Hacker News Reader

Comment by bobthepanda | Hacker News Reader

The real debate is which is worse to society, its existence or attempting to ban it.

Banning porn is not going to do a whole lot. Pornography is illegal in South Korea and if anything they have some of the worst gender toxicity.

View on HN

The real debate has nothing to do with porn. The only reason this started with porn, is because they knew they would get away with taking over the world while everybody is distracted by an unrelated debate.

The debate is weather or not credit card providers should ever be able to blackmail independent companies, for any reason they feel like.

I say no.

Should the government be able to blackmail credit card companies? Do you really think the credit card companies care where you spend your money? All they want you to do is spend more. They are trying to get out ahead of your own fellow citizens (and their government) who agree with more "censorship" and, at least in this regard, more state control. Unless you have a solution for this strain of American politics focusing on credit card companies is, in this situation, missing the point.

>Should the government be able to blackmail credit card companies?

It's called regulations, not blackmail, and yest the government should, because it's accountable to its people, meanwhile CC companies are not. Everything all companies are allowed to to is regulated by the government. Companies only exist at the mercy of the government, otherwise angry mobs can break in and ransack the place.

> Do you really think the credit card companies care where you spend your money?

Obviously they do care, when you see their rulings on this matter they care very much(did you not read the articles before commenting?), otherwise they wouldn't be pushing censorship rules on sellers. Or more specific they care about activists complaining how CC companies let you spend your money.

  > Banning porn is not going to do a whole lot. Pornography is illegal in South Korea

Yet, there's a lot of porn there too. A whole lot of voyeur porn too. As well as prostitution, which is also illegal.

Making something legal or illegal is just signaling. The real part is how it actually is implemented in practice. And as you imply, things are pretty complex. We really need to be careful about our own tendencies to want things to be simple. It always backfires...

Not being 100% effective isn't backfiring. No law is ever absolutely effective. But making something illegal objectively makes it more difficult to obtain, and is certainly effective at reducing access, even if it's not 100%.

In many cases, bans can have unintended side effects which might make the means of acquiring/distributing/producing "banned X" far worse (aka the cure is worse than the disease).

At least in the case of South Korea, all porn is treated equally illegally, so the country has a really high incidence of secret cameras peeping in places like women’s bathrooms, because that’s just as illegal as a scripted porn film.

You're the only one who asserted a percentage. So allow me to clarify, when I wrote that comment I had no belief that a law need be 100% effective for it to be a useful law. I also believe there's a lot of room between 100% effective and "backfiring". I don't believe this is a binary situation but there's a spectrum (that isn't one dimensional)

I hope with this added context that my previous comment will make much more sense and you can interpret it closer to what I intended.

I'll just add, I don't think most people work in those absolutes. So I'd be wary of jumping to the extreme interpretation. People might interpret you as being disingenuous and using the logical fallacy "logical extreme" or "reductio ad absurdum". But I'm pretty sure you're not doing that because then I'd be grossly misinterpreting you, right?

I misread your "It always backfires" comment as making something illegal always backfires, rather than the desire to make things simple always backfires (note that "always" implies 100%). So now I see all you're saying is "be careful", which is fine.

This is just how people speak. Sometimes qualifiers are critical, sometimes they are a bit of exaggeration. But always doesn't mean always because only a sith deals in absolutes.

My comment about some truth was to specifically about:

  * It models unrealistic and possibly unhealthy notions about sexuality
  * It can be exploitive of its subjects (yes, sometimes empowering too)

That's kind of it. I don't think it should be banned at all.

I believe that "free speech" is critical to a well functioning society, but we need to recognize that it can have negative impacts. A key example is the right-wing Hate Industrial Complex: decades of right wing propaganda have conditioned tens of millions of Americans to consider their fellow citizens as non human.

I don't have an answer for how to address this, but you can't fix a problem until you recognize the problem and that it needs fixing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com