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What The Net is Doing to You
Bart writes "The BBC reports One of the world's first research centres dedicated to studying the social, political and economic effects of the net has opened in Oxford" I've offered to trade CowboyNeal to them as a research subject for a case of beer. I think studying the effects of the internet on him will save lives. See? Someone is thinking of the children.
Well, for one, the observed tendency is for many (though definitely not all) negative effects of promiscuity, pornography, and homosexuality to be social negative effects. If the harmful effects of these were relatively isolated to the people who involved themselves in them, I would feel sorry that people choose to mess their own lives up but not be concerned in some of the ways I am. (It's the same way with a lot of mind-altering substances- they help produce unstable personalities who are dangerous to others.) Remember, nobody lives in a vacuum/no man is an island; what you do affects other people profoundly.
A few months ago, some pervert broke into a private home 50 miles north of mine in the middle of the night and kidnapped a preteen girl. What scant evidence there is suggests that he did this to sexually abuse her body (which has not yet been found). It is extremely likely that this person had been feeding a psychological abnormality with pornography until this mental disease had taken over. This is a good example of one (somewhat rare) type of effect of 'expressing yourself' and 'freeing your repressed urges' by turning to pornography.
As to the distinction between legal and illegal drugs, I don't mean to put everything legal on one side of the line and everything illegal on the other. The line I meant to draw is between taking drugs (such as prescription drugs when you have an illness) to correct for a real problem in the operation of your body to attempt to restore it to normal operation and drugs (ofttimes but not always illegal) which are taken to mess with the biological system in all sorts of ways without regard for the healthy and normal operation of the body.
I am aware that there is some degree of non-chosen same-sex attraction, but common sense tells us that this is unnatural, since the biological mechanisms behind sexual attraction are there for the purpose of encouraging reproduction. (There are, of course, other reasons, such as statistical studies of factors of mental health, for classifying same-sex attraction as unhealthy.) I'm not saying that people who feel some same-sex attraction are evil, I'm saying that they are ill. However, those who pride themselves on disease instead of attempting to free themselves of it are fairly obviously unstable in some way.
I do not deny that there may be a fair number of people who are openly homosexual but otherwise largely moral. The fact that plenty of people in mental hospitals across the world are nonviolent doesn't mean it's time to give each of them a machete and release them; the same principle applies to the class of mentally ill under discussion.