The government has something to gain from legalization and regulation of prostitution too. Just think of how much tax money the IRS can collect.
ed21x
Diamond Member
- Oct 12, 2001
- 5,411
- 8
- 81
As much as I love your logic, you have to understand that another role the government plays involes the regulation of society to maintain a somewhat decent social and physical standard of living. This is where things gets complicated as we try to find some balance between anarchy and totalitarianism where we fin the concequences of each side fairly undesireable. In terms of analyzing these socalled 'victimless' crimes individually, in theory they only affect the individual and no one else. However, looking at any environment, heck even in other nations where drugs and prostitution are given free reign, and you'll end up seeing why the far reaching affects of widespread poverty and crime can affect an entire city rather than just isolated cases. You see, drugs are addictive. They influence the ligand-gated Ion channals in your brain, thus requireing you to maintain that habit. Even with awesome willpower, after you have started taking it, you endanger your life the second you attempt to stop. This eventually leads to being enslaved by the drugs that will override any other priority in life and lead to poverty and other affects that can deningrate the entire community.
Amused
Elite Member
- Apr 14, 2001
- 57,354
- 19,534
- 146
Ah, the nanny-state defense. It completely falls apart when one realizes that nanny-state laws only lead to MORE crime and MORE poverty as vast underground black markets popup to fill the demand.
Ask any non-drug user why they do not use drugs, and not a single one will list "they are illegal" as the primary reason. The illegality of drugs has stopped no one from becoming addicted, much less trying their drug of choice. It has not even made a dent in availability.
The same goes for prostitution. Every single town in the US has a thriving prosititution/escort industry. Yet the practice is illegal. Ask any man who does not pay for sex why he doesn't, and again, the fact that is illegal will not be any of the primary reasons.
The fact of the matter is, beyond the violation to indiviual rights, these laws actually cause more harm than good. Making harming oneself a crime does NOTHING to stop people from harming themselves. It does, however, make the supply of these illegal trades a VERY dangerous business that harms far more than just those who choose to harm themselves.
When was the last time you saw liquor dealers doing drive bys on each other? When was the last time you saw people killing each other over liquor?
During prohibition.
yukichigai
Diamond Member
- Apr 23, 2003
- 6,404
- 0
- 76
The situations you describe occur in non-regulated locales. In many cases drugs and prostitution are still illegal, just merely unenforced. As such it is still the domain of organized crime and subject to the secondary effects which come with any segment of organized crime. If a once-illegal act becomes both legal and regulated the criminal element surrounding it almost completely evaporates. The best examples of this can be found in Nevada: Gambling and Prostitution. By and far most of said activities which take place in Nevada involve nothing shady or illegal. Gambling is more of a tourist thing than an underground off-the-books thing.
The reason why illegal activites lead to a degredation of conditions in areas where they take place is because of the very fact that the acts are illegal. Chances are that someone who deals and sells Heroin on a large scale is also involved in a number of other illegal activities, simply because the "venture captial" necessary to start a large scale drug operation is not a small amount by any means. Unless you win the lottery the only way for most people to acquire that much money is to participate in other illegal activites. And crime does attract crime, as the saying goes. If one area gains a reputation for being able to facilitate illegal transactions without risk of police interferrance then other criminals will go there.
Look at the United States' experiment with Prohibition. Before there were problems with drinking on the job, drinking and driving, etc. After Prohibition went into effect the same problems existed, albeit slightly less common, but now with the involvment of organized crime. Clearly the alternative was worse, and Prohibition was later lifted.
The question of legalizing something boils down to whether the rewards are worth the downsides. If what has been shown in Nevada is any indicator -- and I think it is -- then legalizing prostitution is definitely worth it.
PricklyPete
Lifer
- Sep 17, 2002
- 14,582
- 162
- 106
Skoorb is a lucky man considering how quickly you realized your position on this subject was based on your moral perspective and not someone's rights as a person. I have a hell of a time trying to get my girlfriend to realize this.
0roo0roo
No Lifer
- Sep 21, 2002
- 64,795
- 84
- 91
women protected and regulated instead of left out on the streets to be preyed on my psychos? no brainer. only righteous religious wacks who pretend that prostitution doesn't happen because its illegal can live with the higher level of suffering such moralistic laws actually create. u know.. laws for punishing sinners. if a sinner suffers so be it etc. a certain sadism.
