail, but he's been known to exaggerate, so.  I can't remember if lawsuits were involved with this or not.

Regardless, Dave is back on Youtube these days.  He doesn't post videos too often, and he's not part of the partner program anymore I don't believe (meaning probably no money is involved), but he's there.  More drama crept back into his videos related to accusations of theft against someone who had been going to the farm for years, which split the fan base a bit further.  Blind loyalty to Dave continued, with many wholeheartedly believing all of his accusations against the other guy.  This was spilling over into this guy's Youtube channel and everything, and resparked the pedophile debate over and over. 

And so now we finally come to present day.   Despite Dave's repeated attempts to convince everyone he's not a pedophile, he was arrested on charges of child pornography a few days ago.  We've heard no word out of Dave about the incident other than what the news article said, where he defended himself by claiming the content they found was simply nudist videos (since yes, Dave is a nudist, as it turned out).  But come on.  This is a guy who has already been in trouble with the law for recording children; does he really not have enough sense to not be present around naked children, and sure as hell not be filming them?  And this isn't even the first time accusations of inappropriate conduct with children have occurred in recent years, it's just the first one that's gotten him arrested.

So now we're back to comment wars across channels associated with the farm, with people blindly and rabidly defending Dave no matter what.  Some of them even completely dismiss what he did, selfishly arguing that people need to leave it alone so that he can keep making Youtube videos.  Meanwhile, another Youtuber who essentially got his own start by being in Dave's videos, has now officially distanced himself from Dave and the farm.  And this is a guy who's nice to everybody, not to mention keeps a trailer out on the farm for the summer, so I think that has some bearing on fan opinions.  Another Youtuber, who had been the one accused of theft by Dave, pretty much put up an "I told you so" video about the news article of Dave's arrest, which is where I learned the news to begin with.

I've always been a bit torn on this issue myself, because I did take a lot away from Dave's earlier videos, and it's really a shame that this is how it all turned out.  I know I'm not the only one to have learned from his videos, either.  But that doesn't mean I can simply ignore what's going on.  I personally believe many of the experts when they say pedophilia can't be cured, only treated.  And you can't treat a problem when you don't acknowledge you have one, especially while continuing to put yourself into situations in which you can feed the compulsion.  He may have done his time for his past actions, but in this case, obviously his past wasn't left in the past.  You don't reform from pedophilia with simply jail time.

There is so much more to this story that I haven't mentioned, mostly because I knew this would be long (and hence why I never finished writing about this topic before).  But I just thought that this was all worth mentioning because it reinforces something I've talked about before, and that's the fanboy plight.  Whether it's Shaycarl, Katers, Cory, Olga, Charles and Alli, or anyone else on the planet with a fanbase, there will always be blind loyalty, even in the face of blatant hypocrisy or wrongdoing.  This particular situation proves that even if you film and piddle your own kids, you'll still have quite a number of people who will aggressively defend you, thanks to the magical mental distortion field of internet anonymity.