“Addictive” means so many different things to different people at this point, it’s become useless. If you can compare the erotic materials I share with my spouse to heroin with a straight face, I’m not the one with a problem.
Lol, you jump straight up to haroin? Just because you and your wife have a healthy relationship with porn doesn’t mean it can’t be addictive to other people. If someone has physical withdrawal symptoms from not consuming the thing, it’s an addiction.
Like, caffeine is highly addictive, but you wouldn’t compare that with haroin.
A mentally unwell population hyped to chase an overblown issue is easier to control. They’ll let themselves be exploited as long as the moral panic is hijacking their attention, which is why there is always a new one.
Can we stop blaming this on being “mentally unwell” and recognize these people are assholes? I was suicidal for 18 years, and I managed to never be “unwell” enought to pull the lever for a Republican or to think that policy should only be made for the interests of people like me, so clearly mental wellness isn’t the deciding factor here. Most Nazi voters weren’t mentally ill, and neither are most of these people. They’re deeply, profoundly selfish, not sick.
There wouldn’t be a massive media aparatus from TV to social media meant to manipulate and indoctrinate people into conservatives if it was just a matter of people being inherently good or bad. Hell, this is as old as organized religion, which is historically constantly intertwined with power.
It is a matter mental unwellness. It might not be the same type of mental unwellness as yours, but many people out of vulnerability, insecurity, loneliness or nihilism end up becoming prey to manipulative groups. How many times have I heard stories of people who struggle with something in their lives and end up joining a church and pretty much changing completely. Have you never seen anything like that?
Some people spent all their lives being told what to believe and have a hard time even imagining anything else. Some people who are today completely rabid fascists used to be decent and just lost themselves in a rabbit hole for one reason or another. I get that right now even trying to talk them out of it is a nigh impossible effort, but this wasn’t an inevitable fate written on their soul. It’s a result of widespread propaganda and disinformation that twisted them.
I never said it was fate. Of course propaganda plays a role. All I’m saying is that hate isn’t a mental illness. People are morally responsible for their hate. Lumping people like that in with mentally ill people will make our lives harder, and they’re hard enough already. Associating us with them will make it easier, psychologically, for other people to involuntarily commit us or even kill us (check the stats on police shootings and severe mental illness). I’m not saying people are born to hate. I’m saying we have enough problems, please don’t advocate mixing them in with us. Call hate a “social illness” and treat them that way. We have enough problems.
The far-left purity test alienates many mostly-left people.
You can be pro-choice, pro-women, all for supporting the poor, gay rights and trans rights - but if you dare suggest that maybe trans women shouldn’t be competing against born women in top-level sports, then the vocal left brand you as a transphobic TERF whose opinion isn’t even worth listening to. They would rather fight you over the 2% of things you disagree on, than embrace you for the 98% of values you have in common.
The vocal left want diversity in color, gender and sexuality - but they will not tolerate any diversity in thought or opinion.
No… They want people to be able to be themselves without being hounded by bigots. Somehow not a big going to ask imo. And yes, if you are talking about trans woman and AMAB people in that way and preventing women from joining sports (which has included all levels of sports), yes, you’re being transphobic.
Are you not self-aware enough to see how brilliantly you are making their point? This is the tyranny of small differences in action; either you’re with me 100 percent, or you are cast out as an unclean bigot. This is why the Democrats are losing the working class that would otherwise be their natural allies. People have been yelling this at you for years, but for some reason you are unable to hear it.
Who are you even talking to? This 100% with us or against us shit is bullshit. You can be a Democrat/Progressive and still be a bigot, racist, asshole, etc. If you don’t like that label than it’s on you to work on or be at peace with. If you go around spouting it on the internet or yelling it at people, prepare for the consequences. That’s how life works.
On the other hand, If that label or single issue makes you say “This means I have to vote for a Republican instead” then you’re a shitty person who doesn’t deserve respect. It’s even more appropriate now that MAGA really showed everyone who the GOP was.
