is bad for society and we are starting right now. With Daniel's opening statement, thanks so much for being with us again Daniel, the floor is all yours. My pleasure. Thank you to modern-day debates and thank you to Vosh for taking the time to discuss this very important topic. I'm a Muslim and there are many religious and spiritual arguments against pornography, but I understand that Vosh and many of those watching are not religious, so I'm going to mainly stick to non-religious arguments for the purpose of the debate. The main secular argument against pornography is best explained by looking at the research of Nikolas Tinbergen, a Dutch biologist. Tinbergen did experiments with butterflies. He realized that female butterflies attract males due to the eye catching designs on their wings, so Tinbergen made some cardboard butterflies and painted their wings to be super eye catching, more eye catching than what would naturally occur in female butterflies. Surprisingly, the male butterflies would swarm the cardboard butterflies even when real female butterflies were available. The males would ignore those females and instead keep trying to mate with the cardboard. Tinbergen called this a super normal stimulus. By artificially enhancing the normal, Tinbergen could fundamentally transform the behavior of the butterflies. Basically, he tricked the butterflies to abandon the females and instead spent all their time trying to mate with cardboard. And of course, if those exciting cardboard butterflies were not removed, then those males could never reproduce and as a result, the entire butterfly population would die out. You see where I'm going with this. Pornography is the exact same thing. It's the exact definition of a super normal stimulus. That's not my conclusion, by the way. That's the conclusion of neuroscientists and behavioral psychologists. That is one of the biggest harms of pornography. It derails normal human sexuality in the same way that colorful cardboard can derail butterfly sexuality. Look, I think whether you're religious or not religious, most of us agree that long lasting committed relationships such as marriage are very important for human happiness and the overall well-being of society. Second, I think most of us also agree that stable, healthy families are very important for human happiness and the overall well-being of society. Now, if we can agree on the importance of committed relationships and family, then my argument is simply that pornography prevents these two things and is therefore harmful. I ask the audience directly, do you want to have a loving spouse who will offer you companionship and sexual intimacy? Pornography prevents this.  Pornography prevents this. Do you care about the future of a society that mainly consists of happy marriages and healthy, stable families? Pornography prevents this or greatly hinders it. Numerous peer reviewed studies prove why and how all this is the case. Biologically rooted sexual drives, attitudes and behaviors are crucial for marital familial and communal relationships.   There are three major ways that this happens. The first way pornography disrupts human sexuality is that it changes our norms and values. This is huge.  Empirical studies show how the porn users' values change. Porn causes people to see sex as a recreational act for personal pleasure without any long-term commitment.  It causes people to accept when others engage in uncommitted sex, premarital sex, extramarital sex, etc. rather than stigmatize such behavior.  Due to biologically rooted learning mechanisms, humans unconsciously imitate behaviors and accept norms which they see as widely practiced around them. This is known as social conformity and is linked to certain hormones like oxytocin. Media of any kind is powerful because it affects what people believe is widespread and causes individuals to unconsciously imitate and accept norms they observe performed on TV and the internet. Studies also show that humans are highly inclined to imitate and accept behaviors they see when they're children. In fact, with the growth of internet availability, huge amounts of pornography are now consumed by children from six years of age and up, and the amount of porn consumed is only increasing with time.  This in itself is a major psychological shift in the population caused by porn that affects people's behaviors and their attitudes. The second way that pornography disrupts sexuality is that destroys the motivation for pair bonding and family. Porn and masturbation go hand in hand.  This results in spending less time trying to find mates.  With low sex drive, they're not motivated to find mates or to do the things that would make them more attractive for prospective mates. Again, this is exactly like the butterflies. Pornography is a supernormal stimulus that derails people from normal sexuality. This results in fewer marriages, fewer pair bonds, which results in fewer children and fewer families. The third way that pornography disrupts sexuality is that it causes people who are already in committed relationships to have lower quality relationships. A meta study published in 2020 in the Archives of Sexual Behavior found that pornography usage was strongly correlated with less satisfaction in marriage, less happiness, etc. Furthermore, studies show that pornography consumption is associated with people feeling dissatisfied with their partners and eventually cheating on them. One study, for example, tracked couples over a six-year period and found that, of all the factors considered, porn consumption was the second strongest indicator that a marriage would suffer.  These are three major ways pornography usage harms pair bonding and family. To make matters worse, neuroscientific data shows that viewing pornography leads to addictive behavior akin to the use of hard drugs like cocaine. Addictive behavior produces massive changes to brain structure, including structures related to self-control and desire. This does not happen with behaviors like breathing or drinking water, but it does happen with the use of drugs and pornography.   Now, consider this. If I asked you whether it is bad for society if a drug as addictive as cocaine or heroin were freely available to the masses, including young children, and it was easily accessible, wouldn't you think, wow, this is really bad for society? This is exactly the situation with pornography. In many countries throughout the world, large percentages of adults have never been in a relationship and remain as a virgin. In Japan, for example, according to government data, just making sure. In Japan, for example, according to government data, about half of single men and women under age 34 are virgins, yet Japan has one of the highest rates of porn consumption in the world. Other countries have similar trends. Marriage and family are collapsing the world over. Not all of it is due to pornography, but porn has played a significant role. To conclude, I just want to note that Islam has unique and detailed rules about relationships, gender roles, dress that promote stable loving families and marriage. Islam provides a detailed blueprint for marriage and family. And this has never been as important as it is now, simply because people's understanding of gender roles, marriage, family, sex have been warped by modernity. I just want to make this point because my message is not just that porn is destructive. It's one thing to point out the disease, but it's also important to point out the cure. If you want a proven model for marriage, family, and community, Islam provides that. Thank you. With that, we're going to kick it over to Vosh for his opening statement as well. I want to let you know, folks, if this is your first time here at Modern Day Debate, we are a neutral platform hosting debates on science, religion, and politics. We hope you feel welcome no matter what walk of life you are from, whether you be politically left, politically right, Muslim, atheist, Christian, you name it. We are glad that you are here. Thanks for being with us. And, hey, if you haven't yet, hit that subscribe button as we have many more juicy debates coming up. For example, tomorrow night is religion harmful. Tom Jump taking on Jung for the first time. It's going to be a great one. Hit that subscribe button so you don't miss those upcoming debates. And with that, thanks very much, Vosh. The floor is all yours for your opening statement as well. Thank you. We got a lot to go over. Muslim men, of course, being such comers that they need morality police to make sure women aren't exposing their faces because they can't control themselves in the presence of a female flesh. I don't know if that's the healthiest attitude one might take towards the opposite sex, but whatever template we want to go with. All right. So the problem with everything that you just said, in addition to a collection of statistical errors like the correlation causation one, which is a classic to the it's different, therefore bad one to the we're not considering the implicit alternative to porn, which is the social resources which would be required to entirely ban porn, something that has never succeeded anywhere in any country on earth since the advent of the internet. Leaving aside all of that, it doesn't matter because at the end of the day, you're only using empirical metrics as a way of supplementing your real position, which is a fundamental ideological opposition to morality. We'll get to that, but first we can take apart the other bits.  A lot of the stuff surrounding the research into porn addiction provides results which are comparable to a great many things that humans have potentially unhealthy relationships towards. Food, for example, depending on a person's relationship to food, regular old food, not even drugs. They can have incredibly destructive outcomes, addictive behaviors, life ruining stuff. No one would ever talk about banning food, of course, because it's a fundamental human necessity. But if you take a look at how we interact with a great many things, you'll find similar patterns. When humans like something, we have a tendency to to fall into habits of engaging into an unhealthy extent. This has been the case for all of human society. It's not new. The reason why we hear about this with regards to pornography so often is A, a moralistic opposition and B, because the advent of internet pornography happens to coincide with another demographic change and people tend to conflate their outcomes, namely the fact that the birth rates are falling and marriage is becoming less popular. It should be noted, of course, that I don't think marriage is in and of itself a necessary institution. It's not inherent to the human character. We were running around just fine as Neanderthals, clubbing, I don't know, snow leopards and not marrying people. Whatever form of social organization people want to engage in is the one that I support. And I think it's entirely possible to simultaneously support healthy relationships without trying to bring the long arm of the state down on pornography. An act which in every country which it has ever been practiced has led to incredibly authoritarian outcomes, something which I am principally opposed to. At the end of the day, humans exist for the benefit of humans. Some people, usually of the authoritarian disposition, like to gesture at some nebulous social benefit that you can get out of forcing people to behave in a certain way. But often in doing so, they neglect to mention the human cost. For example, stable marriages are good for society because stability in general is good for society. I mean, even if marriages involve three people, if those were stable, they would be good for society. But one of the big reasons why marriages have historically been so stable is because women have had no political rights. You need look no further than the Muslim world to see examples of this. Of course, your marriages are stable. You can't get a divorce. People are married off sometimes before the age of 18. Arranged marriages where people are pressured out of their social spaces and communities if they don't follow the orders of their parents and marry the people that have been lined up for them. Of course, you have stability there. It's because you have no freedom, obviously. It's like bragging about the stability of the Nazi German hierarchical order. Well, of course, it's internally stable. They get shot if they don't follow it. You see this all the time, especially in American history, being an American, of course, I'm biased towards those discussions. But you see people going like, yes, well, nowadays, everyone's getting divorced and women initiate most of the divorces. If they want to divorce, good for them. You know why they weren't divorcing before? Because it wasn't legal for women to open their own bank accounts up until the 1970s, at least not consistently. Of course, if you put a gun to people's heads and force them to behave in a certain way, then you might get generally reliable outcomes in that one metric. But that doesn't mean society is better. It means it's worse because people's freedoms are being infringed on. They're less happy, less able to act. You get a nice clean, pretty slate from the outside. I think that's what you want. That's why you were touting Islam at the end there. Gender relations in Muslim countries are fraught with bias and bigotry, rape, legal oppression. But it all looks nice and clean from the outside because you get to keep your divorce rates zero. It looks nice and consistent, nice and clean. But society is not experienced from the top down. It's experienced from the bottom up. We have to consider what people actually want.  