At one time, I may have agreed with the spurious claims in this article. Then I worked for the public defender, and some of my clients were pedophiles. Now I firmly believe that child porn laws are about where they should be, and possibly may even be too lenient (in the US).
The fundamental, overriding justification for child porn laws is that in most of this filth, an actual child is being raped. In the minority of this filth, the sexual imagery is faked or animated. The fake filth exists only because those perverts cannot get their hands on the real stuff--it's not an alternative, it's a temporary stopgap.
I know that the HN crowd is treating this as some sort of abstract, hypothetical discussion of freedom, but if you actually talk to pedophiles, you will quickly realize why child porn laws exist.
Comments
At one time, I may have agreed with the spurious claims in this article. Then I worked for the public defender, and some of my clients were pedophiles. Now I firmly believe that child porn laws are about where they should be, and possibly may even be too lenient (in the US).
The fundamental, overriding justification for child porn laws is that in most of this filth, an actual child is being raped. In the minority of this filth, the sexual imagery is faked or animated. The fake filth exists only because those perverts cannot get their hands on the real stuff--it's not an alternative, it's a temporary stopgap.
I know that the HN crowd is treating this as some sort of abstract, hypothetical discussion of freedom, but if you actually talk to pedophiles, you will quickly realize why child porn laws exist.