California could require age verification to visit porn sites
calmatters.org
calmatters.org
There are so many issues with this reasoning. The most obvious is that the legislation wouldn’t ban college age men/women from watching porn.
If this law is really about “protecting children” then why are they banning all porn and not just the particular violent videos they object to?
There probably hasn’t been enough time for any studies to link a problem straight from widespread porn emergence all the way to damage in childrens’ development, though. Porn wasn’t, like, WIDELY available until maybe 20 years ago. We’ve basically had a single generation to study, and they’re not even done being kids yet for the most part.
Still, the damage seems like an obvious outcome to me.
And it wasn't soft stuff. I remember having pics of the aftermath of bukkake sessions etc. Yet I'm extremely respectful of women especially in bed.
We don't even have unquestionable evidence about smoking. Tons of people say things like "I'm more likely to be hit by a car so I'm just going to smoke"
But my point is, what most people call 'choking' isn't choking but just some mild consensual degradation. Which is very pleasurable to people with submissive tendencies, of which there are a lot more than people realise.
Same deal when people say plastics can't be that bad of a pollutant because people are fine. Have you looked at people? Half the US is obese.
Plastics and porn or food and sedentary lifestyles and social media might all not be the problem, but "look, things are fine" seems like bad reasoning either way. People are very obviously mentally and physically unwell, the trends there are bad, and the reasons aren't well understood.
restricting everyone's freedoms in order to shove marriage down people's throats is reactionary policy
That said, that has nothing to do with my point, which was that it's hard to look at trends in things like mental health, physical health, and relationships, and declare that there must not be any problems or we would've noticed by now. I see that argument made about all sorts of speculative problems, and it seems crazy to me.
This isn't about protecting children, it's about prudes who don't like the way that other people enjoy sex.
Worth mentioning again that this is California, one of if not the most left/progressive state in the union. Absolutely dominated by Left/Progressive/Democrat politics thanks to how many cities are located in it.
As the old saying goes, one becomes more Right/Conservative/Republican(?) the older they get.
I'll sit back amused at identity politics players' heads imploding if this measure goes ahead further, because they always point and laugh at Texas, Montana, and Right/Conservatives/Republicans, et al. for this very thing.
Once again, I'm breaking molds. The older I get, the more liberal I get, at least with the current leanings of today's "conservative" party. Banning books is atrocious to me. Dictating women's health is insulting. Allowing businesses to be considered a person flabbergasts me. Knowingly denying scientific evidence on pollution is not only insulting to me but future generations. The list continues to go on that I honestly do not understand how just because one gets older they are supposed to suddenly think these things are okay.
Conservative is defined[1] as:
>a: tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions
>b: marked by moderation or caution
>c: marked by or relating to traditional norms of taste, elegance, style, or manners
Liber/libre is the origin for words like liberal and liberty, meaning freedom. Liberal is defined[2] as:
>2 a: marked by generosity
>4: not literal or strict
>a: one who is open-minded or not strict in the observance of orthodox, traditional, or established forms or ways
[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conservative
[2]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/liberal
While they might seem at odds (one observes tradition, the other does not necessarily), they are not mutually exclusive and there is significant political overlap in espousing moderation/caution and freedom ("generosity", "not strict", "open-minded"). Small government is the most obvious form of this overlap.
Conservatism for political contexts can thus be defined as a desire to exercise a minimum (and ideally no) enforcement of powers in order to protect and guarantee people's freedoms, and a general desire to oppose change unless a change can be demonstrably warranted.
As for the saying, the older we get the harder we are set in how we live and conduct ourselves. A man builds stronger and stronger ideals and an identity that defines what is good and evil as far as he is concerned. We become more conservative as we grow older.
Well I don't think it is that they "become OK"; I suspect the effect is that at some point over the course of 40 years most people have the click moment where they start earning some money, realise that the politicians are willing to talk about what is in the news but not what actually matters, and start aligning based on economic incentives.
Picking on the US, the government makes up 40% of the economy, and it appears that an entire generation of capital formation just happened in China rather than in the Americas. All the stuff you listed is a concern, but I think there is a pretty good argument that the entire Trump phenomenon is the backlash against decades of fumbled economic policy that the corporate media has not effectively grappled.
Here is an article I found about that study, https://www.psypost.org/choking-during-is-surprisingly-commo.... So here are the lies:
1. It's not just "college aged women". The study was on undergraduates of both sexes.
2. The framing of OP's comment ("these porn laws are dumb when all these women are being choked!") was obviously made to imply that we should somehow stop women from being choked, implying it was nonconsensual.
