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U.S. Justice Department Prepares Assault on Pr0n
An anonymous reader writes "The Baltimore Sun is reporting that the Justice Department is preparing to reawaken old laws to fight the war on ... no, not terrorists... porn! And not just the kinky stuff either. In the age of Internet connectivity, will this mean these jobs are headed to India too?"
This is of course being spear-headed by John Ashcroft, a very conservative christian. The very same John Ashcroft who spent $8000 of taxpayer money to cover up the bare breast of the statue of Lady Justice.
He once gave a speech at Bob Jones university, that contained such amazing lines as "Unique among the nations, America recognized the source of our character as being godly and eternal, not being civic and temporal. And because we have understood that our source is eternal, America has been different. We have no king but Jesus."
If he's offended by the bare breast of a statue, just imagine what he thinks of porn. That this man holds public office frightens me very, very much.
Asscroft wasn't elected. He was appointed.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I pay my taxes, and make payroll on time.
I comply with the law, while still standing up for my first ammendment rights.
I do my best to screen our tallent to make sure that they can handle doing this type of work. Sometimes when it looks like they don't really want to do this type of work, but they're just down on their luck, I'll buy them dinner and help them consider other options.
I even use 100 percent recycled 2 ply Facial Tissues (The brand is seventh generation, btw) when... testing... the product.
In my morning review of all the sources that I get my news from, I continue to watch the Bush administration and their wacko and corrup cronies continue to wage murder under the guise of war to line their own pockets, while continuing to push these insane and unrepresentative extreme right religious agendas, that were bought and paid for by the religious right.
After that, I go through the considerable frustration of trying to forge business partnerships with other business such as banks, credit card companies, insurance companies, etc, etc, to be able to function in the business world. All the while being discriminated against because the widgets I happen to sell have some naked bits.
I choose between people who often have little interest in supporting my business, but would love to freely copy my work, and the people who want to throw everyone in prison for copying anything, and at the same time throw me in prison for making it.
However I don't let either group of assholes get to me. Instead, I remember that there are more people out there who will choose to support what I'm doing in order to see that I keep doing it.
I don't spam. I don't film anyone who is a minor. I work as hard as the next guy, trying to make the economy recover.
However, until I get arrested, just for exercising my first ammendment right to speech, the speech that I'll be making will be against Bush, Cheyney and Ashcroft.
Why go through all this? Why not just go back to being a database programmer working in a cube somewhere? Because I love what I do. I've built my own company from the ground up, and kept it going. The fundamentalists aren't the only people who believe in what they're doing. They're also not the only people who will stick up for their way of life.
HaXXXor.com - Naked Chicks Teach You How To Ha
Our immoral wars are NEVER about the price of gasoline.... our government doesn't care if oil companies gouge us... it's about ACCESS to oil. That the access sometimes causes gas prices to fall is irrelevent. :-)
Rich...
Ignore Alien Orders
Amusingly, he got the job after losing a Senate race to a dead man (Mel Carnahan). No joke!
People shape laws. Not the other way around.
That is pretty much what happened when Ashcroft was prosecuting cases in Missouri. He would go after small book/video stores. He wasn't going to go after General Motors (who owns a controlling interest in a company that distributes hardcore pay per view material in hotel rooms.) He knew he couldn't win even against the small guys, but he would seize their assets over and over again and hold onto their inventory for a period of time (long enough for them to have to reorder it) to disrupt their business and cost them tons of legal fees till they went bankrupt. He would let them get it back, seize it again... He did eventually bring several of them to trial (and I don't remember him winning though I believe a couple of the stores closed from all of the disruption of their business). Temporary injunctions also work well for business disruption.
... at a retail outlet.
I've always thought that this trait in Ashcroft could be put to good use by telling him most spam is advertising pornography and a good portion of it ends up in the in-boxes of kids and teens. Try to get him to go after spammers instead through the back door. Unfortunately that has not happened.
To me it's all kind of silly. Porn wouldn't be a multi-billion dollar industry with exceptional growth rates if people didn't want it. It also wouldn't be the money maker it is without the internet there to let people shop in relative privacy. It's worked out fantastic for the sellers of sex toys as well, eliminating the barrier to entry for customers that would be averse to buying the double ended
Given his prior history if I hosted a site that sold scat films or beastiality I would probably try to move it off-shore.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
You miss the point, and fail to distinguish between two methods of obtaining true beliefs.
No. I simply don't personally use your "method," that's all.
One of them is a bad way, the other is good.
I agree with this statement! But I think we'd disagree as to which is which. Heh.
1. Your claim that you are able to determine right and wrong independant from God or the threat of hell is a testimony to your willingness to listen to subjective feelings about good and evil.
Of course.
Since you willingly concede that different people will have different conceptions, then you must also agree that such terms "right" and "wrong" are subjective. And without a God, or a yardstick, such understandings must be fluid.
Absolutely. Not only that, but I'd also claim that as a practical matter, such understandings are subjective even if there is a supreme being, because earnest believers will still differ in interpretation. I've known many many devout Christians in my life. None of them had identically the same moral sense as any of the others, since their interpretations of what they felt God wanted out of them were not all identically the same.
2. My point was a logical one - if there is no afterlife, no God, then there is no "right" or "wrong". The important question is not "could you know the right thing to do without the threat of eternal punishment", but rather "is there a right or wrong if there is no God or eternal punishment?"
And here is where we disagree. If, instead, you wrote your first sentence as "if there is no afterlife, no God, then there is no objective right or wrong, independent of human feelings" then I'd agree. I don't know how one comes up with an absolute, objective metric for measuring right and wrong in the absence of a supreme being. But that's different from saying that there's no right or wrong. I make decisions every day based on what seems to me to be morally right or wrong. Those decisions are made using my personal moral compass, rather than one imposed on me from without. But that doesn't make them any less an attempt to do right and not do wrong.
And this is one of the greatest hypocricies of the atheist position - a failure to acknowledge the logical conclusion, that "good" and "evil" only make sense when we consider the divine. Without any God, there is no right or wrong.
This is circular reasoning. You're saying "without any God, there is no right or wrong, because right and wrong only make sense if there is a God." And the source of this circular reasoning is the implicit assumption that the concepts of right and wrong only make sense if those concepts are absolute, objective ones. I don't see any logical reason to buy that.
Naturalists are probably deathly afraid of these conclusions for two reasons:
Well, I hope I've illustrated above that I, at least, am not deathly afraid of these conclusions, since I don't think the first one is bad, while I don't think the second one makes any logical sense. But anyway . . .
Oh, and what's a naturalist? Is that the same as an athiest?
1. It goes against every fibre of humans, because the truth is we do know good and evil, and that we know it because there is a God. The understanding is so overwhelming that even a logical conclusion denying "good" or "evil" is avoided, because it is counter to what we know a priori.
If it reassures you to think that some people feel that way, go for it. I can't speak for anyone but me. In my case, I don't have an overwhelming understanding that there is any supreme being. In fact, just the opposite. I think claims require evidence, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I think the concept of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent supreme being is pretty extraordinary . . .pretty far outside anything we encounter in our lives. So where's that extraordinarily c