Politics/nationalism is always a great cover to erode rights of the population. If you object, you are on the "other team" and will be shunned.
No one in Texas wants porn bans, abortion bans, IVF bans, restrictive marijuana laws and everything else going on down there, but they will still enthusiastically vote for it to show party allegiance.
> No one in Texas wants porn bans, abortion bans, IVF bans, restrictive marijuana laws and everything else going on down there
You sound ripe for some travel! It's not a bad place to visit!
You may want to believe what you wrote because it helps those of us with contrary preferences to pretend that we're just better aligned to some rational truth or something, but no: there are many people in Texas and elsewhere who sincerely believe that each of those things is good and something that they want for their community.
The number or loudness of those people change when stirred up by politicians, and sometimes ideas that weren't widely considered previously are wholly seeded as part of a political strategy, but that doesn't really change that most people are fully sincere in their beliefs and that their beliefs can sometimes be radically different than your own.
"No one" was a figure of speech. Yes there are always some people who want all of these things, but there have been countless polls done in all these states on topics like abortion and there is always a clear majority that is in favor of more sensible laws. One example is for exceptions for rape, incest and mother's health etc., which upwards of 85%+ of Republicans support. Yet the laws they enact don't reflect this, because these same people will not vote for moderates.
Literal, exact, precise interpretations are for machines, not for men. And even with such precision we still often fail to communicate with machines.
Qualifying words are an oft overlooked tool in language. Especially when someone is presenting an idea you disagree with.
Humans often use analogies, exaggerations, representations, examples, and other linguistic tools to attempt to convey their points. But speech is far form simple. If you interpret words as they are, you will always fail to communicate. Words are an attempt at conveying the thoughts in one's head. Never trust the person that is bold enough to claim that they are impossible to misinterpret, because they are an immutable force and the main character in their own reality.
The OP didn't use any qualifying words, I would be happy to take the other side of this argument if they did. You're also lecturing me about a stance that I normally take and agree with. Apply your own logic to me, steelman my position, and figure out what position I'm actually taking.
>>>>>> No one in Texas wants porn bans, abortion bans, IVF bans, restrictive marijuana laws and everything else going on down there, but they will still enthusiastically vote for it to show party allegiance.
That is the quote.
It would be absolutely unreasonable to believe that 100% of Texans (or literally any demographic) is united on any issue.
You are correct that the OP did not use a qualifier, but that is not the only form of miscommunication I mentioned (this one is called "hyperbole", a form of exaggeration, which was explicitly mentioned). So if you're going to complain to me about "lecturing" you (I'm not), you should probably demonstrate a reasonable interpretation. You got downvoted because a lot of people are quite used to this extremely common pattern of speech. It is okay if you are not, but learn from it and move on instead of doubling down.
The federal Senate is 2 Senators per state, no voting representation for territories (places not in admitted states) or Washington DC. So Vermont and Wyoming, with populations around 600,000 each, have the same vote strength as California (39M) and Texas (31M) -- 1.2 million people equated to 70 million.
Gerrymandering ("from Gerry's salamander-shaped district") is the practice of the ruling party in any state drawing their districts for the federal House of Representatives so that their party wins multiple districts (by, say, 52-48%) and making the other party win a smaller number of districts (by 90-10%). Each district is required to have roughly the same number of people in it. The shaping is bad, but the per-population equality of representation is nearly optimal.
Academics generally conclude that of the 435 districts, no more than 40 or 50 are actually representative of the political demographics of the state as a whole.
Is the concept of electoral reform realistic within the US? I believe the gold standard at the moment is a multi party system with ranked choice voting.
I feel like the concept of having more choices to vote for would be appealing to most US voters - but I can't imagine such an initiative would be successful
Each state has an astounding degree of control over their own voting systems for federal elections. Maine and Alaska have chosen RCV in the last decade, and it seems to be working out well for them.
Some states, including New York, allow a candidate to be run simultaneously by several parties, and for voters to then vote for the candidate with a particular party endorsement. This nominally allows a small party to gain status -- say, if the Green Party (tiny) were to nominate Biden (unlikely, but bear with me) and he wins the presidency, then for the purposes of New York State, the Green Party would move closer to being a recognized major party.
The overriding problem is that the Constitution was written with a deliberate ignorance of the concept of parties -- so much so that in the original 1789 document, the runner-up of the Presidential race becomes Vice-President. That didn't work out well; fixed by the 12th amendment.
The other gigantic issue, that has only become clear in the last two decades, is that an astounding amount of the government runs on convention rather than regulation.
Fixing these things would require a significant restructuring of the Constitution, and that opens up doors to... everyone.
It also might be worth pointing out that while the Senate structurally favors low-population states (which in the US are more likely to be conservative), the Republicans currently have a higher proportion of seats in the House than the Senate.
I've lived in the deep south for a number of years. Problem is you're both right. Problem is there's a diverse set of opinions and it depends who you're going to come into contact with.
I'll say that I know quite a number of people who claim to be stout libertarians (a very common stance in the south and especially in Texas) and even be much more supportive of legalizing all drugs because "government bad, personal choice good" and "government shouldn't be a babysitter." YET I've seen those same people vote for those politicians. I've seen those politicians run on those platforms and then push such agendas and then people not really care about it. Not too different from the old "I didn't speak out because I wasn't x, but then there was no one left to speak for me" quote.
Truth is humans are full of hypocrisy, for better or worse. Some of this is so we can handle nuance in an approximate way without having to invest in the computation/effort to resolve those. It is a real thing though and we need to be nuanced to deal with it, including how we discuss it.
BUT there's also a clear and measurable phenomena where politicians are not acting as good representatives. You can find many polls on things like Marijuana laws, government provided health coverage, government pension plans (cough social security cough), paid family leave, corporations not paying their fair share of taxes, wealthy not paying their fair share, complexity of taxes, return free filing, and many other things. You can find Pew and Gallup polls on this stuff running back for years, showing majority approvals. The issue, is we quibble over nuance AND oversimplify the nuance. We often pretend that the optimization functions are the same or identically conditioned. Often the difference is coming down to a focus on positive rights vs negative rights in the conditioning of the linear program. Abortion might be a good example. Liberals try to minimize the harm while conditioning on the liberty of the mother while conservatives tend to have the inverse approach. Essentially liberals will give up liberty of the unborn in favor of the currently living while conservatives are willing to give up liberty of the currently living for the unborn. You cannot maximize both liberties of the living and the unborn at the same time, there has to be a trade-off. Both want surprisingly similar things, but we frame them as extreme opposites because we are not discussing the nuance and we're arguing while we work from a different set of base assumptions assuming that the other persons are operating under the same assumptions. Which makes it quite difficult to actually understand the other person's goals and intentions.
Thing is, people are happy to prey upon this complexity and difficulties in communicating. Knowingly or unknowingly. We are often unwitting players in this as it is so easy to get trapped into the mindset that others operate under the same premise that we do. Until we understand this, we are going to have extreme difficulties in communicating. Even if we want the same things and even if we want extremely similar outcomes. I'm sure many people here have had a "stupid argument" where you realize that you and the person you're passionately arguing with are on the exact same side, just expressing your views in different ways. It's often embarrassing and we laugh about it because we __are__ fucking idiots. Yes, this includes (especially) me. Don't listen to me, I'm a fucking idiot.
>No one in Texas wants porn bans, abortion bans, IVF bans, restrictive marijuana laws
I grew up extremely religious in Texas... I can assure you that there are plenty of people who want these things.
