"It's a sad day for all Americans when they smash any kind of free speech and that's what happened in Tampa today" - Max Hardcore Found Guilty of Obscenity
avn.com/video/articles/30610.htmlPosted Jun 6, 2008, 4:40 AM UTC
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avn.com
We're talking to a couple of jurors and they felt very strongly for me, but the way the laws are formulated, they were boxed in to a corner.
Has nobody heard of juror nullification? You don't have to say "not guilty" just because you don't think the evidence supports the crime. You can also say "not guilty" because you don't think the crime should be punishable.
That's how we got rid of prohibition!
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I don't think most people have. If you mention it in court, the judge may declare a mistrial or have you ejected from the jury. During jury selection the prosecutor will remove you. Sad, but it's a secret in the judicial system.
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The courts don't like to mention it because they don't think jurors are smart enough to make the decision on their own. They judge will say, you decide this case based on such and such laws. Don't think outside that box.
Jury Nullification puts ALL of the power in the hands of the people. They judge the person, as well as the law itself. The judicial system hates this because they are the ones with the law degrees, right? They are the smart ones, right? Fuck them. Power to tHePeOPle.
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Very sad.
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they were boxed in to a corner.
That's right, they were boxed into a corner. They were boxed into the corner of "not guilty," because what was done here was not illegal. The end.
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No, but they voted guilty. Had they voted not guilty, he would not have been convicted. Criminal law requires a unanimous decision from the jurors. Just 1 dissenting vote causes a mistrial.
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And the pussies always back down. I'd tell the others that not guilty is my vote and take a nap.
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You have never served on a jury, and in some senses you are correct, but also dreadfully wrong.
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Totally agree.
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Consenting adults = GET THE FUCKING HELL OUT OF THE BEDROOM, GOVERNMENT.
I don't get it. How fucking hard is that to understand?
You know what? I'm going to start promoting legislature after Obama becomes president to require all government employees to take an IQ test and pass various levels for various jobs. If you don't get a 140, you shouldn't be a judge, you should be a janitor.
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Pornography is publicly broadcast to the rest of the world, indeed is specifically done for that purporse. It is clearly not a case of private bedroom activity.
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Selling a DVD is not broadcasting.
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It is.
http://www.answers.com/broadcasting&r=67
Even if it weren't, my point still stands. This is nothing to do with what people do in private their own homes, it is legislation of distributed material.
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Perhaps you could quote a line that supports your claim that selling DVD's is broadcasting? From what I can see, the page that you linked to, supports my statement that selling DVD's is NOT broadcasting.
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There is no such thing as objective obscenity. To a scat-lover, poop on a chest is not obscene. But, once again, the minority opinion has been invalidated merely because the majority "doesn't like it."
One of the biggest problems in this damned country is that nobody can leave another person alone!
There is no such descriptor as "American," aside from denoting nationality. You cannot be "Un-American," and if you truly believe that you CAN be, I would like you tell me what it means.
America is composed of individuals. Each individual has a different opinion and varying ideals. There is no objective reference point to the "ideals" of "America."
Seriously, how does a Judge, who is supposed to uphold the constitution, allow this nonsense? I hereby motion that the Judge's actions must be deemed OBSCENE and as such he should be punished.
Because I don't like it! Oh also IF U DON'T LIKE IT U CAN JUST GIT OUT bald eagle
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I think there is a general feeling or rough (imperfect) near consensus in most cultures that some things are obscene. There will always be people on the fringes, and there's a huge gray area where there is no consensus, but making women vomit on camera for your sexual gratification - I'm pretty sure, in our culture, most people would find that obscene.
The issue is not that, however - the issue is whether or not obscenity should be legal, and I say, absolutely (I choose this word carefully), it ought to be.
There are two dimensions of authoritarianism in this case and in most obscenity cases, the first being:
(1) You're seeking to decide for others what they can or cannot watch in their own homes in privacy. My remedy for that is to defy it openly if you can get away with it.
(2) You're making the point that you or some portion of the population has a right not to be offended, which is also bullshit.
The underlying assumption here and with all censorship attempts is that we are all imitative apes, who, upon seeing something antisocial (or sociopathic) will begin imitating it and all of society will go down the toilet. It's the basic idea behind most parenting, actually.
When out-of-the-ordinary (or "deviant") expression is above ground, it can be discussed and critiqued. I think it's far better to know that our society is filled with the kind of people who enjoy Max Hardcore's pornography than it is to ban his videos and push these tendencies underground.
As a species, we have got to get self-control back. The average human being should be able to traverse a sea of pornography, fictionalized violence, and video games with sex mods, and come out of it on the other side being exactly the person they want to be, living by their code. It is not and cannot be the role of any government to protect man from temptation, if for no other reason than this makes man morally weak and impotent. We should choose our values and live by them in spite of a decadent culture, if that is in fact what most people want to have to begin with.
I'm tough enough to live in a world of Max Hardcore and his fans. I've got little sympathy for the weak-kneed, morally impotent little crybabies who live in fear of the same.
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What else do you expect from a state shaped like a limp dick?
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Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
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Letting free speech rest on the aesthetic senses of a particular Southern jury is obscene. Fuck Florida!
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Hah, you think this is confined to Florida? Judges and juries across the country have been stomping all over the Constitution to get their way ever since it was written.
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We're talking to a couple of jurors and they felt very strongly for me, but the way the laws are formulated, they were boxed in to a corner.
