An analysis of the consumption of internet pornography found that there are only small differences between states, but that there are some patterns. The patterns will not surprise anyone.
The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000. "The differences here are not so stark," Edelman says.
…
Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year's presidential election - Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.
So Republican states gobbled up more nekkid pitchers than Democratic states… but of course, one could argue that it was just the few Democrats in Utah who were slavering most obsessively over porn, while the Republican Mormons were being upright (no, wait, maybe that's the wrong word…) Montana is a conservative state, too, but maybe the ready availability of all those cows helps slake their forbidden lusts.*
What about those good Christians?
States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement "I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage," bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement "AIDS might be God's punishment for immoral sexual behaviour."
Heh. Now we all know what "values" is a code word for.
*Uh-oh. Here comes all the hate mail from Montanans.
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There's a difference between the likes of facilis believing that God is the source of logic / morality, and facilis arguing that God is the source of logic and morality. Post after post facilis would respond to any criticism of that with "if you can't account for logic, how can you say my position is illogical?" thus continuing on his arrogant faux-intellectual position post after post. Likewise Barb tried to argue on scientific grounds against evolution - by concocting a straw-man representation of evolution whereby evolution is a cat turning into a dog. If they keep these beliefs to themselves, they are perfectly entitled to expect to stay ridicule-free. But both of them have jumped on a science forum to argue their ridiculous points, of course they are going to be ridiculed for doing so. Especially when neither of them seems willing to even slightly compromise their pre-conceived notions.
Rev.
I never said my Grandmother wasn't an asshole. I did say I loved her though.
ps...I didn't realise my email didn't get displayed with my posts...it's iamherem@yahoo.com.
Hunkering down against the snowstorm. Night all...Go Nats!
Ridicule did not work for the last eight years
hello?
did you entirely miss the links I provided?
that it didn't work to oust Bush for war crimes and constitutional violatins does NOT mean it never works, or has no value.
Go Nats?
Where? To the bottom of the NL east?
Go Braves.
Oh and fyi as a self appointed intratubes guru, posting your email in threads is bad juju.
Spam Bots and less ethical types will have a field day with it.
Yeah, serious boozers who can't get anything else drink methylated spirits in Australia.
Aaaa, a little methanol never hurt anyboodlyboodlybopkashlizzzzzzzzzzzz
ROFLMAO!
uh, yes, just to be clear, since Tony wasn't, I do believe he was joking.
Sterno is not good for ingestion at either end of the digestive tract.
However, there ARE an unfortunately large number of methanol drinkers out there (yes, even here in Kiwiland).
Methanol is typically much cheaper than ethanol, and so one often sees methanol consumption in poorer communities.
http://www.safety-council.org/info/OSH/methanol.htm
I love how everyone acts like theres no possible way that using porn has a strong relationship with a persons attitude towards women. In surveys asking how many men would rape a woman if they would not get caught, watching porn was the only major predictor in who would say that they would (the number was well over 50% over all though, very depressing). When you reduce women to being sub human porn becomes very easy to deal with.
Also, most of those mormons are getting married when they are very young. It is really their only chance at getting some sexual variety- they arent supposed to have oral sex at all either.
What about women who use porn?
Was that a correlative or causal link? And what has the effect been on rape in society since the internet has brought an increase with pornographic material?
I wonder where you get your numbers from.
And what percentage of people who "use" porn makes up the "would rape if they wouldn't get caught"?
"Only major factor". I also wonder what other predictors you could match with that group. History of family trouble. Abuse. Alcoholism in the family. Sociopathic diagnosis.
Tony @479- "(and a hint -- listening helps. reading helps too. there are lots of people here who are extremely smart and extremely knowledgable in many many domains)"
Dropping another cyber-love note to Sastra. *sigh*
RickR; SHHH! It's a secret!
utahskeptic @507- "I love how everyone acts like theres no possible way that using porn has a strong relationship with a persons attitude towards women. In surveys asking how many men would rape a woman if they would not get caught, watching porn was the only major predictor in who would say that they would (the number was well over 50% over all though, very depressing). When you reduce women to being sub human porn becomes very easy to deal with.
Also, most of those mormons are getting married when they are very young. It is really their only chance at getting some sexual variety- they arent supposed to have oral sex at all either."
There aren't any women in my fave porn. What does that do to your hypothesis?
Tony- "RickR; SHHH! It's a secret!"
I meant myself. *blush*
Rev @510- "And what percentage of people who "use" porn makes up the "would rape if they wouldn't get caught"?"
