A few years ago we had a shitsplosion involving the BATF running illegal guns in order to "catch criminals", with the result that few if any criminals were caught and Mexican drug lords found themselves in possession of nifty new guns. AFAIR none of the major decision makers lost their jobs, let alone were prosecuted.
I wonder how much actual law enforcement purpose is behind these ops and how much of it is just a game of "let's see what we can get away with".
Philosophical purity is very appealing, but ultimately the justifications we use for why the law is the way it is only have to stand up long enough to convince most interested parties that we're doing the right thing.
When the law is influenced by societal consensus the legal system becomes a farce.
"the Constitution, or any text, should be interpreted [n]either strictly [n]or sloppily; it should be interpreted reasonably"
To criminalize it in all of its forms, is the same thing as criminalizing any sexuality. Perhaps one day we'll create an algorithm that can generate these images without anyone being involved -- does that sound distasteful as well.
At this point even artful depictions of a sexual nature are illegal, criminal offense.
That includes everyone. Women with the most neotenous traits are considered the most attractive in every human society.
I mean the deviant element of this is that it's all so taboo, I mean after all "think of the children" (tm). We should treat it as any other crime and try to do harm reduction.
The law is not a programming language.
We are supposed to be judged by people of our approximate age, origin, location, background, etc, to allow for a greater understanding of context.
Random jury selection is an abomination.
An artist accused of selling fake fraudulent paintings should be judged by a jury of artists, since these would best understand the techniques used to make paintings and could interpret the evidence to determine whether it was fraud.
Toyota cheating their emissions should only be judged by a jury made up of members of large car dealerships, mechanics, car repair services, etc. These would be best equipped to understand what exactly was done where in the pipeline, and interpret the evidence for or against them.
When a Goldman Sachs executive is accused of fraud, only other Wall Street investment bankers should be on the jury as these are his peers and the only ones who understand the complex financial instruments being used.
Beautiful comment.
I think that, while people do care for the victims, their main driving force behind their interactions is hatred of the entire group (both those who commit crimes and those who don't). Hatred they justify by the damage some do, but hatred that does not originate there. It is almost like there is some need to have a group painted as evil beyond any consideration, some group you can openly hate regardless of anything else which fuels it. This is one reason why I think support for treatment of non-offenders is so lacking (other than 'lock them up and throw away the key') and why people tolerate the police engaging in abuse of the very same kind to catch them.
And then, the small piece of my mind which loves a good conspiracy begins to wonder if this wasn't engineered as an constant backdoor into digital rights/freedoms. One only needs to look at laws greater than 60 to 100 years ago to see how vastly different society reacted (often there wasn't much care even when a victim was being directly victimized, especially if they weren't the child of someone white and well off).
The same way downloading pirated material creates a market for it, even if you download it for free and the providers don't get money from it (but are rewarded with scene creds)