It's crazy that we live in a world where maybe a few dozen people's weird ideas about what shouldn't be allowed can cause payment processors to pressure the storefronts to delist the titles. It is censorship of something they personally find distasteful. guess what: nobody is forcing you to play weird art games about trauma.
obviously we must keep the pressure up on payment processors to reverse course, but we also need to push back against people in society who think they can decide what other adults are allowed to do on their own time. If folks IRL have weird ideas pushed back on IRL we wouldn't get to crisis points like this.
> No more absurd than US card schemes dictating what I can and can't buy in another country
Philosophically, sure. Practically, no.
America is an economic and military superpower. Washington having influence over its trading partners and military allies isn't unusual. To the extent I can think of something that mirrors the absurdity of this situation, it's American evangelicals running off to Uganda to stone gays.
"...many extreme evangelical groups started to recognize that the fight against LGBTQ+ rights in the United States was a losing battle. These groups then shifted focus to Uganda, which was seen as fertile ground for this anti-gay ideology..."
Good. The rest of the world is used to rolling our eyes at Americans who can't handle the word cunt or show a dick on TV and the impact it has on us. It's not a bad thing to get a reality check for you.
I'm not sure what you call this fallacy. It's not really whataboutism because you're not equivocating against another argument, but instead you just discard it and push forward on the path that you've chosen for this interaction. I guess it's begging the question. I can see that this would be a powerful technique in a more open forum, or against an uninformed audience, because by pushing like this you imply that you are so correct that no other argument need even be heard. What is the "win condition" here for you? Do you have any other examples of your work, or do you cycle out soon?
They made their point poorly but their argument is not fallacious. They are saying that the Americans who make the relevant decisions at Visa/Mastercard have their own reasons for making this decision and are probably not simply capitulating to a foreign special-interest group. (Of course, they could have more effectively gotten their point across by actually describing it.)
The point is that leaders at Visa/Mastercard probably think it's very convenient that Collective Shout exists because it lets them blame that group for their decisions. And it seems to have worked given how so many members of this not-uninformed audience refuse to look past Collective Shout to see that Visa/Mastercard made a decision to change their policy.
Visa and Mastercard have been sued in various jurisdictions for facilitating the monetization of illegal content by some merchant in that jurisdiction before. They've been made party to the defendants and the court refused their "we have no part in this, we only move money around" and have failed at their motions to be removed from those cases.
Collective Shout has tried to get Steam and Itch to remove the content they don't like / is illegal in Australia.
From the article:
> “We raised our objection to rape and incest games on Steam for months, and they ignored us for months,” reads a blog post from Collective Shout. “We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond to us.”
So after they didn't succeed with Steam and Itch, they likely said to Visa and Mastercard "we tried to get your merchants to follow the law, they haven't. If we sue them, we're suing you too."
As Visa and Mastercard have lost that court case before, the payment processors then went to their merchants and likely said something along the lines of "If you get sued, we're getting sued too - so we're going to not process payments for you until you are not in danger of getting sued."
Could Visa and Mastercard rebuffed Collective Shout? Possibly... but then we'd be reading about how Itch, Steam, Visa, and Mastercard got sued in an Australian court and lost the case on illegal Australian porn.
It's Australia's fault that while they can handle a phallus on TV (as insinuated in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44717254 ), they can't handle a fur lined handcuff, schoolgirl uniform, or shaven anatomy.
Trying to blame the United States for this misplaced.
Visa and Mastercard (and all payment processors) are risk adverse and the risk of being included in another PR damaging and expensive lawsuit that they can't get out of despite having the limited role of moving money from customer to merchant.
If you want to blame someone for this fiasco, one should be looking instead at the laws in the country where this originated from and the courts that mandate the involvement of the payment processor as a defendant.
Yep, and their motivation was different (the opinion that banning these types of games reduces domestic violence) to Visa/Mastercard, but the goals align.
