for what it is worth, while attending a seminar about japanese politics in 2000 there was a study that basically compared the amount of actual child abuse crimes in different countries and it showed, that in japan the rate of actual child abuse was as low (or high) as in western countries.
I am not sure how the estimated number of unreported crimes differs though.

Quote from: SaphimI am not sure how the estimated number of unreported crimes differs though.

That's a problem with Japan, where there is strong cultural pressure to say nothing.  Of course estimating the unreported crimes in any country poses that problem to one degree or another.

Quote from: Malleus ArianorumExpressed well if being "offended" and "angry" is the worst thing that can happen. I personaly see a distinction between being offended and being raped in effagy.

Douglas was also considered a free speech absolutist and his dissent takes some liberties with the truth.  He talks about "the traditions of a free society" when no society has ever treated free speech as absolutely as he would.  And while one can argue that the First Amendment was designed to "invite dispute" and so on, I doubt the founding fathers intended it to protect obscenity, a step further than offensive.  One should also not forget, that before the 14th Amendment, the scope of the First Amendment, as specified in the first word of it, was to restrict Congress and only Congress, not the states.  That is, under the Founder's version of the First Amendment, the Supreme Court would have no business determining the Constitutionality of a state statute restricting obscenity.  (I should also add that the other Justices that dissented did not sign on to Douglas' dissent.)

Quote from: Malleus ArianorumWell lets say for the sake of argument that the governement should never do anything. Government = Bad. Could a private individual make a rule like "I won't allow any "white warriors slaugher enemies of the white race" RPGs. It's my house, my rules." Could a group of people make the same rule for their synagogue? What about a city, nation, or world?

It's been my experience that the more ideologically absolute and extreme a person is, the less use that they have for democratic institutions and the idea that the people should have leeway to govern themselves.  The perfect libertarian society has no use for democracy because there would be nothing to vote on.  The same is true of the perfect communist society, and so on.  Once you have all of the answers and create utopia, how can you possibly improve on it?  Somewhere along the way, the idea of having the consent of the governed for how their society is run gets lost.

Quote from: John MorrowNot at all.  If they can abstain from collecting pornography dealing with children, that demonstrates a substantial amount of self-control.

One might argue that this something that someone who is looking only at drawings/anime etc is doing.

QuoteIt has nothing to do with her getting sent to jail and everything to do with him getting sent to jail.  So you don't think there is anything wrong with a 22 year-old getting a 13 year-old pregnant and have no problem with Planned Parenthood helping him cover it up?

I think Planned Parenthood's job is to make sure that no girl or young woman is EVER afraid of getting an abortion.  That's their priority one. If a girl knows that by going to PP she'll end up having her boyfriend sent to jail; or even if she ends up not going to get an abortion from a pregnancy that is being caused by abuse, leading to a compounding of the tragedy, then you've effectively denied abortion access rights to those girls.

RPGPundit

Quote from: John MorrowAnd, again, I have discussed no particular punishment or penalties.  I think you have legitimate concerns about that but I don't think they are impossible to address.

Isn't that what punishing a drunk driver who has not gotten into an accident does?  Isn't that punishing them because they might get into an accident?  Plenty of people drive while legally drunk without getting in to accidents.  Why should they be punished for what they might "potentially" do?

That's already a clear and present danger. The example is like arresting a guy while he's exposing himself to a kid, or trying to lead one away, or whatever.

QuoteSo given your concern over punishment and hurting people who casually look at the stuff, one could make a distinction between the person with a few images in their cache or downloaded carelessly as opposed to the person with a huge collection of the stuff.

No law I've ever heard of makes this distinction.If you're proposing treating "virtual" porn as identical to real child porn, then even ONE image is enough to be an indictable offense.

And if you're not, then where the fuck do you draw the line? Suddenly you're going to have to have people monitoring traffic and users to see that they have 110 images, but being careful not to make an arrest if they're only up to 109? Please.

