Most people are unaware of Australia's long history of censorship which continues to this day.
I'm genuinely curious to see how this plays out in the American partisan landscape.
Conservatives around the world talk to each other.
The real motivations seemingly have nothing to do with protecting women, which appears to simply be a palatable facade for the true intention to suppress all depictions of sexuality, including the depictions that offer good-faith representation of historically marginalized groups.
And video games are just art.
So, women, drawing and writing stuff they like, being banned and losing an income stream.
I don’t think drawing or writing porn is exploitative at all.
If somehow the puritanical mob banned stuff like that, I'd be genuinely sad.
I ran an online porn website for almost 20 years. For 15 years it was my primary source of income.
I'm in Canada which, compared to the USA is extremely progressive.
In 2022, after a decade of doing business with a certain bank as this business, never having hidden anything about what we did, my wife and I received an urgent, signature required, overnighted letter from our bank informing us that they were terminating our accounts and that we had one month until we would no longer have access to any funds.
The way this played out was that we had an incoming wire transfer get flagged and they phoned us to ask us questions about the wire. We answered everything on the phone honestly and transparently. We were doing nothing wrong.
A few months later we get another phone call from our branch asking us to come in in person, urgently, and do an "extreme due diligence" check. During this process we had to answer an insane amount of questions about our business activities. They saw a credit card transaction from JetBrains, for example, and asked us to explain who JetBrains was and why we were doing business with them etc.
A couple of weeks later we were informed about the termination with a brief letter explaining that we fell outside of their "risk appetite."
We managed to get an extension on the closure, and for two months we tried in vain to find any banking in Canada that would take us... and we ultimately ended up shutting down a business that represented two decades of our lives.
During that time we reached out to industry insiders, some of which we happened to know were in Canada. They all told us that they bank in the USA.
One branch manager at a bank we met with was extremely empathetic but obviously couldn't put her own job on the line, and she explained exactly what was going on.
The issue is "Know Your Customer" regulations that are coming into effect that are meant to target things like money laundering. These regulations force banks to ask questions that they never really cared about before. This branch manager explained that a local strip club used to say they were a "banquet hall", and everyone at the branch knew exactly what they were but it was "don't ask / don't tell."
But once they start digging into these details because the government is forcing them to, then these things get to their compliance departments. And the policies exist because they're afraid of things like human trafficking and other things.
And our major banks have foreign investors from all around the world. Including from countries where porn is actually illegal.
While you point the finger at puritanism in the USA ... consider that in countries like Iceland, producing porn can land you in jail. Now consider MAJOR investments originating in countries like Saudi Arabia etc. and consider how that might impact your bottom line if they all pull out due to nonsense morality conflicts.
Here is an article from the Reykjavik Grapevine that deep dives on it better than I could: https://grapevine.is/mag/2021/05/07/ask-an-expert-why-is-por...
And for a broader overview, see "Pornography laws by region" on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_laws_by_region
There are ongoing debates about how this applies to Onlyfans etc, with one faction claiming all sex work is abuse even if you're doing it solo in the privacy of your own home, so payments to Onlyfans should be banned.
The frame the problem as being vulnerable to escalating customer demands if you make custom content. Like, "insert this object and take a photo, insert this larger object and take a photo, insert this uncomfortably large object and take a photo, insert this painfully large object and take a photo, insert this clearly damaging object and take a photo".
[0] - https://apnews.com/article/fda-vapes-vaping-elf-bar-juul-80b...
If you take that statement at face value (not sure if you should), it's fascinating to think that your business was able to operate for two decades with what I assume are the standard problems people in the porn industry face (e.g. chargebacks from customers unwilling to admit they subscribed in their SO's presence and so pretending it was a scam, etc.)
And yet seemingly none of the bank's risk heuristics based on actual transaction profiling ever went off.
Wouldn't that mean that, in practice, being in the porn industry isn't as high-risk as banks / payment processors think it is?