Honestly though, Visa and MC would take porn in a heartbeat if the dispute rates weren't so high. Like, they were definitely burned by the Mindgeek stuff a few years back, but at it's heart this is a commercial decision because disputes cost them lots and lots of money.
Trump is in favor of giving more power to US corporations and letting money speak ("deals", or bribery depending on your POV).
He's a very good defense against politicians with stronger ideologies, especially those more aligned with international values which tend to smooth out specific cultural gripes.
Despite the down votes I think this is right. The reason the "conservative" side has voted for Trump is more voting against the other side. With maybe a Mitt Romney type and an actual primary, the religious right would go that way. Many conservatives do not like trump, but consider him better than the alternative.
I'm grateful my parents, who were life long conservatives, haven't lived to see the tragedy of what passes for Republicans these days.
> Visa/Mastercard banning porn has been a consistent and steady policy for years now.
Yeah, because they got sued for processing payments on some porn sites that weren't taking down revenge porn. They're not puritans, they're concerned about their bottom line, and the lawsuits threatened them with losing lots of money.
They don't need to. I'm saying that we've seen the same pattern for a while now, and puritan groups have enough money/influence to dictate a lot of how the online world looks like now.
I'd argue Visa/Mastercard could deal with the issue if they really wanted to, but as you point out they're following the money, and I wouldn't expect them to do otherwise either. I still think they share the blame (being opportunistic doesn't mean being above criticism), but you're right that more or it lays on other shoulders.
can you please list some puritan groups you refer to? maybe explain with an example what theyve done before to shape the internet atm? i have zero idea what is going on.
Freedom of speech goes both ways, even people we disagree with are free to express their opinions.
The real problem is how can it be legal for payment provider to forbid stuff that isn't illegal, no matter what it is.
Had Steam decided to deplatform some content, it's up to them (although centralization through steam of other platform causes an unwarranted concentration of power) but that third parties can intervene an have a say in what is allowed and what isn't anywhere on the internet is a very serious trouble.
The payment provider has the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason, being forced to do business with someone is the same thing as compelling someone to speak (or not speak).
There are two parts in this argument I disagree with:
- that doing business is akin to speech.
- that corporations are entitled human rights (freedom of speech).
Also, freedom of speech means nothing for humans if corporations can force their customers not to discuss certain topics in the name of “I don't want to do business with someone who says that”.
Freedom of speech is freedom from being arrested for your speech. It is not the freedom to force others to give your speech a platform. Just like how it's not freedom to force other people to listen to your speech. If it is, then I exercise my freedom of speech to place bumper stickers on YOUR car that say things that you find distateful. "But that's my property!" Yes, and Steam's servers and software are Valve's property. Mastercard and Visa's platforms are theirs.
If you ran a bookstore, and I could force you to carry a bunch of books that glorified Nazism, you would probably find this objectionable. Why? Because if you walked into a bookstore and there's a bunch of books there full of Nazi propaganda, you would probably wonder if the owner of the store was a Nazi. You don't want to be associated with or seen as promoting it.
The reality is more akin to me agreeing to have my car covered in your bumper stickers (and anyone else's, as long as they abide by my particular set of bumper sticker rules), and then having to remove some without notice at a later date because the chap at the gas station got offended and wouldn't serve me any more.
And there being only one gas station.
And the guy having not objected to the exact same bumper stickers for the last 15 years.
Visa have said this is because of 'enhanced risk' caused by this content, but they've been fine with it up to now. It's only because of the Australian group's censorious actions that they've decided to act. That's the frustrating thing, at least to me.
Whether they have the legal right to do it or not, it's still a dick move.
> If it is, then I exercise my freedom of speech to place bumper stickers on YOUR car that say things that you find distateful. "But that's my property!"
And in fact, you cannot stop me from putting leaflets on your car, no matter how distasteful you find the content, just because it's your property. In fact, in many jurisdictions, putting stickers is allowed too, the line being drawn at damaging the property of someone else. (I can write stuff on your car with easy to wash water paint, but I can't carve a message on it).
