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Internet Porn More Addictive Than Crack, Senate Told
applemasker writes "Wired says that the Senate heard testimony today that internet porn is 'worse than crack.' Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) called it the most disturbing hearing he'd ever heard in the Senate, saying that porn is ubiquitous now but compared to when he was growing up and 'some guy would sneak a magazine in somewhere and show some of us, but you had to find him at the right time.' Can someone submit a FOIA request for his browser history or cache?"
...a bill passed into law extending the ban on taxing internet access, a move that is very good for consumers.
Of course, this being slashdot, we'll post a story about it before the vote, not update it when the desired vote actually occurs, not post a new story about it passing, and instead post a story about a lone Senator's response to a University of Pennsylvania scientist's valid research opinions[1] (just as valid as, say, some sociology students alleging studying shaky, unprovable statistical anomalies in Florida voting, even as the MIT/Caltech Voting Project says there was no widespread fraud, tampering, or errors).
Surprisingly, a person who works at a sex toy shop called Good Vibrations doesn't agree with the researcher's conclusions!
Let's just face the facts that some people are more prone to addictive behaviors, and it can happen with anything: drugs, shopping, gambling, sex, and yes, pornography. The putative argument is that with the abundance of free porn on the internet, a porn addiction has the potential to be much more damaging, since it doesn't require the resources that other common addictions might. This is perfectly valid; it doesn't imply that everyone will be addicted to porn (or anything else), nor does it mean that internet porn will be "banned". It simply says an addiction with a free neverending supply can be harmful.
Is anyone the least bit surprised or concerned that a conservative Christian Republican senator from Kansas found the testimony "disturbing". How is this news?
(And as for the crack in the summary, believe it or not, there are some people who probably haven't had occasion to view porn on their computers. No. Really.)
[1]Mary Anne Layden, co-director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Cognitive Therapy, called porn the "most concerning thing to psychological health that I know of existing today."
"The internet is a perfect drug delivery system because you are anonymous, aroused and have role models for these behaviors," Layden said. "To have drug pumped into your house 24/7, free, and children know how to use it better than grown-ups know how to use it -- it's a perfect delivery system if we want to have a whole generation of young addicts who will never have the drug out of their mind."
Pornography addicts have a more difficult time recovering from their addiction than cocaine addicts, since coke users can get the drug out of their system, but pornographic images stay in the brain forever, Layden said.
When was the last time somebody was arested for busting into a house to steal e-porn from a harddrive?
Table-ized A.I.
Pornography leads to boob jobs? May I ask why this is being presented to the Senate Committee on Science, Technology and Space Subcommittee? Now I'm not an advocate of pornography but if I were going to argue against it, I'd try to base my arguments on less personal-value laden arguments than this. And that's leaving aside dodgy use of science. Example: Suggesting that boys and girls don't masturbate without pornography? Children masturbate before they even understand sexual attraction, let alone requiring pornography post-puberty.
But here's another highlight,
Erototoxins? Is this an attempt to re-brand a need for sexual stimulationas a medical condition again? You know that way they could overturn any constitutional protections under the guise of medical treatment, much like drug companies are pushing their drugs that render people resistant to illegal drugs. Why do I get the feeling that these people would like to be able to prevent sexual desire wherever they deem it innappropriate.
The whole basis of this article seems to be that somebody has shown correlation in the brain between pleasure from drugs and pleasure from sex... as far as I understand the article, the correlation appears to be something called, um... pleasure.
I think if you watch a lot of pornography, then that can distance you from other people and perhaps interfere with forming a healthy relationship with your parter, but who knows - it's just my feeling. I don't think anyone with a brain whichever side of the argument they fall on could see this article being anything other than bollocks.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
OK, maybe that broke down a little at the end there. But the point is, porn isn't addictive - sex is.
This going to get worse and worse now that the Republicans (notice I don't say conservatives) have control and the Christian Right feel like they are owed something for shutting up and not scaring the moderates away like they did during the Clinton era elections.
There is a lot of porn on the net and if you arent some by-product of the very culture that is so freaked-out about it in the first place you'd probably find it as boring and silly as it truly is.
