301–310 of 448 posts
VPNs are really a requirement for UK residents now.
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Your points only make sense in the absence of bad and/neglectful parents. For many decades it was required to prove age in order to consume porn. Porn on the internet ought to have the same requirement. I don’t know the best way to implement it but since the industry isn’t trying to find a solution then government should impose one.
Then the government should come up with a good way to prove age that does not negatively impact privacy. It shouldn't be possible for "who is viewing what porn (or other thing)" to be accidentally leaked; because it should be possible to not store the "who" part.
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I would say it is a realistic take, and yours is idealistic.
It isn’t realistic, it’s pessimistic. If the government, the system, is your opponent, there is no other outcome than subversion, everything is futile anyway. That leaves no room for democratic participation, for any kind of peaceful change, if you’re being earnest with it. And that seems very cynical and ideologically driven to me. There’s a lot of room for improvement that doesn’t involve tearing everything down be…
> That leaves no room for democratic participation
I think there is very limited room for democratic participation and it has become far to difficult to change anything. If I vote and I do not care which of the parties that have a chance of winning wins because their policies are so similar it does not matter, where is my democratic participation? Even if the parties are different and I do not like the policies of either, what is the value of my vote?
I think things will improve in the long term when there is sufficient pushback, but it will take a long time.
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They're not synonymous but a vast amount of pornography available online constitutes violence against women. The commercial sex trade, including both porn and prostitution, is a multi-billion dollar industry that seeks to normalize extreme acts and promotes the dehumanisation of women and girls.
So why would the solution to dehumanising women be "minors shouldn't be able see it"?
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I would say it is a realistic take, and yours is idealistic.
It isn’t realistic, it’s pessimistic. If the government, the system, is your opponent, there is no other outcome than subversion, everything is futile anyway. That leaves no room for democratic participation, for any kind of peaceful change, if you’re being earnest with it. And that seems very cynical and ideologically driven to me. There’s a lot of room for improvement that doesn’t involve tearing everything down be…
If platforms like discord take a hard-line stance of "no, we're not enabling a surveillance state apparatus" and the government then forces them to cease business in that country, that is a decision with consequences. People don't like when the government takes away their nice things due to motives they don't agree with. It catalyzes a position - "unchecked government surveillance is creating negative outcomes for me".
Over time, if enough actors behave the same way, public sentiments will shift and, assuming a healthy democracy, the government line will as well.
But acquiescing to demands like these only further entrenches the position, as the public is only loosely incentivized to care. The boiling of the privacy frog in a surveillance state like the UK means most people won't care enough to change it until it's too late
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That was, in fact, what COPA mandated in the US in 1998, and SCOTUS struck it down as too onerous in Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union, kicking off the last 20 years of essentially completely unregulated Internet porn commercially available to children with nothing more than clicking an "I'm 18" button. At the time, filtering was seen as a better solution. Nowadays filtering is basically impossible thanks to…
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It kind of isn't anymore. But not just because of porn, obviously.
Early porn exposure goes hand in hand with the problems we see typified in the recent Netflix movie Adolescence. Seen women constantly railed and treated like meat when that young probably does do something.
"Videos of people having sex" is deliberately misleading, modern porn is not dry educational science videos. It's clear you'd rather be snide than correct.
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There's a peer / social issue at play as well though. If you believe that smart phones are disastrous for kids (I happen to think so), and don't allow your 13yo daughter to have one, you are pretty much forcing her to be the odd one out. Maybe that's OK for some parents, but you can't deny that this cost exists. Preventing your son from playing certain video games that all of his friends enjoy also has a social cost.…
It's important to teach our children that different people have different restrictions. Some of my daughter's friends have no phone. One of them has no phone, but does have a tablet. To the best of my knowledge, none of them are ostracized by the group. I mean, I've seen them hanging out at our house and other places.
This is never about protecting the children. This is always about government overreach. People are less likely to criticize the government, or even participate in political debate, if their online identities are know by the government. Governments like obedient, scared citizens. The only ethical response to laws like this, is for websites and apps to terminate operations completely in countries that create them. Citi…
That’s a very strange take on governments, treating them as a singular entity. A government that deserves that name is first and foremost and elected set of representatives of the constituents, and thus like citizens that vote for them again, act in their interests. If the government is not working like that, you have an administrative problem, not a societal one. A state is its population.
Very dangerous thinking. Unless each and every citizens has approved the elected "representative" and every decision they made (which will never happen), you cannot assimilate the state and the population. The state has to be considered a separate entity, one which operate beyond the common man's thinking.
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They're not synonymous but a vast amount of pornography available online constitutes violence against women. The commercial sex trade, including both porn and prostitution, is a multi-billion dollar industry that seeks to normalize extreme acts and promotes the dehumanisation of women and girls.
So why would the solution to dehumanising women be "minors shouldn't be able see it"?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least the ways that a corner shop verifies age don't have the same downsides as typical online age verifiers. They just look at an ID document; verify that it's on the official list of acceptable ID documents, seems to be genuine and valid and unexpired, appears to relate to the person buying the product, and shows an old enough age; and hand the document back. The corner shop has far fewer false negatives, far lo…
> and unexpired Because certainly one's identity might totally change if one's ID card expires...