And what percentage are religious? Cuz this sounds exactly like the fundie projection of "immorality" onto atheists who, y'know, don't believe in the big cop in the sky.
Without the BigCop, why, a person is liable to do ANYTHING.
Anything at all.
Obviously you are discriminating against women. Why are you anti-women's rights?
"When you reduce women to being sub human porn becomes very easy to deal with."
What does this sentence even mean? So, porn is difficult to deal with if you see women as fully human?
It really is possible to see women as fully human and equal in every way, and still have a "Me Tarzan, you Jane" relationship in the bedroom, if that is what you both desire. (Emphasis on that last bit)
If you really reduce women to subhuman status, you have much much bigger problems than "using porn".
That explains why Mary carey is a Republican.
Or should that be Republickan.
The comments remind me of an old lawyer joke, which for this issue may be switched to the fundies.
What does a fundy use for birth control?
Their personality.
If their personality is keeping the bed from bouncing, so to speak, then maybe a little foray into the internet porn is what is called for and the idealistic side of capitalism is what is keeping them paying the fees. Ha.
Sven (@491):
Sterno may be canned heat, but only Canned Heat is Canned Heat.
Ridicue is a vital weapon against truly stupid belief systems, the ones that manage to spill out of peoples' heads and make a mess on the carpet.
Anyone posting here can be ridiculed. It takes a rather poor mind to post intellectually pretentious posts here and then to complain about the drubbing they receive. I sometimes put such posts here, but the intention is humorous and if I get the piss taken out of me, fine (though I do object, on many levels, to being called a "retard" - see above).
You'll notice, Eric, that you weren't abused yourself for expressing your opinions, though there's always the chance that someone apparently sincere and enquiring like yourself may morph seamlessly into the kind or arrogant lackwit who will get it with both barrels.
You did not do so.
As for sterno, and methanol generally, it can have its uses - though only if you really do wish to get blind drunk.
Lawyer joke:
Did you know that they have started replacing lab rats with lawyers in experiments? It's because there are some things which rats just won't do.
Rev BDC:
I'm with you, Rev. I note that a huge majority of men "watch porn," if you define "porn" and "watch" broadly enough (i.e., if you include men who've checked out a porn site out of casual curiousity, or those who occasionally pick up a Playboy at the news stand), so any list of men who've been identified for some nasty trait will predictably include a large percentage who also say they "watch porn." But, of course, correlation does not imply causation... and this is especially true when the correlation is spurious to begin with.
In addition, you have to consider the explicitly hypothetical nature of the question in evaluating the answer: Ask "would you [commit any heinous act related to a basic universal human appetite] if you knew you wouldn't get caught," and you've put the respondent into the headspace of fantasy role-play, rather than reality. The "if you knew you wouldn't get caught" conditional inherent severs the scenario from reality. Plenty of folks might answer "yes" not because they're inherently monstrous, but just because they've got the requisite imagination to play with the idea of being the bad guy. It certainly does not mean that any significant fraction of the people actually would commit the heinous act in any plausible real scenario.
As a somewhat oblique aside, the other conclusion from this sort of survey is that fear of "getting caught" (which in most respondents' minds probably includes social disapprobation as well as formal legal consequences) is a powerful factor in constraining the way individual appetities and desires are expressed in actual behavior. This is anathema to right-wingers and L-word-people: The notion that society exists, and its norms (expressed both informally and formally) influence individuals' behavior to the benefit of society itself... which is to say, to the benefit of the greater number of individuals in favor of privileged minorities of individuals. The same people who are eager to ask the "if you wouldn't get caught" question as a way to demonize "liberal" sexuality would never ask corporations about all the ways they'd fuck over their customers (and the public at large) if they "knew they wouldn't get caught."
Errata (@523):
In the second paragraph, this...
...should be...
Additionally, my statement that...
...would probably have been clearer in its intent if I'd said...
Are you seriously saying that corporations don't currently fuck over their customers? Many corporations would make Torquemada look like the poster child for restraint and civility.
Is that sterno stuff as good as turpentine? Yeehah, break out the party likker! Dude, you've totally got to try this stuff, I'm, like totally blind!
Not at all. I'm seriously ridiculing the notion, promoted by many on the right, that if "the state" would only leave corporations the hell alone and let the market work, they would always produce "good" results. More broadly, the notion that if each individual (including corporations, which both law and conservative ideology hold to be persons) acts in its own parochial best interest, the net result of all those individual expressions of self-interest will be the greatest good.
As you suggest, experience tells us that corporations will fuck over their customers and the broader public to precisely the extent that we let them get away with it... or in other words, to the extent they "know they won't get caught."