> If you ran a bookstore, and I could force you to carry a bunch of books that glorified Nazism
Welcome to the life of every bookstore clerks in the world. And it turns out they aren't allowed to remove books they disagree with, nor add their own favorite book in the store. If the owner of the store can force that on its clerks I see no reason why the legislator couldn't do the same on the owner. In fact, in countries that aren't hypocritical about freedom of speech, you cannot get fired by your boss if they dislike what you say, but you can definitely be fired if you refuse a customer, which shows doing business has nothing to do with freedom of speech.
So at the end of the day, having refuted your two arguments, my point still stand: Doing business isn't akin to speech, and corporations aren't human beings in the first place so they shouldn't be entitled human rights anyway.
Also, property right isn't some special kind of right that trumps everything else, it's one basic right like any other and have no precedence/superiority over the others.
You have done nothing to refute any of these points because you do not understand the fundamental legal concepts at play here.
You have expressed your opinion, which you are certainly able to have, but the objective reality is that freedom of association applying to businesses is incredibly old and consistently reiterated precedent. If you want to change it in countries where this is the law of the land, you're going to need to pass new laws (and in the case of the US, amend the constitution.)
But the problem is that you seem to misunderstand the difference between being protected from the government compelling speech/association/etc. with the law compelling the protection from other individuals, businesses, etc. from being able to take action because of their disagreement with what you said.
Frankly, I have no idea how the world you are envisioning would function. It would be a neverending argument over what side trumps the other in every disagreement of this nature. It's just not viable and this is one of the reasons that the precedent here is so strong and so universal.
> that freedom of association applying to businesses is incredibly old and consistently reiterated precedent.
I don't know why you bring that up though, as it has no relationship with whether or not the businesses and up having human rights on their own.
> is incredibly old and consistently reiterated precedent.
Again, this is irrelevant, as the age of a practice has no impact on how legitimate it is (slavery used to be incredibly old and reiterated ”).
> and in the case of the US, amend the constitution.
Nah, appointing the right Supreme Court justices is enough to create or destroy constitutional rights.
> Frankly, I have no idea how the world you are envisioning would function
It doesn't take that much imagination though, all you have to look at the real world, especially on the other side of the Atlantic: here businesses just can't put arbitrary restrictions that aren't backed by legitimate interest, and the said restriction must be necessary and proportionate to the achievement of the said legitimate interest. They simply cannot say “I'm free to do whatever I want” because they definitely aren't.
In fact I'm pretty sure that even in the US they cannot either, which is why Visa is framing it in a fraud reduction procedure.
Everyone has to carry around half a million credit cards? Every merchant has to make half a million separate payment processing agreements, each with its own card machine?
No; this is a natural monopoly situation, and just needs to be regulated hard.
There are two providers (more in fact, if you count country-specific providers), and they are interoperable.
Yes regulation are necessary, including for interoperability, but I don't really buy the natural monopoly argument (at least not more than any tech companies).
I don't object to that idea at all. It sounds like Brazil has been having success with that recently.
...Of course, we do need some more safeguards first to make sure that such an entity wouldn't be massively abused by tyrannical executives cheerfully twisting the law into bizarre pretzel shapes in order to attack anyone who disagrees with them.
>We do not make moral judgments on legal purchases made by consumers. Visa does not moderate content sold by merchants, nor do we have visibility into the specific goods or services sold when we process a transaction.
So they are trying to outright lie or they are so disconnected they are ignorant of what other parts of their company are doing. Neither are a good luck.
Maybe for Itch, but I believe Valve is more than large enough to need to work directly with Visa to for payment processes. They likely tried to do as much processing in house before that point as well.
Collective Shout isn't this. They're closer to outrage entrepreneurs.
They identified a non-issue that one could generate outrage around, fundraised on that manufactured outrage, and then launched an attack nobody was defending against because the issue was made up.
I'm less concerned about them and more concerned about groups that are known and bill themselves as credible resources for "extremists" but have extensive ties to foreign states.
