UPDATE Man Faces Minimum 1 Year in Prison for Bringing Manga to Canada On His Laptop

[sapphi_snake]

Baalzamon said:

sapphi_snake said:

It's not as much as thoughts that's the problem (though FTR, planning to murder someone, or planning to commit a terrorist attack are also illegal, even if you're just in the plannign stage, ergo "just thinking"), as the involuntary impulses that lead to those thoughts, impulses controlled by a mental illness.

I'm having a hard time agreeing with this, because we don't know what the fuck people are planning in their head.  So whether or not it is actually illegal (which I doubt just having thoughts in your head is illegal, for the reason that we have no evidence to back it up).  If you try saying that it is, I would absolutely LOVE for you to find a criminal case where somebody was found guilty, where the ONLY evidence was thoughts inside of their head.  The same with a terrorist attack.  Nobody will ever be found guilty for solely having thoughts inside of their head.  If they were, you would see a MASSIVE percentage of the population going to jail, because the fact of the matter is, people have stray thoughts that they may not necessarily ever intend on acting on.

Regardless, these examples cannot be compared to watching manga.  Manga is outside of somebody's brain.  So rather than having absolutely no evidence, other than one's thoughts, this provides at least SOME evidence.  I'm not saying with this alone it should go one way or another, but you can't compare these things.

Well, I was talking about "planning", you'd obviously need physical evidence to prove that the person was doung such a thing. In the case of the person who thought about terrorism it could be written plans to commit such an act. In the case of the paedophile it's material such as lolicon. You can't convict someone for "thinking" something, and even if you wanted to you couldn't, unless you could somehow read people's minds.