EXman
Lifer
- Jul 12, 2001
- 20,079
- 15
- 81
Only people who give a fsck about morals and cannot control their behavior go with the flow and do whatever they please and don't look at the bigger picture here. Making this availible and trying to take the stigma away will surely lead to a decline in values and probably a increase in divorce rates. Can't you people just control yourself? I'd say most people here don't do lots of things because they are illegal but they would if it was. Do you see a hot girl on the street and throw her down and do her? No you don't. You have some control. Get a grip (see below)
Buy a bottle of jurgens it's cheaper, it won't give most people a rash, and afterwards you can just spend that money on a new hard drive for your ever growing pr0n collection. And your wife won't take %50 of the $, the car, the house, the kids, the damn dog, and slash your wiener off in the middle of the night!
0roo0roo
No Lifer
- Sep 21, 2002
- 64,795
- 84
- 91
Originally posted by: EXman
Only people who give a fsck about morals and cannot control their behavior go with the flow and do whatever they please and don't look at the bigger picture here. Making this availible and trying to take the stigma away will surely lead to a decline in values and probably a increase in divorce rates. Can't you people just control yourself? I'd say most people here don't do lots of things because they are illegal but they would if it was. Do you see a hot girl on the street and throw her down and do her? No you don't. You have some control. Get a grip (see below)
Buy a bottle of jurgens it's cheaper, it won't give most people a rash, and afterwards you can just spend that money on a new hard drive for your ever growing pr0n collection. And your wife won't take %50 of the $, the car, the house, the kids, the damn dog, and slash your wiener off in the middle of the night!
are divorce rates higher in countries with legal prostitution and comparable standards of living? i truely doubt it goes past our 50% mark.. its like the abstinence only education debate. its not really a debate at all, all the data shows that teaching children only abstinence leads to higher desease/birth rates, yet the righteous still support such programs. to them, the "bigger picture" of their stand actually causing more total suffering doesn't matter. righteous moral sadism allows the religious to ignore the suffernig they cause in people they don't consider worthy. for another example look at aids and people/religious groups who actively fight against distributing contraception.
a little bit of bertrand russel on this. remember it was written long ago.
The conception of Sin which is bound up with Christian ethics is one that does an extraordinary amount of harm, since it affords people an outlet for their sadism which they believe to be legitimate, and even noble. Take, for example, the question of the prevention of syphilis. It is known that, by precautions taken in advance, the danger of contracting this disease can be made negligible. Christians, however, object to the dissemination of knowledge of this fact, since they hold it good that sinners should be punished. They hold this so good that they are even willing that punishment should extend to the wives and children of sinners. There are in the world at the present moment many thousands of children suffering from congenital syphilis who would never have been born but for the desire of Christians to see sinners punished. I cannot understand how doctrines leading us to this fiendish cruelty can be considered to have any good effects upon morals.
It is not only in regard to sexual behaviour but also in regard to knowledge on sex subjects that the attitude of Christians is dangerous to human welfare. Every person who has taken the trouble to study the question in an unbiased spirit knows that the artificial ignorance on sex subjects which orthodox Christians attempt to enforce upon the young is extremely dangerous to mental and physical health, and causes in those who pick up their knowledge by the way of "improper" talk, as most children do, an attitude that sex is in itself indecent and ridiculous. I do not think there can be any defense for the view that knowledge is ever undesirable. I should not put barriers in the way of the acquisition of knowledge by anybody at any age. But in the particular case of sex knowledge there are much weightier arguments in its favor than in the case of most other knowledge. A person is much less likely to act wisely when he is ignorant than when he is instructed, and it is ridiculous to give young people a sense of sin because they have a natural curiosity about an important matter.
