Silk Road forums
Discussion => Philosophy, Economics and Justice => Topic started by: kmfkewm on January 14, 2013, 09:22 am
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My own personal beliefs are that regardless of any borders on the globe, that all humans have the right to freedom. I do not think that a majority in any particular subsection of the globe can decide to take away freedoms from minorities. I don't care if there is a country with a hundred people, and 99 of them vote for 1 of them to be their slave, I support the slave. I don't care where the slave is from a spatial perspective , and I don't even really care who their master is. I think that what freedom is is pretty easy to define actually. Freedom means that you have what is yours and all you can make from it, and none of what is anothers unless by mutual agreement without coercion. Freedom means that you can pick the person you are married to, the drugs you consume, the information you consume, the possessions you have: Without any restriction what-so-ever. Now some people may need to have their freedom restricted due to their restricting others freedom. A person who kills an innocent person should not be allowed to go free unless it was in the will of the person they murder. These are small details, details that do not cloud my overall desire for Global Human Freedom (but which many who want Global Human Enslavement will argue are extremely intricate and requiring a government to deal with, from which their cancer will grow out again).
I think that ANYONE under authority of ANYONE or THING who stands in the way of these ideals should unquestionably be killed or incapacitated , and thus I consider myself to be a militant libertarian.
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Additionally, I believe that we have a duty as human beings to ensure that our species maintains its own total freedom from slavery.
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It is the military industrial complex profits that seek permenant war. It is the politicians who enjoy sexual desires and the vanity of doing nothing, when they should seek service, but woe to them that pile up high their riches, yet restrict even the poor to come unto peace.
It is the plan since World War 2 ended that they would start their new Boom than bust Great Depression in 1999, to mark the beast at 666. Woe unto those who are pillaging the poor and stealing from the hungrey when the time of awesome dread and mighty days. Even the creeping crawling thing shall overtake them and feed on them.
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I am a libertarian/ancap/agorist/voluntarist, leaning towards panarchist. I voted no.
I think that using militant tactics while we are vastly outnumbered, while it might be justified in specific cases, would be counterproductive to the goal of increasing the general level of freedom. I think it would drive away a good portion of people that identify as libertarians and turn off potential newcomers. It would also give the state the perfect(and perhaps not unjustified) excuse to label libertarians as "terrorists" and start conducting drone strikes.
when/if we are not a minority anymore (or at least not such a tiny minority) then militant libertarianism sounds much more productive to me.
:)
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Whilst I consider myself to be a liberal it is usefull to identify and understand other political ideologies.
For example a liberal puts the rights of the individual ahead of everything else.
So in regards to drugs, a liberal sees it as their choice to take what ever they want, they will accept the consequences of their own actions and therefore the state should not interfere.
Now a conservative places the rights of the family unit ahead of everything else.
So again in regards to drugs, a conservative believes that the state has a role in protecting the family unit and thus drugs cannot be allowed as the state has to protect the other members of your family from your actions.
Now a socialist puts the rights of the wider community ahead of everything else and therefore has to consider if someone taking drugs will have a knock on effect on the rest of the community, and if so then they must be outlawed.
Now whilst I identify myself as a liberal, I have also realized that as liberalism grows, so does the community diminish.
The reason for that is that if you place your own rights ahead of everyone else (including those of your own family, i.e. conservatism) then it stands to reason that this impacts upon the rights of the family, the community and the collective nation.
However the opposite may be true, rather than liberalism being the death of the community, the death of the community may be the rise of liberalism meaning that we may not be eroding society with our liberal views, but rather that society may be being eroded because of the ways in which we now work and interact and this may be causing a shift towards liberalism.
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I don't really agree with that.
In a liberal society, you have the -choice- to put your own interests before those of your family, the community at large or anything else. This is however, not an -obligation-. Living within a liberal society you are fully free to share your wealth with your family, your neighbours, or even everyone in your country or in the world. Liberalism does in no way impede that freedom, it does not forbid you to share resources within a group if you choose to.
Systems like socialism do force you to share, not paying taxes will ultimately result in your assets being taken from you by force/violence.
Conservatives have little to fear from liberalism really - if they choose to, they can operate as family units sharing resources if they want to do so.
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Isn't militant libertarianism a bit of an oxymoron? I mean, I do think that people should be able to decide what they want to do (short of impinging upon others' freedoms), but what about people that want a bit of structure in life? I've noticed that some people like to follow rules, at least to have a few rules, perhaps as "guideposts in life". Being militantly free just has a strange sound, unless one applies that to the behavior of large institutions, such as the government, or perhaps to large corporations (ones that claim intellectual rights to someone's legitimately gotten property). What comes to mind regarding that last statement is Monsano forcing farmers to destroy their crop of, say,, corn because it (the corn) has their patented Bt producing strain, a genetically modified frankenfood created by Monsano. Bt is an insecticide that is produced by corn that has had the genes for Bt added to the plant's chromosome ( a really stupid thing for Monsano to have done, since corn produces pollen, and would immediately begin spreading Bt characteristics to other corn plants; this is how sexual reproduction works). If a farmer planted "normal" corn, collected some of the seeds for next year's crop, and finds that it has some Bt genes from cross-pollination, he shouldn't be required/sued by Monsano for stealing intellectual property. This lengthy, rambling example IS one place where militant libertarianism would be a good thing, esp. since his normal crop wasinfected by the Frankencrop.
I hope that made sense...
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No. Being an empiricist, it's really hard to take any form of Libertarianism too seriously.
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These cases require specific legislation. If you crop gets pollinated by some GM crop naturally, i'd say you have every right to grow the resulting crop. After all, you did not do anything to cause this pollination, nor did the patent holder take adequate measures to prevent transfer of resistance.
I'm not exactly sure on how this works in the US, but as a general line of thought, pollen are just a communication system between plants, which you are legal to receive and use. Since there is not encryption present, receiving and working from the received DNA may actually be your fundamental right, as this information was transmitted over your property and no measures were taken to prevent you from intercepting the information. I suppose this could lead to a a -very- complicated trial if you were to pursue it.
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Absolutely!
and as for 'nuyt'... YOU SUCK SATAN'S COCK!
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I think that ANYONE under authority of ANYONE or THING who stands in the way of these ideals should unquestionably be killed or incapacitated , and thus I consider myself to be a militant libertarian.
lol
you're taking things too seriously
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Absolutely!
and as for 'nuyt'... YOU SUCK SATAN'S COCK!
I don't get it. You don't think Hick was an empiricist himself? If he was alive today I think he'd have as much shit to talk about people who love clothing their rhetoric in abstractions like "freedom" and "liberty" more than thinking through how the world actually works, as he did about people blithely accepting the status quo...
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Isn't militant libertarianism a bit of an oxymoron? I mean, I do think that people should be able to decide what they want to do (short of impinging upon others' freedoms), but what about people that want a bit of structure in life? I've noticed that some people like to follow rules, at least to have a few rules, perhaps as "guideposts in life". Being militantly free just has a strange sound, unless one applies that to the behavior of large institutions, such as the government, or perhaps to large corporations (ones that claim intellectual rights to someone's legitimately gotten property). What comes to mind regarding that last statement is Monsano forcing farmers to destroy their crop of, say,, corn because it (the corn) has their patented Bt producing strain, a genetically modified frankenfood created by Monsano. Bt is an insecticide that is produced by corn that has had the genes for Bt added to the plant's chromosome ( a really stupid thing for Monsano to have done, since corn produces pollen, and would immediately begin spreading Bt characteristics to other corn plants; this is how sexual reproduction works). If a farmer planted "normal" corn, collected some of the seeds for next year's crop, and finds that it has some Bt genes from cross-pollination, he shouldn't be required/sued by Monsano for stealing intellectual property. This lengthy, rambling example IS one place where militant libertarianism would be a good thing, esp. since his normal crop wasinfected by the Frankencrop.
I hope that made sense...
No, militant libertarianism is not an oxymoron. Libertarianism means freedom, it does not mean pacifism by any stretch of the imagination. I believe that measures up to and including violence should be used to force freedom upon the entire world. I do not believe alternatives to freedom should be considered, regardless of the number of people who support alternatives to freedom. Essentially, I believe that there should be totalitarian (in that no other systems should be open to consideration, anything other than libertarianism is slavery and unacceptable), violently enforced freedom. This is not contradictory in the slightest, a free person can voluntarily be the 'slave' of another but anyone who uses violence or the threat of violence to control an unwilling person who has not initiated force, should have violence returned against them until they are incapable of continuing their immoral force.
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No, militant libertarianism is not an oxymoron. Libertarianism means freedom, it does not mean pacifism by any stretch of the imagination. I believe that measures up to and including violence should be used to force freedom upon the entire world. I do not believe alternatives to freedom should be considered, regardless of the number of people who support alternatives to freedom. Essentially, I believe that there should be totalitarian (in that no other systems should be open to consideration, anything other than libertarianism is slavery and unacceptable), violently enforced freedom. This is not contradictory in the slightest, a free person can voluntarily be the 'slave' of another but anyone who uses violence or the threat of violence to control an unwilling person who has not initiated force, should have violence returned against them until they are incapable of continuing their immoral force.
words like 'freedom' don't refer to anything or mean anything. you just have a desire for violence, glory, revolution, and all that fun stuff, militant 'libeterianism' is just an excuse to act out on these desires.... some people become fascists, marxists, etc., for the same reason. it's all puerile fantasy, and you'll grow out of it.
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No, militant libertarianism is not an oxymoron. Libertarianism means freedom, it does not mean pacifism by any stretch of the imagination. I believe that measures up to and including violence should be used to force freedom upon the entire world. I do not believe alternatives to freedom should be considered, regardless of the number of people who support alternatives to freedom. Essentially, I believe that there should be totalitarian (in that no other systems should be open to consideration, anything other than libertarianism is slavery and unacceptable), violently enforced freedom. This is not contradictory in the slightest, a free person can voluntarily be the 'slave' of another but anyone who uses violence or the threat of violence to control an unwilling person who has not initiated force, should have violence returned against them until they are incapable of continuing their immoral force.
words like 'freedom' don't refer to anything or mean anything. you just have a desire for violence, glory, revolution, and all that fun stuff, militant 'libeterianism' is just an excuse to act out on these desires.... some people become fascists, marxists, etc., for the same reason. it's all puerile fantasy, and you'll grow out of it.
Freedom has a meaning, people who want to infringe the freedom of others claim it has no meaning though. I have no desire for violence, I have a desire for freedom and as libertarianism is freedom I have a desire for libertarianism. It would be far superior if libertarianism could be achieved without violence, however this is a fantasy that libertarians need to grow out of. Here is a small example of freedom
1. You can be a member of any religion you want, however you can not force your religious beliefs onto others or take actions in the name of your religion that infringe upon the freedoms of others
2. You do not have to pay taxes or for any service that you do not want
3. You can marry whoever you want, so long as they agree without being coerced
4. You can possess and obtain whatever information and/or other items you want, on your own land or land where it is permissible, without being restricted by laws (however you may be restricted by lack of resources, or by the freedom of others to set rules regarding the information/items that can be on land that they own)
5. You can consume any drugs you want, however if you are on land owned by another they may restrict which drugs you possess and what you may do under the influence of drugs while on their land (a person may own a street and forbid you to drive on it while intoxicated, conversely a person may own a street and allow intoxicated drivers)
6. You can own property on which you can set any rules you want that do not restrict another persons freedoms. For example, you can own land and say that weapons are not allowed on the land, this does not restrict another persons freedom to own guns it merely says that if they bring guns onto your land they are restricting your freedom to have rule over your own land. However, you can not say that people on your land can own slaves, as this would restrict the freedom of other people to not be enslaved.
7. You can say whatever you want and publish whatever you want, provided you do not say things or publish things that are against the rules on the property of someone else
8. You have freedom from being forced to work for another person against your will
Freedom is very well defined actually, if you want to know if something entails freedom or not see the libertarian position on it, if anarcho-libertarians are in favor of something it means that it is compatible with freedom, if they are against something it means that it goes against freedom.
Fascism and Marxism are completely incompatible with freedom. There is a major difference between militancy in the name of Fascism/Marxism and militancy in the name of Anarcho- Libertarianism: militancy in the name of the former ideologies is done to enslave people and militancy in the name of the latter ideology is done in order to free slaves.
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Freedom has a meaning,
please define freedom. you gave a list of examples, but no definition of it.
people who want to infringe the freedom of others claim it has no meaning though.
or maybe people who want to infringe the freedom of others are just as ignorant as those who make an idol of freedom.
Fascism and Marxism are completely incompatible with freedom.
that is beside the point. i'm more interested in your motives than your thoughts.
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Saying that a word like "freedom" doesn't mean anything isn't exactly right. It is an abstract and relative word, so it gains all of its meaning from the context in which it is used. Just consider these two contexts in which a word like "freedom" could be used:
1 "I am an African slave living in 1850's America, and I want my freedom from my captors so I can live a life of human dignity."
2 "I am a violent pedophile, and I want the freedom to express my sexuality by abducting and molesting children."
Clearly, simply using abstract and relative words is almost meaningless unless you provide a full and specific context. Pro tip, most people sooner or later realize that these kinds of words are very uninteresting when compared to their contexts, and that's why most people focus on the contexts and don't really fixate on the words. Other people, though, continue to grant some type of metaphysical significance to these kinds of words, which is a shame. All it would take to clear up such simple confusions would be to study a bit of the philosophy of language or logic. Basic stuff.
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Saying that a word like "freedom" doesn't mean anything isn't exactly right. It is an abstract and relative word, so it gains all of its meaning from the context in which it is used. Just consider these two contexts in which a word like "freedom" could be used:
yeah it has a meaning in certain contexts but the way it is used by libertarians is meaningless. Once 'freedom' is made into an ideology, it loses whatever meaning it originally had. The same is true of 'equality', etc.; means something in some situations, but once it is turned into an abstract end in itself, it ceases to have any meaning.
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The individual belief system is based on immediate surroundings, this is why religion organized is so persuasive due its ability to connect with the feeling of comfort, fellowship ect.....yet what they truly cultivate is the fake feeling of friendship and only seek to challenge each others beliefs and than condemn them in whatever way each manipulative person desires. The economy is the same, you are the low worker, only to be offered a fake sense of comfort enough to get you to work while they take advantage of you.
See I am doing a new thing, you must beware the hypocrites who control these philosophies yet do nothing to carry them out. This philosophy of fighting for freedom has been so misused by America the last century to make war, even mentioning it is sad to bring up the past without any regard to its context being applied to the current political situation. No doubt they only have mass murder for profit, but they don't even allow small community meetings to organized without a FBI agent or Homeland security agent infiltrating them to falsely lead them away from anything or worse into real criminal acts without purpose.
What to make of America? Who knows America is the best of places it is the worst of places. This is the worst of times and it is the best of times. I am nothing!
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@ Nuyt - class post! People too easily fixate on the semantics and become distracted from a more meaningful debate.
On another point, before I started reading these forums my feelings about libertarianism were mainly indifferent. DPR's posts made me curious to find out more. As I read more I came to believe it to be a fundamentally flawed political philosophy (just my opinion, I'm no expert). And when people start in with their militant rhetoric, I become cynical in the extreme.
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On another point, before I started reading these forums my feelings about libertarianism were mainly indifferent. DPR's posts made me curious to find out more. As I read more I came to believe it to be a fundamentally flawed political philosophy (just my opinion, I'm no expert). And when people start in with their militant rhetoric, I become cynical in the extreme.
Pure liberalism is somewhat fundamentally flawed as a large part of liberalism is to do with the reduction of the state mechanism. If this is taken to its extreme it becomes anarchism and anarchism can only exist temporarily as eventually a new state mechanism will emerge.
This is why liberalism tends to get merged with other ideologies which can exist on a more permanent basis, i.e. liberal socialism or liberal conservatism.
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The libertarian flavor of 'freedom' can be defined as the freedom to do anything you choose, so long as it does not infringe on the rights of others. The word 'freedom' has lost some of its reputation since the US gov started using it as the reason to invade and occupy countries around the world. No doubt there is some confusion on the subject.
To the OP: I believe in it.
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Freedom has a meaning, people who want to infringe the freedom of others claim it has no meaning though. I have no desire for violence, I have a desire for freedom and as libertarianism is freedom I have a desire for libertarianism. It would be far superior if libertarianism could be achieved without violence, however this is a fantasy that libertarians need to grow out of. Here is a small example of freedom
1. You can be a member of any religion you want, however you can not force your religious beliefs onto others or take actions in the name of your religion that infringe upon the freedoms of others
2. You do not have to pay taxes or for any service that you do not want
3. You can marry whoever you want, so long as they agree without being coerced
4. You can possess and obtain whatever information and/or other items you want, on your own land or land where it is permissible, without being restricted by laws (however you may be restricted by lack of resources, or by the freedom of others to set rules regarding the information/items that can be on land that they own)
5. You can consume any drugs you want, however if you are on land owned by another they may restrict which drugs you possess and what you may do under the influence of drugs while on their land (a person may own a street and forbid you to drive on it while intoxicated, conversely a person may own a street and allow intoxicated drivers)
6. You can own property on which you can set any rules you want that do not restrict another persons freedoms. For example, you can own land and say that weapons are not allowed on the land, this does not restrict another persons freedom to own guns it merely says that if they bring guns onto your land they are restricting your freedom to have rule over your own land. However, you can not say that people on your land can own slaves, as this would restrict the freedom of other people to not be enslaved.
7. You can say whatever you want and publish whatever you want, provided you do not say things or publish things that are against the rules on the property of someone else
8. You have freedom from being forced to work for another person against your will
Freedom is very well defined actually, if you want to know if something entails freedom or not see the libertarian position on it, if anarcho-libertarians are in favor of something it means that it is compatible with freedom, if they are against something it means that it goes against freedom.
Fascism and Marxism are completely incompatible with freedom. There is a major difference between militancy in the name of Fascism/Marxism and militancy in the name of Anarcho- Libertarianism: militancy in the name of the former ideologies is done to enslave people and militancy in the name of the latter ideology is done in order to free slaves.
If I understand you correctly, following these examples, it would be possible for a private group of landowners to set up their own church of beliefs, on a private residency, which might resemble this; The Island Church of Free Pedos. An island retreat where all pedos and their 'families' are welcome. The age of consent wouldn't exist, as long as consent is given. Sex would be unrestricted between all consenting children and adults. You could marry a twelve year old (or three). And the church would be free to teach children from an early age that sex with adults is essential to their pedo religion, and the only way to repent their sins and go to heaven. Children are more easily brainwashed if they're indoctrinated from an early age.
This would all be possible under you freedoms, and you know their are people out their who not only believe having sex with children is OK, but actually believe it's essential to healthy sexual development! They would brainwash their children to accept this (we know this is possible because many religions already indoctrinate their children from an early age into believing all kinds of rubbish), so they would argue no-one personal freedoms are being threatened.
Is this the case Kmf, or have I misunderstood your personal freedoms? Would there be an age of consent for everyone? If so, how does that not impede on the individuals rite to freedom of personal choice? And how would you stop a pedos freedom to bring up their children in any religious manner they see fit?
I'm not attacking you, I'd just like some clarification please. :)
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Who the fuck are you to force your biased concept of 'freedom' unto me through violent means?
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Freedom has a meaning, people who want to infringe the freedom of others claim it has no meaning though. I have no desire for violence, I have a desire for freedom and as libertarianism is freedom I have a desire for libertarianism. It would be far superior if libertarianism could be achieved without violence, however this is a fantasy that libertarians need to grow out of. Here is a small example of freedom
1. You can be a member of any religion you want, however you can not force your religious beliefs onto others or take actions in the name of your religion that infringe upon the freedoms of others
2. You do not have to pay taxes or for any service that you do not want
3. You can marry whoever you want, so long as they agree without being coerced
4. You can possess and obtain whatever information and/or other items you want, on your own land or land where it is permissible, without being restricted by laws (however you may be restricted by lack of resources, or by the freedom of others to set rules regarding the information/items that can be on land that they own)
5. You can consume any drugs you want, however if you are on land owned by another they may restrict which drugs you possess and what you may do under the influence of drugs while on their land (a person may own a street and forbid you to drive on it while intoxicated, conversely a person may own a street and allow intoxicated drivers)
6. You can own property on which you can set any rules you want that do not restrict another persons freedoms. For example, you can own land and say that weapons are not allowed on the land, this does not restrict another persons freedom to own guns it merely says that if they bring guns onto your land they are restricting your freedom to have rule over your own land. However, you can not say that people on your land can own slaves, as this would restrict the freedom of other people to not be enslaved.
7. You can say whatever you want and publish whatever you want, provided you do not say things or publish things that are against the rules on the property of someone else
8. You have freedom from being forced to work for another person against your will
Freedom is very well defined actually, if you want to know if something entails freedom or not see the libertarian position on it, if anarcho-libertarians are in favor of something it means that it is compatible with freedom, if they are against something it means that it goes against freedom.
Fascism and Marxism are completely incompatible with freedom. There is a major difference between militancy in the name of Fascism/Marxism and militancy in the name of Anarcho- Libertarianism: militancy in the name of the former ideologies is done to enslave people and militancy in the name of the latter ideology is done in order to free slaves.
If I understand you correctly, following these examples, it would be possible for a private group of landowners to set up their own church of beliefs, on a private residency, which might resemble this; The Island Church of Free Pedos. An island retreat where all pedos and their 'families' are welcome. The age of consent wouldn't exist, as long as consent is given. Sex would be unrestricted between all consenting children and adults. You could marry a twelve year old (or three). And the church would be free to teach children from an early age that sex with adults is essential to their pedo religion, and the only way to repent their sins and go to heaven. Children are more easily brainwashed if they're indoctrinated from an early age.
This would all be possible under you freedoms, and you know their are people out their who not only believe having sex with children is OK, but actually believe it's essential to healthy sexual development! They would brainwash their children to accept this (we know this is possible because many religions already indoctrinate their children from an early age into believing all kinds of rubbish), so they would argue no-one personal freedoms are being threatened.
Is this the case Kmf, or have I misunderstood your personal freedoms? Would there be an age of consent for everyone? If so, how does that not impede on the individuals rite to freedom of personal choice? And how would you stop a pedos freedom to bring up their children in any religious manner they see fit?
I'm not attacking you, I'd just like some clarification please. :)
The way I see it, you're right. There would be no law to prevent what you describe. But your implication is that this would be worse than the status quo, and I'm not convinced by that.
If you're not aware, the BBC and the British government are currently defending against allegations of child sex abuse spanning decades. And since the media and police do not effectively report or investigate crime, we can be sure the truth will not be known any time soon. Various cases of rape perpetrated by state-sanctioned armed forces, including against children, have been reported since the declaration of the "war on terror".
The harm caused by the state is incalculable.
If your neighbour went to this pedo paradise, what would you have to say? You would be outraged, you might even kill him and undertake the care of the child. I would have no qualms with that. Maybe (inevitably) you would find people who share your sympathies, your group could decide to use force to stop what you view as an infringement of the rights of children. This is preferable in my opinion.
FWIW OP I'm leaning towards 'no'.
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Who the fuck are you to force your biased concept of 'freedom' unto me through violent means?
See the thing is I desire only force to force you to not enslave others, and likewise I desire to force others to not enslave you. The only people who are immoral are those who wish to force anything other than libertarianism onto anybody, my ideology is one where everyone is equal and everyone is free. So who the fuck are you to force slavery onto anyone, is a better question.
If I understand you correctly, following these examples, it would be possible for a private group of landowners to set up their own church of beliefs, on a private residency, which might resemble this; The Island Church of Free Pedos. An island retreat where all pedos and their 'families' are welcome. The age of consent wouldn't exist, as long as consent is given. Sex would be unrestricted between all consenting children and adults. You could marry a twelve year old (or three). And the church would be free to teach children from an early age that sex with adults is essential to their pedo religion, and the only way to repent their sins and go to heaven. Children are more easily brainwashed if they're indoctrinated from an early age.
This would all be possible under you freedoms, and you know their are people out their who not only believe having sex with children is OK, but actually believe it's essential to healthy sexual development! They would brainwash their children to accept this (we know this is possible because many religions already indoctrinate their children from an early age into believing all kinds of rubbish), so they would argue no-one personal freedoms are being threatened.
Is this the case Kmf, or have I misunderstood your personal freedoms? Would there be an age of consent for everyone? If so, how does that not impede on the individuals rite to freedom of personal choice? And how would you stop a pedos freedom to bring up their children in any religious manner they see fit?
I'm not attacking you, I'd just like some clarification please. :)
Certainly polygamy should be legal. As far as pedophiles rights go, I believe that they should be free to obtain and distribute child pornography, however, they are not to be free to produce it as that entails child molestation. I believe that children have the right to be free from coercive sexual activity, and at some ages children simply cannot consent to engage in sexual acts. These beliefs are entirely consistent with those of anarcho-libertarianism. Deciding the age at which a person is old enough to consent to sexual activity without inherent coercion being involved is one of the small details. Certainly the age should be below 18, for most of human existence it has actually been about 12, however in very modern times it has been significantly increased. Personally I would not feel any desire to stop people from engaging in sexual activity with people around age 13, so long as it is consensual (as is currently the law in Spain, and actually the age of consent in Canada was 14 until quite recently, and many countries around the world have age of consent at about 14). However if an adult coerces a toddler into engaging in sex I would see it as a violation of the toddlers freedom and would thus attempt to prevent this as I am strongly in favor of all humans being free.
As far as what people teach their children, that should not be restricted at all. There is nothing inherently immoral about a pedophile teaching a toddler that it is acceptable for them to engage in sex with adults, however if they actually engage in sex with the toddler it is a violation of the toddlers freedom imo. I also think that parents should be free to teach their children that they will burn in hell if they do not believe in Jesus, or that Jews should be exterminated and a white nationalist government set up. Of course, if they actually try to exterminate Jews they should be stopped as that will violate the freedom of the Jews, however I do believe that they should be free to set up a white nationalist society so long as they do so in a way that is consistent with the freedoms of all others.
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On another point, before I started reading these forums my feelings about libertarianism were mainly indifferent. DPR's posts made me curious to find out more. As I read more I came to believe it to be a fundamentally flawed political philosophy (just my opinion, I'm no expert). And when people start in with their militant rhetoric, I become cynical in the extreme.
Pure liberalism is somewhat fundamentally flawed as a large part of liberalism is to do with the reduction of the state mechanism. If this is taken to its extreme it becomes anarchism and anarchism can only exist temporarily as eventually a new state mechanism will emerge.
This is why liberalism tends to get merged with other ideologies which can exist on a more permanent basis, i.e. liberal socialism or liberal conservatism.
Liberalism taken to its extreme is communism.
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See the thing is I desire only force to force you to not enslave others, and likewise I desire to force others to not enslave you. The only people who are immoral are those who wish to force anything other than libertarianism onto anybody, my ideology is one where everyone is equal and everyone is free. So who the fuck are you to force slavery onto anyone, is a better question.
Your definition of freedom/enslavement might not be (and probably isn't) the same as mine. In my view, the people who are immoral are those who are hypocrites and one-track minded. To believe that libertarianism is the 'one true ideology' is one thing, and I think we can all agree that oppression = bad, but to use VIOLENCE to FORCE your opinion onto others is BULLSHIT, and completely unacceptable. And 'who the fuck i am to force slavery onto anyone' is not a better question, since I never said I would.
Personally, I would rather live under the rule of a genius dictator, that to live at the mercy of autonomous, self proclaimed judges like you.
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See the thing is I desire only force to force you to not enslave others, and likewise I desire to force others to not enslave you. The only people who are immoral are those who wish to force anything other than libertarianism onto anybody, my ideology is one where everyone is equal and everyone is free. So who the fuck are you to force slavery onto anyone, is a better question.
Your definition of freedom/enslavement might not be (and probably isn't) the same as mine. In my view, the people who are immoral are those who are hypocrites and one-track minded. To believe that libertarianism is the 'one true ideology' is one thing, and I think we can all agree that oppression = bad, but to use VIOLENCE to FORCE your opinion onto others is BULLSHIT, and completely unacceptable. And 'who the fuck i am to force slavery onto anyone' is not a better question, since I never said I would.
Personally, I would rather live under the rule of a genius dictator, that to live at the mercy of autonomous, self proclaimed judges like you.
There is nothing BULLSHIT about using violence to free slaves. My opinion is that there should be no slaves, I feel that it is justified to use violence to ensure that this goal is met. People who have slaves maintain their master status by use of violence, so really you should be angry at them and not me. I wish to use violence against those who initiate violence (ie: I do not wish to initiate violence) in order to stop them from continuing the violence they have initiated (ie: They do wish to initiate violence, have done so, and continue to do so) against others. It is completely unacceptable to initiate violence against others, anyone who does not live by libertarian principles MUST initiate violence, as libertarianism allows for EVERYTHING other than the initiation of force. Thus, people who do not follow libertarian principles should have violence used against them until they either follow libertarian principles or are dead.
Nobody who is not evil has anything to fear about a libertarian world. Only those who wish to oppress others have to fear violence being used against them in the name of libertarianism. There is nothing more morally justified than using violence to force libertarianism on the world. Forcing libertarianism on the world is equal to freeing the slaves of the world. There is nothing to fear about a world in which libertarianism is forced with violence, the only people who have anything to fear are those who wish to force slavery onto others. There is no room to argue against libertarianism, in a libertarian world everyone is free to do whatever they want except to initiate force against others. That means nobody will be oppressed by militant libertarianism, they will only be freed or killed/incapacitated for attempting to enslave others. If you do not support slavery you should support militant libertarianism.
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On another point, before I started reading these forums my feelings about libertarianism were mainly indifferent. DPR's posts made me curious to find out more. As I read more I came to believe it to be a fundamentally flawed political philosophy (just my opinion, I'm no expert). And when people start in with their militant rhetoric, I become cynical in the extreme.
Pure liberalism is somewhat fundamentally flawed as a large part of liberalism is to do with the reduction of the state mechanism. If this is taken to its extreme it becomes anarchism and anarchism can only exist temporarily as eventually a new state mechanism will emerge.
This is why liberalism tends to get merged with other ideologies which can exist on a more permanent basis, i.e. liberal socialism or liberal conservatism.
Liberalism taken to its extreme is communism.
No its anarchism
Communism has the biggest state mechanism of all political ideologies, whereas liberalism seeks to reduce the power of the state and increase the power of the individual.
The purest form of libertarianism is anarchistic because the existence of a state requires the involuntary submission to pay for the monopoly services of that state, which is an obvious violation of liberty.
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I believe in militant libertarianism when regulation of this discussion board means I cant post on the main board until I have fifty knobbing fuck off posts.
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On another point, before I started reading these forums my feelings about libertarianism were mainly indifferent. DPR's posts made me curious to find out more. As I read more I came to believe it to be a fundamentally flawed political philosophy (just my opinion, I'm no expert). And when people start in with their militant rhetoric, I become cynical in the extreme.
Pure liberalism is somewhat fundamentally flawed as a large part of liberalism is to do with the reduction of the state mechanism. If this is taken to its extreme it becomes anarchism and anarchism can only exist temporarily as eventually a new state mechanism will emerge.
This is why liberalism tends to get merged with other ideologies which can exist on a more permanent basis, i.e. liberal socialism or liberal conservatism.
Liberalism taken to its extreme is communism.
No its anarchism
Communism has the biggest state mechanism of all political ideologies, whereas liberalism seeks to reduce the power of the state and increase the power of the individual.
The purest form of libertarianism is anarchistic because the existence of a state requires the involuntary submission to pay for the monopoly services of that state, which is an obvious violation of liberty.
The most extreme form of libertarianism is anarchism, the most extreme form of liberalism is communism. Liberals are in favor of redistributing wealth, more mild liberals only want some social programs but at the most extreme end they want state enforced complete equal distribution of resources and this is communism.
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a good example of a more extreme liberal wish is for time dollars, where regardless of the sort of work you do you are paid in units of money named after the amount of time you have worked. Thus, a doctor who works for eight hours receives the same eight 'hour dollars' that a janitor receives for sweeping up floors for eight hours.
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The most extreme form of libertarianism is anarchism, the most extreme form of liberalism is communism. Liberals are in favor of redistributing wealth, more mild liberals only want some social programs but at the most extreme end they want state enforced complete equal distribution of resources and this is communism.
Im sorry but this is nonsense.
Communism and anarchism are at opposite ends of the scale.
Anarchism involves the complete removal of any state mechanism, whereas Communism seeks to have a very large state mechanism with numerous social programs and agendas.
If you take liberalism to its extreme, logically it cannot be both reducing and increasing the state mechanism.
I think where you are confused is that you are not making the distinction between pure liberalism (liberalism), and something like liberal socialism.
Pure liberalism, when taken to the nth degree becomes anarchism.
Liberal socialism is a merger between liberalism and socialism. What you have to understand is that when two ideologies are merged together like this, there are conflicts within the merger as fundamentally liberal philosophy and the social philosophy are different.
True liberalists would disagree with liberal socialism as they are being forced to pay for state programs that they simply don't agree with. In essence a liberal wants to pick and choose what services they pay for, which directly conflicts with a socialist agenda.
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a good example of a more extreme liberal wish is for time dollars, where regardless of the sort of work you do you are paid in units of money named after the amount of time you have worked. Thus, a doctor who works for eight hours receives the same eight 'hour dollars' that a janitor receives for sweeping up floors for eight hours.
Thats a fundamentally socialist idea, its certainly not a liberal concept.
Liberals do not want the state to dictate the value of their work.
From what you just wrote, I think you are more of a socialist than a liberal. You may be a liberal socialist but I think the bias is towards socialism and not liberalism.
There is nothing wrong with that its just this thread is about liberalism and not socialism or liberal socialism.
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@ Kmf and Duckman - I was reading your post and decided to look up some answers myself on wiki. Have either of you heard of the Nolan Chart? I think you may find it interesting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_chart
:)
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@ Kmf and Duckman - I was reading your post and decided to look up some answers myself on wiki. Have either of you heard of the Nolan Chart? I think you may find it interesting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_chart
:)
Nice addition to the discussion. I was thinking about that chart but couldn't remember the name of it.
I like how it shows how 'conservatives' and 'liberals' relate/differ from 'statists' and 'libertarians' on economic and social issues.
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@ Kmf and Duckman - I was reading your post and decided to look up some answers myself on wiki. Have either of you heard of the Nolan Chart? I think you may find it interesting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_chart
:)
Yes I have seen that before, infact its completely in line with what I was saying.
If you look at that square, liberalism is located top right hand quarter of the square whereas communism is located in the top left hand quarter of the square. The more "up and right" you go the more liberal you become. If you move "down and left" you go, the more socialist you become. Certainly there is some common ground between the two but as you become more and more socialist, you are moving away from liberalism.
If anarchism were depicted on that graph it would be a single point located on the top right hand corner of the big square, simply because in anarchism there is no state, so you are both personally and economically completely free. It would be a single point rather than a general direction as, by definition, as soon as a state exists anarchism ceases.
Now liberalism and communism are at opposite ends of the spectrum. This is why one is on the left hand side of the square and the other on the right hand side.
In practice a person rarely wants to be on the edges of that square and all ideologies have both strengths and weaknesses, hence the world is not in agreement as to which would suit us best, and that's why ideologies will tend to become merged with each other. However its important to understand the pure forms of the ideologies so that you can then become able to understand the merged or hybrid ideologies that come from them.
This may be getting a little deep, but although a square is shown, a square is probably not the best shape, although I really have no idea what shape should be used. The reason being some ideologies, when taken to their literal conclusion will endure better than others.
I have mentioned anarchism before, the problem with liberalism is that if you reduce and reduce the state, eventually you weaken it to the point it serves no function.
Whereas with things like communism or totalitarianism you can strengthen the state to the point that the state sucks in so many resources that it fails to be able to serve its own people.
The thing is that a weakened state will fail a lot quicker than a overly strengthened state because the weakened state cannon defend itself externally from other states or internally from citizen warlords. Its that reason that anarchy can only exist temporarily.
So lets say the end points of the square represent the number 10, so its possible to score a 10 in liberalism or a 10 in socialism, well a liberal state may fail at say 7 whereas a socialist state may be able to get to 8 before it fails.
The last few sentences are an extreme summarization it would take me literally hours and hours and pages and pages to fully explain this but I hope its enough to get message across.
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If I had to place where I think kmf would sit on that graph, it would be in the upper left hand side (liberal socialism)
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According to the 'square':
Liberals - Believe in social liberty. Believe in the state's economic control of the people (re-distribution of wealth).
Conservatives - Believe in economic liberty. Believe that social freedoms need to be controlled by the state.
Statists - Believe that the gov should control social freedoms and economic freedoms.
Libertarians - Believe that individuals should control their social and economic choices without intervention from the State.
I personally believe that 'liberals' and 'conservatives' in America are both moving towards the 'statist' end of the spectrum. The lines are getting blurred and the average person can't think outside of the framework which they have been presented with.
By deciding which side to affiliate with (if only choosing between liberal and conservative) you are simply choosing which area of government you want to make larger. Who do you side with when you feel that the gov has too much control economically and socially? Libertarians.
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By deciding which side to affiliate with (if only choosing between liberal and conservative) you are simply choosing which area of government you want to make larger. Who do you side with when you feel that the gov has too much control economically and socially? Libertarians.
Thats very true.
Do you think that your aim should be to get to the edge of the square or do you think that your aim should to be closer to the center with a bias towards your ideology?
Economic freedom sounds, on the surface, like a great idea.
However economic freedom is what caused the banking fiasco of the past few years. One of the consequences of economic freedom is deregulation of the banking industry.
Why shouldn't you be allowed to insure assets you dont own, or to take more and more risk in the pursute of profits?
Part of the reason we are in a mess now is due to the fall of the USSR.
When the USSR fell, socialism was deemed to have failed and therefore there was a shift away from socialist ideas within non-socialist states. If you imagine that square, when the USSR fell, policy makers felt that this was proof that any socialist concept was doomed to fail and so the shifted up and to the right.
So we deregulated more and more and more.
What people didnt realise was that just because socialism regulation was seen to fail, this did not mean that pure economic freedom was destined to succeed.
Thats why we find ourselves where we are now, because governments all over the world relaxed the regulation of the banking industry (increased economic freedom) to a point where it failed.
The existence of the USSR kept our own policy makers in check as they could see how others were handling similar problems but in a different way. As soon as the USSR failed, anything that looked like it might be in anyway socialist was thrown out of the window.
In reality our goal isnt to become extreme in anything, in reality the goal is to keep us nearer the centre but with a bias towards your chosen ideology.
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If I had to place where I think kmf would sit on that graph, it would be in the upper left hand side (liberal socialism)
So you think he believes strongly in social freedoms, but does not believe in economic freedom?
When I think about the average SR user I find two things in common:
a. they exercise their social freedom by choosing to use illegal drugs
b. they exercise their economic freedom by choosing to use Bitcoin
Seems to me that most all SR users are for more social and economic liberty - they just might not realize it yet in their conscious mind.
While kmf may be proposing a physical ground war against the state we are all here actively participating in another type of war: an economic one. So we all hide out lunch money so the bully doesn't steal it. Is it that much of a leap to consider knocking the shit out of the bully instead of running around hiding?
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So you think he believes strongly in social freedoms, but does not believe in economic freedom?
Yes Its largely based on this post here
a good example of a more extreme liberal wish is for time dollars, where regardless of the sort of work you do you are paid in units of money named after the amount of time you have worked. Thus, a doctor who works for eight hours receives the same eight 'hour dollars' that a janitor receives for sweeping up floors for eight hours.
Essentially he is proposing that the state take away a persons right to set their own wage which is a huge infringement upon economic freedom.
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By deciding which side to affiliate with (if only choosing between liberal and conservative) you are simply choosing which area of government you want to make larger. Who do you side with when you feel that the gov has too much control economically and socially? Libertarians.
Thats very true.
Do you think that your aim should be to get to the edge of the square or do you think that your aim should to be closer to the center with a bias towards your ideology?
Economic freedom sounds, on the surface, like a great idea.
However economic freedom is what caused the banking fiasco of the past few years. One of the consequences of economic freedom is deregulation of the banking industry.
Why shouldn't you be allowed to insure assets you dont own, or to take more and more risk in the pursute of profits?
Part of the reason we are in a mess now is due to the fall of the USSR.
When the USSR fell, socialism was deemed to have failed and therefore there was a shift away from socialist ideas within non-socialist states. If you imagine that square, when the USSR fell, policy makers felt that this was proof that any socialist concept was doomed to fail and so the shifted up and to the right.
So we deregulated more and more and more.
What people didnt realise was that just because socialism regulation was seen to fail, this did not mean that pure economic freedom was destined to succeed.
Thats why we find ourselves where we are now, because governments all over the world relaxed the regulation of the banking industry (increased economic freedom) to a point where it failed.
The existence of the USSR kept our own policy makers in check as they could see how others were handling similar problems but in a different way. As soon as the USSR failed, anything that looked like it might be in anyway socialist was thrown out of the window.
In reality our goal isnt to become extreme in anything, in reality the goal is to keep us nearer the centre but with a bias towards your chosen ideology.
I think you are where you are on the chart and you should stand up for what you believe. You can be right in the middle if you want.
I am personally Libertarian and think anything that moves more towards 'liberty' on the 'freedom axis' is a damn good thing.
I don't believe that economic freedom is the cause of our finical woes. The frame you are looking through does not show the entire picture.
Our goal should be to search out truth, not to fit into any one place on a chart. The chart does not define us, but rather describes us.
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So you think he believes strongly in social freedoms, but does not believe in economic freedom?
Yes Its largely based on this post here
a good example of a more extreme liberal wish is for time dollars, where regardless of the sort of work you do you are paid in units of money named after the amount of time you have worked. Thus, a doctor who works for eight hours receives the same eight 'hour dollars' that a janitor receives for sweeping up floors for eight hours.
Essentially he is proposing that the state take away a persons right to set their own wage which is a huge infringement upon economic freedom.
Naw, he is knocking on that shit. He said 'liberal', not 'libertarian'. That is some economic control shit an extreme liberal would want to do.
'Liberal' in today's America means economic control (and a few lame-ass attempts at social freedoms).
'Conservative' means social control (and a few lame-ass attempts at economic freedom).
Both say they are doing the right thing, but in reality both are working to take all our liberties and give them to the state. When you play liberal vs conservative you are leaving out the important 2nd axis, the one that describes individual vs state control.
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Well in that case he isn't a socialist.
In political science words like liberal or conservative have very specific meanings. A liberal is someone who follows the ideology of liberalism.
I understand that political parties often do not follow the ideologies from which they derive their names, but it does make a lot more difficult to have a discussion when people use incorrect words.
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Do you think that your aim should be to get to the edge of the square or do you think that your aim should to be closer to the center with a bias towards your ideology?
The aim should be to as closely as possible match your 'ideology' to the realities and necessities of the times. Doing anything else means that you're placing some type of metaphysical significance to your inner convictions, in which case you're no different that anybody else who goes through life without questioning the lessons taken in at mother's knee (to paraphrase Kant). For instance, it would be difficult to imagine a young boy growing up in present day Tibet having any kind of genuine "statist" sentiments, as it would be difficult to imagine another boy growing up in present day Switzerland having serious anarchist sentiments. You could also imagine a single person's 'ideology' changing over the course of their life, in response to changes in the social and political realities they face. For instance, imagine a third young boy who grew up during the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. You could imagine him in his early years having an understandable excitement for Communentarianism, but as he ages and becomes horrified at the oppression and brutality of Lenin and Stalin's regimes, he would move towards the Liberal, or even Anarchist side of the spectrum.
So without context, your question is only meaningful if you are assuming that there is one 'perfect' or 'ideal' ideology which is right and correct in all places and times. This is just another way of assuming there is a metaphysical truth out there to be found. In my view, a person can't hope to get at what's significant and what matters about one's present social and political context until they have gone through the process of nominalizing their world view. Political theory can only take us so far before we must develop a strong grasp of human psychology and Epistemology.
But most people are only interesting in developing a (or more likely finding a ready made) theory they 'like,' that 'fits' with what they already 'know,' than they are in developing their understanding of and ability to analyze information correctly, and reliably reach conclusions from that information.
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See the thing is I desire only force to force you to not enslave others, and likewise I desire to force others to not enslave you. The only people who are immoral are those who wish to force anything other than libertarianism onto anybody, my ideology is one where everyone is equal and everyone is free. So who the fuck are you to force slavery onto anyone, is a better question.
Your definition of freedom/enslavement might not be (and probably isn't) the same as mine. In my view, the people who are immoral are those who are hypocrites and one-track minded. To believe that libertarianism is the 'one true ideology' is one thing, and I think we can all agree that oppression = bad, but to use VIOLENCE to FORCE your opinion onto others is BULLSHIT, and completely unacceptable. And 'who the fuck i am to force slavery onto anyone' is not a better question, since I never said I would.
Personally, I would rather live under the rule of a genius dictator, that to live at the mercy of autonomous, self proclaimed judges like you.
There is nothing BULLSHIT about using violence to free slaves. My opinion is that there should be no slaves, I feel that it is justified to use violence to ensure that this goal is met. People who have slaves maintain their master status by use of violence, so really you should be angry at them and not me. I wish to use violence against those who initiate violence (ie: I do not wish to initiate violence) in order to stop them from continuing the violence they have initiated (ie: They do wish to initiate violence, have done so, and continue to do so) against others. It is completely unacceptable to initiate violence against others, anyone who does not live by libertarian principles MUST initiate violence, as libertarianism allows for EVERYTHING other than the initiation of force. Thus, people who do not follow libertarian principles should have violence used against them until they either follow libertarian principles or are dead.
Nobody who is not evil has anything to fear about a libertarian world. Only those who wish to oppress others have to fear violence being used against them in the name of libertarianism. There is nothing more morally justified than using violence to force libertarianism on the world. Forcing libertarianism on the world is equal to freeing the slaves of the world. There is nothing to fear about a world in which libertarianism is forced with violence, the only people who have anything to fear are those who wish to force slavery onto others. There is no room to argue against libertarianism, in a libertarian world everyone is free to do whatever they want except to initiate force against others. That means nobody will be oppressed by militant libertarianism, they will only be freed or killed/incapacitated for attempting to enslave others. If you do not support slavery you should support militant libertarianism.
I agree. There should be no slaves. But militant libertarianism does not have dibs on that opinion.
"There is no room to argue against libertarianism"
"Thus, people who do not follow libertarian principles should have violence used against them until they either follow libertarian principles or are dead."
^^^ this is exactly the kind of one-track minded BS I was talking about. If you want to fight fascism, don't use fascist methods. That makes you a hypocrite.
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I agree. There should be no slaves. But militant libertarianism does not have dibs on that opinion.
"There is no room to argue against libertarianism"
"Thus, people who do not follow libertarian principles should have violence used against them until they either follow libertarian principles or are dead."
^^^ this is exactly the kind of one-track minded BS I was talking about. If you want to fight fascism, don't use fascist methods. That makes you a hypocrite.
/thread
daaayuuuum
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a good example of a more extreme liberal wish is for time dollars, where regardless of the sort of work you do you are paid in units of money named after the amount of time you have worked. Thus, a doctor who works for eight hours receives the same eight 'hour dollars' that a janitor receives for sweeping up floors for eight hours.
Thats a fundamentally socialist idea, its certainly not a liberal concept.
Liberals do not want the state to dictate the value of their work.
From what you just wrote, I think you are more of a socialist than a liberal. You may be a liberal socialist but I think the bias is towards socialism and not liberalism.
There is nothing wrong with that its just this thread is about liberalism and not socialism or liberal socialism.
I think where YOU are confused is that you are using the words liberalism and liberTARIANISM interchangeably even though they are very different things. Liberals are quite fond of the state because they think it has a role is distribution wealth, at the more moderate end of liberalism they think taxation should be used to provide social safety nets and at the more extreme end they think that all wealth should be evenly distributed by the state. Liberalism and Libertarianism do have some things in common, a lot of liberals are against the war on drugs (although not usually to as much of a degree as libertarians: liberals tend to be particularly in favor of marijuana being legalized but they don't have as strong of feelings about other drugs, whereas libertarians are in favor of complete drug legalization, liberals want any legalized drugs to be regulated by the government and taxed whereas libertarians want the free market to regulate itself and are generally against taxation (particularly anarchists who are entirely against any taxation, some libertarians think that nation states can exist and tax for national security though). Pretty much all liberals and libertarians are in favor of gay marriage being legalized. Liberals think that guns should be illegal or extremely regulated by the state, libertarians think that guns should be readily available with very little to no state regulation.
I am not a socialist or a liberal, I am a libertarian, which seems to be a new word for you so I suggest you look it up instead of confusing it with liberalism. Liberals are all socialists, a defining characteristic of the liberal philosophy is that society should be forced to provide a financial safety net for everyone else in society, although only extreme liberals are actually communists in that they think all wealth should be evenly distributed.
Im sorry but this is nonsense.
Communism and anarchism are at opposite ends of the scale.
Anarchism involves the complete removal of any state mechanism, whereas Communism seeks to have a very large state mechanism with numerous social programs and agendas.
If you take liberalism to its extreme, logically it cannot be both reducing and increasing the state mechanism.
I think where you are confused is that you are not making the distinction between pure liberalism (liberalism), and something like liberal socialism.
Pure liberalism, when taken to the nth degree becomes anarchism.
Liberal socialism is a merger between liberalism and socialism. What you have to understand is that when two ideologies are merged together like this, there are conflicts within the merger as fundamentally liberal philosophy and the social philosophy are different.
True liberalists would disagree with liberal socialism as they are being forced to pay for state programs that they simply don't agree with. In essence a liberal wants to pick and choose what services they pay for, which directly conflicts with a socialist agenda.
Indeed communism and anarchism are pretty much complete opposites. On the political chart I would go by, which is a bit different from the Nolan chart, it is a four point diamond, the highest point is totalitarianism the lowest point is libertarianism the left most point is liberalism and the right most point is conservatism. Liberalism is signified by being to the left, if it is upper left it tends toward communism, if it is lower left it tends toward liberal libertarianism. Libertarianism is defined by being down, at the furthest point down it is Anarchism.
Communist Liberals: Are against gun rights, are against drug legalization as it translates into higher health care costs which none drug users must pay and also can lead to lower productivity which means there are less resources available to the collective, are against any private industry and want everything to be run by the state, are less concerned with legalizing gay marriage but are not as opposed to it as conservatives, are very nationalistic, generally are pro science but in favor of information censorship, largely against immigration as it puts stress on the collective finances and infrastructure, largely against ex-patriotism (leaving is banned)
Libertarian Liberals: Are against gun rights, are moderately in favor of drug legalization although they want it taxed and regulated, are strongly in favor of legalizing gay marriage, are in favor of social safety nets such as socialized healthcare but are not in favor of total wealth redistribution, are in favor of government regulations on industry for things such as environmentalism but are against government running all industry, they tend to be pro science in general although there are some exceptions, generally are against censorship with a few exceptions, generally are AGAINST intellectual property rights, largely in favor of immigration being easy and leaning towards neutral on ex-patriotism (changing citizenship is not banned, but should be highly taxed)
Conservatives: Are pro gun rights, are against drug legalization, are against gay marriage, are against social safety nets and in favor of significantly reduced taxation, are against government regulations on industry or much government involvement in the market, and additionally they tend to be quite religious and in favor of government and church mixing, for example they make up the vast majority of people who are in favor of teaching creationism in government schools, generally they are pro censorship and quite nationalistic, generally are in favor of intellectual property rights, largely against immigration, leaning towards neutral on ex-patriotism (changing citizenship is not banned or taxed, but is seen as bad)
Fascist Conservatives: Are generally against gun rights for the masses, against drug legalization, against gay marriage, against social safety nets for the people but in favor of providing safety nets to industry/corporations, quite religious and often in favor of government and church mixing, pro censorship, in favor of strong police presence within society, quite fascinated with military building, extremely nationalistic, sometimes in favor of eugenics, generally are in favor of intellectual property rights although generally for corporations more so than individuals, largely against immigration and ex-patriotism (leaving is banned)
Libertarian Conservatives: Pro gun rights, pro gay marriage legalization, pro drug legalization especially for marijuana but unlike liberal libertarians they are against its taxation and strict regulation, against social safety nets, against taxation in the vast majority of cases although they may support it for infrastructure or national defense, less religious than other conservatives, against censorship in most cases, have no opinion on teaching creationism in public schools as they think there should be no public schools, less nationalistic than other conservatives, generally are in favor of intellectual property rights, neutral on ex-patriotism (leaving is not banned or seen as bad) immigration is not banned but is strictly regulated
And then at the very extreme end of libertarianism it becomes less a matter of left or right, and is better defined as simply Anarchy imo
Anarchy: Pro gun rights, pro gay marriage legalization (as there should be no state to sanction marriages in the first place), pro drug legalization (and it shouldn't be regulated or taxed by the state as the state should not exist), a bit of a mixed bag regarding intellectual property rights but quite a lot view pay walls to information as a form of censorship and they tend to be against intellectual property rights as they are against all forms of censorship, against any form of taxation, no opinion on teaching creationism in public schools as they are against public schools, do not believe in national borders or in the concept of illegal immigrants (however they do believe in individuals having control over who enters their own land), extremely relaxed views regarding what should be considered criminal (essentially it boils down to: If it does not initiate force against another person, it should be legal, and this includes controversial things such as child pornography distribution), there should be private defense agencies and infrastructure should be handled by the free market, essentially government should be seen as banditry and outlawed.
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So you think he believes strongly in social freedoms, but does not believe in economic freedom?
Yes Its largely based on this post here
a good example of a more extreme liberal wish is for time dollars, where regardless of the sort of work you do you are paid in units of money named after the amount of time you have worked. Thus, a doctor who works for eight hours receives the same eight 'hour dollars' that a janitor receives for sweeping up floors for eight hours.
Essentially he is proposing that the state take away a persons right to set their own wage which is a huge infringement upon economic freedom.
Dude essentially you get an F- on reading comprehension and vocabulary.
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Wouldn't "militant" cancel out the idea of libertarianism ?
Now if you were to ask about "militant liberalism" - I see that happening in my own country now.
Symbolism over substance.
Knee jerk reactions to every news story. Especially if it's "for the children"
Not happy at all with the way the USA has turned out.
I was born in 1960, and was proud of my country as a child. Not anymore.
The hippie drug culture/pop culture/entertainment culture, corrupted this once great nation.
I love a lot of the music from those years and onward, and I love my Drugs of choice. but somehow it all became entangled in political ideology.
The fact that people look up to actors and entertainers as spokespeople, with "good ideas", is insanity.
Can't remember who said it, but "Liberalism is a mental disorder".
Just my opinion. I could be wrong, but then opinions aren't facts, and EVERYBODY is entitled to their own.
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I don't see the conflict between the words 'militant' and 'libertarian'.
A libertarian certainly can strike down an external force which tries to take ownership/control of them. This in no way contradicts with the core values of a libertarian.
A libertarian won't infringe on your rights, but in return you must not infringe on his.
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Just my opinion. I could be wrong, but then opinions aren't facts, and EVERYBODY is entitled to their own.
Person A holds the opinion: "Blacks are inferior to whites, and should be made to know that through either words or actions."
Person B holds the opinion: "Children are sexual beings, and whenever one can be separated from the herd, they should be fair game for one's sexual advances. Because they like it, and it's normal."
Person C holds the opinion: "Gays are the ultimate sign of Satan's influence on this planet, so I am justified in organizing protests at US military funerals and other events."
Person D holds the opinion: "All I can control in this life is my own behavior, so if I want my life to improve, I can take advantage of the opportunities my daily life brings me to make a positive impact on the life's of others."
So obviously, YES, while opinions aren't facts, it is usually much easier than some people will admit (for whatever reason...) to distinguish shit opinions for those worthy of consideration, and NO, everybody is NOT entitled to just any opinion they'd call their own. Opinions are like any other property a person contains. Compare it to the property of "being a runner." Both a 50 year old retired man who goes jogging a few times a week, and Usain Bolt share this property, but no one in their right mind would say they contain this property on equivalent levels. It's the same with opinions. While it's true that everyone will have one on a given subject, it's just as true that some people's will be utter SHIT, while others will be more informed, more relevant, more inline with the evidence, etc etc etc., and so just intrinsically "better," how ever that might prove out on a case by case basis.
Honestly, and not to pick on you jag, but the whole "opinions aren't facts, and EVERYBODY is entitled to their own" really bugs me. To take it seriously you'd have to completely disregard what education can do for the individual, and instead prefer the warm blanket of mediocrity. "We're all exactly equivalent, and no one can think and better than anyone else." When it comes to children's sports, I'm fine with everybody getting a trophy at the end of the season. In the real world, the adult world, there's nothing to gain from pretending that we're all unique snow flakes, and everyone's opinion should get an equal turn at being considered. That's just garbage.
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Just my opinion. I could be wrong, but then opinions aren't facts, and EVERYBODY is entitled to their own.
Person A holds the opinion: "Blacks are inferior to whites, and should be made to know that through either words or actions."
Person B holds the opinion: "Children are sexual beings, and whenever one can be separated from the herd, they should be fair game for one's sexual advances. Because they like it, and it's normal."
Person C holds the opinion: "Gays are the ultimate sign of Satan's influence on this planet, so I am justified in organizing protests at US military funerals and other events."
