The War on Porn

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You mean that the United states has no laws against Child pornography? Damn that's a shock...

 

No, we have laws against pornography period. But not even the legislators take them seriously. I believe there are also a couple places where prohibition (no alcohol for anyone) was never repealed, but they don't enforce those either.

 

Gah - sorry if the link has porn and such in it - I didn't get that ad and haven't seen anything else of the site - I'll replace it with the link to the story where I got the link from

And Gnarf - it's not like these were pictures of children - not even faked pictures. These were stories ffs - who exactly is being damaged here?

I wonder how long it will be before 'War on Freedom' is declared (openly, anyway).

War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.

 

@ Arendil

Way to take a line from my post completely out of context. I'm only going to focus on the "under 18" part of your comment, because the "over 40" part is completely irrelevant to the discussion.

As for the purveyors of porn, it doesn't matter if a large chunk of people who are under 18 are trying to access their product, provided they have reasonable procedures in place to not sell to these people, and they do. In fact, they have similar practices to other age restricted products. You have to be at least 18 to purchase cigarettes, and at least 21 to purchase alcohol. Should we ban the sales of these products too? Or are you suggesting that no under-aged individuals use these products?

Look, for direct over-the-counter sale of porn, it's definitely on the owner of the store to make sure he's only selling to clients who are at least 18. From what I understand, if you are on the internet and purchasing anything - porn or not - they ask if you are the holder of the credit card account that you are using to make the purchase. If you are under 18 years of age, you aren't the holder of the account, because credit card companies can't enter into contractual agreements with people under 18 years of age. That's not to say that there are no people under the age of 18 with a credit card, but in such instances the account holder is someone over 18 who had the under-aged person placed on the account.

I'm assuming that there's no such thing as a free porn site. These sites are in it for making money. If you are purchasing that material and claiming that you are the primary holder of the credit card account, you are committing fraud. That's not the internet site's fault. It's either on the purchaser or (more likely) on the person holding the account who is over 18.

 

@Aldeth

I envy you - it seems that you live in a country that has means of enforcing the law. Sadly, there are many cases in Poland when noone does anything about few specific crimes. Example: taking profits from prostitution is against our law, yet in fact it is quite legal, only under different name, like ...erm..."massage room" in place of a "brothel".

Pornography is even more complicated case. In theory illegal (if you want exact terms ask chev), in practice never punished, mostly due to lack of good definition what that is, or because of "little harm done to society" - those against porn hear this phrase a way too often.

Everyone here can buy whatever porn he/she/it wants, wherever, and whenever he/she/it wants. Although, in theory you have to be at least 15 to do so...

I'm sorry, but this is completely, and entirely wrong. There are plenty, most with free samples of films, photos, etc. Not to mention illegal sites...truth is - only intelligence of parents stands between their children, and porn from internet...

 

Obviously, I do not frequent porn sites enough to know this. I was under the impression that virtually all of them existed to make money, and as such you were charged for their services. Sites such as this are not making reasonable efforts to prevent minors from accessing their sites.

As far as the law enforcement goes, well, that's the premise behind this new initiative. That having been said, I mostly agree with Poland's assessment, that it isn't doing much harm to society, and as such, there really isn't a need to spend a large amount of resourcing combating the problem.

As for prostitution, I imagine that you have that in every city with a decent sized population all over the world. It's also very hard to arrest people for prostitution also, as it basically requires working under cover as a police officer. You can't just arrest every scantily clad woman on every street corner and charge them with prostitution.

 

I suppose that if the powers that be get their way They could block the entirely of sites dedicated to porn-as has been done in China. Of course, once they do that, it would certainly lead to other temptations... say, blocking alternate view websites criticizing government policy, sites dedicated to free thinking and free living... basically any site that doesn’t agree with the instigators of the whole thing... so... what sites are left?
I suppose this leaves a lot online for the American polulation to view. After all, its long and it says everything... doesn't it?

 

The basic idea behind it is to give out free samples (like those teeny cups of ice cream) to entice you to buy access to the rest of the content. But in practice, all it does is allows anyone access to those samples. I was even once redirected (while surfing a regular site to which I never went back for fear of further redirects) to a site that did nothing but collect links to samples.

 

@Felinoid - Yep...I remeber once, I "googled" for "roguelike RPG", clicked on the second link, and it redirected me to a porn site... ...

@Aldeth - You disappointed me...first it is NOT a question whether this law makes sense or not, it is a matter of enforcing existing one. That makes a country lawful and civilized. Then it is harmful to society when teens somewhere around 15-17 age, or sometimes even younger, can buy whatever porn they want...I thought you agreed with me on that one, my mistake...

 

@Aldeth: There's even that law somewhere in the States that undercover officers can strip naked to perform an arrest. This is because prostitutes started requiring you to strip naked before arranging the deal. Come on, that's freaking slutty. I don't want girls (or guys, for that matter) like that in the police!

...Enough?

