site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25649 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

There has been a recent crackdown on naughty games on steam and itch.io. The game platforms say the crackdown has come from payment processors. Payment processors have said they don't want their business associated with unsavory practices, and that adult products have higher charge back rates. Some people have blamed activist religious groups on aggressively lobbying the payment processors for this crackdown.

I mostly feel a sense of annoyance. My libertarian leanings have me feeling certain ways about all this.

  1. The biggest problem is that payment processors are usually an unholy alliance of governments, banks, and financial groups. This makes them allergic to competition and new entrants to the market. The Internet has reshaped society over the last three decades and I'd say only 1.5 payment processors came out of it. PayPal, and the crypto market. The term "coup complete" got thrown around a lot in the Biden presidency to describe what was necessary to build a competing Internet ecosystem.
  2. I'm worried this might signal the revival of the religious culture wars that happened in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000's. It's frustrating to me but a lot of people seem to gravitate towards religion of some kind. I think woke culture has plenty of religious elements. The atheist movement in the 2000s seemed genuinely anti-religious. But it seems the longer term strategy is just have a different religion.
  3. Neutrality as a default. This is the end goal. Once you accept that a thing is subject to politics it becomes entirely subject to politics. We are cancelling thots and porn this year. 4 years ago it was lab leak conspiracies. I certainly think some things are more important to not be censored, but the machinery of censorship seems to work regardless of the subject being censored. Once it is built it will be used.

This issue (freedom to speak, share and view anything, including seedy content, on the internet, regardless of what the state thinks of it – and "payment processors" are the government by another name, considering the existing interlinkages and their monopolistic market share) in particular both infuriates me like no other, and somehow makes me understand and even sympathize with libs' thinking on immigration.

I absolutely think that having porn widely available is probably bad for society on net if we view it in consequentialist terms. Not even from the "think of the children" standpoint, its detrimental for most adults too. It is a vice that has practical consequences, and probably contributed declining fertility, deteriorating relations between the sexes and all kinds of other social malaises. And still, knowing all that, I would oppose restrictions on it on freedom of speech grounds, because a if a society degenerates and fails because it can't handle that type of freedom, then it morally deserved to fail all along, and should crash and burn accordingly.

I would imagine that's how the smarter ideologically committed proponents of freedom of movement feel about importing infinity migrants.

because a if a society degenerates and fails because it can't handle that type of freedom, then it morally deserved to fail all along, and should crash and burn accordingly.

I would imagine that's how the smarter ideologically committed proponents of freedom of movement feel about importing infinity migrants.

I just want to say, I don't know if my peers and I were particularly smarter than other ideologically committed proponents of open borders back when I was one of those, but that was explicitly and openly one of the arguments we made. If allowing any humans into the USA without limits were to destroy the USA, then let it be destroyed, at least we didn't discriminate against foreigners along the way.

This issue (freedom to speak, share and view anything, including seedy content, on the internet, regardless of what the state thinks of it – and "payment processors" are the government by another name, considering the existing interlinkages and their monopolistic market share) in particular both infuriates me like no other, and somehow makes me understand and even sympathize with libs' thinking on immigration.

What's your stance on CSAM? Do you bite the bullet or break out the carveout knife?

If you bite the bullet, you are unelectable, as all but the lizardman's constant disagree strongly with you. You have principles, and zero access to power.

If you provide a carveout, you have no principles, and we are in fact just haggling over the price.

My own preference is for the Wild West of the Old Internet, with all the good and bad that went into it.

However, I understand that some types of content are extremely distateful to most people, making my view pretty unpopular, and a reasonable carveout can be negotiated by people who believe in freedom of speech, but who, unlike me, a random internet poster, need votes to get elected.

I don't think principles are an all-or-nothing thing, they're more of a rule of thumb "this is what should be done, unless there's an extremely good reason to do otherwise". For example, I would not regard a card-carrying NRA member, who still feels leery about the idea of a felon being able to buy a machine gun at the nearest corner store with no questions asked, as an unprincipled traitor to his position as a pro-2A activist.

if a society degenerates and fails because it can't handle that type of freedom, then it morally deserved to fail all along, and should crash and burn accordingly

What if it turns out that no society can "handle that type of freedom"? Then does the entire human species "deserve to fail all along, and should crash and burn accordingly"?

Then a different society will take our place and try something different, because evidently not every nation even wants to adopt freedom as a value, so it's rather unlinkely this will affect all humans.

And for an actual hot take: I find so many modern people having "survival of the human race by any means necessary" as a terminal value and highest ideal quite objectionable. This is the mentality of a cockroach, not a higher being. Higher beings have ideals, not just biological instincts.

A devoted Christian 500 years ago would believe that "if our civilization falls into terminal sin, the Lord will smite all of our cities like He did Sodom and Gomorrah, and He would be correct in doing so". And that, in my eyes, would make them unquestionably spiritually superior to most of us, moderns, willing to sell everything, up to and including our souls, for the survival of "the human race" (usually refers to us personally or at least the social groups we belong to).

Because this attitude is what it means to really believe in something.

I remember in 2019 when Google/Youtube used similar pretext for demonization, blaming advertisers who didn't wish to be associated with violent or hateful content . At the time it was a big deal , as many channels depended on ad Google ad revenue. That problem suddenly went away, and now I see Google youtube ads on some of the most heinous videos imaginable (execution videos, or a 9/11 jumper landing on a light pole .it didn't end well for him or the pole). The advertisers didn't give a shit and still don't care if their ads are placed next to violent content. Gore aficionados buy stuff, too. Google invented some lame excuse or pretext to demonetize.

Advertisers do kind of give a shit about being next to violent content. They might not mind it enough to boycott/not advertise at all, but they will pay way more for wholesome and mainstream sponsorship opportunities, them's just facts.

LOL, advertisers will pay the most to advertise on a show about large men running straight at one another and clobbering each other.

I'm picturing a medieval jousting tournament. What are you- oh. Yeah. Well, they have a lot of protective gear and the point isn't to actually harm others, but then that was true of medieval tourneys as well, and in both cases people do get pretty badly injured or even killed.

Advertisers, and the general public, consider that wholesome

Wholesome = what is considered wholesome

That started way earlier back in 2017 in response to among other things PewDiePie making thirdies do racist jokes on camera via fiver and a bit later calling an opponent a nigger during a stream.

This was not YouTube using these things as a pretext for demonitization. Major advertiser like Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, Johnson & Johnson, Pepsi, Adidas, HP, Deutsche Bank, etc. started pulling ads completely from YouTube which lead to a steep fall in ad revenue for the creators. YouTube's response came after, trying to get advertisers back.

It was absolutely advertiser driven. It could well be that advertisers don't care now but they did back then.

his was not YouTube using these things as a pretext for demonitization. Major advertiser like Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, Johnson & Johnson, Pepsi, Adidas, HP, Deutsche Bank, etc. started pulling ads completely from YouTube which lead to a steep fall in ad revenue for the creators. YouTube's response came after, trying to get advertisers back.

Google should just call their bluff, where are they going to monetize? Maybe google should just unlist their domains and advertising campaigns if they pull out of youtube.

Google didn't WANT to call the bluff; they're politically aligned.

Google should just call their bluff, where are they going to monetize?

Presumably other internet advertising venues like Facebook?

Maybe google should just unlist their domains and advertising campaigns if they pull out of youtube.

That is how you get bent over and raped by regulators that are already annoyed with you.

They didn't. It was all fake, and an attempt to censor political opposition for the sake of censoring political opposition. There was, and still is, absolutely no evidence they were actually worried about losing profits.

Right. The threat of "advertiser boycotts" was almost certainly dreamed up by people at marketing agencies, and used by their politically-aligned friends at YouTube to get the censorship they wanted. Or possibly they were dreamed up by the YouTube group and the marketing agency people gave the assist.

The people who control the ad spend at large corporates are disproportionately PMC women and metrosexual men with job titles like VP of marketing. (RealMenTM work in sales, not marketing). It would be very odd if these people were happy with their ad spend funding right-populist political content - with no outside pressure needed except the bare minimum to put the issue on the agenda. And it isn't exactly hard to rationalise as a straightforwardly correct commercial decision - in fact for many brands it is a straightforwardly correct commercial decision. People who watch right-populist Youtube videos don't buy packaged laundry detergent - their mothers buy it for them.

in fact for many brands it is a straightforwardly correct commercial decision.

