posted
Once again I will point out that nudity is NOT pornography.
One of the problems with defining and controlling alleged 'pornography' is that to some extent you are trying to legislate thought. More so you are trying to legislate what I am thinking...no, that's not quite right... you are trying to legislate what YOU think I might be thinking, and that is a very tricky process.
Let us use nude art as an example; say the statue of Dave. One person might see that and be in awe of the craftsmanship that it took to create it. Another might be in awe of the aesthetically beautiful capturing of the human form. And, another might be turned on by the naughty idea of seeing a nude boy.
Again, the point is, you can't predict and therefore can't legislate what goes on in my mind.
As an extension of this, and regarding nudist camps and nude beaches, again if you see these as pornographic and obscene then because those thoughts and images come from your own mind, then for you it is true. But for most of the people who frequent beaches and camps, nudity becomes very indicental. It becomes such old hat as to lose all it's significants.
Public bathhouses used to be VERY popular in Japan. Whole families would pack a picnic lunch and a bottle of wine, and meet their friends and neighbors at the public bath for a social gathering. All perfectly innocent. The nudity was purely indicental and had no meaning to them. You couldn't see anything that you couldn't imagine in your mind. There was no sex, boys and girls, children of all ages gathered together for innocent social fun. The nudity simply meant nothing to them because it had a clear social context that was completely non-sexual.
That's the way it is on most nude beaches. After an hour or so of seeing fat 70 year old men and scrawny 70 year of women in the nude, the mystique is gone, and from then on it's just normal life; you swim, you surf, you play volley ball, you have a soda, you talk with your friends, and lay in the sun. No one looks; no one cares.
As to the thought that pedophiles might frequent these beaches to catch a glimpse of some young person naked, so what? Once again you are trying to control what you think other might be thinking, but there is not law so far against thinking. Heaven help us if we sink so low as to institute the 'thought police'.
As along as the alleged pedophile confines his/her actions to thoughts and fantasies, he/she hasn't broken any law. If he/she moves beyond thought into the realm of action, then they have commited a breach of the law that is independant of beach nudity. They have commited a breach of law that could just as easily have been stimulated by the adevertising section of the Sunday newspaper.
Kyvin, I think you have a very warped view of nude beaches. Though I will admit, that there probably are a very few nude beaches that match your view, they are in the minority. Most public nude beaches are very boring places where most people don't give a second thought to the 'nude' apsect of it.
Firther note, that you thoughts and preceptions of nude beaches don't actually create the reality of nude beaches, which is why, very conviniently, we do not let the thoughts of one person dictate the reality for everyone else.
quote:Originally posted by cheiros do ender: Not really. The aborigines had dozens of different cultures, langauages, local areas, histories, stories, and belief systems in general, all coexisting peacefully on the huge continent of Australia. Not once, in something like 60,000 years, did one group try to force their beliefs on another.
They shared ideas, not power structures (like the modern military allieships).
How do you know? It's not as if they had a written history to record any such attempts. I do suspect you are right, since people at that subsistence level of hunter-gathering don't generally have the surplus to fight over abstract ideas - much more likely to fight over hunting grounds. But I do not see how you can be so certain of it.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
| IP: Logged |
Kyvin is most definitely not RK. He's my son, he is 15 years old, he's a Christian. He definitely has some strong opinions and he does love to argue. He has Asperger's syndrome.
Some background:
He just got back from a weekend with his dad. He discovered by accident that his dad, whose infidelity led to our divorce, is looking around on the internet for another woman while still in THAT relationship. So, as you can imagine, sex seems like a bad thing to him at the moment.
I'm quite surprised at some of the opinions he's expressed here and we will be doing a lot of talking over the next few days. In the meantime I'm going to be exercising parental control and restrict him from posting here for a while.
I'm grateful to those of you who tried to gently guide him to express himself more appropriately, I really do appreciate it.
ctm
Quoted for those who don't read the last few posts on the previous page of a thread.
Posts: 4753 | Registered: May 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
You know, it's kind of funny--when kat suggested that they were the same person, my first reaction was "no, surely Robin isn't that skeezy". Which is really a fairly funny thing to have thought.
