Even if it was -- not all illegal (or wrong) things are equally wrong.
I'm much more okay with, eg, petty theft than murder, and would find it weird if people tried to make people stealing candybars from Walmart out to be equal to murderers.
Except it is completely unequal because you've been given 3 chances to follow the laws of the society in which you live. And because sentencing will still be much less severe than that of murder.
Why not three? This "wide range of offenses" generally applies to felonies, which are grevious enough to be placed into their own category with its own suite of punishments, and it is not entirely unreasonable to apply a singular repeat offense rule to all of them. The fact that the number seems arbitrary to you does not make it invalid.
I am sure we can agree that repeat felony offenders need to be handled specially, and, unfortunately, given the [archaic] nature of the judicial system, laws must be codified and at least in theory represent majority agreement. Whether influenced by baseball or something else, three is the number that lawmakers deemed reasonable, and you have not presented a valid argument against the concept or the number.
Actually yes. But California allows some stupid felonies. Petty theft with priors can be charged as a felony, so, third strike can be shoplifting a candybar, since a third strike for stealing anything can be a felony at the prosecutor's discretion. So, it has to be three felonies, but the third doesn't have to be violent, and "prior conviction" upgrades make a lot of petty third strikes "felonies" in CA that would not be such elsewhere.
There's a big discussion about what's bad about drugs. But I wonder if we can rationally work out what's bad about child porn.
My understanding is that possessing it means you obtained it from someone, who probably wanted some kind of payment, who abused children to produce the material so he could get that payment.
There are quite a few gaps there. What if it was published for free? What if children weren't physically abused but were secretly and anonymously photographed? Shouldn't there be exceptions for victimless child porn?
Of course the dominant factor is people are horrified by deviant sexualities. We're barely managing to accept homosexuality which is probably more common than peadophilia.
> There's a big discussion about what's bad about drugs. But I wonder if we can rationally work out what's bad about child porn.
You're right that this is a very difficult topic to discuss rationally but I'm going to try anyway.
> What if it was published for free? What if children weren't physically abused but were secretly and anonymously photographed? Shouldn't there be exceptions for victimless child porn?
1) Compensation does not have to be financial to be an incentive.
2) Anonymous photography of individuals without their knowledge can absolutely cause harm.
3) Being a victim of a crime does not require knowledge of the crime taking place nor does it require physical contact.
> Of course the dominant factor is people are horrified by deviant sexualities. We're barely managing to accept homosexuality which is probably more common than peadophilia.
You're equating homosexuality to child abuse which puts you on the wrong side of history.
Paedophillia != child abuse. It's a deviant sexual preference just like homosexuality, even though perhaps you think it is more morally wrong to have paedophillic tendencies than to have homosexual tendencies.
I don't think it is productive to strongly stigmatize all forms of paedophillac tendencies, specifically because it reduces the chance of would-be child abusers getting help controlling and/or channeling their urges.
There is some research that suggests higher availability of child pornography (including the simulated/drawn) reduces occurences of child abuse, and although it is of course highly controversial, to me it indicates that it is worth investigating.
As a specific example of what I consider to be a very harmful way of dealing with the (real or fake) child porn issue, is the UK porn identification requirement. No paedophile is going to enter their details when they want to look at loli hentai, so they'd be forced to find some other outlet, for instance by going on the darkweb. Or they end up not doing anything to pacify their urges, which might well raise the chances of them actually participating in child abuse. Of course this is purely speculative, but I don't think these are outcomes you can reasonably dismiss out of hand.
I'm not saying I condone the use of photographic material of minors, I tend towards "90% bad" but really have to think it through more, but I do believe it to be harmful to make hand-drawn or CG child pornography illegal. The "but you're abusing the children without their knowledge" argument doesn't hold water there, and it'd be great if it usurped large swaths of the market for abusive child pornography.
While I believe that western sexual norms are a bit puritanical, the premise behind protecting children with zealous laws is that it is extremely difficult to judge whether child pornography is truely victimless, even if you believe that harm from childhood sexuality is overstated in modern society. Because of the power imbalance between adults and children, and the permanent effects that abuse can have on children, it is reasonable to err on the side of caution and keep all child/adult sexual interactions illegal, and reduce demand for such interactions by keeping pornography illegal.
As an aside, I am curious as to the reason you are being down voted, besides your audacity of expressing an unpopular opinion.
Short of presenting data I think you're making a bit of a leap to say that pornography encourages some undesired behavior. It could easily be argued either way.
I tend to agree with "better safe than sorry" since it's unclear. It can go too far though if you end up punishing many more adults for tangentially related crimes than the number of children who were harmed by actual abuse.
As for cultural norms. Many primitive cultures use age of puberty as age of consent. I heard of one (probably Amazon) tribe where sex was treated as common as eating or pooing. It wasn't related to marriage, which they did have. Children were involved much younger than our age of consent. I don't think you could say they were harmed since it was normal behavior and they apparently grew up without emotional problems.