They love jerking off to porn. It is an undeniable fact of the human experience, one which has been around for hundreds of years in whatever form pornography has taken, that people like cooming. Every effort to take this away from people has failed. There are no countries that are not full of degenerate coomers. Osama bin Laden had like risqué anime titillation on his computer. All of them do. You do. They all do. Everyone does. It's a fact of modern life. Some people pretend they don't when they're larping as some kind of like trad cat or whatever. But in reality where we all live, the idea of eradicating this from the public space is entirely unrealistic and would only be done to suit some kind of city skylines as top down paternalistic idea of authoritarian goodness. Where if you can line everyone up like Tetris blocks and they behave the way you expect them to, you get some kind of positive outcome on paper. If you want to help people who have porn addictions, by the way, there are lots of things you can do to like meaningfully improve that porn addiction is a real problem as are many other kinds of addictions. But as somebody who favors drug decriminalization, I don't think the state is the solution. Has it been the solution for drugs? No, we have an unprecedented drug problem here in the States despite committing tens of billions to fighting it. If you really want to help people, you have to try to find what it is they're actually looking for and provide that to them. A lot porn addicts are suffering from a kind of social alienation, which I think is brought about by capitalism and some other factors. Drug addicts lacking at appropriate medical care, job opportunities. There are a number of things. We can walk down any street in Midwestern America and see the consequences of our attitude towards drug criminalization. Let's see what we can actually do for those people and for porn addicts as well. We'll see what we can actually do for them. There are plenty of metrics by which we can improve their lives. You got it. And with that, we're going to jump into open conversation. Want to let you know folks, if you happen to have a question, feel free to fire it into the old live chat. If you tag me with at modern day debate, that's one way to do it. As well as if you put it in as a super chat, let's go to the top of the list and also want to ask that your questions would be germane for the topic that the guest prepared for. With that, we're going to jump into this open dialogue. Thanks so much gentlemen for being with us. The floor is all yours. So I wanted to address some of these points. Let's go one at a time. I like talking. Okay. I'll try to be respectful of equal time. So the first point correlation is not causation. I agree. But there are many studies that are longitudinal in nature that actually do indicate causation. So there are many studies that I kind of alluded to in my opening statement, which I'm happy to go over if you want more details. But some of them, yes, they are cross-sectional and therefore it is correlation or causation doesn't imply causation. We can't know. But some of them, many of the most significant are longitudinal. So they do show causation over time. So that's one point. And also then it should be worth noting that for something like why one might look for pornography in a relationship, it might be difficult to understand what the insiating factor was. So a person can report satisfaction in a relationship, not consume pornography, but then as things in the relationship get kind of worse and they feel kind of distant from their partner, they start to look at porn and they look at porn because they're dissatisfied, not necessarily the other way around. But from a studies perspective, it's really difficult to chart which one caused which. Well, these studies do show that. Like these studies are set, the longitudinal ones are set to determine causation. I'm familiar with the limitation of longitudinal studies. They don't make the correlation causation fallacy disappear. They can track behaviors over long term. But when you're talking about nebulous characteristics like psychological influence, it is legitimately very, very difficult to parse out what is happening and why. I mean, this is, yeah, you can say that about any kind of factor that you want to study in science. It's hard to parse out what is actually the causative factor. So the job of the researcher and the scientist in order to publish peer reviewed research and say, Hey, pornography actually leads to relationships breaking up at least a higher dissatisfaction. Part of the barrier of whether this is publishable research is to justify that through statistical means through all kinds of experiment setup, double blind studies. All of this is part of the research process. So I don't see how what you're saying disagrees with that. I'm familiar with the research process. I have a sociology degree. The issue is that for something like this topic in particular, self reporting is the only metric by which you can measure something like the health of a relationship.  But when you're when you're looking at the development of these things, people don't really have a great assessment of why they act the way they do. And I have seen a good deal of research on pornography and its effects on people. And obviously, I don't want to debate with you like specific studies, because then we get really in the weeds and a broad topic. But I'm only pointing out that like from what I have seen, the idea of a sort of consistent, direct, causative relationship has not been demonstrated in the research that I've looked at. Certainly there are relationships. I wouldn't deny that. Even if there were causative relationships, I don't necessarily think that's a defeater for my positions. But it is complicated. I only mean to say that because it can be very easy to paint a consistent and clear brush when looking from afar. I mean, I agree that it's complicated, but you know, all these studies are showing that there is a negative impact to relationships, but we can put that point aside. I would also, you know, if you want to look at causation, there are biologically rooted mechanisms that are causal in nature that I described, because pair bonding and pair bonding is not something that's only valued by Muslims. This is something that every society throughout history is valued, even if they haven't technically called it marriage. But the idea of a committed relationship with a person, like a soulmate, or a committed relationship over time, that is something that's valued universally. It's not just a Muslim thing, and it's not just like a modern thing. It's something that's throughout history with human society. But if you look at pair bonding, sex is what creates that kind of pair bond, because oxytocin is released. When you are, when there's orgasm by male or female and touch through the skin, the skin touching is what generates oxytocin. And that's something that does not exist with masturbation to pornography. You cannot create that kind of pair bond. And that doesn't exist for any kind of masturbation, though, whether or not you have pornography. That's true. I agree. Well, then that's fine. You masturbate from time to time, and it doesn't contribute to your God-given soulmate potential. And then one day you do lay into a girl, and then it does. No, but the causal relation there is that when you ejaculate, without that pair bond through oxytocin, you have lower sex drive. So you're not motivated to actually go seek a pair bond. You can't keep people from masturbating, whether they have pornography or not. Humans have written on masturbation for as long as we have written language. If you plan on making that illegal, I don't know how you would do that, some kind of 1984-esque telescreen in every living room, probably best to leave people's nuts to themselves in a legal sense. Well, I do want to distinguish porn plus masturbation as its own distinct phenomenon because of this whole supranormal stimulation that is created through pornography. This is its habit-forming. It creates this frequent masturbation, which results in frequent ejaculation. So I do think it's good for your prostate. The goodness for the prostate is just through ejaculation, which you can get through many other means other than masturbation. But the point is that your lower sex drive makes you less motivated to actually go seek out a pair bond or relationship, whether you want to get married or not. The stats on... Yeah, so when we look at... We'll keep trying. We're both at a narrow bridge here. No, I'm just saying that would apply to any masturbation.  But that's just life.  I feel like there's a quick rebound on this. Some people have lower sex drives, but I don't think the ability to masturbate... Because we've always been doing that. Monkeys do that. Yeah, I follow what you're saying and I agree that masturbation has existed way before pornography. But do you agree that pornography is a different kind of stimulus? Like it is a heightened kind of stimulus, just like in the butterfly example. And the factors that the researchers point out is that pornography has this kind of accelerated novelty because people can access lots of different kinds of pornography that has not been possible historically because of the lack of technology. Yeah, we've got wacky stuff these days. I agree it's a more extensive kind of erotic stimulation than anything your imagination could conjure up, at least it has the potential to. It's a quick template to that. But I would say the same thing about candy.  Not really. You could cook meat and it would be fine. But generally speaking the medieval peasants subsisted on gruel. It wasn't a great life. Nowadays you can go down to the grocery store for four bucks, you can pick up a chocolate cupcake that if eaten by a Dickensian orphan would immediately cause them to explode.  It tastes so good, people get hooked on it. That's a real problem. A lot of folks are fat over that. But you can't ban the cupcake, it's just you have to learn to live in a world where those resources are available and teach people to be moderate about it. I completely agree with you that this is the same kind of argument applies to certain kinds of food. But the thing about foods as well because of processing and the ability to highly process foods and you have entire food scientists whose entire job is to artificially manipulate food in order to make it as tasty and addictive as possible because it generates this dopamine rush in an artificial way. I agree with you that- What's an artificial dopamine rush? I mean, if it's tasty, it's tasty. It's artificially induced because the natural food, like if you picked up even white sugar that you're using in desserts like a cupcake, the processed version of the cupcake has been actually over-engineered to artificially induce even more dopamine, which is why a lot of people are addicted to junk food and certain governments have wanted to curb this kind of processed food because it's making the population obese. This is actually a perfect analogy to pornography. Would you want to ban chocolate cupcakes? Artificially engineered. All food you get at the grocer right now is artificially engineered to some extent, outside of like the tomatoes or whatever. Some degree of processing goes into almost everything we eat for preservatives sake or because- I mean, hell, a lot of the fruits and vegetables we eat are GMO. They literally got engineered at the DNA level to be tastier to us. Depending on where you draw the line, because that's the question, right? It's like, where do you draw the line?  Depending on how far back you want to go, pornography has been around a long time. So when did it get too far, right? Was it when the video file came about? Like 240p shit? But you can measure this. It has an empirical effect. Folks have gotten fatter lately. I know because for the same reasons, like for the same reasons that people are being addicted to pornography, they're being addicted to other artificial stimuli. Video games are another example. Food is another example. How much stuff in the world do you want to ban? Just out of curiosity, video games, food, movies, I assume? No, I think that these are all of different moral categories. But when it comes to video games, or not moral categories, but having different moral weight, I would say. But I mean, my argument doesn't depend on that. I just want to point out that with like app developers develop apps to make them as addictive as possible. I think this is very harmful to society because people can't put their phone apps. They can't put down their phones because these apps are hooking them in the same way that casinos hook gamblers because of their slot machines like specific ways that they designed the casino to play on these biological, psychological proclivities of the human mind. So I agree with what you're saying. There are things that people do in food production or how they design gotcha games or what have you, where I think that it goes beyond a desire to produce a product and it goes towards an effort to prey on people's addiction receptors. I think that's a real issue. But the problem is, where do you draw the line? When it comes to food production, I can think of maybe a couple of processes by which you could say, okay, maybe companies, you can't use this chemical, go the extra 100th of a cent more expensive per unit produced and we'll call it there. When it comes to how the gotcha games or casinos, you can think of like common sense legislation to try to curtail some of the more extremely addictive predatory elements here. So where is the line in pornography? Because for me, as somebody with an entirely healthy relationship to pornography, if I want to look at fat titties or whatever, I can just look at the fat titties.  And then I can just, you know, leave, walk away from the computer. I don't know what would constitute like a pornography addiction, like a line where you none of this, but like the other stuff is fine. What about people who draw fat titties, right?  I guess my question is like, where do you like what you're you're in charge?  In Sunni Islam, there's no biggest guy, but in Shia Islam, I'm not Shia, I'm Sunni. So okay, then I will, okay, then not that. Whatever the big guy, all right. What law is it just like you put a drawing up of two circles with smaller circles in them, and they just come and shoot you? Like where would you draw the line? Well, I think before I, let me answer that question, but first, so you say that it's reasonable for governments to actually restrict processed food, like with real extreme examples of manipulation of food or technology to curb, you know, these kinds of harm. So would you say the same for pornography? I think that there are easy lines that you could draw, but I'd always be careful about this stuff because I'm always going to be like very cautious when it comes to the government's ability to restrict the production of materials, especially media. So like when it comes to the like movies, for example, or TV shows, movies and TV shows absolutely do use marketing and production techniques to hook people. And people do get kind of like lost in some of the fake realities, like those folks who killed themselves after Avatar came out. You know, stuff like that, but I would never want the government coming in and saying like, actually, you can't have like crazy alien worlds in your movies because it makes people like want to be in them too much. That shit's way too far for me. And porn is art and is media. So that line, because it's easy, it's chemical with food. Don't use this chemical. Bam, easy. You can test food for it. But what do you do with porn?   Because addictive behaviors or these kinds of behaviors that become problematic, there is a difference in the brain structure that is caused. So the wood carvings that they did a thousand years ago, those wouldn't actually change the structure of the brain. But many studies are showing that the use of porn, even like not even, I'm not saying that like outright addicted, even just very little use can change the structure of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, the reward center, just like like one hit of heroin or one hit of cocaine who will change the structure of the brain. They have discovered this same exact thing with pornography. I've seen studies that parts of your brain light up when you're looking at pornography, but I've seen nothing indicating that looking at titties on a screen once will irrevocably change your brain. I mean, they're just titties on a screen, right? You see them on the screen, you see them in person. If it doesn't break your brain seeing them in person, you know, I don't think like, I don't think there's anything more innately harmful to seeing them through a screen and seeing them in person. The problem is like the habitual relationship you form with it, like the degree of dependency. But people have IRL sex dependency too. There are sex addicts, right?  So I don't know, it seems like humans just have a habit of getting real into things they like. We do the same thing with video games. That's also new, but we can't ban video games. We've got all the people watching this angry. So where does the line cut? Because I want to know like, okay, you're the Grand Puba, okay? I'm a talented artist. How realistic can I draw my circles before I get shot in the back of the head? But you keep saying that there's no like difference between seeing something in real life.  