It's a business lobbying consortium. It's not designed to advocate the views of the individual -- it's to try to siphon Homeland Security money into the coffers of RSA and a couple of security-related companies.
That doesn't mean that it won't have positive benefits -- I would *dearly* love to somehow see increased emphasis on security finally convince people to use PGP more -- but these people are not out to try and make your life better, a la the EFF.
The United States couldn't finish the Microsoft case during the Clinton administration, but it may be the Japanese that cause Microsoft to adopt tactics conducive to competition.
They gave us anime, lots of neat consumer electronics, and Microsoft a slap upside the head. Japan gets two thumbs up from me.
I think that the probability is lower, but the potential damage of having a government that is not stably prevented from becoming a police state is immense. Sure, less likely, but really really awful if it does happen.
There's some kind of law about corpse desecration in at least some states of the US -- I've definitely seen cases where people were charged with it. I suspect that a practicing necrophile could be charged under such a law.
Necrophilia and cannibalism are often textbook cases of relativism in Philosophy or Ethics 101...So a person who adheres to Relativism can make any claim he likes - but the belief system isn't even self consistent. Punch a Relativist in the teeth - if he wants to file a police report, he has proven that his belief system is a fraud. Yeah, maybe necrophilia and cannibalism aren't obviously harmful, but declaring them as harmful isn't exactly controversial.
Absolute relativism is quite different from the belief that necrophilia could be morally valid. Trying to equate the two is a slippery slope fallacy.
I wasn't arguing that something was appropriate because it was natural. I was arguing against someone (the parent poster to my post) that claimed that the naturality or unnaturality of an act formed a valid criterion for determining whether it was acceptable or not. I was just listing counterexamples.
This is a simple concept. I do not want my child to be gay. Ask every person in the U.S. if they want their child to be gay.
More than 80% will say no (yes I'm guessing).
We do not want to legitimize something we do not want.
Hmm. This is an interesting, concise argument that I haven't heard before.
Okay, let's see. The problem I have is that there are two assumptions in your post that I'm not sure are well-founded. The first is that legitimizing gay behavior is likely to produce more gays. I'm not sure that this is the case. Do people "decide to become gay" or are they simply gay, and forced out of fear of overwhelming social repercussions to act as if they aren't?
Suppose your daughter is a lesbian and finds other women sexually attractive. Is it socially healthier to attempt to drive such behavior out of her from fear, by ensuring that she marries a man and has sex with him, or to not attempt to inflict fear on her (and thus increase the likelihood that she engages in sex with other women, rather than just lusting after them)?
The second assumption is that it's a good idea to keep things that we don't want to have happen illegitimate. For example, I suspect that many parents would prefer that their children become doctors or lawyers rather than (generally much poorer) artists. Is a good solution to that problem to ridicule artists, to make them always feel uncomfortable in society, in the hopes that your own child will be ashamed to become an artist? If she does, would you consider ridiculing artists as stupid, poverty-stricken incompetents, or would you stop? Would you be angry if *other* people ridiculed your daughter or son and made them live in shame for their career choice?
I think that this is what many people are grappling with. There are a lot of people out there who have been treated very badly because of their sexual attractions. It's possible to force their behavior underground, at a cost of some suicides, depression, and whatnot, but are the benefits really worth it?
Reserving the word "marriage" for heterosexual unions seems to be primarily useful as a tool to segregate, to attack people, to make them feel badly ("you aren't *married*").
I think that the optimal solution is probably to have states stop issuing marriage certificates, only issue civil union certificates (which, for Chrissake, is what they're *really* doing) and let religious institutions define marriages as whatever they want. If someone wants to be married in a Catholic church, great, and if two lesbians want to be married in some other church that accepts it, great. I don't think this will happen, though, because it would be so much more difficult to reduce marriage to a subset of its current meaning than to increase it to a superset.
You cannont naturally procreate in a homosexual relationship. Therefore it is a perversion of nature.
Does this also make blowjobs between a man and a woman a peversion of nature? Is manual stimulation between same a peversion of nature?
An argument about what is "natural" seems to generally come down to an attempt to justify an unjustifiable system of morals.
Hobbes argued that the "natural state" of humanity is essentially anarchy, an inability to get along, and that government is basically unnatural. He doesn't see that as a bad thing, though.
Playing video games doesn't help in reproduction. As a matter of fact, it's probably detrimental to doing so. Is this an unnatural peversion that should be banned?
