Re: Thoughtcrime (Re: My War)

[Lucky Green <shamrock@netcom.com>]

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.

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