I live in southern California where gambling is illegal, unless you live on an Indian reservation. This is a gigantic boon to Indians and they make tens of millions of dollars thru their special treatment though the law.
You need to read more background information on this. Most of the casinos, and especially the most profitable ones, only benefit a very small part of "the Indians". I'm not arguing on your point on whether it's fair or not to allow casinos in the reservations, but do not list them as something like reparations.
The reparations for the Japanese American internment camps was signed into law in 1988. That's 46 years after the fact.
Women got to vote in the US in 1920 (though some states were earlier to allow them to vote in local elections). By this time, many countries in Europe already had universal suffrage.
Slavery was abolished in the US after the civil war, with the 13th amendment in 1865. By that time, even former primary slavery nations like Tunesia or the Ottoman Empire had long abolished it. In fact, had you guys remained a part of the British Empire, slavery would have been illegal more than 50 years earlier.
And let's not even talk about the civil rights for blacks, USA 1964 - by that time, the rest of the world (minus south africa) had a hard time understanding how blacks could not have the same rights.
So yes, the US has reversed its ways in many of these things - but always as a follower, never as a leader.
All I can say is it's clear there were unethical practices, but it's too early to suggest there's criminality. We have to be careful about applying criminal labels to people until we're very sure.
Who is Assange to judge and / or label corporations or individuals?
That sentence from him is one I would like to read a lot more often in the press. It is easier to judge something on ethical grounds than on criminal grounds. For ethics, you basically just say "that wasn't right". If you accuse someone of a crime, you better be ready to say which law he actually broke.
So, why does Firefox then enable and run those plugins, eh? If you really think they are evil, put your money where your mouth is, keep an internal list of enabled plugins, not editable from outside sources, and if a new plugin is detected, throw up a dialog asking the user if he wants it enabled or not.
If you provide the functionality, don't whine if people use it. If your browser will happily activate and use any plugins I throw into its plugin directory, stop crying if I do.
If extremely long lives are becoming more and more realistic, maybe it is time to start thinking about how humans will cope with it. Most of us never heal of the scars of our experiences, and let them accumulate. By the end of our lives, we are pretty much wrecked, full of guilt, pain, set in our ways and done with learning. Our entire society is built around this concept that you start learning about the world, then you go about being productive, then you get a few years of relaxing and living off the results of your work.
Psychologically, but also socially, we are nowhere near ready to dealing with any significant number of people living a very long life.
Most people only worry about the biological part of living very long. But not only our bodies, but our minds too are built with a limited lifespan. Very few people ever come to terms with everything they've been through. The more common standard is that the scars of your experiences remain, and accumulate.
Unless we start working on that problem, too, we will soon have a collection of very long-lived psychic wrecks around.
The sex-phobic misandry of 1970s separatist feminism left a strong cultural vein in the left of "sex = bad" which has not entirely gone away - it's just shifted its focus onto children as the domain and property of women.
I'll gladly take a shot at that. Yes, the feminist movement has removed itself from the landscape of ideologies taken seriously by massively overdoing it. One of their false-to-fact agendas is this "porn objectifies women" angle. If they had ever actually watched a porn movie, they would have quickly realized that the women are at the center of attention, while it is the men who are reduced to their reproductive parts, to the extent that quite often you never even see much else of them. Porn objectivies sex, removing the emotional elements that most sex contains, but finding an anti-female agenda in porn because it doesn't appeal to more emotional attached women is like calling romance movies anti-male because they don't get to the fucking part as quickly as most men would prefer. Also, I do know quite a few women who actually like porn. Intelligent, sensible, nice women. Not the kind of victimised fucked-up whores that the feminists call any woman that happens to disagree with their extremist ideology.
It is mystifying that people cannot see this for what it is.
Good point, I think you should add one more part to it: Parents are absolutely irrational when it comes to children. There's a great episode of Bullshit! out there showing what ridiculous crap parents are willing to do if they believe it might be good for the kid.
It's not really the kids who are "not ready". Usually, it's the parents. They are not ready to explain, not ready to prepare, and often have a disfunctional relationship to sex themselves.
