She just suffers from dwarfism!
I’m as unnerved by this case as anyone. But for the sake of discussion, I’m going to play devil’s advocate.
Disclaimer: I don’t actually believe this.
The people in favor of this law, assuming they’re actually trying to argue rationally, would say they’re protecting the child concept. Obscene depictions of children present children as sexual objects. The concept of a child transcends fantasy and reality. Therefore, if a person views representations of children as sexual objects, he will view real children as sexual objects.
From there, the argument becomes a bit more muddled. At this stage we’re looking at a thought crime, but a very heinous one, and one that threatens our perception of safety, if not our actual safety. We’ve established that all lolicons (fans of obscene visual representations of children) are potential pedophiles, perhaps even that lolicon = pedophile. Would you feel secure knowing that pedophiles are oggling your child, even though other laws protect her from actual harm? What about pedophiles trying to woo her, without any overt sexual contact?
Now I’m going to make some logical jumps. Let’s suppose we’re reasonably confident that lolicon manga causes real pedophilia, which leads to an increase in sex crimes against children. Now you could argue that making lolicon manga illegal results in objective good–it protects children from being molested. We have many laws in effect to protect you from yourself–just look at seat belt laws. In light of those laws, this law making lolicon manga illegal makes perfect sense. It protects potential pedophiles from become real pedophiles and committing sex crimes, and it protects children from becoming victims of those crimes.
The problem is that the general argument presented – “permitting imaginary depictions of $BAD_THING makes people more likely to do $BAD_THING” – has at this point fairly strong empirical evidence to suggest the reverse is true (that it actually reduces the real-world occurrence of $BAD_THING).
So the logic falls apart at that point in your supposition.
What you’re doing is called a fallacy: so the argument falls apart, as Nandemonai said. The fallacy being:
Pedophiles have sex with children. Lolicon is about having sex with children. People who like lolicon are pedophiles.
Compare that with something like:
NRA members have rifles. Rifles are big guns. People who have big guns are NRA members.
The logic is fail.
The other problem to your argument, is that it’s preemptive overkill law enforcement. Let’s say there’s a mass murderer hiding in an innocent village, who the government has wanted dead for years. He’s a SERIOUS threat to the stability of the country. Problem is, the government doesn’t know what he looks like or who he is. But they’re 100% certain he’s hiding in this village. Execute a thousand innocent people to get the one real guilty person? Sure… you might protect society… but at what cost to your own?
Nah, arresting them all, putting them all in a cell for the rest of their lives without charging them with any crime nor giving them a trial because, well, there’s no actual way to distinguish the guilty from the innocent, nor actual proof to effectively condemn anyone --but, heh, they’re all suspects (of what is a mystery, still they’re not actually charged of anything, but…)-- is the better course. Of course, torturing them all while telling it’s not torture until one admits he’s the murderer is an option.
Joking, of course, there’s no way a modern, western, civilized government would do such a thing.
First person shooters present human beings as targets. Therefore, if a person views representations of humans as targets, he will view real humans as targets.
… except we’ve already gone to the trouble of doing all the research to prove that this isn’t true, so do we have to do it again for your example?
YES, if a homicidal maniac plays a first person shooter, (s)he will probably view the characters in them as human targets!
And YES, if a pedophile plays a loli eroge, (s)he will probably view the characters in them as children.
But the point is that you’ve got the whole thing backwards, and logic is no longer logic if you just reverse it like that. It becomes a fallacy.
Oh, and I have never, ever viewed a loli in an eroge as a child, and never will. Are you going to argue that I’m in the minority (and therefore don’t exist, thus the majority of people who play awesome games like Suigetsu are PEDOPHILES), or are you going to argue that because SOME people do, the entire set of games should be banned? Or am I lying, and I’m actually a pedophile and am probably sitting in a tree, watching your kids through the window with a set of binoculars right now?
See, some people could watch live action porn and view the (very much non-childlike) actors as children. Should all porn be banned because of them?
I nearly fell out of my chair.
It’s a good joke, isn’t it?