You can also be addicted or you can be negatively affected by a certain stimulus that doesn't show up on a screen, but you see in real life, like that distinction is not really relevant to the point that I'm making. The changes to the brain can happen in either case. It can happen through seeing something in real life. It can happen through eating something. It can happen through playing a video game. Like that's just something that is established. And the term that I used is a super normal stimulus. And that's what causes a kind of change to the brain structure that leads to addiction in the same way that a drug addict or the use of even one hit of the crack pipe is going to change the brain and causes someone to fall into crack addiction. Well, wait, hold on. First of all, I'm for drug decriminalization. So that don't fit for me. But if we're talking about, if you're saying that crack is harmful to society, right? I think that banning crack has been more harmful to society than its existence has. Well, put the censorship or banning question to the side because that's the main question though. Even the main question is, is it harmful to society? That's the main question. Well, okay. Do you think porn should be banned? Yes, because it's harmful. But, but that, no, no, no, no, no, well, no, you can't, well, you can't run away from it then because when people say so and so is harmful for society, you know, I don't know, maybe skateboarding is harmful for society, but you got to give people the right to do things that are harmful because otherwise you don't leave in a free society. I don't want to live under a paternalistic nanny state. The real question is, does banning something that is potentially harmful to society produce better outcomes that allowing it to exist at all? The drug war in the United States is a pretty resounding answer to that question. We have not cut down on drug use, but we have increased human misery and spent a lot of money doing it too. So if you acknowledge that you're going to form these brain patterns, seeing titties in real life as opposed to seeing them online as well, then it seems like the capacity for sex addiction, whether it's virtual through porn or in real life is present either way.  So the potential for harm, it seems, is merely being transplanted here, not invented. Right? No, no, if people didn't have access to pornography, the vast majority of people would not have, unless you're in a stable relationship, you won't have the opportunity to see naked women. So you got to sell me on this. I like seeing naked women. Yeah. So if you didn't have access to porn, you might do something to make yourself more attractive so you can get in a stable relationship. And you can see a naked woman as much as you want. What if I don't want it? What if I want to see multiple naked women? Well, Islam has a solution to that because you can marry multiple wives in Islam. But I mean, that's even if we put marriage aside. Okay. So you can't say like, oh yeah, we're going to solve the problem of men and their infidelity by simply allowing a patriarchal polygamy. No, that's cheating. It's like, we've solved the problem of men cheating. They simply marry their mistresses. You know, okay, fine. Right.  You tried to get this kind of high status in society so that more women would be willing to pair bond with you. What if they take a picture of their tits and then they put it online to show me? Like they put it on like an image or link or something. Do they get shot? No society has ever succeeded in banning porn. So the idea of like actually enacting this ban seems weird to me. Okay. So I'm like the counter example would be child porn.  So we have to legalize it.  Child abuse has gone down since the 1990s, at least in the United States. I don't have like worldwide stats or whatever. But it remains a serious issue in spite of its ban, which is an indication that banning doesn't necessarily get rid of something. The critical difference here being, of course, that if a bit of child pornography is put online, that kid's being exploited.  Well, that's separate. Like you're shifting from one point to another. Where just your initial point was banning something doesn't get rid of it.  And if we presume, like my presumption is that pornography is harmful, then banning it would actually reduce the amount of harm. Now, if we want, so that's the whole censorship question. But if it's actually harmful. If, yeah, so that's the whole, that's the whole question of the debate. But it can't get rid of it all like over, right? I mean, we know all the, you know, there are plenty of folks over in the Muslim world who are just sneaking their porn when the morality police aren't up in the foot. You know, there are problems all over the place. So I guess we need to talk about the practicality here. You want to ban porn? Again, like, where's the line on this, right? How realistic do the circles have to be? Because that's the thing. The problem is that what you're talking about is a censorship of expression that is literally unprecedented in the Western world. There's no, there's, there's no comparison to like all media that depicts eroticism is gone. Like that's just such a massive, you know, what about nude art, simplistic drawings? How detailed does an anatomical drawing have to be before it becomes an issue? I just want to know, because I don't know how this plays out, like realistically. Well, I mean, you conceded that there are some restrictions that would be reasonable to restrict porn. Like what? I mean, well, that's what you claimed. So I can draw the line anywhere and I'd be consistent. Where would you think should we draw the line? You already mentioned child porn? Yeah, that's probably pretty bad. I don't want any lines when it comes to like the pornography that we have, though.  That's labor regulations on its production process. But I don't want any tailing there, but you got to give me an example, because again, like the line on this, the line for like what is determined to be child porn is pretty clear. You have like the age of the people involved, but like what makes something pornography? Like even the courts haven't figured that out. I mean, we can like a start of banning all photographic and videographic pornography. Like that can be a line, like any nudity. And like, so what about that could be a start? What about like anatomical stuff or like any context or like medical research? Like here's an example. Medical research is fine. Well, what about the nude yoga videos you can find on YouTube, you know, like for purely educational purposes? You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. So I mean, I would, again, it's like my argument doesn't hinge on where we draw the line. But as long as you're willing to acknowledge that line can be drawn because there is harm at some level at some level, there is harm with pornography. I think we're agreed. We're agreed in this. Oh, no, no, no, not even not even like remotely. I think there are like, but you just said earlier, you said that just like with artificial food that the government should ban certain kinds of artificial food because it's too addictive. Then also with pornography at the extreme level, you left it vague. It should also be restricted. I never said anything about extreme pornography being banned. I don't know what extreme means in this context. I think that you can make a simple like production labor restriction of what chemicals are used for food. That's a production process thing. But porn is art. And I don't think right now the government does very much at all over here in the States to regulate art production. I would be incredibly uncomfortable with that the idea of like the government getting to lean in on every drawing uploaded, everything produced. You're fine with the government leaning in when it comes to children being uploaded in the Senate pornography. So it's not like a technical issue that can't be solved. It is. Well, you can solve it. The question is whether or not in solving it, you do more harm than good banning child pornography does more harm than good or sorry does clip me clip me does more good than harm. If you that's a pretty simple and easy line to cut down, you point at it right there. And it's like, okay, we're not going to allow that cablamo people pretty much get behind that.  But if some lady wants to put her tits up on the internet, the only harm that you can point to is some kind of nebulous social degeneracy, which I would never support a law being made to to crack down on. But my argument and appeal to degeneracy, my argument appeal to the value of pair bonding and the value of advocating polygamy like five minutes ago. Yeah, it's totally wholesome. Okay, this is very much a you thing you can't pair bond. No, but no, but the example I gave is imagine like you're in a society that does not have polygamy, but also pornography has banned. Look at the benefit that is attained. People have well, let me explain to you like you have people who have this natural sex tribe, they can't get this kind of release from pornography. They can look for a mate and they do that by, you know, improving themselves, making themselves attractive to a potential mate. So this improves society. What's wrong with convenience? You form a pair bond with someone in a loving relationship, you're happier, you're more satisfied, you produce children, the problem is children who will take care of you who will. So wait, stop, stop, all of this is no, no, no, you're narrativizing right now, you're running off to the sunset. Couple of problems here. First of all, this is like arguing restaurants should be banned. So people have no choice but to cook food at home, which will teach them cooking skills and improve society. It is true that it's cheaper and more learned to cook all your food at home.  I like titties. I don't think it's like good to restrict human artistic and social development, because you believe that there's some kind of like old world social benefit to curtailing certain behaviors that are only harming society in direct ways that translate through human freedom. Also the idea that people form loving relationships because pornography is not around, this isn't true at all.  That's not true even remotely. We have documentation that goes back to the literal middle ages about desperate women trapped with abusive men, about like spousal violence. Spousal rape wasn't even a crime in the United States till a few decades ago. I'm pretty sure in good parts of the Muslim world it still isn't. So you like you see happy relationships because you deny the people who are victimized in them the ability to like divorce or express themselves in any way. It's easy from the top down when you look at statistics. Oh, look at the good people of I don't know Saudi Arabia, 0.01% divorce rate. Well, these women are like essentially like ball and chain to their house, you know? It's like these narratives. This is why I say narrativization, right? Because we're telling a story right now.  Like no, they weren't. Like things were miserable back then. We have to be critical about the way these institutions manifest because there are very strong social pressures that try to kind of coerce us into viewing them positively. It's almost like a fairy tale, right? At the end of the day, there are plenty of things that can get in the way of a person and like a happy relationship or a marriage. Those factors have been present for basically all of human history. Some of them are less prominent today than they used to be. Some are more prominent. And I think the best way to handle this is to try to give people what they want and make people want to make the healthy choices for themselves rather than denying them the ability to make a choice at all because that never works.  It'll be convenient. Well, let me finish because I let you give your piece, but the same kind of thing can happen with adults just like with drug usage. Like drug usage is something that you want to reduce. How you do that, there are many different approaches that you can take. You can take criminalization, you can take educational programs or whatever, but everyone recognizes that drug usage is bad and you don't just tell people that, oh, well, here's all the heroin that you want. Here's all the cocaine you want. Just practice enough willpower and that's going to solve the problem. No, that is a very destructive approach. That's literally what we do. Wait, that's the effective method. Yeah, that's the reason. Even in countries, even in countries where there's decriminalized, drugs are decriminalized, that doesn't mean that they're legal. They're still illegal, but you just won't get put in prison for them. So no, no, functionally, they have there are literally facilities, even in the United States, where if these people want to do heroin, the government will give them heroin. I think Sweden does this. This is good because it reduces the likelihood of them overdosing on low quality heroin. People don't want to be addicts. People want to live healthy and fulfilling lives. How do you live a happy and fulfilled life? You can't do it if you're addicted to something. You can't form meaningful relationships because you have no drive to do so.   That's the harm. We're not children. Second of all, drug addicts aren't children either, but we still want to curb the usage of those drugs. Arresting people who are drug addicts has not lowered the rate of drug addiction.  You give them clean dope and you give them access to medical care. This is, no matter how unintuitive it might seem, mathematically more effective at reducing drug overdoses and drug addiction. My point was simply that, I'm familiar with decriminalization, but my point was very simple that the drugs are still acknowledged as being harmful to society and you don't want to just spread them widespread so that people can access them wherever they want or however they want. With pornography, it's widely available. It's easily accessible. Anonymously, you can access it. This has driven up the usage of it to astronomical levels and people are not having sex as a result. Forget about marriage. The percentage of virgins under 34 has skyrocketed. This is what I mean about correlative and causative. There are other things happening right now that are making it difficult for people to get laid. This is a one-to-one thing. The best way to get people to live good lives is not to deny them the ability to make good choices. It's to incentivize the good choices. You don't want to ban drugs because that doesn't really reduce drug usage that much for one. It has increased it for a couple of reasons in the States at least. And for two, because you're not actually giving people the tools that they need to get in a better position that they would have been otherwise. You're still letting them languish in the conditions that incentivize drug use. In Portugal, they decriminalize drugs. You don't get arrested for doing drugs over there, but they keep an open door for rehabilitation. The goal then is to allow these people's better instincts to take over.  They get let out in the street and the first thing they think of is, how do I get more drugs? Banning pornography will not make men act good.   