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Egypt Banned Porn, But How Much of the Internet Is That?
pigrabbitbear writes "The recent web pornography ban in Egypt has raised questions about the evils of censorship (and porn) and the changing tide of popular attitude of Egyptians. It perhaps reflects the emerging influence of more conservative Muslim elements in government, a shift. Apparently the same ban was passed 3 years ago but was not enforced because their filtering system was not effective. But porn bans are nothing new. Other countries with strict censorship laws like China and Saudi Arabia have successfully implemented bans that restrict pornography along with anything else they deem inappropriate for public viewing. In 2010 the UK discussed a ban that would require users to specifically request access to pornographic material from their internet service providers. And porn-banning rhetoric has even stomped through the U.S. news media over the last few months, thanks to GOP also-ran Rick Santorum claiming President Obama is failing to enforce pornography laws. (There have also been some awesomely ridiculous pornography PSAs.)"
Violence plastered all over the media is okay, but God forbid little Hazem sees a tit.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
The Libertarian viewpoint is that, even if some people consider it harmful, people should still have the right to view it. There's a leap from "we think this is bad for your marriage" to "so we won't let you see it" that you're ignoring.
Lots of couples actually watch Porn together, to get them in the mood. Nothing wrong with that, right?
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Honestly, if I wanted to do stuff like this, I wouldn't ban porn. I would just ban the anti-government stuff. So similar to China and such, but without blocking porn. Or gambling. Or other sites holding vices that society might not approve.
Keep the general public amused with crap like that and they won't bother looking up anti-government information because they'd be too busy with Facebook and YouTube to care.
Make it appear free and people won't test the boundaries. Sure make it illegal, but just turn a blind eye and you'll find the vast majority of the population won't be trying to bypass the filter because there isn't one. All the dissidents now stick out like a sore thumb to be dealt with.
At least, if I ran my own kingdom.,..
Ban Porn, but it's OK to beat your wife!
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Egypt Banned Porn, But How Much of the Internet Is That?
Well, let's put it this way.
They can run the entire country on a few dial-up accounts now. Broadband no longer required.
So are cars (accidents create widows), jobs (long hours == annoyed wife), lack of jobs (husband annoyed because he thinks nonworking wife is lazy), children (lack of sex), TV (one spouse feels ignored), internet (ditto), books (ditto), gambling (wastes money), stores (spouse blows thousands of dollars).
Maybe we should just ban EVERYTHING that harms marriages.
Or we could take the more logical course and say, "With great freedom comes great responsibility. The government will not protect you from your own bad choices in life. You work too much, spend too much, have car wrecks, or view too much porn, youtube, TV, and your marriage fails. That's your own dumb fault." i.e. The path that was originally laid out for us in 1789.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
According to your Snopes link he claims that hardcore pornography is obscenity and he will have obscenity laws used against it. That sounds like a ban to me.
Ever heard the term "correlation not causation"?
maybe the marriages already had problems, porn was just used as a scapegoat because it was there. Wife doesn't want to put out? well, the computer will. Then the wife gets pissy. hmmmm
Having been married for plenty of years, I've concluded that pornography can actually quite harmful to some marriages if not most marriages
Porn showed me how to eat out my my wife.
How to masturbate her.
And that she has sexual feelings.
Catholic Sunday school taught me that she is evil.
I'm still married after dozens of years.
Porn showed me that my wife can be exiting after she gets old and fat.
Fuck you.
But that would mean that people are responsible for their own actions and that bad things can happen to them if they make poor decisions. People want to be able to blame others when they do something stupid. If they can't make it someone else's fault what are they going to do?
If watching porn borks a marriage, that marriage was boned regardless. Not seeing any porn won't keep you from realizing that there are hotter women out there. Not seeing porn won't form the connection being sought through a webcam.
Marriages based on looks are doomed. Marriages without a connection between the spouses are .. not even marriages, except on paper.
Right now, some illiterate goat farmer who's practices a medieval, backwards religion is looking at the remains of a nearby ancient Egyptian city and wondering what it must have felt like to be one of the world's most advanced civilizations and what went wrong.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
My wife is a sociologist and cultural anthropologist (double major, though closely related). Her anthro dissertation was on educational systems impact on child development both within the US and in the world in general (in many ways the village raising the child as seen in tribal communities in the Amazon and Africa does better at teaching children than the US system).
