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I know this is probably going to come across as uncharitable I find it difficult to get mad about about pedos and gore fetishists getting forced underground, if anything this strikes me as one of the DEI/LGBTQ/BBQ movements few redeeming qualities.
I don't see how this is caused by "DEI/LGBTQ/BBQ movements". Payment processors already had rules about not wanting to be associated with online sex/porn websites. If anything, this should be seen as an extension of existing prudishness along with a refusal to look in any way like they're associated with things that aren't "family friendly".
To expand on that- the DEI crowd keeps around a lot of Allies that push back on the ‘no porn’ taboo regularly and strongly, make their living drawing fetish porn, and has a generally pro-porn stance. The not wanting to service porn sites is not a DEI initiative.
(Note: I'm conflating "DIE" with progressivism-as-faction in general here.)
I'm not convinced they're allies. The Venn diagram of "porn LibsOfTikTok complains about in school libraries" and "porn these people draw" might depict the same things on the surface level, but the trick about the Junior Anti-Sex League's attempts at pornography is that they're not designed to be attractive or appealing in any way to the viewers, and their "porn education" efforts are quite literally just "ensure that the only porn that exists is academic, sterile, unappealing, and unappetizing as the ideal woman should be in bed".
It is by the dominant part of DIE, and aligns with the people DIE is meant to serve and fuck with (good for the Inner Party, worst for the Outer Party). Perhaps it's a saving grace that the people banning porn pisses off are also the group of people technically capable of implementing the workarounds, then.
I don't get your point. Are you arguing that the people who are banning this stuff don't want porn that entices a person?
This I would like proof of. Nowhere in DEI literature am I aware of arguments that loli and guro hentai is bad, and if they do exist, I don't see proof that they are common or widespread views.
From the few screengrabs of the material I've seen, though I haven't done the full research to figure out whether or not that's a good representation, none of what they showed demonstrates what makes sex and sexuality enticing in any way.
They don't bother to make their drawings actually stimulating or attractive, much less abuse superstimulus- if they were actually trying, you'd expect their characters to look like the top-scoring entries on any drawn porn site (or be scripted any less unnaturally), but this isn't the case, so while they're definitely going for shock value, it's more smoke than fire.
(Also, I find it very interesting that women are vanishingly rare in those screengrabs; it's virtually all male-male pairings, exactly what you'd expect from a woman-privileging movement. "Sex is great, as long as I don't have to have it.")
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ロリコン is not the same as 児童ポルノ, they're treated extremely differently in Japan and one is unmistakable for the other. Which, in fact, is the original reason that that stuff ended up on Mastodon, because the ideologically Californian people that ran twitter at the time couldn't fathom Japanese culture being okay with Californian taboos.
But yeah sure, support people who hate you and everything that you are because they might do some harm to people who are loosely affiliated in your mind with other people you hate. See where that gets you.
Or you know I could just not. I could just sit back and let them fight.
I would like to introduce you to a poem somewhat famous but that is very close to your situation:
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/martin-niemoeller-first-they-came-for-the-socialists
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I kind of find this comment ironic since in any other context, most of the people spewing at @HlynkaCG would probably be on Team Burn the Pedos, but if they're pissing off SJWs, then they are defended without reservation.
(And I find the attempts to scrupulously differentiate "loli" from "actual" pedophilia unconvincing. Like, sure, I get that a lot of these guys just like really cute... really... young girls and may not literally be pedophiles in the clinical sense. But again, that's not a distinction the anti-woke crowd would accept in any kind of role-reversal. If we found out some prominent leftist was really into ロリコン, LibsOfTikTok would be all over it.)
I don't care. I am and remain a principled libertarian.
I don't like lolicons but they have rights and Americans being incorrigible puritans doesn't change that.
This is my take as well. If someone is jerking off to lolicon, or gore porn, I think that's disgusting and they are almost certainly a very bad person. I also think that despite that, the person still has a right to exist in society, do legal business freely, etc. I don't support this nonsense of "they're creepy and not very popular, so we're going to gang up on them to punish them".
So to push back on the point @Amadan made, no I'm not supporting them because they upset the SJWs. I'm supporting them because it's the right thing to do. Hell, if it was the SJWs being suppressed I'd support them because it still would be the right thing to do (much as I personally dislike them).