What about abstinence? The concept of avoiding sex based purely on self-control doesn't seem to be a particularly "natural" state of affairs -- it actively detracts from reproduction, and it's not what we once did, yet the same religious groups that use the "natural" argument seem to push abstinence.
Just because a site is media rich doesn't mean it's using Flash.
That's not what I claimed -- it's the converse of what I said.
The original poster wrote that using Flash on media-rich sites is justified. I followed up that using Flash *makes* a site media-rich. You said that not all media-rich sites use Flash, which while true, is only a counterargument to the converse of what I said.
Also, Flash greatly enhances the user experience, especially in online learning situations where animations are required or on sites where navigation goes beyond the standard HTML hierarchy.
I can't think of a situation where online learning would require Flash because it's online learning.
Flash content is great for the disabled because it can screen read for them,
The same can be read for non-Flash, with the added benefit that a disabled person can set their browser up to do so for *all* sites, as opposed to the one where the webmaster implemented speaking functionality.
Color contrast can be adjusted, font size can be adjusted, etc
Both can be done without Flash -- I enlarge my own browser font so that I can sit well back from the monitor. Heck, the lightweight browser I use is dillo, which *definitely* doesn't have any CSS support, and certainly supports increasing font size.
OTOH we don't dump several hundred foreigners on offshore islands and deny them rights to trial (we only do it to a few of them and we let them "leave" back to their original country whenever they wish - which is magnanimous of us given some of them will probably be shot if they do that..)
Our doing that was probably illegal by our own laws and by international agreements we've entered. But, yes, touche.
I don't think the US or UK neccessarily score highly here.
Mmmf. I get frusterated with both as well, but really, I've said quite a few controversial things in my life, and I've yet to wake up with a gun muzzle aimed at my forehead. I mean, what nations are more accepting of controversial opinions?
Yeah, because people should be free to do what they hell they like on-line, free from any kind of rules and regulations that are designed to protect our society.
Yes, but society is not in danger from someone's porn or fetish material.
SYN-flooding me is illegal, and *does* pose a danger to society -- massive SYN floods can severely screw up the Internet's ability to function. Whether or not Joe down the hall finds girls covered in raw egg appealing (and likes to talk about said subject with other people on the Internet) is not a danger to society, and does not prevent me from living my own life.
The thing that blew me away about that case is that he didn't publish his journal, which contained said story.
I mean, I'd personally still find throwing someone in jail for ten years for distributing a story objectionable (heck, I'd find throwing someone in jail for distributing a story at all objectionalbe), but this is a guy who did nothing but record his private thoughts in a private journal, just like zillions of other people, who was arrested and convicted for doing so. Amazing.
If you run a service that arguably exists only to facilitate crime, expect to end up arguing about it in court. This isn't complicated - if you run a website that facilitates crime you can be found liable and guilty of breaking laws.
I don't buy it. You're talking about content aimed an cannibalism fetishists versus the actual, physical crime of cannibalism. There are damned few actual cannibals running around. Serial murderers have a habit of standing out.
Here's an article written by a cannibalism and snuff fetishist. I think that you'll find that it's pretty clear that said person finds actual cannibalism frightening and appalling. There is a tremendous line between people that run out and kill and eat people, and people that have cannibal fantasies. There is a tremendous difference between people that fantasize about BSDM content and actual rapists. There is a tremdous difference between fantasizing about killing your boss/George Bush and actually doing so. There is a tremdous difference between people that fantasize about having sex with an actress and the guy that actually goes out and starts stalking her. The line between the two is quite significant. The issue that I take is that the police officer in the article is either ignoring that line, or attempting to draw connections across the line that I'm not sure I find convincing.
The police are looking at something that can pose a danger to normal people, and addressing it suitably.
I'm a bit dubious as to the "danger to normal people" aspect. The only place I've seen that is in the police chief's assertions.
To present cannibalism as a real "danger to normal people" (and as far as I can tell, cannibalism hasn't even come up, just material relating to cannibalism fetishes on web sites, which is akin to the relationship between BSDM websites and the crime of rape or gay webistes and the crime of sodomy), you'd have to successfully argue both that there are "normal people" being cannibalized at a level that there is a public safety issue, and then you'd have to argue that people were killed for the sake of being eaten, rather than just a serial killer who decides, for whatever reason, to eat the dead victim.
