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So, you are presumably okay with people possessing and distributing actual CSAM?
The reason why CSAM shouldn't be possessed or distributed is because its production is inherently harmful. Not because it's disgusting.
That's an argument for banning production, not distribution or possession.
It's pretty normal to ban distribution or possession to prevent production - look at ivory.
Also, it's pretty normal to treat something produced by serious enough harm to be somewhat tainted by that harm. Interest in the Benin Bronzes declined considerably as it became known that they were essentially made by the worst slavers in Africa, we don't particularly like dealing with the outputs of Nazi 'research' labs (such as they were), etc. etc. That by itself isn't usually considered enough to merit a ban by itself, but e.g. consumption of actual torture porn or gore stuff is both rare and heavily frowned upon even when that doesn't affect production.
Neither argument applies to fiction, though.
I'm not familiar with countries that ban possession of ivory, although its sale is often illegal.
There's also cases of goods whose possession is legal but production and distribution is not (for example, Portuguese drug policy).
I mean, surely people always knew that those people were slavers? It's not exactly a secret what they were up to.
The bronzes are very prominently displayed in the British Museum and Nigeria apparently wants them back. They seem fairly popular though not at an all time high of popularity. Of course, the Benin bronzes were only indirectly enabled by slaving, so it's not really the same as your other examples.
Indeed, but the consumption of fictional sexualized depiction of minors is heavily frowned upon by the general public even though it's been normalized in certain toaster fucker parts of the internet.
Sure, but there's other arguments that apply to fiction. Such as:
People who produce or consume fictional disgusting material may have something wrong with them and belong in an institution rather than among a community of like minded people
People who produce or consume fictional disgusting material may eventually move on to producing or consuming real disgusting material
Etc.
You're usually banned from importing it, even when it belongs to you, which is sort of a compromise. There are nasty cases of hundred-year-old pianos being destroyed by having the ivory hacked off the keys, things like that.
There's people and people. In the UK, the pressure to repatriate the bronzes and the buzz around them came from the progressive crowd who I think were pretty surprised to learn the historical context (I personally didn't know until maybe 2021?) and the pressure to export seems to have dropped considerably. You're right it's not the same, and maybe I was muddying the waters, but I don't know that many torture porn cases so I was feeling out the area.
There are, but they're very far off "you are literally watching with pleasure a terrible thing being done to a real person that actually happened". And consequently their force is hugely diminished. Masturbating to George Floyd being suffocated to death is not the same as reading a KKK fantasy novel, even one in which equally lurid things happen.
The argument that "People who produce or consume fictional disgusting material may eventually move on to producing or consuming real disgusting material" has been trotted out many times and tends to come off very badly. DnD didn't make people satanists, nor did Doom. Grand Theft Auto did not product a wave of, well, grand theft auto. Porn is blamed for lots of nasty new sexual behaviours - mostly choking - but the direct evidential link seems weak and not in the direction that is given (it's a girl-desired thing not a guy-desired thing).
Likewise "People who produce or consume fictional disgusting material may have something wrong with them and belong in an institution" generally doesn't pass the smell test, unless you're willing to lock many, many people into a mental home and you're confident that your definition of 'disgusting' is widely shared and not going to come back to bite you.
In practice, many people privately consider these arguments hackneyed and their force has been dropping through the last century. There will always be crusaders and busybodies but equally there's a reason why governments generally avoid going on loud crusades against immoral private sexual acts that aren't actually crimes. Such crusades aren't popular and the government knows half its MPs will become collateral damage.
The pressure to return artifacts has declined because of Peak Woke, not because of the specific connection of the Benin Bronzes to slavery. The claim that the Bronzes belong in the British Museum as lawful trophies of a just war against slavery is mostly advanced as a piece of right-wing trolling, although I believe it unironically.
This seems akin to arguing that the reason the water level dropped over the past few hours isn't because of the gravitational effects of the moon and the Sun on the Earth, it happened because of low tide. Taking for granted that Peak Woke being in the past is a thing (I must admit, there are enough witness accounts to make it plausible that in some places, some of the time, some of the most extreme of the woke effects have somewhat receded, even if my personal experience isn't concordant with it), it being in the past is something that happened due to many things that happened between then and now. I don't think anyone can truly know exactly what and how much each specific event went into the recession from Peak Woke, but it seems plausible that scratching the surface of some woke cause and finding previously-unseen facts that are embarrassing to the woke was a major part of it.
In general you are correct, but in this specific case I remember the moral panic around historical connections to slavery around the time the Edward Colston statue was pulled down in Bristol, and nobody except the aforementioned right-wing trolls connected it to the moral panic about the return of African artifacts (including the Benin Bronzes) going on at roughly the same time.
My theory of Peak Woke is that the pro-establishment left eventually realised that being tarred and feathered by the anti-establishment right was a lot scarier than being called racist on social media by the anti-establishment left.
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