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As a former 12 year old boy, I don't understand why people are so adamant to protect children from sexual content. When you're old enough to know what you're looking at, it is all you want to look at and you will seek it out no matter what. Personally I used to browse between channels on the telly to get super grainy glimpses of porn. When that wasn't available and after our phone got blocked from calling hotlines, I would simply draw naked women for myself to look at.

When you aren't old enough to know what you're looking at, you won't really care about what you see and won't think twice about it. But really if you're older than, say, 6 or 7 you should know what sex is and how it works. Intellectually speaking at least. You won't really care for seeing porn because, well, LEGOs are far more interesting.

So really, I think all this "shield children omg" isn't so much about shielding children as it is about certain adults being obnoxious prudes and using children as an excuse to get their way.

> Personally I used to browse between channels on the telly to get super grainy glimpses of porn. When that wasn't available and after our phone got blocked from calling hotlines, I would simply draw naked women for myself to look at.

You can't see a difference between grainy glimpses of softcore porn or hand drawn images, and high definition easily available images of heavy duty porn?

Personally, not particularly. Sure they're different, but it's not for the government to decide that they should be blocked, especially if it's legal for a portion of the populace to view them.

If a parent doesn't want a child to view material of that nature (or any nature) it should be up to the parent, not the state, to make sure their child doesn't view it or have access to it. There's commercially available software out there that can make the same blocks, but it's opt-in.

The issue isn't that "kids should be able to see what kids want to see", it's "the state shouldn't dictate people can or can't see in the privacy of their home".

You realise that the state isn't dictating what people can or can't see - these filters are optional? And that for existing customers they default to opt-in?

It's frustrating that the reason the government forced ISP filtering is because i) no-one uses parental filtering and ii) parental filtering is hopeless.

The filters aren't optional.

Setting them to "on" or "off" is currently optional, but the traffic of everyone in the country will soon pass through these filtering machines.

They weren't softcore. And the happiest day of my life was when one of my friends got internet and learned how to find porn on Emule. That was amazing.

You can't imagine how happy a group of 13 to 14 year old boys is when they get their hands on a resource like that ... then they go off and play with LEGOs and toy cars and watching MTV for the sexual content. Yes, I used to fap to MTV. And no adult ever thinks of MTV like that. Should we ban it?

As a fellow former 12-year-old boy, I agree that shielding children from legal sexual images doesn't usually serve a purpose other than to deprive them of an education.

We wouldn't restrict kids' access to math materials, then expect them to know calculus as adults. Similarly, kids who are banned from talking about and seeing sexual content can't be expected to understand sexual health.

From an objective standpoint, the interesting question is whether or not exposure to sexual content at early ages is harmful to children. I did some cursory research on this in college and found that:

a) There seems to a big problem with bias in studies concerning sex and adolescents. Even some of the most frequently cited studies use biased language (e.g. abstracts with the phrase "the problem of children viewing sex").

b) A major variable is whether or not parents are there to mediate the kids' exposure to sexual content — not just to restrict their access, but to provide context. To use the math analogy again, it's like the difference between explaining a chapter or dumping worksheets and a textbook on the table.

> b) A major variable is whether or not parents are there to mediate the kids' exposure to sexual content

This. A thousand times this. Kids need someone to explain what they're seeing, not someone to flat out restrict it. You wouldn't let your kid watch a grizzly war movie without explaining to them that it's a movie, that these sort of things happened and war is terrible, and that they're reasonably safe from these things happening to them if they're from the western world.

But heaven forbid you explain to your kid what sex is and how it works and that it's awesome. Oh no that's way too awkward. (usually because the adults in question aren't emotionally mature enough themselves)

> defending this freedom forces us to grapple with uncomfortable contradictions

No, it doesn't. It just means that if you choose freedom you have to put up with people making choices and doing things that you don't approve of. It's a difficult choice for some people, but it's not a contradiction.

I think you and I are in agreement. We're just phrasing the same sentiment differently.

Well, I vehemently disagree with this:

> Defending freedom of speech feels - and should feel - very painful.

It doesn't feel painful to me at all. I choose freedom, not just for myself but for my fellow man, and I accept that the price of freedom is putting up with people making choices and doing things that I would not choose to do, that annoy the hell out of me, and that do not make the world a better place. But I am completely at peace with my choice. And I understand how a not-entirely-unreasonable person might make a different choice.

But the only reason that this choice should be "painful" is if you don't really want freedom. You might want some abstracted utopian notion of freedom, a freedom without cost or consequences. But this freedom only exists in your imagination, not the real world. Real freedom is messy and inconvenient and a pain in the ass, and I'll take it over oppression any day of the week with no hesitation and no regrets, and certainly no pain.

And where does your particular choice of freedom stop, and oppression begin? Will you let me be free to come over and take all your belonging? Or do you simply draw your freedom line in a very, very slightly different place?

It's not about where the line is drawn, it's about the distinction between difficult and painful. Figuring out how to draw the line is sometimes difficult, but it is never painful, at least not for me. And, I submit, if it's painful for you, you're doing it wrong.

The question of whether or not I will "let" you be free to steal my stuff is a straw man. The topic at hand is freedom of speech, not freedom to steal. We can have a separate discussion about that if you want, but it's a different topic.