Sounds like the debian community team asking for immediate removal of offensive fortunes after they had been there for several decades, without of course even understanding the language the fortunes are written in.
both can be true at the same time: when the majority are voting for the same policies they have always been, and the parties move their positions such that they divide the votes between themselves as evenly as possible, the outcome does depend on a minority of swing voters
Taleb's examples are a variant of this, where the majority is passive instead of static
> the parties move their positions such that they divide the votes between themselves as evenly as possible
That's something I'd like to understand better... Why would they TRY to divide evenly? Where's the party that takes the majority position for each topic? It seems foolish to play for a draw or tie, so something else must be happening.
From what I've seen in my life, people are more likely conform to their party than vice versa. But I've got a very small sample size.
They're not trying to. Each side's politicians are very much trying to get a supermajority voting for them. And in local areas, the skew this produces toward one side or the other is quite clear.
It's only on a national level that the parity becomes visible.
I've never seen numbers for 2024, but I have for previous recent national elections, and the most either party has in any state is roughly 70%. So at the statewide level, that's the total skew you're looking at.
In local elections, things can be more one-sided; I imagine there are a fair number of rural counties that would have only a handful of blue voters (but out of a total of, y'know, a few thousand voters in the whole county).
You don't have to ascribe free will to the politicians; just agency. They have metrics to game, the voters don't, that's enough. For instance, Trump recently tried to get Coca-Cola to replace corn sugar with cane sugar.
It reminds me of WWI attrition tactics..
(I'm trying to analyze the data on this ATM- please tolerate 8my current read. If you've got a better way to say it don't hold back!)
You brought up a "silent minority" effect that I've to think/find out more about. Your friends that disagree with their party line usually stays out of the vote. However,that seems to make (the impact of) the actual swing voter even stronger, according to my very preliminary analysis
The idea is that there should be limits to what democratically elected officials can do when it comes to suppressing the rights of the few. It makes perfect sense. All people deserve equal rights.
If we had a fair popular vote, perhaps. As is, National US elections is disproportionately focused on appealing to 6-7 purple states opposed to who has the best platform for the country.
I read a long interview about porn regulation and the star-chamber-esque process whereby visa and mastercard determine what porn is allowed.
Fundamentally, it's a failure of government. The people / companies involved made it really clear that they don't want to be making the rules. But governments haven't, so they're the last ones left standing because someone must determine what is permissible.
Alternatively, the failure of government here is not in their failure to regulate porn but in their failure to regulate Visa and Mastercard properly and thus deprive the payment processors of the opportunity or excuse to run "star-chamber-esque" processes. If non-cash payment rails are now a necessity to run a business, then access to them has to be a right. The payment processors need to be required to allow every business to accept money through their service, for the same fee as any other business is charged. Otherwise payment rails become a de-facto government in that they gain the power to license or prohibit businesses at their caprice.
An argument I tend to hear is risk management, since the adult industries deal with a higher level of fraud. (And shameful refunds, perhaps somewhat understandably.) I think what we are likely reacting to is a legitimate desire to curb this sort of fraud that has evolved, over time, into a moral panic because inconveniently legal vices correlate strongly with that fraud.
The solution cannot be to turn Visa/Mastercard into the morality police. Or any payment processor, really. That is not their job, and they are ill equipped to perform it. Hard agree that access to payment processing should be based on legality of the sale and nothing else. If Visa/Mastercard want to then *measure* a business's overall fraud level as it happens in reality, and then adjust their rates accordingly, they can still do that in a fair manner. In other words, the riskier businesses deal with higher fees or something, but we aren't trying to define whether furry art is somehow porn or some other nonsense in the crossfire. Separate the streams please.
The fraud argument doesn’t hold water. Adult sites pay higher transaction fees, and it would be bizarre for a moral outrage campaign to be aimed at ensuring profitability for private companies.
There's an (iirc) several hundred page long document, available only to merchant banks, detailing in excruciating detail what is allowed. It's not a fraud thing; that's controlled by rates. It's a few banks want to deal with the hassle and the audit requirements to work with porn producers. Because the banks themselves must audit per visa/mastercard's requirements.
Outside of US there are lots of payment processors that do not touch Visa/MC rails. And in US one can use ACH/Zelle. Nothing stops a business from avoiding Visa/MC. But that may reduce their customer pool, due to increased checkout friction.
I guess you mean users would need to manually send money to the company's E-mail/Phone on Zelle right? Then it's up to the merchant to know if the payment has been received.
Cause I don't think there is any kind of way to buy things with Zelle and possibly it would be a TOS issue.
The reason the government has failed here is religion.
Politicians don't want to wade into porn regulation because saying anything other than "we will outright ban it" will be construed as condoning something a large population chunk sees as immoral in all circumstances. And, obviously, an outright ban will upset the other large set of the population who has no moral qualms with porn.
Prostitution has exactly the same problem. Legislation that regulates sex work would be seen as condoning sex work. So instead, it's outright banned, which pushes sex work into a black market which endangers the sex workers and their patrons.
This is why all politicians pretend to be "good Christians" because of the undue power of group(s) of unreasonable people who share similar beliefs of magical thinking.
No, it has a lot to do with religion. In places like Australia and Singapore it's explicitly the religious right that's pushing back on things like gay rights and, yes, porn.
The UK is an oddball. I think "the online safety act" probably originated from more religiously minded people, but the angle was pretty strongly "Think of the children!".
I can definitely say that the UK is pretty non-religious in general.
For the US, though, it's absolutely a religion thing.
>The people / companies involved made it really clear that they don't want to be making the rules
They may not want to make the rules, but they do want the rules. They just don't want the blame. Otherwise they would just, not have the rules around who they'll work with. They would just work with anyone and tell anyone that complains about it to complain to the government, that it's company policy to work with any legal company.
DNS doesn't stop to check if you're okay to have a name. Water company and electric don't refuse to hook up your building because they don't like your business.
They have chosen to become content arbitrators. It was not foist upon them.
We don't need a new law for this. We need to enforce monopoly law.
We just had a demonstration that the two biggest payment processors, together controlling the vast majority of credit card payments, made the same policy change at the same time and in the process completely suppressed many people's businesses.
Treat them as an anti-consumer oligopoly and regulate accordingly.
Maybe in 2029 we can dream of proper trust busting. Probably sooner given current events. But this administration definitely isn't the one to deal with this.
Legislators are more often chipping away common carrier protections on communications with various age and id laws than they are extending common carrier type protections into other areas. The fact that it seems to be happening around the globe makes me think its a coordinated campaign.
it's definitely the result of lobbying; i've experienced it firsthand in a former job. a private dark fiber provider successfully sued the county to prevent expansion of a previously-laid tax-funded municipal fiber project on anticompetitive grounds - he used every trick in the book including lobbying and it worked. and that was just one asshole who didn't want to compete with a small public project. scale that up to ILEC levels with billions in revenue and a revolving door economy and... yeah, i don't see this sort of thing playing out in the peoples' favor any time soon.
The other side of this is the US Government imposes strict requirements around KYC and AML/CTF. Banks have effectively been deputised by the US government to enforce and regulate payments.
A bank can't merely process any transaction that comes its way. You need to know who the parties are, you need to check they aren't on a prohibited list, or in a prohibited country/region. You need to know the purpose of the transaction (to pick up money laundering, or drug/terrorism financing).
Sort of. Any company is free to boycott goods or services it doesn't approve of, however consumers also are free to boycott payment processors by paying with crypto made through ACH or wire transfers, or some other P2P payment method. I really think that credit card processors as predatory loan enablers and oligopolies need to be abolished and replaced by nonprofit credit unions with an electronic payment system that is universal, low cost, and non-discriminatory.