Person D holds the opinion: "All I can control in this life is my own behavior, so if I want my life to improve, I can take advantage of the opportunities my daily life brings me to make a positive impact on the life's of others."
So obviously, YES, while opinions aren't facts, it is usually much easier than some people will admit (for whatever reason...) to distinguish shit opinions for those worthy of consideration, and NO, everybody is NOT entitled to just any opinion they'd call their own. Opinions are like any other property a person contains. Compare it to the property of "being a runner." Both a 50 year old retired man who goes jogging a few times a week, and Usain Bolt share this property, but no one in their right mind would say they contain this property on equivalent levels. It's the same with opinions. While it's true that everyone will have one on a given subject, it's just as true that some people's will be utter SHIT, while others will be more informed, more relevant, more inline with the evidence, etc etc etc., and so just intrinsically "better," how ever that might prove out on a case by case basis.
Honestly, and not to pick on you jag, but the whole "opinions aren't facts, and EVERYBODY is entitled to their own" really bugs me. To take it seriously you'd have to completely disregard what education can do for the individual, and instead prefer the warm blanket of mediocrity. "We're all exactly equivalent, and no one can think and better than anyone else." When it comes to children's sports, I'm fine with everybody getting a trophy at the end of the season. In the real world, the adult world, there's nothing to gain from pretending that we're all unique snow flakes, and everyone's opinion should get an equal turn at being considered. That's just garbage.
It's OK, I don't feel "picked on" by your opinion of my opinion. I wouldn't be on here if I was that thin skinned - That's YOUR opinion, and I would fight to the death, for your right to express it. - Voltaire
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Do you believe in militant libertarianism?
I'll believe in militant libertarianism if you'll believe in militant lesbianism. ;)
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As far as what people teach their children, that should not be restricted at all. There is nothing inherently immoral about a pedophile teaching a toddler that it is acceptable for them to engage in sex with adults, however if they actually engage in sex with the toddler it is a violation of the toddlers freedom imo. I also think that parents should be free to teach their children that they will burn in hell if they do not believe in Jesus, or that Jews should be exterminated and a white nationalist government set up. Of course, if they actually try to exterminate Jews they should be stopped as that will violate the freedom of the Jews, however I do believe that they should be free to set up a white nationalist society so long as they do so in a way that is consistent with the freedoms of all others.
Hm. This sounds like a really bad idea. I suppose you could argue with some merit that there's really nothing preventing parents from teaching their kids whatever they want right now. But what allows kids right now the opportunity to one day break free from the propaganda they are indoctrinated under is exposure to various and competing ideas. If neo-nazi militantism and white nationalism are allowed to proliferate in a segment of society, you'll have kids attending white nationalist schools and growing into adulthood without ever receiving any exposure to other races or ideas. That's really not fair and would lead to societies regressing instead of progressing.
Or how about, without any uniform standards imposed by government since government in your ideal world wouldn't exist, the fact that many religious schools would replace their scientific education with that of religious and theological education? This is actually being attempted right now by some private voucher schools. OK, you can say parents have the freedom to teach and send their kids to whatever school they want. But how would you feel if you were one of these kids that was deprived of any scientific knowledge or background and instead taught as meaningless a field of knowledge as theology before reaching adulthood and realizing that your formative education was practically worthless? It just seems to create a really un-level playing field.
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This comes down again to peoples beliefs in Freedom of Speech, and how far that freedom should extend. I myself believe that freedom of speech is an essential human right, and we should always strive to uphold it, however I also believe there should be carefully considered limits and responsibilities that come with freedom of speech. Some examples maybe; a parent attempting to groom their child to accept sexual abuse, public hate speech directed at others (racism, gay bashing etc), subliminal broadcasts which attempt to secretly alter the listener/viewers thoughts on a subconscious level (if this is possible), child pornography containing real images of abuse.
Here's a question I'd throw out there for anyone who wants total freedom of speech (the freedom to say anything, to anyone, using any form of media, at any time or place, with no restrictions what-so-ever), surely it would follow that such freedoms would extend to the politician and the government? And therefore they should be free to spread propaganda (the truth of which might be open to interpretation) to the masses? Maybe even start the indoctrination from an early age - the classroom for example. A misinterpretation of history, leaving out key events and emphasizing certain sources and accounts over others, may not be directly lying but can utterly change the perception of the events and the meaning you take from the lesson. Exorcizing it's right to total freedom of speech, the government could drill home it's message to the pupils in other ways as well. Maybe get the pupils to all recite the propaganda together, in unison at the start of each school day (they say repetition is the key to accessing the subconscious). So, if all goes well everyone will grow up to be the perfect unquestioning drone, ready to believe whatever "news" the government and it's official news agents put before them ("Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia").
But I guess if you have no government then you have no problem then...
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Maybe get the pupils to all recite the propaganda together, in unison at the start of each school day (they say repetition is the key to accessing the subconscious). So, if all goes well everyone will grow up to be the perfect unquestioning drone, ready to believe whatever "news" the government and it's official news agents put before them ("Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia").
But I guess if you have no government then you have no problem then...
Great point. But having no government wouldn't make the situation any better and in all likelihood would make it far worse. You'd just have really wealthy megalomaniacal oligarchs or tyrannical religious institutions doing the indoctrinating through their private schools in order to create their armies of unquestioning drones.
At least with government there are some forms of public oversight to implement uniform standards. It's not perfect by any means, I'm sure you can still find plenty of propaganda embedded in primary through high school text books. Fuck I still remember a caption from my fourth grade social studies textbook that I'll never forget in the chapter that taught us about Manifest Destiny, underneath an illustration of two Indians engaging in hand-to-hand combat it read "Indians were such violent peoples they often fought among themselves". Yeah that's outrageous, but there are limits. When religious nutters try to get Intelligent Design taught in high schools as an alternative to theory of evolution federal judges shut that shit down, as they should. With no government, religious schools would be free to school kids only on Intelligent Design and deny education in the sciences altogether.
And it goes without saying that private education would be replete with propaganda dehumanizing the enemies of whoever owns the school.
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Hm. This sounds like a really bad idea. I suppose you could argue with some merit that there's really nothing preventing parents from teaching their kids whatever they want right now. But what allows kids right now the opportunity to one day break free from the propaganda they are indoctrinated under is exposure to various and competing ideas. If neo-nazi militantism and white nationalism are allowed to proliferate in a segment of society, you'll have kids attending white nationalist schools and growing into adulthood without ever receiving any exposure to other races or ideas. That's really not fair and would lead to societies regressing instead of progressing.
Or how about, without any uniform standards imposed by government since government in your ideal world wouldn't exist, the fact that many religious schools would replace their scientific education with that of religious and theological education? This is actually being attempted right now by some private voucher schools. OK, you can say parents have the freedom to teach and send their kids to whatever school they want. But how would you feel if you were one of these kids that was deprived of any scientific knowledge or background and instead taught as meaningless a field of knowledge as theology before reaching adulthood and realizing that your formative education was practically worthless? It just seems to create a really un-level playing field.
Of course I personally think that schools should teach children science and fact, and not bullshit and mythology. However I do not think that I have any right to dictate to people what they must teach their children. From their incorrect viewpoint, they could just as easily say "OMGosh people should not be allowed to teach their children science as it goes against religion and will condemn them to eternal hell in the afterlife!". See, just as I have no right to dictate to others what their children should learn, they also have no right to dictate to me what my children should learn. This is the reason why there is nothing more morally justifiable than militant libertarianism: militant theists/theocracy would want to dictate to others that their children must learn some religious dogma, militant scientists would want to dictate to others that their children must learn science and the truth about religion, militant libertarians would say that religious people can teach their children religion and science people can teach their children science. The only thing that militant libertarians would force people to do is not force others to teach their children any belief system in particular, and thus militant libertarianism embraces freedom and only those who wish to oppose freedom wish to oppose militant libertarianism.
I do not care if people teach their children neo nazism or white nationalism, indeed their right to do so must be protected. Even their right to form an exclusively white society must be protected. However, if they start to go to lands they do not own, and try to oppress the people in those lands, then of course they must be stopped, because in doing these things they will be violating the freedom of others.
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This comes down again to peoples beliefs in Freedom of Speech, and how far that freedom should extend. I myself believe that freedom of speech is an essential human right, and we should always strive to uphold it, however I also believe there should be carefully considered limits and responsibilities that come with freedom of speech. Some examples maybe; a parent attempting to groom their child to accept sexual abuse, public hate speech directed at others (racism, gay bashing etc), subliminal broadcasts which attempt to secretly alter the listener/viewers thoughts on a subconscious level (if this is possible), child pornography containing real images of abuse.
I believe that child pornography should be legal to possess and distribute, however not legal to produce as production inherently involves child molestation which is what should be illegal. Subliminal broadcasts which attempt to secretly alter the listen/viewers thoughts on a subconscious level should also be legal, if you make that illegal you will essentially outlaw marketing and advertising. Public hate speech should be allowed on land that it is allowed on, I do not believe in the concept of public land and thus it is a non-issue, the rules regarding hate speech are determined by the owner of the land you are on. So I believe that I am more in favor of freedom of speech than you are. Indeed I even think it should be legal to yell fire in a crowded room, so long as the owner of the crowded room has not set any rule against it. People will avoid crowded rooms in which it is not against the rules to yell fire, and thus the problem is self correcting without the need to violate peoples right to freedom of speech and property. Freedom of speech doesn't mean that you are free to say anything you want where and whenever you want, but it does mean that you are free to say anything you want on private land that has no rule against saying anything you want.
Here's a question I'd throw out there for anyone who wants total freedom of speech (the freedom to say anything, to anyone, using any form of media, at any time or place, with no restrictions what-so-ever), surely it would follow that such freedoms would extend to the politician and the government? And therefore they should be free to spread propaganda (the truth of which might be open to interpretation) to the masses? Maybe even start the indoctrination from an early age - the classroom for example. A misinterpretation of history, leaving out key events and emphasizing certain sources and accounts over others, may not be directly lying but can utterly change the perception of the events and the meaning you take from the lesson. Exorcizing it's right to total freedom of speech, the government could drill home it's message to the pupils in other ways as well. Maybe get the pupils to all recite the propaganda together, in unison at the start of each school day (they say repetition is the key to accessing the subconscious). So, if all goes well everyone will grow up to be the perfect unquestioning drone, ready to believe whatever "news" the government and it's official news agents put before them ("Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia").
But I guess if you have no government then you have no problem then...
Well the government is currently doing all of these things that you are afraid of. Also I do not think that there should be a government. If some group of people wants to spread propaganda and lies, they should not be restricted from doing these things. Trust is quite important in a libertarian society, it is the most valuable asset there is. If a group is identified spreading propaganda, people will start to discredit them. The groups that consistently tell the truth will be the groups that are believed. I do not think there should be any law that says people can not for example put on television an ad that says smoking marijuana will make you want to rape white women. However, there should also be no laws against others putting an ad out that says that smoking marijuana is relatively harmless. The masses will come to recognize who tells lies in time, especially when scientific minded organizations come together that are interested in the pursuit of knowledge. Currently such organizations are restricted by the government, they are not allowed to carry out research on recreational drugs, they are denied government grants if they cast drugs in anything other than a negative light, and they are manipulated by a coercive organization. In a libertarian society these issues will be gone or less severe, there will not be government grants to be denied to researchers, there will not be governments to make laws against certain types of study. Intelligent people will have less trouble to recognize the truth, and the people who speak the truth will come to be respected by the masses and the liars will be seen for what they are. Already in the world of today there is an insane amount of information warfare, but due to governments there is no level playing field and so they are winning at indoctrinating people to their agenda.
However, I do think it is fraud for a cigarette company to advertise that smoking their cigarettes is not only healthy , but reduces your chances of dying of cancer (unless they can prove this to be the case). Just as I think it should be illegal for a person to sell cyanide tablets as candy. The issue in these cases is not one of freedom of speech but rather one of fraud. I can say that smoking cigarettes doesn't cause cancer and I am a liar but not a criminal, and it is my right to be a liar. But if I say smoking my cigarettes doesn't cause cancer then I have committed fraud and initiated force against others by deceiving them. Additionally, there will be trusted organizations of scientists that will confirm to the masses that smoking cigarettes does indeed cause cancer. And these scientists will not be paid by the government, but rather they will be funded voluntarily by the people who they supply information to. It will be in their best interests to supply correct information to people, because information will become part of a market, and those who give false information will lose their funding. People who give false information will not be funded by governments, as governments will be wiped out , as one of governments typical characteristics is that they are funded by taxation and as taxation is theft it will be forcibly halted by the militant libertarians. Now the cigarette industry may pay propagandists to advertise that cigarettes in general do not cause cancer (people can be paid to lie), but they cannot pay them to say that their specific brand of cigarette does not cause cancer (people cannot be paid to commit fraud). I have faith that the scientific community will be much larger than and able to overcome a few propagandists, even if the propagandists manage to get some people with degrees working for them. One example I can point to today is the scientific debate regarding climate change, of course there are a few scientists who have refuted climate change in its entirety, and they are often accused of being in the pocket of big industry. However, the overwhelming majority of the scientific community claims that climate change is really happening. Conversely we have the war on drugs propagandists who appear to outnumber the scientists interested in facts, but this is a different struggle than that of science versus the desires of corporations, this is the struggle of fact versus the interests of the government. And as already stated, in a libertarian society the government will be outlawed and thus they will have no way to use coercion to manipulate the information presented to society as truth.
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I believe that child pornography should be legal to possess and distribute, however not legal to produce as production inherently involves child molestation which is what should be illegal.
Yeah but by allowing child porn to be possessed and distributed you'd be actually promoting its continuing production by not removing the economic incentive that drives its production in the first place. A policy like that would have the real world affect of more pedophiles (or even just unethical opportunists) willing to take the risk of producing it because of the financial incentives while the chances of getting caught would be minimized. Why? Because as soon as it's secretly produced and hits their distribution channels they cash in. Since their distribution channels would be free to possess, distribute, and profit handsomely off it they have no reason to give up who the producer is, and in fact would have a strong financial incentive not to. You could say the public could boycott the stores that carry it, but seeing as to how porn is primarily distributed online these days that doesn't prevent the websites that cater to it from being driven out of business.
The real world outcome of such a policy would be more prepubescent children sexually exploited before the world. That's fucked up.
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The real world outcome
You've nailed the problem with every single non-critical post in this thread. You'd think some people in this thread are solipsists, completely ignorant that any "real world" exists outside of themselves and their own dissatisfaction with life. It's obvious that "real world outcomes" play no part in anything they advocate for.
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Of course I personally think that schools should teach children science and fact, and not bullshit and mythology. However I do not think that I have any right to dictate to people what they must teach their children. From their incorrect viewpoint, they could just as easily say "OMGosh people should not be allowed to teach their children science as it goes against religion and will condemn them to eternal hell in the afterlife!". See, just as I have no right to dictate to others what their children should learn, they also have no right to dictate to me what my children should learn.
Yeah but what you're essentially doing here is giving mythology and bullshit an equal platform to science and fact. Science and fact should naturally be valued over mythology and bullshit, that kind of goes without saying. Our societal values reflected in our education system right now is that religious parents are free to school their kids in mythology and bullshit but they don't have the right to deprive their kids of also learning about science and fact and religious schools are thus prevented from dropping science as part of their curriculum. The idea being that as the child matures they can then decide for themselves what they want to believe. There isn't any equivalency on the flip side because there shouldn't be. For instance, a scientist will give their kids a secular education that doesn't include mythology and bullshit as part of the course curriculum because, well because it's mythology and superstitious bullshit. If the kid matures and, in spite of being grounded in the real world of science and facts, wants to pursue immersing him or herself in bullshit there are plenty of religious organizations that will accept them with open arms.
Kids don't get to choose who they are born to. By reducing children to no more than the property of their parents by giving them carte blanche to deprive them completely of the science and facts that govern the real world seems to me to be unethical in the extreme and creating victims out of these poor kids that weren't ever given the chance to learn anything but mythology and bullshit. Sure some might be smart enough or lucky enough to break free from such brainwashing to embrace the real world when they come of age but most will not. That's just the nature of how important and powerful education and brainwashing can be on a child's formative years.
You seem to draw the line as to what a parent can or cannot do to their kids when it comes to physical harm. What I don't see is any acknowledgement of the vast mental, emotional, and psychological harm that can be done to a child by educating them in only mythology and bullshit.
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You'd think some people in this thread are solipsists, completely ignorant that any "real world" exists outside of themselves and their own dissatisfaction with life. It's obvious that "real world outcomes" play no part in anything they advocate for.
Yeah I've had really heated debates with kmf over his militant vision of an anarcho-libertarian utopia in the past. All I can do is keep driving home the point that real world outcomes do matter.
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I believe that child pornography should be legal to possess and distribute, however not legal to produce as production inherently involves child molestation which is what should be illegal.
Yeah but by allowing child porn to be possessed and distributed you'd be actually promoting its continuing production by not removing the economic incentive that drives its production in the first place. A policy like that would have the real world affect of more pedophiles (or even just unethical opportunists) willing to take the risk of producing it because of the financial incentives while the chances of getting caught would be minimized. Why? Because as soon as it's secretly produced and hits their distribution channels they cash in. Since their distribution channels would be free to possess, distribute, and profit handsomely off it they have no reason to give up who the producer is, and in fact would have a strong financial incentive not to. You could say the public could boycott the stores that carry it, but seeing as to how porn is primarily distributed online these days that doesn't prevent the websites that cater to it from being driven out of business.
The real world outcome of such a policy would be more prepubescent children sexually exploited before the world. That's fucked up.
You have a complete lack of understanding of the world of modern child pornography. In the probably futile attempt to give you truthful information to base your beliefs on, I will enlighten you. Although for profit child pornography production and distribution are not unheard of, they are quite rare in modern times. I will tell you the simple facts. Please don't take what I say to mean that I minimize the immorality of child molestation, as this is not the case. Also you will be incorrect if you assume that I am a pedophile or have any sexual interest in viewing naked prepubescents.
It would be a lie for me to say that for profit child pornography production and distribution have never existed. Several decades ago, prior to child pornography being made illegal and prior to widespread use of the internet, the majority of child pornography was produced by commercial studios and distributed for profit. After child pornography was made illegal in the United States, it quickly became extremely rare until the internet started to become more mainstream. Production studios shut down and there were no safe distribution channels, although I believe there were some mail order services that advertised in magazines (the postal inspectors were at this time the primary agency that combated child pornography).
With the rise of the internet child pornography made a substantial come back. Private networks of traders came into contact and distributed images amongst themselves, the wonderland club is one of the earlier such groups that I am aware of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cathedral . Of note is the fact that it did not cost money to join the wonderland club. At the time a large percentage of child pornography was distributed in this fashion, freely over private forum based groups and on Usenet as well.
One of the more modern for profit child pornography production and distribution groups was LS studios (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Ukrainian_child_pornography_raids). Most of the modern production studios have been based in Eastern European countries and produced softcore images. They have been responsible for the vast majority of modern for profit child pornography, producing millions of images with thousands of children. It is worth noting that these studios placed advertisements for 'models', paid the children who signed up, and had as much consent from the children as a child can give (which you may say is zero, but I find a distinction exists between photographing a naked child against their will and photographing them naked without them attempting to resist, although both may very well be immoral there is a difference). Additionally, they had the consent of their parents. In many cases the images they produced may not be what most people think of when they imagine child pornography. In some cases it would not be much of a stretch to compare the images to photographic versions of the famous paintings of naked prepubescent angels, with props used in an attempt to create this effect ( an example of such a painting: http://i01.i.aliimg.com/wsphoto/v0/618796241/100-hand-painted-wall-art-high-quality-Bouguereau-font-b-angels-b-font-font-b-oil.jpg). A more fair comparison may be to the infamous brooke shields photographs, which were taken by a professional photographer with her and her mothers consent when she was I believe ten years old. These photographs have been determined by the courts as legal in many jurisdictions including the USA, and have even been in museums (with limited success, frequently they have been pulled after overwhelming complaints). The following article has a cropped image and a bit of background story, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/6248757/Brooke-Shields-photographer-disappointed-by-police-pornography-claim.html. , the entire set is available here https://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2009/06/05/brooke-shields-by-gary-gross/ (please note that although these photographs are beyond a doubt legal in the USA and many other countries, they may be considered child pornography in others. Click at your own discretion, there is nothing legal that more closely approximates softcore child pornography). Many people arrested with child pornography are arrested with images similar to this, but which have not had the blessings of the US courts.
All of the Eastern European production studios and the distribution networks stemming from them were shut down in the late 1990
s to mid 2000's. Although there have certainly been countless small scale for profit production operations since then, they have accounted for an extremely small percentage of the total amount of newly created child pornography. Skip ahead to the later 2000s and there is no police knowledge of ANY organized for profit distribution or production of child pornography. In 2010 virtually the entirety of commercial child pornography distribution was managed by a single group of Eastern Europeans (who managed hundreds of websites), and it was shut down by Interpol, virtually eliminating the existence of commercial child pornography distribution. They had a total of 30,000 customers which accounted for almost all known customers of commercial child pornography in the entire world at the time. As far as I can remember they were purely distributors and not involved with production at all:
http://www.kshb.com/dpp/news/local_news/investigations/lawrence-and-leavenworth-cases-linked-to-massive-worldwide-child-porn-dragnet
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Channing Burgess from Lawrence and Shawn Mullen in Leavenworth were two of 30,000 customers busted for their online subscriptions.
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Child exploitation experts say the global bust does not mean the online universe is now child-porn free. The lion’s share of these images and videos are disseminated for free via e-mail and peer-to-peer file sharing between individuals, who often belong to trust-based clubs.
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Since the websites -- with names like “Excited Angels” and “Boys Say Go” -- went offline in January, the number of active commercial child porn sites has nosedived from perhaps 300 to the single digits, said Dunn.
And really that article sums up the state of modern for profit child pornography production and distribution quite well. Although it is probably not entirely extinct, any existing for profit distribution operations are extremely small scale, account for probably less than 0.5% of total child pornography distribution. There are no known for profit studios or organized studios at all, and there have not been for many years now. This is not to say that absolutely nobody in the world produces child pornography and tries to sell it, it is just that this makes up such a tiny percentage of newly created child pornography as to be virtually insignificant to the global market (which is also virtually non-existent if you take market to mean people paying money for child pornography).
Let's contrast the ~50,000 (adding 20,000 to be a conservative estimate, considering some people probably got away and there are probably other underground yet small for profit channels) known buyers of child pornography IN THE WORLD between 2009 and 2010 with the amount of child pornography distributed for free over public peer to peer networks. over 30 months in the mid 2000's, a single P2P monitoring operation identified 30,000 IP addresses in a single state offering child pornography for free.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/08/AR2008040803930.html
As you can see, in a single TOWN of only 23,000 people, there were 1,058 KNOWN computers on a single P2P network that were offering CP completely free of charge and completely publicly to anyone who typed in the keywords and downloaded it.
The town of 23,000 is reported to have 1,058 known computers that sent hard-core child pornography to investigators.
And this was in 2005, and since then the technology they use to scan P2P networks has improved vastly and the numbers of detected systems has shot up to many times as many. There are currently MILLIONS of computers around the world offering MILLIONS of CP images free of charge on P2P networks. There are public hidden services with hundreds of thousands of CP images free of charge, visited by hundreds of thousands of people around the world (probably millions if you count freenet and I2P and other non-tor hidden services as well). There are free public image boards on the clear net that let anyone upload anything they want, and that have thousands and thousands of images of CP publicly and freely available on them. There are hundreds of private groups sharing millions of photographs freely with their members. In 2010 the entirety of known commercial CP distribution channels consisted of ~300 sites, something like 295 of them were operated by the same group of people and shut down in 2010, and they served thirty thousand customers around the world. By contrast there are MILLIONS of nodes on P2P networks serving TENS OF MILLIONS of people CP for free. As you can clearly see, for profit child pornography distribution is extinct. For profit child pornography production is all but extinct. In 2013 there simply are not for profit CP distribution channels or production studios.
In 2013 it is virtually impossible to find child pornography for sale. Almost all CP in circulation is freely available on public P2P networks and hidden services. Slightly less is traded on closed membership groups. There are no for profit production studios. CP is produced by parents and family friends, or authority figures over children, molesting the children close to them and uploading the photographs of the molestation to public P2P networks or forums, from where they are spread freely. Technically speaking, a large amount of modernly produced child pornography is self produced (often voluntarily, sometimes voluntarily but without the intention of it being distributed, too often by coercion over the internet), and this has been the case since it became standard for young children to have cell phones with cameras on them (although most of this involves young teenagers, and depending on your point of view may or may not actually qualify as child pornography).
So in summary, the secret production studios you think exist do not, and the for profit distribution channels you think exist do not. For profit child pornography has all but been completely eradicated from existence.
Today the most dangerous situation is certainly not for profit distribution or production, rather it is the closed membership distribution forums that require members to upload X new pictures every Y period of time to maintain their membership and access to newly posted images. This is dangerous because these groups quickly exhaust the readily available supply of child pornography, and then in order to maintain membership people are tempted to actually produce their own child pornography so they can continue to meet the required quotas. After such a group has obtained so many images, it naturally progresses into a producers only private group as the people who refuse to produce are banned for not meeting their upload quotas. And really I think we can all agree that production is the primary bad thing.
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The real world outcome
You've nailed the problem with every single non-critical post in this thread. You'd think some people in this thread are solipsists, completely ignorant that any "real world" exists outside of themselves and their own dissatisfaction with life. It's obvious that "real world outcomes" play no part in anything they advocate for.
Really it is obvious that what you think you know about the real world is simply not true. At least it is obvious to anyone who bothers to know the truth about things instead of buying into the bullshit and drinking the koolaid. Saying that legalizing the distribution and possession of CP will lead to children being molested is about as real world as saying that legalizing marijuana will lead to the rape of white women by drug crazed blacks. The mechanism of action jpinkman gave for how this legalization will lead to child molestation is based on the completely false belief that there is any significant amount of commercial child pornography production or distribution (there is not), and is directly opposed to dozens of studies on the matter that show the availability of child pornography in an area has a sharp negative correlative relationship with the amount of child molestation in that area.
But feel free to think that your fantasy world is real, it is your right to be completely out of touch with reality and as a libertarian I would defend your right to be uninformed and irrational. However once you yourself take actions to violate others freedom of speech, and make attempts to enslave innocents, then I support violence being used against you until you either stop such attempts, are incapacitated, or dead. Because I know that I am correct in my beliefs, I know that every credible study done shows that I am correct in my beliefs, I know that only my beliefs are moral, and I know that if the world would be forced to act accordingly that things would be much nicer for everyone who doesn't want to enslave innocents.
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You have a complete lack of understanding of the world of modern child pornography. In the probably futile attempt to give you truthful information to base your beliefs on, I will enlighten you.
What strikes me more than anything else from your comprehensive recounting of the recent history of child pornography is how you seem to be completely missing the obvious. WHY DO YOU THINK commercial for profit studio production of child pornography has ground to a halt? The answer is right in your hagiography. IT WAS MADE ILLEGAL. Not only was production made illegal, but possession and distribution of it was made illegal. The US put cracking down on child pornographers at the top of their enforcement list and the continued awareness of the harms it inflicts had the rest of the world follow suit by making its enforcement a priority.
By making possession, sale, and distribution illegal the COMMERCIAL AVENUES FOR CHILD PORN DRIED UP. It NO LONGER BECAME PROFITABLE TO PRODUCE IT. Well, technically it was still profitable but not at the risk it incurred. Not having distribution channels meant it was far more difficult to profit off it. Selling this stuff for profit puts a huge target on your back and makes it far easier to track you through the digital and paper trails. With the stigma and penalties for even simple possession the risks came to far outweigh the benefits for those that would otherwise be involved in distribution.
This is really not rocket science.
So of course it's become more centered around hobbyists and enthusiasts these days. And with the internet being the primary distribution channel for porn now all my points stand. By not making possession and distribution illegal, and instead allowing distributors to profit off its distribution your policy would in essence promote it.
This is all really just common sense and I'm sorry you seem to have such difficulty seeing it.
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You have a complete lack of understanding of the world of modern child pornography. In the probably futile attempt to give you truthful information to base your beliefs on, I will enlighten you.
What strikes me more than anything else from your comprehensive recounting of the recent history of child pornography is how you seem to be completely missing the obvious. WHY DO YOU THINK commercial for profit studio production of child pornography has ground to a halt? The answer is right in your hagiography. IT WAS MADE ILLEGAL. Not only was production made illegal, but possession and distribution of it was made illegal. The US put cracking down on child pornographers at the top of their enforcement list and the continued awareness of the harms it inflicts had the rest of the world follow suit by making its enforcement a priority.
The biggest production studios EVER operated AFTER child pornography was made illegal. The demand for child pornography today is FAR, FAR HIGHER than the demand for child pornography prior to it being made illegal. The reason commercial for profit production ground to a halt was indeed partially due to it being illegal. The reason for profit distribution ground to a halt is almost entirely due to technological changes. When the for profit distribution channels were at their peaks was right before largely distributed P2P technology became more mainstream. Nobody is going to risk their freedom paying for child pornography (making themselves a top priority consumer) when they can get the same shit for free from a P2P network (blending in with the other tens of millions of consumers using this technique, from which 1% of those identified by law enforcement are arrested in any given year).
Today child pornography consumption is literally an epidemic compared to what it was when it was first made illegal. This probably is largely to do with the prevalence of internet pornography in general, because if you actually knew about the demographics of the consumers of child pornography, you would find out that the majority of them are desensitized pornography addicts who need increasingly taboo content to get aroused, and not even pedophiles. Huge increase in the amount of legally available pornography and ease of access to legally available pornography = huge increase in the amount of people who consume pornography = huge increase in the amount of people who become progressively desensitized to pornography = huge increase in the amount of people who consume increasingly taboo pornography = huge increase in the amount of people who consume child pornography.
By making possession, sale, and distribution illegal the COMMERCIAL AVENUES FOR CHILD PORN DRIED UP. It NO LONGER BECAME PROFITABLE TO PRODUCE IT. Well, technically it was still profitable but not at the risk it incurred. Not having distribution channels meant it was far more difficult to profit off it. Selling this stuff for profit puts a huge target on your back and makes it far easier to track you through the digital and paper trails. With the stigma and penalties for even simple possession the risks came to far outweigh the benefits for those that would otherwise be involved in distribution.
This is really not rocket science.
Well actually as I said prior the LARGEST FOR PROFIT STUDIOS AND DISTRIBUTION CHANNELS IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD OPERATED AFTER CHILD PORNOGRAPHY WAS MADE ILLEGAL, NOT PRIOR. Additionally MORE CP IS DISTRIBUTED AND CONSUMED TODAY THAN AT ANY OTHER POINT IN HUMAN HISTORY DESPITE THE FACT THAT IT IS MORE ILLEGAL TODAY THAN AT ANY OTHER POINT IN HUMAN HISTORY. Also the production studios in Eastern Europe got slapped on the wrists. Not all of them even did any time in jail at all. In lots of places in the world there really just isn't that much stigma associated with these things. Shit I think Japan just made child pornography illegal a few years ago, and it is still legal to possess in the Czech Republic. Actually it is legal to view in a few states of the USA so long as you don't intentionally save a copy (cache doesn't count).
So of course it's become more centered around hobbyists and enthusiasts these days. And with the internet being the primary distribution channel for porn now all my points stand. By not making possession and distribution illegal, and instead allowing distributors to profit off its distribution your policy would in essence promote it.
This is all really just common sense and I'm sorry you seem to have such difficulty seeing it.
See the thing is I don't particularly give a shit if people possess or distribute child pornography so long as they don't molest children. Your argument assumes that I think possession or distribution of child pornography is an immoral thing, but I only think child molestation is immoral.
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Really it is obvious that what you think you know about the real world is simply not true. At least it is obvious to anyone who bothers to know the truth about things instead of buying into the bullshit and drinking the koolaid.
First of all, let it never be said that it was I who began with the ad hom and insults when trying to engage in a reasoned debate.
Saying that legalizing the distribution and possession of CP will lead to children being molested is about as real world as saying that legalizing marijuana will lead to the rape of white women by drug crazed blacks.
And the fallacy of this statement, ladies and gentlemen, so resoundingly speaks for itself that I'd be remiss to argue with him. Kmf discredits himself in the words of his very rants.
dozens of studies on the matter that show the availability of child pornography in an area has a sharp negative correlative relationship with the amount of child molestation in that area.
ROFL. Soooo, you're promoting the distribution of child pornography in order to decrease overall child molestation now? You vigilante instrument of justice you. LMAO!
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Of course I personally think that schools should teach children science and fact, and not bullshit and mythology. However I do not think that I have any right to dictate to people what they must teach their children. From their incorrect viewpoint, they could just as easily say "OMGosh people should not be allowed to teach their children science as it goes against religion and will condemn them to eternal hell in the afterlife!". See, just as I have no right to dictate to others what their children should learn, they also have no right to dictate to me what my children should learn.
Yeah but what you're essentially doing here is giving mythology and bullshit an equal platform to science and fact. Science and fact should naturally be valued over mythology and bullshit, that kind of goes without saying. Our societal values reflected in our education system right now is that religious parents are free to school their kids in mythology and bullshit but they don't have the right to deprive their kids of also learning about science and fact and religious schools are thus prevented from dropping science as part of their curriculum. The idea being that as the child matures they can then decide for themselves what they want to believe. There isn't any equivalency on the flip side because there shouldn't be. For instance, a scientist will give their kids a secular education that doesn't include mythology and bullshit as part of the course curriculum because, well because it's mythology and superstitious bullshit. If the kid matures and, in spite of being grounded in the real world of science and facts, wants to pursue immersing him or herself in bullshit there are plenty of religious organizations that will accept them with open arms.
Kids don't get to choose who they are born to. By reducing children to no more than the property of their parents by giving them carte blanche to deprive them completely of the science and facts that govern the real world seems to me to be unethical in the extreme and creating victims out of these poor kids that weren't ever given the chance to learn anything but mythology and bullshit. Sure some might be smart enough or lucky enough to break free from such brainwashing to embrace the real world when they come of age but most will not. That's just the nature of how important and powerful education and brainwashing can be on a child's formative years.
You seem to draw the line as to what a parent can or cannot do to their kids when it comes to physical harm. What I don't see is any acknowledgement of the vast mental, emotional, and psychological harm that can be done to a child by educating them in only mythology and bullshit.
So essentially you want to force people to have their kids taught science, religious people want to force people to have their kids taught religious dogma, and I want to force both of you to stop forcing other people to do shit. For any observers, this is the reason why militant libertarianism is the only form of moral militancy possible. And indeed it is the reason why militant libertarianism is desperately required.
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So essentially you want to force people to have their kids taught science, religious people want to force people to have their kids taught religious dogma, and I want to force both of you to stop forcing other people to do shit. For any observers, this is the reason why militant libertarianism is the only form of moral militancy possible. And indeed it is the reason why militant libertarianism is desperately required.
;D @ your love of false equivalencies
;D @ the thought that you're convincing anybody but yourself
;D @ what you think is required
;D @ at this whole nonsense, "militant libertarianism"
Ahh, but I guess the crackpots are good for a laugh, and to drum up the feeling one gets when one comes across someone so deluded one actually feels better about one's own life and outlook. Apparently there are some people who want to make this a serious debate, so I'll leave the fun to them and say peace out.
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First of all, let it never be said that it was I who began with the ad hom and insults when trying to engage in a reasoned debate.
In this thread anyway :).
Saying that legalizing the distribution and possession of CP will lead to children being molested is about as real world as saying that legalizing marijuana will lead to the rape of white women by drug crazed blacks.
And the fallacy of this statement, ladies and gentlemen, so resoundingly speaks for itself that I'd be remiss to argue with him. Kmf discredits himself in the words of his very rants.
No please do explain why I am wrong. I mean let's see the studies. Here is one example of many. I mean I am sure you can find some study from the institute of spending tax dollars on funding ourselves to combat child pornography and pay ourselves salaries that says 110% of people who are within five miles of CP molest fifty billion children on average, but I can also find studies saying smoking marijuana makes your dick shrivel off so....
ROFL. Soooo, you're promoting the distribution of child pornography in order to decrease overall child molestation now? You vigilante instrument of justice you. LMAO!
https://www.springer.com/about+springer/media/springer+select?SGWID=0-11001-6-1042321-0
Could making child pornography legal lead to lower rates of child sex abuse? It could well do, according to a new study by Milton Diamond, from the University of Hawaii, and colleagues.
Results from the Czech Republic showed, as seen everywhere else studied (Canada, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sweden, USA), that rape and other sex crimes have not increased following the legalization and wide availability of pornography. And most significantly, the incidence of child sex abuse has fallen considerably since 1989, when child pornography became readily accessible – a phenomenon also seen in Denmark and Japan. Their findings are published online today in Springer’s journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.
The findings support the theory that potential sexual offenders use child pornography as a substitute for sex crimes against children. While the authors do not approve of the use of real children in the production or distribution of child pornography, they say that artificially produced materials might serve a purpose.
Diamond and team looked at what actually happened to sex-related crimes in the Czech Republic as it transitioned from having a strict ban on sexually explicit materials to a situation where the material was decriminalized. Pornography was strictly prohibited between 1948 and 1989. The ban was lifted with the country’s transition to democracy and, by 1990, the availability and ownership of sexually explicit materials rose dramatically. Even the possession of child pornography was not a criminal offense.
The researchers monitored the number of sex-related crimes from Ministry of Interior records – rape, attempted rape, sexual assault, and child sex abuse in particular – for 15 years during the ban and 18 years after it was lifted.
Most significantly, they found that the number of reported cases of child sex abuse dropped markedly immediately after the ban on sexually explicit materials was lifted in 1989. In both Denmark and Japan, the situation is similar: Child sex abuse was much lower than it was when availability of child pornography was restricted.
Other results showed that, overall, there was no increase in reported sex-related crimes generally since the legalization of pornography. Interestingly, whereas the number of sex-related crimes fell significantly after 1989, the number of other societal crimes – murder, assault, and robbery – rose significantly.
Reference
Diamond M et al (2010). Pornography and sex crimes in the Czech Republic. Archives of Sexual Behavior. DOI 10.1007/s10508-010-9696-y
I mean for someone who argues that he is so in support of science, why LOL at the science man? It seems like you really are quite religious yourself, it is just that you are part of the religion of Statism. Do the fucking research and you will see that I am right. The availability of child pornography strongly negatively correlates with the prevalence of child molestation.
But a more direct answer to your question, no I don't promote the distribution of child pornography for this reason. In fact I don't even promote the distribution of child pornography at all. I promote peoples rights to be free and to not be enslaved because a bunch of statist slave traders and brain washed fools are either evil or mind fucked. The fact that respecting peoples right to freedom results in much less children being molested is just a nice benefit. Generally when you respect freedom really really good things start happening! It is for this reason that I think freedom must be forced on the entire world. I can hardly imagine all the great things we will see when this happens, but I know they will be plentiful. I don't think a Utopia will be created, but I certainly think that the progress made and the good things that result will be stunningly remarkable.
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When the for profit distribution channels were at their peaks was right before largely distributed P2P technology became more mainstream. Nobody is going to risk their freedom paying for child pornography (making themselves a top priority consumer) when they can get the same shit for free from a P2P network (blending in with the other tens of millions of consumers using this technique, from which 1% of those identified by law enforcement are arrested in any given year).
You still seem to be missing the obvious. The availability of free adult porn over P2P hasn't ground to a halt the for profit adult industry. Why? Because there's still huge demand for higher production values, better quality video and DVDs, and easy access instead of hunting through P2P. By legalizing possession and for profit distribution of child porn you're creating this enormous potential easy access revenue stream that mimics the adult model that would create huge financial incentives for a real for profit child porn industry to fester and grow. How is this not obvious?
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When the for profit distribution channels were at their peaks was right before largely distributed P2P technology became more mainstream. Nobody is going to risk their freedom paying for child pornography (making themselves a top priority consumer) when they can get the same shit for free from a P2P network (blending in with the other tens of millions of consumers using this technique, from which 1% of those identified by law enforcement are arrested in any given year).
You still seem to be missing the obvious. The availability of free adult porn over P2P hasn't ground to a halt the for profit adult industry. Why? Because there's still huge demand for higher production values, better quality video and DVDs, and easy access instead of hunting through P2P. By legalizing possession and for profit distribution of child porn you're creating this enormous potential easy access revenue stream that mimics the adult model that would create huge financial incentives for a real for profit child porn industry to fester and grow. How is this not obvious?
The availability of free adult porn over P2P/the internet in general, has done enormous damage to the for profit adult porn industry. It threatens the very future of the adult pornography industry. You really are clueless aren't you??
http://www.rosebudmag.com/music-entertainment/porn-industry-012711
It’s an inescapable fact that porn is everywhere. You can find it on televisions, in movie stores, under mattresses, and of course, on the internet. In recent years, however, the porn industry has begun to fizzle. What has caused the decline? Could something as prevalent as pornography actually fade away?
The truth is that porn will never die off completely, but new porn just might. Steven Hirsch, founder of Vivid, one of the top U.S. porn producers claims, “In a couple of years, all you’re going to be left with is old movies, because people just can’t stay in business.” What does Hirsch base this prediction on? He explains, “We have educated an entire generation to expect adult content to be free. As a result of that, it’s very difficult to change that culture.” Therein lies one of the major problems with the porn industry. Are people really going to pay money for what they can easily get for free?
More and more websites offering free porn are popping up every day. YouTube clone sites like YouPorn and RedTube give everyone access to adult content at no charge. Porn producers are seeing their content swapped through file-sharing programs, costing them millions of dollars in lost sales. They are constantly researching stronger anti-piracy software to try and stop these sites from profiting illegally from their movies, but attempts of shutting down the sites completely have so far proven unsuccessful.
An interview with Ron Jeremy, one of the most successful porn stars of all time, revealed how he felt about free porn on the internet. “We embraced it (the internet) in the beginning, and now it’s eating the porn business. It’s literally decimating the porn business.” USA Today’s John Swartz also partially blames the Tube sites for the porn industry’s financial crisis, but the weak economy certainly doesn’t help either. The recession has caused countless individuals to watch their discretionary spending – porn definitely included.
The porn industry tried to fight back by requesting financial aid – to the tune of $5 billion. A $5 billion bailout for porn? Girls Gone Wild CEO Joe Francis said in a statement that “the U.S. government should actively support the adult industry’s survival and growth.” Millions of Americans are malnourished or homeless, but the government should give $5 billion to the porn industry? A few weeks later, Hustler publisher Larry Flynt admitted that the whole thing was a farce, saying he knew it wouldn’t actually happen. Ya think?
Whether the economy, recession, or piracy is to blame, the porn industry is definitely struggling. Representatives state that while they don’t believe porn will die out, fewer companies will be making fewer, cheaper movies. Time will tell if that will be good enough. Will the public demand better quality movies? What will be more important – free porn, or good porn? Perhaps the answer lies in what no one wants to consider – no porn. Hey, relax guys, it was only a suggestion. Good or bad, porn is likely here to stay.
PS: Making child porn distribution illegal actually causes the value of child porn production to increase, if it were not for the fact that tens of millions of people and websites publicly give CP away to anyone who asks for it, criminalization of distribution would have led to increased profits for distributors. Just like criminalization of cocaine is what gives it most of its value.
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So essentially you want to force people to have their kids taught science, religious people want to force people to have their kids taught religious dogma, and I want to force both of you to stop forcing other people to do shit. For any observers, this is the reason why militant libertarianism is the only form of moral militancy possible. And indeed it is the reason why militant libertarianism is desperately required.
Love how you love to speak for "any observers" rather than allowing them to make up their own minds. FYI, you don't speak for them. They speak for themselves.
And excuse me for valuing science and facts over religious dogma and believing that all kids should have the right to learn about science and facts. I'm not denying them the chance to learn religious dogma should their parents wish it so, but not at the expense of learning science and facts.
Once again you remain oblivious to the real world result that more kids would grow up ignorant to science and facts. Or maybe you're not oblivious to it but instead just feel that's the price they must pay for their parents being religious fruitcakes. I can't decide which is worse.
I also think the profound speciousness of your argument couldn't do a better job in exposing the absurdity of militant libertarianism. That you would use force to keep these kids ignorant, well, I don't even know what to say. I rest my piece.
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and religious people think that you are insane to use force to reduce the probability that their children will not burn in eternal hell fire.
I unfortunately have met my fair share of highly religious people. They tend to do a pretty decent job of compartmentalizing their insanity. Many of them would want to have highly educated children, although only in particular fields. A lot of religious people are quite well educated in general, they have lawyers, chemists, accountants, etc. Their primary beef is with biologists, although they also are largely incompatible with a large amount of other scientific fields. And of course there are some exceptions, like most sorts of thought disorder, religion can be minimally disruptive ("I think there is some God") or extremely disruptive ("I know that XYZ is God worship him or die!!!").
Essentially you want to force the children to do learn what you think is right (and if you think science is right, which I find to be unlikely in all areas but probably likely in some, then I agree with you that science is right), Their parents want to teach them what they think is right. You have no right to force them to teach them what you think is right, anymore than the religious people have a right to force you to teach your children that their religious Dogma is right. In a libertarian world you can both do what you think is right, you just cannot force others to do anything except be libertarian. And that is why it is so awesome, in a libertarian world EVERYBODY WINS (except for people who want to force anything other than libertarianism).
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The availability of free adult porn over P2P/the internet in general, has done enormous damage to the for profit adult porn industry. It threatens the very future of the adult pornography industry. You really are clueless aren't you??
PS: Making child porn distribution illegal actually causes the value of child porn production to increase, if it were not for the fact that tens of millions of people and websites publicly give CP away to anyone who asks for it, criminalization of distribution would have led to increased profits for distributors. Just like criminalization of cocaine is what gives it most of its value.
Yes, of course technology has resulted in the wide scale proliferation of porn that has been damaging to the adult industry. And I have no doubt that technology will continue to close the gap that allows the for-profit adult industry to be able to still charge for content today. That doesn't take away from the fact there's still an enormous potential revenue stream to be had by legalizing the possession and distribution of for profit child pornography today.
Because your claim that the illegality of child porn has increased its demand is straight bullshit and ignorant. If anything its illegality has DECREASED demand because of the costs associated with possessing and distributing it. Its increased its value, yes. Because the far fewer that still demand it are willing to pay a premium for it by taking the far greater risks associated with possessing and distributing it. This is all just the simple economics of supply and demand. But illegality hasn't increased demand, quite the opposite.
You could make a cogent case that TECHNOLOGY has increased demand by jading enough people to adult porn that a small percentage of thrill seekers who aren't even pedophiles seek it out. But that percentage will only rise when there are no longer any personal costs associated with possessing it. And guess what happens when that percentage rises? DEMAND INCREASES. And what happens when demand increases? Supply increases increases in attempts to meet the increased demand. And assuming you're not a pedophile you don't want to see the supply increase. You see? Well probably not, but this is logic. You should try and use it sometime.
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I never claimed that illegality increased demand for child pornography, only that it increased the profits to be made by producing and distributing child pornography. However, due to the fact that millions of sources offer CP for free, this economic certainty was not fully realized like it was for cocaine. Because you cannot download cocaine for free from a p2p network or torrent tracker.
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You have no right to force them to teach them what you think is right, anymore than the religious people have a right to force you to teach your children that their religious Dogma is right.
;D @ your love of false equivalencies. That you would think it's right to brainwash a kid with religious dogma and not expose them to any other ideas is simply astounding.
And that is why it is so awesome, in a libertarian world EVERYBODY WINS (except for people who want to force anything other than libertarianism).
Except for the innocent kids that you would use force to keep ignorant. That you would continue to ignore the emotional and psychological damage done to kids brainwashed by only bullshit and mythology and dismiss the harm done to their intellectual growth, well like I said I don't know what else to say other than that it thoroughly confirms to me that you are oblivious and delusional. Your words speak for themselves. Since I'm sure you would say the same of me let the public come to their own conclusions and decide. I rest my piece on this issue.
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The availability of free adult porn over P2P/the internet in general, has done enormous damage to the for profit adult porn industry. It threatens the very future of the adult pornography industry. You really are clueless aren't you??
PS: Making child porn distribution illegal actually causes the value of child porn production to increase, if it were not for the fact that tens of millions of people and websites publicly give CP away to anyone who asks for it, criminalization of distribution would have led to increased profits for distributors. Just like criminalization of cocaine is what gives it most of its value.
Yes, of course technology has resulted in the wide scale proliferation of porn that has been damaging to the adult industry. And I have no doubt that technology will continue to close the gap that allows the for-profit adult industry to be able to still charge for content today. That doesn't take away from the fact there's still an enormous potential revenue stream to be had by legalizing the possession and distribution of for profit child pornography today.
Because your claim that the illegality of child porn has increased its demand is straight bullshit and ignorant. If anything its illegality has DECREASED demand because of the costs associated with possessing and distributing it. Its increased its value, yes. Because the far fewer that still demand it are willing to pay a premium for it by taking the far greater risks associated with possessing and distributing it. This is all just the simple economics of supply and demand. But illegality hasn't increased demand, quite the opposite.
You could make a cogent case that TECHNOLOGY has increased demand by jading enough people to adult porn that a small percentage of thrill seekers who aren't even pedophiles seek it out. But that percentage will only rise when there are no longer any personal costs associated with possessing it. And guess what happens when that percentage rises? DEMAND INCREASES. And what happens when demand increases? Supply increases increases in attempts to meet the increased demand. And assuming you're not a pedophile you don't want to see the supply increase. You see? Well probably not, but this is logic. You should try and use it sometime.
First of all there are already several million CP images and videos, so there is quite a large supply. Only very large trading groups manage to exhaust the currently available supply of CP, and if an individual spent ten seconds looking at every CP image available in a row it would take them a year or two straight before they came close to exhausting the supply. Second of all, thrill seekers who aren't even pedophiles are the primary type of people who view CP. Third of all, it isn't like someone literally consumes CP in the sense that after they view an image it is gone forever. The same image can be copied a billion times and seen for the first time by an unlimited number of people. The only scenario in which I see supply and demand apply is on the massive trading platforms that have upload quotas for continued membership. Certainly supply and demand does not apply to P2P networks, it isn't like someone downloads some CP and then some magic happens that causes some random pedophile to sense the increased demand and molest a kid to add the photo to the P2P network. There is no incentive to share CP on P2P networks and it is extremely risky, finding people with CP has become literally like shooting fish in a barrel you just make a simple software program that searches P2P networks for some keywords, downloads the files that match the keywords, compares their hash value to known CP image hash values and spits out thousands upon thousands upon thousands of IP addresses at a time. The only reason they haven't arrested millions more people for CP distribution is because of the overwhelming number of people who are downloading CP from P2P networks without realizing that they automatically share everything they download. If P2P network software didn't automatically share everything that a person downloads, the amount of CP available from such networks would be a tiny fraction of what it currently is.
Anyway I think I have pretty exhaustively argued against you with this strategy, and now I will take a slightly different approach. Before I argued that legalization of child pornography possession and distribution will not lead to increased levels of child molestation, and in fact will decrease the levels of child molestation. Now I will argue while pretending to hold the incorrect assumption that legalization of child pornography will increase the amounts of child molestation. Imagine alcohol. A lot of people enjoy alcohol, others find it to be quite immoral to drink, many are neutral regarding it, and essentially nobody really needs to consume it, it is purely recreational. Now I think that the majority of people do not think that drinking Alcohol is immoral, but a lot of people think that drunk driving and crashing your vehicle into an innocent bystander should be illegal. Now, it is correct to say that if alcohol is outlawed, the rates of drunk driving will plummet. But clearly it is wrong to restrict the rights of those who drink responsibly simply because some people are irresponsible and do immoral things related to alcohol. The same logic applies to child pornography, even incorrectly assuming that legalized possession and distribution will lead to higher rates of child molestation. A lot of people enjoy viewing child pornography, others find it to be quite immoral to view, few are neutral regarding it, and essentially nobody needs to consume it, it is purely recreational. It is the producers of child pornography, those who molest children, that are engaging in immoral behavior (these are the drunk drivers). The possessors and distributors of child pornography are not engaging in immoral behavior, and thus far your argument that they are is that their demand for child pornography leads to a supply being created, thus leads to child molestation. Likewise, the demand of people who do not get drunk and crash into innocent bystanders is a large part of the reason why people who do get drunk and crash into innocent bystanders have a supply of alcohol. Following your logic, it makes sense to prohibit alcohol, restricting those who do not harm others, in order to prevent drunk driving and protect innocent bystanders from being crashed into. According to my logic, we need to put the blame for immoral activities on the perpetrators of immoral activity, and it is immoral to punish others for the perpetrators immoral actions, even if this punishment would reduce the ability of the perpetrators to engage in their immoral activities.
Another argument I could present to you is more in order to reveal your inherent desire for child pornography to be illegal regardless of its relationship with child molestation rates. When people go with the flawed supply and demand argument for child pornography possession and distribution criminalization, I like to point out a technology known as private information retrieval. This is a cryptographic system in which a client can request an item from a server or group of servers, with out the servers knowing the item that is being requested. Although hardly practical, it is entirely in the realm of possibility to have a group of servers that store every single child pornography photograph ever created, and allow people to download them without the possibility of the servers knowing how many people are downloading child pornography (although the servers would need to contain at least one item that is not child pornography as well). the servers can determine how many people are downloading items, but they are completely incapable of determining which items are being downloaded, and thus they are incapable of determining the demand for child pornography. Do you think that if such a system was put into place, that the rate of child pornography production would plummet? Do you support legalizing the possession and distribution of child pornography so long as the possessors and distributors use a PIR algorithm ??
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You have no right to force them to teach them what you think is right, anymore than the religious people have a right to force you to teach your children that their religious Dogma is right.
;D @ your love of false equivalencies. That you would think it's right to brainwash a kid with religious dogma and not expose them to any other ideas is simply astounding.
And that is why it is so awesome, in a libertarian world EVERYBODY WINS (except for people who want to force anything other than libertarianism).
Except for the innocent kids that you would use force to keep ignorant. That you would continue to ignore the emotional and psychological damage done to kids brainwashed by only bullshit and mythology and dismiss the harm done to their intellectual growth, well like I said I don't know what else to say other than that it thoroughly confirms to me that you are oblivious and delusional. Your words speak for themselves. Since I'm sure you would say the same of me let the public come to their own conclusions and decide. I rest my piece on this issue.
But what about the innocent kids you want to force to be exposed to information that puts them at a substantially higher rate of burning in eternal hell fire!! It is almost like different people have different opinions (some stupid) and belief systems (some stupid)! Maybe everybody should be free to follow their own belief system and have their own opinions, so long as they do not infringe upon the rights of others to do the same??
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First of all there are already several million CP images and videos, so there is quite a large supply. Only very large trading groups manage to exhaust the currently available supply of CP, and if an individual spent ten seconds looking at every CP image available in a row it would take them a year or two straight before they came close to exhausting the supply.
First of all how many of those several million CP images are actually of decent enough quality that connoisseurs would care to watch, let alone pay to watch? My guess is a small fraction. Thrill seekers perhaps for the novelty don't mind trudging through 15 year old shitty images but regulars, just like in adult porn, would be all about seeking fresh content with the best quality that uses the latest technologies. This is where the demand for new content would be that could exact a price should its distribution and possession become legal.
Second of all, thrill seekers who aren't even pedophiles are the primary type of people who view CP.
Really? Sounds far fetched and counter-intuitive to me but if you can back it up with proof I'll be happy to concede this point.
Third of all, it isn't like someone literally consumes CP in the sense that after they view an image it is gone forever. The same image can be copied a billion times and seen for the first time by an unlimited number of people. The only scenario in which I see supply and demand apply is on the massive trading platforms that have upload quotas for continued membership.
Again, that image is still limited by the technology that was used to capture it. The more time goes by the more it suffers diminished marginal returns in the appeal it holds to view it.
Certainly supply and demand does not apply to P2P networks, it isn't like someone downloads some CP and then some magic happens that causes some random pedophile to sense the increased demand and molest a kid to add the photo to the P2P network. There is no incentive to share CP on P2P networks and it is extremely risky, finding people with CP has become literally like shooting fish in a barrel you just make a simple software program that searches P2P networks for some keywords, downloads the files that match the keywords, compares their hash value to known CP image hash values and spits out thousands upon thousands upon thousands of IP addresses at a time. The only reason they haven't arrested millions more people for CP distribution is because of the overwhelming number of people who are downloading CP from P2P networks without realizing that they automatically share everything they download. If P2P network software didn't automatically share everything that a person downloads, the amount of CP available from such networks would be a tiny fraction of what it currently is.
Again P2P networks do not offer the most efficient means to find and browse content. This is why adult websites can still charge a premium right now. They can offer better quality content than what you'd find on average on p2p. And they can offer highly specialized and catered content instantly without having to resort to seeking it out. So you insist on continuing to compare apples and oranges. Your argument that legality would not increase demand is just not compelling.
Anyway I think I have pretty exhaustively argued against you with this strategy, and now I will take a slightly different approach. Before I argued that legalization of child pornography possession and distribution will not lead to increased levels of child molestation, and in fact will decrease the levels of child molestation.