What I was noting (once again, for the 1.973×1019th time) was the bizarre intersection of "social conservatism" (i.e., demonization of personal behavior that indulges "earthly pleasure" at the expense of a "higher values"... which is to say, essentially a religious focus on "sin," regardless of whether it's acknowledged as religious or not) and the secular ideology of conservatism/libertarianism, which celebrates the individual entirely at the expense of the very same kind of broader societal values that social conservatism ostensibly promotes.
Somehow these strange bedfellows always end up on the same side of the argument, but it's a miracle to me that their psyches can stand the shear stress (no, that's not a typo: I do mean shear, in the mechanical sense, not sheer) of holding two such contradictory positions.
And so it comes to pass that conservatives are happy to use the "if they knew they wouldn't get caught" argument to demonize "perverts" (which apparently means anyone who expresses his/her sexuality in any non-god-approved manner), yet won't apply the implied principle of that argument (i.e., that social norms [aka regulations] have a beneficial effect on individual behavior) to their beloved corporations.
As for the extent to which corporations currently fuck over the rest of us, I'd say it's directly attributable to the political success of conservatives' anti-regulation (arguably anti-social, in the precise sense of that term) agenda from Reagan through Bush 43. I have some hope we've at least begun to roll back that agenda, though I'm under no illusion that change will be easy or quick.
Careful now, Bill. You're getting perilously close to a discussion on Libert...no, no, no.
But surely, and strenuously avoiding that particular cesspit of foolishness, not all corporations/organisations do or would or want to fuck over the rest of us? Personally, there are plenty of things I wouldn't do, even if I could "get away" with them, and to an extent even Big Business is an individual, and human enterprise.
Bill (@#520): Right you are! Just to close the circle:
"There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an Sterno binge.' -Dr. Hunter S. DiMilo
AnthonyK (@528):
I actually don't believe all corporations are invariably evil, but defending them would've been tangential to the point I was trying to make in my reply to tony.
I don't think corporations are any more or less "self-interested" than individuals... but their "self-interest" is much more narrowly focused on generating wealth (which is their sole reason for existing), while individual humans often express interest not directly related to monetary gain.
The thing is, corporations have vastly more power than individual humans do to promote their self interest to the exclusion of others' interests. And while I believe that corporations' behavior is influenced by the social values of their leaders (and in a more diffuse way, by the aggregate social values of their stockholders), such that corporations led by "good guys" tend to be relatively "good" corporate "guys," their prime directive (to increase the value of the owners' investment) often implies that their unregulated self-interest will produce behavior that is (at best) not perfectly aligned with the broader social good... no matter how high-minded the CEO's intentions.
So yes, I believe corporations can exercise values-based self-restraint, just as you and I can... but owing to their corporate nature and their purely commercial raison d'etre, they're somewhat less likely to honor nonmonetary values. And owing to their massive economic power (compared to actual individuals), they're significantly more likely (if left unregulated) to get their way... even when "their way" isn't good for the majority of individual citizens.
I don't want corporations killed or even injured; I just want sensible regulations to help balance their imperative to create wealth (which I don't hold to be an inherently bad thing) with broader (and not exclusivly monetary) values of society.
Back to the original question:
Sure; me too. But (assuming you're an intelligent person with a working imagination) there are probably things you'd never do in real life but would entertain doing, in a purely hypothetical sense (i.e., in fantasy-space), if they were divorced from any real-world consequences. There are plenty of people, both men and women (though I'm not implying you, personally, are such a person, and I am certainly not), who find rape fantasies stimulating, but would never want to rape (or be raped) in real life. Most people (but apparently not all conservatives) understand that the relationship between what turns us on to think about or look at and what we want to actually do isn't so linear.
As a relatively tame, noncontroversial example, I love reading about, and hearing talks about, and watching movies about mountaineering... but you couldn't get me to climb a high mountain (i.e., any activity that deserves the name climbing rather than simply hiking) for any amount of money. The intellectual/emotional interest has no connection to any intended behavior.
The market of public opinion is as important as any other market to an "L-word" supporter. We are fond of the statement, "My right to swing my arms around ends at your face." The whole idea of "L-ism" is to avoid the trespasses of force and fraud against the liberty interests of individuals. Corporations, not being individuals except in the legal-fictional sense, cannot truly have "rights."
Oh, and another thing (re me@530):
In fact, it may be (though I'm neither a sociologist nor psychologist, so my opinion is worth what you've paid for it) that some (most?) of the people who find such out-of-bounds fantasies stimulating do so precisely because they're so far removed from their real-life values or behavior. Maybe people like far-out porn or sexual role-play for the same reason some folks like SF or comic books: Because it's so completely different from real life.
