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Japan Moves Toward Blocking Online Child Porn
crimeandpunishment writes "In the wake of increased international demands that it do something about its legal lenience toward child pornography, Japan is beginning to take action, albeit slowly. Thursday a government task force recommended that kiddie porn sites be blocked as soon as they're discovered, instead of waiting for an investigation or arrests. Making or distributing child porn is illegal in Japan, but possession is not ... and critics have called that a legal loophole making Japan an international hub for child porn."
simply keeping child porn around on your HDD should not be illegal and what the rest of the world should be doing instead of criticizing japan.
just because 235235235235.jpg on the porn site you visited happens to be of a 17 year old girl instead of 18 and is stored in your browser cache DOES NOT MAKE YOU A PEDO.
GO JAPAN!
I remember reading it is like twelve years old. That might not be true, but even if it is, who the fuck is the USA to tell Japan what constitutes child pornography?
If kids can make porn legally in Japan, who's fucking business is it really other than the Japanese?
I don't know if you have noticed this but the US has been known to tell all sorts of sovereign states what they should and shouldn't do on quite a number of topics. Its the type of action that causes all sorts of people to yell and complain about imperialism by the US.
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Child prostitution should be illegal everywhere. Child porn is evidence of child prostitution in some cases and child abuse in others. It shouldn't be difficult to block websites from selling it.
To stop people from viewing it is a different matter entirely and in my opinion is technically impossible and unconstitutional because its relying on thought crime legislation. As long as no children are being victimized and nobody is profiting from it, it's not a problem.
Why should the GP back up an argument he/she never made?
Note: "preventing spread of CP" != "protecting actual victims"
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
While child porn is certainly a very terrible thing, the rush to suppress it brings up an interesting point.
we often hear these two arguments:
possessing child porn = supports the industry and encourages further production
possessing downloaded music/movies = damages the industry and threatens further production
If downloading media is such a serious threat to the production of new content that laws have to be introduced to prevent unauthorized sharing, why isn't anyone suggesting that downloading child porn be encouraged to drive the producers out of business?
I guess one, (or both) of the above statements is false. Anyone care to take a guess which?
-I only code in BASIC.-
and searched usenets for childporn. I found it, and then deleted it. Months later my computer was seized by law enforcement because the guy I was renting a room from was under investigation for a completely separate matter.
The deleted cp was discovered and I was charged with posession. No jail time, but did have to work at the local animal shelter for a couple days a week for a couple months. The lawyer bill was about $4,000.
I would probably be much more bitter about the whole episode had I ended up being a Registered Sex Offender. Turns out that in my state the offender registry is reserved for the more serious offenses.
Witches are being hunted down, non-believers are being tortured: it's easy to see all our technological progress and think that we've progressed far beyond the fire and stake.
--
Independent of the age at which something becomes "child porn", this expression is way too much overused. There was a time when someone saying "child porn" was sounding an alarm, today it's like background noise.
I admit I've seen lots and lots of porn on the web, but never anything that could be remotely called "child porn", unless you call adult women with small breasts and shaved pubic hair "children". If this "child porn" thing actually exists, which I doubt, it's so well hidden that any measures about blocking it are useless. Better try to block the Illuminati instead.
Sadly, the politicians have learned to use "child porn" like they use "terrorism", a convenient handle by which they are able to manipulate the masses.
Japan tried this once. They failed.
I know I'm not alone in feeling uncomfortable about Western society's view of sex and nudity as something dangerous, mysterious, and generally negative. It varies from country to country, but it feels like we're continuing to regress into a puritanical and uneducated fear of our reproductive systems, even while other parts of our society leverage that fear - churches, MTV, clothing companies, magazines..
I worry that we're sending the wrong message to youth. That they should be denied sexual education, and told that they will be punished for developing sexually before some arbitrary age - typically several years after the onset of puberty.
Now I'm not going to argue that real commercial kiddy porn is a positive thing. But I also wish humanity would take a step back, a deep breath, and view the issue with some amount of rationality. For crying out loud, we're locking up our children for sending nude images of themselves! Talk about psychosis.
Many men are terrified to approach and help a child in need for fear of being caught up in this institutionalized hunt.
We're justifying censorship, Internet filtering, gestapo-state police invasions, horrific prison terms... for pictures. For all we know (and we don't because research on the subject is utterly impossible), pictures help otherwise decent human beings who happen to be attracted to young people to cope with their sexual orientation. By threatening dozens of years in jail for simple possession, we could be encouraging those inclined to go out and find the real thing.