-_-
Coffee is addictive and so is tea and so are many other things in life. Some people are addicted to books. I have never seen senate debating library addiction PROBLEM? Before they should discuss internet porn addiction, they should show clearly that it is a problem which needs immediate addressing. Americans access more internet porn then many other nations in middle east, africa etc, but I don't think those countries have any less sexual crimes than USA.
Their website looks very Christian, has the declaration of "standing up for what I believe".
I saw this story before it was posted on slashdot, and my conclusion that, as usual, the extremists of opinion are about to strangle each other, and moderation is hardly represented.
senators and congressman hold these kinds of hearings all the tme so they can tell their constituants that they are actually doing stuff.
sorry 'bout the mess...
Let's see here we have wars, intolerance an ACTIVE hatred of environmentalism (they call it GAIAISM) and science, a contempt for the human body and a concern to control the behavior of others while giving up their decision making ability to a primative conception of christ. Now explain to me why these people are qualified to point fingers about porn? It seems they have the more agregious symptoms.
-_-
We liked it better when people were stealing magazines instead of surfing the web for free.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
...when he was growing up and 'some guy would sneak a magazine in somewhere and show some of us, but you had to find him at the right time.'
When he grew up women stayed at home and men did all the work and sex was something that was viewed as a contractual obligation to marraige.
The guy grew up in the 60s, wasnt he paying attention to all that sexual revolution business? Sucks to be him.
Congress better stay away from porn and cut it out with this "erototoxin addiction" angle. That kind of rhetoric is more damaging than porn, in my opinion. Science is the new religion, and now instead of labelling people "evil", we label them all "sick". Erototoxin. What a retarded buzzword. Worst ever.
Yeah, sex and drugs are similar in that they are both a hell of a lot of fun if you do them right.
Wait till these guys find out about Rock n Roll.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Addiction is a reification, and that's where the problem comes in. We've blurred the use of addiction in society until the abstract definition of addiction - the need to perform some behavior compulsively - determines the connotation of the word. The only meaning of the word addiction that applies to physical reality is that version that arises from biological adaptation to the ingestion of substances, which some people (alcoholics, for one) are much more prone to. Continued use develops continued need, and soon, their bodies (literally) depend on the substances for normal functioning, as they have stopped producing sufficient amounts of affected neurotransmitters on their own.
The other connotation of addiction is the one we refer to in common speech - when a person repeats behaviors, regardless of the consequences or his/her own inclination to do so. So we speak of those addicted to shopping, grooming, sex, or any other behavior a person focuses on for what others would deem an unhealthy period of time (this behavior is almost always a vice, or capable of becoming one in excess). This is where our definitions overlap and the problem first appears. Any thought or behavior is necessarily biological. What's more, for all of human history, people have tried to resist pleasure, such as eating or sex, that is innately tied with both biological reward and negative consequences. And in this way, the reward and the strong drive to perform the behaviors that bring about this reward are abstracted on the basis of their biological similarity (the same brain rewards both behaviors) and the strikingly similar behaviors of those deemed addicted (when you want to do something, you do it). But when we do this, we overstep the bounds of the word addiction, and soon we start regulating all human behavior associated with pleasure, negative consequences, and an obsessive quality into the category of addiction. Now, if you think that a reasonable definition of addiction is one that can apply to any pleasure-deriving activity, including every vice, that's your opinion. It just happens to be a very wrong one.
It's hard not to do the things we like. They make us feel the same (happy) as heroin makes heroin addicts feel (happy). And for all of human history, we've been trying to figure out how to suppress the human tendencies toward pleasure that can hurt and destroy us. But when we speak like this, we replace a deeper understanding of human action with the shallow descriptions of behavior we read in magazines. I used to smoke cigarettes, and I occasionally smoke pot. When I quit smoking, I felt nuts, like I was losing something that my body depended upon. When you're a smoker, you can't remember what it was like to be a non-smoker - to go a day without thinking of a cigarette. It was the hardest thing I've ever done, and if you non-smokers could imagine that suffering, you'd know what we mean we when talk about addiction. When I stop smoking pot, I feel upset that I'm not doing what I like to do, and I want to smoke. But I when I stopped smoking cigarettes, I couldn't think, my head felt like it was being smashed, and I wasn't able to register anything other than my shaking and desire for a cigarette.
