fanfic, bicycles, thought crime

I have a number of custom Google searches for my surname that feed my RSS reader. These usually throw up references to Justin Bennee a snow-border who may or may not be related to me. However today it threw up a slightly more "interesting" result from it's use as the name of a character in some Jane Austin fanfic (although self deprecatingly tagged as badfic as well). Oddness.

I picked up my Dad's bike yesterday as my Dad won't be using it for the next few weeks which saves me having to buy a bike right now. The cycle ride from Shelford to Milton was slightly circuitous round the centre but still weighed in at a relatively modest 8.3 miles (and around 60 minutes, give or take a stop for a phone call). At the end of it I wasn't dead so I think pretty much any journey around Cambridge should default to cycling, especially given the way petrol prices are going. In a slight unrelated point my car insurance has dropped by another 100 or so pounds now I have left the environs of Manchester.

Listening to the news this morning I heard that ministers are considering adding thought crime to the statute book. I have no problem with people being prosecuted for owning images that have been processed from images of real abuse. The problem with the proposals is the criminalising of the act of depicting minors in sexual fantasy in art. It may be socially unacceptable, it may upset the wider populace but is it abuse? Even if you argue it may be a precursor to actual abuse (I have no idea what the stats are on this) surely that would be a call for psychological intervention rather than hard jail time? The proposal makes me uneasy as it currently stands.