Up Front: Do My Homework For Me
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but at that age we were in a legislative nowhere land.
Not only are children unlikely to comprehend the law but it goes totally against earlier experience. You go from laying there with your Mother wiping poo off your butt and calling you a good boy or girl to being taught that that sort of thing is bad. You can no longer run naked down the beach because... well, just because, because it's rude. The paranoia begins, the fear of being seen, the secrecy starts and the mystery deepens... and deepens. Until you awake one day and all that has changed... you have desire and nobody ever told you how to cope with it. With luck you meet a member of the opposite sex and muddle through the whole mess of marriage and children and schools and jobs and Society calls this Normal and nobody is rude.
As a kid I had a fantasy that all this could be reversed, that we all ran around naked and peed in the woods. When we fell over it didn't hurt, in fact it felt great, you could jump off trees and never get a graze. And, of course, I could fly.
That innocence should be preserved as long as possible. -
I've always had this problem with childhood innocence - it's more ignorance than anything else - in that - well, it lacks knowledge. So, there's no guilt factor. Which is why we used to call mentally-disabled people 'innocents.'
Steve B - I suspect there is a deep - not ancestral memory - maybe not even primate memory - but an instinctual set of ...let's call them longings-
and, this day&age, it literally cant be preserved for very long in most of the kinds of family groups we have here in ANZ.
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Not sure if that extends to encouraging children to record themselves and share. But even if it did, I'm pretty sure that a child so minded wouldn't be prosecuted for child porn, no?
You haven't been paying attention to the news from the States lately then. There have been several cases of kids in their early teens being prosecuted for taking pictures of themselves - just themselves. They've been charged with producing kiddie porn and ended up on the sexual offenders register.
I'd hope NZ is a bit more enlightened, but I wouldn't be surprised to see something like it happen in the 51st state across the Tasman there. -
With luck you meet a member of the opposite sex and muddle through the whole mess of marriage and children and schools and jobs and Society calls this Normal and nobody is rude.
Paging Mr Huxley, call for Mr Aldous Huxley on line 1 - something about a Brave New World...
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pretending that prepubescent boys and girls don't have a sexuality, I'm right with you
yeah. guess i'll have to break my long hiatus from reading books and actually actually check it out.
Not only are children unlikely to comprehend the law but it goes totally against earlier experience.
I don't understand your arrogance in informing me as to what my earlier experience should have been according to your's, maybe you were sexually naive/ignorant until a later age and it was a mystery, but I don't see why that need affect us all. Innocence is a fine contrast to make.
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makse note
Too much whiskey, too early brings out vitriol.
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I'd hope NZ is a bit more enlightened, but I wouldn't be surprised to see something like it happen in the 51st state across the Tasman there.
Seven year olds? I don't think so. Then again, the parents probably would be charged with something.
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Too much whiskey, too early brings out vitriol.
Whiskies and other distilled beverages such as cognac and rum are complex beverages containing a vast range of flavouring compounds, of which some 200 to 300 can be easily detected by chemical analysis. The flavouring chemicals include "carbonyl compounds, alcohols, carboxylic acids and their esters, nitrogen- and sulphur-containing compounds, tannins and other polyphenolic compounds, terpenes, and oxygen-containing heterocyclic compounds" and esters of fatty acids. The nitrogen compounds include pyridines, picolines and pyrazines.
Wiki
That explains the Vitriol I guess. -
ha
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Here's a pretty interesting example of censorship:
I want to shout from the rooftops to proclaim a triumph of online journalism. But I can't. I want to show you all a prize-winning piece of video. But I'm banned from doing so; the threat of an $11,000 fine hangs over me and this site.
Last year an Iranian woman, Neda Soltan was shot in election-related protests, and the video of her last moments (graphic) was seen around the world, including on Australian television.
The anonymous videographer was awarded a George Palk Prize for journalism. But the Australian censors have refused the video classification, and all links to the video are now illegal under Australian law, and liable to being blacklisted under the filter.
It is a very worrying precedent. If footage of violence taken in these or similar circumstances, presented in ways that manifestly do not intend to titilate, is declared illegal, then our ability to publicise such atrocities and stop them prevent them from happening again is limited.It was public slideshows of images of gruesome abuses, such as children in Belgian Congo with their hands cut off that birthed the modern human rights movement. Censorship has a funny way of having impacts well outside the limited grounds that its defenders claim.
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Similarly, Indonesia is a relatively liberal democracy and country with the freest press in its region.
But encouraged by a range of forces, its telecoms ministry is proposing an internet code that threatens to ban all content that is indecent, or upsets public order.
You can imagine how that could work out.
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Similarly, Indonesia is a relatively liberal democracy and country with the freest press in its region.
I'm not sure about its press, but Indonesia has some human rights issues that wave 'not that liberal a democracy' flags for me.
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I'm not sure about its press, but Indonesia has some human rights issues that wave 'not that liberal a democracy' flags for me.
The West Papua situation is complicated - I just submitted a thesis on how the province is represented, particularly focused on human rights issues. There's poverty, health problems, and advocating independence is illegal. There's a general discontent with the Indonesian Government, manifested in widespread support for the idea of "freedom", usually interpreted as support for independence. But it's not a dire place of terrible repression or of genocide, as many would imply.
