I was under the impression that Australia was more America than America in a lot of ways.

Supposedly you can still hear the last of the V8 interceptors roar in the wild there...

No more absurd than US card schemes dictating what I can and can't buy in another country.

> 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.

> it’s American evangelicals running off to Uganda to stone gays.

Is that something that happened? That sounds horrible. Do you have any more info?

Not literally, but they did manage to get homosexuality re-criminalized in Uganda.

No mention on stoning, though...

Yes, I think GGP was being hyperbolic.

Still a shameful state of affairs.

The group that did this is Australian based on Australian laws on illegal pornography.

Yes, and the things I described are based on American decision makers with American sensibilities. What is the point you're making?

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.

Essentially to act as if Australia doesn't have it's own puritanical pearl clutching lobby... is ignorance or bad faith.