It's not a strictly scientific claim from a logical positivist perspective, but a case can certainly be made to suggest it. I think a famous sexual predator was quoted as saying something like in jail, there wasn't a single sex offender that wasn't a frequent viewer of pornography.
Insert some minor, generic mumblings about cause and effect here. Post hoc ergo proctor hoc, I think it goes. Not too important, since it is a generic defense and not worth getting in to. Generic arguments tend to end the same way every time: boringly, badly.
Porn changes us when we view it, and it changes us when we're part of it. The extent to which it does, and whether or not the effects are good or bad, is open for debate.
I will not disagree, although I would like to in principle. The question of whether or not one can remain unchanged by ones surroundings is interesting to me, but incidental to this topic.
And certainly the degradation of women is almost a requirement in much pornography
I would tend to disagree; I would soften it and say, "The degredation of women can be necessary for some forms of pornography."
Sure--I can't fathom how selling your body out for cash won't damage you.
And I can so fathom. Therein lies 98% of our disagreement, I think. I like it when it's simple, 'cause understanding a basic difference is better than arguing to convince someone of a minor detail. (This has been a Baseless Assertion! Stay tuned for more.)
I'm talking about women that pose naked as their primary source of income. Do you really believe that it doesn't harm them?
I believe that it *can* pose no harm. I would tend to agree that it *probably doesn't* cause *no* harm, in most cases. I would disagree that it causes extreme harm in most cases, if you ever said it did (apologies otherwise).
I'll resign myself if you concede that because none of us speak with authority, none of us knows whether or not a life of pseude-prostitution is acutally harmful. In which case, the original parent that I was rebutting, who claimed that there is nothing wrong with posing naked, is equally baseless.
I will agree that none of us knows whether or not a particular life of pseude-prostitution is acutally harmful, but not that a life of pseudo-prostitution must be in some way harmful.
If we're all going to settle for ignorance, then we should at least have a desire to investigate this further before we view more porn. It could be the case that these women are living in hell right now, and that by purchasing porn that they're part of, we're perpetuating that living hell. This kind possibility deserves some kind of consideration.
Certainly it does. My answer to this is along similar lines to my response to "With so much pain and misery in the world, how can you live with yourself, given that you are a by-comparision rich, slothful and people-hurting First-World country resident?" Which I can go in to, if you like, but you may be able to guess the gist of it.
In the end, I'll just get labeled a moralist that wants to impose my views of right and wrong on everyone else.
My political belief is that porn ought not be illegal, at least at the federal level. Not even child porn.
Libertarian? Doesn't matter! I will, in the end, be labeled the same way, but for different views.
I guess there are just a lot of moralists out there who want to impose their morality on us through legislation that we get jumpy when we hear anyone speak of moral absolutes.
I did get jumpy, and I am glad you did not jump back at my rather harsh initial tone.
I personally think the fan adoration is harmful for people like Brittney Spears. However, I'm not really going to get into that.
And I personally think that it is not necessarily harmful, if the famous person is sufficiently prepared. I do not think Britney Spears is, but that is irrelevant.
I like disgreeing on basic things, it makes arguing clean.
What is common then, that most women who pose nude just do it for kicks? I think that's the utopia that men who enjoy looking at porn tell themselves, but I've never met a woman who actually wanted her body to be exploited sexually--whether in person or on photo.
What is not common is psychological damage from attention-soliciting acts in general, as I was not refering to posing nude in particular. Although I will say I do think that there can be and probably is a percentage of women who pose nude who suffer no real or imagined psycholigical damage. You seem to be set against that possibility, which is fine.
However, I'm not saying that it ought to be illegal--they have the right to choose to do it. But we also have the right to choose not to look at porn, and also determine for ourselves whether or not we think that posing nakid is morally acceptable.
I can see where I think you're going with this--it seems unfair for me to pronounce 'judgement' on a whole class of people and judge them for what they choose to do, even if I were correct in that they lead self-damaging lives. But my point is not to pronounce 'judgement' just give a good reason why both myself and many others have a decent reason to think that there is "something wrong" with posing naked.