I think we need to distinguish between just "child sex abuse" and "child sex abuse AND exploitation through CP". I believe the latter is far worse for the victim than just molestation because it exploits and exposes the child to the world through CP. I maintain that the increased levels of demand and demand for premium content streams of CP would increase the amount of exploitation. This is just simple supply and demand and common sense.
It is the producers of child pornography, those who molest children, that are engaging in immoral behavior (these are the drunk drivers). The possessors and distributors of child pornography are not engaging in immoral behavior, and thus far your argument that they are is that their demand for child pornography leads to a supply being created, thus leads to child molestation. Likewise, the demand of people who do not get drunk and crash into innocent bystanders is a large part of the reason why people who do get drunk and crash into innocent bystanders have a supply of alcohol. Following your logic, it makes sense to prohibit alcohol, restricting those who do not harm others, in order to prevent drunk driving and protect innocent bystanders from being crashed into. According to my logic, we need to put the blame for immoral activities on the perpetrators of immoral activity, and it is immoral to punish others for the perpetrators immoral actions, even if this punishment would reduce the ability of the perpetrators to engage in their immoral activities.
Really poor analogy. For your analogy to work it would have to be the distillers that produce the alcohol to be blamed as the purveyors of immoral behavior just like the producers of child porn. My argument is not that consumption of child porn is a catalyst for the consumers to go out and rape children they wouldn't otherwise have raped. Again, it's that the increased demand for CP increases the sexual exploitation of minors to meet that demand. It's really quite simple. There's a direct causal relationship. What you're describing is incidental and dependent upon other factors. By consuming alcohol you're not enabling someone else drinking alcohol to engage in vehicular manslaughter. By paying for CP you are directly enabling producers or potential producers of premium CP to produce it.
When people go with the flawed supply and demand argument for child pornography possession and distribution criminalization, I like to point out a technology known as private information retrieval. This is a cryptographic system in which a client can request an item from a server or group of servers, with out the servers knowing the item that is being requested. Although hardly practical, it is entirely in the realm of possibility to have a group of servers that store every single child pornography photograph ever created, and allow people to download them without the possibility of the servers knowing how many people are downloading child pornography (although the servers would need to contain at least one item that is not child pornography as well). the servers can determine how many people are downloading items, but they are completely incapable of determining which items are being downloaded, and thus they are incapable of determining the demand for child pornography. Do you think that if such a system was put into place, that the rate of child pornography production would plummet? Do you support legalizing the possession and distribution of child pornography so long as the possessors and distributors use a PIR algorithm ??
Not really sure what your point is with this metaphor. Just because the exact figures with regards to the demand for CP is obfuscated doesn't change the reality that increased demand for fresh and premium content CP would increase the supply. Is this really bad metaphor some sort of joke?
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But what about the innocent kids you want to force to be exposed to information that puts them at a substantially higher rate of burning in eternal hell fire!! It is almost like different people have different opinions (some stupid) and belief systems (some stupid)! Maybe everybody should be free to follow their own belief system and have their own opinions, so long as they do not infringe upon the rights of others to do the same??
ROTFL. What it really boils down to is that you value the freedoms of deranged parents to victimize their kids through a total immersion in brainwashing while I value the rights of the innocent kid to not be thoroughly brainwashed. Since you pretty much agree with the value I place on science and facts over mythology and bullshit then that's what it comes down to. No matter how much you try to dress it up and justify it otherwise, there's no other way around it. You value the freedom of the parent over the mental health of the kid. Deal with it. :P
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When I saw this title, I thought, "Isn't that oxymoronic?"
But then I thought about it.
There is a difference between wanting to Do No Harm, and Doing What Must Be Done.
In other words, I may believe that Justice based on Eye-For-An-Eye is abhorrent, and that such Justice Is Perverted, based on ancient and outdated monkey-thinking.
But I live in a world of math and theory, there exists very little space for actual human beings in my world of ideas.
Humans, in reality, are generally smallminded pathetic dirty stinky creatures who make me wish I was never born.
They have great capacity to be more than what they are now, however, it is hard to see that without great intuition and detachment.
People can choose to be greater than their genetic makeup intends them to be.
I do not believe that people are slaves to their genes.
If this was true, we would all be thieves, brigands, Machiavellian in nature.
Good people exist, though they are rare.
So Militant Libertarianism makes sense to be, but only if you put aside ideals of doing no harm, and being willing to get one's hands dirty in order to reshape the world.
I am a Utilitarian. I believe in attempting to shape one's own behavior according to what Reason and Logic indicate will result in the greatest Happiness and Pleasure for the most people.
I have played with the idea of building a Garden in which all sentient living things (a distinct concept from sapient) can live without suffering of any kind.
Such a Garden would be incredibly expensive to construct, and may take thousands upon thousands of years to construct, however it is our Moral Imperative as Utilitarians to Abolish Suffering.
I have given much thought to how such a Garden would be constructed, which would involve carefully engineered ecosystems which involved pure mutualism if not outright symbiosis, as predation of any kind would be abolished by Moral Imperative.
All parasites of every manner, shape, and kind would be abolished and eradicated.
I do not wish to destroy entire species, however my mother raised me to be the best person I can be, a Man of Principle and Justice. I can not turn away from this task merely because I find destroying entire species distasteful.
And so, Militant Libertarianism makes sense to me, because Libertarianism is Highly Idealistic, and such Ideals can only exist in a world of reason and justice.
We do not live in a world of Reason and Justice.
We live in a world of suffering, poverty, disease, parasitism, predation, fraud, trickery, brigandry, thievery, and malice.
We live in a world where those who predate upon the weak thrive.
This must change for Libertarianism, and the Reason and Justice it requires to thrive instead.
The only counter to trickery is trickery.
We must match wit for wit.
We must be Cunning Like The Fox.
Only by outwitting the predators who rule us can we hope to build a world of Reason and Justice.
Such a world can only be Stateless, Industrialized, and Modern, based on the highest of technology, and defended with powerful robotics and military weaponry.
Only when The People have weapons that match The Oppressors can we achieve parity with our Masters.
Only then can we hope to rebuild the world, tearing apart the rudiments of nature, destroying parasitism, destroying predation, and re-engineering our paradise.
Paradise will not engineer itself.
So though many will say Libertarianism is a Pipe Dream, an overly-idealistic perspective, I reply, "We Can Do It."
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We live in a world of suffering, poverty, disease, parasitism, predation, fraud, trickery, brigandry, thievery, and malice.
We live in a world where those who predate upon the weak thrive.
And what makes you think militant libertarianism will allow you to transcend those things?
There seemed to be another time not long ago when fanatics inspired by ideology used similar words to describe the world. They were Bolsheviks.
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But what about the innocent kids you want to force to be exposed to information that puts them at a substantially higher rate of burning in eternal hell fire!! It is almost like different people have different opinions (some stupid) and belief systems (some stupid)! Maybe everybody should be free to follow their own belief system and have their own opinions, so long as they do not infringe upon the rights of others to do the same??
ROTFL. What it really boils down to is that you value the freedoms of deranged parents to victimize their kids through a total immersion in brainwashing while I value the rights of the innocent kid to not be thoroughly brainwashed. Since you pretty much agree with the value I place on science and facts over mythology and bullshit then that's what it comes down to. No matter how much you try to dress it up and justify it otherwise, there's no other way around it. You value the freedom of the parent over the mental health of the kid. Deal with it. :P
I value the freedom of people to do what they think is right over my ability to force them to do anything other than not force others to do what they think is right.
First of all how many of those several million CP images are actually of decent enough quality that connoisseurs would care to watch, let alone pay to watch? My guess is a small fraction. Thrill seekers perhaps for the novelty don't mind trudging through 15 year old shitty images but regulars, just like in adult porn, would be all about seeking fresh content with the best quality that uses the latest technologies. This is where the demand for new content would be that could exact a price should its distribution and possession become legal.
Well the big Eastern European production studios used only professional photographers with cutting edge equipment of the time. I have no idea what the quality of the 'average' CP is though. I don't imagine that it is mostly extremely low quality though. Anyway the production of new CP could still exact a price if distribution were handled securely. Although the content will leak immediately to P2P networks. I do think directly paying for the production of CP should be illegal, just as I think that the production of CP should be illegal.
Really? Sounds far fetched and counter-intuitive to me but if you can back it up with proof I'll be happy to concede this point.
I will try to dig up a link to a typology of CP offenders I read once. Googling around a little didn't find it for me, but I can probably still dig it up. I don't believe it listed the prevalence of each type of CP offender though. I can also likely find several other citations for the somewhat counter intuitive claim that pedophiles are not the most common CP offenders, although this will entail me digging through google and a bunch of .PDFs. So in short when I get more free time I will get your citations and post back with them, and until that point in time feel free to not believe me :). CP offenders are a pretty diverse bunch and certainly pedophiles are in their ranks, however the comprehensive typologies include a lot more offender types. Curious people, sadists, libertarians, pornography addicts, voyeurs, non-pedophile philes (infantophiles, hebephiles, ephebephiles) ((although this is somewhat of a stretch as most people incorrectly lump them together with pedophiles regardless, and some people don't even consider jailbait to be CP)) and a lot of other things I cannot immediately recall.
Curious offenders may search for CP not because they have any sexual attraction to children but rather out of a desire to see what the big deal is all about. They usually are busted with a few images, sometimes even in their caches and not even saved. Thankfully they are not very commonly arrested as law enforcement do make some attempts at focusing resources to people with larger collections and people who search for more disturbing materials / materials more indicative of being a child molester. However sometimes these people get tangled up in the web when they use P2P programs, as they don't realize the images they downloaded are being served from their computers, and thus they have been elevated from the bottom of the target list to a much higher position as a distributor. Libertarian offenders are pretty similar to curious offenders, although their driving motivation to look at CP is because the government restricts them from doing so. They pretty much have the same pattern as the curious offender. Sadists who are not pedophiles may still be attracted to hardcore child pornography, it is not the age of the victim that they find attractive but rather the suffering inflicted upon the victim. Sadists who view/distribute CP are the highest priorities for law enforcement, and they signal their status by having collections of largely 'hurtcore' CP. They are more likely to use security measures to protect themselves, and to be parts of a community as well (people who are parts of a CP community are also higher priority targets for LE than people who do not engage in networking). Pornography addicts may view CP even though they are not pedophiles, because they become addicted to looking at taboo images. Their progression may be similar to that of the stereotypical drug addicts, starting with softcore legal materials and working up to extreme legal materials prior to moving into illegal materials of increasing extremity. This is a very common sort of offender, and they are often big collectors and as such pretty high priority targets of law enforcement. They are also very vulnerable to law enforcement operations as they tend to use P2P networks (making them distributors in many cases, often unintentionally) and limited security measures. A voyeuristic offender may view CP due to a desire to see people who have been covertly recorded in sexual situations. They would be more attracted to the fact that a spy cam recorded someone in a bathroom naked than they would be to the fact that the person it recorded naked was underage. And of course there are the various other age related philes, pedophiles only being attracted to children from ages 2 to 12 but CP encompassing all pornography of anyone under 18. Law enforcement put the highest priority on people who view infant porn, and the least priority on people who view jailbait porn (which is often freely distributed even through otherwise legal amateur sites, with very little law enforcement attention given to the viewers/distributors or producers for that matter in the case of self created CP). Since in common speech pedophile means anyone attracted to anyone under 18, and technically child porn means porn with anyone under 18 in it, this can seem like kind of a stretch.
Again P2P networks do not offer the most efficient means to find and browse content. This is why adult websites can still charge a premium right now. They can offer better quality content than what you'd find on average on p2p. And they can offer highly specialized and catered content instantly without having to resort to seeking it out. So you insist on continuing to compare apples and oranges. Your argument that legality would not increase demand is just not compelling.
Websites can still charge a premium now for adult porn because a lot of old people and internet noobs don't realize they can get the same exact shit for free. Also I know that legality will not increase demand. I can assure you that nobody who doesn't want to look at CP today, is going to run out and start looking at CP because it has been legalized. I imagine you think that legalizing heroin will lead to a bunch of people running out and trying it as well?
I think we need to distinguish between just "child sex abuse" and "child sex abuse AND exploitation through CP". I believe the latter is far worse for the victim than just molestation because it exploits and exposes the child to the world through CP. I maintain that the increased levels of demand and demand for premium content streams of CP would increase the amount of exploitation. This is just simple supply and demand and common sense.
You are going to need to show me the mechanism by which this will happen. The people who produce CP have their own reasons for doing so, and only the commercial producers (who are essentially extinct, and who would still be breaking the law by producing anyway), attention seekers (who produce for the props they get from the CP community) and exclusive content seekers (who produce CP to satisfy the membership requirements of private producer only communities) seem open to the formation of a supply and demand relationship. A very small percentage of the children who are molested on photo/video, are molested for the primary purpose of child pornography production.
Really poor analogy. For your analogy to work it would have to be the distillers that produce the alcohol to be blamed as the purveyors of immoral behavior just like the producers of child porn. My argument is not that consumption of child porn is a catalyst for the consumers to go out and rape children they wouldn't otherwise have raped. Again, it's that the increased demand for CP increases the sexual exploitation of minors to meet that demand. It's really quite simple. There's a direct causal relationship. What you're describing is incidental and dependent upon other factors. By consuming alcohol you're not enabling someone else drinking alcohol to engage in vehicular manslaughter. By paying for CP you are directly enabling producers or potential producers of premium CP to produce it.
Should we not buy diamonds because they could be blood diamonds? Should we not buy shoes or electronics or anything else from Asian countries because they could have been produced by slaves in sweatshops? Your argument is that we should outlaw diamonds, shoes and electronics because otherwise people might buy them and fund immoral activity, leading to even more immoral activity. My argument is that we should punish the people who are doing immoral things and leave the innocent people who are not hurting others alone.
Not really sure what your point is with this metaphor. Just because the exact figures with regards to the demand for CP is obfuscated doesn't change the reality that increased demand for fresh and premium content CP would increase the supply. Is this really bad metaphor some sort of joke?
The thing is that the increased demand would be impossible to determine if distribution took place only over a properly designed PIR infrastructure. If zero people or a million people are downloading CP from the PIR network, nobody would be able to tell.
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So Militant Libertarianism makes sense to be, but only if you put aside ideals of doing no harm, and being willing to get one's hands dirty in order to reshape the world.
Militant libertarianism isn't an oxymoron because libertarians don't say "do no harm" they say "do not initiate force". It is impossible to not initiate force unless you are in line with libertarianism, and thus from a libertarian point of view it is not immoral to respond to non-libertarians with force until they either are incapacitated (they can be against libertarianism, they just cannot act on this, as to act on being against libertarianism is by definition to initiate force), dead, or libertarians.
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I value the freedom of people to do what they think is right over my ability to force them to do anything other than not force others to do what they think is right.
You really don't see the paradox in what you said? You'd still be using force in making people do things you think is right. You'd be using force to ensure kids remained brainwashed and ignorant by clueless parents who would deny them the right to learn about the world they were born into. You keep callously treating children as chopped liver, no more than the property of their parents with no rights to be free in your world. When I point out the kids should be free from brainwashing you return to the parent's rights as superseding their child's right not to be brainwashed. You outright ignore the kid having any rights at all. You don't give a damn about the intellectual, psychological, and emotional damage done to a child who grows up fearing imaginary foes and eternal damnation while never exposed to other ideas. It doesn't bother you that kids in such circumstances don't learn to think for themselves or question authority and become religious tools enslaved to fictional ideas. You aren't even aware of mental enslavement being just as wrong as physical enslavement. You draw the line at sexual abuse as what a parent should not be "free" to making their kids endure while I include brainwashing as what a parent should not be "free" to make their kids endure because I believe brainwashing to be every bit as damaging as sexual abuse and in some circumstances MORE.
So no, when you keep repeating this as your mantra it makes no sense to me because I believe a child must not be brainwashed in order to be free. Someone never exposed to alternative ideas CANNOT BE FREE. They are not free to make a choice about something they're not aware exists. And really, saying the parents believe I would force their child into eternal damnation by forcing them to learn science so I should respect their bullshit opinion is such a ludicrous argument it's hard to believe you could make it with a straight face. It's not themselves they are fucking up but their INNOCENT CHILD! So their opinion is not equally valid to mine because theirs is based in fiction and mine is based in fact. Science is rooted in the empiricism of the real world we live in. Religion is not. People are free to make stupid choices, but they should NOT be free to deny their kids the option of choosing NOT to make stupid choices. Is this really that hard to understand?
Well the big Eastern European production studios used only professional photographers with cutting edge equipment of the time. I have no idea what the quality of the 'average' CP is though. I don't imagine that it is mostly extremely low quality though. Anyway the production of new CP could still exact a price if distribution were handled securely. Although the content will leak immediately to P2P networks.
Like I pointed to the adult model before, that's the way it would profit. Using that model is still a helluva lot more profitable than now, bleeding or not.
I do think directly paying for the production of CP should be illegal, just as I think that the production of CP should be illegal.
Oh? Did you just decide this? I don't recall you ever mentioning you had a problem with this before. What do you mean, please clarify. Are you referring to the paying customers of say, a premium CP website?
I will try to dig up a link to a typology of CP offenders I read once.
Yes please do because it seems just counter-intuitive to me. Pedophiles are motivated by their sexual urges and human sexuality is so fundamental to our biology it would be natural for them to perpetually seek it out. Thrill seekers are bound to get bored after a certain amount of exposure and move on to new forms of thrills. So it doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense to me.
Websites can still charge a premium now for adult porn because a lot of old people and internet noobs don't realize they can get the same exact shit for free.
This might be true too, but I also provided good reasons why. Ease of access, more choices, fresh content, and customization. But the reasons are really irrelevant. All that matters is that the CP business model could mimic the adult model and be profitable.
Also I know that legality will not increase demand. I can assure you that nobody who doesn't want to look at CP today, is going to run out and start looking at CP because it has been legalized. I imagine you think that legalizing heroin will lead to a bunch of people running out and trying it as well?
You can "assure" me demand won't increase huh? Based on what? Crypto-religious blind faith? I'm not sure how you can "know" something like that when it's so illogical. What about all the pedophiles that hold themselves back that would then have a green light? What about all the curious people, sadists, libertarians, pornography addicts, voyeurs, non-pedophile philes that were holding themselves back because of how totally illegal and taboo it is and they didn't want to jeopardize their lives? The reality is that there are countless that no doubt hold back. So what's your assurance worth? Your reasoning as to why demand wouldn't increase is flawed.
Just like the heroin analogy. Legalizing heroin WOULD increase demand, at least initially. Of course it wouldn't be coming from those that had no interest before but those already inclined but feared arrest or didn't have access. You'd also have opiate addicts who were taking other illegal or Rx based opiates making the switch to heroin because of the legalized ease of obtaining it. It might not be a huge increase, but the numbers would initially surge just from the act of legalization.
You are going to need to show me the mechanism by which this will happen. The people who produce CP have their own reasons for doing so, and only the commercial producers (who are essentially extinct, and who would still be breaking the law by producing anyway), attention seekers (who produce for the props they get from the CP community) and exclusive content seekers (who produce CP to satisfy the membership requirements of private producer only communities) seem open to the formation of a supply and demand relationship. A very small percentage of the children who are molested on photo/video, are molested for the primary purpose of child pornography production.
Fair enough. Let's extrapolate. The for-profit online porn industry worldwide is a 5 billion dollar industry:
http://www.guardianexpressla.com/porn-revenues-exceed-5-billion-world-wide-despite-free-pornography-online-and-rampant-piracy/
Pedophiles account for 4% of the population. Let's assume your stat of more thrill seekers than pedophiles consume CP is true, so let's say 5% are thrill seekers, and let's say 1% account for the various other CP consumer profiles. That gives us a market 10% the size of the adult market of potential consumers of premium CP. Remember, we don't have to factor out P2P users because this is an extrapolation already of only the for-profit adult model.
There's your mechanism. A 500 million dollar market just waiting to be exploited for premium CP producers to milk. And as econ 101 tells us, when you have that sort of demand with those sorts of dollars involved, there will be those willing to take the risk to fill the void to get a piece of the pie especially since the risk won't be THAT great to themselves. Studios are easy to stealth in a home. Yes, it's true that the illegality of production will provide some deterrence. But with the possession and distribution channels fully legalized ready to fill the coffers of the pro producer that provides them content, that's what's known as a STRONG incentive for such producers to go underground and get into the game. Now let me return to my very first post on this subject to explain the rest of the mechanisms of how this would work and why producers wouldn't be at that great a risk, for which you said I was clueless because you were convinced child porn could not be profitable:
"A policy like that would have the real world affect of more pedophiles (or even just unscrupulous opportunists) willing to take the risk of producing it because of the financial incentives while the chances of getting caught would be minimized. Why? Because as soon as it's secretly produced and hits their distribution channels they cash in. Since their distribution channels would be free to possess, distribute, and profit handsomely off it they have no reason to give up who the producer is, and in fact would have a strong financial incentive not to. You could say the public could boycott the stores that carry it, but seeing as to how porn is primarily distributed online these days that doesn't prevent the websites that cater to it from being driven out of business."
It still stands.
Should we not buy diamonds because they could be blood diamonds? Should we not buy shoes or electronics or anything else from Asian countries because they could have been produced by slaves in sweatshops? Your argument is that we should outlaw diamonds, shoes and electronics because otherwise people might buy them and fund immoral activity, leading to even more immoral activity. My argument is that we should punish the people who are doing immoral things and leave the innocent people who are not hurting others alone.
"Could be" is not incontrovertible proof is it? I believe there is international law in place that prevents corporations from obtaining items produced under those unethical circumstances, so if they do make their way way to western markets there's no way to determine if they are or aren't. We're not going to punish vendors of products ethically produced because some indistinguishable make it to market are we? If some ephebophile is producing and selling "child porn" that's hard to distinguish from adult porn are we supposed to ban all porn? No.
There is NO grey area around the absolute fact that purchasing premium CP directly funds and promotes their business model of exploiting children.
The thing is that the increased demand would be impossible to determine if distribution took place only over a properly designed PIR infrastructure. If zero people or a million people are downloading CP from the PIR network, nobody would be able to tell.
But you don't even seem aware that the market forces of supply and demand happen completely organically, no matter the industry, irrespective of if the vendors have access to industry numbers. The supply and demand curve is the most basic and essential concept in economics. Are online businesses not suppose to see how much additional profit they bring in when demand of their product increases? Are they not suppose to have access to how many uniques and page impressions they get a day and see those numbers go through the roof? Are they not suppose to invest those increase profits on expanding, whether it be infrastructure investments, technology improvements, or fresh and unique content all for the purpose of capturing a larger piece of the much expanded revenue pie? Are potential CP premium producers suppose to sit back while watching the present businesses expand and not think that these guys are rolling mucho dough so they need to get in? Supply and demand market forces have been around as long as markets have been around and during much of history, vendors never had access to accurate industry stats.
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I suppose I can admit that I have for a long time not been in favor of legalizing the payment for child pornography, but rather only possession and distribution that does not involve a financial transaction. What caused me to change my mind in regards to for profit distribution is largely that it is seen as not immoral by many libertarians. The primary libertarian argument I have heard for why even payment for distribution should be legal, is because the payment is really for the costs of distribution. I have for a long time thought that CP possession and distribution should not be illegal, but then I must ask myself is it right to put restrictions on the people who legally provide CP, that are different from the restrictions put on people who provide other things? It seems that saying distributors of one legal thing must not be paid to compensate for the bandwidth consumed and other costs incurred, is not in line with freedom.
You really don't see the paradox in what you said? You'd still be using force in making people do things you think is right. You'd be using force to ensure kids remained brainwashed and ignorant by clueless parents who would deny them the right to learn about the world they were born into. You keep callously treating children as chopped liver, no more than the property of their parents with no rights to be free in your world. When I point out the kids should be free from brainwashing you return to the parent's rights as superseding their child's right not to be brainwashed. You outright ignore the kid having any rights at all. You don't give a damn about the intellectual, psychological, and emotional damage done to a child who grows up fearing imaginary foes and eternal damnation while never exposed to other ideas. It doesn't bother you that kids in such circumstances don't learn to think for themselves or question authority and become religious tools enslaved to fictional ideas. You aren't even aware of mental enslavement being just as wrong as physical enslavement. You draw the line at sexual abuse as what a parent should not be "free" to making their kids endure while I include brainwashing as what a parent should not be "free" to make their kids endure because I believe brainwashing to be every bit as damaging as sexual abuse and in some circumstances MORE.
Actually the way I worded my response made it not paradoxical. The thing is I value peoples right to teach whatever they want to their children more than I value children being taught things that I think are correct.
So no, when you keep repeating this as your mantra it makes no sense to me because I believe a child must not be brainwashed in order to be free. Someone never exposed to alternative ideas CANNOT BE FREE. They are not free to make a choice about something they're not aware exists. And really, saying the parents believe I would force their child into eternal damnation by forcing them to learn science so I should respect their bullshit opinion is such a ludicrous argument it's hard to believe you could make it with a straight face. It's not themselves they are fucking up but their INNOCENT CHILD! So their opinion is not equally valid to mine because theirs is based in fiction and mine is based in fact. Science is rooted in the empiricism of the real world we live in. Religion is not. People are free to make stupid choices, but they should NOT be free to deny their kids the option of choosing NOT to make stupid choices. Is this really that hard to understand?
The thing is even though religious people are wrong about very many things, they have functioned in society for quite some time now, and indeed they are the overwhelming majority of the world. Although more intelligent people are less likely to believe in religions in general, even some very intelligent people have been religious, and there are many religious doctors and scientists even. Hell, some Christians even believe in evolution, but that God started the process. So not every religious person would desire to teach their children nothing of real value. Although I can admit that a significant enough number of them would. But even though I am quite certain that what I believe is right, I can recognize that the people who want to teach creationism are quite certain about what they believe is right as well. So long as they do not force my children to learn Creationism, I don't really care what they teach their children. We could fight with them etc, or we could just mind our own business. That is what is great about libertarianism and horrible about statism, statists believe in one size fits all solutions, the public schools will teach from one curriculum to all of the students, and the curriculum will of course be biased (for lack of a better word?) as pretty much everything is once it gets any significant distance away from math (I don't think anyone disagrees that 1 + 1 = 2??). Even in the US schools they teach children many lies about drugs, I would not want my children subjected to such bullshit. In a libertarian society on the other hand, you are free to have your children taught your beliefs but you are not allowed to force people to teach their children your beliefs and you are not allowed to force people pay for the education of your child.
I do think directly paying for the production of CP should be illegal, just as I think that the production of CP should be illegal.
Oh? Did you just decide this? I don't recall you ever mentioning you had a problem with this before. What do you mean, please clarify. Are you referring to the paying customers of say, a premium CP website?
I mean I think that if I know someone named Bob, and Bob has a little girl, that I should not legally be able to pay Bob (edit: for -> to create) pictures of him molesting his little girl. to do so would be equivalent to paying someone to murder someone for me, and even though I am not carrying out the murder I am directly funding it. However, if someone sells CP that they did not pay a producer for, and someone sends them money for that CP, I do not think that this should be illegal. This is not funding the molestation of children, this is funding the transfer of data. Unless a clear and direct link can be established between the funds and the molestation of an actual child, with proof given that the payment was sent in order to create new images of a child being molested, then I do not think it is an issue.
Yes please do because it seems just counter-intuitive to me. Pedophiles are motivated by their sexual urges and human sexuality is so fundamental to our biology it would be natural for them to perpetually seek it out. Thrill seekers are bound to get bored after a certain amount of exposure and move on to new forms of thrills. So it doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense to me.
I will try and get you some citations within the next two days , I am a bit too busy right now to hunt down obscure .pdfs and dig through them
This might be true too, but I also provided good reasons why. Ease of access, more choices, fresh content, and customization. But the reasons are really irrelevant. All that matters is that the CP business model could mimic the adult model and be profitable.
The thing is I don't think that adult pay sites offer these things over filesharing services. To access a pay site you need to sign up, get your credit card out and join. To get the same shit for free from a p2p network, you type in the name of what you are looking for. Pay sites do not have more choices than P2P networks, because P2P networks have almost everything from every pay site + a bunch of amateur shit that is not on pay sites. They have fresh content but only for a small period of time before it makes its way to filesharing sites, and additionally I am not sure what sort of customization you are talking about.
Also I know that legality will not increase demand. I can assure you that nobody who doesn't want to look at CP today, is going to run out and start looking at CP because it has been legalized. I imagine you think that legalizing heroin will lead to a bunch of people running out and trying it as well?
You can "assure" me demand won't increase huh? Based on what? Crypto-religious blind faith? I'm not sure how you can "know" something like that when it's so illogical. What about all the pedophiles that hold themselves back that would then have a green light? What about all the curious people, sadists, libertarians, pornography addicts, voyeurs, non-pedophile philes that were holding themselves back because of how totally illegal and taboo it is and they didn't want to jeopardize their lives? The reality is that there are countless that no doubt hold back. So what's your assurance worth? Your reasoning as to why demand wouldn't increase is flawed.
I said I can assure you that nobody who doesn't want to look at CP today, is going to run out and start looking at CP because it has been legalized.
Just like the heroin analogy. Legalizing heroin WOULD increase demand, at least initially. Of course it wouldn't be coming from those that had no interest before but those already inclined but feared arrest or didn't have access. You'd also have opiate addicts who were taking other illegal or Rx based opiates making the switch to heroin because of the legalized ease of obtaining it. It might not be a huge increase, but the numbers would initially surge just from the act of legalization.
I imagine it would be similar between heroin legalization and CP legalization. The desire for both will not change, which is the only claim that I made. The demand may increase slightly, but I doubt by much.
Fair enough. Let's extrapolate. The for-profit online porn industry worldwide is a 5 billion dollar industry:
http://www.guardianexpressla.com/porn-revenues-exceed-5-billion-world-wide-despite-free-pornography-online-and-rampant-piracy/
Pedophiles account for 4% of the population. Let's assume your stat of more thrill seekers than pedophiles consume CP is true, so let's say 5% are thrill seekers, and let's say 1% account for the various other CP consumer profiles. That gives us a market 10% the size of the adult market of potential consumers of premium CP. Remember, we don't have to factor out P2P users because this is an extrapolation already of only the for-profit adult model.
There's your mechanism. A 500 million dollar market just waiting to be exploited for premium CP producers to milk. And as econ 101 tells us, when you have that sort of demand with those sorts of dollars involved, there will be those willing to take the risk to fill the void to get a piece of the pie especially since the risk won't be THAT great to themselves. Studios are easy to stealth in a home. Yes, it's true that the illegality of production will provide some deterrence. But with the possession and distribution channels fully legalized ready to fill the coffers of the pro producer that provides them content, that's what's known as a STRONG incentive for such producers to go underground and get into the game. Now let me return to my very first post on this subject to explain the rest of the mechanisms of how this would work and why producers wouldn't be at that great a risk, for which you said I was clueless because you were convinced child porn could not be profitable:
And why don't these commercial producers exist today? There are plenty of hidden services, bitcoin, etc. The CP groups that have been operating online for over a dozen years consist of some of the most skilled internet security people in the entire world, it isn't like they couldn't set up a commercial distribution channel. And they already have millions of CP images to boot! But I just don't see it happening. The last group that tried commercializing old images was pwnt by interpol, but at their peak they served 30,000 customers in the entire world, which is a small drop in the bucket compared to the total demand for CP. I think that nobody really wants to risk their entire lives in jail so they can make some commercial CP that will be freely available within days after its commercialization.
"A policy like that would have the real world affect of more pedophiles (or even just unscrupulous opportunists) willing to take the risk of producing it because of the financial incentives while the chances of getting caught would be minimized. Why? Because as soon as it's secretly produced and hits their distribution channels they cash in. Since their distribution channels would be free to possess, distribute, and profit handsomely off it they have no reason to give up who the producer is, and in fact would have a strong financial incentive not to. You could say the public could boycott the stores that carry it, but seeing as to how porn is primarily distributed online these days that doesn't prevent the websites that cater to it from being driven out of business."
The financial incentives for CP are not going to increase if distribution and possession are legalized. In fact they will probably drop if anything, just like the prices for recreational drugs would drop and the cartels would go out of business overnight if drugs were legalized. There are already freely accessable distribution channels for CP that are not going to be shut down any time soon, Tor for one and possibly even more infamously Freenet which is probably one of the biggest CP caches ever. It is very difficult to prove that anyone requested CP from Freenet, because it has strong plausible deniability built into it, and it is very difficult to tell if someone originally inserted content into Freenet as well. The feds have not taken down any Tor hidden services, it is easier to trace them than to prove that someone downloaded anything in particular from Freenet. Also don't forget bitcoin and bitcoin blind mixes, which make getting money from customers and cashing it very secure. It isn't like people with massive access to CP are not aware of these technologies, so where are these huge production studios you are worried about, and where are these commercial CP providers you are worried about? The studios have all been gone since the mid 2000's and the commercial sites are all but extinct as well, even though with with modern technology distributing commercially is easier than it has ever been, there is nobody doing it currently and a few years ago the last group of people doing it were pwnt (and they had 30,000 customers in total, and they were not producers).
"Could be" is not incontrovertible proof is it? I believe there is international law in place that prevents corporations from obtaining items produced under those unethical circumstances, so if they do make their way way to western markets there's no way to determine if they are or aren't. We're not going to punish vendors of products ethically produced because some indistinguishable make it to market are we? If some ephebophile is producing and selling "child porn" that's hard to distinguish from adult porn are we supposed to ban all porn? No.
Do you have incontrovertible proof that someone who pays to view a CP image has caused a child to be molested? Nope. Sure it could happen, but it will not happen in all cases. I could go to a hidden service, download some CP (but I wont because eww), and sell it to you for fifty bucks right now. Did a child get molested because of our transaction? No. Did your demand for CP cause child abuse to occur in this instance? Nope!
There is NO grey area around the absolute fact that purchasing premium CP directly funds and promotes their business model of exploiting children.
It is not an absolute fact though, as I explained above.
But you don't even seem aware that the market forces of supply and demand happen completely organically, no matter the industry, irrespective of if the vendors have access to industry numbers. The supply and demand curve is the most basic and essential concept in economics. Are online businesses not suppose to see how much additional profit they bring in when demand of their product increases? Are they not suppose to have access to how many uniques and page impressions they get a day and see those numbers go through the roof? Are they not suppose to invest those increase profits on expanding, whether it be infrastructure investments, technology improvements, or fresh and unique content all for the purpose of capturing a larger piece of the much expanded revenue pie? Are potential CP premium producers suppose to sit back while watching the present businesses expand and not think that these guys are rolling mucho dough so they need to get in? Supply and demand market forces have been around as long as markets have been around and during much of history, vendors never had access to accurate industry stats.
I never argued that CP distribution should be entirely regulated to private information retrieval protocols, but it is just a thought experiment for you so you can see that you are not really concerned with the demand for CP but rather are simply against CP in general. If the demand for CP can be perfectly obfuscated, and the demand for CP is the only reason to keep CP possession and distribution illegal, then if CP is distributed with PIR it shouldn't be an issue,
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suppose I can admit that I have for a long time not been in favor of legalizing the payment for child pornography, but rather only possession and distribution that does not involve a financial transaction. What caused me to change my mind in regards to for profit distribution is largely that it is seen as not immoral by many libertarians. The primary libertarian argument I have heard for why even payment for distribution should be legal, is because the payment is really for the costs of distribution. I have for a long time thought that CP possession and distribution should not be illegal, but then I must ask myself is it right to put restrictions on the people who legally provide CP, that are different from the restrictions put on people who provide other things? It seems that saying distributors of one legal thing must not be paid to compensate for the bandwidth consumed and other costs incurred, is not in line with freedom.
I credit you for conceding that. The libertarian argument that payment would just cover the "costs of distribution" doesn't sound coherent. How did they come to such a determination? Producer and distributor agree on a price that's mutually beneficial therefore profitable to each of them. Producer receives payment from distributor in exchange for content. Producer uses payment to pay for costs of creating more content. He charges distributors more than the costs of production so he can turn a profit and stay in business. Distributor marks up price and resells to consumer at a profit so he can stay in business. How is money paid by consumer only covering the cost of distribution? If that were true, there would be no incentive for distributor to distribute product if he's not turning a profit. The money paid by consumer goes directly into the pocket of the producer sans the distributor's take.
The thing is I value peoples right to teach whatever they want to their children more than I value children being taught things that I think are correct.
What surprises me is your willingness to minimize science down to what you "think is correct" as if it were no more than an opinion, like it were an art critique with equal subjective value as any other art critique. Why do you do that when science is not a subjective opinion? It's knowledge of the universe we live in based on testable hypotheses through the rigorous process of scientific method. It's founded in empirical reality, not opinion or fiction. Yet you treat it as if it had no more value than an opinion. It's really bizarre.
The thing is even though religious people are wrong about very many things, they have functioned in society for quite some time now, and indeed they are the overwhelming majority of the world. Although more intelligent people are less likely to believe in religions in general, even some very intelligent people have been religious, and there are many religious doctors and scientists even. Hell, some Christians even believe in evolution, but that God started the process. So not every religious person would desire to teach their children nothing of real value.
Seriously, are you crypto-religious? If so, I think it's better that you just came out of the closet and admitted to being religious than pretend to not be while giving the religious perspective equal weight to the scientific perspective. It's OK if you are, I just think it's better if you came out and admitted it so I knew where you were coming from.
I agree with you that there have been a great number of intelligent people that have been religious and still are. But these people aren't dogmatists. There are quite a few religious people that are able to co-exist with science. In fact the Catholic Church for centuries had been the epicenter of intellectual thought and scientific development. Paradoxically, theology and scientific development from that time went hand in hand where now they're considered diametrically opposed. But the church does embrace evolution as well as science and reason. Religious moderates can see religion and science co-existing because they view science explaining the 'how' and religion explaining the 'why'. A Belgian priest even came up with the Big Bang theory.
But religious types like these would never deny their children scientific knowledge. They would see it as sacrilege as I do to deny ones children an education about fundamental truths of the world we live in.
I'm talking about the dogmatists that would refuse their kid the chance to learn these truths (not opinion but FACTS).
The thing is you value the rights of deluded dogmatists to teach fucked up bullshit to their children more than you value children being taught things that are correct. Why would you side with deluded dogmatist over innocent kids unless you are religious yourself?
These kids would never get the chance to be become a religious scientist because they were denied a scientific education. Maybe it's because you don't care about anyone else but you or your kids. Libertarians I've met seem to be like that, very self centered and Ayn Rand worshiping, they don't seem to give two shits about the rest of the society they live in. That could be another reason why that it wouldn't bother you to use force to keep innocent kids ignorant of reality, as long as they weren't your kids you wouldn't care. The other reason I can think of is because you are religious.
Although I can admit that a significant enough number of them would. But even though I am quite certain that what I believe is right, I can recognize that the people who want to teach creationism are quite certain about what they believe is right as well. So long as they do not force my children to learn Creationism, I don't really care what they teach their children.
But right now, no one is forcing your kids to learn creationism. It doesn't bother you in the slightest that you would be forcing innocent kids to remain ignorant just because their parents blew a fuse? You see the only reason I can think of that you would adopt such a position is if you are actually religious yourself but for whatever reasons don't want to admit it.
We could fight with them etc, or we could just mind our own business.
But minding your own business in the face of injustice makes you complicit. You obviously feel strong enough about some injustices to take a stand. But to not take a stand when innocent children are being victimized is deplorable.
That is what is great about libertarianism and horrible about statism, statists believe in one size fits all solutions, the public schools will teach from one curriculum to all of the students, and the curriculum will of course be biased (for lack of a better word?) as pretty much everything is once it gets any significant distance away from math (I don't think anyone disagrees that 1 + 1 = 2??).
Sounds like you're sloganeering. Are you seriously suggesting that teaching science to all students is a bad thing because it's ONE SIZE FITS ALL? Did you that there is a REASON why there are uniform education standards? Because if there wasn't there would be no objective way assessing students from school to school. If each school had their own curriculum based on whatever the fuck they want, do you really see that being a good thing? Think about it. Why would you think the libertarian answer of utter chaos in the course curriculum is what's "great about libertarianism"?
Even in the US schools they teach children many lies about drugs, I would not want my children subjected to such bullshit. In a libertarian society on the other hand, you are free to have your children taught your beliefs but you are not allowed to force people to teach their children your beliefs and you are not allowed to force people pay for the education of your child.
Guess what though. You can educate your children yourself so they don't believe the stuff you don't want them to believe. Just like creationists can tell their kids to disregard science class and believe in the fairy monster in the sky. But you don't control what your kids think, they are their own person. They can believe what they want.
I mean I think that if I know someone named Bob, and Bob has a little girl, that I should not legally be able to pay Bob (edit: for -> to create) pictures of him molesting his little girl. to do so would be equivalent to paying someone to murder someone for me, and even though I am not carrying out the murder I am directly funding it. However, if someone sells CP that they did not pay a producer for, and someone sends them money for that CP, I do not think that this should be illegal. This is not funding the molestation of children, this is funding the transfer of data.
Seriously though, what's the difference between you and the distributor that bought it from the producer? You and the distributor are in the precise same role that you just described that you don't think is legal. You both are paying the producer for the content. And didn't you say distribution should be legal? So you've just provided a clear contradiction to your original point. The link couldn't be clearer between a distributor buying it from the producer.
Unless a clear and direct link can be established between the funds and the molestation of an actual child, with proof given that the payment was sent in order to create new images of a child being molested, then I do not think it is an issue.
Except it is an issue.
The thing is I don't think that adult pay sites offer these things over filesharing services. To access a pay site you need to sign up, get your credit card out and join. To get the same shit for free from a p2p network, you type in the name of what you are looking for. Pay sites do not have more choices than P2P networks, because P2P networks have almost everything from every pay site + a bunch of amateur shit that is not on pay sites. They have fresh content but only for a small period of time before it makes its way to filesharing sites, and additionally I am not sure what sort of customization you are talking about.
Which p2p networks are you talking about? What I'm thinking of is say someone likes a particular star or label or series or specializiation. If you go to a p2p network you have to spend time digging for what you're looking for as far as I'm aware. If you go to that label or star's website you have everything right there. You have all the various video standards available for download or stream and it's high quality and instant. I'm not aware of any p2p that has it all and has that kind of variety.
And why don't these commercial producers exist today? There are plenty of hidden services, bitcoin, etc. The CP groups that have been operating online for over a dozen years consist of some of the most skilled internet security people in the entire world, it isn't like they couldn't set up a commercial distribution channel. And they already have millions of CP images to boot! But I just don't see it happening. The last group that tried commercializing old images was pwnt by interpol, but at their peak they served 30,000 customers in the entire world, which is a small drop in the bucket compared to the total demand for CP. I think that nobody really wants to risk their entire lives in jail so they can make some commercial CP that will be freely available within days after its commercialization.
Risks and costs outweigh the benefits today. If you're going to start a business you run a cost-benefit analysis. That 500 million dollar industry would be if CP were legal to possess, distribute, and produce like adult porn. The industry pie has shrunk to zero with all 3 illegal with the penalties steep like you have now. The illegality depresses demand where legality would drive demand. So you make 2 of those 3 things legal you'd have most of that 500 million there to be had.
Basics of supply and demand. For a transaction to happen, you have to have both. Making production illegal limits supply. But not doing anything about possession and distribution does NOT limit demand.
The financial incentives for CP are not going to increase if distribution and possession are legalized. In fact they will probably drop if anything, just like the prices for recreational drugs would drop and the cartels would go out of business overnight if drugs were legalized. There are already freely accessable distribution channels for CP that are not going to be shut down any time soon, Tor for one and possibly even more infamously Freenet which is probably one of the biggest CP caches ever.
Why not? Seriously, this is all econ 101. I encourage you take a macroeconomics class. This is elementary stuff. The financial incentives for CP would go through the roof if distribution and posession were legalized because 1) there would be no longer any risk to own and possess. 2) demand would go up as a result 3) increased demand would drive up the price 4) the increased price from incresaed demand would mean supply (which is virtually nil for pay content right now) would rise in attempt to meet that demand. But the supply would be constrained by illegality, but would have the benefit of stealth technologies and distributors who are immune from prosecution, and consumers who were immunite too. Such a condition is ripe for the price to attain such a height that it would make it worth it for commercial production to get involved.
Do you have incontrovertible proof that someone who pays to view a CP image has caused a child to be molested? Nope. Sure it could happen, but it will not happen in all cases. I could go to a hidden service, download some CP (but I wont because eww), and sell it to you for fifty bucks right now. Did a child get molested because of our transaction? No. Did your demand for CP cause child abuse to occur in this instance? Nope!
Huh? What are you TALKING about? A chunk of that payment goes into the pocket of the producer who then uses the cash to keep the business functioning and continuing to exploit children and produce CP. The payment is directly supported and promoting the production of CP. When CP is produced a child is molested. That's what CP is.
It is not an absolute fact though, as I explained above.
Actually it is, like I pointed out.
I never argued that CP distribution should be entirely regulated to private information retrieval protocols, but it is just a thought experiment for you so you can see that you are not really concerned with the demand for CP but rather are simply against CP in general. If the demand for CP can be perfectly obfuscated, and the demand for CP is the only reason to keep CP possession and distribution illegal, then if CP is distributed with PIR it shouldn't be an issue,
Don't get what you're saying. You can't separate the demand for commercial CP from the production of commercial CP. One drives the other. Without the demand there's no production. The real world does not live in the vacuum of PIR. That's why you couldn't make your metaphor work. There's no way to perfectly obfuscate demand in the real world. The demand for a product is half of what brings it to market, supply the other half. The price is entirely dependent upon where the demand curve intersects the supply curve. With no price there's no product. So your metaphor couldn't possibly apply.
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I credit you for conceding that. The libertarian argument that payment would just cover the "costs of distribution" doesn't sound coherent. How did they come to such a determination? Producer and distributor agree on a price that's mutually beneficial therefore profitable to each of them. Producer receives payment from distributor in exchange for content. Producer uses payment to pay for costs of creating more content. He charges distributors more than the costs of production so he can turn a profit and stay in business. Distributor marks up price and resells to consumer at a profit so he can stay in business. How is money paid by consumer only covering the cost of distribution? If that were true, there would be no incentive for distributor to distribute product if he's not turning a profit. The money paid by consumer goes directly into the pocket of the producer sans the distributor's take.
The model you give is one possibility, but directly paying for the creation of CP would still be illegal in a libertarian world. What would not be illegal is for me to go to a hidden service, copy some CP, and charge people to buy it from me. Libertarians recognize that there is a difference between these two things, whereas you want both to be illegal in order to do a better job at preventing one. Libertarians do not sacrifice freedom in order to provide security, so they will not sacrifice the freedom of a person to sell CP for money in order to protect from people illegally paying for the creation of child pornography.
What surprises me is your willingness to minimize science down to what you "think is correct" as if it were no more than an opinion, like it were an art critique with equal subjective value as any other art critique. Why do you do that when science is not a subjective opinion? It's knowledge of the universe we live in based on testable hypotheses through the rigorous process of scientific method. It's founded in empirical reality, not opinion or fiction. Yet you treat it as if it had no more value than an opinion. It's really bizarre.
I am a strong believer in science as being more beneficial to humans than religion. I am not a believer in any religion, and consider myself to be a doubtful agnostic. I do not consider myself to be an atheist, as if God or some other deity comes to me and performs some miracles or gives me any good reason to believe, I would be open to believing. That said, I find the probability of this happening to approach zero, and thus I am quite close to an atheist. An atheist may say that they know God does not exist, or that they have no opinion regarding the existence of God, where as I would say I highly doubt that God exists and I currently believe that all religions are incorrect.
That said, I respect peoples right to have incorrect opinions. You seem to want to force people to know the truth, whereas I am more interested in letting people believe lies if they so choose. I believe that parents have a right to teach their children whatever they please, and although it is unfortunate that some people will choose to teach their children only religious dogma, I do not think that I have any right to force them to stop doing this. In a way my belief in the correctness of the scientific process is subjective, although to me it is clearly real it could just as well appear to someone else as flawed. They may think that the devil planted the dinosaur bones we find, in an attempt to weaken peoples belief in God. Do I think that this happened? Of course I do not. Can I prove that it did not happen? Well, not with certainty, although I certainly think that there is extremely strong evidence against it.
Seriously, are you crypto-religious? If so, I think it's better that you just came out of the closet and admitted to being religious than pretend to not be while giving the religious perspective equal weight to the scientific perspective. It's OK if you are, I just think it's better if you came out and admitted it so I knew where you were coming from.
I am a very doubtful agnostic.
The thing is you value the rights of deluded dogmatists to teach fucked up bullshit to their children more than you value children being taught things that are correct. Why would you side with deluded dogmatist over innocent kids unless you are religious yourself?
The thing is I do not side with anyone, rather I side with everyone. Everyone should be free to teach their kids whatever they want.
But right now, no one is forcing your kids to learn creationism. It doesn't bother you in the slightest that you would be forcing innocent kids to remain ignorant just because their parents blew a fuse? You see the only reason I can think of that you would adopt such a position is if you are actually religious yourself but for whatever reasons don't want to admit it.
Nobody is teaching my kids to learn creationism however I do believe it is still being taught in some of its various forms at some public schools in the United States. The most recent incarnation I am aware of was Intelligent Design, which was being taught at some public schools not that long ago. Perhaps the courts squashed that as well, but I have little doubt that the creationists will just repackage it again as they have been doing for a very long time now.
But minding your own business in the face of injustice makes you complicit. You obviously feel strong enough about some injustices to take a stand. But to not take a stand when innocent children are being victimized is deplorable.
And the religious people say that to not take a stand when innocent children are being sent to hell is deplorable. I highly believe that they are wrong in their beliefs, but I strongly believe that it is their right to teach their children whatever they want and that it is no business of mine.
Sounds like you're sloganeering. Are you seriously suggesting that teaching science to all students is a bad thing because it's ONE SIZE FITS ALL? Did you that there is a REASON why there are uniform education standards? Because if there wasn't there would be no objective way assessing students from school to school. If each school had their own curriculum based on whatever the fuck they want, do you really see that being a good thing? Think about it. Why would you think the libertarian answer of utter chaos in the course curriculum is what's "great about libertarianism"?
I think that teaching science to all students would be a great thing. I do not think that forcing all students to learn science is a good thing. I do not think that forcing religious people to have their children taught science is a good thing. I do not think that there would be utter chaos in curriculum in a libertarian world, I believe that a majority of people would want their children to be taught science.
Guess what though. You can educate your children yourself so they don't believe the stuff you don't want them to believe. Just like creationists can tell their kids to disregard science class and believe in the fairy monster in the sky. But you don't control what your kids think, they are their own person. They can believe what they want.
Sure children can believe whatever they want to. Additionally, they are free to get information from external sources. However, I do not believe that it is right to force parents to provide their children with any particular type of curriculum.
Seriously though, what's the difference between you and the distributor that bought it from the producer? You and the distributor are in the precise same role that you just described that you don't think is legal. You both are paying the producer for the content. And didn't you say distribution should be legal? So you've just provided a clear contradiction to your original point. The link couldn't be clearer between a distributor buying it from the producer.
Well actually I think I just have shown that there is no such clear link. If I go to a hidden service CP site and get some CP for free, and then sell that CP to you, the finances you have sent to me did not fund child molestation. In fact, the child molestation could have already taken place many years prior to anyone paying for the resulting child porn, and the producer and child could even both be dead.
Except it is an issue.
Except it isn't an issue!!!
Which p2p networks are you talking about? What I'm thinking of is say someone likes a particular star or label or series or specializiation. If you go to a p2p network you have to spend time digging for what you're looking for as far as I'm aware. If you go to that label or star's website you have everything right there. You have all the various video standards available for download or stream and it's high quality and instant. I'm not aware of any p2p that has it all and has that kind of variety.
I have never had trouble finding what I am looking for on P2P / Torrents , maybe I just don't look for enough things to notice though.
Risks and costs outweigh the benefits today. If you're going to start a business you run a cost-benefit analysis. That 500 million dollar industry would be if CP were legal to possess, distribute, and produce like adult porn. The industry pie has shrunk to zero with all 3 illegal with the penalties steep like you have now. The illegality depresses demand where legality would drive demand. So you make 2 of those 3 things legal you'd have most of that 500 million there to be had.
Basics of supply and demand. For a transaction to happen, you have to have both. Making production illegal limits supply. But not doing anything about possession and distribution does NOT limit demand.
I just don't see it happening. The last commercial CP operation charged $100 for access, $100 * 30,000 customers = $3,000,000 profits in total. The demand for CP would need to be 166 times what it was during their operation, for that $500,000,000 market to exist.
Do you have incontrovertible proof that someone who pays to view a CP image has caused a child to be molested? Nope. Sure it could happen, but it will not happen in all cases. I could go to a hidden service, download some CP (but I wont because eww), and sell it to you for fifty bucks right now. Did a child get molested because of our transaction? No. Did your demand for CP cause child abuse to occur in this instance? Nope!
Huh? What are you TALKING about? A chunk of that payment goes into the pocket of the producer who then uses the cash to keep the business functioning and continuing to exploit children and produce CP. The payment is directly supported and promoting the production of CP. When CP is produced a child is molested. That's what CP is.
Really? If I go download some CP from Tor right now, and then I sell that to you, I have inherently put money into the pocket of a producer? Nope. That is the reason why libertarians are against criminalizing the payment for child pornography, because it does not inherently lead to producers being paid to molest children. In cases where distributors are directly paying producers to molest children, libertarians are against this. However, they do not think it should be illegal if I download CP from Tor and sell it to put money into my pocket, only if I pay the people producing to continue producing.
Actually it is, like I pointed out.
Actually it isn't like I explained once again.
Don't get what you're saying. You can't separate the demand for commercial CP from the production of commercial CP. One drives the other. Without the demand there's no production. The real world does not live in the vacuum of PIR. That's why you couldn't make your metaphor work. There's no way to perfectly obfuscate demand in the real world. The demand for a product is half of what brings it to market, supply the other half. The price is entirely dependent upon where the demand curve intersects the supply curve. With no price there's no product. So your metaphor couldn't possibly apply.
The thing I am saying is that if CP is distributed only with private information retrieval, the demand is all but impossible to determine. If the demand for something is impossible for anyone to determine, then it cannot be demand that drives CP distribution. Also with no price there is no product is complete bullshit, have you never heard of open source software? Also are you oblivious to the fact that a huge amount of CP is produced with absolutely no commercial intentions? I would hesitate to say the vast majority of CP is not produced with commercial intentions only because of the sheer amount of softcore CP produced by the Eastern European studios, but certainly a very large percentage of CP was not produced with a financial motivation, and with the eastern European studios all shut down and no production studios currently in operation, it is safe to say that hardly any CP produced since the mid 2000s was produced with commercialization in mind.
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I'd just like to chime in that this thread is EPIC! I've never seen such a rational debate on the topic of child pornography. ok... carry on ;D
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The model you give is one possibility, but directly paying for the creation of CP would still be illegal in a libertarian world. What would not be illegal is for me to go to a hidden service, copy some CP, and charge people to buy it from me. Libertarians recognize that there is a difference between these two things, whereas you want both to be illegal in order to do a better job at preventing one. Libertarians do not sacrifice freedom in order to provide security, so they will not sacrifice the freedom of a person to sell CP for money in order to protect from people illegally paying for the creation of child pornography.
Well actually I think I just have shown that there is no such clear link. If I go to a hidden service CP site and get some CP for free, and then sell that CP to you, the finances you have sent to me did not fund child molestation. In fact, the child molestation could have already taken place many years prior to anyone paying for the resulting child porn, and the producer and child could even both be dead.
Do you have incontrovertible proof that someone who pays to view a CP image has caused a child to be molested? Nope. Sure it could happen, but it will not happen in all cases. I could go to a hidden service, download some CP (but I wont because eww), and sell it to you for fifty bucks right now. Did a child get molested because of our transaction? No. Did your demand for CP cause child abuse to occur in this instance? Nope!
Really? If I go download some CP from Tor right now, and then I sell that to you, I have inherently put money into the pocket of a producer? Nope. That is the reason why libertarians are against criminalizing the payment for child pornography, because it does not inherently lead to producers being paid to molest children. In cases where distributors are directly paying producers to molest children, libertarians are against this. However, they do not think it should be illegal if I download CP from Tor and sell it to put money into my pocket, only if I pay the people producing to continue producing.
If you are an accessory to the molestation of a child you should be punished. If you help the producer in any way (emotional, financial, physical, concealment, advice, etc) then you are guilty. It is reasonable to think that if you are paying for CP then some of that money is going to the producer. Since you can not be sure you are taking a great risk assuming it isn't.
Kmfkewm: Thou doth protest too much. I suspect you grasp tightly to libertarian beliefs in an attempt to justify your own activities. I hope all pedos are as committed to not facilitating the production of CP as you are to your libertarian convictions.
If one of the pedos does molest (or contribute to the molestation of) a child then I think it would be the perfect time for some of that 'militant libertarianism' we were talking about.
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The model you give is one possibility, but directly paying for the creation of CP would still be illegal in a libertarian world. What would not be illegal is for me to go to a hidden service, copy some CP, and charge people to buy it from me.
