Draw a naked woman - in a sex act.
Is it illegal? I label it ‘age 26’ - nope.
I erase the label and put ‘age 14’ - ok now you go to jail.
This is what you are basically talking about here. If this is ‘OK’ then anyone who writes horror (Stephen King, or lets say Neil Gaiman - after all Coraline had violence against children), and anything else that is deemed ‘unacceptable’ should go to jail.
Oh and apparently reading Lolita should get you branded a pedo as well right? Seriously wtf.
http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/12/why-defend-freedom-of-icky-speech.html has always seems to be relevant.
good god, exactly this. This is just more taboo.
My intent was not to say they’re equal, merely that we accept limits to freedom of expression.
What is the false equivalence here? I don’t think I was comparing anything in that portion.
We require immunization against communicable diseases and enact quarantines, don’t we? Again, there is accepted precedent for infringing the rights of individuals for public health.
Then I would advise him to seek actual professional help and not self “medicate”.
FTFY.
So, once you start here, where will you end? This slippery slope is teflon-coated, and shaked by all kinds of do-gooders.
I’m of the idea that this should not be prosecuted as a crime, but that it does warrant government involvement.
If a person is identified as a pedophile by a professional, he should be required to receive therapy, and offered free treatment. This is for his own good as well as for the good of the people around him.
I agree that it it’s idiotic to think that people who enjoy an image like the one included in this article are pedophiles. Pedophilia is something completely different.
I should add that there is a danger in treating pedophiles as criminals, since it will make them less likely to seek help.
Would your opinion on this be changed if research showed that consumption of virtual child pornography didn’t make pedophiles any more likely to commit pedophilia, and perhaps even helped them manage their urges to make them less likely to act on them in real life? Certainly I think a fair number of people who say it should be legal would likely change their mind if studies showed the opposite, that consuming this material made pedophiles more likely to molest real children. In the absence of evidence either way, perhaps there is an argument for making it illegal based on the precautionary principle, but I don’t have much confidence either way about what such a study would show.
Yeah, my concern is that I do not much of a line between this and making a book illegal to own or read. I am very anti-book-ban so I don’t see that we should criminalize this sort of “art.” Laws to protect children should have the clear intent and consequence of protecting actual children, not to prevent sick individuals from personal victimless gratification.
Before you you say we should allow the government to step in and and prosecute someone, for, essentially, being as creepy as hell, but with no actual victims, you might consider the fact that a lot of right wing christians apparently think people performing black masses, or satanism of paganism in general, is a lot more creepy than stuff like this. (eg. in a couple of recent cases in Boston and Oklahoma when people have planned public black masses, the local Catholic clergy cared a lot more about trying to infringe on other people’s religious freedom then they’ve ever cared about preventing child abuse within their own ranks. ) Once you’ve established a precedent that just being really creepy is enough for the government to step in and charge you with a crime, you’ve opened a huge can of worms and guaranteed that that power will very shortly be used towards ends that it wasn’t originally advertised for.
There are several issues here:
It shouldn’t be about labeling things good or evil, but about trying to bring about the best outcomes.
The idea that people under 18 are children is idiotic and makes these laws extremely dangerous.
Where is the line - Just to be clear if you like horror movies, comics, or books - many would call you a sicko. In fact, if you like erotica (not just pornography but inclusive of) many would call you a sicko. If you like rock and roll - many would call you a sicko.
This is a big world - name 10 things you like and somewhere out there are thousands of people (or more) that would call you a sicko for it.
The line has to be at reality vs. fiction. Writing on paper ‘John decapitated Mary’ (or visualizing it in comic form) should never be equated to… actually decapitating someone. This follows for any kind of weirdness.
No, actually, we don’t, in many cases; that’s what’s causing outbreaks of long-dormant diseases at the moment. And telling people they can’t look at artwork is in no way the same thing as immunizing them from measles.
And what would ‘professional help’ involve? Nobody knows the way their own brain works as well as the person themselves. If someone has, for the past 20 or whatever years, known that they can easily tamp down their desire to act on their pedophilic impulses by whacking it to drawings of preteen girls, then what will a doctor do – medicate them? Talk to them on a couch to convince them not to think about the things that give them boners? It’s a slippery slope and ill-advised.
The actual limits to free speech are highly circumscribed. The “fire in a crowded theater” justification was given for a conviction that by today’s standards constitute clear protected political speech.
It does not at all follow that it is rational unless you believe that consuming media that depicts sexualized portrayals of minors leads to directly to general social ills. That’s a very high standard.
It’s particularly bizarre in Canada where age of consent is 16. At 16 you are competent to have sex with whoever you want, but if you write down that you want to have sex with someone then you are a sex offender! The logic around that is incredible.
I know this is an aside to the general conversation, but while the famous “fire in a crowded theater” case was a bad example of a case, the example persists because it works. If you yell “Fire!” in a crowded public space when you know there is no fire and know it may cause panic and then it does cause panic and people are trampled, injured or killed, that is illegal. It’s still a good example of an obvious case where you can’t just “express” yourself however you want, even if it is tied to a historically bad case.
As disgusting as I find pedophilia, I have to say I am ok to people jacking off to cartoon porn.
Real child porn is horrible. Even though people who never act out their urges in real life, they are supporting a system that does abuse children in horrible ways. Everyone image they acquire is evidence of a vile crime.
On the other hand, cartoons have no victims. No one is hurt. The only down side I can see is that it perhaps encourages a vile behavior. But I think plenty of people can keep this tucked away in the fantasy part of their minds and never have it manifest itself in real like ( just like FPS games don’t make people want to go on killing sprees.)
What if this ended up in your browser’s history?
How is it different?
That reminds me. I had a gay friend make a post about Putin on face book, and he said, “Oh well, there isn’t anything in Russia I want any way.”
I said, “Nothing?” and posted a pic of a shirtless Russian sailor.
Then I said, “I hope you laughed, because now I have “gay Russian sailor” in my browser history and god knows what sort of ads I’m going to get now.”
If this is an argument that a model of thought can be extrapolated from non-violent behaviour to indicate violent motivations which will inevitably lead to physical or emotional abuse, then it makes me also wonder if the motivation of this ruling also criminalises many articles of faith central to Catholic dogma.
That the ritualistic placement and employment of young children who undoubtedly were sexualised in an organised and protected manner by the institution in question occurred is not up for debate; however, I would argue that for many priests and other enacters of ritual, some children were made to assume the role of the abused within the context of rituals commonly enacted by members of the same faith who attributed no such victim-hood.
Should those Catholics assume the moral responsibility for engaging in, what symbolised for some directors of the ritual, child abuse?
Before you jump to point out that those rituals just so happen to involve children and an adult priest and were not designed as ritual abuse, I would ask you to first consider what such a ritual, when performed in the context of ongoing abuse by the Priest, might appear to the child to really be about and in the context of such knowledge, what qualities the machinations of the ritual actually acquire.
Wait a minute … the anime schoolgirl is dodgy but this is legit?
How can I remove the hidden copy of that from my computer?
