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Are you seriously defending child pornography right now? First off, the "harmless outlet" concept is absolutely not "well established." Pedophilia is a paraphil

by ahelwer 14y ago

Are you seriously defending child pornography right now? First off, the "harmless outlet" concept is absolutely not "well established." Pedophilia is a paraphilia. The desire grows as it is fed. Furthermore, the reason you hear of child porn rings is because those are what form - people share it with each other in a tit-for-tat sort of way. It absolutely incentivizes the production of more, which means more abused kids. God damnit HN, I should have known a thread on a Tor node being shut down would bring out all the child porn apologists. Funny how that happens, eh?

aes256 14y ago
> Furthermore, the reason you hear of child porn rings is because those are what form - people share it with each other in a tit-for-tat sort of way. It absolutely incentivizes the production of more, which means more abused kids. I'd imagine it's like any other prohibited material or substance; drugs, counterfeit goods, pirated works, etc. Of those implicated, a small minority are involved in production, while the vast majority are simply consumers. I assume you are willing to at least acknowledge the existence of the latter group; people who simply consume child pornography and play no part in the production, or any sexual abuse of children for that matter. Do you really think it is appropriate to ruin these peoples' lives — splash their names across the newspapers, lock them in jail, destroy their career, their relationships, make them a social pariah — for mere possession of child pornography? For having a certain sequence of 0s and 1s on their computer?
- drzaiusapelord 14y ago
  >and play no part in the production, or any sexual abuse of children for that matter. Their demand of it CAUSES IT TO BE MADE. Jesus, I've never seen so much bending overbackwards over CP. Hey guys, we still have the first amendment and SCOTUS always rule sensibly on speech issues. No one is going to start a police state over CP enforcement. The slippery slope doesn't always happen, in fact, its rare that it does.
  - aes256 14y ago
    I don't view CP as a free speech issue, I just think its prohibition is an arbitrary, puritan social construct. Same applies to indecent exposure laws, I guess. At what point did we decide the human form is indecent in its unclothed state, and people should be deprived of their freedom for exposing their natural form in public? At what point did we decide people should be deprived of their freedom simply for looking at images of children in their natural, unclothed state?
    - mistercow 14y ago
      This actually touches on another issue, which is the definition of "pornography". Weirdly, most people these days seem to make an exception for artistic adult nudes, but consider any image of a nude child to be pornographic. This is insane, of course. If you take a cute picture of your toddler playing in the bathtub, that is not pornography, yet a lot of people would lump it in under that definition, including many governments. But when we're talking about images and video depicting child abuse, that's a different situation altogether.
  - mistercow 14y ago
    >Their demand of it CAUSES IT TO BE MADE. I mean, you can shout it in all caps, but I don't know if we can really say that's established as fact. But it's pretty disingenuous to claim that people in this thread are defending CP. The issue is far more nuanced than that, but we all agree that people taking pictures/video of themselves hurting children is terrible. It's just that from there the discussion moves into pragmatism and how we should actually be dealing with it as a society. Pedophiles are a fact of life, and it's better for everyone if we can find ways for them to satisfy their urges without hurting anybody, instead of waiting for them to do something horrible so that we can punish them for it. Just to be very specific because people love to misinterpret me on this point: legalizing CP is not a solution that I am advocating. A benign outlet" will, by definition, have to be something that does not harm children. >Hey guys, we still have the first amendment and SCOTUS always rule sensibly on speech issues. Seriously?
  - darkarmani 14y ago
    > The slippery slope doesn't always happen, in fact, its rare that it does. So what happens if a spammer sends millions of CP images to inboxes? What do you think of a situation that instantly makes millions of people felons? Is that a reasonable law?
btilly 14y ago
I like how you jump from not being well-established to being definitely wrong. Everyone is telling you that citation is needed because it very much is. On topics like this a lot of people have strong opinions, far fewer have well-informed ones. We want the latter. Here is my, I believe, moderately informed opinion. As http://anthonydamato.law.northwestern.edu/Adobefiles/porn.pdf http://anthonydamato.law.northwestern.edu/Adobefiles/porn.pd... makes clear, evidence that we now have says that widespread availability to porn has coincided with a massive decrease in rapes. Caused? Very hard to prove (as with most social statistics). But definitely coincided and there likely is some causal effect. If that happens with regular porn, the natural expectation is that it is likely to happen with specific kinds of porn as well. If so, even though we don't have proof (and proof will be very hard to come to), we should be inclined to believe that the "harmless outlet" concept is likely valid. Moving on, let's address your "paraphelia" comment. My opinion is that paraphelias are sexual orientations that we dislike for fairly good reasons. However all evidence that I'm aware of says that sexual orientations exist, have poorly understood causes, and are permanent. Penalizing homosexuality did not stop it, nor did allowing it create more. When we didn't have operations to allow transgendered people to become their mental gender, they