"People should take responsibility for the results of the things they write and publish, after all."
expatbrit, do you believe this in all circumstances? What about personal responsibility? If someone, say Dostoevsky writing "Crime and Punishment," writes a book about the right of the individual to commit a crime and get away with it, and a reader reads this and decides to act it out, are you saying Dostoevsky should be punished for writing the novel?
In the expressing of ideas, it's easy to confuse the character with the author. Just because an idea is presented by a character, it doesn't necessarily mean that it is an idea the author approves of. Heinlein wrote several books espousing political points of view that made people think this was his political point of view. As he kept saying, what a character says is not necessarily what the author believes, but only what the character believes. If a crazed fan tries to follow the example of the character, should the author be held responsible if he wrote a character who was mad and did bad things?
Doesn't there come a point when people have to take responsibility for their own actions instead of saying, in effect, "he made me do it"?
With Bonsai Kitty, this would be an elaborate operation in real life, far beyond the ability of a child. If a child owns a kitten, the parents have already explained the importance of treating it carefully. So why would a child do something like this when they have been trained? And if a child did ignore all their training, and crabbed the cat anyway and tried to stuff it in a jar, wouldn't the parent come running at the first screech made by the kitten? Could it be that this is why in the years that this site has been up there have been no cases in real life of people trying this? First of all, it's an awful thing to do, and most parents have taught their children not to do awful things. Secondly, it's a hard thing to attempt. Any child old enough to read the site will know that there's a whole lot more to this than just putting kitty in a jar. Any child old enough to read the site will know that he has to do complicated things. That should deter them. Finally, parental supervision will stop things before it gets out of hand anyway. The parents will be aware that their kids are reading the site and can talk to them about it. And they will certainly be around to prevent any action from occurring.
Of course, if the parents don't know what sites their kids are reading, or they aren't around when their children are around the kittens, then we have a problem with parents shirking their responsibilities. That would be the real problem in this case, not that some adults made a parody for other adults.
Blaming an author, or web site designer, for what your own children do is passing the blame.