The rise of internet pornography has correlated with a significant reduction in the rate of sexual assault. So that's another thing to take into account. But for the most part, I think it's far better. If you want dudes to get their not, you don't want to just ban porn. You just want to like say, like give them the tools, build like walkable cities, give them like local areas to congregate in, build a strong social network, give them hot chicks to talk to, you know, get over to Daniel. Go ahead. Yeah. So I mean, you're you look at a society where you have reduced the amount of meth and cocaine and heroin on the streets versus a society where that is increased. You have more meth, heroin and cocaine on the streets, which is a better, healthier society. It's obviously the one that where there's less of the drug that people can abuse. Wrong. It has nothing to do with this. Let me think. It has nothing. It's fewer addicts. Yeah. So people who don't have a source, they don't have access to the drug. They are going to withdraw from that drug because they have no choice. But this has nothing. No, no, no, no. I can't let you. No, no, no, you keep interrupting me. This doesn't work. James, come on now. I will stay quiet. Let's get Daniel a chance to finish. I will. I apologize. It don't work. It'll be another 60 seconds for Daniel. Every government in the world tries to curb the import of these hard drugs. Yeah. There is a public health problem with drug addicts who are hooked on heroin, but all these governments want to get to a situation where there are fewer people who are addicted to these kinds of drugs. And they take, they're just different strategies on how to do that because they recognize that at the end of the day, this is something extremely harmful. Pornography is also extremely harmful. It creates this kind of addiction. It changes the structure of the brain. And it prevents people from marrying or getting into these kinds of pair bonds. It prevents family. And that's why, when we look at all of the statistics on the rate of, the amount of people having sex, okay, forget about marriage, that has been plummeting. And you want, I agree with you completely that we can't make a simple correlation and say, oh, this is because of pornography that is creating less sex.  People are going to porn without porn. No, there's a difference. There's a super normal stimulus when it comes to pornography. That makes a huge difference. Okay. We're doing the narrativization thing again. One more time to make it clear. Drug prohibition fails. The alcohol prohibition in America in the 1920s. We're talking about morality. We're talking about morality. No, we're not. You keep jumping back and forth.  We're talking about how you- That's the whole topic of the debate. No, we're talking about how do you improve society? Whether or not you think something's harmful, and by the way, I don't think porn is harmful. I don't think cupcakes are harmful. It's possible to have harmful relationships with them. I think that about video games and everything else. There are literally most of the population looks at porn. Most of the population don't have a porn addiction.  There are people with video game addictions. There are people with food addictions who have eating disorders. I don't think that inherently makes the thing harmful. However, what we're really talking about here is prohibition. And there is just no indication that prohibition has been an effective tactic of making people's choices for them. It's the paternalist's answer, the easy answer. Funnily enough, the child's answer. Because it's so simple. You don't like something, so you ban it. It works for child porn. It works for child porn. It works for many other things that people want to ban. This is what the left is constantly wanting. We still have a massive problem. You want to ban guns or not? Like, is banning guns actually reduced gun violence? Yes or no? I mean, there are many things that they've governed.  I waited for you. I waited for you. First of all, when we're talking about stuff like banning actual real-world products and services, entirely different worlds. We're talking about media distribution and what people have access to. You were including stuff like just a lady putting her tits up on Imager, okay?  Also, people don't have a general inclination towards child pornography. I'd like to believe that much about human society. But human beings have been replicating and consuming pornography for literally as long as we've been able to, and the majority of humans consume pornography. So in terms of its widespread distributability, its prominence, this is an entire whole other scale. It's a lot like alcohol, something that's typically enjoyed, hopefully, by adults that almost all of them like or partake into some extent or another for which prohibition has failed historically. And it's funny you keep saying it's a morality issue when you're implicitly arguing in favor of the prohibition, by with this gun ban or whatever. I think it's just my thing. So, okay, now you're talking about like, let me be sure, just to be sure. No, you need to, no, no. Prohibition ain't gonna work. If you want people to make good decisions, you give them the tools to make those choices themselves. You want people to make the right choice because you've encouraged them socially. You've given them the tools. You don't wanna just lock people's lives right in front of them and say, oh, well, all these other things would be detrimental society, possibly somewhat in some abstract way. Oh, sure, maybe you could have a drink of alcohol or maybe you could look at a lady's tits online and be fine, but some people wouldn't be fine. They might like it so much that they have a slightly bad relationship with it or possibly a very bad one. So the state will shoot you if you look at titties online or something to that effect. This is a debris of abstraction which does not warrant state intervention.  Well, the problem is- Really long narrative. Here, answer this question. Wait, first of all, you don't get the right to complain about long narratives. Yeah, can we like have two minutes or something? Why can't we just talk like friends? Because you keep interrupting me. That's why. Well, you keep going back to the narrativization and you jumped in on me and you brought up the gunbands and I think that's incomparable. So I had to cut that down. No, it is comparable. Or if you want to limit it to speech. Gentlemen, forgive me. I hate to do this, but because it's something that we did for the first time ever tonight, I want to hear both of you guys' opinion on this. We put a poll in the chat to ask what particular topics people wanted to hear you guys touch on. So we can maybe do a quick refresher and what we'll do is just one minute back and forth. Literally, I'll set it for a 60-second timer. Is first of our four topics, the one that actually came out on top was, what about porn? Does it help lonely people? So I want to hear from both of you on this. I'll give you 60 seconds each. We'll start with Vosh. Or is all yours? It's not necessarily whether it helps or doesn't help lonely people. It's more like it can be potentially helpful. It's just a matter of how they interact with it, right? You could argue that, is it helpful for a person who lives in poverty to see movies depicting wealth and luxury? I don't know. Do they get something from it? Do they learn? Do they experience and understand? I think the individual should be given the opportunity to make the decision as to whether or not they should be consuming it. If they think it's harmful in keeping them from going out and getting real pussy, then that's bad. But 99% of the people watching this right now are lonely. Would you appreciate the long arm of the state coming in and telling you what's good for you? You got it. Daniel, what about you in 60 seconds? Yeah. So lonely people need motivation to go out and make social connections. And right now technology is creating a situation where people have these pseudo relationships because of social media, because of video games, because of these artificial communities that trick the brain into thinking that you are interacting socially with others when in reality it's just a poor substitute for the real thing. If people didn't have these kinds of substitutes, they would be actually motivated, as is human nature, to go and make connections with other people, to pair bond, to get romantic with others, make friends, have a real community, have real social connection. That's what's been happening for the vast majority of human history. It's only now, is it a coincidence, that loneliness has been skyrocketing now that we have all of the pseudo relationships through social media, pornography, technology, and so forth? So should we ban the internet? I do want to jump into this next question because there were several topics. This next one was... Oh wait, this is Q&A section? This is Q&A session? Not yet. It's just like a speed round. I just wanted to reset you guys, to be honest. But it is, I did do the poll. It's you. This poll is real. So this poll, the second one, is they asked what about the treatment of the porn actors or actresses, whatever you want to call them. Are they treated decently? We'll give you a wash, 60 seconds, and then we'll go to Daniel. No, of course not. We live under capitalism. Right now, a ton of the products that we use are literally made by like, sweatshop workers and slaves around the world. No, of course not. Pornography is a particularly visible and sometimes very egregious example of a broader problem, which is the mistreatment of workers. Obviously, I want them to be treated as well as possible, and I would support legislation to enforce that. Daniel?  Are they actually poorly treated? I don't know. Like, maybe some of them are. Maybe some of them aren't. Sex trafficking is an issue, as Vosch mentioned. So, but that has nothing to do with the morality of the argument. My whole argument is premised on this value that having healthy relationships, loving relationships between people and creating families, this is something necessary and important for society, and pornography cuts that and undermines that at every level. It sounds like earlier, he was arguing in favor of banning the Internet. So, this applies to so many things. So, Vosch, then what about when you said porn is distributive media, you can't regulate it? What about regulating and censoring Nazi speech or this kind of extreme right speech? Like, should we de-platform? I am a firm believer in the First Amendment. Should we de-platform? This is a perfect segue. Exactly, kind of maybe where you're going, Daniel, at least in one way, shape or form. Another topic was where do we draw the line on different types of porn, in particular, whether it be age or whether it be animals in the words of Cenk, if the horse enjoys it, is it wrong? Oh, okay, no, I'll jump right into it. These are like, obviously, there's incredibly easy lines to distinguish. There's a huge difference between the question, what lines should we draw on pornography when it comes to, it's content and what lines should we draw on its pornography when it comes to the people or types of people involved and what was done to them? Like, for example, there's a pretty hard line you can draw for snuff pornography where they kill somebody or something. It's pretty easy. Like, these lines are very clear. I don't think it's at all comparable to banning all pornography. They're so incomparable that it's kind of... I don't think people understand, like, if anyone's on the fence about this, the logistics of even beginning to fathom what banning pornography would mean, in addition to having never worked anywhere in human history, pornography is just something we sort of species produce, I suppose, that are species being. But like, where we draw that line, it would be like the source of... Like, the amount of government intervention. We're talking hundreds of billions for online monitoring. Are we gonna be doing FBI raids on people's houses because they have hard drives of their girlfriends like sex tapes that they took when they were 27?  Because people are lonely?   No, you wouldn't. Everyone likes to blame other couples. A minute, yeah. Was it a minute? I was getting into it. You guys, a minute 30 on that one. There's a little left wash. If you have any other types of porn you want to mention.  The problem is with you, all right?  Is that specifically to Daniel? No, no, no, not him. I'm talking to the audience. Oh, I'm just kidding. Come on, Daniel. All right, Daniel, we'll give you a safe thing a minute and a half. Yeah, I mean, the whole question of where to draw the line. Clearly you are drawing the line somewhere, but it seems quite arbitrary to the audience. Why shouldn't snuff films where someone gets killed? If it's consensual, like the person maybe is suicidal, euthanasia is legal in many countries. Why not just put it on film? And what would be the problem with that? Adults consenting and you videotape it. You have a snuff film. Why shouldn't that be allowed according to your morality or bestiality or necrophilia or any of these kinds of practices? Where do you draw the line? So this is already have the line. It's already there. I want to give. Yeah, so it's justified. The point is, is it justified? And not Daniel, if you wanted it otherwise, we can go. Yeah, but I really want Vosh to when he keeps saying that, oh, this is impossible. We need billions of dollars. Look, there's all kinds of moderation that's currently used to ban all types of speech online and Twitter and YouTube and Facebook. They have no problem with heavily moderating the content that is posted. And we're not even talking about videos. Anything that is put online that is objectionable contrary to their TOS, yes, taken down within minutes. So this is so this is something that is not difficult to do with technology and especially with artificial intelligence. But you seem to have this kind of fallacy that it's either everything completely or it's nothing. Why can't there be a middle line? But you're denying that it's even possible. Wait, where's the wait? No, I asked you where the line was and you didn't give me one. If you want to give me a midline, if I think it's impossible, then correct me. Where would you draw the line of pornography? I don't know. When it comes to the technological ability to limit it, you're saying that it's impossible to technologically prevent all forms of pornography from the internet. Therefore, nothing can be done. But this is a fallacy. Okay, fine. Maybe 100 percent, it can't be moderated. But what about 50 percent? What about 70 percent? You could curtail it. You could curtail it. But I don't think you could keep it out of the hands of people who want to see it. I know that because there are plenty of reports on countries that have banned pornography, like Iran, that's still like all the dudes there look at porn. Like all the time. You can curtail it. That's the only point that I'm making that you're conceding to. But it doesn't change the outcome. It does. If you curtail it, you are reducing the amount of usage. Just like deep platforming works. Do you think deep platforming works? That's terms of service. Not about the First Amendment. I'm okay with Twitter banning people, not with the state arresting you for looking at titties. So do you think Twitter banning the extreme right won't that just mean that the extreme right can find other ways to fill in on it? I'm trying to be civil, but you're actually, okay. I'm not trying to trigger you. This is a simple example.  Hold on for a second. The idea that there is any parallel between the state criminalizing all forms of pornographic nudity across the entire internet in a world where the internet servers are hosted broadly, that that has any bearing on Twitter TOS is insane. There is no comparison between these things. And I know, and by the way, I just want to point out, I said this at the beginning, okay? You don't actually care about the effects pornography has in society. You're religious. I do. You're opposition. No, your opposition is principle. If I could find... It is principle, but it's also based on the society. No, no, no, no. The effect's on society. Let's bring it into 60 seconds. Go ahead, watch. It's principle first. If there were studies indicating, for example, that the presence of gay people doesn't detriment, like society in any way, you would still be homophobic. And I've seen your site. I know you are. You're not evidence-driven, which is why you abuse evidence when you attempt to use it. I find there's plenty of evidence. Is not harmful for the vast majority of people. Wait, what citations have you made here? Horror is not harmful for the vast majority of people who consume it. Plenty of people of harmful relationships with stuff that you see all around the world, like video games or food. We have studies on the effects these things have on the brain. Your argument earlier was essentially one that indicated we should just ban the entire Internet. The way we form these relationships online, like parasocial relationships with streamers, these do contribute to loneliness. Do you want to ban streaming?  