Egypt Banned Porn, But How Much of the Internet Is That? 316
pigrabbitbear writes "The recent web pornography ban in Egypt has raised questions about the evils of censorship (and porn) and the changing tide of popular attitude of Egyptians. It perhaps reflects the emerging influence of more conservative Muslim elements in government, a shift. Apparently the same ban was passed 3 years ago but was not enforced because their filtering system was not effective. But porn bans are nothing new. Other countries with strict censorship laws like China and Saudi Arabia have successfully implemented bans that restrict pornography along with anything else they deem inappropriate for public viewing. In 2010 the UK discussed a ban that would require users to specifically request access to pornographic material from their internet service providers. And porn-banning rhetoric has even stomped through the U.S. news media over the last few months, thanks to GOP also-ran Rick Santorum claiming President Obama is failing to enforce pornography laws. (There have also been some awesomely ridiculous pornography PSAs.)"
Bigger problems in the world than... (Score:3)
.. OMG, the evils of having sex for recreation, entertainment!
Re:Bigger problems in the world than... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bigger problems in the world than... (Score:4, Insightful)
Shouldn't that be insightful? Especially with the muslim brotherhood now running for the top office, and believed to have 43% of the vote in the bag already.
The difference between the Muslim Brotherhood and Christian conservatives in the west isn't really that big, both are pretty conservative, very religions and willing to crack down on any wrong thinking liberals that they see as being a threat to their cherished beliefs, values and traditions. You can think of the Muslim Brotherhood as being Egyptian Republicans or Tea-Partyists. That being said I'd quite frankly be more worried if Rick Santorum or god forbid, Sarah Palin, became president of the US than I would be if the Muslim Brotherhood won an election with 43% of the vote and formed a coalition government in Egypt with some center right party. Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood does not have thermonuclear weapons.
one disgusting religion doesn't equal them all (Score:3, Insightful)
The difference between the Muslim Brotherhood and Christian conservatives in the west isn't really that big,
Sure it isn't where [youtube.com] does [youtube.com] anyone [youtube.com] get [youtube.com] that [youtube.com] ...
idea [youtube.com].
I'm sure you have a good response to this. I'm sure it will explain how slightly inconveniencing you is much worse than mass murder. How every religion is really the same, whether it started by the self-sacrifice of someone who wouldn't raise a sword against his own executioner or it started with a paedophilic thief, warmonger and slave. Whether it built the best, freeest and by far the most moral, most scientific, least poverty-stricken and most advanced soc
Re:one disgusting religion doesn't equal them all (Score:4, Insightful)
You seriously want to make that argument? Mass murders? Slavery?
How many are dead in Iraq? I think that little mass murder escapade outnumbers all other terrorist actions combined. And don't try to claim that wasn't a war started by right-wing xians, all you have to do is listen to some of the rhetoric from the man responsible, G. W. Bush.
Oh, you want state judicial murders? Yeah, we've got those too. Over 1200 of them just since 1977.
Pure terrorism? McVeigh wasn't exactly muslim, was he? How about Eric Rudolph? No?
Go back a few hundred years - witch burnings. Go back a bit farther - crusades. islam is about 700 years younger than xianity, which makes a difference in scale of fanaticism, religions calm down somewhat as they age.
And we're not exactly short on slavery either. The US imprisons more of its population than any other country, and most of those people are forced into virtually unpaid work for someone else's profit. Things which hurt no one can lead to a very long prison term, which becomes enslavement.
islam and christianity are both evil, and very much alike. In many ways, they're just different branches of the same religion, both claiming to have the truth while being very, very wrong. The xian bible is full of exactly the same kind of instructions from "god" to kill, maim, and enslave that are in the koran. They're just fortunately ignored by more of its followers.
Re:Bigger problems in the world than... (Score:5, Funny)
But the people watching internet porn aren't having any sex at all.
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Masturbation: It's sex with someone you love!
Just wait... (Score:2)
Re:Just wait... (Score:5, Insightful)
After a year of bitching about it, Egypt realises they can still get it without too much hard work, and are getting a bunch more done these days. Plus, real naked people rock!