I don't even think that cannibalism *is* a significant worry to "normal people", to be honest. I'm a bit of an interest in reading about weird and bizarre crimes, and I've read about all the cannibals on crimelibrary.com. People that killed for the sake of eating were *extremely* rare. Of the cannibals, there were a number that ate to dispose of evidence or other reasons, but not many that were known to kill specifically out of a desire to eat human flesh.
Breaking an existing regulation is a more or less accepted way to bring attention to the fact you disagree with it. People that break such rules do so knowing that they'll go to court for it.
The only other real alternative is open discussion. Clearly, based on the comments in this forum, things are not cut-and-dried in any direction.
At public schools, no less. In fact, there are private, state, and federal programs in place to distribute mechanisms of birth control to people, with a focus on young people.
I'll buy into "private" and possibly "state", but I suspect that there are no federal programs in place to either hand out the Pill or condoms or what-have-you.
Just like it's ok for a woman to strip down naked and hump a pole in a strip club, but it's not ok for her to do the same thing at a bus stop, for reasons beyond the simple infection risk.
I contend that the primary oppontent to public nudity is from religious groups, and I furthermore claim that if we let relgious groups immutably dictate our social norms in the United States, we'd still be burning witches.
We allow bare-breasted breastfeeding. France allows toplessness on beaches. Neither of those seem to have crushed society. Yet there's some fundamental issue with nudity? (By the way, the Wikipedia article on nudity is fairly interesting, and worth a read.
Why, other than as a claim founded in your particular set of morals?
And not every permutation and combination of human desire *should* be expressed.
That's a pretty weak statement. I don't think you'll find anyone proposing to do "every permutation and combination". If, however, we return to a particular issue, say, necrophilia...I'm not sure that I can simply say "no, this souldn't be the case". I don't see an honest, convincing reason why necrophliac material should be censored. I've tried to come up with a couple, but they all seem awfully unconvincing.
if there's not going to be self-restraint,
It's hardly *self*-restraint if it's censorship being imposed.
Yes, we must have the freedom to express political dissent
At what point do you draw the line between "political dissent" and "interests that much of the population does not agree with and toys with banning"? I grant that you will probably *get* political dissent from the disenfranchised necrophilia porn affeciandos after you ban their content, but aren't morals, values, and desires the foundation of political feelings? If Catholicism is banned nationally, how can the Catholics ever manage to get people consider Cathlicism seriously enough to bring up a political debate over whether Catholicism should be allowed? The system you are advocating pushes the establishment of a static system of social norms nd ethics. So we wouldn't have *had* homosexuals able to rally politically, because homosexual content would have been suppressed.
And, sure, I'd rather not the govt be doing this, but are you going to put your ps2 controller down to solve the problems of pedophilia and terrorism?
So unless we are actively and individually fighting to exercise each right we have, the government should have the freedom to take those rights away? I haven't been actively exercising my political voice, so the government should be able to take that voice away?
Frankly, I view pedophilia and terrorism as the #1 overrated-but-useful-for-controlling-fear topics in the UK and the United States, respectively. They are both easily used to manipulate citizenry, and are blown wildly out of proportion relative to more damaging issues.
Note that it's quite funny that many countries catch flak for "violating UN mandates" when a number of first world countries quite deliberately and regularly violate them. I used to have a signature that pointed to a list of war crimes the US committed in Iraq (Gulf War I), including violations of UN rules, the Geneva convention, the US Constitution, and the like.
By putting the word "abhorrent" in speech marks the poster suggests that these practices are somehow merely borderline or even acceptable.
Would you eat another human if you were stranded on an island for a month with a couple of other people, and you had a chance of living through the period if some of the strandees were eaten? Here's an even better one -- what if your child/sister/mother could be saved by consuming the flesh of one of those people? Would you sacrifice a life to stick to social norms?
I claim that the primary reason for avoiding cannibalism is because of a specific moral mandate against it. I furthermore claim that morals exist because they provide general, irrational rules that can be useful (because they don't allow one to make logical rules, and immediately rule out potentially harmful behavior). Cannibalism is dangerous because it provides a severe disease vector (quite serious in some animals where cannibalism is common), because if conducted on unwilling subjects, it can mean that people might lose the ability to not have to "watch their back", so folks have built up moral imperatives not to engage in cannibalism. But morality is frequently irrational, and doesn't always suggest the best course of action.
Would we be worse off if we had cannibals running around? Yeah, probably. Are we worse off with people drinking alcohol in society? Yeah, probably. Which one is more likely to cost more lives? Frankly, I'm a lot more frightened being in a bar with a violent drunk than I am of someone eating me.