Should we go back to eating nothing more than grain and vegetables? If you want to make the argument that the fruits of modernity can lead people towards unhealthy relationships with media and with products, I agree. But I don't think humans are children. I think that we're capable of making decisions for ourselves and the data backs me. Because prohibition don't work. It has never led to positive outcomes. Daniel, 60 seconds. Wait, how come he gets as much time as he needs? But I get 60 seconds. I just gave him 60 seconds. I can assure you, I really did. Okay, sounded like a lot more than that. But look, the state is constantly threatening criminal and civil liability for all kinds of speech, including when it comes to political speech. That's something found in plenty of liberal societies, including the US. You have the government directly involved with many of the social media platforms that you have the Biden White House actually trying to restrict people's speech on social media. The government has had no problem restricting speech that it seems to be harmful and bad. And that kind of restriction is justified because they say that this is posing a severe societal harm. Therefore, we are justified in curbing it. Now, whether you want to disagree, whether the speech that is being curbed is harmful or not, that's a separate question. But the logic there, the liberal logic that you can ban things that cause significant societal harm, that is sound. It's shared amongst liberal societies. It's shared amongst Islamic societies and Muslim societies. So if we determine that porn is harmful and I've made a clear argument on why it is without appealing to anything other than the value of marriage, the value of love and companionship and family, those very empirical metrics. Then, yeah, plenty of empirical studies to justify that. Then that would be something that should be also curbed, whatever way that would be, whatever kind of laws could curb that. That's a separate discussion. Wash or 60? Yeah, no, it's simply not the case. People like to fear monger over pornography in particular, but all of these arguments apply to all of these products of modernity to varying extents. That's why he won't answer directly, should we ban the internet or whatever. All these arguments, he wants to talk about the effects of ejaculation. People have been jerking off without porn. You want to talk about the effects of people forming emotional pair bonds with people they're not in direct relationship with. Say hello to dancers, models, TV actors and actresses, and people you see out there on the street. You want to talk about infidelity?  People fear monger because, again, people are lonely and desperate and they're looking for any opportunity they can get to find the problems with their life. People who want simple solutions to those problems will always defer to the authoritarian answer. They'll say, what if the government just banned it? But when you grow up and look at the actual effects of prohibition worldwide, you see pornography and rape is incredibly common in the Muslim world. You see that the United States war on drugs hasn't led to a decrease in drug usage and has made the problem worse and has been very expensive. The criminalization of alcohol, like increased alcohol consumption, when you realize these problems are complicated, you understand that humans are complicated and you can't just pull them along the right social path by the nose. You have to give them the incentives to do well. Daniel. Yeah, I just want to note, you keep saying that the Muslim world is filled with rape. You know, I think that this is an Islamic phobic talking point that I hear from the far right. I didn't expect to hear it so much from Bosch. It's kind of disturbing how much you keep saying this trope about Muslims being raped. It's common in misogynistic countries. Okay, this is interrupting again. But yeah, I'm just pointing out that you sound exactly like the far right. When it comes to banning alcohol and prohibition, no, these things do have a positive effect. This is actually a myth that prohibition led to, was a failure. Prohibition did lead to organized crime and things like speakeasies. But the overall drinking went down in society. It was a positive effect that the government decided that alcohol was causing a problem. It's harmful and they prohibited it. And the actual usage of alcohol went down. That's a positive result if you accept that alcohol is harmful. This whole debate is not about prohibition. You keep wanting to make it about prohibition and you bring all these strawmen. But when it comes to reducing the harm, it's something that's harmful. Therefore, it should be done. So this is fantastic. No, alcohol consumption fell at the very beginning of prohibition, but it only took a couple of years for it to increase massively from that point to the point where it was nearly breaching. Why would that happen? Because people like alcohol. Why would it increase beyond what it was initially? Because people wanted to get drunk. Because people like drinking. They like fun. They like big titties, obviously. No, why would the rate go up beyond its original level? I want to be sure that Hodge gets a chance to make his one minute. I know, it's so hard here. Not only did it not work in curtailing alcohol consumption. Like, ah, yes, we criminalized it countrywide, brought it from 100% to 90%. Job well done, boys. We only created modern organized crime, spent billions of dollars of government money, got a lot of people killed. Job well done, lads. Nothing has changed and everything is worse. No, this is ridiculous. And it's, I don't know. It's just the authoritarian mindset. It's just, you know, well, I think thing bad. Therefore, get rid of it. Should we get rid of gaming? Live streaming. Tell me, should my job be illegal? Go ahead, Daniel. I mean, you keep repeating the same kind of point. Like, yes, things that are addictive, like gaming, like these apps that hook you in because they have taken advantage of your dopamine receptors. That should be made illegal.  No, all games do not do that. Playing, like, for example, Super Mario Brothers is not the same as playing Fortnite. Fortnite has been designed to be as addictive as possible using technology and science that did not exist when, you know, ping or pong came out. People get video addiction. So this is, so the point being that you're not an authoritarian if you decide to ban child pornography. This is something that society has determined to be harmful. And the government takes action to ban it because it is harmful. That doesn't make you an authoritarian. You're just begging the question when you're constantly saying that, we shouldn't ban these things because banning will never work. Clearly banning does work. Governments put laws in place all the time to legally restrict people from things that they want to do or they desire to do. That's a part of a legal system. You're basically denying the possibility of laws. I love you, James.  I don't even know when that would have happened like a long time ago, I guess.  The thing that made it decrease wasn't actually making it illegal. It was already illegal. The thing that made it decrease was the Me Too movement precursors. Obviously, the Me Too movement was like 2016. But the idea of taking people seriously when they talk about the experiences of abuse they've had or listening to kids, if they say, or giving sex education to younger people because it would help them identify if they're being abused. Behavior like that was the actual most effective metric in bringing down the abuse of children, which I suppose you find funny because I hear you laughing. But your amusement at the concept of children being abused aside, the actual thing that brought it down, it wasn't just the law. Because at the end of the day, the law is a very ineffective clumsy tool. The best thing you do is to create social pressures and cultural incentives that lead people towards good behaviors. Law can be supplementary. I don't think the existence of pornography warrants it in any case. I don't think it's even remotely comparable in harm. Again, might as well ban all video games because video game addictions have existed for as long as they have. It's not like loot boxes were the beginning of video game addictions. Livestreamers form parasocial relationships, but hell, so did TV stars. Depending on where you want to draw the line, your arguments are an excuse to ban everything. But from the best results, always come not from the authoritarian measure, but the considered measure. How do we address these problems substantively? How do we correct the... Yes, James, I give it to you. Yeah, I mean, this whole thing has been a strawman. Like, when did I say that only have authoritarian measures, quote, unquote? Yeah, I agree, have social programs, have all kinds of deterrents to prevent people from using this kind of material. No problem, but the whole argument should be about, the whole debate should be about whether it is harmful.  Like, this is a strawman. Yeah, I agree. Have all kinds of social programs. Child porn, you're absolutely right. It's not just decreasing because of the law. It's also the huge social stigma that's associated, rightfully so, with that kind of practice. Why can't pornography have the same social stigma in addition to banning it, in addition to preventing people from accessing it, so that they actually go out and form these kinds of relationships, have happy marriages and families, and flourish like human beings are meant to do so, instead of sitting in front of a screen masturbating all day.  Video games, yes. Yes, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You keep doing it. All games have the ability to incite that psychological response. No, no, no, no, no. Don't show me the study that shows that. You can't walk by this, okay? All forms of media can, but video games, because they're interactive, have a higher potential to elicit this response. You keep acting like any time, any person sees any pornography, that pornography is designed to be maximally addictive, and we're talking like some chick with fat titties, posting them on Twitter or something. You keep exacerbating the effect of pornography relative to other things that can cause addiction responses. You're lying. Pornography has a prominent effect, but so do interactive mediums like video games. Plenty of people have video game addictions. A lot of people watching have video game addictions. I might be willing to argue more people watching this right now through my audience have video game addictions than pornography addictions. But when I ask you, should we ban video games, your answer is, oh, only the addictive ones. But you haven't delineated the difference between addictive and non-addictive porn, so you're lying right now. You want to ban all games. I'm not lying. Look, if it's shown that playing Super Mario Bros. is going to prevent people from getting married and is going to prevent them from having sex and is going to prevent them from reproducing in the same way that pornography does, then I'll gladly concede ban Super Mario Bros. in the same way that you ban pornography. I mean, this is not a problem for my argument. You want to look at studies that talk about porn addiction? Or the thing is, we don't talk about recreational use of crack cocaine. Pornography is the same thing. Taking one hit is enough to get you hooked, especially since most people, since most children are exposed at an average age of 10 years old, right? They just come across a website and that elicits and that elicits a curiosity that the child wants to consume or seek out more and more pornography. And when they have access to phones and tablets and the internet, that's where the addiction comes from. But the initial hit is the same kind of hit as a kind of hardcore drug. This reminds me, I do want to jump into this because this is the last one on our poll. So earlier I mentioned what are subtopics that people want to see you guys address. We'll give you 60 seconds each for this topic as well. Can I respond to that and then get to what you're saying? No, no. Daniel says no. I didn't get a chance to respond to your final word either. How about we come back to it? Can I just say one sentence? One sentence, sure.  Everything he said there could apply to video games. Just one hit when you're 10. Oh yeah, Super Mario Bros. A lot of those people ended up getting game addictions. It's the same thing. He's just playing it up.  Like we're talking about games. It is the same. We must, I hate to do this, we must jump. This one is on whether or not porn might negatively affect relationships. So let's say it's a monogamous relationship and let's say they're committed to each other. Is that, so let's say yeah, old fashioned. They're committed to each other. They're not open. They're not swinging or anything like that. What do you guys think? Wash first. I think it depends on the relationship. It can be harmful depending on their standards, but I think a healthy relationship should be accommodating of porn use. The idea that like anytime you look at porn, it like makes you think less of your partner or whatever.  The idea that it's like cheating your part.  Again, like it's people's preferences. You should respect your partner's preferences and talk about it and find out what you're both okay with and the relationship if you're not. But like, I don't know. It's like so many people consume porn. It seems like it's easier these days to just be like, oh, well you like porn. Well, I like porn.   Who cares? Got it. Daniel? Yeah. So there's a study that actually addresses this from 2011, viewing sexually explicit materials, alone or together, associations with relationship quality published in the archives of sexual behavior.  Individuals who viewed porn alone and with their partner reported three times the rate of cheating. So there are many, many studies on this. Does viewing pornography reduce marital quality over time? Evidence from longitudinal data?  