The Muslim Brotherhood won't be able to completely eliminate it, but they'll succeed to a greater extent than you think. The Taliban had things pretty well nailed down in Afghanistan, after all. It stinks for the minorities of Egypt... the Coptic Christian Church might well be extinct in Egpyt in our lifetime the way things are going over there... but ultimately, their fate is their own, made by their own choice. If Egyptians pick rulers that are going to do things like ban Internet access, let them live by their own choices.
Egyptians clearly wanted Islamism. They clearly wanted Sharia law. Let them have it. Maybe naive Americans that kept hyping the "Arab Spring" will finally realize that it was nothing of the sort, it was an Islamist Spring. What's going on in North Africa is Iran in 1979 all over again. "Freedom" for these people means "No one can stop us from becoming an Islamist state now". This is why I have little sympathy for the Iranians. They're protesting now, but you have to ask "What did you think you were getting when you demanded rule by Ayatollah?"
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To be fair, the Taliban didn't exactly have to lock down a lot of internet customers. It's not like your average Afghan citizen is likely to have a computer or internet access, unless they're well paid and living in a major city. Egypt, on the other hand, is pretty well infused with technology across the country.
Santorum and Toews must just be drooling with envy at the idea of blocking access to naked nipples. After all, we all know that the end of the world will be caused not by fanatics with nuclear
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I think your viewpoint is a bit narrow. The "Arab Spring" was indeed about freedom from tyrannies, not about religious revolutions. But opportunistic religious groups have used the power vacuums to insert themselves.
There's no doubt that many Egyptians are conservative, but there is more of a split between the conservative (and less educated) rural areas and the cities like Cairo that generally have more progressive populaces. On top of that, you have the two religious Islamist groups, the fairly moderate M
Re:Just wait... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think your viewpoint is a bit narrow. The "Arab Spring" was indeed about freedom from tyrannies, not about religious revolutions. But opportunistic religious groups have used the power vacuums to insert themselves.
Sorry, I think this is naivete. I think a relatively small group of people wanted what in the west is considered freedom, and that the majority did want religious rule. One of these days we'll learn that "freedom" doesn't mean the same thing to different people.
There's no doubt that many Egyptians are conservative, but there is more of a split between the conservative (and less educated) rural areas and the cities like Cairo that generally have more progressive populaces.
That may be so, but.... so what? The former still outnumber the later considerably. And as for the "less educated" thing, that's a falsehood. The most radical, and most committed Islamists in both Arab nations and the West tend to be the best educated. It's the least educated types that tend to be the most moderate, the guys that just want to earn a living. The 9/11 hijackers were all well educated, and the London bombers were British citizens, the children of immigrants that grew up in Britain and had all the advantages of a liberal Western education. They choose Jihad, not had it imposed on them. The old "if we just get more of them in school, they'll be less radical" is an old saw that simply isn't true.
On top of that, you have the two religious Islamist groups, the fairly moderate Muslim Brotherhood, and the Sharia Law-loving Salafists, who are in discussions behind-the-scenes as to how radical to go.
Do you really think the Muslim Brotherhood is "moderate"? Seriously? By what standard?
I find it ridiculous when Americans act superior about Islamist states though;
I think you misunderstand me here. I'm not acting superior. If Islamism is what they want, then I really mean that they should have it. I'm not condemning them for it. I'm saying we should stop expecting that they're going to be a western democracy when they clearly aren't.
look at all the religion-motivated laws being passed in America lately that are taking women's rights back to the Mad Men days.
Religion-motivated laws, as you put it, are and always have been, part and parcel of American law. It's not like this is anything new. Religious influence in a law is not necessarily the same thing as a law being a religious law.
We're just as much in the hands of a conservative Christian cabal as Egypt is with Islam
Really? We can ban religions other than Christianity? We can jail people for apostasy? I bet that's news to the Christian Cabal that just watched the ban on homosexuals serving in the military to get lifted. Having a religious people, and certain laws influenced by religious tradition, is not the same thing as a theocratic state.
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Look at theocratic tendencies in the US, and you'll see a similar dynamic, the younger you go, the less likely you are to see Americans who want to unify Church and State.
