At 03:02 PM 6/9/97 -0700, Tim May wrote:
Precisely. The laws are designed to go after the thoughts. Synthetic images, images of little girls in leotards. images of teenagers of legal age *in the countries of origin*...none of these involve acts of sexual congress with a child in violation of the laws of the U.S. The only crime is thoughtcrime.
Lately, I have been thinking much about an old saying: "Everything is the other way around." My current interpretation of this rather Zen expression is that what we know to "obviously" to be the cause is often the effect and the other way arround. Let us assume that it is unethical to force children to participate in the production of child pornography. (For the benefit of Kent and the more ignorant people on this list, I will state that I firmly believe this to be true, despite the fact that doing so should be irrelevant for the argument.) Furthermore, let us assume that there are a number of individuals who enjoy looking at hard core child pornography. The question then is: does going after the distributors provide a benefit to the children being (potentially) used for such pictures? The answer is clearly no. By limiting the distribution of an individual picture, you increase the total number of pictures required to satisfy market demand. That means more children will be required to meet demand. Thus, by going after the distributors, Se7en causes more children to be violated by child pornographers. The only question that remains is: how can he live with this? Logic != base emotions, --Lucky Green <shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred. Put a stake through the heart of DES! Join the quest at http://www.frii.com/~rcv/deschall.htm