The good news is things are changing. Some members of my family who effectively spent their entire lives trying to overturn Roe, are now totally overwhelmed and distraught by the after effects, and what an awful person Donald Trump is. Truly a dog-that-caught-the-car situation.
The abortion ban in particular has me confused: A huge amount of people believe abortion means killing a baby and absolutely are for banning it entirely.
13 states (Texas included) had trigger laws already on the books to ban abortion if Roe v. Wade was ever overturned, and are now in effect. This was a big thing all over the place when it happened.
1st a. will be the least of our concerns when Ruth Bader Biden loses to orangeman who will change the flag, make a new loyalty test salute, and require documentation checkpoints every few miles.
Are guns a country-wide problem? I was offered a job in San Francisco but am scared of moving to the US because of stats like there being like 1.5 mass shootings per day.
Because they're a widely available part of the culture and are effective at enacting mass violence by those who want to, they've been used in what seems to be an endless stream of tragedies.
But these tragedies are not something any given person in the US is likely to ever encounter first-hand. It's a real big country and your frequency measure is more "geez, don't you thinn we should do something?!" more than "whelp, let's hope I don't get shot today"
As far as geographic difference and the prior commenter's statement, the biggest relevant difference for you would be that you will probably never see someone bearing a gun in San Fransisco and will almost certainly see many people doing over the course of any stay in Texas.
That's an internal cultural thing, and involves a combination of regional regulations and regional aesthetics. Both states are safe, though.
Frankly -- if this is an otherwise exciting opportunity for you, you really shouldn't let the gun thing get in your way.
The headline seems misleading. "Pornhub blocked in Texas" suggests Texas did the blocking, a better headline would be "Pornhub blocks users with Texas IPs"
The Texas legislation is effectively a block - there's no way for PH to verify the age of users entering the site in the way the legislation demands, but they face fines and legal action for not doing so. Catch-22, the only solution is to turn off access.
This is interesting. What about the Texas law makes it impossible for PH to comply if they were to otherwise decide that that they wanted to (which of course isn't likely)?
Yeah, if you make a bad faith effort to comply you deserve to be sued.
If you did your honest reasonable best, a suit shouldn't go anywhere. Systems aren't perfect. They aren't really expected to be either.
Given the way the porn industry historically operates by addicting the young and the huge levels of abuse towards women. I'm not holding my breath for good faith efforts.
Maybe one hack would be to have a binary "restricted" flag communicated through the ISP's reverse IP lookup (probably very slow). It wouldn't put any personal information at risk, but it would probably open Pandora's box, except that Pandora's box had hope inside of it.
1) IP address from "Restricted Region" connects to website.
2) Server attempts a reverse IP lookup and waits for reply from ISP's DNS.
3) If DNS reply contains "restricted" (on behalf of the subscriber), server has to restrict access, etc.
> there's no way for PH to verify the age of users entering the site in the way the legislation demands
What exactly are those requirements, and how is there "no way" for Pornhub to satisfy what "the legislation demands"?
I ask because I'm tired of seeing (in general, not just PornHub) deceptive rephrasing of "we don't want to" as "it's impossible for us to." Companies too often take the attitude that they're entitled to their business model or being able to push externalities onto others, but that's obnoxious BS propaganda.
Edit: So according to the OP, the law "requires [PornHub] to verify the age of all visitors using a government-issued ID or 'public or private transactional data.'" I'm pretty sure they've already implemented that to verify the identify of performers (https://help.pornhub.com/hc/en-us/articles/19159382668435-Tr...), after much kicking and screaming, in the wake of that Nicholas Kristof article a few years ago. So a pretty straightforward implementation would be to require user accounts to view (at least for Texas), push users through PornHub's existing age verification flow, then give them access.
A much better way of phrasing my comment, thank you.
It's perfectly valid for PH to say "we don't believe the requirements of the law are reasonable so we're choosing to not do business in Texas rather than comply" - but that's a very different conversation than "the requirements the law imposes on us/other adult websites are impossible to satisfy from a technical perspective".
> I ask because I'm tired of seeing (in general, not just PornHub) deceptive rephrasing of "we don't want to" as "it's impossible for us to." Companies too often take the attitude that they're entitled to their business model or being able to push externalities onto others, but that's obnoxious BS propaganda.
Somebody posted their message to users from Texas.
I know you are just talking in general, but in this specific case, it doesn’t appear that they actually say they can’t do it. The idea that they can’t do it just seems to be a misunderstanding from somebody posting on this site.
I agree in general that it is annoying that companies say they “can’t” do something, mixing up “incompatible with my business mode” and “incompatible with reality.” But I don’t see anything like that in their comment.
WRT reusing their implementation for the actors, I’m not sure, is that possible? The actors upload videos of themselves so it ought to be easy to verify the fact that the face on the ID matches the face in the video, right?
In the case of a user, somebody could easily steal their parent’s ID or use a computer that someone else had left logged in, right? I mean, I don’t know how any of that works, but I could see why the site would rather not risk it.
I mean, this is a site full of webdevs, would anyone here want to take a chance at implementing something like this in-house, before best methods have been discovered? I suspect most people would rather wait for a lawsuit-tested turnkey solution. So, “can’t” in this context could mean something like: we aren’t aware of an existing solution that fits inside our legal risk tolerance. That’s still a business objection rather than a laws-of-physics one, but it seems a lot more reasonable.
The upload verification afaik requires:
- copy of ID
- clear photo of self holding up a hand-written sign saying either PornHub or a random phrase that is given
After that they manually compare the ID and photo.
But I can imagine there is going to be a market for verified accounts if access is given this way, and they can't do this process on every login. Plus it will require logins to access content in general, while I think most PH visitors never log in.
There is likely also a black market for the browsing history of verified accounts, or even just the verification act - for blackmail purposes. So the risk of a breach of such information would be another risk that the operator would have to manage.
Suppose it really can't be done cheaply enough that Pornhub could pay for it and still make a profit. Possible in theory, but not possible within their budget. Would you then call it impossible or onerous? Which term describe that situation, in your opinion?
FWIW I've no idea how expensive commercial age verification is. I'm just wondering why none of the commenters seem to consider the aspect of cost, and picked a random commenter to ask.
That answer really clarifies the thread for me. Thanks.
Now I read it as some people treating Pornhub as obviously similar to the gambling sites and others obviously different, basing their different viewpoints on the different foundations, and not stating those foundations because they're obvious.
FWIW I can see how login-required porn sites are similar to gambling sites. I'm open on whether mostly-without-login sites are.
As of TLS 1.3, the ClientHello (which includes the Server Name Identification (SNI) extension) is still sent in plaintext. There is a current draft for encrypted client hellos[0], but I don't think its adoption is widespread. QUIC appears to encrypt the ClientHello; however, it does not protect from an attacker which can observe the initial connection packets[1].
Man, I hope that by paying for something with my credit card I'm not giving the vendor that much access to my information. I kind of assumed the point of a credit card was to be a third party and put me at less risk, not more.
IIRC, the legislation that's being passed in red states defines age verification as the service provider being provided with 2 pieces of valid government photo ID
(1) provide digital identification; or
(2) comply with a commercial age verification system
that verifies age using:
(A) government-issued identification; or
(B) a commercially reasonable method that relies
on public or private transactional data to verify the age of an
individual.
Unclear to me what the transactional data means, and if a charging a credit card would suffice, but it does not require 2 forms of photo ID.
