Russia Blocks Porn Site Brazzers for 'Damaging Human Psyche'

The difference is making restrictions through compassion, as a loving parent does to a child. Compared to making restrictions out of a desire for control, like all authoritarian rulers.

We like to think that we are making our own choices, but in reality we are largely prisoners of our genetic programming. Given the choice between broccoli and a marshmallow, well, sure, some people are able to choose the broccoli. But there are strong evolutionary forces that bias us towards choosing the marshmallow every time. And of course the situation is much worse when we are constantly barraged by similar choices in every domain (including media).

When we say "people should be able to make their own choices," we pit the superego against the id (for want of better terms). We implicitly take the position that if a person's superego is weaker than their id, that person deserves to fail and suffer. Wouldn't it be better if we could make the path of least resistance also the best choice?

Of course, correlation != causation, but 50% is a huge amount and it overlaps quite neatly with the growth of the internet.

https://www.rainn.org/statistics/scope-problem

"To understand the logic behind those obviously absurd and inefficient bans, one should look deep into the very essence of the "checklist system" (палочная система in Russian). Once there's a law in place, requiring the police, the prosecution, the courts, the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Communications to find and censor "bad" websites, it means that they have to find and ban some URLs every other month, just for the record. It does not matter much, whether those sites are actually bad, or how many million other sites do carry the same content, but haven't been included in the current version of filtering blacklists. There is only one relevant KPI for every single official in the chain: a checklist, showing how many sites they've blocked in every given month.

There is one district prosecutor in Ufa, who initiates the whole judicial process of blocking Russian copies of Hitler's Mein Kampf online, one mirror at a time. For every copy there's ample paperwork, starting from police investigators, who conduct primary finding of fact, then the district prosecutor's office, that petitions the district court to ban the copy in question. The court passes its ruling, citing the URL as stated in the filing. Then the Ministry of Justice in Moscow enters the URL into Extremist Materials' List, and Ministry of Communications updates its Banned Websites' Registry. Even before the cycle is completed (usually takes 2 to 6 months), the process reopens with another copy of same book, on a different URL. Five years since the initial inclusion of Hitler's manifest in the federal Extremist Materials' List, which is today, there are still some 300 copies of Mein Kampf in Russian, freely accessible online, and five years from now, there will probably be 3000. But every single civil servant, involved in the blocking process, duly receives his salaries, promotions and other benefits of government service, as long as he doesn't forget to submit the updated checklist to his superiors. That's how this system works, and there is absolutely no point in trying to evaluate its efficiency in conventional terms of common sense or public good."

http://dolboeb.livejournal.com/2843155.html