My opinion is the parents were negligent in their primary parental duty of managing risk. My opinion is correct too.

Now, I ask you, why in this world would a sane person leave a matter of opinion in such an important matter up to perfect strangers?

You think I don’t get it, Brenda, but I get it. You might want to think about it a bit more and you might get it.

Whatever everyone wishes to say about the employee, the company, the parents, or whatever, several points still stand.

The parents *do not* deserve to be registered as sex offenders. They are now on that registry.

The mother did not deserve to be suspended from her job.

We should not have to live in fear. We all have photos from when we were kids that show us naked in the bath, and people will continue to take them and have them printed.

The cops and DA went into the situation without any logical thought for possible consequences for this family. They deserve to get the pants sued off of them.

I have converted fully to digital. I have over 5000 photographs on my computer and I often set the computer to slide show and enjoy random photos set to music. I almost never take out my old photo albums, and when I do it’s usually to scan them into the computer. I have all my photos on my Zune (yes, I know) too.

I haven’t printed a photo in years. If there are those who insist on or are forced by economic circumstances to using film and having it developed outside the home, my only advice is to know who you are dealing with. This is now demonstrably risky behavior if the photos are marginal, and the margin seems to be shifting by the day.

To reiterate my position, what the parents did was not wrong. Taking pictures of one’s own children is not wrong. Showing them to strangers who will have their own unpredictable and arguably aberrant opinions of said photos is RISKY. It is a parent’s primary mandate to manage risk in the lives of their young children, and these parents failed. That doesn’t make them criminals, it doesn’t even make them bad parents, but they must accept responsibility for their actions or they are admitting that they have no control over their lives.

For what it’s worth, I hope they win their lawsuit against Wal-Mart, and I hope the publicity gets the attention of parents everywhere to guard their families more closely.

Thank God I’m not the only one that keeps baby photos for dating blackmail use.

As to everyone saying that print photos are a dying breed. Then why does every convenience store that I go to have a photo print section? There’s obviously a demand for it, not everyone wants/can dole out $200 for a home photo station. Yes I’ve gone to digital photos for my color (still do b&w in film) but I still need somewhere to print the things, otherwise I’ve got to only view them on a computer or small screened device.

The Wal-Mart clerk did not behave criminally. His behavior was only marginally questionable, and it was a posteriori, that is after the parents acted.

I’m done Fluffy. There’s no right or wrong in this situation. Some who posted here agreed with me, and some disagreed.

There is no correct answer, just subjective opinions. My logic is valid and sound either way, you just want to see the world the way you want to see it. Fine.

OK, enough strawmen for one day. I’m out. I like you Fluffy, and I’d like to keep this civil.

It’s not a strawman based on the terms of the argument you’re advancing.

You’re saying that since the parents action led to their predicament, they’re to blame, and you don’t want to consider irrelevancies like whether the people who “reacted” to the parents are being just or not.

Your syllogism is:

1. The world is not perfect.
2. One imperfect aspect of the world is hysteria about photos showing incidental child nudity.
3. The parents could have or should have known this.
4. The parents took an action that brought that hysteria down on their heads, and had they taken greater care they could have avoided that.
5. Therefore, this situation is the parents’ fault.

If we’re going to be “dispassionate” about it, then the Anne Frank example is not a straw man at all. It’s just a reductio using the exact same terms as advanced in your argument:

1. The world in 1944 was not perfect.
2. One imperfect aspect of the world in 1944 was the Nazi regime’s hysterical hatred of Jews.
3. The Franks definitely knew this, and we have documentary and literary evidence that they knew it.
4. The Franks failed to hide well enough, just as these parents failed to hide their bath photos. Had the Franks taken greater care, they would have been better hidden and would not have gotten caught.
5. Therefore, Anne Frank’s death is her parents’ fault.