This is, of course, utter nonsense. There is no genuine meaningful support for any theocratic movement in the United States except in the fever swamps of the imagination on the left and among some deluded atheists. Unlike Christianity, unifying church and state is a central tenet of Islam. That is what the Caliphate was, until it was disestablished 90 years ago, and what Islamist extremists want to reestablish today.
Read Bin Laden's Letter to America [guardian.co.uk]. He demanded that Americans convert to Islam, and sub
Please (Score:3, Funny)
I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Violence plastered all over the media is okay, but God forbid little Hazem sees a tit.
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These people are depraved, just like all conservatives.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Violence plastered all over the media is okay, but God forbid little Hazem sees a tit.
Sounds American, so it must be OK!
Disagree (Score:3, Interesting)
Having been married for plenty of years, I've concluded that pornography can actually quite harmful to some marriages if not most marriages.
You might argue that the government shouldn't censor pornography. But there's a big leap from that libertarian viewpoint, to implying that porn is generally harmless. Which is the underlying sentiment I took away from the line, "(There have also been some awesomely ridiculous pornography PSAs.)"
Re:Disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
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You are confusing Libertarianism with Anarchism.
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Same with marijuana and alcohol. Even though I personally think both are destructive, I'd never ban these products. I would have opposed Prohibition in the 1920s, and I oppose it now too. (Besides it's unconstitutional - Congress does not have the authority to ban natural things.)
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There's absolutely nothing in the Constitution about "natural things". However, there was an amendment passed to ban alcohol, so that alone makes Prohibition perfectly Constitutional, and the reason a second Amendment was required to overturn it.
I'm thinking we need a new Amendment that states that no Amendment can contradict or repeal an older Amendment, or contradict anything else in the Constitution, no matter what. If you have a situation where this is needed, it's time for a new Constitution. Ours i
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>>>There's absolutely nothing in the Constitution about "natural things".
Yes there is. The 10th. Congress shall exercise no power it has not been granted. Congress does not have the power to ban natural things (or any thing). Said power is reserved to the States and the People.
As for a new Constitution, it would end-up being 500 pages long like the EU Constitution (lisbon treaty), and it would serve to give government MORE power not less. Drafting a new constitution would make us little more
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The Libertarian viewpoint is that, even if some people consider it harmful, people should still have the right to view it.
No; the Libertarian point of view is that so long as one person's actions do not harm another, what fucking business is it of yours what they do?
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Censorship is telling a man that he can't eat a steak because a baby can't chew it.
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no body is stopping hiim from eating the steak... he just can't watch it on his computer
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>>The Libertarian viewpoint is that, even if some people consider it harmful, people should still have the right to view it. There's a leap from "we think this is bad for your marriage" to "so we won't let you see it" that you're ignoring.
>He isn't saying porn should be banned, he's just saying porn can be harmful.
Actually he didn't even say that much. He would run into way too many problems (as such arguments tend to do) since all the arguments on that bases have been utterly discredited. All he s
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I'm not arguing that it should pornography should be legislated away. I'm just arguing that someone is no fool for avoiding it, especially if married.
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But seriously I know a married couple that enjoys pornography together and actually thinks it enhances their marriage. But I suppose their point of view will be swept under the carpet. When I was married pornography helped my marriage by giving me an alternative to cheating when the wife was out of town. I don't see what the big "evil" here is. It is like alcohol - if you are addicted don't partake. if you aren't there shouldn't be a pr
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I think you may have missed my point. Never once in this thread have I argued that porn should be banned, or that there were no marriages for which is helped.
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Personally I thin
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I'm just arguing that someone is no fool for avoiding it, especially if married.
Different strokes for different folks, pun intended.
My wife and I occasionally watch porn together, and just the other night I channel surfed past a couple Scinemax movies after she went to bed, woke her up, and we made love. My wife will also point out good looking women we see in public so that I can make up a story about me screwing the stranger later while we make love. That kind of stuff gets her off.
On the other hand, we are friends with a couple where the wife can stand when he even so much as look
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What in the world makes you think it would harm a marriage or even most marriages?
Unless you mean staring in it, that I guess could.
