One bourbon, one scotch, and one mav

It’s 01:52 MST and so it’s been Christmas for one hour and fifty-two minutes. I used to use little details like this to talk my parents into letting me open my presents when I couldn’t sleep on Christmas night. Oddly, it worked. Maybe my mom loves me, maybe she’s just a sucker. Pick one.

Any rate, I have some thinkin’ shit to talk about. Nerdy shit will come after this.

FAIR WARNING: This is fucked up. Coming from me this should tell you something. If you’re at work watch your clicks. Nothing NWS will be here but links might be. In addition, it is a very long story.

If you’re a SA nerd or even read the forum occasionally, and have done so for a while, you’re probably aware of all the fucked-up problems that they have had with the old, heavily-modified version of vBulletin they run and the trials they have had with software author Jelsoft’s lawyers about the forum footers, etc. Their lawyers are very unforgiving.

On Friday, Jelsoft’s outsourced copyright handlers piratereports.com, and in particular their lawyer Howard Spinks revoked the license of hongfire.com because they host morally questionable content. In particular, among the shit they host on their forum is a form of anime called lolicon(potentially NWS?) that has seen quite a bit of controversy in the US as of late. US law is very fuzzy about the legality of lolicon and its ilk, but generally falls on the side of it being a non-crime; Japanese law is far more specific, it’s not a crime there. Nevertheless, Mr. Spinks felt it prudent to ask the site owner to remove the content, and when he responded that he felt the content was legal and therefore violated no law, Spinks responded by revoking their license, and making a few interesting comments. Hongfire has apparently taken down their copy of their interactions between the site owner and Spinks (IMO, a poor decision on their part) however this site has a few bits of it still posted. In particular, one quote from Spinks stuck out:

The matter is not up for debate as you can either remove the morally devoid items as requested, or take your activities to another software.

So this is straight-up “We don’t care whether your content is legal, we don’t like it, so get fucked.” This seems a scary precedent, and it got dugg quite a bit. Forum goon and webmaster DirtyWorker decided to take this up with Jelsoft and posted the interaction he had with them on his blog.

Days later, after a hugely large amount of Internet drama and backpedaling on the part of Jelsoft, Hongfire’s license was reinstated. Hongfire itself appears to have little news and has taken down most of the things they posted during this period (or I’m too stupid to find it all, pick one.)

I know it’s a long story. What’s the point, you ask? Well, it seems that everywhere you go to read about this story - SA included - it breaks down into two very polarized opinions: you’re either a censorship advocate or you’re a kiddie diddler. And that’s when I ran into this post by Martin Random:

This is an awesome example of one side of the debate on individual rights. Users supporting hongfire will say, in a broad and general sense, “Freedom of speech and contract is sacrosanct” while Lowtax and supporters of stiffer regulation respond by narrowing the issue until it is unsupportable, by saying that this contention is about, “The first amendment right to display images of kids being fucked.”

I’m pointing this out because it is incredibly interesting, and it’s a pattern that shows up in almost every individual freedom vs. regulation debate. Check out some recent seminal cases in constitutional law, such as lawrence v. texas, and pay close attention to the dissenting opinions. It is fascinating. Invariably, the justices arguing in favor of protecting homosexual sex and abortions from the government will be stating the case as broadly as possible, saying things like, “The constitution prohibits the government from entering into the private sphere of the bedroom.” or “The human body is sacrosanct.” No mention of dick in butt or baby cutting.

People on the other side of these decisions phrase the right threatened as narrowly as possible. They’ll say things like, “The constitution doesn’t protect the right for one man to put his penis into the ass of another man. That is ridiculous.” or “The constitution does not protect the act of opening a woman’s vagina with a dialation tool, inserting tools, and cutting apart a viable baby fetus until it is in chunks small enough to suck out with a vacuum tube.” There is actually a decision where the judge goes on for like five pages describing the carnage of an abortion in graphic detail, all for the purpose of narrowing the issue. It’s great because not only does it make the right look ridiculous and undefendable, it makes the people who try to defend that right look like baby killers and dirty faggot sodomites.

If you phrase the right broadly, it is easy do defend. Freedom of speech? Awesome. Give me more. Freedom from government intrusion into your body? Of course. How could you argue with that? If you phrase the right narrowly, it is impossible to defend. Freedom to put your penis in the ass of a man? Fuck that, what are you, a faggot lover? Cutting up babies? Are you serious? You fucking butcher. Freedom to jerk off to depictions of child sex? God, who could find that right sacred? Where in the constitution does it say ANYTHING about jerking off to fake kiddy porn?

The bait and switch occurs when one side phrases the right in contention narrowly for the purpose of enacting a broader restriction. Like, I argue in a case that the constitution doesn’t protect Mr. Smith from government sanctions for putting his penis in the butt of Mr. Ralph, I win on those grounds, and on the strength of that I can now regulate what sexual positions all married couples can legally use to copulate. I regulate foot fetishes. Etc. The argued issue was penis in the butt. The right actually at stake was the broader issue of bedroom privacy and sexual freedom, basic human rights shit. It’s a powerful way of arguing away broad rights on the strength of a single, narrow, absurd, and indefensible-sounding contention.

I love this shit. I love freedom of expression. I love individual rights. God damn we live in interesting times.

So after all that, where are we? And why are we looking back at this shit on Christmas Day of all days? We are at a point where we should realize two definite and unchanging facts:

1. People are so afraid of being on the side of something percieved to be evil that they will give away almost any freedom to be percieved as not-evil. The number of people who would stand up for an unpopular belief no matter what the personal cause is getting smaller, not larger.
2. Debate has almost completely degenerated into a Springer-style fight.

Later today in pt. 2: Eric Raymond actually makes sense. Hey, anything can happen on Christmas!