Are you talking about these bills? They have nothing to do with "what consenting adults do and possibly criminalizing LGBT again".
As the article says, adults can "disable the filters...through passcodes".
And even children are allowed to bypass the filters, if their parents permit it: "Providing such a passcode to a child would be forbidden, except when done by a parent."
Dogmatic and wrong but at least you said it with confidence.
This simplistic line of 'porn bad' is just the pretense for labeling anything out of line with your religion's prescribed morality as pornohrafic and therefore worthy of being expunged by violent means. This ideology never stops at videos containing nudity or sex but continues on to being directed at music, literature, women who don't cover their heads, Transgender people, and so on.
It's the exact justification currently used by conservative turbo-karens to ban books from public libraries that contain any trace if LGBTQIA+ content, histories that acknowledge the slave trade and racism, or even basic health information about periods.
The opinion "porn bad" (for children) isn't limited to conservatives or religious people.
Here's what Unicef says:
> Pornographic content can harm children. Exposure to pornography at a young age may lead to poor mental health, sexism and objectification, sexual violence, and other negative outcomes. ...
> UNICEF is alarmed by the massive quantity of pornography available online, including increasingly graphic and extreme content that is easily accessible to children of all ages. Efforts to regulate content and restrict children’s access to pornography have not kept pace with technological shifts that have profoundly altered the landscape for the consumption of pornography.
What a silly question to come back and ask two days later.
But since you asked, I'll respond. I have my own computer and internet connection, so I don't watch anything at the library. But it's not unheard of for homeless people to watch porn at the library.
Also who defines 'porn'. Is porn any photo that shows nudity, or where do you draw the line on vanilla videos vs more extreme.
You might end up with devices blocking all photos of a woman topless, or naked men, even art. Does Michelangelo's David statue get his privates covered or blocked? Or like in China where they increasing block things like picture/videos of women eating bananas as that is taken as sexual (and to be fair some steamers were knowingly doing as so).
Obviously there is reasonable ground in these discussions, but when it comes to censorship the best overall position is government should stay out as much as possible. History shows human nature, or the people attracted to powerful positions, seems to not play well in these spaces over time.
If we are including all fetishes and kinks, then any photo, video or drawing that shows feet is porn. The internet has a massive foot fetish. Some people are aroused by eyes. So any photo, video or drawing that contains eyes is porn. Some people are into ... I mean, I could keep going but it's already silly.
There used to be clear lines drawn for porn penetration, oral copulation, etc... but those lines have been quite blurred. Now anything lewd could be porn and just about anything could be lewd in the eyes of the beholder. There's some case law that tries to put bullet-point requirements on this but is still somewhat subjective even when stare decisis is utilized. A considerable amount of artistic content on DeviantArt could be considered lewd by current US standards.
Overall I agree with you. The government should stay out of it. The tech industry should also stay out of it. Just add a header for URL's that may contain user-generated content and let the clients decide what actions to take or not take on that header.
The same religious people pushing this law claim that books acknowledging the existence of queer people is pornographic. Forgive me for my cynicism but I think this is less about pornography and more about providing a legal framework for Christians to censor information about queer identities, reproductive healthcare, and things of that nature.
Not a troll, just someone whose life experience leads to the conclusion that people trying to ban "pornography" in the United States are motivated almost exclusively by Christian religious motivations. Especially the ones who are demanding legal solutions that will be a detriment to the freedom of everyone.
Furthermore, the notion of the state forcing computer makers to inspect for and block certain content dovetails nicely (if one's goal is the eradication of queer people in the public sphere) with states prohibiting the discussion of queer identities.
> Modern porn isn't like your grandpa's playboy magazines
I'm sure there was very extreme porn when grandpa was reading his magazines. Maybe access to it is easier today, but I'm sure humans have been into extreme sexual activities for a veeeeeeery long time.
Yep, accessibility is my concern. Think about the most vile, extreme porn you've seen. Now multiply that vileness by 10. That content is just as easy to access (via the Internet) as some innocent nude selfie.
Again, I think adults should be able to watch what they want. The concern is for the children who are given unrestricted access to the Internet from a young age.
> The concern is for the children who are given unrestricted access to the Internet from a young age
Kinda agree - but for me that's up to the parents. Control your kids devices, restrict them, educate them etc.
Else, how do you want to control this? Mandatory identification on the whole internet? No thanks...
I've seen a lot of things as a teenager which I shouldn't have seen (gore videos of mexican cartels, ISIS etc.), and I'm sure that this has done some mental damage, even though I can't exactly pinpoint what kind. But still, if the alternative is total bureaucratic control over the whole internet with my personal ID being identified everywhere, just to save some uncontrolled kids from watching things they shouldn't...I don't know.
EDIT: to clarify, i do agree that kids should be protected from harmful content. just don't think that ID checks or scanning my own data are a net positive.
We need to stop asking the government to parent our children. This is the chief problem. That idea has been mainstreamed such that the assumption is "there ought to be a law" for everything.
Once upon a time, when conservatism was a set of principles and not a set of rants, it was conservatives that stood for limiting government's reach into private concerns. Those values have largely flown out the window to the point where the "two sides" are simply arguing over what to interfere in.
At a global level, human societies have gone through this before. The rash of attaching fig leaves to statuary, for example. The last decade has seen an up-tick of that kind of activity as well.
What happens when you tear down religion and the family unit as moral centers in society? Society replaces them with government... which is drastically worse. Governmental agencies have no interest in teaching that they don't have the responsibility. Their existence depends on growing their authority. There's a conflict of interest.
This is not a slippery slope argument either, it's the consequences of some ideas winning mind share (government as moral authority, morality as old-fashioned...).
As a parent, I'd sooner argue we should just give the kids a copy of Encarta and kick them off the internet.
Porn is a drop in the ocean of the problematic content out there. You don't wage war with the ocean. You keep kids away from it until they learn how to swim.
It could be bad in terms of the outcomes for consumers even if it's produced ethically.
Imagine all junk food and sugary soda was produced with sustainable farming and renewable energy. It could still be the case that it leads to worse health outcomes for the population, which seems like grounds for regulation to me.
I don't really have a position on this, but it seems easy to imagine how someone could.
If you say "I don't see the grounds for banning or regulating porn" but you mean "I disagree with the concept of consumer protection regulation altogether", you're wasting people's time.
Just say the more general thing in the first place so people don't have to bother trying to argue the finer points of the specific case.
Where is the line between porn and art, and how would it remain a consistently enforceable standard? Since early times, through the Greeks to now, art celebrates nudity and sometimes depicts static (because earlier civilizations had no video) representations of sex and violence mixing in order to tell a story (uhh … Persephone and Hades, much? or Zeus turning into a thousand animals to lure women then rape them). Where do you draw the line; why draw it “there” as opposed to anywhere else; by what right is it to suppress, in the process, others’ definition of where to draw said line?
Why would there need to be a line? Something can be porn or art, or both. There is no conflict. Anything done between two consenting adults should be completely un-controversial.
> Where do you draw the line; why draw it “there” as opposed to anywhere else; by what right is it to suppress, in the process, others’ definition of where to draw said line?
What is the point in having a line? If it’s just to decide what can be shown in public and what cannot, then I don’t see why more or less explicit nudes would be any worse than the various depictions of killings and torture we all seem to be comfortable with for some reason.
The sooner we grow up and can go past the kindergarten “OMG we can see her nipple” stage, the better.
The line is where it empirically stops hurting the protected class. We don't do empirical evidence based policy on social stuff anymore (science in social politica is mostly rhetoric lately), so it's pointless for me to type this out, but that is the answer to establishing a boundary.
When teenagers and young adults stop measurably falling off their path in life (chosen according to their own wishes) then we can say that age is the right age for teenagers to be allowed to opt-in to porn.
This is not to condemn the average joe who is unaffected by porn, but to distance the innocent from getting addicted.
Alcohol, cars, guns and literal sex all have minimum ages. The controversy around porn is more rabid and faith-based than logical.
The government doesnt need any new tools to do it, too. Just legally require porn providers to accept a one-off credit card verification payment or 2factor phone auth or a gift card, to establish that the user is old enough to do those basic tasks. If the teenager uses a parents card or phone, the parent will find out eventually and it will solve itself.