Now I cannot speak to the morality of this until someone less lazy than I dredges up some hard facts and evidence about whether or not lying to your children about the basic nature of the world by way of censoring their access to facts outside of the home causes more psychological harm than images or viral ideas can.
The evidence exists, but I'm too lazy to look it up right now. The quick and dirty of it is that children are still evolving their minds, and there are certain ages at which capabilities are developed. One well-documented example is that children up to the age of four or so simply do not understand that someone else can have a different point-of-view of the world. That capability has not yet been developed in their minds. They really believe that all the world shares their knowledge. There's an example of having them watch someone accidentally take the wrong sandwich and eat it, and kids up to this age judge him a thief, while kids older understand that he didn't mean to.
There is likewise an age until which kids do not comprehend sex. There is an age where they can not seperate fantasy and reality. There is an age where they can not yet handle deep emotions.
If someone can prove scientifically that porn is bad for children under a mean age of X, then I'd be in favor of that particular censorship, because we have scientific evidence that the parties affected are not (yet) capable of making a good decision themselves.
However, all current age limits are based on superstition, arbitrary choices and political compromises instead of facts.
I really do believe that pornography is nothing more than a macguffin and a red herring in a debate about whether or not parents deserve government support in shielding their children from ideas which challenge whatever the household doctrine is.
In part, yes. On the other hand, AFAIK the law has not yet invaded the private home, so if you want to share a porn movie with your 9 year old in private, you can.
I think one main part is that parents are afraid of talking about sex with their children, so they don't want them to see anything that might cause them to start asking. Fear is an incredible powerful force.
You assume that the irish government is opposed to the tech companies. I doubt that. For some reason, this feels like on of the cases where a secret meeting ran roughly like this: "Hey, corporate guys. We here in the government would prefer to leverage the whole cost on the dumb sheeple, but we need a reason. The press is asking for corporate taxes to rise. Could you issue a press statement like the one we prepared here, so we can justify our actions? If you don't, we may actually have to raise corporate taxes, and that would suck, wouldn't it?"
Corporations this size and local governments do not usually communicate via the press with each other. If they have something to discuss, they meet and discuss it, they don't post it in the newspapers.
Germany has been economically successful the past years, including living through the crisis fairly well, by a constant and pretty aggressive redistribution from the bottom to the top. Real wages (i.e. adjusted for inflation) have been falling for years, the number of people employed in part-time and low-wage jobs (there's no minimum wage in Germany, except for a few very small areas) has exploded. Millions of full-time workers don't earn enough to feed a family.
Now add the "paying for the rest of Europe" feeling to that. Do you think the simple people care if the money comes back to some german bank? Not the least. This is just the latest episode where taxes are raised to rescue banks and large corporations that gambled more than they could handle.
Unfortunately, none of the left has so far realized and made into a political movement that the people in all countries are being exploited in the same way. The irish and the german taxpayers are both abused in this. The right-wing and neo-liberals have successfully divided the people of Europe against each other, with open animosity against the greek, etc. being visible already. There are some demonstrations with mottos like "we don't pay for your crisis", but very little international solidarity. If the left were serious in their opposition, they would not only demonstrate against the "rescue package" in Ireland, but also in Germany and France, which is basically taking money from the taxpayers to finance the package which then goes into paying the banks. It's a bank tax, and Ireland is just the step inbetween to make that less transparent.
The fact that I define something one way doesn't mean I put myself above anybody or that I have authority.
No problem there. So it's your definition, and you act according to it. Makes sense.
The "authority" for that derives from the US military. You may not like that, but tough shit.
Actually, I do like it. Now we're finally at the point where we've overcome all this high-moral-ground bullshit and come to the point: Might is right. You act according to your definition, including killing other people for it, simply because you can, with the intent of having them change their ways.
Yes?
How are you different from the terrorists, then?
I think the honest answer is: "We have more guns." or any variation of that. I'm confident that any argument that tries to make this a "good vs. evil" or a "we're better" or some moral affair can be ripped apart.
That depends on what you consider right and wrong.