This is just like that “if you’re not nice to people, it will make them vote for Trump” bullshit that was peddled all over reddit. Usually pushed by right-wing, bad faith dipshits trying to muddy the waters.
Indeed, this is the major problem on the left. It’s why there’s so much interest online in centrist “anti-woke” discussions and podcasts. But it’s also fertile recruiting ground for the far right - if you’re excommunicated for the 2% difference and actually, effectively canceled (I mean like a twitter mob actually gets you fired or the like), you’re more inclined to go where people support you, and all too often, that’s now the far right.
Identitarinasm doesn’t lead anywhere good IMO on either side, and we would do well to re-think that on the “loud” part of the left.
I’m usually happy to hear an international perspective of us politics because it can be grounding. But you can’t “both sides” your way out of fascism. There is no far left institutional power in the us. Kindly keep your boot licking to yourself
Oh yes. Extreme Left Wing ideas like: Trans people deserve human rights, We should feed our children, We should forgive college loans to borrowers that are being burdened so heavily with debt they can’t start a family or buy homes (and the impact of it on the US Economy), Everyone has the right to vote. Wow…
The US Democrats aren't great, especially from our European perspective, but this is such a stupid enlightened centrist type of shit take. The Democrats after all aren't the one who are banning media and take peoples right away.
Lots of them, but normal doesn’t sell advertisements or make headlines. I see by the downvotes (or whatever Lemmy calls them) that you’ve been visited by the Reddit groupthink. It feels weird when it happens. Some of us just want everyone to get along…which feels radical in its own way.
I guess if you’re mostly happy with how something is then you’ve no reason to bring it up.
Nobody is writing long articles, posting tweets or appearing on TV shows to talk about it being quite nice that they can currently go and buy a beer from a shop. But someone could easily decide that they want to rile people up about the easiness of buying beer. And it all goes from there.
Alcohol consumption was like 800% higher before prohibition happened. It seems silly today, but alcohol abuse was a super rampant issue in the early 1900s.
The US doesn’t have a left wing party. We have a extreme right wing party, and a center right wing party. This both sides shit is stupid as fuck. “We want to ban gays” is extreme. “We want gay people to have rights” is not
The sad part is that's the best there is for people on the left out of over 500 Congress people. Yet I still regularly have to listen to morons screech about socialism, communism, "cultural Marxism" etc.
Yes, so far at least the Democrats seem to be far less tolerant of extremists in politics. Maybe that’s untrue - but they tend to not be violent or wanting to overthrow the system. Part of it is how you define extremists - I’m more tolerant of people who want to campaign and try to make most any change via the democratic process via voting no matter their position. I’m less interested in those who feel we should invade the capital to try and overrule the outcomes of elections or violently intimidate opponents.
how you define extremists - I’m more tolerant of people who want to campaign and try to make most any change via the democratic process via voting no matter their position. I’m less interested in those who feel we should invade the capital to try and overrule the outcomes of elections or violently intimidate opponents.
Hmm, I actually disagree that extremists should only be those who want to go outside the system and use violence. I would also find trying to effectively and knowingly go against the 1st amendment extreme too. I think that extremists also need to be kind of at the… extremes of a political spectrum also. In fact, I do find it useful (maybe we need a different term) for a way to talk about if someone is in a very edge AND niche position of their group.
You don’t need to be violent if the electoral apparatus is rigged to favor you (the right in American politics—I’m not making this up), but they are anyway. But if the electoral apparatus is rigged against you, if your party can get the most votes consistently and still lose, while your opponents make policy that literally kills people, if you’d still argue that extraelectoral measures are extremist, you’re not advocating democracy, you’re advocating acquiescence. The people of Germany would have been right to rise up against the Nazis (who only got 38% of the vote, btw), yeah? So where’s the line? Which standing up for yourself makes you righteous, and which an extremist?