Re:Disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
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[citation needed]
Re:Disagree (Score:4, Insightful)
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...becasue somehow you think having an imagination is the same as physically cheating?
That's what the Bible tells him.
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Not finding your partner interesting enough to get "in the mood" just with them seems like a problem to me.
If you're married, it will DEFINITELY seem like a problem to you at, oh, about the 7-year mark...
Re:Disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
If watching porn borks a marriage, that marriage was boned regardless. Not seeing any porn won't keep you from realizing that there are hotter women out there. Not seeing porn won't form the connection being sought through a webcam.
Marriages based on looks are doomed. Marriages without a connection between the spouses are .. not even marriages, except on paper.
Re:Disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
My wife is a sociologist and cultural anthropologist (double major, though closely related). Her anthro dissertation was on educational systems impact on child development both within the US and in the world in general (in many ways the village raising the child as seen in tribal communities in the Amazon and Africa does better at teaching children than the US system).
Her soc. paper was focused on the sex trade.
A couple interesting points come out of this: my children are less exposed to violence than sexuality (not to say they watch graphic movies, they are 6 and 8, but questions about gender are not danced around at all). My wife and I talk a lot about what the other finds attractive in a stranger/movie star (of either gender) && each other (though we specifically do not talk about friends this way, even if they have traits in common with those we discuss), and we have the open offer to each other to talk about the chance of an affair prior to one ever happening.
The point I'm trying to get at, porn will not damage a marriage nearly as badly as poor communication. It may not be a net positive for all marriages (though I think there are more [couples] than people think who indulge together), it should not be all that toxic to a well grounded marriage either.
-nB
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The latter is the staring in it I mentioned. Who would lose interest in actual sex vs touching yourself. No matter how hot the video it can't compare to sex with even the most hideous wife. You can turn the lights out in that case.
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Re:Disagree (Score:4, Insightful)
I can see hotter women than my wife just by turning on the TV, watching a movie, or even going to the mall. She can do the same for seeing hotter men than me.
Plus, these days, amateur porn is growing by leaps and bounds, and many of those people aren't hot at all. Just go to some of the amateur video sites like youporn.com and xtube.com and watching random videos. There's lots of average-looking (or worse) people on there (and considering what the "average" body type is these days in the USA, this is a pretty far cry from "hot").
Re:Disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
So are cars (accidents create widows), jobs (long hours == annoyed wife), lack of jobs (husband annoyed because he thinks nonworking wife is lazy), children (lack of sex), TV (one spouse feels ignored), internet (ditto), books (ditto), gambling (wastes money), stores (spouse blows thousands of dollars).
Maybe we should just ban EVERYTHING that harms marriages.
Or we could take the more logical course and say, "With great freedom comes great responsibility. The government will not protect you from your own bad choices in life. You work too much, spend too much, have car wrecks, or view too much porn, youtube, TV, and your marriage fails. That's your own dumb fault." i.e. The path that was originally laid out for us in 1789.
Re:Disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
But that would mean that people are responsible for their own actions and that bad things can happen to them if they make poor decisions. People want to be able to blame others when they do something stupid. If they can't make it someone else's fault what are they going to do?
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Okay, but you realize I'm not saying it it should be banned, right?
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Having been married for plenty of years, I've concluded that pornography can actually quite harmful to some marriages if not most marriages.
So can video games, interest in science fiction, political conviction, religion, lack of religion, overeating, eating (or not eating) the wrong things, etc., etc. Should we legislate all those as well? Or put out PSAs to try to drive people away from those things?
Re:Disagree (Score:4, Informative)
I believe you missed my point. I was not arguing at all that porn should be outlawed.
I was arguing against an tacit attitude I was picking up from the post, which is that it's silly to avoid porn.
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Saying the PSAs are "awesomely ridiculous" is not the same as saying that it's silly to avoid porn. PSAs are awesomely ridiculous more often than not, even when they're arguing against things that most sane people would avoid, like random violence or heroin addiction.
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I agree. I was making an inference. The post was clearly against the banning of porn. And the only other point it made was that some PSA's against porn are ridiculous.
So with a conspicuous silence about whether or not porn actually can be harmful (which is the underlying assumption both in banning and in those PSA's), I figured I'd put in my 2 cents.