Every boy is interested in trains. Suppose we told him that an interest in trains is wicked; suppose we kept his eyes bandaged whenever he was in a train or on a railway station; suppose we never allowed the word "train" to be mentioned in his presence and preserved an impenetrable mystery as to the means by which he is transported from one place to another. The result would not be that he would cease to be interested in trains; on the contrary, he would become more interested than ever but would have a morbid sense of sin, because this interest had been represented to him as improper. Every boy of active intelligence could by this means be rendered in a greater or less degree neurasthenic. This is precisely what is done in the matter of sex; but, as sex is more interesting than trains, the results are worse. Almost every adult in a Christian community is more or less diseased nervously as a result of the taboo on sex knowledge when he or she was young. And the sense of sin which is thus artificially implanted is one of the causes of cruelty, timidity, and stupidity in later life. There is no rational ground of any sort or kind in keeping a child ignorant of anything that he may wish to know, whether on sex or on any other matter. And we shall never get a sane population until this fact is recognized in early education, which is impossible so long as the churches are able to control educational politics.
Leaving these comparatively detailed objections on one side, it is clear that the fundamental doctrines of Christianity demand a great deal of ethical perversion before they can be accepted. The world, we are told, was created by a God who is both good and omnipotent. Before He created the world He foresaw all the pain and misery that it would contain; He is therefore responsible for all of it. It is useless to argue that the pain in the world is due to sin. In the first place, this is not true; it is not sin that causes rivers to overflow their banks or volcanoes to erupt. But even if it were true, it would make no difference. If I were going to beget a child knowing that the child was going to be a homicidal maniac, I should be responsible for his crimes. If God knew in advance the sins of which man would be guilty, He was clearly responsible for all the consequences of those sins when He decided to create man. The usual Christian argument is that the suffering in the world is a purification for sin and is therefore a good thing. This argument is, of course, only a rationalization of sadism; but in any case it is a very poor argument. I would invite any Christian to accompany me to the children's ward of a hospital, to watch the suffering that is there being endured, and then to persist in the assertion that those children are so morally abandoned as to deserve what they are suffering. In order to bring himself to say this, a man must destroy in himself all feelings of mercy and compassion. He must, in short, make himself as cruel as the God in whom he believes. No man who believes that all is for the best in this suffering world can keep his ethical values unimpaired, since he is always having to find excuses for pain and misery. http://www.luminary.us/russell/religionciv.html#sex
0roo0roo
No Lifer
- Sep 21, 2002
- 64,795
- 84
- 91
and more on righteousness http://www.luminary.us/russell/religionciv.html#righteousness
The Idea of Righteousness
The third psychological impulse which is embodied in religion is that
which has led to the conception of righteousness. I am aware that many
freethinkers treat this conception with great respect and hold that it
should be preserved in spite of the decay of dogmatic religion. I cannot
agree with them on this point. The psychological analysis of the idea of
righteousness seems to me to show that it is rooted in undesirable
passions and ought not to be strengthened by the imprimatur of
reason. Righteousness and unrighteousness must be taken together; it is
impossible to stress the one without stressing the other also. Now,
what is "unrighteousness" in practise? It is in practise behaviour
of a kind disliked by the herd. By calling it unrighteousness, and by
arranging an elaborate system of ethics around this conception, the herd
justifies itself in wreaking punishment upon the objects of its own dislike,
while at the same time, since the herd is righteous by definition, it
enhances its own self- esteem at the very moment when it lets loose its
impulse to cruelty. This is the psychology of lynching, and of the other
ways in which criminals are punished. The essence of the
conception of righteousness, therefore, is to afford an outlet for sadism by
cloaking cruelty as justice.
But, it will be said, the account you have been giving of righteousness
is wholly inapplicable to the Hebrew prophets, who, after all, on your own
showing, invented the idea. There is truth in this: righteousness in the
mouths of the Hebrew prophets meant what was approved by them and Yahweh.
One finds the same attitude expressed in the Acts of the Apostles, where
the Apostles began a pronouncement with the words "For it seemed good to
the Holy Ghost, and to us" (Acts xv, 28). This kind of individual
certainty as to God's tastes and opinions cannot, however, be made the
basis of any institution. That has always been the difficulty with which
Protestantism has had to contend: a new prophet could maintain that his
revelation was more authentic than those of his predecessors, and
there was nothing in the general outlook of Protestantism to show that this
claim was invalid. Consequently Protestantism split into innumerable
sects, which weakened one another; and there is reason to suppose that a
hundred years hence Catholicism will be the only effective representation
of the Christian faith. In the Catholic Church inspiration such as the
prophets enjoyed has its place; but it is recognized that phenomena
which look rather like genuine divine inspiration may be inspired by the
Devil, and it is the business of the church to discriminate, just as it is the
business of the art connoisseur to know a genuine Leonardo from a forgery.