We tend to confuse normal sexual attraction to teenagers with peadophilia and lump them all into the same group. For example teachers having relationships with underage teenage students. It might be harmful but the sexuality is normal, not deviant.
That's not expressing an "unpopular opinion". They're being ignorant about the harm being done to the victims of child pornography and (it seems) trying legitimize that harm by drawing a dotted line to homosexuality.
It has no place on HN. I would downvote if I could.
Someone drawing or 3d modelling fictional underage character?
In many jurisdictions thats the same thing as genuine child abuse base child porn. In my jurisdiction, Harry Potter fanfiction with sex counts as child porn - and as one with extended penalty because it is "delivered through very efficient means like computer network".
Not all things are all the same, even with the same label.
>They're being ignorant about the harm being done to the victims of child pornography
You are foolish to believe that all children are harmed by childhood sexuality and/or child pornography. Sex is part of the human nature, and we do not wake up on our 18th birthday and realize that we are ready to begin exploring our bodies. Never mind the fact that human beings can be conditioned to both be traumatized by and accepting of sexual activity by/as children.
>It has no place on HN. I would downvote if I could.
This amounts to morally-derived censorship.
It is foolish to presume that your cultural programming should not be scrutinized; society is worse off for this kind of puritanical closed mindedness. No, I'm not asking you to accept victimization of children, but if you cannot honestly discuss and/or examine both sides of an issue, you cannot be confident in your opinion.
If you believe the MPAA/RIAA's claims that piracy harms sales, there would be some moral case for piracy of CP. Although, there is still some direct harm from the distribution of the material (for the privacy for the victim). However it's more likely that (contra the MPAA) piracy actually serves as advertising, just like in the ordinary entertainment industry.
> What if children weren't physically abused but were secretly and anonymously photographed?
Still harmful for privacy reasons mentioned above, even if less harmful than actual physical abuse.
> Shouldn't there be exceptions for victimless child porn?
Probably, but the example I would reach for is art / drawings of obviously fictional characters, rather than any of the above. The fact that many CP laws extend to this is better evidence that lawmakers are being irrationally swayed by puritanism. (Or that puritanism breeds indifference. Maybe they don't care about the "deviants" interested in these sort of drawings enough to specifically target them, but they also don't care enough to carve out an exception.)
Australia is stricter. Somebody was charged for possessing Simpsons porn because it was "sexualised depiction of persons under 16". The defence argued they weren't human because they only had 4 fingers on each hand!
bro.. don't try and make the abusers out to be victims.
the dominant factor in stigmatized pea do philadelphia has very little to do with deviant sexuality and has everything to do with coercion and rape of still developing human beings. this is seen across just about every other facet of civilized society as well.
We don't allow minors into enforceable contracts, leave home or check out of school, smoke cigarettes or drink booze, and we sure as hell don't allow them to participate in "amateur" pornography where the consequences can be life long.
We restrict these things because the mind isn't developed or experienced enough to understand and appreciate the effects of these actions.
The abusers are not the issue here, the parent is questioning whether possession should be illegal in all cases, especially if we are talking about a victimless crime. Photoshopped adult porn to make the actresses look young, for example. It's a good question. However, I expect that no politician is brave enough to ask the question for fear of getting precisely the criticism you just demonstrated. So the discussion will remain theoretical.
Go with an even easier case. What if it is of a 17 year old who is old enough to consent, even by the law where they live, who willingly takes the photograph and releases it. Technically illegal, but why?
> ...It's legal to think about murder as long as you don't behave that way.
Sort of. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1117 ("conspiracy to commit murder") only requires one person to take action and everyone in the group that did the thinking with them is guilty of a crime. This is in the US, but I would be quite surprised if various other countries did not have similar statutes.
More generally, there are all sorts of laws out there that effectively criminalize thoughtcrime rather than behavior. Of course behavior might be needed for anyone to _discover_ the thoughtcrime.
> Sort of. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1117 ("conspiracy to commit murder") only requires one person to take action and everyone in the group that did the thinking with them is guilty of a crime.
Wrong. It requires all the people to have taken action to communicate their intention to collaborate on the plan, and only one of them to have taken additional action toward acheiving it.
People don't think in groups; thoughts have to manifest as action for people to conspire.
> to communicate their intention to collaborate on the plan
What the law says is "conspire to violate".
If person X and person Y together work out a way for person Y to commit murder and then person Y commits murder, is person X considered as conspiring?
> People don't think in groups
Sure they do. It's called "conversation" or "correspondence". If we had telepathy, we could skip the transcoding to sound or text, but we don't yet, but fundamentally it's the same thing.
