[ you must chill ]

[winterlive]

everybody knows i love freedom of expression.

this ain't it. (link is nsfw and also pretty despicable, imho.)

maybe we'll all pick up and wander off or whatever. maybe fandom will decide to go all haywire and make their own space on the web, maybe we'll all have to uproot ourselves and exodus from the reign of stinky stinky six apart. but let's not make martyrs out of molehills, okay?


eta: in case i was somehow unclear, the following two things are true:
1. i find that image repulsive. personally, ethically, ugh. i also find rapefic, bestiality and torture to be by and large repulsive.
2. i cannot fault lj for banning it because it's illegal. i do not support the banning of any user over the perceived offensiveness of their material, only its legality.

eta II, much after the fact: i see that people are still keen to talk this one over. good for you. it's good to keep informed. but just so you know, a lot of information came out between the time this was posted and the three days later that some of this conversation is happening in. we know more things now, things have been confirmed, proven false, proven different. i therefore stand by two things i said in the original post: 1. sixapart stinks, and 2. you must, MUST chill. i stand by all things said in the first ETA.

Comments

[stormcloude]

there are places where the rights of the subject supersede the rights of the artist,

I know you're not saying that the rights of fictional Harry Potter outweigh the rights of the real-person Ponderosa, but that's kind of what it sounds like and could be interpreted as.

something that's unmitigated by respect for the subject or an artistic purpose,

See, but when you just link to the picture, you're taking it out of context. When you know that it was drawn to illustrate a scene from a fic, does that then give it artistic purpose? (I think so.) And who is the onus on to show that artistic purpose? Pond who drew it to go with a specific fic and posted and labeled it accordingly or someone who just passes the picture around by itself out-of-context and says "this is despicable"?

[winterlive.livejournal.com]

there is a RAFT of context here that you're missing.

there is a legal, business side of this, and there is an ethical side of this. the question of whether ponderosa should have been booted off lj, the question of whether her fic qualifies as illegal, whether she should be banned, freedom of expression, these are all legal/business questions. lj is a business, the government houses the law, and not even ponderosa herself contests that lj had every right to enforce their TOS on her.

the question of whether we, may ethically support the creation of something like this is totally different. white supremacists have the right to peaceful protest under the law, but do we ethically support their stance? HELL NO.

the picture ponderosa posted is, in my view, child pornography. does she have the right to have lj host her? no. is she breaking the law by having made it? maybe. is that law fair? that is a matter up for extreme and heated debate, and brings up questions of freedom of expression that are tricky for all of us. do i ethically support that picture? HELL NO. i think it's despicable, as outlined in the post following this one.

but i might support that it's an unjust law. i do think she deserves freedom of expression, and the many reasonable conversations i've had with others over the past few days have probably softened my viewpoint a little from the original. the line, it seems, is blurry at best.

i know i never would have reported her, no matter how distasteful i found her drawings. i know that whoever did ought to be strung up by the toes and beaten like a pinata.

[stormcloude]

I think I got all the context, actually, though I may not have expressed it all with my comment. And I do think you missed my point.

I think LJ can host whatever content they want, however they have a legal responsibility to make it clear what is and isn't acceptable through their TOS before taking people's money and they failed in that in this instance. I don't want to debate LJ's business practices since IMO the picture that they banned her for isn't the picture we are talking about here. (As a matter of fact, I wasn't specifically talking about LJ at all. If that's the context you think I missed, I apologize. I didn't miss it, it just wasn't what I was trying to address.)

Ethically, I think I disagree with you on some points, which probably can't be resolved here. I'll try to clarify though.

the question of whether we, may ethically support the creation of something like this is totally different. white supremacists have the right to peaceful protest under the law, but do we ethically support their stance?

To misquote Voltaire: "I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." If that logic applies to the white supremacists, as you seem to imply above, shouldn't it apply to Pond as well? No one is asking you to like any of her art, only to take it in context as art and not as child pornography. (which is where I think the biggest problem is and where we disagree most strongly. I think art and child pornography are mutually exclusive and in order for something to qualify as child pornography, it has to have a real child in it. I get that you (and LJ) think differently and that the law here is murky at best. Honestly, I have too much to do today and have spent way too much time writing this comment already, but were I inclined, I'd probably go to the ACLU website to get the most up-to-date case law I could to try and debate this topic. I know there have been Supreme Court rulings involving unconstitutionality, and I'd guess there are lawsuits pending even now that will affect how the law is applied, but I can't dig them up right now.)

is she breaking the law by having made it? maybe. I think this is the meat of the issue. I don't think she's breaking the law because it is art and no real people were harmed by it. I think that in your view, she is breaking the law because you don't see art and you see real people harmed? (whether you like it or not is moot.)

Hypothetically, if the law is unjust and were to be overturned would you then change your stance on it being child pornography?

I didn't mean to imply that you would have reported her. That never crossed my mind.

My main point from before was that anything taken out of context can be made to look irredeemable. Which is what I think happened to the drawing you cited originally. Yes, you have every right to think it's despicable, but that doesn't automatically mean it isn't art.

[winterlive.livejournal.com]

dude, it depicts a child that has undeniably been eroticized. it's child porn. there can be no contesting that. it's clearly what it is.

but since it's a fictional character, since it's a drawing, it might be protected under the law. it might be something that should be covered under freedom of expression. you're quite right - whether i like it or not is neither here nor there.

when i said that we need not panic over this, many facts were not in. ponderosa hadn't yet posted her summation of events, or not that i'd seen linked. the picture above was an example of her art, and we didn't know she'd been banned for something in particular. i had been implying, by the original post, that i could not fault lj for removing such an item from their servers.

now, since then, it's become clear that the logic for the removal was arbitrary at best and that 6A are made of the highest order of failure. since then, this issue has gotten enormously huger and a bunch of stuff has come under a much wider umbrella. fandom has gotten massively cheesed off and 6A has sat on their thumbs and said nothing.

what i think of the image linked above has not changed. whether i am prepared to be angry about what 6A has done... that's a different matter.

[stormcloude]

dude, it depicts a child that has undeniably been eroticized.

It depicts a character that's been eroticized. And yes, that character is underaged, but still a character and not a child. You can argue it's obscene and thus child pornography, I can argue it's art and thus not. A court of law would be needed to decide which of us was right.


As for the rest, I apologize. I came to this late and I've been following Pond's posts from the beginning so I didn't realize I was lagging as far behind as I was wrt your point of view.