In this way revelation becomes institutionalized at the same time.
Righteousness is what the church approves, and unrighteousness is what it
disapproves. Thus the effective part of the conception of
righteousness is a justification of herd antipathy.
It would seem, therefore, that the three human impulses embodied in
religion are fear, conceit, and hatred. The purpose of religion, one may
say, is to give an air of respectability to these passions, provided they
run in certain channels. It is because these passions make, on the whole,
for human misery that religion is a force for evil, since it
permits men to indulge these passions without restraint, where but for its
sanction they might, at least to a certain degree, control them.
I can imagine at this point an objection, not likely to be urged
perhaps by most orthodox believers but nevertheless worthy to be examined.
Hatred and fear, it may be said, are essential human characteristics;
mankind always has felt them and always will. The best that you can do
with them, I may be told, is to direct them into certain channels in which
they are less harmful than they would be in certain other channels. A
Christian theologian might say that their treatment by the church in
analogous to its treatment of the sex impulse, which it deplores. It
attempts to render concupiscence innocuous by confining it within the
bounds of matrimony. So, it may be said, if mankind must inevitably feel
hatred, it is better to direct this hatred against those who are really
harmful, and this is precisely what the church does by its conception of
righteousness.
To this contention there are two replies - one comparatively
superficial; the other going to the root of the matter. The superficial
reply is that the church's conception of righteousness is not the best
possible; the fundamental reply is that hatred and fear can, with our
present psychological knowledge and our present industrial technique, be
eliminated altogether from human life.
To take the first point first. The church's conception of
righteousness is socially undesirable in various ways - first and foremost
in its depriciation of intelligence and science. This defect is inherited
from the Gospels. Christ tells us to become as little children, but little
children cannot understand the differential calculus, or the principles of
currency, or the modern methods of combating disease. To acquire such
knowledge is no part of our duty, according to the church. The church no
longer contends that knowledge is in itself sinful, though it did
so in its palmy days; but the acquisition of knowledge, even though not
sinful, is dangerous, since it may lead to a pride of intellect, and
hence to a questioning of the Christian dogma. Take, for example, two
men, one of whom has stamped out yellow fever throughout some large
region in the tropics but has in the course of his labors had occasional
relations with women to whom he was not married; while the other has been
lazy and shiftless, begetting a child a year until his wife died of
exhaustion and taking so little care of his children that half of them
died from preventable causes, but never indulging in illicit sexual
intercourse. Every good Christian must maintain that the second of these men
is more virtuous than the first. Such an attitude is, of course,
superstitious and totally contrary to reason. Yet something of this absurdity is
inevitable so long as avoidance of sin is thought more important than
positive merit, and so long as the importance of knowledge as a help to a useful
life is not recognized.
The second and more fundamental objection to the utilization of fear
and hatred practised by the church is that these emotions can now
be almost wholly eliminated from human nature by educational, economic, and
political reforms. The educational reforms must be the basis, since men
who feel hatred and fear will also admire these emotions and wish to
perpetuate them, although this admiration and wish will probably be
unconscious, as it is in the ordinary Christian. An education designed to eliminate
fear is by no means difficult to create. It is only necessary to treat
a child with kindness, to put him in an environment where initiative is
possible without disastrous results, and to save him from contact with
adults who have irrational terrors, whether of the dark, of mice, or
of social revolution. A child must also not be subject to severe
punishment, or to threats, or to grave and excessive reproof. To save a child from
hatred is a somewhat more elaborate business. Situations arousing jealousy
must be very carefully avoided by means of scrupulous and exact justice as
between different children. A child must feel himself the object of warm
affection on the part of some at least of the adults with whom he has to
do, and he must not be thwarted in his natural activities and curiosities
except when danger to life or health is concerned. In particular, there
must be no taboo on sex knowledge, or on conversation about matters which
conventional people consider improper. If these simple precepts are observed
from the start, the child will be fearless and friendly.
