Oh look! Rising cases of pedophilia in Florida!
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article … ml?cnn=yes
I’m sure that Iowa case had a massive impact on them. Quick! Someone check if their computers have lolicon games on it! :roll:
I’m now bored of playing devil’s advocate and will return to my regularly scheduled lolicon promotion.
I’m completely against the idea of thought crime, which really was the basis for much of my argument. However, while the harm principle is usually a good meter stick for legal issues, utilitarianism itself is only one of many moral schools of thought, and is certainly not accepted as gospel even among academic circles. A strict moralist might balk at a legal ban of lolicon, but strongly push for effective industry self-censorship (aka, via Sofurin). The means may be different, but the result ends up being pretty similar–at least in terms of largely professionally produced items like erogames.
And that’s exactly why I paid the earlier cases little notice but am very concerned about this one. I don’t really care about the rights of convicted pedophiles. They gave up their freedom of expression when they committed a crime.
Let’s go a little bit WILD with that metaphor. So in my opinion the closest metaphor would be that the goverment decides that instead of hunting that criminal down and risk lives and effort in the process they might as well nuke the place. They already know who the culprit is, so they allow the villagers to get out of there. The villagers protest. They would lose their property and their way of life with no chance to go back due to nuclear fallout. Some even decide to stay there. Still, the goverment does nuke the place, also killing the people left in the village.
It’s what happened in Handley’s case, though.
AFAIK, it’s not Handley’s case. While his mails were opened, they didn’t contain obscene materials, but lolicon material, which causes police to search his house. There, they couldn’t find ANY CP material, only lolicon and obscene manga. Since he couldn’t be charged with CP (lolicon material doesn’t count for thta), he was charged with possession of obscene materials.
The feminist community I hang out in gets mad at these stories… because they hate the way that newspaper headlines never say RAPE. “A 40 year old woman can not ‘have sex with’ a 14 year old boy! ARGH!” And don’t get them started on the inequalities of sentencing. Yes, they do in fact want the female offenders to be treated just like the male ones, instead of the wink-wink all-boys-want-sex-anyway atmosphere. (Which is stupid anyway. Sure, plenty of teenage boys want to sleep with their teachers. PLENTY OF TEENAGE GIRLS DO TOO. It’s not exactly a rare fantasy, especially when there are limited numbers of ‘mature’ people in your life to fixate on! The whole idea behind statutory rape as an offense is that the young person cannot GIVE consent. Especially to a teacher.)
I don’t totally agree - I think ‘rape’ and ‘statutory’ are wildly different and I wouldn’t want to dilute the meaning of rape by blindly applying it to absolutely everything. We really need more language to describe the range of not-properly-consensual sex.
Do they even fight against them? Because, for all your and Nande’s accusations of me being obtuse because I put all feminists in one same bag, the thing is that all feminist movements I ever heard about act this way. It’s easy to say “we’re not the same as them!” while you officially make your opinions known on the same points they do when you agree with them, but refuse to voice your opinions when you disagree. In other words:[list][]Case unfair to the woman: both you and them protest,[/][]Case unfair to the man: they agree, you don’t say anything.[/][/list]In the end, it looks the same to me: men being trialled see all kinds of feminist movements voice to condemn him, but never even one to take their defence, regardless of whether they’re guilty or innocent (in trials where “man-woman equality” is in game, of course).
On-topic, so the guy got 15 years. Ha! USA, such a wonderful country. Cheat billions of dollars and send thousands unemployed and you may get free, have real child porn and you get 5 years, own drawings and you get 15 years. I’m glad the USA is a champion of freedom and justice, though, because the other countries must be so much worse~
YES!!!
They go through the exact same sort of letter-sending and politician-badgering procedure over this kind of stuff that they do about other things.
But the people who hate feminists don’t get outraged by them doing these things and therefore don’t post complaints about them all over the internet.
Nobody here heard about Equality Now’s fixation on rapelay because they were actively following them as a feminist movement, afaik. Not even me, because as I said, my community was not involved in that. (Places I visit did get pissy at Amazon over having a Rape Recommendations list.) You heard about them because somebody was upset by their actions and therefore started publically blasting them.
Someone needs to form a men’s rights group and go after things like Mugen Kairou and Discipline =P
Talk to that lensman dude! 
