reasons of proportionality
Yeah, good job you guys. Violence is not that bad. Scenes where children are being killed in movies (American Sniper) are not even questioned and yet we are crying about drawings. Don’t even get me started on the movie “IT”.
This.
I’m seeing a lot of double-speak from the German outlets in these posts. It’s like they can’t decide between moral appeasement or logical thinking.
What I find funny is that flooding the underground CSAM market full of fictitious and non-abusive, yet satisfactory images is part of the majority opinion in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition for why virtual/simulated child pornography is protected by the First Amendment.
The Government next argues that its objective of eliminating the market for pornography produced using real children necessitates a prohibition on virtual images as well. Virtual images, the Government contends, are indistinguishable from real ones; they are part of the same market and are often exchanged. In this way, it is said, virtual images promote the trafficking in works produced through the exploitation of real children. The hypothesis is somewhat implausible. If virtual images were identical to illegal child pornography, the illegal images would be driven from the market by the indistinguishable substitutes. Few pornographers would risk prosecution by abusing real children if fictional, computerized images would suffice.
I find the vitriol against child sex dolls and simulated child pornography to be without merit. There is no causal link between the consumption of these images and subsequent contact offenses against children.
Yeah, it’s uncomfortable.
Yeah, it’s icky.
Yes, it’s uncanny and even downright offensive.
But so are other things, things with arguably less ‘value’.
Yup… it’s so frustrating to think about. With the continuing rise of AI and more and more sophisticated computer graphics we could (soon) be in a situation where we could flood child pornography platforms with massive amounts of comparatively easily generated virtual child pornography, which involves no real child, swamping out and thus pushing aside the material where real children were harmed.
Instead fictional material is banned, ensuring that the real stuff is kept alive and circulating without competition. And then this situation and the rising number of child pornography cases is used as a popular argument – not to rethink the basic approach of tackling the issue mind you, but to vote for more and harder punishments, even though the laws have been made stricter at least half a dozen times already now with absolutely no positive effect.
I theorize that most pedophiles who do watch child pornography do not actually want children to be harmed, and would eagerly accept any alternative where no children are involved in the production. The state should support and subsidize those alternatives, and I am almost sure this would do more to drain the consumer base of real child pornography then any number of police raids and jail sentences. With virtual child pornography that is basically indistinguishable from reality, the only ones remaining that would be looking for real material would be psychopathic sadists, who explicitly seek out and enjoy the suffering of real children, and that is (hopefully) quite a small group.
Again, too many people want to LARP as Vampire Hunters or something, and we are the common group that can be labeled as “monsters”. I say this as someone who, in games, specializes in hunting Hunters.
Most people don’t really care tho. They just love to share their disgust and then move on. “Oh this guy got prison for a drawing? Serves him well!”. I doubt that the majority even pro-actively does anything other than complain.
It’s more about wanting to watch public executions like in the medieval times. Humans love seeing “monsters” suffer.
And that’s exactly why I love seeing the monsters make the stupid humans suffer. Thank you, Overlord:
One thing that hasn’t been said on this: what about the lawyers who would be required to defend people caught up in this? Especially public defenders.
Like so many they will not see logical arguments, purely emotional, moralistic ones. Not to mention, from a business point of view, they would emphatically eschew any accusation of being “paedo sympathisers”.
Regardless of how defendants might wish to expose the hypocrisy of prosecuting someone for a victimless crime; unless they’ve got extremely sympathetic, brave and principled lawyers (good luck finding one of those) there isn’t going to be much the legislators and advocates of this tactic are going to be particularly concerned about… and they know it.
“Indistinguishable from reality”
Nice to know German police are way ahead of Hollywood in terms of cgi.
Even if the technology isn’t “truly” indistinguishable as of yet, one day it surely will be. But guess what? It doesn’t matter how “real” it LOOKS, it’s still fake as fuck. Only in cases where it was, say, based on someone real could a case be made against it, but otherwise? How do you prove it isn’t a coincidence (only so many human faces)? What if you can’t prove beyond a shadow of a doubt it’s truly based on some random kid from a stock image? If no IRL minor is being taken advantage of (digitally or otherwise), no crime has occurred and any conviction made is absolutely unjust.