The problem with people is that most of them truly believe that what they do, say and think is "right" in some sense. Conservatives believe that protecting children from sex is incredibly important. They believe that as honestly as the colour of the sky. Some of them believe that protecting people of all ages from sex is incredibly important. At the same time they are against artificial insemination. And decry the low birth rates. It doesn't match up, but then again neither does the extreme on the other hand of the spectrum, where everyone should be able to do whatever he or she pleases. And of course drugs don't hurt anyone. And people are always nice to each other. And someone would take out the garbage, without the evil necessity of taxes.
It is my personal belief that children aren't harmed by sex in the least, and that you could let your 5 year old watch all the hardcore pornography he wants - which would probably boil down to quick boredom and a "can you switch to the Disney channel, please?" request. It is also my personal belief that when at 9 or 11 or whatever the age is these days, when the kid does get curious, sitting down with him and watching some good porn and answering questions about it just like any other topic your kid needs to learn, would help the next generation overcome this curious attraction/repulsion fetish we have with sex and porn. Don't do it later than 11 or so, because there comes a time when kids insist on having secrets from their parents and discovering the world on their own, and knowing everything better than the oldsters. If you haven't done basic sex education by then, you have put your kid at the risk of teenage pregnancy and STDs. Now what is the better parenting - having a talk about sex or turning your kid into an HIV infected teen parent?
That is my personal belief. The funny thing is that any conservative with a brain (they exist!) could probably argue his belief just as consistently and eloquently, and find as many flaws in mine as I in his.
Which is why it's a good thing to have discussions with the people you don't normally discuss with - those with a totally different opinion. It helps you find the flaws in yours. Your friends with the same opinion share those flaws and thus won't find them.
What you're suggesting, Tom, is a much more elementary set of social skills, which hopefully they've already picked up on before they're even actively interested in porn.
You are probably a lot like me - I grew up in an upper-middle-class family, went to a good school and then to university. For most of my life I realized that there are people who are poorer or less educated than I am, but I didn't think they would be all that different.
My girlfriend opened my eyes to that. She is currently becoming a teacher, and the school type she has chosen means most of her pupils are from lower-class families, many immigrants. Those kids have trouble expressing themselves in whole sentences. They need school teachers to tell them basic etiquette they will need in their jobs. They need school to teach them basic conversational skills. Quite frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if some of them didn't know that there is a connection between having sex and getting pregnant.
I don't think we need porn for "the technical aspects". Instinct has served us well for a million years or so, and our ancestors before then. But forming a relationship, no matter if it's for a week or for life, is something that has become terribly complicated. Some support on that would be great. Helping kids to form a good personal opinion of what is sex, what is love and where do the two meet would be great. Having them come up with their own solution as to whether they want to enjoy pure sex without the bothersome love part, or prefer deep intimacy with it, or to experiment with both before/if settling on one - that would be perfect.
The kind that Ms. Perry and most conservatives propagate: Don't talk about it to your kids, hide it from them like the sweet forbidden fruit, accept the risk that they'll discover it on their own without guidance at an age where they do not realize the difference.
OK, but I think the probability of catching a gun is so high that it's simply not worth it for a terrorist to try it.
Not the simple way, no. You are right that it acts as a deterrence.
The problem with weapons - guns, knives, tasers - is that they aren't as big an equalizer as most people believe. Someone trained in using them and not afraid of doing so is at a big advantage. Three terrorists with tasers could easily keep three times their numbers of regular people with tasers off, especially in a crowded place like a plane.
And you have to deal with false positives. A lot more innocent people than gangsters are shot each year in the US, and I'd even say the number of people accidentally shot is higher than the number of people shot in self-defense.
True, but dirty magazines lack the breadth of the internet. You're not going to find that your dad's secret stash accurately reflects the full expanse of sexual predilections,
I hate to break this to you, but - neither does any porn flick. The "full expanse" includes emotions, touch and smell and many other fine details that even the best porn does at most hint at.
I'm with you on most of your points, but I consider it equally important that kids are taught the difference between actors in a movie and people passionate about each other (no matter if it's love or a ONS).
