- Down Economy Boosts Military The faltering US economy is fueling a dramatic turnaround in military recruiting, with new statistics showing that the Army is experiencing the highest rate of new enlistments in six years.
- Obama Please Note: Those Who Fail to 'Master the Past' Are Guilty, Too In other words, it is not sufficient to merely "regret" past actions and believe that "looking forward" and "getting the country moving again" are substitutes for atonement. Future generations must, to use Schlink's term, "master the past" by taking responsibility for it. Americans demand this of others -- why not of themselves?
- Thousands of Youth Demand New Climate Change Policy All weekend, more than 12,000 college and high school students have traveled across the country for the second Power Shift conference, a meeting-of-the-minds for students serious about taking leadership roles in not only confronting climate change, but also taking on Washington attitudes and business-as-usual.
- Expanded Settlements Have Intent to Destroy Two-State Solution Peace Now says that a new right-wing government presents the danger of "expanding settlement growth at a rapid pace... with the clear intention of destroying the possibility of a two-state solution."
- CIA Admits to Destroying More Interrogation Videos The US Central Intelligence Agency revealed today that it had destroyed far more videotapes of terror interrogations than it had originally admitted, resuscitating a Bush administration scandal and increasing the pressure on Barack Obama to support a full investigation of the agency's detention practices during his predecessor's time in office.
- Prop. 8: A Case About Justice The legal challenge to Prop. 8 is supported by hundreds of religious organizations, civil rights groups, women's organizations and labor unions, along with numerous California municipal governments, bar associations and leading legal scholars.
Porn in the USA: Conservatives Are Biggest Consumers
8 of Top 10 Porn-Consuming States Voted Republican in 2008 Presidential Election
By EWEN CALLAWAY
published Feb. 28, 2009 on http://abcnews.go.com
Americans may paint themselves in increasingly bright shades of red and blue, but new research finds one thing that varies little across the nation: the liking for online pornography.
A new nationwide study of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.
"When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different," says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.
However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.
"Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by," Edelman says.
Political Divide
Edelman spends part of his time helping companies such as Microsoft and AOL detect advertising fraud. Another consulting client runs dozens of adult websites, though he says he is not at liberty to identify the firm.
That company did, however, provide Edelman with roughly two years of credit card data from 2006 to 2008 that included a purchase date and each customer's postal code.
After controlling for differences in broadband internet access between states online porn tends to be a bandwidth hog and adjusting for population, he found a relatively small difference between states with the most adult purchases and those with the fewest.
The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000. "The differences here are not so stark," Edelman says.
Number 10 on the list was West Virginia at 2.94 subscriptions per 1000, while number 41, Michigan, averaged 2.32.
Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year's presidential election Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.
Old-Fashioned Values
Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays a 1% increase in a postal code's religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds.
Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don't explicitly restrict gay marriage.
To get a better handle on other associations between social attitudes and pornography consumption, Edelman melded his data with a previous study on public attitudes toward religion.
States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement "I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage," bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement "AIDS might be God's punishment for immoral sexual behaviour."
"One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you're told you can't have this, then you want it more," Edelman says.
Sean
- Obama Please Note: Those Who Fail to 'Master the Past' Are Guilty, Too In other words, it is not sufficient to merely "regret" past actions and believe that "looking forward" and "getting the country moving again" are substitutes for atonement. Future generations must, to use Schlink's term, "master the past" by taking responsibility for it. Americans demand this of others -- why not of themselves?
- Thousands of Youth Demand New Climate Change Policy All weekend, more than 12,000 college and high school students have traveled across the country for the second Power Shift conference, a meeting-of-the-minds for students serious about taking leadership roles in not only confronting climate change, but also taking on Washington attitudes and business-as-usual.
- Expanded Settlements Have Intent to Destroy Two-State Solution Peace Now says that a new right-wing government presents the danger of "expanding settlement growth at a rapid pace... with the clear intention of destroying the possibility of a two-state solution."
- CIA Admits to Destroying More Interrogation Videos The US Central Intelligence Agency revealed today that it had destroyed far more videotapes of terror interrogations than it had originally admitted, resuscitating a Bush administration scandal and increasing the pressure on Barack Obama to support a full investigation of the agency's detention practices during his predecessor's time in office.
- Prop. 8: A Case About Justice The legal challenge to Prop. 8 is supported by hundreds of religious organizations, civil rights groups, women's organizations and labor unions, along with numerous California municipal governments, bar associations and leading legal scholars.
Porn in the USA: Conservatives Are Biggest Consumers
8 of Top 10 Porn-Consuming States Voted Republican in 2008 Presidential Election
By EWEN CALLAWAY
published Feb. 28, 2009 on http://abcnews.go.com
Americans may paint themselves in increasingly bright shades of red and blue, but new research finds one thing that varies little across the nation: the liking for online pornography.
A new nationwide study of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.
"When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different," says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.
However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.
"Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by," Edelman says.
Political Divide
Edelman spends part of his time helping companies such as Microsoft and AOL detect advertising fraud. Another consulting client runs dozens of adult websites, though he says he is not at liberty to identify the firm.
That company did, however, provide Edelman with roughly two years of credit card data from 2006 to 2008 that included a purchase date and each customer's postal code.
After controlling for differences in broadband internet access between states online porn tends to be a bandwidth hog and adjusting for population, he found a relatively small difference between states with the most adult purchases and those with the fewest.
The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000. "The differences here are not so stark," Edelman says.
Number 10 on the list was West Virginia at 2.94 subscriptions per 1000, while number 41, Michigan, averaged 2.32.
Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year's presidential election Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.
Old-Fashioned Values
Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays a 1% increase in a postal code's religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds.
Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don't explicitly restrict gay marriage.
To get a better handle on other associations between social attitudes and pornography consumption, Edelman melded his data with a previous study on public attitudes toward religion.
States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement "I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage," bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement "AIDS might be God's punishment for immoral sexual behaviour."
"One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you're told you can't have this, then you want it more," Edelman says.