Most people don't even have two forms of photo id in the US. Usual identification for jobs involves deeds/bills (no photo), pay stubs (no photos), social security (no photo, usually), and birth certificate (no photo).
The only major form of photo ID is a state/driver's license and passports and I think only 30% of the US has Passorts. It's such a big country that you can reasonably never require it and still travel more than the average EU citizen.
You can also fill out a form with your employer to get a photo form of employee authorization, but you're Sol of you're freelance/gig economy.
Theoretically they could sure, it would just be expensive, labor-intensive and put them at risk of criminal penalties if their process failed or broke down. Also the number of people willing to send their ID to a porn site is very small so whether they complied or not, they will not be getting much traffic from Texas. Its "impossible" from a common business sense perspective, not a theoretical perspective.
> Also the number of people willing to send their ID to a porn site is very small
Not saying you’re wrong (I certainly don’t have any data to the contrary), but this isn’t intuitive to me. Don’t tons of people send their credit card (which is linked to their SSN) to PornHub? From there seems like a small step to also send ID?
Not usually. Porn sites tend to use a 3rd party payment processor to manage funds (often sites dedicated to working with adult sites). So you don't get Pornhub on your billing statement, but something like Probiller or whatever.
As I said, they could but they don't want to. You said there is no way for PH to verify ages the way the legislation demands, but that plainly isn't true.
When it comes to legislators demanding changes to technology, many things are impossible. This isn't one of them. It's only cumbersome to their business model; boo hoo..
Leaving aside free speech and spurious moral panic concerns for a moment — isn’t digital ID verification a solved problem? Getaround has to verify my ID before I can drive, and I’ve had to do digital ID verification for a number of other apps. This doesn’t really seem like a question of whether ID verification is possible or practical. AFAICT it definitely is.
I will verify my identity for unemployment benefits, but not for this. It's only a matter of time before a breach happens, especially since I am not verifying with a local government but rather a private entity, who do not have strict mandated security measures (or at least are likely to violate them).
Then check the ID and then throw the PII away. All I’m saying is that there are absolutely ways to do this, and I keep hearing that these companies “can’t” accomplish this, but it just isn’t true.
If you want to buy a copy of Playboy from a newsstand, in general, you’re going to get asked for ID at the counter. It’s been like that for a very long time and nobody seems to have a real problem with it. It’s unclear why people think this kind of requirement just goes away if it’s on the Internet.
I would not feel that my privacy was any less threatened by a promise to discard my information after use.
The difference between the Internet and the guy at the newsstand is that you know the guy at the newsstand doesn't have a photographic memory, a replicated database in multiple availability zones, SLAs with IDV providers which are vague about retention policies, or marketing partners who have special offers just for you.
At a news stand you open you wallet wave it at them without evan taking the card out of the sleave and they hand you your purchase you hand them a $20. no ID is kept on file, no purchase/veiw history is kept, no record of the payment is made there at no middlemen and no chance of it being stolen by hacker and used for ID theft or blackmail. And most importantly no checking with a government database. Comparing in person purchase to online is unreasonable.
No, I’m saying verify the user’s ID, don’t save the PII at all, and then authenticate the user for some length of time. Or let users make an anonymous account and have a bit in their profile that says the ID was verified, without saving any of the ID information. There’s no technical reason you couldn’t do this.
> 129B.002(b) A commercial entity that performs the age verification
required by Subsection (a) or a third party that performs the age
verification required by Subsection (a) may not retain any
identifying information of the individual.
So I suppose the court would take them at their word unless there were some evidence presented that they did not check ID or accepted an obvious fake (e.g. a sting operation), just like in person.
I don't understand why everyone gets so up in arms about this topic without ever reading the laws being written. Absent any information, you might guess that the system ought to work exactly the way it does in person too, which seems to be the case. This was true of the (Utah?) parental controls law discussed on HN a couple weeks ago too. People start asking all these what-ifs about things the law explicitly thought about, and handled in a reasonable way.
Generally, "prove you didn't break the law" isn't how the law works. If there's no evidence that they broke the law, then there's no issue. If the government gets a 16-year-old to participate in a sting operation to get evidence that they're not checking id... well then if they provide porn to a 16 year old, they broke the law. Lawyers can hash out where the line is on "reasonable" steps to check an ID/what is a reasonably convincing fake/whether appropriate steps were taken to check that the person presenting the ID is the person on the ID. Businesses checking ID for adult-restricted items is not new ground. Collecting and presenting evidence of people breaking this kind of law is not new either.
This doesn't cover the very real digging for extra charges that occurs when someone is subjected to the legal system. We see people all the time get caught for minor offenses and then upon further examination also are found guilty of loads of other things. The fact that parallel construction exists makes it even more egregious.
I even agree with you, violations of this won't be anyone's primary charge, but I might disagree that we should conclude that its existence won't affect people.
Besides, like a lot of these laws, the primary consequence is a chilling effect where porn sites aren't accessible and in that light it's an effective law.
> Suspecting the Washington-based hospital of providing gender-affirming care to Texas children, which is now banned in Texas, AG Ken Paxton issued investigative subpoenas demanding medical information.
Why wouldn’t they do the same sort of harrassing digging in this case?
Probably because there's nothing to dig because the law explicitly bans storing information. If they wanted to bury companies in legal work assembling records, they probably should've required them to keep records instead of requiring them not to.
If they were going to, why not do that kind of harassment digging with records they are required to keep about the performers?
Looking at the article, the statement they display to blocked users could do with either a change in tone to be more legally formal or a change in tone to be more approachable to less-literate users - bullet points, multiple headings etc. Right now that message is the worst of both worlds and will get a very low conversion rate.
I've been away from this line of work for over a year, though. Does anybody here who has current experience in effective messaging, legal communication or marketing want to read the message Mindgeek put up and give their two cents on it for our entertainment?
As a technologist the most interesting part to me is they bring up "Device based age verification" and I am very curious what the current state of that is. Some initial research shows that it is only at the exploratory stage (according to my 10 whole seconds of searching) but it definitely seems interesting.
In NL we have IDIN. A website can use it to verify age or address information. I don't think that any porn-websites are using it, but technically this should do the job.
IDIN is set up by all the Dutch banks. You check in via your own bank using an IDIN link. IDIN will do an age-check to verify that you're 18 or older. IDIN can verify age, name, address and contact info. You need a bank account, and the bank has checked your identity and age, so this is guaranteed to work.
Maybe you don't want that the bank knows that you visit a porn website, but that's another question.
From a logistics one, devices can be shared and it is very easy to share to a minor (which is what theses laws supposedly target). Or have multiple accounts on one device.it seems like a lot of work for less results..
Here is the full text on pornhub.com if accessed from within Texas:
"Dear user,
As you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. Not only does this impinge on the rights of adults to access protected speech, it fails strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas’s stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors.
While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, providing identification every time you want to visit an adult platform is not an effective solution for protecting users online, and in fact, will put minors and your privacy at risk.
Attempting to mandate age verification without any means to enforce at scale gives platforms the choice to comply or not, leaving thousands of platforms open and accessible. As we've seen in other states, such bills have failed to protect minors, by driving users from those few websites which comply, to the thousands of websites, with far fewer safety measures in place, which do not comply. Very few sites are able to compare to the robust Trust and Safety measures we currently have in place. To protect minors and user privacy, any legislation must be enforced against all platforms offering adult content.
Unfortunately, the Texas law for age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous. Not only will it not actually protect children, but it will also inevitably reduce content creators’ ability to post and distribute legal adult content and directly impact their ability to share the artistic messages they want to convey with it.