On entering adult life, however, a young person so educated will find
himself or herself plunged into a world full of injustice, full of
cruelty, full of preventable misery. The injustice, the cruelty, and
the misery that exist in the modern world are an inheritance from the past,
and their ultimate source is economic, since life-and-death competition for
the means of subsistence was in former days inevitable. It is not
inevitable in our age. With our present industrial technique we can, if we choose,
provide a tolerable subsistence for everybody. We could also secure that the
world's population should be stationary if we were not prevented by the
political influence of churches which prefer war, pestilence, and
famine to contraception. The knowledge exists by which universal
happiness can be secured; the chief obstacle to its utilization for that
purpose is the teaching of religion. Religion prevents our children from
having a rational education; religion prevents us from removing the
fundamental causes of war; religion prevents us from teaching the ethic of
scientific co-operation in place of the old fierce doctrines of sin and
punishment. It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age;
but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the
door, and this dragon is religion.
The Idea of Righteousness
The third psychological impulse which is embodied in religion is that
which has led to the conception of righteousness. I am aware that many
freethinkers treat this conception with great respect and hold that it
should be preserved in spite of the decay of dogmatic religion. I cannot
agree with them on this point. The psychological analysis of the idea of
righteousness seems to me to show that it is rooted in undesirable
passions and ought not to be strengthened by the imprimatur of
reason. Righteousness and unrighteousness must be taken together; it is
impossible to stress the one without stressing the other also. Now,
what is "unrighteousness" in practise? It is in practise behaviour
of a kind disliked by the herd. By calling it unrighteousness, and by
arranging an elaborate system of ethics around this conception, the herd
justifies itself in wreaking punishment upon the objects of its own dislike,
while at the same time, since the herd is righteous by definition, it
enhances its own self- esteem at the very moment when it lets loose its
impulse to cruelty. This is the psychology of lynching, and of the other
ways in which criminals are punished. The essence of the
conception of righteousness, therefore, is to afford an outlet for sadism by
cloaking cruelty as justice.
But, it will be said, the account you have been giving of righteousness
is wholly inapplicable to the Hebrew prophets, who, after all, on your own
showing, invented the idea. There is truth in this: righteousness in the
mouths of the Hebrew prophets meant what was approved by them and Yahweh.
One finds the same attitude expressed in the Acts of the Apostles, where
the Apostles began a pronouncement with the words "For it seemed good to
the Holy Ghost, and to us" (Acts xv, 28). This kind of individual
certainty as to God's tastes and opinions cannot, however, be made the
basis of any institution. That has always been the difficulty with which
Protestantism has had to contend: a new prophet could maintain that his
revelation was more authentic than those of his predecessors, and
there was nothing in the general outlook of Protestantism to show that this
claim was invalid. Consequently Protestantism split into innumerable
sects, which weakened one another; and there is reason to suppose that a
hundred years hence Catholicism will be the only effective representation
of the Christian faith. In the Catholic Church inspiration such as the
prophets enjoyed has its place; but it is recognized that phenomena
which look rather like genuine divine inspiration may be inspired by the
Devil, and it is the business of the church to discriminate, just as it is the
business of the art connoisseur to know a genuine Leonardo from a forgery.
In this way revelation becomes institutionalized at the same time.
Righteousness is what the church approves, and unrighteousness is what it
disapproves. Thus the effective part of the conception of
righteousness is a justification of herd antipathy.
It would seem, therefore, that the three human impulses embodied in
religion are fear, conceit, and hatred. The purpose of religion, one may
say, is to give an air of respectability to these passions, provided they
run in certain channels. It is because these passions make, on the whole,
for human misery that religion is a force for evil, since it
permits men to indulge these passions without restraint, where but for its
sanction they might, at least to a certain degree, control them.
I can imagine at this point an objection, not likely to be urged
perhaps by most orthodox believers but nevertheless worthy to be examined.
Hatred and fear, it may be said, are essential human characteristics;
mankind always has felt them and always will. The best that you can do
with them, I may be told, is to direct them into certain channels in which
they are less harmful than they would be in certain other channels. A
Christian theologian might say that their treatment by the church in
analogous to its treatment of the sex impulse, which it deplores. It
attempts to render concupiscence innocuous by confining it within the
bounds of matrimony. So, it may be said, if mankind must inevitably feel
hatred, it is better to direct this hatred against those who are really
harmful, and this is precisely what the church does by its conception of
righteousness.