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The response here to the revelation that several scientists who write the WPATH recommendations regarding the treatment of transsexuality in children, were regulars on a castration fetish forum, wasn't that such a forum shouldn't be allowed to exist.
Not here, no, the norms here would push against such a statement. But I'd be willing to bet if I went looking in right-wing forums it wouldn't be hard to find such sentiments. I'd also be willing to bet that quite a few of the rightists here, if actually given the power, would ban castration fetishist forums (and a lot of other things). More than one has admitted as much.
I wouldn't wager against some overlap in actual people, but this assessment seems less like it's trying to avoid outgroup homogenity bias, and more like it's trying to exploit it.
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Are you really going to argue against imaginary rightwingers so you don't have to address the arguments of people here?
If we actually look at the actual arguments of people who are actually here, it's weird to see the shift away from "woah there: you can't prove they're castration fetishists just because they administer a castration fetish website and write castration fetish porn, and who's to say if there's anything wrong with them basing medical treatment for children off of content from said fetish website."
At least they weren't drawing lewd cartoons, I guess. Apparently that's much worse and doesn't require any of the same charity.
I am addressing the arguments of people here. I believe some (not all) of the people here are not committed in any principled way to free speech, especially not that of people whom they would normally call pedos regardless of the strict accuracy of the term. I believe they are reacting firstly to "the enemy of my enemy" and secondly to "someone I don't like said something."
(If this is not you, then it is not you.)
I don't know who you are referring to here. Certainly not me or @HlynkaCG, so who is the defender of castration fetishists who's now criticizing lolicon?
Again, who are you referring to? I don't recall seeing anyone saying that lewd cartoons are worse.
I did not note in my original post (because I try to avoid unnecessary throat-clearing disclaimers) that I don't actually agree with Hlynka entirely. My own personal view is that castration fetishists and lolicon fans are deeply weird and creepy, but they should be left alone so long as they aren't actually touching children. I would not censor either one legally. But I agree with him a little - I think the weird, creepy fetishists should keep that shit to themselves and not encourage its normalization.
The thing I posted in this thread which seems to have you so upset was not a lack of charity for lolicon. It was an observation that it's ironic to see people say "That's weird and gross" or "That's free expression that only humorless puritans would object to" depending entirely on whose fetish is being indulged.
You'll notice people did not just say "that's weird and gross" about the castration fetishists. We actually had interesting neutral discussions about it. People would indeed be humorless puritans if they, for example, carried out a DDOSing and reporting campaign against a castration fetish site.
The thing people were getting upset about? Fetishists being given license to shove their fetishes into medical doctrine for treating children. And I can promise you that everyone here who's upset about payment processor censorship would be equally upset if Ken Akamatsu dropped his "artistic freedom" platform in favor of legalizing tentacle rape in schools, or whatever the hentai artist equivalent to leftists writing castration fetish fanfiction into pediatric medical policy is.
So the hypocrisy you're trying to pin on people doesn't even exist here. And that's all you had to say about both issues?
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Who's the attacker of castration fetishists who's now defending lolicon? I'm prepared to believe that people hold such a position, but is anyone actually doing it?
...I think you and the person you're responding to are both going off a vibe that is both real and not terribly quantifiable. One gets the general sense that the other side isn't objecting enough on a specific topic, no? There's a sense that, while the literal meaning of the statements might be roughly equivalent, they're masking some deeper disagreement, perhaps intentionally. That about the size of it?
That is probably a reasonable summation.
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Do you find it hard to differentiate cartoon violence (assault with deadly weapon, attempted murder etc...) and the IRL thing?
https://i.imgur.com/87UDzEV.jpg
No. But if you're whacking off to Jerry hitting Tom over the head with a mallet, I might suspect you have an unhealthy fixation on violence, cartoon or otherwise.
Is your main concern that lolicon is used to jack off and you believe that that is a gateway to actual pedophilia?
No. I'm not concerned at all about what people jack off to. That's their business, and I'd merely thank them to keep it that way.
Then, what is your concern?
Why do you think I'm concerned?
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Personally I am more into top catting - that's when you get off on imagining yourself as a cat who stole a fist sized diamond by pretending to be a maharaja with a turban and fake moustache.
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The only true right-wing republican's gradual return to the loving breast continues apace.
