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> Don't like porn? Don't buy it. Simple as that. The claim isn't "we don't like it", the claim is "this is damaging to society". I don't agree with such thing

by ben_w 1y ago

> Don't like porn? Don't buy it. Simple as that. The claim isn't "we don't like it", the claim is "this is damaging to society". I don't agree with such things in many cases (and many people disagree with me when I'm the one saying something is damaging to society), but it's important to note the difference or you will always be arguing against something other than their claim. > No one, including governments or payment processors, should be in the position to decide whether a platform can sell something or not. It's kinda the job of the government to decide such things; but an automatic extension of that is, it's not the job of the payment processors… and I think they should be banned from doing so because it's damaging to society to let them take on this role.

pstuart 1y ago
> the claim is "this is damaging to society" There is some truth to that, but if one were to operate at that level then Facebook would be illegal. Porn is a convenient thing to weaponize anger in your constituents (just like babies not being born). It pushes emotional triggers and riles people up and then they're waiting to be told what to hate/attack next.
- bobthepanda 1y ago
  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.
  - godelski 1y ago
    > 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...
    - simplify 1y ago
      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%.
      - godelski 1y ago
        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?
        simplify 1y ago
        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.
        godelski 1y ago
        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.
      - vunderba 1y ago
        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).
  - gitt67887yt7bg 1y ago
    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.
    - pear01 1y ago
      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.
      - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
        >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.
  - pstuart 1y ago
    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.
- Lerc 1y ago
  You then have to ask, "In what way is it damaging?" Some porn is exploitative, but also so are other things. Why is the attack being made upon porn and not exploitation? If the things being criticised appear in many areas, it is hard not to draw the conclusion that they chose their target because it involves sex, and that is what they have a problem with.
  - mystraline 1y ago
    > Some porn is exploitative, but also so are other things. Why is the attack being made upon porn and not exploitation? If we are to talk about exploitation, then capitalism itself is subject to be attacked and prohibited. If we work for a living, we sell our bodies to someone else for a time (40h a week or more). Does it really matter if we work on a factory floor doing parts, sitting and coding at a desk, or having sex in front of a camera? Labor is labor. Sure its the christian 'sex is bad' in various stripes (puritanical to catholic to baptist etc). But in reality, its just different labor. Now, capitalism in exploitive in that you generate X value, and you get a small percentage of your labor's output. Some owner is who collects the surplus. So if exploitation is the problem, then its time to start looking at worker cooperatives, unions, banning shows like Shark Tank, and all the capitalist propaganda. But no, its just 'sex icky'. We won't actually look at the root of exploitation.
    - simplify 1y ago
      You're framing of "sex icky" is a common reductionist approach to remove all humanity from the topic and try and make it purely logical. But that's always been a ridiculous way to argue. The human experience has never been pure reason. A picture of a naked person will have wildly different effects than a picture of a dog, even though you could technically say they're both "just pixels on a screen". Reductionism doesn't get an argument anywhere; it's too commonly an intellectually lazy defense of the vulgar.
      - mystraline 1y ago
        Remember, that the SCOTUS judgement of what obscenity is defined as, is "I'll know it when I see it". I prefer reductionist rather than the current standard of 'whatever 9 fucks think of it'.
- throwaway_l33t 1y ago
  > one were to operate at that level then Facebook would be illegal. This shows a fairly low level of engagement with the sorts of people that are pushing to ban porn. It’s not uncommon for them to be anti-screens, social media, etc. for similar reasons. The movement is often as much an attempt to get kids outsides and reduce the influence of smartphones and the internet on society as it is an attempt to ban porn.
- simplify 1y ago
  > if one were to operate at that level then Facebook would be illegal. Sounds great, where do I sign? Sure ban porn, but IMO ban social media first. Or at the very least, mandate educational materials on it. Kids grow up thinking it's important and it ruins their lives. Brainrot content deadens their sensory inputs. Same thing needs to happen with AI; we seriously need some required education in these spaces.
  - Nasrudith 1y ago
    I would rather we ban censors from positions of power.
godelski 1y ago