still wanted it just as much. And so on and so forth. Pedophilia is just another sexual orientation. (Actually many subdivisions exist, some are interested in girls, some in boys, some in both, some also are attracted to adult women, etc.) You aren't attracted to men or women, you're attracted to children. As with homosexuality, it isn't likely to ever be cured. Unlike homosexuality, there can be no possible consent, and expressing it is fundamentally against our moral values. Unfortunately sex is a very strong urge, and denying tends to fail in the long run. There is no evidence that any sexual orientation is affected by availability of stimulating materials. Therefore it is unlikely that child porn contributes to the existence of pedophilia. As for incentivizing - anyone who thinks that sexual beings need to be incentivized to try to do what they are wired to do doesn't understand sexual drives. Full stop. I give it better than even odds that if you get to this point, you'll think that I'm a "child porn apologist". You'd be wrong about that. Why? Because, as I said, child porn is interesting to pedophiles. Evidence that I've seen says that pedophiles actually will abuse children. Repeatedly. If you can track them down through child porn, and book them for that, you're probably doing the world a service. It is kind of like going after Al Capone for tax invasion. It is not exactly what we didn't like him for, but it was what we could get him on. Incidentally my opinion on whether child porn should be criminalized will change very quickly if I ever run into evidence that some combination of therapy and availability of child porn can allow pedophiles to remain in society and abuse at an acceptably low rate. (The idea of an "acceptable" risk of child abuse is revolting to many, but public policy accepts the idea of an "acceptably low" risk of all sorts of things, like death, dismemberment, etc. And, honestly, we're implicitly accepting that there is an acceptable risk of abuse every time we underfund programs to find and help people who are at risk...)
mistercow 14y ago
>Are you seriously defending child pornography right now? Where did I defend child pornography? I advocated finding harmless sexual outlets for pedophiles. Not the same thing. Here's a really good rule of thumb you can use when examining your own reasoning: if you find yourself attacking a point because you think it could serve as a premise in an argument for a conclusion you don't like, then your objectivity has been compromised. Arguments must be judged on the merits of their premises, never the other way around. In any case, research (e.g. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-010-9696-y http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-010-9696-y) suggests that legal possession of child pornography is linked to a decline in child sexual abuse rates. That does not imply that we should legalize the possession of child pornography, but it does strongly suggest that benign outlets for pedophiles are helpful in reducing child abuse. In contrast, the only evidence available that such outlets would encourage child abuse is a number of longitudinal studies on convicted child molesters. Such studies are incapable of establishing a direction of causation, and it is extremely likely in this case that the relationship is spurious (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spurious_relationship http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spurious_relationship). Both child molestation (A) and consumption of child pornography (B) are caused by the lurking variable of pedophilia (C). But this is crucial: real child pornography is not a benign outlet, and I never suggested that it was. What I said was that the problem is children getting hurt, not pedophiles getting off.
stormbeta 14y ago
I assumed mistercow was talking about things like drawn erotica, not actual CP.
dbaupp 14y ago
I definitely don't like child pornography, I think it should be stamped out as much as possible. However: > Are you seriously defending child pornography right now? Please don't do that. There's rarely hard and fast boundaries between what is X and what isn't X (e.g. what about someone who looks like a child, but is a perfectly normal adult in all other respects), so one must be able to discuss issues without it escalating into every party involved proposing tougher and harder punishments for more and more borderline cases. http://lesswrong.com/lw/ls/when_none_dare_urge_restraint/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/ls/when_none_dare_urge_restraint/ > Pedophilia is a paraphilia. The desire grows as it is fed. [Citation needed.]
joepie91 14y ago
"The desire grows as it is fed." [citation needed] "Furthermore, the reason you hear of child porn rings is because those are what form - people share it with each other in a tit-for-tat sort of way. It absolutely incentivizes the production of more, which means more abused kids." You believe in driving pedophiles in corners, and are then surprised that they group together in said corners you just drove them into. I'm not sure how that was an unexpected result? "God damnit HN, I should have known a thread on a Tor node being shut down would bring out all the child porn apologists. Funny how that happens, eh?" I should have known a thread on a TOR node being shut down would bring out all the irrational witch hunters. Funny how that happens, eh?
gambiting 14y ago
Well how is it that you can legally have a video of two dudes stabbing another guy to death, chopping his head off and eating the body, and yet in some countries like US you can actually go to prison for longer for possession of child porn than for actually abusing a child sexually? This does not make sense. A video of a crime != crime. And no, I am not defending pedophiles - but I am defending the stance that you should not be sent to prison for any kind of video you might have in your possession, as long as its not a video of you committing a crime,in which case, well, it's just an evidence against you.