But we all know the gov will try to implement more control than that. And that will kill the idea dead, before it begins.
I disagree, but even if you are right, if we accept censoring porn, we will need a bureaucratic censorship corps, and will need to distinguish porn from, for example, lover sending nudes to each other, art with nude sculptures, sex scenes in films, and so on.
And there is zero chance that a bureaucracy designed to censor the citizens will not overextend it's powers and refrain from censoring these things.
for all people replying. I' m referring to this https://fightthenewdrug.org/ (+some peer reviewed studies), not to some religion. Porn is literally bad, if somebody want to jerk off, better use imagination
"Fight the New Drug" is much more entangled with religion than its owners would like the public to believe.
> The group denies a formal affiliation with the Mormon church, though as journalist Samantha Allen notes, its founders are all Mormon, and its facts rely on claims from Mormon author Donald Hilton’s He Restoreth My Soul: Understanding and Breaking the Chemical and Spiritual Chains of Pornography through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. The group’s leader Clay Olsen has explicitly distanced his group from the larger sect. His group opts for a newer-age revelation, explaining on its website, “As young college students not too long ago, we came across the recent science of how porn affects the brain and we were shocked!”
> The leaders and presenters of FTND are not mental health nor sexuality professionals and do not have sufficient training in sexuality or human development to be addressing these subjects. Investigative journalists have recognized FTND as an LDS organization, which FTND continues to deny.
> The largest published neuroscience study of this topic to date, as well as a series of published behavioral studies, shows that those who report problems viewing sex films do not resemble any other substance or "behavioral" addictions. According to their own website, 90 percent of FTND attendees end up agreeing that "pornography releases the same chemicals in your brain as other hard drugs" compared to 43 percent who believed this prior to their presentation. FTND is advertising their ability to successfully spread false information.
> FTND claims they use "peer reviewed science and research" to back their information. A "sex/porn addiction" diagnosis does not exist in the DSM-5, which was explicitly rejected for "lack of scientific evidence."
Also I'm not supporting on-device blocking, it's against privacy and may be used as a precedent to block other stuff, I'm just saying porn is bad and try to minimize it's consumption (ideally to 0)
Locking devices is the wrong step, but deploying nation-scale firewalls to block content you happen to find objectionable, isn't?
If you want to block porn in your own home, there's plenty of consumer gear out there that allows you to do just that. Why do you want to voluntarily expand power of the government to moderate content that you're allowed to access?
And this is exactly what people complained would happen back when the piracy blocks went into place. "this is going to be abused to block other things".
In the TV show Hannibal they unironically had to cover a naked butt with blood to lower the age rating. This single sentence sums up just about every pathology of US culture
It's possible to express yourself without resorting to words/phrases like this. Shake your vocab tree. There are a million other appropriate ways to express your belief that a person thing (or country) is backwards, regressive or foolish.
> One of these anti-pornography bills was passed into law in 2021 in Utah but cannot go into effect unless five additional states pass similar laws — a provision included to prevent Big Tech companies from isolating the state after passing the law.
Ok so they have to isolate five small states instead? I don't think the tech companies will worry until California, New York, or Texas pass this law.
The reason Utah likely has that provision is because they would comply, but in the easiest of ways: if a state is too small to bother, stop selling the devices there.
There have already been at least 3 other states trying to make this law. They've been discussed here on HN. I do not have links handy. So they may very well be on the path to their goals.
[Edit] Here [1] is the one for the UK and here [2] is the one for Louisiana. Partially related is the fight against PornHub [3]. Here [4] is the one for Arkansas and here [5] is Canada. There is at least one more, I could not find it. I want to say it was Oklahoma.
First amendment issues aside. Your feelings about porn aside.
How many women are selling images of themselves on onlyfans for a living? What is that economic impact to a majority female population. The only number I could find is a million people create content on there.
Idaho just legalized execution by firing squad and are considering repealing their anti-militia law. Texas gets a lot of attention because of its size, but Idaho is maybe the outright craziest state almost completely controlled at the state government level by Christian/Mormon theocratic fascists.
Devices having accurate ML-based content/app filters that users have control over? Great!
Devices having user-controlled ability to limit certain content & experiences to certain days and times? Great!
Devices having robust parental control features? Great!
Devices having support system control features to help users manage their addictions, e.g. user has to ask chosen friends and support buddies to disable filters? Great!
Devices having several well thought out default content filters selectable during device setup? Great!
Basic legislation that requires devices to have these features? Possibly!
Devices having content filters as default on? Not great!
Devices being legislated to just not allow content? Yikes!
At least it's possible to reconfigure the device you own to obey your own wishes and not that of the manufacturer's.
Oh wait, no it's not, Apple can censor anything that an iPhone can display, and any jurisdiction Apple operates in can compel them to do such and the device owners would have no workaround.
The most a device maker should be implementing is looking for RTA headers and then checking what options the device owner/purchaser set. This is not in any way a new concept. Implement child accounts and implement checks for RTA headers. This delegates the responsibility entirely to the device owner to raise their own children and website operators to set a simple header. This would be trivial to implement on both ends. Child visits site, device prompts for device owner password, then prompts to allow the site temporarily or permanently.
If a website is serving user-generated or adult content and not adding RTA headers then fine the crap out of them once the corresponding legislation is in place. There is financial incentive for governments to do this correctly and to create very simple laws and device manufacturers to implement very simple technology.
This will not stop people from sexting each other. Sexting would have to be addressed in parental controls on the device as to whether or not multimedia content is allowed to be received or sent to/from the device. Obviously a device owner that does not have children would never be subject to such restrictions.
I don't have a good answer for this. I guess it would be whatever would be done to handle a foreign website hosting something that is illegal in the US today. I hope the goal is not for the US to police the entire planet.
I thought they already did censor like that. You can only see lewd stuff in a browser because they censor the fuck out their app stores. I guess this would target browsers too which is why you should be free to run your own software on a phone.
My phone was made in China, the Internet is global, and my porn most certainly isn’t American puritan. Cultural imperialism is just as bad when the US does it than when Russia does.
A designed-in-California phone that is made using designed-in-California production processes and funded by American dollars is only nominally "made in China".
The "global" internet is very much more American than it is marketed to be; including having been invented there and having most of its backbone there.
I remember growing up in Africa and connecting to the "international" network. I found almost only American businesses and content.
Well, censoring porn is one of the things I would happy to be censoring.
Although this leads down a steep road easily to censor other content also, yet for a long time I have wondered why is it so easy to find porn, and why is nobody doing anything about it ?
Porn is probably one of the major addictive behavioural and thought changing things in this world currently. It takes under 3 seconds to find porn if you want it, probably from any device from anywhere around the world. Is this what humanity wants to optimize for ?
Porn causes distortions in how you think about women, how you sexualize over them and what kind of thoughts you have about women generally. It is very addictive, and leaves you with an empty feeling afterwards.
It can be violent, disturbing, abusive to the people involved and can cause mass scale feelings of not being enough, not being good enough to compared to the people showing you how "sex" should be had.
And yet almost everybody just silently accepts that porn is okay, and nothing should be done about it.
We give 5 year olds smartphones which can lead to the most disturbing porn scenes by just googling a couple of words, within a minute you could be watching somebody just abusing young women violently, and yet this is accepted.
I am all for free speech and that, but I think we have a blind spot here.
Probably it is because we are addicted to this as a nation, as a species.
I wish the big players would decide to ban porn, or at least make it substantially harder to find it. It's just a freaking stupid idea that we give our children these devices at very young ages, and almost nobody is doing anything about filtering or limiting what kind of content is available to them in this manner.
Well, banning kitchen knives is one of the things I would be happy to see.
Although it could lead to bans of other useful equipment in future, I've always wondered why it's so easy to find kitchen knives and no one is doing anything about it.
Kitchen knives are probably the most dangerous equipment in the world. Whether at home or travelling, most people can get their hands on one in minutes.
People harm themselves and others with knives. Whether it is a planned domestic murder, a break in and robbery, or someone seeking to end their own life, knives can always be found and used.
They're often kept in drawers or on counter tops where even 5-year-olds can reach them.
I am all for home cooking, but I think we have a blind spot here. Probably because everyone needs food.
I wish the big players would ban knives or make it substantially harder to buy.
I know we could also teach people the dangers of knives from a young age and train them to use them safely but this just doesn't seem worth the tradeoff.