Her soc. paper was focused on the sex trade.
A couple interesting points come out of this: my children are less exposed to violence than sexuality (not to say they watch graphic movies, they are 6 and 8, but questions about gender are not danced around at all). My wife and I talk a lot about what the other finds attractive in a stranger/movie star (of either gender) && each other (though we specifically do not talk about friends this way, even if they have traits in common with those we discuss), and we have the open offer to each other to talk about the chance of an affair prior to one ever happening.
The point I'm trying to get at, porn will not damage a marriage nearly as badly as poor communication. It may not be a net positive for all marriages (though I think there are more [couples] than people think who indulge together), it should not be all that toxic to a well grounded marriage either.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Post-Internet, bestiality vanishes from 10% to almost nothing.
Not that hard to understand - if you live in a small town and are not the handsome jock, you don't have much options for masturbation. The married shmucks outlaw porn, and if you are a teenager/poor you can't get around their laws. The animals start to look not bad.
But give them access to internet and suddenly they no longer want to screw animals.
THE INTERNET IS A HUGE FORCE FOR MORALITY.
The only thing is, moralistic shmucks never knew the disgusting things their neighbors liked before. Know they have become aware of what we do, and blame it on the internet.
No.
Mankind was always a bunch of horny perverts, it's just you were a blind fool before. The internet makes us better people, in part by showing moralistic fools that they are wrong about what most people do.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
But the people watching internet porn aren't having any sex at all.
May the Maths Be with you!
I once did a Google image search on the most common 1000 words in English and noted the index of the first porn image in that list.
I was interested to see if there was a way to measure how far any word would have to be taken to indicate porn. For example, I would expect "car" to be distant from porn, but "head" to be fairly close.
To my surprise, using Google images as a metric indicated that all common English words were within 15 images of porn.
This was before they switched to the Javascript image results page, and they may have cleaned up their act a bit, but the results were inescapable - much of the net is centered around porn.
Trekkie had it pegged about right.
If porn harms your marriage? Install local filters are your computer.
It's not the government's job to babysit your marriage.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Completely agree. I have a theory about the underlying cause, though, and I'm curious as to what you (and others) would think of it:
Love is a meeting of minds, and healthy marriages are based on love. In the most grown-up model of a monogamous relationship, a sexual relationship is a possession of love.
It sounds like these marriages have been put together for the wrong reasons. Perhaps, when men come from a conservative culture where they must find women with whom to get married because there's social pressure to do so, they end up with sub-optimal relationships. At that point, all they have holding their holy matrimony together is a base instinct to pair off and procreate, and a big sign that says "recreational sex = eternal damnation." The traditional family structure puts the woman subservient to the man in pretty much every regard, so to her, he's primarily a ticket towards safety. Complicating this is the pressure to provide a positive environment for any children (which may be merely customary, as in Protestantism, or downright a legal matter, as in other monotheistic Abrahamic religions.) It's not hard to find examples of dirty jokes and other media that affirm these perceptions of the sexes, and the indoctrination seems to come mostly from how people have adapted to accommodate the expectations of traditional institutions. (This is not to say that men only want sex and women only want security; merely that they're encouraged to think that way through many generations of group polarization.)
It would seem to me that all this really proves is that the more rules you put on people, the more likely they are to resent them. The label of 'pornography addiction' is hence utterly pseudo-scientific; it's just a disinterest in the forced baby-generating/baby-protecting relationship brought on by animosity between partners. I would even go so far as to call it a misandrist concept, because escapism through trashy romance novels (the distaff counterpart to cheap pornography) in response to marital stress has been given absolutely no attention.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
After a year of bitching about it, Egypt realises they can still get it without too much hard work, and are getting a bunch more done these days. Plus, real naked people rock!