> it's important to note the difference or you will always be arguing against something other than their claim. I think this is critical insight and applies to a lot of topics. I think it is true for pretty much every heated topic. The mistake we often make is that we believe that the other side is not optimizing correctly. Instead, it is often that they are optimizing but under differing constraints. If we don't pay attention to these differing constraints we'll just end up with infuriating arguments as it will ,,sound like'' we're talking about the same thing, but actually aren't. It's one of the major difficulties of communication: we have to make a lot of assumptions to interpret the other person. Importantly, there's no way to convince the other person that they're wrong unless you are able to understand their model. It's easy to assume you do, but if your model boils down to "they're dumb" or "they're evil" then all you can do is fight. You have to understand your enemy and all that...[0] [0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/17976-if-you-know-the-enemy-and-know-yourself-you-need https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/17976-if-you-know-the-enemy...
- stevenAthompson 1y ago
  > they are optimizing but under differing constraints Most often this doesn't happen because one side fails to understand the other, it happens because one side is dishonest about their motivations or goals. In this case, the censors would like you to believe that they think pornography is harmful. The reality is that they're religious zealots who feel the need to prevent other people from making their own choices about something their religious leaders have told them is evil. They can't admit their real goal though, or people will realize it's just westernized Sharia law and stop taking them seriously.
  - godelski 1y ago
    IME it doesn't help to villainize the other side, it only escalates things. You're right that there are bad actors, but I don't think this is accurate for the majority of people. You need to differentiate the people leading a group from the people within a group. Leaders may be highly manipulative bad actors, but that doesn't mean that the people that they duped are. It may not be good logic, or even self-consistent, but everyone is always using some logic. I'm saying "find it if you want to convince them." Very few people see themselves as evil, or more accurately intentionally choosing evil. And I say this as someone who was once a member of a religion that has its own state. You're not going to pull people out of that by acting like they're evil. They're trying very hard to be good, just misguided. There's an saying that I believe was popularized during the Cold War. I think you should consider it. The difference between you and me is smaller than the difference between us and our respective leaders.
__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
It's pretty wild that people think that porn is more damaging to society than censorship.
- ivape 1y ago
  One can make a very strong argument that the manosphere stuff is rooted in poor sexual attitudes of men that only got worse with tons of porn. You only need to type any random sexual thing and find any explicit subreddit you want, that’s how pervasive the porn is on even an allegedly non-porn platform. Every other game has basically stripper-level female characters now days. We’ve literally gone crazy. Holistically, you’re talking about a hyper sexualized society where the content and ideology are available at high density and velocity from a pretty early age until the day you die. It’s a problem. The truth is one side is not wrong forever. The Christian right is wrong about so much, but the progression of our society has finally made them mostly correct on this issue. People need to take a deep hard look at what hip hop did to a generation of youth (both the violence and sexuality permeated deep into the culture). None of this shit is a joke, the kids end up fucked up.
  - ants_everywhere 1y ago
    > that the manosphere stuff is rooted in poor sexual attitudes of men that only got worse with tons of porn.... The Christian right is wrong about so much, but the progression of our society has finally made them mostly correct on this issue. I have news for you my friend, the Christian right is fucking people up way more than porn. So is the NoFap/incel movement. There are some pretty fucked up people who see women as breeding machines. This is tied pretty closely to the great replacement conspiracy theory and similar white nationalist conspiracy theories. People who believe this junk promote the idea that porn is bad because they want young men desperately horny so they breed with women either with or without their consent. This is the same reason it was a major priority for them to deny women's rights to their own bodies.
  - dontlaugh 1y ago
    I was with you until the last two paragraphs. There’s nothing inherently wrong with hip hop.
melagonster 1y ago
They are talking about games, right? Somebody drew/built all of them, unlike porn.
willis936 1y ago
We regulate speech based on its damage to society? Well, sounds like a certain canidae TV network ought to be regulated out of existence.
- mouse_ 1y ago
  yeah but that network benefits the rich and powerful people who orchestrate our society
- FabHK 1y ago
  Not to mention Facebook and YouTube.
fenomas 1y ago
> The claim isn't "we don't like it", the claim is "this is damaging to society" That's their framing, it's not what they actually do. If Collective Shout was a group that studied which things caused harm, and then campaigned against those things, then the point you're trying to make could stand. They're not. They've campaigned to ban rap artists, GTA 5, "50 Shades", lingerie ads, whatever random thing is around at the time - always under the pretext that it harms someone, but never with any evidence or substantial arguments that it does. In practice groups like this campaign against whatever they don't like, so it's correct to refute them on those grounds.