This "for the children" mentality, as many have said, has been and always will be illogical.
It's an instinct. There was a great episode on Bullshit about it. Parents are just totally lost idiots who'll gladly do anything if you can convince them it'll somehow benefit their children.
At least the basics of raising a child, including debunking of the most common myths, should be taught in school. After all, the chances that you'll need it one day are statistically higher than for almost all other subjects.
Personally, I think there is one and only one thing that kids should know about porn: It is staged, acted, not real. Real sex is not like in the porn movies. That simple lesson should prevent the main damage that porn actually does - and it does it not because it is porn, but because moms and dads like Ms. Perry are scared of talking about porn to their kids and thus lobby to have it hidden away, which means the kids will discover it on their own, and because it is something forbidden, will not ask questions about it.
Not only that they want the plausible deniability, and they want the filters to be incomplete - because I'm certain lots and lots of people access especially the pay sites from work, because at home the wife could see them. In addition, there have been quite some financial investments into domain names and marketing.
But the real problem is where to draw the line. There are some sites that are porn sites, plain and simple. But what about adult dating sites? What about adult photography sites? Images on those are sometimes explicit as well, but their purpose is different. Especially the line between porn and art is of the kind where even a supreme court judge could only say he can't define it.
There is no simple solution. That is the main part of the world that has changed in the past 50-100 years or so. All the simple solutions have already been found.
even a simple "are you 18" would be sufficient and many websites don't have this.
Err... You must think that people get handed their brains when they turn 18. There's a considerable age span before that where they will put into some random-but-old-enough date as quickly as any adult.
And the age before that - they simply don't care. There have been some actual studies on the subject, showing that hardcore porn simply doesn't interest very young kids. Not fascinate, not disgust, not scar for life, it's simply one of those meaningless things of the adult world to them.
And by the age they do care - see above.
No, what's really going on is that porn is something that parents don't want to explain to their children, and therefore they lobby for it being put out of sight.
Which leaves the possibility of terrorists with guns. However, I'm pretty sure that we achieve 100% gun control on planes anyway (feel free to present counterexample).
Guns are missed all the time. On my last holiday to the carribeans, they missed a large knife we used for cutting open coconuts in our carry-on luggage, until the intermediate stop where it was discovered (had to go through security again). The stewardess later told us why they were so upset - they had missed a guy who had brought a loaded gun on board the same morning, and was by accident discovered when he got off the plane in Florida.
There is no such thing as 100% control or 100% security. It just doesn't exist, the system always has holes. You can make them damn small, but as long as people like me whose day jobs involve maybe 2% physical security can come up with three different ideas of how to get a gun past the security theatre while waiting in line, they aren't even very small.
What we have is luck. Terrorism is like the military - shit does happen and stuff does go wrong. Many terrorists plots would not have been prevented if it hadn't been for something going wrong on the terrorists side.
You assume maximum death count is the terrorists goal.
I don't think it is. Maximum terror and discomfort is. And on that count, the TSA is on the terrorists side. If I were a terrorist, I'd make damn sure nobody even thinks about bombing the waiting lines, or doing anything else that could result in a re-thinking of the procedure. On the contrary, I would spend all my time coming up with other crazy shit to try (and fail, doesn't matter) so it gets added to the list of stuff you can't do or bring anymore.
Right and wrong, I can't answer. But for something to be a democratic decision, it has to be reached under democratic principles and conditions: free and fair elections, free political speech, and a guarantee of basic human rights, among other things. Majority vote is neither necessary nor sufficient.
Ok, now we're getting somewhere.
I'll accept that point. We can use that definition as well as any other.
My question and your dilemma remains: Those rules have been defined by someone. Defining rules for someone else means that you put yourself above them. By what authority?
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I live in southern California where gambling is illegal, unless you live on an Indian reservation. This is a gigantic boon to Indians and they make tens of millions of dollars thru their special treatment though the law.
You need to read more background information on this. Most of the casinos, and especially the most profitable ones, only benefit a very small part of "the Indians". I'm not arguing on your point on whether it's fair or not to allow casinos in the reservations, but do not list them as something like reparations.
