Does anyone know of any studies that show that pornography harms children more than anything else, like seeing bomb victims on nightly news or ISIS beheadings on Facebook? I seem to recall seeing porn when I was a child, and i'm not intellectually or emotionally damaged, as far as I know.
Well, you're not exactly an unbiased source on yourself ;)
To be honest, I would expect many studies to have rather a moralistic bent, since it's getting into issues of right and wrong, cultural issues rather than strictly behavioral ones.
That said, I do think there is something to the idea that early exposure to porn does change one's expectations when it comes to sex. Sure, you could view like a "action movie" version of the act, but all the same it could taint somewhat one's ideas of how it's done, what the opposite (or same for that matter) sex is like in or out of bed, etc.
Banning it is, of course, ridiculous and impossible, so I wouldn't support it even if I thought it was morally justified (precious little is).
Still baffling, that violence and murder you see on TV almost non-stop is not considered a big problem. Probably because it is not.
Everyone is going to deal with sex. Only a few will have to deal with murder. Go figure.
Yes it does matter! It matters if we could easily spend fewer resources to fix a much greater harm, but we are focusing on some scapegoat due to moralistic reasons not having anything to do with the scale of (or even existence of) harm.
It matters, sure, especially if there are great alternatives handy that really do spend much less resources for much more benefit AND working on the example at hand rules out alternatives. But without those qualifiers, it is a weak line of reasoning. It's pretty rare that we can attack a social problem only one way at a time.
Is it a reasonable argument to say that the USA's carbon emissions do not need to be worried about, because the USA does not emit more carbon than anyone else? China produces about 40% more carbon than the USA.
So what criteria do you use to determine what you should 'fix'? If you're going to do it arbitrarily, I suggest we just ban all images and videos on the entire internet. It's a much more elegant solution and it would fix more issues.
Of course, we would need to create filters for ASCII pr0n, lest the kiddies on a BBS suddenly become paralyzed by a boob made out of markup.
Acting against harmful things is very often not a net positive. Children playing and scraping their knees, etc.
In the cast of overreacting to nudity, uh, maybe you risk weird sexual hangups later in life that can interfere with intimacy? On top of negative effects that happen when you get as far as censorship.
That's assuming it's actually harmful, which we have absolutely no proof of, just "think uh duh childrens" gut feelings.
Society hasn't collapsed just because kids have had access to internet porn for a few generations. A more libertarian perspective would be "unless you can prove something is causing demonstrable, serious harm, the government should not be involved in it at all, because at best you're wasting resources on something insignificant, or at worst you're unintentionally causing actual, demonstrable damage to society in pursuit of a misguided goal."
Not that it really matters in this case, it's obvious that Cameron doesn't give a shit about porn and is just using this as an excuse to curb civil liberties and justify surveillance.
I caught that. I will also admit that I could have been more verbose and state that I was primarily objecting to
>we should do something about it.
because I believe governments and societies generally function better when they err on the side of permissiveness whenever possible. Even if we did agree that pornography is "bad," not every "bad" thing should warrant a response.
Also, I think you were wrong to object to your parent commenter's argument, because there is a big difference between "us" choosing between "stopping" internet pornography or violence on the nightly news, and the government and media hypocritically attempting to censor one kind of (allegedly) traumatizing material while flaunting and sensationalizing an arguably much more traumatizing kind.
How quickly do you need society to collapse anyway? Just because it hasn't collapsed yet doesn't mean it isn't collapsing. Wouldn't disturbing trends precede this collapse, like time magazine's report on millenials[0] or the abysmal state of technical writing?
What on earth does that have to do with internet porn?
I think you took my mention of societal collapse way too literally, but if you want my serious opinion on that, the real problems afflicting millennials are all directly caused by economic woes, while the moralistic whining about attitudes and porn and snapchat etc. is part out-of-touch curmudgeons being curmudgeons as they have always been, and part governments and their media lapdogs trying to point the finger away from said economic woes. See Japan, where porn and "parasite singles" are constantly blamed by the media for the nation's low birth rates, when the more logical answer is that Japan never fully recovered from its bubble and most people simply can't afford to get married and have kids these days.