So you, in the end, are attempting to explain your morals, your stance on why choosing not to look at pornography is good.
Let me just say that I disagree with your premise, and the odd fact or to, so my morals fall differently, and I have few problems with looking at porn.
All that remains is for me to scream about you trying to tell me what I ought to do, which we can all just take as read (if you don't mind) since my heart isn't in it.
I can't believe I've just had a more or less wholly reasonable exchange on Slashdot.... I must be slipping.
Those things you list are not inherent to selling sex, which encompases porn as well as prostitution. They are not/necessarily/ inherent even to prostitution, though for all practical purposes they are at present, in most locales.
I'll assume the opposite of my premise--that these women (and by these I mean not just SG's) really do find self-realization or at least gratification by their line of work.
Just as there is a danger in premature optimization, there is a danger in premature generalization. If we want to talk about all women who pose naked we will have a far different conversation than if we talk about any specific set. While your assertion on a general level may be true, you seem to be saying that since it's true generally (a thing that has not been proven to my satisfaction) it must be true in this case with this set of women.
The second case actually works for my position Engaging in any act in order to solicit attention from strangers suggests serious psychological problems, not the least of which is self worth!
So movie stars, singers, and so forth are lacking in this nebulous 'self worth'? A lot of them certainly seem to enjoy the attention.
I seriously disagree with you there. While it is *possible* that engaging in any act in order to solicit attention from strangers means rge actor has psychological problems, I would assert that cases in which that is true are by far the exception, not the rule (as you seem to imply).
In my case, that means accepting that while watching women in sexual acts might be gratifying, there are people at the other end of the computer screen that probably don't really like having to do what they're doing.
Your position seems to be that there is no way in which there could be people on the other end who do like, or at least are not damaged by, doing what they are doing. This seems like an arrogant and largelky baseless assertion to me.
The fact that *some* or even *most* probably don't like doing it is not so important to the discussion.
Technically, a prostitute doesn't even 'sell' her body. She rents it.
Technically a constructure worker rents his body as well. I rent my brain out every day I go to work. This is life. So if a woman rents her body and provides a service in, say, a Wal Mart checkout it's okay, but if she does it in a bed it isn't? Who says?
Can it be proven that selling sex is inherently self destructive?
I, however, think women ought to bring more to the world than just jerk-off material, and not for my sake, but for theirs. I don't think you can become a sex object and not suffer from losing your humanity.
So if that's what you think, never having been one, and someone who has been one swears it's not true. what is the reality? You wont admit they're right, because you are comitted to the idea that (at the very least) they can't tell, or more likely wont admit, that they have been damaged.
Resign yourself: It's impossible to know for sure. You speak with no weight of authority, none of us do. We can only cite specific cases back and forth until we get tired and go home.
But the damn thing would only let me install to/opt and I fucking hate/opt. If they've fixed their build system I'll grab this in a nanosecond for all of my quick graphical program needs.
(No matter what Perl zealots other than me say, there is no such thing as a quick, throwaway GUI perl app.)
Or you could put all configuration files under a single directory called, I don't know, ~/.etc/. Then you could put all OpenStep configuration files under ~/.etc/OLibrary/.
The file browser could then decide whether to hide.etc (traditional! Expected! Makes sure the user doesn't delete it thinking it's a junk folder!) or show it.
I'll go a step further: It's the best intro to programming I've ever seen.
Okay, the best non-traditional intro. Maybe in the long run it would be less helpful than a standard (Programming C-style) introduction, but I doubt that.
Set IEs proxy to 127.0.0.1. Alter the registry so that the Connections tab no longer appears in Internet Options.
This is really hard to get around. You have to know which keys controls the connections tab, and what values they should be set to for it to appear. It's sufficiently long and complex enough that I don't even remmeber what it is at the moment.
This means that not matter where you get to IE from, it wont work. And it doesn't affect Firefox one iota.
A credible argument, but ALL of the people who I've heard mention their rejections were non-christian.