How is this a strawman? “Dispassionately” explain the difference to me. If, as you argue, you’re responsible for any injustice that befalls you if there was some theoretical action you could have taken to avoid the injustice [or some action you could have refrained from taking to avoid the injustice] then a Jew who didn’t hide well enough, or who didn’t flee Europe in time, is responsible for his own Holocaust death. If you think it’s different, you have to explain to me how it’s different using the terms of the argument you’ve already advanced – and you’ve excluded questions of justice and fairness from consideration, so “But the Nazis were really bad guys” is not on the table here.

I think you got it JOR. There are no normative subjective interpretations. It is all opinion. That is what “The Myth of the Rule of Law” by John Hasnas is all about, linked to many times here. Delmar England wrote at length about it as well.

“Your argument is a defense of the clerk and of law enforcement, and you simply don’t realize it.”

I’ll have to disagree with you, Fluffy, no surprise there.

The actions of the parents are one thing (and the first thing). The actions of the clerk are another thing. The actions of law enforcement are yet another. I am defending none of the actions of any party, nor am I condemning the parents actions. There should be no issue here in a perfect world. The problem is the world is not perfect and it is incumbent on rational individuals to defend themselves. Thus, the parents failed to defend themselves by their actions. Everything else flows from that failure. This is pure logic. There is no judgment involved, because that would entail the perfection of the world.

I would not make the same mistake. Would I make a different mistake of equal magnitude? Perhaps. Such is life in society, it is rife with uncertainty and risk.

“You have to be careful when you drop photos off at Wal-Mart these days,” and “This whole thing is the parents’ fault,” are completely different statements. The problem here is that you think they are the same statement, and that’s both stupid and morally bankrupt.”

I never wrote you have to be careful when you drop photos off at Wal-Mart. I argue you should never bring photos to be developed in public ever. Avail yourself of the wonderful technology of digital photos and at-home photo printers. Or not and take the risk. Hell, scrutinize what you post on Facebook too. This is just common sense, unless you’re someone who wants to bring a test case before the Supreme Court, then by all means post whatever you want. As for it being the parents fault, I establish that dispassionately out of logic as they were the prime actors. Disagree with me all you want, it is irrefutable that had they not acted first, none of this would have happened, whatever judgments you want to lay on the subsequent actors for their alleged lack of common sense.

“You have to be careful being a Jew in the Netherlands in 1944,” is not the same statement as, “It’s Anne Frank’s family’s own damn fault that they got killed, because they weren’t careful enough.” You’d have to be retarded to think that they’re the same statement.”

OK, enough strawmen for one day. I’m out. I like you Fluffy, and I’d like to keep this civil.

And personally, I hope they do win a case against Walmart. Now I don’t think it’s likely, but it would be good if it happened. People who participate in enforcing stupid laws in stupid ways should be punished. Whatever encourages people to stop snitching is a good thing.

“The solution then, to eliminate these random acts of oppression, is to form a just society apart from the corrupt one, even if it means living alone.”

Well, there are huge dangers in living alone, and bad things happen in the world that have little or nothing to do with people. They’re all dangers we have to deal with and arrange our lives to take account of – so they all inhibit our freedom in some way, forcing us to arrange our affairs in ways we’d otherwise rather not and adopt habits we’d otherwise not want to. I don’t see a huge difference, in terms of my own freedom to do as I please, whether a danger originates from other people or not. Or maybe there is – even a cop or some other lowlife gangbanger that has you at his mercy is more likely to have a moment of, well, human decency, and stop hurting you, than a grizzly bear or a tornado is.

Your argument is a defense of the clerk and of law enforcement, and you simply don’t realize it.

“You have to be careful when you drop photos off at Wal-Mart these days,” and “This whole thing is the parents’ fault,” are completely different statements. The problem here is that you think they are the same statement, and that’s both stupid and morally bankrupt.

“You have to be careful being a Jew in the Netherlands in 1944,” is not the same statement as, “It’s Anne Frank’s family’s own damn fault that they got killed, because they weren’t careful enough.” You’d have to be retarded to think that they’re the same statement.

