Oxford Union Porn Debate

[DGUtley]

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'.

What? You have me confused with someone else. Mark Twain what? Who has defended kiddie porn?

[Standing Wolf]

What? You have me confused with someone else. Mark Twain what? Who has defended kiddie porn?

Chuckles accuses anyone who defends the availability of "sociopathic crap" (which he makes no attempt at defining) to adults as an implicit approval of passing it all out to kids in school...or something. He's not interested in a discussion; he just wants to rant and repeat. The Twain reference was to a quote about censorship that I mentioned earlier - one that I think is particularly apt in this situation, but also one that apparently went right over Chuck's head.

[IMPress Polly]

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.

I dunno if I'd say the policy was a great success in major urban centers, but you're definitely right that the motivation to repeal prohibition was fiscal, not social. Alcohol prohibition was fought for mainly by women who didn't have a more socially acceptable way of talking about situations like domestic violence at the time.

Liberals and libertarians -- individualists in general -- LOVE harping on the idea that America was once overrun by organized crime because of alcohol prohibition and use this analogy to justify quite a lot of insanity more broadly. It's a go-to foil for many of their causes. ...I dunno. My home state of Vermont, which is commonly thought of as a liberal place, strongly supported prohibition even long after the policy was repealed and to this day, more than a century after prohibition was enacted, we remain an alcohol control state (meaning that the state buys it from manufactures and distributes it to licensed sellers itself) and there's no movement here I'm aware of to abandon the policy. Some states that used to have alcohol control policies have looked toward privatization of the business since, but Vermonters and many others look at the failure of Washington state's repeal and the fact that many people who voted in favor of repealing alcohol control policies now regret their votes because of a major proliferation of stores that resulted and think "maybe that's not for us". Our system seems to work just fine. It's not perfect, but it seems better than privatization.

The younger generation today is pretty skeptical of alcohol because they're pretty well-informed and practical. It's not the rite of passage into adulthood that it used to be anymore. I think the romanticization of drinking is starting to be pretty played out.

[Chuck]

Cities like Chicago and NYC were corrupt long before Prohibition, so that is a bit of a red herring claim. Most of the claims of it 'failing' are based on a few wet newspaper reporters and a couple of cops who didn't really know anything, they just had anecdotal assertions. We do have good idea of booze consumption from long before and long after Prohibition, and it's very clear consumption was way down after it ended and remained lower until the 1960's, and the death tolls from drunk drivers tells the results.

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-ve...ths-and-rates/


Keep in mind the U.S. population was much lower in the 1960's than it is now. the crackdowns on drunk driving in the 1970's and on have worked well, too. The death tolls in the 60's decade far exceeded the entire U.S. death toll in the Vietnam War almost every year.

[Chuck]

I dunno if I'd say the policy was a great success in major urban centers, but you're definitely right that the motivation to repeal prohibition was fiscal, not social. Alcohol prohibition was fought for mainly by women who didn't have a more socially acceptable way of talking about situations like domestic violence at the time.

Liberals and libertarians -- individualists in general -- LOVE harping on the idea that America was once overrun by organized crime because of alcohol prohibition and use this analogy to justify quite a lot of insanity more broadly. It's a go-to foil for many of their causes. ...I dunno. My home state of Vermont, which is commonly thought of as a liberal place, strongly supported prohibition even long after the policy was repealed and to this day, more than a century after prohibition was enacted, we remain an alcohol control state (meaning that the state buys it from manufactures and distributes it to licensed sellers itself) and there's no movement here I'm aware of to abandon the policy. Some states that used to have alcohol control policies have looked toward privatization of the business since, but Vermonters and many others look at the failure of Washington state's repeal and the fact that many people who voted in favor of repealing alcohol control policies now regret their votes because of a major proliferation of stores that resulted and think "maybe that's not for us". Our system seems to work just fine. It's not perfect, but it seems better than privatization.

The younger generation today is pretty skeptical of alcohol because they're pretty well-informed and practical. It's not the rite of passage into adulthood that it used to be anymore. I think the romanticization of drinking is starting to be pretty played out.

It took time for those policies to become effective.