Pornography and relationship quality? Establishing the dominant pattern by examining pornography use and 31 measures of relationship quality in 30 national surveys. So all of these studies show that pornography use is associated and sometimes even causally linked to decreasing relationship quality and also cheating. Like where this is not a swinging couple. This is a couple where the one party is doing something extramarital on the side. So this is not the kind of stable relationship that the relationship that leads to a happy, stable society. Time. Sounds correlative to me. No, longitudinal studies are not correlative. Longitudinal studies can absolutely be correlative. They don't intrinsically demonstrate causation. Look, everything is correlative. It's like correlation does not prove causation, but there are indications of causation that are shown through experimentation. Longitudinal studies is not just cross-sectional. Yeah. That's what you do in science. You do experiments to show that a correlation is highly probably causing the phenomenon. They're not doing experiments on people's levels of infidelity related to porn usage. I don't know what kind of experimental model they're implementing. I didn't say it's experimental. But then why are we talking about it? I did our longitudinal. It's looking at over time. That doesn't mean they're causative. I would need to look at that. I can't live react to all these studies here. But the one you said there, it sounded like it was correlative. I would need to look at it. I'm telling you, longitudinal studies are not purely correlative. Also, I think it's the right of those people if they want to look at porn, even if it ends the relationship. As a freedom lover myself, if you want people to have good relationships, you can't just have the state hold a gun to their head and go, don't engage in any behaviors that might compromise the legitimacy of this social institution. No, if you want people to have good relationships, that has to be born out of their individual free will. They have to choose to act in the good way towards each other. Yeah, but you want to help them make the right decision by having kind of social conventions. Yeah, that's another big problem with social conventions go hand in hand with laws. But I mean, most of society... I just said state holding a gun to your head. That's what I... When I say law, I mean state hold... When I say the state holding a gun to your head, I mean law. It's not... You're not choosing the right decision. You're not even making a decision. If the state has a gun to your head. How's that a decision? So you don't think that it is bad for people to have the right to cheat on their spouse, but do you think that... Of course, people should have the right to cheat on their spouse.  Society A, you have a low rate of extramarital affairs and cheating. And society B, where there is a high rate, comparatively high rate of extramarital affairs and cheating, which is the better society? The first one, because they're free. P, freedom means the freedom to make bad choices. That freedom means the freedom to make mistakes. That's what freedom is. We're not clockwork dolls and this isn't the Sims. No, you didn't answer the question. You didn't answer... One society has like 10% cheating, and another society has 50% cheating. Are they both free? They're equal in every single way. So they're both so in one society. So there's no law against cheating in either. There's no difference between the two societies. Exactly the same in terms of laws, in terms of social conventions. Everything is the same. Well, then I suppose it would be better to not cheat. It seems like a wrong thing to do to your partner. Why? Because it's rude. Yeah. Yeah, because it's rude to your partner. Because you have standard to your relationship. I'm not thinking it's like an understatement to say that. No, that's it. It's rude. Yeah, it's rude. It's like a violation of their trust. Yeah, it's rude. Yeah, violation of trust is something serious. But the point is that you're acknowledging that the society with lower extramarital affairs is better. Well, guess what? Born usage will increase the amount of extramarital affairs in society. That's interesting because I'm looking at a study right now which indicates that, hold on, across these samples we found consistent evidence that partners who watch pornography together report higher relationship and sexual satisfaction than partners who do not. Notably, this association was not moderated by gender. So this is associations between relationship quality and pornography use dependent contextual patterns of use within the couple. The problem is a lot of the stuff you've said to me feels kind of like Susie. I bet if I looked for your studies, I'd be able to tear a few of them apart because I have the degree to do so.  Like the degree of narrativization that you've engaged in here indicates to me that obviously these studies are a means to an end for you. Well, you're talking about small effects. Like, yeah, I can agree that one 10-year-old or two 10-year-olds expose some pornography. They're never going to be able to get married. They're never going to be able to have family. No, that's definitely possible. But we're talking about not just one or two people. We're talking about millions, hundreds of millions. And that creates a cumulative effect that has an impact on the character of society. According to this, watching porn together makes the relationship better. So do you think it should be illegal to not watch porn together with your partner? I saw that.  You have like one study, I cited three. But I'll acknowledge that there is going to be studies that will point out what you just read. The means to an end. Right. But I will contend, and I can back this up, that there are more studies that show the detrimental effect. Initially, the science was out on whether smoking is bad for you or not. You could find studies that said smoking was actually great, would make your life so much better if you spoke 10 times a day.  Yeah, I am comparing. But your studies... I'd say pornography is much more harmful than smoking, actually, how I'd go that far.   Like, all the studies in the world could indicate that it's beneficial for society, and you would oppose it, right? For some, like, what's your point?  Even though... What's your point? Like, what's your point?  No, no, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait, wait. Don't get it triggered. Literally all data indicates that the outcomes for a gay couple adopting children are the same as a straight couple. There's no harm to the kid, no social harm, no, like, weird problems with that, but you're opposed to it, aren't you? Because your religion tells you to.  I bet if I took a look through your studies, it's fine they weren't as causal as you think they are. Yeah, I mean, that's a great argument, too. You know, I don't know what. It's just, I can, you know, when it comes to these questions about these kinds of social issues, this is something that we can do, like, a careful reading of the studies and have an extended discussion. Yeah, we could look at the Quran for answers. I know. No, no, I think that I've established that the empirical studies, like, I've laid down a very clear argument. I've pointed to research studies, I've named some of them. People can look it up on their own and try to verify whether I'm wrong or not, or whether you're right. But the data is all there. And you want to say, oh, this is just a means, this is just a means to an end. So what? Like, address the argument.  Address the argument. Wait, can you, just out of curiosity, can you answer the gay adoption question?  I've answered this on my website, muslimskeptic.com. What does it say? I've answered on YouTube. Do you want me to start interrogating you about your statements about child pornography? I know what your answer is. You want me to do that? The empirics are second hand. Well, for me, empirics, you can interrogate me or whatever. For me, empirics are first hand. I try not to do that. Like, I try to be decent and respectable in this debate and not bring up these kinds of points that are not related to the topic or the debate. Indecency. When you're having a discussion on stuff like this, which is really complicated, like, I want to be clear, my positions on this are strong, but the subject is very complicated.  If you want to have a debate, if you want to have a debate on gay adoption, I'm happy to have that. Okay. You want to debate on that? Wait, no, I'm trying to answer your thing. So the subject is really, really complicated and people have the ability to narrativize and bias their perspective in a lot of ways, like, even like researchers do this all the time. So it's important to understand where people come at their arguments from. And I think in your case, it's important to know that for you, like, the empirics don't matter. You could be lying about everything you're saying empirically. It doesn't matter for you either. But it wouldn't matter because your actual source of reasoning is coming from another place. What if all the studies showed that gay adoption is actually, like, horrifically abusive to children? What if all the studies showed that? Would you then say that we have to ban gay adoption? Well, why would they be harmful to the children? Well, wait, why? We're just, I'm just stipulating that all the studies show that gay adoption is extremely harmful.  Wait, why is it hard? Wait, that determines my answer. No, it doesn't. It's a very simple question. Wait, no, it does, yeah. All the studies show that. Imagine, imagine. You approach every question with a cudgel.  You can't answer the Q&A shortly. You can't answer a simple question. If all the studies- Can you just answer why it's harmful?   Why can't you answer? Because there's critical context. Because of what you're revealing right now. Empiricism is just a means to an end. What you're revealing right now is that you don't actually- Wait, James, he's not actually- All right, given that you're each speaking at the same time, nobody can hear either of you. And this is what the audience will feel mercilessly. I only want to say, I think this is indicative of his thought process, because to him, whether he likes or doesn't like something has nothing to do with why it is. He has the simple mind of an authoritarian. He approaches it with a hammer, you see? It doesn't actually matter why it is the way it is. It's just whether you like it or don't like it. And I think it's kind of revealing that you wouldn't care what the context of why something is bad is. Oh, we just stipulated for the sake of argument and you couldn't answer the question. If gay adoption was proven in some hypothetical world to be very harmful to children, it should be very easy for a normal person who is guided by the empirics and is not guided by some kind of politically correct ideology or liberal ideology to say that, well, given that all the studies show that this is harmful, this practice is harmful, let's ban it. But you were not willing to say that. You were not willing to say that. Can I ask you a question to help you understand? The existence of Muslims in America causes hate crimes. Should we ban Muslims in America? Can you repeat that? Sorry. The existence of Muslims in America allowing them into this country, allowing them to be here, causes hate crimes. Hate crimes exist because Muslims are here. Should we ban Muslims from being in America? But why are the hate crimes caused? Is it because of the Muslims or is it because of Islamophobes? You're wondering, but you can't ask me to clarify, can you? Because that would defeat the whole point.  Look, okay, fine, fair enough. Ah, it's getting tough. No, it's not getting tough.  That's why they're harmed. Oh, I figured that. But why are they abusing the children? They just have this hatred of children. If gay couples had an intrinsic hatred of children, then yes, I agree. Maybe it should be bad. I don't think that's true, though.  What if it's people bullying the kids for having a gay parents? But it's not that in this hypothetical scenario. So the reasons matter, yeah? If gay people were inherently more violent or so, yeah, you could talk about that. That's fantasy stuff, but yeah. But the reason matters, you know?  Same with Muslims in America. It's not them committing the crimes. People do hate crimes against Muslims. So the reasons why bad outcomes are happening, like the product of what incentives, you know, that matters a lot to me.  In reality, however, everything's fine. This is purely hypothetical. There are no research studies that I know of that show this. But in this hypothetical example, you would be forbanning gay adoption. In a hypothetical fantasy world where things were different than the way they are, then I would have different positions on the subject, yes. Thankfully, in the real world where there is no harm, I do support gay adoption and you... Right. I'm happy to debate you, Vosch, on this topic. James, I think we're ready for the Q&A. We're ready for another debate. Juicy, we're going to jump into the Q&A. I want to say, folks, a couple of things in particular. Our guests are linked in the description.  I want to learn more about their views. You can click on their links in the description box right now, including the description box for the podcast. As we put all of our debates for modern day debate on the modern day debate podcast. And we put all of our guest links there as well. If you haven't yet, pull up your favorite podcast app and find us as, hey, let's say you're driving to work and if you, like me, I'm in Fort Collins, Colorado. I drive through spots where all of a sudden I don't have data. So it's nice to have it downloaded beforehand and it's 100% ad-free. We don't make a dime off the podcast. We just hope it's a value for you. This one coming in from Satanic Cabal says, I must ask upfront, what are the thoughts of Vosch and Daniel on furry porn? Stuff is fine. Art isn't it. It sure promotes artistic development for one. It's the greatest product of our generation. In reality, the furry stuff isn't that new. People have incorporated anthropomorphized humans into mythology for longer than we have writing.  Loki turned into a female horse. It's a whole thing. I don't know. I think it's fun, whatever.  That's important. Daniel, would you agree? That sounds degenerate to me. You got it. Thank you. Very empirical answer. Short and sweet. You to have a cue says, shout out to sideshow nav and let's farm great mods. Great mods indeed. And I saw there were some people getting banned in the chat. As a reminder, folks, we do follow YouTube terms of service. So any sort of attack on a group is going to get you banned immediately. No warnings. If you are harassing one of the speakers, such as if you're making fun of Vosch's appearance, depending on how malicious it is, we'll give you the answer. Let him do it. Let him rent. We'll give you, depending on how malicious, if it really looks like you're really going for the throat, we'll say, hey, can you chill out? Otherwise, if it's of the Lucy, like he said, let it rent. But yes, I agree, though. Thanks very much for saying that. Sideshow nav, let's farm, and the other mods do a great job as we do want to follow the terms of service for YouTube. The coolest FR says for Daniel, if authentic Islamic hadith agreed and basically said, quote, porn is good, would you change your entire argument? I'd be Muslim. If the hadith, like, said that, like, if God commanded something, then, you know, that's, we would follow God's commands. So God says, for example, that it is moral and permissible to marry multiple women. That's considered something very disturbing and disgusting to certain cultures. But that's something that God has permitted. There are all kinds of arguments or wisdoms that you can point out to why this is a good practice. For example, you know, in all kinds of societies that don't have polygamy, higher status men inevitably have mistresses. They have inevitably cheat on their wives. But in Islam, it allows higher status men who have more wealth, who have more influence, whatever. They have the option of marrying multiple women who agree to marry that person. So, you know, this is something that gives leeway to men, higher value men in society, within Islamic societies. So we can talk about the wisdoms of that. But at the end of the day, it goes back to what, well, what did God allow us to do? And in the case of polygamy, God has allowed men to have multiple wives. If God had commanded something else related to whatever topic that you want to imagine, then we would follow that as well. You got it. Thank you very much for this question. Coming in from Mr. Monster says, I believe the said topic is actually helpful for the human body. For stress relief and easing of sexual tension, the more you bottle it up, the worse it gets. Daniel, agree? Yeah. Yeah. So ejaculation is something that's necessary and ejaculating with your loving wife or if you're a woman and having an orgasm with your loving husband, that produces a kind of hormonal response that is really beneficial for your relationship. It creates these feelings of companionship and pair bonding that doesn't happen with masturbation. So yes, ejaculation is necessary biologically. It's important. It helps with all kinds of endorphins and feelings of happiness. It's just that much better when you have a person to do it with. I don't disagree with that at all. I just like a reminder that if you want to just quickly boil some ramen so that you can just have it real quick while doing some homework, like that's food, but it doesn't feel that good. But if you make a nice home-cooked meal and you have it with a friend, then there are lots of social receptors in your brain, that pair bond either in a romantic or social sense and make it better there. I'm just pointing out this phenomena exists in almost everything we do. Sex is a social activity, of course. So a lot of the exacerbating factors associated with it versus doing the solo version on your own, like those are going to be present for a lot of different things. We literally do release different brain chemicals when we're hanging out with a friend having a good meal than if we're just eating on our own. Be with people. That's the lesson, right? Be with people. But I don't think the best way to get people to have meals with others is to deny them the home ramen. You can't be like, all right, well, it's better for you to go eat with another person.  