QuoteI'm not talking about punishing thoughts.  I'm talking about punishing actions.

The action of expressing one's thought. Face it Morrow, no matter how you're trying to wriggle your way around it, or wrap yourself in the flag of the defender of public decency or crying "WON'T ANYONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?" you're being identical to Pat Pulling or that guy who wants to ban videogames (Jack Thompson?); you're being worse in fact, because you're suggesting that people doing this thing you don't like that doesn't harm anyone should be sent to prison for many many years, and put on a sex offender registry for it.

Regardless of how you justify it, you're a fascist.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Malleus ArianorumBut that seems exceptionaly lenient. Would you permit people to fire into a crowd legaly until they directly killed someone?

Bullshit comparison. That's like asking if I would allow a child rapist to go around attempting to rape a child until he succeeded.

But that's not what the people who have furry porn on their computer are doing.

Don't get me wrong, if they attempt it even once, then that's that; but you're talking about charging everyone with murder who owns a gun, because they might end up shooting someone with it one day.

QuoteOops! I meant: We are the knights who say: Nox!

Yes, and your point is?
If you want to mock guys who have underage furry porn or who wank over otaku schoolgirl rape scenes, go hog wild; hell, we can do it together: they're stupid sad fucks!

You want to ostracize them from your personal social environments, boot them out of your forums, etc? Go for it.

If some guy came around here and started advocating pedophilia, and could not stop himself, he would be banned.

There's a huge difference though between rightly mocking someone, or kicking them out of social groups, and sending them to prison for 10-15 and putting them on a registry that will guarantee to socially isolate and criminalize them for life.

RPGPundit

Quote from: John MorrowDouglas was also considered a free speech absolutist and his dissent takes some liberties with the truth.  He talks about "the traditions of a free society" when no society has ever treated free speech as absolutely as he would.  And while one can argue that the First Amendment was designed to "invite dispute" and so on, I doubt the founding fathers intended it to protect obscenity, a step further than offensive.

I'm in the same club as most of the Founding Fathers, and I'm pretty sure that they did very much intend that.

RPGPundit

Quote from: John MorrowIt's been my experience that the more ideologically absolute and extreme a person is, the less use that they have for democratic institutions and the idea that the people should have leeway to govern themselves.  The perfect libertarian society has no use for democracy because there would be nothing to vote on.  The same is true of the perfect communist society, and so on.  Once you have all of the answers and create utopia, how can you possibly improve on it?  Somewhere along the way, the idea of having the consent of the governed for how their society is run gets lost.

The simple logic is that anyone whose beliefs differ significantly from the majority will feel some qualms about following democratically determined laws.  So in the 19th century U.S., abolitionists were dangerous radicals who were absolutist and unreasonable in their extreme position of "no slavery" rather than the more reasonable compromises of slave and free state divisions -- which gave rise to their supporting illegal theft and even terrorism and murder.  Today in the U.S. you have anti-abortionists who chafe at the laws which allow what they view as murder -- and they have also gone to extremes of terrorism and murder.  

As far as I've seen, your positions (and mine for that matter) are fairly moderate within our society.  That's nice for us, but it doesn't make us morally superior for our greater belief in democracy.

Quote from: RPGPunditOne might argue that this something that someone who is looking only at drawings/anime etc is doing.

OK.  

Quote from: RPGPunditI think Planned Parenthood's job is to make sure that no girl or young woman is EVER afraid of getting an abortion.  That's their priority one. If a girl knows that by going to PP she'll end up having her boyfriend sent to jail; or even if she ends up not going to get an abortion from a pregnancy that is being caused by abuse, leading to a compounding of the tragedy, then you've effectively denied abortion access rights to those girls.

