Quote - I sincerely hope that it can hold off degenerating that way, I've been around far too long and I'm kind of hoping that history for once won't repeat itself.

And up until now, it's been a good discussion - it's forced me to have to think to explain my own concerns in new ways, which is never a bad thing from my perspective.

So in the hopes of trying to bring it back on track, I'll toss in a couple of current events I think are "similar" to the risks of this law to artists.

In the UK, Darryn Walker faces charges for writing a porn story involving some band called "Girls Aloud".

In Afghanistan, a student has had his death sentence commuted to 20 years imprisonment for blasphemy - he downloaded material from the 'net regarding women's rights in Islam.

To me, these two cases aren't that much different from the matter at hand - both of them are purely subjective judgment calls about material that doesn't actually involve harm to real people.

shrug  As I've pointed out in other, similar threads: you can be executed for running a porn site in China.  You can also be tortured and executed there for being a Christian.  The Middle East is its own story, of course: but the same rules largely apply.  Only for what appear to be 'different' underlying reasons: "different" reasons which end up having precisely the same practical effects.  We aren't likely to change the collective minds of those societies on such subjects any time soon.  But it's interesting to note that one of the standard characteristics of ALL forms of oppressive societies -- of whatever ideological stripe -- in the modern era, regardless of the particulars of the foundational political / social philosophies involved: is to persecute Christianity as a mode of thought: and to persecute individual Christians as persons.  Not to mention Jews.........

But we in the West do seem to have been changing our own minds in regards to cultural mores over the last several decades.  Slowly, at first.  And then increasingly more rapidly as time has gone by.  By and large: we seem to be basing our thinking on the late Roman cultural model.  I'd go into more details: but it's late.  However: I will say this: children were regularly used for sexual purposes, including for "art", in the late Roman empire.

Also, ancient Carthage used to regularly sacrifice children and infants both for the sake of personal convenience and to seal business deals, etc..  Killing infants without conscience is another characteristic of those societies which have so spectacularly collapsed in past times.

The high-sounding, sophistic and oh-so-smooth and oh-so-comforting justifications for doing just exactly whatever we please are always easily ready to hand, to use in a pinch.  But it's the down-the-road results of doing whatever we please that people always have a hard time accepting: results that people prefer to pretend don't exist -- in spite of the repeated examples of those results throughout human history.  But accept those results we will.  We won't have a choice in the matter.

Something To Do At 3:00AM