Yeah but that's not what we were talking about though. We were talking about the distribution of premium content and that would require my model. I'm sure you could probably find some dumb tools who would buy child porn you lifted off a hidden service. But that doesn't make what you sold them premium content because premium content wouldn't be available for free on a hidden service. You might find content that AT ONE TIME was considered premium content when it first came out but due to the passage of time and antiquated technologies would no longer be considered premium.
Also the typical distributor of premium content would not be like what you described because charging for content that can be copied for free is not a sustainable business model. Just like you're not going to find many people trying to sell repackaged free content as premium content today. It happens, but only by fly-by-night small timers whose extremely low profit ceiling is dependent entirely on having enough unwitting noob consumers to exploit. All the tools and techniques for maximizing profits for a conventional business; establishing brand loyalty and return customers, would be unavailable to you since what's the point? They're not going to stick around once they see the shit you sold them on a hidden service and as word of your charging for freely available content affects your rep.; your business model becomes broken.
My business model is how the big boys would do it. Building brand loyalty by providing freshly updated premium content unavailable elsewhere that would appeal to enthusiasts and high rollers alike giving you the greatest opportunities to monetize your traffic and thereby maximize profits. Growing a satisfied customer base that lets you not just charge them once, but who are happy to have you automatically charge their card every month. They're always coming back for more because what you give them what they can't find elsewhere.
You seem to want to force people to know the truth,
And this is where you either keep fundamentally misunderstanding me or just fundamentally misunderstand human nature. You can't force people to know the truth, even if mandated by law. What you can do is provide the truth and allow people to come to their own decisions. Isn't that what you're advocating, that people should be free to decide what they want to believe?
I believe that everyone has a right to learn the truth so they can make an informed decision on what they want to believe. Because when you deprive someone of even the awareness of truth, an informed decision can't be made; whether that be to reject or accept the truth. There is no exercise of free will. How can you call that the freedom to decide for themselves when the person isn't even aware there's a question? So yes, I believe force should be used if necessary to ensure everyone is aware of the truth so they can decide for themselves whether to reject or accept it because fundamental to freedom is having that choice.
Meanwhile, in your world it's more important that their delusional parents have the right to freely brainwash their kids than for the kids to have the right to be aware of the truth enough to make their own decisions. This is why I don't believe you believe your own rhetoric that everyone has a right to freedom. You keep saying how you value freedom before all else, yet you would use force to guarantee parents the right to keep their kids powerless, deluded, and enslaved. How hypocritical is that? I consider such treatment to be abuse and has nothing to do with "freedom".
whereas I am more interested in letting people believe lies if they so choose.
I'm in absolute agreement with you here. But freedom depends on having a "choice", and in order for someone to be able to "choose" one must be aware of a choice to begin with. By depriving these kids this awareness you are depriving them of the ability to choose, and therefore depriving them ultimately of freedom.
And why would you do something so inhumane and cruel that is of no benefit to society or our species? Why would you use force to deprive innocents of their freedom of choice? Because you think it's more important to protect a parent's right to enslave their children. You don't seem to understand that depriving a parent of their ability to do this is not depriving them of their "freedom" because freedom should not include the freedom to enslave others.
I believe that parents have a right to teach their children whatever they please, and although it is unfortunate that some people will choose to teach their children only religious dogma, I do not think that I have any right to force them to stop doing this.
Again you fundamentally misunderstand me because I'm in absolute agreement with you here. But I also believe the parent DOES NOT have the right to enslave their kids by depriving them of exposure to science and facts whereas you do. The real world outcome is the mental enslavement of innocents. Not freedom.
In a way my belief in the correctness of the scientific process is subjective, although to me it is clearly real it could just as well appear to someone else as flawed.
Just because it could appear to someone else that scientific method is flawed doesn't make their understanding any less wrong. And it certainly doesn't mean we as a society should start respecting invalid viewpoints just because someone has one. It's clear you don't understand that science is not a "belief system" by the way you keep referring to it like one. Its knowledge is amassed by observations and analysis of the physical world we live in. Even the interpretation and analysis of physical data have to be grounded in scientific method to be credible. It must be based in the empirical evidence and the reasoning must be sound. There is nothing "subjective" about it.
They may think that the devil planted the dinosaur bones we find, in an attempt to weaken peoples belief in God. Do I think that this happened? Of course I do not. Can I prove that it did not happen? Well, not with certainty, although I certainly think that there is extremely strong evidence against it.
Yeah because the devil is nothing more than an idea personified in numerous works of religious fiction. It exists in the realm of mythology and imagination. Dinosaur bones exist in our world of concrete fact. That you would even equivocate and say you can't know for sure the devil didn't plant them even though insofar as being able to know the difference between fantasy and physical reality, YES YOU CAN. This is why I suspect you are a religious wingnut and that you might not even be aware of it. That you secretly yearn to accept religion and find god but are just too embarrassed to admit it right now. Maybe all that religious schooling unhealthily influenced you in this way.
The thing is I do not side with anyone, rather I side with everyone. Everyone should be free to teach their kids whatever they want.
Here's the problem with your thinking. When you would use force as a militant libertarian, it does not matter one whit any claims you make about not siding with anyone, you end up having to choose a side when enforcing your beliefs. So yes, that you would choose to side with the delusional fanatic's right to raise their kids ignorant of science over the innocent kid's right to learn science so he can make up his own mind whether to accept or reject it means that you are taking sides. You are siding with slavery. You are definitely NOT embracing freedom.
Nobody is teaching my kids to learn creationism however I do believe it is still being taught in some of its various forms at some public schools in the United States. The most recent incarnation I am aware of was Intelligent Design, which was being taught at some public schools not that long ago. Perhaps the courts squashed that as well, but I have little doubt that the creationists will just repackage it again as they have been doing for a very long time now.
Dude you must be high. There's no WAY ID was taught in public schools. School boards composed of religious extremists tried to get course curriculum changed to offer education of ID as a competing theory to evolution because they argued evolution is a "theory" like Intelligent Design is a "theory" so is equally valid. It really resembles the kind of false equivalency that is so pervasive in your thinking. But you can't just change something like that because there are uniform standards and a process involved in changing them. Yet here you are decrying uniform standards which in this case prevented ID being taught in those schools and will further prevent it being taught to your kid. It's for this reason that uniform standards were developed, to prevent falsifiable bullshit being outright adopted in our educational curriculum.
So who cares what the creationists do? It doesn't matter. You are under no threat of your child being taught creationism in public schools because our country was founded on the principle of a clear seaparation of church and state that was affirmed by the Supreme Court first in the Scopes monkey trial almost a century ago. Scopes established the precedent that has since been reaffirmed and upheld by every case of this nature that has appeared before any court ever since by a concept in law known as Stare Decisis as established precedent. Any attempt to teach ID would be instantly challenged in court and not tolerated. Church and state separation is a bedrock principle of our founding fathers as espoused by Thomas Jefferson. Didn't you learn this stuff in school? Ah, that's right. You had a superior private religious education didn't you? Figures they wouldn't teach you that. :(
And the religious people say that to not take a stand when innocent children are being sent to hell is deplorable. I highly believe that they are wrong in their beliefs, but I strongly believe that it is their right to teach their children whatever they want and that it is no business of mine.
Yeah because you don't believe innocent kids have a right to be free if their parents enslave them by brainwashing them whereas I think they have a right to choose what to believe.
You keep returning to the false equivalency of what religious people think as if it somehow validates your point when all it does is just makes you look ludicrous and unhinged to any objective reader. So why don't you just admit that you secretly agree with what the religious people think? It's hard to believe anyone but a religious absolutist could introduce such an argument and think it was compelling. Since you proclaim your devotion to libertarian militancy you should have no shame admitting you're a fanatic. Religious zealotry and ideological fanatacism are just two sides of the same coin.
I think that teaching science to all students would be a great thing. I do not think that forcing all students to learn science is a good thing. I do not think that forcing religious people to have their children taught science is a good thing.
But you haven't given a rational explanation why. Your argument "it interferes with their freedom" without offering a coherent explanation of WHY their freedom takes precedent over the enslavement of their children. Your answer so far of "because I value their right over their child's rights" just isn't compelling. Do you value their rights and support their "freedom" to sexually abuse their kids? I hope not. Well why not?
I do not think that there would be utter chaos in curriculum in a libertarian world, I believe that a majority of people would want their children to be taught science.
But if libertarians that think like you had gotten their way by doing away with uniform educational standards, ID could have been taught in public schools because religious extremists were elected to school boards and/or formed the majority public opinion in certain school districts and imposed their will upon course curriculum. The irony is that with a more libertarian setup your kid WOULD actually be under the threat of being taught ID. Reality seems to have a habit of dictating something quite contrary to what you believe would happen.
However, I do not believe that it is right to force parents to provide their children with any particular type of curriculum.
So if a parent decided to not educate their kid at all and keep them confined at home and dumb as a stump doing slave labor for them on their farm that would be perfectly ok with you too using your logic here. You seem to have a sadistic side to you.
Well actually I think I just have shown that there is no such clear link.<--snip>
But the reasoning you used to show that was all fucked up. Look, it doesn't matter if the link doesn't apply in all cases. All that matters is that in the vast majority of cases there would be a link because providers of premium content would want to follow a profitable business model. The broken one you outlined would not be the case in the vast majority of premium child porn content for sale because its profitability is not sustainable. I haven't thought through the ethics of what you're proposing yet, but your claim that it doesn't "inherently" lead to CP production is besides the point. The fact that it WOULD be the case in the vast majority of cases should be reason enough. But if it even leads to only one less child being exploited, isn't it worth it to make CP distribution illegal? If you say no, I ask how you can be so callous? So you can protect the chump changers that are engaging in the semi-unethical borderline fraudulent activity of reselling freely copied content as premium content? Why are the freedoms of chump changers to conduct their business this way more important to you than the kids who would suffer sexual exploitation by producers trying to meet the increases in demand? What if it were your kid?
Except it isn't an issue!!!
Tell you what, in your world where chump changers try and sell repackaged free content copied off a hidden service to clueless noobs it isn't an issue. But in the vast majority of cases where kids are sexually exploited from child porn producers that turn a profit from your fucked up policies it would DEFINITELY be an issue.
I have never had trouble finding what I am looking for on P2P / Torrents , maybe I just don't look for enough things to notice though.
If you took a random adult label and tried to find every flick they ever produced downloadable on p2p you'd quickly learn how vastly you're overstating what's available and it's not even close. You’d come up short BIG TIME.
I just don't see it happening. The last commercial CP operation charged $100 for access, $100 * 30,000 customers = $3,000,000 profits in total. The demand for CP would need to be 166 times what it was during their operation, for that $500,000,000 market to exist.
What? First, your logic here is AFU because you're using figures from ONE commercial CP operation which says nothing about how many other operations could have profitably co-existed, especially if the depressed demand from making possession and distribution illegal with harsh penalties were lifted. The market was far from saturated. Second, it doesn't address how legalization would allow distribution channels to operate freely and openly, increasing their exposure and accessibility to the masses. These are factors that would have definitely increased membership totals and the bottom line.
Third, the 500 million is obviously a quick and dirty ballpark guesstimate that shouldn't be taken as gospel. If I were to work up an actual McKinsey style business analysis from more in depth research that number could be different. There was obviously a lot of guesswork involved in the size of CP consumer demographics beyond pedophiles. They could be smaller OR larger than what I had assumed but wouldn't change the fundamentals; which is that there are enormous sums to be made by legalizing possession and distribution of CP by legitimizing the distribution channels and removing constraints on demand.
The thing I am saying is that if CP is distributed only with private information retrieval, the demand is all but impossible to determine. If the demand for something is impossible for anyone to determine, then it cannot be demand that drives CP distribution.
But demand is never impossible to determine and is innately involved in the reasons to bring a product to market. If there were no demand it wouldn't be on the market. So it doesn't make sense to introduce a metaphor where demand for a product is impossible to determine. That's not how the real world works.
Also with no price there is no product is complete bullshit, have you never heard of open source software? Also are you oblivious to the fact that a huge amount of CP is produced with absolutely no commercial intentions?
Dude, do you realize we've been talking about premium child porn? Without demand that sets a price for a premium commercial product, there's no premium commercial product. It's that simple.
And since I've been running linux since the mid nineties I think I'm pretty familiar with open source. Price doesn't have to involve just an affixed numerical figure from a denomination of currency although this is the way it's usually represented on econ charts. Demand for open source and linux is constrained by its increased complexity that makes it more difficult for the layman to use, lack of uniform customer support (too many distros for any uniformity even though some 3rd party vendors offer support), a need to RTFM everything especially when something breaks, etc. So the price for potential consumers is the time and commitment involved over other OS's. And I shouldn't have to explain how open source dev returns benefits that exceed the cost else they wouldn't be doing it. Read the mission statement from the Free Software Foundation if you have to. The return is not monetary and but instead involves other high valued intangible commodities. If there was really no cost, MS and other closed source vendors that produce dirt like OSX would be historical artifacts by now. I think I've been remarkably restrained in refraining from browbeating and telling you how clueless I know you are. So if you want to keep this civil, I'd rec doing the same. If not, let 'er rip.
I would hesitate to say the vast majority of CP is not produced with commercial intentions only because of the sheer amount of softcore CP produced by the Eastern European studios, but certainly a very large percentage of CP was not produced with a financial motivation, and with the eastern European studios all shut down and no production studios currently in operation, it is safe to say that hardly any CP produced since the mid 2000s was produced with commercialization in mind.
Not sure why you would bring this up again unless you remain fundamentally ignorant to the effect that illegality and the high priority the US DOJ places on shutting down child porn has on potential premium content suppliers. If anything the lack of commercial product confirms all the points I’ve been making; that making distribution and possesion illegal makes the production of premium content creation too high. The benefit to producing it does not outweigh the cost because profits are limited from demand repressed by illegality.
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I'd just like to chime in that this thread is EPIC! I've never seen such a rational debate on the topic of child pornography. ok... carry on ;D
ROFL. Hilarious. ;D
You've got a point though. This child porn tangent has kind of gotten out of control getting bogged down the weeds. Point taken.
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If you are an accessory to the molestation of a child you should be punished. If you help the producer in any way (emotional, financial, physical, concealment, advice, etc) then you are guilty. It is reasonable to think that if you are paying for CP then some of that money is going to the producer. Since you can not be sure you are taking a great risk assuming it isn't.
So I should stop posting security tutorials here because a pedophile might use one of them in order to protect themselves while they molest children? It is insane to think that helping a producer in any way should be criminal. You probably meant knowingly contributing to a producer. Sure I will grant that it should be illegal to knowingly contribute to child pornography production, at least financially and concealment. I am not so sure that I think it should be illegal to give advice to anyone though, and actually I am pretty sure that it should not be illegal to. I strongly believe in freedom of speech and information. However, when you qualify your statement with knowingly, as I assume you must mean, then you must also admit that although a person may be taking a great risk in assuming that the money they pay for CP is not going to a producer, unless they know that it is going to a producer they are exempt from this. I already have said it should be illegal to knowingly pay a producer of child pornography to molest children, and thus unless I am misunderstanding you we actually are not in too much disagreement regarding this.
Kmfkewm: Thou doth protest too much. I suspect you grasp tightly to libertarian beliefs in an attempt to justify your own activities. I hope all pedos are as committed to not facilitating the production of CP as you are to your libertarian convictions.
Meh I am not a pedohpile, although I am admittedly sexually attracted to teenagers who are under the age of consent. Not that I have actually done anything with anyone under the age of consent, or have an exclusive attraction to them. In fact most child pornography makes me feel quite sick to my stomach (as far as I can tell from the descriptions anyway), although I do not imagine I would find images of nude children to be inherently upsetting to me. That said I really feel no desire to justify my own actions, I try my best to not partake in actions that cause harm to others and except for minor things (I mean I am not a saint) I find that I succeed at not hurting others. As my actions cause no significant harm to others, I feel that they are inherently justified. And actually, I care quite little about how the majority of people perceive me, due to the fact that I view the majority of people as being either evil or brainwashed.
If one of the pedos does molest (or contribute to the molestation of) a child then I think it would be the perfect time for some of that 'militant libertarianism' we were talking about.
Yes I entirely agree. That is a prime example of something a militant libertarian would use force to halt. If a pedophile rapes a child they should have force used against them, as they are violating the freedom of the child. If a government agency tries to extort taxes from someone, they should have force used against them, as they have initiated force in an attempt to violate the freedom of another person. If someone arrests a person for a drug crime, they should have force used against them as they have initiated force and violated the freedom of another. If a criminal burglarizes a home they should have force used against them as they have initiated force and violated the freedom of others. If someone attempts to harm a person for viewing images they deem to be inappropriate, militant libertarians would use force to stop them, as they will be initiating force in an attempt to restrict the freedom of an innocent. Libertarians would be against all forms of force initiation, and would violently oppose the initiation of force by responding to force initiators with force until the force initiators are incapacitated, dead, or change their tune. The fact that militant libertarianism only opposes the initiation of force inherently means that only those who wish to initiate force against and violate the freedom of others have anything to fear, or any reason to not support militant libertarianism.
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Yeah but that's not what we were talking about though. We were talking about the distribution of premium content and that would require my model. I'm sure you could probably find some dumb tools who would buy child porn you lifted off a hidden service. But that doesn't make what you sold them premium content because premium content wouldn't be available for free on a hidden service. You might find content that AT ONE TIME was considered premium content when it first came out but due to the passage of time and antiquated technologies would no longer be considered premium.
Also the typical distributor of premium content would not be like what you described because charging for content that can be copied for free is not a sustainable business model. Just like you're not going to find many people trying to sell repackaged free content as premium content today. It happens, but only by fly-by-night small timers whose extremely low profit ceiling is dependent entirely on having enough unwitting noob consumers to exploit. All the tools and techniques for maximizing profits for a conventional business; establishing brand loyalty and return customers, would be unavailable to you since what's the point? They're not going to stick around once they see the shit you sold them on a hidden service and as word of your charging for freely available content affects your rep.; your business model becomes broken.
That is what the last big commercial distributors did though, the ones I was talking about earlier. I am pretty sure they didn't produce anything at all, all they did was collect a lot from freely available sources and then put it behind a pay wall. The thing is that is how most commercial CP distribution has been since the Eastern European production studios were shut down. The model I discussed was the most recent model that was seen happening prior to commercial CP's complete eradication from the internet. The model you are worried about did happen as well with LS studio though, for example. There have only been two big child porn production studios that have operated that come to my mind anyway, BD and LS. And they did have a big network of distributors and sites and such. But there have been even more distribution sites that simply collected freely available CP and sold it behind a pay wall to idiots who didn't realize they could hop on Tor and get the same exact shit. I agree with you that studios like LS and BD, and the distributors who pay them to continue production, should be treated as criminal. Where I disagree is on the distributors who are not actually paying producers to produce more CP.
My business model is how the big boys would do it. Building brand loyalty by providing freshly updated premium content unavailable elsewhere that would appeal to enthusiasts and high rollers alike giving you the greatest opportunities to monetize your traffic and thereby maximize profits. Growing a satisfied customer base that lets you not just charge them once, but who are happy to have you automatically charge their card every month. They're always coming back for more because what you give them what they can't find elsewhere.
Sure the model you are discussing has been seen in practice regarding CP, see LS and BD studios and their distribution networks. In other cases it has been the model I discuss, including the last significant commercial CP distribution group to go down (and I mean last as in most recent as well as last as in there were not others when they went down). I recall reading about a payment processor in the US who got fucked for handling credit card transactions for CP as well, I think they were called Landslide. I don't know if they were connected to LS studios or not (pretty much 99.99% of what I know about CP is from reading .pdfs ranging from case studies on groups to offender typologies to even medical / scientific literature....I have not been in the CP community to see these things first hand , and it has been some years since I did an in depth study on the CP world , so my memory is not quite exact regarding these things but from what I can recall from studying). They did not pay producers anything, rather they just processed credit card information for websites (including CP sites) and took their cut. Another model for commercial CP is advertisement based, where the CP is freely available but on sites with advertisements for other adult content. This is most prevalent with jailbait pornography distribution though, and it is often well mixed in with lots of legal pornography. So I do see that there are many models of commercializing CP distribution, and I never denied that the model you claim is real. I also never claimed that it should be legal for distributors to knowingly fund producers to molest children, or that it should be legal for consumers of CP to pay producers to molest their children.
And this is where you either keep fundamentally misunderstanding me or just fundamentally misunderstand human nature. You can't force people to know the truth, even if mandated by law. What you can do is provide the truth and allow people to come to their own decisions. Isn't that what you're advocating, that people should be free to decide what they want to believe?
Yes I do believe that people should be free to decide what they want to believe.
I believe that everyone has a right to learn the truth so they can make an informed decision on what they want to believe. Because when you deprive someone of even the awareness of truth, an informed decision can't be made; whether that be to reject or accept the truth. There is no exercise of free will. How can you call that the freedom to decide for themselves when the person isn't even aware there's a question? So yes, I believe force should be used if necessary to ensure everyone is aware of the truth so they can decide for themselves whether to reject or accept it because fundamental to freedom is having that choice.
Meanwhile, in your world it's more important that their delusional parents have the right to freely brainwash their kids than for the kids to have the right to be aware of the truth enough to make their own decisions. This is why I don't believe you believe your own rhetoric that everyone has a right to freedom. You keep saying how you value freedom before all else, yet you would use force to guarantee parents the right to keep their kids powerless, deluded, and enslaved. How hypocritical is that? I consider such treatment to be abuse and has nothing to do with "freedom".
Really it is hard to argue with you because on an emotional level I agree with you. I think it is horrible for parents to keep their children from true knowledge and education. However, I still do not think I have any right to force others to teach their children my belief system, any more than I think they have the right to force me to teach my children their belief system. I imagine that over time the extremely religious people will become extinct actually, information tends to spread even to the most repressed of places. Additionally, people who are so religious as to desire only to indoctrinate their children with religious Dogma will probably eventually fall so far behind the rest of humanity that they will go extinct in the modern world (ie: they pray for healing, and die, and we get medicine, and live. Or they use outdated antibiotics because they don't believe that bacteria could have evolved. Or they try and start a holy war and get wiped out by militant libertarians for initiating force against others). I do think that what you want is the ideal thing, for everyone to have access to the truth from an early age. However I do not always think that the ideal thing is the right thing, and this is one of those cases.
I'm in absolute agreement with you here. But freedom depends on having a "choice", and in order for someone to be able to "choose" one must be aware of a choice to begin with. By depriving these kids this awareness you are depriving them of the ability to choose, and therefore depriving them ultimately of freedom.
And why would you do something so inhumane and cruel that is of no benefit to society or our species? Why would you use force to deprive innocents of their freedom of choice? Because you think it's more important to protect a parent's right to enslave their children. You don't seem to understand that depriving a parent of their ability to do this is not depriving them of their "freedom" because freedom should not include the freedom to enslave others.
I am not depriving them of anything, rather their parents are. I am merely stating that I do not think it is my right to dictate to parents the values that they should instill into their children. I would use force to protect the freedom of a parent to choose the values they instill in their children, and I would use force to ensure that the children of these parents can choose a different path than their parents have, if they so choose.
Again you fundamentally misunderstand me because I'm in absolute agreement with you here. But I also believe the parent DOES NOT have the right to enslave their kids by depriving them of exposure to science and facts whereas you do. The real world outcome is the mental enslavement of innocents. Not freedom.
I do not believe that the parent has the right to deprive their children of exposure to science or facts, I merely believe that I do not have the right to force tI believe that parents have a right to teach their children whatever they please, and although it is unfortunate that some people will choose to teach their children only religious dogma, I do not think that I have any right to force them to stop doing this.
hem expose their children to science or facts. If the children voluntarily attempt to obtain science and facts from a source who voluntarily desires to teach them science and facts, I do not believe that I or the childs parents can prevent them from doing this. But I do not believe that I can force the parents to teach their children science or facts, or to have their children taught science or facts.
Just because it could appear to someone else that scientific method is flawed doesn't make their understanding any less wrong. And it certainly doesn't mean we as a society should start respecting invalid viewpoints just because someone has one. It's clear you don't understand that science is not a "belief system" by the way you keep referring to it like one. Its knowledge is amassed by observations and analysis of the physical world we live in. Even the interpretation and analysis of physical data have to be grounded in scientific method to be credible. It must be based in the empirical evidence and the reasoning must be sound. There is nothing "subjective" about it.
......
Yeah because the devil is nothing more than an idea personified in numerous works of religious fiction. It exists in the realm of mythology and imagination. Dinosaur bones exist in our world of concrete fact. That you would even equivocate and say you can't know for sure the devil didn't plant them even though insofar as being able to know the difference between fantasy and physical reality, YES YOU CAN. This is why I suspect you are a religious wingnut and that you might not even be aware of it. That you secretly yearn to accept religion and find god but are just too embarrassed to admit it right now. Maybe all that religious schooling unhealthily influenced you in this way.
I am not so certain as to say that I can disprove the existence of God or the Devil. I believe that God and/or the Devil are inherently unfalsifiable (which also inherently disconnects them from being worthy of scientific study, at least hard sciences, sociologically religion can be studied of course). I do not think that I can prove that I am not in the matrix either. I certainly do not see the probability that God or the flying spaghetti monster or the invisible pink unicorn exist to be high enough for me to start basing any of the actions in my life on their presumed existence. That said I also recognize that I simply cannot disprove things that are impossible to falsify. If there is an a powerful supernatural being, he could easily plant dinosaur bones to try and test peoples faith. I certainly do not think there is such a powerful supernatural being, and just as strongly I think that there are indeed dinosaur bones. I would not go as far as to say that I am a subjectivist, thinking that I cannot know anything, but I would say that I believe I cannot know anything with absolute certainty. Knowing anything with absolute certainty would require omnipotence/omnipresence , and even in such cases I am not convinced that absolute certainty can be obtained (actually, if God were real, which I highly doubt is the case, I find it hard to imagine that he could actually be certain of his omnipotence or omnipresence).
Thus I do see science as a belief system of a sort. I see it as the belief system that has the most evidence backing it, and that has been the most useful thing to humans. Actually I rather hate organized religion myself, I think that organized religion has been responsible for an enormous amount of the suffering in the world, and indeed I think that if it were not for organized religion we would be thousands of years more advanced than we currently are, and live in a far more libertarian world at that. So I am no fan of religion, but from a purely philosophical point of view I have trouble to claim that I know anything with absolute certainty, and from a scientific point of view I do not even bother with unfalsifiable claims, and I recognize the existence of God as being such a claim. As it is unfalsifiable I cannot claim to know that it is not true, but I can say that I very strongly believe it to be true that God does not exist.
And despite having received some education at private religious schools, due to the fact that my family thought it would provide me with a higher quality education than public schools, my immediate family consists largely of atheists and scientists. I have known for my entire life that I should give about as much credit to religion as I should give to Santa.
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Here's the problem with your thinking. When you would use force as a militant libertarian, it does not matter one whit any claims you make about not siding with anyone, you end up having to choose a side when enforcing your beliefs. So yes, that you would choose to side with the delusional fanatic's right to raise their kids ignorant of science over the innocent kid's right to learn science so he can make up his own mind whether to accept or reject it means that you are taking sides. You are siding with slavery. You are definitely NOT embracing freedom.
I can only disagree with this.
Dude you must be high. There's no WAY ID was taught in public schools. School boards composed of religious extremists tried to get course curriculum changed to offer education of ID as a competing theory to evolution because they argued evolution is a "theory" like Intelligent Design is a "theory" so is equally valid. It really resembles the kind of false equivalency that is so pervasive in your thinking. But you can't just change something like that because there are uniform standards and a process involved in changing them. Yet here you are decrying uniform standards which in this case prevented ID being taught in those schools and will further prevent it being taught to your kid. It's for this reason that uniform standards were developed, to prevent falsifiable bullshit being outright adopted in our educational curriculum.
So who cares what the creationists do? It doesn't matter. You are under no threat of your child being taught creationism in public schools because our country was founded on the principle of a clear seaparation of church and state that was affirmed by the Supreme Court first in the Scopes monkey trial almost a century ago. Scopes established the precedent that has since been reaffirmed and upheld by every case of this nature that has appeared before any court ever since by a concept in law known as Stare Decisis as established precedent. Any attempt to teach ID would be instantly challenged in court and not tolerated. Church and state separation is a bedrock principle of our founding fathers as espoused by Thomas Jefferson. Didn't you learn this stuff in school? Ah, that's right. You had a superior private religious education didn't you? Figures they wouldn't teach you that. :(
I believe that you are incorrect. Every now and then I hear (rightfully) controversy about creationists having snuck some shit into the public school systems again. Let me try to find some examples.
This actually contains a lot of information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Pandas_and_People#2004.E2.80.932005:_Dover.2C_Pennsylvania
Of Pandas and People became the focus of a litigation and controversy in Dover, Pennsylvania in 2004 after the Dover Area School Board endorsed it as a reference book. Perhaps inevitably, the ensuing court case was dubbed the "Panda Trial" by the media in an allusion to the famous "Monkey Trial" of 1925.[56]
Although the board did not actually purchase the book, 60 copies were donated to the district by an anonymous party. It was revealed in court that a school board member asked his church for donations for the purchase of those books[57] although that board member had denied all knowledge of the source of donation in an earlier deposition.[58] Amid an international controversy, the board also became the first in the US to promote the teaching of intelligent design in the classroom, sparking a lawsuit, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, by the American Civil Liberties Union and other plaintiffs.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10545387/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/judge-rules-against-intelligent-design/
U.S. District Judge John E. Jones delivered a stinging attack on the Dover Area School Board, saying its first-in-the-nation decision in October 2004 to insert intelligent design into the science curriculum violates the constitutional separation of church and state.
This is just the first example I can find of creationism being taught in schools in the USA recently. It has happened on several occasions in several different ways though. You are right that it is unconstitutional, but so is the ban on child pornography possession and distribution and that hasn't stopped anyone from going to jail for it. The creationists do tend to get shut down pretty quickly, but it has been part of the curriculum at some public schools in the USA even as recently as the later 2000's, although I am not sure when the last reference I can find would be from. The courts do shut it down fairly quickly though, but then it just gets repackaged and pops up again. so you are not correct in saying that the entire public schools of the USA are free from creationism, just the majority of them are, and the minority that become temporarily infected are routinely quashed by the courts (until they repackage it as something else). The thing is in a highly religious area of the USA teaching creationism in school has enough public support that of course it is going to keep working its way into the curriculum before the courts can rule it illegal in its nth reincarnation (intelligent design being the newest version that I am aware of).
Yeah because you don't believe innocent kids have a right to be free if their parents enslave them by brainwashing them whereas I think they have a right to choose what to believe.
You keep returning to the false equivalency of what religious people think as if it somehow validates your point when all it does is just makes you look ludicrous and unhinged to any objective reader. So why don't you just admit that you secretly agree with what the religious people think? It's hard to believe anyone but a religious absolutist could introduce such an argument and think it was compelling. Since you proclaim your devotion to libertarian militancy you should have no shame admitting you're a fanatic. Religious zealotry and ideological fanatacism are just two sides of the same coin.
I am actually in essentially complete disagreement with the religious people, and am actually quite against religion in general as I see it causes a lot of bad things to happen, many of which actually negatively effect me. So you are incorrect to assume that I am a religious person, and actually I am substantially far from being a religious person. I am in favor of freedom though, including freedom for insane religious nuts.
But you haven't given a rational explanation why. Your argument "it interferes with their freedom" without offering a coherent explanation of WHY their freedom takes precedent over the enslavement of their children. Your answer so far of "because I value their right over their child's rights" just isn't compelling. Do you value their rights and support their "freedom" to sexually abuse their kids? I hope not. Well why not?
Of course I do not claim they have a right to sexually abuse their kids. I also do not think that they have a right to abandon or neglect their children, using the logic that they brought their children into existence, and thus if they leave their vulnerable children to fend for themselves, they have essentially initiated force against their children. I just do not personally hold abusing or neglecting children on the same level as teaching children religious dogma and refusing to teach them science.
But if libertarians that think like you had gotten their way by doing away with uniform educational standards, ID could have been taught in public schools because religious extremists were elected to school boards and/or formed the majority public opinion in certain school districts and imposed their will upon course curriculum. The irony is that with a more libertarian setup your kid WOULD actually be under the threat of being taught ID. Reality seems to have a habit of dictating something quite contrary to what you believe would happen.
First of all ID HAS been taught in public schools in the USA. Second of all libertarians do not think that there should even be public schools, as they do not think that there should be taxation to fund them. Libertarians believe that any private school can teach whatever they want, and children are free to go to whatever private school will take them / they can afford, and parents are not required to send their children to any particular private school or have them taught any particular curriculum.
So if a parent decided to not educate their kid at all and keep them confined at home and dumb as a stump doing slave labor for them on their farm that would be perfectly ok with you too using your logic here. You seem to have a sadistic side to you.
I do not believe that a parent has a right to keep a child confined at home if the child does not want to be confined at home. I do not claim that parents own their children, I only claim that I do not own their children and I do not own them (so therefor I can not force them to teach their children what I believe is right).
But the reasoning you used to show that was all fucked up. Look, it doesn't matter if the link doesn't apply in all cases. All that matters is that in the vast majority of cases there would be a link because providers of premium content would want to follow a profitable business model. The broken one you outlined would not be the case in the vast majority of premium child porn content for sale because its profitability is not sustainable. I haven't thought through the ethics of what you're proposing yet, but your claim that it doesn't "inherently" lead to CP production is besides the point. The fact that it WOULD be the case in the vast majority of cases should be reason enough. But if it even leads to only one less child being exploited, isn't it worth it to make CP distribution illegal? If you say no, I ask how you can be so callous? So you can protect the chump changers that are engaging in the semi-unethical borderline fraudulent activity of reselling freely copied content as premium content? Why are the freedoms of chump changers to conduct their business this way more important to you than the kids who would suffer sexual exploitation by producers trying to meet the increases in demand? What if it were your kid?
As I mentioned previously in this reply, the last major CP distribution group actually made three million dollars distributing content that was already freely available on Tor and Freenet. To the best of my knowledge, they used recycled and rebranded content and did not produce anything or pay producers to produce anything. Actually there is an extremely detailed history of child pornography that was leaked to Wikileaks by an insider in the commercial CP world, that goes into much more detail than what I have gone into in this thread. I highly suggest you read it, although it was indeed written by a sick pedophile who in some cases even minimized the immorality of forcible child rape. Regardless it is the best insider look into the world of CP that you will likely find, and again I remind you that my insight into the world of CP is largely from research and reading and not from first hand participation on any level (especially not distribution or production!). And no I do not think if it saves one child from being molested that it is worth it to make CP distribution illegal. From a utilitarian point of view (and really I am not a utilitarian, but in this case I would take such a view), I would see more value in preventing millions of people from going to prison for often unwittingly distributing CP on P2P networks, than I would on preventing one child from being molested.
Tell you what, in your world where chump changers try and sell repackaged free content copied off a hidden service to clueless noobs it isn't an issue. But in the vast majority of cases where kids are sexually exploited from child porn producers that turn a profit from your fucked up policies it would DEFINITELY be an issue.
I am against trading liberty and freedom for a little temporary protection.
What? First, your logic here is AFU because you're using figures from ONE commercial CP operation which says nothing about how many other operations could have profitably co-existed, especially if the depressed demand from making possession and distribution illegal with harsh penalties were lifted. The market was far from saturated. Second, it doesn't address how legalization would allow distribution channels to operate freely and openly, increasing their exposure and accessibility to the masses. These are factors that would have definitely increased membership totals and the bottom line.
Well to be fair, at the time there was essentially only ONE commercial CP operation in existence, so....
But I guess I can agree with you here for the most part, membership would have increased and so would the bottom line. But again this distributor was not producing they were selling old rebranded images from P2P networks and other sources.
But demand is never impossible to determine and is innately involved in the reasons to bring a product to market. If there were no demand it wouldn't be on the market. So it doesn't make sense to introduce a metaphor where demand for a product is impossible to determine. That's not how the real world works.
If not for commercialization you could indeed use PIR to perfectly obfuscate the demand for CP. Due to commercialization, there may be some side channels for this information to leak through, perhaps a boost in the number of people paying for access to the PIR correlates with the introduction of more CP to the PIR. However this would be speculative demand as the PIR would still be successful in totally obfuscating the actual demand for CP. That is how....mathematics works.
Dude, do you realize we've been talking about premium child porn? Without demand that sets a price for a premium commercial product, there's no premium commercial product. It's that simple.
And since I've been running linux since the mid nineties I think I'm pretty familiar with open source. Price doesn't have to involve just an affixed numerical figure from a denomination of currency although this is the way it's usually represented on econ charts. Demand for open source and linux is constrained by its increased complexity that makes it more difficult for the layman to use, lack of uniform customer support (too many distros for any uniformity even though some 3rd party vendors offer support), a need to RTFM everything especially when something breaks, etc. So the price for potential consumers is the time and commitment involved over other OS's. And I shouldn't have to explain how open source dev returns benefits that exceed the cost else they wouldn't be doing it. Read the mission statement from the Free Software Foundation if you have to. The return is not monetary and but instead involves other high valued intangible commodities. If there was really no cost, MS and other closed source vendors that produce dirt like OSX would be historical artifacts by now. I think I've been remarkably restrained in refraining from browbeating and telling you how clueless I know you are. So if you want to keep this civil, I'd rec doing the same. If not, let 'er rip.
If you are not just worried about dollars going to producers, then what other price is it that you are discussing in relation to premium CP? I am kind of confused by what you have written here actually. Also perhaps you should define premium for me, I take it to mean high end, but I also consider linux to be high end software that is provided to me for no financial charge so....
Not sure why you would bring this up again unless you remain fundamentally ignorant to the effect that illegality and the high priority the US DOJ places on shutting down child porn has on potential premium content suppliers. If anything the lack of commercial product confirms all the points I’ve been making; that making distribution and possesion illegal makes the production of premium content creation too high. The benefit to producing it does not outweigh the cost because profits are limited from demand repressed by illegality.
This is easily refuted by once again pointing out that the largest production and distribution rings ever operated AFTER child pornography was made illegal to possess or distribute. Also the demand may be repressed but it is still enormous, there are literally tens of millions of people out there who are downloading CP on any given day. That seems like quite a lot of demand for CP to me. Also essentially none of them are paying for it.
PS: Another story about intelligent design being taught in a USA public school (and again of course the courts put an end to it. But it was briefly being taught. Looks like this time they at least taught it as philosophy instead of an evolution alternative!): http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10545387/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/judge-rules-against-intelligent-design/
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design_in_politics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_and_evolution_in_public_education_in_the_United_States
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That is what the last big commercial distributors did though, the ones I was talking about earlier. I am pretty sure they didn't produce anything at all, all they did was collect a lot from freely available sources and then put it behind a pay wall. The thing is that is how most commercial CP distribution has been since the Eastern European production studios were shut down. The model I discussed was the most recent model that was seen happening prior to commercial CP's complete eradication from the internet. The model you are worried about did happen as well with LS studio though, for example. There have only been two big child porn production studios that have operated that come to my mind anyway, BD and LS. And they did have a big network of distributors and sites and such. But there have been even more distribution sites that simply collected freely available CP and sold it behind a pay wall to idiots who didn't realize they could hop on Tor and get the same exact shit. I agree with you that studios like LS and BD, and the distributors who pay them to continue production, should be treated as criminal. Where I disagree is on the distributors who are not actually paying producers to produce more CP.
Ok. Based on your apparent command of the historical subject matter and without having independently confirmed these details I probably underestimated the commercial viability of repacking freely available content, at least within the CP industry. But I also think the fact that child porn consumers have shown such a willingness to pay for what is freely available also speaks to the enormous commercial possibilities for this market. In a sense it confirms reasons I’ve mentioned as to why people pay for premium content despite the fact that they could find some of the exact same content on p2p; it saves them the time of having to look for it and from the risk of not finding what they were looking for.
I do not believe that the parent has the right to deprive their children of exposure to science or facts, I merely believe that I do not have the right to force them expose their children to science or facts. If the children voluntarily attempt to obtain science and facts from a source who voluntarily desires to teach them science and facts, I do not believe that I or the childs parents can prevent them from doing this. But I do not believe that I can force the parents to teach their children science or facts, or to have their children taught science or facts.
You’re being really disingenuous here. So here’s a child completely dependent upon domineering religious parents for physical, financial, and emotional survival with their education strictly controlled and absent of any understanding of scientific knowledge and whose only exposure to science is the demonization of the subject by their nutjob parents. How freely do you believe that child could voluntarily choose to learn science and facts? It’s as outrageous as claiming the obliviously brainwashed could voluntarily and spontaneously choose to unbrainwash themselves.
The appearance of such disingenuity makes everything else you say here sound like a complete and total cop out if it didn’t already.
I am not so certain as to say that I can disprove the existence of God or the Devil. I believe that God and/or the Devil are inherently unfalsifiable (which also inherently disconnects them from being worthy of scientific study, at least hard sciences, sociologically religion can be studied of course). I do not think that I can prove that I am not in the matrix either. I certainly do not see the probability that God or the flying spaghetti monster or the invisible pink unicorn exist to be high enough for me to start basing any of the actions in my life on their presumed existence. That said I also recognize that I simply cannot disprove things that are impossible to falsify. If there is an a powerful supernatural being, he could easily plant dinosaur bones to try and test peoples faith. I certainly do not think there is such a powerful supernatural being, and just as strongly I think that there are indeed dinosaur bones. I would not go as far as to say that I am a subjectivist, thinking that I cannot know anything, but I would say that I believe I cannot know anything with absolute certainty. Knowing anything with absolute certainty would require omnipotence/omnipresence , and even in such cases I am not convinced that absolute certainty can be obtained (actually, if God were real, which I highly doubt is the case, I find it hard to imagine that he could actually be certain of his omnipotence or omnipresence).
Maybe not absolute certainty. Epistemology might have us conclude the impossibility of this for anyone. But there are relative degrees of certainty no? How you might live your life might be radically different if you thought the probability of the christian narrative had an 80% chance from being true than 20%. I’m actually not in disagreement with anything you just said, just your absolutist approach based on your inability to know with certainty 100% that religious zealots aren’t right, that you can’t use some of your militant libertarianism to ensure their kids are being given a choice to decide whether to follow in the footsteps of their parents or not. Holding out the possibility of that .000001% likelihood of an outcome that you are 99.999999% certain is false seems so ridiculousy futile while making you look so small and petty it makes one wonder why you would insist on it. And even here I probably still vastly underestimated the unlikelihood of a lake of fire being a real destination for “sinners” following death.
This is just the first example I can find of creationism being taught in schools in the USA recently. It has happened on several occasions in several different ways though. You are right that it is unconstitutional, but so is the ban on child pornography possession and distribution and that hasn't stopped anyone from going to jail for it.
In light of your provided reference I see it has happened on very rare occasions, although most of the time efforts were made to introduce such things such proposals were soundly defeated. But your comparison with the unconstituionality of child porn is a poor one. The founders made no mention of child porn as it didn’t yet exist. Furthermore, restrictions on 1st amendment rights that don’t appear explicitly in the constitution has long been established by the courts as constitutional and desired in limited and exceptional instances. The founders, however, did have strong and explicit feelings about church and state separation which is why courts will continue to quash these cases that appear before it quickly. Also, it’s not that the system didn’t work. It’s only that it didn’t work as fast as you or I would have liked when curriculum was stealth changed by religionists through the introduction of a storybook rendition of creationism. It would seem the lesson to be drawn is to remain vigilant about looking out for these sorts of shenanigans so they can be challenged in court as soon as its identified. Not to change the system altogether so this sort of stuff doesn’t happen. Because it’s not like a government run by your militant libertarian cabal would be perfect either. If you believe in due process a case like this would still need to appear before a court to determine and assess guilt, even if it’s a private court. Or maybe you think the wealthy oligarchs that would certainly own these schools should be able to aribtrarily decide what happened and who was at fault. But that’s still no guarantee that the oligarch will make an actionable decision faster than you or I would have liked or to prevent such a thing from happening.
I also really think these wealthy oligarchs who would rule over their private property like mini-despots in your world of no public property would really do a number on due process even if there were private courts although I see no reason that such a thing would exist, if they did they would resemble how private arbitration works today. Yet as biased as arbitration is today slanting heavily towards their court’s employer, the private court in your world would be an order of magnitude worse because there would be even less checks and balances to demand equity with no government.
Of course I do not claim they have a right to sexually abuse their kids. I also do not think that they have a right to abandon or neglect their children, using the logic that they brought their children into existence, and thus if they leave their vulnerable children to fend for themselves, they have essentially initiated force against their children. I just do not personally hold abusing or neglecting children on the same level as teaching children religious dogma and refusing to teach them science.
OK, so tell me. If the parents had brainwashed their kids to become willing, complicit, and consensual sex slaves and incorporated it into their religious dogma it would be ok with you?
I do not believe that a parent has a right to keep a child confined at home if the child does not want to be confined at home. I do not claim that parents own their children, I only claim that I do not own their children and I do not own them (so therefor I can not force them to teach their children what I believe is right).
Here’s the rub. When you talk about militant libertarianism seizing and governing a society by force, it’s not enough to sit around passively saying you do or do not claim something. Policy would be built on these ideas that you do or do not claim which would be followed by real world effects. So the question is whether you believe parents own their children. And the answer has to be definitive as it’s not enough to say that “you do not claim that parents own their children” because you’re the one proposing to run a society by your ideals so you really should start making claims instead of trying to dodge these sorts of big picture questions by only stating what you do not claim. You either claim parents own their children or claim they do not and if the latter you should be willing to stop parents doing this with force if necessary or else what’s the point of making such a claim?
Because really, I'm still have the hardest time wrapping my head around what this militant libertarian silliness would look like in actuality. No government. Just roving packs of armed-to-the-teeth militant libertarian vigilantes going around like a gang of thugs enforcing private law with brute force against those they suspect of violating the law as arbitrarily decreed by their employer. Judge, jury, and likely executioners too all wrapped up into one uber administrator of justice y0h? Just think of how much dough would be saved for not having to spend a dime on due process in this world where everyone is "free". Oh yeah, but that's not public money going to a public court again. The dime is being saved by the mini-despot who owns the property and goes instead to his private pinkerton army to enforce his law. The price of freedom y0h.
From a utilitarian point of view (and really I am not a utilitarian, but in this case I would take such a view), I would see more value in preventing millions of people from going to prison for often unwittingly distributing CP on P2P networks, than I would on preventing one child from being molested.
Trust me when I say I would never accuse you of being utilitarian. Your ruthless refusal so far to waver from ideology in order to spare even one child from sexual exploitation or religious brainwashing makes it rather clear you are more an anti-utilitarian that is opportunistically adopting the ostensible utilitarianism of this specious argument for less-than-utilitarian reasons. But as to your noble cause of wanting to save the "unwittingly distributing" dupes, you said yourself that LE is pretty good these days about distinguishing the unwitting from the intentional when deciding who and who not to pursue. So now you're claiming there are "millions of unwitting distributors" getting popped today? It doesn't sound as utilitarian as you're making it out to be because AFAICT, you're pulling these numbers out of your ass.
I am against trading liberty and freedom for a little temporary protection.
What is little or temporary about protecting kids from sexual exploitation?
Correct me if I’m wrong but what I hear you saying then is that you now believe the purchase or distribution of child porn from its producer (as opposed to repackaged content) should be illegal but you have no way of enforcing that illegality since there would be no good way to determine whether a distributor is knew the producer?
But I guess I can agree with you here for the most part, membership would have increased and so would the bottom line. But again this distributor was not producing they were selling old rebranded images from P2P networks and other sources.
So just think of the mountain of cash they would have made had they been producing fresh quality content instead of recycling.
I am kind of confused by what you have written here actually. Also perhaps you should define premium for me, I take it to mean high end, but I also consider linux to be high end software that is provided to me for no financial charge so....
You have the right idea of what you think the word “premium” means. What I’m pointing out is how asinine it is for you to try and claim the open source business model is the same as the for-free child porn business model. It’s ludicrous. Open source thrives on the supply side because it’s supported by numerous businesses like system integrators that stand to gain monetarily from lowered marginal costs and an increased customer base from switching to open source. Hardware manufacturers sell more units when their consumer products use open source than bullshit proprietary source. Who are the big money business patrons that support the for-free child porn industry to raise it to the level of being able to call it “high end”?
Open source developers code it for free for the prestige, bragging rights, and to bolster their professional pedigrees. There are indirect but real financial rewards from raising their profile this way. They also do it because they can; code needs to be written to support this piece of hardware they have and no one else had done it yet so if they don’t do it themselves they can’t use it. They have the need and skillz. Amateur child porn producers do it for sick thrills and voyeuristic and exhibitionary reasons. They’re not all about raising the profiles for bragging rights unless they’re looking to get popped and take themselves out of the game. They’re not doing it to improve the financial rewards in their professional life. And the average amateur producer will have neither the time, resources, nor skillz to produce high end content. The small percentage of them who do have the time, resources, and skillz are have no incentive to get in the game of producing high end content right now. Why? Because the risks are too high and the return of investment too low as there are no easy ways to monetize the return on their high end content. There’s huge demand for drugs through the mail too, you don’t think vendors would stop vending on SR should bitcoin become defunct even though enormous demand would remain? Of course they would. The inability to monetize demand makes it not worth the expense for businesses. Simple economics. Costs exceed benefits.
So now you’re proposing to remove price controls that hold the price at zero by legalizing possession and distribution. Now all that demand that couldn’t be previously monetized can be. So what do you think happens from the deluge of demand genius? Premium content providers would see the enormous returns waiting to be had and fire up production again. Why? Because the distribution channels that provide spigots of cash would be turned on and eager to do business again. Supply and Demand really isn’t difficult to understand even without a macro background. You just have to be willing to think through all the issues.
If not for commercialization you could indeed use PIR to perfectly obfuscate the demand for CP. Due to commercialization, there may be some side channels for this information to leak through, perhaps a boost in the number of people paying for access to the PIR correlates with the introduction of more CP to the PIR. However this would be speculative demand as the PIR would still be successful in totally obfuscating the actual demand for CP. That is how....mathematics works.
I don’t see how you can call marked increases to the bottom line through sales “speculative” demand. Looks like a tangible increase in demand to me. And since we are discussing commercialization, I still don’t see the use of this metaphor. I’m against legalizing possession and distribution because of the harm it incurs. If these acts happened in a vacuum that made it impossible to harm anyone else I wouldn’t be. If it didn't harm anyone sexual attraction to prepubescent children could just be another sexual fetish, a sexual preference even, and I wouldn't give two shits about what pedophiles did. But it’s not useful to speculate on that because facts don’t exist independently in vacuums IRL. And we are talking about child porn and not widgets in a mental masurbatory math exercise.
This is easily refuted by once again pointing out that the largest production and distribution rings ever operated AFTER child pornography was made illegal to possess or distribute.
But this argument is specious because after it was outlawed the explosion of the net meant technology was developing at a rate that outpaced LE's ability to enforce the laws on the books, which meant there was far less risk involved for those who defied the law. LE techniques and efficacy gradually caught up over time. I thought this truth was self evident from the way you presented your enormous hagiography to child porn in your original response on this subject. So I’m not sure why you keep repeating what appears to me a conspicuously specious argument.
Furthermore, knowledge of the heavy psychological damage incurred upon victims of child sex abuse has only become prominent over the last 30 years or so with awareness spreading gradually during that time around the globe. It's why massive underage sex scandals could even come to light at all against religious orgs as powerful as the Catholic Church. It's why pedos like Gary Glitter can find no safe refuge in the world where he can safely practice his desire of underage sex, while serial child sex abuser Jimmy Saville could go to town on hoards of children and have it all complicitously hushed up by mobs of enablers back in the seventies.
Also the demand may be repressed but it is still enormous, there are literally tens of millions of people out there who are downloading CP on any given day. That seems like quite a lot of demand for CP to me. Also essentially none of them are paying for it.
Although I’m not familiar with the numbers you admitted yourself there are large numbers doing this unwittingly who have no idea CP is mingled in with the jailbait porn they are downloading.
But I absolutely agree the demand is enormous. Just think of the type of floodgates you’d be opening by repealing its illegality and the kind of profits that could be made by creating original premium content for a crowd so willing to fork over cold hard cash for recycled images.
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How is money paid by consumer only covering the cost of distribution? If that were true, there would be no incentive for distributor to distribute product if he's not turning a profit. The money paid by consumer goes directly into the pocket of the producer sans the distributor's take.
The problem with making no distinction between simply distributing child pornography and the production of child pornography, is that there is a very real moral difference between harming children and not harming children.
Once you take the harm of real physical children out of the equation, then it becomes a very dull power struggle among elites and a matter of propaganda between countries as to whom should control whom.
What surprises me is your willingness to minimize science down to what you "think is correct" as if it were no more than an opinion, like it were an art critique with equal subjective value as any other art critique. Why do you do that when science is not a subjective opinion? It's knowledge of the universe we live in based on testable hypotheses through the rigorous process of scientific method. It's founded in empirical reality, not opinion or fiction. Yet you treat it as if it had no more value than an opinion. It's really bizarre.
I like this argument, because it makes it clear that both of you want to make schools teach what you think they should.
Schools should be forced to teach their curriculums based on Scientific understanding as we currently understand it.
Schools should be forced to teach only current Science. However, who is going to make them?
The government?
Seriously, are you crypto-religious? If so, I think it's better that you just came out of the closet and admitted to being religious than pretend to not be while giving the religious perspective equal weight to the scientific perspective. It's OK if you are, I just think it's better if you came out and admitted it so I knew where you were coming from.
He's right for hiding the fact if he's religious, as he's outnumbered severely.
Most people on Tor hide their identities not merely because we're dealing in the traffic of contraband, but also because of certain groups forcing the situation of contraband and its traffic upon us.
I agree with you that there have been a great number of intelligent people that have been religious and still are. But these people aren't dogmatists. There are quite a few religious people that are able to co-exist with science.
The culture among the Scientific community and the culture among certain denominations of certain mainstream religions are not compatible, arguing that the culture of Christianity or Islam is somehow compatible with the culture of the Scientific community is like arguing that it does not matter that you believe the sky is purple, I will tolerate your delusions in exchange for not being shot for saying the world is not flat.
In fact the Catholic Church for centuries had been the epicenter of intellectual thought and scientific development.
During the Dark Ages. My dad is Catholic, and he feels that the Enlightenment was a great betrayal, even greater than the Protestant churches all turning against Rome and the Pope.
I love my Dad dearly, and I think he's a great person, but that does not mean he's factually correct.
Although the Church contained many great luminary minds, they also are responsible for witch hunts and the Crusades. Let us not forget that.
But religious types like these would never deny their children scientific knowledge. They would see it as sacrilege as I do to deny ones children an education about fundamental truths of the world we live in.
Not all people are willing to allow their children to make up their own minds.
Not all people think that religion is something that should stand rigorous Scientific validation and testing.
My dad sees no conflict between Science and Reason, and his Church, and although I have to admit that the Catholics are very professional and rigorous in their thinking, it does not change the fact that the Catholic Church invented the word dogma.
I'm talking about the dogmatists that would refuse their kid the chance to learn these truths (not opinion but FACTS).
Children are smart and often arrive at the truth without parental permission. This is why schools exist, to beat the truth out of children.
The thing is you value the rights of deluded dogmatists to teach fucked up bullshit to their children more than you value children being taught things that are correct. Why would you side with deluded dogmatist over innocent kids unless you are religious yourself?
So you are no different, you want to teach Science and Reason to children against their parents' wishes? You want to use the Big Stick of Government to tear families apart.
Lets say that it is morally fine that you destroy families and go against parental authority on anything.
What do you replace those families with? Do you have an alternative?
Are you willing to design and pay for an alternative?
These kids would never get the chance to be become a religious scientist because they were denied a scientific education. Maybe it's because you don't care about anyone else but you or your kids.
Do you have children? Do you plan on having children?
Libertarians I've met seem to be like that, very self centered and Ayn Rand worshiping, they don't seem to give two shits about the rest of the society they live in. That could be another reason why that it wouldn't bother you to use force to keep innocent kids ignorant of reality, as long as they weren't your kids you wouldn't care. The other reason I can think of is because you are religious.
I like this statement. So whose responsibility is it to take these children away from their families and teach them Science?
Do you think real Science is taught in schools? If not, what would you do about it?
What would you do? Just leave the children homeless, or worse, in foster homes?
But right now, no one is forcing your kids to learn creationism. It doesn't bother you in the slightest that you would be forcing innocent kids to remain ignorant just because their parents blew a fuse? You see the only reason I can think of that you would adopt such a position is if you are actually religious yourself but for whatever reasons don't want to admit it.
He's right for hiding it.
But minding your own business in the face of injustice makes you complicit.
Damn right it does.
You obviously feel strong enough about some injustices to take a stand. But to not take a stand when innocent children are being victimized is deplorable.
You have no idea what I have seen.
Sounds like you're sloganeering. Are you seriously suggesting that teaching science to all students is a bad thing because it's ONE SIZE FITS ALL?
Is it your opinion that the scientific community is without fault, without arrogance, without factual incorrectness?
Even if the scientific community has the best story, which not everyone believes, is it your place to teach children The Truth?
Did you that there is a REASON why there are uniform education standards? Because if there wasn't there would be no objective way assessing students from school to school. If each school had their own curriculum based on whatever the fuck they want, do you really see that being a good thing?