I live in a democracy that allows me, should I so wish, to *campaign* for the legalisation for necrophilia.
Free speech allows me to campaign for changes to the law, but it doesn't allow me to flaunt the laws I don't like.
Do you speed?
More people are killed from speeding than from cannibals.
If you speed, why do you consider flaunting the law on it reasonable, but necrophilia unacceptable?
Heck, speeding can kill living people. Necrophilia, at worse, offends the sensibilities of a few people (not involved) and potentially religious beliefs (again, of a few people not involved in the act). Why is necrophilia unacceptable, but homosexuality acceptable? Heck, why are *blowjobs* acceptable? There are people offended by blowjobs. What gives you the right to engage in sexual behavior with your willing partner that offends those people? And why doesn't it give that same right to necrophiliacs? Women don't reproduce with their mouths, so you getting a blowjob makes no evolutionary sense, and really doesn't have any justification other than "it feels good and I like it" -- the same justification a necrophiliac would use.
Because the guy that accepted to be killed had some psychological/psychiatric probems
What do you define as "problems"? Is it in "differing from the norm"? Do you define Heaven's Gate cult members to have problems, wanting to ride a UFO away? How about Christians, who think that there is an all-powerful Father that they're going to hang out with after they get sideswiped by a Ford Explorer? How about a number of fundamental religious types that refuse modern medical treatment? How about left-handers -- that was considered problematic behavior at one point, and left-handers were frequently forced to modify their behavior in an attempt to train them to act "properly". Did Albert Einstein have "problems" for using bizarre and uncommon ideas? Is it things that might pose a threat to you, or society at large? Is it a subconscious fear that you or a loved one might be killed and eaten, and that you are vaguely suspicious that necrophiliac material promotes necrophiliac behavior? Or, what about actual necrophilia -- in this case, both subjects were willing and interested. Should they be prevented from doing so? Perhaps you're concerned that they are being self-destructive, which is clearly irrational. What about people that pierce themselves or have their tongues surgicially forked -- isn't that behavior self-destructive? How about people that have their children circumcised -- genital mutilation -- is that acceptable, and if so, why? Is Russian roulette "problem" behavior, and if so, why is white water rafting not?
so did the freak that was doing the cannibalism.
You clearly intend "freak" as a perjorative, but yes, he certainly had different desires than the general population.
A sane, modern society would :
Oh, good. This promises controversy.
Help the guy that got killed with his mental problems,
By "help", you mean "bring into line with the general population, because his thoughts deviate unacceptably", right? Remember Turing -- society "helped" him to be straight. It did work to make him more in line with what's considered normal. Of course, it also forced hormone injections and behavior modification on him, and eventually drove him to sucide. Perhaps that isn't a "sane, modern society"? After all, that was a good fifty years ago that the Brits were doing this. Maybe we should look to today, where people that protest male circumcision have problems and people that advocate female circumcision have problems?
Try to fix whatever is wrong with the cannibal's brain/social behavior, and/or handle people like that by removing them from society to prevent harm.
What do you consider harm? Killing someone that wanted to die? Are assisted suicides harmful? Why are sports car dealers legal, when they facilitate people engaging in behavior that risks human lives? Why is Go acceptable? People waste *years* of their life on something that has minimal benefit to society versus other things they could be doing -- Go is clearly self-destructive behavior, but you have no problem with it being played? Why?
Something cannot be considered "consentual" if it can only be consented by someone with serious psychiatric problems. There's a huge difference between most consentual acts, like sex (straight and otherwise), drinking, smoking (tobacco or otherwise) and getting killed by someone for his own pleasure.
Ah, now we get some answers. The sort of people with problems, that need to be helped back into normalcy, are those with "serious psychiatric problems". Or do we? It seems like this is a circular definition.
Among behavior that has been considered abnormal and in need of correction at various times:
* Homosexuality (up to and including this century)
* Polygamy (current US)
* Heresy (Mideval England)
* Left-handedness (US public schools, until sometime in the last hundred years)
Slashdot Mirror
It's a business lobbying consortium. It's not designed to advocate the views of the individual -- it's to try to siphon Homeland Security money into the coffers of RSA and a couple of security-related companies.
That doesn't mean that it won't have positive benefits -- I would *dearly* love to somehow see increased emphasis on security finally convince people to use PGP more -- but these people are not out to try and make your life better, a la the EFF.