- phire 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - throwawaysoxjje 1y ago
    > They don't give a shit about individuals, just society as a whole. No they say they give a snot about society a whole. I can say a lot of things too.
  - fenomas 1y ago
    ...ok? My comment didn't say anything about the distinction you're drawing here.
    - phire 1y ago
      My point is that it's not just a framing, an excuse to push their likes and dislikes on everyone. If anything, it's actually the other way around. Their puritan views of what makes a healthy society is what informs their likes/dislikes. They are legitimately fighting for what they legitimately think will make a healthier society. If you assume otherwise, you will misjudge them.
      - fenomas 1y ago
        It's an imagined difference. Picture two people, each working to get a particular book banned. One is a petty moralizer trying to impose his likes and dislikes on everyone, and the other is legitimately fighting for what he believes will make society healthier. How do I tell which is which when their actions are identical?
globalnode 1y ago
Even if thats their claim, I doubt it has evidence. What if its actually beneficial to society?
Rapzid 1y ago
> and I think they should be banned from doing so In general though outside protected classes business can, and should IMHO, have a lot of discretion over who they choose to do business with and how they do business. Unless we want a carve out for payment processors. Treat them as a utility of sorts? Sounds like an interesting idea TBH. To me it's critical though that society has room to moderate itself where the government can not and should not. Something we've lost with social media is the ability to collectively ignore the guy at the bar nobody likes talking to. All the guys from all the bars are on the internet now being very loud.
- sitharus 1y ago
  > Unless we want a carve out for payment processors. Treat them as a utility of sorts? Given that there are two payment processors that have about 90% global market share (excluding China) and your bank chooses the payment processor for the most part, yes we should regulate them and force them to process payment for any legal business. They have the ability to effectively determine what we can spend our money on when we can’t get cash to the vendor in person, and almost every alternative processor has to deal with them and is also subject to their rules. The only way around this is via informal networks. Cryptocurrency isn’t an option for many as it’s very hard to obtain, due to the duopoly coercing banks and governments to keep people on their systems. I don’t live in the US, and where I live has a local electronic non-credit card payment system which has been around since the 80s. It’s less popular now because only the card networks support contactless payments instead of swipe/chip and pin. All the systems support contactless use, but banks won’t enable it because it has no interchange fees.
  - xvector 1y ago
    > yes we should regulate them and force them to process payment for any legal business. There is actually a bipartisan bill proposing precisely that: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/987 https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/987
  - Rapzid 1y ago
    > yes we should regulate them and force them to process payment for any legal business I like that idea. The USA actually used to trust bust :|
themaninthedark 1y ago
This is the exact claim of "hate speech" as well. Often both sexual content and hate speech get added to the same clause.
- spixy 1y ago
  Except having virtual sex and threatening to kill/hurt someone in real life are two different things.
lofaszvanitt 1y ago
No, this is killing revenue streams for people. You should be under a company to earn money. The problem is, more stupid the general populace is, more stricter rules will be introduced, otherwise you cannot keep the herd together.
Telemakhos 1y ago
> It's kinda the job of the government to decide such things; In some countries, maybe. In the US, there were concerted attempts (like the First Amendment to the Constitution) to prevent that from being the government's job, because of the fear that government would use that job to suppress dissent and coerce opinions. If payment processors are picking up that job, and doing so in a coordinated manner that doesn't allow porn companies to simply say "use these payment rails to do business with us, not those ones," it is not unreasonable to suspect that they are doing so not for their own business interests but as a proxy for powers that the government is denied. Someone should be taking a long look at whether the US-based payment processors are becoming a tool of censorship and, if so, how that censorship is being coordinated. It's not like Visa and Mastercard come up with these things independently and on a whim.
- wutwutwat 1y ago
  > that government would use that job to suppress dissent and coerce opinions. Thank baby jebus that this sort of thing never happens. Can you imagine if our government were to, for instance, threaten to deport our own citizens, publicly, for disagreeing with the government. That would be a fucking shit show! Thank you, first amendment!
docmars 1y ago
The other common (valid) argument is that it's easy for children to access this content because they're already using Steam and unless they have mature content filters enabled, it's already trivial to bypass age gates by lying. That said, I don't agree with censorship and especially by payment processors of all groups. The slippery slope is very concerning for adults who would enjoy any other category of content that are targeted by activist groups. Collective Shout has a history attacking media falling outside the porn bubble.

