> a few dozen people's weird ideas about what shouldn't be allowed
I want to underline the absurdity of a foreign feminist organisation [1], in this political environment, dictating what Americans can and cannot see.
I want to underline the absurdity of a foreign feminist organisation [1], in this political environment, dictating what Americans can and cannot see.
Supposedly you can still hear the last of the V8 interceptors roar in the wild there...
Philosophically, sure. Practically, no.
America is an economic and military superpower. Washington having influence over its trading partners and military allies isn't unusual. To the extent I can think of something that mirrors the absurdity of this situation, it's American evangelicals running off to Uganda to stone gays.
Is that something that happened? That sounds horrible. Do you have any more info?
"...many extreme evangelical groups started to recognize that the fight against LGBTQ+ rights in the United States was a losing battle. These groups then shifted focus to Uganda, which was seen as fertile ground for this anti-gay ideology..."
Still a shameful state of affairs.
The point is that leaders at Visa/Mastercard probably think it's very convenient that Collective Shout exists because it lets them blame that group for their decisions. And it seems to have worked given how so many members of this not-uninformed audience refuse to look past Collective Shout to see that Visa/Mastercard made a decision to change their policy.
Collective Shout has tried to get Steam and Itch to remove the content they don't like / is illegal in Australia.
From the article:
> “We raised our objection to rape and incest games on Steam for months, and they ignored us for months,” reads a blog post from Collective Shout. “We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond to us.”
So after they didn't succeed with Steam and Itch, they likely said to Visa and Mastercard "we tried to get your merchants to follow the law, they haven't. If we sue them, we're suing you too."
As Visa and Mastercard have lost that court case before, the payment processors then went to their merchants and likely said something along the lines of "If you get sued, we're getting sued too - so we're going to not process payments for you until you are not in danger of getting sued."
Could Visa and Mastercard rebuffed Collective Shout? Possibly... but then we'd be reading about how Itch, Steam, Visa, and Mastercard got sued in an Australian court and lost the case on illegal Australian porn.
It's Australia's fault that while they can handle a phallus on TV (as insinuated in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44717254 ), they can't handle a fur lined handcuff, schoolgirl uniform, or shaven anatomy.
Trying to blame the United States for this misplaced.
Visa and Mastercard (and all payment processors) are risk adverse and the risk of being included in another PR damaging and expensive lawsuit that they can't get out of despite having the limited role of moving money from customer to merchant.
If you want to blame someone for this fiasco, one should be looking instead at the laws in the country where this originated from and the courts that mandate the involvement of the payment processor as a defendant.