Am I the only one who thinks this is a good thing? Pornography and obscenity should not be protected speech. It’s violence against human dignity akin to hate speech.
I am absolutely sick and tired of people using the word violence willy nilly when discussing things they don't like. "Violence against human dignity" is not real, that is a nonsensical concept. You are not being stabbed in the human dignity. No one's human dignity is being blown to pieces. You are more than welcome to argue that pornography causes psychological damage, but calling it violence and lumping it in with hate speech is not compelling in the slightest.
We certainly sanction hate speech because of the psychological and physical damage it causes to its victims. Pornography is harmful to everyone involved, from producer to consumer. In the case of video games that don’t depict real people this is attenuated somewhat, but not in the way that counts. By consuming or producing pornography, you are blowing your own human dignity to bits.
If you would prefer, I’d say it’s an “affront” to human dignity.
My opinion is that sexuality is something that shouldn’t be commodified in any way, shape, or form. When we package it and promote it as a commodity or for entertainment, that practice as such is harmful. There’s simply no such thing as “healthy” pornography because the very preconditions for pornography to come into existence are rooted in an unhealthy and disordered understanding of human sexuality. I think MacKinnon and Dworkin were absolutely right on this front.
I’m far more afraid of the world we currently live in, where we treat sex/sexuality as something that exists for entertainment value and can be commodified — than I am of this form of censorship. At least our overlords are making the ethical call here.
You think that a payment processor having arbitrary power to shut down any business they want anywhere in the world for any reason is a good thing because this time you agree with the reason?
Book burners don’t have any morals, they just want to burn books, and they’ll come for yours sooner or later.
They don’t have arbitrary power - power is never exercised unilaterally. I can’t imagine they would succeed for very long at say, shutting down all the grocery stores in the world. They wouldn’t even dare try from the hell they would have to pay.
And the payment processors aren’t “book burners.” They’re acting to restrict an unsavory market that potentially hurts their business. They have no agenda or incentive to promote censorship as such.
The fact that you had to jump to such an extreme misinterpretation of my point to attempt to refute it shows just how right I am. I said ‘any business’, not ‘any number of businesses simultaneously’. Your counterpoint is as ridiculous as saying a man with a loaded gun in a crowded bar isn’t dangerous because he has fewer bullets in his magazine than there are people in the bar. Economic warfare always operates on defeat in detail.
Okay, since you stated it as a fact: Citation needed. Show me Visa’s statement to the effect that they have no agenda, because all of their actions suggest otherwise.
> And the payment processors aren’t “book burners.” They’re acting to restrict an unsavory market that potentially hurts their business.
They're not book burners... they're just trying to eliminate certain media they find objectionable? They would consider it unacceptable for Steam to, for example, make these items only purchasable through crypto/bank transfer.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s violent and some pornography is good for most people. It’s not going to kill or murder or whatever people.
But what’s been happening lately with onlyfans and other things is a recipe for a disaster in my mind. We’ve made it hard for younger generations, made paths to success much less atrainable and instead have enabled black markets while the economy suffers because of it. I imagine we’re stuck with a deranged and broken society of people moonlighting to make ends meet by doing soft porno in far greater numbers than before. And yes of course that’s what strip clubs are for but that was way less of an issue than this.