Oh, no, you’re spot on. Democrats have actively kept leftists from getting traction in the party. There’s a huge age gap between Bernie and AOC with no real progressives in between them. And they’re not even that far left.
The name “do nothing democrats” is sadly very accurate. They are just letting the right wing extremists walk all over us. I’d like to imagine how much better our political system would be if we simply had an age cap on political positions. Of course the people in power will never vote themselves out though.
Lol did you just do a “BoTh siDes” which leftist extremist have actual political power in the US. Defending people’s freedom to make and consume legal porn is not an extremist take LOL. I’m also European by the way
It’s harder to see where the other side is coming from when you’re standing so far apart.
“Normal people,” or people anywhere in the middle of the two poles, who can see both sides still are generally pretty quiet now because they get attacked by one side for “sympathizing” with the other. I talk to both extremes daily in my line of work, and it’s exhausting to be respectful of either far-directional sentiment all day, every day
They won the overall popular vote for the House by 2.8% in a midterm election with a somewhat unpopular President from the opposite party plus economic turmoil. The standard assumption would be that they’d blow it out. In the 2018 midterms, Democrats won the popular vote for the House by almost 10% under somewhat similar circumstances.
The Republicans party is very much elderly people, uneducated people, and religious people.
The old people are dying, religion is on a steady decline.
The thing is that Republicans show up to vote because their bubble is largely fear driven politics.
They also have gerrymandering on their side, they limit polling places, they unconstitutionally use poll taxes that disproportionately affect minorities, they make voting harder by eliminating vote by mail… In short, they cheat like fuckin crazy and rile up their base to get out and vote.
I would not agree that they’re gonna disappear by 2028, but they are waning.
Globally, far right politicians are getting more votes.
It’s not coming back, it never left. We’re seeing them get more aggressive because they know that the newer generation isn’t buying into the ideology as much as previous generations and so their ideals are going to die with them unless they use systemic tools to enforce it.
Everything you’ve said is true. But it was all true in 70s as well. Todays young people aren’t going to remain as progressive - every generation becomes more conservative over time. Hell, baby boomers were hippies. That Karen who votes for Trump and calls the HOA when you forget to take your bins in on time - there’s a good chance she was burning her bra for equal pay when she was in college.
That depends on material conditions. An economic boom doesn’t seem to be on the horizon, and boomers could have turned out very differently without the 80s. Plus, the boomers didn’t have to contend with climate change being obviously real. There are limits to our ecosystem, limits boomers didn’t have to work around, but we do. I don’t think younger people are better than boomers were, but I also don’t think that belief is the only possible source of hope.
This is not going to stop porn. All it will do is criminalize the actors, producers, and viewers.
I'm reminded of the drug war, where they took a relatively harmless narcotic used disproportionally by minority populations at the time (Marijuana), and used it to criminalize and imprison large swaths of the population, especially within the black community.
It's no coincidence that most of the folks targeted by this effort are women and sex industry workers, which skew liberal by a large degree. Note I'm not just talking about prostitution or porn actors, but the entire sex industry, including toys and books.
The GOP is scared shitless of the rising power of women in modern society, and being able to criminalize and consequently attack the revenue stream of sex industry workers is a way to blunt it. There's also an element of class warfare involved, as OnlyFans or similar sites are often the most economical way for a young woman to lift herself out of poverty if she has no other marketable skills.
No, cocaine was for black people in the 50s and 60s. Crack wasn’t a thing yet. Crack was another way they came up with to put black people in prison, but that was in the 80s.
Actually, when William Hearst originally started the campaign in the 20s to take out the hemp farmers that were competing with his timber business (he bought up most of Humboldt so he could corner the paper market), he targeted Hispanics (primarily Mexicans) with Marijuana in his articles about drug crimes and how they were ruining America. Henry Ansligner bought it hook, line and sinker, and he set the tone until the 40s, when hemp was briefly made legal for the war effort. Note that Jack Herer's The Emperor Wears No Clothes does an excellent job illustrating this historical relationship.