I don't see why we need a government entity telling us what to teach to our kids. Like they know fuck all.
Think about it. Why would you think the libertarian answer of utter chaos in the course curriculum is what's "great about libertarianism"?
Anarchy is not chaos.
The opposite of some agency telling us what to teach our kids, regardless of their credentials, if any, is not chaos.
If we were to outlaw centralized curriculum, the obvious outcome would be that schools would use a number of certification agencies to ensure their schoolchildren could prove their capacity to get the job done. These certification agencies would all compete for the role of issuing the best certifications.
Guess what though. You can educate your children yourself so they don't believe the stuff you don't want them to believe. Just like creationists can tell their kids to disregard science class and believe in the fairy monster in the sky. But you don't control what your kids think, they are their own person. They can believe what they want.
You mad, bro? You are correct, however, parents should be responsible for teaching their own children. We do not need a government agency for any of that.
We can teach our children about Eris and the importance of worshipping Discordia, or even better, we could teach our kids all about the importance of Pastafarianism and about the noble struggles of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Seriously though, what's the difference between you and the distributor that bought it from the producer? You and the distributor are in the precise same role that you just described that you don't think is legal.
So you think that the government should make transmitting money illegal? You realize this is why Bitcoin is so important, right?
You both are paying the producer for the content. And didn't you say distribution should be legal? So you've just provided a clear contradiction to your original point. The link couldn't be clearer between a distributor buying it from the producer.
The problem here is that you are deliberately ignoring the distinction between directly funding the actual harm of children and distributing content after the fact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Vesalius
Science and medicine has made great progress due to Andreas Vesalius's work on anatomy, digging up dead corpses from graves, and then dissecting them in a secret laboratory.
You would throw away the entire field of human anatomy if you tried to avoid using the priceless documentation and content that was discovered from Andreas Vesalius.
His documentation of human anatomy is called De Humani Corporis Fabrica, in case you were curious.
Except it is an issue.
What is an issue, jpinkman, is that you'd give government vast powers, and think they would not abuse that power. That is folly.
Which p2p networks are you talking about?
Your mother's P2P network is to one to which he is referring.
What I'm thinking of is say someone likes a particular star or label or series or specializiation. If you go to a p2p network you have to spend time digging for what you're looking for as far as I'm aware. If you go to that label or star's website you have everything right there. You have all the various video standards available for download or stream and it's high quality and instant. I'm not aware of any p2p that has it all and has that kind of variety.
There are some private trackers to which you are not invited that offer choices like that.
Also, Interpol needs to suck a cock, seriously.
Risks and costs outweigh the benefits today. If you're going to start a business you run a cost-benefit analysis. That 500 million dollar industry would be if CP were legal to possess, distribute, and produce like adult porn. The industry pie has shrunk to zero with all 3 illegal with the penalties steep like you have now. The illegality depresses demand where legality would drive demand. So you make 2 of those 3 things legal you'd have most of that 500 million there to be had.
The solution obviously is to make forms of CP that do not involve harming children not just legal, but subsidized by government.
Loli and Shota artwork and similar does not involve molesting and hurting actual children, and yet, there's a huge, huge demand for it.
It has been scientifically proven that cartoon children (drawn by adults) does not increase the likelyhood of future criminal activity, including but not limited to molesting children. I'll need to dig up the study one of these days, I'm sure Kotaku has a copy of it archived.
Basics of supply and demand. For a transaction to happen, you have to have both. Making production illegal limits supply. But not doing anything about possession and distribution does NOT limit demand.
Someone hasn't done their research on the history of prohibition, it seems.
Making something illegal does nothing to change demand, sure, but it makes supply more risky, and more profitable.
Why not? Seriously, this is all econ 101. I encourage you take a macroeconomics class. This is elementary stuff. The financial incentives for CP would go through the roof if distribution and posession were legalized because 1) there would be no longer any risk to own and possess. 2) demand would go up as a result 3) increased demand would drive up the price 4)
Wait, how would demand be effected at all?
the increased price from incresaed demand would mean supply (which is virtually nil for pay content right now) would rise in attempt to meet that demand. But the supply would be constrained by illegality, but would have the benefit of stealth technologies and distributors who are immune from prosecution, and consumers who were immunite too. Such a condition is ripe for the price to attain such a height that it would make it worth it for commercial production to get involved.
That made no sense whatsoever.
Huh? What are you TALKING about?
That's what I want to know.
A chunk of that payment goes into the pocket of the producer who then uses the cash to keep the business functioning and continuing to exploit children and produce CP. The payment is directly supported and promoting the production of CP. When CP is produced a child is molested. That's what CP is.
Do you think Loli and Shota art counts as CP, then?
Don't get what you're saying.
What he is saying is that the production of child pornography, which involves the harm of children, has been outside the control of governments around the world for a very long time, and that prohibiting child pornography only harms people who are not actually involved in the harm of children.
Two wrongs do not make a right, just saying.
I do not like it when children are harmed, because children have the potential to become great people, kind people, people I talk to all of the time.
However, the government is not any better than people that produce child pornography. The assumption that government are the good guys makes me want to laugh at people who imply it.
You can't separate the demand for commercial CP from the production of commercial CP. One drives the other. Without the demand there's no production.
You think making child pornography illegal is going to make demand disappear? You think that prohibition is effective?
The real world does not live in the vacuum of PIR. That's why you couldn't make your metaphor work. There's no way to perfectly obfuscate demand in the real world. The demand for a product is half of what brings it to market, supply the other half.
So we should round up all of those CP-lovers and kill them all for their thoughtcrime! That'll make it better!
The price is entirely dependent upon where the demand curve intersects the supply curve. With no price there's no product. So your metaphor couldn't possibly apply.
"With no price."
Meaning that the price magically goes away when you make something punishable by law, huh?
What a macaroon.
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And now for my promised citations.
www.fd.org/pdf_lib/FJC2012/Child_Porn_Dangerousness.pdf
by Melissa Hamilton, JD, Ph.D
summary:
Does not show an offender typology, but is still nice reading for any who wish to be informed. It shows the scientific flaws of various government studies involving CP, points out that the market thesis (jpinkmans argument) has absolutely zero empirical support, explains that teenagers are some of the biggest producers of child porn, traditional organized crime is not involved in child porn, child sex abuse rates have dropped 62% since the internet became mainstream (and CP became available again), child porn offenders and molesters are distinct groups with minor overlap, most CP offenders have large collections of adult porn as well (making them likely pornography addicts and/or sexually indiscriminate rather than pedophiles), technically a large percentage of males have interest in child porn, a popular government study into correlation between child porn possession and sexual contact with minors included sexual contact with minors when CP offender was under age (how honest of them!).
Here is a typology from an FBI agent with 30 years of experience. It doesn't say the percentages though. Pornography addicts would likely fall under situational offender type a.
Preferential Offenders
a . pedophile: Offender, as previously discussed, with a definite preference for
children.
b. Diverse offender: Offender with a wide variety of paraphiliac or deviant sexu-
al interests, but no strong sexual preference for children. This offender was
previously referred to in my typology as the sexually indiscriminate.
c. Latent offender: Individual with potentially illegal but previously latent
sexual preferences who has more recently begun to criminally act out
when inhibitions are weakened after arousal patterns are fueled and vali-
dated through online computer communication.
Situational offenders:
a. "Normal” adolescent/adult: Usually a typical adolescent searching online
for pornography and sex or an impulsive/curious adult with newly found
access to a wide range of pornography and sexual opportunities.
b. Morally indiscriminate offender: Usually a power/anger-motivated sex of-
fender with a history of varied violent offenses. Parents, especially mothers,
who make their children available for sex with individuals on the Internet
would also most likely fit in this category.
c. Profiteer: The criminal just trying to make easy money. With the lowered
risk of identification and increased potential for profit, these individuals
have returned to trafficking in child pornography.
Miscellaneous “offenders:”
a. Media reporters: Individuals who erroneously believe they can go online
and traffic in child pornography and arrange meetings with suspected
child molesters as part of an authorized and valid news exposé.
b. Pranksters: Individuals who disseminate false or incriminating informa-
tion to embarrass the targets of their “dirty tricks.”
c. Older “boyfriends:” Individuals in their late teens or early 20s attempting to
sexually interact with adolescent girls or boys.
d. Overzealous citizens: Individuals who go overboard doing their own private
investigations into this problem. As will be discussed, investigators must be
cautious of all overzealous citizens offering their services in these cases.
here is another info clip from here: http://www.nlada.org/forensics/for_lib/Documents/1170859257.66/nladasubmission.doc
(note in particular that it says the frequently do not qualify for pedophilia)
Pornography and importuning offenders are often a different ‘breed’ of sex offender. These offenders often do not have a prior sex offense history. They rarely possess an antisocial personality disorder and frequently do not qualify for pedophilia. They may possess symptoms that fall under the rubric of the following categories:
Paraphilias (sexual deviancy disorders, i.e., pedophilia)
Hypersexual disorders
Obsessive compulsive disorders/Impulse Control Disorders
Online sexual problems/addictions
Other psychiatric disorders such as depression that include features of emotional loneliness and isolation or stem from environmental issues such as broken marriage and loss of employment. They may cope with these problems through inappropriate sexual activity.
The most relevant paraphilic disorder concerning pornography offenders and importuners would be pedophilia. One must experience recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child or children, generally age 13 years or younger.
All too often, a defendant is contacted by a law enforcement officer who imposters a 12 year old girl. The age of 12 is usually used to fulfill two purposes: to establish an age relevant to pedophilia and also to satisfy harsher penalties under sex offender laws. When considering this diagnosis, an expert should view all pornographic images to consider the ages of the children/adolescents as many of these pictures will be of teens older than age 13. The expert must determine if the individual was viewing pornography for 6 months or longer. One can technically be diagnosed with pedophilia by viewing child pornography (and not actually engaging in hands-on offending of youth). Such use must cause them impairment in social, occupational, or other areas of functioning.
Conversely, hypersexual disorders include a disturbance of more conventional sexual functioning such as masturbating or the use of pornography and at some point the use is compulsive and/or excessive and causes the person distress. Hypersexual disorders may also include cybersex (Internet related activities geared for sexual arousal and attracting others online).
....
INTERNET ADDICTION & EMOTIONAL AVOIDANCE
Many offenders who have possessed pornography on their computers and engaged in cyber-chat with underage females use the Internet to avoid negative emotional states, such as depression, anxiety, anger, boredom, and loneliness.
Quayle, E., Vaughan, M., & Taylor, M. (2006). Sex offenders, Internet child abuse images and emotional avoidance: The importance of values. Aggression and Violent Behavior (11). This is a critical point because these offenders may not be sexually deviant, rather they use sex as an outlet to deal with these emotional deficits.
The Internet serves as a device to access sexual material which ultimately assists in relieving one’s sexual arousal and alleviating emotional distress and dissatisfaction in one’s life. The Internet offers sex offenders an avenue to download pornography and masturbate to images which is in effect a rewarding and reinforcing process leading to further avoidance from dealing with one’s problems and human relationships.
Greenfield, D., & Orzack, M. (2002). The Electronic Bedroom: Clinical Assessment of Online Sexual Problems and Internet-Enabled Sexual Behavior. In A. Cooper (Ed.), Sex and the Internet: A Guidebook for Clinicians (pp. 129-146). This Internet behavior has an addictive quality with the subconscious process of avoiding negative emotional states.
Internet addiction includes an individual who has obsessive thoughts about the Internet and has volitional problems controlling Internet use leading to excessive amounts of time online and failure to meet the demands of their everyday life. They will likely experience negative emotional states when offline and increasing tolerance to the effects of being online while denying problematic behaviors in their lives. When online, they will have more positive feelings about themselves. This Internet addiction includes a behavioral sequence that has a rewarding and reinforcing quality that mimics an impulse control disorder such as Kleptomania. The images that stimulate sexual arousal, the anonymity with the computer use including anonymous chat rooms and typing on the computer, may play a role in making the Internet reinforcing.
An important feature, the anonymity of the computer use which includes having relationships with others, is critical to many of these offenders, perhaps especially the importuners. Importuning type offenders often lack relationships or are involved in dissatisfied and conflictual relationships/marriages and the chat rooms allow an outlet to have connections with others. This connection with others which may be legal (exposing oneself through webcams to other consenting adults) may be reinforcing and have an addictive quality. The adult male who searches for consenting women to view his ‘show’ may have a difficult time finding these women online. He may be afraid that the individuals he is exposing himself to are in fact homosexual men posing as women. His exposing activities which may not qualify for exhibitionism (because the viewers are not ‘unsuspecting strangers’) may be reinforcing to him when he does find viewers he deems appropriate. However, given his emotional deficits and need for anonymous connection, this type of offender is often vulnerable to an instant sex connection with an online law enforcement agent who he thinks is an adolescent female.
Importantly, one may question the differentiation of the behavioral reinforcement of the Internet use versus the function of the pornographic material itself.
Quayle, E., & Taylor, M. (2002). Child pornography and the Internet: Perpetuating a cycle of abuse. Deviant Behavior: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 23. Both resources serve the same purposes of obtaining reinforcing stimulation and avoiding negative mood and emotional states. The Internet functions as an anonymous device to access both connections with others via chat rooms as well as a resource to obtain pornographic images to masturbate to. Each behavioral sequence on the Internet serves as a motivation resulting in sexual arousal and orgasm which are pleasurable and intrinsically rewarding.
Pornography offenders are unlike contact ‘hands on’ sex offenders as the access to the Internet is available and immediate, controlled and anonymous. The predator who society fears is the individual who stalks children and abducts them on playgrounds eventually sexually assaulting them, often in a heinous fashion. Indeed, most pornography offenders do not use pornography as a vehicle to stimulate themselves to engage in a contact sex offense.
Well that is all I am going to post for now as I am having trouble to find any solid numbers in regards to the percentages of people arrested for CP crimes who qualify for a diagnosis of pedophilia versus pornography addiction. I know there is a pdf out there with such numbers though, as I recall reading it some years ago. I will continue looking and update this thread if I find it. Still I believe I have demonstrated citations proving that child pornography offenders fall somewhere on a wide typology that includes more than pedophiles, and additionally that they frequently do not qualify for pedophilia (as the last citation I give states).
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I'd just like to chime in that this thread is EPIC! I've never seen such a rational debate on the topic of child pornography. ok... carry on ;D
Indeed.
This thread is pretty vast.
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Ok. Based on your apparent command of the historical subject matter and without having independently confirmed these details I probably underestimated the commercial viability of repacking freely available content, at least within the CP industry. But I also think the fact that child porn consumers have shown such a willingness to pay for what is freely available also speaks to the enormous commercial possibilities for this market. In a sense it confirms reasons I’ve mentioned as to why people pay for premium content despite the fact that they could find some of the exact same content on p2p; it saves them the time of having to look for it and from the risk of not finding what they were looking for.
Sure there are plenty of idiots who are willing to pay for things they can get for free. The world is a large place and it would be foolish for me to think that there will not be thousands of people in it who are willing to pay for CP. I still maintain that they should not be treated as criminal unless it can be proven that they have knowingly and directly funded a child molester for the purpose of producing new child pornography. I also still maintain that with the rise of P2P, commercial CP distribution is going to be less valuable to those interested in obtaining CP.
You’re being really disingenuous here. So here’s a child completely dependent upon domineering religious parents for physical, financial, and emotional survival with their education strictly controlled and absent of any understanding of scientific knowledge and whose only exposure to science is the demonization of the subject by their nutjob parents. How freely do you believe that child could voluntarily choose to learn science and facts? It’s as outrageous as claiming the obliviously brainwashed could voluntarily and spontaneously choose to unbrainwash themselves.
The appearance of such disingenuity makes everything else you say here sound like a complete and total cop out if it didn’t already.
I guess what it really comes down to is I do not feel like we are responsible for the children of others, but I do feel that we have no right to dictate to others how they will raise their children, short of preventing them from abusing their children. I do not think that religious indoctrination is an abuse of such magnitude that it would justify external intervention. Even today there are groups that largely indoctrinate their children and cut off their access to external information, the Amish is one such population, however I do not believe that we must force the Amish to modernize themselves or to teach their children things that are at odds with their traditional faith. Does that mean that you now suspect me of being a closeted Amish person?
Also for the record again, I would like to clarify for everyone that I am indeed not a religious person, and I am quite openly a doubtful agnostic.
Maybe not absolute certainty. Epistemology might have us conclude the impossibility of this for anyone. But there are relative degrees of certainty no? How you might live your life might be radically different if you thought the probability of the christian narrative had an 80% chance from being true than 20%. I’m actually not in disagreement with anything you just said, just your absolutist approach based on your inability to know with certainty 100% that religious zealots aren’t right, that you can’t use some of your militant libertarianism to ensure their kids are being given a choice to decide whether to follow in the footsteps of their parents or not. Holding out the possibility of that .000001% likelihood of an outcome that you are 99.999999% certain is false seems so ridiculousy futile while making you look so small and petty it makes one wonder why you would insist on it. And even here I probably still vastly underestimated the unlikelihood of a lake of fire being a real destination for “sinners” following death.
Yeah you did vastly overestimate the probability of the Christian beliefs mapping to reality, it approaches zero so closely that I could fill the screen up with zeros prior to putting a 1. It seems we do not disagree on this, rather we disagree on if we have the right to force others to teach their children the things that have the highest probability of being true or not.
In light of your provided reference I see it has happened on very rare occasions, although most of the time efforts were made to introduce such things such proposals were soundly defeated. But your comparison with the unconstituionality of child porn is a poor one. The founders made no mention of child porn as it didn’t yet exist. Furthermore, restrictions on 1st amendment rights that don’t appear explicitly in the constitution has long been established by the courts as constitutional and desired in limited and exceptional instances. The founders, however, did have strong and explicit feelings about church and state separation which is why courts will continue to quash these cases that appear before it quickly. Also, it’s not that the system didn’t work. It’s only that it didn’t work as fast as you or I would have liked when curriculum was stealth changed by religionists through the introduction of a storybook rendition of creationism. It would seem the lesson to be drawn is to remain vigilant about looking out for these sorts of shenanigans so they can be challenged in court as soon as its identified. Not to change the system altogether so this sort of stuff doesn’t happen. Because it’s not like a government run by your militant libertarian cabal would be perfect either. If you believe in due process a case like this would still need to appear before a court to determine and assess guilt, even if it’s a private court. Or maybe you think the wealthy oligarchs that would certainly own these schools should be able to aribtrarily decide what happened and who was at fault. But that’s still no guarantee that the oligarch will make an actionable decision faster than you or I would have liked or to prevent such a thing from happening.
I also really think these wealthy oligarchs who would rule over their private property like mini-despots in your world of no public property would really do a number on due process even if there were private courts although I see no reason that such a thing would exist, if they did they would resemble how private arbitration works today. Yet as biased as arbitration is today slanting heavily towards their court’s employer, the private court in your world would be an order of magnitude worse because there would be even less checks and balances to demand equity with no government.
Certainly it has come to light on rare occasions, however you are naive to think that schools do not routinely expose the children they teach to religion. I have had teachers at public schools who knew of my lack of faith tell me that they think it is insane I risk my eternal soul. Indeed, I had one tell me while looking down his nose at me, that it is "too bad" that I am not a Christian. Although they did not try to teach me intelligent design. I cannot recall if in our daily pledge of allegiance to the state if we said "one nation under God", but I assume that we did as it is part of the pledge.
Also, the founders made no mentions of Ak-47s either, but it is widely believed that we have the constitutional right to own these weapons. Likewise the constitution promises us freedom of speech and of the press. Admittedly there have been restrictions placed on freedom of speech, as well as the firearms that we are allowed to own. It makes sense that we cannot falsely yell fire in a crowded room, at least it makes sense so long as we live in a society that doesn't respect the rights of property owners enough to let them decide the rules of their own property. The courts have held that freedom of speech can be violated when there is a compelling reason to do so, with a clear societal benefit in doing so. I would maintain that this is not the case for child pornography possession in particular, as numerous studies have shown that there is no true correlation between child pornography possession and sex crimes against children. I would also extend this to distribution, although of course not production short of non coerced self production. In fact I would argue that there is a compelling reason with a clear societal benefit in legalizing the possession and distribution of child pornography, as numerous studies have concluded that the access to child pornography in an area strongly negatively correlates with the rate of child sex abuse in said area. Thus the courts ban of child pornography possession not only does not meet the criteria required for restricting our right to freedom of speech, but it actually does the exact opposite of what they intended. This is what happens when uninformed and emotionally charged people are given power, they make decisions that seem to be correct to them but are incorrect due to their lack of knowledge and inability to reason.
Additionally our constitutional right to freedom of and from religion is also routinely violated. People in the church of Santo Daime are given an exception to the controlled substance act that allows them to consume DMT, Native Americans of certain religious backgrounds are given exceptions to the controlled substance act allowing them to use mescaline and additionally Catholic children are given exceptions to alcohol laws in order for them to be allowed to take their communion. These are all clear violations of the constitution. In short, essentially every single part of the constitution has been and continues to be violated by the government. It is essentially a worthless document and it is used more for propaganda and as a political talking point than anything. None of the major political parties in the United States actually want to follow the constitution, and they don't. Libertarians are the only ones who actually like the majority of the constitution of the USA.
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OK, so tell me. If the parents had brainwashed their kids to become willing, complicit, and consensual sex slaves and incorporated it into their religious dogma it would be ok with you?
I believe that at some ages a child is incapable of giving consent to sexual activity and thus at these ages it is justified for us to intervene in preventing them from being taken advantage of by their family members and/or others.
Here’s the rub. When you talk about militant libertarianism seizing and governing a society by force, it’s not enough to sit around passively saying you do or do not claim something. Policy would be built on these ideas that you do or do not claim which would be followed by real world effects. So the question is whether you believe parents own their children. And the answer has to be definitive as it’s not enough to say that “you do not claim that parents own their children” because you’re the one proposing to run a society by your ideals so you really should start making claims instead of trying to dodge these sorts of big picture questions by only stating what you do not claim. You either claim parents own their children or claim they do not and if the latter you should be willing to stop parents doing this with force if necessary or else what’s the point of making such a claim?
I do not believe that parents own their children. I do believe that parents have a responsibility to provide to their children up to a certain point and age. I do believe that a child is free to leave his parents if he so desires, and to obtain resources and education in any way he is capable of doing. Primarily I do not think that I own the children of others, and thus I do not believe I have the right to force them to learn the things that I strongly believe to be correct.
Because really, I'm still have the hardest time wrapping my head around what this militant libertarian silliness would look like in actuality. No government. Just roving packs of armed-to-the-teeth militant libertarian vigilantes going around like a gang of thugs enforcing private law with brute force against those they suspect of violating the law as arbitrarily decreed by their employer. Judge, jury, and likely executioners too all wrapped up into one uber administrator of justice y0h? Just think of how much dough would be saved for not having to spend a dime on due process in this world where everyone is "free". Oh yeah, but that's not public money going to a public court again. The dime is being saved by the mini-despot who owns the property and goes instead to his private pinkerton army to enforce his law. The price of freedom y0h.
Essentially there would be private defense agencies. These agencies would be funded solely by their customers. They would have lists of things that they would be willing to enforce. It would be similar to insurance in a way. If your home is burglarized, they may agree to reimburse you for your losses provided that you transfer to them the right to collect from the criminal. Then they will be motivated to find the criminal to recoup on the losses they sustained by reimbursing you. After apprehending the person they believe to be the burglar, they would need to consult with his defense agency as well. A process for determining guilt would need to be agreed upon between the two agencies. If the burglars defense agency is unwilling to do this, then force would likely have to be used against their client and/or them (depending on if they resist the force used against their client). The primary goal of the defense agency is to recover the profit loss of reimbursing their customer and apprehending the criminal, and it is likely that they will forfeit the criminals assets in order to do this. The exact amount of asset forfeiture will be determined by agreement between the two private defense agencies, likely with contractual bindings as well (for example, the criminals defense agency is unlikely to tolerate a death penalty for the stealing of a candy bar). In cases where the criminal has no defense agency, he will be more at the mercy of the defense agency accusing him of theft. However, it will not be in this defense agencies best interests to pay for his long term incarceration, as that will cost them money for no benefit. Also, it is not in their best interests to execute him, as an organization that executes people for relatively minor crimes will come to be seen as a threat by other defense agencies, and preemptively incapacitated.
One of the best benefits of having private defense agencies rather than public banditry agencies, is that victimless crimes will soon become impossible to enforce. Nobody in their right mind is going to agree to fund things such as the war on drugs, it would be of absolutely no advantage to them. Now there will still be criminal organizations such as the DEA, who try to make their livings by robbing and possibly even enslaving drug users, but they will be seen as the criminals that they are, and they will have to go up against the private defense agencies protecting the drug dealers. Additionally, even if a drug dealer has no private defense agency representing him, it is in the best interests of all drug dealers in the criminal bandits of the DEA are preemptively incapacitated.
Trust me when I say I would never accuse you of being utilitarian. Your ruthless refusal so far to waver from ideology in order to spare even one child from sexual exploitation or religious brainwashing makes it rather clear you are more an anti-utilitarian that is opportunistically adopting the ostensible utilitarianism of this specious argument for less-than-utilitarian reasons. But as to your noble cause of wanting to save the "unwittingly distributing" dupes, you said yourself that LE is pretty good these days about distinguishing the unwitting from the intentional when deciding who and who not to pursue. So now you're claiming there are "millions of unwitting distributors" getting popped today? It doesn't sound as utilitarian as you're making it out to be because AFAICT, you're pulling these numbers out of your ass.
To their slight favor, law enforcement appear to typically use some discretion in order to pursue targets that are more likely to commit crimes against children, and they are less likely to pursue minor offenders, however this is not always the case it is typically true. Their system of determining who to pursue uses a sliding scale that takes into account the extremity of the pornography (simple nudity to torture) the age of those in the photographs/videos (newborns to 17 year olds) the number of illegal items possessed (from 1 to millions) the level of networking the offender is involved in (from none to part of a closed membership security oriented group), the level of involvement the offender has with CP (from viewing without saving to production), and if there are any signs of the offender planning to engage in molestation. That said, with the rise of P2P distribution, law enforcement are much less able to distinguish between people who intended only to view some images and people who are distributors. This is because P2P software generally shares all downloaded content, and the person who would have once been a low priority target for having viewed a dozen CP images, now becomes a much higher priority target for continuously sharing a dozen CP images from his IP address. I do not have exact numbers, but I can imagine that a great many of the millions of people sharing CP on public P2P networks, never intended to be CP distributors but rather only intended to be CP possessors. This has some amount of evidence backing it, it is quite typical for those arrested for distribution to claim that they were unaware their P2P software had made the images available. This is particularly troubling, as the amount of effort LE puts into apprehending CP possessors is much much less than the amount of effort they put into apprehending CP distributors.
What is little or temporary about protecting kids from sexual exploitation?
Correct me if I’m wrong but what I hear you saying then is that you now believe the purchase or distribution of child porn from its producer (as opposed to repackaged content) should be illegal but you have no way of enforcing that illegality since there would be no good way to determine whether a distributor is knew the producer?
If it can be proven that a distributor has paid for a child to be molested, then I believe that they should be treated as criminals. If it cannot be proven though, I am not convinced that they have done anything that should be treated as criminal. There is a massive difference between paying for a child to be molested and paying for recycled images from ten or twenty years ago. Ignoring this difference, at the cost of the liberties of those who are paying for old images, in order to be better able to combat those who actually are paying for children to be molested, is sacrificing liberty for security.
So just think of the mountain of cash they would have made had they been producing fresh quality content instead of recycling.
I think they would have made almost exactly as much.
Open source developers code it for free for the prestige, bragging rights, and to bolster their professional pedigrees. There are indirect but real financial rewards from raising their profile this way.
A lot of CP is produced for bragging rights in CP trading communities.
They have the need and skillz. Amateur child porn producers do it for sick thrills and voyeuristic and exhibitionary reasons. They’re not all about raising the profiles for bragging rights unless they’re looking to get popped and take themselves out of the game
Although all of what you have said is true, they also do frequently do it for bragging rights in their own communities. One of the biggest reasons they do it is to be given membership to producer only groups.
. They’re not doing it to improve the financial rewards in their professional life. And the average amateur producer will have neither the time, resources, nor skillz to produce high end content. The small percentage of them who do have the time, resources, and skillz are have no incentive to get in the game of producing high end content right now. Why? Because the risks are too high and the return of investment too low as there are no easy ways to monetize the return on their high end content. There’s huge demand for drugs through the mail too, you don’t think vendors would stop vending on SR should bitcoin become defunct even though enormous demand would remain? Of course they would. The inability to monetize demand makes it not worth the expense for businesses. Simple economics. Costs exceed benefits.
People were vending drugs online years before Bitcoin was created. A lot of people use western union with fake ID to take payment to this very day.
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I don’t see how you can call marked increases to the bottom line through sales “speculative” demand. Looks like a tangible increase in demand to me. And since we are discussing commercialization, I still don’t see the use of this metaphor. I’m against legalizing possession and distribution because of the harm it incurs. If these acts happened in a vacuum that made it impossible to harm anyone else I wouldn’t be. If it didn't harm anyone sexual attraction to prepubescent children could just be another sexual fetish, a sexual preference even, and I wouldn't give two shits about what pedophiles did. But it’s not useful to speculate on that because facts don’t exist independently in vacuums IRL. And we are talking about child porn and not widgets in a mental masurbatory math exercise.
You would charge for access to a PIR system that holds many things including CP. Since the payment is for access to the system, and the content downloaded from
the system cannot be determined by anyone, it thus masks the demand for the content both from a financial perspective and also from the perspective of nobody knows that the content is actually downloaded. Child porn essentially is a widget in a math exercise, just as all other data represented with 1's and 0's is.
Furthermore, knowledge of the heavy psychological damage incurred upon victims of child sex abuse has only become prominent over the last 30 years or so with awareness spreading gradually during that time around the globe. It's why massive underage sex scandals could even come to light at all against religious orgs as powerful as the Catholic Church. It's why pedos like Gary Glitter can find no safe refuge in the world where he can safely practice his desire of underage sex, while serial child sex abuser Jimmy Saville could go to town on hoards of children and have it all complicitously hushed up by mobs of enablers back in the seventies.
Sure child sex abuse causes horribly psychological damage to the victims of it. However I am entirely unconvinced that there is a magical voodoo revictimization process that somehow instantaneously occurs when someone looks at CP. A CP file is just a bunch of 1's and 0's when you get down to it, looking at how a particular series of 1's and 0's causes pixels on your monitor to color themselves does not have a magical effect on the subjects portrayed in the images.
Although I’m not familiar with the numbers you admitted yourself there are large numbers doing this unwittingly who have no idea CP is mingled in with the jailbait porn they are downloading.
I am familiar with the numbers. There are tens of millions of people on P2P networks intentionally seeking out and downloading very underage CP, often unwittingly becoming distributors in doing so. There are also a lot of people who unwittingly download jailbait porn, which actually is considered to be CP, from many clearnet porn sites that allow user uploadable content. And there are some cases where prepubescent porn makes its way to such sites as well, although on mainstream porn sites you will be much less likely to find content like this than to find jailbait porn. CP is quite the epidemic at this point in time, the number of people becoming involved with it is growing at an extremely rapid rate that shows no signs of slowing down. And it is largely not child molesters but simply curious idiots on P2P networks who don't realize how easy it is for them to be caught, or that after viewing some images they will automatically start distributing them. That is really the saddest part about CP laws, the fact that a great many good and normal people are finding themselves facing many years in prison and lifetimes as registered sex offenders for finding some image or video from a P2P network search (perhaps not even a search for CP), downloading it out of curiosity and unwittingly becoming a distributor of child pornography. It is the most unfair and cruel fate for these people to have their entire lives completely and thoroughly ruined for downloading a bunch of 1's and 0's. I am grateful that federal judges particularly are starting to speak out about the cruelty of child pornography laws, as well as some other small parts of the legal system. But there is so much misinformation in peoples heads, so many bullshit government studies with falsified statistics, so much misinformation and fear mongering and term merging from the media and so many political points to be won for being hard on CP offenders, that countless more people are going to be fucked by these laws for many more years before anything significantly changes. And really it is insane that even if someone faces only a maximum of five years in prison for having a CP image, they quickly can go away for life once they have twenty images. They are almost entirely at the mercy of the courts in regards to if they will die in prison or be released on probation, and it has gone either way in cases that are otherwise essentially the same. Where is the justice in that?
I would like to point out that the people arguing against reduced sentences for CP possession in the following article, are citing LIES and FALSIFIED STUDIES. They are either misled by propaganda or they themselves are continuing to intentionally spread lies and propaganda. As the citation I gave above shows, one of their primary studies that showed 85% of CP offenders had had sexual contact with a child, INCLUDED SEXUAL CONTACT WHEN THE OFFENDER WAS A MINOR. That is like saying we should have strict sentences for having yellow as your favorite color, because 85% of people who have yellow as their favorite color had sex with one of their peers when they were in highschool! It is god damn shameful that we have people in authority positions making such bullshit studies (they were probably trained by the people "studying" drugs) and it is a god damn shame that the media and politicians regurgitate these lies so much that they enter into the minds of the public as truth. It is a sham, they try to demonize people so they can get them sent to prisons and rehabilitation facilities and on probation, so that they can fund themselves with more and more money, fund their private industry partners (a lot of private industry involvement in making tools for tracking down CP offenders, it is a multi billion dollar industry for fucks sake!), gain political points, etc. They are literally selling harmless, normal people into a lifetime of fucking slavery, people who go to prison for CP offenses are just as much slaves to the state as people who go to prison for drug offenses, the dirty tactics used by the state to turn society rabidly against these people are the same dirty tactics they use to turn society against drug users. It is a farce and it is a fucking shame.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/04/29/debate-rages-over-severity-child-porn-sentences/
NEW YORK – Their crimes are so loathsome that some hardened courtroom veterans recoil at viewing the evidence. Yet child-pornography offenders are now the focus of an intense debate within the legal community as to whether the federal sentences they face have become, in many cases, too severe.
By the end of this year, after a review dating to 2009, the U.S. Sentencing Commission plans to release a report that's likely to propose changes to the sentencing guidelines that it oversees. It's a daunting task, given the polarized viewpoints that the commission is weighing.
The issue "is highly charged, both emotionally and politically," said one of the six commissioners, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell.
On one side of the debate, many federal judges and public defenders say repeated moves by Congress to toughen the penalties over the past 25 years have badly skewed the guidelines, to the point where offenders who possess and distribute child pornography can go to prison for longer than those who actually rape or sexually abuse a child. In a 2010 survey of federal judges by the Sentencing Commission, about 70 percent said the proposed ranges of sentences for possession and receipt of child pornography were too high. Demonstrating their displeasure, federal judges issued child porn sentences below the guidelines 45 percent of the time in 2010, more than double the rate for all other crimes.
On the other hand, some prosecutors and members of Congress, as well as advocates for sexual-abuse victims, oppose any push for more leniency. At a public hearing in February, the Sentencing Commission received a victim's statement lamenting that child pornography offenders "are being entertained by my shame and pain."
"They need to be taught how much pain they inflict and a greater term of imprisonment will teach them that, (and) will comfort victims seeking justice," the victim said. "I don't believe that short periods of imprisonment will accomplish these things."
Once completed, the Sentencing Commission report will be submitted to Congress, which could shelve it or incorporate its recommendations into new legislation.
Already, the commission has conveyed some concerns. In a 2010 report on mandatory minimum sentences, the commission said the penalties for certain child pornography offenses "may be excessively severe and as a result are being applied inconsistently."
However, similar misgivings voiced by the commission in previous years failed to deter Congress from repeatedly ratcheting up the penalties — including legislation in 2003 that more than doubled average sentences for child pornography crimes.
Many of the offenses carry a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison, and the guidelines call for additional penalties — known as enhancements — based on a range of factors, such as the age of the children depicted in the imagery and whether a computer was used in the crime. As of last year, the median sentence was seven years.
In a recent article for the journal of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, former Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and former federal prosecutor Linda Dale Hoffa criticized the approach by Congress.
"The fact that child pornography offenders can be given longer sentences than child abusers or violent offenders reflects a lack of care by Congress," Specter and Hoffa wrote. "In the rush to prove itself hostile to individuals who possess or distribute child pornography, Congress has obscured the real distinctions between different offenders."
Hoffa doubts Congress will be eager to ease the guidelines.
"If you vote against these harsher penalties, the sound bite is that you're protecting child pornographers, and that could be the end of somebody's career," she said in a telephone interview. "It's a political radioactive hot potato."
As a backdrop to the sentencing debate, Internet-based child pornography has proliferated, and the crime is an increasingly high priority for federal law enforcement agents.
According to the Justice Department, federal prosecutors obtained at least 2,713 indictments for sexual exploitation of minors in 2011, up from 1,901 in 2006. This month, the FBI announced that the latest addition to its "Ten Most Wanted Fugitives" is a former elementary school teacher, Eric Justin Toth, who is accused of possessing and producing child pornography.
In testimony to the Sentencing Commission in February, three Justice Department experts said the sentencing guidelines for child pornography should be revised — not with the overall aim of making them more lenient, but rather to help the courts do a better job of differentiating among offenders and determining appropriate punishment.
"The guideline has not kept pace with technological advancements in both computer media and Internet and software technologies," the DOJ experts said.
As opposed to focusing on the quantity of images collected by an offender, the experts said revised guidelines could take into account the length of time the offender has been involved with child porn, the degree of sophistication of measures taken to avoid detection, and the extent to which the offender communicates as part of a network.
One such network, called Dreamboard, was unraveled by investigators last year. In all, 72 people were charged with participating in an international, members-only Internet club created to trade tens of thousands of images and videos of sexually abused children.
There's one point of agreement in the sentencing debate: All parties agree that penalties should remain severe — or be toughened — for those who produce and promote child pornography.
A key point of contention, by contrast, is the degree to which offenders charged with receipt and possession of child porn pose a risk of physically abusing children themselves, as opposed to looking at images of abuse.
New York-based federal defender Deirdre von Dornum told the Sentencing Commission there's insufficient evidence to prove a strong correlation. Child pornography offenders have a lower recidivism rate than child molesters, she said, and many could be safely monitored via supervised probation.
"Many of these individuals have stable employment, family support, and no prior contact with the criminal justice system," she said. "Punitive terms of imprisonment do nothing but weaken or destroy pro-social influences in their lives."
The Justice Department experts were more skeptical, citing research suggesting that a substantial percentage of child-pornography offenders are pedophiles who either have sexually abused a child or might try to do so.
Von Dornum challenged the premise that tough sentencing would dry up the market for child porn.
"Because child pornography is free, widely available and easy to produce, it is not subject to the normal laws of supply and demand," she said, noting that many countries do not even have laws against it.
She also said the sentencing guidelines contribute to unjust disparities, depending on whether a prosecutor charged a defendant with receipt of child pornography, as well as possession. Under the guidelines, receipt carries a five-year mandatory minimum sentence, but possession has no mandatory minimum.
According to von Dornum, the average sentence for a federal child pornography offense in 2010 was higher than for all other offenses except murder and kidnapping. Indeed, the average was about six months higher than for sexual abuse offenders.
"Yet there is significant political pressure to do nothing but continue to increase penalties for these offenders, the 'modern-day untouchables,'" she testified. She urged the commission "to take the difficult step of rising above the politics and fear" and revise the sentencing framework.
Another witness at the February hearing — testifying on behalf of her fellow federal judges in the Judicial Conference of the United States — was Casey Rodgers, chief judge of the Northern District of Florida.
Rodgers stressed that child pornography entails "unspeakable acts by the offenders and unimaginable harm to the child victims."
Nonetheless, she said doubts are growing within the judiciary about the reasonableness of the sentencing guidelines, as demonstrated by the extent to which judges are refusing to follow them and issuing lower sentences.
Rodgers urged the commission to propose repealing the mandatory minimum sentence for receipt of child porn. And she said the guidelines should be revised to help judges better identify which offenders are at greatest risk of committing future sexual abuse of children.
"Lengthy terms of incarceration alone will not adequately address the harms of these offenders," she testified. "Greater reliance on the use of supervised release should be considered."
Troy Stabenow, an assistant federal public defender in Missouri, said the judges' resistance to the sentencing guidelines was "pretty courageous,"
"They're doing it knowing they're likely be lambasted in the media," he said. "They wouldn't be doing it unless they really believe a lot of typical offenders they see are not the menace that people assume they are."
In Congress, some Republicans have voiced dismay at the judges' stance, as evidenced by a recent letter to the Sentencing Commission from Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., chairman of the House Subcommittee on Crime.
"I am concerned that the federal judiciary is failing to consider the severity of child pornography and its victims," he wrote. "This departure rate is disturbing and threatens the most vulnerable among us, our children."
Among Democrats in Congress, there are numerous critics of mandatory minimum sentences — for example, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. But members of Leahy's staff doubt there will be any groundswell of support in Congress for easing child-pornography sentences.
One of the few recent rollbacks of sentencing laws came in 2010 when Congress reduced the difference between sentences for crimes committed by crack cocaine and powder cocaine users.
The disparity had been assailed by civil-rights advocates as a form of racial discrimination because most people convicted of crack crimes were black.
There's no equivalent advocacy campaign on behalf of child porn offenders, about 90 percent of whom are white.
"You don't have any built-in sympathy," said Jelani Jefferson Exum, a professor at the University of Toledo College of Law. "Who's going to stand up and say, 'I'm fighting for child porn possessors.'"
Susan Howley, public policy director for the National Center for Victims of Crime, has been urging those involved in the debate to keep the victims in mind. She says they face higher risk of developing mental health disorders, sexual dysfunction and substance abuse problems.
"While sentencing does not appear to be the perfect tool to reduce the market for child abuse images, it is one of the few tools available," Howley told the public hearing in February. "Through sentencing we express to society, and to the individual victims and family members harmed, that we recognize the seriousness of this offense."
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I am entirely unconvinced that there is a magical voodoo revictimization process that somehow instantaneously occurs when someone looks at CP.
Hahah phony libertarian. The rights of the victim were abused by having their (C)rimescene (P)hotos spread all over the internet without their consent. This violated their rights to privacy. I thought you were committed to violent freedom, if so you should kill yourself for looking at CP as you jackbooted straight on the face of some kids privacy rights.
If pedos want to draw, render or animate CP and write about it who cares, but when you spread around anybody's rape pics be they kids or adults you're violating fundamental privacy. You'd be the first to cry if cops were handing out pics of rapist victim injuries they took in a hospital.
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The problem with making no distinction between simply distributing child pornography and the production of child pornography, is that there is a very real moral difference between harming children and not harming children.
I don't think you understood me then. I do draw a distinction. One drives supply and the other drives demand. Supply and demand are both integral to determining the price. You seem to think that distribution doesn't harm children. See my previous posts for my reasoning as to why this is not the case. Your attempt to make this an either/or is neglecting that there are real world consequences to financially supporting kiddie porn even if one doesn't directly participate in it.
I like this argument, because it makes it clear that both of you want to make schools teach what you think they should.
False equivalence. It's more nuanced than you're making it out to be.
He's right for hiding the fact if he's religious, as he's outnumbered severely.
Most people on Tor hide their identities not merely because we're dealing in the traffic of contraband, but also because of certain groups forcing the situation of contraband and its traffic upon us.
Actually TOR is the reason why he shouldn't have a problem admitting he's religious. Why not admit it if you're anonymously admitting it?
The culture among the Scientific community and the culture among certain denominations of certain mainstream religions are not compatible, arguing that the culture of Christianity or Islam is somehow compatible with the culture of the Scientific community is like arguing that it does not matter that you believe the sky is purple, I will tolerate your delusions in exchange for not being shot for saying the world is not flat.
You're preaching to the choir here.
Although the Church contained many great luminary minds, they also are responsible for witch hunts and the Crusades. Let us not forget that.
Couldn't agree more. Thomas Aquinas, one of the most brilliant philosophical minds of all time IMO (would make the top 5, even top 3 in my book) felt strongly that heretics should be burned at the stake.
Not all people are willing to allow their children to make up their own minds.
Not all people think that religion is something that should stand rigorous Scientific validation and testing.
My dad sees no conflict between Science and Reason, and his Church, and although I have to admit that the Catholics are very professional and rigorous in their thinking, it does not change the fact that the Catholic Church invented the word dogma.
Again, you're preaching to the choir.
Children are smart and often arrive at the truth without parental permission. This is why schools exist, to beat the truth out of children.
Yes children are smart, but they are still dependent upon their parents to survive. You'll have to clarify what you mean about schools.
So you are no different, you want to teach Science and Reason to children against their parents' wishes? You want to use the Big Stick of Government to tear families apart.
Lets say that it is morally fine that you destroy families and go against parental authority on anything.
False equivalence. Teaching a kid science in school does not mean their families will be torn apart. Should the parents decide to do that, that is of their own volition. Trying to hold education their kid receives about the empirical world we live in as responsible for parents destroying their own family is absurd.
Do you have children? Do you plan on having children?
Why do you care?
I like this statement. So whose responsibility is it to take these children away from their families and teach them Science?
No one said anything about separating them from their families except you. If its my characterization of libertarians that caused you offense, I'll just say that not all libertarians are dogmatists, I've met some that are very fair minded even though I disagree with them. But it's the dogmatists that always come across as exceptionally self centered.
Do you think real Science is taught in schools? If not, what would you do about it?
As opposed to fake science? Not sure I understand your question.
Is it your opinion that the scientific community is without fault, without arrogance, without factual incorrectness?
You've gotta be fucking kidding me. Of course there's plenty of that in the scientific community. You should immerse yourself in the scientific community if you're not sure. There's a key difference though between the scientific and religious communities about falsifiable hypotheses that it's hard to believe you could be that oblivious to.
Even if the scientific community has the best story, which not everyone believes, is it your place to teach children The Truth?
I believe that children should be taught the truth yes, as you might have inferred from my past volley in this thread with kfm. Whether they believe it or their wingnut parents is up to them.
I don't see why we need a government entity telling us what to teach to our kids. Like they know fuck all.
Straw man. No one said they know fuck all. Furthermore, no one's telling you what you can teach your kids. You can teach them fuck all if you want. Parents not clued in enough to know better are being told they cannot keep their kids uneducated and ignorant to scientific education. That's a not so subtle and quite important difference.
If we were to outlaw centralized curriculum, the obvious outcome would be that schools would use a number of certification agencies to ensure their schoolchildren could prove their capacity to get the job done. These certification agencies would all compete for the role of issuing the best certifications.
If you're trying to illustrate why anarchy is not chaos (which I actually agree that it's not), this narrative doesn't do a very good job. With no uniform standards just how do you expect they determine who had the best certifications? For free markets to work efficiently requires access to full information by consumers. Instead of providing clarity, your solution obscures. How you answer this question also opens you up to all sorts of potential externalities that would distort incentives to perfect competition.
You mad, bro? You are correct, however, parents should be responsible for teaching their own children. We do not need a government agency for any of that.
Straw man. There are no government agencies responsible for teaching children. You're oblivious to the obvious. Of course parents should be responsible for teaching their own children. But some don't.
We can teach our children about Eris and the importance of worshipping Discordia, or even better, we could teach our kids all about the importance of Pastafarianism and about the noble struggles of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
You could do that. But you shouldn't have the right to keep them from learning anything else.
So you think that the government should make transmitting money illegal? You realize this is why Bitcoin is so important, right?
Straw man. Never said that. Transmitting money for the production of commercial CP makes the transmitter an accessory to a crime though. Important difference there from just making transmitting money illegal.
The problem here is that you are deliberately ignoring the distinction between directly funding the actual harm of children and distributing content after the fact.
The problem here is that you are deliberately ignoring that payments go directly to supporting the commercial production of CP, which is directly involved in sexually exploiting children.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Vesalius
Science and medicine has made great progress due to Andreas Vesalius's work on anatomy, digging up dead corpses from graves, and then dissecting them in a secret laboratory.
You would throw away the entire field of human anatomy if you tried to avoid using the priceless documentation and content that was discovered from Andreas Vesalius.
His documentation of human anatomy is called De Humani Corporis Fabrica, in case you were curious.
U Mad Bro? We're talking about child porn. Not anatomy.
What is an issue, jpinkman, is that you'd give government vast powers, and think they would not abuse that power. That is folly.
What is an issue, nardine, is that pitiful shack you live in. I never said government is perfect. It's naturally going to be quite imperfect as we are imperfect. The important thing is that when abuse of power happens that there are levers available to the masses that allow them to legitimately reign in that power without having to resort to the use of force. Because *however imperfect*, our constitutional republic does have such safeguards in its checks and balances that do provide a measure of accountability to abuse of power.
What's folly is all that straw you're grazing on.
Your mother's P2P network is to one to which he is referring.
My mother? The one your catholic daddy taught you about? Problem is that's not my mother.
There are some private trackers to which you are not invited that offer choices like that.
And these invite-only private trackers aren't available to the public at large either. Your point?
Also, Interpol needs to suck a cock, seriously.
Can't argue with you there.
The solution obviously is to make forms of CP that do not involve harming children not just legal, but subsidized by government.
Loli and Shota artwork and similar does not involve molesting and hurting actual children, and yet, there's a huge, huge demand for it.
It has been scientifically proven that cartoon children (drawn by adults) does not increase the likelyhood of future criminal activity, including but not limited to molesting children. I'll need to dig up the study one of these days, I'm sure Kotaku has a copy of it archived.
I agree. No different than the Manga industry in Japan, which is protected and why they refuse to conform to western industrialized standards. The US laws in this regard are extreme. Computer generated images are also illegal. My attitude is that if it doesn't harm children then no harm no foul. Pedos need something to keep themselves occupied.
Basics of supply and demand. For a transaction to happen, you have to have both. Making production illegal limits supply. But not doing anything about possession and distribution does NOT limit demand.
Someone hasn't done their research on the history of prohibition, it seems.
Making something illegal does nothing to change demand, sure, but it makes supply more risky, and more profitable.
Someone hasn't done their research on this thread and appears thoroughly ignorant about supply and demand. Making possession and distribution illegal DOES change demand, it suppresses it by making it more risky to engage in it. Making production illegal suppresses supply. But so long as aggregate demand outpaces aggregate supply, the value and hence price, goes up. This output gap during prohibition was huge from the shortages in supply from illegality which is what drove the price sky high. This is different though than the variables involved in the CP industry. If you want to learn, read through the previous exchanges I had with Kwm it would save some redundancy of having to explain it again.
Wait, how would demand be effected at all?
Again, please read through previous exchanges. Also would help if you could familiarize yourself with a supply and demand chart and understand how it works. It's not difficult.
That made no sense whatsoever.
Economics. Supply and demand. See above. It can be hard to explain pre-algebra when basic long division is not understood.
That's what I want to know.
And that's for you to find out.
What he is saying is that the production of child pornography, which involves the harm of children, has been outside the control of governments around the world for a very long time, and that prohibiting child pornography only harms people who are not actually involved in the harm of children.
Which makes no sense. Murder has happened outside the control of government since the dawn of our species. Doesn't mean it shouldn't be illegal to commit. Again, please read through my previous exchanges. I've explained very clearly why I don't believe this train of thought is valid. If you want to address why I'm wrong, it helps to not reinvent the wheel.
However, the government is not any better than people that produce child pornography. The assumption that government are the good guys makes me want to laugh at people who imply it.
Straw man AND false equivalence. The values of implicit in the laws of a democratic goverment are generally reflected by the majority of the society governed. It is imperfect in this reflection because it takes time for the laws to change as societal values change. But to claim the government is not any better than people that produce child porn ... uh well you're going to have to explain yourself better than that. Not many would agree that agents representing government are going around raping children. You and David Ickes maybe.
You think making child pornography illegal is going to make demand disappear? You think that prohibition is effective?
Looks like you enjoy blowing straw out of your ass too. Got any other tricks? Or are you a one trick pony?
So we should round up all of those CP-lovers and kill them all for their thoughtcrime! That'll make it better!
All that straw in your gut must now be going to your head.
Meaning that the price magically goes away when you make something punishable by law, huh?
What a macaroon.
Straw man. No one said anything about price going away. See above and try and understand that the entire field of economics is based on the market forces of supply and demand and how that affects price. You should try and learn. Claiming economics is false just because you don't understand it just makes you look the tool.
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That is not a simple question but I vote yes. U have to add that if the government gives me the moral high ground by coming against me and trying to hurt me then yes I will be militant! I believe in Ron Paul as a true libertarian. Thats all I can say about this.
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OK, so tell me. If the parents had brainwashed their kids to become willing, complicit, and consensual sex slaves and incorporated it into their religious dogma it would be ok with you?
I believe that at some ages a child is incapable of giving consent to sexual activity and thus at these ages it is justified for us to intervene in preventing them from being taken advantage of by their family members and/or others.
Here’s the rub. When you talk about militant libertarianism seizing and governing a society by force, it’s not enough to sit around passively saying you do or do not claim something. Policy would be built on these ideas that you do or do not claim which would be followed by real world effects. So the question is whether you believe parents own their children. And the answer has to be definitive as it’s not enough to say that “you do not claim that parents own their children” because you’re the one proposing to run a society by your ideals so you really should start making claims instead of trying to dodge these sorts of big picture questions by only stating what you do not claim. You either claim parents own their children or claim they do not and if the latter you should be willing to stop parents doing this with force if necessary or else what’s the point of making such a claim?
I do not believe that parents own their children. I do believe that parents have a responsibility to provide to their children up to a certain point and age. I do believe that a child is free to leave his parents if he so desires, and to obtain resources and education in any way he is capable of doing. Primarily I do not think that I own the children of others, and thus I do not believe I have the right to force them to learn the things that I strongly believe to be correct.
Because really, I'm still have the hardest time wrapping my head around what this militant libertarian silliness would look like in actuality. No government. Just roving packs of armed-to-the-teeth militant libertarian vigilantes going around like a gang of thugs enforcing private law with brute force against those they suspect of violating the law as arbitrarily decreed by their employer. Judge, jury, and likely executioners too all wrapped up into one uber administrator of justice y0h? Just think of how much dough would be saved for not having to spend a dime on due process in this world where everyone is "free". Oh yeah, but that's not public money going to a public court again. The dime is being saved by the mini-despot who owns the property and goes instead to his private pinkerton army to enforce his law. The price of freedom y0h.
Essentially there would be private defense agencies. These agencies would be funded solely by their customers. They would have lists of things that they would be willing to enforce. It would be similar to insurance in a way. If your home is burglarized, they may agree to reimburse you for your losses provided that you transfer to them the right to collect from the criminal. Then they will be motivated to find the criminal to recoup on the losses they sustained by reimbursing you. After apprehending the person they believe to be the burglar, they would need to consult with his defense agency as well. A process for determining guilt would need to be agreed upon between the two agencies. If the burglars defense agency is unwilling to do this, then force would likely have to be used against their client and/or them (depending on if they resist the force used against their client). The primary goal of the defense agency is to recover the profit loss of reimbursing their customer and apprehending the criminal, and it is likely that they will forfeit the criminals assets in order to do this. The exact amount of asset forfeiture will be determined by agreement between the two private defense agencies, likely with contractual bindings as well (for example, the criminals defense agency is unlikely to tolerate a death penalty for the stealing of a candy bar). In cases where the criminal has no defense agency, he will be more at the mercy of the defense agency accusing him of theft. However, it will not be in this defense agencies best interests to pay for his long term incarceration, as that will cost them money for no benefit. Also, it is not in their best interests to execute him, as an organization that executes people for relatively minor crimes will come to be seen as a threat by other defense agencies, and preemptively incapacitated.
One of the best benefits of having private defense agencies rather than public banditry agencies, is that victimless crimes will soon become impossible to enforce. Nobody in their right mind is going to agree to fund things such as the war on drugs, it would be of absolutely no advantage to them. Now there will still be criminal organizations such as the DEA, who try to make their livings by robbing and possibly even enslaving drug users, but they will be seen as the criminals that they are, and they will have to go up against the private defense agencies protecting the drug dealers. Additionally, even if a drug dealer has no private defense agency representing him, it is in the best interests of all drug dealers in the criminal bandits of the DEA are preemptively incapacitated.
Trust me when I say I would never accuse you of being utilitarian. Your ruthless refusal so far to waver from ideology in order to spare even one child from sexual exploitation or religious brainwashing makes it rather clear you are more an anti-utilitarian that is opportunistically adopting the ostensible utilitarianism of this specious argument for less-than-utilitarian reasons. But as to your noble cause of wanting to save the "unwittingly distributing" dupes, you said yourself that LE is pretty good these days about distinguishing the unwitting from the intentional when deciding who and who not to pursue. So now you're claiming there are "millions of unwitting distributors" getting popped today? It doesn't sound as utilitarian as you're making it out to be because AFAICT, you're pulling these numbers out of your ass.
