Waldo Jaquith

pixels, where you been? It’s all about voxels now.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/04/unlimited-detail-3-d-graphics/

Posted by perlogik on 22 April 2010 @ 3pm

Dude. Roberts. You’re only 55. Stevens is almost 90, and he telecommutes between Washington, D.C. and a beach chair in Miami outside his tennis club when the Court isn’t in session with his trusty laptop.

No excuses.

Posted by Sam on 22 April 2010 @ 3pm

Sam, what’s your point?

Posted by I.Publius on 22 April 2010 @ 11pm

That while I acknowledge that sometimes Supreme Court justices find it easy to be sequestered in the ivory tower and lose track of whats going on in public life over time, Roberts has only been there for a handful of years, and depending on when Sotomayor’s birthday is, he may also be the youngest justice currently on the bench. Especially when his 90-year-old colleague who has served on the bench since the Ford administration is tech-savvy enough to find a WiFi signal on South Beach, Chief Justice Roberts ought to understand the technology of the age well enough to not need help discerning the difference between emails and pagers.

Additionally, in the 21st century, I wouldn’t hire an employee who wasn’t at least passingly tech-savvy for anything except manual labor. I certainly wouldn’t hire a lawyer if I had reason to doubt he didn’t know how to use LexisNexis.

Posted by Sam on 23 April 2010 @ 12pm

Sam, what if they knew how to use Westlaw?

;-)

Posted by Michael on 23 April 2010 @ 12pm

Waldo writes: “The videos in question are no doubt awful, and the people who make them vile, but the crime here is the cruelty to animals, not the videotaping of animal cruelty.”

But we criminalize child porn even though the “real” crime is the adults involved in the production.

Maybe you can explain the difference.

Posted by robert legge on 23 April 2010 @ 1pm

Michael,

We in Charlottesville should hope they know how to use Lexis so they don’t keep cutting people locally.

:-)

Posted by Stormy on 23 April 2010 @ 1pm

But we criminalize child porn even though the “real” crime is the adults involved in the production.

Maybe you can explain the difference.

Sure: Two harms are committed when a child is molested and that incident is recorded and distributed. Not only is that child harmed, but s/he then endures a lifetime of humiliation, knowing that video or those photos are out there. (Imagine your pants falling down in public. Now imagine somebody videotaping that, and that video going viral on the internet.) Animals have no concept of that, of course.

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 23 April 2010 @ 1pm

But I think that one of the main reasons why we have child porn laws is that there is a fair amount of evidence that disseminating of such material results in 1) more demand for such material and 2)results in viewers acting out their fantasies on real subjects.

It’s hard to imagine that the courts will ever see child porn and videos of animal cruelty as legally identical, however I think there are many similarities in terms of the effect it has on people who view it.

I also think there are fine lines between both what constitutes child porn and what constitutes animal cruelty. Something we’re not likely to get settled here.

Posted by robert legge on 23 April 2010 @ 2pm

But I think that one of the main reasons why we have child porn laws is that there is a fair amount of evidence that disseminating of such material results in 1) more demand for such material and 2)results in viewers acting out their fantasies on real subjects.

That’s a claimed rationale, but I’ve never seen any data supporting it. The same logic is routinely applied to video games: Kids who shoot virtual opponents are more likely to shoot real people. (Columbine was presented as the inevitably results of those two kids playing a lot of video games.) But there’s just no data to support that, either. I’ve seen that logic turned on its head, too: If pedophiles have access to child pornography, then they won’t need to enact their fantasies on real children. I don’t buy that, either, but I find it no less credible than the inverse.

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 23 April 2010 @ 7pm

“Stevens is almost 90, and he telecommutes between Washington, D.C. and a beach chair in Miami outside his tennis club when the Court isn’t in session with his trusty laptop.”

Two words: Ruggero Alisdert. His Honor sits on the Third Circuit (which, fun fact, covers the Virgin Islands), except he lives in California, and hears oral argument via telecon.