And would this not then suggest a gap in the market, for an (ideally vertically-integrated) bank + payment processor + card issuer + KYC provider, who is willing to
1. evaluate risk on a customer-by-customer basis (through e.g. continuous dynamic network analysis of transaction flow, with txs annotated with their KYC info) rather than by actuarial categorization; and
2. avoid seeking any investment (at any remove) by parties who would insist they avoid these types of customers?
I bet you that American organizations were involved in the societal pressure that led this Canadian organization to do this. They're just not as effective in their own country in comparison to places where it's not all about money, and values do matter.
I understand the risk tolerance aspect from a bank, they wouldn't want to give a massive loan to a property developer or oil driller going under water. But when it comes to basic deposit services where nobody is asking them to risk their own money, they should be forced to allow any customer who isn't breaking any laws, such as in your case.
I'm not sure if Bitcoin is the right answer due to the 51% attack vulnerability. And a network of miners where everyone can join in principle sounds pretty yolo, but it seems the be the one of the few organizations that exist outside of government? At least, it does in principle, the fact that the whole crypto industry is a mix of scams and recreation of the actual finance industry isn't helping that case, but a part of it definitely still exists outside of it.
We need more digital systems that exist outside of governments. I'm not sure if it's feasible, but stuff like this is egregious.
I wonder what our view on all of this is in a 1000 years. People in the future probably look at us in disbelief with how we practiced our ethics.
Virginia was the most populous colony during the revolution, did English planter society just disappear and the Puritans made it all the way down to the South?
What about the Quakers in Pennsylvania?
Dutch society in New York?
Poor Scots in Appalachia?
And, in any case, this campaign started in Australia. Were there a lot of Puritans there?
& want to bring back laws that sex would only be used to 'recreate' not recreation.
But let's be real here, they were a bunch of jerks. There's a reason it took no time flat for Rhode Island to exist.
There's a tendency for social liberals to see their view as the only legitimate one. Sometimes they are right. But this is an area where there is lots of international push back from undeveloped, developing, and even many developed socially liberal countries.
That's getting somewhat off topic though. In the context of this thread it's merely the observation that attributing this to "puritans" or "christianity" or "US history" is rather misguided. The US and western Europe are very much the outliers here.
It's one thing to recognize that it happens, another to recognize the practice as legitimate, virtuous, or even desirable.
To be clear, I'm not accusing you of promoting these practices, just asking you to clarify your position.
I think it also follows from such a principle that in general the relevant reasoning should be explicitly articulated when discussing the topic.
> It's one thing to recognize that it happens, another to recognize the practice as legitimate, virtuous, or even desirable.
Suppose that a thing is explicitly chosen by the majority of the world's population, or dictated by the majority of governments, or imposed by the majority of cultural norms. I am suggesting that dismissing it in favor of your own reasoning is fine, but that doing so lightly is arrogant and misguided.
Humans engaged in tribalistic groupthink committing moral atrocities is a tale as old as time.
It is never wise to accept a majority or status quo position reflexively without thoroughly interrogating the ideas held within. A great deal of majority positions are morally reprehensible and ethically indefensible, and that has always been the case throughout human history.
Human sacrifices of the innocent were not a "different culture", they were barbaric murders that were always wrong. They were also normative in much of the world for much of human history.
The values espoused (but not always upheld) by western societies that many of us take for granted today are the exception to the rules throughout human history - rules that promoted needless bloodshed, widespread suffering, and persecution of the innocent.
It is not arrogant to assert that loss of innocent human life is reprehensible and the societies that normalize it should be condemned. To assert otherwise isn't simply innocuously defending pluralism, it's defending atrocities.
All life is inherently valuable and I will not apologize for asserting that, no matter how many billions of people disagree for tribalistic, persecutory reasons.
Perhaps the fact that you made a claim without bothering to explain this supposed "extensive, careful, and deliberate thought" of yours? Also the fact that your tone generally comes across as ideologically charged; in my experience zealots rarely engage in patient critical thinking.
Certainly I don't suggest that one should blindly favor the status quo when given the chance to think things through. However absent careful thought the status quo is the obvious default. When in Rome and all that. There is nearly always a reason that things are done the way they are done although often the particulars will be quite convoluted.