Re:Disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
maybe the marriages already had problems, porn was just used as a scapegoat because it was there. Wife doesn't want to put out? well, the computer will. Then the wife gets pissy. hmmmm
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Yes. But your point seems to be that because correlation is causation, we should never make any inferences in life that presume causation. If so, have fun with that.
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Sorry, meant to write, "... correlation isn't causation ..."
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I'm sorry, I'm going to be pedantic here.
Correlation doesn't imply* causation.
'correlation isn't causation' isn't correct because it's an absolute, when in fact sometimes correlation IS causation.
*imply in the statistical sense.
Re:Disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
Completely agree. I have a theory about the underlying cause, though, and I'm curious as to what you (and others) would think of it:
Love is a meeting of minds, and healthy marriages are based on love. In the most grown-up model of a monogamous relationship, a sexual relationship is a possession of love.
It sounds like these marriages have been put together for the wrong reasons. Perhaps, when men come from a conservative culture where they must find women with whom to get married because there's social pressure to do so, they end up with sub-optimal relationships. At that point, all they have holding their holy matrimony together is a base instinct to pair off and procreate, and a big sign that says "recreational sex = eternal damnation." The traditional family structure puts the woman subservient to the man in pretty much every regard, so to her, he's primarily a ticket towards safety. Complicating this is the pressure to provide a positive environment for any children (which may be merely customary, as in Protestantism, or downright a legal matter, as in other monotheistic Abrahamic religions.) It's not hard to find examples of dirty jokes and other media that affirm these perceptions of the sexes, and the indoctrination seems to come mostly from how people have adapted to accommodate the expectations of traditional institutions. (This is not to say that men only want sex and women only want security; merely that they're encouraged to think that way through many generations of group polarization [wikipedia.org].)
It would seem to me that all this really proves is that the more rules you put on people, the more likely they are to resent them. The label of 'pornography addiction' is hence utterly pseudo-scientific; it's just a disinterest in the forced baby-generating/baby-protecting relationship brought on by animosity between partners. I would even go so far as to call it a misandrist concept, because escapism through trashy romance novels (the distaff counterpart to cheap pornography) in response to marital stress has been given absolutely no attention.
Fuck you. I love my wife. (Score:4, Insightful)
Having been married for plenty of years, I've concluded that pornography can actually quite harmful to some marriages if not most marriages
Porn showed me how to eat out my my wife.
How to masturbate her.
And that she has sexual feelings.
Catholic Sunday school taught me that she is evil.
I'm still married after dozens of years.
Porn showed me that my wife can be exiting after she gets old and fat.
Fuck you.
Re:Fuck you. I love my wife. (Score:4, Interesting)
She probably didn't know herself. The Hindus didn't write the Kama Sutra just for the fun of it, they did it because sexual techniques aren't always obvious and more-experienced people can train less-experienced people in finer points of technique, just like any other human pursuit.
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But would not that be a personal and cultural thing, and not an absolute. It is only bad for the marriage becasue one or more of the married parties think it is inherently bad to begin with.
Or have you see married couples who both like porn and honestly like watching it together, but their marriage still fell apart because of this watching of porn?
That's fine for you. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not the government's job to babysit your marriage.
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Having been married for plenty of years, I've concluded that pornography can actually quite harmful to at least one marriage.
Edited for scientific accuracy.
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The burden of proof is on those who would claim something is harmful. No one has demonstrated any harm, and we've actually observed decreases in sexual assults when pornography is liberalized.
Re:Disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
Having been married for over 10 years, I've concluded that porn is awesome and keeps some marriages fun and interesting, if not most marriages.
Lack of communication is what's harmful to marriages.
Porn is generally harmless, its the sexual freedom that is perceived by fear filled conservative and sexually introverted religious people that does not work in their definition of normalcy and acceptable behavior, it ruins the artificial and suppressive rules of societal order among men and women. Moderation can be a good thing, but censorship is contrary to freedom of expression and personal liberty.
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As an avid and pensioned master-baiter, i can solemnly state that chronic self-service has had no ill effect on the woodiness of my snake trouser!