To their slight favor, law enforcement appear to typically use some discretion in order to pursue targets that are more likely to commit crimes against children, and they are less likely to pursue minor offenders, however this is not always the case it is typically true. Their system of determining who to pursue uses a sliding scale that takes into account the extremity of the pornography (simple nudity to torture) the age of those in the photographs/videos (newborns to 17 year olds) the number of illegal items possessed (from 1 to millions) the level of networking the offender is involved in (from none to part of a closed membership security oriented group), the level of involvement the offender has with CP (from viewing without saving to production), and if there are any signs of the offender planning to engage in molestation. That said, with the rise of P2P distribution, law enforcement are much less able to distinguish between people who intended only to view some images and people who are distributors. This is because P2P software generally shares all downloaded content, and the person who would have once been a low priority target for having viewed a dozen CP images, now becomes a much higher priority target for continuously sharing a dozen CP images from his IP address. I do not have exact numbers, but I can imagine that a great many of the millions of people sharing CP on public P2P networks, never intended to be CP distributors but rather only intended to be CP possessors. This has some amount of evidence backing it, it is quite typical for those arrested for distribution to claim that they were unaware their P2P software had made the images available. This is particularly troubling, as the amount of effort LE puts into apprehending CP possessors is much much less than the amount of effort they put into apprehending CP distributors.
What is little or temporary about protecting kids from sexual exploitation?
Correct me if I’m wrong but what I hear you saying then is that you now believe the purchase or distribution of child porn from its producer (as opposed to repackaged content) should be illegal but you have no way of enforcing that illegality since there would be no good way to determine whether a distributor is knew the producer?
If it can be proven that a distributor has paid for a child to be molested, then I believe that they should be treated as criminals. If it cannot be proven though, I am not convinced that they have done anything that should be treated as criminal. There is a massive difference between paying for a child to be molested and paying for recycled images from ten or twenty years ago. Ignoring this difference, at the cost of the liberties of those who are paying for old images, in order to be better able to combat those who actually are paying for children to be molested, is sacrificing liberty for security.
So just think of the mountain of cash they would have made had they been producing fresh quality content instead of recycling.
I think they would have made almost exactly as much.
Open source developers code it for free for the prestige, bragging rights, and to bolster their professional pedigrees. There are indirect but real financial rewards from raising their profile this way.
A lot of CP is produced for bragging rights in CP trading communities.
They have the need and skillz. Amateur child porn producers do it for sick thrills and voyeuristic and exhibitionary reasons. They’re not all about raising the profiles for bragging rights unless they’re looking to get popped and take themselves out of the game
Although all of what you have said is true, they also do frequently do it for bragging rights in their own communities. One of the biggest reasons they do it is to be given membership to producer only groups.
. They’re not doing it to improve the financial rewards in their professional life. And the average amateur producer will have neither the time, resources, nor skillz to produce high end content. The small percentage of them who do have the time, resources, and skillz are have no incentive to get in the game of producing high end content right now. Why? Because the risks are too high and the return of investment too low as there are no easy ways to monetize the return on their high end content. There’s huge demand for drugs through the mail too, you don’t think vendors would stop vending on SR should bitcoin become defunct even though enormous demand would remain? Of course they would. The inability to monetize demand makes it not worth the expense for businesses. Simple economics. Costs exceed benefits.
People were vending drugs online years before Bitcoin was created. A lot of people use western union with fake ID to take payment to this very day.
That doesnt have any common sense besides being a fucking sick ass example!
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OK, so tell me. If the parents had brainwashed their kids to become willing, complicit, and consensual sex slaves and incorporated it into their religious dogma it would be ok with you?
I believe that at some ages a child is incapable of giving consent to sexual activity and thus at these ages it is justified for us to intervene in preventing them from being taken advantage of by their family members and/or others.
Who is "us"? For whom is it justified for "us" to intervene? Who would be responsible for the children of such a sex cult? Why should "we" care? They are someone else's kids.
Here’s the rub. When you talk about militant libertarianism seizing and governing a society by force, it’s not enough to sit around passively saying you do or do not claim something. Policy would be built on these ideas that you do or do not claim which would be followed by real world effects. So the question is whether you believe parents own their children. And the answer has to be definitive as it’s not enough to say that “you do not claim that parents own their children” because you’re the one proposing to run a society by your ideals so you really should start making claims instead of trying to dodge these sorts of big picture questions by only stating what you do not claim. You either claim parents own their children or claim they do not and if the latter you should be willing to stop parents doing this with force if necessary or else what’s the point of making such a claim?
I do not believe that parents own their children. I do believe that parents have a responsibility to provide to their children up to a certain point and age. I do believe that a child is free to leave his parents if he so desires, and to obtain resources and education in any way he is capable of doing. Primarily I do not think that I own the children of others, and thus I do not believe I have the right to force them to learn the things that I strongly believe to be correct.
What age would this be? 11? 14? 20? Why do you choose that age? Is there any rhyme or reason to that particular age? Is it because your country says that is the "Age of Reason"? Does the legal "Age of Consent" in your country have any bearing on reality whatsoever?
So do all children on the planet fall under your responsibility?
What if the colonists of Mars decided to "initiate" their children into a "Sex cult" at the age of 12. Would that also be relevant to your society?
If so, if that is your business, then would you be willing to wage a war of extermination to wipe out that entire culture, possibly killing many of those children in the process?
What would that accomplish?
Because really, I'm still have the hardest time wrapping my head around what this militant libertarian silliness would look like in actuality. No government. Just roving packs of armed-to-the-teeth militant libertarian vigilantes going around like a gang of thugs enforcing private law with brute force against those they suspect of violating the law as arbitrarily decreed by their employer. Judge, jury, and likely executioners too all wrapped up into one uber administrator of justice y0h? Just think of how much dough would be saved for not having to spend a dime on due process in this world where everyone is "free". Oh yeah, but that's not public money going to a public court again. The dime is being saved by the mini-despot who owns the property and goes instead to his private pinkerton army to enforce his law. The price of freedom y0h.
Essentially there would be private defense agencies. These agencies would be funded solely by their customers. They would have lists of things that they would be willing to enforce. It would be similar to insurance in a way. If your home is burglarized, they may agree to reimburse you for your losses provided that you transfer to them the right to collect from the criminal. Then they will be motivated to find the criminal to recoup on the losses they sustained by reimbursing you. After apprehending the person they believe to be the burglar, they would need to consult with his defense agency as well. A process for determining guilt would need to be agreed upon between the two agencies. If the burglars defense agency is unwilling to do this, then force would likely have to be used against their client and/or them (depending on if they resist the force used against their client). The primary goal of the defense agency is to recover the profit loss of reimbursing their customer and apprehending the criminal, and it is likely that they will forfeit the criminals assets in order to do this. The exact amount of asset forfeiture will be determined by agreement between the two private defense agencies, likely with contractual bindings as well (for example, the criminals defense agency is unlikely to tolerate a death penalty for the stealing of a candy bar). In cases where the criminal has no defense agency, he will be more at the mercy of the defense agency accusing him of theft. However, it will not be in this defense agencies best interests to pay for his long term incarceration, as that will cost them money for no benefit. Also, it is not in their best interests to execute him, as an organization that executes people for relatively minor crimes will come to be seen as a threat by other defense agencies, and preemptively incapacitated.
Some private defense agencies will be corporations, and would have to be pretty large to defend themselves.
What do you think about mutualist cooperatives?
A cooperative defense agency would actually be pretty competitive in such a market, wouldn't you think?
One of the best benefits of having private defense agencies rather than public banditry agencies, is that victimless crimes will soon become impossible to enforce. Nobody in their right mind is going to agree to fund things such as the war on drugs, it would be of absolutely no advantage to them. Now there will still be criminal organizations such as the DEA, who try to make their livings by robbing and possibly even enslaving drug users, but they will be seen as the criminals that they are, and they will have to go up against the private defense agencies protecting the drug dealers. Additionally, even if a drug dealer has no private defense agency representing him, it is in the best interests of all drug dealers in the criminal bandits of the DEA are preemptively incapacitated.
I'd love to see the DEA treated like the criminal bandits they really are.
Trust me when I say I would never accuse you of being utilitarian. Your ruthless refusal so far to waver from ideology in order to spare even one child from sexual exploitation or religious brainwashing makes it rather clear you are more an anti-utilitarian that is opportunistically adopting the ostensible utilitarianism of this specious argument for less-than-utilitarian reasons. But as to your noble cause of wanting to save the "unwittingly distributing" dupes, you said yourself that LE is pretty good these days about distinguishing the unwitting from the intentional when deciding who and who not to pursue. So now you're claiming there are "millions of unwitting distributors" getting popped today? It doesn't sound as utilitarian as you're making it out to be because AFAICT, you're pulling these numbers out of your ass.
To their slight favor, law enforcement appear to typically use some discretion in order to pursue targets that are more likely to commit crimes against children, and they are less likely to pursue minor offenders, however this is not always the case it is typically true. Their system of determining who to pursue uses a sliding scale that takes into account the extremity of the pornography (simple nudity to torture) the age of those in the photographs/videos (newborns to 17 year olds) the number of illegal items possessed (from 1 to millions) the level of networking the offender is involved in (from none to part of a closed membership security oriented group), the level of involvement the offender has with CP (from viewing without saving to production), and if there are any signs of the offender planning to engage in molestation. That said, with the rise of P2P distribution, law enforcement are much less able to distinguish between people who intended only to view some images and people who are distributors. This is because P2P software generally shares all downloaded content, and the person who would have once been a low priority target for having viewed a dozen CP images, now becomes a much higher priority target for continuously sharing a dozen CP images from his IP address. I do not have exact numbers, but I can imagine that a great many of the millions of people sharing CP on public P2P networks, never intended to be CP distributors but rather only intended to be CP possessors. This has some amount of evidence backing it, it is quite typical for those arrested for distribution to claim that they were unaware their P2P software had made the images available. This is particularly troubling, as the amount of effort LE puts into apprehending CP possessors is much much less than the amount of effort they put into apprehending CP distributors.
Although I think most of us in this thread can agree that harming children is reprehensible, the question, I think, is where does the responsibility to correct the situation lie?
If I saw a human child being harmed, I would not ignore it. However, I have seen several times the mention of groups of enforces to protect children even from their own parents.
I was abused as a child, so I can understand the necessity. The problem is how would we construct such an enforcement system?
What happens to the children once they have been "liberated" from their parents, who were molesting and exploiting them?
It's all well and good to throw out an obviously corrupted system, but quite another to replace it with a superior system.
What is little or temporary about protecting kids from sexual exploitation?
Correct me if I’m wrong but what I hear you saying then is that you now believe the purchase or distribution of child porn from its producer (as opposed to repackaged content) should be illegal but you have no way of enforcing that illegality since there would be no good way to determine whether a distributor is knew the producer?
If it can be proven that a distributor has paid for a child to be molested, then I believe that they should be treated as criminals. If it cannot be proven though, I am not convinced that they have done anything that should be treated as criminal. There is a massive difference between paying for a child to be molested and paying for recycled images from ten or twenty years ago. Ignoring this difference, at the cost of the liberties of those who are paying for old images, in order to be better able to combat those who actually are paying for children to be molested, is sacrificing liberty for security.
Was it Washington who said that those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither?
So just think of the mountain of cash they would have made had they been producing fresh quality content instead of recycling.
I think they would have made almost exactly as much.
Open source developers code it for free for the prestige, bragging rights, and to bolster their professional pedigrees. There are indirect but real financial rewards from raising their profile this way.
A lot of CP is produced for bragging rights in CP trading communities.
They have the need and skillz. Amateur child porn producers do it for sick thrills and voyeuristic and exhibitionary reasons. They’re not all about raising the profiles for bragging rights unless they’re looking to get popped and take themselves out of the game
Although all of what you have said is true, they also do frequently do it for bragging rights in their own communities. One of the biggest reasons they do it is to be given membership to producer only groups.
. They’re not doing it to improve the financial rewards in their professional life. And the average amateur producer will have neither the time, resources, nor skillz to produce high end content. The small percentage of them who do have the time, resources, and skillz are have no incentive to get in the game of producing high end content right now. Why? Because the risks are too high and the return of investment too low as there are no easy ways to monetize the return on their high end content. There’s huge demand for drugs through the mail too, you don’t think vendors would stop vending on SR should bitcoin become defunct even though enormous demand would remain? Of course they would. The inability to monetize demand makes it not worth the expense for businesses. Simple economics. Costs exceed benefits.
People were vending drugs online years before Bitcoin was created. A lot of people use western union with fake ID to take payment to this very day.
Interesting.
After reading through all of that, I am left with the impression that both sides of this can agree that children should be protected from exploitation, even if it's from their own families, people who should take responsibility over them.
However, what I am unclear about is what the consensus is on WHO is responsible for these forsaken children? What system would you design and build to replace this one?
Where is the line drawn?
I like the idea about private defense agencies, because that's an idea that would lead to a very civilized society.
That also means that even the youngest genius would be able to defend himself, since it's money, not age, that determines membership with a private defense agency.
Say my son is 12 years old, and has made some money, and I die. Rather than be shuttled off to some church to be put up for adoption, he could use the life insurance payment upon my death to roll over my contract with the family private defense agency. If he is cunning and wise, he could maintain the family if he absolutely had to.
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Who is "us"? For whom is it justified for "us" to intervene? Who would be responsible for the children of such a sex cult? Why should "we" care? They are someone else's kids.
What I mean by us, is that if someone is raping their infant, I would be willing to contribute to a fund that hires a defense agency to act on the infants behalf in preventing their parents from continuing. If someone is screwing willing fourteen year old's , I would not spend money to try to stop them. That said you do not need to care about the infant, I do not think that you should be forced to defend the infant. I also doubt you will spend money to try to counter those who do spend money / resources in a bid to help the infant. I also doubt that you would support a defense agency that attempts to protect people who rape their infants from attack, and indeed I think that a lot of people would preemptively attack such an agency.
What age would this be? 11? 14? 20? Why do you choose that age? Is there any rhyme or reason to that particular age? Is it because your country says that is the "Age of Reason"? Does the legal "Age of Consent" in your country have any bearing on reality whatsoever?
So do all children on the planet fall under your responsibility?
I do not think that there is a set age perhaps. I think it does depend to some extent on what people with resources have to say, so far as enforceability goes anyway. Even though it is morally contemptible for a person to rape infants, if nobody wants to spend resources on preventing infants from being raped, then it will not matter from an enforceability point of view. From a moralistic point of view, I certainly do not think that it is moral for someone to have sexual relations with prepubescents, and the younger the child is the more immoral I see their behavior to be. I am in favor of a fairly young age of consent, perhaps 14. I wouldn't spend any money to incapacitate people who have sex with people who are 14 or older anyway. I probably wouldn't even spend money to stop people who have sex with 13 year old's honestly, if I found this to be particularly abhorrent behavior I would probably be campaigning in Spain for them to raise their age of consent past 13, and I do not envision myself going to war with Spain even if militant libertarianism catches on. I do not believe any country has an age of consent below 12, so it seems that most people in the world agree that sexual relations with people under 12 are immoral and should be illegal.
No the legal age of consent in my country has absolutely no mapping to reality. Some parts of my country have an age of consent that is higher than almost anywhere else in the entire world, save Madagascar where the age of consent is 21, and some countries that place 21 age of consent for homosexual but not for heterosexual relationships. One of the funniest things I find with USA is that in some parts of it the age of consent is 16, which is the minimum allowed age of consent by federal law. So it is legal to have sex with 16 year old's, but a felony to have pictures of flashing 16 year old girls. That makes absolutely no sense to me.
That said it is not my responsibility to take care of any children other than any children of my own. But nothing prevents me from spending resources on trying to prevent people from raping their infants.
If so, if that is your business, then would you be willing to wage a war of extermination to wipe out that entire culture, possibly killing many of those children in the process?
I would likely contribute to an agency that attempts to prevent people from raping their children.
Some private defense agencies will be corporations, and would have to be pretty large to defend themselves.
What do you think about mutualist cooperatives?
A cooperative defense agency would actually be pretty competitive in such a market, wouldn't you think?
I do think that there would be large networks of defense agencies with similar beliefs. I also think there will be agencies that attempt to enforce the laws of today, it is quite likely that the DEA will continue in their mission of robbing drug dealers for example. I think that there will be war between these agencies, and eventually one network of agencies will defeat the networks which hold ideologies that are mutually exclusive with the victors ideologies. For example, there cannot be a communist "defense" agency that holds the ideology that property ownership if theft, while there is a libertarian private defense agency that holds that coercive wealth redistribution is theft, without a war erupting. The communist defense agency will be funded by people who hold to the communist ideology, they will likely rob people and then redistribute their money. The libertarian defense agency will be funded by libertarians, they will try to prevent the communist agency from stealing money from their clients, as well as attempt to eradicate the communist agency to preemptively protect their clients. Eventually one of these agencies will need to use force to overcome the other. I think that these agencies will be highly decentralized and distributing, operating on a global scale and of course they will not operate under the flag of any state. Some of them, like the communists, will steal for part of their funding, whereas others, such as the libertarians, will be supported entirely by the free market.
I'd love to see the DEA treated like the criminal bandits they really are.
And this is why you would aid in funding the libertarian defense agencies.
Although I think most of us in this thread can agree that harming children is reprehensible, the question, I think, is where does the responsibility to correct the situation lie?
Nobody has the responsibility to correct the situation.
Was it Washington who said that those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither?
No it was Benjamin Franklin.
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Sure there are plenty of idiots who are willing to pay for things they can get for free. The world is a large place and it would be foolish for me to think that there will not be thousands of people in it who are willing to pay for CP. I still maintain that they should not be treated as criminal unless it can be proven that they have knowingly and directly funded a child molester for the purpose of producing new child pornography. I also still maintain that with the rise of P2P, commercial CP distribution is going to be less valuable to those interested in obtaining CP.
Thinking about this issue a little more, it's hard for me not to conclude that the commercial viability of repackaged old kiddie porn was in many ways driven by a lack of new content. Again I point to the adult model. There's just no way discerning porn buyers are going to be paying for repackaged old content. None. It's just ludicrous unless they were duped into it by false advertising. So again, it's hard for me to believe the example you provided tells us anything about how things would be should distribution and possession be legalized. Would those thousands of members been paying a hundred bucks for membership to the site you mentioned if their money could have gone to a site that was creating new content? Fuck no.
I do not think that religious indoctrination is an abuse of such magnitude that it would justify external intervention. Even today there are groups that largely indoctrinate their children and cut off their access to external information, the Amish is one such population, however I do not believe that we must force the Amish to modernize themselves or to teach their children things that are at odds with their traditional faith. Does that mean that you now suspect me of being a closeted Amish person?
Since the Amish forsake technology and modern conveniences and don't educate themselves past 8th grade, no I don't believe you're a closeted Amish or any sort of neo-luddite of that nature.
I'll just point out that in your world of no government it would really be up to the private school owner whether a student could opt out of a class because of the religious objections of the parent. Any secular minded owner might see for themselves the downside of degrading education standards and the level of education from their graduating students and refuse. The dogmatically religious not in the vicinity of a religious school that spurns scientific education would have to educate their child likewise else not at all, since in a purely privatized world property rights would trump all.
Yeah you did vastly overestimate the probability of the Christian beliefs mapping to reality, it approaches zero so closely that I could fill the screen up with zeros prior to putting a 1. It seems we do not disagree on this, rather we disagree on if we have the right to force others to teach their children the things that have the highest probability of being true or not.
Ok. So here's a thought experiment for you. Instead of 99.99999999999-whatever it were 100%. Would that make any difference in whether you'd feel justified to use force? If not, why did you even use that totally specious argument earlier about how you don't feel you can use force when you don't know for sure?
Certainly it has come to light on rare occasions, however you are naive to think that schools do not routinely expose the children they teach to religion. I have had teachers at public schools who knew of my lack of faith tell me that they think it is insane I risk my eternal soul. Indeed, I had one tell me while looking down his nose at me, that it is "too bad" that I am not a Christian. Although they did not try to teach me intelligent design. I cannot recall if in our daily pledge of allegiance to the state if we said "one nation under God", but I assume that we did as it is part of the pledge.
Absurd. You seem to have a hard time distinguishing between the actions of rogue individuals, in this case a teacher trying to pressure proselytize to you in spite of that being strictly prohibited in a public school, and public education policy. There's nothing preventing what you just described from happening to you at a secular private school in your militant libertarian world.
You're really gullible in thinking your world will just run perfectly without people breaking the rules of negotiated contracts. Like I was saying, the separation of church and state was a founding principle and bedrock of the constitution and public schools are in no danger of introducing religion into course curriculum as part of public policy.
Also, the founders made no mentions of Ak-47s either, but it is widely believed that we have the constitutional right to own these weapons. Likewise the constitution promises us freedom of speech and of the press. Admittedly there have been restrictions placed on freedom of speech, as well as the firearms that we are allowed to own. It makes sense that we cannot falsely yell fire in a crowded room, at least it makes sense so long as we live in a society that doesn't respect the rights of property owners enough to let them decide the rules of their own property. The courts have held that freedom of speech can be violated when there is a compelling reason to do so, with a clear societal benefit in doing so.
You missed my point completely. Separation of Church and state enjoys an invioblility on a level that the 1st and 2nd amendment and their exceptions do not. There are no exceptions. What you keep confusing is the actions of rogue teachers or groups imposing their beliefs on a school or district unconstitutionally. The fact that they get shut down demonstrates the inviobility of this separation.
I would maintain that this is not the case for child pornography possession in particular, as numerous studies have shown that there is no true correlation between child pornography possession and sex crimes against children. I would also extend this to distribution, although of course not production short of non coerced self production. In fact I would argue that there is a compelling reason with a clear societal benefit in legalizing the possession and distribution of child pornography, as numerous studies have concluded that the access to child pornography in an area strongly negatively correlates with the rate of child sex abuse in said area. Thus the courts ban of child pornography possession not only does not meet the criteria required for restricting our right to freedom of speech, but it actually does the exact opposite of what they intended. This is what happens when uninformed and emotionally charged people are given power, they make decisions that seem to be correct to them but are incorrect due to their lack of knowledge and inability to reason.
Haven't read through the study yet though it looks interesting, thanks for digging that up. I've already made my position clear though that I never claimed child porn acts as a catalyst for pedos to go out and rape. I've been pointing out since my OP that by legalizing distribution and possession the incresaed demand and distribution channels ready to monetize demand will increase incentives for commercial CP will become a reality.
Additionally our constitutional right to freedom of and from religion is also routinely violated. People in the church of Santo Daime are given an exception to the controlled substance act that allows them to consume DMT, Native Americans of certain religious backgrounds are given exceptions to the controlled substance act allowing them to use mescaline and additionally Catholic children are given exceptions to alcohol laws in order for them to be allowed to take their communion. These are all clear violations of the constitution. In short, essentially every single part of the constitution has been and continues to be violated by the government.
Wait, I'm not following why you think the examples you provided are violations of the constitution. To me they appear to be upholding the freedom to practice one's religion. Since these drugs are part of religious practice, they are condoned even though there are laws on the books that prohibit them.
It is essentially a worthless document and it is used more for propaganda and as a political talking point than anything.
Used as propaganda and a political talking point? Yes. Worthless document? Whatever.
None of the major political parties in the United States actually want to follow the constitution, and they don't. Libertarians are the only ones who actually like the majority of the constitution of the USA.
This is purely your opinion. Do you realize that there are multiple ways to interpret the constitution? Libertarians don't have a monopoly on the legitimacy of their interpretation, nor would all libertarians agree on one interpretation. You're really regressing into self absorbed self righteousness right here in spite of offering nothing but emotive appeals to your subjective biases.
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Wait, I'm not following why you think the examples you provided are violations of the constitution. To me they appear to be upholding the freedom to practice one's religion. Since these drugs are part of religious practice, they are condoned even though there are laws on the books that prohibit them.
It is government favoritism of certain religions, which is prohibited by the constitution. It is illegal for the government to give a specific religion exceptions to the controlled substance act without giving all people the same exception.
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Also you are absolutely crazy to think that there is really separation of church and state.
some sources form here: http://www.theocracywatch.org/faith_base.htm
1. Churches are exempt from paying some taxes and yet individuals and corporations are not, thus individuals and corporations by proxy pay money to churches
2. Religious groups are given exceptions to the controlled substance act
3. In some states strict alcohol laws are the result of the desires of religious people, particularly Utah comes to mind
4. In some states there are laws regarding business operating hours on Sunday
5. On several occasions, intelligent design has been taught in public schools
6. Students are subjected to hearing the pledge of allegiance at public schools, which includes the words "Under God"
7. Currency has "One Nation Under God" stamped onto it
8. People are put under oath with one hand on the Bible
9. Presidents are sworn in with one hand on the Bible
10. Faith Based Initiatives, a program started by Bush, has provided religious organizations with billions of dollars
11. Religious discrimination is allowed in the hiring practices of publicly funded religious charity organizations
12. Judges sentence people to faith based rehabilitation facilities, and groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous, where Christian prayers are frequently said and a requirement to turn your life over to God is also present
13. The lack of adequate sex education in many public schools is due to religiosity
I could really go on and on. America is a Christian country, run by Christians, with Christian laws. On paper it isn't, and it is strictly forbidden for it to be, but in real life America is a Christian country.
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Essentially there would be private defense agencies. These agencies would be funded solely by their customers. They would have lists of things that they would be willing to enforce. It would be similar to insurance in a way. If your home is burglarized, they may agree to reimburse you for your losses provided that you transfer to them the right to collect from the criminal. Then they will be motivated to find the criminal to recoup on the losses they sustained by reimbursing you. After apprehending the person they believe to be the burglar, they would need to consult with his defense agency as well. A process for determining guilt would need to be agreed upon between the two agencies. If the burglars defense agency is unwilling to do this, then force would likely have to be used against their client and/or them (depending on if they resist the force used against their client). The primary goal of the defense agency is to recover the profit loss of reimbursing their customer and apprehending the criminal, and it is likely that they will forfeit the criminals assets in order to do this. The exact amount of asset forfeiture will be determined by agreement between the two private defense agencies, likely with contractual bindings as well (for example, the criminals defense agency is unlikely to tolerate a death penalty for the stealing of a candy bar). In cases where the criminal has no defense agency, he will be more at the mercy of the defense agency accusing him of theft. However, it will not be in this defense agencies best interests to pay for his long term incarceration, as that will cost them money for no benefit. Also, it is not in their best interests to execute him, as an organization that executes people for relatively minor crimes will come to be seen as a threat by other defense agencies, and preemptively incapacitated.
LOL.This whole scenario is hilarious. First I'll point out that the overwhelming majority of these burglars wouldn't have or be able to afford their own defense agencies or they wouldn't be burgling. Highline crime, cat burglars, pro bank robbers, etc would make up such a tiny fraction to be practically irrelevant in the vast majority of these cases.
So why would executing these nobodies who are too poor to defend themselves be seen as a threat instead of a cost saving measure? Seems like all these defense agencies would be thrilled to offer a policy of execution of such riff raff as an add on service for an additional fee. And that you would even propose that other agencies will band together and go to war to "incapacitate" an agency for the rights of these poor nobodies ... ROTFL! It's just hysterical.
One of the best benefits of having private defense agencies rather than public banditry agencies, is that victimless crimes will soon become impossible to enforce. Nobody in their right mind is going to agree to fund things such as the war on drugs, it would be of absolutely no advantage to them.
Wishful thinking. If people can be indoctrinated enough to fund religion, they can be brainwashed enough to fund the WoD too.
Now there will still be criminal organizations such as the DEA, who try to make their livings by robbing and possibly even enslaving drug users, but they will be seen as the criminals that they are, and they will have to go up against the private defense agencies protecting the drug dealers.
Not really sure what would distinguish any of these private armies from the DEA really. They all would be serving the private interests of the few so they wouldn't be standing up for the general interest of the public. But you somehow think they would stand up to a DEA militia because they are robbing and enslaving drug users. LMAO! Well Game Theory tells us that's simply nonsense. They'd sooner come to an agreement with the DEA militia that they can do whatever the fuck they want so long as they don't try to rob and enslave the drug users amongst the private army owners and their associates. No one with a private army and private interests to protect is going to go to war over the rights of drug users outside of their own. The losers, as usual, would be those that can't afford private armies to defend themselves. A DEA militia will have no incentive to go to war against private armies when they can negotiate a kickback from wealthy drug users and mop up the rest.
Additionally, even if a drug dealer has no private defense agency representing him, it is in the best interests of all drug dealers in the criminal bandits of the DEA are preemptively incapacitated.
Again wishful thinking. Drug dealers without private armies would be nothing. Riff raff and totally inconsequential to everyone, to be extorted and abused by cartels and DEA alike. Drug dealing cartels that had private armies would just see the DEA as another cartel attempting to intrude on their turf. Meanwhile they would negotiate terms with the DEA as I explained already. There's no reason to see the DEA as more of a threat than any other competing cartel pursuing wealth and power. The DEA ideology might be different. But in practice there would be nothing separating them that would make it any more likely for cartels to set aside their differences to smash the DEA than one to work with the DEA to smash a competing cartel.
There is a massive difference between paying for a child to be molested and paying for recycled images from ten or twenty years ago. Ignoring this difference, at the cost of the liberties of those who are paying for old images, in order to be better able to combat those who actually are paying for children to be molested, is sacrificing liberty for security.
Ditto on Comsec's point about re-victimization of the victims that the continued distribution of repackaged images does.
I think they would have made almost exactly as much.
Ridiculous. Here is where I"ll point out that if you do come from an immediate family of scientists and atheists as you claim, then I'm kind of hoping for your sake that you're about 19 and are just going through the massive rebellion of post-teen angst. Or else it's hard not to think your parents failed. They failed to impart the wisdom of skeptical inquiry and the importance of empirical analysis on you. It's because of statements like this where you cling to blind faith that made me think you've gotta be crypto-religious. Whether you like it or not, economics is a science and the market forces of supply and demand are established. I've already put forth the many reasons why legalization of distribution and possession would increase demand and profits would skyrocket. To dimiss them while continuing insist on believing otherwise without putting forth a coherent explanation of why and how demand all the reasons I mentioned would not increase profits is what makes you look like a zealot. Either that or a diehard crypto-pedophile. To think people would even consider paying for repackaged shitty content in the face of fresh content is in the blind realm of a religious zealot.
People were vending drugs online years before Bitcoin was created. A lot of people use western union with fake ID to take payment to this very day.
You completely missed my point again by getting bogged down in the details. So let me paste what my point of that paragraph was:
"The small percentage of them who do have the time, resources, and skillz have no incentive to get in the game of producing high end content right now. Why? Because the risks are too high and the return on investment too low as there are no easy ways to monetize the return on their high end content."
The free kiddie porn industry is not going to start producing high end content like the open source model has developed high end software like linux. Not going to happen. As long as that doesn't happen, there will be a huge market for it waiting to be filled should you legalize distribution and possession.
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You would charge for access to a PIR system that holds many things including CP. Since the payment is for access to the system, and the content downloaded from the system cannot be determined by anyone, it thus masks the demand for the content both from a financial perspective and also from the perspective of nobody knows that the content is actually downloaded. Child porn essentially is a widget in a math exercise, just as all other data represented with 1's and 0's is.
Yeah but no business owner IRL would ever agree to such an arrangement. A store owner is going to want to know which store items he sells so he knows which products to focus capital investment on. Your theoretical exercise is pointless even as a thought experiment. Your attempt to isolate whether or not my being against kiddie porn exists independent of demand doesn't make the least bit of sense. I'm against the legalization of kiddie porn possession and distribution because the increased demand drives content creation. Creating content of sexually exploited children is morally and ethically unconscionable on all levels.
Combining kiddie porn content with a bunch of other legal content so you can fool yourself into thinking that just maybe the money paid for kiddie porn is paying for some other bullshit is the kind of useless thought experiment that I would imagine pedos engage in a lot. But it is otherwise a completely futile activity with no applicaiton in the real world.
Sure child sex abuse causes horribly psychological damage to the victims of it. However I am entirely unconvinced that there is a magical voodoo revictimization process that somehow instantaneously occurs when someone looks at CP. A CP file is just a bunch of 1's and 0's when you get down to it, looking at how a particular series of 1's and 0's causes pixels on your monitor to color themselves does not have a magical effect on the subjects portrayed in the images.
This is so outrageous I don't even know what to say. I can't imagine anyone but the most zealous of pedophiles who would even attempt to make a rationalization that child porn is nothing more than a file of binary numbers so somehow the circulation of the pictures that are represented by that binary do not harm the victim.
Unreal.
That is really the saddest part about CP laws, the fact that a great many good and normal people are finding themselves facing many years in prison and lifetimes as registered sex offenders for finding some image or video from a P2P network search (perhaps not even a search for CP), downloading it out of curiosity and unwittingly becoming a distributor of child pornography. It is the most unfair and cruel fate for these people to have their entire lives completely and thoroughly ruined for downloading a bunch of 1's and 0's.
So what if those files of binary numbers happened to represent content where a distributor directly paid for it. What then? Didn't you say you would be against such content? But wait, it's just a file with 1's and 0's, so why are you making such an exception when that's all it is?
Your logic is obscene.
I am grateful that federal judges particularly are starting to speak out about the cruelty of child pornography laws, as well as some other small parts of the legal system. But there is so much misinformation in peoples heads, so many bullshit government studies with falsified statistics, so much misinformation and fear mongering and term merging from the media and so many political points to be won for being hard on CP offenders, that countless more people are going to be fucked by these laws for many more years before anything significantly changes. And really it is insane that even if someone faces only a maximum of five years in prison for having a CP image, they quickly can go away for life once they have twenty images. They are almost entirely at the mercy of the courts in regards to if they will die in prison or be released on probation, and it has gone either way in cases that are otherwise essentially the same. Where is the justice in that?
Sounds like your gratitude might be born from firsthand mercy shown to you. Yes, these are good arguments for the reform of laws. Not the removal of them altogether.
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LOL.This whole scenario is hilarious. First I'll point out that the overwhelming majority of these burglars wouldn't have or be able to afford their own defense agencies or they wouldn't be burgling. Highline crime, cat burglars, pro bank robbers, etc would make up such a tiny fraction to be practically irrelevant in the vast majority of these cases.
So why would executing these nobodies who are too poor to defend themselves be seen as a threat instead of a cost saving measure? Seems like all these defense agencies would be thrilled to offer a policy of execution of such riff raff as an add on service for an additional fee. And that you would even propose that other agencies will band together and go to war to "incapacitate" an agency for the rights of these poor nobodies ... ROTFL! It's just hysterical.
I don't think that many people would WANT someone who burglarized them to be executed for doing so, so I doubt that many people would buy such an add on package. If an agency starts killing people for minor crimes, I believe that other defense agencies will attempt to put a stop to it even if nobody is paying them to do so.
Wishful thinking. If people can be indoctrinated enough to fund religion, they can be brainwashed enough to fund the WoD too.
Probably some will continue to fund the war on drugs, however the funding would be significantly cut.
Not really sure what would distinguish any of these private armies from the DEA really. They all would be serving the private interests of the few so they wouldn't be standing up for the general interest of the public. But you somehow think they would stand up to a DEA militia because they are robbing and enslaving drug users. LMAO! Well Game Theory tells us that's simply nonsense. They'd sooner come to an agreement with the DEA militia that they can do whatever the fuck they want so long as they don't try to rob and enslave the drug users amongst the private army owners and their associates. No one with a private army and private interests to protect is going to go to war over the rights of drug users outside of their own. The losers, as usual, would be those that can't afford private armies to defend themselves. A DEA militia will have no incentive to go to war against private armies when they can negotiate a kickback from wealthy drug users and mop up the rest.
Again wishful thinking. Drug dealers without private armies would be nothing. Riff raff and totally inconsequential to everyone, to be extorted and abused by cartels and DEA alike. Drug dealing cartels that had private armies would just see the DEA as another cartel attempting to intrude on their turf. Meanwhile they would negotiate terms with the DEA as I explained already. There's no reason to see the DEA as more of a threat than any other competing cartel pursuing wealth and power. The DEA ideology might be different. But in practice there would be nothing separating them that would make it any more likely for cartels to set aside their differences to smash the DEA than one to work with the DEA to smash a competing cartel.
I will use silk road for an example. Silk road serves as a sort of private defense agency, it offers protection to any drug users / dealers who wish to use it, and in return for this service the operators receive a percentage of the profits made. Silk road is a purely defensive operation though. An example of an offensive operation would be an assassination market. An assassination market could exist where people put bets on the time of death of DEA agents, or the time when a "terrorist" attack is carried out against DEA agents. When such an even occurs, the person who bet closest to the event wins the entire jackpot, probably payable with Bitcoins. Now every drug dealer who desires freedom from the DEA will be encouraged to place bets on when these events occur. This will create a large sum of Bitcoins available to whoever most closely predicts the time of an event that is negative to the DEA. So if the pot for the bombing of a DEA building gets high enough, agencies and/or independent actors that wish to collect this jackpot will be encouraged to take actions that cause their predicted date of attack to be correct. Drug dealers will be encouraged to place bets if they wish for the DEA to be compromised, but even the drug dealers / users who cannot afford to place bets or who don't want to place bets, will gain an advantage from the carried out offensive action. This is one possible mechanism of action that would allow my claim to be true, although there are many others as well.
Ditto on Comsec's point about re-victimization of the victims that the continued distribution of repackaged images does.
Revictimization is such a bullshit claim. First of all, child porn crime scenes are the only crime scenes that it is illegal to view photographs of. Thus, there is inconsistency in the law if this is truly the reason why you think CP possession should be illegal. Why are people not tried for war crimes when they view images of the holocaust? Why is it legal to possess images of rape so long as the person being raped is not a minor? Second of all, if you want to make the claim that the child rightfully owns the image in which they appear, and you are arguing with someone who agrees that information can be owned, then it makes me wonder why are CP possessors given sentences that are more severe than child rapists are given, instead of tried in civil court with the other information property rights violators? So again there is inconsistency. Additionally, the true violator of the child's privacy is the person who publishes the image in the first place. This is the child molester, who I have already established is a criminal for engaging in child molestation. Also, what about the CP willingly and intentionally produced and distributed by young teenagers? The entire argument of re-victimization completely falls apart in such cases. Additionally, if it is a privacy violation that is the cause for child porn viewing to be illegal, then why is it not illegal to view spy cam pornography of adults? Some more inconsistency. Not to mention the fact that it is completely futile to make child porn illegal in an effort to ameliorate a victims fears that someone is viewing the material they are in, even the feds admit that once CP is released to the internet it is virtually impossible to remove it completely, and this is with laws against CP viewing already in full effect. So in short, the people who argue from this basis, believe in a magical process and additionally are entirely inconsistent when it comes to what they think the laws should be when it comes to viewing photographs of a crime scene, viewing photographs in which someones privacy has been violated and the penalties that should be given to violators of information property. Once you realize that you realize that they are just making shit up to justify the fact that they want to enslave people who view CP.
Ridiculous. Here is where I"ll point out that if you do come from an immediate family of scientists and atheists as you claim, then I'm kind of hoping for your sake that you're about 19 and are just going through the massive rebellion of post-teen angst. Or else it's hard not to think your parents failed. They failed to impart the wisdom of skeptical inquiry and the importance of empirical analysis on you. It's because of statements like this where you cling to blind faith that made me think you've gotta be crypto-religious. Whether you like it or not, economics is a science and the market forces of supply and demand are established. I've already put forth the many reasons why legalization of distribution and possession would increase demand and profits would skyrocket. To dimiss them while continuing insist on believing otherwise without putting forth a coherent explanation of why and how demand all the reasons I mentioned would not increase profits is what makes you look like a zealot. Either that or a diehard crypto-pedophile. To think people would even consider paying for repackaged shitty content in the face of fresh content is in the blind realm of a religious zealot.
Yes I do come from an immediate family of atheists and scientists, I also come from an immediate family of firm libertarians. The economic forces of supply and demand may be established, but when there is an infinite supply already existing that far exceeds the demand of essentially everybody, the model starts to become less applicable. There are millions and millions of unique CP images and videos, essentially infinite copies of these images and videos can be made for free, only the most die hard CP traders obtain even a small fraction of the currently available CP. Additionally I already said that paying for production and production should be illegal.
I think that they would have made almost exactly as much because they advertised via spam, and regardless of the content they had I think the people who joined would have joined in either case. Shit, the same people would have probably joined and/or not joined even if they had no child pornography at all and it was really a sting operation from the get go. I believe that the number of people who joined would be consistent regardless of the sort of material they had, or if they had any material at all, and thus I believe the number of people who joined is representative of the current demand for commercial CP. It is likely that the demand for commercial CP would increase if it was legal to pay for CP, yet it is even more likely that the fact that CP is widely and freely available would majorly counter the amount of money going into commercialized CP. Also I have put forward a coherent explanation of why supply and demand does not apply to CP, and if I am not mistaken I gave a citation to a publication from a Ph.D holding researcher saying that there is no empirical evidence for the market theory of CP and additionally a quote from a federal employee claiming that supply and demand is not applicable to CP.
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Yeah but no business owner IRL would ever agree to such an arrangement. A store owner is going to want to know which store items he sells so he knows which products to focus capital investment on. Your theoretical exercise is pointless even as a thought experiment. Your attempt to isolate whether or not my being against kiddie porn exists independent of demand doesn't make the least bit of sense. I'm against the legalization of kiddie porn possession and distribution because the increased demand drives content creation. Creating content of sexually exploited children is morally and ethically unconscionable on all levels.
Combining kiddie porn content with a bunch of other legal content so you can fool yourself into thinking that just maybe the money paid for kiddie porn is paying for some other bullshit is the kind of useless thought experiment that I would imagine pedos engage in a lot. But it is otherwise a completely futile activity with no applicaiton in the real world.
Firstly I am not talking about an IRL business owner, but am giving this as a thought experiment. However, if CP distribution was only legal via PIR, I do believe that business owners wishing to distribute CP would do so via PIR.
I'm against the legalization of kiddie porn possession and distribution because the increased demand drives content creation. Creating content of sexually exploited children is morally and ethically unconscionable on all levels.
Beg the question much?
Me: "What if we had a system for distribution of CP where it is impossible for anyone to determine the demand"
You: "No, I am against CP possession because the increased demand drives content creation!!"
Me: "Yes yes but what if we make it absolutely impossible for anyone to determine the demand??"
You: head explodes
Also, no, pedophiles don't try to justify their behavior in such a way. They generally fall into one of two camps, the first camp being "Society is oppressing me just like they oppressed homosexuals (gay porn used to be illegal) and I am absolutely doing nothing wrong by viewing/possessing/distributing/producing CP and someday society will realize that we are just like gay people and accept us!" and the second camp being "I have little to no capacity to feel emotion and thus have no ability to empathize with the children I view being molested / molest, and additionally am incapable of feeling guilty for my actions, so why would I justify them".
This is so outrageous I don't even know what to say. I can't imagine anyone but the most zealous of pedophiles who would even attempt to make a rationalization that child porn is nothing more than a file of binary numbers so somehow the circulation of the pictures that are represented by that binary do not harm the victim.
Unreal.
There is absolutely no denying the fact that digital child pornography files are nothing more or less than very large numbers. It is a simple fact. Very large numbers are subject to the rules of mathematics, and therefor it is completely correct to say that objectively speaking child pornography files are essentially widgets in a mathematical formula. Although it is not my best argument, I do like to point out that you essentially want to make it illegal for people to count too high. Also, you want to outlaw all numbers, because there is a mathematical formula for turning any given number into a CP file. You probably also think that random number generators should be outlawed because they can produce any possible CP file if they run for long enough, and additionally probably think that PI should be illegal because it probably contains a CP file somewhere in it if you go out far enough. btw: I am mostly kidding about the last few things I said you probably believe, although in a way I also am not kidding.
So what if those files of binary numbers happened to represent content where a distributor directly paid for it. What then? Didn't you say you would be against such content? But wait, it's just a file with 1's and 0's, so why are you making such an exception when that's all it is?
Your logic is obscene.
Your original claim was that CP is not a widget in a math exercise, and I merely refuted your claim by saying that in all actuality CP files really are nothing more than widgets in a math exercise. I am against people paying for the production of child pornography because this action is intrinsically linked to paying for a child to be molested, which should be illegal. I am not against people paying for CP that has already been produced. I think producers of CP are criminals and should be treated harshly.
Sounds like your gratitude might be born from firsthand mercy shown to you. Yes, these are good arguments for the reform of laws. Not the removal of them altogether.
Nope I have never run into trouble with the law, and I doubt that I ever do, particularly for CP, partially because of the fact that I am not interested in viewing any pornography that LE gives a fuck about, but primarily because I am quite skilled with computer security and anonymity. If the feds apprehend me for doing anything with a computer, it will be a ground breaking operation requiring much more sophisticated measures than they have ever demonstrated a capability of utilizing. And in the extremely unlikely even that they manage to locate me, they will have a hell of a time obtaining any incriminating evidence from me, or proving shit in court for that matter. Additionally, I stay pretty well posted on federal operations and their capabilities, so if they do start doing anything impressive I will be one of the first to know :).
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Ah I see that you were shocked and appalled that I claim revictimization isn't real rather than my claim that CP is a really big number and thus subject to the laws of math.
Let me ask you a question. If I download a CP image, and nobody is aware of it (perhaps I use a PIR!), and then I view how the really big number I just downloaded causes the pixels of my screen to color themselves, where exactly is the information transfer between me and the victim portrayed in the image I am viewing? Can you isolate it for me? Or is it more like , I don't know, a soul (something that you have faith exists, but cannot see or prove). If there is no possible information transfer between a person who views CP and a person who is portrayed in the CP, then revictimization stemming from viewing CP is essentially as realistic to me as a soul. The claim that viewing an image of CP causes revictimization, or causes the child to "relive the experience all over again" (people really claim this!! fucking astounding!), is inseparable from voodoo magic.
I believe that the people who claim this may have some part of their brain which is underdeveloped, because it seems almost insane to think that the act of viewing a photograph has an effect that is separate from the intrinsic act of viewing the photograph (ie: it causes your brain to intake light, that causes you to perceive an image, and have some emotional response to the image). Really it seems like quite a primitive belief to me, something I would expect of a caveman or perhaps some isolated non-modernized tribe in Africa or some such place. Certainly it is not a belief I would expect someone familiar with photography or modern technology to have!
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It is government favoritism of certain religions, which is prohibited by the constitution. It is illegal for the government to give a specific religion exceptions to the controlled substance act without giving all people the same exception.
This is your subjective interpretation, and a very poorly reasoned one at that. It's not "favoritism" to a certain religion over another religion. There are no Christian denominations demanding to use DMT that are being denied the right because of favoritism that I'm aware of. There is nothing in the constitution that says that protected religious practices ruled unlawful by the general population must be granted to everyone that doesn't practice the religion. Nor is there anything protecting someone underage who sips wine at the alter during mass in practicing their Christian religion that would protect them from prosecution if doing so outside of religious worship. Your logic is insane.
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Your knowledge of the constitution is obviously piss poor:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
Saying that people who are members of one church can use DMT, but I cannot, IS MAKING A LAW RESPECTING AN ESTABLISHMENT OF RELIGION. There really isn't much interpretation going on there, just basic reading comprehension skills.
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A challenge to this religious discrimination actually made it all the way up to the Supreme court, when someone was charged with a Marijuana offense and claimed that it was their religious right to possess marijuana. They argued that other religions are given exceptions to the controlled substance act, and therefor it is unconstitutional if the court does not give them a religious exception. The court decided that .... it is in the best interests of society if marijuana is prohibited because it is Sooooo dangerous and rejected the argument that he should obtain a religious exception.
It reminds me of how the supreme court has also taken away the right to free speech in the case of CP possession and distribution, also done in the name of the good of society of course.
Good old Supreme Court of the USA, wiping their asses with the constitution and imprisoning society for the good of society!
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Good old Supreme Court of the USA, wiping their asses with the constitution and imprisoning society for the good of society!
The Supreme Court has obviously overstepped their authority, but does that really surprise anyone? Their term is too long, and they are appointed, not elected.
They answer to no one, except maybe the ones that funded their careers, and even then, it's only partial accountability.
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I don't think that many people would WANT someone who burglarized them to be executed for doing so, so I doubt that many people would buy such an add on package.
And why not? It would seem to provide some fantastic extra deterrent value. Who's a burglar going to try and rob, someone known for having intruders executed or one that doesn't?
If an agency starts killing people for minor crimes, I believe that other defense agencies will attempt to put a stop to it even if nobody is paying them to do so.
But your belief that this will happen follows no rhyme or reason. Especially since executing people for burglary could provide a lucrative financial incentive as an add on service, as I just explained as to why it would, it makes absolutely no sense as to why a security firm owner would risk himself and his assets by going to war with another security firm that is merely practicing good 'ole capitalism.
I will use silk road for an example. Silk road serves as a sort of private defense agency, it offers protection to any drug users / dealers who wish to use it, and in return for this service the operators receive a percentage of the profits made. Silk road is a purely defensive operation though. An example of an offensive operation would be an assassination market. An assassination market could exist where people put bets on the time of death of DEA agents, or the time when a "terrorist" attack is carried out against DEA agents. When such an even occurs, the person who bet closest to the event wins the entire jackpot, probably payable with Bitcoins. Now every drug dealer who desires freedom from the DEA will be encouraged to place bets on when these events occur.
OK, but my point was that there'd be really no distinction between the DEA and any other cartel if the DEA would even exist at all in a world with no government. What gives the DEA its power is the legitimacy it derives from the enormous might of the US government. In a world with no government, it's questionable whether such an ideological organization could get a leg up on everyone unless it was given legitimacy by a similarly powerful but private security firm or coalition of firms. And if there were such an all-powerful mandate from private security firms that created a DEA division to go around enslaving and killing people for drug use, manufacturing, etc. I think the population would probably have a lot more to worry about than having their drugs confiscated like battling the tyranny of the security mafias repressing them.
Although I'm curious, given your belief in the viability of an assassination market of DEA agents, why you think it hasn't happened yet.
Revictimization is such a bullshit claim.
So if you were raped as a child you'd have no problem with your rape images being widely circulated legally. I see. But I don't think most would agree with you. I certainly wouldn't want my shit spread around like that for all to see.
First of all, child porn crime scenes are the only crime scenes that it is illegal to view photographs of. Thus, there is inconsistency in the law if this is truly the reason why you think CP possession should be illegal.
I'm not following. You're saying possessing CP is not illegal if not done at the crime scene?
Why are people not tried for war crimes when they view images of the holocaust? Why is it legal to possess images of rape so long as the person being raped is not a minor? Second of all, if you want to make the claim that the child rightfully owns the image in which they appear, and you are arguing with someone who agrees that information can be owned, then it makes me wonder why are CP possessors given sentences that are more severe than child rapists are given, instead of tried in civil court with the other information property rights violators? So again there is inconsistency.
I don't see the relevance of whether laws are consistent or not in the punishment they mete out as to whether a person is further victimized should their rape images be allowed to distributed legally without their consent.
Also, what about the CP willingly and intentionally produced and distributed by young teenagers?
What about it? Maybe this is content that shouldn't be prohibited if it they give their consent. Doesn't change the fact that it shouldn't be distributed for those that don't.
The entire argument of re-victimization completely falls apart in such cases.
How strange. You said nothing that made me think the argument "falls apart". All you did was pursue tangents that had little to no relevance.
Additionally, if it is a privacy violation that is the cause for child porn viewing to be illegal, then why is it not illegal to view spy cam pornography of adults? Some more inconsistency.
Because adult porn is not illegal. Seems perfectly consistent to me.
Not to mention the fact that it is completely futile to make child porn illegal in an effort to ameliorate a victims fears that someone is viewing the material they are in, even the feds admit that once CP is released to the internet it is virtually impossible to remove it completely, and this is with laws against CP viewing already in full effect.
So because it might be impossible to remove it completely your reasoning is that carte blanche should be given so that not only is the image not reduced to a minimum from circulation but it can be freely distributed at will. Yeah who gives a shit about the victim anyway huh?
So in short, the people who argue from this basis, believe in a magical process and additionally are entirely inconsistent when it comes to what they think the laws should be when it comes to viewing photographs of a crime scene, viewing photographs in which someones privacy has been violated and the penalties that should be given to violators of information property. Once you realize that you realize that they are just making shit up to justify the fact that they want to enslave people who view CP.
Enslave people who view CP. Hm. Yeah what evil bastards huh? Even though I didn't hear one coherent argument in there, ok.
Yes I do come from an immediate family of atheists and scientists, I also come from an immediate family of firm libertarians. The economic forces of supply and demand may be established, but when there is an infinite supply already existing that far exceeds the demand of essentially everybody, the model starts to become less applicable.
The fallacy in your reasoning is that there is no "infinite supply" of premium child porn content.
There are millions and millions of unique CP images and videos, essentially infinite copies of these images and videos can be made for free, only the most die hard CP traders obtain even a small fraction of the currently available CP. Additionally I already said that paying for production and production should be illegal.
You did. Although your stance that distribution of child porn doesn't perpetuate victimization didn't appear to be anything more than a series of bad rationalizations.
I think that they would have made almost exactly as much because they advertised via spam, and regardless of the content they had I think the people who joined would have joined in either case. Shit, the same people would have probably joined and/or not joined even if they had no child pornography at all and it was really a sting operation from the get go. I believe that the number of people who joined would be consistent regardless of the sort of material they had, or if they had any material at all, and thus I believe the number of people who joined is representative of the current demand for commercial CP. It is likely that the demand for commercial CP would increase if it was legal to pay for CP, yet it is even more likely that the fact that CP is widely and freely available would majorly counter the amount of money going into commercialized CP.
So what you've just confirmed then is the enormous profitability of this industry. Not only are there vertical markets to be exploited when demand increases, but there are horizontal markets where the same consumers can be recycled into purchasing numerous memberships. Some will be more highly valued than others, and therefore able to charge more. Guess which ones?
Also I have put forward a coherent explanation of why supply and demand does not apply to CP, and if I am not mistaken I gave a citation to a publication from a Ph.D holding researcher saying that there is no empirical evidence for the market theory of CP and additionally a quote from a federal employee claiming that supply and demand is not applicable to CP.
You haven't offered a coherent explanation. The only explanation you offered was that it doesn't apply because of P2P or within the p2p framework. I've already refuted that by pointing to the adult model. You have yet to provide a coherent explanation of why the adult model wouldn't apply. You bring up that production would remain illegal, as if the increased demand from legalizing and monetizing distribution channels that would drive up the price wouldn't somehow increase production when that is lala land talk.
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I don't think that many people would WANT someone who burglarized them to be executed for doing so, so I doubt that many people would buy such an add on package.
And why not? It would seem to provide some fantastic extra deterrent value. Who's a burglar going to try and rob, someone known for having intruders executed or one that doesn't?
The concept is to pit defense agencies against each other. There is no pretense of legitimacy, so as long as one defense agency does not gain total dominion over the others, it might be a very good system.
If an agency starts killing people for minor crimes, I believe that other defense agencies will attempt to put a stop to it even if nobody is paying them to do so.
But your belief that this will happen follows no rhyme or reason. Especially since executing people for burglary could provide a lucrative financial incentive as an add on service, as I just explained as to why it would, it makes absolutely no sense as to why a security firm owner would risk himself and his assets by going to war with another security firm that is merely practicing good 'ole capitalism.
Warfare is extremely expensive. Every true capitalist knows this. It is better to settle on certain unofficial protocols between defense agencies rather than risk expensive warfare between defense agencies, because that would eat through profits very quickly.
If it were governments, which is defined here as a total monopoly on defense within a given geographical region, it would be called international law, but here they are given no such overt legitimacy.
I will use silk road for an example. Silk road serves as a sort of private defense agency, it offers protection to any drug users / dealers who wish to use it, and in return for this service the operators receive a percentage of the profits made. Silk road is a purely defensive operation though. An example of an offensive operation would be an assassination market. An assassination market could exist where people put bets on the time of death of DEA agents, or the time when a "terrorist" attack is carried out against DEA agents. When such an even occurs, the person who bet closest to the event wins the entire jackpot, probably payable with Bitcoins. Now every drug dealer who desires freedom from the DEA will be encouraged to place bets on when these events occur.
OK, but my point was that there'd be really no distinction between the DEA and any other cartel if the DEA would even exist at all in a world with no government. What gives the DEA its power is the legitimacy it derives from the enormous might of the US government. In a world with no government, it's questionable whether such an ideological organization could get a leg up on everyone unless it was given legitimacy by a similarly powerful but private security firm or coalition of firms. And if there were such an all-powerful mandate from private security firms that created a DEA division to go around enslaving and killing people for drug use, manufacturing, etc. I think the population would probably have a lot more to worry about than having their drugs confiscated like battling the tyranny of the security mafias repressing them.
Although I'm curious, given your belief in the viability of an assassination market of DEA agents, why you think it hasn't happened yet.
No one else has bothered yet. I'm actually designing one, but I'm still in the early phases of design. No code yet.
I offered to permit others to have design input or contribution, but nobody was interested, so I'm doing it alone.
Once there is a significant codebase, I'm sure people will start showing interest, but it may take a year to get to that point.
Revictimization is such a bullshit claim.
So if you were raped as a child you'd have no problem with your rape images being widely circulated legally. I see. But I don't think most would agree with you. I certainly wouldn't want my shit spread around like that for all to see.
Most children do not resemble their adult selves, so the only reason you would be bothered is if you were constantly looking for your own images.
If you had a life, you wouldn't even notice.