It was also late to the show in many cases.
The reparations for the Japanese American internment camps was signed into law in 1988. That's 46 years after the fact.
Women got to vote in the US in 1920 (though some states were earlier to allow them to vote in local elections). By this time, many countries in Europe already had universal suffrage.
Slavery was abolished in the US after the civil war, with the 13th amendment in 1865. By that time, even former primary slavery nations like Tunesia or the Ottoman Empire had long abolished it. In fact, had you guys remained a part of the British Empire, slavery would have been illegal more than 50 years earlier.
And let's not even talk about the civil rights for blacks, USA 1964 - by that time, the rest of the world (minus south africa) had a hard time understanding how blacks could not have the same rights.
So yes, the US has reversed its ways in many of these things - but always as a follower, never as a leader.
All I can say is it's clear there were unethical practices, but it's too early to suggest there's criminality. We have to be careful about applying criminal labels to people until we're very sure.
Who is Assange to judge and / or label corporations or individuals?
That sentence from him is one I would like to read a lot more often in the press. It is easier to judge something on ethical grounds than on criminal grounds. For ethics, you basically just say "that wasn't right". If you accuse someone of a crime, you better be ready to say which law he actually broke.
the discovery that our democracy has grown to be something riddled with shit and corruption.
Everyone with half a brain has known that for years. What's new is that we finally have it in writing.
The question that I pose is: What's next?
Convincing the 80% with less than half a brain of it.
Yes. One can only hope one of them gets stupid enough to issue such a contract - and it gets leaked...
So, why does Firefox then enable and run those plugins, eh? If you really think they are evil, put your money where your mouth is, keep an internal list of enabled plugins, not editable from outside sources, and if a new plugin is detected, throw up a dialog asking the user if he wants it enabled or not.
If you provide the functionality, don't whine if people use it. If your browser will happily activate and use any plugins I throw into its plugin directory, stop crying if I do.
If extremely long lives are becoming more and more realistic, maybe it is time to start thinking about how humans will cope with it. Most of us never heal of the scars of our experiences, and let them accumulate. By the end of our lives, we are pretty much wrecked, full of guilt, pain, set in our ways and done with learning. Our entire society is built around this concept that you start learning about the world, then you go about being productive, then you get a few years of relaxing and living off the results of your work.
Psychologically, but also socially, we are nowhere near ready to dealing with any significant number of people living a very long life.
Most people only worry about the biological part of living very long. But not only our bodies, but our minds too are built with a limited lifespan. Very few people ever come to terms with everything they've been through. The more common standard is that the scars of your experiences remain, and accumulate.
Unless we start working on that problem, too, we will soon have a collection of very long-lived psychic wrecks around.
The sex-phobic misandry of 1970s separatist feminism left a strong cultural vein in the left of "sex = bad" which has not entirely gone away - it's just shifted its focus onto children as the domain and property of women.
I'll gladly take a shot at that. Yes, the feminist movement has removed itself from the landscape of ideologies taken seriously by massively overdoing it. One of their false-to-fact agendas is this "porn objectifies women" angle. If they had ever actually watched a porn movie, they would have quickly realized that the women are at the center of attention, while it is the men who are reduced to their reproductive parts, to the extent that quite often you never even see much else of them.
Porn objectivies sex, removing the emotional elements that most sex contains, but finding an anti-female agenda in porn because it doesn't appeal to more emotional attached women is like calling romance movies anti-male because they don't get to the fucking part as quickly as most men would prefer.
Also, I do know quite a few women who actually like porn. Intelligent, sensible, nice women. Not the kind of victimised fucked-up whores that the feminists call any woman that happens to disagree with their extremist ideology.
It is mystifying that people cannot see this for what it is.
Good point, I think you should add one more part to it: Parents are absolutely irrational when it comes to children. There's a great episode of Bullshit! out there showing what ridiculous crap parents are willing to do if they believe it might be good for the kid.