Prove it, please.

People who watch right-populist Youtube videos don't buy packaged laundry detergent - their mothers buy it for them.

Ad targeting algorithms already try to find the most likely buyer, you wouldn't need boycotts if this was what it's about.

It was not all fake. You might claim that the advertiser boycott was intended to censor political opposition but the boycott itself was real.

It's fake in the sense that "it could well be that advertisers don't care now but they did back then" is false. They caree back then exactly as much as they do now, which is not at all. What they were doing was attacking political opposition.

At any rate, advertisers still have a right to choose where they want to put their money. That's why the YouTube "Adpocalypse" was always a fictitious crisis to me by people who wanted to cry "censorship!," because that meant these content creators would have to diversify their platform or find alternative sources of income elsewhere. I'm not a fan of the advertising industry one bit, but calling it censorship stuck me as nothing more than a shout of butthurt among people who think they're entitled to other people's money.

I would agree with you if it was just about the money, people crying over demonetization always came off as rather pathetic to me, but that was a non-issue since Youtube implemented superchats. The real issue was that Youtube used the whole thing to go on a banning, shadow-banning, and algorithimc fuckery spree.

True. But I don't think that should've come as a surprise to anyone. Why should it? You saw that on other fronts as well that had nothing to do with advertising. You saw it with them kicking RussiaToday off the platform at the outset of the Ukraine war (propaganda at work). You saw it with Chess channels having their subscribers removed (collateral damage?). You saw it with both left and right-wing political channels being demonetized (business cycles come and go, progressivism is out of season).

I just don't know why it's captivated the attention of so many people.

More comments

My libertarian leanings have me feeling certain ways about all this.

This is genuinely interesting to me as I think what these payment processors do is exactly in line with libertarian view. They are private companies and they may refuse business to anybody for any reason.

On the one hand that's right.

On the other, as we discussed a year back: the nature of the financial system is everyone is tied to everybody else.

Even if one person creates the 'maximum' libertarian payment processing company, the fact is that they still have to tie into the larger financial network in order to transfer funds around. And thus every other node on the network can blacklist them, meaning they can't very easily process payments, EXCEPT amongst their existing userbase.

As I said:

It'd be nice to think of our financial system as mostly as set of dumb tubes that transmit the data representing our money around without caring much about the start and endpoint... with a lot of protections in place to mitigate fraud, theft, and user error. But ultimately a financial company is operated by humans who are subject to legal jurisdiction of some country or other, and have to maintain access to the global finance system if they want to take that money to any other jurisdiction, so in reality the 'rules' are set based on what all participants are willing to tolerate.

Unless you can create a financial system entirely beyond the jurisdiction of any overbearing governments (crypto was supposed to do this, but alas) then realistically, the system will fall down to the level of the least tolerant users.

So yeah, its 'private companies' who can do business with whomever they want, but there's really NO scenario where I can set up a bank or payment processor specifically to do business with degenerates and expect to just be left alone to do so.

On the gripping hand banking is not a free market and the government should force banks to accept transactions which can't be directly proven to be for purposes of crime, and no happy go lucky maximum joy anime pixels on the screen aren't a crime yet.

I guess next you'd also tell them that they can't take credit risk into account when issuing loans.

Yeah, I tried thinking it through in that previous thread.

Basically, you could conceive of a basic 'right to transact' that means that banks have to accept transactions that are under, say $500, maybe up to some maximum on a monthly basis or something, without concern for the source of funds or the destination, as long as there is no evidence of explicit criminal activity.

And the Gov't could provide "chargeback insurance" to said banks in exchange. Similar to FDIC insurance. Government can of course investigate any transactions they deem actually suspicous.

The goal is to just prevent any 'debanking' of anyone merely for doing 'icky' stuff, and allow these niche businesses to eke out an existence.

Banks need the ability to define the boundaries of their business in order to function. They also need the ability to refuse individual customers they don't trust - this is what a credit score is trying to systematise.

If banks were required to open accounts for anyone who isn't provably a crook, then the main beneficiaries would be crooks with plausible deniability.

Why do bank accounts and payments need credit? A checking account (no overdraft) and pre-funded payment do not need credit at all.

If phone companies were required to give a phone line to anyone who is not provably a crook, then the main beneficiaries would be crooks with plausible deniability. Substitute for any other service. Does this sound reasonable at all?

Because of chargebacks. If Alice steals Bob's payment info and sends money to Carol, when Bob notices this he's going to request the money back. If you are Carol's bank, your options are:

  1. Refuse. This gets you blacklisted from other banks, and your customers can't receive money.
  2. Pay it back yourself. This means charging significant fees as fraud insurance, while also allowing criminals to keep their fraudulent gains.
  3. Request the money back from Carol. This is equivalent to offering her credit.
  4. Hold the money until the chargeback can't be requested. This takes multiple months, and most merchants do not want to (or can't afford to) wait that long before actually getting their money.

In practice banks almost always do 2. ‘Overdraft fees’ exist for a reason.

What I meant for option 2 was pay it back yourself instead of getting the money from the customer. While it is true that banks will pay overdrafts initially, the customer is still ultimately on the hook for the money. The bank doesn't say "we paid that for you, don't worry about it". They say "we paid that for you as a loan, now you need to give us the money we sent". Which is option 3.

If phone companies were required to give a phone line to anyone who is not provably a crook, then the main beneficiaries would be crooks with plausible deniability.

I'm pretty sure that under US common carrier rules, telephone companies are largely required to offer service in this fashion as regulated utilities. See also "universal service" requirements.

There is a spectrum of private company all the way up to government run "business" (like the post office). Payment processors are much closer to the government run business side of that spectrum. The closer any business is to being government run the more of a problem I have with it's operations being decided via politics.

It's not because I just dislike government. It's because the private market has corrective mechanisms that discourage politicized decision making. The more free market type businesses have the opposite problem, where they can be too heavily incentivised by the profit motive and not consider political things like "maybe this is really evil".

Do you have any requirement for what constitutes as "government run business"? For instance a small restaurant is already subject to insane amount of government meddling - from zoning rules, food safety regulation, employee regulation or anti-discrimination laws etc. so it can be considered as largely government run business, as most of the decisions are mandated or heavily influenced by government.

Which leads me to my next question as your explanation provides an interesting dichotomy - the closer the government involves itself in a private business, the less "politicized" it should be? This is impossible, government involvement is already politicization of that business. Did you mean something else?

"Politicized" in this context means for the business to act against its customers based on politics.

This does not make sense to me. Deep down majority of businesses "act against customers" - they want to extract as much money from them for as little cost as they can get away with. One can definitely consider this stance as a highly political one, at minimum businesses are not supporting communism or similar political stances.

What do you mean exactly?

No, that isn't true.

  1. You have principal/agent problems where the people working for the businesses get a chance to personally gain by promoting their politics, even if it hurts the business.
  2. It's not true that businesses want to make as much money as possible. Rather, businesses who don't don't compete well and eventually lose. It can take a long time before the business actually goes broke. Disney has lost a lot of money by putting woke in Star Wars and Marvel, but such losses aren't going to drive Disney out of business for the forseeable future.
  3. Owners spending money on wokeness (and making the business, and indirectly themselves, lose money) is ultimately no different from owners spending money on, say, baseball games and directly losing money on them. The owners gain personally. (Related to #1 and #2, if the business is big.)

The closer any business is to being government run the more of a problem I have with it's operations being decided via politics.

I regret to inform you that business and politics are inseparably intertwined aspects of the same continuum, if not just one and the same, full-stop.

For better or worse, there is not, never has been, and likely never will be a clean, non-arbitrary divide between the two.

That's why the Bitcoin and crypto-crowd overplayed the selling point of the tech, thinking it provides some pathway to this purified economic system of the future that does away with the broad experimentation and advantages of prior economic systems and mixed economies. Anyone thinking economics is going to completely do away with politics in the future has oversold themselves on an ideology. The problem being that techno-libertarians may want to live in this kind of fantasy society, but normal human beings do not.

As I said things are a spectrum, you said continuum. I don't think I'm asking for an impossible standard. The post office will send any letter between two private addresses, no matter what words you put in there. They'll send it no matter who you are or the recipient is or who they voted for. As far as I know they've maintained this level of non-politics since they were created. Even when they were a much more essential service.

Smut has been legally non-mailable at most times and in most places, including the USA for most of its existence.