(Nevertheless, upvoted, for comedic value and because pedos are, indeed, very bad publicity for the cause of freedom).
Return?
Unlike @IGI-111 I was never a libertarian (principled or otherwise) and as I told you before I see a stark difference between "silence" and "being silenced".
Frankly the OP's complaint really only makes sense to me if one starts with the conception of porn as some sort of "positive right" IE that we are owed validation/satisfaction and that declining to participate is on the same level as a personal attack. It's the same basic impulse as that behind those transsexuals who sued the cake shop, it is not enough for a vendor to offer
cakeporn, vendor must participate in and affirm their specific flavor of sexual deviancy, and should the vendor balk the fault lies not with those making the demand but with the vendor for denying them their "rights".The right is not to the porn, it's to the ability to make consensual legal transactions freely. Which has historically been true because there was rarely a required middleman to make consensual legal transactions until recently. So it's a relatively unprecedented situations worthy of being considered without crude analogies.
doesn't really matter but it was a gay couple, not transsexuals.
Unsurprisingly there was a second case to harass the same baker.
He'll be fighting lawsuits and prosecutions from the Colorado government until he dies, and nobody will even think of counter-attacking to ruin his harassers.
Sometimes you really do just need to admire the pure spite these people operate on. But I imagine the lawyers are running the show now and the owner is probably well compensated with conservative lawyer money.
Where does such things come from?
People who want to set judicial precedents, same place but opposite side that wants to create the opposite precedent.
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I think this is a stronger argument were we talking about randos charging down SFW (or just not-their-kink) artists and demanding commission slots. Which does happen, but it's pretty quick route to mockery-town.
((Although the comparison still wouldn't be quite accurate: among her other sins, Mrs. Scardina is very clearly more interested in finding something Masterpiece Cake Shop is unwilling to do, specifically.))
At a deeper level: there's a meaningful distinction between going to a random baker until you find one unwilling to bake your cake, and finding out that every baker on the planet is unwilling to bake any cake for you unless you change unrelated behaviors. And that, in turn, is different from when every baker in the country acting under extremely strict regulatory requirements which have historically been used against some of those unrelated behaviors, and while possession of too much flour or icing is considered evidence of a crime in itself.
Maybe, in some alternate universe where this wasn't a thing, then we'd have far more credit card companies and banks around, and still no payment providers willing to touch it. Might even be more likely than not. But it's really convenient to assume. I'm libertarian enough that the difference from "silence" and "being silenced" matters; I'm also libertarian enough to notice that the difference is not quite so clear-cut when the government has hollowed out many 'private actors' and started wearing them like sock puppets.
((I'd actually bet in favor of banning this particular content, but it's very clear that it doesn't stop or even start here.))
Luckily the ban also includes bestiality, so as per your previous example they're already telling furries to, uh, stop sticking their animal dildos where the sun doesn't shine.
Since this is an impossible challenge, we'll hopefully get some resistance from them, despite the sudden but inevitable betrayal that will follow as soon as their Puff The Knotted Dragon toys are safe.
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No, this is the baker and customer both happy but the storefront the baker is operating in saying that flavor of cake can't be served because they don't like it. The artists already drew it happily, now they just want to distribute their work.
It's analogous to facebook deciding that a perfectly legal gun store cannot have a facebook page. The various layers of services in between a producer of some thing and a consumer of that thing are getting more and more deeply enmeshed in all our lives, and along the way being given more control over what can be produced/consumed.
Many more things should be common carriers. Payment providers included.
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Don't make me tap the sign.
Scoundrels should be oppressed. The fact that honest people can be falsely portrayed as scoundrels, and the necessary mechanisms of justice turned unjustly against them, does not change this reality. Auto-immune disorders can't be resolved by simply switching off the immune system.
"Scoundrels should be oppressed" is fine in a vacuum. History has indicated that when governments begin oppressing scoundrels, they rarely stop there - they keep pushing at the boundaries of what constitutes a scoundrel until non-scoundrels are included.
I'm not claiming that Visa/Mastercard are "like the Nazis" but the principle is the same.
My understanding of history argues otherwise. Do you have some examples in mind? When you say that the boundary of "scoundrel" expands to include non-scoundrels... well, pretty clearly if they're accusing people of being scoundrels, they think they are scoundrels, no? How do you distinguish between the definition of scoundrel being too narrow, and expanding to match reality, versus the definition being perfect, and growing too broad?