by ben_w 1y ago

pstuart 1y ago

> the claim is "this is damaging to society" There is some truth to that, but if one were to operate at that level then Facebook would be illegal. Porn is a convenient thing to weaponize anger in your constituents (just like babies not being born). It pushes emotional triggers and riles people up and then they're waiting to be told what to hate/attack next.

bobthepanda 1y ago
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.
- godelski 1y ago
  > 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...
  - simplify 1y ago
    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%.
    - godelski 1y ago
      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?
      - simplify 1y ago
        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.
        godelski 1y ago
        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.
    - vunderba 1y ago
      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).
- gitt67887yt7bg 1y ago
  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.
  - pear01 1y ago
    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.
    - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
      >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.
- pstuart 1y ago
  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.
Lerc 1y ago
You then have to ask, "In what way is it damaging?" Some porn is exploitative, but also so are other things. Why is the attack being made upon porn and not exploitation? If the things being criticised appear in many areas, it is hard not to draw the conclusion that they chose their target because it involves sex, and that is what they have a problem with.
- mystraline 1y ago
  > Some porn is exploitative, but also so are other things. Why is the attack being made upon porn and not exploitation? If we are to talk about exploitation, then capitalism itself is subject to be attacked and prohibited. If we work for a living, we sell our bodies to someone else for a time (40h a week or more). Does it really matter if we work on a factory floor doing parts, sitting and coding at a desk, or having sex in front of a camera? Labor is labor. Sure its the christian 'sex is bad' in various stripes (puritanical to catholic to baptist etc). But in reality, its just different labor. Now, capitalism in exploitive in that you generate X value, and you get a small percentage of your labor's output. Some owner is who collects the surplus. So if exploitation is the problem, then its time to start looking at worker cooperatives, unions, banning shows like Shark Tank, and all the capitalist propaganda. But no, its just 'sex icky'. We won't actually look at the root of exploitation.
  - simplify 1y ago
    You're framing of "sex icky" is a common reductionist approach to remove all humanity from the topic and try and make it purely logical. But that's always been a ridiculous way to argue. The human experience has never been pure reason. A picture of a naked person will have wildly different effects than a picture of a dog, even though you could technically say they're both "just pixels on a screen". Reductionism doesn't get an argument anywhere; it's too commonly an intellectually lazy defense of the vulgar.
    - mystraline 1y ago
      Remember, that the SCOTUS judgement of what obscenity is defined as, is "I'll know it when I see it". I prefer reductionist rather than the current standard of 'whatever 9 fucks think of it'.
throwaway_l33t 1y ago
> one were to operate at that level then Facebook would be illegal. This shows a fairly low level of engagement with the sorts of people that are pushing to ban porn. It’s not uncommon for them to be anti-screens, social media, etc. for similar reasons. The movement is often as much an attempt to get kids outsides and reduce the influence of smartphones and the internet on society as it is an attempt to ban porn.
simplify 1y ago
> if one were to operate at that level then Facebook would be illegal. Sounds great, where do I sign? Sure ban porn, but IMO ban social media first. Or at the very least, mandate educational materials on it. Kids grow up thinking it's important and it ruins their lives. Brainrot content deadens their sensory inputs. Same thing needs to happen with AI; we seriously need some required education in these spaces.
- Nasrudith 1y ago
  I would rather we ban censors from positions of power.

godelski 1y ago

> it's important to note the difference or you will always be arguing against something other than their claim. I think this is critical insight and applies to a lot of topics. I think it is true for pretty much every heated topic. The mistake we often make is that we believe that the other side is not optimizing correctly. Instead, it is often that they are optimizing but under differing constraints. If we don't pay attention to these differing constraints we'll just end up with infuriating arguments as it will ,,sound like'' we're talking about the same thing, but actually aren't. It's one of the major difficulties of communication: we have to make a lot of assumptions to interpret the other person. Importantly, there's no way to convince the other person that they're wrong unless you are able to understand their model. It's easy to assume you do, but if your model boils down to "they're dumb" or "they're evil" then all you can do is fight. You have to understand your enemy and all that...[0] [0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/17976-if-you-know-the-enemy-and-know-yourself-you-need https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/17976-if-you-know-the-enemy...