There is a biological reality to real addiction. The rest is human behavior and the same attraction to vice that we've lived with for years. While this is necessarily biology, it arises naturally from human behavior, and is not caused by physical adaption to external agents and chemicals that act upon the body. This is a critical distinction, and not one easily understood by half-rate thinkers, people who read magazines, and those who've never wanted a cigarette.
This shit gets so old. First comes convincing people that others aren't in control of their actions. That's the only way a person can say "stop doing this action, even though it doesn't affect me, because I don't like it" without getting laughed at. Listen to this quote from the article: "Pornography really does, unlike other addictions, biolog
I bet what a fair share of the commission members (including the president) found most disturbing was to realize they were badly intoxicated by their self erototoxins, because I can't imagine they just discovered there was p0rn available on the net.
I dont feel the goverment has a place in legeslating morality, because morality can be a very grey area. I think the only time when the geverment has a possible legetimate concern is when aan activity can have a negative impact on another individual.
Some of these fanatical people have to deal with the concept that sexuality is a natural part of us. to try to supress such strong urges seems to invite mental instablity.
The Dems are just as bad, HINT - Tipper Gore, Al Gore and a whole list of others from the Dem side of the isle that try to control things.
The only difference between the GOP and the Dems is that they wish to control different areas of our lives. Neither side wants smaller goverment, both wish to control us.
Please do not group all Christians into the same category as these people. Not all Christians believe that the government should be used to force our values down others throats. Besides, this isn't really about Christianity or religion, it is about power and the ability to control people.
Hell, if these people in congress really believed what they say they believe they would act and vote differently.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
This is mumbo-jumbo as far as I can tell. Note how quickly Dr. Reisman -- her Ph.D. is in Communications, and she has no education in medicine -- goes from coining a brand new word to describe something she cannot prove exists ("what I dub erototoxins") to using that word as if the substance is real ("study erototoxins"). Along the way she uses partial quotes out of context, and prepends her views on pornography to a quote that matter-of-factly describes an obvious fact about the brain.
And if you missed it -- yes -- she is railing against "sexually explicit sex education." She is saying that sex ed causes brain damage.
This is the same woman who thinks the Catholic Church should sue because priests molested children.
What about the emotional and marriage problems it causes?
"I was gonna go fuck the neighbor boy, but the bus sign reminded me not to," testified recovering child fucker N.Curable-Sicko. "Until now, nothing had been able to stop me from having my way with them, not even the prospect of being sent to prison where I'd be raped constantly. Now, with the bus signs, I'm able to control my urges."
Internet porn is more addictive than Christ.
And it has them worried.
Howard Roark, Architect
I believe in a Man's right to exist for his own sake.
Which is the more "demented" form of entertainment:
looking at images/movies of naked people to achieve sexual arousal
or
watching images/movies of people hurting and killing one another with various weapons and by various means.
I mean, if we are going to *assume* that such stimulation motivates one to act, which is the more harmful resultant action? Sex/masturbation or harming/killing someone?
I have yet to hear a single argument against porn which could not apply equally well to violence, and yet no-one bats an eye at the tremendous amounts of violence in the entertainment industry.
Our culture is truely twisted.
(incidentally, this same reasoning applies to marijuana legalization as compared to alcohol/tobacco).
This is the way news works.
You bring the initial inklings of the story to the public's attention, bringing them to the edge of their seat and then don't follow up on it. It causes people to hunger for news as a source of entertainment. What it really becomes is terrorism, striking fear and doubt into the minds of millions of people who think that they live in the worst possible time in the history of the earth.
..the more I feel that I should run for an elected office and make my way up to the Senate. I'm absolutely serious. It is obvious on many fronts that our current crop of representatives have no fuckin' idea what the people want. That is what they are there for, right? To represent us?
Whether it is technological issues, societal issues, foreign policy.. Politicians seem to think that they know what's best.
Where are the blogs from Senators and other elected officials? Why do they feel that they are using technology effectively when their official website is merely a brochure for themselves maintained by some lackey, some summer "work for free" intern? Seriously.. America, especially the 18-30-something demographic seems to get ignored somewhat. It's bullshit.