Operation Choke Point. Also the Biden administration leaning on social media to censor inconvenient truths. There's more than a little government coercion hiding behind the mask of private companies making internal decisions.

Operation Choke Point was an actual conspiracy to unbank people in just that manner. They made sure to coordinate it using in-person meetings and to not document anything in order to frustrate possible investigations into their actions. Like a band of criminals. It is insidious.

And now when we see the same pattern, we're supposed to believe that THIS TIME it isn't political, it's just the moral paragons at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs wouldn't dare involve themselves with "smut". LOL.

It could be completely internal but then there's the Civil Rights Act and over a half of a century of discrimination against white males (particularly right leaning) in the private sector.

Or it would be if

1) The pressure being applied to them wasn't possibly being applied clandestinely by governments, as with Operation Choke Point. This is speculative, of course, but well-precedented.

and

2) There weren't barriers to entry, very much caused by government, to building a new payment processor without these restrictions. This is the "just build your own international financial system" objection.

This is the "just build your own international financial system"

And not just "build your own international financial system" but "build an international and national financial systems on every served country down to the street level" as banks tend to be unwilling (usually due to government pressure) to even transfer money between the official and inofficial financial systems.

This is the "just build your own international financial system" objection.

As much as I'm not a huge fan of cryptocurrency stans --- it has spurred a bunch of interesting cryptography research, and there are a few reasonable uses, and a bunch of speculators who seem to care about neither --- I have to give them "and they took that as a challenge" on this one.

Well that’s the Hegelian dialectic of freedom innit?

“I think everyone should be free to do whatever they want.”

“Ok then I’m free to make you my slave.”

“Wait that’s not what I meant.”

Of course recourse to a “nonaggression principle” already admits that 1) there are certain other “natural” principles that must be allowed to impinge on the purity of absolute freedom, which leaves open the possibility that there are further “natural” principles that remain undiscovered, and 2) we are in want of a definition of “aggression”, which of course immediately drags us into hopeless complications and confusions.

The natural principles are in one sense a result of natural selection, and in another sense, properties of abstract rationality itself. This is quite literally where social structure emerges from: groups that constantly kill each other by using physical force to resolve disputes are naturally out-competed by groups that preserve their members by resolving disputes in other ways. The laws that emerge might seem messy at first, but all sane laws ultimately just boil down to some flavor of universal quantification: there is a "naturality" to solutions like "person A cuts the cake in 2 pieces, but person B gets to choose which piece is theirs." (to be more mathematically formal, the naturality is if you switched person A and person B, you'd still get the same answer--that the cake is cut in half--which is why this answer is, in some peremptory sense, "better"/more fundamental/more natural than all other answers). This is essentially the Golden Rule / Rawls's Veil of Ignorance / etc. etc. To the extent our complicated mess deviates from this underlying principle, it's just a buggy system -- and any people less myopic and better able to deal with the bugs will be more efficient, and thus ultimately be capable of conquering us, further manifesting the underlying natural structure.

The natural principles are in one sense a result of natural selection, and in another sense, properties of abstract rationality itself. This is quite literally where social structure emerges from: groups that constantly kill each other by using physical force to resolve disputes are naturally out-competed by groups that preserve their members by resolving disputes in other ways.

How did you come up with this? The only true "natural" social law is the law of the jungle or might makes right. History is full of stories where peaceful and pacifist societies were wiped out by groups that cooperated exactly in order to gain strength to protect and impose their will. Like this one or this one or this one.

Maybe I expressed myself poorly.

Let me ground it in hard technical reality: consider Bitcoin. Each individual is pursuing their own interest, and it is this collective pursuit of self-interest that compels the effectiveness of the blockchain into existence. If I make a blockchain where only my magic key can mine coins, that blockchain is great for me, and it may even work well without any bugs -- but nobody will use it because there's nothing in it for them. It is difficult to out-compete Bitcoin with an "unfair" blockchain, in the cut-the-cake-in-two-unequal-pieces sense, though we witness innumerable attempts to do so backed by astronomical amounts of wealth and marketing propaganda.

I'm merely contending that these same underlying dynamics are at play everywhere, and that Bitcoin (or any fair blockchain) is just the most formally-grounded vindication of it.

Of course, you may say "But Soteriologian, aren't central banks kinda like a blockchain with one set of magical mining keys, just like you describe?" Yes, yes, just wait. The truth--meaning the underlying, peremptory rational structure of the universe--will manifest itself. It just takes some time.

The truth--meaning the underlying, peremptory rational structure of the universe--will manifest itself. It just takes some time.

Where does this true underlying structure manifest itself? If anything, it is the law of the jungle that manifests constantly all around us for hundreds of millions of years. That it is why it is called the law of the jungle - each individual or a group of any given species only gets what they can keep from their peers or predators or what they can extract from their prey. You may point out to some groups - like hives of insects or packs of wolves or tribes of apes - but even they themselves are subject to inherent law of the jungle in competition with other groups and organizms.

So again - demonstrate how nonviolent voluntary cooperation is some underlying structure of the universe, some primordial social law. And no, the bitcoin example does not cut it. It would be on the level of an example where a cow eats grass and then shits to provide fertilizer as some "underlying structure" - and even then it is not clear if cows do not commit "violence" on grass which just accepted its fate to be regularly and violently culled, with some grass species developing abrasive properties to harm ruminants who in turn evolved more durable teeth and mouth to chew on it.

I just don't get this hippie talk of peaceful underlying structure of the universe.

“Ok then I’m free to make you my slave.”

"And I'm free to kill you for trying. Let's find a middle ground, eh?"

Perhaps we could agree on a compromise where we cede some of our natural freedom to a governing institution in exchange for protection and stability? I've written more about this in my pamphlet, Behemoth.

The only people who might be persuaded by that argument, are the ones roughly evenly matched with you in terms of armaments, which probably does not overlap much with the ones saying things like "I'm free to make you a slave".

This not a one-on-one conversation in reality. The actuality has been hashed out for millennia and many a liter of spilled blood. That's why we have a reasonably stable equilibrium of countries and armed forces/police with a monopoly on violence. If someone threatens to enslave me, I'm going to call the cops.

“I think everyone should be free to do whatever they want.”
“Ok then I’m free to make you my slave.”
“Wait that’s not what I meant.”
"Shut up Slave, that pyramid isn't going to build itself" cracks whip

Some people have blamed activist religious groups on aggressively lobbying the payment processors for this crackdown

Last time we saw this exact same play, Operation Choke Point came directly from the DOJ. I can easily understand how Federal investigations and lawsuits would apply significant pressure; I have to wonder how much pressure activist groups can really apply to these institutions? They seem unlikely to me to be the real driving force. On the other hand, Trump's first DOJ shut down Operation Chokepoint, so I don't see why his 2nd one would boot it back up. Maybe this really is just something payment processors have decided is in their own interest.

I don't have any special insight into the payment processors internal discussions of these policies. I suspect they are happy to go along with these requests, and just want someone else to be blamed or sued for the decision.

As I said the most important thing is the very incestuous relationship between government and private industry, and the lack of competition that this relationship causes.

In my head the optimal response to "these three payment processors don't accept porn games" should be something like "use one of the other dozen payments processors". Right now those other dozen mostly don't exist. That was supposed to be the dream of crypto.

I mean, it seems clearly possible to run a business with crypto and extra steps. The fact that no one is doing it for this indicates either A) thé niche isn’t profitable enough to be worth it or B) thé difficulties with payment processors arent bad enough.

I’m pretty sure it’s B.

The problem with crypto is you run into the same problem of having to explain the source of the funds during the fiat conversion process. It adds additional complexity without much benefit, for example, if someone uses stolen crypto to pay for a service.

Crypto is will never replace the traditional banking system or international financial system. The major selling point behind all crypto at least in the beginning was blockchain tech, which aimed to be able to make electronic payments without relying on trust. Which is a cool and ambitious idea. But it’s just not true. Yeah, bitcoin eliminates 'some' trusted intermediaries that are inherent in other payment systems like credit cards. But you still have to trust bitcoin and consequently everything else about it.

Blockchain tech mostly just ends up reshaping trust. But if you actually think about it and analyze both blockchain and trust, it's pretty obvious that it's all much more hype than value. And blockchain solutions are often worse than what they replace in the beginning.

