Comment by JeremyT

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 21:35:06 EST

Personally, I Think child molesters and those making money off running these types of websites should be sent to a muslim country where they can be dealt with. Im not muslim but dang atleast they got one thing right!

Comment by Michael Croft

Tue, 15 Jun 2004 21:01:30 EDT

Sexual exploitation of children is despicable and those proven guilty of it should be punished and good laws exist to do so. My concern here is that we should do so without infringing the rights of adult citizens who are not violating the law. One of the reasons the problem (which is real) is not universally accepted is that the flag gets carried by politicians who aren't universally trusted. If a politician fulminates against abortion, women in the army, tax exemption for Unitarians, gay marriage, gays in general, welfare, gun control, the income tax, the Clenis, nekkid statues in the halls of justice, and the internet, they'll get support from some and ignored by others. The baby gets thrown out with the bathwater. Because of this, I'm generally leery of any claim by politicians that my rights must be infringed 'for the sake of the children!'. It usually means someone wants to infringe my rights because they hate my freedom and want to cloak their authoritarianism is your fear. I just don't believe that the only way to protect the children is preemptive destruction of everyone's liberty. The response I have to 'think of the children!' is 'no, you think of a way to protect them without all the baggage of your anti-freedom agenda, and then we'll be able to move forward.' The solutions that I see proposed (like the assorted unconstitutional laws like Children Online Protection Act) seem like they'll have no effect on the problem (due to the nature of the internet) and will instead curb our freedoms for a false sense of security and the vague comfort of 'having done something' about the problem. I want the opposite of what we're being offered: a solution that will actually curb the problem without curbing freedoms. Freedoms are hard to recover once they're surrendered to the fearmongers. I think this is good information, but because it's incomplete it's potentially misleading. It discusses arrests, search warrants, and reports, but those aren't convictions. Arrests and search warrants go up when the government increases scrutiny, but that doesn't necessarily mean there is a real problem, just government scrutiny. File sharing warrants are at an all-time high, but that doesn't indicate a crime wave. Salem was not an isolated incident involving a few bad apples. There is a very human tendency that urges actions against freedom and justice in order to provide security. It's easy to get a gut level reaction in agreement with such appeals, but that's not how I want public policy decided. Some solid data presented without emotional appeal is more likely to convince me that this isn't just a screen for an attack on personal liberty.

We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we...remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were, for the moment unpopular. --Edward R. Murrow, See It Now, 1954, discussing the McCarthy HUAC hearings

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." --H.L. Mencken (blogcritics' favorite blind squirrel...)

So, the stated point of the post was to raise awareness of the problem. I'm aware of the problem. Now what? Is there a way to prevent it without ordering the tide not to come in or without assaulting liberty? I hope so. Not that I know what that way is.

Blogcritics Comments on The War on Child Pornography—Who are the Victims?

Comment by JeremyT

Comment by Michael Croft