The safety of our users is one of our biggest concerns. We believe that the only effective solution for protecting minors and adults alike is to verify users’ age on their device and to either deny or allow access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that verification.
We call on all adult sites to comply with the law. Until the real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Texas. In doing so, we are complying with the law, as we always do, but hope that governments around the world will implement laws that actually protect the safety and security of users.
We encourage you to:
Learn more about device-based age verification* solutions that make the internet safer while also respecting your privacy.
Contact your representatives and demand device-based verification solutions that make the internet safer while also respecting your privacy.
*Device-Based Age Verification refers to any approach to age verification where the personal information that is used to verify the user’s age is either shared in-person at an authorized retailer, inputted locally into the user’s device, or stored on a network controlled by the device manufacturer or the supplier of the device’s operating system. Whether through pre-installed content blocking and filtering software, the disabling of web-browsing permissions, or other means, the user will then be prevented from accessing age-restricted content over the internet unless they are age-verified. To come to fruition, such an approach requires the cooperation of manufacturers and operating-system providers."
"Device-Based Age Verification" raises my software freedom hackles. I could imagine public perception for things like Google's Web Environment Integrity being bolstered by this kind of call to action.
The power of "think of the children" arguments for "normies" is already strong when it comes to encryption and privacy. I can't imagine standing up for software freedom if it runs counter to "think of the children" will fare well.
Well, if implemented properly I think it's OK. Back in the Internet Explorer days, Microsoft used to block adult sites on device based on the RTA header adult sites added themselves. I think if adult sites were required to use the RTA header and device manufacturers/OS/browser makers forced to obey it; it's an OK compromise.
All the well known adult sites are already using it, it's just up to the browser makers to support it again... and besides, with on-device AI they don't even need to only rely on the RTA header if they want to make their implementation more advanced.
Tech industry has long burned through its goodwill. I don't trust that such securities will only stop at "adult sites". I don't trust the implementation to only verify the RTA header and not be used to track a bunch of other data, on the web and on your computer habits.
It doesn't even fix the "problem". Multiple accounts can use the same device so hardware level checks either have to block all or nothing. These kinds of tech forget people share devices, at home and to each other
With something like the RTA label, the site sends the header, so it can't be used to track you. The browser would then, upon seeing that header, call an OS-provided parental controls library which could e.g. do nothing (parental controls not enabled), block the content, or prompt the user to put in an unlock password. It's not a hard problem. TVs and video game consoles already have this kind of system.
Tvs are the exact fear I have for such tech. All the stuff you can't turn off or has been argued to even turn itself on after explicitly saying not too. It's not a hard problem so they'll find a way to make it harder and more profitable.
Modern consoles don't really have publicly accessible web browsers so that's another way to solve the problem. 17+ rated games would simply check the age on your profile instead of needing a device centric verification.
I'm not sure what you have to fear with the TV analogy. The biggest issue with parental controls in TVs was that no one knows they're there to turn on. The design was always that TV channels broadcast the ratings information, and if you configured it and set a password, then the TV would block any content outside of the rating you configured it to allow. That's exactly how the RTA header would function.
It's all client-side decision making based on server provided metadata. There's nothing to track. Every TV in the US has been required to work this way for over 20 years.
>I'm not sure what you have to fear with the TV analogy.
It's a tangential discussion that doesn't have to do with blocking content.
As it is these days, TV's are a device that with no control of my own chooses to send telemetry data back home in order to sell my data to 3rd parties for ads. This subsidizes "smart" TV's, but given that there are no more mid-high end "dumb" TV's, this feels less like a choice than a mandate of the industry.
On top of all this, there has been murmur of dark patterns related to making sure your TV is internet-connected, which includes trying to connect to an open network after you opt out of a network connection, and having unlisted 4/5G modems built into the tv that are unusable by the consumer but otherwise made to send data out, even if the consumer does not connect to a network. I'm honestly sort of surprised GDPR hasn't come down on this yet.
----
So the header check you describe with computer devices aren't necessarily a concern by itself. But it's a slippery slope one that has been exploited by so many companies so consistently when it comes to matters like this. The world over still hasn't properly litigated to make sure that companies can't simply grab whatever data they want and sell it, so we're in a game of cat and mouse until then. And as a mouse I simply see this piece of cheese with a looming shadow above it.
How is this enforceable if a company does not physically operate in any capacity in that state? The worst I thought could happen is local ISPs might block the site, but otherwise why shut it off yourselves?
I didn't think one state could compel a business in another state to do anything whatsoever.
The rules for online businesses usually do not need you to operate physically in a state. For example, CCPA in California, is enforceable if you buy/sell/share personal information of California residents and generate revenue from it, even if your business is not in California physically. You can be sued and the state will pursue fines if you are in violation of the law.
Similarly, even if Pornhub doesn't operate physically in Texas, if they make money off of users residing in Texas, you are "conducting business" in Texas and therefore the laws are applicable to you as any other business.
I assume this would be more complex than that. Logging (storing personal data), ad revenue from viewers in TX, etc could easily make this a much larger task than the revenue is worth. Even if those were done, you’re then serving content to an entire state completely for free, which makes no business sense.
Not if your business isn't registered in that state. Just because you acquired personal information from CA residents doesn't mean they gave it to you directly.
> The CCPA applies to businesses that “collect” or “sell”[1] personal information of California residents and that meet one of the three statutory thresholds described below, even if they are not organized under California law and even if they have no physical presence in California.
In terms of jurisdiction: Texas would have specific jurisdiction due to business activities in the state. (See also "minimum contacts" and "long arm judgement.")
As far as enforceability:
* There is extradition for criminal offenses. (In practice, usually only for felonies.)
* Texas can prohibit its residents/businesses from doing business with companies with judgments render against them.
* Texas can issue warrants and then arrest violators if they step into the state.
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States very often restrict goods/services sold in their state. Like, you can't sell a gun to a buyer in California, without going through a 10-day waiting period, even if you do not live in California and comply with federal regulations.
They can't prevent buying outside of California to someone who lives in California if their state/country laws allow it. California could setup roadblocks and search everyone to contraband.
It works quite well in practice, as KYC (know your customer) is in order for every state that has legalized it. Typically, a government-issued id#, SSN (last 4), and perhaps a license photo or selfie are required to open an account.
Pornhub tries to keep their brand positioned inside the law and away from politics so that they can retain dominance of any legal market for online porn and serve porn consumers of all political stripes. They're relatively risk-averse, avoiding insult and heated political confrontation over stuff like this.
Even if there wasn't a sure enforcement method, they're not the company that would risk court drama to find out.
It may not be enforceable but it probably isn't worth the legal risk especially if any of your employees might ever want to travel to that state. Same reason why you wouldn't want to be running a web site that's openly defying European law if you might want to visit the EU someday.
As mentioned in the article, Pornhub isn't literally blocked, rather they're serving a page containing a statement protesting Texas' law along with a request for users to contact their representatives, to any Texas IP.
> How is this enforceable if a company does not physically operate in any capacity in that state?
Enforce what? Texas took no step to block them.
> Pornhub Disables Website in Texas Over Age-Verification Law
Pornhub blocked themselves in Texas. It's like all these US sites preventing EU users from visiting them, just because they don't want to be GDPR compliant.
The government takes no steps to prevent lots of law infractions, that doesn't mean they won't punish you for not adhering. As is the nature of laws.