> It is not arrogant to assert that loss of innocent human life is reprehensible and the societies that normalize it should be condemned.
Is it really your intent to imply that I have called for such? That is quite the wild leap. I feel compelled to object that the turn this exchange has taken does not come across as being one of good faith.
No, that was not my intention. You are right to object here. I allowed myself to get worked up by inadvertently framing your more methodological perspective as a moral perspective, and your perception that I came on too aggressively in response to that is correct. I'm sincerely sorry. This wasn't an attempt to attack you or your character, but it did come out looking like that, and that was my fault. My bad on this one.
However that isn't a free standing view on my part. I acknowledge that the conservatives raise a number of hard hitting points about corrosion of the social fabric, but observe that even jurisdictions with far stricter laws than the US still appear to suffer the same ills (in addition to those caused by the laws themselves).
My view is that this is due to modern technology having fundamentally changed the social dynamic. Continually eroding civil liberties in a doomed attempt to regain some imagined ideal of the past strikes me as nothing more than an obscene parallel to the war on drugs.
Given that we clearly recognize that certain activities are detrimental to society when flaunted in public surely we could apply the same principle to various forms of expression? It's not much of a leap - you'll already land yourself in trouble if you go around shouting your head off or intimidating people for example. Analogous to alcohol consumption, I'd much prefer a clear distinction between standards for public displays, secluded public business establishments, and private gatherings than the bizarre scenarios that the current obscenity laws inevitably give rise to.
We live in a world where technology made everyone live in their own bubbles, only consume and reinforce what they already believe, create narrow identities with strict rules enforced by groupthink, and lose track of the things and people that we actually interact and have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.
Yet, people think this small stuff that has been around forever, that are tiny parts of our society or lives, that this stuff is the problem with everything today.
See the Steven Donziger[1] case. It was just done more Americanly. Private corporation threw their full weight at a lawyer defending an indigenous population who had their water supply poisoned. Chevron hired a private prosecutor who had him locked up on house arrest for years.
Similar to this porn case, the censorship and suppression is coming from market interests rather than government, but they're nearly equally untouchable and even more difficult to hold accountable. You can't vote out the leadership of mastercard or chevron.
I’ve been following the case closely. This is the first time anybody has claimed he’s a journalist, AFAIK.
Am I missing something?
Edit: according to Wikipedia he worked as a journalist for three years before attending law school. So I guess he’s an ex-journalist, and ex-lawyer for that matter.
But calling the persecution of journalists is false. Maybe persecution of environmental lawyers, but lawyers, unlike journalists, are heavily regulated, and face much higher liability for bad acts.
I used Steven as an example if private prosecution, where a private organization can take away your freedom outside of public prosecutors.
Steven did similar work to an investigative journalist at a high level, he brought attention to, and fought for a marginalized group. He did it through the court system rather than through publication. Despite doing it legally.
I don't see much of a difference. As recent times have shown, much of the legal system(and legal protections) depend on someone enforcing. Without that, there's little difference between the government boot and the corpo boot.
Then I realized that it was all wrong, countries accept western liberal democracy only as long as the free aid keeps flowing. And the libdems were in for a rude awakening if they ever ran out of kibble.
Hence comments about the U.S. being extremely puritanical, when anyone can look at laws throughout the world and see that the U.S. is more open on most of these issues than the vast majority of countries.
It’s a very strange form of self-loathing. I’ve discussed it with a lot of people from non-Western countries, and they find this behavior extremely confusing.
He thought of undeveloped places as filled with “noble savages” uncorrupted by the evils of modern society.
This is why many people believe that anti-gay sentiment only exists because of American or European influences.
While it’s true undeveloped counties often have very different sexual ethics, that does not mean humanity’s default is liberal individualism sanctioned by custom and community.
Like slavery, smallpox, and tipping, Puritanism was Europe's gift to the new world.
Religion and taboo often exist for a reason, because endless self gratification does not lead to flourishing.