In any case, it does not follow, as the original "if you knew you wouldn't get caught" comment seeks to suggest, that people who answer "yes" to such a poll are all latent rapists.
speedwell (@531):
Curious, isn't it? This should be a point of irreconcilable difference between L-word-people and mainstream pro-business conservatives, yet somehow the two groups invariably make common cause against even the relatively mild version of "the Left" found in mainstream American politics.
This is what puzzles me about the American right: It seems to embrace the worst (from my left-of-center point of view) doctrines of three constituencies ("moral-values" conservatives, secular pro-business conservatives, and L-word-arians) that ought to be intractably at odds. How is this Axis alliance of U.S. politics maintained? 'Tis a puzzlement!
@ Bill Dauphin: Yes, it is puzzling. Many times I wonder if I shouldn't call myself something other than "libertarian." "Classical liberal" would do it if I was in Europe, but it doesn't have the same effect in the United States of Ignorance.
Eh, I've paid for porn, usually because it's just easier, and because you can get high-quality videos you can save, but only a very few select sites are worth that on OCCASION. I also download plenty of free porn, so it all balances out :)
Somebody over at Berube's made an apt and witty distinction between yacht-club Republicans and Evinrude Republicans.
This I agree with. Or it's just a sexual thing that has no necessary relation to "real life" one way or the other.
Yeeeeah, not so much. I know nothing about this alleged survey, but if the question is whether you would rape a woman if you would not get caught, I'm not inclined to give anyone who answers yes the benefit of the doubt. I think someone who answers "yes" to this question is a latent rapist. Do I think they're one short step away from breaking into women's homes and raping them at knifepoint? No. Do I think they're willing to create or take advantage of situations in which a woman is too impaired to withhold or give consent? Yes.
I find this
unconvincing. I wouldn't ever suspect anyone of being a latent rapist (or rape victim) because he or she enjoys SMBD fantasy or role-play. However, your argument isn't about that, but about a hypothetical response to a hypothetical survey question. If a person answers that yes, he would commit such an act, I see no reason to spin a web of psychological explanation around that plain answer.
Speedwell: As a classic European model socialist, with many European model liberals as friends - how can you countenance consideration of the term 'libertarian'? It seems at odds with the more 'social' perspective of classic European liberals.
speedwell:
Sorry to double-team your post (@531), but another thought occurred to me (and FSM forfend that I should have an unexpressed thought, eh?):
I actually agree with this... but where I differ with L-word-arians is that I believe appropriate regulation by a democratically elected government is the appropriate expression of "the market of public opinion" in this instance.
Bill,
Let me put it another way: Your daughter is planning to go to a party on campus. The guys who will be in attendance at the party have just been surveyed and 80% answered "yes" to the question: "Would you rape a girl if you wouldn't get caught?" How comfortable would you feel about this?
"Mormons"??? So righteous, they won't even steal their porn.
What they (we?) need is a Mormon porn site. Kewl..I dig blonds.
SC @#540: Gah!!! Can you home-school for college and grad school?
On the question of the imagined fantasy becoming the real fantasy - isn't that precisely the problem with pornography itself?
Most of us can draw the limit between sexual fantasy and real actions (pump actions?) and, I think, most people just don't have "illegal sex" fantasies. The problem, apart from the age old one of promiscuity, is the actions of the few who do.
Although I would argue for very excplicit "normal" -ie legal - pornography like everyone else here I would ban child-porn, rape-porn, and deoiction of other people's exploitative sexual fantasies. But is this really a terribly difficult problem?
I mean I'm well aware of what is the wrong sort of pornography and avoid even searching for it. Is it really that difficult?
Hi, Tony. I agree the word is bad. I don't know a better word to use. It's the one that seems to be held in common by people whose position combines limited, efficient government, laissez-faire economic policy, and generally permissive social policies. The recent coinage of "left-libertarian" is worse rather than better.
I don't want to derail the thread, so I'll contribute something to the topic; L-ists who think that porn should be banned can't be completely in favor of any of the three things I listed above. This incidentally causes a lot of problems when an L-ist is religious, because religious laws and dogmas are almost by definition anti-liberty.
Sorry! It was just a hypothetical to make a point! I made the percentage up!
My apologies to all fathers disturbed by #540.
Any percentage is too high on that one. When my daughter was born I immediately worried about her dating cowboys. Then we moved and now it's lacrosse players.