I doubt Christopher Handley is finding this funny, though…
I recently discovered that Christopher Handley was not given a written promise by the prosecution, when he pleaded guilty. I’m not so sure it was a plea bargain… he might have simply pleaded guilty. Evidently the sentencing is not set. Because he pleaded guilty, there’s nothing he can do to appeal. He made his bed… his battle is over.
Handley’s Declaration of Surrender
Justice Department’s Declaration of Victory
Series of incredibly detailed legal analysis of the case and what the future holds:
Entry #1: http://blog.newsarama.com/2008/12/23/co … nd-the-law
Entry #2: http://blog.newsarama.com/2009/05/22/ha … -obscenity
Entry #3: http://blog.newsarama.com/2009/05/22/th … ndley-case
His ultimate verdict? Lolicon isn’t automatically fucked, but 9-out-of-10 it’s going to be. 
So-called ‘bad’ content can generally be handled just fine by someone who’s able mature enough to recognise that it doesn’t reflect reality or is talking to someone who can explain it. That’s why most censorship arguments are met with “Just watch it WITH your kids for heaven’s sake and explain it if needed.”
Of course, people passing crazy laws are also certain that other parents suck and will fail to perform this role. (Which is sometimes true). However, banning racist cartoons does NOTHING to stop actual racist parents from bringing up their kids to be fuckheads. 
shrugs
Well, the basis was that obscene materials are illegal, anyway, even when kept in the privacy of one’s house. Why, and what’s the harm, is still something to which I didn’t find a conclusive answer but…
Neither do I. However the more I uncover, the more I become aware that if something is obscene, possession of it in the US is illegal: privacy or not. Why does having a single obscene cartoon dictate a max 15 year prison term, when things like organized dog fighting are a max 6 year term, is beyond me as well.
However what we think isn’t at issue. It’s important we figure out the boundaries of what we’re working with. People on the various chan boards and blogging community say lolicon isn’t illegal in the US… that we’re making it illegal. Well that’s not exactly true: there’s a large portion of it that’s been illegal for decades. It’s only recently people have been taking notice of the laws again (because of the Internet, expansion of the pornography industry, and greater ease in importing the stuff from Japan).
“The Law is hard, but it’s The Law.”
If mere possession of obscene material is illegal in the USA, so it be.
The legal system, like the tax code, gets constantly patched for new occurrences and special interests raising a fuss on one tiny piece at a time without an eye on the bigger picture. So you end up with all kinds of illogical nonsense regarding parity in sentencing.
But many people don’t really want to throw the whole thing out and start over…
Yea… I think fictional lolicon and rape need to follow the same battle plan that hate speech won: it is legal to express certain forms of hate speech so long as one does not engage in the acts being described or urge others to commit illegal acts. Basically you can say NAZI’s were right about exterminating Jews; but not exterminate them yourself.
A rather interesting item I found on Wikipedia:
The CBLDF fought for him, but lost the battle. He didn’t serve actual jail time, but was labeled a social deviant:
Given the precedence of this case, perhaps Christopher Handley won’t serve jail time either, but do some sort of “house arrest” thing. Not fair in our opinion, but obviously better than being locked in prison.
I’m going to persist with this argument because, frankly, I want some good counterarguments to give to people who argue, or appear to argue, the same way.
Disclaimer: I still don’t actually believe this, despite some provacative language in my post.
Note the way I’m defining “pedophile” however. A pedophile has sexual thoughts of children, but may or may not commit criminal acts. I think it’s a reasonable argument to say that lolicon manga invokes the child concept, and that this child concept is central to the lolicon’s appreciation of the material. It may not be true, but the psychological basis is sound. With that established, it’s a simple logical extension to say that lolicon manga encourages real children to be viewed as sexual objects. True or not, a LOT of people would find that statement reasonable. And unfortunately, that’s not a hypothesis easily proven or disproven.
