Absolutely it is not universal, but that’s… kind of the problem.
Porn isn’t that big of an issue either way. Left-wing movements can take a stance on whatever side of it. The problem is when issues like this end up being targeted at some portions of the left-wing spectrum but not to others and you end up with a split down the middle that one or both sides decide to make into a dealbreaking issue.
Hey, if you just happen to be a run of the mill traditional prudish conservative that would actually be mildly heartening. I genuinely don’t care about those continuing to run that line.
Still not wrong about the underlying issue, though. And for the record, I don’t think anti-porn so-called “abolitionists” are “my enemy”. I think all left of center forces are my allies, personally. The problem is single issue wedges used as hostile propaganda do work, as seen very clearly in the case of trans issues.
I mean, ChatGPT broke the top 5 most visited sites earlier this year.
People do use chatbots, but there is a biiiig gap between popping in to a chatbot to… I don’t know, help you remember the name of a movie, or sub in for Google Translate or check your spelling or whatever people are doing in there, and a very different one to push it as an agentic always-there ur-feature.
Chatbots are alright at chatbotting, but most of these other applications are way out of spec and just don’t work or fit the user experience of the software they’re being bolted on to.
I sometimes think the overzealous, always-online blanket rejection of GenAI stuff is doing a disservice by obscuring the things that have an use from all this forced garbage designed to tick a checkbox.
FWIW, I’ll happily keep ignoring these features as long as I’m able to actually ignore them. It’s a bit of a waste, but not a dealbreaker. The whole conversation, the irrational stances, the insane, transparent false hype and the quivering economy-ending bubble are all exhausting and incredibly depressing.
I, once again, did not say or imply that I am persecuted in any way.
I do think porn is free expression, of sexuality and otherwise, and should be protected about as much as any other form of free expression. Which is not universally and without limit, before you try that one.
And all of that is not the same as saying I “can’t stand criticism” about it. Which I didn’t say or think. I will actively, aggressively criticise actual porn, both as a media product and as an industry.
Once again, the strawmanning and talking points aren’t doing much to disprove the notion that anti-porn activism will become the new TERF-like trojan horse wedge among ostensible leftist movements going forward. People don’t like to talk about those, but they are bad and this is incoming.
That’s a cool argument you’re having with a thing nobody said.
Educating children about sex in general is educating children about sex (and nobody here has argued against it or equated it with being anti-porn).
There is a rising trend in European lefitsm, and particularly in European feminism, that argues that all porn is inherently pernicious and ultimately should not exist.
Note those are two separate statements.
You definitely dabbled in the second of those statements when you claimed that “that [can’t] be considered safe for anyone”. Whether you meant to say what you said is in your head, but as presented that slope is both mighty slippery AND very consistent with some of the very anti sex-work trend I’m talking about. The false equivalence and misquote at the top of your response doesn’t lead me to believe you’re treating this “objectively”, either.
Waaay better than the porn bans and online age verification schemes, honestly.
I question why this is just for “children who show mysoginistic behavior”, though. Sex ed should be universal, and this should be a major part of sex ed.
I assume the fear here is parents complaining about their kids being talked about porn, which may end up being a larger underlying issue than the porn itself. I guess you just have to trust that education professionals handle the opportunity well and this doesn’t become a stern talking to for problem kids, which is likely to do as much as stern talking tos have done historically.
“Young humans” sure. Not young humans, you absolutely do you.
There’s a bit of an emerging trend in leftist European circles in particular that sees porn as inherently patriarchal and wrong and we’re not ready for how much anti-porn is going to be the new terfism yet. This is going to suck a lot, and not in a good way.
There are boys in trousers in the picture, though. And no real “short” skirts.
I mean… you do you, but some of this may be an eye of the beholder situation.
Is there anybody on Lemmy that isn’t a software engineer of some description? No? Anyone?
I genuinely don’t know that I follow that explanation. For one thing, what reasons would there be to ban paid blind boxes, online or offline, while allowing outright games of chance with a monetary payout? In what world is a Magic the Gathering blister more of a problem (for a consenting adult, anyway) than an online casino?
But also, by the larger point you’re making it seems like you’d be fine with a government saying “porn is banned for everybody because reasons” but not with “porn is banned for kids”, at least in a scenario where that comes with age verification.
To be clear, I agree that both of those are… not good. I just don’t know that I can wrap my head around the logic of thinking the more extensive issue is more acceptable than the alternative. You could argue that the porn ban is an excuse to add mass surveillance, but at that point we’re not talking about the porn ban, we’re talking about the mass surveillance.
Oh, and for the record, there is plenty of will someone think of the children regarding loot boxes. Both on its own and bundled together with a blanket assessment that gambling is immoral and/or illegal. It’s actually a fairly close match to the porn issue, where concerns about children are being wrapped around a more targeted hostility around the concept from both sides of the political spectrum.
I… don’t know where you’re from, but actual gambling is legal here for adults. Are you suggesting that people should be able to place bets on actual sports but not buy a random loot box in a game? That seems incredibly extreme.
Which still leaves a bunch of other stuff people have used kids to attack on all sides of multiple political aisles, but hey, if that’s the one you want to caveat I’m happy to flag how weird the caveat is.
Yeah, I read about some of the tightening at the time and I’m not disputing that there are technical ways of… you know, making your country’s Internet a mostly separate bubble for non-techie users.