It's not really the kids who are "not ready". Usually, it's the parents. They are not ready to explain, not ready to prepare, and often have a disfunctional relationship to sex themselves.
Now I cannot speak to the morality of this until someone less lazy than I dredges up some hard facts and evidence about whether or not lying to your children about the basic nature of the world by way of censoring their access to facts outside of the home causes more psychological harm than images or viral ideas can.
The evidence exists, but I'm too lazy to look it up right now. The quick and dirty of it is that children are still evolving their minds, and there are certain ages at which capabilities are developed. One well-documented example is that children up to the age of four or so simply do not understand that someone else can have a different point-of-view of the world. That capability has not yet been developed in their minds. They really believe that all the world shares their knowledge. There's an example of having them watch someone accidentally take the wrong sandwich and eat it, and kids up to this age judge him a thief, while kids older understand that he didn't mean to.
There is likewise an age until which kids do not comprehend sex. There is an age where they can not seperate fantasy and reality. There is an age where they can not yet handle deep emotions.
If someone can prove scientifically that porn is bad for children under a mean age of X, then I'd be in favor of that particular censorship, because we have scientific evidence that the parties affected are not (yet) capable of making a good decision themselves.
However, all current age limits are based on superstition, arbitrary choices and political compromises instead of facts.
I really do believe that pornography is nothing more than a macguffin and a red herring in a debate about whether or not parents deserve government support in shielding their children from ideas which challenge whatever the household doctrine is.
In part, yes. On the other hand, AFAIK the law has not yet invaded the private home, so if you want to share a porn movie with your 9 year old in private, you can.
I think one main part is that parents are afraid of talking about sex with their children, so they don't want them to see anything that might cause them to start asking. Fear is an incredible powerful force.
You assume that the irish government is opposed to the tech companies. I doubt that. For some reason, this feels like on of the cases where a secret meeting ran roughly like this: "Hey, corporate guys. We here in the government would prefer to leverage the whole cost on the dumb sheeple, but we need a reason. The press is asking for corporate taxes to rise. Could you issue a press statement like the one we prepared here, so we can justify our actions? If you don't, we may actually have to raise corporate taxes, and that would suck, wouldn't it?"
Corporations this size and local governments do not usually communicate via the press with each other. If they have something to discuss, they meet and discuss it, they don't post it in the newspapers.
You don't get the full picture.
Germany has been economically successful the past years, including living through the crisis fairly well, by a constant and pretty aggressive redistribution from the bottom to the top. Real wages (i.e. adjusted for inflation) have been falling for years, the number of people employed in part-time and low-wage jobs (there's no minimum wage in Germany, except for a few very small areas) has exploded. Millions of full-time workers don't earn enough to feed a family.
Now add the "paying for the rest of Europe" feeling to that. Do you think the simple people care if the money comes back to some german bank? Not the least. This is just the latest episode where taxes are raised to rescue banks and large corporations that gambled more than they could handle.
Unfortunately, none of the left has so far realized and made into a political movement that the people in all countries are being exploited in the same way. The irish and the german taxpayers are both abused in this. The right-wing and neo-liberals have successfully divided the people of Europe against each other, with open animosity against the greek, etc. being visible already. There are some demonstrations with mottos like "we don't pay for your crisis", but very little international solidarity. If the left were serious in their opposition, they would not only demonstrate against the "rescue package" in Ireland, but also in Germany and France, which is basically taking money from the taxpayers to finance the package which then goes into paying the banks. It's a bank tax, and Ireland is just the step inbetween to make that less transparent.
The fact that I define something one way doesn't mean I put myself above anybody or that I have authority.
No problem there. So it's your definition, and you act according to it. Makes sense.
The "authority" for that derives from the US military. You may not like that, but tough shit.
Actually, I do like it. Now we're finally at the point where we've overcome all this high-moral-ground bullshit and come to the point: Might is right. You act according to your definition, including killing other people for it, simply because you can, with the intent of having them change their ways.
Yes?
How are you different from the terrorists, then?
I think the honest answer is: "We have more guns." or any variation of that. I'm confident that any argument that tries to make this a "good vs. evil" or a "we're better" or some moral affair can be ripped apart.
