| Akvod said: My interpretation of laws are limitations on people's freedom that are imposed to protect the "natural" or "inalienable" rights of others. A secondary (and controversial, although both American liberals and conservatives both use and decry it for their own purposes) feature is to use it for the benefit of the entire society (utilitarianism). So an example of the former would be property rights, and an example of the latter would be bans on trans fat. My take on lolicon bans is this. It causes really damage (imprisonment, fines, humiliation, etc) for no benefit whatsoever to society or to individuals. Let's analyze bans on child pornography though. I like the logic to ban it, not based on obscenity, but because it harms the rights of individuals (the children involved in the making of the product). Obviously the making of the material involves harming the child, and the circulation of the material goes against the child's will and further humiliates them. The circulation of the material and ownership of the material should be stopped, not just based on the issue of consent and humiliation, but because it will cripple the MARKET that exists for such material. Crippling the market, will greatly decrease the supply and demand for the product (yes, demand too. If you increase the risk of being caught and arrested, that adds a cost to each purchase). Now let's look at lolicon. There's no individual harmed in the process of making the material. None. Therefore, there's no reason to ban the creation of it, as well as the ownership and circulation of it as well. There's no need to attack the supply and demand of it, since there's no harm with the market existing. The only possible argument that exists, the one that all anti-videogame/movie/music/etc proponents fall back to is that such material increases risk for dangerous behavior (this falls into the secondary usage of laws: utilitarianism). But there is not an overwhelmingly strong evidence for such a thing. It's not a scientifically proven fact yet. We shouldn't base any law, or limit the rights of individuals based on unproven things. A few dubious studies (if there are any) aren't enough. |
I agree completely, the main problem being that anyone who runs around litigating for the right to watch/read about animated kiddies do it (which is how the argument will be framed by its detractors or worse) is not going to gain traction of any kind
First amendment rights could be brought into play (Free Speech Coalition v Ashcroft already defeated a similar law in the past, and likely if this guy raised a big enough stink about this to get the ACLU's attention, or the attention of the porn-industry-representing Free Speech Coalition, they could fight it and get the current anti-lolicon US provisions overturned as well), but you're never going to get support for such a thing, and then Congress would just try to weasel around it, because it's an easy target soft-button issue that no one except people who enjoy the stuff (though as i said, i'm not into loli, but i am into resecuring my right to own these non-loli Sailor Moon doujins which are equally illegal), and really hardcore libertarians would find any reason to object to.
Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.
