Ah - it was an academic interest, was it?

Let's not be too quick to condemn Pete Townshend for using his credit card to buy kiddie porn - it may be easy to suggest that if he really was researching a book and "wanted to know what was there" - and who wouldn't be puzzled what may lay behind a link saying "Kids being fucked here", after all? - that maybe he should have contacted, say, a police department or one of the many academics (actual academics) who have already done this sort of research.

It would be cheap, wouldn't it, to suggest that it would be of little comfort to know that the person paying the bloke flogging pictures of her being raped was only handing over the cash to gather some material for a book - I know I have no problem with kiddie pornographers getting rich from flogging images, providing the end users are merely writing details of the pictures down in spiral bound notebooks, after all.

After all, how could Peter be a paedophile - look, he's calling people who find that sort of thing "mentally ill" (although if he believes child porn users are mentally ill, wouldn't his "anger and vengeance" be misplaced?)

Let's take him at word. Which still makes him at best morally dubious and very, very stupid, doesn't it?