That depends on what you consider right and wrong.
The problem with people is that most of them truly believe that what they do, say and think is "right" in some sense. Conservatives believe that protecting children from sex is incredibly important. They believe that as honestly as the colour of the sky. Some of them believe that protecting people of all ages from sex is incredibly important. At the same time they are against artificial insemination. And decry the low birth rates. It doesn't match up, but then again neither does the extreme on the other hand of the spectrum, where everyone should be able to do whatever he or she pleases. And of course drugs don't hurt anyone. And people are always nice to each other. And someone would take out the garbage, without the evil necessity of taxes.
It is my personal belief that children aren't harmed by sex in the least, and that you could let your 5 year old watch all the hardcore pornography he wants - which would probably boil down to quick boredom and a "can you switch to the Disney channel, please?" request. It is also my personal belief that when at 9 or 11 or whatever the age is these days, when the kid does get curious, sitting down with him and watching some good porn and answering questions about it just like any other topic your kid needs to learn, would help the next generation overcome this curious attraction/repulsion fetish we have with sex and porn.
Don't do it later than 11 or so, because there comes a time when kids insist on having secrets from their parents and discovering the world on their own, and knowing everything better than the oldsters. If you haven't done basic sex education by then, you have put your kid at the risk of teenage pregnancy and STDs. Now what is the better parenting - having a talk about sex or turning your kid into an HIV infected teen parent?
That is my personal belief. The funny thing is that any conservative with a brain (they exist!) could probably argue his belief just as consistently and eloquently, and find as many flaws in mine as I in his.
Which is why it's a good thing to have discussions with the people you don't normally discuss with - those with a totally different opinion. It helps you find the flaws in yours. Your friends with the same opinion share those flaws and thus won't find them.
So, please, do rip my argument apart.
What you're suggesting, Tom, is a much more elementary set of social skills, which hopefully they've already picked up on before they're even actively interested in porn.
You are probably a lot like me - I grew up in an upper-middle-class family, went to a good school and then to university. For most of my life I realized that there are people who are poorer or less educated than I am, but I didn't think they would be all that different.
My girlfriend opened my eyes to that. She is currently becoming a teacher, and the school type she has chosen means most of her pupils are from lower-class families, many immigrants. Those kids have trouble expressing themselves in whole sentences. They need school teachers to tell them basic etiquette they will need in their jobs. They need school to teach them basic conversational skills. Quite frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if some of them didn't know that there is a connection between having sex and getting pregnant.
I don't think we need porn for "the technical aspects". Instinct has served us well for a million years or so, and our ancestors before then. But forming a relationship, no matter if it's for a week or for life, is something that has become terribly complicated. Some support on that would be great. Helping kids to form a good personal opinion of what is sex, what is love and where do the two meet would be great. Having them come up with their own solution as to whether they want to enjoy pure sex without the bothersome love part, or prefer deep intimacy with it, or to experiment with both before/if settling on one - that would be perfect.
The kind that Ms. Perry and most conservatives propagate: Don't talk about it to your kids, hide it from them like the sweet forbidden fruit, accept the risk that they'll discover it on their own without guidance at an age where they do not realize the difference.
OK, but I think the probability of catching a gun is so high that it's simply not worth it for a terrorist to try it.
Not the simple way, no. You are right that it acts as a deterrence.
The problem with weapons - guns, knives, tasers - is that they aren't as big an equalizer as most people believe. Someone trained in using them and not afraid of doing so is at a big advantage. Three terrorists with tasers could easily keep three times their numbers of regular people with tasers off, especially in a crowded place like a plane.
And you have to deal with false positives. A lot more innocent people than gangsters are shot each year in the US, and I'd even say the number of people accidentally shot is higher than the number of people shot in self-defense.
True, but dirty magazines lack the breadth of the internet. You're not going to find that your dad's secret stash accurately reflects the full expanse of sexual predilections,
I hate to break this to you, but - neither does any porn flick. The "full expanse" includes emotions, touch and smell and many other fine details that even the best porn does at most hint at.