I don't think it rejects non-christians, but I DO think it rejects non-religious types. People who, like me, may have a lot to say about religion and spirituality, but who don't happen to "test as spiritual". I think their algorithms are designed to match people largely in some kind of religiously-compatible way, which breaks down if you give a kind of combination of answers which just doesn't come from a christian.
So non christians CAN get accepted, but it's just less likely.
I don't let it upset me. The site is catered to a demographic of "Christian" and "Try not to think of themselves as christian, but can't seem to escape it and will inevitable give in" and "highly spiritual/religious non-christian" people. This probably covers 90% of the USAs datable population, so the choice makes good business sense.
The thing I'm bitter about is the fact that so much of the population IS christian; that they cater to the majority is just common sense.
They didn't switch from Linux to Windows. They had a contract with another company to provide their web site and services, and that company ran Linux. The other company took care of all of the details. It was merely unhappyness that the company with which they dealt would only offer them a (presumably expensive) Oracle database which caused them to start looking for a new provider. It sounds like the guys in charge were never too thrilled with Linux and we're just looking for a reason to stop using it, but until the DB thing happened were dismayed to find that it worked.
This is not a "We ditched Windows for Linux, but now want Linux again!" it's a "We switched contractors and didn't want to switch to one running Linux 'cause we're intimidated by it and have very small penis'."
No. GNOME for the people who love Macs, KDE for the people who like Windows but want more power. And for the people who love UNIX... XFce, AfterStep, Enlightenment, Fluxbox, even ratpoison.
File context menu in konqueror is too overloaded, there are so many that it slows down 'quick access' to the commonly wanted functions. For instance there are entries for both 'Move to Recycle Bin' and 'Delete'. Only the first should be displayed by default, the latter perhaps appearing on 'Shift+Right Click', ala MS Windows.
I think it should be:
Delete ->
To Recycle Bin
From Disk
To Shredder
With a subment. Except that DOES make it slower...
In a Libertarian society you'd probably have regional educational cooporative corporations which pool money to build facilities and hire teachers. There'd also be purely corporate private schools, and home-schooling done by parents or religious organizations. It might not be "guaranteed" with such a system that every child gets educated, but that guarantee has done little good for the current system.
The United States stayed out of WW2 untill... when? If you said "we were attacked" you get a gold star.
The U.S. did not attack Japan first, they attacked us first. The U.S. sympathized with the British, so we were helping them with equipment at good prices. Very capitalistic, very Libertarian. We eventually declared war on Germany... after Germany declared war on us by sinking our peaceful trade vessels. Trading weapons, sure, but in a libertarian society Hitler could have bought from us, too. We probably would not have given him such good prices because we don't like his face, but in a libertarian society thats okay.
I'm not a Libertarian, (damned conservative bastards!) just a fan, and I can see that.
Yes. Look at recent changelogs: They're patching/potential/ vulnerabilities and removing ambiguities to make it harder to annoy/confuse people. They're doing this BEFORE it becomes a big problem. Microsoft may know the potential exists, but they wait until their entire user base is up in arms before releasing an update. The Firefox folks notice the potential and head it off. Because of the whole "there are daily builds" thing, likely you'll see patches merged for any serious exploit within a few days, ready for enterprising people to download. And if you don't think average people go for nigthlies: at least with Firefox official releases are damned frequent, not once every six to eighteen months, as with IE.
I can't consider adaptations to be counted under this criteria, because the stories were already written, they just had to adapt them. It's not a hollywood plot, it's a literature one.
Spiderman wasn't an adaptation?
Remember: Comic books are the cultural literature of the USA.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a strictly scientific claim from a logical positivist perspective, but a case can certainly be made to suggest it. I think a famous sexual predator was quoted as saying something like in jail, there wasn't a single sex offender that wasn't a frequent viewer of pornography.
Insert some minor, generic mumblings about cause and effect here. Post hoc ergo proctor hoc, I think it goes. Not too important, since it is a generic defense and not worth getting in to. Generic arguments tend to end the same way every time: boringly, badly.
