latest

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.

Crypto-Islamic news editors at CNN were in shock yesterday: ‘Qandeel Baloch: Pakistani social media star strangled by her brother.’

This was apparently front page news, nestled between stories about Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, the assault-style truck attack in France, and the aborted coup attempt in Turkey. I doubted many of CNN’s readers knew or cared much about Pakistani social media stars, so I dove into the article to see what I could learn about the mass mind-control apparatus that is CNN. What did they want me to think because of this article?

The answer came quickly, in the vein of why we are all constantly force-fed praise about Malala Yousafzai: women are being oppressed in the Indian subcontinent, and you should feel bad about it. This time the oppression took the form of an angry Pakistani man who strangled his sister, who was making a name for herself posting half-naked selfies on Facebook and Instagram. He protested the “kind of pictures she had been posting online.”

CNN described Qandeel Baloch’s online exploits as “brazenly sassy, and increasingly political.” She was “curvaceous and self deprecating.” Here’s a money quote:

"In recent weeks, several of her posts encouraged her audience to challenge old practices of Pakistani society. In a July 14 post, Baloch referred to herself as a “modern day feminist.”"

Haha, oh man.

Qandeel Baloch’s brother didn’t murder her. Feminism murdered her.

I almost feel bad for Qandeel Baloch. Almost. This chubby female of middling looks, with the desperate need for attention common to her sex, somehow found a way to boost and buttress her own status and popularity. In a traditional Pakistani society, she found the Internet. She found Facebook and Instagram, doubtlessly shortly thereafter followed by Western ideas about “women’s visibility.” She found that, even though she was pretty average and unremarkable, she could do a simple thing to become famous and popular: post half-naked pictures of herself on social media with captions using words like “empowering.”

What happened next? The Cathedral found her, of course. Feminists found her. NGOs found her. Journalists found her. Did they tell her to stop posting such lewd and stupid stuff online? Did they tell her that Kim Kardashian is a warning, not a role model? Did they tell her she’d be better off doing something actually productive, like raising children? No, of course not!

...

That newspaper eagerly encouraged and fueled Qandeel Baloch’s narcissistic endeavours in order to further a political goal: the advancement of feminism and other progressive norms in Pakistan. Baloch made a reckless but predictable deal with the Devil. She would be the cudgel with which the Cathedral would beat traditional Muslim Pakistanis. In exchange, she got attention, fame, notoriety, and money. In theory.

In reality, the deal got messy very fast, and her own traditional Muslim Pakistani brother strangled her before she became a Kim Kardashian. He saw her become the Pakistani Lena Dunham, and he had enough.

Now CNN is eulogizing her as yet another martyr in the global and endless war of feminism and progressivism against human nature.

...

Tanqeed is not quite a fully-fledged Soros operation yet, but its donor list is suspiciously full of non-Pakistani names: Brady Calestro, David Dencker, Anna Waltman, and so on. Tanqeed, much like Dawn, provided cover and incentive for Qandeel Baloch. Do they reap any blame for her death? Are they at all ashamed or apologetic for pushing her into the role of a crowdfunded Lena Dunham in a country where honor killing is still common? No, of course not!

...

It’s clear she wasn’t rich, because if she was, she would have been writing a feminist column in The Harvard Crimson far away from Taliban and honor killers. She was a working class woman who took the high-risk job of being the Cathedral’s frontline feminist culture war shock trooper in a heavily Muslim country.

...

The Express Tribune, needless to say, is another major English-language Pakistani newspaper. It is Pakistan’s only newspaper affiliated with the International New York Times. Its editorial stance identifies with “social liberalism.”

What is the real story here? CNN wants to spin an epic tale of an average woman standing up to patriarchal oppressors against all odds. CNN wants to turn her into a martyr and a heroine. But she is neither of those things, and CNN’s tale is false on its face.

The real story is a sordid one. It is a story of a number of news organizations and NGOs following Anglo-Saxon ideologies of feminism and progressivism, funded and directed from abroad, working on a long-term project to undercut traditional Pakistani society and remake it in the images of Harvard and Oxford Utopia. It is a story of a lower-class Pakistani woman without a husband who got sucked into the pointless spiral of selfies, clicks, and likes that is Western social media, and was then selected and fueled down that path by those same news organizations and NGOs in order to further their political goals.

When she met her inevitable fate in Muslim Punjab, they eulogized her and blamed the patriarchy. And yet, before Qandeel Baloch was having phone calls with journalists at major left-of-center newspapers, she was not likely fearing for her life, nor twerking half-naked for millions to watch on YouTube. Qandeel Baloch was not empowered, she was a political pawn for organizations that did not care whether she lived or died.

Feminism killed the Pakistani Lena Dunham. It’ll kill the American one too, but that inevitable wound will be self-inflicted, unlike in Muslim Pakistan.