The United States couldn't finish the Microsoft case during the Clinton administration, but it may be the Japanese that cause Microsoft to adopt tactics conducive to competition.
They gave us anime, lots of neat consumer electronics, and Microsoft a slap upside the head. Japan gets two thumbs up from me.
Excellent and informative series of posts. Thanks.
I think that the probability is lower, but the potential damage of having a government that is not stably prevented from becoming a police state is immense. Sure, less likely, but really really awful if it does happen.
There's some kind of law about corpse desecration in at least some states of the US -- I've definitely seen cases where people were charged with it. I suspect that a practicing necrophile could be charged under such a law.
Necrophilia and cannibalism are often textbook cases of relativism in Philosophy or Ethics 101...So a person who adheres to Relativism can make any claim he likes - but the belief system isn't even self consistent. Punch a Relativist in the teeth - if he wants to file a police report, he has proven that his belief system is a fraud. Yeah, maybe necrophilia and cannibalism aren't obviously harmful, but declaring them as harmful isn't exactly controversial.
Absolute relativism is quite different from the belief that necrophilia could be morally valid. Trying to equate the two is a slippery slope fallacy.
I wasn't arguing that something was appropriate because it was natural. I was arguing against someone (the parent poster to my post) that claimed that the naturality or unnaturality of an act formed a valid criterion for determining whether it was acceptable or not. I was just listing counterexamples.
Good point.
As Calvin put it "What, did some guy just grab a cow and say 'I think I'll drink whatever comes out of this thing when I squeeze it'?"
This is a simple concept. I do not want my child to be gay. Ask every person in the U.S. if they want their child to be gay.
More than 80% will say no (yes I'm guessing).
We do not want to legitimize something we do not want.
Hmm. This is an interesting, concise argument that I haven't heard before.
Okay, let's see. The problem I have is that there are two assumptions in your post that I'm not sure are well-founded. The first is that legitimizing gay behavior is likely to produce more gays. I'm not sure that this is the case. Do people "decide to become gay" or are they simply gay, and forced out of fear of overwhelming social repercussions to act as if they aren't?
Suppose your daughter is a lesbian and finds other women sexually attractive. Is it socially healthier to attempt to drive such behavior out of her from fear, by ensuring that she marries a man and has sex with him, or to not attempt to inflict fear on her (and thus increase the likelihood that she engages in sex with other women, rather than just lusting after them)?
The second assumption is that it's a good idea to keep things that we don't want to have happen illegitimate. For example, I suspect that many parents would prefer that their children become doctors or lawyers rather than (generally much poorer) artists. Is a good solution to that problem to ridicule artists, to make them always feel uncomfortable in society, in the hopes that your own child will be ashamed to become an artist? If she does, would you consider ridiculing artists as stupid, poverty-stricken incompetents, or would you stop? Would you be angry if *other* people ridiculed your daughter or son and made them live in shame for their career choice?
I think that this is what many people are grappling with. There are a lot of people out there who have been treated very badly because of their sexual attractions. It's possible to force their behavior underground, at a cost of some suicides, depression, and whatnot, but are the benefits really worth it?
Reserving the word "marriage" for heterosexual unions seems to be primarily useful as a tool to segregate, to attack people, to make them feel badly ("you aren't *married*").
I think that the optimal solution is probably to have states stop issuing marriage certificates, only issue civil union certificates (which, for Chrissake, is what they're *really* doing) and let religious institutions define marriages as whatever they want. If someone wants to be married in a Catholic church, great, and if two lesbians want to be married in some other church that accepts it, great. I don't think this will happen, though, because it would be so much more difficult to reduce marriage to a subset of its current meaning than to increase it to a superset.
You cannont naturally procreate in a homosexual relationship. Therefore it is a perversion of nature.
Does this also make blowjobs between a man and a woman a peversion of nature? Is manual stimulation between same a peversion of nature?
An argument about what is "natural" seems to generally come down to an attempt to justify an unjustifiable system of morals.
Hobbes argued that the "natural state" of humanity is essentially anarchy, an inability to get along, and that government is basically unnatural. He doesn't see that as a bad thing, though.
Playing video games doesn't help in reproduction. As a matter of fact, it's probably detrimental to doing so. Is this an unnatural peversion that should be banned?