To this contention there are two replies - one comparatively
superficial; the other going to the root of the matter. The superficial
reply is that the church's conception of righteousness is not the best
possible; the fundamental reply is that hatred and fear can, with our
present psychological knowledge and our present industrial technique, be
eliminated altogether from human life.
To take the first point first. The church's conception of
righteousness is socially undesirable in various ways - first and foremost
in its depriciation of intelligence and science. This defect is inherited
from the Gospels. Christ tells us to become as little children, but little
children cannot understand the differential calculus, or the principles of
currency, or the modern methods of combating disease. To acquire such
knowledge is no part of our duty, according to the church. The church no
longer contends that knowledge is in itself sinful, though it did
so in its palmy days; but the acquisition of knowledge, even though not
sinful, is dangerous, since it may lead to a pride of intellect, and
hence to a questioning of the Christian dogma. Take, for example, two
men, one of whom has stamped out yellow fever throughout some large
region in the tropics but has in the course of his labors had occasional
relations with women to whom he was not married; while the other has been
lazy and shiftless, begetting a child a year until his wife died of
exhaustion and taking so little care of his children that half of them
died from preventable causes, but never indulging in illicit sexual
intercourse. Every good Christian must maintain that the second of these men
is more virtuous than the first. Such an attitude is, of course,
superstitious and totally contrary to reason. Yet something of this absurdity is
inevitable so long as avoidance of sin is thought more important than
positive merit, and so long as the importance of knowledge as a help to a useful
life is not recognized.
The second and more fundamental objection to the utilization of fear
and hatred practised by the church is that these emotions can now
be almost wholly eliminated from human nature by educational, economic, and
political reforms. The educational reforms must be the basis, since men
who feel hatred and fear will also admire these emotions and wish to
perpetuate them, although this admiration and wish will probably be
unconscious, as it is in the ordinary Christian. An education designed to eliminate
fear is by no means difficult to create. It is only necessary to treat
a child with kindness, to put him in an environment where initiative is
possible without disastrous results, and to save him from contact with
adults who have irrational terrors, whether of the dark, of mice, or
of social revolution. A child must also not be subject to severe
punishment, or to threats, or to grave and excessive reproof. To save a child from
hatred is a somewhat more elaborate business. Situations arousing jealousy
must be very carefully avoided by means of scrupulous and exact justice as
between different children. A child must feel himself the object of warm
affection on the part of some at least of the adults with whom he has to
do, and he must not be thwarted in his natural activities and curiosities
except when danger to life or health is concerned. In particular, there
must be no taboo on sex knowledge, or on conversation about matters which
conventional people consider improper. If these simple precepts are observed
from the start, the child will be fearless and friendly.
On entering adult life, however, a young person so educated will find
himself or herself plunged into a world full of injustice, full of
cruelty, full of preventable misery. The injustice, the cruelty, and
the misery that exist in the modern world are an inheritance from the past,
and their ultimate source is economic, since life-and-death competition for
the means of subsistence was in former days inevitable. It is not
inevitable in our age. With our present industrial technique we can, if we choose,
provide a tolerable subsistence for everybody. We could also secure that the
world's population should be stationary if we were not prevented by the
political influence of churches which prefer war, pestilence, and
famine to contraception. The knowledge exists by which universal
happiness can be secured; the chief obstacle to its utilization for that
purpose is the teaching of religion. Religion prevents our children from
having a rational education; religion prevents us from removing the
fundamental causes of war; religion prevents us from teaching the ethic of
scientific co-operation in place of the old fierce doctrines of sin and
punishment. It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age;
but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the
door, and this dragon is religion.
Kadarin
Lifer
- Nov 23, 2001
- 44,296
- 16
- 81
There is nothing wrong with your personal opinion on sex. However, do you feel that you have the inherent right to force that opinion on others? Or are you ok with the fact that people will disagree with you?
For myself: I have never and strongly doubt I will ever go to a prostitute for sex. On the other hand, I feel that it should be legal (to reduce crime, to improve health, and as a source of revenue for government from taxes and fees).
0roo0roo
No Lifer
- Sep 21, 2002
- 64,795
- 84
- 91
Originally posted by: jagec
Holy...