The point is it’s both hard and extremely invasive to get there. You can’t just wish upon a star for VPNs to not be used for a particular application without going to those extremes. Especially if the thing you’re trying to prevent is people watching Superman two weeks early or wanking to a mainstream porn page.
It’s kind of unfortunate how much this has been encouraged by petty online fights. People were very excited when “will somebody think of the children” was applied to, say, some social media content or gaming loot boxes because the Internet did not like those things, so they were very happy to ignore the pre-existing parental control devices and request blanket bans. Then people remembered that a bunch of old, prudish people on both sides of the political aisle don’t like porn and it was too late.
Man, people love the “they first came for” argument online and I should have guessed the first time it really pays off in the 21st century it’d include the absolute most depressing things possible instead.
Anyway, this is bad and I don’t like it, but UK politics are almost as bad as US politics, so I’m happy to let both stew in their own cautionary tale juices.
I guess that works for VPN services offering servers outside the country. That’s not what VPNs are, though, and you still can’t ban the concept of VPNs having a connection outside the country. VPN software is available open source and all it takes for it to connect abroad is my phone with a VPN connection to my home computer being abroad.
I mean, Russia (and even China) still have people using VPNs all over the place. This (and a lot of the push for age verification and comms backdoors) reeks of barely understanding the desired result and entirely misunderstanding how the tech works.
See, there’s a lot of online chatter about how much sense Linux folder structures make, with everything grouped by type all over the filesystem. And then this happens.
DOS 5.1 folder structure or bust, I say. Home directories are evil, if your filename doesn’t fit in 8.3 characters you’re doing it wrong and if you can’t find it with dir . /w it shouldn’t exist.
How do you “ban VPNs”? That’s not how software works, and VPNs are… you know, a key part of a bunch of online infrastructure. I get that they mean “ban them to bypass restrictions”, but the entire point of a VPN is you can’t tell from the outside what it’s being used for. You may as well ban thinking about butterflies. You can write it down, but you can’t enforce it.
For the record, not an American. Which, you know, I thought was obvious from my post, but hey.
I’d add that there’s a difference between caring about outcomes and not having values but, honesly, this is not a conversation worth having.
It takes a prodigious amount of entitlement to look at things that way. The leap of logic from a tangible action to… some other thing that happened requires keeping the loosest possible tally and looking at international politics strictly from the lens of how it affects your worldview, rather than the actual impact on the ground.
No, my dear online performative leftist, the US deciding to reverse their policy and cut tens of billions of international aid is not “the same” as whatever war, political stance or act of interference you vaguely remember being mad about a decade ago. They can both be bad without both being the same.
I mean, never mind that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were started by Bush, in turn the proto-Trump that opened the door for the fascist base to encroach on the US right, the fact that those things happened doesn’t mean that the new, different thing Trump did that none of his predecessors did isn’t worse than what their predecessors were doing. The people that relied on US aid relied on US aid, independently of whatever US tanks were doing thousands of kilometers away.
Trump also reversed policy regarding Israel, incidentally, with the recognition of Jerusalem and moving the embassy. That’s the type of false equivalence that led to him being in power in the first place. Because man, I was not on board with Biden’s stance on Palestine, and I am sure Harris would have been way too lenient with Israel for my tastes, but if you think that’s the same as openly suggesting mass displacement for the sake of turning Gaza into a tourist resort and that it made no diplomatic difference in how fast and what type of ceasefire could have been attained you’re out of your mind.
And this is the last I say about it. I have zero patience for this type of willful ignorance in general, but I also have no energy to be angry. Thanks for the reminder that leaving even a tiny crack for US politics, even if it’s coming from the left, is way too much. The entire thing is toxic. Malign actor indeed.
Buuuullshit.
Utter garbage.
Extremely nope.
It takes deliberate ignorance to reach that conclusion. Forget the cuts in aid, which an article two posts up the chain here was directly linking to a worsening of cholera in South Sudan, the notion that anybody in Brazil or Mexico is going “I can’t tell the difference” is ludicrous. Your mileage may vary on whether Trump invading Venezuela is a good or a bad thing, but I’m pretty sure the regime there isn’t going “same thing, really”.
I guess the Argentitian government would say things are better now, considering they just got bailed out in what amounts to buying a midterm election. In that case I’d wager it’s the opposition who doesn’t find things were just as bad a couple years ago.
What the hell do you have to be on to think only Europe has noticed open fascists being in charge in the US. This is why I’ve been taking a break from this place, holy crap.
It… kinda sounds like judgement.
So what happens to… you know, Uber drivers, software engineers for social media and Amazon drivers? Because there’s a biiig spectrum of work under capitalism, and it doesn’t fit particularly neatly in “selling your body” or “helping people”.
Look, nobody is saying that sex work can’t be exploitative or even that it’s not generally exploitative. The legal gray areas and general ickiness of the entire space is… a lot, and I think it needs specific regulation. But to take it as a uniquely patriarchal, capitalistic thing distinct from “normal” work requires not seeing it as proper labor, but as inherently… well, they do kind of abuse the word “abolition” very pointedly.
That has a long, nasty tradition with pretty unhealthy side effects, honestly.
In any case, that’s the rhetorical trick I’m worried about. You let the right own sex work AND you let the stance on this split feminist/leftist spaces in half and you’ve manufactured a mix of TERFism and the concession of “free speech” as a fascist talking point. It’s a political problem more than a policy problem, frankly.