What about abstinence? The concept of avoiding sex based purely on self-control doesn't seem to be a particularly "natural" state of affairs -- it actively detracts from reproduction, and it's not what we once did, yet the same religious groups that use the "natural" argument seem to push abstinence.
Just because a site is media rich doesn't mean it's using Flash.
That's not what I claimed -- it's the converse of what I said.
The original poster wrote that using Flash on media-rich sites is justified. I followed up that using Flash *makes* a site media-rich. You said that not all media-rich sites use Flash, which while true, is only a counterargument to the converse of what I said.
Also, Flash greatly enhances the user experience, especially in online learning situations where animations are required or on sites where navigation goes beyond the standard HTML hierarchy.
I can't think of a situation where online learning would require Flash because it's online learning.
Flash content is great for the disabled because it can screen read for them,
The same can be read for non-Flash, with the added benefit that a disabled person can set their browser up to do so for *all* sites, as opposed to the one where the webmaster implemented speaking functionality.
Color contrast can be adjusted, font size can be adjusted, etc
Both can be done without Flash -- I enlarge my own browser font so that I can sit well back from the monitor. Heck, the lightweight browser I use is dillo, which *definitely* doesn't have any CSS support, and certainly supports increasing font size.
OTOH we don't dump several hundred foreigners on offshore islands and deny them rights to trial (we only do it to a few of them and we let them "leave" back to their original country whenever they wish - which is magnanimous of us given some of them will probably be shot if they do that..)
Our doing that was probably illegal by our own laws and by international agreements we've entered. But, yes, touche.
I don't think the US or UK neccessarily score highly here.
Mmmf. I get frusterated with both as well, but really, I've said quite a few controversial things in my life, and I've yet to wake up with a gun muzzle aimed at my forehead. I mean, what nations are more accepting of controversial opinions?
I'm curious as to what you feel that the distinguishing factor is, and whether you can justify it.
Yeah, because people should be free to do what they hell they like on-line, free from any kind of rules and regulations that are designed to protect our society.
Yes, but society is not in danger from someone's porn or fetish material.
SYN-flooding me is illegal, and *does* pose a danger to society -- massive SYN floods can severely screw up the Internet's ability to function. Whether or not Joe down the hall finds girls covered in raw egg appealing (and likes to talk about said subject with other people on the Internet) is not a danger to society, and does not prevent me from living my own life.
The thing that blew me away about that case is that he didn't publish his journal, which contained said story.
I mean, I'd personally still find throwing someone in jail for ten years for distributing a story objectionable (heck, I'd find throwing someone in jail for distributing a story at all objectionalbe), but this is a guy who did nothing but record his private thoughts in a private journal, just like zillions of other people, who was arrested and convicted for doing so. Amazing.
If you run a service that arguably exists only to facilitate crime, expect to end up arguing about it in court. This isn't complicated - if you run a website that facilitates crime you can be found liable and guilty of breaking laws.
I don't buy it. You're talking about content aimed an cannibalism fetishists versus the actual, physical crime of cannibalism. There are damned few actual cannibals running around. Serial murderers have a habit of standing out.
Here's an article written by a cannibalism and snuff fetishist. I think that you'll find that it's pretty clear that said person finds actual cannibalism frightening and appalling. There is a tremendous line between people that run out and kill and eat people, and people that have cannibal fantasies. There is a tremendous difference between people that fantasize about BSDM content and actual rapists. There is a tremdous difference between fantasizing about killing your boss/George Bush and actually doing so. There is a tremdous difference between people that fantasize about having sex with an actress and the guy that actually goes out and starts stalking her. The line between the two is quite significant. The issue that I take is that the police officer in the article is either ignoring that line, or attempting to draw connections across the line that I'm not sure I find convincing.
Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) guarantees the right to freedom of expression.
The ECHR is enacted in English law through the Human Rights Act 1998.
Brits got the right to freedom of expression less than five years ago?
[shakes head] Wow. Culture shock.
The police are looking at something that can pose a danger to normal people, and addressing it suitably.
I'm a bit dubious as to the "danger to normal people" aspect. The only place I've seen that is in the police chief's assertions.
To present cannibalism as a real "danger to normal people" (and as far as I can tell, cannibalism hasn't even come up, just material relating to cannibalism fetishes on web sites, which is akin to the relationship between BSDM websites and the crime of rape or gay webistes and the crime of sodomy), you'd have to successfully argue both that there are "normal people" being cannibalized at a level that there is a public safety issue, and then you'd have to argue that people were killed for the sake of being eaten, rather than just a serial killer who decides, for whatever reason, to eat the dead victim.