I think what you're trying to ask is: Is being labeled gay grounds for imprisonment? Or does one have to be caught in the act of fornicating with a male to be imprisoned? I'm sure it depends on the jurisdiction, but many jurisdictions that have this kind of explicit law usually frowns upon homosexuality so much, that the mere accusation is enough to be damaging.
What I'm asking is more like, if the government microphone in your potted plant hears you coming out as gay to your friends, would that be grounds for criminal punishment?
Laws against inherent characteristics seem to me at least to be worse than laws which ban behavior. Conflating the two in order to make some particular law sound worse seems sort of dishonest to me.
True. It sounds like the site was mostly dealing in drugs, which for small time dealers I feel is a waste of time to prosecute... But the problem is that larger organized criminals often get their funds to do worse things from the drug market.
Wait, it sounds like you're saying big drug dealers are just selling drugs to get money to, I don't know, go on murder sprees? I'm not saying violence is not a part of these kinds of crimes, but I don't think the purpose of their participation is just to enable other, more serious crimes.
That is, I don't think it's very common for someone to say "I want to sell a lot of drugs because I can't afford to kill enough people otherwise," rather than what I think is more common, "I want to sell a lot of drugs because I want to buy a house without a lot of effort."
For an example of this, check out Portugal that legalized and had great success.
I wonder if anyone can point to place where drugs are legalized and violence increased? Where addiction increased?
Seems absurd, yet people don't think the drug war is absurd-- they don't immediately see this takeover of Hanza as the government illegally operating a black market for weeks and thus committing massive crime, and they don't see the shutdown of the market as a further crime violating the rights of the sellers to sell something that morally and practically their buyers should be able to buy (when it comes to drugs anyway)
> it sounds like you're saying big drug dealers are just selling drugs to get money to, I don't know, go on murder sprees
No. I'm just saying that the people upstream manufacturing massive quantities of meth and heroin probably aren't the kinds of organizations that you want to be making that kind of money.
But until that happens, don't buy from big drug sellers.
In a broader sense: We can acknowledge that there's an underlying problem, and how to fix it, while at the same time being willing to advocate a temporary fix until the underlying problem actually is fixed.
Think of it like polyfill: The underlying problem is that old browsers exist, but we can't boil the ocean and make everyone upgrade, so we use polyfills to gain the functionality we want on those old browsers.
And I'm saying that it sounds like you think "the kinds of organizations" are using drug money to enable worse crimes. I mean, it's no secret that the purpose of certain laws are to prevent anybody from making "that kind of money," but to me your comment read as if there was more to it.
Because that's also the case.
Big organized crime groups often have access to exactly the kind of logistics required to manufacture and smuggle drugs across large distances.
They have the muscle to stay competitive in a market where there is no state authority to give you guarantees on anything.
You are correct. Making drugs illegal has funded the creation of massive cartels who use that funding to pursue other crimes and to war against any competitors.
The solution will never be shutting down darknets and arresting people.
The counterargument is that if drugs are legalized then the crime syndicates will need to find a new line of work. It's possible they'll go "legit" like the mob did after prohibition and get into the Casino business, but it's also possible they'll switch to human trafficking or gun running or some other harmful trade.
This is an especially big danger if you're talking about a gang that currently deals mostly drugs but also smuggles forced prostitutes over borders on the side. Take away the drugs and they're likely to expand the side business.
If they could expand the side business, they already would have. The massive profits of illegal drugs gives them the capital to invest in new side businesses, take that away they can't expand anything.
The Mafia was all about prostitution, gambling, and protection rackets. The prohibition gave them a business where you could make far more than all the others combined, and all you needed to do was to kill people who got in your way.
I dont think human trafficking is as easy as drug trafficking and gun running is a much smaller market than drugs. Legalization will be a severe impediment to the activities of the cartels.
> The counterargument is that if drugs are legalized then the crime syndicates will need to find a new line of work
Is that a counter argument? There are bad actors (in society). Some bad actors have social, moral, physical, intellectual barriers that prevent them from acting WORSE. Raising the social barrier (marketplace) isn't any different than the social barrier (legality). If you rather not compete bad actors out of the market because of what they might do, why legally punish them out of the market? Why bother trying to stop them at all?
Society doesn't want to consider certain transactions to be legitimate.
Allowing a marketplace for murder or human trafficking (or the other nefarious things organized crime gets up to) allows the most efficient and effective bad actors to prosper, as markets are designed to do. But society doesn't want bad actors to prosper, it wants them prevented from acting badly.
The point is that gansterism will become a smaller part of the economy, have "less funding" if you want to think of it that way.
Gangsterism is funded by various econmic oppornities which for one reason or another are illegal. Some things like assasination and extortion need to be illegal by their very nature.
But by passing laws that make new things illegal, we increase the amount of resources available to fund criminalality.