Porn changes us when we view it, and it changes us when we're part of it. The extent to which it does, and whether or not the effects are good or bad, is open for debate.
I will not disagree, although I would like to in principle. The question of whether or not one can remain unchanged by ones surroundings is interesting to me, but incidental to this topic.
And certainly the degradation of women is almost a requirement in much pornography
I would tend to disagree; I would soften it and say, "The degredation of women can be necessary for some forms of pornography."
Sure--I can't fathom how selling your body out for cash won't damage you.
And I can so fathom. Therein lies 98% of our disagreement, I think. I like it when it's simple, 'cause understanding a basic difference is better than arguing to convince someone of a minor detail. (This has been a Baseless Assertion! Stay tuned for more.)
I'm talking about women that pose naked as their primary source of income. Do you really believe that it doesn't harm them?
I believe that it *can* pose no harm. I would tend to agree that it *probably doesn't* cause *no* harm, in most cases. I would disagree that it causes extreme harm in most cases, if you ever said it did (apologies otherwise).
I'll resign myself if you concede that because none of us speak with authority, none of us knows whether or not a life of pseude-prostitution is acutally harmful. In which case, the original parent that I was rebutting, who claimed that there is nothing wrong with posing naked, is equally baseless.
I will agree that none of us knows whether or not a particular life of pseude-prostitution is acutally harmful, but not that a life of pseudo-prostitution must be in some way harmful.
If we're all going to settle for ignorance, then we should at least have a desire to investigate this further before we view more porn. It could be the case that these women are living in hell right now, and that by purchasing porn that they're part of, we're perpetuating that living hell. This kind possibility deserves some kind of consideration.
Certainly it does. My answer to this is along similar lines to my response to "With so much pain and misery in the world, how can you live with yourself, given that you are a by-comparision rich, slothful and people-hurting First-World country resident?" Which I can go in to, if you like, but you may be able to guess the gist of it.
In the end, I'll just get labeled a moralist that wants to impose my views of right and wrong on everyone else.
My political belief is that porn ought not be illegal, at least at the federal level. Not even child porn.
Libertarian? Doesn't matter! I will, in the end, be labeled the same way, but for different views.
I guess there are just a lot of moralists out there who want to impose their morality on us through legislation that we get jumpy when we hear anyone speak of moral absolutes.
I did get jumpy, and I am glad you did not jump back at my rather harsh initial tone.
I personally think the fan adoration is harmful for people like Brittney Spears. However, I'm not really going to get into that.
And I personally think that it is not necessarily harmful, if the famous person is sufficiently prepared. I do not think Britney Spears is, but that is irrelevant.
I like disgreeing on basic things, it makes arguing clean.
What is common then, that most women who pose nude just do it for kicks? I think that's the utopia that men who enjoy looking at porn tell themselves, but I've never met a woman who actually wanted her body to be exploited sexually--whether in person or on photo.
What is not common is psychological damage from attention-soliciting acts in general, as I was not refering to posing nude in particular. Although I will say I do think that there can be and probably is a percentage of women who pose nude who suffer no real or imagined psycholigical damage. You seem to be set against that possibility, which is fine.
However, I'm not saying that it ought to be illegal--they have the right to choose to do it. But we also have the right to choose not to look at porn, and also determine for ourselves whether or not we think that posing nakid is morally acceptable.
I can see where I think you're going with this--it seems unfair for me to pronounce 'judgement' on a whole class of people and judge them for what they choose to do, even if I were correct in that they lead self-damaging lives. But my point is not to pronounce 'judgement' just give a good reason why both myself and many others have a decent reason to think that there is "something wrong" with posing naked.
So you, in the end, are attempting to explain your morals, your stance on why choosing not to look at pornography is good.
Let me just say that I disagree with your premise, and the odd fact or to, so my morals fall differently, and I have few problems with looking at porn.
All that remains is for me to scream about you trying to tell me what I ought to do, which we can all just take as read (if you don't mind) since my heart isn't in it.
I can't believe I've just had a more or less wholly reasonable exchange on Slashdot.... I must be slipping.
