How about you prove that the individual rights of the person being exploited by the dissemination of products produced in the commission of a rights offense are not being violated.
Cutting out all of your emotionalism, you failed to meet the burden of proof. And it is your burden. You make the claim, you prove it. You won’t trick me that easily.
This whole thing sounds fishy to me. By the way, unless the computer’s hard drive is physically destroyed, there are ways to extract its contents.
That’s what I thinking, especially when the person who wanted the guy arrested, for having a hard drive full of child pornography, started questioning laws against child pornography. The way the question was framed was that the person recognized that child porn was a crime, but had reservations for turning someone in out of spite and because it may not have been his concern; there were no reservations at all concerning the person being arrested for his hard drive full of child pornography, but in various posts this became the sole concern. Also, something I didn’t realize until this morning, is that the child pornography was just hypothetical to begin with–unless the poster was just didn’t want to come right out with the case being concrete.
Cutting out all of your emotionalism, you failed to meet the burden of proof. And it is your burden. You make the claim, you prove it. You won’t trick me that easily.
Yup, you know what I do get emotional about absolute evil. Too bad more people don’t.
What burden of proof. What do you want a victim statement from a raped child? Perhaps you want to talk to police and judges and lawyers and teachers and child welfare workers, psychiatrists… Maybe you’d have to meet someone who was victimized as a child and ask them what sort of damage having all those people look at them being abused means to their sense of life, their ability to behave as any human being has the right to.
What exactly would be good enough for you? Maybe if someone had raped you and taken pictures, perhaps maybe then you could make a valid claim that the existence of those pictures has no effect on you and your individual rights.
What exactly would be good enough for you? Maybe if someone had raped you and taken pictures, perhaps maybe then you could make a valid claim that the existence of those pictures has no effect on you and your individual rights.
How about you meet the burden of proof? That you present a logical argument? That would be good enough for me.
I’ll ask again:
How is someone who views CP depriving the child of it’s right to life? What is he doing that deprives it?
Here is the definition from VoS:
the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action—which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life.
To the argument that the crime in Child Pornography is ‘viewing it with intent to derive sexual satisfaction from it.’
Some people get sexual satisfaction when watching other people die, some get it from watching people do drugs, in fact some get it just from watching people do -anything-. Are we going to question every cop and criminal lawyer about their own personal intent when they watch a video of a crime happening? If they watch it with the intent of going home to masturbate about it, then obviously they are a criminal and should be put in jail and should get the DEATH PENALTY because there is no worse crime in the entire world than watching a video. <—hyperbole
A person’s sexual desires are parallel to his thoughts, and having thoughts can never ever be a crime. It is possible to prove that possessing Child Pornography is a crime, however not through ‘the person’s intent when viewing it.’ Neither is it going to be proven if your argument consists of attempts at guilt-throwing and emotionalism like ‘Child Pornography is so amazingly absolutely evil that I don’t even see how it’s possible for anyone to -not- see how absolutely unquantifiably evil it is, and I’m frightened of you because you don’t agree with me.’
Possession of Child Porn is illegal, everywhere. Period. There is no justification that can be made for it.
Some here are rationalizing the irrational. A grown man or woman getting sexual gratification from children is a sexual perversion, and is not tolerated anywhere on the face of the planet.
How about you meet the burden of proof? That you present a logical argument? That would be good enough for me.
I’ll ask again:
How is someone who views CP depriving the child of it’s right to life? What is he doing that deprives it?
Here is the definition from VoS:
“Rights” are a moral concept—the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual’s actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others—the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context—the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics. Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.
Since Man has inalienable individual rights, this means that the same rights are held, individually, by every man, by all men, at all times. Therefore, the rights of one man cannot and must not violate the rights of another.
For instance: a man has the right to live, but he has no right to take the life of another. He has the right to be free, but no right to enslave another. He has the right to choose his own happiness, but no right to decide that his happiness lies in the misery (or murder or robbery or enslavement) of another. The very right upon which he acts defines the same right of another man, and serves as a guide to tell him what he may or may not do.
The end does not justify the means. No one’s rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others.
But the “right” to view this porn is enabled by the violation of the right of the child to his/her own life.
Still don’t see how this would be a violation of the victim’s rights?
This whole thing sounds fishy to me. By the way, unless the computer’s hard drive is physically destroyed, there are ways to extract its contents.
Untrue.
Data on a disk is stored as pointers, it is all over the disk and not in fixed blocks. As you write and delete data, it gets a bit messy, with files spread all over the physical disk (hence the process of ‘defragmenting’)
When you hit the delete button, the disk doesn’t actually seek out every byte of the file and scrub it off, it just removes the pointers to it - then goes over it when the physical space is needed.
But, there are lots of tools (called things like ‘shredders’) that will seek out all data in a file and wipe it clean, or will just fill the disk with random 0 and 1 bits, making it irrecoverable.
