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To: AppyPappy
If a guy drinks a ton of beer, gets drunk and drives home, gets involved in a wreck, are you going to say the beer and the wreck are merely coincidental because he drank water at some time as well?

There's a huge difference.

We can prove a causal relationship between alcohol and poor driving. You take a large group of people and randomly divide them into two groups. Give half of them three beers and the other half three non-alcoholic bev's that taste and smell like beer and let them drive around a track... or drive a simulated car... or use some measure of reflex time and vision. Then look at the results. If the results of the two groups are significantly different, then you've proven a causal relationship. This study (and others like it) has been performed over and over again. There is no longer any doubt that alcohol intake is a cause, not a side effect of, poor driving ability. Nor is there any lingering question that perhaps poor driving ability and alcohol intake both have the same root cause.

As far as I know we've done no similar study with porn... and the "evidence" that porn causes violence presented here would be wholly rejected by anyone with even one semester of college-level statistics.

It could be that doing * and enjoying it tends to cause people to want to relive the moment by watching other people *. Or... it could be that your love of * causes you to both watch other people * and to * yourself. Or it could be that a person believes that most people who do * like to watch * and feels pressure (real or imagined) to watch * by others who like to *.

Or, yes. It's possible that watching * encourages people to actually do * when otherwise they might not have. They're all possibilities. And until proper studies are done, assuming a causal relationship is unfounded.

Replace "*" with whatever you like. Performing music, playing sports, gambling, playing chess... or the obscene (if you prefer).

Say it with me once. Correlation does not imply causation.

293 posted on 05/19/2005 1:37:41 PM PDT by bigLusr (Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur)
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To: bigLusr
and the "evidence" that porn causes violence

No one said that porn causes violence so you are creating a strawman. BTW alcohol doesn't cause car wrecks. It is a factor in accidents.

319 posted on 05/19/2005 1:57:46 PM PDT by AppyPappy (If You're Not A Part Of The Solution, There's Good Money To Be Made In Prolonging The Problem.)
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