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I might believe correlation, but I'm really suspicious of any claims of causation. Erectile disfunction is comorbid with depression. So is lonliness. If people treat their lonliness with porn, that's reason to expect a correlation between ED and porn without there being any causative influence.
Incorrect citation on the summary (Score:3, Informative)
Not to do with the Egypt ban but the summary states that Santorum has as a policy pledge to Ban pornography. The proper context is that he was the Santorum: "Believes that federal obscenity laws should be vigorously enforce" Refering of course to current laws already in the books. This is not a ban: http://www.snopes.com/politics/santorum/taliban.asp
Re:Incorrect citation on the summary (Score:5, Informative)
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Congress shall make no law limiting the freedom of speech, or of the press..... Frothy Santorum can say whatever he wants, but he is not above the Supreme Law of the land.
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Congress shall make no law limiting the freedom of speech, or of the press..... Frothy Santorum can say whatever he wants, but he is not above the Supreme Law of the land.
I don't think porn should be banned outright, but to call it "speech" is ridiculous. To call it "the press" is even moreso. It's a form of entertainment, not a forum to communicate or argue ideas. You might as well declare prostitution as "free speech". We should allow porn to some degree because freedom means the right to screw up and do stupid things (again, to an extent). But to compare a porn pic to a newspaper column or editorial is silly.
Not looking to ban porn... (Score:2)
Governments do it wrong... (Score:5, Interesting)
Honestly, if I wanted to do stuff like this, I wouldn't ban porn. I would just ban the anti-government stuff. So similar to China and such, but without blocking porn. Or gambling. Or other sites holding vices that society might not approve.
Keep the general public amused with crap like that and they won't bother looking up anti-government information because they'd be too busy with Facebook and YouTube to care.
Make it appear free and people won't test the boundaries. Sure make it illegal, but just turn a blind eye and you'll find the vast majority of the population won't be trying to bypass the filter because there isn't one. All the dissidents now stick out like a sore thumb to be dealt with.
At least, if I ran my own kingdom.,..
Re:Governments do it wrong... (Score:5, Informative)
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In this case, it's partly a populist measure - Islamist sentiment is on the rise in Egypt (and other post-"Arab Spring" countries), so banning "vile" things immediately scores you points with the largest and most active electoral group. Remember that those countries are democracies now, even if they're oppressive democracies.
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That's how they do it here.
There, a different set of blinders are in use.
awesomely ridiculous... (Score:2)
that link isn't working. Either it's a wrong link or I just discovered that mu pipe is censored somehow.
Up next... (Score:4, Funny)
Egypt's population spikes to unprecedented levels
Much Lower Costs... (Score:5, Funny)
Egypt Banned Porn, But How Much of the Internet Is That?
Well, let's put it this way.
They can run the entire country on a few dial-up accounts now. Broadband no longer required.
Porn and Hookers (Score:4, Insightful)
Hookers are a bad example for what you are arguing (Score:3)
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Wow. That sounds as pointless and counterproductive as the war on drugs. What are these people thinking? They could be going after actual criminals. Rhetorical question.
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I wonder if that's like here in Norway, they outlawed buying prostitutes here as well. It got rid of the real problem many people wanted to get rid of, street hookers bothering a lot of people and standing around in slutty outfits making the streets look trashy, people having sex in public parks nearby after dark and all sorts of public nuisance. The market simply moved out of the public eye into apartments and getting contact over the Internet. You can still find them very easy, in fact some say the market
Somewhere in Egypt (Score:5, Interesting)
Right now, some illiterate goat farmer who's practices a medieval, backwards religion is looking at the remains of a nearby ancient Egyptian city and wondering what it must have felt like to be one of the world's most advanced civilizations and what went wrong.
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If I remember correctly, the Christians invaded and found all this "great library" and "learning" business not to their taste (and they were probably illiterate anyways), so they burnt the great library to the ground.
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You might want to research a bit more (Score:4, Informative)
In 48 BC the library was burned due to a war, the Siege of Alexandria. Later, when the Romans controlled Egypt, they destroyed the Serapeum for religious reasons (was a Christian Emperor). This was in 391 AD. The Muslims seized control of the library in 642 AD and again, brunination went on.