In short, it depends if he just deleted the files (then they are recoverable) or if he actually looked it up on google and used a better tool.
It still might be worth reporting.
As for the proper legality of child pornography: what if you were walking down the street, nobody else about, and you witnessed a child being raped. Of course, your looking wouldn’t make the slightest difference - even if you took a photograph. But it would take someone truly deranged not to notify the police.
If a stranger on the street handed you a picture of himself raping a child: you would absolutely report him to the police.
The same goes for viewing child pornography online. You are aware that somebody has committed a crime, you have photographic evidence of this, and yet you don’t notify the police.
Quite clearly it is not the case, when somebody has a ‘hard drive full’ of such data, that they keep stumbling upon it by chance and just dont want to tell the police. A dangerous mental disorder is likely the cause.
This brings up two questions which have probably been discussed here:
If one knows of a terrible crime, is he obligated to report it?
Should the dangerously mentally ill be separated, by force, from society?
How about you meet the burden of proof? That you present a logical argument? That would be good enough for me.
I’ll ask again:
How is someone who views CP depriving the child of it’s right to life? What is he doing that deprives it?
Do you recognize that sexual molestation, etc.., is such a deprivation; do you recognize that someone watching a child get raped is an accomplice? If you do, you should recognize that buying or downloading a recording of such an act would be criminal. It would make one an accomplice to the activity by supporting the media, no matter how far separated or removed it was acquired, from its originators; and not the least of all, one would be receiving the services of a child raped – watching it through a video or in person makes no difference, except maybe some sort of twisted courage.
If one knows of a terrible crime, is he obligated to report it?
Should the dangerously mentally ill be separated, by force, from society?
If you know of a rights violation, then yes, I would say that you are morally obligated to report it. Because protecting your own rights also involves protecting the rights of others to the degree that not reporting it would put you into a similar situation of having your rights violated. In other words, let’s say you witness someone being shot in your neighborhood. If you don’t report it, who knows if you will be next or not?
As to the second question, we are discussing that here. Our conclusion has basically been that it doesn’t matter if someone is mentally disturbed or not, if they are violating rights, then they need to be handled by the government authorities. However, one cannot conclude that just because someone is mentally ill that he is a danger to others without specific evidence that he is dangerous to others. I would suggest reading the last page, and then you can read the rest of the thread if you like.
I think child pornography ought to be illegal since a child has not reached the age of consent of an adult, and therefore cannot give his consent to be so photographed and exploited (at least not without permission of his parents or legal guardians). If you witness a rape tape or a snuff tape or a child porn tape, in the very least you are a witness to that crime, and if you don’t report it, you might be rightfully be considered a co-conspirator after the fact, which is also illegal.
The intent of the person perpetrating the abuse is a matter of case by case determination. Off hand, I’d say that in general, someone who sexually abuses a child is doing it for his own twisted pleasure, not to distribute a video of it to other people.
Why would you completely falsify reality, in order to defend your position on allowing child pornography? Of course the reason for producing child pornography is to distribute it.
Here’s your position, as I see it:
There is a fixed percentage of Americans who are pedophiles, and openly willing to download or buy videos of children being forced to have sex, or even subjected to sadism (their number is in the thousands if not higher). You want the government to allow these materials to be openly traded online, in stores, magazines etc. You haven’t presented any arguments to why the government would allow them to be distributed for free, but not traded for money (can’t imagine on what basis and how the government would make that distinction), so you are in favor of allowing these thousands of pedophiles to finance the abuse of many thousands of children in countries outside the government’s jurisdiction.
Please defend this position, or correct me if I misread it.
From what I understand, a lot of CP is distributed through P2P sharing, which is decentralized and not tied to any website.
Who all use tons of proxies or such IT Mumbo Jumbo, I get it. :dough:
Also, what does that have to do with whether his actions should be considered a crime or not?
If that person did find a site or a traceable network they should have been the ones to report it, P2P however probably makes the perpetrator a fellow accomplice in spreading it.
Unless you’re saying it’s a crime not to report a crime. But then you’re only talking about the method of acquisition as a crime, not viewing or possessing the material.
I don’t mean the former, and punishing mere viewing without possession would be ridiculous.
As to the thread title yes you should, if you don’t have explicit reasoning available and it would lead to analysis paralysis to come up with it one should trust ones fastest dare I say lightning value judgements.
And finding Child Pornography on someones PC is not something I think I would benefit enough from to contemplate for longer then it would take me to reach the
telephone.
If you know of a rights violation, then yes, I would say that you are morally obligated to report it. Because protecting your own rights also involves protecting the rights of others to the degree that not reporting it would put you into a similar situation of having your rights violated. In other words, let’s say you witness someone being shot in your neighborhood. If you don’t report it, who knows if you will be next or not?
