Comment by aes256 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aes256 | Hacker News Reader

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> Furthermore, the reason you hear of child porn rings is because those are what form - people share it with each other in a tit-for-tat sort of way. It absolutely incentivizes the production of more, which means more abused kids.

I'd imagine it's like any other prohibited material or substance; drugs, counterfeit goods, pirated works, etc. Of those implicated, a small minority are involved in production, while the vast majority are simply consumers.

I assume you are willing to at least acknowledge the existence of the latter group; people who simply consume child pornography and play no part in the production, or any sexual abuse of children for that matter.

Do you really think it is appropriate to ruin these peoples' lives — splash their names across the newspapers, lock them in jail, destroy their career, their relationships, make them a social pariah — for mere possession of child pornography? For having a certain sequence of 0s and 1s on their computer?

>and play no part in the production, or any sexual abuse of children for that matter.

Their demand of it CAUSES IT TO BE MADE.

Jesus, I've never seen so much bending overbackwards over CP. Hey guys, we still have the first amendment and SCOTUS always rule sensibly on speech issues. No one is going to start a police state over CP enforcement. The slippery slope doesn't always happen, in fact, its rare that it does.

>Their demand of it CAUSES IT TO BE MADE.

I mean, you can shout it in all caps, but I don't know if we can really say that's established as fact.

But it's pretty disingenuous to claim that people in this thread are defending CP. The issue is far more nuanced than that, but we all agree that people taking pictures/video of themselves hurting children is terrible. It's just that from there the discussion moves into pragmatism and how we should actually be dealing with it as a society. Pedophiles are a fact of life, and it's better for everyone if we can find ways for them to satisfy their urges without hurting anybody, instead of waiting for them to do something horrible so that we can punish them for it.

Just to be very specific because people love to misinterpret me on this point: legalizing CP is not a solution that I am advocating. A benign outlet" will, by definition, have to be something that does not harm children.

>Hey guys, we still have the first amendment and SCOTUS always rule sensibly on speech issues.

Seriously?

I don't view CP as a free speech issue, I just think its prohibition is an arbitrary, puritan social construct.

Same applies to indecent exposure laws, I guess. At what point did we decide the human form is indecent in its unclothed state, and people should be deprived of their freedom for exposing their natural form in public?

At what point did we decide people should be deprived of their freedom simply for looking at images of children in their natural, unclothed state?

This actually touches on another issue, which is the definition of "pornography". Weirdly, most people these days seem to make an exception for artistic adult nudes, but consider any image of a nude child to be pornographic. This is insane, of course. If you take a cute picture of your toddler playing in the bathtub, that is not pornography, yet a lot of people would lump it in under that definition, including many governments.

But when we're talking about images and video depicting child abuse, that's a different situation altogether.

> The slippery slope doesn't always happen, in fact, its rare that it does.

So what happens if a spammer sends millions of CP images to inboxes? What do you think of a situation that instantly makes millions of people felons? Is that a reasonable law?

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