I'm a woman. I watch porn. I've made porn (well, I've posted nudes online.) I definitely don't think it's twisted the way I see women (or, like, myself.) I'm pretty done with men deciding what's in my best interest though.
What about the predatory nature of the industry ? 18 year olds being hunted down to "act" in these pieces, mostly by older men who are just using these women for their own pleasure and financial benefits.
People have agency. Set an age of majority and treat those above it like adults. It's a hell of a lot better than infantilizing women and chauvinistically "protecting" us from exploitation.
I feel like I'm finally starting to understand how burqas took off. This kind of moral panic. Keeping us safe from the lecherous eyes of men.
> What about the predatory nature of the industry ? 18 year olds being hunted down to "serve", mostly by older men who are just using these young men for their own political and financial benefits.
Your complaint could just as easily be applied to the US army and the consequences there are often much more severe. Food for thought.
How do you know how these actors get into the business? Have you watched that BBC documentary about the porn industry? If anything I came out with the impression there's a huge supply of young girls and men willing to come for auditions anywhere... have you ever been young? I don't know about you, but if I had the chance to do porn at a younger age, I would've totally done it.
I think you may be actually believing those "exploited girl f*s for acting job that doesn't exist" are actually real LOL??
Sounds like good reason to better educate young people in general about the predatory nature of others and the many way in which they can be exploited without them realising.
But neither is chocolate, coffee, minerals mined in Africa, Gulf oil. You know child labor, slavery, exploitation.
We can talk about saving the 18 year old who should know better after we spend the day slapping cell phones and mocha caps out of people hands in front of Starbucks.
Then we can try to save 18 year olds, Im fairly sure that a good number of them are going to tell us to fuck off were poor with their only fans money.
Well, maybe don't do it? Maybe not until they are 12yo or something like that?
My feeling is many parents don't want to parent at all and so they delegate to smartphone, tablets and TVs.
Parents should go back to be more...parents.
We don't have an ipad exactly because otherwise my 6yo would like to play with it (her friends have one) instead of going out and play outside.
In my opinion children should not have a smartphone, do tangible stuff and games.
But what are you going to do about the majority of people doing this ?
And children looking at their phones. I've heard of tales of second graders looking at porn together while on recess, that is the world we now live in.
There should be some good defaults.
I agree with you totally, it makes no sense to give under 10 year olds smart phones.
> But what are you going to do about the majority of people doing this ?
What the hell, why do you care what other parents do or not do?? How about we let them make their own choices?! Geez, what kind of authoritarian mindset is this kind of argument coming from?
Because unless I want to be one of those snotty mothers who will only allow my child to associate (play, do sports, go to school) with the children of other parents who don’t allow their children unsupervised access to mobile devices, my child will effectively also have unsupervised access to mobile devices. Probably not when he’s 6 or 7, but definitely by the time he’s 9, if one of his less-supervised classmates has a smartphone, my kid will be seeing all sorts of things I’d rather he not see before he’s in his teens.
I’d like for my kid to grow up with kids from all backgrounds, not just the children of those of us who have been exposed to tech for so long and so deeply that our concern for its downsides on our kids outweighs the temptation (which is less when your life is easier) to shove a mobile in a fidgety toddler’s hand or pay 10 EUR/mo to give a primary school kid a reliable distraction.
> I’d prefer if we’d start by censoring violence and religion. Religion is just a big lie
you are in favor of censoring violence from video games? you're not lying? and you said "start by", so you'd be on board censoring pornography too so long as it started with censoring violence and religion?
Well given religions are all different and only one could be true, it's more correct to say they're all a lie. One might be true. However, as old ones have died away and new ones will be created and the current ones evolve it's not even possible to say that any one religion is subjectively true to itself.
They have different beliefs, but it's all the same God.
You can't know enough in this lifetime to judge them to be objective or subjective lies. Just getting through the magisterium is more reading than one lifetime, let alone the other old judeo-christian 'usual suspects' faiths.
Replacing your category of God and religion with 'its all a lie' is very dangerous and distasteful to read.
The inside and outside perspective. (1) If you're religious and inside then it's so important to you, it makes no sense to casually dismiss the ideas that are ingrained in your life about the ideas of God and religion.
(2) If you're like me, on the outside and not religious, can you understand that I can shrug those off and call them a lie very easily, because they don't matter to me at all? From the outside it is like people getting upset that you've insulted something in Harry Potter books.
Face to face with people I'm more mindful and just don't talk about this kind of thing unless its with like minded people. On a technical forum like this, I'm not going to hold back with my real opinion though. You have a choice to read or not, and to consider (2). I do not wish to offend you by writing off your beliefs. But to an atheist who does not think about religion much at all, it is a bunch of nonsense.
Engaging in blunt conversation on here is valuable to me aswell. It can be difficult to summarize a topic like religion (so much to say) that I know exists, but isn't directly my faith. Protection from offense is not something I need in my faith, though I understand sensitivity to offense is common in American-focused websites.
You are free to say whatever you want and I love that freedom. I want it too.
I believe saying that God and religion is a lie, is something you can do as an atheist and be fine.
But if taken as a statement of truth about God and a foundational axiom, you can end up in nihilism and a 'bad place', speaking loosely, quickly.
In discussing porn and the way we all have to live together in society, I'm not willing to casually throw away the moral implications of porn and the moral logic of the conversation about porn.
Making porn a matter of faith, religion, atheism or belief is a policy mistake to begin with. If it has measurably damaging outcomes to our youth, the case should be much clearer about the boundary between freedom and delayed gratification.
If damaging outcome to our youth is your main concern we might want to start by censoring social media altogether. And alcohol, and not doing any sports, and eating fastfood, and being overweight…
But back to religion, I think religion opens the doors to a society that accepts lies as facts. It basically legalizes stating assumptions for facts, and making those assumptions have big impact on society. And thereby it states that it’s ok to do that on a larger scale, the way you see fox media spewing lies as facts, and how the way Trump talks is ok.
The black and white idea of censoring is beyond my want. We can talk about those things for sure,
- Alcohol displays the % alcohol content on the bottle and has age-verification for purchase in some countries/retailers. An equivalent for porn would in theory, be a plausible discussion.
- Hard contact sports are battling CTE brain trauma as we speak. It's worth trying to save our men from injuries that permanently degrade their ability to contribute to society. We are working on preventing the damage to our youth from the whole concept of sports. Broadly speaking, similar preventative idea could be plausible for teenagers-home-alone and in low-income neighbourhoods who need a help up (and off porn).
- Fast food has changed. Coke moved to Diet-Coke and then widespread acceptance of No-Sugar varieties. That is a huge change that could find a metaphorical analogy in porn. Moving the majority of teenage porn consumption from hard-core down to soft-core, would be a theoretically plausible conversation.
- Being overweight is less clear as the causes-and-effects are so numerous and can combine unhealthily, it is not easy to my mind, to make measurable and agreeable claims towards limiting it's downsides. You got me on this one.
Yeah it brings me to low to watch factual debate fly out the window. The freedom to say whatever you want, I love, but a government or official somewhere shouldn't be allowed to have no grain-of-truth at all, in his interpretative rhetoric. There should be a fact at the bottom somewhere.
It's certainly true that there are people today with deeply held spiritual beliefs with tens of thousands of years of continuity that don't revolve about a singular interventionalist monotheist God - which rather dents the claim that "but it's all the same God".
Yeah that theological argument is surmountable, from my eyes. I'm happy to have both ideas on as options, the monotheism one was left off the map.
The Indian and Japanese beliefs are particularly fascinating in the departure from monotheism. The Shinto practices and Hindu beliefs are something I have left inadequately studied so far.
I don't feel the need to defend against the idea that missionaries and colonizers were Saturday-Morning-Cartoon villains hellbent on death and destruction. Not saying you said it like that, but just want to express the notion that it leaves me ambivalent.
Symbolically they might have threatened <the other>'s society and religion/faith/beliefs.
But in practice the English "invaders" of the Aboriginals have brought a lot of positives and sought to preserve Aboriginal culture and beliefs in written works, film & media pieces (limited due to Aboriginal beliefs), live performances and routine practices, and linguistic, seasonal and historical documentation.