I actually agree with this... but where I differ with L-word-arians is that I believe appropriate regulation by a democratically elected government is the appropriate expression of "the market of public opinion" in this instance.
I understand. That's certainly a legitimate point of disagreement. I think that you situate the proper "locus of control" (to borrow a phrase from psychology) in the group, whereas I locate it in the individual. I don't think that rights really mean anything at any level but that of the individual. I don't think that you can meaningfully or effectively assign words like "rights" and "opinions" and "decisions" to a group of people, as if they were cells in an organism and had lost the power of acting on their own. Reasonable people may certainly disagree, but I find understanding the opposing position exceedingly difficult; maybe I'm not characterizing it properly.
SC (2537):
I was actually expecting to hear from you on this thread, but I thought it would be on the role-of-corporations point, rather than on the sex bit!
I should back up here and make it clear that my intent was never so much to defend the yes-answerers as to attack the worth of the poll itself. My point was not so much that people answering "yes" to that poll (BTW, I'm taking the existence of the poll on faith, based on the comments here; I don't know anything about it independently) were defensible individuals, but that the explicitly hypothetical predicate of the question calls into doubt whether people answered it seriously at all, and that no conclusion whatsoever can be drawn about likely behavior based on such a poll.
The original commenter suggested that the number of respondents answering "yes" to the poll was >50%. Unless the poll was administered to a population of known felons, I don't believe more than half of all men are "latent rapists" in any meaningful (i.e., post-Dworkinian) sense of that term; ergo, the poll sucks (IMHO, of course).
I probably did a disservice to both latent rapists and rape fantasy enthusiasts by mentioning both in the same stream of thought: It's one of my conversational flaws that I often drift from one idea to the next (vaguely) related one without making it clear that I understand the inherent distinctions involved. My bad.
In any case, nothing I've said here was intended to defend anyone who would say — and mean it — that he would rape a woman if he thought he'd get away with it... nor to imply that people who enjoy rape fantasies or any other sort of BDSM ("SMBD"? Did I miss a memo?) power-exchange play are in any way comparable to latent rapists. Thank you for pointing out my error.
PS: I haven't been ignoring your e-mail... or rather, I haven't been ignoring your e-mail any more than I've been ignoring pretty much everything that happens at my home keyboard (my blog, Facebook, e-mail generally...). I'll be in touch.
SC:
My response and your continuation passed each other in the wires; hopefully I've at least partially answered your concerns already.
Nonetheless...
Ahh, the Kitty Dukakis gambit, eh? ;^)
But seriously... since none of the other information I have supports the conclusion that 80% of any significant subset of male Yale students are latent rapists, I would conclude that there's something collossally bogus about the survey. Which is really all I was trying to say about this.
That said... as you correctly intuit, I wouldn't willingly bet my daughter's safety on my ad hoc evaluation of the poll. Life is complex, isn't it?
Sven:
No, the lacrosse players were exonerated; worry about her dating prosecutors!
(Just kidding, of course: The behavior of the exonerated Duke lacrosse players hardly recommends itself to fathers-of-daughters, however legal it may have been.)
Well, I wasn't actually referring specifically to the Duke thing. However, one quote I remember from news coverage of that mess rang true (I know some lacrosse players); something like "a toxic combination of rich white-boy entitlement and contact-sport machismo."
Don't forget "Unethical Unbridled District Attorney ambition".
Rev:
Yeah... after I typed "worry about her dating prosecutors," it occurred to me that I'd just circled Sven back to worrying about cowboys.
Sorry about the double post: It was literally the result of an unintentional physical twitch of my mouse-finger. Who knew it would work that way?
Lawyers in general are right out!
I'm taking a (possibly permanent, if SIWOTI doesn't get the better of me) break from responding to propertarians and fellow-travelers. The problem is similar to the one I complained about yesterday on the "Radio Reminder" thread with regard to creationist arguments, but in the political realm. There are huge problems in the world and people doing a lot to address them, and we should be talking about that, and yet we're in this position of having to respond to people repeatedly making absurd, childish arguments based on fantasy (same thing with AGW). I don't know if Walton's capable of developing politically, but I don't have the patience right now to keep banging my head up against that wall; Africangenesis is dishonest and just too incoherent a thinker to deal with. None I've seen on this thread are any better. I mean, when you have to keep going back to defending democracy and explaining how corporations operate, you're not going to get very far. Constantly battling these ridiculous ideas is like constantly having to counter the bacterial-flagellum argument.
I'm burned out on it right now, but I'm glad that others, even if I don't agree with everything they say, are here to do it. Honestly, though, I wish they'd just go away. They lower the level of and interfere with every promising political discussion.