The Muslim Brotherhood won't be able to completely eliminate it, but they'll succeed to a greater extent than you think. The Taliban had things pretty well nailed down in Afghanistan, after all. It stinks for the minorities of Egypt... the Coptic Christian Church might well be extinct in Egpyt in our lifetime the way things are going over there... but ultimately, their fate is their own, made by their own choice. If Egyptians pick rulers that are going to do things like ban Internet access, let them live by their own choices.
Egyptians clearly wanted Islamism. They clearly wanted Sharia law. Let them have it. Maybe naive Americans that kept hyping the "Arab Spring" will finally realize that it was nothing of the sort, it was an Islamist Spring. What's going on in North Africa is Iran in 1979 all over again. "Freedom" for these people means "No one can stop us from becoming an Islamist state now". This is why I have little sympathy for the Iranians. They're protesting now, but you have to ask "What did you think you were getting when you demanded rule by Ayatollah?"
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Having been married for over 10 years, I've concluded that porn is awesome and keeps some marriages fun and interesting, if not most marriages.
Lack of communication is what's harmful to marriages.
Porn is generally harmless, its the sexual freedom that is perceived by fear filled conservative and sexually introverted religious people that does not work in their definition of normalcy and acceptable behavior, it ruins the artificial and suppressive rules of societal order among men and women. Moderation can be a good thing, but censorship is contrary to freedom of expression and personal liberty.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Shouldn't that be insightful? Especially with the muslim brotherhood now running for the top office, and believed to have 43% of the vote in the bag already.
The difference between the Muslim Brotherhood and Christian conservatives in the west isn't really that big, both are pretty conservative, very religions and willing to crack down on any wrong thinking liberals that they see as being a threat to their cherished beliefs, values and traditions. You can think of the Muslim Brotherhood as being Egyptian Republicans or Tea-Partyists. That being said I'd quite frankly be more worried if Rick Santorum or god forbid, Sarah Palin, became president of the US than I would be if the Muslim Brotherhood won an election with 43% of the vote and formed a coalition government in Egypt with some center right party. Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood does not have thermonuclear weapons.
I think your viewpoint is a bit narrow. The "Arab Spring" was indeed about freedom from tyrannies, not about religious revolutions. But opportunistic religious groups have used the power vacuums to insert themselves.
Sorry, I think this is naivete. I think a relatively small group of people wanted what in the west is considered freedom, and that the majority did want religious rule. One of these days we'll learn that "freedom" doesn't mean the same thing to different people.
There's no doubt that many Egyptians are conservative, but there is more of a split between the conservative (and less educated) rural areas and the cities like Cairo that generally have more progressive populaces.
That may be so, but.... so what? The former still outnumber the later considerably. And as for the "less educated" thing, that's a falsehood. The most radical, and most committed Islamists in both Arab nations and the West tend to be the best educated. It's the least educated types that tend to be the most moderate, the guys that just want to earn a living. The 9/11 hijackers were all well educated, and the London bombers were British citizens, the children of immigrants that grew up in Britain and had all the advantages of a liberal Western education. They choose Jihad, not had it imposed on them. The old "if we just get more of them in school, they'll be less radical" is an old saw that simply isn't true.
On top of that, you have the two religious Islamist groups, the fairly moderate Muslim Brotherhood, and the Sharia Law-loving Salafists, who are in discussions behind-the-scenes as to how radical to go.
Do you really think the Muslim Brotherhood is "moderate"? Seriously? By what standard?
I find it ridiculous when Americans act superior about Islamist states though;
I think you misunderstand me here. I'm not acting superior. If Islamism is what they want, then I really mean that they should have it. I'm not condemning them for it. I'm saying we should stop expecting that they're going to be a western democracy when they clearly aren't.
look at all the religion-motivated laws being passed in America lately that are taking women's rights back to the Mad Men days.
Religion-motivated laws, as you put it, are and always have been, part and parcel of American law. It's not like this is anything new. Religious influence in a law is not necessarily the same thing as a law being a religious law.
We're just as much in the hands of a conservative Christian cabal as Egypt is with Islam
Really? We can ban religions other than Christianity? We can jail people for apostasy? I bet that's news to the Christian Cabal that just watched the ban on homosexuals serving in the military to get lifted. Having a religious people, and certain laws influenced by religious tradition, is not the same thing as a theocratic state.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel