Oxford Union Porn Debate

[carolina73]

And it only increased demand and exposure to kids. Same with 'legalizing drugs' and every other attempt to decriminalize whatever 1960's era hippies thought was grand. Demand that banning this crap be 200% effective or legalizing it all cuz 'failure n stuff' is faulty 'logic'. Banning people from websites doesn't prevent some from getting back on via underhanded methods, but it does work to keep 90% of those banned from bothering a site, as an example.

How much gay porn or kiddie porn do we see posted here on this board?

I disagree. Prohibition always fails.If someone wants to kill themselves with drugs, then why do you want to stop them? Do you also want to bring back alcohol prohibition? Gun control?

[Standing Wolf]

lol you just ask rhetorical questions while answering none. If you can't admit sick stuff should be kept away from children I could care less what you run around demanding. You can't admit people and their govt. reps should severely restrict porn and ban a lot of it as nothing but trash. All you can babble is nonsense memes about 'freedum n stuff'.

Your first sentence made me laugh. Think about it really hard and you might laugh, too.

Asking where you draw the line for what should legally be available to adults is not a rhetorical question. You use a lot of words the meaning of which you apparently don't understand.

"If [I] can't admit sick stuff should be kept away from children"? I'm not 100% sure, but I believe I did say something on that subject in at least one of my earlier posts. If you really need me, for whatever reason, to say it again, okay: Sick stuff should be kept away from children. However, like so many other things that millions of adults own or otherwise enjoy - guns, alcoholic beverages, cigarettes, etc. - the answer to how to accomplish that end can not include making those things unlawful for adults.

[IMPress Polly]

You are only more aware of what is going on since the internet. It is not new. And violence has dropped.

I don't know where you're getting your data from, but it's clearly outdated because that's just not true. All indications I can find (including reports to the police) suggest that sexual assault and rape have become more common over the last decade. As should surprise exactly no one.

The more compelling issue for me though is not that whether porn causes rape, but rather that trauma resulting from rape and battery are leading causes of pornography; something the industry could hardly survive without.

[The Xl]

Porn is harmful in my opinion, especially now that with smartphones in the hands of children many will be seeing things they should not be seeing many years before their brains can handle it. However, I do believe it is Constitutional and should be legal.

[DGUtley]

More cognitive dissonance. So why is private censorship not 'bad' as well? Representative govt isn't 'oppression', it's setting social boundaries, and citizens have a right to certain expectations as to what society tolerates and what it doesn't. Just because Ayn Rand thinks she's the final arbiter of what govt. should do or not do doesn't make her claims valid. Sociopaths never like restrictions on their behavior and fetishes. Nobody should care what they think.

We are not discussing whether censorship is the ambiguous "good" or "bad" - whatever that means, we are discussing whether it is legal/constitutional or not. It is legal here because this is a private site. Again, if you don't like it, you are free to leave. As for society, Citizens have the right to expect the government to stay within the boundaries of the COTUS. The COTUS is a messy thing. You are free to try to change it if you'd like.

Still waiting for that quote link - or that apology.

[carolina73]

I don't know where you're getting your data from, but it's clearly outdated because that's just not true. All indications I can find (including reports to the police) suggest that sexual assault and rape have become more common over the last decade. As should surprise exactly no one.

The more compelling issue for me though is not that whether porn causes rape, but rather that trauma resulting from rape and battery are leading causes of pornography; something the industry could hardly survive without.

No its not. Many of us grew up in that era and it went largely unreported. There was no DNA testing. Date rapes were not even prosecuted, so they were not reported. As a result they were usually only reported when trips to the hospital were necessary. What was considered rape was even different. Now if I touch your shoulder you can call it sexual assault. People would have laughed at you in the 60's or early 70's.

All major crimes rates are trending down from their 50-year highs in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
Kidnappings, Homicides, Assaults, Child Abuse..., so what makes you think that rapes were any different? They were not. They just went unreported.
Ask everyone here that grew up in or before the 70s if they ever told their parent(s) they were going to call the cops if their parent hit them.

You from the younger generations have it easy. I'm not saying in every case but as a whole that is certainly true.

[Ethereal]

I'm not sure that they are. I think the First Amendment as applied to the States through the 14th restricts or bars their ability to do so. It's been almost 40 years since I studied it (and the law may have evolved since) but that's my recollection. Obscenity is a different issue but because censorship laws enacted to combat obscenity restrict the freedom of expression, crafting a legal definition of obscenity presents a First Amendment issue.

It is a very interesting legal issue.

The fourteenth amendment's legal status is dubious at best. Yes, it carries the force of law and has for a long time, but that is not the same thing as being properly legal. The spirit of the amendment process is that the States and the people get to decide what kind of government they have. The fourteenth amendment was forced on half the country in the context of martial law, which is a violation of the spirit of the law.

[Chuck]

I disagree. Prohibition always fails.If someone wants to kill themselves with drugs, then why do you want to stop them? Do you also want to bring back alcohol prohibition? Gun control?

Prohibition worked fine for such a weak law. It was mainly a womens' issue, seems many got tired of being beaten and seeing their kids beaten and starved by drunk husbands who blew their paychecks at the local saloons every week. Alcohol consumption in the U.S. per capita was over 3 times that in Europe; that went way down with Prohibition and didn't get back to that level after Repeal until the 1960's, when the drunks were happily turning the roads and highways into slaughterhouses, so yes it worked pretty well, considering it didn't ban alcohol or drinking, just transportation and sale. Hey let's legalize rape and murder, laws haven't stopped them so they're a big failure, too.

[Chuck]

We are not discussing whether censorship is the ambiguous "good" or "bad" - whatever that means, we are discussing whether it is legal/constitutional or not. It is legal here because this is a private site. Again, if you don't like it, you are free to leave. As for society, Citizens have the right to expect the government to stay within the boundaries of the COTUS. The COTUS is a messy thing. You are free to try to change it if you'd like.

Still waiting for that quote link - or that apology.

I'm still waiting on all those 'Authorities' like Mark Twain's views on kiddie porn and the same for all those Founders who claimed porn is protected political speech. If people want to make appeals to authority they should at least try to do so with the actual subject, not just some pious idiocy that has no bearing on the topic.

So 'libertarians' should move to Somalia or some other $#@!hole with zero law and order, not the rest of us. The SC is nothing but a partisan political hack thing, appointed by partisan pols, not a real concern for 'Constitutionality' and legality since the Civil War. As for 'legality', when societies degrade and degenerate all kinds of sociopathic crap becomes 'legal n stuff', like herding people into freight cars and shipping them to death camps, so saying something is 'legal' isn't a reason to accept it or keep it 'legal'.

[Chuck]

Mindeless faux 'libertarianism in a nutshell:

"NAMBLA"logic - an extreme absolutist position which demands that for logical consistencies sake that certain gross crimes be allowed, in order that no one might feel restrained."

Stirling S. Newberry

The guy whose Big Giant Government Statue is the Libertarian Party's symbol:

Every society has a right to fix the fundamental principles of its association, and to say to all individuals, that if they contemplate pursuits beyond the limits of these principles and involving dangers which the society chooses to avoid, they must go somewhere else for their exercise; that we want no citizens, and still less ephemeral and pseudo-citizens, on such terms. We may exclude them from our territory, as we do persons infected with disease.

Thomas Jefferson to William H. Crawford, 1816

Real 'Libertarians' don't read Ayn Rand, except for laughs. Most adults know govt. is necessary for real rights to exist, not some inane anarchy run by 8 year olds living on candy bars and chili dogs.