But the situation here isn’t exactly equivalent. I think a closer analogy would be if the villagers were willingly hiding the murderer amongst them, showing they had a way out in the matter. Because in the real matter we’re discussing, all people have to do is give up lolicon. There’s no “collateral damage” if they just comply. Then you can just treat the remainder as criminals without a guilty conscience–they were told their behavior was dangerous, they were told the consequences of continuing to behave in the same fashion, and they ignored it. Lolicons aren’t innocent in the arena of child exploitation. They’re part of the problem.
The fallacy with this argument is that it assumes the nature of violence and sexuality are the same. They’re not. Violence is merely a tool to resolve conflict, a means to an end. A non-psychotic person does not derive pleasure from violence. Sex and sexuality, on the other hand, are very strongly ingrained into human nature. Sex directly activates potent pleasure circuits in the bodies of normal people. Witnessing violence may or may not stimulate aggressive thoughts or behavior in the viewer. But witnessing sex will almost certainly stimulate sexual thoughts and provoke a measureable physical response (with the correct stimuli of course–but almost all viewers will have a set of circumstances they find erotic).
You could be in the minority, or you could be lying to yourself. The person that reacts the most violently to the idea of homosexuality is often the person not confident in their own sexuality. If you’re a lolicon, there’s obviously something about lolis that appeals to you. For it not to be their childishness–their immature body or mind, or their child-like position/role in society–seems rather odd. And if there’s something child-like about lolis that appeals to you, it’s hardly a stretch to imagine that having it emphasized and repeated to you in manga would cause you to view real children differently, in a more sexual manner. But sure, you could be in some minority that sees lolis as ink on paper, with no connection at all to the child concept. I bet you also get off on random ink blots.
Sure, but here the actors are real and the viewer knows for a fact they are not children. No matter what fantasy the show tries to convey, the reality of the situation is concrete and unyielding. They are adults pretending to be children, not drawings open to interpretation. And to avoid a possible conflict here, let me add we could just ban obvious lolicon, where the characters are very obviously pre-pubescent.
(Again, you’ll have to excuse my rather personal comments. :P)
Here I admit the flaw in my charade: I lack the knowledge/fanatical misinterpreations to back it up. But there’s no doubt a true believer could pull out some studies that would refute this. But really, in my original argument, I admit my logical jump and ask that this be simply accepted as a premise for further discussion. Because backed by evidence or not…there’s again a lot of people that accept this premise intuitively, and may not even believe that science can prove or disprove it.
But even without this argument, some people would say that the child concept itself is worth defending, regardless of its impact on crime, for many of the reasons I outlined before that point. Some feminists argue, for example, that all porn should be banned because it’s degrading to women and objectifies them as nothing more than tools for sex–regardless of its effects on crime. They’re concerned about attitudes and perceptions, not objective outcomes.
Did you uncover Stanley v. Georgia? Mere private possession of obscene material cannot be criminalized.
It’s been a while since I looked this up, but here’s what I remember: The Supreme Court never addressed the issue, but appelate courts (which create binding precedent) have said the protection for private possession does not extend to anything with a nexus to interstate commerce. Therefore, you can have obscene materials, but you cannot cause them to be sent through the mails. So once the game has made it to your possession, they can’t really do anything to you. It is only if your mail is searched and you have bad luck, that you are likely to have problems.
Download-only may or may not have a sufficient nexus to interstate commerce to be actionable, but is probably quite a bit safer (pragmatically speaking) than having games shipped thru the mail. So DLSite is probably pretty safe. Unfortunately, this also appears to mean that, had Handley pirated the material, he probably could not have been convicted of anything.
In between this, and the 2003 Lawrence ruling, I think obscenity law cannot survive much longer. But it remains on the books for now.
The viewer knows for a much better fact that lolis are not children. They’re not REAL. Whereas with live actors, there’s always a chance that the actor actually is underage and has fake papers!
One time Something Awful decided to invade a paedo forum and I went to look out of morbid fascination, I remember the posters there being extremely dismissive of loli, because it wasn’t real and didn’t properly stroke their fetish at all. (Although I’m sure that varies. And I didn’t want to read too much because that place GAVE ME THE CREEPS, also SA crashed it repeatedly.)