First of all, child porn crime scenes are the only crime scenes that it is illegal to view photographs of. Thus, there is inconsistency in the law if this is truly the reason why you think CP possession should be illegal.
I'm not following. You're saying possessing CP is not illegal if not done at the crime scene?
I'm still curious about whether you think animated or drawn media with obviously underaged characters should be illegal.
Why are people not tried for war crimes when they view images of the holocaust? Why is it legal to possess images of rape so long as the person being raped is not a minor? Second of all, if you want to make the claim that the child rightfully owns the image in which they appear, and you are arguing with someone who agrees that information can be owned, then it makes me wonder why are CP possessors given sentences that are more severe than child rapists are given, instead of tried in civil court with the other information property rights violators? So again there is inconsistency.
I don't see the relevance of whether laws are consistent or not in the punishment they mete out as to whether a person is further victimized should their rape images be allowed to distributed legally without their consent.
The consistency of the law is extremely relevant.
Again, why are images of specific Jews being slain not illegal? Why are people who view scenes of war and carnage not persecuted the same way?
It's illogical.
Where punishment and deterrent measures are being meted out, it's always relevant when these measures are not even sensical or reasonable.
It's always relevant when the tyrants who rule us are batshit insane.
Also, what about the CP willingly and intentionally produced and distributed by young teenagers?
What about it? Maybe this is content that shouldn't be prohibited if it they give their consent. Doesn't change the fact that it shouldn't be distributed for those that don't.
What about adults who are punished and persecuted for distributing CP of themselves they produced as minors? What about teenagers who are punished for distributing CP of themselves amongst each other? Should these people be thrown into prison as well?
The entire argument of re-victimization completely falls apart in such cases.
How strange. You said nothing that made me think the argument "falls apart". All you did was pursue tangents that had little to no relevance.
Additionally, if it is a privacy violation that is the cause for child porn viewing to be illegal, then why is it not illegal to view spy cam pornography of adults? Some more inconsistency.
Because adult porn is not illegal. Seems perfectly consistent to me.
Nope. This is very inconsistent.
If the argument for punishing producers of CP is on the basis of privacy, even once the children who are featured in the content are adults at this point, then why is nothing done about spy cams? I had no idea that was perfectly legal to produce and distribute.
On the same thread, if the basis of prohibition of CP is privacy, and this privacy carries over into the childrens' adulthood, then why is privacy eroded everywhere else?
What about wiretapping? Why is it not illegal to wiretap households with children? Children do perfectly innocent things with webcams amongst themselves, and the staff who wiretap these households then become producers of CP in the sense that they are recording transmissions between children.
If you argue there is no proof that wiretappers retain these transmissions, then where is the proof they do not?
Not to mention the fact that it is completely futile to make child porn illegal in an effort to ameliorate a victims fears that someone is viewing the material they are in, even the feds admit that once CP is released to the internet it is virtually impossible to remove it completely, and this is with laws against CP viewing already in full effect.
So because it might be impossible to remove it completely your reasoning is that carte blanche should be given so that not only is the image not reduced to a minimum from circulation but it can be freely distributed at will. Yeah who gives a shit about the victim anyway huh?
The argument wasn't about the child (who is almost certainly an adult at this point), the argument was about wasting taxpayer money on enforcing laws that cannot be enforced.
You know, like the folly of prohibiting drugs. It's a waste of taxpayer money.
So in short, the people who argue from this basis, believe in a magical process and additionally are entirely inconsistent when it comes to what they think the laws should be when it comes to viewing photographs of a crime scene, viewing photographs in which someones privacy has been violated and the penalties that should be given to violators of information property. Once you realize that you realize that they are just making shit up to justify the fact that they want to enslave people who view CP.
Enslave people who view CP. Hm. Yeah what evil bastards huh? Even though I didn't hear one coherent argument in there, ok.
"People who view CP" is actually a lot broader than you realize, especially if you count children on Skype, teenagers who record short video clips of themselves and share the files with each other as part of a consensual relationship, and other borderline cases.
But of course the victims cannot give consent in your view, even if they are wiser and more responsible than adults for that exact reason. I can imagine what you would say regarding teenagers and young adults having a relationship, so I won't even ask you about that.
Yes I do come from an immediate family of atheists and scientists, I also come from an immediate family of firm libertarians. The economic forces of supply and demand may be established, but when there is an infinite supply already existing that far exceeds the demand of essentially everybody, the model starts to become less applicable.
The fallacy in your reasoning is that there is no "infinite supply" of premium child porn content.
I think he may know more about the supply than you do. If he says the supply is nearly infinite, I'd be inclined to believe him.
Also, something you have been deliberately ignoring is the distinction between the "supply" in terms of filesharing and datalove, and the "supply" of fresh immediately-produced content. They are not the same.
There are millions and millions of unique CP images and videos, essentially infinite copies of these images and videos can be made for free, only the most die hard CP traders obtain even a small fraction of the currently available CP. Additionally I already said that paying for production and production should be illegal.
You did. Although your stance that distribution of child porn doesn't perpetuate victimization didn't appear to be anything more than a series of bad rationalizations.
Appearance is in the eye of the beholder.
Hey kmfkewm, I have a question for you.
If you believe that CP should be illegal, and you also believe that the world should be governed by private defense agencies, then how would CP production be prohibited in any consistent way?
With these private defense agencies, would there be specific geographical regions defined, or would the world be borderless, and private defense agencies would be relatively free to pursue producers of CP where ever in the world they might be? How would such private defense agencies justify the pursuit of CP producers if the private defense agencies the CP producers employ have different laws, and possibly a different geographical region, possibly with a different culture?
Would you recommend a total war scenario to enforce these laws? Why or why not?
I think that they would have made almost exactly as much because they advertised via spam, and regardless of the content they had I think the people who joined would have joined in either case. Shit, the same people would have probably joined and/or not joined even if they had no child pornography at all and it was really a sting operation from the get go. I believe that the number of people who joined would be consistent regardless of the sort of material they had, or if they had any material at all, and thus I believe the number of people who joined is representative of the current demand for commercial CP. It is likely that the demand for commercial CP would increase if it was legal to pay for CP, yet it is even more likely that the fact that CP is widely and freely available would majorly counter the amount of money going into commercialized CP.
So what you've just confirmed then is the enormous profitability of this industry. Not only are there vertical markets to be exploited when demand increases, but there are horizontal markets where the same consumers can be recycled into purchasing numerous memberships. Some will be more highly valued than others, and therefore able to charge more. Guess which ones?
What do you mean by vertical and horizontal markets? I'm studying economics and finance, and I've never come across these terms.
Additionally, I just looked up those terms in a dictionary of finance and investment terms, and those terms do not exist. You just pulled that pseudo-jargon out of your ass, in other words.
Also I have put forward a coherent explanation of why supply and demand does not apply to CP, and if I am not mistaken I gave a citation to a publication from a Ph.D holding researcher saying that there is no empirical evidence for the market theory of CP and additionally a quote from a federal employee claiming that supply and demand is not applicable to CP.
You haven't offered a coherent explanation. The only explanation you offered was that it doesn't apply because of P2P or within the p2p framework. I've already refuted that by pointing to the adult model. You have yet to provide a coherent explanation of why the adult model wouldn't apply. You bring up that production would remain illegal, as if the increased demand from legalizing and monetizing distribution channels that would drive up the price wouldn't somehow increase production when that is lala land talk.
I think we've reached an impasse, and discussing this further without new participants has officially reached pointlessness.
jpinkman will never acknowledge the distinction between CP filesharing and production in terms of demand, and jpinkman will never acknowledge the distinction between CP viewers who view amateur pornography of each other, and viewers who demand freshly-produced hardcore content, and are willing to pay for it.
Those are important distinctions to make. If there is proof, such as dissertations by renowned doctors on the topic, jpinkman is highly unlikely to take that into consideration.
kmfkewm, I have a few questions for you, myself.
In a world where private defense agencies are the only forces of law and order in a lawless land, how would your previously-stated prohibitions on child pornography production be enforced? I'm afraid I'm not very familiar with the concepts involved, since I still have a lot of reading to do on Libertarian thought.
Another question I have is how you'd build a voluntary social welfare system? I've seen conceptual systems in places like Italy where employers, employees, and unemployed people work cooperatively to help support families and such. How would you approach social justice in a lawless stateless society? Is it something that would interest you?
A few other questions regarding CP would be whether you would regard exploitation of children in other cultures or subcultures relevant to your society, and whether you would be willing to commit major resources to total warfare, or wars of extermination against those cultures, even though you don't have any real claim of responsibility over those children. What are your views on this?
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And why not? It would seem to provide some fantastic extra deterrent value. Who's a burglar going to try and rob, someone known for having intruders executed or one that doesn't?
But your belief that this will happen follows no rhyme or reason. Especially since executing people for burglary could provide a lucrative financial incentive as an add on service, as I just explained as to why it would, it makes absolutely no sense as to why a security firm owner would risk himself and his assets by going to war with another security firm that is merely practicing good 'ole capitalism.
Because most people believe that punishment should be fitting of the crime committed. Particularly, what if someone in your family decides to steal something one day? Will you want them to be executed for doing so? Of course not. Peoples own selfish desires will be enough that they will want penalties for crimes to reflect the crimes. Of course some people are insane and think that possession of marijuana warrants severe penalties, but I am not arguing that everyone will be in favor of realistic punishments for crimes, only that enough will be that defense agencies will be forced into constraints. If an agency is killing people for relatively small crimes, people will find it in their best interests to put a stop to this.
OK, but my point was that there'd be really no distinction between the DEA and any other cartel if the DEA would even exist at all in a world with no government. What gives the DEA its power is the legitimacy it derives from the enormous might of the US government. In a world with no government, it's questionable whether such an ideological organization could get a leg up on everyone unless it was given legitimacy by a similarly powerful but private security firm or coalition of firms. And if there were such an all-powerful mandate from private security firms that created a DEA division to go around enslaving and killing people for drug use, manufacturing, etc. I think the population would probably have a lot more to worry about than having their drugs confiscated like battling the tyranny of the security mafias repressing them.
Although I'm curious, given your belief in the viability of an assassination market of DEA agents, why you think it hasn't happened yet.
I agree that without the US government the DEA would be in a tough position. However, they do make a substantial income from robbing drug dealers and selling drug users into slavery, and I imagine that they will continue to do this even if the US government collapses. They make enough money just stealing drug money that they could largely support themselves even without external financial support, although it will still be bad for them financially if they cannot use the force of the entire US government in order to extort money from non-drug dealers/users as well. I agree that we have a lot to worry about more than the DEA, we have a full tyrannical government to be concerned about! It seems like over 30% of people on SR think we should battle them :).
I do believe that an assassination market of DEA agents and other government officials is possible. Jim Bell partially implemented an assassination market, although he was promptly arrested for tax evasion and various other charges as well. Two of his friends also attempted to implement one but I don't know what ever came of that, they were possibly arrested as well for some unrelated things. One of the reasons an assassination market might be difficult, although not impossible, to pull off is because of the fact that the NSA and similar intelligence agencies might not be to fond of it. Something like SR, they are extremely unlikely to involve themselves, but an assassination market against government officials is likely to be something they would concern themselves with. The anonymity of Tor is not enough to prevent such an agency from locating clients / servers, and thus they would be able to quickly find such a market if hosted on a hidden service. Additionally, they can hack into most any server, and would perhaps be able to steal the bitcoin pools and cause general havoc. Additionally they would be able to trace the operator and arrest him/her, as well as determine everyone who placed a bet. This problem can be countered though, if the market is not hosted on a hidden service but rather over a high latency network consisting of highly secured mixes. NSA is not an easy agency to take security measures against, but I do not think it is impossible to be secure and anonymous from them, although perhaps with the technologies of today it would be quite difficult.
Another issue is that if such a site is set up, potential assassins will not be certain that they will receive a payout from carrying out the action. After all, the site could be run by scammers. So they will be taking a very large risk with no certainty of receiving payment. Additionally, a lot of people may be too afraid to place bets or they might dismiss the entire market from the get go.
That said, I do think that such a market could exist but it would need to be exponentially more secure and anonymous than any of the other illegal networks are, because if it actually worked and gathered any significant participation, it would quickly become a high priority target for many police and much more importantly intelligence agencies. Hm, I read a paper about an anonymous AND undetectable covert channel system the other day. An interesting feature of the discussed system is that unlike mix networks and low latency onion type networks, it does NOT need its own dedicated infrastructure, rather it piggy backs off of servers on the internet in general. It allows Alice and Bob to communicate without either revealing their identity to the other, and it is covert in that there is an extremely low probability of third parties determining that Alice and Bob are communicating with each other OR that Alice or Bob are communicating covertly at all. I imagine software to create a group communication channel using a system similar to this would be required for the assassination market site, strong crypto would be required for validation of bet placement, and payment would need to be with bitcoin which would additionally need to be heavily mixed and preferably cashed out as anonymously as possible as well.
So if you were raped as a child you'd have no problem with your rape images being widely circulated legally. I see. But I don't think most would agree with you. I certainly wouldn't want my shit spread around like that for all to see.
Although I would not want my rape images spread around, I would also recognize that I do not have a right to prevent other people from accessing information on the internet.
I'm not following. You're saying possessing CP is not illegal if not done at the crime scene?
No I referred to child porn as a crime scene photograph, which is one of the many politically correct terms for CP. I believe the currently used word is Child Abuse Materials, or CAM. People in the government and organizations against child porn do not like it to be called pornography because they say that this implies it is similar to consensual adult pornography, when in reality it is a photograph of a crime scene (hence Crime(scene) Photograph, as comsec called it), or a photograph of child abuse, hence Child Abuse Material.
My point was mostly to Comsec, and to reiterate my point is that CP is the only case in which it is illegal to view a photograph of a crime scene, and this is not consistent. It does not make sense to argue that child porn possession or distribution should be illegal because CP is photographic evidence of a crime, if you do not hold the belief that ALL photographic evidence of crimes should be illegal to distribution or possess. Nobody believes this to be the case really, I have never heard for a ban on images of the holocaust, and certainly the holocaust was a massive crime against humanity. Thus the people who argue against CP possession legalization on this ground are unprincipled in their argument, because if they were principled then they would argue for all crime scene images to be made illegal to distribute or possess.
I don't see the relevance of whether laws are consistent or not in the punishment they mete out as to whether a person is further victimized should their rape images be allowed to distributed legally without their consent.
I was merely pointed out that the people who argue against CP possession/distribution legalization, on the grounds that CP = crime scene photographs, are unprincipled people who hold inconsistent beliefs. To argue against what you just said, I would ask why you think that the information stealing crime of possessing CP without consent of the victim should be treated differently than other information stealing crimes, which are generally civil matters for possessors (although criminal for distributors). To the extent that a person is victimized by the continued spread of the CP they are in, I would place the blame entirely on the person who originally produced the photograph. Additionally, depending on your definition of revictimization, you may very well simply be insane to think that viewing a CP image revictimizes the child. Certainly the definition of revictimization that I most frequently run into (causing the child to experience the abuse all over again) is complete and utter bullshit with no mapping to reality. I can see that some privacy violation does occur, which I would blame on the original person who published the images.
What about it? Maybe this is content that shouldn't be prohibited if it they give their consent. Doesn't change the fact that it shouldn't be distributed for those that don't.
Okay so you think that CP possession is an information stealing crime. Why should it not be a civil rather than criminal matter then?
Additionally, if it is a privacy violation that is the cause for child porn viewing to be illegal, then why is it not illegal to view spy cam pornography of adults? Some more inconsistency.
Because adult porn is not illegal. Seems perfectly consistent to me.
I can only imagine that you did not think this reply out all the way. This is circular logic.
if you believe:
1. It should be illegal for CP to be viewed or possessed because it is a privacy violation
and:
2. Spy camera footage of naked adults is a violation of the adults privacy
but also believe that
3. Spy camera footage of naked adults not being illegal on privacy violation grounds and child pornography being illegal on privacy violation grounds is not inconsistent
and your supporting reasoning for the third point is
4. Because child pornography is illegal and adult pornography isn't
then you essentially are saying "Child pornography should be illegal because child pornography is illegal"
seems like a pretty dumb argument to me, I think you are more intelligent than to use such piss poor circular logic too. Maybe you are tired or something ??
So because it might be impossible to remove it completely your reasoning is that carte blanche should be given so that not only is the image not reduced to a minimum from circulation but it can be freely distributed at will. Yeah who gives a shit about the victim anyway huh?
It is just worth pointing out that if the reason for making child pornography possession illegal is because the victim fears their photo being seen, then it is an entirely pointless effort as even if the photograph IS entirely removed from circulation the victim will have no way of actually knowing that and thus will continue to fear.
Enslave people who view CP. Hm. Yeah what evil bastards huh? Even though I didn't hear one coherent argument in there, ok.
People who view CP are frequently enslaved, they are captured by FBI or ICE for a bounty (salary) and then sold to the prison industrial complex.
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Me: "What if we had a system for distribution of CP where it is impossible for anyone to determine the demand"
You: "No, I am against CP possession because the increased demand drives content creation!!"
Me: "Yes yes but what if we make it absolutely impossible for anyone to determine the demand??"
You: head explodes
Yeah you're right. It's hard for my head not to explode when you're proposing the impossibility of making it impossible for anyone to determine demand. Determining demand would be quite easy even with PIR.
Let's say you mixed the premium content in with a bunch of other legitimate adult premium content so you didn't know which content you were profiting from when someone made a purchase. It would still be quite easy to determine which premium content you were profiting more from as you went to replenish the content. Just compare sales from when you replenish the CP from when you replenish the adult content. And the site owners would have every reason to want to do this in order to maximize profits. Like I was saying, it's just not possible to separate demand from a premium product you bring to market for a price. It's the reason you brought the product to market in the first place. So introducing the impossible in a thought experiment is just superfluous.
Also, no, pedophiles don't try to justify their behavior in such a way. They generally fall into one of two camps, the first camp being "Society is oppressing me just like they oppressed homosexuals (gay porn used to be illegal) and I am absolutely doing nothing wrong by viewing/possessing/distributing/producing CP and someday society will realize that we are just like gay people and accept us!" and the second camp being "I have little to no capacity to feel emotion and thus have no ability to empathize with the children I view being molested / molest, and additionally am incapable of feeling guilty for my actions, so why would I justify them".
So what about the "government wants to enslave me" rationalization? :)
There is absolutely no denying the fact that digital child pornography files are nothing more or less than very large numbers. It is a simple fact. Very large numbers are subject to the rules of mathematics, and therefor it is completely correct to say that objectively speaking child pornography files are essentially widgets in a mathematical formula. Although it is not my best argument, I do like to point out that you essentially want to make it illegal for people to count too high. Also, you want to outlaw all numbers, because there is a mathematical formula for turning any given number into a CP file. You probably also think that random number generators should be outlawed because they can produce any possible CP file if they run for long enough, and additionally probably think that PI should be illegal because it probably contains a CP file somewhere in it if you go out far enough. btw: I am mostly kidding about the last few things I said you probably believe, although in a way I also am not kidding.
Saying this isn't your strongest argument is an epic understatement. It's pathetic. You've provided other arguments that completely contradict what you're saying here which you didn't address. Namely, what distinguishes the files of binary of premium content someone had paid for that you're against purchasing from the others? According to your broken logic, that's just widgets in a mathetmatical formula too and there is nothing morally repugnant about downloading them either. You want to make it illegal for people to count too high and outlaw all numbers. You're a hypocrite.
Your original claim was that CP is not a widget in a math exercise, and I merely refuted your claim by saying that in all actuality CP files really are nothing more than widgets in a math exercise.
Your refutation though was absurd. Math exercises exist in the realm of theory to illustrate mathematics, and widgets are used to denote what could be anything in a mathematical story problem. Child porn exists in the real world and its production has real world outcomes, namely the sexual exploitation of minors.
That was my point.
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Yeah you're right. It's hard for my head not to explode when you're proposing the impossibility of making it impossible for anyone to determine demand. Determining demand would be quite easy even with PIR.
Let's say you mixed the premium content in with a bunch of other legitimate adult premium content so you didn't know which content you were profiting from when someone made a purchase. It would still be quite easy to determine which premium content you were profiting more from as you went to replenish the content. Just compare sales from when you replenish the CP from when you replenish the adult content. And the site owners would have every reason to want to do this in order to maximize profits. Like I was saying, it's just not possible to separate demand from a premium product you bring to market for a price. It's the reason you brought the product to market in the first place. So introducing the impossible in a thought experiment is just superfluous.
I did mention the possibility for this speculative correlation to be observed from the very first time I mentioned PIR. I agree that a person could use this technique to speculate on the demand for CP, probably with decent accuracy at that. So what if we remove the financial aspect then? Are you against legalization of CP distribution and possession, so long as there is not a financial aspect? Also, if people pay a fixed price for access to the PIR system, then there will not be price fluctuations correlating with the introduction of any particular material, and thus the demand could still be masked even with a commercial model.
So what about the "government wants to enslave me" rationalization? :)
Government wants to enslave people "rationalization" is not used by pedophiles , most common amongst libertarians and anarchists I would say. Actual pedophiles (not all CP consumers) tend to stick with the tried and true "We are like gay people" and "Who gives a fuck about children anyway?" rationalizations.
Saying this isn't your strongest argument is an epic understatement. It's pathetic. You've provided other arguments that completely contradict what you're saying here which you didn't address. Namely, what distinguishes the files of binary of premium content someone had paid for that you're against purchasing from the others? According to your broken logic, that's just widgets in a mathetmatical formula too and there is nothing morally repugnant about downloading them either. You want to make it illegal for people to count too high and outlaw all numbers. You're a hypocrite.
You are confusing separate issues. I do not think it should be illegal to shoot a gun. I do think it should be illegal to shoot a gun at an innocent person. I do not think it should be illegal to pay for the possession of any large number. I do think it should be illegal to pay for the molestation of children. I don't think it should be illegal to count up to infinity. I do believe it should be illegal to molest a child and take a picture of this molestation, in order to obtain a sought after number without having to count to an extremely large number (or for any other reason). I find nothing morally repugnant with downloading ANY large number, however I do find it morally repugnant to pay for the molestation of children, or to molest children. There is a difference! In fact, there is a large number that will create the exact same photograph that would be created if any given child was molested on camera. I think paying for a childs molestation in order to obtain this number (or for any other reason) should be illegal, I think that molesting a child in order to obtain this number (or any other reason) should be illegal, I do NOT think that obtaining this number should be illegal. As it stands today, if I run a random number generator, and by some extraordinarily unlikely (but entirely possible) chance it outputs a CP image, my possession of the output image is as illegal as if I paid for a child to be molested! This is insanity, there is nothing immoral about running a random number generator and keeping the output, there is something immoral about paying for a child to be molested!
Your refutation though was absurd. Math exercises exist in the realm of theory to illustrate mathematics, and widgets are used to denote what could be anything in a mathematical story problem. Child porn exists in the real world and its production has real world outcomes, namely the sexual exploitation of minors.
That was my point.
The original thing that you called a math exercise, was my suggestion that you should not object to CP being distributed via PIR as it masks demand. CP distributed via PIR is a math exercise, CP is a really large number and PIR is a mathematical formula for being able to obtain numbers from people without them knowing the numbers you obtain from them.
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http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/04/29/debate-rages-over-severity-child-porn-sentences/
Many of the offenses carry a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison, and the guidelines call for additional penalties — known as enhancements — based on a range of factors, such as the age of the children depicted in the imagery and whether a computer was used in the crime. As of last year, the median sentence was seven years.
"The fact that child pornography offenders can be given longer sentences than child abusers or violent offenders reflects a lack of care by Congress," Specter and Hoffa wrote. "In the rush to prove itself hostile to individuals who possess or distribute child pornography, Congress has obscured the real distinctions between different offenders."
"The guideline has not kept pace with technological advancements in both computer media and Internet and software technologies," the DOJ experts said.
"Many of these individuals have stable employment, family support, and no prior contact with the criminal justice system," she said. "Punitive terms of imprisonment do nothing but weaken or destroy pro-social influences in their lives."
All I see here is cultural warfare against Internet people. They are quietly waging a war of extermination against my culture.
I find this loathsome and despicable.
The idea of discrimination against my culture is something I will not tolerate.
The proof is right there, that they will increase sentencing for using a computer, they will increase sentencing for merely possessing child porn as opposed to sentencing for directly molesting or raping children.
All I see here is injustice and cultural warfare.
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I don't think that many people would WANT someone who burglarized them to be executed for doing so, so I doubt that many people would buy such an add on package.
And why not? It would seem to provide some fantastic extra deterrent value. Who's a burglar going to try and rob, someone known for having intruders executed or one that doesn't?
The concept is to pit defense agencies against each other. There is no pretense of legitimacy, so as long as one defense agency does not gain total dominion over the others, it might be a very good system.
I'm not following. What does your concept have anything to do with what was being discussed? I'm talking about the ethics of having burglars executed.
Warfare is extremely expensive. Every true capitalist knows this. It is better to settle on certain unofficial protocols between defense agencies rather than risk expensive warfare between defense agencies, because that would eat through profits very quickly.
Which was my point. There's not reason to go to war to stop other defense agencies from executing burglars.
No one else has bothered yet. I'm actually designing one, but I'm still in the early phases of design. No code yet.
I offered to permit others to have design input or contribution, but nobody was interested, so I'm doing it alone.
Once there is a significant codebase, I'm sure people will start showing interest, but it may take a year to get to that point.
Interesting.
I'm still curious about whether you think animated or drawn media with obviously underaged characters should be illegal.
I'm curious as to why you didn't see my long reply to your post already.
The consistency of the law is extremely relevant.
Again, why are images of specific Jews being slain not illegal? Why are people who view scenes of war and carnage not persecuted the same way?
It's illogical.
Where punishment and deterrent measures are being meted out, it's always relevant when these measures are not even sensical or reasonable.
It's always relevant when the tyrants who rule us are batshit insane.
I should probably narrow what I said. I don't see the relevance of whether it's prosecuted in criminal or civil court as being pertinent to the ethics of the free distribution of CP against a victim's consent.
What about adults who are punished and persecuted for distributing CP of themselves they produced as minors? What about teenagers who are punished for distributing CP of themselves amongst each other? Should these people be thrown into prison as well?
Definitely not. The key word in what I said was "consent".
The argument wasn't about the child (who is almost certainly an adult at this point), the argument was about wasting taxpayer money on enforcing laws that cannot be enforced.
You know, like the folly of prohibiting drugs. It's a waste of taxpayer money.
Sure they can. If distribution and possession of the individual's image is illegal, anyone caught distributing and possessing will be prosecuted. How is that not enforceable?
"People who view CP" is actually a lot broader than you realize, especially if you count children on Skype, teenagers who record short video clips of themselves and share the files with each other as part of a consensual relationship, and other borderline cases.
You seem to be making a lot of assumptions about what "I think". Perhaps you should review the entirety of posts I"ve made in this thread to kfm to get a better handle on it.
But of course the victims cannot give consent in your view, even if they are wiser and more responsible than adults for that exact reason. I can imagine what you would say regarding teenagers and young adults having a relationship, so I won't even ask you about that.
Straw man. See above.
I think he may know more about the supply than you do. If he says the supply is nearly infinite, I'd be inclined to believe him.
I think you have no idea what you're talking about. Again, you should review this thread rather than cherry pick one post without context.
Also, something you have been deliberately ignoring is the distinction between the "supply" in terms of filesharing and datalove, and the "supply" of fresh immediately-produced content. They are not the same.
Something you've been deliberately ignoring is all my past posts on this subject.
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The concept is to pit defense agencies against each other. There is no pretense of legitimacy, so as long as one defense agency does not gain total dominion over the others, it might be a very good system.
I'm not following. What does your concept have anything to do with what was being discussed? I'm talking about the ethics of having burglars executed.
I'm not sure how that happened. You are correct, I seem to have failed to use the bbcode properly.
I'm curious as to why you didn't see my long reply to your post already.
Which page is it? I can't find your reply. I wish Tor was not so damned slow.
I should probably narrow what I said. I don't see the relevance of whether it's prosecuted in criminal or civil court as being pertinent to the ethics of the free distribution of CP against a victim's consent.
Oh, okay, that makes sense.
You seem to be making a lot of assumptions about what "I think". Perhaps you should review the entirety of posts I"ve made in this thread to kfm to get a better handle on it.
I'm having some frustration with this thing. The thread is huge, and I THOUGHT I had chewed through the entire thing, but from what you say, I must have missed something.
Possibly more than one something.
I apologize for the failure. Fucking Tor.
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Just thought I'd post a very quick apology for responding to old posts, or missing entire replies.
This system is not making it easy to keep track of everything, and I could have sworn I managed to chew through the entire thread.
That's my mistake, and I'm sorry about that. Carry on.
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Because most people believe that punishment should be fitting of the crime committed. Particularly, what if someone in your family decides to steal something one day? Will you want them to be executed for doing so? Of course not. Peoples own selfish desires will be enough that they will want penalties for crimes to reflect the crimes.
I see this as being grossly idealistic. I think there are quite a few people who would use the rationalization of "well, i would never burgle someone and the world is a better place without such vermin anyway so I'm doing the world a favor by having them executed plus providing extra deterrent value to warn against future burglars". For starters, I could see the entirety of the law abiding citizens of Texas alone thinking this way, not even counting the rest of the deep south. :)
Of course some people are insane and think that possession of marijuana warrants severe penalties, but I am not arguing that everyone will be in favor of realistic punishments for crimes, only that enough will be that defense agencies will be forced into constraints. If an agency is killing people for relatively small crimes, people will find it in their best interests to put a stop to this.
The "people" will have no say about stopping it. It would be the decision of agency owners whether to go to war with the agencies doing it. I see no incentive (and actually quite a bit of risk and downside) for them to do so. Much more likely would be that all agencies would be participating in the cash grab of offering this add on service.
I agree that without the US government the DEA would be in a tough position. However, they do make a substantial income from robbing drug dealers and selling drug users into slavery, and I imagine that they will continue to do this even if the US government collapses.
I sort of doubt it. Maybe after splintering into a ton of smaller gangs and units maybe, but it's the cohesiveness of the gov hierarchy and as paymasters that keeps them structured under one umbrella. Without that there'd be a bunch of internal power struggles and splintering if they stayed together at all. Then they'd resemble nothing more than gangs of toughs and robbers with sophisticated weapons, if they were able to retain those.
They make enough money just stealing drug money that they could largely support themselves even without external financial support, although it will still be bad for them financially if they cannot use the force of the entire US government in order to extort money from non-drug dealers/users as well.
I agree. I think this would be fatal.
I agree that we have a lot to worry about more than the DEA, we have a full tyrannical government to be concerned about! It seems like over 30% of people on SR think we should battle them :).
You see this is where you and I disagree. Outside of the fucked up drug laws I don't feel particularly oppressed by tyrannical government. I know you've got your opinions on taxation as theft equaling your enslavement so this is true for you. But since I consent to my taxation as the cost of enjoying the benefits of the society I live in (DEA and all that notwithstanding) it's not enslavement for me. AFAICT, whether one is enslaved by taxation is a state of mind.
Hm, I read a paper about an anonymous AND undetectable covert channel system the other day. An interesting feature of the discussed system is that unlike mix networks and low latency onion type networks, it does NOT need its own dedicated infrastructure, rather it piggy backs off of servers on the internet in general. It allows Alice and Bob to communicate without either revealing their identity to the other, and it is covert in that there is an extremely low probability of third parties determining that Alice and Bob are communicating with each other OR that Alice or Bob are communicating covertly at all. I imagine software to create a group communication channel using a system similar to this would be required for the assassination market site, strong crypto would be required for validation of bet placement, and payment would need to be with bitcoin which would additionally need to be heavily mixed and preferably cashed out as anonymously as possible as well.
Fascinating stuff. Do you remember the name of the arch?
Although I would not want my rape images spread around, I would also recognize that I do not have a right to prevent other people from accessing information on the internet.
You don't think you'd have a right to prevent others from accessing YOUR RAPE IMAGES specifically?
Certainly the definition of revictimization that I most frequently run into (causing the child to experience the abuse all over again) is complete and utter bullshit with no mapping to reality. I can see that some privacy violation does occur, which I would blame on the original person who published the images.
Ok. I agree with you here, somewhat. Maybe it's not "experiencing revictimization all over again" but it IS a privacy violation and it can still cause extreme pain , shame, and all the other extreme emotions that came from that period of ones life no? I imagine if I saw my rape photos being circulated that would happen to me. Maybe the person taking the photo is to blame, but seeing how there is a privacy violation I don't see how others have a right to possess and distribute it without my consent.
Okay so you think that CP possession is an information stealing crime. Why should it not be a civil rather than criminal matter then?
I'm not saying it shouldn't. Maybe it should. I'm focused on the ethics. Appropriate laws should follow from there. It seems far more personal than something that should be resolved in civil court though, but I admittedly haven't thought through all the particulars on how it should be appropriately resolved legally.
if you believe:
1. It should be illegal for CP to be viewed or possessed because it is a privacy violation
and:
2. Spy camera footage of naked adults is a violation of the adults privacy
Yeah good point. It's bizarre that spy cam footage of adults is legal as it seems really invasive. I'd be interested in finding out what the legal reasoning in the case law was that set that precedent. But in any case, I'm against it. And you're right I'm getting tired and need to crash soon. :)
It is just worth pointing out that if the reason for making child pornography possession illegal is because the victim fears their photo being seen, then it is an entirely pointless effort as even if the photograph IS entirely removed from circulation the victim will have no way of actually knowing that and thus will continue to fear.
I don't see it that way. If I were a victim I'd feel far more comfortable knowing that the circulation of my rape photos were minimized, even if not completely eradicated, because the distribution and possession of it was illegal than if it were legal and freely distributed. Yes, I know that ultimately it would be out of my control. But I can see how there might be a major psychological difference in feelings of vulnerability in one instance than the other.
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What do you mean by vertical and horizontal markets? I'm studying economics and finance, and I've never come across these terms.
Additionally, I just looked up those terms in a dictionary of finance and investment terms, and those terms do not exist. You just pulled that pseudo-jargon out of your ass, in other words.
Oh and I should have said expanded "vertically" and "horizontally". Adding the "markets" after each term was my brain dead move. :( I crash now.
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Oh and I should have said expanded "vertically" and "horizontally". Adding the "markets" after each term was my brain dead move. :( I crash now.
Sleep well!
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Before muslim fundamentalism communism was the enemy. Well today with people paying 50% and above of their income through various acumulated taxes for a corrupt government that oppresses us , i dont see much difference from communism.
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Here is the paper on anonymous covert channels without dedicated infrastructure :
https://research.microsoft.com/~gdane/papers/cover.pdf
abstract:
Abstract. We show that Alice and Bob can communicate covertly and
anonymously, despite Eve having access to the traffic data of most ma-
chines on the Internet. Our protocols take advantage of small amounts
of shared state that exist in many TCP/IP stacks, and use them to
construct a covert channel. Techniques inspired from Direct Sequence
Spread Spectrum (DSSS) are used to make sure that the communica-
tion is covert and resistant to noise. We implement a prototype based on
ICMP Echo (ping) to illustrate the practicality of our approach and dis-
cuss how a more complex protocol would modulate information through
the use of TCP features to make communication detection very difficult.
The feasibility of covert communications despite stringent traffic data
retention, has far reaching policy consequences.
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an assassination market would need something like this I think. sans math formulas (at least properly formatted) and graphs.
1
Introduction
This work contributes to the understanding of covert communications on de-
ployed networks such as the Internet. We show that if any shared state can be
accessed and influenced by two parties they can use it to communicate indirectly,
making it hard for observers to correlate senders and receivers of messages. We
also present a very common feature of the IP protocol [28, 27], based on the IPID
packet field, that can be used to implement such covert communications. As a
result our scheme does not require a dedicated infrastructure (as mix networks
do), but uses any of the large number of deployed machines to relay messages.
We further show that the ‘noise’ produced by other, innocuous users, can
be used to enhance covertness – given the observer does not know the shared
key it becomes difficult to assess whether there is a communication at all. To
achieve this we are inspired by techniques close to DSSS, that allow for low
power signals to be hidden and uncovered from high noise environment. Finally
we note that our scheme allows for covert communication despite, even stringent,
data retention. This is partly due to the low level mechanisms we rely on (raw
IP packets) and the very low signal power that would require prolonged, very
costly, observation to allow the identification of a communication.
We first introduce in Section 3 the requirements of a cover communication
systems, and discuss why established technologies only partially satisfy them. In
Section 4 we present the basic TCP/IP mechanisms on which we shall build two
systems: a basic one based on ICMP Echo requests (Section 4.2) and a second,
more covert one, based on TCP circuits (Section 4.3). We discuss extensions and
open issues in Section 5 and present our conclusions in Section 6.
2
Background and Related Work
Covert and jamming resistant communications are a well studied discipline in
the field of military and civilian radio communications. Low probability of in-
tercept and position fix techniques like frequency hopping and Direct Sequence
Spread Spectrum (DSSS) have been developed to force an adversary to spend
a lot of power to jam a signal, as well as to hide altogether the existence of a
communication from those that do not know a shared key [5]. Such technolo-
gies have been deployed in military tactical radios, but have also become part
of civilian communications with frequency hopping being used in GSM phones,
and CDMA (a variant of DSSS that uses orthogonal codes) being used in mobile
communications and high-speed modems.
Yet relatively little attention has been directly payed to the covertness of
communication in the context of the Internet. The field of anonymous communi-
cations, as started by David Chaum’s [13] proposal for mixes and mix networks,
attempts to provide unlinkability of senders and receiver. These anonymity prop-
erties fall short of full covertness, in that an observer is in a position to determine
that some form of communication is taking place. Jamming resistance is also dif-
ficult to achieve, since the anonymous communication infrastructure in deployed
systems [14, 23, 15], can easily be targeted and rendered inoperable by a pow-
erful adversary. A peer-to-peer approach [18, 29] to providing anonymity may
change this, but so far no such system was found to provide strong anonymity
properties.
Steganography [6], the embedding of ciphertext into innocuous data, also pro-
vides some form of covertness. An adversary observing a communication cannot
determine its content with certainty, and messages can be transferred under
the cover of ‘normal’ traffic. Yet steganography does not hide the acts of com-
munication themselves, or the communicating parties. Therefore traffic analysis
techniques that map social structures [30, 21] to extract information would still
be able to uncover information. Such techniques often ignore content and are un-
likely (in the absence of cover traffic – which would bring us back to anonymous
communications) to be affected by steganographic techniques.
Despite the little attention payed to covertness properties, traceability of
communications has become a policy hot topic. National legislatures, often af-
ter terrorist incidents, have imposed ‘traffic data retention’ requirements on the
telecommunications and Internet service provider industries [12, 20, 24], forcing
them to log call, information access and location data (not content). At a Eu-
ropean level EU Directive 2002/58/EC [3] (Directive on Privacy and Electronic
Communications) and its December 2005 amendment [4] respectively allowing
and making retention mandatory, replaced Dir. 1995/46/EC [1] (Data Protec-
tion Directive) and Dir. 97/66/EC [2] (Telecommunications Privacy Directive)
that prohibited such practices. The granularity of the retained data is variable,
and the directives and laws often refer to communications in an abstract man-
ner to allow for technology independence. As a rule of thumb for this work we
shall assume that everything that is routinely logged in deployed systems shall
be available for inspection. This requirement is much more stringent than the
most draconian data retention schemes proposed, that usually only require log-
ging high (application) level communication events and user identification events
(when the user is authenticating to an ISP). Relaxing the attacker models would
make covert communication more efficient, yet the principles to achieve a secure
scheme would be the same as presented in this paper.
There exist other, simpler, approaches to circumvent traffic data retention
and achieve covert communications in practice. The simplest approach would
be to use one of the many open relays documented in the SORBS list, for anti-
spam purposes. These include SMTP (email) and SOCKS (any TCP stream)
relays that would allow two parties to get in contact and talk. Another more
ambitious solution would be to establish a bot-net, composed of many compro-
mised machines, and deploy a parallel communication infrastructure that does
not log anything. These solutions rely on the assumption that the relays are
not observed by the adversary, which is most probably true. The solutions we
propose on the other hand allow covert communication even when under some
forms of surveillance. In this sense our techniques take advantage of the funda-
mental limits of traceability versus covertness, and raise significantly the cost of
surveillance.
3
Covert Communication Requirements
Alice and Bob would like to communicate without Eve, the adversary, being
able to observe them. They share a symmetric key K, unknown to Eve, and can
use established cryptography techniques to protect the secrecy and integrity of
exchanged messages. In addition to this they would like the mere act of commu-
nication to be unobservable to Eve: Eve should not learn that Alice or Bob are
communicating with each other, or engaging in an act of covert communication.
Hiding the fact that Alice and Bob are communicating with each other could
be achieved using anonymous communication protocols [13, 23, 14, 15]. Yet these
protocols (like encryption itself) are very easy to detect, therefore jeopardising
covertness. They use standard handshakes, fixed message sizes and formats, a
more or less fixed and public infrastructure. As a result, it is easy for Eve to
determine that Alice and Bob (along with many others) are taking part in an
anonymous communication protocol – which in many cases would give rise to
suspicion. Due to their dependence on mixing infrastructure such systems may
also be prone to legal compulsion (to log or reveal keys), targeted denial of
service attacks or blocking.
The straight forward composition of steganography and anonymous com-
munications comes also short of providing both anonymity and covertness. A
message, that possibly contains steganographic embedded information, that is
transported anonymously is already very suspicious, and a clear indication that
the sender and the receiver (although not linked) are taking part in some covert
communication. On the other hand a mere steganographic message might pro-
vide covertness of content, in that the true message is not revealed to Eve, but
also provides a clear link between Alice and Bob.
We therefore propose that covert communication mechanisms should have
certain characteristics.
Definition: A covert communication system has to make use of unintended
features of commonly used protocols, in a way that does not arise suspicion, in
order to unobservably relay messages between two users.
The use of common communication protocols is essential in not arousing sus-
picion, since any deviation from the norm may indicate an act of covert commu-
nication. The challenge is to find generic enough features of common protocols
that allows messages to be relayed through third party machines. Any direct
communication between Alice and Bob would create a link between them, that
may in the eyes of Eve contain a covert channel or steganographicaly embedded
information. On the other hand the use of an intended communication channel
provided by a third party can be subject to logging and interception. As a result
the only option for implementing covert communications is to use unintended
features that allow relaying of messages. Furthermore these features should be
exploitable without giving rise to suspicion to an observer (which again would
jeopardize covertness).
Given all these requirements it is surprising that such features, not only exist
in deployed communication protocols, but they are abundant.
The security of any covert communication scheme is dependent on the ob-
servation capabilities of the adversary. We wish to mostly consider an adversary
that observes the world through retained traffic data. Furthermore, we would
ideally want to provide security against a global passive observer, that has ac-
cess to any information transiting on the network. We present a spectrum of
systems, protecting Alice and Bob from an Eve with increasing surveillance ca-
pabilities. As we expect the more we bound and reduce Eve’s capabilities the
more efficient our systems can be, while still remaining covert.
There are also inherent advantages to finding and exploiting low level network
mechanisms to provide covert communications. First low level mechanisms are
likely to be used in a variety of ways, depending on the protocols that are
stacked on them. This adds variance to the network behavior that would allow
communications to be more effectively hidden. Secondly, low level mechanisms
are also more abundant – more machines run vanilla TCP/IP than a particular
version of a web-service. This allows for more choice when it comes to finding
a relay, which in turn increases the cost of an adversary that has to observe
all potential hosts for communication. Finally low level protocols produce high
granularity traffic data, the storage of which is orders of magnitude more costly
than storing high level network events – compare the cost of storing web access
logs versus the cost of storing the header of every single IP packet traversing a
network.
In the next sections we concentrate on a particular feature of many Internet
Protocol (IP) implementations, namely sequential IPID values, that is low level
and exhibits all the necessary characteristics to facilitate covert communications.
4
A Covert Communications System
Our key contribution is to show that there is a ubiquitous feature of deployed
IP networks that allows for covert communication. The Internet is a collection
of networks that ‘talk’ the same Internet Protocol (IP) [27] to exchange packets
containing information. Each packet starts with a header that contains routing
information, but also a special identification IPID field. The IPID field is 16 bits
long, and is used to detect duplicate packets and perform fragmentation and
reassembly of IP packets in the network. The creator of the IP packet sets its
identification field to “a value that must be unique for that source-destination
pair and protocol for the time the datagram will be active in the Internet sys-
tem.” [27]
Many deployed operating systems and TCP/IP stacks use a simple counter
to set the value of the IPID field on outgoing packets. This feature has been
used in the past to perform security sensitive monitoring in a manner of ways.
Steven Bellovin uses the serial nature of the IPID field to monitor the number of
different machines behind a Network Address Translation (NAT) gateway [10].
The IPID can be determined either by a global or a ‘per-host’ counter. The
availability of some machines with global counter makes possible a techniques
known as ‘idle scan’ or ‘dump scan’ [8], that determines which TCP [28] ports a
machine is listening to, without sending any direct traffic to it. This technique
is implemented in the Nmap [19] network scanner. Applications of serial IPID
fields to remote monitoring and traffic analysis have also been proposed [7, 9,
25].
We are going to use the serial nature of IPID fields of many Internet con-
nected computers in order to allow for covert communications. We explain how
to implement covert communications using an intermediary that uses a global
IPID counter.
Alice wants to talk to Bob, with whom she shares a key K, over an inter-
mediary called Charlie. Charlie implements an IP stack that selects IPID values
using a global counter. Note that if Alice an Bob can force Charlie to emit pack-
ets, and if they are able to observe any packet from charlie they will be able
to communicate. More concretely, Alice will at each time 2ti force Charlie to
emit n packets, while Bob will observe a packet from Charlie at times 2ti + 1 to
retrieve n. The number of packets n is the information that has been transferred
between Alice and Bob. By repeating this process Alice can transmit to Bob
arbitrary messages.
The first question that arises is: how can Alice and Bob force Charlie to emit
packets, and receive packets from him. We shall present two ways in which this
is possible based on ICMP Echo [26] and TCP [28], in subsections 4.2 and 4.3.
A second worry is that Charlie will also be generating traffic with third
parties, incrementing the IPID counter, and adding noise to the observation of
Bob. We note that this is a great opportunity for cover traffic: if Alice and
Bob were the only parties that Bob would be receiving and sending information
to, they may be linked easily by an observer. On the other hand if Charlie is
engaging in multiple conversation, including with Alice and Bob, it is difficult
for even a direct observer to establish who may be communicating with whom.
Furthermore we shall make it difficult for other clients to establish that there is
any signal in the IPID data, by using the shared key K to allow Alice and Bob
to communicate over that noisy channel.
4.1
Transmission over a noisy IPID counter
Assume that Alice and Bob want to communicate the binary symbols n0 = 0
or n1 = 1, over the channel. They use their secret key K in order to produce
two psedo-random traffic patterns v0 and v1 of length l corresponding to each
symbols n0 and n1 respectively:
v0i = H(0, i, K), ∀i ∈ [0, l − 1] (1)
v1i = H(1, i, K), ∀i ∈ [0, l − 1] (2)
We assume that H is a good hash function that takes bit strings and produces
uniform values in the interval [0, 2μ]. As a result each symbol is mapped into a
traffic pattern, which is a sequence of l values in the interval [0, 2μ]1 . Alice sends
in each round the number of packets specified in the sequence of the symbol she
wishes to emit one value at each time period time. For example to transmit the
string ‘0110’, the sequence v0 , v1 , v1 , v0 should transmitted, which would take 4·l
time periods.
Bob observes packets from Charlie with IPID increments, from one time
period to the next, of ui for i ∈ [0, l−1]. How does Bob determine the symbol sent
by Alice? Based on the knowledge of K, Bob can construct a filter to determine
if the traffic pattern v0 or v1 is embedded in the noise. To differentiate between
the two symbols Bob calculates the values r0 and r1 , for each candidate symbol:
rj =
vji ui ,
j ∈ {0, 1}
(3)
i∈[0,l−1]
The difference between the value of r associated with the correct symbol,
versus the value of r associated with other symbols grows linearly with the
length of l. It can be shown (full derivation in Appendix A) that, if the selection
of traffic levels v follows a probability distribution D (in our example the uniform
distribution D = U (0, 2μ)), this difference is:
(∆r) =
(rcorrect − rincorrect) = l · Î(D)
(4)
The function Î denotes the variance of the distribution D.
It is therefore clear that, if the key K is known, Bob can reconstruct the
appropriate traffic patterns v to extract the correct symbols from the IPID in
the long run, despite any noise. Furthermore by increasing the length l of the
traffic pattern we can afford to keep the additional traffic injected by Alice low
and make it difficult for an observer to detect that any communication is taking
place.
Our results hold for any distribution D, and therefore we are also free to use
a traffic distribution that looks realistic i.e. that mimics the characteristics of
some type of innocuous traffic. In fact the covertness our this scheme depends
on the adversary’s ability to distinguish between the distribution D used and
‘normal’ traffic, not containing any covert information.
4.2
An ICMP Echo realization
We have established that if Alice can force Charlie to emit any packets, and
Bob can receive any packets from Charlie, Alice and Bob can communicate
through Charlie using information encoded in the IPID field. The simplest way
for Alice and Bob of achieving this is using the ICMP Echo [26] protocol, often
referred to as ‘ping’, that must be implemented by a compliant TCP/IP stack
(although some firewalls block it). ICMP Echo allows a host to send a packet to
a destination address, which in turn echos it back to the original sender. Alice
can therefore send ‘ping’ messages to force Charlie to increment his counter since
responding increases the counter by one. Bob can use the same facility to receive
messages from Charlie and determine the state of his IPID field.
This simple minded approach provides surprisingly good results, yet has some
security shortcomings as we shall see. Figures 1, 2 and 3 illustrate a single run
of our prototype in a low noise environment. For this experiment we used 30
second long traffic patterns of length 30 (which indicates a time interval of at
which Bob must observe the counter of one second) from a uniform distribution
U (0, 100), to transmit one symbol out of an 8 bit alphabet.
We first collect the data sent by Alice (figure 1). This data is likely to contain
some low frequency noise, that can be filtered out, since it is not likely to contain
any useful information. To eliminate its effects we calculate the predictors r using
a randomly generated traffic pattern, and use this as the baseline for detection
(this is equivalent to subtracting from rcorrect a random rincorrect providing us the
result we expected). The values of rincorrect for all times are shown in figure 2.
Note some patterns emerging, that are due to the traffic patterns not being
orthogonal. These might represent a security problem since they leak the message
content and their regularity would leak the existence of a message. We shall
discuss how to avoid them in the discussion section.
-
Finally we calculate values of r for three candidate symbols in figure 3. The
value of r for ‘H’, ‘E’ and ‘A’ is denoted by ‘+’, ‘*’ and ‘o’ respectively. A spike
detection filter is also applied. The transmitted string can easily be extracted by
choosing the symbol with the highest peak at a 30 second interval. Furthermore
we can see that there is little danger of losing synchronization, as long as the
difference between a correct and an incorrect symbol is large enough.
The key drawback of the ICMP Echo based technique is that large volumes
of ICMP traffic from legitimate users is not common. Such traffic is often the
precursor of an attack, and indicative of hostile intentions. As a result standard
intrusion detection systems, such as SNORT [32] log information about high rate
of ping packets. To keep under the radar of such detection systems we would
need to limit ourselves to the transmission of a very low volume of ping packets
in time. As a result the variance of the distribution D would be lower, and the
rate at which we could transmit and correct for noise would be greatly reduced.
As a proof-of-concept ICMP Echo shows we can engineer covert communica-
tions using deployed mechanisms. Yet triggering intrusion detection systems, let
alone provoking logging, is not compatible with our requirements for covertness,
and the low rates that Alice would have to suffer to evade detection force us to
look for a different solution.
4.3
A TCP based realization
The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) [28], provides multiplexed, reliable
and bidirectional stream communication between two Internet hosts. A session
is established between two hosts using a 3 way handshake, and then further
data can be exchanged in both directions between the hosts. TCP also provides
facilities for rate and congestion control, that we shall make use to provide covert
communications.
Two key concepts in TCP congestion control are acknowledgments and win-
dows. Each TCP packet contains a serial number, and an acknowledgment num-
ber. The acknowledgment number is set by the sender to be the serial number of
the last TCP packet received, which is part of a continuous sequence from the
beginning of the transmission. Conceptually this means that all previous pack-
ets, with smaller sequence number, have already been received. Packets that are
not acknowledged are re-sent at intervals according to some set algorithms [11,
17] (with exponential increase of the delay and linear reduction, to slow down
when there is congestion).
Each host also provides a hint about the amount of data it can hold in its
buffers at any time, which is called the window size, also included in each TCP
packet sent. The window size indicates the maximum number of unacknowledged
bytes that can be sent to that host. Using this mechanism the receiver has control
over the rate at which data is reaching him or her.
Alice and Bob, that want to communicate covertly, can use the congestion
control features of TCP to modulate a global IPID counter. To do this Alice es-
tablishes a TCP session with a third party, Charlie (that implements an IP stack
with serial IPID values), and so does Bob. An HTTP (web) request would be
perfectly adequate. During the setup of the TCP connection they both negotiate
a suitably small maximal payload size (using the Maximum Segment Size option
in TCP) to ensure that even if small amounts of data are transmitted many IP
packets are generated. Alice can control the rate at which the intermediary’s
IPID counter is increased by modulating the window size, and by only acknowl-
edging packets when more packet transmission is desirable. As a result Alice can
lead Charlie to transmit a set number of packets pet unit time, and increase
the IPID field by the amount dictated by the traffic pattern of the codeword
she wishes to transmit. Bob on his side keeps the windows very small, and only
acknowledges a packet at a time, forcing Charlie to only send one packet per
unit time. This allows Bob to read Charlie’s IPID counter contained in the TCP
packet, without adding too much noise, and recovering the codeword embedded
by Alice.
It is important to note that, even genuine, TCP traffic has quite a large
variance, and as a result the information encoded by Alice can be extracted by
Bob, despite shorter keywords and higher levels of traffic, without compromising
covertness. The degree to which the TCP traffic characteristics have to perfectly
match a typical TCP connection depends on the level of surveillance expected.
In case each and every packet is logged, it would be important to stick to the
degrees of freedom provided by standard TCP congestion control algorithms that
regulate traffic. This should make cover traffic indistinguishable from ‘normal’
traffic, but would reduce the bandwidth of the channel – the only parameters
of the traffic distribution that Alice could control are the random back-offs,
simulated congestion in links, full buffers, etc. On the other hand if we only
expect the connection establishment to be logged, and maybe even the content
of the stream, but not the packets themselves, Alice can modulate at will all the
window, acknowledgment and Maximum Segment Size parameters to maximize
the bandwidth of the channel.
5
Evaluation and Discussion
So far we have provided an overall framework within which Alice and Bob can
communicate covertly if they can modulate and read a shared counter. Yet, as
for most real-world security systems, the devil is in the details, and a lot of
details have to be carefully considered before such systems can be considered
secure.
5.1
Auto-correlation and synchronization
The first problem with our simple-minded traffic pattern design is illustrated in
figure 2, where an adversary can observe a traffic pattern forming (the different
parts of the message look the same). The reason for this is that we use the
same traffic pattern to transmit the same symbol. As a result an adversary
auto-correlating he traffic volume should be able to extract the full traffic code
book, and recover (or at least detect) signal transmitted. The solution to this
is to never use the same traffic pattern again. To do this we can include in the
generation of the traffic pattern the time, or sequence number of the symbol
(denoted t), and include this in the random generation of the traffic pattern for
each symbol:
v0it = H(0, i, t, K), ∀i ∈ [0, l − 1] (5)
v1it = H(1, i, t, K), ∀i ∈ [0, l − 1] (6)
This means that 0s and 1s will be represented with different traffic patterns
according to the time, or their position in the ciphertext.
The new approach for generating traffic patterns to encode symbols is se-
cure, but imposes an additional requirement on Alice and Bob to have some way
of synchronizing their clocks or their transmission. Off-the-shelf technology, like
GPS, can make this easier, and even cruder Network Time (NTP) based pro-
tocols should be able to provide an appropriate time resolution to synchronize
the traffic pattern code books. The design of self-synchronizing yet secure codes
would be an interesting potential avenue of research, which is beyond the scope
of this work.
5.2
Identification of Intermediate Hosts and Incentives
Alice and Bob need to find an intermediate host that implements its IPID using
a global counter to be able to use our techniques. During our experiments we
scanned our local sub-net (a /24 section of the global address space), and dis-
covered 50 machines responding to ICMP Echo requests. Out of those about 30
used a counter to determine the IPID values of IP packet. About 5 of these used
a global counter shared amongst all destinations, the others using only a per-
destination counter. An estimate of one machine in ten exhibiting this feature
gives hope that finding an appropriate host should not be too difficult.
The simplest approach would be for Alice and Bob to determine an appro-
priate host ahead of time, and use that for communication. This may not be
possible, and they may need to determine a host ‘on-the-fly’. A simple-minded
approach would be for Alice and Bob to seed a random number generator using
their shared key K and test random Internet hosts until they find the first one
that exhibits the right characteristics. The number of hosts that they will have
to try follows a geometric distribution, and if one in ten hosts is appropriate,
then we expect about ten hosts to be tested before finding a good one.