stevenAthompson 1y ago
> they are optimizing but under differing constraints Most often this doesn't happen because one side fails to understand the other, it happens because one side is dishonest about their motivations or goals. In this case, the censors would like you to believe that they think pornography is harmful. The reality is that they're religious zealots who feel the need to prevent other people from making their own choices about something their religious leaders have told them is evil. They can't admit their real goal though, or people will realize it's just westernized Sharia law and stop taking them seriously.
- godelski 1y ago
  IME it doesn't help to villainize the other side, it only escalates things. You're right that there are bad actors, but I don't think this is accurate for the majority of people. You need to differentiate the people leading a group from the people within a group. Leaders may be highly manipulative bad actors, but that doesn't mean that the people that they duped are. It may not be good logic, or even self-consistent, but everyone is always using some logic. I'm saying "find it if you want to convince them." Very few people see themselves as evil, or more accurately intentionally choosing evil. And I say this as someone who was once a member of a religion that has its own state. You're not going to pull people out of that by acting like they're evil. They're trying very hard to be good, just misguided. There's an saying that I believe was popularized during the Cold War. I think you should consider it. The difference between you and me is smaller than the difference between us and our respective leaders.

__MatrixMan__ 1y ago

It's pretty wild that people think that porn is more damaging to society than censorship.

ivape 1y ago
One can make a very strong argument that the manosphere stuff is rooted in poor sexual attitudes of men that only got worse with tons of porn. You only need to type any random sexual thing and find any explicit subreddit you want, that’s how pervasive the porn is on even an allegedly non-porn platform. Every other game has basically stripper-level female characters now days. We’ve literally gone crazy. Holistically, you’re talking about a hyper sexualized society where the content and ideology are available at high density and velocity from a pretty early age until the day you die. It’s a problem. The truth is one side is not wrong forever. The Christian right is wrong about so much, but the progression of our society has finally made them mostly correct on this issue. People need to take a deep hard look at what hip hop did to a generation of youth (both the violence and sexuality permeated deep into the culture). None of this shit is a joke, the kids end up fucked up.
- ants_everywhere 1y ago
  > that the manosphere stuff is rooted in poor sexual attitudes of men that only got worse with tons of porn.... The Christian right is wrong about so much, but the progression of our society has finally made them mostly correct on this issue. I have news for you my friend, the Christian right is fucking people up way more than porn. So is the NoFap/incel movement. There are some pretty fucked up people who see women as breeding machines. This is tied pretty closely to the great replacement conspiracy theory and similar white nationalist conspiracy theories. People who believe this junk promote the idea that porn is bad because they want young men desperately horny so they breed with women either with or without their consent. This is the same reason it was a major priority for them to deny women's rights to their own bodies.
- dontlaugh 1y ago
  I was with you until the last two paragraphs. There’s nothing inherently wrong with hip hop.

melagonster 1y ago

They are talking about games, right? Somebody drew/built all of them, unlike porn.

willis936 1y ago

We regulate speech based on its damage to society? Well, sounds like a certain canidae TV network ought to be regulated out of existence.

mouse_ 1y ago
yeah but that network benefits the rich and powerful people who orchestrate our society
FabHK 1y ago
Not to mention Facebook and YouTube.

fenomas 1y ago

> The claim isn't "we don't like it", the claim is "this is damaging to society" That's their framing, it's not what they actually do. If Collective Shout was a group that studied which things caused harm, and then campaigned against those things, then the point you're trying to make could stand. They're not. They've campaigned to ban rap artists, GTA 5, "50 Shades", lingerie ads, whatever random thing is around at the time - always under the pretext that it harms someone, but never with any evidence or substantial arguments that it does. In practice groups like this campaign against whatever they don't like, so it's correct to refute them on those grounds.