Why not focus our efforts and energy on things we can (probably) all agree are worse for kids than possession of images like ending child hunger and poverty, war, child soldiers, and such things? Japan can sort her own issues.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
What you are doing (besides drooling on your keyboard) is called an "Appeal to emotion" and is usually done by someone who cannot argue the facts because they aren't on his/her side, hence the emotion. What your rant cannot change is this: Busting someone who has drawn images is a thoughtcrime, nothing less. With real CP a real child got hurt, but with hentai and lolicon someone used ink and paper to draw what they thought. If you can be arrested and lose your freedom for putting your thoughts on paper? pretty much the definition of a thoughtcrime.
So you go ahead with your foaming at the mouth while the rest of us have an intelligent discussion, kay? Have you ever talked to law enforcement and asked what they thought on the subject? I used to have lunch daily with a guy working the state crime lab in charge of CP (He tried to recruit me but....bleech) and you know what he said? The average amount of children abused by those evil CP collectors? Zero. Most were socially retarded losers that would hide in the corner if you offered them a naked anything. One he said even screeched like a wild animal if anyone came into physical contact with him, yet the average term being handed out for these dangerous criminals? 40 years. They would have actually gotten less time if they had actually raped and murdered a teenager than for possessing pictures. Sorry dude, that is seriously fucked up.
So I have to go with my friend here who thought a better use of the resources would have been to get therapy and rehab for sex addiction for those that hadn't actually touched anybody, and instead used the resources they were wasting on their prosecution for hunting down those that made the images in the first place. He also said the witch hunt atmosphere made it nearly impossible to try to "flip" one of the low level consumers to get higher up the chain, because no prosecutor would dare give a deal to anyone caught with CP and looking at 40 years+ they simply had no incentive to turn. So your "sick childfucker" drool drool drool is actually making things worse, as anyone who has experience with law enforcement knows one of the best ways you have to break a criminal org is by snitches, which thanks to the witch hunt we simply don't have because guys like you would vote any prosecutor that cut a deal out of office. Great going there, congrats.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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Yes, obviously child porn is bad... that this is already a horrible piece of dogmatic reasoning, is not even the worsed of it. What is next?
Read up on "The people vs Harry Flint". Why did so many people come to the defence of a porn peddler? A crude porn peddler at that? Why defend a guy selling smuts with a few crude and insulting attackings on decent public people thrown in? (Some child porn addicts call this parody/satire) Because of this:
First they came...
It might be one of the most paraphrased quotes in history but it remains extremely valid. Remember, the guy who said it was a nazi symphatizer. Or to put it in this context, the anti-porn peddler hit by anti-depravity laws.
"obviously child porn is bad". I call this dogmatic because it leaves no room for argument, this is the classic tactic of the dictator. "Obviously X is bad" has been used countless times. Put communism in place for X and you got the McCarthy trials. Put independent woman and you got the witch hunts. And you can't argue against it, because it is obvious. You get to the point that just arguing against it becomes a crime by itself.
Child porn is the moralists dream. Nobody can argue that sex with a toddler should be allowed, so you have won the entire argument and then it becomes just a matter of constantly increasing the definition of child and eventually porn. Different countries have different ages of consent. Do you REALLY want the entire world to have to accept the age of consent of the most puritan nation on earth? Plenty of arguments to raise the age to 21. Say bye bye to any porn and once you accepted that to any nudity. Venus the Milo? Could be under 21, FORBIDDEN!
One of the indicators that the people who want to introduce these bans have not so hidden agenda's is that they talk bull shit. Japan is introducing censorship because of international pressure. Funny, Japan goes on whaling despite international pressure. It keep denying its warcrimes despite international pressure. But the one thing that could benefit the Japanese content industry like Sony, that they act upon. Oh, you don't see how censorhip of CP can benefit Sony?
Simple, file sharing networks are filled with CP and copyrighted content. Ban them for the CP and the copyrighted content follows. Freedom of exchange information means CP. Can't be helped, just asked the people behind Freenet. By its very nature the founders of freenet support CP because that has become the ultimate test of free anonymous speech. If you support that people have the right, the need, to be able to share any document without fear of reprisal, then you support the exchange of CP in practice.
It is simple really, freedom is the freedom to do really bad things. If you are free to drink, then you are free to drink yourself to death. If you are free to buy a rope, then you are free to hang yourself (remember that one of the first things they do when you freedom is removed in a jail, you are stopped from having the means to commit suicide).
Freedom is not some limited concept. You can't say: "well you can't do these things because a lot of people find them disgusting" because there will always be someone somewhere who finds something disgusting. You might not like 2 girls 1 cup but you would like it even less if all the content of the world had to pass through the approval of some Utah citizen.
But because of Dogma, if you want to protect freedom, you are defending the CP peddlers. It is almost impossible to fight this and I am fairly certain we will come to regret this. "Daddy, where were you when they took freedom away". "Why, I was thinking of you my dear, I killed your freedom to protect you."
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