It is not reasonable to say that Australia is a British country, it isn't. The structural bones the Brits built and the blood they poured into cultivating the land, bore a lot of good fruit, for Aboriginals and the native Australians, born of emancipated criminals. There is a lot the Brits failed to do, leaving a good structure to build into the future was not a failure of theirs.
British missionaries have always been stuck between thoroughly empirical/routinized Kingdom and following the mission to nurture the people on the land. When those two elements disagree, there's not a lot of control in the missionary's hands.
Some of the Medicine Leaves pieces are really nice.
By this logic, we could decide to censor violence, religion, social media, subcultures, sugar, the study of chemistry, and perhaps coffeine. I don't think it's a blind spot. It's a deliberate decision not to be overprotective. Should it be the government's responsibility to censor anything that people easily get into with bad consequences?
I'm not saying it should be the governments responsibility.
And governments are already heavily censoring and trying to kill child pornography, religion and certain political views, so why would this be so different ?
It should be our responsibility as humans and parents to protect our children. If we are not thinking about our children and protecting them from content that could be potentially life changing and addictive for the rest of their lives, why are we not stepping up to the plate and doing that ?
The government's responsibility is that the government passes the laws to censor things, not that it does the dirty work of actual censorship.
Censoring religion and political views is regarded as a violation of human rights, so while this is different, I do agree that it should be treated the same.
I agree with the need to protect people from bad influences, but the government is not the only entity that's capable of protecting. Traditionally, that role has also been fulfilled by the social network and the person in question themselves. I don't see the urge to shove it all off on the government, except in cases where the social network is failing to protect, e.g. in the cases of crime.
There's a balance to be hit between the ability to take risk and the negative consequences. Best example is personal vehicles which cause life changing consequences when they go wrong, sometimes ending lives altogether, and doing this reliably to thousands of people every year.
"And governments are already heavily censoring and trying to kill child pornography, religion and certain political views, so why would this be so different ?"
Child pornography: of course!
Religion: ... What ? Which ones?
Certain political views: of course we ban Nazis... That's what you meant right?
I did not mean Nazis.
Have you even followed the censorship in Twitter for example and the situation that is unraveling now ?
We already ban certain views, but yet, pornography: no.
It's not important enough, and as seen here by the downvotes, many people are addicted to it and cannot understand what I tried to message.
I don't. The pandora's box has been opened. Using that criteria, we should also probably limit access to social media, AI, internet access altogether, stop governments from surveilling and tracking every single movement you make, and so many more things that have become an ingrained part of day-to-day life in the last few decades.
I find it funny that some people want to "patch" things up. It's over. I say let's just the experiment until society collapses and then build up from there.
> Although this leads down a steep road easily to censor other content also, yet for a long time I have wondered why is it so easy to find porn, and why is nobody doing anything about it ?
Why should we do anything about it? I’ve never seen a cogent argument. It always boils down to “I don’t like it” and “but the children”. Other people don’t have to care if I like something, and the children would benefit much more from true sex education, so that they get the knowledge they need from more valid sources than entertainers. Same as with abortion, really. If you don’t like it, then prepare your children to make enlightened choices and avoid problematic behaviour.
> It can be violent, disturbing, abusive to the people involved and can cause mass scale feelings of not being enough, not being good enough to compared to the people showing you how "sex" should be had.
Then we need to prosecute instances of actual abuse and exploitation. But that would mean actually listening to victims (including, yikes!, women). Exactly like we do with violent content: who cares if you post yourself shooting your AR-15 on YouTube? But shooting your school mates is crossing a line. Why are we so mentally defective as soon as sex is involved?
Going to the bathroom is nasty, poop is icky, smells are highly unpleasant and there's often crap in the streets (it can also be used for revenge or abuse)
Let's discourage defecation by banning toilet paper.
I don't see a problem with this actually. Toilet paper is nasty and should be eliminated. If toilets all had washlets, you wouldn't need TP, except for drying yourself, but that could be done with a blow-drier added to the washlet.
In civilized countries, washlets on toilets are normal and standard, even in most public restrooms.
No as it's almost impossible to attribute these effect to porn as porn is too widely spread among women and men, and most of the "porn behavior" existed before that porn was universally consumed. Strangely most of these studies talked about men behavior when women consume a lot of porn.
This is the same kind of things you hear about gay, role playing games, metal music, video games, rap music that are all rotting the brain of young people.
I understand the censorship argument also, and to be honest expecting also people defending their right to watch porn, the addiction is real.
Porn is like a thought virus, if you watch it enough you will start to think about all these things you see visually about the women in your life and people around you. Many people might not want to admit this, and will just spew out silly comments defending porn, maybe they are addicted to it and like to watch it.
Then go ahead, I'm not saying you should not be able to watch porn.
I'm saying _by default_, things like porn should be more harder to find and access.
Fuck these prudes. It's time to stop accepting the demonization of sex by religious extremists. If we don't fight for our rights we forfeit them.
[flagged]
Are you talking about these bills? They have nothing to do with "what consenting adults do and possibly criminalizing LGBT again".
As the article says, adults can "disable the filters...through passcodes".
And even children are allowed to bypass the filters, if their parents permit it: "Providing such a passcode to a child would be forbidden, except when done by a parent."
Of course they can! For now.
Next step: this porn type needs to be filtered out
Eventual step: all LGBT+ material isn't legal in this state and must be filtered.
Also: "Providing such a passcode to a child would be forbidden, except when done by a parent."
Better hope no one posts it online. Won't someone think of the children!
[flagged]
Dogmatic and wrong but at least you said it with confidence.
This simplistic line of 'porn bad' is just the pretense for labeling anything out of line with your religion's prescribed morality as pornohrafic and therefore worthy of being expunged by violent means. This ideology never stops at videos containing nudity or sex but continues on to being directed at music, literature, women who don't cover their heads, Transgender people, and so on.
It's the exact justification currently used by conservative turbo-karens to ban books from public libraries that contain any trace if LGBTQIA+ content, histories that acknowledge the slave trade and racism, or even basic health information about periods.
The opinion "porn bad" (for children) isn't limited to conservatives or religious people.
Here's what Unicef says:
> Pornographic content can harm children. Exposure to pornography at a young age may lead to poor mental health, sexism and objectification, sexual violence, and other negative outcomes. ...
> UNICEF is alarmed by the massive quantity of pornography available online, including increasingly graphic and extreme content that is easily accessible to children of all ages. Efforts to regulate content and restrict children’s access to pornography have not kept pace with technological shifts that have profoundly altered the landscape for the consumption of pornography.
https://www.unicef.org/harmful-content-online
OP didn't say "porn bad for children". They said "porn bad".
I was responding to deserialized, who cited examples like public libraries where books are available to children.
(At least I'm not aware of any public libraries with adult-only sections.)
And in the context of the overall discussion of a bill attempting to restrict specifically children's (not adults') access to porn.
What porn have you been reading at the public library champ?
What a silly question to come back and ask two days later.
But since you asked, I'll respond. I have my own computer and internet connection, so I don't watch anything at the library. But it's not unheard of for homeless people to watch porn at the library.
I wonder how we determined that porn is bad for children. Were there any studies done on the subject? What would I need to google for to find them?
What's lacking here is any sort of definition for 'porn', just another 'porn bad' regurgitation
[dead]
Porn has its fair share of issues with human trafficking, exploitation etc.
But to label all porn as not good is not correct either in my opinion.
If, as an example, you find a porn account of a consentual couple who uploads videos on their own terms - why would that be bad?
Also who defines 'porn'. Is porn any photo that shows nudity, or where do you draw the line on vanilla videos vs more extreme.
You might end up with devices blocking all photos of a woman topless, or naked men, even art. Does Michelangelo's David statue get his privates covered or blocked? Or like in China where they increasing block things like picture/videos of women eating bananas as that is taken as sexual (and to be fair some steamers were knowingly doing as so).
Obviously there is reasonable ground in these discussions, but when it comes to censorship the best overall position is government should stay out as much as possible. History shows human nature, or the people attracted to powerful positions, seems to not play well in these spaces over time.
If we are including all fetishes and kinks, then any photo, video or drawing that shows feet is porn. The internet has a massive foot fetish. Some people are aroused by eyes. So any photo, video or drawing that contains eyes is porn. Some people are into ... I mean, I could keep going but it's already silly.