> Pornhub blocked themselves in Texas. It's like all these US sites preventing EU users from visiting them, just because they don't want to be GDPR compliant.
Yes, preventing yourself from breaking a law is generally wise. What point do you believe you're making in these comments?
I don’t know if MG changed their approach to the issue or if Texas is under less regulatory capture than the UK but the difference in approach is interesting.
Pornhub should purchase and publish the search history and browsing habits of Texas government officials in lieu of the usual content. Name and shame the hypocritical bastards.
I've often wondered if the american hatred of what we europeans love is born out of a real lived experience of vastly more gov. oppression than we have.
We have no HSAs, no three or four layer tax systems, no governments trying to legislate really bizarre religious issues, no paranoid militarised police, no busy-body suburban sprawl of interfering no-bodies.
Here, the prices in our stores are what we pay; our taxex are handled for us; the "invasion" of the government, eg., in healthcare, is to unburden us from concern.
it seems "society and government" in the US is preoccupied with burdening people, and "micro-oppressions" of bureaucracy and interference
American issues are deeply rooted in christianity. Separation of church and state is unfortunately not really a thing here, despite it being inshrined in our constitution.
that's the point of sep' of church and state. it's to protect the church and keep it religious.
We have no sep' in the UK and our most sophisticated atheists are the appointed bishops of the church of Englandm (selected by, iirc, our prime minister)
Though I don't think this entirely explains the difference. The same could be said for some EU countries:
- "Irish issues are deeply rooted in Christianity"
- "Italian issues are deeply rooted in Christianity"
- "Polish issues are deeply rooted in Christianity"
- "Hungarian issues are deeply rooted in Christianity"
It simply doesn't explain why the USA is so different from Ireland in terms of public policy.
-----------------------------------------------
I think a bigger issue is which countries people (even europeans!) mean to include when they say "Europe". Usually they mean either "Northern Europe" and/or "Western Europe", or sometimes even a small subset of those (just the richest ones -- even Spain/Italy/Portugal are preferentially excluded sometimes depending on the topic). Some people probably started to get uncomfortable seeing "Poland" and "Hungary" up above, and have already steeled themselves for any further analysis involving "those" European countries. Many certainly wouldn't generally want to have to include Moldova, North Macedonia, Albania, and Belarus in their most casual definitions of "Europe", at least when comparing how good they have things things compared to the USA.
Breaking down "We have no HSAs, no three or four layer tax systems, no governments trying to legislate really bizarre religious issues, no paranoid militarised police, no busy-body suburban sprawl of interfering no-bodies.", I could look at two of these:
- no governments trying to legislate really bizarre religious issues
And counter with Poland and Hungary having some serious recent issues with abortion legislation/enforcement and LGBT freedoms. These are both "EU" nations, so it's hard to claim "Oh they're not part of Europe" but what is often implied is "Oh I wasn't talking about that Europe". But that's not a fair comparison because when we say "USA" we don't just mean California.
- no paranoid militarised police
I get what the commenter is saying. Yes, the overzealous policing situation is generally worse across the USA than the EU. But we can find regular abuse by police officers against Roma communities across Bulgaria, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Romania, and Slovakia (once again, people will often say "Oh when I say Europe I'm not talking about Bulgaria or Romania or Slovakia", as if the USA could ever just exclude the ten worst states when talking about "USA" things as well).
We also see increased militarization of police in Germany with the BFE+ anti-terror police units. And many protestors of the Gilets Jaune in France certainly saw the results of clashing with increasingly militarized police as well[0][1], including armored transport vehicles. To which some people will say "oh that's not the police, that's the Gendarmerie", which is a bit of an odd argument as that's specifically a domestic police force, and one that is explicitly militarized. What they mean by this is that the "average" police officer a citizen is likely to encounter will be less militarized, and that's true. But saying "we have no militarized police" is pretty off-the-mark.
“Separation of church and state” appears nowhere in the Constitution. The First Amendment says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…”
An “establishment of religion” refers to established churches, of which there were several in existence when the first amendment was ratified: https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/established-churches.... What it’s saying is that Congress cannot establish a national church, or regulate the state established churches. The Constitution clearly doesn’t prohibit even state official churches. Massachusetts—one of the most important states at the time of the founding—had an established church until the 1820s!
What isn’t in the Constitution is French-style “separation of church and state,” where religion cannot be a motivation for laws Congress is otherwise entitled to pass. Congressmen/women can vote for laws based on Christian beliefs just as they could vote for laws based on neoliberal or socialist beliefs.
My comment above is talking about the First Amendment. When Congress approved the First Amendment in 1789, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and arguably South Carolina still had established state religions. The First Amendment simply prohibited Congress from messing with established state religions, or creating its own. It didn’t create a “separation of church and state.”
And there is no other amendment that created a “separation of church and state.” You won’t find anything like that phrase in the Constitution or its amendments.
There is a jurisprudential concept called incorporation that SCOTUS largely adheres to borne from the 14th amendment, but for various reasons that’s actually a can of worms I don’t want to debate so instead I encourage you to learn more about it and make up your own mind.
> It didn’t create a “separation of church and state.”
That said, even if we were still under only the original Constitution plus the first 10 amendments, this statement would still be incorrect because State in this case refers to the Federal government which is a state in political philosophy terms which is what this phrase is using, but counterintuitively it’s not a State under US law. The Federal state is the operating one here, because the Constitution plus the first 10 amendments are laws for running the Federal government. On the subject of the States themselves, it says very very little, not nothing, just almost nothing. At least until you get to the doctrine of incorporation I mentioned above.
Most States also have their own form of separation of church and State under their own constitutions. They don’t tend to put it in terms of “separation of church and State” but that is what they do.
The issue is that the Establishment Clause doesn’t say anything about “separation of church and state.” It’s about regulating or creating established state churches—I.e., establishments of religion.
The concept of “separation of church and state” is much broader, and comes from the writings of Thomas Jefferson—who admired revolutionary France and its secularism. But it has nothing to do with either the Constitution or the First Amendment. If we are picking random quotes from founding fathers, you could reach the exact opposite conclusion by quoting Adams instead: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
It so happens that, because the Establishment Clause is a specific limit on the federal government’s ability to interfere with the state established churches that it makes no sense to incorporate the establishment clause into the states via the 14th amendment. (Just as it makes no sense to incorporate the tenth amendment against the states.)
But my point remains even if you’re just talking about the federal government. The Establishment Clause is just not getting at the “separation of church and state” concept.
I think you and I can agree that the Establishment Clause is often read over-broadly, but the First Amendment is a list of prohibitions on Congress.
Quoting the relevant part here:
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
So reinterpreting that in modern words: Congress shall not establish a Church of the United States and Congress shall not govern religion. The phrasing comes from Jefferson, and you are right that it is ex post facto the Constitution, but the idea is very Puritan and Jefferson himself was referencing Roger Williams (who established the first Baptist Church in America over 150 years prior) and his idealistic "Wall of Separation"[1]. Even restating the establishment clause with terminology, I can't read it any other way but as a conceptual separation of Church and State. The language does not need to be literal to have this effect.
Your quote from Adams doesn't contradict this either because it reads like an assumption that the Constitution does not need to do more than this to address religion because the American people are already moral and religious, therefore to the extent that it does so, it is adequate, but it would not necessarily work well for a different people.
Originally, it was plain old-fashioned colonialism, having to pay tribute to an overseas king that wasn't doing anything for you to fund wars between France and England that didn't involve you.