I'm with you on most of your points, but I consider it equally important that kids are taught the difference between actors in a movie and people passionate about each other (no matter if it's love or a ONS).
This "for the children" mentality, as many have said, has been and always will be illogical.
It's an instinct. There was a great episode on Bullshit about it. Parents are just totally lost idiots who'll gladly do anything if you can convince them it'll somehow benefit their children.
At least the basics of raising a child, including debunking of the most common myths, should be taught in school. After all, the chances that you'll need it one day are statistically higher than for almost all other subjects.
Personally, I think there is one and only one thing that kids should know about porn: It is staged, acted, not real. Real sex is not like in the porn movies. That simple lesson should prevent the main damage that porn actually does - and it does it not because it is porn, but because moms and dads like Ms. Perry are scared of talking about porn to their kids and thus lobby to have it hidden away, which means the kids will discover it on their own, and because it is something forbidden, will not ask questions about it.
Not only that they want the plausible deniability, and they want the filters to be incomplete - because I'm certain lots and lots of people access especially the pay sites from work, because at home the wife could see them. In addition, there have been quite some financial investments into domain names and marketing.
But the real problem is where to draw the line. There are some sites that are porn sites, plain and simple. But what about adult dating sites? What about adult photography sites? Images on those are sometimes explicit as well, but their purpose is different. Especially the line between porn and art is of the kind where even a supreme court judge could only say he can't define it.
There is no simple solution. That is the main part of the world that has changed in the past 50-100 years or so. All the simple solutions have already been found.
even a simple "are you 18" would be sufficient and many websites don't have this.
Err... You must think that people get handed their brains when they turn 18. There's a considerable age span before that where they will put into some random-but-old-enough date as quickly as any adult.
And the age before that - they simply don't care. There have been some actual studies on the subject, showing that hardcore porn simply doesn't interest very young kids. Not fascinate, not disgust, not scar for life, it's simply one of those meaningless things of the adult world to them.
And by the age they do care - see above.
No, what's really going on is that porn is something that parents don't want to explain to their children, and therefore they lobby for it being put out of sight.
Dear Ms. Perry -
Fuck you. And please make a video of it and upload it to youporn. Put it in both the MILF and the assholes section.
Yours,
The Internet
Which leaves the possibility of terrorists with guns. However, I'm pretty sure that we achieve 100% gun control on planes anyway (feel free to present counterexample).
Guns are missed all the time. On my last holiday to the carribeans, they missed a large knife we used for cutting open coconuts in our carry-on luggage, until the intermediate stop where it was discovered (had to go through security again). The stewardess later told us why they were so upset - they had missed a guy who had brought a loaded gun on board the same morning, and was by accident discovered when he got off the plane in Florida.
There is no such thing as 100% control or 100% security. It just doesn't exist, the system always has holes. You can make them damn small, but as long as people like me whose day jobs involve maybe 2% physical security can come up with three different ideas of how to get a gun past the security theatre while waiting in line, they aren't even very small.
What we have is luck. Terrorism is like the military - shit does happen and stuff does go wrong. Many terrorists plots would not have been prevented if it hadn't been for something going wrong on the terrorists side.
You assume maximum death count is the terrorists goal.
I don't think it is. Maximum terror and discomfort is. And on that count, the TSA is on the terrorists side. If I were a terrorist, I'd make damn sure nobody even thinks about bombing the waiting lines, or doing anything else that could result in a re-thinking of the procedure. On the contrary, I would spend all my time coming up with other crazy shit to try (and fail, doesn't matter) so it gets added to the list of stuff you can't do or bring anymore.
Right and wrong, I can't answer. But for something to be a democratic decision, it has to be reached under democratic principles and conditions: free and fair elections, free political speech, and a guarantee of basic human rights, among other things. Majority vote is neither necessary nor sufficient.
Ok, now we're getting somewhere.
I'll accept that point. We can use that definition as well as any other.
My question and your dilemma remains: Those rules have been defined by someone. Defining rules for someone else means that you put yourself above them. By what authority?