Further, if it does expand too far... what then? What's to stop people from simply assessing that it's gone too far, correcting, and dialing it back to the appropriate level?
And if they don't dial it back to what you consider an appropriate level, what happens if their society simply operates in that fashion indefinitely? Is your claim that, if the borders expand too large, something catastrophic happens? If nothing catastrophic happens, is your theory disproven?
Kohlberg stage III/IV morality, which says "that which gets you in trouble is bad", makes it hard to abolish rules against things; "it's illegal, so it's immoral, so it should stay illegal". This is a ratchet effect, which does justify caution.
To give a simple (if petty) example, webforum rules lists almost always get longer over time.
The ratchet can be pushed back, but it's not easy. Usually (but not always) involves some sort of Year Zero, whether that be a revolution, a counterculture, or more pettily and virtually a breakaway webforum redrawing its rules from scratch.
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The USA PATRIOT Act was passed and implemented with the ostensible goal of combatting a group most of us would consider "scoundrels" by any reasonable definition: terrorists, especially Islamist extremists. Almost immediately, it was used as a tool for oppressing any group the federal government didn't like the look of, such as people operating Stargate SG-1 fan websites, people suspected of having committed non-terrorist crimes (without being formally indicted or being served a search warrant), legal permanent residents who the Attorney General suspects may cause a terrorist act and so on.
There are people that most reasonable people would consider scoundrels (murderers, rapists, drug dealers). The government is afforded various powers to combat these scoundrels. But there will always be a natural temptation for the government to abuse this privilege by using it against people the government doesn't like, but that no reasonable person would consider scoundrels (anti-war activists, environmentalists, homosexuals, directors of low-budget horror films and so on).
An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. Better that ten guilty men escape than one innocent man hang.
Not necessarily. To use my earlier example of the USA PATRIOT Act, I don't think anything "catastrophic" has happened as a result of that piece of legislation - it hasn't led to a genocide, or destabilised the US, or anything of that magnitude. But I think it's fair to say that numerous people have had their civil liberties unfairly infringed upon - or indeed, their lives ruined - as a result of this legislation and how it was (ab)used, and I think that's bad.
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Scoundrels should have justice coming to them, for the bad things they actually do, no more, no less. Doing more than that, because they're bad people who deserve being treated badly, is not justice, and it's not what the justice system is supposed do to, and it can get out of control quickly. That's not autoimmune disorder, that's leukemia.
As long as you're keeping to justice, punishing scoundrels for scoundreling, not for existing, honest people have little to fear. Once you cut down the law to get at scoundrels who "hide behind it" by abiding it, it doesn't protect honest people anymore either.
Another issue is that scoundrel can mean bad people, but it also can mean icky people. Lolicons are the latter.
You appear to be approaching the question from a context of laws and other highly legible systems of formal rules. If I'm understanding you correctly, the idea would be that there's a clear separation between the legal rules and the justice system, and the various sorts of informal social consequences for lesser transgressions, with the idea being that the latter are perhaps less important and can more or less be ignored. If someone's not breaking the law, they should be left alone to do as they please, and we should in fact maintain a broad commons of unpoliced social space where people, generally, mind their own business and live and let live.
The problem, as I see it, is that people can do harmful and selfish things that make life a lot worse for everyone around them, and it's not possible to actually codify law against all those things. There's always going to be leaks, cracks, failures of encoding or enforcement. Also, there's a lot of social interactions that the law is simply too slow and regimented to meaningfully police. I observe that social consequences, even very serious social consequences that ruin or even end lives, have more or less always been part of our social structure. My guess is they always will be.
Society needs cohesion to function. broad commons of unpoliced social space where people, generally, mind their own business and live and let live was tried. It collapsed very quickly, and it is not obvious that it can or should be rebuilt. Live-and-let-live failed because it allowed a variety of social harms to spread unchecked, until people found the situation intollerable and began throwing their weight behind various forms of crackdown. And this is the pattern: your laws and social systems have to actually keep things running smoothly, or people will simply tear them out and replace them wholesale.