There used to be clear lines drawn for porn penetration, oral copulation, etc... but those lines have been quite blurred. Now anything lewd could be porn and just about anything could be lewd in the eyes of the beholder. There's some case law that tries to put bullet-point requirements on this but is still somewhat subjective even when stare decisis is utilized. A considerable amount of artistic content on DeviantArt could be considered lewd by current US standards.
Overall I agree with you. The government should stay out of it. The tech industry should also stay out of it. Just add a header for URL's that may contain user-generated content and let the clients decide what actions to take or not take on that header.
Quite a coincidental headline to read one day later:
"Principal fired after Florida students shown Michelangelo statue"
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65071989
The same religious people pushing this law claim that books acknowledging the existence of queer people is pornographic. Forgive me for my cynicism but I think this is less about pornography and more about providing a legal framework for Christians to censor information about queer identities, reproductive healthcare, and things of that nature.
[flagged]
Not a troll, just someone whose life experience leads to the conclusion that people trying to ban "pornography" in the United States are motivated almost exclusively by Christian religious motivations. Especially the ones who are demanding legal solutions that will be a detriment to the freedom of everyone.
Furthermore, the notion of the state forcing computer makers to inspect for and block certain content dovetails nicely (if one's goal is the eradication of queer people in the public sphere) with states prohibiting the discussion of queer identities.
> Modern porn isn't like your grandpa's playboy magazines
I'm sure there was very extreme porn when grandpa was reading his magazines. Maybe access to it is easier today, but I'm sure humans have been into extreme sexual activities for a veeeeeeery long time.
Yep, accessibility is my concern. Think about the most vile, extreme porn you've seen. Now multiply that vileness by 10. That content is just as easy to access (via the Internet) as some innocent nude selfie.
Again, I think adults should be able to watch what they want. The concern is for the children who are given unrestricted access to the Internet from a young age.
> The concern is for the children who are given unrestricted access to the Internet from a young age
Kinda agree - but for me that's up to the parents. Control your kids devices, restrict them, educate them etc.
Else, how do you want to control this? Mandatory identification on the whole internet? No thanks...
I've seen a lot of things as a teenager which I shouldn't have seen (gore videos of mexican cartels, ISIS etc.), and I'm sure that this has done some mental damage, even though I can't exactly pinpoint what kind. But still, if the alternative is total bureaucratic control over the whole internet with my personal ID being identified everywhere, just to save some uncontrolled kids from watching things they shouldn't...I don't know.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocal...
EDIT: to clarify, i do agree that kids should be protected from harmful content. just don't think that ID checks or scanning my own data are a net positive.
We need to stop asking the government to parent our children. This is the chief problem. That idea has been mainstreamed such that the assumption is "there ought to be a law" for everything.
Once upon a time, when conservatism was a set of principles and not a set of rants, it was conservatives that stood for limiting government's reach into private concerns. Those values have largely flown out the window to the point where the "two sides" are simply arguing over what to interfere in.
At a global level, human societies have gone through this before. The rash of attaching fig leaves to statuary, for example. The last decade has seen an up-tick of that kind of activity as well.
What happens when you tear down religion and the family unit as moral centers in society? Society replaces them with government... which is drastically worse. Governmental agencies have no interest in teaching that they don't have the responsibility. Their existence depends on growing their authority. There's a conflict of interest.
This is not a slippery slope argument either, it's the consequences of some ideas winning mind share (government as moral authority, morality as old-fashioned...).
As a parent, I'd sooner argue we should just give the kids a copy of Encarta and kick them off the internet.
Porn is a drop in the ocean of the problematic content out there. You don't wage war with the ocean. You keep kids away from it until they learn how to swim.
A principal in Florida was recently fired for showing students a picture of David. So there's that.
It could be bad in terms of the outcomes for consumers even if it's produced ethically.
Imagine all junk food and sugary soda was produced with sustainable farming and renewable energy. It could still be the case that it leads to worse health outcomes for the population, which seems like grounds for regulation to me.
I don't really have a position on this, but it seems easy to imagine how someone could.
> It could still be the case that it leads to worse health outcomes for the population, which seems like grounds for regulation to me.
I don't see how that would be grounds for regulation, though. Grounds for education, perhaps.
If you say "I don't see the grounds for banning or regulating porn" but you mean "I disagree with the concept of consumer protection regulation altogether", you're wasting people's time.
Just say the more general thing in the first place so people don't have to bother trying to argue the finer points of the specific case.
Where is the line between porn and art, and how would it remain a consistently enforceable standard? Since early times, through the Greeks to now, art celebrates nudity and sometimes depicts static (because earlier civilizations had no video) representations of sex and violence mixing in order to tell a story (uhh … Persephone and Hades, much? or Zeus turning into a thousand animals to lure women then rape them). Where do you draw the line; why draw it “there” as opposed to anywhere else; by what right is it to suppress, in the process, others’ definition of where to draw said line?
The people who want to ban porn also want to extinguish free culture. So I would say this is a feature, not a bug.
> Where is the line between porn and art
Why would there need to be a line? Something can be porn or art, or both. There is no conflict. Anything done between two consenting adults should be completely un-controversial.
> Where do you draw the line; why draw it “there” as opposed to anywhere else; by what right is it to suppress, in the process, others’ definition of where to draw said line?
What is the point in having a line? If it’s just to decide what can be shown in public and what cannot, then I don’t see why more or less explicit nudes would be any worse than the various depictions of killings and torture we all seem to be comfortable with for some reason.
The sooner we grow up and can go past the kindergarten “OMG we can see her nipple” stage, the better.
> two consenting adults
Why stop at two?
Fair enough.
The line is where it empirically stops hurting the protected class. We don't do empirical evidence based policy on social stuff anymore (science in social politica is mostly rhetoric lately), so it's pointless for me to type this out, but that is the answer to establishing a boundary.
When teenagers and young adults stop measurably falling off their path in life (chosen according to their own wishes) then we can say that age is the right age for teenagers to be allowed to opt-in to porn.
This is not to condemn the average joe who is unaffected by porn, but to distance the innocent from getting addicted.
Alcohol, cars, guns and literal sex all have minimum ages. The controversy around porn is more rabid and faith-based than logical.
The government doesnt need any new tools to do it, too. Just legally require porn providers to accept a one-off credit card verification payment or 2factor phone auth or a gift card, to establish that the user is old enough to do those basic tasks. If the teenager uses a parents card or phone, the parent will find out eventually and it will solve itself.
But we all know the gov will try to implement more control than that. And that will kill the idea dead, before it begins.
Computer freedom is best. My computer is supposed to do what I tell it to do. I couldn't care less about some government's mandatory child passcodes.
I disagree, but even if you are right, if we accept censoring porn, we will need a bureaucratic censorship corps, and will need to distinguish porn from, for example, lover sending nudes to each other, art with nude sculptures, sex scenes in films, and so on.
And there is zero chance that a bureaucracy designed to censor the citizens will not overextend it's powers and refrain from censoring these things.
So you'd eliminate general purpose computing to get rid of it?
Dogmatic, monochromatic view that is obviously wrong.
for all people replying. I' m referring to this https://fightthenewdrug.org/ (+some peer reviewed studies), not to some religion. Porn is literally bad, if somebody want to jerk off, better use imagination
> I' m referring to this https://fightthenewdrug.org/ (+some peer reviewed studies), not to some religion
"Fight the New Drug" is much more entangled with religion than its owners would like the public to believe.
> The group denies a formal affiliation with the Mormon church, though as journalist Samantha Allen notes, its founders are all Mormon, and its facts rely on claims from Mormon author Donald Hilton’s He Restoreth My Soul: Understanding and Breaking the Chemical and Spiritual Chains of Pornography through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. The group’s leader Clay Olsen has explicitly distanced his group from the larger sect. His group opts for a newer-age revelation, explaining on its website, “As young college students not too long ago, we came across the recent science of how porn affects the brain and we were shocked!”
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/04/a-crisis-...
> The leaders and presenters of FTND are not mental health nor sexuality professionals and do not have sufficient training in sexuality or human development to be addressing these subjects. Investigative journalists have recognized FTND as an LDS organization, which FTND continues to deny.