I am. Well, that's not the correct analogy, though. It's not like comparing eating food with masturbating. Pornography is creating this super normal stimulus. You should compare eating out with friends versus staying at home and eating a highly addictive, processed, super food that has been generated in a lab. Yeah, ramen is that better? Like if you keep having that, if you keep eating that kind of processed food, that's going to prevent you from going out and seeking those social relationships. Yeah, I don't want the state to ban the ramen. That's the correct analogy with pornography. So the state should ban that super food, highly engineered product. They should ban that. The ramen is, though. Those little squiggly ramen packets are literally a product of millions of dollars agricultural and food engineering.  Scientists worked in it, you know? I don't want the government to barge in, kick down the door and go like, no, it's better for society if you can't have the MSG packet or whatever.  That'd be, that'd suck. That ramen got me through college. Yeah, but prevented people from actually forming these kinds of relationships. The government would be justified in banning it. I know. Like with the Mario Brothers and everything else good in the world. This one coming in from, do appreciate your question. Oh, Flamie, oh, this is my religion. Discordianism mandates pornography. Daniel, I don't believe in the super normal. I think that they're a troll. Mr. Monster says not everyone out here wants to be in a relationship or have a partner.  This is a lot like the last one that they just said in terms of like relief rather than bottling it up. A lot of comers in the chat. Do it like how your ancestors did. Find a, get a telescope and find an open window from a lower rise apartment and peep on some lady. Okay. That's your pornography and the gigachat Muslim future. Oh wait, that's allowed. That's allowed and you're according to your morality? No, that's not allowed. That's voyeurism. It was a joke. Just want to make sure and just want to make sure.  Discussion done. Addiction should be discouraged, but not stigmatized in cells and leftists need help. I played like a hundred hours of underrail in like 10 days. I know addiction destroys your brain. Just being an adult means learning to work through these things. The state can't come in and solve every problem. You can't, you can't stub your toe on the step up to the loft in your, in your house.  You know, we have the potential to form unhealthy relationships with a ton of stuff. You know, it's not just porn. It's always been like this. We have to form strength of character. We have to form the social relationships that allow us to overcome these, these adversities. This one from Malavia. Thanks to your says as a former math and heroin addicted person, porn is nowhere near as addictive nor destructive as drugs. Daniel, I can read you the studies that will disagree with that. Let me quote it for you right now. Okay. Neuroscience of internet pornography addiction, a review and update. The review leads to the conclusion that internet pornography addiction fits into the addiction framework and shares similar basic mechanisms with substance addiction. Another paper, neuroscientific approaches to- Wait, that doesn't speak to the severity though. That just says it's in the same frame. So it says the same basic mechanisms with substance addiction. Yeah, like how a punch in a book use kinetic energy. That doesn't- Yeah, the same basic. So the review, this other study from neuroscience of internet pornography. Oh, that's what I registered. Neuroscientific approaches to online pornography addiction. This is actually a textbook on internet addiction. Given previous results, excessive pornography consumption can be connected to already known neurobiological mechanisms underlying the development of substance-related addictions. Next, searching for clarity and muddy water. Future considerations for classifying compulsive sexual behavior as an addiction. Quote, we recently considered evidence for classifying compulsive sexual behavior as a non-substance behavioral addiction. Our review found that CSB shared clinical neurobiological and phenomenological parallels with substance use disorder. And if you look at the neurobiology of pornography addiction, a clinical review, it goes through how all the same mesolimbic dopamine pathways are fired in the same way as cocaine use or heroin use. This is not triggered by playing Super Mario Brothers. It's not triggered by- Yes, it is. ...having ramen noodles. It's not- Like video addiction. Let me know, literally. I'm answering the questions. Fits under the same pattern of behavior addiction. Video game addictions to Fortnite and those kinds of modern games that have been designed. Video game addiction. Being an online or being a casino addict addicted to gambling, yes, those all have the same kind of pathways. Those are all behavioral addictions. So yes, they're all in the same category. Pornography is in that. They're all bad. So wait, so like you just said, yeah, they're all behavioral addictions. This includes so many types of behaviors. The point that you just made for me is, yeah, the stuff you're complaining about with regards to porn is present in a ton of different human behaviors.  Just because it's a potential for some people. There is no evidence. There is no evidence that shows that playing Super Mario Brothers or eating ramen noodles or eating ramen noodles causes the same kind of pathways of addiction to light up causes prefrontal cortex diminishing in the gray matter of the prefrontal cortex. None of that has been established. None of those other behaviors. None of those other behaviors calls that to the brain. Wait, can you find me a study saying Ron Jeremy specifically causes the same kind of neural pathway markers? Ron Jeremy, can you find it? Control F, can you find it? Because you're just saying ramen and Super Mario. If you said food and video games, food does not cause it. You find the same behavior. Food does not cause it. Yes, wait, you can absolutely find studies. Eating food does not. Eating food is not the same as taking heroin. Consuming pornography does not immediately give you a behavioral addiction, but the category of behavior fits into the solid behavior addiction. How many more studies can I read for you? No, the studies you just read agree with me. Wait, hold on, James, I need to point this out for the sake of medical accuracy. Okay, this is, we're going to get shut down by YouTube for medical disinfo, right? I want to be clear. The studies he just read indicates it. Behavioral addiction is something that can be caused in a ton of different ways. The reason he keeps fashisously bringing up like ramen or Super Mario Bros. is because he knows that if he googled can video games form a behavioral addiction or can food form a behavioral addiction, the answer would be a yes. Can porn form a behavioral addiction? Yes. Is there any evidence that it always will? No, same with food and video games. You would ban the world, man. It would be, there would be nothing left, but an empty room in a Quran that we could ram our head against because it's also been found that reading can cause addictive behaviors when it comes to narrative dependency. So we just rammed our head against it and prayed. That's all we'd have, but people form addictions associated with religiosity as well. There are people addicted to religious-oriented behaviors. So we'd have to ban that as well. They looked at specifically non-addicted behavior. They looked at very low exposure to pornography and they immediately noticed these kinds of changes to the brain. Look at the study. Brain structure and functional connectivity associated with pornography, consumption published in July 2014. It's looking at non-64, non-porn addicted males and it's pointing out that just when you start, these changes start happening to the brain. We must look forward. Exactly with any kind of drug usage. It's not the same with food. It's not the same with eating bread and then your brain starts to change. We just have so many questions. Is this one coming in front of you? This one. You'd have to accuse, says Daniel, adult porn bad. Let's see, question mark. This one coming in from Jesse Miller says correlation does not equal causation and the opposite fallacy is rejecting the possibility of causation because correlation does not equal causation. That's absolutely true. 100%. It is entirely possible that there are causative factors here but I think they need to be determined when claims are being made so strong as like society will crumble unless we ban this or that because human happiness is oriented around the strength of the family. The problem is like having read a lot of research studies on the subject myself, these studies are not as determinative as he claims they are. I mean, the ones he just read out loud completely support my point that it's porn addiction just fits into a broad category of behavioral addiction which is present in a ton of other human behaviors. But if we take a look at the specifics on this a lot of it is like way more complicated. You can get interesting results on people's brain patterns but just if they change their diet over a long enough period of time like in a short time because the rush of chemicals their brain and the sugars that process stuff is complicated. I just don't want people to fear monger over like fat titties online.    Like the changes that you're talking about when it comes to going on a diet or what about music? Like people who learn how to play an instrument their brain also can change. So you could say, oh well see playing you have to ban playing music because it causes changes to the brain. That's not the argument that I'm making. It's a change to the brain that changes your ability to control yourself. Changes your ability to make a kind of long-term decision making because you prefer short-term benefit over long-term value. Like the prefrontal cortex what's called hypofrontality will actually change your attitude your personality. And this is something that has been documented in research study after research study. You've been on this one for so long. I hate to do this but this one coming in from Yeshua the king says if Allah allowed porn would Daniel contest it? I think we basically had that question before. If you want to say anything you can otherwise I'm moving to the next one. Yeah I want to say something because this question about banning like I'm only arguing on the basis of empirical studies and it's only in reality my position is only because Islam disavows it. Like this is a mischaracterization of Islamic and even just religious reasoning in general. Like you can have a kind of utilitarian argument within religion. Like Islam does consider like the real world circumstances and how things can be negatively impacted by societal behaviors. So even something that is not explicitly banned in the in the Quran or in the Islamic tradition Muslim scholars could still on the basis of a utilitarian or consequentialist reasoning determine that that needs to be banned or that needs to be promoted. So you're straw manning actually religious arguments and specifically Islamic arguments. Like the kind of argument I made in this debate is perfectly in line with Islamic religious morality and I'm not trying to be too faced. Like I really actually believe that non-Muslims should seriously consider the harms that come from pornography usage even if they're not committed to any kind of religious morality. This one from Olgoat says Daniel your arguments involve flipping the script and using peer reviewed studies from Western institutions against liberals. How do you decide when science is valid outside of an Islamic agenda? I think that the truth is the truth. Like I think the truth is consistent. Empirical reality is consistent. My belief and what I've seen in the entirety of my life is that empirical reality is consistent with Islamic teachings about the world about ontology about epistemology about morality. And that's on the that's you know the premise that I take to all the debates that I go into. So there's a concordance between the truth. Sometimes science can get things wrong. I think everyone acknowledges that. But if there's something that is definitely true empirically then it will coincide and be compatible 100% with Islam. And if there's something that the science says that happens to be conflicting with Islam then I would just say that we need to look at those studies and determine what is exactly the truth. You got it. And in terms of the phrase PMO addiction I think this means pornography masturbating and orgasm. This person says King Cash says as a person who separate from PMO addiction for more than four years with on and off cycles thankfully now I've conquered the horrible addiction Vosch has no idea what he's talking about when it comes to porn. Well that's not very specific. No I do. Behavioral addictions can be really serious in many ways. Even without a chemical reaffirmation like by doing cocaine or heroin or whatever you know. People say this about like marijuana right? Like they're marijuana addicts even though the like people can form behavioral associations and this stuff can be really strongly.  It's not that I don't recognize how serious it can be it's that I don't think like the problem is getting the state to run in and like ban for all humans the shit that you have an irresponsible relationship with you know. It's a bit it's self-interested on your part with respect. The best thing we can do I think is like better mental health access and resources better sociability in society so it's easier for people to make friends.  