If you look at the data structures that make up a blockchain, the first is a distributed (which in this case means multiple copies) but centralized (as in there’s only one) ledger. That's a way of recording what happened and in what order. The ledger is public which means that anyone can read it. And it's also immutable that means that no one can change what happened in the past. The second part is the consensus algorithm, which ensures all the copies of the ledger are the same. That's what "mining" is. And a critical part of the system is that anyone can participate. It's also distributed, which means that you don’t have to trust any particular node in the consensus network. It's also extremely expensive, both in data storage and in the energy required to maintain it. Bitcoin has the most expensive consensus algorithm the world has ever seen, by a 'long' shot. The last element is the currency itself. Some type of digital token that has value and is publicly traded. Currency is necessary of a blockchain to align the incentives of everyone involved. Transactions involving these tokens are stored on the ledger.

All three elements of a public blockchain fit together as a single network that offers new security properties. But the relevant thing to ask is: "Is it actually good for anything?" It’s all a matter of trust. Most blockchain enthusiasts have far too narrow of a definition of trust. They’re fond of catchphrases like “in code we trust,” “in math we trust,” and “in crypto we trust.” This is trust as verification. But verification isn’t the same as trust. Interpersonal trust can work very good on the basis of morals and individual reputation, but the problem is they often only scale to a certain population size. Primitive systems were good enough for small communities, but larger communities required delegation, and more formalism. This is where political institution's come into play. Institutions have rules and laws that induce people to behave according to the group norm, and they impose sanctions on people who don't. What laws do in this context is they formalize reputation.

If you look at banking and the financial system, financial institutions, merchants, and individuals are all concerned with their reputations, which prevents theft and fraud. The laws and regulations surrounding every aspect of banking keep everyone in line, including backstops that limit risks in the case of fraud. And there are lots of security systems in place, e.g., anti-counterfeiting technologies to widespready internet security technologies.

What blockchain does is shift some of the trust in people and institutions to trust in technology. You have to trust the cryptography, the protocols, the software, the computers and the network. And you need to trust them absolutely, because they’re often single points of failure. When that trust turns out to be misplaced, far too often there is 'no' recourse. If your bitcoin exchange gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If your bitcoin wallet gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If you forget your login credentials, you lose all of your money. If there’s a bug in the code of your smart contract, you lose all of your money. If someone successfully hacks the blockchain security, you lose all of your money. In many ways, trusting technology is harder than trusting people. Would you rather trust a human legal system or the details of some computer code you don’t have the expertise to audit?

Blockchain supporters love point to the more traditional forms of trust like bank processing fees as expensive. But what blockchain trust does is also costly, the cost is just hidden from you. For bitcoin, that’s the cost of the additional bitcoin mined, the transaction fees, and the enormous environmental waste. It doesn’t eliminate the need to trust human institutions. There will always be a big gap that can’t be addressed by technology alone. People still need to be in charge, and there is always a need for governance outside the system. This is obvious in the ongoing debate about changing the bitcoin block size, or in fixing the DAO attack against Ethereum. There’s always a need to override the rules, and there’s always a need for the ability to make permanent rules changes. As long as hard forks are a possibility—that’s when the people in charge of a blockchain step outside the system to change it.

Any blockchain system will have to coexist with more conventional systems. The advantage modern banking has is that it's designed to be reversible in real time. Crypto isn't. That makes it hard to make the two compatible and that makes things more insecure. Steve Wozniak got scammed out of $70K in bitcoin because he forgot this.

Blockchain technology is centralized. Crypto might theoretically be based on distributed trust but in practice it's not. Just about everyone using bitcoin has to trust one of the few available wallets and use one of the few available exchanges. People have to trust the software and the operating systems and the computers everything is running on. And we’ve seen attacks against wallets and exchanges. We’ve seen Trojans and phishing and password guessing. Criminals have even used flaws in the system that people use to repair their cell phones to steal bitcoin. These issues are not bugs in current blockchain applications, they’re inherent in how blockchain works. Any evaluation of the security of the system has to take the whole system into account. Too many blockchain enthusiasts focus on the technology and ignore the rest.

To the extent that people don’t use bitcoin, it’s because they don’t trust bitcoin. That has nothing to do with the cryptography or the protocols. In fact, a system where you can lose your life savings if you forget your key or download a piece of malware is not particularly trustworthy. And no amount of explaining how SHA-256 works to prevent double-spending will fix that.

To the extent that people do use blockchains it's because they trust them. People either own crypto or not based on reputation. That’s true even for speculators who own bitcoin simply because they think it will make them rich quickly. People choose a wallet for their cryptocurrency, and an exchange for their transactions, based on reputation. We even evaluate and trust the cryptography that underpins blockchains based on the algorithms reputation.

You can see how this will fail too. Look at the various supply chain security systems that are using blockchain. A blockchain isn’t a necessary feature of any of them. The reasons they’re successful is that everyone has a single software platform to enter their data in. Even though the blockchain systems are built on distributed trust people don’t always accept that. Some companies don’t trust the IBM/Maersk system because it’s not 'their' blockchain.

Do you need a public blockchain? The answer is almost certainly no. A blockchain probably doesn’t solve the problems you think it solves. The problems it solves are probably not the ones you have. Manipulating audit data is probably not your major risk. A false trust in blockchain can itself be a risk. The inefficiencies, especially in scaling, are probably not worth it. If you look at different blockchain applications, all of them could achieve the same security properties without using a blockchain.

And to the point about crypto more generally... Honestly, cryptocurrencies are useless. They’re only used by speculators looking for quick riches, people who don’t like government-backed currencies for different reasons, and criminals who want a black-market way to exchange money; which are the real use cases we see involved.

To answer the question of whether the blockchain is needed, just ask yourself: Does the blockchain change the system of trust in any meaningful way, or just shift it around? Does it strengthen existing trust relationships, or try to go against them? How can trust be abused in the new system, and is this better or worse than the potential abuses in the old system? But most importantly: What would your system look like in the first place if you didn’t even use blockchain at all?

For most people that would ask themselves those questions, I think it's likely they’ll choose solutions that don’t use public blockchain. And that’ll prove to be a good thing in the end.

Sure, crypto aims to eliminate the middlemen; but middlemen are sometimes useful.

Why not both? Why not have crypto act as a threat that keeps bankers from ripping off their customers?

Payment systems are rigged. You need to be a large bank to participate, and regulators will fight for large banks to keep competitors out. Sure, they might say this is for a good reason like financial stability or anti-money laundering (AML); but they don’t even have good arguments for why this is worthwhile (in the case of AML) or whether it is effective (in the case of financial stability.

You might be right that, in some ideal, free-market world, there wouldn’t be crypto. But, in this world, there should be even if it is only to push against the inefficiencies imposed by governments, bureaucrats, and regulators.

There's also a D) of "it's really, really hard, and if you fuck up in the slightest amount, you don't just lose your business account, you get blacklisted from every mainstream credit card processor and bank in your personal capacity".

And potentially face prison time for not correctly complying with regulations.

C) Mainstream pron sites rely heavily on impulse-buying normies (often intoxicated) with credit cards, and setting up some sketchy crypto shit is way too much friction for this market segment

The calculus for B has just changed, so I guess we will see if that leads to more adoption of crypto.

I don't think the big picture on B has changed. Legal smut peddlers have always had difficulties getting and keeping payment processors - it is arguably the core competence of big platforms like Mindgeek and Onlyfans. What has changed is that the Kangaroo Karens convinced the system that Steam qualified as a smut peddler if it got 10% of its revenue from smut.

(FWIW, I think this is a reasonable close call from the bank's point of view. If my employer has chosen not to bank smut, do I want to bank a stream of payments which is 90% clean and I don't know which 10% is the smut? Probably not, but does that change if it's fricking Steam?)

With Itch, it looks more like a website that had successfully deceived a small business banker in a hurry as to how smut-dependent it was, and got narced on by the Kangaroo Karens. This bank back-office professional sees an easy call - close the account, dock the small business banker and his boss's year-end bonusses, assign the whole team extra online training on customer onboarding, and warn your wife that the next few weekends are going to be spent on tedious paperwork.

Itch is still majority non-smut. With, admittedly, its own issues: they owe the Vintage Story people six figures worth. But they’re no more a smut peddler than Steam or Patreon.

Since one itch processor is/was Stripe, the rules there have also changed: itch signed onto them back before Stripe went category no on smut.