phire 1y ago
[flagged]
- throwawaysoxjje 1y ago
  > They don't give a shit about individuals, just society as a whole. No they say they give a snot about society a whole. I can say a lot of things too.
- fenomas 1y ago
  ...ok? My comment didn't say anything about the distinction you're drawing here.
  - phire 1y ago
    My point is that it's not just a framing, an excuse to push their likes and dislikes on everyone. If anything, it's actually the other way around. Their puritan views of what makes a healthy society is what informs their likes/dislikes. They are legitimately fighting for what they legitimately think will make a healthier society. If you assume otherwise, you will misjudge them.
    - fenomas 1y ago
      It's an imagined difference. Picture two people, each working to get a particular book banned. One is a petty moralizer trying to impose his likes and dislikes on everyone, and the other is legitimately fighting for what he believes will make society healthier. How do I tell which is which when their actions are identical?

globalnode 1y ago

Even if thats their claim, I doubt it has evidence. What if its actually beneficial to society?

Rapzid 1y ago

> and I think they should be banned from doing so In general though outside protected classes business can, and should IMHO, have a lot of discretion over who they choose to do business with and how they do business. Unless we want a carve out for payment processors. Treat them as a utility of sorts? Sounds like an interesting idea TBH. To me it's critical though that society has room to moderate itself where the government can not and should not. Something we've lost with social media is the ability to collectively ignore the guy at the bar nobody likes talking to. All the guys from all the bars are on the internet now being very loud.

sitharus 1y ago
> Unless we want a carve out for payment processors. Treat them as a utility of sorts? Given that there are two payment processors that have about 90% global market share (excluding China) and your bank chooses the payment processor for the most part, yes we should regulate them and force them to process payment for any legal business. They have the ability to effectively determine what we can spend our money on when we can’t get cash to the vendor in person, and almost every alternative processor has to deal with them and is also subject to their rules. The only way around this is via informal networks. Cryptocurrency isn’t an option for many as it’s very hard to obtain, due to the duopoly coercing banks and governments to keep people on their systems. I don’t live in the US, and where I live has a local electronic non-credit card payment system which has been around since the 80s. It’s less popular now because only the card networks support contactless payments instead of swipe/chip and pin. All the systems support contactless use, but banks won’t enable it because it has no interchange fees.
- xvector 1y ago
  > yes we should regulate them and force them to process payment for any legal business. There is actually a bipartisan bill proposing precisely that: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/987 https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/987
- Rapzid 1y ago
  > yes we should regulate them and force them to process payment for any legal business I like that idea. The USA actually used to trust bust :|

themaninthedark 1y ago

This is the exact claim of "hate speech" as well. Often both sexual content and hate speech get added to the same clause.

spixy 1y ago
Except having virtual sex and threatening to kill/hurt someone in real life are two different things.

lofaszvanitt 1y ago

No, this is killing revenue streams for people. You should be under a company to earn money. The problem is, more stupid the general populace is, more stricter rules will be introduced, otherwise you cannot keep the herd together.

Telemakhos 1y ago

> It's kinda the job of the government to decide such things; In some countries, maybe. In the US, there were concerted attempts (like the First Amendment to the Constitution) to prevent that from being the government's job, because of the fear that government would use that job to suppress dissent and coerce opinions. If payment processors are picking up that job, and doing so in a coordinated manner that doesn't allow porn companies to simply say "use these payment rails to do business with us, not those ones," it is not unreasonable to suspect that they are doing so not for their own business interests but as a proxy for powers that the government is denied. Someone should be taking a long look at whether the US-based payment processors are becoming a tool of censorship and, if so, how that censorship is being coordinated. It's not like Visa and Mastercard come up with these things independently and on a whim.

wutwutwat 1y ago
> that government would use that job to suppress dissent and coerce opinions. Thank baby jebus that this sort of thing never happens. Can you imagine if our government were to, for instance, threaten to deport our own citizens, publicly, for disagreeing with the government. That would be a fucking shit show! Thank you, first amendment!

docmars 1y ago

The other common (valid) argument is that it's easy for children to access this content because they're already using Steam and unless they have mature content filters enabled, it's already trivial to bypass age gates by lying. That said, I don't agree with censorship and especially by payment processors of all groups. The slippery slope is very concerning for adults who would enjoy any other category of content that are targeted by activist groups. Collective Shout has a history attacking media falling outside the porn bubble.