But that was a long time ago. Uncharitably, US southern states got up in arms (quite literally) about the federal government forcing them to end slavery and then later forcing them to integrate schools and serve blacks and whites at the same businesses. Charitably, there is a fair amount of legitimately bad stuff the federal government has done, i.e. Ruby Ridge, Waco, assassinating Fred Hampton, the red scare, interning of the Japanese, everything that was ever done to natives, trampling all over Hawaii.
I don't think you can just say universally one way or the other works better. The US system is designed for it to be damn near impossible to ever have true tyranny, at the cost of an ineffective government. European governments tend to take the opposite approach. Right now, that is arguably working largely in Europe's favor. In the past, well, Europe had fascism and started multiple world wars and colonized over half the world. The US has certainly done some bad stuff, but not really anything quite like that, so the "avoid descent into outright autocracy" has largely worked out so far.
There is, of course, no guarantee this will continue to work out in the future, either. Up until now, the basic idea has been the only organizations out there with the power to do things like fascism and world wars are states. As multinational private corporations become increasingly large and powerful, that may not remain the case, and the US does very little to tame them compared to what it does to tame the government.
I’m not an economist but what else do you propose we do with the government that’s thoroughly corrupt, and that’s charging $1T every 100 days on our collective credit card, to immediately piss it away on the most inane BS imaginable? What makes you believe that putting it in charge of $4.7T “healthcare system” we have in this country is going to improve, rather than worsen the matters?
That is a slogan, to justify doing more bad things. The ends justify the means, and making up a reason. "Of course the government is corrupt, hence I'm justified in also being corrupt."
If there is actual corruption and proof, it should be brought forward.
Strangely enough, this is done, and Republican/Right have a much higher percentage of being the corrupt party. Even though this is their rally cry.
If you don't see it, you not going to, so I'm not going to try to change your mind. Keep going as you are then, but keep in mind that it's not the ultra rich nor the poor who will be paying down those trillions. It'll be _you_. Each man, woman and child in the US already owes $100K. Bear that in mind when contemplating whether the government is corrupt, and whether you should let it borrow even more for no apparent benefit. Because frankly, I don't see the benefit, and I ain't going to pay all that. I'm going to retire elsewhere.
I see. You are equating national debt to corruption? That is a financial discussion. Supply/Demand, markets, investment, accounting. You'd be surprised how much 'free' markets need support to function.
I thought you were talking about actual corruption, like giving your cousin the local contract to build a bridge and getting a kick back.
It is hard to discuss these things when one side is just chanting a simple slogan.
Democrats do try to invest in society more, and sometimes that takes on more debt to do that, but that isn't the definition of the word 'corruption'.
Republicans do tend to give loans to 'friends' and get kickbacks. That is real 'corruption' and is documented in criminal cases.
Where does the money go? Why are we spending trillions on countless and unnecessary wars? Why does it cost $100B to build high speed rail between SF and LA? Why does it cost $1M to outfit a simple intersection with 4 traffic lights? Why are we spending $4.5T a year on non-functional “healthcare”? Why is it that our politicians get cushy “do nothing” sinecures after they leave “public service”? Etc, etc, etc. Until you start asking these questions yourself you won’t see the world for what it really is.
Learn what “Uniparty” is, and then maybe the clouds will part and you will see that both “parties” are really just one lobbyist controlled party which is really efficient at robbing you and depriving your children and grandchildren of a decent future. You’ll continue to be very confused until you see that by and large what we have in this country is an illusion of democracy and no matter who you vote for, the wars continue. Obama was bombing something like 7 countries at the time when he received his Nobel. The only president to not start any new wars in the last several decades won his election accidentally because the Uniparty got too cocky.
Sorry. I tend to agree with this sentiment. But it is so hard to tell what people really believe these days.
Maybe you'd be surprised, maybe not, but a large number of people expressing this exact view, will also say that the only one that can save us is Trump, he is the only one that can break this cycle. Then they will still just vote for Republicans and consent to be lead along and fall in line with the same things you are pointing out. Lambs to the slaughter in their loyalty.
[e] A lot of it is deeply rooted in American culture, the founding of the country, and a culture of individual independence/reliance on the self. In regard to this pornography thing, it's really not related to any of that; it's more of an evangelicals versus... I guess everyone who's less-than-evangelical thing, which largely splits along red versus blue party lines in the south.
> the UK's official church only appoints atheist; it would be impolite to appoint someone who actually believed in god
The Anglican Church doesn't believe in God? That's quite an argument. The U.K. still has legally required prayer in schools! https://www.tes.com/magazine/news/general/schools-could-be-i.... Many schools follow that law, even if it's not usually enforced.
> the UK hasnt banned porn; and despite some attempts, such extreme levels of intrusion would provoke a massive political backlash
Median US household income is ~$75k. For married households with that income and a ~$30k standard deduction, they will pay an overall federal tax rate of around 7%. For single households with that income and a standard deduction of ~$15k, they'll pay federal tax of around 12%.
10-12% is a high state tax rate, so add that on. (Most high tax states graduate tax by income and wouldn't apply these top rates to $75k income households, but nevermind that.)
1% is a high city tax rate.
10% sales tax isn't unheard of, but sales tax also does not apply to all income -- only spending, and only non-exempt spending. (And usually you also don't see 10% sales tax rates in high income tax states; it's one or the other.)
The end result is south of 30% for the median household, even in high tax states. Nowhere near 50%.
The UK was in the process of requiring age verification for online pornography in 2018. One of the reasons the law fell through is because MindGeek’s age verification system (which news reports claimed to already be in use in Germany) was going to end up becoming a de facto monopoly, with all the privacy concerns that implies.
> I've often wondered if the american hatred of what we europeans love is born out of a real lived experience of vastly more gov. oppression than we have.
What is it that "Europeans" love that Americans "hate"?
Social security. Public education. Public transportation. Walkable cities. Strict gun regulation. Not spending half of our budget in the military and police. Laws that apply to rich people. Slavery (in prison) and child labor (in farms) not protected by laws and constitution. Not relying on wars to impulse the economy. Not having our city centers crawling with desperate, dispossessed people. Probably there’s more.
> Social security. Public education. Public transportation. Walkable cities. Strict gun regulation. Not spending half of our budget in the military and police. Laws that apply to rich people. Slavery (in prison) and child labor (in farms) not protected by laws and constitution. Not relying on wars to impulse the economy. Not having our city centers crawling with desperate, dispossessed people. Probably there’s more.
Well it seems, just like Americans, Europeans love age verification laws:
I think this is really my favorite takeaway from the Cato Institute's study/ranking/index. Despite being #50 in personal freedom, Texas ranked #6 for most economic freedom. But even for things like "Personal travel freedom", half the sub-ranking was based on ALPR presence and seat belt laws. Somehow Texas ranked dead last for that, even though they allow people to ride in the back of pickup trucks without any seatbelt, and that's illegal in a lot of other states.
It's nice to see these comprehensive categorizations, where I can prompt myself to ask "How much do I care about this particular freedom vs. that one?"
Cato's a pretty well-known libertarian think tank. Not saying they are right or wrong or that your choice of words was intentional, but calling them "The conservative Cato Institute" feels a little iffy.
"Libertarian think tank says Texas sucks for personal freedom" has very different vibe than "Conservative think tank says Texas sucks for personal freedom"
American libertarianism, of which Cato is perhaps the premier example, is a somewhat extreme right wing belief system. Despite not being high control authoritarian like the other strains of conservativism in America, it is still decidedly conservative. We just have an interesting taxonomy of conservative ideologies here, from the dominant strain of theocratic fascism currently in vogue with the GOP, to the anti-regulation Galts like Ron/Rand Paul.