Yes, this is a flaw in surveys as a research method (I'll probably be writing a midterm question about precisely this in the next few hours!). Not that "no conclusion whatsoever can be drawn about likely behavior" based on them, but that they're not the same as observing actual behavior (although these can be combined in useful ways). But I'm not buying your argument that because the (alleged) question is phrased as a hypothetical, no conclusion whatsoever can be drawn about likely behavior based on it. (You didn't answer my question about my own hypothetical.) Even though it was very likely plucked from thin air, I don't find the 50% figure so absurdly high as to invalidate any such survey. It would be cause for more/better research, definitely. But women have too much at stake here to second-guess any such expressions.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=smbd
Ha! Really, it was just a momentary flippage thing.
Identify ZFX and I'll be impressed. :P
Um...
I never thought you were, of course. My argument was with your interpretation of this (possibly imaginary) survey result.
No problem. I've been pretty (well, very) anti-esocial myself of late. I will be in your area in a few weeks, though - I'll let you know when my plans are more firmed up, if I don't hear from you first.
Not to mention that as a proud CT resident (I don't care where your daughter goes) any Duke athlete should be out automatically. :D
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree here. I don't think the part about not getting caught really puts it in any fantasy realm. A large number of rapes are of the sort that I described in my latent-rapist discussion, an extremely small number of these men are "caught," and people are aware of this.
Dreadful sentence structure, but I'm sure you get my drift.
SC:
I've been thinking a bit more about that (is it a Feature or a Bug that I keep thinking about a question even after I've given an answer?): I may have been under-rating the importance of the hypotheticality-to-heinousness ratio:
Imagine we ask the same sort of question about a less emotionally charged offense: "Would you shoplift a candy bar if you knew you wouldn't get caught?" In that case, I would expect a small number of people to take the question seriously and give the principled answer — "Of course not! It would be wrong, whether I got caught or not!" — and another small number to take the question seriously and give the red-in-tooth-and-claw answer — "Sure; where's the downside for me?" My expectation (and this is admittedly purely intuitive on my part) is also that there'd be a much larger middle, made up of people who would not take the question very seriously at all (because its premise is so transparently nonreal), and would just give whatever answer amused them in the moment, whether flippant or deliberately contrarian or just casually tossed off.
Now that you've pressed me on the issue, though, I'm thinking that the sheer emotional weight of rape probably squeezes down the "casual middle" I've described above to a much smaller slice, at least partially invalidating some of my previous blathering.
That said, though, I still don't believe that every other male you see on the street would rape you, if only the coppers weren't watching. Perhaps my faith in humanity is naive, but I just don't believe we live that close to the precipice.
Yes I did... or at least, I posted something that was intended as an answer to your hypothetical. Is this another passed-in-the-wires thing, or did you mean to be rejecting my answer as insufficient?
I meant "disservice" in a values-neutral sense: I simultaneously incorrectly legitimized the bad guys and delegitimized innocent fantasists by linking the two; in neither case did I "serve" them appropriately with my comment.
I guess I'll have to live with the shame of failing to impress you! ;^) But do tell...
don't want to know don't want to know don't want to know don't want to know don't want to know don't want to know ...
But again, I'm speaking mainly about a certain kind of situation, one that doesn't involve violent attacks on strangers on the street.
I'd like to think that. I honestly have no idea, even about the US specifically - it's not something I study. I don't think I'm up to investigating it at the moment. (I may also be in a strange frame of mind since I watched Gomorra yesterday and just watched Crazy Love. If you want to preserve that naive faith, though, I'd avoid the episodes of that "What Would You Do?" show when a guy goes to a bar and pretends like he just drugged a girl's drink and is going to take her outside and have sex with her. :S)
Nah - our comments crossed.
I know - I was teasing.
Amusing BDSM-related initials of a production outfit that an old friend and I have had a running joke about for years. Google "zfx shockwave" - if you think you can handle it. :)
The study is ridiculous. Generally, Democrat states have the highest internet porn subscription rate per capita. Obviously this would not give the desired headline.
So instead of reporting that statistic, the authors report an entirely theorised notion that "If Republican states had the higher levels of broadband that Democrat states have, then they'd proportionally have marginally higher numbers of porn subscriptions per capita".
By the internet "chinese whispers" this gets turned into "Republicans consume more porn" etc.
Here is a more likely alternative theory:
The users desiring internet porn subscriptions in states with low broadband uptake have probably ALREADY bought broadband. So, in states with low broadband usage, the proportion of porn subscriptions to broadband connections is HIGHER than it would be if more people in the state were to have broadband. So instead of INCREASING the proportion of users with porn subscription, the proportion should be DECREASED with increasing broadband rollout, and the already "underconsuming" Republican states would be even lower down the consumption list.