I don't even think that cannibalism *is* a significant worry to "normal people", to be honest. I'm a bit of an interest in reading about weird and bizarre crimes, and I've read about all the cannibals on crimelibrary.com. People that killed for the sake of eating were *extremely* rare. Of the cannibals, there were a number that ate to dispose of evidence or other reasons, but not many that were known to kill specifically out of a desire to eat human flesh.
Breaking an existing regulation is a more or less accepted way to bring attention to the fact you disagree with it. People that break such rules do so knowing that they'll go to court for it.
The only other real alternative is open discussion. Clearly, based on the comments in this forum, things are not cut-and-dried in any direction.
At public schools, no less. In fact, there are private, state, and federal programs in place to distribute mechanisms of birth control to people, with a focus on young people.
I'll buy into "private" and possibly "state", but I suspect that there are no federal programs in place to either hand out the Pill or condoms or what-have-you.
Just like it's ok for a woman to strip down naked and hump a pole in a strip club, but it's not ok for her to do the same thing at a bus stop, for reasons beyond the simple infection risk.
I contend that the primary oppontent to public nudity is from religious groups, and I furthermore claim that if we let relgious groups immutably dictate our social norms in the United States, we'd still be burning witches.
We allow bare-breasted breastfeeding. France allows toplessness on beaches. Neither of those seem to have crushed society. Yet there's some fundamental issue with nudity? (By the way, the Wikipedia article on nudity is fairly interesting, and worth a read.
There must be accountability on the web. Period.
Why, other than as a claim founded in your particular set of morals?
And not every permutation and combination of human desire *should* be expressed.
That's a pretty weak statement. I don't think you'll find anyone proposing to do "every permutation and combination". If, however, we return to a particular issue, say, necrophilia...I'm not sure that I can simply say "no, this souldn't be the case". I don't see an honest, convincing reason why necrophliac material should be censored. I've tried to come up with a couple, but they all seem awfully unconvincing.
if there's not going to be self-restraint,
It's hardly *self*-restraint if it's censorship being imposed.
Yes, we must have the freedom to express political dissent
At what point do you draw the line between "political dissent" and "interests that much of the population does not agree with and toys with banning"? I grant that you will probably *get* political dissent from the disenfranchised necrophilia porn affeciandos after you ban their content, but aren't morals, values, and desires the foundation of political feelings? If Catholicism is banned nationally, how can the Catholics ever manage to get people consider Cathlicism seriously enough to bring up a political debate over whether Catholicism should be allowed? The system you are advocating pushes the establishment of a static system of social norms nd ethics. So we wouldn't have *had* homosexuals able to rally politically, because homosexual content would have been suppressed.
And, sure, I'd rather not the govt be doing this, but are you going to put your ps2 controller down to solve the problems of pedophilia and terrorism?
So unless we are actively and individually fighting to exercise each right we have, the government should have the freedom to take those rights away? I haven't been actively exercising my political voice, so the government should be able to take that voice away?
Frankly, I view pedophilia and terrorism as the #1 overrated-but-useful-for-controlling-fear topics in the UK and the United States, respectively. They are both easily used to manipulate citizenry, and are blown wildly out of proportion relative to more damaging issues.
You mean the country that gave us the Statue of Liberty?
Note that it's quite funny that many countries catch flak for "violating UN mandates" when a number of first world countries quite deliberately and regularly violate them. I used to have a signature that pointed to a list of war crimes the US committed in Iraq (Gulf War I), including violations of UN rules, the Geneva convention, the US Constitution, and the like.
By putting the word "abhorrent" in speech marks the poster suggests that these practices are somehow merely borderline or even acceptable.
Would you eat another human if you were stranded on an island for a month with a couple of other people, and you had a chance of living through the period if some of the strandees were eaten? Here's an even better one -- what if your child/sister/mother could be saved by consuming the flesh of one of those people? Would you sacrifice a life to stick to social norms?
I claim that the primary reason for avoiding cannibalism is because of a specific moral mandate against it. I furthermore claim that morals exist because they provide general, irrational rules that can be useful (because they don't allow one to make logical rules, and immediately rule out potentially harmful behavior). Cannibalism is dangerous because it provides a severe disease vector (quite serious in some animals where cannibalism is common), because if conducted on unwilling subjects, it can mean that people might lose the ability to not have to "watch their back", so folks have built up moral imperatives not to engage in cannibalism. But morality is frequently irrational, and doesn't always suggest the best course of action.
