> I'm just so surprised by how bad politics has become in the USA. It's like they want to have charia law... or Christian law as it were.
There are a lot of Americans who think the country's going to shit because of a lack of religion and morals and think they can MAGA by going hard that direction.
A good argument can be made that our lack of a unified morality (or at least more unified than today) led to better individual outcomes.
Sure there are aspects that needed to progress for a better change, no doubt about it.
But without a moral framework, many are either reluctant or ignorant of the extra work involved in making moral choices for oneself, and aiming not to succumb to a fad ideology (this goes for both sides), a false god as it were.
Well, they should probably start by having some morals themselves first. Many of the branches of Christianity are straight up scientology-scams only.. for example, what the hell is that “help setting up how much you can afford to donate regularly to church”?! Bishops and whatnot traveling on private jets!?
The sad thing is that any sane branch of Christianity should absolutely distance themselves from these lunatics, a bad apple.. yet they don’t.
There's loads of laws defining what permissible sexual behaviour is though?
This is only unusual in the sense that generally Western countries are in favour of porn. I think you could make a good argument against the universal availably of porn given its negative effects on the individuals that engage in it and on society as a whole – similar to arguments against drug use or prostitution.
I'm not saying I'm in favour of banning porn or anything, just that where we draw the line on what's permissible behaviour between consenting adults seems largely arbitrary and mostly down to cultural factors rather than a fundamental analysis of harm.
What are these negative effects on individuals? I often wonder if our lower violent crime rates compared to the past largely come from humans staying in and watching porn and playing video games.
There's the landed elite ski crowd in Utah, but I guess they just fly into their timeshare in park city for 5 days a year and don't much care what happens outside that idyllic vacation.
> I'm just so surprised by how bad politics has become in the USA. It's like they want to have charia law... or Christian law as it were.
The USA are diverse and laws greatly vary from state to state. Talking about "US politics" when a single state does something is absurd.
Furthermore, many European countries like France are about do the same thing with online porn, no later than this year, are you also going to accuse France of wanting to have "charia law"? That's preposterous. France couldn't be further from a very religious country.
I'm not saying these kind of laws are efficient at stopping minors from watching online porn, I'm just saying that your characterization of USA as a country is wrong.
I think, as a rule of thumb, it's reasonable to treat sexual laws as a "fingerprint" of a religious society. That doesn't mean there aren't exceptions. But when my state passed a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, the polling indicated that support for the measure was strongly divided along religious lines.
So it's not so much a division between religion and morality, but just an observed pattern of religions that happens to be applicable here.
Utah blocking porn is completely a religious issue. Just because the line between religious motivation and anything else isn't 100% black and white doesn't change that.
It's not that it's not 100% black and white. The line basically does not exist. What is the line between someone's personal morality influenced by a society that espouses a particular religion as opposed to whatever basic hacker news atheist liberal democrat morality or whatever? One is supposedly better apparently? The Utah law is clearly influenced by their religion but to distinguish that as religiously motivated as opposed to whatever motivation US coastal elite morality barfs out, it's ridiculous.
This law is religiously motivated because Utah politics usually represent the will of the Brighamites, the Mormon adherents to the corporation that owns the entity of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Or what has the More Good Foundation and other similar orgs been pushing for for the last 15 years?
> Where's the line between religious motivation and morality?
Religions are subcommunity groups, morality is interally driven.
Spain has a super left wing feminist coalition in power and wants to ban porn, prostitution, surrogacy all in the name of feminism. One of the biggest countries in Europe.
I think looking the world through the American conservative vs liberal goggles is just ignorance.
What is their argument? That porn objectifies women?
It does that to men too, but aside from that the majority of women in porn are there consensually, many make a ton more money than they could elsewhere. That is empowering to women! As long as there's no coercion, the woman wants to do it. What happened to my body my choice?
The book "renegade history of the United States" is a great read I recommend. It really goes into aspects of our history that is never covered in school and avoided in polite company. It is both enlightening and fascinating
Are you implying that this is a hypocritical stance for feminists to have? Why do American feminists speak for all feminists in the world?
Even if these were American feminists, you could make the argument that there is manipulation and coercion happening so the "my choice" part might be less than safe to assume. So a ban may be against human trafficking and coercion first and foremost.
> Are you implying that this is a hypocritical stance for feminists to have? Why do American feminists speak for all feminists in the world?
No, I'm asking a question in an attempt to understand.
> Even if these were American feminists, you could make the argument that there is manipulation and coercion happening so the "my choice" part might be less than safe to assume.
Unless you're arguing that any and all decisions are due to manipulation and coercion, then this doesn't get us anywhere and is a strawman version of the 'pro choice' argument. Of course there is manipulation and/or coercion in some cases (from what I've heard, it's a sickly large number at that). That is (IMHO) terrible and unethical and should not be legal. I doubt that anyone (or to avoid absolutes, very, very few people) arguing "pro choice" would take the position that there's no problem with that.
But what about situations where it's voluntary? Do you argue that there is no such situation? If there is any money involved at all, you could say that is "manipulation," but is it any less manipulation than any other job where the person wouldn't be doing it if there weren't some incentive? and does that make all jobs unethical and should be illegal?
Some certainly do, but I think it's important to separate two "pro" arguments as despite arriving at similar conclusion, they're quite different in reasoning:
1. Prostitution is liberating and empowering
2. Women should be able to choose what they do with their own bodies, even if it means prostituting them
For those truly arguing item 1, I couldn't say. That conclusion is certainly not self-evident to me and the chain of logic seems to include at some point something that is supposed to self-evident.
However some of the feminists that appear to argue item 1 are actually arguing item 2 but they're jumping to the conclusion.
I think that in general, as an citizen here that most people definitely think about laws as generally similar across states with the odd things like liquor laws frequently standing out. The current push towards emphasizing state's rights is a slippery slope the conservatives have been abusing quite handily like they did with the new ban on abortion. The minute they got invalidated Roe v. Wade, suddenly it immediately swung towards a federal ban on abortion. States rights are important but again, as a citizen, you know the couple things your neighbor state does differently but only recently has this felt like it split so far.
Sure, but in the context of society all laws exist to override personal decision making. Anything from speeding fines to marriage laws to corruption regulations. It's all about taking the autonomy away from the individual. RvW isn't unique in that regard.
I can't imagine why, with claims this juicy, you wouldn't share your sources. I'd recommend showing the data, or be prepared to defend these ideas without it.