The problem is those other options aren't very common and crypto is pretty useless as a payment method these days due to slow processing and high value fluctuations. Wore transfer is also slow.
It's indeed ridiculous that you need to get a loan just to be able to pay with your own money. At least here in Europe most "credit cards" are actually debit cards. Because we really frown on loans (the best credit rating is for the person who has never even needed to take out a loan)
> ...and crypto is pretty useless as a payment method these days due to slow processing and high value fluctuations.
That is not true. For example using USDT on Polygon is cheap (~0.00 USD fee), fast (a few seconds) and not volatile (because its value is tied to USD). There are other options too, with a slightly different set of tradeoffs.
The main problems of crypto are actually scams and illiteracy of the masses on how to use it. The situation is IMHO improving on both counts, but slowly.
Governments have not promissed they won't go after them for things that are 'near the line' but it isn't clear over. So they must stay far away as they have money.
Ideally, they should be able disallow whatever they want, and give up that business if they don't want it.
What they can't do is create a monopoly situation and continue to be that selective---because there is no other game in town, due to their own actions.
They already have a monopoly situation, so either they must be forced to allow all transactions or they must be forced to allow those that will to use their networks.
Tell ya what. When the postal service runs a card network to compete with them, that charges lower interest, and doesn't monetize by selling transaction sets, then we can talk about CC companies being able to be picky about transactions. Til then? Nah...
While this is ideaologically motivated, there are business reasons to not want to deal with porn. Porn has traditionally had disproportionately high charge-back rates, and it does waver on legal lines in several regions, even for US laws. It's a large cost center that I'm sure the business side won't miss dealing with.
>But governments haven't, so they're the last ones left standing because someone must determine what is permissible.
That is somewhat intentional. Governments haven't, usually because they believe they will lose in court (at least in the US), but they still want restrictions so there is pressure put on payment processors to make the determination. That way, it is a private entity doing the banning and not the government. Or at least that is the appearance.
Governments have made a variety of rules on what acceptable for their individual country. The issue is that some groups don't like that governments (often, governments other than their own) aren't as restrictive as they want.
Like here, the driving group is Australian. Similar groups have been quite successful in getting the Australian government to ban the sale of video games with content they find objectionable, but is very arguably non-pornographic, like Hunter × Hunter: Nen × Impact. To the point that they're far more restrictive than Nintendo.
>Fundamentally, it's a failure of government. The people / companies involved made it really clear that they don't want to be making the rules. But governments haven't, so they're the last ones left standing because someone must determine what is permissible.
Politicians fallacy. Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it. It completely glazes over the fact that it's an equally valid course of action to not do something.
My understanding is that for banks, governments regulators don’t want to make rules either, so sometimes they just require banks to have rules that achieve certain goals.
To me this is also a stark warning over silicon valley companies instilling their morals and assumptions on other parts of the world. It's not a popular take because it's got many touch points into our spheres of working.
If only there was some kind of decentralized technology that allowed us to move value between two independent entities in a trustless manner, at very low cost and very very fast.
No, I'm not talking about the POC that the pseudonimus guy proposed. Maybe something later that actually scales... a man can only wish that such technology will be invented sometime in the future.
I imagine this currently would be deflationary and be a superb store of value to keep inflation from eating away your life savings and possibly become the best performing asset of this generation.
We'll see what? Other factors are more important so I don't think the success or failure of cryptocurrencies will be a good way to prove or disprove what I'm saying.
If it's a worse currency then it would be idiotic for the world to switch to it instead of their local government's paper money or some other asset in order to conduct transactions, save money, invest, etc.
I was saying that specific feature makes it worse than if it didn't have that feature. I wasn't comparing it to any other currency.
That said there's no way in hell the world "switches" to bitcoin or ethereum. That's so much higher of a bar than a healthy market where you can buy most things.
Bro it's not a "weird art game about trauma" its a rape simulator. Should payment processors be involved here? Probably not. But the game is definitely a bad thing that should not exist and whoever made it is 100% a bad person.