Once the Beats started smoking weed in 50s, hemp was criminalized again, and the prohibition was expanded to felony status as law enforcement started targeting the evolution of the Beat movement, the hippies.
The subsequent prohibition on cocaine products was targeted at black neighborhoods (as per the GOP intention during the Nixon/Reagan era), and was built upon the "successes" of the previous marijuana prohibition.
The GOP is scared shitless of the rising power of women in modern society, and being able to criminalize and consequently attack the revenue stream of sex industry workers is a way to blunt it.
I agree that this is a big part of the war on porn. These stuffy prudes are seeing soceal/cultural norms changing before their eyes and they hate it.
I also think they’re using it as an angle of attack to undermine online privacy/security in an effort to chill free speech/expression online. It’s all about control.
It is mind boggling to me that in the year 2023 we’re complaining about porn, LGBT existence, and fucking book content. Isn’t this what we were laughing at 20 years ago? About book burnings and how stupid the previous generations were for fearing and banning media that challenged them?
Dungeons and Dragons. Tabletop roleplaying game. Because it featured demons, magic, etc with elaborate books documenting it all, conservatives condemned it.
More context for OP, AD&D is Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, basically it is the second edition of Dungeons and Dragons before they started using the 3E, 3.5E, 4E, 5E nomenclature.
You’re selling Comcast short there. They put in the effort, they should get 1st place. Please have their medal ready somewhere between 6am and 2pm on Tuesday, if they don’t cancel.
ATT was honing their evil while Comcast was still in diapers. You should look into the history of ATT and just how long they have been around in various forms.
The real impact of the 9/11 attacks: There is direct line from shock and confusion to nationalistic rhetoric and “'OOORAH!”- patriotism to the rise of the Tea Party, the growing influence of the Evangelicals up to the emergence of Trumpism and Qanon.
You should watch the documentary show about the duggars and how they’re part of a huge cult that systemically indoctrinates kids, fucks them, and gets them into politics. It’s disgusting. It’s an organized push of quiverfull fundamentalist shit being pushed into law.
Human nature doesn’t change that much over time. Teenage me thought the future would be awesome because people like me would be in power. Adult me knows that people my age and younger are like everyone before them, just younger.
It is mind boggling to me that in the year 2023 we’re complaining about porn, LGBT existence, and fucking book content. Isn’t this what we were laughing at 20 years ago?
It’s easy to forget because of how quickly the cultural zeitgeist shifted when it finally did, but the early 2000s was still very homophobic. Watching pretty much any comedy from that era reminds you of just how common the punchline to jokes was just, “teehee they’re gay.”
Yup been watching Scrubs and while a still funny show a lot of the time, there’s still a lot of jokes that make me cringe. I’m sure it’s like that for any show in that era.
In the early 2000s it was exceptionally common to hear things referred to as “gay” if they were “bad” in some way. Chandler’s “Dad” in friends is one I look back on and shudder. I understand when boomers say things like “things were different back then, but our ability to reflect and do better is what moves our species forward. Not dig in and scream no!
You ever watch Lily Simpson on You Tube, she does analysis of trans characters and their treatment in older media. Her analysis of Chandlers dad actually showed they weren’t that bad of a depiction.
Of course. Humor is never used to other out-groups so they can be treated as less. Gay jokes are just good clean fun. Like racist and misogynist jokes. /s
It’s always incredibly ironic when the party that favors small govt, minimal State, is also the one that loves to make the most bullshit laws curtailing personal freedom.
I’m pretty sure when they say small government they just mean they want a gov that isn’t strong enough to keep them from being the assholes they really are.
This is a mass panic attack over manufactured or overblown fears. But this isn’t going to stop far-right politicians and their allies from capitalizing on this fear.