What is your penile percentile?
and, no pun intended, i say "fuck them". go get some therapy or something and leave the internet alone for the others who either know how to incorporate porn into a healthy lifestyle, aren't interested in it, or aren't interested in other people and rely solely on porn. this desire to legislate "morality" is much more evil and harmful to a truly free society than pornography.
people always have and always will have emotional problems, but that's not my problem (or most other peoples either) so why should the rest of the world be penalized for someone's lack of ability to handle their own life? these bible-thumping right wingers sure don't mind forgetting all about personal accountability and responsibility when it's a topic they disagree with, but hey, say it loud & say it proud - sex is here to stay! put that in your communion wafer and smoke it, mr sexually repressed government tool.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
Groucho Marx
If I couldn't look at net porn and rub one off every so often, I sure wouldn't be able to deal with the stress my wife lays on me.
Wake up.
You know, some people use porn as part of keeping a marage alive and interesting...
Though it takes two to tango, and normally one or the other probably objects to porn.
Don't believe him?
Then quit for a week. You'll be back at it within two days, because "it's not a problem". Just do it to see if you can last a week.
The chemicals released by human orgasm shouldn't be under-estimated in their addictive powers. Sex has been the second most powerful driving force in shaping human society, bar only power.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Pornography is exactly showing people having sexual intercourse. Pornography is LEGAL. Its distribution to minors is not.
The reason women were treated like property is that the only way to get a human male to stay with the wife and kids was to give him a sense of ownership. In the wild, in most cases the strongest male has all the women, and no responsibilty for the children. In society, men where made to 'own' the women so that they'd feel like they where losing something by leaving. Now that this sense of ownership is gone (and has been replaced by a new breed of woman who have all the privileges and none of the responsiblites of marriage), men are leaving in droves. Hence the high devorice rate and number of fathers who won't support their children.
Furthermore, women don't make choices to shift power around, but instead follow existing power. 90% of women marry up. That sexual freedom is a practical if not actual illusion. This is why societies need monogomous relationships. There's nothing more dangerous than a poor, desparate and horny guy with no family. People like that crash planes into buildings.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
A difference of willingness is a fair bet with, say introducing a third party into the sex relationship (jealousy is very common), but I can't possibly tell you how many couples enjoy porn together, based on what I've personally observed. Models, Ivy leaguers, union members, women's college grads, Christians, Jews, blue collar workers, Midwesterners, Europeans, Asians, gay men, African-Americans, lesbians, nerds, virgins; outside of religious fundamentalists, I can't think of a single group I haven't personally observed to show enthusiam for porn (well, maybe Arabs, but I'm not ready to lump them in with their fundamentalist brethren just because I lack sufficient cultural exposure). Except for Canadians; they might just be Satan's squeaky clean naughty milkmaids. Come here, Canada; you need a spanking.
People like to alter their consciousness (with drugs or otherwise). People like porn. Get used to it, and try to minimize harm. And frankly, that is 10,000 times more important than any particular moral bugaboo (and if you think otherwise, clearly you favor societal harm over disrupting your personal mental illnesses).
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Emotional and marriage problems caused by porn?? Holy befrackin jebus.
Here's a tip: If you love porn, don't marry a woman who hates porn. She will find it. Who wants to spend 50 years pretending you don't like to watch people fuck?
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Crack, heroin, gambling, the big three right now--they all have the very real potential to take every dime a person owns without ever looking back, and for this reason they are legislated against.
Lemme see here. Someone doesn't like XYZ, so we'll make it illegal, thus driving it onto the black market, where the cost will rise by a factor of 100 and quality control will drop to null, and trade in the product will fall entirely into the domain of criminals. And when all that's done, and we're arresting 800,000 people a year for being caught holding a plant, then we'll pat ourselves on the back on what a kindly service we're doing making these expensive, dangerous, criminal drugs illegal. Do you really think heroin is illegal because it's expensive, or is it perhaps the other way around? May I remind you that hemp and marijuana at one time could be found growing in road-side ditches along half of all US roads? it's not called 'weed' for nothing.
Have you ever read some of the claims early proponents of prohibition made about drugs? They are farcical beyond the limits of credulity. The sort of things that only someone who was out to ban a product no matter what the reality would say. In fact, it sounds a lot like the outrageous claims the Kansas senator is spouting. How wonderful, Ashcroft kicks off the War on Copying, followed closely by the War on Porn. Give these guys a few more years, I'm sure they'll work their way through the entire dictionary of things to declare war on.
Dyolf Knip
I fall into the same catagory as you (check out my website). I am a Christian and a libertarian.