I will say, though, that developing cedonyms doesn't seem like something that is in keeping with what Robin has shown us of himself here.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
| IP: Logged |
posted
Clarifying because I initially misread -- you are saying not so skeezy as to make up an alias, not that Kyvin comes off as exceptionally skeezy, yes?
Posts: 9866 | Registered: Apr 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
Oh, I hadn't realized that it could be interpreted that way--thanks for pointing that out, Dana. I meant the former. Kyvin didn't come off as skeezy at all--just very young, and given to seeing the world in primary colors.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by cheiros do ender: Not really. The aborigines had dozens of different cultures, langauages, local areas, histories, stories, and belief systems in general, all coexisting peacefully on the huge continent of Australia. Not once, in something like 60,000 years, did one group try to force their beliefs on another.
They shared ideas, not power structures (like the modern military allieships).
How do you know? It's not as if they had a written history to record any such attempts. I do suspect you are right, since people at that subsistence level of hunter-gathering don't generally have the surplus to fight over abstract ideas - much more likely to fight over hunting grounds. But I do not see how you can be so certain of it.
They were nomads. When cultures conflict, they tend to build bases to prepare for defence and attack. Then more and more do until it starts looking like Medieval Europe.
Sure, maybe in their earlier years they weren't nomads. Maybe they designed all the technologies we had today, and then some, got all around the Universe, and then eventually destroyed themselves except for some nomads left on Earth, and all that were remaining in Australia knew less about civilisation than most teenage Australian Aborigines know about their own culture today.
posted
So if their technology and society did not support it (granting you some great big ifs that you have shown no evidence of earning), is it really a virtue to not have done it?
I, personally, have never borrowed someone's soul for a few hours and taken it for a spin. I consider this to be a virtue.
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
| IP: Logged |
quote:Stone Age hunter-gatherers are often billed as the peaceful precursors of agricultural peoples who cultivated frequent warfare along with their crops beginning around 5,000 years ago. But cave paintings in northern Australia, some dating to 10,000 years ago or more, bluntly blast that assumption.
In fact, these scenes painted by aboriginal peoples represent the earliest known portrayals of organized warfare, according to two researchers who have studied paintings at more than 650 Australian sites. Depictions of large battles, small skirmishes, and people attacking one another with spears and boomerangs document an ancient tradition of warrior art by aboriginal hunter-gatherers that extends from pre-agricultural times to the early part of this century.
Stone Age humans thus possessed a full-fledged capacity for waging war, argue Paul Tacon, an anthropologist at the Australian Museum in Sydney, and Christopher Chippendale, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge in England. “Warfare is often seen as a side effect of sedentary farming and then of urban societies,” Chippendale contends. “But organized conflict is decidedly a characteristic of mobile huntergatherers and Homo sapiens in general.”
Also check out Guns Germs and Steel for a description of the severe xenophobia associated with stone-age hunter/gatherer tribes in general.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Elaborate? What she said was pretty straight forward. If a group has developed the capacity to do horrible thing X, yet refrains from doing it, there is virtue there. If the group never develops the capacity to do horrible thing X, there is no virtue in not doing it.
It wasn't especially virtuous of the Athenians to refrain from using tactical nukes on Persia during the wars between them. There was no restraint at work that kept them from doing so; they just didn't have the technological capacity to even conceive of it, let alone to build the bomb and the delivery system for it.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Robin Kaczmarczyk: I have a dream:
When one day, Ron Jeremy and his legions will be able to broadcast on daytime t.v.!
My threory on hard core pornography is that only closeted gay men really like it. The whole thing (except for the lesbian ones, acting like men by the way) is centered around the male genitalia.
Posts: 3134 | Registered: Mar 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote: The whole thing (except for the lesbian ones, acting like men by the way) is centered around the male genitalia.
I've never been a fan of hard-core pornography myself, but it seems to me that its quite often the exaggerated female enjoyment of said exaggerated male genitalia which is the focus.
Posts: 5656 | Registered: Oct 1999
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Noemon: Elaborate? What she said was pretty straight forward. If a group has developed the capacity to do horrible thing X, yet refrains from doing it, there is virtue there. If the group never develops the capacity to do horrible thing X, there is no virtue in not doing it.
