So I have a friend to whom I have strongly hinted I am into loli. He doesn’t think it should be illegal, but he also thinks it can make people into ticking bombs because according to him, it reinforces those desires. I noticed that today, after describing to him without any details some of the stuff from “Juliette” by Marquis de Sade, he got kind of distant.
How would you respond to a friend who doesn’t want to hang out with you because of your tastes in fictional material?
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I’d preemptly cut them off.
“You support thought policing and precrime. Sorry man, I don’t think we can hang out anymore.”
Don’t give them the upper hand.
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The thing is, he doesn’t think it should be illegal. He just thinks it reinforces the desires and people will then want to abuse kids.
I disagree with him.
I am not sure about distancing myself away, as I don’t want to be seen as the dogmatic one…
“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
Then watch him try and disprove Newton’s third law. 
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Will do!
I also had brought up violent video games and real life violence. I asked if he also thinks violent games incite violence (knowing he plays those games. Low, I know 
). But he said violence was different than sexual desire. I asked him to explain how, and he gave an explanation that didn’t convince me at all. Frankly, I don’t remember it because it didn’t make much sense. It all reeked of him trying to justify why he dislikes fictional depictions of kids and thinks they are wrong.
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Bring up the point that alcohol is the gateway drug to heroin as well.
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Or that living is the gateway to fucking, which is the gateway to fucking kids.
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Actually we aren’t far off the mark… some people want even ADULT porn banned because it leads people to not only abusing women but to abusing kids as it leads to child porn. These people just want to ban shit and make everyone else unhappy and miserable. Fuck them
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I’d try to explain it to them as gently as possible that my tastes in fiction aren’t a reflection of me as a person. Being aggressive won’t do anything except ignite emotions.
But if they’re determined to end the relationship over imagination, there’s not anything that can be done at that point. Might be bummed out for a while, but time heals all wounds so I’d eventually move on.
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I lost a friend to fiction, albeit not in the way the OP has. My friend was jailed in the United States, for writing/editing/hosting non-illustrated, text-only, fiction featuring underage characters engaged in explicit sexual activity. He contracted Covid19 in prison, and died there.
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How was your friend caught? It seems really hard to convict someone over stories.
Damn, I’m so deeply sorry to hear that. That’s unacceptable and inexcusable. Actually disgusting and shameful this happened, far worse to let a man die in jail than just let him embrace fiction.
As to how my late friend (Frank McCoy) was caught, he took no measures to protect himself; he posted under his real name, and his email address also had his real name on it. Frank had this delusion that he could somehow overturn decades of settled law – he wanted to be prosecuted, as he believed that he could thereby overturn Miller v. California, which set out the current obscenity standard in America, in a landmark case argued before the Supreme Court in 1973.
A lot of Americans have this naive faith in the First Amendment to the Constitution – virtually all of them are blissfully unaware of the enormous carve-out for obscenity that started with the Roth case in 1957, wherein it was ruled that the First Amendment does not protect ‘obscenity’.
In New York v. Ferber (1982), the Supreme Court upheld the use of strict standards of obscenity in cases involving children, maintaining that the government’s interest in protecting children was “compelling” and “surpassing.” I
I already referred to the 1973 case Miller v. California, where Marvin Miller, a bookseller was prosecuted over mail-order obscenity. This case established the current legal regime with respect to ‘obscene’ materials. Now, it should be noted that Miller dealt with illustrated materials – my friend’s materials were strictly text-only.
How the Feds proceeded in his case was novel (not to mention clever). They prosecuted him for transmitting a link to where obscene materials may be found. The prosecutors used an obscure statute that was passed circa 1873: 18 USC 1462. This statute, passed in the third-quarter of the 19th Century, was originally intended to criminalize the publication of birth-control materials.
18 U.S. Code § 1462 - Importation or transportation of obscene matters
Whoever brings into the United States, or any place subject to the jurisdiction thereof, or knowingly uses any express company or other common carrier or interactive computer service (as defined in section 230(e)(2) [1] of the Communications Act of 1934), for carriage in interstate or foreign commerce—
(a) any obscene, lewd, lascivious, or filthy book, pamphlet, picture, motion-picture film, paper, letter, writing, print, or other matter of indecent character; or
(b) any obscene, lewd, lascivious, or filthy phonograph recording, electrical transcription, or other article or thing capable of producing sound; or
(c) any drug, medicine, article, or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use; or any written or printed card, letter, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement, or notice of any kind giving information, directly or indirectly, where, how, or of whom, or by what means any of such mentioned articles, matters, or things may be obtained or made; or
Whoever knowingly takes or receives, from such express company or other common carrier or interactive computer service (as defined in section 230(e)(2) 1 of the Communications Act of 1934) any matter or thing the carriage or importation of which is herein made unlawful—
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both, for the first such offense and shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both, for each such offense thereafter.
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Even after more than a dozen years after Frank’s original arrest, I continue to be astonished at the lengths that the state went to – they wanted him BADLY. Among the tactics that the Feds used were judge-shopping as well as jurisdiction-shopping. IIRC, the Feds went to at least two judges in McCoy’s home state of Minnesota, and were turned down – both judges refusing to sign an arrest warrant. They then turned to judges in the state of Georgia – one of the most conservative states in the Union. Even in Georgia, the first two judges refused to sign-off on an arrest warrant, but they tried a third, and finally succeeded.