God, I love the Third sometimes… we’re no Rocket Docket, and we’re no 9th, but we’ve got some good things. :)

Posted by Genevieve on 26 April 2010 @ 12am

I’ll have to remember that “”that’s a claimed rationale” line. And I believe you when you say you haven’t read any data supporting it (that child porn viewing may contribute to acting such fantasies).

Well I have some data for you below. But even if you still don’t accept that, isn’t it reasonable that when a person pays for one child porn video that that encourages the production of more child porn videos?

OK here’s some links for you. Alas some links don’t seem to be working but the ones with the URLs should work.

LifeSiteNews: “A recent study performed by psychologists among inmates of the Bureau of Prisons suggests a strong link between the use of child pornography and child abuse. The study, conducted between 2002-2005 and chronicled in an article by Tori DeAngelis in this month’s edition of the American Psychological Association’s Monitor on Pyschology, studied men who had already been convicted of child pornography crimes to see if they had also molested children.”

Tori DeAngelis, Porn use and child abuse: The link may be greater than we think, a controversial study suggests, APA Monitor on Psychology, Volume 40, No. 11 December 2009: ”The study, published in the April Journal of Family Violence (Vol. 24, No. 3), analyzed data on 155 men convicted of possessing, receiving or distributing Internet-based child pornography, who took part in an 18-month treatment program.”

Michael L. Bourke and Andres E. Hernandez, The ‘Butner Study’ Redux: A Report of the Incidence of Hands-on Child Victimization by Child Pornography Offenders, Journal of Family Violence (Vol. 24, No. 3, April 2009)

J. Sher and B. Carey, “Debate on Child Pornography’s Link to Molesting,” New York Times, 7/19/07 (“Experts have often wondered what proportion of men who download explicit sexual images of children also molest them. A new government study of convicted Internet offenders suggests that the number may be startlingly high: 85 percent of the offenders said they had committed acts of sexual abuse against minors, from inappropriate touching to rape…Previous studies, based on surveys of criminal records, estimated that 30 percent to 40 percent of those arrested for possessing child pornography also had molested children.”).

M.C. Seto, J.M. Cantor and R. Blanchard, “Child pornography offenses are a valid diagnostic indicator of pedophilia,” J. Abnorm. Psychol. 115, 610-615, 2006, abstract available at http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=main.doiLanding&uid=2006-09167-022

J. Wolak, D. Finkelhor and K. Mitchell, “Child Pornography Possessors Arrested in Internet-Related Crimes,” National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, 2005, available at http://www.missingkids.com/en_US/publications/NC144.pdf

D.E.H. Russell and N.J. Purcell, “Exposure to Pornography as a Cause of Child Sexual Victimization,” in Handbook of Children, Culture, and Violence 59, (N.E. Dowd, D.G. Singer and R.F. Wilson, eds., 2006), available at http://www.dianarussell.com/chapter.html.

Posted by robert legge on 26 April 2010 @ 2pm

Robert, I don’t have time for a response thoughtful enough that’s a fair response to the time that you put into your comment, but I don’t want that to prevent me from writing anything at all. What I get from reading through much of this is that there are competing theories as to whether child pornography causes child molestation, or is a “safety valve” (as Diana Russell calls it) to prevent it. The trouble is that I’m not a psychiatrist, so I don’t really feel equipped to understand the arguments put forth on either side. But I haven’t seen anything here that convinces me to change my mind on the idea that two crimes have been committed with child pornography versus just one crime with crush videos. OTOH, I appreciate that there is a lot of gray between speech that should not be permissible because it is harmful, and speech that should be permissible because there’s no reason to outlaw it. The Supreme Court has a long history of trying to walk that line, and of the case law that I’ve read on that front, I believe that they did the right thing here.

Incidentally, I hope that ultimately the court rules in favor of the Westboro Baptist Church, too. Awful people…but I just think they’re on the right side of the law.

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 28 April 2010 @ 10pm