It wasn't especially virtuous of the Athenians to refrain from using tactical nukes on Persia during the wars between them. There was no restraint at work that kept them from doing so; they just didn't have the technological capacity to even conceive of it, let alone to build the bomb and the delivery system for it.
In other words, they weren't smart enough? Only smart cultures design weapons of mass destruction, and wage war?
It's the structure of Nomadic Hunter-Gatherer societies itself that precludes these stupid conquests not happening. And it's a structure of choice, so yes it is virtuous.
Not that I'm totally against civilisation in and of itself, but I certainly think we could have done better with it than we've done.
Posts: 1138 | Registered: Nov 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
cheiros, can you cite a source on this theory of yours? (If you did, I apologize, but I thought I looked pretty closely.) It contradicts much of what I've read, some of which is cited above.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
| IP: Logged |
The point is that refraining from doing something that you're not capable of doing in the first place is no great achievement. Me deciding not to fly like Superman shows no great restraint, because I don't have the ability to do so in any circumstance.
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by El JT de Spang: You're missing the point entirely.
The point is that refraining from doing something that you're not capable of doing in the first place is no great achievement. Me deciding not to fly like Superman shows no great restraint, because I don't have the ability to do so in any circumstance.
It is the point. They had thousands of years to use their intelligence, if they so chose, to develop ways of doing those things. It wasn't a matter of refraining from doing it because the technology didn't already exist.
That's like an ancient society claiming they lost a war, or didn't get the harvest they were used to, because God wasn't on their side all of a sudden.
Posts: 1138 | Registered: Nov 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
It's not a matter of deciding not to do something they couldn't do. It comes down to deciding not to try to figure out a way to do something they couldn't at that time do.
By the fact that Westerner's did do all these things that you claim the Aborigines weren't "capable" of doing, you are essentially calling them intellectually inferior, IMO.
Why would you use flying like superman as an example? We're talking about something Westerner's have done, and is therefore possible. It's hard to take you seriously when you make comparisons like that.
Posts: 1138 | Registered: Nov 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:By the fact that Westerner's did do all these things that you claim the Aborigines weren't "capable" of doing, you are essentially calling them intellectually inferior, IMO.
No, they are acknowledging a lot of geographic and environmental factors that affect how groups advance technologically.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
| IP: Logged |
The option was there for them to move to other continents, to extend their reach. Or were they too stupid for that too?
Environmental factors?
Right, because no-one could even build up a society in Australia. I'm typing this from a cave on a rock, and it's magically getting transmuted to this forum by the power of God, because he pities us for not being able to build a civilisation.
I mean, you can't build a house out of boomerang's. Posts: 1138 | Registered: Nov 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:It seems the first post in this thread was from pH who was vaguely complaining about having to view pornography on his/her way to Target, but beyond that, everything is a little vague. There seems to be a substantial lack of setup here that would allow anyone to comment intelligently on the subject.
Is this a hypothetical? Is this based on an extension of comments found in another thread that I missed? Is this based on a news article? Is this based on pure speculation of what could happen, but so far hasn't? Is this based on personal experience, and if so what was that personal experience?
I can certainly comment on other people's responses, but I have no idea what the original comment was.
Are we referring to normal video systems now found in many mini-Vans and SUVs?
Well, I was not aware that I had to sketch out the entire situation for you. Yes, this indeed happened. It was my personal experience a couple of nights ago that while driving to Target, I pulled up behind a man in some kind of car (maybe a Cadillac), who had three DVD screens in his car, two of which were deliberately positioned so that only people outside the car could view them, as I saw when I later pulled up next to the car.
quote:Originally posted by Robin Kaczmarczyk: I have a dream:
When one day, Ron Jeremy and his legions will be able to broadcast on daytime t.v.!
My threory on hard core pornography is that only closeted gay men really like it. The whole thing (except for the lesbian ones, acting like men by the way) is centered around the male genitalia.
quote:Why would you use flying like superman as an example? We're talking about something Westerner's have done, and is therefore possible. It's hard to take you seriously when you make comparisons like that.
Because the more subtle analogies already offered seemed to escape your comprehension.