It's not necessarily the US government that is turning up the pressure. The rest of the Anglosphere hasn't exactly been shy about pushing for such censorship recently and even if the Trump administration isn't going to apply similar pressure itself, it's not likely to apply counter pressure to prevent such crackdowns.

That's a good point; I was too focused on the US government due to the history there. Several US States have been actively cracking down on online porn lately as well. So it's very plausible any combination of governmental bodies could be driving this, possibly at the behest of religious and/or feminist activists.

Sorry, the best we can offer is JD Vance mocking the UK PM about "freedom of speech" in the Oval Office and on Twitter. It's not much, but it's more than the previous administration, I suppose.

One of the possible explanations for the timeline here is the UK's Online Safety Act implementation and related age-gating, which would actually explain why the hammers came down for itchio in the way that they did, and which the administration is actually pushing on (if for unrelated and kinda stupid reasons).

Hasn't Trump threatened sanctions against Brazil for going after Musk? Here's an NPR affiliate https://www.wlrn.org/americas/2025-08-13/brazil-kept-tight-rein-on-big-tech-trumps-tariffs-could-change-that complaining about it. Not Anglosphere, I suppose.

I’m guessing porn developers arent quite as tight with Trump.

The Executive Order announcing the tariffs on Brazil mentioned both the trial of Bolsonaro and the treatment of US tech companies. The Truth Social rant that preceded it focused on Bolsonaro, so unless there has been non-public communication informing the Brazilian authorities to the contrary, the Brazilians are going to assume it is mostly about Bolsonaro.

Is there a deal on offer to Brazil if they let Bolsonaro off the hook and don't change tech regulation - almost certainly, given that the UK and EU got deals without budging on tech regulation. Is there a deal on offer if they hang Bolsonaro and allow Musk to run the birdsite the way he wants to? Probably not, based on Trump's posturing to date.

Fetishes are spiritual (shoutouts to Skimmerlit, he's a real one):

Fetishes are like your own spirit schemas. Your own spirit schemas. It's a tool and a religion. This is the method by which you'll do your most important analysis of the world. This is the religion you belong to. Frankly, this is probably the way you'll interact most or best with your deity. Do not mistake fetishes for simple perversions.

Those who already perceive the resonance of duty within themselves, those who already walk a "path" -- be they adherents of traditional religious tendencies, or woke activists, or TRP/manosphere/MGTOW types, or even certain garden variety authoritarians -- correctly identify pornography as a portent of an alternative spirituality, an intrusive force from "somewhere else" that encroaches on their market share and threatens to de-sediment what they have worked so hard to bring together under a certain conceptual regime.

Those who already perceive the resonance of duty within themselves, those who already walk a "path" -- be they adherents of traditional religious tendencies, or woke activists, or TRP/manosphere/MGTOW types, or even certain garden variety authoritarians -- correctly identify pornography as a portent of an alternative spirituality, an intrusive force from "somewhere else" that encroaches on their market share and threatens to de-sediment what they have worked so hard to bring together under a certain conceptual regime.

True, as far as it goes. Fetishism can be a tool and a religion, and as such other tool/religions recognize it as mutually exclusive. But take it a step further, and ask what separates this entity from other entities in the tool/religion class, and you'll see there's a reason "free love" isn't the rallying cry it once was.

One of the themes I keep coming back to in my participation here is the crucial importance of cultural memory. In attempting to understand our current culture, it's very useful to see where we came from, and what people were aiming for as they pushed society along. Old sci-fi is handy for this purpose, and having read a good amount of it in my youth, one meme that stands out is the common idea of the therapy-sex appointment. That meme came as an extrapolation of where people thought they were and where they thought they were going. There's a reason we didn't get there, and ended up here, instead. Not all tools/religions are equal under a given set of values.

(Just as a quick note for anyone reading this: my views on sexuality will be inevitably misunderstood at first glance, although if prompted to clarify these misunderstandings, I could perhaps only speak in metaphorical language. It's easier to clarify what I don't believe in. I don't advocate for Bataille's permanent revolution, I don't advocate for the ecstasy of transgression-as-such, etc.)

you'll see there's a reason "free love" isn't the rallying cry it once was.

I am cautious regarding this concept.

One of the themes I keep coming back to in my participation here is the crucial importance of cultural memory.

Something that, due to my own dimwittedness, I didn't appreciate until recently, is the difference between concrete rootedness as such on the one hand, and rootedness-to-come on the other.

I yearn for rootedness. There's nothing I want more. But it's a rootedness-to-come. It's an abstract rootedness that can only be intimated at with whispers and signs. It's a familiar image, but it's been passed through a filter that makes it look like a dream. Perhaps it will forever be on the horizon.

It's easy for me to forget sometimes that there are people who live in reality, and not in dreams. Rootedness for them is already here; it's inconceivable for things to be otherwise. Rootedness for them is Aunt Sally and Uncle Joe, it's the corner convenience store that's been in the family going five generations back, it's the guys down at the Elks Lodge or the local church, it's all the family gatherings at Thanksgiving and Christmas and in general it's all these things that define the coordinates of their world. These are their "roots", this is their "memory".

Given the vast differences in constitution and temperament you find among different individuals, it's unsurprising that we develop different conceptions of "memory".

Once you accept that a thing is subject to politics it becomes entirely subject to politics.

I’ve always felt that politics is inherently more expansive than the common definition most people have in their head. After all politics is really just figuring out how to live as a society, figuring out when collective action is needed, and finding tradeoffs. There are a lot of potential disagreements that can arise from that and stuff like how morality interacts with legality is one of those natural fronts. In that light I’d say that the role of porn in society is something that, if it ever weren’t subject to politics, was more an accident than something natural.

The natural and completely normal response of a liberal democratic society to private collective monopolies is regulation (if not trust busting) via policy choices. That’s clearly the case for the payment processors, so now that the matter comes to a head we must debate in the political realm whether we want to restrict or regulate their behavior or not. Perfectly normal.

Punishing lab leak theorists exists on a spectrum where the spectrum is subject to politics. Obviously the government regulates stuff like health claims for drugs (and sorta supplements but not really), as it should, so the government is already in the business of policing health claims, even if only in extreme cases. This is also politics, and is also natural. The fact that lab leak theorists probably shouldn’t be punished is a good and likely correct opinion to have, but it’s not immune from political discussion inherently.

After all politics is really just figuring out how to live as a society, figuring out when collective action is needed, and finding tradeoffs.

Politics is conflict resolution. Conflict resolution is a subset of Conflict. Where there is no politics, there is no conflict, and where there is politics, there is conflict. If "everything is political", then conflict is necessarily existential.

The core aim of "living in a society" is finding ways to limit the scope and scale of political conflict, to minimize the role politics plays in life so that as much of life as possible is lived outside it. Or to put it more precisely, so that life is possible, because "life outside of politics" is in fact the sort of life worth living, and "life in politics" ranges from unpleasant through wretched to, at the terminus, non-existent.

Punishing lab leak theorists exists on a spectrum where the spectrum is subject to politics.

Walking outside and eating bananas exist on a spectrum, where the spectrum is exposure to radiation; therefore, let us calmly discuss the glowing lump of cesium isotopes before us.

Every aspect of human life, action and experience exists on the spectrum of "subject to politics". Every aspect of human life, action and experience can be about politics, and unless effective limits on the scope and scale of political conflict are deployed, will be. Every aspect of human life, down to one's freedom to draw breath, can be negotiable, if we decide to allow it to be so.

Obviously the government regulates stuff like health claims for drugs (and sorta supplements but not really), as it should, so the government is already in the business of policing health claims, even if only in extreme cases.

One might frame this another way: "expressing disagreement with government policy" is already a category the government is in the business of policing, and is not immune from "political discussion", of which the government-issued truncheon is a subcategory. All this is known and agreed between us, it seems. I simply insist that, this being the reality, it should and must be my government and your expression that we "discuss" in this manner.

I've been feeling of late that we've (well, maybe not the youngest of us) living through The Internet going through the entire cycle from "new digital frontier" to "the railroad has moved in and brought civilization". Open rangeland has been wholesale fenced off into walled gardens, and those of us "digital natives" (not really analogous to Native Americans, but the term was bandied about a couple decades back) are sometimes struggling to deal with the massive cultural changes that entails.

