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const_cast 2 days ago

> First, you'll have to prove to me that weapons, porn, sex exploitation, and drugs like OxyContin aren't issues in the US, then we can keep talking.

No, I don't actually. Why not? Two major reasons:

1. You cannot naively equate things for free. You cannot claim porn is like narcotics without proving that first. I simply do not need to prove narcotics are good to show porn is fine.

2. When it comes to rights, we never, ever, take an approach of "it's bad until it's proven good". Ever. For example, I need not prove every single potential piece of speech is okay to advocate free speech. We take the inverse approach - all speech is fine, until it's not and we can prove it's not. I don't need to ask permission first. For example, yelling "fire!" in a theater isn't okay, but we reach that conclusion by proving it's bad - NOT by proving everything around it is good. Does that make sense? It's a sort of innocent until proven guilty approach.

We do not restrict rights without first proving doing so will be good. You are, implicitly, granted a right to do whatever - EXCEPT the stuff we've taken the time to blacklist.

So, if something is bad, that's something you need to prove if we want to restrict that right. I don't need to prove it's good, I implicitly have the right. For example, in practice, there's a lot of bad stuff I can do that I have the right to do. I have the right to watch a scary movie that will keep me up at night. I don't need to prove anything is good, and we don't need to write a law like "scary movies are good". YOU would need to prove they're bad, and then write a law like "scary movies are bad, no more scary movies".

pyman 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

You said there are no sex workers or people paying for sex in the US. I said, prove it. You can't because you're just talking nonsense.

> because these people barely exist in the US. I've never seen them, I've never seen anyone who's seen them

const_cast 2 days ago | parent [-]

> You said there are no sex workers or people paying for sex in the US. I said, prove it. You can't because you're just talking nonsense.

Well, that's not what I said, it appears you're trying to be dishonest.

You said there's people who "spend all their money" on porn and that daughters are increasingly becoming sex workers. I said this is rare, which is true.

What you're trying to do is say porn is bad by appealing to a worst case scenario. It's a common argumentative tactic people who don't really know how to argue use.

For example, cars are bad because people fly through windshields and paint the freeway with their brains. This is true, and does happen, but without a qualifier for how often it happens, it's worthless. This statement says absolutely nothing about how good or bad cars are.

But, to be clear, even if it did, that alone would not be enough to sacrifice any and all privacy and security. See, the problem here is you're making multiple levels of arguments, of which you cannot even justify the lowest level.

Making the argument that porn is bad is one argument, making the argument that this means we should sacrifice privacy or security is another argument, and a much more difficult one. You haven't even proved the more fundamental argument, so certainly you're a long way away from proving the more stringent one.

2 days ago | parent | prev [-]
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