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
| IP: Logged |
I think that you are failing to take into account the fact that many elements are necessary for a culture to reach a level of technological sophistication. Among them are access to other cultures, grain with kernels of a certain size and nutritional value, herd animals that are both useful and domesticable. And these are just a few. Far from saying that aborogines were intellectually inferior, this just points out that geographic and environmenetal factors for early cultures play a critical role.
I suggest you read Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.
Posts: 11187 | Registered: Sep 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:My threory on hard core pornography is that only closeted gay men really like it
Hmm, well my girlfriend is going to be shocked. SHOCKED!
'Cause, well, since no one else has come right out and said it: I like porn. If this makes me a pervert, well, I'm cool with that. Hell, I've been called much worse. As long as I'm happy, my loved ones are happy and I ain't hurtin' no one, nobody best be stickin' their snouts in my porn box and shuttin' down da fun.
I don't know about elsewhere, but in Houston it is not an uncommon thing to see porn being proudly displayed in in your friendly neighborhood vehicle. As far as I have heard, it is illegal, and punishable by fines, but typically, the kinds of people that play porn on LCD screens from the inside of their tricked out Escalades with spinners are not the type of people that the police will willingly pull over for non-violent offenses.
So we just learn to live with it. Laugh at it when you see it and if your of the mind, ride real close and enjoy. If you have kids in the car, the odds are that they aren't going to be seeing the naughtiness for long enough to understand, much less form violent associations with love-making.
Posts: 2596 | Registered: Jan 2006
| IP: Logged |
posted
KMB makes an excellent point, but there are cultural factors as well which don't necessarily imply that given cultures which aren't as developed are unintelligent or inferior.
Certain governments, religious, and societal values can lead to technological progress and others retard it or keep it at a statis. Also, different governments/tribes may have different policies on maintaining isolationism. This isn't always the case, as there are a LOT of factors involved, but the cultural elements can't necessarily be discarded.
Posts: 484 | Registered: Feb 2006
| IP: Logged |
The option was there for them to move to other continents, to extend their reach. Or were they too stupid for that too?
Environmental factors?
Right, because no-one could even build up a society in Australia. I'm typing this from a cave on a rock, and it's magically getting transmuted to this forum by the power of God, because he pities us for not being able to build a civilisation.
Bang your head all you want, cde.
The point is that there were no domesticable plants or animals suitable for agriculture in Australia prior to European presence there. That says NOTHING bad about the people who lived there. The same effect can be seen in the Americas: there was no large animal suitable for domestication at the time, and the plants were not as useful agriculturally from a staples perspective (i.e., corn has much lower protein than wheat or rice).
Frankly, until you deign to at least try to present some evidence, your head banging frustration is very silly. You're basically mad because we're not taking your word for something which many of us have read contrary reports from far more authoritative sources.
Please, cite something to tell us why we should take your word over, say, Jared Diamond's.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
| IP: Logged |
quote:I suggest you read Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.
I plan to. And another book with it.
Someone, to buy two books together from Amazon.com, can I get the p&h cost cheaper by buying two books together, without them being from the same seller? Or does this just not apply to Amazon, and I'm thinking of eBay maybe?
Posts: 1138 | Registered: Nov 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
You have clearly never seen hardcore pornography.
Take any non-lesbian porn movie and delete every scene that focuses on a penis. In 99% of them you'll be left with a few scenes of a couples talking in a kitchen and three or four of the credits.
[ June 19, 2006, 08:35 PM: Message edited by: Chris Bridges ]
Posts: 7790 | Registered: Aug 2000
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Chris Bridges: You have clearly never seen hardcore pornography.
Take any non-lesbian porn movie and delete every scene that focuses on a penis. In 99% of them you'll be left with a few scenes of a couples talking in a kitchen and three or four of the credits.
I'm no expert on sex, but I'm pretty sure that any time a straight couple gets naked, there's at least one penis involved.
I've looked at my own penis many a time, I suppose that makes me totally gay.
quote:Originally posted by Chris Bridges: You have clearly never seen hardcore pornography.