Google is talking about disabling side-loading on Android, making users unable to run their own code on their own devices. Social networks are closing access to non-account users. New PC games are even talking about requiring Secure Boot, which limits what you can do with your own purchased hardware. And as you mention, payment processors are swinging their weight around to control what we do online.

I remember reading RMS' short story "The Right to Read" (written 1996) probably 20 years ago. Stallman is a controversial figure for a bunch of reasons --- I suppose all prophet figures are --- but it feels disturbingly prescient in a way that I remember thinking "oh, that can't all happen" at the time, but subtly thinking "oh, this is normal" in 2025. I'm not sure I like the changes, even if I can see why they're taken: security (keep your devices updated, required Internet connections), copyright (although Netflix, Spotify, and iTunes did manage to diffuse the Copyright Wars of the 2000's), or limiting unfettered access to obscene and abhorrent content ("think of the children" hits different once you have kids).

I suppose I'd be interested in reading "closing of the digital frontier" cyberpunk science fiction, if anyone has recommendations.

Onboarding normies and recently indians and other thirdworlders onto the internet has been an unmitigated disaster, infinite endless waves of Eternal September. The kind of people who used the internet and discussed things on forums and made little hand crafted websites are largely displaced and drowned in a sea of shit and vapid pedestrian nonsense.

I suppose I'd be interested in reading "closing of the digital frontier" cyberpunk science fiction, if anyone has recommendations.

Cyberpunk 2077 has this having happened as its basic premise: The new internet is mostly just a bunch of closed corporate systems, and there's a strict cordon sanitaire against the old one, which was a wild and free place but is now supposedly full of dangerous AIs. But if there are any actual books from the setting, I don't know them.

Everything ebbs and flows. Lenny Bruce made a career on censorship and now far worse things are being actively promoted by the large media networks.

The next frontier for pure computing is crypto. I don't mean the financial instruments like bitcoin, but all of the superscale distributed information sharing protocols. Interplantery Filesystem comes to mind.

This will, like everything in life, be both good and bad. Good in that actually free, I-control-all-of-my-own-shit computing plus actual anonymity (until quantum is a thing). It will also be bad in that the bad people will have access to all of this too - there's already cheese pizza on the main crypto blockchain for instance. But how new is this? Modulo math and cryptography have been around long enough that anybody who really truly wants to send out "bad" data (bad in a moral or ethical sense or w/e) has been able to.

There will be a period of transition. I think we're already in it. People who have to learn how to use computers again, at a lower level. It is amazing the number of college undergrads who begin a compsci class and have literally never heard of a "directory structure" before and have never, ever popped open a terminal of any type.

And that last part is the real shame of it. The gamification / subscriptionification of personal computing has destroyed what was (and will be, eventually) a fundamentally liberating technology. A few weeks ago, my Dad (late 70s) bought a new laptop with Windows 11. He was an early user of COBOL (!) back in the day. To see - and help - him trudge through all of the surveillance-ware screens was deeply sad. It was like watching a delta blues musician see Mick Jagger shimmy to "Brown Sugar" at some chintzy Las Vegas mega venue. His simple comment was succinct; "computers aren't fun anymore."

But I remain an optimist, although not one that believes "the good" comes for free or without some metaphysical combat. The bifurcation, I think, will be people who are content to let Corporate BigAI into the very depths of their minds and hearts simply in exchange for a daily (hourly?) dose of DOPEamine. On the other side of that line will be folks who value the human spirits role in intellect, epistemology, and information / knowledge / wisdom cultivation. I think this later group will engage in some sort of "dark-techno-renaissance" where some really hardcore but compelling Linux distros pop up. Perhaps to the point that a crypto-first layer of the internet emerges. A kind of BBS / IRC version .... 2030.0?

I am very much not a Richard Stallman fan. I think he's unpleasant as a person, is an ideological zealot, and frankly hasn't done much to deserve the rep that he has in the tech community. But every time companies keep pulling these stunts, all I can think is "dammit, Stallman was right again". It's like the "pol was right again" meme, but for tech.

At risk of being slightly off topic, Cory Doctorow’s novel “Little Brother” was a major influence when I was younger, early high school maybe? I have no idea how well it holds up now (probably poorly, it was YA), but I remember it opening my eyes to some big ideas about privacy vs security trade offs.

The MC is a kid who gets whisked off to essentially a black site prison in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, after which he gets released but government surveillance gets cranked to 11. He tries to get groups to fight back with stuff like flooding their surveillance of encrypted traffic with false positives via a network of hacked Xboxes, disrupting checkpoints being used for location tracking, stuff like that with a background of the classic debates like “why does privacy matter if I have nothing to hide” like I think the dad thinks.

But returning to your broader point I think that’s a great analogy. It’s been pretty incredible to see the simple idea that “it’s yours, so you can do what you want with it” be undermined so thoroughly and universally in almost every tech adjacent sphere. I get that the increased ease of distribution is a thing that creates some notably unique economic realities, but I think we need to grapple with those new realities directly rather than randomly flail around.

I think copyright more generally needs an entirely new re-imagining in the tech space. The old paradigms just don’t work, are too easily subject to regulatory capture, enforcement is a mess and inconsistent, there are so many problems. Software patents are also frequently bullshit.

I have no idea how well it holds up now (probably poorly, it was YA)

I personally don't think it held up well at the time, but I also was something like 10 years older than you when I read it. The book is full of bad writing - first, it is generally written like Doctorow wanted an excuse to explain technical concepts like public key cryptography, not because he was trying to tell an interesting story. Second, the characters are all insufferable teenagers, ranting about how you can't trust anyone over the age of 30 with any chance they get. Third, and perhaps worst, the main character is continually thinking in leet-speak - which nobody does. It was super cringe, and I have no idea what Doctorow was thinking.

You might feel differently than I if you reread the book, though. Personally, I thought that the book always sucked; it made enough of a negative impression on me that I remember specific criticisms I had (which is unusual, I normally remember a vague sense of "I didn't like it" when it's been longer than a month or two). But YMMV.

it’s yours, so you can do what you want with it

One problem is that most computers these days is basically a monitor attached to an Ethernet port. Even excluding licenses and EULAs, almost nothing important is happening on hardware you own.

I mean, yes, but also, you can fight it. I switched to Linux at the beginning the year in anticipation of Windows 10 hitting end of support, and it's been fantastic. AI features aren't constantly being shoved down my throat, it's not constantly defaulting to cloud storage, ads are constantly appearing on every UI surface. Most applications have a perfectly fine Linux version or equivalent. Those that don't usually run in Proton or Bottles. And for the few that can't do that either, I can run Windows in a VM easily enough when I absolutely have to.

It's not all upside. There is currently a bug in the Nvidia drivers causing a pretty sizable DX12 performance penalty in many games. And a lot of their Nvidia App features don't have any Linux equivalent. And it's a pain in the ass to get gsync working. But these problems are on the margins compared to the annoyances of windows that were increasingly part of the core experience.

Stallman is a controversial figure for a bunch of reasons

Only for being too correct. The baseless character assassination he suffered was purely to sideline him so that Google and Microsoft could get the foundation he formerly headed to be more "reasonable" and/or diminish their influence in total.

I think he probably is someone that's hard to deal with in person. I saw him speak once in college, and the most memorable part wasn't his own presentation, but when he showed up at a symposium the next day and started asking questions about copyright licenses in a presentation about algorithms (I honestly don't remember what sort) and not accepting "we haven't gotten to the point of releasing any code, and haven't decided on that yet" as an answer.

and that adult products have higher charge back rates

The banks are not wrong on this point. The industry is rife with bad practices on the customer side - teenage boys using their dad's credit cards, dads telling mum that a teenage boy used dad's credit card, people paying (real and virtual) card thieves for stolen credit cards to protect their anonymity, people who just feel comfortable committing so-called "friendly fraud" (i.e. buying something and taking advantage of the pro-consumer bias in the chargeback process to avoid paying for it) against a pornographer in a way they wouldn't against any other website, real post-purchase regret. And it isn't immune to bad practices on the website side - particularly hard-to-cancel subscriptions. Also, from a bank perspective, the low barriers to entry attract the kind of business that will be surprised by this and go bust under a wave of chargebacks leaving their acquiring bank with a loss.