What most people fail to realize is that the idea of seperation of church and state is there to protect the church just as much as it is to protect the state. Look in history when the church and state were either one in the same or very close to one another. It wasn't good for the church, nor was it good for the state. Think Rome, Britian, Spain...
Also, I think that we have to remember that under no circumstances should we attempt to impose our moralities on others via legislation/regulation. The reasoning behind this is that if/when we become a minority in this country then we don't want someone imposing their morals on us. The best way to avoid this is to ensure that the gov doesn't have power to legislate morality.
Now of course this takes into account the ideas that your rights end where mine begin (ie - you can't infringe on my rights by killing, stealing, raping etc...).
A couple of final thoughts:
1) I wish my fellow Christians would pull their heads out of their rear ends and think about things critically. The faith is spiritual but the world is intellectual - most Christians only get the first half of that.
and
2) I wish all of these athiest/secular humanists/agnostics (whoever) would quit labeling all Christians as prudes and mental cave men. Those are extreme gross generalizations.
And to everyone out there reading this I drink every once in a while, I listen to Metallica (the old stuff), I watch R rated movies, I have a high IQ, I believe evolution is a viable theory, I also happen to worship the Lord and love Jesus. People can still have their faith and enjoy life too!
Libertas in infinitum
Consider the myth of Isis and Osiris, Penelope and Ulysses from Homer's Oddessy, Dido and Aeneas from Virgil's Aeneid, dozens of stories from "The Arabian Nights", and so on. You can dismiss them as just books and poems, but the audience wouldn't have found these stories affecting if they hadn't some relationship to the travails of their own lives. And it isn't just the fiction and mythology. I think if you read the social commentaries of ancient times you'll find they too remark on the conflict between marriage for practical reasons and marriage for love. Economics and politics have usually had the last word in most marriages, but marriage for love was not unknown even in the ancient world.
How do you explain the existence of anti-polygamy laws then? The powerful male with the harem is just one of dozens if not hundreds of reproductive strategies that have evolved across the living world. The fascinating thing about humans is that we employ several of them at once.
Uh huh. Look, condoms break, diaphrams leak, women lie about being on the pill, men promise to pull out. Any act of coitus between a man and a woman may result in a pregnancy. Someone has to care for his child, I don't see why your brother shouldn't be on top of the list. I'm sorry your brother got involved with a scheming woman, but it was his choice to sleep with her.
As True Porn Clerk Stories put it...
I get sort of conflicted about throwing kids and teenagers out of the porn section. I really don't want them down there, not because I think sex is dirty or bad, but because I don't want them to think that that's what sex is about. The stuff on our boxes is sex in the basest, sometimes most brutal terms - naked women spreading their relevant orifices and making that Porn Face. Unless you're talking about the Max Hardcore series, which involves women with "SLUT" and "WHORE" written across their foreheads in lipstick. And besides - do we really need to raise another generation of men who can't deal with pubic hair?
So I don't feel bad about getting them out of there, except that I'm very conscious of the fact that I'm a woman while I'm doing it. I worry that I'm either setting up or reinforcing the idea that there are fun, bad women who like sex and good, boring women who restrict access to sex.
I always want to debrief them. "Hey, guys, it's cool that you're curious, but this isn't the way to find out. Porn is fine, but it's not real sex. Real sex is great, and even good girls love it, but it has to be a two-way street..." But I always just end up with "Sorry, guys - come back when you're 21." Perhaps I should write a children's book. Porn Is Healthy and Fine, but Only as a Temporary Physical Release.
It's true. Most of it is just incompetent, but some of it is actively... repulsive. Well, to me at least. The "Bangbus" stuff that was so, so popular on the campus network just left me kinda icked out. Where's the fun in degrading someone like that?
Now, compare that with Buttman: The Fashionistas, in which everyone's having a grand old time beating the heck out of each other. Because the participants wear wackier clothing and hit each other, it's supposedly more perverse... but I find it a lot more wholesome than "Bangbus" or anything in a similar mold.
'Course, given that I get all my porn from the internet, or make it myself, I probably don't have a representative sample.
Perhaps I'm missing something. Is there something terribly alluring about bullying women? It's like being in high school again.
I'd like to hear uplifting and affirming stories about good porn, if anyone has 'em.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Pornography psychopharmacologically imprints young brains --- thereby invalidating notions of informed consent.