Take any non-lesbian porn movie and delete every scene that focuses on a penis. In 99% of them you'll be left with a few scenes of a couples talking in a kitchen and three or four of the credits.
I dunno, most of the porn I've seen focused on a penis doing something related to the female body.
posted
No easy way to discuss without getting far beyond the boundaries of this topic and well past the comfort levels of this forum. Suffice it to say that searching for porn that isn't solely concerned with gratifying the male in the scene is a difficult road. They're out there, but not as many as there used to be. Porn as an industry is quickly turning into exactly what anti-porn activists always said it was, which is really depressing.
Posts: 7790 | Registered: Aug 2000
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Noemon: [qb] Elaborate? What she said was pretty straight forward. If a group has developed the capacity to do horrible thing X, yet refrains from doing it, there is virtue there. If the group never develops the capacity to do horrible thing X, there is no virtue in not doing it.
It wasn't especially virtuous of the Athenians to refrain from using tactical nukes on Persia during the wars between them. There was no restraint at work that kept them from doing so; they just didn't have the technological capacity to even conceive of it, let alone to build the bomb and the delivery system for it.
In other words, they weren't smart enough?
You think that the Greeks were stupid? What a bizarre notion.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
| IP: Logged |
posted
What, the Aborigines are supposed to have made a conscious choice to not develop metal working and agriculture? How ridiculous. They didn't do so because they had the bad luck to land on a continent where there was no useful intermediate. You might as well argue that elephants have made a conscious choice not to evolve wings.
As for moving to other continents, no, in fact they were not smart enough. They came from other continents, and the reason they did was that they got chucked out. There wasn't room for them to go back against stronger, hostile peoples.
By the way, GGS mentions that the Australian aborigines managed the interesting trick of actually losing some technology, to wit, the bow. It's found in the oldest settlements, but not newer ones.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
| IP: Logged |
quote:2. It's primary use was for hunting, though not neccessarily hitting the animal itself (what would be the point of that with an instrument designed to come back?)
As I understand it, it's only the toys that are designed to return. Boomerangs intended to be used as weapons don't return.
Posts: 2849 | Registered: Feb 2002
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Stephan: My threory on hard core pornography is that only closeted gay men really like it. The whole thing (except for the lesbian ones, acting like men by the way) is centered around the male genitalia.
Besides being incredibly naive about pornography and sexuality in general, your claim is offensive in its attempt to use gay men as a scapegoat for your prudery. Either you're so irrationally afraid of homosexuality that you can't even conceive of a man viewing a penis without actually desiring it on some level, or you think that being gay itself is a negative and therefore zing! you sure got those porn lovers, heh heh heh, closet homos the lot of them.
There are two separate attractions in pornography (which also hold true for most forms of vicarious entertainment). There is the object of desire, and there is the stand-in for the viewer. In straight porn, only the viewer knows which is which for himself or herself. I'm certainly not claiming sexuality is a cut and dried dichotomy, but I think I'm safe in saying that, in general, if you identify with the man and desire the woman, you're probably straight. Without getting too graphic, your claim is almost as ridiculous as saying that only the mouths of closeted gay men water when watching commercials of a man eating a rich chocolate cake.
Posts: 6394 | Registered: Dec 1999
| IP: Logged |
It seems that perversion seems to be relative to the eye of the beholder.
For instance, the general discussion here (to me) seems fairly perverted on my scale, and yet to others it is a perfectly rational debate.
So instead of grappling each other's throats over a subject that we will never agree on, why don't we turn our efforts to more constructive discussions elsewhere on the forum?
Then again, to some of you this may seems a perfectly constructive and important factor to your well-being, to prove your point to those who simply will not listen.
It's all relative!
I repeat, no offense intended.Posts: 292 | Registered: Jun 2006
| IP: Logged |
posted
The subjects that we'll never agree on are where some of the most constructive discussions take place, in my experience. If the content bothers you (the royal you), then you simply don't click on the thread. The power of choice, and all that.
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
Topics like this one make me wish that we had an adult portion of the forum. For intelligent discussion of these issues--not for hookups and titillation.
Posts: 2880 | Registered: Jun 2004
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Wink]](wink.gif)
![[Wall Bash]](graemlins/wallbash.gif)
