Reply #158: I'm coming into this discussion a little late

[hyphenate]

and haven't read all the responses, so this might be repetitive. However, this is my opinion of the answer to your question.

Yes, BOTH of these things can influence people, just as many other things do. You can become afflicted with fundie fanaticism if you stick around wrong-winged religious nuts too long, you can learn something from teachers if they lecture to you long enough, you can get better at a hobby if you practice at it for awhile, and you certainly can become inured to violence if you are desensitized to it from repeated exposure. The effects of anything can be felt for good or bad if there is repeated subjection to it.

Anything can have cause and effect, whether it's something desirous or something anathema. And whether we like it or not, some people are affected far more seriously than others, especially those who might already have a personality disorder which makes them more sensitive to content which is already negative.

Back when I was growing up (the 60s), there was significant violence on TV. Some critics kept saying that young people were being affected by all that "violence" and that things were getting out of hand. The solution? Make TV violence even MORE appalling, with blood, gore and all kinds of juicy guts. Yeah--that's what happened. The result? The violence level in the real world got far worse, far more difficult to contain. I don't think some people even looked at the world around them, with the war in Vietnam and seeing veterans coming home with PTSD, or the assassinations of both Bobby and John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, or several very famous murders and serial killings. Some people are so fucking blind to the real world, and look for their own slanted reasons to explain things. Conservatives and religious fanatics all wanted to blame something they hated for societal ills, instead of coming to the truer conclusion that perhaps it was the stick up their own asses which was mitigating circumstances even more than normal.

The thing is, if we don't give everyone their 1st amendment rights and dues, we're going to find those rights gone bye-bye. We've already seen it in this debacle known as the Bush administration, and some of us are appalled by the changes done to this country in the name of "security." Yeah, it boils down to this: there are unstable people out here in the world for whom any kind of lengthy exposure to ANYTHING will affect them, and horribly. But for the rest of us, hopefully the other 99% of us, nothing is going to make us into psychotics or sociopaths, regardless of how much exposure we have to something nasty.

Pornography is one of those things which the wrong-wingers constantly want to remove from the social environment. If it's of consenting adults, with consenting adults, reasons for trying to eradicate it are signs of intolerance and tightly-wound people. Some people enjoy the fantasies they see, and will sometimes incorporate some of the more pleasurable things they see into their own lives. It doesn't harm anyone if all participants are mature enough and consenting. It doesn't lead to rape, because rape is a crime of violence and control, and the rapists overpower their victims in ways that most people would never do. Those with normal proclivities are unlikely to become rapists overnight, nor are they suddenly likely to develop personality disorders such as pedophilia or other psychosexual behaviors.

OTOH, shock jocks, especially those with marked intolerances for people who are "different" than their own brand of "normality" are repeating memes day after day to people, and can definitely make many people more susceptible to the tirades they listen to. And while this is true of many people, of any political persuasion, the listeners of such crap as Limbaugh get fed a steady diet of hate and blatant mischaracterizations of those who are not adherents of the "principles" Limbaugh and others of his ilk espouse. It's the same kind of stuff that worked in pre-WWII Germany. Lulled into a false sense of "superiority," people will do anything after being sucked into someone's demented vision.

We all here (at DU) are intelligent enough to know the difference between reality and fantasy (at least I hope so!), but for those who are not, it's not up to us to try and police people who have yet to show signs of instability. That would be like arresting someone for murder while the potential "victim" is alive and well--we've learned that until some crime is committed, we can't just arrest someone for doing it. All we can hope is that we spot the signs of mental illness in order to help those afflicted.

Nevertheless, outside influences are many and myriad. Whether they are good or bad is not for any of us to judge, except for ourselves. It can be frustrating at times, but until we can prove that something is filled with malice (like wrong-winged shock jocks) or simply entertainment (adult films), we have to simply accept that all of these things fall under First Amendment rights.