Those things you list are not inherent to selling sex, which encompases porn as well as prostitution. They are not /necessarily/ inherent even to prostitution, though for all practical purposes they are at present, in most locales.
I'll assume the opposite of my premise--that these women (and by these I mean not just SG's) really do find self-realization or at least gratification by their line of work.
Just as there is a danger in premature optimization, there is a danger in premature generalization. If we want to talk about all women who pose naked we will have a far different conversation than if we talk about any specific set. While your assertion on a general level may be true, you seem to be saying that since it's true generally (a thing that has not been proven to my satisfaction) it must be true in this case with this set of women.
The second case actually works for my position Engaging in any act in order to solicit attention from strangers suggests serious psychological problems, not the least of which is self worth!
So movie stars, singers, and so forth are lacking in this nebulous 'self worth'? A lot of them certainly seem to enjoy the attention.
I seriously disagree with you there. While it is *possible* that engaging in any act in order to solicit attention from strangers means rge actor has psychological problems, I would assert that cases in which that is true are by far the exception, not the rule (as you seem to imply).
In my case, that means accepting that while watching women in sexual acts might be gratifying, there are people at the other end of the computer screen that probably don't really like having to do what they're doing.
Your position seems to be that there is no way in which there could be people on the other end who do like, or at least are not damaged by, doing what they are doing. This seems like an arrogant and largelky baseless assertion to me.
The fact that *some* or even *most* probably don't like doing it is not so important to the discussion.
Technically, a prostitute doesn't even 'sell' her body. She rents it.
Technically a constructure worker rents his body as well. I rent my brain out every day I go to work. This is life. So if a woman rents her body and provides a service in, say, a Wal Mart checkout it's okay, but if she does it in a bed it isn't? Who says?
Can it be proven that selling sex is inherently self destructive?
I, however, think women ought to bring more to the world than just jerk-off material, and not for my sake, but for theirs. I don't think you can become a sex object and not suffer from losing your humanity.
So if that's what you think, never having been one, and someone who has been one swears it's not true. what is the reality? You wont admit they're right, because you are comitted to the idea that (at the very least) they can't tell, or more likely wont admit, that they have been damaged.
Resign yourself: It's impossible to know for sure. You speak with no weight of authority, none of us do. We can only cite specific cases back and forth until we get tired and go home.
VB.net fixed this. VB now has very Java-like exception handling.
It was a *required* course at my college for anyone doing programming. I made them regret that.
But the damn thing would only let me install to /opt and I fucking hate /opt. If they've fixed their build system I'll grab this in a nanosecond for all of my quick graphical program needs.
(No matter what Perl zealots other than me say, there is no such thing as a quick, throwaway GUI perl app.)
Slashdotted! Oooh, that's gotta hurt.
I did not realize that postscript was, either.
No, I am not going to turn sarcasm off. Me likes it on.
Or you could put all configuration files under a single directory called, I don't know, ~/.etc/. Then you could put all OpenStep configuration files under ~/.etc/OLibrary/.
.etc (traditional! Expected! Makes sure the user doesn't delete it thinking it's a junk folder!) or show it.
The file browser could then decide whether to hide
...quartz is PDF. Oops.
I'll go a step further: It's the best intro to programming I've ever seen.
Okay, the best non-traditional intro. Maybe in the long run it would be less helpful than a standard (Programming C-style) introduction, but I doubt that.
Stay up... and get drunk all over again!
Try this one:
Set IEs proxy to 127.0.0.1. Alter the registry so that the Connections tab no longer appears in Internet Options.
This is really hard to get around. You have to know which keys controls the connections tab, and what values they should be set to for it to appear. It's sufficiently long and complex enough that I don't even remmeber what it is at the moment.
This means that not matter where you get to IE from, it wont work. And it doesn't affect Firefox one iota.
A credible argument, but ALL of the people who I've heard mention their rejections were non-christian.