It kind of reminds me of the Amman and Wahl verification of 99% certainty with an RE benchmark of zero for the Mann hockey stick. Complete shameless manipulation of statistics.
You know what is cool about citing studies?
Actually citing them.
Bzzzt! If you can't (or more typically, deliberately refuse to) get the name of the Democratic Party right, you forfeit any interest I might have had in the rest of whatever you have to say. If you want to persuade your adversaries, get their name right; if you just want to insult people, bite me.
Bill Dauphin, you are straining at gnats here over the use of Democrat vs. Democratic.
Barb, you have no point. But then, that is expected from ignorant godbots.
416 Walton
"The difficulty I have with your position is primarily epistemic... you're asserting that the morals of the modern world are largely wrong, and that "true" morality comes from God.... How can we actually know that the Bible is the "word of God"? Where is the empirical evidence of this?
I imagine your response will be that you don't need empirical evidence, because you accept it on faith. Fine. But then we face a fundamental epistemic difficulty. If we don't require evidence in order to accept a claim as true, how can we know which claims are true and which false? How do you know that it is (Trinitarian) Christians who are right, and that Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Mormons and Scientologists are all wrong? If you accept that the Bible is the Word of God simply because it says so, then on what basis do you reject the Qu'ran, the Book of Mormon or the Vedas, all of which also claim to be holy scripture? Where do you draw your distinctions between what is true and what is false?"
________________________________
Every witness at the trial MAY be telling the truth if all of them tell the same story. Or they could ALL be lying or mistaken. They may all tell DIFFERENT stories --and still ALL be lying or mistaken. There isn't any way to tell for certain which witnesses are telling the truth about a past event and which are lying.
So we look at motive. Why would some be motivated to lie? bribery? plea-bargains? to deflect their own guilt? We look at corroborrating evidence.
In the final analysis, we decide that certain witnesses and their testimonies are credible --and certain ones are less so.
The New Testament has several writers involved who had nothing to gain by fictionalizing the life of Christ, Paul, and the acts of the early church.
the other "holy books" you mentioned were written by one author each, and they borrow from other sources and they don't have as good results.
OUt of time --back later.....
So we look at motive.
*bzzz*
wrong.
the lesson to be learned from the very example you excessively used caps with, is that witness testimony is inherently unreliable (there is not even any reason to involve motive), so we move on to EVIDENCE.
It's this simple little thing all you godbothering tubthumpers keep living in denial about.
you don't even have fucking circumstantial evidence to support your case, let alone any witnesses or actual physical evidence.
if you really want to analogize your faith into a court case, know that it would be immediately tossed as insubstantial.
Hell, in CA, you might even get a nuisance charge tacked on.
And then there is the terrible little problem of how, as Ichthyic eloquently put them, "godbothering tubthumpers" don't care to explain how a moronic, unyielding adherence to a literal interpretation of the Bible will help explain anything, whether about fossil organisms or about cooking mushrooms and cheesecake.
By the internet "chinese whispers" this gets turned into "Republicans consume more porn" etc.
you conveniently left out the word: proportionally, you dishonest git. Which, of course, was the exact result of the study, and not "chinese whispers".
BTW, anonymous isn't likely anonymous at all, but an all too familiar global warming denier, too cowardly to show his face for yet another drubbing.
here's some bait for ya, coward:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/myths-vs-fact-reg…
http://www.logicalscience.com/skeptic_arguments/fakeddata.html
McIntyre is a loser and a failure. Hasn't gotten a single paper on the subject published since the first one, and for good reason:
he was wrong.
bye now.
Ugh, the Lee Strobel argument, yuck. I had to read this drek in confirmation a long time ago, and even then I saw through it. All you have to do is go through history finding ridiculous claims, try to frame the argument that they had nothing to gain, and *poof* it's true!
Tell you what, why don't you explain why Marshall Applewhite wasn't correct? He had nothing to gain, after all.
Then, after you're done with that, I have a list of some other people who had nothing to gain, and we'll start with Solomon Molcho. He also thought he was the messiah. And he had nothing to gain. In fact, he lost everything, sort of like Jesus supposedly did.
But while you're doing this, why exactly do we have to settle for unreliable, ancient proclamations? Why not look for corroborating evidence, instead of hunting for an infallible testimony?
AnthonyK, you were the last to address me and you still didn't get it. Sterno is an excellent lubricant.