Dude, you've GOT to be violating some copyright law
haha, yea its part of one of his books. but it was published in 1930? think it might be public domain now.
About the Author
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, Viscount Amberley, born in Wales, May 18, 1872. Educated at home and at Trinity College, Cambridge. During World War I, served four months in prison as a pacifist, where he wrote Introduction To Mathematical Philosophy. In 1910, published first volume of Principia Mathematica with Alfred Whitehead. Visited Russia and lectured on philosophy at the University of Peking in 1920. Returned to England and, with his wife, ran a progressive school for young children in Sussex from 1927-1932. Came to the United States, where he taught philosophy successively at the University of Chicago, University of California at Los Angeles, Harvard, and City College of New York. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. Has been active in disarmament and anti-nuclear-testing movements while continuing to add to his large number of published books which include Philosophical Essays (1910); The ABC of Relativity (1925); A History of Western Philosophy (1946); Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948); and The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (1967). For a chronological list of Russell's principal works see The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell (Simon and Schuster). http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671203231/qid=1088401893
Judgement
Diamond Member
- Feb 8, 2001
- 3,815
- 0
- 0
Originally posted by: EXman
Only people who give a fsck about morals and cannot control their behavior go with the flow and do whatever they please and don't look at the bigger picture here. Making this availible and trying to take the stigma away will surely lead to a decline in values and probably a increase in divorce rates. Can't you people just control yourself? I'd say most people here don't do lots of things because they are illegal but they would if it was. Do you see a hot girl on the street and throw her down and do her? No you don't. You have some control. Get a grip (see below)
Buy a bottle of jurgens it's cheaper, it won't give most people a rash, and afterwards you can just spend that money on a new hard drive for your ever growing pr0n collection. And your wife won't take %50 of the $, the car, the house, the kids, the damn dog, and slash your wiener off in the middle of the night!
You should seriously stop arguing in this thread, everytime you post I lose more and more respect for you and your opinion. The simple fact that you don't agree with prostition does not give you the right to dictate to rest of the nation that it should be illegal and a punishable offense; there is no victim and both parties are willing as long as the profession is being regulated. Who are you, or anyone else for that matter, to decide the morals for the entire nation and what should and shouldn't be legal. The government isn't (shouldn't be) here to set the moral standards for the nation.
Amused
Elite Member
- Apr 14, 2001
- 57,354
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Originally posted by: EXman
Only people who give a fsck about morals and cannot control their behavior go with the flow and do whatever they please and don't look at the bigger picture here. Making this availible and trying to take the stigma away will surely lead to a decline in values and probably a increase in divorce rates. Can't you people just control yourself? I'd say most people here don't do lots of things because they are illegal but they would if it was. Do you see a hot girl on the street and throw her down and do her? No you don't. You have some control. Get a grip (see below)
Buy a bottle of jurgens it's cheaper, it won't give most people a rash, and afterwards you can just spend that money on a new hard drive for your ever growing pr0n collection. And your wife won't take %50 of the $, the car, the house, the kids, the damn dog, and slash your wiener off in the middle of the night!
The key here is history. Are people in the US more, or less moral than they were in the 1890s and before? Before the 1890s, nearly every town in every state had legal brothels, even our nation's capital.
The problem with arguments like this, be it prostitution, the war on drugs, gun control, welfare, etc is that people tend to ignore history. The question to ask is have the new laws really made anything better... and at what cost?
Fact: Morality is arguably LESS strict today in the general population than it was when legal protitution was nation wide. But making prostitution illegal has done nothing to stop or even slow the practice. It has only driven it underground and caused disease and abuse to be spread without check.
Correlation is against you in this case and utterly destroys your argument. The more laws against prostitution; the LOOSER our sexual morality as a society has become.
Fact: Drug abuse has not been affected by drug laws. In fact, abuse rates have followed education campaigns far more closely than any enforcement. All drug bans have done is driven the drug trade underground and into the hands of highly dangerous organized crime, thus causing far more damage than the drugs alone. To top it off, our freedoms and civil rights have taken huge hits in the effort to fight this "war."
It's time to face the fact that creating victimless crimes creates victims of us all.
yukichigai
Diamond Member
- Apr 23, 2003
- 6,404
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