Can you give a good reason why you believe child pornography ahouldnt be illegal? Because to me it sounds like youre justifying child rape in the name of "anti-censorship"

I’m not doing that at all, and you shouldn’t put scare quotes on anti-censorship.

First, let’s go over a few incidents. Recently, I heard about an acquaintance of mine whose 16-year-old son’s 17-year-old girlfriend attempted to send him a topless selfie but instead accidentally texted it to her neighbor, an old lady who freaked out and called the police. And the first reaction of the police was to begin the process of indicting ALL THREE OF THEM for possession of child pornography and adding them to the sex offender registry for life - and it’s only because the girl’s dad was a golfing buddy of the chief of police that it ended with all of their cell phones being confiscated and wiped instead. Does this sound like a reasonable way of dealing with this situation? Were all of them child rapists? How much prison time should you get for the crime of receiving an unsolicited JPEG file exactly?

Let’s consider also the Playpen incident last year, which was what prompted that post you’re probably responding to, in which the FBI ran a sting operation that disseminated a massive amount of child pornography through the dark web, which was so badly mishandled that very few people they caught downloading real hardcore child rape pornography can be prosecuted. The US federal government is itself unquestionably the biggest distributor of child pornography there is. This is the same federal government that ran COINTELPRO, MKULTRA, the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, etc. And they are now headed by Donald Trump, who is one of several political figures who went to Jeffrey Epstein’s private island before Epstein was convicted of trafficking in underage prostitutes. Donald Trump of the Republican Party, which recently had Dennis Hastert as the Speaker of the House, who has since been convicted of raping an underage boy. And let’s not even get into all the shit the Democrats have been caught doing. Are these the people you trust to fairly enforce these laws? Do you think it would be difficult for any three-letter agency to put child pornography on your computer without your knowledge if they wanted to, so they could prosecute anyone they wanted and claim they were secretly a pedophile, to destroy their reputation? Is that a power you are comfortable with Donald Trump and the deep state having? They haven’t been willing to legally define ‘pornography,’ even. Having laws forbidding certain combinations of ones and zeroes hands those people a blank check to destroy whomever they wish.

Let’s go back to what prompted my personal interest in this whole debate, which was the relationship I had with an older woman when I was 16 - when I had a job, I was going to college, I was allowed to drive a multi-ton motor vehicle, I was talking to a recruiter about joining the Marine Corps, etc. but had no access to many other legal rights arbitrarily withheld from people under 18. If she had sent me racy photos of herself or vice versa, well, she might still be in prison today. As it was, we carefully avoided putting her at risk for two very long years until I was 18, at which point we had a rather normal romantic adult relationship for several years that ended amicably, that I look back on fondly today. As the person who was supposedly protected here by being forcibly kept apart from the person I loved, how do you think I feel about the state’s interference in our relationship now? If you guessed ‘immensely resentful even after all these years,’ you are correct. Would it have been child rape on her part if I had sent her a picture of my naked body unprompted? Does it make any sense that I could pledge to sign several years of my life over to the military at that age but I couldn’t send someone a picture of myself? Do you get how that experience molded my opinion on the subject and made me willing to speak out on the subject even if it meant people would call me a pedophile?

One of the most famous home movies in history is the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination. We’ve all seen it, right? But it’s photographic evidence of a crime. Shouldn’t we all be charged with condoning the murder of the president for watching that footage, by your logic? Surely you agree that murder is worse than rape. Shouldn’t possessing media of a person being killed be illegal, if possessing media of a person being raped should be? And if animated or drawn child pornography is illegal, shouldn’t possessing any movie or video game in which a person is shown being killed be grounds for imprisonment as well? The logic that you folks use has implications far beyond this subject, but you never really pursue those implications (and you shouldn’t, because they’re insane).

My point is, that’s because you’re fabricating unsound legal principles here to support the existence of this unjust, unconstitutional law (probably because anyone who questions it gets accused of being a pedophile, and you don’t want to wind up with clueless anons accusing you of justifying child rape, for example), instead of coming up with law based on sound legal principles. In any other context, anyone would tell you that possessing a picture or video of a crime is not the same thing as committing the crime yourself and the harm was entirely in the original crime, not just watching it. Are you justifying robbing convenience stores by saying it shouldn’t be illegal to watch America’s Dumbest Criminals? And if we took that principle to extremes it’d suppress important political speech - for example, after Vietnam the American media was pressured by the military to stop showing images of US soldiers in body bags, and as a consequence we’re more emotionally isolated from the wars currently being waged and information about the circumstances of the deaths of soldiers has been kept from the public ‘out of respect.’ Laws against pornography were used not so long ago to suppress information about birth control and sex education. It’s not unimaginable that there’s something important we’re not being allowed to know about, or that we’re all afraid to discuss, because it’s been declared child pornography. Censorship is absolutely something you should be afraid of in any form, and even well-meaning censorship can inadvertently suppress the truth. A free society, especially a democracy, depends on open access to information to function and I’m skeptical of anything that nibbles at that around the edges, even for the noblest of causes. These things always have chilling effects on expression far beyond their official limits as well. If some JPEGs can be illegal it requires all this machinery of surveillance and enforcement that can be just as easily used to suppress other things, and if we don’t trust the state, which we shouldn’t, we shouldn’t be comfortable with that machinery of censorship existing at all. We can’t trust them to stay within their mission - look at all the NSA personnel spying on their girlfriends instead of terrorists. Look at how the state has far outgrown its constitutional bounds. Stopping a few fucked up people from getting access to their preferred masturbation material is not worth having to give Leviathan access to all of our digital communications.

I am an anarchist. I discuss radical libertarian politics here. That’s why I’m against this law that’s been abused so much, the enforcement of which has been a massive travesty of justice for decades. Not because I’m ‘trying to justify child rape.’ My ideology is rooted in the nonaggression principle, which rape obviously violates. Do you think I should take the position of ‘we need to remove all power from the government except the power to prosecute people for child pornography?’ There’s no exception here to my general critique of the state. And what do you think would happen to child rapists in Ancapistan, anyway? ‘Hunted for sport’ is my guess. A convicted child rapist would probably not be able to retain the protection of a DRO (I’ve conjectured for a long time that that might be the one thing all of them would refuse to deal with) and they’d have the status of a medieval outlaw, they’d have no legal protections - likely a de facto death sentence with all the people who’d be lining up to kill them. Meanwhile, the state plays catch and release with child rapists - go check the sex offender map and see how many live in your community right now, I dare you.

Anyway, Anon, you are the unwitting pawn of someone who has started a harassment campaign against me, who has accused me of all kinds of other ridiculous vile shit in the past few days as well, and sent messages encouraging me to commit suicide. They dug up a post from nearly two years ago and reposted it outside of the context of the ongoing debate we had had, triggered by the revelation that the FBI had disseminated a massive amount of child pornography on the deep web. I had explained all of this back then in even greater detail, but then someone sent me an anon asking me about banning violent porn and I made the mistake of mentioning my position again without that context, so it could be misinterpreted by people unfamiliar with my ideas.

So yeah, I don’t condone raping children, I’m not a psychopath, I just really don’t trust the government, in large part because there are so many actual child rapists at the highest levels of government, and I think we can do better than the current system. I hope this clarifies my thinking for you.