Yep, looks like all we need is a little more Jesus in our lives to cure the social degradation spearheaded by the blue state liberals. Lol!
Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code's religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds.
Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don't explicitly restrict gay marriage.
To get a better handle on other associations between social attitudes and pornography consumption, Edelman melded his data with a previous study on public attitudes toward religion.
States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement "I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage," bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement "AIDS might be God's punishment for immoral sexual behaviour."
"One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you're told you can't have this, then you want it more," Edelman says."
Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don't explicitly restrict gay marriage.
To get a better handle on other associations between social attitudes and pornography consumption, Edelman melded his data with a previous study on public attitudes toward religion.
States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement "I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage," bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement "AIDS might be God's punishment for immoral sexual behaviour."
"One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you're told you can't have this, then you want it more," Edelman says."
(a) My immediate thought was echoed in the comments section of the blog I found this article from-
"The study just shows that red staters are too dumb to know how to get their porn for free."
4 comments:
Aaron,
I wonder what the consumation of more porn entails.
In any case, John Duignan wrote a book about Scientology. A reviewer wrote of it:
"Psychiatry is pretty much the root of all evil, according to Scientology: at one stage, Duignan describes Miscavige raving about a US psychiatrists’ secret plan to turn a million acres of Alaska into a huge mental health colony. (We are not told whether the state’s Governor would be an administrator or an inmate of this icebound loony bin.)"
I thought it highly fitting and proper to bring this to your attention.
I'm Yours.
Aaron,
I began reading Ian McEwan's Saturday at the bookstore one hour ago, and I was immediately engrossed by the irony of the meaninglessness that pervades the work. Every page is saturated with absurdity: the identification of a fatal tumor, the belief that "there must be more to life than saving lives," the absolute lack of pretense about the fragility of bodies that separate us from nonbeing, the raising of a son utterly unlike his neurosurgeon father.
I love the book's scientific context. It lacks any superstitious pretense. It describes chilling scenes from the world without the slightest perturbation of the doctor's psychic equilibrium.
Ian McEwan is the British Albert Camus, updated for our generation. In painting vivid portraits of a meaningless life, we find ourselves gripped by a meaning that we sense in the periphery but cannot, ourselves, touch.
The doctor envies his blues musician son: carefree, eighteen, a boy who broke the traditional expectations of school, more school, and a medical degree in favor of other types of degrees--degrees of freedom that the father knows he can never have. With age, the probability narrows, as the omniscient narrator points out.
We read the book as if sitting on the shoulder of an angel (or devil), our attention steered this way and that to all that makes mundane life alive. We're close enough to overhear the doctor's thoughts, yet never so close as to become the doctor.
With no time for rhetoric and special effects, Ian's minimalism makes starkly clear that we are not his readers, there to be entertained, but students to be made wise. Enlightenment is only this: things are just as they are. They have always been.
The only novelty in the universe is the degrees of illusion that directly correspond to our degrees of mental and behavioral freedom.
What was it, Aaron, that allowed you to most clearly see the brutal reality of the world, devoid of any magic, mystery, or mysticism, apart from that endowed it by the delirious workings and comprehension occluding constraints of the mind?
Were you ever struck as powerfully by any particular event in your own life as I was when I realized that my chronically (indeed, dangerously) angry father was nothing but a stooge (or, as you would put it, an unknowing puppet) on life's stage, an invisible bit player in a stadium of faces condemned to suffer an illness that sears raw his psyche and spews molten destruction in an undifferentiated pool of invective too common to be mistaken for self-directed conscious activity? The puppetmaster--if there was one--is now dead, a formerly tall, thin alcoholic who beat his son, causing him to flee at the first opportunity. But geographical separation rarely reduces psychic distance. The pattern of abuse repeats itself. It is good that I am gay, for the violence will end with me. The genes will be propagated no further. The world will be better.
I wish that I were depressed--just a little, but not too much. Such suffering helps me to think, to write, to speak. One day, we will go to the Grand Canyon together, for the first time, and walk, and talk, for a long time.
I love that you seek to understand reality. I hope that you'll become a medical doctor (solving the problems of prestige and money) or a famous writer, but no matter what you do, you, like the rest of us, will only substitute one set of problems for others and, owing to our stable psychic makeups that we call personalities, that will never prove significantly better than the old ones. We're trapped by our genes, by our environment, by our thoughts. These are all elastic leashes, but such very short ones.
I'm so glad that you exist, Aaron. As I've always said, you--alone among those I've met on life's journey--understand.
Steve
PS Your computer is much faster than mine, and that won't change anytime soon. Freedom comes from relinquishing desire at one moment, or giving in at another. Freedom is guidance. May we both learn to navigate well.
Aaron,
Just when I thought that the Australians were genetically programmed criminals offloaded to the continent by the British, I saw this:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/03/02/record.prison.population/index.html
"Chilling," as Ian McEwan likes to say, always leaving us with the implication that there is absolutely nothing that can be done. We are powerless against the vast, impersonal forces against which we find ourselves in conflict.
In a word: BAM!!
Yours.
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