Yup, some people believe that. I believe they’re wrong. But I can’t think of any safer way to address that other than “censorship is bad, thoughts are not deeds”. Any fiddly complex argument trying to compare it to something else is likely to fall down under enough poking.
Fight bad ideas with good ideas, I say. As I was mentioning elsewhere, banning racist cartoons does nothing to prevent a racist parent from bringing up their kid to be racist - but causing the kid to see NON racist cartoons (and more importantly, to interact with people of different races) is more likely to help communicate the other ideas. While I understand the motives behind it and have known wonderful homeschooled people, I think homeschooling is a much bigger danger to the future of society than video games, porn, and movies… because if bad parents keep a kid locked up for 18 years and control all the information it receives they can do all SORTS of nasty stuff.
The other big argument (other than the “in fact it appears to work in reverse, in the real world” argument I used before) is that this essentially calls for thoughtcrime to be created. I have big problems with that, because the logic can and will be extended in ways that would seriously curtail freedom of expression.
Koi Kaze, for example, could be banned for promoting child porn (the sister is clearly a high school student and the brother clearly is an adult) and incest (they’re brother and sister). Nobody who actually sat down and watched it would think it deserved to be banned, but people form an opinion based off of sometimes a single sentence out of an eight-page speech (look at Obama’s SCOTUS nominee) and would not watch a whole 13 episode show to find out that it’s a very serious treatment of the subject.
They HAVE pulled out studies which refute this. These studies have been roundly criticized and hotly debated. The antientertainment lobby flat out ignored the scientific controversy and continued pushing the studies anyway. This happens disturbingly often with policymakers. The numbers on the estimated total impact of (intellectual property) piracy, for example, have been thoroughly debunked as pure fiction, yet continue to be cited all over as ‘proof’ something ‘must’ be done.
But I do accept that many of these people honestly believe their own misinformation. They are trying to do what they believe is in the best interest of society as a whole. This doesn’t change the fact that they are wrong. Wanting to ban something because it has an (allegedly!) negative effect on someone’s attitude is clearly the thought police.
If the virulent pestilential onslaught that is racism is allowed to spread, in the interest of freedom of thought, then even if the naysayers are 100% correct, it is still a disproportionate response to ban porn. We know what happens when people buy into racism. We’ve seen the bodies, mountains of them, human ash falling from the sky like snow.
You know¬Ö I just wanted to point out, that to the best of my knowledge:
#1: Every single pedophile in the US, who was found with lolicon on his computer, was ALREADY convicted of actual child pornography and violating his sentence. Lolicon had no influence in “awakening” the individual’s pedophilia.
#2: In the single publicized case in which a person possessed ONLY lolicon (and not real child pornography): that individual had no criminal record, no indication of criminal intent, no sign of mental instability or unbalance, a valid interest in Japanese artwork, and has no actual interest in having a sexual relationship with children (or shows psychological evidence of wanting so).
The individual in case #2, has the potential to serve equal time as the person in case #1.
There are ZERO provable connections or hard defined research that proves possession of lolicon alone, creates a pro-pedophilia emotion in normal mentally stable people. I could probably find more evidence that people wearing white socks, have a greater statistical odd of killing someone, because more people wear white socks than any other color (faulty conclusion: ban white socks). Or that being religious, has a greater potential of causing someone to be a murderer, because of the number of people who are religious (faulty conclusion: ban all religion). It’s always possible to get fault and misconstrued results from biased research, or research that solely extracts data from a single control source (in this case: deriving that lolicon is dangerous, only from the evidence collected from pedophiles owning lolicon… not doing a mass population calculation, of EVERYONE who collects lolicon, and determining what percentage of them are criminal pedophiles).
Furthermore: the idea that clearing the world of fictional lolicon, will prevent mentally unstable pedophiles yet to be, ignores the fact that booms and falls in pedo crimes have been with humans since before recorded history. Again, someone provide me with documented research with hard data collection, that proves there is a connection between fictional lolicon and criminal pedophilia. There isn’t any. You’d have better luck finding WMD’s in Iraq.