> The largest published neuroscience study of this topic to date, as well as a series of published behavioral studies, shows that those who report problems viewing sex films do not resemble any other substance or "behavioral" addictions. According to their own website, 90 percent of FTND attendees end up agreeing that "pornography releases the same chemicals in your brain as other hard drugs" compared to 43 percent who believed this prior to their presentation. FTND is advertising their ability to successfully spread false information.
> FTND claims they use "peer reviewed science and research" to back their information. A "sex/porn addiction" diagnosis does not exist in the DSM-5, which was explicitly rejected for "lack of scientific evidence."
https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=4409139&itype=CMSI...
Also I'm not supporting on-device blocking, it's against privacy and may be used as a precedent to block other stuff, I'm just saying porn is bad and try to minimize it's consumption (ideally to 0)
We need a middle ground. Sex is not equal to porn either. No parent wants their child accessing porn but locking devices is the wrong step.
ISPs should do a better job at completely blocking porn access. It's poorly implemented in the UK.
Locking devices is the wrong step, but deploying nation-scale firewalls to block content you happen to find objectionable, isn't?
If you want to block porn in your own home, there's plenty of consumer gear out there that allows you to do just that. Why do you want to voluntarily expand power of the government to moderate content that you're allowed to access?
Consumer gear for all families is an extra step.
I don't like national firewalls either but we're already here and have been for 10+ years, ie piracy sites.
And this is exactly what people complained would happen back when the piracy blocks went into place. "this is going to be abused to block other things".
But at least piracy has been solved /s
What evidence do you have for that assertion?
The USA is so f*cking retarded. Sure, take all the drugs and pills you want. Sure, but guns. Sure, watch all the death and violence you want.
But don’t you dare look at a nipple!
In the TV show Hannibal they unironically had to cover a naked butt with blood to lower the age rating. This single sentence sums up just about every pathology of US culture
They somehow manage to export that prudishness to other countries too.
And the porn as well…
> is so f*cking retarded
It's possible to express yourself without resorting to words/phrases like this. Shake your vocab tree. There are a million other appropriate ways to express your belief that a person thing (or country) is backwards, regressive or foolish.
Yeah the hypocrisy is really silly. You can kill, murder, maim people, but oh no better censor that butt crack showing!
And yet at the same time, most of the porn industry is in the US.
[dead]
[flagged]
> Porn has gotten more and more degenerate and debased and it's absolutely evil. Ban it.
What kind do you watch that this is your takeaway?
Porn is kind of a choose your own adventure these days in my experience.
Keep your ethics in your pants.
> One of these anti-pornography bills was passed into law in 2021 in Utah but cannot go into effect unless five additional states pass similar laws — a provision included to prevent Big Tech companies from isolating the state after passing the law.
Ok so they have to isolate five small states instead? I don't think the tech companies will worry until California, New York, or Texas pass this law.
The reason Utah likely has that provision is because they would comply, but in the easiest of ways: if a state is too small to bother, stop selling the devices there.
There have already been at least 3 other states trying to make this law. They've been discussed here on HN. I do not have links handy. So they may very well be on the path to their goals.
[Edit] Here [1] is the one for the UK and here [2] is the one for Louisiana. Partially related is the fight against PornHub [3]. Here [4] is the one for Arkansas and here [5] is Canada. There is at least one more, I could not find it. I want to say it was Oklahoma.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19501987 [UK]
[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34262400 [Louisiana]
[3] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31724701 [PornHub]
[4] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34789752 [Arkansas]
[5] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6097746 [Canada]
> This year, Florida, South Carolina, Maryland, Tennessee, Iowa, Idaho, *Texas* and Montana lawmakers are all considering versions of the bill
(emphasis added)
Yes I saw that. I’m saying they won’t worry until Texas actually gets past “considering”
Based on recent history, I’m astonished they haven’t already passed it.
I mean… https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/12/ted-cruz-twi...
First amendment issues aside. Your feelings about porn aside.
How many women are selling images of themselves on onlyfans for a living? What is that economic impact to a majority female population. The only number I could find is a million people create content on there.
It would be amusing to put in a gun recognizer, so unless you enable porn, you can't look at pictures of guns. Just to annoy Idaho.
Why Idaho? I thought Texas was the big gun state.
Idaho just legalized execution by firing squad and are considering repealing their anti-militia law. Texas gets a lot of attention because of its size, but Idaho is maybe the outright craziest state almost completely controlled at the state government level by Christian/Mormon theocratic fascists.
This. Of all of the scary states, Idaho is perhaps the scariest.
Devices having accurate ML-based content/app filters that users have control over? Great!
Devices having user-controlled ability to limit certain content & experiences to certain days and times? Great!
Devices having robust parental control features? Great!
Devices having support system control features to help users manage their addictions, e.g. user has to ask chosen friends and support buddies to disable filters? Great!
Devices having several well thought out default content filters selectable during device setup? Great!
Basic legislation that requires devices to have these features? Possibly!
Devices having content filters as default on? Not great!
Devices being legislated to just not allow content? Yikes!
At least it's possible to reconfigure the device you own to obey your own wishes and not that of the manufacturer's.
Oh wait, no it's not, Apple can censor anything that an iPhone can display, and any jurisdiction Apple operates in can compel them to do such and the device owners would have no workaround.
If only Americans spent as much time trying to ban guns and fix their mass shootings issues as they try to police the people’s sexuality.
The most a device maker should be implementing is looking for RTA headers and then checking what options the device owner/purchaser set. This is not in any way a new concept. Implement child accounts and implement checks for RTA headers. This delegates the responsibility entirely to the device owner to raise their own children and website operators to set a simple header. This would be trivial to implement on both ends. Child visits site, device prompts for device owner password, then prompts to allow the site temporarily or permanently.
If a website is serving user-generated or adult content and not adding RTA headers then fine the crap out of them once the corresponding legislation is in place. There is financial incentive for governments to do this correctly and to create very simple laws and device manufacturers to implement very simple technology.
This will not stop people from sexting each other. Sexting would have to be addressed in parental controls on the device as to whether or not multimedia content is allowed to be received or sent to/from the device. Obviously a device owner that does not have children would never be subject to such restrictions.
> If a website is serving user-generated or adult content and not adding RTA headers then fine the crap out of them
How could Utah fine a website from a foreign country?
I don't have a good answer for this. I guess it would be whatever would be done to handle a foreign website hosting something that is illegal in the US today. I hope the goal is not for the US to police the entire planet.
I thought they already did censor like that. You can only see lewd stuff in a browser because they censor the fuck out their app stores. I guess this would target browsers too which is why you should be free to run your own software on a phone.
How would these even work?
Poorly and frustratingly for users.
It sounds like parental controls would just be turned on by default.
Puritan americans going to ruin everything if they can.
Here’s the problem with the abortion win: those same people are going to keep fighting for more and more things.
Well, Americans made my phone, the backbone of the internet, and maybe the porn too
Im pretty sure the 'puritan americans' made none of those things
My phone was made in China, the Internet is global, and my porn most certainly isn’t American puritan. Cultural imperialism is just as bad when the US does it than when Russia does.
A designed-in-California phone that is made using designed-in-California production processes and funded by American dollars is only nominally "made in China".
The "global" internet is very much more American than it is marketed to be; including having been invented there and having most of its backbone there.
I remember growing up in Africa and connecting to the "international" network. I found almost only American businesses and content.
If the first two can be a result of tax-funded research, we need tax-funded porn too!
Well, censoring porn is one of the things I would happy to be censoring.
Although this leads down a steep road easily to censor other content also, yet for a long time I have wondered why is it so easy to find porn, and why is nobody doing anything about it ?
Porn is probably one of the major addictive behavioural and thought changing things in this world currently. It takes under 3 seconds to find porn if you want it, probably from any device from anywhere around the world. Is this what humanity wants to optimize for ?
Porn causes distortions in how you think about women, how you sexualize over them and what kind of thoughts you have about women generally. It is very addictive, and leaves you with an empty feeling afterwards.
It can be violent, disturbing, abusive to the people involved and can cause mass scale feelings of not being enough, not being good enough to compared to the people showing you how "sex" should be had.
And yet almost everybody just silently accepts that porn is okay, and nothing should be done about it.
We give 5 year olds smartphones which can lead to the most disturbing porn scenes by just googling a couple of words, within a minute you could be watching somebody just abusing young women violently, and yet this is accepted.