Given that at this point the games that have been delisted include IGF award winners and art games that have been shown in museums, I think we're pretty far past pointing at any individual games as a reason to justify this.
They're probably talking about Mouthwashing which was announced to be delisted from itch (not steam though) today [^1]. Not played the game, only read synopsis, but it's a horror game instigated by a rape. As far as I know, the rapist is not meant to be a sympathetic character.
I've played it, and without spoiling, there's no way to play it through and come to the conclusion that the rapist (and mass murderer) is an even halfway decent person. It's not titillating (not that the graphics or art style would allow for that in any case), and it's not played in any way except upsetting and mature.
Tbh it's a pretty impressive narrative experience, it really leverages the difference between watching a story and experiencing it.
I doubt I'll ever play a game like that, but it does sound reasonable for a game like that to exist. Especially in light of the horror and violence we do allow. (Didn't GTA require you to torture someone? I know people who refuse to play it only for that reason, yet I don't think it was ever banned.) Of course I wouldn't want games that celebrate and glorify rape, and wouldn't really object to seeing those banned, but it's always hard to draw the lines with bans like that.
I recall some years ago that bans on sexual content for teenagers also ended up banning sex ed content, info about contraception and other vital information.
So I'd really prefer to err on the side of less rather than more bans. No blanket bans just because they address some topic, because some topics do need to be addressed.
Ultimately, though, I really don't think it should be up to payment processors to enforce stuff like this. It's up to either Steam or governments. If payment processors want to police stuff, they should be concerning themselves with money laundering, fraud, and other financial crimes.
It's definitely one to play when you're 100% up for it, and I'd argue it might even be best played with other people. It's genuinely rough, but impressive as hell, and it's a great example of people making their vision come to life with pretty simple tech.
brother i don't even know what specific thing you're talking about. hundreds, thousands? of games have been delisted on storefronts for the sin of including themes that the lobbiers found objectionable.
So do what 99.9999% of us already do: don't play these games. You deciding to make it a moral issue that you get to determine for everyone else is where you turn a personal opinion (really just an understandable sense of disgust) into a policy.
If we still decided what was allowed based on the sense of disgust it engenders in some people, we'd still be living like Medieval peasants. Adults should be free to make informed choices, that includes purchasing and consuming things that you and I find repellent.
Question... do you or would you be willing to extend this line of reasoning to child porn? As in, some people want to watch it, and most people find it repulsive, but those that don't should be allowed to make the informed choice to watch it?
If not, where do you draw the line? And why there?
> do you or would you be willing to extend this line of reasoning to child porn?
No, because that's illegal.
Slippery slope morality arguments are stupid and deserve to be treated as such. I've already heard this a thousand times with homosexuals. Men fucking men? What's next, men fucking kids? Men fucking dogs???
No, it's a stupid line of reasoning and, in fact, it's so stupid that even just a few seconds of inspection is enough to have it crumble and fall between the cracks of your hands.
> As in, some people want to watch it, and most people find it repulsive
You have a very fundamental misunderstanding here.
Okay, people find murder repulsive too. But is the reason that we outlawed murder because it's repulsive? Think about it. Throwing up is repulsive. Do we throw people in jail if they feel sick?
No. Whether or not ANYONE thinks something is repulsive is completely unrelated to if it should be allowed.
We did not, have not, and will never ban child pornography on the grounds it's "repulsive". It is, but that doesn't matter. We ban it because children are unable to consent, and subjecting unconsenting people to sexual acts is rape. Distributing the material is equally bad because it creates a market for it - meaning, more rape.
> If not, where do you draw the line? And why there?
When it comes to sex, consent. That's the only place you can draw the line. Otherwise I can easily weaponize your arguments against you. There are many sexual things you personally do which I find repulsive - please, tread carefully. This line of reasoning is dangerous.
I'm not a gamer, so I'm not really up with the play on what games have been banned. I was under the impression some of the games being banned were of the "think of the children" variety.