It is not obvious to me that this is actually true. I know that libertarians and Enlightenment idealists of the first water think it's true, and even desperately want it to be true, but many of the arguments they present seem to me to cash out in various forms of just-world fallacy. Censoring people doesn't seem to lead to you getting censored in any sort of causal fashion. Riding roughshod over the law to secure necessary results doesn't actually force woeful outcomes. Sticking it to the outgroup doesn't by any means result in someone else getting to stick it to you, thus restoring the balance. The Soviets broke every rule, and simply won, killed everyone who got in their way, ruled half the world for the better part of a century, and then more or less quietly died off. There was not and will not be any triumphant counter-revolution that does to them or their posterity what they did to others. Lincoln cut down a variety of laws, because the situation seemed to demand it... and his side won, and imposed their will on the losers, and there was no consequence of any significance that resulted.
It's very comforting to imagine that those who exercise power receive strict karma for the way they use it... but this does not appear to be the case. If you use power benevolently but ineffectually, others can take power away from you, and how they use it has nothing to do with how you used it.
What protects honest people is a cohesive society of other honest people who share their values and their understanding of who is and is not a scoundrel, and are willing and able to punish defectors appropriately. Lacking that, all the laws in the world will not save them.
The distinction does not seem sustainable at our present social scale.
I don't think you understood me correctly, I made no such distinction.
My point applies equally to informal social punishment: You should punish bad actions, not "bad people". At its basis, that's an ethical principle. No one deserves punishment for existing.
There seems to be another misunderstanding here. By "honest people" I'm not referring to the people who want to oppress scoundrels, in fact I believe these people are very often not honest. I'm thinking people who are minding their own business, innocent people.
My point is not that oppression is shortsighted due to risk of backfiring, but ethically fraught due to risk of hurting innocent people (as well as on its own merits in a vacuum). And it does seem obviously, trivially true that if you cut down the law (or non-law principle), it can't protect people anymore.
That said, the risk of backfiring is higher than you believe. Purity spirals, the revolution eating its own children. You talk about the soviets, but "the soviets" includes many people who did not in fact win in the end. Trotsky lost the power struggle with Stalin, and suddenly Trotskyists were considered scoundrel. Yezhov led the great purge and fell to it himself. Not everyone gets to be Stalin, so even the person who doesn't care about hurting innocents might consider self-interest.
You can't sustain an understanding of who is scoundrel. As you say yourself:
The issue is that if you go after bad people and aren't fair to them, it becomes hard for supposed scoundrel to defend themselves.
This also means dishonest people gain power, because they can falsely accuse honest people of being scoundrel. The solution is to go after bad actions, and fairly, so the accused gets a chance to correct potential mistakes.
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And thus, we get back to the age-old question: who determines the scoundrels? What if the Determinator-Of-Scoundrels is himself secretly a scoundrel seeking to shift the definition of "scoundrel" and oppress his enemies?
We do, collectively. If "we" has broken down, that itself is a problem that cannot be sidestepped, papered over, or worked around through clever systems design, and all these other problems emerge as a consequence.
There is no substitute for a foundational level of values coherence. Society inevitably breaks down in its absence. If you have such values coherence, defining and suppressing "scoundrels" is a solvable propblem. If you do not, it is not, and your society self-destructs.
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When Mastercard bans you from buying a gun or ammo and reports you to the FBI for it, maybe you'll understand the consequences.
Mastercard doesn't need to report me to the FBI I do that to myself when I fill out the 4473, and if you think I (or anyone else) would be buying an off-list firearm with a credit card you're an idiot.
You don't (yet) fill out a 4473 to buy what credit card companies will call "mass shooter quantities of ammunition" for a day at the range, which is exactly what the antigun guys are bragging about being able to do now.
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This seems quite adjacent to the "man, I too hate $government, but nobody else can lead the fight against $external_enemy quite like them" sentiment that autocrats everywhere seek to foster. See also Western ex-dissidents siding with the American deep state vs. the Russians, or Democrats with the same vs. Trump, or patrician Republicans with Trump vs. the Democrats, or every military dictatorship in history.
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My favourite part of "woke" movement is delegitimizing America's moral authority, by, for example, claiming it was conceived in slavery as Project 1618 does, or emphasizing how long aspects of racism, like redlining, linger.
By this, orthodox pro-American historiography ceases to be considered valid, as Slavinated and Asianated voices join the previously all-Anglo choir.
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