Bold statement from a guy publishing an article speculating about how the GOP will suspend the first amendment.
Weak statement about the party that is LITERALLY banning books and writing laws against teachers discussing objective historical fact in classrooms across the country.
Not to mention the main point you’d ignored/missed while skimming the headline, which is that pornography is first amendment protected speech according to the law and the gop have been actively working to ban it, as a pillar of their party, for over 50 years at this point.
pornography is first amendment protected speech according to the law and the gop have been actively working to ban it, as a pillar of their party, for over 50 years at this point.
Politicians have been fighting the “moral decay” of society for longer than 50 years, and neither party has had a monopoly on trying to legislate their view of morality.
How close do you think we are to successfully banning pornography in the United States, timeframe-wise?
So, let’s get this straight. They’re going to take a bunch of dudes, take away their porn, not teach them sexual health, not tech them about consent, strip abortion rights, make women scared to come forward, teach them it was their fault, and do nothing about police ineptitude/corruption. I’m not even exaggerating when I say that it seems like the GOP wants a generation of rape babies. Banking on their future voting bloc?
If I had no context and read your comment I’d think you’re describing the Taliban or some other islamofascist government. The GOP has really gone off the deep end.
When you start talking about consent they get uncomfortable and that’s just a bridge too far. It’s really, really close to accountability, the one thing they hate more than anything else.
Look you can call me any name in the book. The current where children can easily form para social relationships with what are essentially pornstars and it’s extremely easy for teenagers to become sex workers isn’t healthy.
I’m not saying Hawley is right but there needs to be some real effort to address this.
A very small yet very loud part of the USA is losing the plot and their mind. The rest of us are just trying to get on with our own lives while navigating the mine field that is the gop magats.
I mostly agree with you. I’d say the “rest of us” have a certain population that feel like getting on with their own life is now being made impossible/illegal/unsustainable. That leads to disharmony between citizens who would be better off teaming up against the common enemy of Oligarchs. The GOP feels like a symptom of legal human rights violations at this point. If we just keep living our own lives like I would also like to, the blight will just continue to get worse.
The fight doesn’t end at the ballot box, but it does start there. Everyone needs to vote. Vote in the primaries, vote in the general, vote in local elections, & vote in state & national elections. Make yourself heard, & organize.
I wish there were non republicans running. Usually there’s one person running, and they’re generally republican. And no - I don’t have the time to become a politician.
Yea I hear ya. That was the case in my old township. The same 2 people have been running it for two decades and I can’t remember anyone ever challenging them. There are also two other positions that are always blank on the ballot. No idea if those positions are just vacant or someone wins via write-in. I haven’t actually looked.
OTOH, maybe it doesn’t need to take any time. Just put your name on the ballot as a Democrat. Don’t campaign. If you’re elected, you can do better than a Republican by just not showing up.
I’m not sure that’s true - I mean, presumably some things have to happen for the position or else why have it? I guess in terms of being in a group of legislators that’s less true, but town supervisor or dogcatcher or whatever - I’d get elected once, then when there’s no one at the meetings or doing whatever needs to be done to IDK, plow the roads or something or no one answers a call to catch a dog - I’d not get elected again, so have I accomplished anything doing that? And I don’t like to claim I’ll do something and then just never do it, it’s even worse to go in knowing I’m never going to do it, but I’d prefer no one to a Republican. Plus, then I become a public individual and lose a lot of privacy rights and am liable to get attack ads etc, even if I’m actually just a “straw candidate” to have a D on the ballot.
As someone who stood in front of some dude trying to force me to suck his dick (and I fucked off immediately) and getting back assaulted by randoms on the midschool (while dressed) yet I’m still an hetero, biological male…? What the heck is going on? Why on earth I’d start sucking dicks just because I saw some dude naked on screen? That’d be ridiculous, and a demonstration of a severe lack of wit and common sense. That is like, staring at my own cock would make me gay or something amongst those lines.
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