Sadly the simple-minded approach described above is not very covert. In case
the adversary controls even a small fraction of the Internet she will be able to
observe two parties attempting to connect to the controlled hosts simultane-
ously. The probability this happens repeatedly becomes quickly very small (the
probability of Alice and Bob both accessing l random hosts by chance becomes
O(2−32·(l−1) )), and after even two observations the adversary can determine that
Alice and Bob are trying to find a good relay to talk to each other. This is far
from being merely a theoretical threat: large organizations control class A IP
address spaces (including MIT and IBM) and large portions of unused address
space is connected to Honey Nets [31] to detect automatic scanners – these real
world entities and projects would most definitely detect Alice and Bob.
Strategies to avoid detection while identifying appropriate intermediaries
would have to masquerade, once again, as legitimate traffic patterns. This might
include a random query to a search engine for a relatively common term, and
then using the shared key to select candidate hosts from the retrieved results.
Alice and Bob selecting hosts using a random (but popular) walk over web-sites
may also decrease the likelihood of suspicion or interception.
It is worth noting that unless a host in controlled by the adversary it has
very few incentives to stop providing a service as an intermediary. No security
properties of the intermediary host are affected at all by our scheme. Alice and
Bob communicating, particularly under low noise conditions, is only imposing
a very small burden (a few packets a second) – hardly noticeable for current
networking infrastructures. Logging such activity in comparison would be much
more expensive than bearing the cost of the transmission, and changing operating
system or applying a patch that changes the IPID behavior would not be worth
the inconvenience. As a result we do not expect this behavior to change any time
soon.
5.3
Reducing Noise and Adaptive Codes
It is clear from our constructions that both Alice and Bob can affect Charlie’s
IPID counter, and they can both observe it. This can prove invaluable for Alice
as she can determine the amount of noise present on Charlie and adjust the
‘traffic strength’ she uses to encode its symbols accordingly. This would involve
applying a set multiplicative factor to all the traffic patterns she induces so that
they are still detectable despite the noise.
Since she is receiving feedback, to the same degree as Bob, she can also
assess whether the pattern induced are easily detectable and vary their lengths
accordingly. This approach favors covertness, since the traffic strength induced
can be used by an adversary to detect the covert communication.
More efficient coding techniques may be developed to take into account all
the information that Alice and Bob are aware off, that will be undoubtedly
more efficient than our simple minded scheme. These are beyond the scope of
this work. At the same time our scheme has the advantage that it allows for very
simple interactions, where Alice induces the increase of Charlie’s counter, and
Bob only observes it, to be turned into a full covert communication medium.
5.4
One-Sided Covertness and Firewall Piercing
There is a body of literature concerned with censorship resistance [16, 22], and in
particular communication across a filtering firewall, that has a particular type of
covertness requirement. In this setting only one partner needs to remain hidden,
the one inside the firewall, and has to acquire a small amount of information to
communicate with the outside world. This information is usually a ‘fresh’ address
for an anonymizing proxy through which further unfiltered communication is
possible. This can be compared to a ‘bootstrapping’ problem for censorship
resistant technologies.
We note that our approach would be extremely effective in providing such
information through the firewall. Bob, who is inside the firewall, chooses hosts
outside in a pseudo-random way, according to some pre-determined key, until an
appropriate host is found to allow for covert communication. Then Alice sends
a small message (about 32 bits) that is the fresh address of a proxy, that is
not yet on the blacklist of the firewall. Bob retrieves the fresh address and can
communicate further through the proxy.
In this scenario we can optimize considerably our algorithms without fear of
compromise, since both Alice and Charlie are on the trusted side of the firewall,
and not subject to surveillance. The advantage that the covert communication
protocol offers to Alice is the ability to modulate the network address that Bob
has to access, so that the firewall cannot block the initial communication.
5.5
High level events and counters
For most of this work we have concentrated on low level events, since they are
unlikely to be the subject of logging and traffic data retention. Yet our techniques
maintain some covertness despite observation and logging (as long as the traffic
distribution that carries the covert message is indistinguishable from genuine
traffic). We can therefore consider using high level protocols to communicate
covertly.
The first approach is to use high level events to increment the IPID counter,
instead of low level ICMP Echo packets or TCP features. In this case Alice and
Bob find a suitable Web Server, with a global counter determining the IPID,
and simply perform a set of web requests, according to a common distribution
sampled using a pseudo-random number generator seeded with their shared key.
This will result in the IPID counter increasing, and (in the long run) information
flowing from Alice to Bob.
A second possibility is to ignore all together low level counters such as IPIDs
and only use high level counters such as counters measuring the number of
accesses to particular web pages, that many web-sites incorporate. It is clear that
Alice can influence the counter (by performing requests) and Bob can simply read
it, and as a result covert communication is possible. Shared counters can also be
found in abundance in on-line multi-player games. All the same algorithms for
transmission and error correction would also apply to these cases.
6
Conclusions
We have shown that covert communications, that allow Alice and Bob to com-
municate indirectly and covertly are possible despite widespread traffic data, or
even content retention. The bit rates we achieved easily with our prototypes are
of the order of 16 bits a second, but can be effortlessly increased using more sym-
bols of the same length. We expect a mature covert communication system to be
able to carry a few hundred characters in a few seconds, an amount comparable
to contemporary text messaging on mobile phones.
The covertness properties we provide are based on a key assumption: that
Alice and Bob are able to generate traffic out of a distribution that looks realistic
to the adversary. Very much like steganography and steganalysis relies on very
good models of what images ‘look like’, it is likely that the field of covert commu-
nications on the Internet will have to spend more time studying traffic models,
and finding efficient ways to tell apart real and synthetic traffic. Such models
exist, in the network measurements literature, but have not been designed or
used for such security purposes yet.
The model of the world of that adversary is crucially linked to the amount and
kind of traffic data retained – the less data, the more uncertainty the adversary
will have about the true distribution of the traffic, and higher rate covert com-
munications are possible. If all data transiting in the network are available, then
the inherent uncertainty of network traffic behavior can still be used to achieve
low rate covert communications. Widening the traffic data to be retained would,
of course, considerably raise the cost of the retention scheme.
Finally we can only hope that this study informs the debate about traffic
data retention, as to its effectiveness in tracing determined adversaries that wish
to communicate covertly. Many simple ‘hacks’ are possible to evade proposed
retention, yet we have demonstrated that there are fundamental limits to the
ability to trace, and well grounded ways to evade it. Widening the net of retention
to detect those would require logging at the IP level, with limited success, which
would make the policy even more expensive, for even lower returns in terms of
intelligence product.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Nick Feamster for suggesting having a look at the IPID mech-
anisms in IP. Klaus Kursawe suggested using shared state in on-line games for
covert communications. Richard Clayton has provided valuable early feedback.
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I did mention the possibility for this speculative correlation to be observed from the very first time I mentioned PIR. I agree that a person could use this technique to speculate on the demand for CP, probably with decent accuracy at that. So what if we remove the financial aspect then? Are you against legalization of CP distribution and possession, so long as there is not a financial aspect? Also, if people pay a fixed price for access to the PIR system, then there will not be price fluctuations correlating with the introduction of any particular material, and thus the demand could still be masked even with a commercial model.
It would depend entirely on the consent of the victims. IF the victims are against it, absolutely I would be against it. If the victims instead wanted to profit from it, they should have that choice to negotiate a fee with content providers want to distribute it.
You are confusing separate issues. I do not think it should be illegal to shoot a gun. I do think it should be illegal to shoot a gun at an innocent person. I do not think it should be illegal to pay for the possession of any large number. I do think it should be illegal to pay for the molestation of children. I don't think it should be illegal to count up to infinity. I do believe it should be illegal to molest a child and take a picture of this molestation, in order to obtain a sought after number without having to count to an extremely large number (or for any other reason). I find nothing morally repugnant with downloading ANY large number, however I do find it morally repugnant to pay for the molestation of children, or to molest children. There is a difference! In fact, there is a large number that will create the exact same photograph that would be created if any given child was molested on camera.
So let me get this straight. It's the act of payment, not the act of downloading you have a problem with. So if someone not into CP were to pay your membership fee for you, but the membership was in your name and you were the one that actually downloaded and enjoyed the content and benefits of membership, the person that paid your membership fee should be held criminally liable while you should not?
The original thing that you called a math exercise, was my suggestion that you should not object to CP being distributed via PIR as it masks demand. CP distributed via PIR is a math exercise, CP is a really large number and PIR is a mathematical formula for being able to obtain numbers from people without them knowing the numbers you obtain from them.
I understand that. That's why I pointed out that it's not a good metaphor because of the difficulty of separating demand from a commercial product as they're dependent upon each other. If the content were free and you had the consent of the victims then I'm all for it. But I doubt most victims would be willing to give consent without some financial compensation of some sort.
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Also you are absolutely crazy to think that there is really separation of church and state.
I think you consistently conflate public policy with religion. Yes. Christianity is religion practiced by the dominant majority. That doesn't mean there isn't a separation between church and state. You treat them as mutually exclusve when they're not.
1. Churches are exempt from paying some taxes and yet individuals and corporations are not, thus individuals and corporations by proxy pay money to churches
Churches are exempt PRECISELY for the reason of church and state separation under the principle that there is no surer way to destroy the free exercise of religion than to tax it. This is not a separation between church and corporation, or church and citizen, but church and state. So where do you see the contradiction? Of couse individuals and corporations are taxed. You could make the claim any tax exempt organization, not just churches, are being paid by individuals and organizations by proxy. So? What's your point?
2. Religious groups are given exceptions to the controlled substance act
Again, this looks to me like the state is providing people the freedom to exercise their religions.
3. In some states strict alcohol laws are the result of the desires of religious people, particularly Utah comes to mind
So what? Can you really not see that they have the right to pass laws and govern the state as they want? The fact that they're religious is incidental. There is no guaranteed right to drink alcohol in the bill of rights. If someone doesn't like the alcohol laws in Utah, they can move.
4. In some states there are laws regarding business operating hours on Sunday
So what? Dude are you serious? These are your reasons for why there is no church and state separation in this country? That some states have business op hours on Sunday? OK, something's weird here, like we're not on the same page with terms. What do you think the "state" part means when I say "church and state"?
5. On several occasions, intelligent design has been taught in public schools
We've been over this already. It's important you distinguish between rogue teachers and groups and public policy.
6. Students are subjected to hearing the pledge of allegiance at public schools, which includes the words "Under God"
7. Currency has "One Nation Under God" stamped onto it
So what? How does this violate "congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion"? There is no specific religion referenced.
8. People are put under oath with one hand on the Bible
You have a right to just "affirm" that you will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. No gods, Bibles, or anything else religious need to be involved.
9. Presidents are sworn in with one hand on the Bible.
Presidents can "affirm" too, see above.
10. Faith Based Initiatives, a program started by Bush, has provided religious organizations with billions of dollars
11. Religious discrimination is allowed in the hiring practices of publicly funded religious charity organizations
Only place I could see you have a point, although the wall of church state separation rolled back during Bush in religious charities is being rolled out again it's not happening as fast as I would like.
I'll point out also that with 80% of the population Christians, in your militant Libertarian world Christians would still own and dominate large swaths of land where you'd have even less freedom from Christian influences and be subject to their rules when on their property. And in this part of a world with no public property, that would be often.
12. Judges sentence people to faith based rehabilitation facilities, and groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous, where Christian prayers are frequently said and a requirement to turn your life over to God is also present
So the fuck what? The rehab facilities are not state institutions. AA might be a freak cult and use similar language to Christianity, but 'God' in AA can mean the higher power of the group itself and atheists in AA use it to mean that.
13. The lack of adequate sex education in many public schools is due to religiosity
Much like with ID, this was caused by rogues and was quashed by a judge immediately upon entering the court system.
I could really go on and on. America is a Christian country, run by Christians, with Christian laws. On paper it isn't, and it is strictly forbidden for it to be, but in real life America is a Christian country.
Do you realize that there can be a separation of church and state while the majority of people allowed to practice their religion of choice are Christians?
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Just thought I'd post a very quick apology for responding to old posts, or missing entire replies.
This system is not making it easy to keep track of everything, and I could have sworn I managed to chew through the entire thread.
That's my mistake, and I'm sorry about that. Carry on.
Reply #108 was my original reply.
If you haven't already you might want to go to:
Forum Profiles -> Look And Layout
And set pull down menus to display 50 topics per page and 50 messages per page.
That way you can deal with less pages and makes this topic thread only 3 pages so far.
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Churches are exempt PRECISELY for the reason of church and state separation under the principle that there is no surer way to destroy the free exercise of religion than to tax it. This is not a separation between church and corporation, or church and citizen, but church and state. So where do you see the contradiction? Of couse individuals and corporations are taxed. You could make the claim any tax exempt organization, not just churches, are being paid by individuals and organizations by proxy. So? What's your point?
Okay you have a point that other non-profit organizations also have tax exempt status.
Again, this looks to me like the state is providing people the freedom to exercise their religions.
Yes and the constitution mandates that they do this, but it also mandates that they do not make laws respecting any religion , and thus ANYBODY being prohibited from using DMT or Mescaline is having their rights unconstitutionally infringed upon. It is a law respecting a certain religion to say that a certain religion has an exception from the law but nobody else does.
So what? Can you really not see that they have the right to pass laws and govern the state as they want? The fact that they're religious is incidental. There is no guaranteed right to drink alcohol in the bill of rights. If someone doesn't like the alcohol laws in Utah, they can move.
So what exactly do you think separation of church and state means if not "No laws shall be passed favoring religions"? Religious based laws are prevalent, and that is largely why there is no real separation of church and state. It is impossible to have separation of church and state in a pseudo-democracy that consists overwhelmingly of religious people. Why do you think gay marriage is banned? Because the Bible says that Homosexuals are an abomination and marriage is between a man and a woman. If the Bible said Homosexuals can marry, there would be no laws in USA against gay marriage. I don't understand how you can not see that this means there is not really separation of church and state. Enforced separation of church and state would prohibit the masses from passing laws that have their roots entirely in religion. There is absolutely no reason to outlaw homosexual marriage other than the fact that it pisses off God according to Christians, and actually the fact that this is why they want homosexual marriage outlawed is widely known and admitted to by all of them. How is it separation of church and state when there are state enforced laws saying that gay people cannot get married, and these laws are openly based on the fucking Bible?
So what? Dude are you serious? These are your reasons for why there is no church and state separation in this country? That some states have business op hours on Sunday? OK, something's weird here, like we're not on the same page with terms. What do you think the "state" part means when I say "church and state"?
If there was really enforced separation of church and state, the state would not be able to limit business operating hours on Sunday solely because it is the Sabbath. There is no other reason to restrict business operating hours on the arbitrary ass day of Sunday, and only an idiot would think that they do this for any reason other than as a nod to the christian faith. They cannot make laws respecting religions, why should Buddhists be subjected to laws that are based on the Christian faith?
So what? How does this violate "congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion"? There is no specific religion referenced.
By law public currency is stamped with "In God we Trust" , God is obviously a reference to the Christian God. It doesn't say in Allah we trust, it doesn't say in Buddha we trust, it says In God we Trust. Additionally it makes a claim that all people in the US are theists, which is complete bullshit. It is clearly unconstitutional for the government to have an official policy of putting Christian slogans on everything, they are PROHIBITED from establishing a state respected religion but only an idiot would think that they are not full supporters of Christianity in an official capacity.
You have a right to just "affirm" that you will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. No gods, Bibles, or anything else religious need to be involved.
Okay.
Only place I could see you have a point, although the wall of church state separation rolled back during Bush in religious charities is being rolled out again it's not happening as fast as I would like.
I'll point out also that with 80% of the population Christians, in your militant Libertarian world Christians would still own and dominate large swaths of land where you'd have even less freedom from Christian influences and be subject to their rules when on their property. And in this part of a world with no public property, that would be often.
In my militant libertarian world the Christians can feel free to live in their backwards ass cities, persecuting gays and staying stuck in the past. They also will be prevented from harassing non-Christians who stay away from their backwards asses. I will move to some area full of young people (who are atheist in much larger numbers) and chill with gays and druggies and other generally-not-insane-people, and they can all move to the south and condemn each us all to hell :).
So the fuck what? The rehab facilities are not state institutions. AA might be a freak cult and use similar language to Christianity, but 'God' in AA can mean the higher power of the group itself and atheists in AA use it to mean that.
It does not matter if the facilities are state institutions or not, the people who sentence you to attend them are acting in the official capacity as representatives of the state. By your logic it doesn't matter if judges sentence us to go to Catholic Church for ten years, because the Catholic church is not a state institution. Nonsense. Also AA is a christian cult, you can pretend they say God to mean some higher power but they say the lords prayer for fucks sake.
Do you realize that there can be a separation of church and state while the majority of people allowed to practice their religion of choice are Christians?
Sure and they can feel free to practice their religion, but right now they pass laws that are based on little more than their religious brainwashing and this oppresses the rest of us. Pretty much all vice laws are based on either religion or ultra-liberal philosophy (most liberals are actually pretty against vice laws). The laws about store operation times on Sunday are certainly because of Christianity. The laws about alcohol are from Christianity. And anyway, these more abstract examples aside, the government routinely funds religious institutions, allows and engages in religious discrimination and promotes Christianity in general.
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Here is the paper on anonymous covert channels without dedicated infrastructure :
https://research.microsoft.com/~gdane/papers/cover.pdf
Sweet paper. Thx for posting.
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Liberals and libertarians are a bunch of middle/upper class, wet, apolitical people if you ask me,
Socialism is the only logical, equal and egalitarian society we can live under properly, i admire militant socialists.
(i now await the clueless remarks about socialism and the real left! not the apologist trendy lefty crap)
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Yes and the constitution mandates that they do this, but it also mandates that they do not make laws respecting any religion , and thus ANYBODY being prohibited from using DMT or Mescaline is having their rights unconstitutionally infringed upon. It is a law respecting a certain religion to say that a certain religion has an exception from the law but nobody else does.
I would have to agree with this. Even if US government supposedly, theoretically protects us from a specific religion taking over the state, by which I mean the entire country, not a territory ("states" have no rights, as everyone knows), the predominant religion still manages to push through modern blue laws regardless, and they use the excuse of tradition and historical artifacts to justify this. All the more reason we need a full-scale revolution.
So what? Can you really not see that they have the right to pass laws and govern the state as they want? The fact that they're religious is incidental. There is no guaranteed right to drink alcohol in the bill of rights. If someone doesn't like the alcohol laws in Utah, they can move.
Utah is a very large territory. If you were born in Utah, and have the good luck to discover that everyone around him is batshit insane, moving out of such a large territory is prohibitively expensive, and the state deliberately makes it overly difficult and bothersome to migrate to other territories within the US, much less other countries.
So what exactly do you think separation of church and state means if not "No laws shall be passed favoring religions"? Religious based laws are prevalent, and that is largely why there is no real separation of church and state. It is impossible to have separation of church and state in a pseudo-democracy that consists overwhelmingly of religious people.
I just thought I'd mention the cold hard fact that we do not live in a democracy. Every country other than us knows we live in a federal constitutional republic. There is no democracy here. It is propaganda and myth. Do not be fooled.
Why do you think gay marriage is banned? Because the Bible says that Homosexuals are an abomination and marriage is between a man and a woman. If the Bible said Homosexuals can marry, there would be no laws in USA against gay marriage.
The separation of church and state is not a two-way street. The seperation of church and state was a deliberate limitation placed upon the federal constitutional republic, to defend the church from the state, not the other way around. Remember, our ancestors were pilgrims, and the memory of the state (monarchs) slaying most of them was still fresh. It was part of the reasoning behind limiting state power in the first place, though we see how well that turned out.
If there was really enforced separation of church and state, the state would not be able to limit business operating hours on Sunday solely because it is the Sabbath. There is no other reason to restrict business operating hours on the arbitrary ass day of Sunday, and only an idiot would think that they do this for any reason other than as a nod to the christian faith. They cannot make laws respecting religions, why should Buddhists be subjected to laws that are based on the Christian faith?
I shudder to think what the state would be forced to do to pagans if the church really wanted to wipe us out.
So what? How does this violate "congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion"? There is no specific religion referenced.
By law public currency is stamped with "In God we Trust" , God is obviously a reference to the Christian God. It doesn't say in Allah we trust, it doesn't say in Buddha we trust, it says In God we Trust. Additionally it makes a claim that all people in the US are theists, which is complete bullshit. It is clearly unconstitutional for the government to have an official policy of putting Christian slogans on everything, they are PROHIBITED from establishing a state respected religion but only an idiot would think that they are not full supporters of Christianity in an official capacity.
This is not historically accurate. The state is PROHIBITED from infringing upon protestant christian denominations. The state is perfectly free to slay anyone else.
In my militant libertarian world the Christians can feel free to live in their backwards ass cities, persecuting gays and staying stuck in the past. They also will be prevented from harassing non-Christians who stay away from their backwards asses. I will move to some area full of young people (who are atheist in much larger numbers) and chill with gays and druggies and other generally-not-insane-people, and they can all move to the south and condemn each us all to hell :).
According to the Gospel of Snowcrash, if we enforced a Libertarian culture upon the state, and abolished it, the future holds that there would be small city-states called Burbs where people can choose to raise children. There would be fierce (sometimes violent) competition between them, since families vote with their wallets where to have children, and they are all roughly equivalent.
So the fuck what? The rehab facilities are not state institutions. AA might be a freak cult and use similar language to Christianity, but 'God' in AA can mean the higher power of the group itself and atheists in AA use it to mean that.
Yes they are. This is cultural warfare at its finest.
It does not matter if the facilities are state institutions or not, the people who sentence you to attend them are acting in the official capacity as representatives of the state. By your logic it doesn't matter if judges sentence us to go to Catholic Church for ten years, because the Catholic church is not a state institution. Nonsense. Also AA is a christian cult, you can pretend they say God to mean some higher power but they say the lords prayer for fucks sake.
In November 1934, Wilson was visited by old drinking companion Ebby Thacher. Wilson was astounded to find that Thacher had been sober for several weeks under the guidance of the evangelical Christian Oxford Group.[17] Wilson took some interest in the group, but shortly after Thacher's visit, he was again admitted to Towns Hospital to recover from a bout of drinking. This was his fourth and last stay at Towns hospital under Doctor Silkworth's care. It was while undergoing treatment with The Belladonna Cure that Wilson experienced his "Hot Flash" spiritual conversion and quit drinking.[18] According to Wilson, while lying in bed depressed and despairing, he cried out, "I'll do anything! Anything at all! If there be a God, let Him show Himself!"[19] He then had the sensation of a bright light, a feeling of ecstasy, and a new serenity. He never drank again for the remainder of his life. Wilson described his experience to Dr. Silkworth, who told him, "Something has happened to you I don't understand. But you had better hang on to it".
The cold hard facts speak for themselves.
Do you realize that there can be a separation of church and state while the majority of people allowed to practice their religion of choice are Christians?
Churches are exempt PRECISELY for the reason of church and state separation under the principle that there is no surer way to destroy the free exercise of religion than to tax it. This is not a separation between church and corporation, or church and citizen, but church and state. So where do you see the contradiction? Of couse individuals and corporations are taxed. You could make the claim any tax exempt organization, not just churches, are being paid by individuals and organizations by proxy. So? What's your point?
Qualifying for tax exemption is difficult to the point of nigh impossibility unless you are a church. If you are a church, your qualification is a given. If you are not a church (of protestant christian denomination), it is deliberately nearly impossible to qualify for tax exempt status.
You should read the tax code sometime, it's enlightening.
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Yes and the constitution mandates that they do this, but it also mandates that they do not make laws respecting any religion , and thus ANYBODY being prohibited from using DMT or Mescaline is having their rights unconstitutionally infringed upon. It is a law respecting a certain religion to say that a certain religion has an exception from the law but nobody else does.
That's your subjective interpretation that seems to infer a lot of things out of thin air that I just don't see.
Here's the exact quote:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ...."
That to me implies exactly what it says. That no laws will be passed that co-opts a religious organization into government or prohibits religious organizations from practicing their religion. How do you somehow derive from that that exemptions made to religions so they are not prohibited from their "free exercise thereof" means that the exemption becomes defunct because everyone gets to participate in whatever practice was being granted the exemption? If I were your Logic 101 professor the deductive reasoning you used for your proof would earn you an F-. :)
So what exactly do you think separation of church and state means if not "No laws shall be passed favoring religions"?
That's a bogus quote you just provided. Based on that I think I'm starting to understand why you seem to fundamentally misunderstand and misinterpret what is meant by the "separation of church and state" in the constitution. The irony once again being how you claimed my knowledge of the constitution was "piss poor". You are what you eat. Once again, here's the quote:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ...."
It's important to understand context. The founders had witnessed a recent history of all the bloody wars waged in the name of religion when one country had adopted the teachings of one church while persecuting the members of the other after the great Christian schism created the divide between Catholic and Protestant.
Notice how "religion" is used in the singular, and not plural as you used in your quote. The wording is very specific, not even saying "religion" generally but an "establishment of religion". They were concerned that government might get co-opted by one religious establishment in favor of another which, based on recent history, they were trying to prevent against.
Religious based laws are prevalent, and that is largely why there is no real separation of church and state. Enforced separation of church and state would prohibit the masses from passing laws that have their roots entirely in religion. It is impossible to have separation of church and state in a pseudo-democracy that consists overwhelmingly of religious people.
It could easily be argued that ALL laws of consequence are derived from religious laws. Secular society is a fairly recent phenomenon. So what? I think you're resorting again in your last sentence here to overly emotional appeals to your subjective biases that's just not compelling to anyone outside of your church.
There is absolutely no reason to outlaw homosexual marriage other than the fact that it pisses off God according to Christians, and actually the fact that this is why they want homosexual marriage outlawed is widely known and admitted to by all of them. How is it separation of church and state when there are state enforced laws saying that gay people cannot get married, and these laws are openly based on the fucking Bible?
Again, this is your subjective interpretation based on our modern understanding of homosexuality. A few hundred years ago people reasoned that homosexuality served no reproductive purpose, therefore was "unnatural" and should be outlawed because it goes against the laws of nature. Just like marriage to a horse should be outlawed. It made perfect sense to them from a secular POV. And no, it wasn't just the religious using it as a convenient rationalization. This was THE secular argument against it. The religious were against it because God told them so in the bible. So what makes perfect sense to you for there being "no reason" to outlaw gay marriage wasn't always the case. Like I've said many times already, when our knowledge and understanding grows and our societal values change, as has our understanding of homosexuality, it takes a while for our laws to catch up, which is exactly what's happening on that issue now. We have to reach a tipping point, and no doubt religion plays a big role in preventing knowledge from filtering down to the masses enough to reach that tipping point and have it reflected in sensible policy.
But to say that laws against gay marriage proves there is no separation oif church and state is just ignorant of the secular reasoning (however flawed the reasoning might be to us in hindsight) used for quite a long time to justify its prohibition.
If there was really enforced separation of church and state, the state would not be able to limit business operating hours on Sunday solely because it is the Sabbath. There is no other reason to restrict business operating hours on the arbitrary ass day of Sunday, and only an idiot would think that they do this for any reason other than as a nod to the christian faith.
There's no doubt that special exemptions were granted to Utah in efforts to get them to agree to join the Union. These sorts of exemptions are granted elsewhere too, like with orthodox Jewish townships in New York, under the reasoning that it is in accordance with allowing them to freely practice their religion and that anyone that does't like it can open their business elsewhere. But I still think your reasoning here is specious because like I said, many laws are derived from religious law. So it's just not a good argument.
They cannot make laws respecting religions, why should Buddhists be subjected to laws that are based on the Christian faith?
Also a specious argument. All major laws are derived from religions. It's not a good reason an atheist shouldn't have to comply with a law against murder just because it's based on the Ten Commandments.
By law public currency is stamped with "In God we Trust" , God is obviously a reference to the Christian God. It doesn't say in Allah we trust, it doesn't say in Buddha we trust, it says In God we Trust.
I wouldn't expect it to say in "Allah" we trust because their native tongue is English and not Arabic. Buddhists have no problem with the concept of God or it being called "God". So these are poor arguments.
Additionally it makes a claim that all people in the US are theists, which is complete bullshit.
It makes no claims. It makes assumptions. That's a key difference you seem to be missing. During those times it was generally assumed that everyone was a theist even if not everyone was.
It is clearly unconstitutional for the government to have an official policy of putting Christian slogans on everything, they are PROHIBITED from establishing a state respected religion but only an idiot would think that they are not full supporters of Christianity in an official capacity.
Resorting to rash emotional appeals again I see. First of all, it isn't Christian slogans "on everything". We're talking about issuances of money and there is no reference to Christianity or any "Establishment of religion". It is strictly your opinion that anything in the constitution is in reference to a Christian God. Again, this is what you subjectively choose to infer based on your ignorance of the deists among the founders and the influences with respect to Judaism.
You've also chosen once again to ignore context, which is always important. "In God we Trust", even though its origins were in the Star Spangled Banner, wasn't put on coins until Civil War times as a statement by the North of their endorsement of their belief that God was on their side because God would see slavery as an abomination, which is really quite ironic given how much the bible so explictly endorses slavery on so many occasions. So no, the motto wasn't adopted as some sort of covert endorsement of Christianity as the unofficial state religion. During Eisenhower it was made into an official motto and included on paper money as a response to Communism and the ideology's promotion of atheism. Again, it was not as an offical endorsement of Christianity.
I won't deny that Enlightenment era thinking and principles of Christian morality were what the constitution was based on because many of the founders were, after all, Christian. But that doesn't mean that when some laws are passed based on Christian laws that they're automatically unconstitutional. They have to be determined to be unconstitutional based on whether they violate the constitution.
Plus it's hard to believe you even believe something as nonsensical as what you just said here. If the founders believed in Christianity in an official capacity it would have been adopted in the constitution. Thomas Jefferson, who many credit for the language in the constitution because he's the one that actually WROTE the original and subsequent drafts of the constitution, strongly believed in the separation of church and state and, based on his personal correspondence with John Adams towards the end of their lives, was almost certainly an atheist. So since Jefferson would disagree with you, according to you that makes him an idiot.
What is this you were saying again about libertarians being the only ones that study and understand the constitution? Based on what you've said so far, you don't appear to know a whole lot about the subject.
In my militant libertarian world the Christians can feel free to live in their backwards ass cities, persecuting gays and staying stuck in the past. They also will be prevented from harassing non-Christians who stay away from their backwards asses. I will move to some area full of young people (who are atheist in much larger numbers) and chill with gays and druggies and other generally-not-insane-people, and they can all move to the south and condemn each us all to hell :).
That's all well and good, but this would also be a much less cooperative and organized world since you wouldn't have people of all different beliefs mutually co-existing. You'd naturally only feel comfortable staying within lands and territory of people of your secular tribe. And even then you'd be subject to arbitrary takeovers of property purchases (think public goods that in your world wouldn't exist, like roads, bridges, clean water and clean air, all owned and who you'd have to pay someone for the rights to use even if there are no alternatives) by someone of a hostile belief who could legally justify depriving you of your freedom should you violate his backass property rights laws that you were oblivious to.
It does not matter if the facilities are state institutions or not, the people who sentence you to attend them are acting in the official capacity as representatives of the state.
And like I said, AA is not particular to any "establishment of religion" so your logic is completely flawed.
By your logic it doesn't matter if judges sentence us to go to Catholic Church for ten years, because the Catholic church is not a state institution. Nonsense.
Although there would be many nominations for such a recognition, this would place highly for "weakest argument you've ever used". The purpose of drug rehab is rehabilitation, not religious worship.
Also AA is a christian cult, you can pretend they say God to mean some higher power but they say the lords prayer for fucks sake
Again, this is strictly your opinion that's not based in reality. It might have been derived from Christianity, and it might even be a cult, but it's not a "Christian" cult. I would think if it were a Christian cult then only Christians would attend. It's purpose is rehab, not religious worship. If it relies on cognitive dissonance and cult-like rigidity and discipline to get tools clean, then so it does. But it's not specifically Christian if everyone can join and retain their own religious beliefs. And I don't know what rehab you went to but I was never forced to say the lords prayer, the serenity prayer yes, but not the lords prayer. :)
Furthermore, 80% of rehab facilities are AA based. Your being stuck in the land of ideology refuses to recognize the simple reality that, although it's changing, there really are no other established rehab models in many areas that are non AA based. The intention of the state sending people to AA based rehab is to get them clean, not to brainwash them with Christianity. Nor does AA serve that purpose. Just because there might be a few Christian based rituals doesn't make it a Christian cult.
Sure and they can feel free to practice their religion, but right now they pass laws that are based on little more than their religious brainwashing and this oppresses the rest of us. Pretty much all vice laws are based on either religion or ultra-liberal philosophy (most liberals are actually pretty against vice laws). The laws about store operation times on Sunday are certainly because of Christianity. The laws about alcohol are from Christianity.
Again, this is strictly your opinion. Since it's hard to distinguish any law outside of ordinance specific ones, not based in religion it's hard to see your point.
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I would have to agree with this. Even if US government supposedly, theoretically protects us from a specific religion taking over the state, by which I mean the entire country, not a territory ("states" have no rights, as everyone knows), the predominant religion still manages to push through modern blue laws regardless, and they use the excuse of tradition and historical artifacts to justify this. All the more reason we need a full-scale revolution.
Utah is a very large territory. If you were born in Utah, and have the good luck to discover that everyone around him is batshit insane, moving out of such a large territory is prohibitively expensive, and the state deliberately makes it overly difficult and bothersome to migrate to other territories within the US, much less other countries.
Really? How does the state of Utah make this "prohibitively expensive"? In any case "too expensive to move" smacks as a very anti-libertarian argument. What makes even less sense is to use this as justification for a revolution. If you and 3 other members of your congregation want to revolt to protect the rights of non-Mormon drinkers in Utah no one's going to stop you. But I think the rest of your congregants along with the rest of us generally will look at you and gawk. :D
According to the Gospel of Snowcrash, if we enforced a Libertarian culture upon the state, and abolished it, the future holds that there would be small city-states called Burbs where people can choose to raise children. There would be fierce (sometimes violent) competition between them, since families vote with their wallets where to have children, and they are all roughly equivalent.
Wicked. I love Neal Stephenson. His creative intellect is amazing. :)
So the fuck what? The rehab facilities are not state institutions. AA might be a freak cult and use similar language to Christianity, but 'God' in AA can mean the higher power of the group itself and atheists in AA use it to mean that.
Yes they are. This is cultural warfare at its finest.
The cold hard facts speak for themselves.
Fact. AA does not push Christianity on you. It does not proselytize Christianity. It tries to get people to stay clean by making them recount all the fucked up things they did while high to remind them what a fucking piece of shit they are and shame them into not getting high again. It tries to make them dependent upon the group to stay sober, which is very indicative of cult protocol. But Christianity is in no way part of their course curriculum. The religious leanings, no matter how diehard, of the originators is besides the point since the mission of the group is not to proselytize Christianity, so it can hardly be deemed a "Christian" cult. A cult, yes.
Qualifying for tax exemption is difficult to the point of nigh impossibility unless you are a church. If you are a church, your qualification is a given. If you are not a church (of protestant christian denomination), it is deliberately nearly impossible to qualify for tax exempt status.
Last I checked the Church of Scientology wasn't a Protestant Christian denomination yet they enjoy tax exempt status.
You should read the tax code sometime, it's enlightening.
501c? Yeah I'm familiar. I actually wasn't referring exclusively to just religious organizations but ALL tax exempt organizations under 501c. Charities, non profits, scientific, public safety, educational, political orgs that are tax exempt under 501c it could technically be claimed they are all funded "by proxy" by tax paying citizens and corporations.
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I was gonna start a new thread but I guess this kinda belongs in here:
If an individual uses force to impose restrictions on your actions, actions that do not harm others, I think most people would agree that you could use force to defend yourself from that initiation of force.
If it was a group of individuals that is attempting to impose restrictions in the same manner, most people would also agree that the use of force to defend against this would be perfectly legitimate.
But what if a group of individuals takes an action (ie going to a polling booth) that indirectly leads to restrictions being imposed on your actions (ie drug laws)? Why is it more difficult to accept the legitimacy of using force against these people (voters)?
If people voted on a referendum to enslave or kill a sector of their society - I would accept the use of force against these people as legitimate. Beyond that it seems like a sliding scale of greyness.
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But what if a group of individuals takes an action (ie going to a polling booth) that indirectly leads to restrictions being imposed on your actions (ie drug laws)? Why is it more difficult to accept the legitimacy of using force against these people (voters)?
The simplest definition of a state is that " a state holds a legal monopoly of the use of force within a designated territory"
That means that the only state sanctioned institutions can use force on citizens.
If what you are saying were tolerated then that would mean that the state had lost its legal monopoly of the use of force and thus the state would cease to exist. Thus we would be in anarchy; anarchy being a society completely devoid of a state. Unfortunately for anarchists, anarchy can only exist as a temporary form. Eventually one group gains enough power to impose a new monopoly on the use of force and thus a new state is created.
If people voted on a referendum to enslave or kill a sector of their society - I would accept the use of force against these people as legitimate. Beyond that it seems like a sliding scale of greyness.
Would you accept this use of force if you were one of the members of society that was selected for slavery or death? It happened in Nazi Germany!
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The original poster must be American. Only in America does "Libertarian" mean anarcho-capitalist. In Europe it refers to libertarian socialist (anarcho-communist). I only read the first page of this thread so apologies if this has been discussed. I often find it bizarre that people who are against coercion and for freedom do not see the inherent coercion of capitalism. How can you say people going to jobs they don't give a fuck about for their entire lives just so they can exchange food and housing credits (money) with the very same class of people they are spending their lives slaving away for just because those capitalists control the means of production and all the resources the working masses need for survival is not blatant coercion? The absence of the state will not keep capitalist monopolies from forming. In fact, if the state were smashed and private ownership of resources and production maintained there would be a new state immediately. The state is the only entity that protects private ownership. For instance, I buy a car because if I go and take it from the dealership owner he will call armed men with guns that my tax dollars pay for to come and take the car back and put me in jail or murder me. So without the state, private police and militias (which is what existed before modern nation states) will take the place of the police to enforce property rights and ownership by FORCE.
I have met a few right libertarians/anarcho-capitalists and they almost always are failed entrepreneurs who feel the only reason their brilliance has not made them capitalist super stars is because the state is holding them back due to crony capitalism or some type of BS that would still occur after the current state were smashed and the inevitable rebirth of the state by the monied class would arise. Look into anarcho-communism, it is not an oxymoron and contains literally no coercion. Unless you think it is coercive to deny the product of the labor of the workers to people who don't want to work (i.e. the current capitalist class).
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I have met a few right libertarians/anarcho-capitalists and they almost always are failed entrepreneurs who feel the only reason their brilliance has not made them capitalist super stars is because the state is holding them back due to crony capitalism or some type of BS that would still occur after the current state were smashed and the inevitable rebirth of the state by the monied class would arise. Look into anarcho-communism, it is not an oxymoron and contains literally no coercion. Unless you think it is coercive to deny the product of the labor of the workers to people who don't want to work (i.e. the current capitalist class).
ROTFL. That sounds about right refunguy. ;D I find the anarcho-capitalists balls out nuts and have done a good deal of debating with many of them that seem to gravitate to the SR forums.
Here in America I think it's better to refer to anarcho-communists as anarcho-syndicalists even if the latter is merely the means to the former. It's easier on the ears since "communist" has become such a loaded epithet these days. ;)
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I have met a few right libertarians/anarcho-capitalists and they almost always are failed entrepreneurs who feel the only reason their brilliance has not made them capitalist super stars is because the state is holding them back due to crony capitalism or some type of BS that would still occur after the current state were smashed and the inevitable rebirth of the state by the monied class would arise. Look into anarcho-communism, it is not an oxymoron and contains literally no coercion. Unless you think it is coercive to deny the product of the labor of the workers to people who don't want to work (i.e. the current capitalist class).
ROTFL. That sounds about right refunguy. ;D I find the anarcho-capitalists balls out nuts and have done a good deal of debating with many of them that seem to gravitate to the SR forums.
Here in America I think it's better to refer to anarcho-communists as anarcho-syndicalists even if the latter is merely the means to the former. It's easier on the ears since "communist" has become such a loaded epithet these days. ;)
I agree. I should use syndicalist and have grappled with that reality myself. I just get a stubborn streak in me that wants to reclaim the word "communist" from the grave of that fuck face stalin.
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I agree, the Russuan "Soviets" were far From what Communism, Soviets and Socialism actually is, coming from an an Anarco-communist. We have no good example of our politics put into place anywhere really. YET! The red tide in Latin America is very inspiring though :)
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Glad to see some more comrades on here! I met an Irishman on holiday here once and he was cool as shit. His dad was in the struggle against British imperialism. If I was in Ireland I would order from you just for your politics, but I do not order out of country as of now. +1 Karma will have to do! ;D
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Glad to see some more comrades on here! I met an Irishman on holiday here once and he was cool as shit. His dad was in the struggle against British imperialism. If I was in Ireland I would order from you just for your politics, but I do not order out of country as of now. +1 Karma will have to do! ;D
Thanks comrade! Members of my own family have been murdered, tortured etc by the British too, and they still occupy a quarter of our country! The fight is still left in some of us Irish. we WILL be free!
In solidarity comrade! +1
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Solidarity comrade! Sorry for your loses. You have support all over the world. Glad to meet internationalists in that struggle. A large amount of nation state rhetoric can be found, same as anywhere else of course. Everyone wants to freely associate though, and that screams out for the need for people of an occupied territory to assert independence. I dig it and dig the militancy of the people.
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Socialist ideology is based entirely on entitlement and thinking that it is morally acceptable to use violence to rob rich people of their money and distribute it to the poor. Nothing prevents poor people in a free market capitalist world from moving up in the socioeconomic hierarchy, lots of rich people today were born into poor families. Tons of people have the next generation of their family better off than they were, just look at any middle class neighborhood and see where the people came from. A lot of them were born into poor families and worked hard to become middle class. And their children have an even easier time to get even more rich than their parents, and the same for their children as well. There is no reason to work hard particularly in a communist world where working hard just means that you support more people who you don't really even give a shit about.
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Seriously anarcho-socialists have the most backwards ass logic I have ever heard. "If you own two cars you are a thief, because you are using force to deprive someone who has no car from having your extra car, and thus you have stolen a car from him!" I don't see how people can say that with a straight face. In their world it is righteous for violent criminals to use force to steal your extra car, because in their twisted minds you are the one who has stolen the car from society by having an extra of something while some people have none. They think that means you are a car thief, and they are collecting stolen property by using force to take your car from you and give it to someone who has no car. The best word to describe these people is completely mind fucked.
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Seriously anarcho-socialists have the most backwards ass logic I have ever heard. "If you own two cars you are a thief, because you are using force to deprive someone who has no car from having your extra car, and thus you have stolen a car from him!" I don't see how people can say that with a straight face. In their world it is righteous for violent criminals to use force to steal your extra car, because in their twisted minds you are the one who has stolen the car from society by having an extra of something while some people have none. They think that means you are a car thief, and they are collecting stolen property by using force to take your car from you and give it to someone who has no car. The best word to describe these people is completely mind fucked.
Wow,
To be fair, reading your last two posts, it would be very very evident to anyone who understands even the very fundamental types of politics out there, that you absolutely haven't a clue as to what socialism or communism is, seriously. Not a clue. Its laughable and the posts are emitting a fine example of the ignorant stereotype you people have on it too, it was funny enough to put me in good form even!
Im just glad im not so limited as that.
BTW, the "higher" classes and bourgeois are absolute fucking parasites, they depend on an entire class (the working class) to do literally 99% of all their work while they rack in profit. While the worker has no choice only to accept the pittance said parasite pays them every week to get by, in comparison to the wages of the parasite, so there is no chance of social mobility, get it?.
I / We believe in equality. Not watered down slavery. Is that simple enough?
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Seriously anarcho-socialists have the most backwards ass logic I have ever heard. "If you own two cars you are a thief, because you are using force to deprive someone who has no car from having your extra car, and thus you have stolen a car from him!" I don't see how people can say that with a straight face. In their world it is righteous for violent criminals to use force to steal your extra car, because in their twisted minds you are the one who has stolen the car from society by having an extra of something while some people have none. They think that means you are a car thief, and they are collecting stolen property by using force to take your car from you and give it to someone who has no car. The best word to describe these people is completely mind fucked.
Wow,
To be fair, reading your last two posts, it would be very very evident to anyone who understands even the very fundamental types of politics out there, that you absolutely haven't a clue as to what socialism or communism is, seriously. Not a clue. Its laughable and the posts are emitting a fine example of the ignorant stereotype you people have on it too, it was funny enough to put me in good form even!
Im just glad im not so limited as that.
BTW, the "higher" classes and bourgeois are absolute fucking parasites, they depend on an entire class (the working class) to do literally 99% of all their work while they rack in profit. While the worker has no choice only to accept the pittance said parasite pays them every week to get by, in comparison to the wages of the parasite, so there is no chance of social mobility, get it?.
I / We believe in equality. Not watered down slavery. Is that simple enough?
First of all I know that there is social mobility. My grandparents and my parents were born poor, and now my grandparents are quite rich and my parents are well to do as well. I also know that this is a common theme, because I know a lot of people from upper middle class / lower upper class families and it is not at all uncommon that their parents were born poor and became wealthy. A grandparent of one of my friends ran away from an abusive home when he was a teenager, and worked his way up to being a multimillionaire, and a job provider! His grandchildren have been quite wealthy for their entire lives, and all of them have high paying jobs and received excellent educations. Going from living on the street as a run away from a poor abusive family to having millions of dollars sure seems like quite a lot of social mobility to me, so I really have not got a clue where you get the idea that there is no social mobility from? In a socialist world he would not have been rewarded for his work as much, because he would be forced to fund other people with his money.
There is social mobility if you are a hard worker or if you are skilled / intelligent. If you are not willing to work hard or if you are not above average intelligence / skilled at some specialty, then there is not as much mobility. In a free market people are paid for their abilities, it is called a job market. Rewarding skilled people only makes sense, why should someone with rare and sought after abilities be paid the same amount as someone who hasn't got rare and sought after abilities? When the government forces this to happen it just takes motivation away from people who have skills that are in high demand and short supply. It is bad for society as a whole.
I am well aware of socialism and communism, although they do have many different forms. Basically socialism is a watered down version of communism. Socialism is a collectivist leaning ideology that puts 'the good of society' over the good of the individual, hence the name socialism. Socialists believe in wealth redistribution, they think that healthcare should be paid for by society for society rather than by individuals for individuals. This is accomplished with high tax rates, which essentially boils down to by shoving guns in peoples faces (particularly rich people) , taking their money, and using it to fund social programs. Communism is the epitome of collectivism, it is socialism taken to its most extreme. In a communist society there is not even money, rather goods are distributed by a central agency 'from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs'. There are no longer owners of shoe factories hiring people to make shoes which are sold to consumers, rather the armed communist gangs raid the shoe factory and kill the owner, then they force people to make shoes which are then distributed through out the society. That is communism in a nut shell. It is impossible to have communism without initiating force because nobody in their right mind wants to be a slave to the collective, it is also impossible to have communism without a strong centralized government to manage the redistribution of wealth, which makes anarcho-communism a complete misnomer.
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Here we go again. I am not sure why state socialism always comes up when we talk about a stateless society. That major detail seems to be left out of the brilliant theoretical lesson put forth by pro-capitalists. STATELESS. Say it out loud. Libertarian socialism calls for no taxes, because it calls for no state to levy taxes, as well as no bosses, no borders, and no gods. The truth is capitalism artificially keeps people idle (unemployed) because a capitalist cannot currently profit to the extent desired by exploiting the labor of those people. Capitalism sees even more people devote their lives to jobs that bear no use to the survival of people or their basic pleasures. Resources are wasted and humans exploited as wage slaves. My problem is not that someone has two cars, something I have never heard a libertarian socialist use as a battle cry, but that million dollar cars exist, and that workers are required to build those so some oil baron's spoiled son can get his dick wet without trying. I do not advocate stealing that million dollar car, I advocate handcuffing its owner to the steering wheel and lighting it on fire. Please do yourself and everyone else a favor and at least read the first paragraph or two regarding libertarian socialism on wikipedia. That will increase the understanding of the average SR user one thousand times.
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So you would prefer the workers making the million dollar cars go hungry instead of being paid to make cars? Because you are jealous of someone who is more successful than you and so you want to put hundreds of working class people out of work and kill someone for having a nicer car than you? You sound like an insane person. I am sure that, like most socialist-"anarchists" I have met, you are about 15 years old and pissed off that you are broke while your rich neighbors kid has nice things because his dad is rich. I have actually heard the two car argument from socialists, who think that having two cars means you stole one car from society. Because not many people actually need two cars, and your underlying philosophy is from each according to his ability to each according to his need. So you want to take from the person with two cars one car, as he doesn't need the extra car, and give the extra car to someone who has no car and needs one. Just look at squatting, that is huge with European socialists, and it pretty much comes down to if someone has a home and they are not using it, it should be illegal for them to keep others out of it, because others need homes and they have no current use for it. I don't claim that all squatters are socialists though, I know it is a common cultural thing in parts of Europe, and indeed I have plenty of friends who have squatted (but I certainly wouldn't stay friends with someone who burns rich kids alive in their cars, or probably even with someone who goes around making sure everyone has exactly one car!).
No taxes and socialism is pretty much a non-sequitor. Let's go over to wikipedia and see what you actually think "anarcho-socialism" is!
Libertarian socialism (sometimes called social anarchism[1][2] or left-libertarianism)[3][4] is a group of political philosophies that promote a non-hierarchical, non-bureaucratic society without private property in the means of production. Libertarian socialists believe in converting present-day private productive property into common or public goods, while retaining respect for personal property.[5]
So they believe in "converting" (ie: stealing) private property into a public good, while allowing some forms of personal property. So you can own shoes, but not a shoe factory. So they want to steal the shoe factory, most likely killing the owner, and then they want the shoes produced to be distributed throughout society. That seems pretty much in line with my claim, although they did use some mighty fine euphemisms to make it seem less horrible. Also, you are going to have a hard time stealing the means of production without a strong central government. And who exactly determines how to distribute all of the produced shoes? I imagine also a central government. So pretty much you need a government to have socialism, which is pretty much what I said, and also what makes anarcho-socialism a misnomer.
Libertarian socialism is opposed to coercive forms of social organization. It promotes free association in place of government and opposes the social relations of capitalism, such as wage labor.[6] The term libertarian socialism is used by some socialists to differentiate their philosophy from state socialism,[7][8] and by some as a synonym for left anarchism.[1][2][9]
The first sentence goes against the first paragraph. The first paragraph claims that the socialist "anarchists" desire to steal productive property, and this is a coercive social organization. It is coercive to force people to not own means of production. You are also apparently against free association, as you don't want to let people join companies that make million dollar cars. You most likely want to tell people where to work actually, although you certainly want to tell them where they cannot work!
Adherents of libertarian socialism assert that a society based on freedom and equality can be achieved through abolishing authoritarian institutions that control certain means of production and subordinate the majority to an owning class or political and economic elite.[10] Libertarian socialism also constitutes a tendency of thought that promotes the identification, criticism, and practical dismantling of illegitimate authority in all aspects of life.
Socialists assert that a free society can be attained by stealing everything from rich people and murdering them for good measure. They also promote identifying, criticizing and dismantling all authority that that goes against their belief system, which here is called by the euphemism of illegitmate authority. Whereas anarcho-capitalists seek to identify, criticize and dismantle all authorities that attempt to initiate force against others, anarcho-socialists wish to initiate force against those who are richer than they are in order to create a society where everyone is of equal socioeconomic status. Anarcho-capitalists claim that illegitimate authority is any authority that attempts to initiate force, socialists claim that illegitimate authority is anyone who has more economic power than others.
Accordingly, libertarian socialists believe that "the exercise of power in any institutionalized form—whether economic, political, religious, or sexual—brutalizes both the wielder of power and the one over whom it is exercised".[18] Libertarian socialists generally place their hopes in decentralized means of direct democracy such as libertarian municipalism, citizens' assemblies, trade unions, and workers' councils.[19]
But this is also contradictory. The socialists claim they are against the exercise of institutionalized economic power, yet they desire to form institutions that exercise so much power that they seize the means of production from all individuals.
Libertarian socialists are strongly critical of coercive institutions, which often leads them to reject the legitimacy of the state in favor of anarchism.[28] Adherents propose achieving this through decentralization of political and economic power, usually involving the socialization of most large-scale private property and enterprise (while retaining respect for personal property). Libertarian socialism tends to deny the legitimacy of most forms of economically significant private property, viewing capitalist property relations as forms of domination that are antagonistic to individual freedom.
They claim to be critical of coercive institutions, but what could be more coercive than handcuffing rich kids into their million dollar cars and burning them alive? What could be more coercive than stealing all economically significant property? What could be more coercive than telling people what they can produce (no million dollar cars apparently) and what they can have (again no million dollar cars, but really they take it much further and would say you can only have one car, one pair of shoes, to be changed after so much time and after putting in a request to a centralized agency, just like the socialists have always done). They act like if someone buys a car factory it is not his personal property, which is just absurd. They think that someone owning a car factory is antagonistic to individual freedom, but not torching the rich person who owns the car factory and taking it over themselves.
Libertarian socialists are anti-capitalist, and can thus be distinguished from right-wing libertarians. Whereas capitalist (and right-libertarian) principles concentrate economic power in the hands of those who own the most capital, libertarian socialism aims to distribute power, and thus freedom, more equally amongst members of society. A key difference between libertarian socialism and capitalist libertarianism is that advocates of the latter generally believe that one's degree of freedom is affected by one's economic and social status, whereas advocates of the former focus on freedom of choice. This is sometimes characterized as a desire to maximize "free creativity" in a society in preference to "free enterprise."[38]
Although it is obvious that capitalism does give more power to people who have more capital, it does not prevent people from amassing more capital. It is entirely possible to move up several positions in the socioeconomic hierarchy, as I previously stated. I know many upper middle class and lower upper class people who were born poor. It is more rare to move up from the bottom to the top, although even this happens in some cases. Many rappers are a good example of this, a lot of them were born into the worst poverty and now they are some of the richest people in the world. Sure this is exceptional, but it demonstrates that even moving from the bottom to the top is possible. It is equally possible to move from the top to the bottom, as many who win or inherit large amounts of money discover. In a socialist world they strive to make it impossible to move below or above dead center, and somehow they think that this increases freedom. In all implementations of socialism ever seen, two classes emerge. The party class and the people class. The party class is essentially what the socialists claim to be against, but in reality it is what their leaders are striving for. The people who manage seizing the means of production and distributing it to society will always distribute more to themselves and their friends than they do to the people, just look at a history book to see this. So in practice socialism turns into something horrible, and in theory it is something almost as horrible to begin with.
Many libertarian socialists argue that large-scale voluntary associations should manage industrial manufacture, while workers retain rights to the individual products of their labor.[40] As such, they see a distinction between the concepts of "private property" and "personal possession". Whereas "private property" grants an individual exclusive control over a thing whether it is in use or not, and regardless of its productive capacity, "possession" grants no rights to things that are not in use.[41]
And here is where they argue that you should have only one car. If you have two cars, one of the cars is not in use. In the eyes of socialists, this car is private property and should be seized and redistributed to society. You possessions are things that you can actually use according to them, so therefor you get to keep one of your cars if you are in the habit of using it anyway. It is funny that these idiot socialists said my argument is incorrect and that I should read wikipedia, when it says right on wikipedia that these socialist idiots actually believe what I claimed they believed in the first place.
Anarchist communism (also known as anarcho-communism and occasionally as free communism) is a theory of anarchism which advocates the abolition of the state, markets, money, capitalism and private property (while retaining respect for personal property),[5] in favor of common ownership of the means of production,[113][114] direct democracy and a horizontal network of voluntary associations and workers' councils with production and consumption based on the guiding principle: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need".
No surprise there, the communist slogan "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". This means that you don't get that extra car if you don't, in the eyes of the implicit state, need it. Also, if the state thinks you have the ability to make shoes, don't be surprised when they come with guns and tell you that you are now a shoe maker. Again they want to abolish private property, but not "personal property", which although it doesn't at its face value make any sense at all, can be analyzed to mean "You only get one car". The communists want to abolish money, although one of their implementations uses time dollars. In such a system everyone is given money from the centralized government according to how many hours they work. An hour working as a janitor is rewarded with one hour dollar, and an hour working as a neurosurgeon is rewarded with one hour dollar. Now it is quite obvious that a great many people would not desire to do demanding work when they are paid as much for their work as people who are doing much less demanding work, so you may wonder how the hell is anything other than unskilled labor going to get done in such a society. Well the answer is that the state-by-any-other-name decides who is skilled enough to do demanding work, and then they pick a job for them and tell them that is the job they must do. So there are still neurosurgeons, they are just working with guns to their heads, and they are paid an hourly wage equal to the janitors. Sounds like a totally free society to me!!
Well I think that is enough Wikipedia reading for now. I would comment on the entire article but it is massive and really I think I have already shown that my understanding of the subject was correct prior to you suggesting that I read more about it, and also have demonstrated that I probably actually have a much better understanding of it than you do.