The counter-counterargument is that we can legalize difficult-to-police but high-volume "sin" crimes, such as drug use and prostitution, regulate them to the point it's impossible to be a criminal syndicate in those realms, and leave the syndicates with lower-volume crimes, such as murder for hire.
Sure, we can't possibly legalize murder for hire and still have a functional society, but how much profit can you really make filling those kinds of contracts, especially in a world with no illegal drug trade and no human trafficking because hookers are now clean and legal? They can try to expand side businesses all they want, but some of them have a natural cap to how much demand there can be.
And 'small time' drug dealers get their supply from the bigger fish. The value in prosecuting them isn't in stopping end users or sales that max out at like $200, it's in working towards shutting down large international suppliers. Because they don't just ship drugs, they ship people and weapons too. Regardless of how one feels about drug use, the realities of the trade are grim.
I think there's also value in defining what people mean by 'small time dealer' in this context. To me, that connotes someone selling a bit of pot to their friends so they can smoke for free or something. People who ship misc. substances internationally and in some cases earn six figures plus annually don't fit that definition in my eyes.
The reality of illegal drugs is by making them illegal you give massive amounts of capital to the worst people in the world, who invest those profits into other awful trades.
You legalize drugs, you take away their massive cash flies and cripple their organizations.
> You legalize drugs, you take away their massive cash flies and cripple their organizations.
I'm not convinced this is true, there's lots of ways to make a big profit illegally, drugs are just comparatively easy. I'm a proponent of full drug legalization (it's a space where I have large amounts of first hand experience that won't be discussed on HN), but it's still important to separate an ideological position from reality. The international drug trade is directly tied to human trafficking. Turning a blind eye to one is turning a blind eye to both.
Drug trafficking funds human trafficking. It's not the other way around. Removing profit incentives from bad behavior is an easy way to improve human behavior. Our murder rates plunged after prohibition was repealed, for example.
And human trafficking is for a purpose, take away it's incentives and it mostly goes away too. Legalizing prostitution eliminates a big incentive for human trafficking. Rationalizing immigration laws eliminates most of the rest.
Buying drugs can fund actions far worse than just creating drugs. From human slavery (drug mules) to murder. Some of the other things on that list are bad not because the actual item being traded is bad, but because of what the trade enables. I'm not seeing a significant difference between the markets in this regard, except for popularity.
Compared to the example you gave, where no one is harmed and no further harm is caused or funded by people being gay.
Edit to specify that this doesn't happen in every drug transaction.
Buying drugs doesn't fund those actions. Making drugs illegal does, just like when Prohibition started murderous gang wars, gave us the highest murder rate in modern history, caused thousands of deaths from adulterated spirits, and funded the modern mafia.
Murder is illegal. But somehow the profits from tens of millions of murders aren't injecting cash into a vast underground economy. It's the money that does that.
Buying drugs does fund those actions. Drugs being illegal are a major reason why, and why I support legalization. But that doesn't excuse anyone currently making a purchase today.
Think of it this way, illegal images could be produced by advanced CGI, but aren't because that tends to be just as illegal. That doesn't excuse anyone who consume images not produced by advanced CGI.
People have the right to control what goes in their bodies. I don't have the ability to see if my weed is "violence free", because drug prohibition took that away. You can't hold me responsible for violence among marijuana cartels if you don't give me a clean source for my marijuana.
It's like saying encryption is used by terrorists, so if I buy encryption I'm indirectly supporting terrorism.
You can be held responsible. You don't have a right to obtain a substance just because you want it. It doesn't matter if it "goes in your body" or not. That's not how rights work. You have to justify the value to society.
Doesn't this holds true of the other crimes we were talking about taking place on the dark-net as well? Maybe not at the same rates, but even weapon sells don't definitely mean someone is coming to harm by that specific sell.
Paying taxes contributes to legally dubious actions such as drone strikes at weddings. Buying certain types of cheap clothing or manufactured goods supports slave like conditions for some workers. Buying beef and other food products contributes to deforestation, depletion of fishing stocks and other things destructive to the environment. Going to a strip club supports human trafficking and sex slavery. Buying diamonds and rare earth metals necessary for tech devices supports bloody, endless civil wars. The drug wars raging in Mexico pale in comparison to the atrocities and Heart of Darkness horrors happening still in the Congo, with its rich supplies of coltan.
Don't think that you can claim innocence because you are following the law.
It's more accurate to say that government prohibition fund actions far worse than just creating drugs, human slavery (drug mules) to murder.
It promotes growth of the marketplace which also allows buying/selling of drugs that do involve victim crimes. If the market was limited to safely produced/trafficked drugs, it would be different. One might even make the argument that shutting down a market that only allowed victimless drugs end up causing harm.
This is a dangerous way to present facts that changes the perception of the reader in ways that may not be noticed while not technically telling a lie.
You are claiming that all crimes are of equal severity and should have equal consequences. That is absurd.