Slashdot Mirror
Graphic Artists Condemn UK Ban On Erotic Comics
mdwh2 writes "Graphic artists, publishers and MPs have condemned the UK's Coroners and Justice Bill, which will criminalize possession of sexual depictions that appear to show someone under 18 (the age of consent is 16 in the UK), as well as adults where the 'predominant impression conveyed' is of someone under 18, and even if they are merely drawn as being present whilst sexual activity took place between adults. The definitions could include Lost Girls, Watchmen, and South Park. The Comic Book Alliance has launched a petition against the law."
Dear Sasayaki
The IRS has it on good authority that you owe approximately $529,000 in unpaid child support for your children Bart, Lisa and Maggie Simpson. Our records show you are delinquent on every payment since the birth of each child. Your tax rebate has been rejected and you now owe us $528,500.
Love
The IRS
There's "what a law targets", and there's "what a law hits", and they can be two very different things indeed.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Question their motives? So what if their motive is that they want to draw fictional naked children? As long as no real children are portrayed or in any way harmed in the making of those drawings, why should anyone care? The original point of child porn laws was to protect the children in the pornography. In this case, there are none.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
And what's wrong with obscenity?
I understand obscene material bothers some people, but as long as they're not forced to watch it, I don't see why I can't.
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
How does some weirdo drawing Lisa Simpson naked harm my kids any more than it does me?
No one is arguing that actual child molesters shouldn't be punished, but passing laws against even depicting such things is not just nonsense; it's dangerous.
It's all in there!
Perverts have been forcing it on children for thousands of years!
The sickness must stop!
Hitler studied to be a Catholic Priest.
Stalin studied to be an Orthadox Priest.
Almost everyone convicted of a violent crime in the US is religious. Worldwide, every single major terrorist incident was committed by religious people.
So again, if we are going to ban something for the good of everyone it should be the Bible, not comic books.
People are such twits. They really think they are helping children when doing this, which is the ultimate scape goat. What they are actually doing is preventing them selves from being exposed to something they find objectionable. They are imposing their morality/fear on individuals who aren't committing crimes, of course... not for long. What this all boils down to in a neat way, as it always does, is.... people are stupid.
Eat sleep die
The difference it makes is that if you've never had kids then you can only reliably argue half the facts, meaning your argument is flawed from the get-go.
This is exactly why I only listen to child molesters.
But drawing people being torn apart or burned or tortured (non-sexually) is not obscene? I suppose I must have missed the memo explaining how X+sex is evil and must be banned, when X is tolerated and "free speech" and what not.
Weird. I thought anti-CP laws were about preventing child abuse. But if they are simply about obscenity... well, from now on I'll have to regard CP-producers as free speech activists!
Circumcision is child abuse.
Although drawing a naked baby being raped by guys in rabbit suits might not involve any children who once or ever will exist, it's still obscene.
What's obscene is that you consider it your business to tell people what they can draw.
I have a kid, and I can say that you are simply wrong. Rational people can make rational conclusions irrelevant of whether they have kids or not. Nut jobs just change their irrational ranting to match their current situation. I have no fear of drawings of Bart plowing Lisa doing any harm to my child. A law that gets you thrown in jail for drawing pictures of underage people naked? That causes me to fear for my child. My son turning thirteen and drawing a picture of that cute girl in his class naked doesn't seem impossible at all.
Meanwhile in the USA two people who forced a 13yo to strip and expose herself to them on nothing more than the word of one student who they knew hated her are not being tried for a sex offense while a 14yo girl who took sex pics of herself for her boyfriend IS. Rest of the world: We don't get it either.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Get off it.
The problem with a law like this is that it affects everyone in society, regardless of whether parasites have erupted from their groins. Despite the fact that I do not have children, I am very much a part of society, and I don't want to live in a society where fake things are considered real.
Furthermore, just because I haven't had kids myself doesn't mean I don't know anything about them. It may come as a bit of a surprise to you, but I actually spent quite a few years as a kid myself, and I can report that I can't imagine much lewd material even getting to me in the first place (my parents did their job), and what little did did not seem to scar me irrevocably. What's worse about this particular law is that, as children, my friends and I often drew (admittedly poor) renditions of girls in class whom we liked sans clothes. This is pretty normal for heterosexual boys growing up, and such a law would very definitely have hurt me during those times.
Child molestation is so ridiculously rare, that, like terrorism, all the trouble of trying to stop it is far worse than the problem. Kids aren't molested by dirty pictures; they're molested by their family members and the clergy. Don't come around bothering me over dirty pictures while Father O'Malley sodomizes little Timmy.
The difference it makes is that if you've never had kids then you can only reliably argue half the facts, meaning your argument is flawed from the get-go.
And if you have kids, then you've forgotten what's it like to not have kids. And of course, you can't have a legitimate opinion on child molestation until you've molested a child. Do I have your argument down correctly? I think I do.
Let's consider one of those amateur moral debates. Suppose you had to chose between my life and the life of your child or children. You probably would chose the life of your own. Similarly for me. This is, if you will, a normally minor conflict of interest between us.
My view is that you are confusing your interests with some sort of moral knowledge. I don't have children, but I believe I would maintain my views even if I had children. I have considered those other viewpoints. At a wild and perhaps unfair guess, I'd wager that you had an awakening when you have one or more children and experienced a new way of viewing the world. To continue, you probably now view that former self as ignorant or worse. My take is that you are being too unfair on people like your former self. We never will have a full view of the world or of implications of moral dilemmas. We must decide based on incomplete knowledge and experience, subject to our biases.
My view is that no matter how this law is interpreted or implemented, it will never have a measurable effect on the evils of exploiting children for pornography and sex. In exchange, it burdens society with more pointless restrictions and increases the power of government. Allowing politicians to make laws with negligible moral impact and thereby rewarding those politicians with increased power is one of the worst things a democracy can do.
Opposing laws like this are some of those things that you should do for your children.
HAHA, if you are between 16 and 18, it is already illegal for you to watch yourself having legal sex in most countries!
I have children. I believe that people drawing pictures of children IS NOT the same thing as people touching children. Touch my children and risk death. Draw cartoons all you want. Personally, I'd rather the perverts wank to hand-drawn cartoons than to images of REAL children. No one gets harmed by cartoons - published or otherwise.
Correction: The difference it makes is that if you've never had kids then you can only reliably argue with facts, not emotions.
Not proven. And even if it were, not anybody else's business.
See above.
Not proven.
Not proven - so vague as to be meaningless, hence unprovable.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I find child pornography as revolting as anyone (aside from the sickos, of course). That said, I staunchly defend anyone's right to artistic expression, regardless of how revolting I might find it. You can't have it both ways; either you have freedom of expression, or you wind up legislating it away.
As long as no actual child is harmed, I cannot argue with fictional representations of sexual acts involving children. Are they repulsive? Yes. I'll still fight hard to defend the right to create such content, on the grounds that no actual person is being hurt.
In short, I find your agreement with legislating morality as it pertains to freedom of expression to be obscene.
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It's yucky and I don't like it personally so you shouldn't be allowed to do it. Decent people (like me) all agree.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.