While we're not sure Pete Townshend's " I was just doing some research" explanation will hold up in court, The Who guitarist last year drafted a six-page treatise on the easy availability of child pornography on the Internet. So easy, in fact, that Townshend, 57, wrote that he accidentally discovered a photo of a two-year-old boy being raped when he typed the words "Russia," "orphanages," and "boys" into a search engine.
Smoking Gun has Townshend's letter, from his website a year ago
{the end of the piece has this tone, I don't know, a little too goody-goody, a little too forced, a little too something, it's hard to know for sure, whatever motivated him to write it, that's all changed now. what he most needs to address is the idea that being an intelligent person he intentionally left an alibi behind him, in case the shit hit the fan, knowing that it would, or would probably. and I guess that would fall out around how many times his credit cards were billed. he makes some really valid points about the complicity of looking, that merely hitting sites like that feeds the slave trade in underage sex-toy human lives.
on the other hand, no one wants to talk about the threat in the presence of these 'above the law' vigilantes, not just on the internet but everywhere seemingly. there was a time when I felt that anything done to stop that destruction, that degradation, was justified. I don't think so anymore. I think the people involved in, and I don't know what else to call it, vigilante activities, too many of them are not healthy, that they spread a kind of sickness that's harder to see, but that does its own kind of damage. and they hide behind the real and undeniable fact of their resistance to evil, their defense of the innocent. so that in the immediate the children are rescued, some of them, but in the long run something else we haven't figured out a name for is perpetuated. the mentality that says if they have to ruin the lives of a few innocent people to get to the evil ones it's how it has to be. that same logic has turned America into a vast stockyard, filled with nervous sheep. we should not forget that the reason the exploitation of children is bad is the damage it does. many people without being able to say it, feel that sexual exploitation of children is wrong because sex is bad and children are good. but it's the damage. and there are other, non-sexual, forms of damage that go on all around us all the time. people get outraged at pedophile priests yet think nothing of a priest who tells a believing child that masturbation will send him to hell for all eternity. imagine what that is for someone who believes in eternity and hell as real possible outcomes. these are people many of them who are less affected by the sight of a child killed in a car wreck, than a child raped. even given that a raped child is very likely to become suicidal, still, one's dead, the other's alive. there's something sick about preferring the dead, virginal child to the living, violated child. something real sick. that child pornography is undebatably wrong, yes, I'm not interested in any arguments about that, but that the process the systems the ways of living that have made this all possible are somehow all right, and only the child pornography is wrong, that's the argument that needs to begin, if it isn't already too late. the responsibility of the so-called Free World to the suddenly free-falling people behind the Iron Curtain, the part that capitalism itself has played in the creation of the markets for young bodies and lives, that goes unspoken still. it isn't just sex that's wrong in our treatment of third-world children, an argument could be made that a ten year old working to exhaustion in a poorly ventilated factory, working with toxic chemicals and dust, working for almost nothing to enrich people whose attitudes toward that child's health and well-being are a perfect mirror for the sexual predator's disregard, that a child in those circumstances is being violated, being damaged to a degree that only an inhuman mind and heart could distinguish from the damage of sexual violation.}
