Another mistake

That thing I said the other day about how humans are a mistake. One branch of that mistakenness is the taste that some humans have for torture and cruelty as a form of entertainment. Take Andrew Picard, former Etonian, for instance.

Andrew Picard, 18, was found to have more than 2,000 pornographic images of children as young as  two years old, including rape and bestiality. The images were found on his computer at [Eton] after Picard, then 17-years-old, shared the illegal material in an online chat room with an undercover police officer, The Daily Mail reports.

Judge Peter Ross said: “This defendant Andrew Picard was a privileged young man. His family are clearly wealthy enough to send him to school in Eton. Quite how you found your way into this unpleasant world Mr Picard, the world of chatrooms and exchanging this material, is not clear to me.

“Why you did it, doctors and others have sought to explain- the emotional difficulties you had, issues around your sexuality… It has been said that you and your family have suffered deeply as a result of your arrest and public exposure. Your family didn’t deserve that but it is a consequence of this sort of offending.”

“All too often in these courtrooms, we see the internet and chatrooms providing a degree of assumed detachment in terms of what is said and the material that is viewed. Please make no bones about it, these are children, some of them very tiny and they are being abused and tortured simply to provide sexual gratification, mainly, to adult males.

“All over the world, too often in the third world, children [are] being made objects of the most appalling abuse. It forms a currency and you played a part in that. You were seeking to obtain your own sexual gratification.”

That shouldn’t be a thing. Rich men and boys in the rich parts of the world shouldn’t have a taste for looking at the torture and abuse of children.

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