And unless they’re the same statement, you are completely wrong.

I suppose the one positive thing that can be said about the American justice system is that it has layers. Normally, one person is not judge, jury and executioner. One would hope that common sense would prevail somewhere along the chain, and often it does not. This should tend to smooth out subjective interpretations until something akin to a normative results, and many times individuals are displeased with the result owing to the cross-purposes of State power and individual freedom, so it is not perfect. Nothing human can ever be.

Self-responsibility is the foundation to a healthy existence. It sucks to have to constantly think, “What are the consequences of my actions or lack of action?” But it must be done. It is impossible to account for every possibility. But this is the responsibility of every individual in society.

Risk cannot be eliminated, but it can be mitigated rather effectively. Trust no strangers.

To think that any of us have any material freedom left is a cute, quaint thought. If you consider being able to have family photos printed at Walmart without risk of prosecution to be freedom, then that’s pathetic.

Here is my simple advice for today: trust no strangers. And if you absolutely must trust someone, make sure you know as much about them as possible, and most preferably, make sure they are a good friend.

Or roll the dice. Whatever.

Wow. Just wow.

I’ll give you my address, ransom. You can bring your lynch mob and I’ll build the scaffold myself.

Is it that hard to realize that human beings are actors and that each action that one performs carries risks, justified or not?

I am trying to perform a public service here, not defending the actions of the clerk or law enforcement.

I could make the same argument that people who choose to live in flood zones cannot blame the hurricane for their demise.

Why is this so f’en hard to deal with? Why the denial?

You know, this is one case where I cannot write, “What Fluffy said.”

I already clarified that my position is purely logical. The Walmart customers consciously chose to publicly print their photos. They live in this world, they have access to the news and by now they should be aware that cases such as theirs predate them by years. I maintain that they acted in the face of such technology as consumer photo printers, and I even maintain that photo prints are a dying medium. And by tracing first cause, it is easy to see that had they not brought the photos to Walmart, they wouldn’t have been playing “kiddie porn” roulette, where the clerk spins the wheel and pushes the button where the ball will land. Who in their right mind except an ignoramus would put their lives in a strangers hands in such a way?

In a perfect world, what these parents did is harmless. Last time I checked, this world is as imperfect as it gets — I hope.

You raise interesting points, JOR. Distilled to its essence, your argument (really logically paraphrasing my argument to its extreme) is that by choosing to live in a less-than-perfect society, each of us commits an act that sets in motion possibilities such as befell the Walmart customers or victims of no-knock wrong-door raids. While my opinion is there is a difference in kind between the two, I cannot argue with the base logic of your statement.

The solution then, to eliminate these random acts of oppression, is to form a just society apart from the corrupt one, even if it means living alone. Or barring that, one must simply deal with the randomness and count one’s lucky stars for each day that one passes unscathed.

You know, I was prepared to be on your side in this discussion, but you just had to do and say something stupid like this.

The moral blame for a conflict belongs to the first person who takes an action which is not innocuous or blameless. Since everyone now concedes that these people were not making child pornography, they cannot be assigned any blame for their action whatsoever. Whatsoever.

It’s one thing to say that people should try to be cognizant of other people’s insanity when conducting their lives. But you’re going one step further here, and excusing the insanity – by calling it a “reaction”, and therefore absolving the actor of blame.

You may think that you can insulate yourself from this sort of insanity by simply being more careful. I’m not so sure you can predict how effing stupid authorities will be next. OK, so you don’t use Walmart to print pictures of your kids in the bath. What about that family pic where grandpa is holding your little boy? Hey, does that dirty old man have his hand on that kid’s bottom?

Or maybe…”We have arrested you, because you seem to have an unhealthy obsession with little girls in pretty dresses.”

“It was my kid’s birthday party.”

“Yeah, that’s what they all say.”

Once you start avoiding perfectly innocent activities, because you are afraid they will be misconstrued, you have already kissed your freedom goodbye.