"Why do you care about women in porn, you're a gay man? What's it to you?"
First, I'm a traditional American liberal, the folks who brought you abolition, women's suffrage, humane treatment of the insane and prisoners, children and animals, labor rights, ..... Being a liberal isn't anything about what's it to you, IT'S ABOUT WHAT'S IT FOR THEM. Pseudo-liberalism becomes pseudo partially by buying into the practice of turning everything into a story of self-interest. Doing that merely ignores the fact that the entire difference between an act of self-interest and a selfless act is far more obvious in the effects of those than anything the cynical, fashionable, fictitious hedonist analysis is based in. The difference makes all the difference in the world in the experience of the recipient of action. The hedonistic analysis is done for selfish reasons, it gives permission to be indifferent to even obvious depravity and cruelty. As in the post about the pseudo-liberal approval of and acceptance of porn when they believe its effects can be kept at a distance from them and their loved ones.
You may have guessed the second one already,
"You don't have to look at it if you don't like it. Turn off the TV"
That's a good strategy when it's a matter of not listening to annoying pop-music, it's not a liberal argument about anything of more importance in the world. I can't imagine it would have quite done it to end slavery or helped labor to organize for its rights, it is what allowed Steve Jobs to be raised up as i-God even as the sweat shops that drove people to suicide as they were crushed by increasing production of his latest Richie-Rich toy were being exposed.
While I am loathe to do it, that second dodge of preening pseudo-liberal slackerdom does have a rather effective self-interest argument to be made against it. If you turn off the fascist propaganda - and porn is propaganda for sexual and gender fascism - the kid down the street is watching it. The one you live in the same town with, the one who goes to school with your daughter or son, the one who they might date or hang around with, the one who may choose them to prey on as instructed in that unpleasant-making thing you turned off so as not to be bothered by it.
Once when I was sick and slumming, watching City Confidential, cabloid crime porn going into extensive detail about some gruesome crimes, how they were committed, how the depraved criminals got away with it to go on to commit more crimes and how, eventually, the police caught up with them, Even as I was feeling cheap and thinking I should turn the TV off and do something useful, I realized that the program could serve a few of those watching it as a how-to manual of how to commit similar crimes and avoid the mistakes their fellow criminals had made that led them to be caught.
The copy-cat phenomenon in crime is frequently suspected and, in some cases, has been documented. Some of those copy-cats getting off on those kinds of crime programs, looking on some of the more infamous serial killers and mass murderers as heroes to emulate will be looking at how to improve on what they did. There is no reason to not suspect that people with violent criminal plans aren't attracted to that kind of media, taking inspiration for their actions and getting instruction from what, for most of us, as a rather corrupt form of entertainment. There is no reasonable doubt but that is how the criminally insane use the same media that most of us will, eventually turn off in disgust.
Adam Lanza was fascinated enough with the Norwegian mass murderer,Anders Behring Breivik that he kept clippings of several news stories about his crime. I don't know the extent to which they would be able to track Lanza's TV and online viewing of someone who he may have considered a hero to emulate and outdo but we do know that he tried to do something very similar, murder lots and lots of children in one location. Anyone who dismisses the link between the news stories about Breivik and Lanza's copy cat massacre is making a case that isn't credible. You would have to get past the fact that it is known he was a student of many other mass shooters. He obviously considered himself to be rather expert in the topic.
Between August 2009 and February 2010, the same user name linked to Lanza made revisions to 12 Wikipedia entries about massacres across the world during the same 2009 to 2010 time frame as the gun website and gaming chat-room posts.
One entry meticulously specifies the weapons Kip Kinkel used at the age of 15 to kill his parents before going on a shooting spree at his Oregon high school, where two were killed and 25 were wounded in May 1998.
A revision involving the Sept. 13, 2006, shooting at Dawson College in Montreal, in which one student was killed and 19 others wounded, is quite particular about how the article posted on Wikipedia describes the firearm used by the killer.
... The poster believed to be Lanza delves deeply into Wikipedia's account of the ESL shooting, revising it on at least four occasions in February 2010 and adding such details as the caliber and manufacturer of weapons in Farley's arsenal.
There are striking similarities between the ESL massacre and the Sandy Hook shooting more than 20 years later. Farley, carrying more than a thousand rounds of ammunition on a vest and wearing earplugs, shot through the glass of a door of ESL, gunning down employees as he encountered them in the building.
The poster suspected to be Lanza also corrected Wikipedia entries about mass shootings at shopping centers, including the Sello mall massacre in a town near the Finnish capital of Helsinki in December 2009 that left four people dead, and the Westroads mall shooting in Omaha, Neb., in December 2007, in which a man with a rifle opened fire at the busy mall, killing eight people before taking his own life.
As most of those reading this, the willful blindness of the NRA and the paranoid gun nuts it caters to regularly enrages me as they dishonestly refuse to acknowledge the clearest lessons learned from mass murders and the largest of all mass murders committed that happens every year, month, week and day in the United States, in multiple locations by multiple people. Their irresponsibility is epic, it is related to the voluntary ignorance of those who actively ignored the crimes of the Nazis and fascists, who overlooked the massacre in Rwanda and Kosovo even as those were happening and they could have been stopped.
We are especially enraged by their irrational and dishonest citation of the Second Amendment. But even many of those who are regularly enraged by the irresponsible protection of the gun industry do exactly the same thing when it is the media whose financial and ideological interests lead to murders and, especially sexual crimes. For pseudo-liberals, the First Amendment is often their Second Amendment, it is the thought blocker that serves as the barrier that shuts down debate and thought and reason, even in the face of criminal depravity. Their willful denial of the results of the free availability of the encouragement to murder and, especially to objectify, use, rape, damage, enslave and torture people as sexual gratification is every bit as willfully blind and is frequently funded by the porn industry in exactly the same way that the gun industry funds the ideological opponents to gun regulation.
