IamJoseph “Carnal knowledge involves actual sex with a minor “

according to reference.com

“Carnal knowledge is an archaic or legal euphemism for sexual intercourse.”

It makes no mention to the age of the participants, which you seem to be presuming a certain specificity to.

If it happened a couple of octogenarians decided to ‘get it off’, they would still experience ‘carnal knowledge‘ of one another (and walking frames put to a whole new purpose).

“but the principle of this crime is not disassociated with naked female children, then justified with 'but art is anything the offending person decides'.”

Interesting thought… maybe you can join the dots between ‘bonking’ and ‘looking at pictures’. I often look at pictures of people, does that mean I have ‘carnal knowledge’ of them all? It might explain my breathlessness.

Your last sentence seems to lack direction (like the mad woman suffering dysentery and doing cartwheels). I am not sure how to address it

(or undress it or maybe have carnal knowledge with it)….

As for Roman rights and ugly babies – well has been known for people of today to reject the fetus when it suffered dwarfism, I guess the similarities are too close for comfort and they do negate your assertion that

“these regimes fell away, after comitting every depravity, and not a single of their laws were accepted or are enshrined in today's laws. “

. . . . don’t ya think?

Now back to art, what I find really boring is when some learned pratt stands up and orates on the subliminal meaning behind Picassos cubist representations or Salvador Dali’s obsessions with everything, especially his nanny.

I was looking up Paul Klee (not a personal favourite but an art academic luminary), today, trying to track his dissertation on the five states every piece of art transits but found no ‘google’ sources.

However he was, like Klimt, vilified as a degenerate and his art described as “the work of a sick mind”.

The irony of that statement is profound when we consider those behind such judgments were responsible for the Holocaust.

Col: Stop kidding yourself with ahistorical, emotive, polarizing and sensationalist grabs for attention as if necessary liberties and rights are threatened by good, traditional law that prohibits "adults making and/or using photos of naked children for entertainment purposes".

Expressionist, Cubist, Symbolist and other such plastic arts have nought to do with photos of naked kids taken for adults' entertainment. Nazi and other Fascist art was often very "degenerate" by practical definition: it is disturbing that you seem so relaxed about your uncritical acceptance of comments by Hitler - as if good faith or rational and responsible consideration drove any of his utterances about politics, society and culture! With such simplistic and caricatured pose at "debate" as yours, we may as well try making mystical claims that Hitler's vegetarianism to have been some influential factor behind the Holocaust.

Australian artist Ivan Durrant, known for his own direct experience at the hands of censors in the 1970s, recently expressed his own opposition to such pedo-artistic photography. As many may remember, he slaughtered a cow before the NGV. But some comparison with Durrant is very useful in this case nonetheless.

Now the statement of Durrant's slaughter-as-performance art was to remind people to be aware of the consequences of their actions. His work then was not some fanatical vegetarian or animal rights protest, but a simple reminder that if you eat meat, there will be a process of brutal slaughter and bloodshed.

The contrast with Henson, Papapetrou, and their supporters could hardly be starker: they instead persist in conjuring and contriving vague and irrelevant statements, deflecting attention from the very consequences that their own art makes obvious to concerned and responsible onlookers i.e., encouragement and normalization for some adults afflicted with that pathological sexual taste for children, otherwise known as pedophilia.

mil-observer, you keep pointing to a kitten or puppy and saying it's a bear. It's not. Stop pretending it is.

mil-observer>"Stop kidding yourself with ahistorical, emotive, polarizing and sensationalist grabs for attention"

You should read Hetty's accusations and your own posts carefully and observe the manner this was conducted in the media.

Sensationalist? Double Check.
Polarizing? Double Check.
Grabs for attention? Double Check.
Emotive? Double Check.
Ahistorical? Double Check.

Read the model's support for Henson. Read the parent's support for her daughter and Henson. These people are victimised by your disgusting, morally repulsive assertions (and agenda) about the exercising of their liberty and happiness and pride the pictures.