I hate to say it, but this appears to be the case. At the very least, downloading will greatly the reduce the likelihood the police will decide to search your residence. As olf points out, I’m still not sure if Handley was being charged with the assumption that all his obscene materials were obtained through interstate commerce (directly by his request or through his own efforts, of course). Regardless, this all compelling argues for the availability of downloadable editions of any title that could possibly be construed as featuring sex with “underaged minors”–i.e., most eroge ever produced. 
I heard about it from someone covering general developments in the gaming industry from a political standpoint - gamepolitics.com. I immediately knew it was gonna be bad news for us, but in fact I did hear about it because I actively follow political winds in the gaming industry as a whole. Most people here probably heard about it from the board though.
No, he pled guilty to a charge which has a max of 15 years. Given the extenuating circumstances, he probably gets away with probation or a much lower sentence. Hardly anyone ever gets max. (In fact, if the max sentence is being handed out all the time, it means it’s probably too low and should be raised.) Even if he had actual child porn, had he taken this plea deal – since he never actually hurt anybody, he probably still wouldn’t get max.
Yes, but you didn’t hear about them because you were following them as a feminist movement. You heard about them because they did something that negatively affected your specific interests (gaming). If they were fundraising to buy menstrual rags for Ethiopians, you wouldn’t have heard. I’m not saying there’s something WRONG with that, I’m just saying that people who aren’t involved in a movement are much more likely to hear about them when they do something stupid enough to get wide coverage.
You know… I totally disagree with Equality Now’s stance against eroge… but papillon is right about some of their “positive” (although it’s negative to us) thinking: they’re doing a level headed job at what they’re aiming for. Equality Now is trying to get rape eroge banned. I don’t like them for that. However Equality Now is ONLY trying to get production of rape eroge banned. If that’s the only step they’re taking (although I wouldn’t think they’d stop there; but so far there’s no proof they want anything more from the market), then they’re a LOT more tame than the Justice Department.
As far as I can tell, Equality Now isn’t seeking imprisonment of people who bought/make rape eroge - or destruction of the ganes peope have in their private collections - only termination of their creation and commercial sale from this day forward. They’re not even demanding the shutdown of Illusion, whom they MUST know makes adult games: only that they cease making rape games.
I mean it’s bad to erogers defending creative license and anti-censorship… but it’s not a radical insane goal, as far as things go. Then again, maybe they’re just planning to divide and conqurer: attacking the beast one leg at a time, before they go for the kill. 
Tangenting even further, I’ve just released an RPG featuring anime schoolgirls (Which I didn’t mention on the main forum because there’s no romance element). While the game is going well, I’ve had to deal with a handful of men trying to tell me that I’m objectifying and degrading women by decking my schoolgirls out in outfits so obscene they’d be kicked out of school immediately for wearing them.
The outfits in question? These.
I think somebody’s got issues.
Um, these guys obviously haven’t been around a high school lately, much less a Japanese one. I remember our gym uniform featured shorts that were probably shorter than that. The Japanese have burumas–can’t get much shorter than that. In Japan, schoolgirls will shorten their skirts by folding it under a belt that’s covered by their shirt. To get around a skirt length check, they’ll simply let it back down. It’s hard to call it “objectifying and degrading” when girls themselves prefer shorter skirts. Although it appears that many girls prefer pants over skirts anyway.
Least of all, short schoolgirl skirts are an anime mainstay. Get over it!
That’s considered rather conservative where I am,
I’m guessing these were American men bitching? Myself, I live in a fairly forward thinking state, so we don’t have to deal with that overmuch, (in fact Portland is considered one of the most open minded cities in the America …) but I can imagine there are those from the middle states or new england who’d just quake in horror at school girls in uniform.
I do live in the midwest and that is still conservative. The skirts might cause some issue with extremely conservate people, but not to the point that they’re “so obscene they’d be kicked out of school immediately for wearing them.” We had dress codes in our schools and that mostly pertains to certain symbols on clothing and for girls they couldn’t have anything showing above their mid hips and had to cover their bellybutton and higher up. They may have gotten some looks, but they would not have been kicked out or even reprimanded. Nor do I think its changed much. Teenagers I know today mostly have restrictions on gang symbols, sometimes proactive phrases dealing with suicide, murder, etc. I don’t even know if the restrictions for girls still stand.
People that think skirts are inappropriate attire for girls do not deserve to live on this planet and breathe our oxygen. This is one issue on which I am steadfast.