Everyone has a conception of “freedom” that excludes conduct that’s “wrong.” Nobody thinks you should be “free” to engage in wrongdoing. You just disagree with Texans about what’s wrong or harmful.
That stat is from 2018. If you extrapolate the trend, it’s likely a different story.
A big chunk of my fellow countrymen also think trump is worth re-electing so I really don’t value their opinions at all. Huge swath of this nation is insane.
Can someone who understands Texas well help characterize the values and political behavior of it?
As an outsider, I only have incomplete impressions:
* Personal liberty is highly valued.
* Pro individual ownership of guns, as well as self-defense.
* Oil is a big part of the economy.
* Socially conservative overall, with exception of some enclaves of more liberal or progressive values.
* Large percentage of people identifying as Christian.
* Centralized editorial influence over school textbooks, for not just Texas but the nation.
* Aggressive anti-abortion push.
Apropos of this post, I'm interested in whether there are conventions over how conflicting values are reconciled (e.g., if anti-porn is driven by social conservative values, how does that override personal liberty values).
>Large percentage of people identifying as Christian.
This is likely a large driving factor of this ban. Despite the mantra of "separation of church and state", US as a whole has so much religion built into government and its people (our pledge has the line "one nation, under God". Our currency has "in God we trust) that it very much influences policy.
>if anti-porn is driven by social conservative values, how does that override personal liberty values
If we wanna be frank: sexism. If the adult industry were mostly male escorts and the abortion laws involved vasectomies, these laws would never even be put to the floor.
Women in US congress are at an all time high, but is still only 28%. So issues involving women's right still don't have representation proportional to its population. Doublethink isnt the biggest issue here, sadly.
The "personal liberty" is a rhetorical shield for protecting a certain kind of person and the things that person wants to do. If you don't fit that mold, your personal liberty is of little importance to the state of Texas.
> I'm interested in whether there are conventions over how conflicting values are reconciled (e.g., if anti-porn is driven by social conservative values, how does that override personal liberty values).
The convention is if it helps my (perceived) tribe, good, and if it hurts the other tribe, good.
It has nothing to do with the US or Texas. Just human nature. People express conflicting thoughts, ideas, or actions because it benefits them.
In fact, a little bit of inconsistency to benefit your tribe is a good signal to others in the tribe that you are willing to break rules to benefit yourself and/or whichever tribe you might find yourself in.
Because it's not 'Texas' in aggregate but Abbot and the christofascist wing of the Republican party that want to turn the state into the Republic of Gilead. He's in a pissing contest with Ron DeSantis to see who can be crueler to anyone who doesn't fit his mold.
(I've lived in Texas for uhhhh five years now, in Austin.)
You have to understand that Texas is a big place. Like any big place, there is significant diversity. The stuff you've said is what the government likes to project, but isn't really representative of the population as a whole.
(Furthermore, this is confounded by certain issues playing out very differently in Texas than elsewhere: the left is more likely to like guns, for example.)
For example:
> * Personal liberty is highly valued.
This is what they say, but not what they do. The state is constantly passing laws that restrict the freedoms of individuals.
> Pro individual ownership of guns, as well as self-defense.
This one is complicated. Certainly more people are pro-ownership of guns, but that doesn't actually mean they have them. Texas has the most guns in the county, but adjusted for population, it's 37th in the nation.
> * Oil is a big part of the economy.
It surely is, especially historically, but Texas has also generated more green energy than other states for a long time. Solar is huge, wind as well.
> * Socially conservative overall, with exception of some enclaves of more liberal or progressive values.
You're right in a certain sense: if you look at a map, it's mostly red. But a lot of that land has basically nobody living there, and the "enclaves" are large cities.
It's tough to track political affiliation, but most reports show it to be very evenly split. "When will Texas turn blue?" is a question people have been asking for a long time, and the details of why it has not are complicated. But winning elections is different than sentiment, and the sentiment is at least very closely tied.
> * Large percentage of people identifying as Christian.
This is true; it's about 75%.
> * Centralized editorial influence over school textbooks, for not just Texas but the nation.
Not just textbooks, but see also the fights over vouchers and trying to privatize the school system.
> * Aggressive anti-abortion push.
This is true from the state, but that doesn't mean it's popular: a 2022 survey said that 78% of Texas voters think abortion should be allowed in some form, and only 15% think it should be completely outlawed.
> I'm interested in whether there are conventions over how conflicting values are reconciled
To be blunt about it, the current conservative movement in America isn't really interested in ideological consistency. They just don't see it as a problem.
I'm a Texan, a Christian, and a conservative; maybe I can help? Your impressions of Texas are all true, in my experience (though keep in mind that it's a big place and Austin is barely distinguishable from a California city). You're right that the dominant values come into conflict sometimes, with libertarians wanting to protect porn and social conservatives wanting to ban it. The reasons for wanting to ban porn go something like this:
1. Unmarried men will consume it in lieu of putting their sexual frustration to good use by looking for a wife -- or if necessary, working on self-improvement until they're worthy of the kind of wife they want.
2. Married men will consume it while depriving their wives of sexual contact. If necessary, those men should be confronting whatever marital problems are preventing sex from happening often enough to satisfy them.
3. A huge amount of porn production is downstream of major personal and societal tragedies; the actors being threatened in some way is eerily common (just ask Andrew Tate), and even the "consenting" ones often have histories of sexual abuse and unresolved trauma that are tainting their "consent." A hypothetical society where every daughter grows up in a two-parent household, is known and loved by her father, and is never raped, is going to have a major shortage of porn stars.
Jordan Peterson has talked a lot about the downsides of porn, you can find plenty of snippets on YouTube. I'd recommend this if you want to know more about why conservatives oppose it.
We have to keep in mind that half the population has below-average conscientiousness, and will find it very difficult to resist temptations (such as porn) that are daily put in front of them. Christian societies have generally believed that it's good to work together and structure things to minimize the number of such stumbling blocks (to the extent that it's feasible). Banning porn is considered a step towards that goal.
BUT, you're also right that personal liberty is important and might cut against this. My guess is, this bill was framed in terms of age verification to try and work around this; the authors of it are clearly anti-porn, but if anyone asks, they could say "we're not banning porn, just preventing minors from accessing it."
I've noticed some other commenters claiming things like "conservatives are lying about believing X, it's really an excuse to do Y" so let me address that: all of the viewpoints I've described here are very sincerely held, as I know well from many different conversations with people in the community.
> consume it in lieu of putting their sexual frustration to good use by looking for a wife
> consume it while depriving their wives of sexual contact
These are astounding ideas which, empirically, evoke laughter and/or revulsion in honest women.
> A huge amount of porn production is downstream of major personal and societal tragedies;
This clause sounds reasonable. But Texas has shown zero appetite for addressing the personal and social tragedies that lead some people to the porn industry. So, I am very skeptical that caring for the common (wo)man is part of the true motivation.
> all of the viewpoints I've described here are very sincerely held
It would be naive to believe that people cannot sincerely hold beliefs which are simply perpetuating of a self-serving narrative. In fact I'd say it's the norm.
> even the "consenting" ones often have histories of sexual abuse and unresolved trauma that are tainting their "consent." A hypothetical society where every daughter grows up in a two-parent household, is known and loved by her father, and is never raped, is going to have a major shortage of porn stars.