The jiggly liquid that methanol is contained in is very jell like and very slippery. A VERY good anal lube in a pinch.
In fact, nobody here picked up on that. All you guys fail. This is my point. Knowledge of science and the method does not equal true knowledge. Yes you all figured out the contents of sterno but had no idea what is was really used for in a pinch. It is used for lube and heating. NOT drinking.
Applying that to the bigger picture, why should I believe anything you say? ;-) Yes I am trolling but only half way.
I have fundies I love yet don't believe them. Do you?
Eric, we got it.
Sorry, Eric, had to reread the thread, work out if you were a dickhead, work out if I was a dickhead...and now I'm confused. I didn't know what Sterno was. Now I know that it's a methanol-based lighter fuel and, apparently, a lubricant.
So....why should you believe anything I say? I give up, why should you? Of course "knowledge of science and the method does not equal true knowledge" but it's a start, and not a bad method for seeking it. As I see it, re the religion thing, there are (I was going to write plenty, but I mean a few) some people I know who are religious, and some of them are lovely human beings, a credit to Xianity. No problems. But when they start to tell me that, say, evolution is untrue, because of their religion, then I know that some little part of them is deeply, horribly stupid. And I tend to equate that with the bit of them that has religion.
Naive, I know, but that's what it seems like. Any decent religious person would take on board what science knows, regard it as further evidence of god's wonderful work, and get on with their lives.
However, though I am deeply deeply rude here, as rude as possible - why? because I can - I wouldn't do this to Xtians I met in real life.
The christianists here? Well, they're morons, who come here to prozelitize. They do the opposite of keeping their beliefs to themselves (as I do, unless asked, and even then I would be civil) but try to make us all into pathetic godbots.
The religion that people like Barb represent is mean, vapid, fascistic, cruel and stupid. The fact that they turn up, telling us what is right and wrong in science, with no knowledge or understanding of what they are talking about, seems to be pure evil. And here, I get to confront it, gloves off, loving it.
I hope that answers your questions. But now, I have to go to bed. Feel free to talk to me another time. And don't troll here, ever. We'll rip you apart, as you can see. Goodnight.
File it away in your fundie vault Sven. Then don't swear at the next believer you meet.
Oh, and re your grandmother and whether you should have mocked her - no, but you could have teased her a little. If she really was as smart as you say, she wouldn't have minded one bit.
NOT drinking
and yet YOU did not pick up on the fact that it is, in fact, used for drinking (I even provided a link; there are thousands of Sterno drinkers, even in the US; it's a real problem, actually).
In fact, nobody here picked up on that. All you guys fail. This is my point.
care to provide us with more humorous attempts at self-mockery?
done. with. you.
uh
what?
btw, you can even check wiki on it:
there's a link to the relevant case file at the bottom of it.
now, if you want to claim us ignorant of the uses of sterno as an anal lubricant, that's fair, but you can't lump one into the other and try to use ignorances of anal lubricants as if there is ignorance of everything.
that's the massive fail on your part, in case it wasn't clear.
AnthonyK,
Kudos to you! You REALLY said what you think and I love it. I wish more people would do the same yet they don't.
We butted heads on a stupid point of anal lube! LOL!
Is this what the argument has come to? I admitted to being half a troll. I knew you guys wouldn't know the other uses of sterno in advance.
So I ask myself what the hell was my point? To be honest, I had and have no agenda. I admit the vitriol shown to others angered me yet was that all? Hell I don't even think there is a god!
You and others have forced me to finally think this through. I am against calling out in a forceful (about religion) way those that we love because there is no upside.
Sheesh...I feel like the gay guy that is embarrased to tell his Mom.
Perhaps I am what is wrong with athiesm?
I would never use sterno as an internal lubricant. Alcohol dries out and irritates cells without a protective layer, and hurts like the devil if it gets in a cut or tear.
Thanks all for your responces. Most spent more time on me than I deserve.
I am about to microwave the best meatloaf and mashed potatoes availible on this planet. All of you all's task is to find better! Get those telescopes on other planets as the better grub needs to be tested...and I volunteer.
Go Nats!
-Eric
Perhaps I am what is wrong with athiesm?
or maybe it's just what's wrong with you.
Could just be that Republicans are more likely to pay for it. Democrats, being marginally more intelligent on average, are more likely to figure out how to use Pirate Bay and the newsgroups to get their porn for free.
Seriously! PAYING FOR PORN?
It is sheep in Montana, damn it, SHEEP!!!! Do you know how hard cows kick?
Barb, even though I like watching women dressed like stupid cats