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Joshua Katz's avatar

Indeed. I've begun to think the religious right is simpler than I used to think. They're unhappy, bored people who don't want others to enjoy anything. They're miserable and want to spread that. They mostly don't want to live insular lives, but they've locked themselves into a weird pact to do so and can't get out.

Also, I must point out that the Supreme Court used to gather once a month to watch movies and decide if they were obscene. Justice Harlan was nearly blind, so his clerks would narrate for him, while he said things like "By Jove! Extraordinary!"

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Nicholas Weininger's avatar

I wonder how many other emotive issues are affected by this same mental move of "X feels like it must be harmful, so when studies show that X is associated with harmful thing Y, I am not going to bother thinking about whether this is actually causal or not".

I read Tangle for news balance, and the editor, Isaac Saul, generally impresses me as a very careful thinker. But his recent thing about age verification laws falls straight into this trap. His deep dive cites a bunch of studies that say heavy porn use is associated with some bad outcome, but when you look at the study they are literally just reporting the association, not even trying to establish causation.

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Cathy Reisenwitz's avatar

So many things, I'd imagine. Single motherhood, singleness generally, and divorce come to mind.

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Matt Truesdail's avatar

Amen

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Andrew's avatar

I don’t really know how much combatting the stigma is achievable. I’m all for it but it seems like there’s just an unresolvable tension. Perhaps I just have a weak imagination but it really seems like an everyone gets a pony idea.

Curious on your thoughts on the somewhat related topic of ai here. It’s somewhat reduced my interest in only fans//fansly style content and I could imagine a world where it gets good enough to really reduce the market for parts of the online sw trade.

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