3. As you point out, the study itself was more about sex practices than people being attacked.
Hardly anything is even bothered to be argued in good faith anymore.
I've been into this longer and it's funny to see girls wearing designer dresses with black leather straps and studs and collars etc. Good for them though. I also love being choked, by women in fact (I'm a man)
The cool thing is that these people will shape a society that no longer looks down on such things, as these conservative politicians do. It will take a long time though, in a country where politics is a game for geriatrics.
Is there a pornography rating system?
It's her recommendations that became the UK law and multiple state level laws.
I'm actually kinda impressed, because she doesn't have a high net worth nor is she nobility (she was given the Barronness title for her directorial work in 2012).
It goes to show that if you are organized and can hustle and network enough, you can make massive change.
[0] - https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/14/british-baroness-on...
For example, you can frame opposition to this as an affront to privacy and overreach by government.
Precisely, like the kind that costs obscene amounts of money.
> the right mix of logos, ethos, and pathos.
So it suggests the question, is there evidence that this is how this was achieved?
> you can frame opposition to this as an affront to privacy and overreach by government.
Which are not outcomes that are historically difficult to achieve.
So out of the 11 children she happened to follow, 4 ended up with pretty severe negative outcomes. And yet we’ve had nearly 17 years of smartphones and 20 years of Facebook, and I don’t believe I’ve read anywhere that ~40% of kids have such negative reactions to tech. Either she has enormous bad luck in selecting children for her documentary and selected mostly outliers, selected children who were more predisposed to having problems in the first place, or she is actually the one that has such a negative impact on kids lives.
That’s not to say whether or not such things are bad ideas in the first place, but I wish policy was focused more on what the scientific literature says rather than what a filmmaker who followed some kids around is promoting.
What are the penalties when this is violated (by pretty much every company involved)?
As far as I understand, the ISO 18013-5 mobile drivers license standard (which appear to be being implemented across a bunch of US states, including California[0]) seems to allow for each fact that appears on your license to be individually signed so that you could store your ID on your phone, and then when prompted, provide only your birthday or only an "over 18" marker that's signed by the state.
The service provider could then not keep any records except to mark your user as a verified adult so in the future you can just login.
This proposal's end results will be banks and other corporations doing the KYC and those types of corporations will mistakenly deny service to tens of thousands of people in order to prevent one actual real positive from making it through.
Where is the consistency here?
If we're going to restrict one, why not restrict the other? Or if we're not going to restrict one, how the fuck would restricting the other ever make sense?
Or maybe they should make school libraries available to the public so I can go pick up some material from one the next time I need to do my business
Makes much more sense to require sites to adhere to things like "Restricted to Adults" labeling, https://www.rtalabel.org/, so that they can be appropriately blocked by parental filters.
The slippery slope comes from someone then asking the question: "Well, we already require an ID to allow someone to access porn... so can we require it for other things online where people have less desire for privacy? Why shouldn't we require an ID to post to social media, or participate in online video games (especially those violent ones!)"
The slope I see, is once you set up a system for ID verification and require it for a primary thing people want to keep private, it becomes easier to mandate it in other areas where privacy is less demanded.
Concern about that slope would be a nonissue if the laws mandated adult sites tag themselves as "adult content" for trivial filtering at the household network level, instead of establishing and normalizing the ID verification regime.
The other part that may or may not be the case, is a tendency to expand the scope of a mandate. This is in part because the companies that derive cash flows will always want to increase them. It's also because the existence of the apparatus is attractive; it's an existing solution that can be coopted to new or expanded ends more easily than coming up with a new solution. And the ease is not just in implementation; it's also that the precedent is set so the opposition may be less powerful.
In this case, I think the recent trend in school board elections and local library funding of banning minors (or everyone) from materials on sex education, sex positivity, LGBTQ stories or discourse, etc. suggests how any age verification program might find public pressure to increase in scope.
Where it gets more dubious is the possibility of expanding the scope beyond minors (to identifying or simply banning everyone) or beyond materials of some (potentially alternative) sexual nature, i.e. to political, religious, foreign or technical subjects.
If you ask me, this is just a warmup to a broad attack on internet anonymity. Politicians want it to be literally impossible to be anonymous on the internet, so they can harrass their opposition.
I'm sorry, but that is not a properly-formatted verification can.
Please drink verification can.
Please come back when you have money, are allowed to vote, and have parents who didn't lose your identity documents.