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To: damniseedemons who wrote (150484)	12/3/2002 10:33:36 PM
From: damniseedemons	Respond to of 164684

btw, one of the main things that pisses me off about the moral imposers is their hypocracy and double-standards (hey, just like US foreign policy!!). there are a zillion examples. "celebate" catholic preists who molest little boys, etc. i'm sure you could come up with as many example than me. christians should follow the words of jesus, "let he who is without sin cast the first stone." oh, one of my favorite examples is Adelphia: they would not carry the Playboy channel on their cable system because it is "immoral." yet those same people were involved in a huge criminal fraud. oh the hypocracy, and irony. i am not a perfect angel nor do i pretend to be.

To: damniseedemons who wrote (150484)	12/29/2002 12:08:17 PM
From: craig crawford	Respond to of 164684

externalities, which is to say that even if you choose not to look at porn, you will be affected by those who do. society has a right to protect the community at large from these externalities. it is done all the time in numerous instances. i can provide several examples if you're interested. >> i don't really understand how someone influenced by porn is going to adversely affect his neighbors. please explain or cite the examples you mentioned. << Robert H. Bork Critiques Libertarianism world.std.com .................... The second bit of advice --'If it offends you, don't buy it' -- is both lulling and destructive. Whether you buy it or not, you will be greatly affected by those who do. The aesthetic and moral environment in which you and your family live will be coarsened and degraded. Economists call the effects an activity has on others 'externalities'; why so many of them do not understand the externalities here is a mystery. They understand quite well that a person who decides not to run a smelter will nevertheless be seriously affected if someone else runs one nearby. Free market economists are particularly vulnerable to the libertarian virus. They know that free economic exchanges usually benefit both parties to them. But they mistake that general rule for a universal rule. Benefits do not invariably result from free market exchanges. When it comes to pornography or addictive drugs, libertarians all too often confuse the idea that markets should be free with the idea that everything should be available on the market. The first of those ideas rests on the efficacy of the free market in satisfying wants. The second ignores the question of which wants it is moral to satisfy. That is a question of an entirely different nature. I have heard economists say that, as economists, they do no deal with questions of morality. Quite right. But nobody is just an economist. Economists are also fathers and mothers, husbands or wives, voters citizens, members of communities. In these latter roles, they cannot avoid questions of morality. The externalities of depictions of violence and pornography are clear. To complaints about those products being on the market, libertarians respond with something like 'Just hit the remote control and change channels on your TV set.' But, like the person who chooses not to run a smelter while others do, you, your family, and your neighbors will be affected by the people who do not change the channel, who do rent the pornographic videos, who do read alt.sex.stories. As film critic Michael Medved put it: ' To say that if you don't like the popular culture, then turn it off, is like saying if you don't like the smog, stop breathing. . . .There are Amish kids in Pennsylvania who know about Madonna.' And their parents can do nothing about it. Can there be any doubt that as pornography and depictions of violence become increasingly popular and increasingly accessible, attitudes about marriage, fidelity, divorce, obligations to children, the use of force, and permissible public behavior and language will change? Or that with the changes in attitudes will come changes in conduct, both public and private? We have seen those changes already and they are continuing. Advocates of liberal arts education assure us that those studies improve character. Can it be that only uplifting reading affects character and the most degrading reading has no effects whatever? 'Don't buy it' and 'change the channel,' however intended, are effectively advice to accept a degenerating culture and its consequences. The obstacles to censorship of pornographic and viloence-filled materials are, of course, enormous. Radical individualism in such matters is now pervasive even among sedate, upper middle-class people. At a dinner I sat next to a retired Army general who was no a senior corporate executive. The subject of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs came up. This most conventional of dinner companions said casually that people ought to be allowed to see whatever they wanted to see. It would seem to follow that others ought to be allowed to do whatever some want to see.... Any serious attempt to root out the worst in our popular culture may be doomed unless the judiciary comes to understand that the First Amendment was adopted for good reasons, and those reasons did not include the furtherance of radical personal autonomy.