by ahelwer 14y ago

aes256 14y ago

> Furthermore, the reason you hear of child porn rings is because those are what form - people share it with each other in a tit-for-tat sort of way. It absolutely incentivizes the production of more, which means more abused kids. I'd imagine it's like any other prohibited material or substance; drugs, counterfeit goods, pirated works, etc. Of those implicated, a small minority are involved in production, while the vast majority are simply consumers. I assume you are willing to at least acknowledge the existence of the latter group; people who simply consume child pornography and play no part in the production, or any sexual abuse of children for that matter. Do you really think it is appropriate to ruin these peoples' lives — splash their names across the newspapers, lock them in jail, destroy their career, their relationships, make them a social pariah — for mere possession of child pornography? For having a certain sequence of 0s and 1s on their computer?

drzaiusapelord 14y ago
>and play no part in the production, or any sexual abuse of children for that matter. Their demand of it CAUSES IT TO BE MADE. Jesus, I've never seen so much bending overbackwards over CP. Hey guys, we still have the first amendment and SCOTUS always rule sensibly on speech issues. No one is going to start a police state over CP enforcement. The slippery slope doesn't always happen, in fact, its rare that it does.
- aes256 14y ago
  I don't view CP as a free speech issue, I just think its prohibition is an arbitrary, puritan social construct. Same applies to indecent exposure laws, I guess. At what point did we decide the human form is indecent in its unclothed state, and people should be deprived of their freedom for exposing their natural form in public? At what point did we decide people should be deprived of their freedom simply for looking at images of children in their natural, unclothed state?
  - mistercow 14y ago
    This actually touches on another issue, which is the definition of "pornography". Weirdly, most people these days seem to make an exception for artistic adult nudes, but consider any image of a nude child to be pornographic. This is insane, of course. If you take a cute picture of your toddler playing in the bathtub, that is not pornography, yet a lot of people would lump it in under that definition, including many governments. But when we're talking about images and video depicting child abuse, that's a different situation altogether.
- mistercow 14y ago
  >Their demand of it CAUSES IT TO BE MADE. I mean, you can shout it in all caps, but I don't know if we can really say that's established as fact. But it's pretty disingenuous to claim that people in this thread are defending CP. The issue is far more nuanced than that, but we all agree that people taking pictures/video of themselves hurting children is terrible. It's just that from there the discussion moves into pragmatism and how we should actually be dealing with it as a society. Pedophiles are a fact of life, and it's better for everyone if we can find ways for them to satisfy their urges without hurting anybody, instead of waiting for them to do something horrible so that we can punish them for it. Just to be very specific because people love to misinterpret me on this point: legalizing CP is not a solution that I am advocating. A benign outlet" will, by definition, have to be something that does not harm children. >Hey guys, we still have the first amendment and SCOTUS always rule sensibly on speech issues. Seriously?
- darkarmani 14y ago
  > The slippery slope doesn't always happen, in fact, its rare that it does. So what happens if a spammer sends millions of CP images to inboxes? What do you think of a situation that instantly makes millions of people felons? Is that a reasonable law?