I don't think that should be their top priority because they aren't, you know, the law or the girl's parents, who are the people with the authority (legal and moral) to make that sort of decision.  And like most people who support unrestricted abortions, you assume that an abortion is always the right thing for the girl (so much for "choice") and that nobody could possibly be pressuring her into getting one that she doesn't want (so much for "choice").  And if we assume, like the law does, that a minor of that age is not competent to make that choice on her own, then what makes a Planned Parenthood employee more qualified to help that girl than her parents or a court-appointed advocate?  And what gives Planned Parenthood the authority to flaunt the law because they feel that making sure girls aren't afraid of getting abortions is more important than reporting child abuse?

I suppose I should also point out that the girl in those phone calls indicated that she was not aware that her boyfriend could get arrested if she showed up with him until the Planned Parenthood employees warned her of that, thus it wouldn't have discouraged her from showing up.  But maybe if word got around that 22 year-olds couldn't just hand their 13 year-old girlfriends a few hundred bucks to take care of it without risking getting arrested they would be more careful about not getting them pregnant or, you know, not pick 13 year-olds as their girlfriends in the first place.  That's how deterrence works.  But yet again, the abortion uber alles attitude trumps any other common sense interest including preventing the abuse of young girls.  Better to cover up child abuse and help enable it than give young girls any reason not to have an abortion because nothing is more important for young women than making sure that they have abortions when they get pregnant whether they want one or not, right?

Quote from: jhkimThe simple logic is that anyone whose beliefs differ significantly from the majority will feel some qualms about following democratically determined laws.

Which is something that people need to get over if they really want to support the idea of democracy.

Quote from: jhkimSo in the 19th century U.S., abolitionists were dangerous radicals who were absolutist and unreasonable in their extreme position of "no slavery" rather than the more reasonable compromises of slave and free state divisions -- which gave rise to their supporting illegal theft and even terrorism and murder.  Today in the U.S. you have anti-abortionists who chafe at the laws which allow what they view as murder -- and they have also gone to extremes of terrorism and murder.

Yet the vast majority of people involved in both causes continued to try to enact change within the law.  In the case of the abolitionists, the reason why the Southern states started to secede was that the long term prognosis for slavery was not good staying within the system.  Things were changing in the abolitionists' favor.

In the case of abortion, the problem is that it was decided nationally in an undemocratic way (Supreme Court decision) which even some supporters of abortion rights question (e.g., here) and has politicized the Supreme Court such that litmus tests and who a President will nominate has become a major election issue.  If abortion were returned to the states to regulate or not regulate, then the issue could be worked out democratically (as it was being in the late 1960s and early 1970s before Roe stepped in and 7 justices set a national policy).  But even then, most anti-abortion people are working to resolve the issue by changing the makeup of the Supreme Court and through a variety of other legal or nonviolent means, not by killing abortionists and bombing clinics.  And there will always be violent nuts in almost any emotionally charged group (e.g., the environmental movement, the Puerto Rican independence movement, the anti-war movement, etc.) so the anti-abortion groups are hardly special in this regard.

Quote from: jhkimAs far as I've seen, your positions (and mine for that matter) are fairly moderate within our society.  That's nice for us, but it doesn't make us morally superior for our greater belief in democracy.

No, but it does give us a vested interest in supporting it.

Quote from: John MorrowYet the vast majority of people involved in both causes continued to try to enact change within the law.  In the case of the abolitionists, the reason why the Southern states started to secede was that the long term prognosis for slavery was not good staying within the system.  Things were changing in the abolitionists' favor.

In the case of abortion, the problem is that it was decided nationally in an undemocratic way (Supreme Court decision) which even some supporters of abortion rights question (e.g., here) and has politicized the Supreme Court such that litmus tests and who a President will nominate has become a major election issue.  If abortion were returned to the states to regulate or not regulate, then the issue could be worked out democratically (as it was being in the late 1960s and early 1970s before Roe stepped in and 7 justices set a national policy).

I find it a bit shocking that you can talk about slavery, and then immediately jump into saying that determining state-by-state is the only democratic way of working things out.