Oh, and there's no such thing as free porn -- in the sense that everyone involved pays the price in one form or another. I'm not talking about karma, but doing such things for money affects people. Making others do it and profiting from it does so. Watching it, too.

 

No, I do agree with you that people within the age of 15-17 should not be able to purchase porn. I'm saying that people aged 18 and older should be able to if that's what floats their boat. I don't support porn sites, but shutting them all down is a violation of freedom of speech. The problem isn't the porn sites, it's the fact that minors can access them. Just like the problem isn't the people who produce beer, but the people who drink and drive, and minors who also abuse it.

I had that one coming. Good one.

 

Actually, those are the very ones I'm glad to have on the police force. Taking the extra necessary step to get criminals off of the streets is to be commended, not scorned. Such actions only show that law enforcement will take whatever steps are necessary to comlete the job, no matter how distasteful those steps may be to them.

Simply giving up on enforcing a particular law because the "bad guys" have a way to screen out cops is, well, giving up. And that's not the kind of wimps I want patrolling my streets.

BTW, good one chev.

 

well, i actually think it is legal for kids(under 18) to watch porn as much as they want, on sites from other countries that is eg. Denmark, i'm not sure if there is a minimum age for viewing porn(if there is it is 15 or 16), like it is legal to post torrent files in sweden(if you know what that is

 

I don't know if it's been mentioned or not, but porn, in pictureor written form, is not protected speach and, as such, people have no inherrant right to it. I know Arabwel mentioned freedom of speach.

 

@Felinoid:

Question is, are the steps necessary? Often those cops' superiors would rather they lost the case than had done that. Policemen are not just guys with guns who are on our pay as opposed to guys with guns who are not. Policemen are guardians in the society and as such they need to maintain a certain moral high ground. That high ground is lost when the distinction between the good guys and the bad ones is blurred. Is it really better to use sex to put someone into jail than to earn money? Come on, I could come up with a dozen arguments to support an improvised frivolous thesis that what prostitutes do is better than what cops do in such cases. And the more I think about it, the less frivolous the thesis sounds to me.

But don't we give up if we have the police do what prostitutes do (use sex as a job tool)? If you were a woman and your husband a policeman, would you like him to get naked to make an arrest? What if female undercover decoys started undressing because johns wouldn't believe them to be real prostitutes if they didn't? Now imagine your gf or wife or daughter or sister is one.

Heck, every intelligence service probably has a batallion of special agents who are slutting "for king and country". I don't like the idea of public authorities dabbling with such things. It's not like I'm a prude. I mostly don't even care to care. But some things are just disturbing.

 

I assume this was meant to provoke a reaction, but I'll respond to it anyway. The cops are not having sex for money; the line is still clearly defined.

Well, it's not Plan A. I'm sure a number of things have happened that led to this unfortunate state of affairs. Undercover cops have a lot of psychological tricks to get out of bad situations, but they don't always work, and some allowance needs to be made for that.

Never going to happen. To put it bluntly, a john should not be expecting to get something he hasn't paid for yet. IOW, "No sampling the merchandise." And once he's offered, that's all you need to make the arrest.

Now that's a different subject entirely. If someone you know is a cop, do you treat them like you would other cops? I don't think so.

The police force is not the knighthood; it has little to do with providing a shining beacon to humanity. Their job is the dirtiest one you can imagine, trudging through the filth of human society and trying to clean it up. You can hardly expect someone who cleans out a sewer pipe to come home smelling like roses. Yes, they should be better than the common criminal, but not so much so that they are prevented from doing their jobs.

 

@NOG: and just where does it say that?

 

Dittoing what Ara says and also:

'Freedom of speech', to me (and hopefully to everyone, seeing that it's not freedom if there are limitations attached to it) is freedom of *all* speech, not just that which you agree with. You might find it disgusting and wrong, but to define what speech can be free or not is totally screwing with the concept of freedom.

 

@Felinoid:

Oral isn't sex?

So in order to fight the bad things we need to allow more bad things to happen? So, again, as an example, if we were to have a war on porn, should we send undercover female cops to take part in castings for porn actresses?

Besides, I'm a handsome guy, myself, and very charming, and I would never even think about using sex as a means of getting something. It's so incredibly cheap...

Sampling could hurt business, but there is such a possibility. It doesn't have to be undressing, just something a decent woman wouldn't do. Besides, what about male prostitutes? Or, more in context of our current topic, what about hypothetical female undercover cops pretending to be porn actresses?

A reasonable degree of morals? Naah, it doesn't work like that. Sometimes you need to shoot a poor lost idiot before he has a chance of detonating his not even certainly working home-made bomb, but come on, sex is not part of the job. I believe we've had enough of cross-gender searching (police, prison guards, even teachers) and watching (prison guards), as well as naked scanning ideas (airport guards who aren't even public officers), we don't need special slutty units in the police. Not even as a part of the war on porn.

 

Are you suggesting that shooting a potentially innocent person is somehow more ethical than the aforementioned sex-related activities that conclusively *prove* the culprits are guilty?

But the high ground isn't lost when shooting first and asking questions later?