I'm reading this as, "when you get a hard-on, you lose all sense of right and wrong, and become a rampaging rapist".
Hasn't that, you know, not been in style since the eighteen fucking hundreds? Am I missing something here?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
So, if we're going to ban porn because of its addictiveness are we going to ban news, too?
I'm an information addict. I spend half my day browsing various news sites (no, not pornographic) and forums to read new information. I rarely remember what I read, I just read for reading's sake. I barely get to do anything else and when I do I often want to stop pretty soon and get back to the information. If you spend your leisure time reading Slashdot (or other news sources) instead of doing other things you usually love to do (e.g. play games if you're a gamer) you are another victim.
Sources: 1, 2 (NYTimes, reg or circumvention required), 3
There might be a connection between these two forms of addiction, after all porn is a form of information, too, right?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I cant fathom how our congress is concerned with people, private citezens, who might look or see pornography on their computers, which by the way is no different from the 70's and 80's when all we had were tapes. The internet has simply sped up the process, as it has for everything else that it has an effect on.
Im just sick of all these high-road people who will hide every bit of sexually related material from their lives, and then they turn around and plop themselves in front of CNN and watch people die on live tv. This seems to me like the general public is more comfortable watching one person shoot another in the head than watch two people have sex. It's fine to bring your 15 year old kid into a movie theater to watch Hannibal Lechter eat sombody's brain, but how many of you would have left the theater with your kids if he threw Foster down on the table and made love to her. Values are F**KED.
Just remember that when you are browsing your teenager's internet cache looking for evidence of "deviancy" there is most likely sombody selling crack cocaine a block away from your kid's high school.
Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.
Obviously the problem here is not pornography, but these 'naturally occurring opioids'! if you want to solve the problem, you're going to have to ban them - obviously that means banning orgasms! Because what this is suggesting is that not only can society not handle artificial drugs, but we can't handle the natural drugs in our own body! The whole issue of censorship here is completely screwed up, someone can be pretty arousing when they are fully clothed, in fact often more so than when they're totally naked - so censorship is not only draconian, its useless! People learn to combat addictions, and those who don't, well lets just say evolution trims off the crud.
Learning to live in society is like being pushed out of the birds nest, if you don't learn how to deal with a reasonable amount of issues early on then you are totally fucked for life. Go look at the Taliban or Saudi Arabia, their philosophy is light-years ahead of the Christian-right, cover all women and no-one will think about sex. It doesn't work and even worse is that when someone who has been pampered into this 'zero-porn' environment leaves they have major issues. Just imagine how a child would turn out if they were waited on hand and foot from birth, never allowed to so much as cross the road or plug something in on their own because it was too dangerous, imagine they had everything handled for them and everything in their life was sugar coated; would they be able to deal with the outside world? The opposite end of that scenario is if the kid had been allowed to do anything and go anywhere from birth, nature suggests that they would probably get hit by the first car they saw.
There's a balance - people should grow up in an environment as free as possible but with enough restrictions to keep them safe enough to live and not get trauma for life. There are some things that people have to deal with and learn from or else they are going to be weaklings, deal with porn, its not going to kill you.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Of course it's addictive. But so is e-mail and slashdot. Quake3 & filesharing. Everything about the Internet. Some of us were adults before this Internet thing exploded and remember adult life then. The thing is immediate gratification and conveniences have made life more complex. I would say it's more of an issue for young people, but this is the new world and it's not going back ever. You wanted to have all your computers talk to eachother and now you have it. (learn appropriate latin phase and enter here. Damm.) be careful what you wish for?.. Remember your grandparents(?) stories of horse carriges and gentleman callers? Those days were gone long before the Internet. This is just the newest level. Okay people, keep on poping more kids out. Theyre going to have quite a ride ahead.
it's a pretty typical tactic to compare one thing to another when they're not related, in this case drugs and pornography. these are separate issues and should be handled as such. trying to lump them together under the category of "these are activities that i don't approve of" isn't going to cut it. perhaps if people would stop trying to make such broadly generalized categories such as "this is *good*, this is *bad*" they might be able to actually think a little more critically about some of these problems rather than respond with a knee-jerk "this must be stopped" mentality.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
Groucho Marx
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?