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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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??
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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, 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.
> 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?
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.
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!
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.
They somehow manage to export that prudishness to other countries too.
And the porn as well…
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
> 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.
> 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.
> 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...
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]
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.
Well, Americans made my phone, the backbone of the internet, and maybe the porn too
If the first two can be a result of tax-funded research, we need tax-funded 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.
Here’s the problem with the abortion win: those same people are going to keep fighting for more and more things.
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 ?
> Don't you agree ?
No.
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 ?
>why would this be so different ?
That's literal slippery slope. What is different?
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.
>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.
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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.
Prudes having permanent hysteria is not what I would call healthy social interactions.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Is this okay ?
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.
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??
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.
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.
Average age is closer to early 20s. Look at any agency and their roster…
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...
There are women on board with this as well, it's not just men. That narrative doesn't work.
I’d prefer if we’d start by censoring violence and religion. Religion is just a big lie to manipulate people.
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.
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...
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.
Some laws were lobbied through lies too.
> 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.
"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.
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?