But then, I guess that’s kind of where we’re at, isn’t it. It’s become almost indisputable that rights have become those things the government still allows you to do rather than activities over which they have no jurisdiction.

One thing that should be obvious, in both this statement and the statements made about divorce, sex crimes against children, etc. are the various confounding variables that haven’t been taken into account here. We can’t conclusively say the availability of pornography is the cause of any of these outcomes- especially considering the numerous other variables that could be at play here. For example police departments in big cities will cite their adoption of information management systems such as Compstat for the reduction of violent crimes such as sex crimes since the 80’s…certain politicians might state the relatively good economy during the past couple decades (and the various reasons for the state of the economy too). Anyway, it’s clear that there are going to be many many variables, and your answer is going to depend on who you ask. I’m usually always wary whenever someone makes such absolute statements as “X caused such and such crime to go down”…in almost any case you will find that there are actually Xa-Xz where the X usually stands. You’d have to do a factor analysis to really weed these variables out, and even then there’s room for interpretation.

Another reason I would be wary of making certain types of conclusions, especially in the case of crime as it relates to pornography is because Internet pornography especially, is a huge multi-billion dollar, international business, there’s a ton of information to factor in. It’s questionable whether or not the specific conclusions in the slate article took the entire nature of the sex industry into account. For example, most of the child sex slaves, and children used in pornography is done in other countries. A vague claim such as “Internet porn reduces sex crimes” means next to nothing for me…but suppose we were to refine that statement a bit into: “Internet child porn reduces child sex crimes”…Now obviously that statement makes little sense, because logically, the more “child porn” that is consumed, the larger the demand for child porn would be…and since generally a crime has to be committed in order to produce the product, we can only assume that the result would be more and more children working in the pornography business as demand rose. UNICEF estimates that roughly one million children are entered into the sex industry each year (worldwide)…with roughly 12 million already living in slavery. And these numbers are growing each year, not shrinking. Much of this is simply supply and demand…however I should just point out that conversely, not all child porn and child sex crimes is the result of American porno watching adults, again there are many many factors at work, not all of them being equal either. Depending on your data and analysis, it can become very problematic to make such an absolute statement as “Internet porn reduces sex crimes/child sex crimes/etc.” and likewise the same would be true with saying “Internet porn causes sex crimes/child sex crimes/etc.

I’m using the child pornography the most obvious example…however there’s plenty of not so obvious examples that aren’t readily recognizable unless you are familiar with the data and the issue.

Anyway, regardless of how porn is seen by society, and regardless of the societal effects, actual or perceived…legislating vice/morals is almost always going to be ineffective. That said, it’s certainly well within the rights of an employer to know what his/her employees are doing, and whether or not they are making efficient use of their time…They are, after all, being paid to do a certain job, if an employee is consistently spending long periods of time on the computer engaged in non-work and personal related matters…It would be apparent to most employers that the employee is not doing the job that he/she is being paid to do. Thus It would certainly be within the employers rights to fire the employee. In my mind, the issue of porn in the workplace really has nothing to do with the societal effects of porn. It has everything to do with an employers right to expect that his employees will do the job that they are being paid for.

#22 Robert

Unless they block google image search, everything else is pointless. So I’ve heard, anyways.

They do block google image search where I work. I’m surprised they don’t block theagitator.com since they had reasonmag.com blocked for a while.

They also used to block email messages from outside the company if they had certain dirty words like “breast”. Eventually they learned that some words have meanings that aren’t dirty, so they eventually dropped the screening. Lots of people’s messages weren’t getting through because they were saying, you know, grownup stuff (which frowned upon there).

I complained about their blocking the image search because I sometimes use it for legitimate engineering reasons, but they told me that it’s company policy to block anything that could lead to offensive images. I told them I was stunned that they didn’t take a website’s worked related utility into account when they blocked it. They never replied.

Oddly, they don’t block yahoo image search.

I also asked them to stop blocking my website. They refused. Needless to say, I was crushed, suffering irreversible diminishment of my self esteem. Seems like I should be able to draw disability for that or at least be allowed to park in the handicapped parking spaces.

Oscar Levant: It helps.

No chance in hell we’re enjoying the access we have today to porn in 10 years.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Na7vqd3DvFg

Bah.

Letting gov’mint into it just makes it so that rare (and stupid, unless it’s business related) company that APPROVES of such stuff can even legally allow it. My company does things you’ve all probably used every day. We used to have playboy.com blocked. Now we don’t, because, well, we do business with them.

There’s no real way to know for sure if the decline in sex crime is caused by the availability of porn.

That being said, when I googled Felicity Fey, there was definitely some correlation and causation going on.

Pornography is a major workplace problem in contemporary American society – and yet few private employers or government managers are willing to talk about it for fear of seeming prudish, or blindly trusting their employees, or being accused of infringing on individual liberties.

I am the one who typically gets the “pleasure” of monitoring or implementing monitoring for this type of traffic. And I will say this. No company – not a single one – I have ever encountered would allow someone to cruise porn from a company own asset on a company own network. They are terminated immediately. Just last year we re-enabled the monitoring systems after they were temporarily disabled due to loss of personal for a local company. Three people were walked out the door within 7 days due to repeated viewing of “inappropriate” material.

I have no idea where the washington times is getting its information.

(porn is not the usual focus for these systems – its usually for worms, virus’s, data loss prevention, etc – porn is added just because its a ’sexual harassment’ issue).

Second Question: Do you think Balko’s site here is going to start getting filtered out? Not only does the word ‘porn’ come up quite a bit, we’ve also got the name of a specific porn star.

At least, I’m assuming that’s who this Felicity Few is.

Full Disclosure: I work in academia. When we’re not looking at porn, we’re probably asleep.

Whoever she is.

I don’t see how that is possible for most government workers. Most agencies block porn, entertainment, and social networking sites, some more stringently than others. If some sites are unblocked or a person can otherwise get to them, our web surfing is also monitored. I personally know of several government workers having been fired for going to inappropriate websites. One worked right up the hall from me. Even when we aren’t being monitored, I find it hard to believe that the guy next to me in the cube farm is going to just poke around on a porn site and no one reports him.

It is also the same period during which I developed carpal tunnel syndrome.

Weird huh?

Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, to his credit, has the courage to tackle the issue of pornography at work head on.

Snicker.