Re: Re: Truth Amidst Opinions
I agree with Ausländische.
Furthermore, Graham Marsden's rejoinder is more or less valueless.
"Countries like the UK and the USA seem to think that "affording children the greatest degree of innocence..." by denying them access to sex education is a benefit. Oddly enough, these are the two Western countries with the highest level of teen pregnancy."
Care to pull any more random figures out of the air? Or are you really suggesting that if more children watched porn, the number of teen pregnancies would be reduced?
The entire rejoinder reads to me like the writer thought: 'I am deeply uncomfortable with the idea that there is anything wrong with porn, and I am uncomfortable with my liberal views being challenged so I will attack those who try.'
Anyone who attempts to construe sentances like:
"statistically this happens most often with homosexual men, but the perpetrators are adults of many descriptions and their motives range from misguided all the way to malevolent"
as an anti-gay slur should be studiously ignored. This is a standard trick used by many campaigners of dubious repute to attempt to further their controversial liberal views - twist what the opposition said to make said opponent appear bigoted.
It should be obvious to any sane person (including, it would appear, the porn 'baron' mentioned in the article - although the honesty of his statement is questionable) that porn is extremely harmful to the men and women who appear in the films/images.
It is also unhealthy for those who watch it - porn is highly addictive and is often destructive to real relationships. The number of people being treated for pornography addiction in the UK is high, and growing.
That anyone can think this is a good thing to expose children to is frankly astonishing, and I am given great comfort from the fact that should any of these people have their own children and subject them to porn they will be locked up for a very, very long time.
As regards filtering technology, I think there is some truth to the complaints in the article - while Google does indeed default to 'moderate safe search' on image results, it seems to do little if any URL filtering and as noted above it would seem that not overmuch effort has gone into improving its safe search on images. Whilst I appreciate that it is basically impossible to filter images in any sane way with current technology, there is more that could be done in the image tagging area.
Having said that however, no filtering technology is going to be perfect - and most intelligent people don't expect it to be. The task of filtering technology is not to stop kids who are trying to access porn from accessing it - this is all but impossible at a technological level. The task of filtering technology is (for example) when the child searches for information for their school project, to prevent them from being presented with pornography instead.
Google's safe search feature currently does this reasonably well, for images.
It should really apply this feature to the rest of its searches, too.