Pornography, communism, and independence movements step firmly outside the limits of acceptable discourse in Indonesia, and are barred by law. There's no way I'd defend any of those limitations, but these things don't impact (currently) on other many other political issues or freedoms. As always however, the space available to express ideas is a moveable one, and encroachments should be resisted and the space opened.
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Under what circumstances should it be illegal to look at a picture of something it is legal to do?
The legality of doing it is utterly irrelevant.
Watching and disseminating kiddie porn is illegal because of the (alleged) effects it has on the viewers. "Fake" kiddie porn where no real kids are used (either via some weta-digital-like effects or actors who just look really really young) has the same effects. Even though it's legal for an incredibly-young-looking 16-year-old to have sex.
If you want to argue that there should be no censorship, go ahead. I'll disagree, but I think there's a coherent case against censorship even if that case is wrong. But the idea of censoring only images of acts that <i>are</i> illegal, and not images of acts that <i>appear to be</i> illegal, is silly.
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Is it sensible for laws to deal with "alleged" effects?
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The legality of doing it is utterly irrelevant.
Oddly, when I asked this question, child pornography wasn't my focus. That's why I asked this question. My own personal concern is more related to consensual BDSM material, which runs into problems with different areas of the "offensive material" definition.
Is it sensible for laws to deal with "alleged" effects?
Yeah, see... sometimes the actual effect of something turns out to be quite counter-intuitive. Home VHS caused a huge rise in the availability of porn - for the first time, you didn't have to go out to an X-rated theatre and sit in a crowd of "like-minded individuals - and yet there was no corresponding rise in sexual violence. Instead, there was a decrease. (And let me say, again, that I don't think porn causes that.)
I went to an excellent chat at Foo Camp about evidence-based policy making, and it struck me how completely our censorship laws aren't evidence-based. I'd like to see a complete, unemotive, evidence-based re-examination of the basis for everything on the ban list. Now, sometimes that isn't going to be possible because some of the experiments would simply be unconscionable, but does that mean we should keep punishing people on the grounds of how gicky we find something?
Effects that aren't "alleged" are those of the people convicted for owning things like the Simpsons cartoons, or teenagers convicted for taking photographs of themselves, or people who wrote stories in which the age of the participants was unclear.
Watching and disseminating kiddie porn is illegal because of the (alleged) effects it has on the viewers.
So... watching lolicon turns a 'normal' person into a paedophile? We're back there?
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Watching and disseminating kiddie porn is illegal because of the (alleged) effects it has on the viewers
No it is not. It is illegal because it is considered objectionable.
Effects that aren't "alleged" are those of the people convicted for owning things like the Simpsons cartoons, or teenagers convicted for taking photographs of themselves, or people who wrote stories in which the age of the participants was unclear.
Have any of these cases occurred in New Zealand? I think not.
So... watching lolicon turns a 'normal' person into a paedophile?
The 'it's OK because it's hentai' defence is especially lame. If it depicts children in sexual activity, it is objectionable, regardless of how cool the genre might be.
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Have any of these cases occurred in New Zealand? I think not.
No, they haven't, but there's nothing to stop them happening here. We couldn't link to some of the art here (for 'it's not actually that, it's this' purposes) because that would leave us open to prosecution. Our laws are actually tighter and more conservative than those in the states, just usually more liberally enforced and interpreted. We're one of very few countries that actually ban lolicon, because in most countries the laws, excluding the 'promoting' clause, don't allow it.
The 'it's OK because it's hentai' defence is especially lame. If it depicts children in sexual activity, it is objectionable, regardless of how cool the genre might be.
Paul, I find that kind of offensive. I was responded to icehawk's point, which you disagreed with in your first point. Where did I say anything even remotely like "lolicon is cool"? If people could stick to criticising stuff I've actually said instead of just making shit up (and that goes for implying I'm opposed to censorship too - I'm opposed to the filter and I've given my reasons), I'd appreciate it.
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Emma, I was not accusing you of anything or attributing any thought to you. I was making a passing comment on a common attitude.
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there's a tactic i've not seen before :)
1. quote someone's previous comment.
2. write some straw-man argument directly below.
3. get pulled up on this little piece of bullshit.
4. deny any wrongdoing followed by more straw-man bullshit!ta-dah!
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Piss off Stephen. If I had meant that comment as Emma interpreted it, I would have stood by it. I really do not appreciate you impugning my integrity.
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Hi guys, Emma asked me to pop in and say she's taking a couple of days stress leave, but didn't want you to think she was bailing on the discussion.
It's not you, it's her.
She'll be back soon, with her head screwed on firmly, and optimal levels of baddassed-ness.
(Shut up, it is so a word, and one that perfectly describes Ms Hart.)
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(Shut up, it is so a word, and one that perfectly describes Ms Hart.)
You get no argument there.
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Word.
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baddassed-ness
(Shut up, it is so a word, and one that perfectly describes Ms Hart.)I thought badass mostly came with tinges of uncooperativeness and overly aggressiveness which I wouldn't have laid at Emma's door - so I'm guessing we are going for the secondary
meaning of formidable and excellent...
definitely no argument there!There's a devil inside of me dept:
though I am wondering if the "double-d" version
of baddassed-ness you have used, is in context ?
;- )
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