I don't think it rejects non-christians, but I DO think it rejects non-religious types. People who, like me, may have a lot to say about religion and spirituality, but who don't happen to "test as spiritual". I think their algorithms are designed to match people largely in some kind of religiously-compatible way, which breaks down if you give a kind of combination of answers which just doesn't come from a christian.
So non christians CAN get accepted, but it's just less likely.
I don't let it upset me. The site is catered to a demographic of "Christian" and "Try not to think of themselves as christian, but can't seem to escape it and will inevitable give in" and "highly spiritual/religious non-christian" people. This probably covers 90% of the USAs datable population, so the choice makes good business sense.
The thing I'm bitter about is the fact that so much of the population IS christian; that they cater to the majority is just common sense.
They didn't switch from Linux to Windows. They had a contract with another company to provide their web site and services, and that company ran Linux. The other company took care of all of the details. It was merely unhappyness that the company with which they dealt would only offer them a (presumably expensive) Oracle database which caused them to start looking for a new provider. It sounds like the guys in charge were never too thrilled with Linux and we're just looking for a reason to stop using it, but until the DB thing happened were dismayed to find that it worked.
This is not a "We ditched Windows for Linux, but now want Linux again!" it's a "We switched contractors and didn't want to switch to one running Linux 'cause we're intimidated by it and have very small penis'."
Move along...
No. GNOME for the people who love Macs, KDE for the people who like Windows but want more power. And for the people who love UNIX... XFce, AfterStep, Enlightenment, Fluxbox, even ratpoison.
Real men don't use Desktop Environments.
File context menu in konqueror is too overloaded, there are so many that it slows down 'quick access' to the commonly wanted functions. For instance there are entries for both 'Move to Recycle Bin' and 'Delete'. Only the first should be displayed by default, the latter perhaps appearing on 'Shift+Right Click', ala MS Windows.
I think it should be:
Delete ->
To Recycle Bin
From Disk
To Shredder
With a subment. Except that DOES make it slower...
In a Libertarian society you'd probably have regional educational cooporative corporations which pool money to build facilities and hire teachers. There'd also be purely corporate private schools, and home-schooling done by parents or religious organizations. It might not be "guaranteed" with such a system that every child gets educated, but that guarantee has done little good for the current system.
Reality check:
The United States stayed out of WW2 untill... when? If you said "we were attacked" you get a gold star.
The U.S. did not attack Japan first, they attacked us first. The U.S. sympathized with the British, so we were helping them with equipment at good prices. Very capitalistic, very Libertarian. We eventually declared war on Germany... after Germany declared war on us by sinking our peaceful trade vessels. Trading weapons, sure, but in a libertarian society Hitler could have bought from us, too. We probably would not have given him such good prices because we don't like his face, but in a libertarian society thats okay.
I'm not a Libertarian, (damned conservative bastards!) just a fan, and I can see that.
It is a great idea. There's just one problem with it.
Yes. Look at recent changelogs: They're patching /potential/ vulnerabilities and removing ambiguities to make it harder to annoy/confuse people. They're doing this BEFORE it becomes a big problem. Microsoft may know the potential exists, but they wait until their entire user base is up in arms before releasing an update. The Firefox folks notice the potential and head it off. Because of the whole "there are daily builds" thing, likely you'll see patches merged for any serious exploit within a few days, ready for enterprising people to download. And if you don't think average people go for nigthlies: at least with Firefox official releases are damned frequent, not once every six to eighteen months, as with IE.
A better Star Trek comparison might be:
Mal - Kirk
Inara - Spock
Kaylee - Scotty
Wash - Sulu
Zoe - McCoy
Jayne - Chekov
Shepherd - ?
In terms of role the characters serve. The weakest of those is the Jayne->Chekov thing, which is mostly for completeness.
I can't consider adaptations to be counted under this criteria, because the stories were already written, they just had to adapt them. It's not a hollywood plot, it's a literature one.
Spiderman wasn't an adaptation?
Remember: Comic books are the cultural literature of the USA.
No one today seriously claims that the earth is flat, so presenting such a point of view would violate both of these rules.
No, people seriously do.