Your heart's in the right place but your logic here is flawed. By framing it this way you muddy the entire concept of consent by declaring an entire class mentally unsound on account of unsubstantiated past events. Exceptions for intoxication are arbitrary enough. Now past "trauma" invalidates consent?
Don't get complacent. It's easier than you think to recruit the next generation of porn stars from stable families; it's been happening in front of us all along. Just expose kids to sexual topics early and often, nudge them in the direction of alternative religions with euphemistic masturbation rituals, promote the idea that promiscuity and "sex work" is normal and empowering, get them used to posing for cameras for validation, offer them more attention than their parents, get them to reblog excerpts of erotic literature with strangers, persuade them to run away, and coerce them into prostitution/child porn. It's the "fuck you mom and dad please help me" pipeline. The sexual abuse starts under your own roof and the rape only begins at the end. It's the parents who assume their family is immune that end up blindsided. Everything throughout is engineered coercion.
Once grooming became a taboo topic, we stopped talking about it long enough to forget what it even looked like. Anyone interested can trawl /r/runaway or Roblox/Discord looking for fresh faces to add to the NCMEC posters. The FBI has been warning about this for years...but fuck those morons, we're "protecting kids" by banning Backpage, TikTok and PornHub. Porn stars don't all start as junkies from broken homes but they often end that way.
If you and your community care as much as you claim, please advocate for effective mandatory parental controls, especially within multiplayer game environments that allow communication. The action against PornHub is an empty stunt that will likely not stand and achieves nothing.
Yeah, they'll find dodgier sites composed of even more illicit material hosted in places Texas can't reach. It's not like it's hard to find other sites by going to google and searching "porn".
Basically this, it's been years now since Pornhub purged anonymous content (and by extension, pirated material), so anything that targets it is redundant.
Yeah the irony of the focus on PornHub is that 1) they were never any worse than the other dozen major sites which still accept anonymous uploads, and 2) they're now one of the most squeaky-clean porn sites out there.
I mean, as clean as you can be when you allow users to upload porn, but by forcing out those who adhere to the rules you instead empower those who don't.
They'll just go to to one of the million other sites that don't enforce this at all. Which may actually be worse, since many of those sites are far less scrupulous about sharing data and spreading malware.
You assume that kids today know as much about technology than when you were their age. I can assure you - it's not the case. They might know what is VPN and how it works, but they do know how it install it from app store and avoid geo-restrictions.
I'm guessing that (just like actually happened when I was their age) one kid will figure it out (or read about it, or have an enabling parent tell them how to do it under the presumption of good reasons) and then tell all their friends how to do it.
Even if they don't know now, put an obstacle in their way and they quickly find a workaround. Hell, as a kid the we learned how to bypass bios password within a day, because me and my siblings very motivated indeed. The trick was to not let parents know that we knew. That part lasted a week. We got greedy.
I'm sure they already know. I see people that I've least expected are using VPN providers all the time. It's a lot easier today than it was when I was a teenager.
In my teenage days, VPN was only used for: corporate site-to-site, illegal activities. It all required a manual fragile setup. Today: download an app, launch that app.
Time to milk those juicy VPN-codes that are thrown around like drops. I hope we will see some statistic in some week, about the Texas-centric growth, this could be really insightful, for ah...political reasons.
Whole lot of commenters haven't read the article. Here's the first line:
"Pornhub and other affiliated adult websites have blocked access to users in Texas, amid a legal battle with the Lone Star State’s attorney general over an age-verification law."
I saw somewhere that it was Porn that made the internet popular.
I wonder what kind of consequences would emerge from imposing a world wide ban on the online porn industry.
I see some comments here saying that people would still find a way. But would it be the majority? I don't think so.
The internet without it's common access points like google, youtube, social media, becomes extremely unusable and unpleasent for the majority of the population.
Banning search engines from showing porn would be a quick way to achieve this.
> I see some comments here saying that people would still find a way. But would it be the majority? I don't think so
The majority of creators? No. Many would quit, many others would tease and lose money, most adult sites would collapse while a few adapt to said teasing, pushing the line.
The majority of consumers? Yes. Especially in a world where dating is more of a roulette than ever in the US and social spaces are collapsing. Even if it just means taking and consuming the past 50 years of porn underground, people would find a way to relive their primal urge
>Banning search engines from showing porn would be a quick way to achieve this.
Porn is the one exception that has very high demand and extremely effective word of mouth. By default (and even more so with parental controls), search engines try to avoid showing you adult content as is. Banning it outright will, again, just make people search and curate underground.
I think if we ban porn sites, people will try to find ways to sneak porn onto on-porn sites. Personally, I prefer having an internet where I can use non-porn sites and not worry that I might stumble across some porn.
That is religious conditioning. Not everyone believes sex between two consenting individuals needs to be so righteous. Women don't need to be protected from having sex for fun. Of course there are dark sides to the porn industry, but the concept in and of itself is not bad. Lots of people enjoy casual sex for fun, and there is nothing bad about that. Lots of people enjoy watching other people have sex, and there is nothing wrong with that either.
Re Rabbi ... Jews are not as sexually opressed or conservative as other world faiths, quite the opposite actually.
Ask your children to work in it if there is nothing bad about it.
Nothing to do with religion, dignity of human beings is a universal concept. You have been conditioned into thinking its normal for young women to degrade themselves on camera in return for money. And 99% of the time it is for money. Yes its voluntary, but you live in a country where people go bankrupt because healthcare is expensive, and these are not phds with a tonne of options, you realize this?
>Ask your children to work in it if there is nothing bad about it.
If that's their choice, I will make sure they know the dangers and follies of it or any other industry they want to work in. Because every industry has its bads. Especially for women.
Once they hit 18, I have to trust the judgment I instilled in them. Always welcome back home, especially early on because fuck housing market. But it's their life to live, not mine.
>You have been conditioned into thinking its normal for young women to degrade themselves on camera in return for money.
Compared to kids on tiktok degrading themselves (usually non-sexually) on camera in return for money? Yeah, I don't like either
But again: to each their own.
>Yes its voluntary, but you live in a country where people go bankrupt because healthcare is expensive, and these are not phds with a tonne of options, you realize this
Sounds like we should actually let kids get hired instead of go through 4 rounds of Pseudo-IQ tests just to get minimum wage work at the grocery store. But that must be the conditioning as well. No one wants to work anymore after all.
Have you seen the modern entry level market? I'm not surprised people are seeking gigs these days, sexual or not.
You have been conditioned into thinking its degrading for women to show themselves on camera in return for money.
You find this degrading, but not everyone does. Work is work. Value is value. If you have goods or services to provide and can earn income from that, and it isn't hurting anyone, what is the problem? If I was an attractive woman I would have absolutely no problem with being on a site like OnlyFans. The only people who feel the way you do are ones who have been conditioned to believe this from antiquated religious beliefs.
> And why does a Rabbi own a conglomerate of porn websites?
Interestingly, porn was pioneered by Jews who arrived here during / after WWII. I've always found it interesting how different cultures / ethnicities have subtly different social mores, like whether prostitution is a good or a bad thing.
Hopefully what will happen in Texas is the pro-porners (not sure if there's a better term?) leave and the situation sorts itself out.
Is it also unreasonable that brick and mortar stores can't sell pornography to children? Should they be allowed to let children view porn for free as long as they look at some ads first?
No one in Texas wants porn bans, abortion bans, IVF bans, restrictive marijuana laws and everything else going on down there, but they will still enthusiastically vote for it to show party allegiance.