As to the second question, we are discussing that here. Our conclusion has basically been that it doesn’t matter if someone is mentally disturbed or not, if they are violating rights, then they need to be handled by the government authorities. However, one cannot conclude that just because someone is mentally ill that he is a danger to others without specific evidence that he is dangerous to others. I would suggest reading the last page, and then you can read the rest of the thread if you like.
I think child pornography ought to be illegal since a child has not reached the age of consent of an adult, and therefore cannot give his consent to be so photographed and exploited (at least not without permission of his parents or legal guardians). If you witness a rape tape or a snuff tape or a child porn tape, in the very least you are a witness to that crime, and if you don’t report it, you might be rightfully be considered a co-conspirator after the fact, which is also illegal.
Great, now I also have an explicit position against it.
As to the second question, we are discussing that here. Our conclusion has basically been that it doesn’t matter if someone is mentally disturbed or not, if they are violating rights, then they need to be handled by the government authorities.
“Our conclusion”?
Perhaps a minor point, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to speak of “our” conclusion in a discussion thread, certainly not one in which the participants have not agreed on some significant issues. Just with your statement here, I’d want to know, and state that I certainly can’t be in agreement with a statement I do not understand, just what you mean by “handled by the government authorities.” “Handled by the government authorities” has been a point of significant dispute in that thread.
The only point that I think it’s close to fair to say that the participants, at least you and I, agree upon expliticly is that the only concern of a proper government is individual rights.
“Our conclusion”?
The only point that I think it’s close to fair to say that the participants, at least you and I, agree upon explicitly is that the only concern of a proper government is individual rights.
Point taken, Trebor. Yes, we had a lot of disagreements in that thread, and some people near the end were still saying the government ought to be involved in the seriously mentally ill person’s life. So, I withdrawal the “we” and “our” conclusion. In many of these discussion, you are right that individuals are involved and there often is not even a consensus.
Point taken, Trebor. Yes, we had a lot of disagreements in that thread, and some people near the end were still saying the government ought to be involved in the seriously mentally ill person’s life. So, I withdrawal the “we” and “our” conclusion. In many of these discussion, you are right that individuals are involved and there often is not even a consensus.
Thank you, Mr. Miovas.
There are too many people here who have trouble reading, so instead of responding to all of your “misunderstandings” about my position, I’m going to lay it out again, for the last time:
Sexual abuse of a child is a crime and should be. Period.
A video is a recording of an event. A video that records a person sexually molesting a child is a recording of a crime. That’s all it is. A recording. Whether it was made for distribution or just for “sick pleasure” all it remains is a factual rendering of the offense.
Paying the perpetrator of the crime for the video (unless you an undercover law officer in a sting) is a clear financing of the crime, since the perpetrator is profiting from his gross violation of rights. Payment here strictly denotes the transfer of cash or property in exchange for the recording. A person financing crime can be charged as a conspirator or accomplice or whatever lawful determination best fits.
The internet can propagate a digital file in limitless quantities and after a certain point it becomes impossible to determine what the origin of the file was. Therefore a person who downloads a file at any given time after the initial propagation has increasingly favorable odds that he has no knowledge of its origin and no connection to the originator.
A person who looks at a video or picture that depicts a crime, cannot be connected to or held responsible for that crime if he has not committed it and has no knowledge of its origins.
Many people on this board have made the claim that a person who watches a recording of someone having their rights violated, is himself violating that person’s rights. That is a positive claim and so the burden of proof to justify that claim rests with its advocates.
The standard of proof to justify Point 6 is a logically connected argument that refers to reality, starting with what a right is, how a right can be violated, and ending with how a person who views a video or picture that depicts a crime, and has no knowledge of its origins, is violating the rights of the victim of the crime in the recording.
That is my position. I will not explain it again.
I eagerly await a proof of Point 6. If it is logically tenable then no further discussion is necessary. Further outbursts of emotionalism and ad hominem will be ignored. Thank you.
The watcher is creating a market for the crime. These people share CP because they can then get more CP as other perverts share their rapes.
The payment is in barter. Just because cash doesn’t change hands does not mean that there is no benefit being realized by either party, no matter how far removed they are from the actual abuse.
Disregarding the fact that the law itself was flawed. During prohibition alcohol was illegal. The person caught drinking it could not claim innocence based on the fact that he didn’t know who made it, who bottled it or where it came from.
The payment is in barter. Just because cash doesn’t change hands does not mean that there is no benefit being realized by either party, no matter how far removed they are from the actual abuse.
Who is bartering what?
How does a person watching a video downloaded for free pay anything to anyone?
Who is bartering what?
How does a person watching a video downloaded for free pay anything to anyone?
So a person downloading a song for free off of the internet isn’t paying anything either. So by your reasoning that isn’t a crime either.
So a person downloading a song for free off of the internet isn’t paying anything either. So by your reasoning that isn’t a crime either.
This logic is spurious. The moral principle in IP theft is refusal to recognize (and treat appropriately) he who created a value. The question of the thread is of a different kind.