Nudity is not a sin. It is not a crime. It is perfectly natural. It's normal. For you to characterise the people involved is simply sick and disgusting. Babies are born naked. With your mentality, they must all be seen in a sexual manner. You are imposing your values and corruption onto the images.

mil-observer:"The contrast with Henson, Papapetrou, and their supporters could hardly be starker: they instead persist in conjuring and contriving vague and irrelevant statements, deflecting attention from the very consequences that their own art makes obvious"

No. You are the contrived one. You are the one deflecting attention from your comments about vigilantism and the damage people like you have done to the models who thought they lived in a free, democratic nation. You are the criminals here, who have dragged this into the media and forced them to be told they are revolting by their own PM. That is what is disgusting here. And that is what you represent. The religious puritan sects that pepper our country like termites and are chewing away at it piece by piece. That is where this anti-nudity ideology comes from. It's from the same poisoned tree as Islam

Dear Mr Peter Bowden
I do wish people would not misquote and misrepresent philosophers. You really should know better. Can I suggest that you actually read the originals.

1. Kant did not say ‘if you are unwilling to allow everybody to adopt an activity whenever they wanted to, then that activity is not morally acceptable’ or anything like this. I presume this is a reference to the first version of the categorical imperative. – ‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’. Your interpretation would make medical procedures immoral. After all, we would surely be unwilling to allow “everyone” to take up surgery whenever they “wanted” to, so, according to you, surgery must be immoral. This is nonsense and certainly not Kant. If the imperative applies at all in this case, it would apply as a maxim regarding persons with particular qualification or skills or social standing or occupation in relation to actions of a particular sort under particular conditions.

2. Kant’s second imperative does not say “we should not use anybody for our own purposes”. Again, this is a gross misinterpretation of Kant and utterly implausible. It is impossible to avoid using other people for our own purposes. Your interpretation would have it that asking someone to pass the salt would be an immoral act! What Kant actually said was ‘Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end’. There is no evidence that Bill Henson failed to respect his models as ends in themselves. There is even less evidence that the parents of the model failed to respect the child’s humanity as an end.

I don't have a fixed view on the Hensen issue but I am greatly depressed at the falling standards of philosophy in Australia.

"...encouragement and normalization for some adults afflicted with that pathological sexual taste for children, otherwise known as pedophilia."

Actually, I think the opposite is true. In a culture engaged in a confusing mishmash of infantalising young adults and sexualising young children, Henson presents adolescent boys and girls as they really are. I find his portraits honest, revealing, rich, disturbing. I think naked people are beautiful, and certainly appropriate subjects for art from the day they are born to the day they die. Henson has made a particular study of adolescence. I discovered it as an adolescent girl myself.

Henson isn't a pedeophile. It's possible pedophiles look at his work, but pedophiles look at Myer catalogues and we haven't stopped publishing them.

Who defines art? We do. If a pedeophile defends possession of child porn on the grounds that it is art, a court would have to be persuaded that reasonable people agree with him. I believe we can trust the community to distinguish between art and porn. Not everyone can make that distinction — including some people on this thread — but, as a group, the citizenry can.

Steely's right back into his OTT hysteria mode calling me a criminal again, but he knows that I qualified with exlicit unease my prediction that vigilantism will happen if the state continues to refuse meeting its obligations to protect society's most vulnerable. To reiterate, I hope it does not come to that, but judicial precedent and socio-economic breakdown could easily worsen existing vulnerabilities. Consider the following from yesterday's news in a middle-class Melbourne suburb:

[20 August 2008]
“A Templestowe man thwarted a child-stealing attempt in Templestowe. Two men in a white van flashed a wad of cash in an attempt to lure two 12-year-old boys into their van in daylight on August 6. ...Police also investigated whether the child-stealing attempt was linked to the disappearance of nine-year-old Yadav Munohur, who went missing the day after the Templestowe incident.” [as readers are probably aware, Yadav's corpse has just been found today]

Now what if the kids took the cash and it was for a soft kiddie porn shoot? Would that meet the Hensonites' pedo-jungle standards of law?

Steely probably regards such news items as sensationalist, populist, etc., and better off to be censored, but parents should know how the phenomenon of child-stealing has usually functioned in Southeast Asia and Latin America. Hired thugs perform the kidnap for pedophiles or their pimp-providers. I suppose steely regards myself, police and criminologists sick for considering these issues too.

Remember too the repeated notorious cases of pedophile clients of child prostitution where the predators casually and self-righteously emphasize the parental and/or child consent. Properly considered, the consent issue in kiddie porn would be relevant only as a matter for potential mitigation (as in that UK case at the thread's start, which would vindicate their system's enforcement of such law).

So steely seems to be – at the very least - in quite ugly criminal company. If there is more to such unsavory association, steely, then remember that the community knows well how both police and most prisoners would reserve special treatment for you too.