I do take it seriously if I sound like I'm being facetious with all the big titty jokes or whatever like you know I mean I am facetious generally but it's not because I don't care you know this one from Charlie Dowell Tazkirin says wrestling is a sooner in Islam Daniel and Vosh should have a freestyle wrestling match Salam Alaykum Daniel May Allah grant you Jannah this one coming in from I don't have a law on my side I'll lose what the fuck I'm an I'm an atheist I'll lose Sunflower says Vosh you support decriminalization of drugs but you support fentanyl vending machines in every home because that's how accessible porn is to anyone with a computer it's uniquely ubiquitous and free I wanted to be the third tap right next to the right next to the hot in the cold for the sink let me base this fuck no really though I don't think that after some drugs I don't think actual drugs are comparable to pornography at all I don't think it's possible to have a healthy relationship with something like fentanyl I do think it's very easy to have a healthy relationship with pornography because I think I think that with pornography fits more within a behavioral category that I would compare to stuff like food or television or video games where people can form negative relationships with it and that's serious but like most people are fine whereas stuff like fentanyl is being a drug it's not just a behavioral addiction it's a chemical addiction it literally kill you it rots your body this one from Brenton Lengel one of my favorites Brenton to see you Brenton he says oxytocin doesn't just come from sex it comes from touch music exercise a dad gets more oxy from holding his baby than from sex the idea that every activity should produce it is patently ridiculous does that ban babies contradict does that contradict anything I said ban babies this one from usb and first try he says the question wasn't whether it should be outlawed but whether porn is bad for society I wonder how many people would be comfortable admitting their mother or sister does porn for a living not judging okay wait that's a bias result though right there first of all like your if your mom tells you that she just took a fat shit you probably wouldn't wouldn't want to hear that either but you wouldn't set the government on banning moms from taking shits you know that's that's more of a like tmi type deal than it is like a social harm type deal also people of biases that don't necessarily translate into objective social harm right like that's that's what goes back to like the muslims cause hate crime argument you know like maybe them being their causes hate crimes but it's really a discrimination against them that like actually makes them happen yeah no this this stuff is complicated um yeah brendan langle strikes again says if you have problems with apps and food using the science of addiction to manipulate the consumer you have a problem with capitalism and the profit motive daniel well i guess that's true i don't believe in a kind of libertarian free enterprise i'm actually surprised that if i'm wrong i think vosh is a marxist or he has some sympathies towards carl marx who said that religion is the opium of the masses but i think that porn is actually much greater opium for the masses that prevents revolution because if people were not able to release through pornography they would actually look at the kinds of problems in society such as you know not being able to get married you know when you have like a over 40 percent up to 50 percent incel rate in some countries like japan people aren't able to get married but they don't revolt why do they not revolt even though they can't get married and have a loving relationship have a family they don't revolt because they have all of this pornography that they're busy masturbating to if the government closed you know turned off the spigot those japanese or you know those french or whoever would be out in the streets calling for you know revolution peaceful peaceful revolution at the ballot box of course at the ballot box but you know the the pornography is actually tangibly preventing people from being you know aware of the problems and the oppression of the ruling elite capitalist class so i think on that basis we can have some common ground vosh but remember the full quote is religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions that is the opium of the people so carl marks would also say that pornography that deep anal is the heart of a heartless world in which case i would have to agree with him again really drop up and bangers that guy this one again from do appreciate your question kairi erving says vosh stop comparing anatomy slash scientific drawings to the unlimited amount of internet porn which kids can discover usa obscenity laws cover this difference they cover it by basically saying and you'll you'll know when you see it that's the problem the obscenity the obscenity laws are already incredibly vague and people are already really really really unwilling to invoke them in large part because they're so vague that they're almost legally useless like the literally like the us like legal precedence on what pornography is as you know it if you see it right and trust me like if you make an anatomical diagram of like oh well this is like the how the breast tissue whatever looks like there's not really a hard line there okay people were jerking off the sears and robot catalogs for like decades before internet pornography came along I promise you that if there was broadly available anatomical medical diagrams online the government would be watching that shit with a very close eye you know it'd be it's you know is you can you can show a male erection but you it's long as it's less than six inches you know I mean this is not like this is not accurate like the whole idea that I know it when I see it like that's the that's the thing for a lot of complex phenomenon like tell me give me a definition of happiness and if you can't give me a definition we don't legislate happiness no I'm just making a conceptual point that just because there is not like a criteria in a few lines that you can express in the law doesn't mean that it doesn't have a definition or it doesn't have a clear distinct concept that you can regulate that's the whole point of that that's the whole point of the statement I I know it when I see it that's not clear or distinct that's incredibly vague that the human mind knows what happiness is even though if I put you on the spot to define happiness no it doesn't if human minds do what happiness was we wouldn't be talking about porn you can you can define happiness you can define justice like what is people could what is that what is a game like no no but we all have an idea of what a game is my idea of porn is probably I mean this is the whole this is like the vipkinsonian argument in philosophy that you don't necessarily have to have a concrete verbalized definition you have the concept you can have the concept of something like what is obscene or what is a game I have the concept and I can recognize examples I've never seen before in my life I can say yeah that's a game yeah that's obscene yeah that's justice I can identify those things I'm sure you have very confident answers but mine would be different yeah I'm just giving it like a vipkinsonian argument you can't have like legal lines being drawn on vipkinsonian abstractions here you can because people know what is obscene no people have different ideas our ideas of obscenity are different yours and mine that's not good enough every judge would have a different ruling that's not law that's just individual tyranny that's just giving the judge the free right to decide what they do and don't like you can't have legal lines drawn people have different definitions therefore you can't make laws basically you're denying the possibility of any law because all laws depend on different concepts have a central that people will differ on people will differ on concepts that are invoked in the law there is no central definition of what pornography or obscenity is who decides what's the central definition well usually through legal precedent and we haven't done it so you're just begging the question no okay wait legal precedent is what the law is I can't tell if you're deliberately being dumb or not there is a huge difference between the law making a concrete distinction in direct terms and trying to legally distinguish what's something like happiness or obscenity is those are two completely different things which is why our legal system hasn't tried to do it our legal system has given up on trying to define pornography it doesn't there is no strict or clear definition how can they define child pornography how can they define it because who defines the child that is we do just by setting the line at 18 years of age that's it that's empirical you can measure that with that you can measure that with radioactive decay you can't measure what the effect is you can measure the psychological transformation of porn use that's what the whole debate I've been trying to express to you decide whether or not it's not just a subjective thing it's not just a subjective thing it's not just a subjective thing there is tangible objective empirical psychological effects on the mind and I'm not even talking about those of addiction looking at serious roboclips if that were the case then that should also be under the purview of the law wait chicks wearing clothing in sweaters those Sears robot catalogs were like magazines I don't know what you're talking about I don't know what Sears robot young men would jerk off and fucking nut while looking at chicks in tight sweaters okay their brains are lighting up too this one coming in from do you appreciate the word question that should also be been okay raise 174 says Daniel can studies and arguments convince you when you're underlying reasons are really it's the will against the will of God and people who do it go to hell I mean this is the same thing like this is the third time this question has come up but it's important because this is the same thing with liberals okay with people like Vosh hate those guys I'll ask Vosh yeah like whatever you want to define it but Vosh here I'll ask you the same question all your values okay do they can you give me an example of where your values and what you believe actually contradict or contradict the empirical studies like the empirical studies say one thing but you believe something else well the empirical studies can only describe things descriptively whereas my moral values would be prescriptive so there can't be a contradiction between them I have axiomatic values that I attempt to achieve and maximize through empirical understanding and to that extent I try to have my beliefs conform with reality no but what if you have like a certain kind of belief that deeply conflicts with the empirical reality is there any example of that that you can give me no because I would have another word so then you're the same as me we'll know because I have axiomatic values I gave the same exact exact answer to this question of whether anything in Islam will could conflict with empirical studies and then go back to the gay adoption question no I mean this is a conceptual point again like no it's a pretty you're saying that there's it's just coincidence it's just a coincidence that all your values are supported by empirical studies no it's not a coincidence it takes a lot of effort actually okay so I can say the same thing no but yours aren't we demonstrated that with the gay adoption question your beliefs aren't informed by we haven't had that debate if you want to talk about it agree to a debate I'm challenging you Vosh I'm challenging you Vosh or do you know except the debate except the debate any studies that indicate that it's harmful for a child to be adopted I got plenty of studies I got plenty of arguments I'm happy I'm happy to give you any kind of argument and study that you want I know you have arguments on it get into a debate a formal debate we'll have James here he's such an amazing moderator I love him and we'll have that debate this would run just a friendly conversation I'm happy to talk to you as well Vosh Brenton my civil rights Brenton what about civil rights my civil rights I'm gay this one from Brenton Langel says one hit of cocaine has been shown to cause brain changes in mice not humans drugs cannot change a human brain that quickly only long-term use can the hit of cocaine I think that's a super normal is a super normal stimulus this is a neurological term there is more dopamine that is produced in your brain when you take drugs or watch pornography or see big kids on the street or online gambling there's a bigger rush of dopamine to your brain in that one hit then you get from you know eating a hamburger or seeing a curvy piece of wood or looking in a Sears magazine there's a big difference between these kinds of super normal stimuli versus many of the things in common life that humans have lived with for thousands and thousands of years like big titties on the street which didn't exist back in antiquity because we didn't have streets yet but you can't go and sit you couldn't go and stare at someone and masturbate while watching someone's you know breasts in public you couldn't do that like 40% of no no because the alpha male the alpha male would kill you if you stared at his woman that's actually all just jerked off while looking at the big titties no they couldn't they had no access to it because there was no photography they just found the girl a historical you just have a historical opinions that you're just a canuck or angry canuck says this debate is about whether or not porn is good or bad vosh is just debating about whether or not it should be banned because you'd be angry if it gets banned well I mean I do believe in like freedom yeah sorry that I'm an American no the real the real problem is that whether or not it's good or bad is like not an answerable question in large part because there is absolutely no data on the quantifiable happiness achieved by society through jerking off to porn he laughed like he laughed when I said that but it's true any question as to whether or not porn is good or bad became unanswerable the moment it was posed because we have literally no way of empirically measuring the counterfactual we have no idea what good is being done we just have some studies on what harm is being done so the real there's a fact of the matter like no the fact of the matter there's a difference between have that data you'll never have it the real question in the real world as if we're like mature enough to realize what we're really talking about here the real question is what should we do about it that's the actual question people have because big like discussions and whether or not something is good or bad and you don't have all the data it's worthless there's no point it's a child's discussion you know who would win Superman or Iron Man I don't fucking care the real question is what do we do and in this you know in this question we have much more data to work with but yeah you've got to focus on the good stuff this one coming in from do appreciate your question Salman Khan says Vosch pornography isn't natural throughout human history it has always been discouraged or looked down upon that's why you would never marry a porn star after viewing her porn for men is a means to an end that's completely retarded what the fuck are you talking about what it's not a good point people have been carving big fat titties to fertility goddess we have like cave paintings what are you talking about here's a historical precedent established by the concept of a modern porn star not having partners except modern porn stars have partners again like please I'm begging if people disagree with me come up with a better disagreement than I disagree and here's this fantasy world that I live in please god no I think that's like a very coherent that's a very important point like these kinds of behaviors were stigmatized no they weren't do you have a study on that yeah I have plenty of studies do you have a study on ancestral humans and their stigmatization of pornography yeah this has do you do not pornography it hasn't existed show me the study that that says that pornography existed a thousand years ago without using you know that's not pornography oh wait the greek urns where they would literally draw men w