Would we be worse off if we had cannibals running around? Yeah, probably. Are we worse off with people drinking alcohol in society? Yeah, probably. Which one is more likely to cost more lives? Frankly, I'm a lot more frightened being in a bar with a violent drunk than I am of someone eating me.
I live in a democracy that allows me, should I so wish, to *campaign* for the legalisation for necrophilia.
Free speech allows me to campaign for changes to the law, but it doesn't allow me to flaunt the laws I don't like.
Do you speed?
More people are killed from speeding than from cannibals.
If you speed, why do you consider flaunting the law on it reasonable, but necrophilia unacceptable?
Heck, speeding can kill living people. Necrophilia, at worse, offends the sensibilities of a few people (not involved) and potentially religious beliefs (again, of a few people not involved in the act). Why is necrophilia unacceptable, but homosexuality acceptable? Heck, why are *blowjobs* acceptable? There are people offended by blowjobs. What gives you the right to engage in sexual behavior with your willing partner that offends those people? And why doesn't it give that same right to necrophiliacs? Women don't reproduce with their mouths, so you getting a blowjob makes no evolutionary sense, and really doesn't have any justification other than "it feels good and I like it" -- the same justification a necrophiliac would use.
Oh, good. A fun post to discuss.
Because the guy that accepted to be killed had some psychological/psychiatric probems
What do you define as "problems"? Is it in "differing from the norm"? Do you define Heaven's Gate cult members to have problems, wanting to ride a UFO away? How about Christians, who think that there is an all-powerful Father that they're going to hang out with after they get sideswiped by a Ford Explorer? How about a number of fundamental religious types that refuse modern medical treatment? How about left-handers -- that was considered problematic behavior at one point, and left-handers were frequently forced to modify their behavior in an attempt to train them to act "properly". Did Albert Einstein have "problems" for using bizarre and uncommon ideas? Is it things that might pose a threat to you, or society at large? Is it a subconscious fear that you or a loved one might be killed and eaten, and that you are vaguely suspicious that necrophiliac material promotes necrophiliac behavior? Or, what about actual necrophilia -- in this case, both subjects were willing and interested. Should they be prevented from doing so? Perhaps you're concerned that they are being self-destructive, which is clearly irrational. What about people that pierce themselves or have their tongues surgicially forked -- isn't that behavior self-destructive? How about people that have their children circumcised -- genital mutilation -- is that acceptable, and if so, why? Is Russian roulette "problem" behavior, and if so, why is white water rafting not?
so did the freak that was doing the cannibalism.
You clearly intend "freak" as a perjorative, but yes, he certainly had different desires than the general population.
A sane, modern society would :
Oh, good. This promises controversy.
Help the guy that got killed with his mental problems,
By "help", you mean "bring into line with the general population, because his thoughts deviate unacceptably", right? Remember Turing -- society "helped" him to be straight. It did work to make him more in line with what's considered normal. Of course, it also forced hormone injections and behavior modification on him, and eventually drove him to sucide. Perhaps that isn't a "sane, modern society"? After all, that was a good fifty years ago that the Brits were doing this. Maybe we should look to today, where people that protest male circumcision have problems and people that advocate female circumcision have problems?
Try to fix whatever is wrong with the cannibal's brain/social behavior, and/or handle people like that by removing them from society to prevent harm.
What do you consider harm? Killing someone that wanted to die? Are assisted suicides harmful? Why are sports car dealers legal, when they facilitate people engaging in behavior that risks human lives? Why is Go acceptable? People waste *years* of their life on something that has minimal benefit to society versus other things they could be doing -- Go is clearly self-destructive behavior, but you have no problem with it being played? Why?
Something cannot be considered "consentual" if it can only be consented by someone with serious psychiatric problems. There's a huge difference between most consentual acts, like sex (straight and otherwise), drinking, smoking (tobacco or otherwise) and getting killed by someone for his own pleasure.
Ah, now we get some answers. The sort of people with problems, that need to be helped back into normalcy, are those with "serious psychiatric problems". Or do we? It seems like this is a circular definition.
Among behavior that has been considered abnormal and in need of correction at various times:
* Homosexuality (up to and including this century)
* Polygamy (current US)
* Heresy (Mideval England)
* Left-handedness (US public schools, until sometime in the last hundred years)
* Any