I am all for free speech and that, but I think we have a blind spot here. Probably it is because we are addicted to this as a nation, as a species.
I wish the big players would decide to ban porn, or at least make it substantially harder to find it. It's just a freaking stupid idea that we give our children these devices at very young ages, and almost nobody is doing anything about filtering or limiting what kind of content is available to them in this manner.
Don't you agree ?
Well, banning kitchen knives is one of the things I would be happy to see.
Although it could lead to bans of other useful equipment in future, I've always wondered why it's so easy to find kitchen knives and no one is doing anything about it.
Kitchen knives are probably the most dangerous equipment in the world. Whether at home or travelling, most people can get their hands on one in minutes.
People harm themselves and others with knives. Whether it is a planned domestic murder, a break in and robbery, or someone seeking to end their own life, knives can always be found and used.
They're often kept in drawers or on counter tops where even 5-year-olds can reach them.
I am all for home cooking, but I think we have a blind spot here. Probably because everyone needs food.
I wish the big players would ban knives or make it substantially harder to buy.
I know we could also teach people the dangers of knives from a young age and train them to use them safely but this just doesn't seem worth the tradeoff.
Don't you agree?
Wait till you hear about "Glassing" in UK pubs.
I'm a woman. I watch porn. I've made porn (well, I've posted nudes online.) I definitely don't think it's twisted the way I see women (or, like, myself.) I'm pretty done with men deciding what's in my best interest though.
There are women on board with this as well, it's not just men. That narrative doesn't work.
This is not about you, or keeping you from doing whatever you want with your body. It is about an addictive behavior impacting the life of millions of men : https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/miscellaneous-resources/star...
What about the predatory nature of the industry ? 18 year olds being hunted down to "act" in these pieces, mostly by older men who are just using these women for their own pleasure and financial benefits.
Is this okay ?
People have agency. Set an age of majority and treat those above it like adults. It's a hell of a lot better than infantilizing women and chauvinistically "protecting" us from exploitation.
I feel like I'm finally starting to understand how burqas took off. This kind of moral panic. Keeping us safe from the lecherous eyes of men.
You can read up about Islamic and pre-Islamic Arabia from authentic (Muslim) sources regarding the Hijab and Niqab. No one is moral panicking.
> What about the predatory nature of the industry ? 18 year olds being hunted down to "serve", mostly by older men who are just using these young men for their own political and financial benefits.
Your complaint could just as easily be applied to the US army and the consequences there are often much more severe. Food for thought.
How do you know how these actors get into the business? Have you watched that BBC documentary about the porn industry? If anything I came out with the impression there's a huge supply of young girls and men willing to come for auditions anywhere... have you ever been young? I don't know about you, but if I had the chance to do porn at a younger age, I would've totally done it.
I think you may be actually believing those "exploited girl f*s for acting job that doesn't exist" are actually real LOL??
Sounds like good reason to better educate young people in general about the predatory nature of others and the many way in which they can be exploited without them realising.
Is this okay?
No
But neither is chocolate, coffee, minerals mined in Africa, Gulf oil. You know child labor, slavery, exploitation.
We can talk about saving the 18 year old who should know better after we spend the day slapping cell phones and mocha caps out of people hands in front of Starbucks.
Then we can try to save 18 year olds, Im fairly sure that a good number of them are going to tell us to fuck off were poor with their only fans money.
Average age is closer to early 20s. Look at any agency and their roster…
"We give 5 year olds smartphones"
Well, maybe don't do it? Maybe not until they are 12yo or something like that? My feeling is many parents don't want to parent at all and so they delegate to smartphone, tablets and TVs. Parents should go back to be more...parents.
We don't have an ipad exactly because otherwise my 6yo would like to play with it (her friends have one) instead of going out and play outside. In my opinion children should not have a smartphone, do tangible stuff and games.
Well, I dont do that.
But what are you going to do about the majority of people doing this ? And children looking at their phones. I've heard of tales of second graders looking at porn together while on recess, that is the world we now live in.
There should be some good defaults. I agree with you totally, it makes no sense to give under 10 year olds smart phones.
> But what are you going to do about the majority of people doing this ?
What the hell, why do you care what other parents do or not do?? How about we let them make their own choices?! Geez, what kind of authoritarian mindset is this kind of argument coming from?
Do you have children?
Because unless I want to be one of those snotty mothers who will only allow my child to associate (play, do sports, go to school) with the children of other parents who don’t allow their children unsupervised access to mobile devices, my child will effectively also have unsupervised access to mobile devices. Probably not when he’s 6 or 7, but definitely by the time he’s 9, if one of his less-supervised classmates has a smartphone, my kid will be seeing all sorts of things I’d rather he not see before he’s in his teens.
I’d like for my kid to grow up with kids from all backgrounds, not just the children of those of us who have been exposed to tech for so long and so deeply that our concern for its downsides on our kids outweighs the temptation (which is less when your life is easier) to shove a mobile in a fidgety toddler’s hand or pay 10 EUR/mo to give a primary school kid a reliable distraction.
I’d prefer if we’d start by censoring violence and religion. Religion is just a big lie to manipulate people.
> I’d prefer if we’d start by censoring violence and religion. Religion is just a big lie
you are in favor of censoring violence from video games? you're not lying? and you said "start by", so you'd be on board censoring pornography too so long as it started with censoring violence and religion?
I have a sense you didn't mean any of that.
Religion controls people. Whether you think it's a lie is up to you & subjective.
Laws are based on someone else's ideas and those ideas control you.
Well given religions are all different and only one could be true, it's more correct to say they're all a lie. One might be true. However, as old ones have died away and new ones will be created and the current ones evolve it's not even possible to say that any one religion is subjectively true to itself.
They have different beliefs, but it's all the same God.
You can't know enough in this lifetime to judge them to be objective or subjective lies. Just getting through the magisterium is more reading than one lifetime, let alone the other old judeo-christian 'usual suspects' faiths.
Replacing your category of God and religion with 'its all a lie' is very dangerous and distasteful to read.
The inside and outside perspective. (1) If you're religious and inside then it's so important to you, it makes no sense to casually dismiss the ideas that are ingrained in your life about the ideas of God and religion.
(2) If you're like me, on the outside and not religious, can you understand that I can shrug those off and call them a lie very easily, because they don't matter to me at all? From the outside it is like people getting upset that you've insulted something in Harry Potter books.
Face to face with people I'm more mindful and just don't talk about this kind of thing unless its with like minded people. On a technical forum like this, I'm not going to hold back with my real opinion though. You have a choice to read or not, and to consider (2). I do not wish to offend you by writing off your beliefs. But to an atheist who does not think about religion much at all, it is a bunch of nonsense.
Engaging in blunt conversation on here is valuable to me aswell. It can be difficult to summarize a topic like religion (so much to say) that I know exists, but isn't directly my faith. Protection from offense is not something I need in my faith, though I understand sensitivity to offense is common in American-focused websites.
You are free to say whatever you want and I love that freedom. I want it too.
I believe saying that God and religion is a lie, is something you can do as an atheist and be fine.
But if taken as a statement of truth about God and a foundational axiom, you can end up in nihilism and a 'bad place', speaking loosely, quickly.
In discussing porn and the way we all have to live together in society, I'm not willing to casually throw away the moral implications of porn and the moral logic of the conversation about porn.
Making porn a matter of faith, religion, atheism or belief is a policy mistake to begin with. If it has measurably damaging outcomes to our youth, the case should be much clearer about the boundary between freedom and delayed gratification.
My blunt(-ish) $0.02.
If damaging outcome to our youth is your main concern we might want to start by censoring social media altogether. And alcohol, and not doing any sports, and eating fastfood, and being overweight…
But back to religion, I think religion opens the doors to a society that accepts lies as facts. It basically legalizes stating assumptions for facts, and making those assumptions have big impact on society. And thereby it states that it’s ok to do that on a larger scale, the way you see fox media spewing lies as facts, and how the way Trump talks is ok.
The black and white idea of censoring is beyond my want. We can talk about those things for sure,
- Alcohol displays the % alcohol content on the bottle and has age-verification for purchase in some countries/retailers. An equivalent for porn would in theory, be a plausible discussion.