btilly 14y ago

I like how you jump from not being well-established to being definitely wrong. Everyone is telling you that citation is needed because it very much is. On topics like this a lot of people have strong opinions, far fewer have well-informed ones. We want the latter. Here is my, I believe, moderately informed opinion. As http://anthonydamato.law.northwestern.edu/Adobefiles/porn.pdf http://anthonydamato.law.northwestern.edu/Adobefiles/porn.pd... makes clear, evidence that we now have says that widespread availability to porn has coincided with a massive decrease in rapes. Caused? Very hard to prove (as with most social statistics). But definitely coincided and there likely is some causal effect. If that happens with regular porn, the natural expectation is that it is likely to happen with specific kinds of porn as well. If so, even though we don't have proof (and proof will be very hard to come to), we should be inclined to believe that the "harmless outlet" concept is likely valid. Moving on, let's address your "paraphelia" comment. My opinion is that paraphelias are sexual orientations that we dislike for fairly good reasons. However all evidence that I'm aware of says that sexual orientations exist, have poorly understood causes, and are permanent. Penalizing homosexuality did not stop it, nor did allowing it create more. When we didn't have operations to allow transgendered people to become their mental gender, they still wanted it just as much. And so on and so forth. Pedophilia is just another sexual orientation. (Actually many subdivisions exist, some are interested in girls, some in boys, some in both, some also are attracted to adult women, etc.) You aren't attracted to men or women, you're attracted to children. As with homosexuality, it isn't likely to ever be cured. Unlike homosexuality, there can be no possible consent, and expressing it is fundamentally against our moral values. Unfortunately sex is a very strong urge, and denying tends to fail in the long run. There is no evidence that any sexual orientation is affected by availability of stimulating materials. Therefore it is unlikely that child porn contributes to the existence of pedophilia. As for incentivizing - anyone who thinks that sexual beings need to be incentivized to try to do what they are wired to do doesn't understand sexual drives. Full stop. I give it better than even odds that if you get to this point, you'll think that I'm a "child porn apologist". You'd be wrong about that. Why? Because, as I said, child porn is interesting to pedophiles. Evidence that I've seen says that pedophiles actually will abuse children. Repeatedly. If you can track them down through child porn, and book them for that, you're probably doing the world a service. It is kind of like going after Al Capone for tax invasion. It is not exactly what we didn't like him for, but it was what we could get him on. Incidentally my opinion on whether child porn should be criminalized will change very quickly if I ever run into evidence that some combination of therapy and availability of child porn can allow pedophiles to remain in society and abuse at an acceptably low rate. (The idea of an "acceptable" risk of child abuse is revolting to many, but public policy accepts the idea of an "acceptably low" risk of all sorts of things, like death, dismemberment, etc. And, honestly, we're implicitly accepting that there is an acceptable risk of abuse every time we underfund programs to find and help people who are at risk...)

mistercow 14y ago

>Are you seriously defending child pornography right now? Where did I defend child pornography? I advocated finding harmless sexual outlets for pedophiles. Not the same thing. Here's a really good rule of thumb you can use when examining your own reasoning: if you find yourself attacking a point because you think it could serve as a premise in an argument for a conclusion you don't like, then your objectivity has been compromised. Arguments must be judged on the merits of their premises, never the other way around. In any case, research (e.g. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-010-9696-y http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-010-9696-y) suggests that legal possession of child pornography is linked to a decline in child sexual abuse rates. That does not imply that we should legalize the possession of child pornography, but it does strongly suggest that benign outlets for pedophiles are helpful in reducing child abuse. In contrast, the only evidence available that such outlets would encourage child abuse is a number of longitudinal studies on convicted child molesters. Such studies are incapable of establishing a direction of causation, and it is extremely likely in this case that the relationship is spurious (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spurious_relationship http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spurious_relationship). Both child molestation (A) and consumption of child pornography (B) are caused by the lurking variable of pedophilia (C). But this is crucial: real child pornography is not a benign outlet, and I never suggested that it was. What I said was that the problem is children getting hurt, not pedophiles getting off.

stormbeta 14y ago

I assumed mistercow was talking about things like drawn erotica, not actual CP.

dbaupp 14y ago

I definitely don't like child pornography, I think it should be stamped out as much as possible. However: > Are you seriously defending child pornography right now? Please don't do that. There's rarely hard and fast boundaries between what is X and what isn't X (e.g. what about someone who looks like a child, but is a perfectly normal adult in all other respects), so one must be able to discuss issues without it escalating into every party involved proposing tougher and harder punishments for more and more borderline cases. http://lesswrong.com/lw/ls/when_none_dare_urge_restraint/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/ls/when_none_dare_urge_restraint/ > Pedophilia is a paraphilia. The desire grows as it is fed. [Citation needed.]

joepie91 14y ago

"The desire grows as it is fed." [citation needed] "Furthermore, the reason you hear of child porn rings is because those are what form - people share it with each other in a tit-for-tat sort of way. It absolutely incentivizes the production of more, which means more abused kids." You believe in driving pedophiles in corners, and are then surprised that they group together in said corners you just drove them into. I'm not sure how that was an unexpected result? "God damnit HN, I should have known a thread on a Tor node being shut down would bring out all the child porn apologists. Funny how that happens, eh?" I should have known a thread on a TOR node being shut down would bring out all the irrational witch hunters. Funny how that happens, eh?

gambiting 14y ago

Well how is it that you can legally have a video of two dudes stabbing another guy to death, chopping his head off and eating the body, and yet in some countries like US you can actually go to prison for longer for possession of child porn than for actually abusing a child sexually? This does not make sense. A video of a crime != crime. And no, I am not defending pedophiles - but I am defending the stance that you should not be sent to prison for any kind of video you might have in your possession, as long as its not a video of you committing a crime,in which case, well, it's just an evidence against you.