Law and politics

This isn't even so unusual anymore: high school students exchanging naked pictures of themselves, school administrators concerned, one saves a picture as evidence, the picture isn't actually pornographic even by Loudoun County standards, but OMG HE'S POSSESSING CHILD PORNOGRAPHY!!!!, zero-tolerance, life ruined. Note that Loudoun County is the same place where they had the filtering software lawsuit in 1998; as one of the smarter commentators on the Wired article points out, if you're going to subject children to that kind of repression, what do you expect them to do a few years later when they're young adults? This kind of disaster is inevitable as long as we think it's a good idea to ban the mere possession of speech. Freedom of expression must be absolute. See also my comments from a few years ago on Nymphet and instigation, which I'd been meaning to move to my new site code and now looks like the right time. As I said then, if we treat the normal sexual behaviour of human beings - which absolutely starts at an age well under 18 - as a frightening aberration, then we guarantee that we will be frightened pretty often.

People have the wrong idea about the law. They think it's magic. They think that the law consists entirely of arbitrary rules, technicalities, and loopholes, and that dealing with the law is primarily about getting around the challenges the system creates. The idea that there might be real standards of conduct with a point to them that you're supposed to actually follow instead of getting around, doesn't count for much. I think it's partly the fault of the media, in showing us ten examples of dysfunctional nonsense in the law for every one example of the system actually working as it's meant to, so that we think the dysfunctional nonsense is what it's actually meant to be about. It's also the fault of the legislators, courts, and lawyers, for putting way too much dysfunctional nonsense into the law in the first place. But it's not all dysfunctional nonsense. The law generally does have a point to it, and the system is meant to actually work and to be for real.

A great deal has already been said about Seven Seas and Kodomo no Jikan/Nymphet. People who want to know about that stuff already do. There is just one thing relating to that mess that I'd like to comment on here; it concerns a point in Jason DeAngelis's first public statement on the subject. He has since retracted some of the statement, but the principle illustrated is more general than just this one incident.

Lots of people are saying a lot of things about Google's recent announcement that they will obey Chinese censorship rules to filter their search results on their Chinese search engine. For a simple and graphic demonstration of the consequences, you can compare the image results for the query "Tiananmen" between regular (U.S.) Google and Google China. There are a few important points that people seem to have made either explicitly or by implication in this discussion, that I'd like to challenge. 新年快乐 to those celebrating the Year of the Dog, by the way.

This is a frightening decision (PDF here, recommended if you can read it because the quotations aren't properly marked up in the HTML) from the Ontario Court of Appeal in April of 2005. I found out about it while reading contemporaneous Justice Committee evidence (and my comments on that evidence were delayed, because this is more important). You must read this case. I'll say it again, you must read this case, even the disgusting quotes. It's important.