But even in the case of freedom of speech there are reasonable limits on things like slander and raising false alarms (shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre). "Freedom" does not mean that everyone gets to do whatever the fuck they want whenever they want. That is a childish caricature of freedom. Real freedom involves making the tradeoffs necessary so that everyone gets to make their own choices as much as possible, with "possible" being the operative word. Letting everyone do whatever they want whenever they want is not possible in the real world, and so maximizing freedom, like any optimization problem with real constraints, is hard work. But doing this hard work need not be, should not be, and, if you truly value freedom will not be, painful.

Have you ever heard the expression "it pains me to say this"?

Sometimes the word painful is used to imply the internal turmoil one has when making difficult decisions. I'm not attempting to be disparaging, merely curious, since I don't know anything about your level of familiarity with English idioms. The phrase "painful decision" when read by myself immediately reads as synonymous to "difficult decision", so your attempting to make a distinction here that honestly confuses me.

> Have you ever heard the expression "it pains me to say this"?

Yes. It's an idiom. It means, "I feel uncomfortable or ambiguous about saying this, but I'm going to say it nonetheless."

But you didn't use the word "pain" in this idiomatic sense. You said:

"Defending freedom of speech feels - and should feel - very painful."

No. Having a tooth filled without anesthetic feels painful. Deciding to put a pet to sleep feels painful. Going through a divorce feels painful. (I speak from personal experience in all three cases.) But defending freedom of speech does not feel painful. It can be quite frustrating at times, but never painful. Most of the time it make me feel proud.

> I don't want to see Neo-Nazis protesting in a public area of my city

Neither do I. But I absolutely want neo-nazis to be able to protest in a public area of my city. There is not an iota of moral ambiguity here (at least not in my mind) and hence no pain. It does not "pain me to say" this: I will defend the right of neo-nazis to spew their bile every bit as vigorously as I will oppose nearly all of what they say.

The subject of censorship is always irrational in nature. The described painfulness comes when two equally irrational world views crashes, and each side try to use logic and ration in order to find a common ground.

> I don't want underage children to view pictures of sexual violence.

In the 1990 TV censorship in Sweden, explicit violence was demonized to the point where a cartoon show called Darkwing Duck was banned mid season. People argued that the young audience of the day had picked up a nastier and darker form of violence, and used crime statistics as evidence. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre become a symbol, and the minister of education spoke how it "spread violence" to the population. Even the plain videocassette recorder became a target, as an enabler of this plague of spreading violence.

Sexual content however, now that’s educational. In family prime time, a show called "bullen" was a teenage show which talked about sexuality from a teenage perspective. "Activities" and genitalia was commonly on the screen when a subject to be discussed was introduced. Nudity or sex was never viewed as something bad, but simply a matter of fact.

We would get the same painful experience described in the above comment if one person from the "video violence is bad" camp would meet the "sexual content is bad" camp. Each sides would try to use rational argument, which then would crash with the other sides irrational and emotional concerns.

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."

- H.L. Mencken

Either I don't understand the quote, or it's way off.

   The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

By 'beginning', you'd think you want to stop a criminal from becoming a criminal (general: a problem from becoming a problem) in the first place. Laws never do this, and the quote used "and", as if that is what a law does.

I'm guessing you're missing some nuance to it, because it's always struck me at least as rather insightful. It sounds like you're looking at it exactly backwards. The adage doesn't apply to the criminal, but to the actions we would otherwise wish to protect.

In regards to the first amendment, the earliest affronts to it in my lifetime were under the guise of pornography. Pornography, even by today's standards, is considered unseemly and unnecessary, so it's easy to get a bunch of folks willing to defend it and have their name associated with porn.

In regards to the second amendment, the battle is against fully automatic firearms. Again, considered unseemly and unnecessary.

Both of those assaults were likely political ruses, and to those ends, as a citizenry, we failed to defend them strongly enough. Now, the door has been opened. The first amendment is not considered sacrosanct, nor is the second. By proxy, nor are any of the others. That we failed at the onset, because we did not defend the scoundrels, we have steepened the slope. Now there's precedent on the books, that rights can be violated, "if there's a good reason". Our government has decided that it has a good reason, and that reason is terrorism, from which it will milk every last ounce of reasonability until it can be replaced or our war on civil rights is won or lost.

As much as I detest censorship it seems to me that there's a good argument to be made for censoring pornography, or even outlawing it altogether.

I believe pornography is a destructive force in modern society. If modern leaders have (more or less) come to the conclusion that environmental pollution is harmful to earth and to human kind, and have put in place measures (however controversial) to reduce said pollution, maybe it's time for them to recognize that pornography is just as harmful, and that it too should be stopped, or at least reduced. If we need to take measures to protect our bodies, should we not also protect our souls?

I find this line of argument fascinating.

To take a parallel argument, we appear to be living at a time of mass reduction in violence and crime. Yet violent video games are everywhere.

I like to think I'm in favour of evidence-based policy. What evidence do you have for believing that pornography is a destructive force in modern society?

When I look, I tend to find things like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President's_Commission_on_Obsc...

> On balance the report found that obscenity and pornography were not important social problems, that there was no evidence that exposure to such material was harmful to individuals, and that current legal and policy initiatives were more likely to create problems than solve them.

I'm genuinely interested in your logic here. Can you tell me more about how pornography is a destructive force in modern society?

Also, I'm curious as to whether you oppose all pornography or the type of pornography that is most prevalent in, say, the U.S. and the U.K.