Adam Lanza's mother was irresponsible in ways similar to those parents I mentioned yesterday who introduced their children to hard core porn before they reached puberty. We know the results of her irresponsibility, I have no doubt that there are also consequences of having millions of children growing up on porn, I think you can see that in stories of mass rape of girls who will then be blamed for what the men and boys did to them. Porn instructs them in that, it instructs them to think of their victims in those terms, that lesson has become embedded in the culture. If it was there before porn might have had an influence on it, that attitude is confirmed by the contents of pornography. Pornography teaches that kind of behavior. It may not produce undeniable depravity in all of the people who watch it but it does in some. To favor gun regulation in the one case and then to rule out any consideration of regulation in the other is insane. As the results of porn become ubiquitous, including the deaths and murders of many people, it is as much a moral atrocity. The two are equivalent in their effect.
The copy-cat phenomenon in crime is frequently suspected and, in some cases, has been documented. Some of those copy-cats getting off on those kinds of crime programs, looking on some of the more infamous serial killers and mass murderers as heroes to emulate will be looking at how to improve on what they did. There is no reason to not suspect that people with violent criminal plans aren't attracted to that kind of media, taking inspiration for their actions and getting instruction from what, for most of us, as a rather corrupt form of entertainment. There is no reasonable doubt but that is how the criminally insane use the same media that most of us will, eventually turn off in disgust.
Adam Lanza was fascinated enough with the Norwegian mass murderer,Anders Behring Breivik that he kept clippings of several news stories about his crime. I don't know the extent to which they would be able to track Lanza's TV and online viewing of someone who he may have considered a hero to emulate and outdo but we do know that he tried to do something very similar, murder lots and lots of children in one location. Anyone who dismisses the link between the news stories about Breivik and Lanza's copy cat massacre is making a case that isn't credible. You would have to get past the fact that it is known he was a student of many other mass shooters. He obviously considered himself to be rather expert in the topic.
Between August 2009 and February 2010, the same user name linked to Lanza made revisions to 12 Wikipedia entries about massacres across the world during the same 2009 to 2010 time frame as the gun website and gaming chat-room posts.
One entry meticulously specifies the weapons Kip Kinkel used at the age of 15 to kill his parents before going on a shooting spree at his Oregon high school, where two were killed and 25 were wounded in May 1998.
A revision involving the Sept. 13, 2006, shooting at Dawson College in Montreal, in which one student was killed and 19 others wounded, is quite particular about how the article posted on Wikipedia describes the firearm used by the killer.
... The poster believed to be Lanza delves deeply into Wikipedia's account of the ESL shooting, revising it on at least four occasions in February 2010 and adding such details as the caliber and manufacturer of weapons in Farley's arsenal.
There are striking similarities between the ESL massacre and the Sandy Hook shooting more than 20 years later. Farley, carrying more than a thousand rounds of ammunition on a vest and wearing earplugs, shot through the glass of a door of ESL, gunning down employees as he encountered them in the building.
The poster suspected to be Lanza also corrected Wikipedia entries about mass shootings at shopping centers, including the Sello mall massacre in a town near the Finnish capital of Helsinki in December 2009 that left four people dead, and the Westroads mall shooting in Omaha, Neb., in December 2007, in which a man with a rifle opened fire at the busy mall, killing eight people before taking his own life.
As most of those reading this, the willful blindness of the NRA and the paranoid gun nuts it caters to regularly enrages me as they dishonestly refuse to acknowledge the clearest lessons learned from mass murders and the largest of all mass murders committed that happens every year, month, week and day in the United States, in multiple locations by multiple people. Their irresponsibility is epic, it is related to the voluntary ignorance of those who actively ignored the crimes of the Nazis and fascists, who overlooked the massacre in Rwanda and Kosovo even as those were happening and they could have been stopped.
We are especially enraged by their irrational and dishonest citation of the Second Amendment. But even many of those who are regularly enraged by the irresponsible protection of the gun industry do exactly the same thing when it is the media whose financial and ideological interests lead to murders and, especially sexual crimes. For pseudo-liberals, the First Amendment is often their Second Amendment, it is the thought blocker that serves as the barrier that shuts down debate and thought and reason, even in the face of criminal depravity. Their willful denial of the results of the free availability of the encouragement to murder and, especially to objectify, use, rape, damage, enslave and torture people as sexual gratification is every bit as willfully blind and is frequently funded by the porn industry in exactly the same way that the gun industry funds the ideological opponents to gun regulation.
Adam Lanza's mother was irresponsible in ways similar to those parents I mentioned yesterday who introduced their children to hard core porn before they reached puberty. We know the results of her irresponsibility, I have no doubt that there are also consequences of having millions of children growing up on porn, I think you can see that in stories of mass rape of girls who will then be blamed for what the men and boys did to them. Porn instructs them in that, it instructs them to think of their victims in those terms, that lesson has become embedded in the culture. If it was there before porn might have had an influence on it, that attitude is confirmed by the contents of pornography. Pornography teaches that kind of behavior. It may not produce undeniable depravity in all of the people who watch it but it does in some. To favor gun regulation in the one case and then to rule out any consideration of regulation in the other is insane. As the results of porn become ubiquitous, including the deaths and murders of many people, it is as much a moral atrocity. The two are equivalent in their effect.
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