Ok so a few destruction periods, one by pagan Romans (and not for religious reasons, just as a part of a war), one by Christian Romans, and one by Muslims.
Fine but then we have, oh, 1370 years during which it could have been rebuilt. Even if you want to say nothing could have happened until after all the crusades, those ended about 1400 AD (the Alexandrian Crusade, which would be the most reliant here, was 1365 AD). So again a good 600+ years to rebuild.
Muslims cannot lay any of their anti-education stances on the feet of Christians. Dr. Tyson has an excellent talk on the topic, The God of the Gaps, which generally talks about religion and science, but one of the topics is the Muslim fall to theocracy, and the failure to ever recover from it.
It is not a case of "Oh the Christians burned a library, we can never be educated again."
Priorities! (Score:3, Insightful)
"Mr. President. The world's faced with rising oil costs and falling windpower costs, people in Africa are starving, 1/6 of our country has no access to health care and half don't have adequate access to it, our kids aren't keeping up with the rest of the world in math and science education, businesses are going Big Brother on their employees' facebook profiles, and our Defense Department is spending $700 billion a year with nothing to show for it"
"QUICK! BAN ALL THE PORN!"
Pornography Prevents Bestiality (Score:5, Interesting)
Post-Internet, bestiality vanishes from 10% to almost nothing.
Not that hard to understand - if you live in a small town and are not the handsome jock, you don't have much options for masturbation. The married shmucks outlaw porn, and if you are a teenager/poor you can't get around their laws. The animals start to look not bad.
But give them access to internet and suddenly they no longer want to screw animals.
THE INTERNET IS A HUGE FORCE FOR MORALITY.
The only thing is, moralistic shmucks never knew the disgusting things their neighbors liked before. Know they have become aware of what we do, and blame it on the internet.
No.
Mankind was always a bunch of horny perverts, it's just you were a blind fool before. The internet makes us better people, in part by showing moralistic fools that they are wrong about what most people do.
Obl (Score:3)
So far not very succesfully:
% lynx http://google.com/ [google.com]
Google
Egyptian porn_____________________
[Google Search] [I'm Feeling Lucky] [Advanced search]
Web Results 1 - 10 of about 10,200,000 for Egyptian porn.
(0.53 seconds)
Re: (Score:3)
Check out this beauty :)
ß
Nice huh :)
Distance to porn (Score:5, Interesting)
I once did a Google image search on the most common 1000 words in English and noted the index of the first porn image in that list.
I was interested to see if there was a way to measure how far any word would have to be taken to indicate porn. For example, I would expect "car" to be distant from porn, but "head" to be fairly close.
To my surprise, using Google images as a metric indicated that all common English words were within 15 images of porn.
This was before they switched to the Javascript image results page, and they may have cleaned up their act a bit, but the results were inescapable - much of the net is centered around porn.
Trekkie [wikipedia.org] had it pegged about right [youtube.com].
Trekkie's Law (Score:3)
If you can see the internet but can't see porn, you are a statistical anomaly;
Proposed: "a successful ban on internet porn is within the noise threshhold of backhoe fade."
Re: (Score:3)
> but the results were inescapable - much of the net is centered around porn. ... or porn sites are way, way better at gaming Google than regular content providers?
The Internet is for Porn... (Score:2)
Still pretty awesome:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWEjvCRPrCo [youtube.com]
I'm confused. (Score:3)
I thought that Obama was the secret Muslim, with a Muslim agenda.
But - Muslims are banning porn.
Santorum wants to ban porn.
*gasp* Santorum is a secret Muslim!
Re: (Score:3)
From an earlier post by gurps_npc:
OK, here we go... So, access to porn eliminates bestiality... Santorum wants to ban access to porn... being against one thing that prevents another is effectively promoting the other... therefore, Santorum is promoting bestiality!!!
Too bad his candidacy is all but buried, this would be a
Sharia Law coming to a country near you... (Score:3)
Porn makes a good portion of the internet (Score:3)
Some interesting stats behind one of the larger sites.
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/123929-just-how-big-are-porn-sites [extremetech.com]