They had _one_ example of a game that was more of an art piece about the mind of a sexual predator (who was NOT glorified in any way in the game and would mostly make you feel ill).
It was also removed from itch.io in 2014. Never made it to Steam.
But then they got Visa and Mastercard to throw their weight around with vague terms and now stores have to remove everything remotely erotic to not go out of business...
The problem here is how opaque and arbitrary the entire process is. Because someone could sue Visa/Mastercard over certain games' content in an arbitrary jurisdiction, they have imposed a ban worldwide in every game storefront in existence.
I guess we're also going to have to ban movies like A Clockwork Orange then. Stanley Kubrick and all the other people involved in production? 100% bad people.
Careful on that slippery slope, you might fall and break something!
The targeting here is very broad. As a reminder, Collective Shout has tried to get GTA blocked. And Detroit: Become Human for having you play as an abused woman and child as they escape the abuse.
A lot of people are in fact defending the game, just look at the replies to my post. I'm a staunch free speech proponent but defending this game is like defending the Nazis' right to march - we should defend the right to create it on principle, but also we should be clear that like the nazis, the creators of this game are despicable, the game has no value, and the world would be better off if the game didn't exist.
I think its obvious that making the game should be legal, and also obvious that platforms like Steam should ban it. Payment processors are a weird middle ground, I'll leave it to smarter people than me to figure out the ethics there.
I really disagree. I think hentai is a flimsy wrapper around child fetishization and needs to be heavily regulated. I think having rape or torture simulators are extremely harmful in multiple ways.
Really would prefer the government outlaw these things but I don’t mind companies protecting themselves from liability.
In my opinion, this content has a net positive effect on society.
While of course I cannot approve those activities, we cannot ignore the fact that there exists people who are sexually attracted and aroused by children, torture, rape and many other things. And we know that you don't get to choose your sexual orientation, it just happens.
As a parent, I find it reassuring to live in a country where those people can relief their pulsions through fictional content. Stripping them from this option would only make them suffer through this pain and shame until a point where they cannot endure it anymore and end-up harming real people.
We know that harassing and witch-hunting minorities doesn't work and actually makes the situation worse. As uncomfortable as this specific case is, I believe that it's much better to help them find a way to live peacefully in society.
We can't go banning things just because they can, potentially, be used for "child fetishization".
Movies can be used for that purpose, and certainly Hollywood knows that. Books. TV. Any form of media.
Not to mention, rape and torture "simulators" (do you by change mean media?) are integral to our understanding of those things. What if rape survivors could not speak it, for it is too shameful?
And, the elephant in the room, sex is alone on this pedestal. Sex, alone, is uniquely stigmatized to a degree that nothing even comes close. Violence, no matter how gruesome and vile, does not reach even 1/1000th the scorn of even modest sex.
This is a purity game, plain and simple. The shame around sex and the extreme desire to control it comes from the patriarchy and religious ideals. These should not be humored.
I looked up the word 'hentai', and the way you used it is incorrect. It's like using the word 'porn' to mean 'child pornography.'
There is also a problem with your argument itself. Child pornography is illegal because it involves harm to children, not to suppress people with certain preferences. If there are no victims and it’s just a fictional depiction, there’s no reason to ban it.
Personally I don’t really like people who are into that but that doesn’t give anyone the right to oppress them.
Well, at least in the US, it's legal to draw, sell, and purchase those drawings—no wrapper needed it can be explicitly cp. And while I have negative infinity desire to consume or encounter this kind of content I nonetheless think it should exist as a 'methadone' for folks whose sexual frustration might otherwise drive them to do something horrible.
And if we allow it at all I don't think it makes sense to pick and choose what artistic mediums it's allowed to take no matter how abhorrent I might personally find it.
obviously we must keep the pressure up on payment processors to reverse course, but we also need to push back against people in society who think they can decide what other adults are allowed to do on their own time. If folks IRL have weird ideas pushed back on IRL we wouldn't get to crisis points like this.