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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Now THAT'S a snark . . .
Really? Silly me. I didn't get it. I thought he really wanted to know what I think and feel.
I'm kind of slow sometimes, I guess.
AKA Smith explains the confusion: "Really? Silly me. I didn't get it. I thought he really wanted to know what I think and feel. I'm kind of slow sometimes, I guess."
Thanks for the heads up.
I thought that, because AKA said so, sometime ago during the great Hillary/Obama flame wars, she said something to the effect that she didn't want to talk about that stuff because she couldn't even bring herself to watch the news. If not, I stand corrected, and no snark was intended.
But if AKA wants to talk comment about the porn censorship conviction side of the case, I'm still trying to figure out what she is getting at, what the bun-fight she is having with two or three people is actually about. Because honestly, I can't figure out what is under dispute.
I think the heart of the matter is that Governments torturing people is as appalling as porn producers torturing people. But Glenn attacked the Gov. while trying to defend the porn guy. He says it's a matter of law, not of humanity. Aka Smith differs. She thinks they are both wrong. I agree.
evidently things are 'seen' different if you have been trained that way. I don't mean that sarcastically either. It just seems to be a different perspective that a layperson doesn't get. Or rather, this layperson doesn't get : )
But his blog's raison d'etre is the massive violation of the law under the Bush Administration. He wasn't talking about good or evil, he was talking about the hypocrisy of going after obscenity convictions while pardoning torturers.
Secondarily, he is strong on free speech issues, and likely would never feel comfortable with any kind of censorship conviction. On the other hand, I don't think he would raise an eyebrow at rape or assault charges. Frankly, I tend to agree.
Thirdly, outside of personal moral judgment, if we are to take action against evil people, we can only do it under necessarily arbitrary yardsticks. At what point does a nudge become a bump become a push become a shove become an assault become aggravated? The pornographer may be an evil man who exploits and abuses young and stupid women, but as long as we have set an arbitrary yardstick of 18 years old for self-determination, whatever our moral judgments, we cannot punish one crime (abuse of adult women) by convicting of another (obscenity), let alone a crime like obscenity which is far more ridiculously arbitrary than arbitrary age of adulthood, and thus a very dangerous tool in the hands of the state. I agree with this also.
As to whether the pornographer in question in fact is an evil man who abuses and exploits women, or an unusual person engaged in unusual but consensual activities, I really do not know. He is in a dirty (literally) but legal business, where there is an awful lot of extreme behaviour and many questionable individuals, and a good deal more lying and hype than fact and information available. For certain, there is material easily available on the internet that is a good deal more vile than what he got convicted for.
And finally, if he is indeed fully guilty of conning young adult but naive women into being exploited and abused, I agree that that is wrong and evil; but compared to torture, to years of solitary confinement of teenagers, to assassinations, to mass killings, to support of vile dictators, well, I feel fairly comfortable judging his crimes as significantly lesser than those of the Bush Administration.
But, in the past, AKA has never wanted to make those kind of comparisons, has never shared the same sense of urgency and outrage over them as I do, because the urgency and outrage she feels over the abuse of children and women is about as much as she can bear. And I respect that, if I don't share it.
"I think the heart of the matter is that Governments torturing people is as appalling as porn producers torturing people....He (Glenn) says it's a matter of law, not of humanity. Aka Smith differs. She thinks they are both wrong. I agree." - you
I think you misuse "torture" - there seems to be a difference between prisoners of war (or enemy combatants or terr-rists) and porn actors. One is being paid for a job they willingly signed up for, while the other is being held as a prisoner of war - captive - against their will. Needless to say, the porn actor can get out while the POW can't.
The issue in dispute, as you define it, is also kind of circular because it just begs the question: what is consent? Or, what is free will? You're essentially saying that the porn actors can't choose, or they're not old enough to choose, or they're being coerced in some way. But we know they can choose, they may not be old enough which is a separate legal/criminal issue besides obscenity, and we definitely know if they're being coerced. In this example, the actors in question were not. So that's kind of a wash.
So then it seems you're saying Max Hardcore's porn is "wrong" as in "immoral" or "something that doesn't sit well with you," but I think that perspective has already been established as irrelevant to the point of Glenn's post, which seems to be to highlight the hypocrisy of a government jailing people for fictionalized, consensual scenes of humiliation/degradation while protecting or ignoring its own tendrils that actually do those things in reality to non-consenting prisoners.
Ironically, inherent in your claim that it's a matter of humanity instead of law is a negation of the validity, or even existence, of choice - which many would argue is essentially to negate the thing that makes a human a "human," as distinct from all other living beings. Conscious choice. After that, your contention that it's about "the humanity" is kind of self defeating.
I'm not trying to be snarky - if I understand the definition of that term correctly.
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