Quote from: jhkimI find it a bit shocking that you can talk about slavery, and then immediately jump into saying that determining state-by-state is the only democratic way of working things out.

There are several reasons for that but I really don't want to turn this into a lengthy abortion debate (net.abortion, which became talk.abortion, was the first "noise" newsgroup on the Usenet created to keep abortion debates out of all of the other topics because they tend to get out of control very quickly).  All I'll say is that I think that both sides can make a legitimate slavery analogy in support of their own side, even if most people can't understand why the other side feels that way.

Quote from: RPGPunditI'm in the same club as most of the Founding Fathers, and I'm pretty sure that they did very much intend that.

Not all of the Founding Fathers were Freemasons and they weren't in complete agreement about a great many things (hence the split between Federalists and anti-Federalists and so on).  So at this point I'll concede that it's silly for me to argue that none of them supported that sort of intent (so I won't) but the Bill of Rights was a compromise document and I doubt it would have passed when it did had it applied to the States as well as Congress.  It's actually pretty interesting reading the earlier drafts of the Bill of Rights recorded by James Madison, George Mason, and others because it gives some interesting insight into what they were thinking.  And, of course, some of the Founding Fathers (non-Freemasons, as far as I can tell) went on to support the Anti-Sedition Acts of 1798 which was pretty clearly in violation of the First Amendment.

The Virginia Declaration of Rights reads in part:

   XII That the freedom of the press is one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.

XV That no free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.

XVI That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore, all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity towards each other.

Mason's draft of the Bill of Rights reads, in part:

   16. That the People have a right to Freedom of speech, and of writing and publishing their Sentiments; that the Freedom of the Press is one of the great Bulwarks of Liberty, and ought not to be violated.

20. That Religion or the Duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by Reason and Conviction, not by Force or violence, and therefore all men have an equal, natural, and unalienable Right to the free Exercise of Religion according to the Dictates of Conscience, and that no particular religious Sect or Society of Christians ought to be favored or established by Law in preference to others.

One of Madison's early drafts reads:

   The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.

It also would have inserted the following text between clauses 3 and 4 of section 9 of the first article:

   The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, infringed.

I suppose I should add that in addition to the original scope of the First Amendment ("Congress..."), the final amendment of the Bill of Rights reads:

   The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

Quote from: John MorrowOK.  




I don't think that should be their top priority because they aren't, you know, the law or the girl's parents, who are the people with the authority (legal and moral) to make that sort of decision.  And like most people who support unrestricted abortions, you assume that an abortion is always the right thing for the girl (so much for "choice") and that nobody could possibly be pressuring her into getting one that she doesn't want (so much for "choice").  And if we assume, like the law does, that a minor of that age is not competent to make that choice on her own, then what makes a Planned Parenthood employee more qualified to help that girl than her parents or a court-appointed advocate?  And what gives Planned Parenthood the authority to flaunt the law because they feel that making sure girls aren't afraid of getting abortions is more important than reporting child abuse?

I suppose I should also point out that the girl in those phone calls indicated that she was not aware that her boyfriend could get arrested if she showed up with him until the Planned Parenthood employees warned her of that, thus it wouldn't have discouraged her from showing up.  But maybe if word got around that 22 year-olds couldn't just hand their 13 year-old girlfriends a few hundred bucks to take care of it without risking getting arrested they would be more careful about not getting them pregnant or, you know, not pick 13 year-olds as their girlfriends in the first place.  That's how deterrence works.  But yet again, the abortion uber alles attitude trumps any other common sense interest including preventing the abuse of young girls.  Better to cover up child abuse and help enable it than give young girls any reason not to have an abortion because nothing is more important for young women than making sure that they have abortions when they get pregnant whether they want one or not, right?

I think that if you want to veer into a full-blown discussion about abortion, you should start a new thread on that topic. Just a suggestion.

RPGPundit