- Hard contact sports are battling CTE brain trauma as we speak. It's worth trying to save our men from injuries that permanently degrade their ability to contribute to society. We are working on preventing the damage to our youth from the whole concept of sports. Broadly speaking, similar preventative idea could be plausible for teenagers-home-alone and in low-income neighbourhoods who need a help up (and off porn).
- Fast food has changed. Coke moved to Diet-Coke and then widespread acceptance of No-Sugar varieties. That is a huge change that could find a metaphorical analogy in porn. Moving the majority of teenage porn consumption from hard-core down to soft-core, would be a theoretically plausible conversation.
- Being overweight is less clear as the causes-and-effects are so numerous and can combine unhealthily, it is not easy to my mind, to make measurable and agreeable claims towards limiting it's downsides. You got me on this one.
Yeah it brings me to low to watch factual debate fly out the window. The freedom to say whatever you want, I love, but a government or official somewhere shouldn't be allowed to have no grain-of-truth at all, in his interpretative rhetoric. There should be a fact at the bottom somewhere.
Reading someone defending religion is distasteful to read, yet here we are.
Edit: I shouldn't have posted this as I was not adding to the conversation, just defending the GP's position. I'll leave it anyway though.
No, you're right. I was glib and mildly judgey. I made a mistake too.
It's certainly true that there are people today with deeply held spiritual beliefs with tens of thousands of years of continuity that don't revolve about a singular interventionalist monotheist God - which rather dents the claim that "but it's all the same God".
Yeah that theological argument is surmountable, from my eyes. I'm happy to have both ideas on as options, the monotheism one was left off the map.
The Indian and Japanese beliefs are particularly fascinating in the departure from monotheism. The Shinto practices and Hindu beliefs are something I have left inadequately studied so far.
Surmountable?
It's not exactly a game that you win, missionaries were just another group of colonisers bent on the destruction of other.
See, also: https://www.aboriginal-art-australia.com/aboriginal-art-libr...
and others.
I don't feel the need to defend against the idea that missionaries and colonizers were Saturday-Morning-Cartoon villains hellbent on death and destruction. Not saying you said it like that, but just want to express the notion that it leaves me ambivalent.
Symbolically they might have threatened <the other>'s society and religion/faith/beliefs.
But in practice the English "invaders" of the Aboriginals have brought a lot of positives and sought to preserve Aboriginal culture and beliefs in written works, film & media pieces (limited due to Aboriginal beliefs), live performances and routine practices, and linguistic, seasonal and historical documentation.
It is not reasonable to say that Australia is a British country, it isn't. The structural bones the Brits built and the blood they poured into cultivating the land, bore a lot of good fruit, for Aboriginals and the native Australians, born of emancipated criminals. There is a lot the Brits failed to do, leaving a good structure to build into the future was not a failure of theirs.
British missionaries have always been stuck between thoroughly empirical/routinized Kingdom and following the mission to nurture the people on the land. When those two elements disagree, there's not a lot of control in the missionary's hands.
Some of the Medicine Leaves pieces are really nice.
https://www.aboriginal-art-australia.com/artworks/jacinta-nu...
Some laws were lobbied through lies too.
By this logic, we could decide to censor violence, religion, social media, subcultures, sugar, the study of chemistry, and perhaps coffeine. I don't think it's a blind spot. It's a deliberate decision not to be overprotective. Should it be the government's responsibility to censor anything that people easily get into with bad consequences?
>By this logic, we could decide to censor violence, religion, social media, subcultures, sugar, the study of chemistry, and perhaps coffeine.
I totally agree: "coffeine" should definitely be banned or restricted. Caffeine from tea, however, is fine.
I'm not saying it should be the governments responsibility.
And governments are already heavily censoring and trying to kill child pornography, religion and certain political views, so why would this be so different ?
It should be our responsibility as humans and parents to protect our children. If we are not thinking about our children and protecting them from content that could be potentially life changing and addictive for the rest of their lives, why are we not stepping up to the plate and doing that ?
The government's responsibility is that the government passes the laws to censor things, not that it does the dirty work of actual censorship.
Censoring religion and political views is regarded as a violation of human rights, so while this is different, I do agree that it should be treated the same.
I agree with the need to protect people from bad influences, but the government is not the only entity that's capable of protecting. Traditionally, that role has also been fulfilled by the social network and the person in question themselves. I don't see the urge to shove it all off on the government, except in cases where the social network is failing to protect, e.g. in the cases of crime.
There's a balance to be hit between the ability to take risk and the negative consequences. Best example is personal vehicles which cause life changing consequences when they go wrong, sometimes ending lives altogether, and doing this reliably to thousands of people every year.
>why would this be so different ?
That's literal slippery slope. What is different?
"And governments are already heavily censoring and trying to kill child pornography, religion and certain political views, so why would this be so different ?"
Child pornography: of course! Religion: ... What ? Which ones? Certain political views: of course we ban Nazis... That's what you meant right?
I did not mean Nazis. Have you even followed the censorship in Twitter for example and the situation that is unraveling now ?
We already ban certain views, but yet, pornography: no. It's not important enough, and as seen here by the downvotes, many people are addicted to it and cannot understand what I tried to message.
> Don't you agree ?
I don't. The pandora's box has been opened. Using that criteria, we should also probably limit access to social media, AI, internet access altogether, stop governments from surveilling and tracking every single movement you make, and so many more things that have become an ingrained part of day-to-day life in the last few decades.
I find it funny that some people want to "patch" things up. It's over. I say let's just the experiment until society collapses and then build up from there.
How is that collapse going to look like? Not sure, but it's already happening in the near future. Ironically enough, this is what most women will be doing: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/489/000/a49....
Mind your own business. It's not your place to decide what other people watch or do.
> Although this leads down a steep road easily to censor other content also, yet for a long time I have wondered why is it so easy to find porn, and why is nobody doing anything about it ?
Why should we do anything about it? I’ve never seen a cogent argument. It always boils down to “I don’t like it” and “but the children”. Other people don’t have to care if I like something, and the children would benefit much more from true sex education, so that they get the knowledge they need from more valid sources than entertainers. Same as with abortion, really. If you don’t like it, then prepare your children to make enlightened choices and avoid problematic behaviour.
> It can be violent, disturbing, abusive to the people involved and can cause mass scale feelings of not being enough, not being good enough to compared to the people showing you how "sex" should be had.
Then we need to prosecute instances of actual abuse and exploitation. But that would mean actually listening to victims (including, yikes!, women). Exactly like we do with violent content: who cares if you post yourself shooting your AR-15 on YouTube? But shooting your school mates is crossing a line. Why are we so mentally defective as soon as sex is involved?
> We give 5 year olds smartphones which can lead to the most disturbing porn scenes by just googling a couple of words
If you want something done about it, use parental control.
And maybe don’t hand smartphones to 5 years olds unsupervised.
You do you. Leave everyone else alone.
By this logic we should not try to even protect our kids from anything.
People freaking out here seem to not have kids.
I don't know a parent in the real world that would allow their child access to any porn.
> Don't you agree ?
No.
Going to the bathroom is nasty, poop is icky, smells are highly unpleasant and there's often crap in the streets (it can also be used for revenge or abuse)
Let's discourage defecation by banning toilet paper.
I don't see a problem with this actually. Toilet paper is nasty and should be eliminated. If toilets all had washlets, you wouldn't need TP, except for drying yourself, but that could be done with a blow-drier added to the washlet.
In civilized countries, washlets on toilets are normal and standard, even in most public restrooms.
[deleted]
No as it's almost impossible to attribute these effect to porn as porn is too widely spread among women and men, and most of the "porn behavior" existed before that porn was universally consumed. Strangely most of these studies talked about men behavior when women consume a lot of porn.
This is the same kind of things you hear about gay, role playing games, metal music, video games, rap music that are all rotting the brain of young people.
Prudes having permanent hysteria is not what I would call healthy social interactions.
I understand the censorship argument also, and to be honest expecting also people defending their right to watch porn, the addiction is real.
Porn is like a thought virus, if you watch it enough you will start to think about all these things you see visually about the women in your life and people around you. Many people might not want to admit this, and will just spew out silly comments defending porn, maybe they are addicted to it and like to watch it.
Then go ahead, I'm not saying you should not be able to watch porn. I'm saying _by default_, things like porn should be more harder to find and access.