One thing that courts never want juries to know is that they have no obligation to pay attention to the law and can exercise their conscience.
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Jury nullification.It's a great thing that far too few jurors are aware of.
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oh noz! penises! ahhh! save me!
sigh...
mr. max hardcore: RUN BITCH RUN!
Go to Europe or China or something.
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Lary Flynt seemed like the perfect free-speech cause: artistically indefensible, but involving and selling to conseting adults and, apparently, harming no-one.
Free speech. Yay.
Look at the press it got us.
Max Hardcore is an irrelevant distraction. Worry having a practicing and active free press first.
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Now where am I going to get my videos of chicks being smacked around and pissed on?
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Most of Europe, I s'pose.
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[deleted]
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Wow, this is startlingly irrelevant.
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Submit the story...
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Way to go America. You suck.
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Yes Mister.
We're a dirty little country mister.
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Hypocrisy.
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Florida.
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The prosecutors seem to miss the irony in righteously convicting a man of obscenity for making videos of what the man Florida sent to the White House has been doing to the country for seven years.
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[deleted]
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america's bullshit meter just keeps going up and up with no end in sight
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Interestingly, I looked up the Max Hardcore site on Google to see what it was about and got a report that Google had blocked the site for being harmful, yet when I viewed why no reason was given. It seems to be unblocked now.
I suppose it is a coincidence, but I'm curious if anyone else gets the message.
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Small-minded, ill-informed half-wits dicking up the media mindscape like this are way more important than the revenue-stream of some pornographer. Not least because this never reaches a court, and the implied judgement passes unchallenged into the collective unconscious.
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You know, max hardcore films are exploitive trash that I can't jack off to, but he should NOT have been found guilty on obscenity charges. Obscenity charges are God Damned un-American.
Is it? Historically, even the most freely-speaking countries have undergone obscenity rulings and it is true to say that this is easily the most liberal age of the mass media. It can't easily be said to be un-American in spirit either, because it is in large part a conservative country. Maybe it should be un-American, but in reality I do not think it is.
I prefer freedom to restriction, but I think absolutism is more dangerous either way. Even if rarely enforced, I would prefer that there is at least a method of saying "Woah, isn't that a bit much?" if needed.
The First Amendment lists or allows for no exceptions.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
Any anti-obscenity law is illegal.
Haven't you heard about the constitution, "It's just a goddamned piece of paper!"
Heh. A goddamned piece of paper with the highest law in the land written on it.
I got downvoted for quoting Bush? Should have I tried to find some quote from Steve Jobs? You guys are not my friends anymore.
There is a big difference between saying casually "Woah, isn't that a bit much?", as a citizen-observer might, and saying from the position of the state "That is a bit much, now spend five years of your life in prison and give the government your home"!
When you allow for unconsistent enforcement you open the door for abuse of power by officials.
When you enforce absolutism, you end up with teenagers being treated as sex offenders for exchanging nude pictures and endless other problems.
The law should not be black and white because issues are not black and white. Life is not black and white. Absolutism is for a default mindset and an immovable worldview. It is not healthy.
A law with grey areas does open the door to abuse by officials, but that's better than being abusive by default, which in some circumstances it is.
The issue isn't absolutism or extremes, it's the wrong extremes. People have tried to sell me on this idea for a long time, that because the "other side" has extremes, we should not be entitled to our own, but I have no problem saying:
I do not demand, consent to, or want anyone making any kind of determination about what information or media I choose to see, read, or listen to - especially governments. If it meant I wouldn't have to put up with the ass-backward, usually religiously fueled nanny-state mentality, I would certainly be more than willing to put up with such "abuses" of free speech as yelling fire in crowded theaters.
How interesting, then, that it was a conservative who famously said, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice...Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."
I saw a documentary some time ago that covered Max Hardcore. His material is vile and I'm not even down on all pornography. My own assumption is you have to have a sick attitude toward women to enjoy his stuff, but unless and until it can be shown that the women in his films were coerced in some way, it's not even a "gray area" to me - this is basic freedom of expression, all the more important to protect because it is provocative and offensive.
I mean, you know, he gets the gas face and all for making shitty porn. But this is a guy who is facing five years in prison and a quarter million dollar fine because of something he taped. The acts on the tapes aren't illegal as far as I know (and if they are, they shouldn't be), so it's quite a thing to want to imprison someone for simply filming them.
As for your claim that absolutism is an "immovable worldview," your moderation and gray areas are no different. It a self-contradictory viewpoint ("There shouldn't be absolutes" = an absolute).
It is one thing to have studied and considered a problem and to have said, "Yes, having thought about this, I am a radical on <some viewpoint>" and another to stick your fingers in your ears and say, "lalalala I am a radical and I won't listen to what anyone has to say if they disagree." Well, I've thought about freedom of speech and expression perhaps to the point of obsession, and I have not heard a single convincing argument in my entire life why I should cede authority to anyone else for what goes into my brain (through my senses).
If you have an argument for censorship to make, make it, but simply saying that such a view is "absolute," "extreme," or "radical" is a handwave and a distraction - the idea has merit, or it does not. Its categorization as some kind of legal or philosophical absolute remains unpersuasive. You might as well say "I reject that because some guy named Ted had that opinion once, and I hate all guys named Ted."
You make a good point. There has to be a way to avoid prosecuting kids as sex offenders while preventing corrupt zoning boards.
Is it?
Yes.