You don't have to agree that it should be banned, but you can at least concede it's not entirely arbitrary content like say a sitcom.
A habit I've noticed is that a person vulnerable to being addicted to X is more prone to fall back on Y, Z, etc. even when X is fixed. So I only see "this hurts certain people" as a scapegoat. Stairs probably hurt more people in any given day than many activities, we don't base law purely on harm and potential harm.
The issue with GGP is that in context it appears to be an argument in favor of increasing restrictions (ie in favor of the events that the article is talking about) despite disclaiming that "You don't have to agree that it should be banned". That's analogous to a loaded question. Expressing agreement with the literal wording of GGP seems to also carry an implication of agreement with some rather different things as well.
It's perfectly fine to say "I think porn is generally unhealthy and would suggest people not partake, but I think they ought to be able if they'd like". It's also reasonable to say "I think things like porn, alcohol, cigarettes, violence, and/or gambling should be accessible to adults, but they should not be able to advertise in spaces where children are likely to visit (like an online video game store), and stores should check ID to purchase those things, and 'paying via advertising' should not act as a loophole for those ID checks." There's a wide range of reasonable positions to debate that are entirely shut down by basically implying that people are unreasonable to disagree.
That's up for debate on what's "good for people". But I don't mind proper, formal laws from lawmakers restricting access of that's the will of that region. I will note that trying to restrict porn in the US has traditionally been difficult die to the first amendment.
My main point was: credit card is not a lawmaker. It should be as dumb a pipe as my ISP.
So then why aren't those activists going after Instagram, TicTok, X/Twitter, etc. you know, the OG spyware, brain rot and anxiety inducing companies, because that would actually benefit society and not too many people would mourn their loss.
Why are they instead going after a dozen random horny video games nobody heard of? Oh that's right, because those random game devs don't have the power to fight back in court, unlike Meta/X, so it's an easy win for them to collect brownie points, for performative nonsense.
Though Steam is not weak. But small-time game devs probably don't care to fight unless they're making bank.
What makes you think they aren't? Because it hasn't been discussed in the HN bubble?
Maybe post some proof that they are if you wanna make this argument.
What else should we arbitrarily ban based on this criteria? It doesn't seem to hold up to much scrutiny.
Sure video games can be unhealthy. Maybe I'm weird but I would much rather prefer my son plays video games 8 hours a day than watches adult content 8 hours a day. Let's stop pretending like they're comparable.
Isn't it the end result that matters? Presumably you'd like your son to become a functional adult. Neither of the scenarios you describe there sound like that to me (excepting perhaps "professional competitive gamer" but somehow I suspect most parents don't really approve of that outcome either).
It's no worse than reading a lot of books or watching a lot of TV shows, activities that are not disparaged as much.
That's the context of this entire discussion though, that these things are being banned…
Or maybe put another way, if my child was at a neighbors house and one of the parents watched an adult movie with my child I would have a huge issue. If they watched Terminator or something similar, I would have much less of an issue.
They're not even close to the same thing.
A better question would be if you would be more comfortable with your child being shown porn or snuff movies. For me the answer would be neither, in about an equal measure
I think parent comment is asking you to consider why you think young children watching violent movies is way less of a problem. E.g. "Terminator or similar" - why draw the line there?
I'd actually hypothesise that if you locked three sets of teenage boys in rooms, one with only porn games, one with only social media and one with only sitcoms, that the first group would likely emerge the healthiest of the three. I'm basing this on my bias towards activity and that nobody seems to have bothered with actually doing research on porn games, the organisation pushing for these bans included [1], instead proxying research on porn as a whole for this specific category.
Whatever you want. Substance abuse rates. Marriage or long-term partnership rates. Employment. Income. Wealth. Serum cortisol.
My assumption is someone actively participating in something, even something unhealthy, is going to maintain cognitive and executive function above someone simply observing. (To the degree these games may be destructive, I'd argue it's in its game mechanics.)
We have no evidence pornography causes negative outcomes across population. (Versus among a vulnerable subset.) We have lots of evidence for social media addiction causing broad psychological issues, particularly in children.