So it was, that in January 2008, no less than six heavily-armed U.S. Marshals, equipped with a battering-ram, arrived at Frank McCoy’s front door to effect an arrest. You have to remember that Frank was approximately 64 at the time of his arrest, and in marginal health. He was never, to the best of my knowledge, ever accused of any type of contact offense-- the only offense that was ever brought up was his writing/editing. Yet, despite that, he was treated on a par with violent criminals.
I suspect it was to set (or cement) a legal precendent. From the time that Miller v. California was originally decided in 1973, prosecutors had, for close to three decades, usually declined to prosecute cases involving text-only materials. That began to change around 2006-2008. There was a rabidly anti-pornography District Attorney by the name of Mary Beth Buchanan. IIRC, one of the cases she went after was that of Louise “Red Rose” Fletcher. Ms. Fletcher was agoraphobic in the extreme, and she had allegedly suffered from physical and sexual abuse while growing up.
As a coping mechanism of sorts, Ms. Fletcher wrote fictional stories involving the torture, physical and sexual abuse of children, even infants. She published these materials on a website, and charged people a nominal fee to access these. Her intent was not to make a profit off of her fiction – rather the idea of requiring a credit-card for access was to keep the material out of the hands of minors.
Fletcher was arrested, and Buchanan pushed for a 5 year custodial sentence. (IMO, the stress from such a custodial sentence would have killed Fletcher). Fletcher agreed to a plea-bargain, wherein she fofeited her computer and website, and paid a modest fine, in return for a guilty-plea.
Since Fletcher plea-bargained, her case could not serve as precedent, so that left the case of Frank McCoy. Frank went to trial before a judge only – the trial lasted for two days, and 3 years later the guilty verdict was rendered. Frank was sentenced to 2-1/2 years in jail.
Less than six months after his initial release, Frank was re-arrested and put on trial a second time, this time over some alleged contraband found on his computers by a parole officer. He was prosecuted as a repeat offender, and sentenced to ten years in jail, to be followed by a further ten years of probation.
Frank was at about the half-way point of his ten-year sentence when he contracted Covid19 and died.
The Feds wanted him silenced, and they succeeded.
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But doesn’t that mean that now, there is something solid to actually fight against? I mean, while I rarely use my real name, I can’t exactly say that I go out of my way to hide it either, and I never use a VPN (whenever I do, it causes lag, and I have a friend in Germany, who has a VPN, but generally does not use it either).
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There has always been censorship and suppression of speech, whether it be through legal or other means. What has me worried now is that there is a very real possibility that surveillance will be made mandatory, and encryption effectively outlawed. Version 2.0 of the #chatcontrol proposal in the European Union could be passed as early as this summer. This would legally require service providers to proactively surveil users’ devices for contraband imagery and, what is even worse, text. (What they’re after is elimination of contraband images, and also text that would amount to ‘grooming’.)
One of the most common sayings on the Cypherpunk mailing list was, “When privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy.” I had truly hoped that I would not see this in my lifetime, but it appears that it may be a concrete reality in the next 2-5 years.
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Also, if they were Feds, why were they reporting to state courts? Doesn’t the federal police report the federal court?
As a general rule, I use the term “Feds” in a generic way to refer to all law enforcement.
Law enforcement in the United States is mind-bogglingly complex. You have local, state and federal forces – even some government agencies have their own armed police agencies, e.g. the U.S. Department of Education (imagine that, they have their own SWAT teams!)
When I referred to courts in Minnesota and Georgia, I believe these were federal courts, as opposed to state courts. There are some 92-odd federal judicial districts scattered all over the United States. Any ‘crime’ that involves a computer is almost automatically treated as a federal matter, because data packets tend to cross state lines.
That is not a hard and fast rule, however. People have been prosecuted and convicted of child pornography offenses in state courts, and the penalties under the state criminal codes can be far harsher than what federal law calls for. I recall reading about a teacher in Arizona who was busted for possession of some images obtained off of the internet (i.e. he did not make any materials himself) – he was sentenced to 200 years in prison. IIRC, he appealed his sentence under the 8th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which bars cruel and unusual punishment. His case was heard by a 3-judge panel, and his sentence was upheld. The dissenting judge (a woman) argued that there were child murderers who were sentenced to less time than this man, who was guilty of a non-violent offense.
In Arizona, the state law is so harsh that the law calls for a minimum penalty of ten years per image – the maximum penalty is 30 years, again per image.
This means that someone caught in Arizona with a dozen contraband images will receive a minimum 120 year sentence, with the maximum sentence being 360 years.
Back in the day, when I was doing some research on NBC’s “To Catch A Predator” with their sordid associates (Perverted Justice) I learned that there is a Texas statute which criminalizes role-playing, if certain conditions are met. Those conditions are: at least one of the participants has to be physically located in Texas at the time the offense is committed, and one of the participants must describe themselves as underage.
So, this means that two middle-aged adults (one of whom resides in Texas) cannot role-play, in a manner where one of the participants is described as underage, without committing an offense against the criminal law in the state of Texas.
This in fact, is what NBC/Perverted Justice wanted to use to arrest that prosecutor (Louis Conradt) in Murphy Texas – you may recall that the man shot himself in the head, and died.
This debacle ended in the cancellation of the series.
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I am sorry that happened to your friend. It’s wrong and reprehensive the government would spend resources for someone who writes. My condolences.
Second: why do you think they picked Frank? (Btw, I have read the court documents of his case a while ago. His attorney made a good case his works had value but the judge dismissed that testimony). Do you think his statements about wanting to overturn obscenity law made someone angry?
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Also, that Texas law states that the defendant must believe the person is a minor. If the defendant knows the person isn’t one, and it is established on the chat, then there is no offense. There is even something called the fantasy defense.
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