Lawmakers Want to Block Pornography at the Expense of Free Speech and Privacy

I vaguely remember reading about a similar effort in China many years ago --- that failed silently.

Trying to tie this into "human trafficking" is a cruel diversion, just like pornography, terrorism, and drugs.

"Let's make the world safer" seems to be the common thread in all of these anti-freedom bills, with the implicit intent of branding those who are against them as supporters of human traffickers, pedophilia, terrorism, or whatever else.

There are two memorable quotes which will become very relevant in the near future:

"If you outlaw freedom, only outlaws will have freedom."

"Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."

Wait, what? Why should a fee to opt out exist?

If your state happens to be listed, please remember to vote in November. There has to be serious electoral consequences for every politician who thought it was a good idea to put their name on such an abhorrent piece of legislation.

Freedom of speech is not an in-app purchase.

Assuming that the device manufacturers do not actually want to participate in this, is there anything that stops them from making the removal code be some simple function of the serial number, and throwing up a website that will compute that function for $20? It will quickly get cracked, of course, and for the most part won't serious inconvenience anyone during the time it takes to get the stupid law overturned.

A near-future dystopian fiction could involve the opposite, with people being required to show their ID and aver that they've been shown a "written warning regarding the potential dangers" of installing censorship software on their devices, abrogating the decision of what's decent to either the state or to the device manufacturer, and paying $20 for the privilege.

This is a serious issue and while the OP bill is obvious censorship, all parents want more easy control.

1. Enforce OSHA workplace safety law on all u.s. porn sets. 2. Enforce international trade rules against labor safety arbitrage, and or create new ones. 3. Enforce copyright law against tube sites that have made a mockery of d.m.c.a 4. Unionize all porn workers

Of course this will never happen... Porn is a symptom of the underlying I'll of our society.. where the accumulation of wealth and power are the only denominators of worth or virtue, then things like OSHA, labor rights, copyright law for small producers, and unions, are all seen as enemies of ,if not progress then the system itself.

If the u.s. loses a war to China because China infiltrated our computers with free porn, while they had mass censorship which prevented it, then American capitalism will have lost the Mandate of Heaven.

In other words... If porn destroys society, it might be a natural feedback loop, a self correcting mechanism whereby unrestrained , brutal greed is kept in check, by the society that glorifies it the most , collapsing in on itself.

I did not think of this myself. A young porn star aka victim made a documentary a few year back, about the disgraced CMU professor who began the true mass industrialization of porn. She called it "McDonald's for sex" or something like that. The point is that you can't apply Harvard business school brutalistic to every human process and expect a positive result.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/national/assaul...