Most banks are not interested in providing payment processing to the online smut industry for sound commercial reasons - it is a specialised market niche for banks who are happy dealing with massive chargeback fraud and whose fees reflect this. I suspect the Venn diagram of "Banks Valve management are comfortable working on Steam payments with" and "Banks which want to bank smut" looks like a pair of spectacles.

I think this is all bullshit at this point. On average to make a credit card purchase I have to enter the credit card number, the CCV, open the bank app on the smartphone and enter the PIN. Depending how you count it's either 3 factor authentication or 4 factor authentication.

Once you have a system like this in place you can just say "no" to chargebacks, there is no constitutional rights to chargebacks on pornography. I don't know how things are in other countries but I strongly suspect that the "we have a lot of chargebacks" has been a fake excuse for around 20 years.

I count two, maaaaybe three, factors. Entering two passwords in the same form is definitely not 2FA.

You have to have the credit card (one factor) or the credit card and the ccv (two factors) the smartphone app connected to the bank account (one factor) and the pin number (one factor).

The number on the credit card (something you know), the other number on the credit card (something you know), the smartphone app connected to the bank (something you have[conditions apply]), and the pin number (something you know but enter into an entirely different system from the CC/CVV, the compromise of those two probably being heavily correlated).

Consider as well how completely the banks and cc companies will screw over their customers in hundreds of other ways. They will cheerfully add 47 overdraft and late fees and not reverse those, but somehow chargebacks make them squeamish?

These rules also get applied where chargeback rates are very low, and related rules get applied by Mastercard against the high-risk payment processors that are supposedly the market niche for managing higher levels of chargeback fraud.

(And these rules are less reasonable than they look at first glance: "non-con" here is not talking about just or even primarily real-world rape, but is so broad as to include hypnosis kink.)

I was not aware that any payment processors even existed that would willingly get into this industry. Not even limiting it to the ones that valve is willing to work with. But I've never tried to run a smut based business, so I'm ignorant of the options available.

They exist, but a good deal of the problem is that many are also pinch points, here. Stripe, for example, once would proudly proclaim their happiness working with adult product merchants until WellsFargo teabagged them; today, their policy completely bans all adult content and services.

CCBill used to be the transaction provider of last resort for a lot of adult businesses on the edge -- and you'd pay a pretty sizable penny for the privilege -- but they've had the screws turned on them, too. Not tied into that ecosystem enough to know if there's a new meta; most modern stuff in the circles I move have found it more effective to work in gray-compliance for more 'mainstream' sellers that are too big to notice them.

"They have a lot of chargebacks" is unfalsifiable without a congressional investigation, so it's an easy excuse. And when we did get the congressional investigation--surprise, it turned out to be pressure from ideologues, not getting a lot of chargebacks.

You would have said, at the time, that Operation Chokepoint and the crypto sequel are just the payment processors fearing chargebacks. And you would have been wrong.

Also, I don't think Steam has a lot of chargebacks, because if you do they ban your entire account and every game you've ever purchased.

At the scale Valve operates at, surely banks pass the costs of chargebacks along to them. But also, banks probably aren't worried about them going bankrupt from chargebacks and leaving them with the bill.

This wouldn't be true of a fly-by-night porn site, though.

Note, none of this matters if what you mean by chargebacks is when you do it through the bank rather than the store itself.

Depends on what you count as a lot. I've done up to three refunds per month a few years ago and they all got refunded, I think at some point I went up to five and only then received a warning, but after taking a break, my account is fine, and I can still get refunds.

You're talking about Steam refunds. I'm talking about chargebacks. The oft-repeated argument is credit card companies hate porn because people get their rocks off and try to chargeback, or tell their wives it was fraud. But no, if you try to go around Steam support and charge back with the bank you're pretty much never interacting with Steam again.

Operation Chokepoint involved a co-ordinated pullback from businesses, some of which (like payday lending) were known to be high-risk businesses which required special handling by their banks (and were charged accordingly) but with risks that were well-understood and a long history of banks who chose to do that kind of specialist business successfully banking them, and some of which (like gun stores) were known to be unproblematic other than politically. This is pathognomic for non-transparent regulatory intervention, which was later uncovered. Nobody who understands banking thought at the time that banks were making sensible commercial decisions to debank gun shops - the question we were asking was whether this was a hivemind effect among woke bank risk managers and compliance staff, or a conspiracy run by the regulators. It turned out to be the latter.

"Online smut generates high chargeback rates" is, among banking risk and compliance professionals, a notorious fact that no longer requires a citation. "Gun shops generate high chargeback rates" is something that would be surprising, if true. (AFAIK, it isn't, and the regulators pushing Chokepoint didn't claim it was).

The "crypto sequel" involves an industry which is well-known to be a wretched hive of scum and villainy, and which had just turned out to be even more full of scum and villainy than people had expected. This included both the kinds of villainy that, while not a direct threat to bank safety and soundness, are unbankable for public policy reasons (Binance) and the more directly fraudulent kinds of villainy (FTX). Even if banks were unregulated, there is no world in which the Binance and FTX scandals happened without it becoming significantly harder to bank crypto startups - banks do not want to bank scum and villainy for both commercial and ethical reasons! In the world we live in, the banks which specialised in the niche business of banking crypto failed to do their jobs and the regulatory response reflected this. The winds that changed when FTX turned out to be a fraud were not political ones. This Bits About Money post has details and receipts. Two banks (Metropolitan and Silvergate) suffered franchise-threatening losses as a result of banking reputable-by-industry-standards crypto operations which turned out to be fraudulent. That should change behaviour - just like it did when multiple banks suffered franchise-threatening losses due to certain practices in the US mortgage market in 2006-7.

The Steam smut scandal is a bank that chooses not to bank smut (in most cases, banks which don't bank online smut made that decision back when Avenue Q was still running and have retained the policy ever since) re-evaluated the business of a platform that was onboarded as a non-smut business but was, in fact, getting about 10% of its revenue from smut. That they did this in the response to the Kangaroo Karens rather than proactively is an indictment of said bank's customer due diligence, but it doesn't reflect a regulatory-driven change in policy. Valve have said that they are going to look for a smut-friendly bank to take on this business, which is capitalism working as advertised.

Yes, crypto is high risk. And as you mention, payday lenders were also high risk. But even though they are high risk, that doesn't mean that the risk is the whole story, and that there isn't any pressure of some other kind. And without looking at the payment processors' financial records or finding a smoking gun, there's no airtight way to tell the difference between a genuine market-based reason, and something else that's being covered up by giving a market-based reason that's true, but wouldn't have been such a big issue on its own.

So of course, porn generates high chargeback rates. But if you go from "high chargeback rates exist" to "high chargeback rates are the reason", it will become impossible for you to notice any other explanations.

re-evaluated the business of a platform that was onboarded as a non-smut business but was, in fact, getting about 10% of its revenue from smut.

Mastercard also lied about it, which looks suspicious, along with suddenly noticing that Steam was a problem just now.

The winds that changed when FTX turned out to be a fraud were not political ones.

That particular example was not political pressure, but there was political pressure in addition to it. Again, high risk and political pressure that makes it worse than if it was just high risk, can exist at the same time.

Nobody who understands banking thought at the time that banks were making sensible commercial decisions to debank gun shops...

"Online smut generates high chargeback rates" is, among banking risk and compliance professionals, a notorious fact that no longer requires a citation. "Gun shops generate high chargeback rates" is something that would be surprising, if true. (AFAIK, it isn't, and the regulators pushing Chokepoint didn't claim it was).

Yup. They went with "reputational risk", which is overtly admitting that the only 'problem' that could be in play is that some people would disapprove of the banks doing business with gun shops. One may still not think that "online smut generates high chargeback rates" is a sufficient reason to pull back, but it's genuinely a qualitatively different type of reasoning, and the two cases don't really stand/fall together by analogy.

That these bans follow political winds is, I think, sufficient to demonstrate that the chargeback argument is just an excuse/soldier. This content has been around for years, being paid for by credit card, and the credit card companies didn't somehow not notice a high chargeback rate that whole time.

And throughout that time, being an acquiring bank for online smut peddlers has been a niche business that the JP Morgan Chases of the world don't really want to do.

Visa and Mastercard have always been happy to have payments for mainstream smut on their networks. It looks like they still are - Valve are saying that the problem with smut on Steam is being driven by their "payment processor" and that they are looking for an alternative, which strongly suggests that the party that wants out is the acquiring bank.

Visa and Mastercard have always been happy to have payments for mainstream smut on their networks.

