The Essence Of Thoughtcrime

The bigot nest that is Absolutezerounited put up an interesting post last week titled 'I Have Nothing To Hide'. I found it interesting on a couple of fronts. Firstly I found it interesting that they'd present as current information a Vigilant Antis post from May 2008... yes, a post that is two and a half years old!! The first half of the post was their usual boring character assassination of someone they see as a foe and, to be perfectly frank, I stopped reading after the first couple of sentences as it was the same drivel they regurgitate time and time again.

What did catch my attention was the following portion of their post:

In particular, the assertion that one could be prosecuted for merely stating they are in possession of illegal pornography even if they had never even actually seen an image of said pornography seemed too ludicrous to be true. Unbelievably, this is actually the case.

Before I go on, it is worth bringing a bit of accuracy to AZU's misinformation. In their post AZU employed one of their favourite logical fallacies: the straw man argument.

No evidence has been produced demonstrating that Amazon.com has any vested interest in child pornography and in the absence of such evidence the thought that a multinational company would have any vested interest in kiddie porn is simply a fanciful conspiracy theory. There is also no evidence that Amazon.com has ever distributed child pornography nor has any desire to distribute it in the future. Rather, the hacks at AZU have fabricated these claims in order to have an easy target to attack as they know an attack on Amazon.com's actual policies is far less effective.

AZU also stated that Amazon.com "... support Williams". This is not the case. The person referred to is Michael Williams (United States v Williams); a man who was gaoled for sending an undercover LEO a link to kiddie porn and also for actually possessing kiddie porn. He was further charged for stating to the undercover LEO that he was in possession of kiddie porn. It is this charge that was being contested and this law alone which Amazon.com, amongst a number of organisations, was opposed to. Amazon.com was in no way trying to make it legal for a person to possess and/or distribute child pornography and for AZU to insinuate such a thing is outrageous.

So, back to the ludicrous law. I thought the Washington Post article about the case summed the law up effectively when they wrote

So that is the crux of the law that reasonable people are opposed to: someone who has never even seen an image of child pornography can be charged, convicted and end up with a sex offender record for simply saying they have kiddie porn.

Now, I know my cultural competitors will throw up the usual red herring of... 'Well, if they're the sort of person who'd say they have kiddie porn they deserve everything they get' but this is clearly an argument based on emotion rather than logic. This law, taken to its logical conclusion, could even result in a person who confesses to possessing child pornography being charged for the confession as well as being charged for the porn itself. No, I'm not silly enough to think this would actually happen but it would appear it is possible under this law. Justice Scalia admits as much when he said

Note he didn't say that the grandparents would not run afoul of the law as it wouldn't apply to them in this situation but rather that they shouldn't be worried as a 'reasonable juror' wouldn't apply it to them. Too bad for them if Marina Hammond or her cronies were the jurors as we know just how 'reasonable' they are. No doubt if they were on the jury in such a case the poor grandparent would end up with 'sex offender' tattooed across his/her forehead.

As a final thought, I find it interesting that one can be gaoled in the USA for falsely claiming to possess kiddie porn yet one can falsely claim to be a sexually available child and it's completely legal. That is one seriously fucked up system!