You might be surprised.

That these bans follow political winds is, I think, sufficient to demonstrate that the chargeback argument is just an excuse/soldier.

Do they follow political winds? I don't think so.

In 2014, Chase Bank went after the personal accounts of "adult entertainers." This was part of Operation Choke Point, done under the Obama DOJ.

In 2021, OnlyFans banned adult content (I...guess this just didn't stick?) again due to banking issues. OnlyFans is based in the UK, but it seems it had issues with JPMorgan Chase as well.

This is just on a quick Google, I'm sure there's more examples out there.

In 2014, Chase Bank went after the personal accounts of "adult entertainers." This was part of Operation Choke Point, done under the Obama DOJ.

That sounds pretty damned political to me. Certainly it's not about chargebacks.

Then I think I misunderstood you - I agree that Choke Point was political, but I took you to be saying that it had to do with what party was winning at musical chairs this time, when it's actually a consistent feature across administrations - my mistake!

Operation Chokepoint was explicitly political in the sense that it was an Obama administration policy designed to achieve the policy goals of the Democratic party.

The identification of certain industries, including smut, as high-risk and the expectation that banks who choose to bank them have appropriate procedures in place rather than just handing out small business accounts on standard terms, is something that has been around for a very long time regardless of the party in power and reflects a combination of regulatory common sense (some industries really are fraud magnets) and bipartisan views on the role of the banking system (including, critically, the idea that banks should actively seek to avoid banking criminal businesses)

Before Operation Chokepoint was revealed, the explanation for the debanking, at least for payday lenders and porn, was exactly what you claim is the explanation here: those industries are high risk. This wasn't true; they were debanked because the government told them to. They may have actually been high risk, but the claim that they were being debanked for that was a coverup for the true reason. The lesson from this is that you should not just say "sure, those industries are high risk" and credulously believe that the credit card companies and payment processors are only reacting to market forces.

As you note, dealing with high risk has been around for a very long time. Which means that if the behavior changes, it probably isn't because of high risk, even if someone claims it is.

Operation Chokepoint was explicitly political in the sense that it was an Obama administration policy designed to achieve the policy goals of the Democratic party.

Isn't part of the point being made that when Operation Chokepoint was taking place, it's results were being explained away as "the identification of certain industries, including smut, as high-risk and the expectation that banks who choose to bank them have appropriate procedures in place rather than just handing out small business accounts on standard terms, is something that has been around for a very long time regardless of the party in power"?

I think the capitalist solution would be that you simply charge smut providers higher fees.

Also, I am not sure if this applies to steam accounts, especially if they have years of content on them. I imagine if I tried to cancel a CC purchase made to my steam account, the first thing steam would do would be to lock my account -- after all, I have just said that it was used by an unauthorized person.

Also, steam is kind of a big platform and unlikely to go bankrupt over some porn game chargebacks.

teenage boys using their dad's credit cards

This is puzzling to me. If daddy told the CC company "actually, that was my 15yo son paying for smut online", I would imagine the CC company to reply "no problem, here is your money back. Also, we have just reported your son to the police for wire fraud. Have a nice day!"

This would reduce such claims to a very small number, because most families would gladly forgo 100$ to avoid having a family member investigated for financial crimes.

Instead, they mostly react without the middle sentence. But my view of CC is that they are a laughably insecure system whose insecurity simply gets papered over by them absorbing losses through fraud.

Everything you say is correct. You absolutely can bank smut providers, and charge high enough fees for doing so to make a profit - precisely because there are things you can do to manage the high risk of chargeback fraud. But this is a specialised niche banking service, and apparently not one that Valve's first-choice banking partner wants to provide.

But my view of CC is that they are a laughably insecure system whose insecurity simply gets papered over by them absorbing losses through fraud.

Precisely. It turns out that normies find dealing with effective security difficult and confusing, which means that a laughably insecure system that charges high enough fees to eat the resulting fraud losses is hugely socially valuable.

Some people have blamed activist religious groups on aggressively lobbying the payment processors for this crackdown.

Can we look for specifics here? This comes from Collective Shout, which is not a religious organisation, and in their FAQ claim that the accusation that they're "easily offender, prudish, moralisers, or religious fundamentalists" is a deflection tactic used by others in bad faith.

As a prudish religious person myself, I don't think there's anything bad with being one, but the idea that we specifically were behind this seems false.

They are listed as an Australian pro-life feminist group. Pro-life tends to map to the right, feminism to the left. Both sides of the GamerGate coin are trying to tie them to the other side, though there's always a risk mapping another country's left and right to yours. That said, I don't know that the evidence is there that Collective Shout is really responsible for Visa's behavior, or a convenient scapegoat.

Good correction. I had a surface level recollection of the details, and the article I read was probably a left leaning author so putting the blame on religious people was probably better in their mind than putting the blame on feminists.

I mostly don't want to go after any of the groups that might have moral objections. For both practical reasons and philosophical reasons. I'd rather just remove the tools of censorship so that no one can use them.

They are shriveled up old feminists, it might as well be a religious organization as far as I'm concerned. Their holy sacrament is dressing up the women and their original sin is patriarchy or whatever.

See below - I think that precision when it comes to identifying an opponent is instrumentally good.

I am personally uninterested in the exact ideology behind restrictions on communication between consenting adults. Besides, targeted media is one to which both feminism and Christianity have objections too. I will note, however, that self-idenfication standard is not absolute, person can be a nazi, without claiming to be one, for example. A Christian organization will find allies among those on the left more easily, if it puts its objections in leftist-coded language.

Edit: If one lived in a society with poweful faction of Christians, one would be incentivised to put ones moral statements in terms of Christian vocabulary, even if one was not a Christian. Likewise with feminism. Thus mere choice of words is not that good of a test. In my opinion a better one would be finding a piece of media about which Christian and feminist opinions differ, and see Massed Yell's evaluation of it.

I am personally uninterested in the exact ideology behind restrictions on communication between consenting adult

Ok, then let's blame it all on liberals and libertarians.

Naw, if we're just making up who's to blame, lets go with the Jews. They're used to it.

Did libertarians (libers) have anything to do with A) payment pricessors coalescing into a handful of entities and B) payment pricessors feeling empowered to block lawful transactions?

US had for a long time light anti-trust regulation, a point libers were in favour of. But there is a network effect at play here, more powerful than the former argument. Thus A is more due to economics, than ideology.

B is a consequence of Operation Chokepoint, that lawsuit against PornHub where a judge considered Visa not obviously not involved. There former is a point where libers can say with pride they were opposed, the latter is more difficult. If Visa picks and choses who it deals with, and one of those it picks violates the law, holding Visa complicit is not obviously against libertarianism. But the fact that payment processors are not common carriers is at least adjacent to libertarian values. As libers are apt to consider freedom of association important, they consider common carriers something to resist. I am sure you are familiar with these types with regards to social media censorship.

But I admit I overstated my point. If one knows the cause, one can better argue it. And libers played a at best a bit part.

Did libertarians (libers) have anything to do with A) payment pricessors coalescing into a handful of entities and B) payment pricessors feeling empowered to block lawful transactions?

Why are you suddenly caring who gets blamed?

Because witch hunts are a thing. And blaming the wrong target, especially blaming someone much weaker than the actual culprit, leads to witchhunts.

Yes, that's my point. When it was people blaming Christians for the actions of a feminist activist group his response was

I am personally uninterested in the exact ideology behind restrictions on communication between consenting adults. Besides, targeted media is one to which both feminism and Christianity have objections too.

When @ArjinFerman jokingly blamed it on libertarians in response, he wrote a 4 paragraph response trying to clear them of blame on the issue.

I'd argue that factional differences among one's opponents are relevant for understanding those foes, even if for only tactical reasons. If nothing else, if you approach this particular drama by concluding you need to attack Christians, you're likely to be quite ineffective, because they weren't the ones who got this done.

For what it's worth, my view on the object level issue is:

It's rather shady to go after payment processors specifically, as a way of putting pressure on other platforms. Collective Shout would have been better or more honest to make their cases to Steam or Itch.io directly.

It would be reasonable for platforms themselves to make decisions about what they want to host, including NSFW content; there would be nothing in principle objectionable about Steam or Itch.io making such decisions.

I think it would be best for society overall if a platform like Steam made a decision not to host porn. This is because I think it's socially beneficial for porn to be at least somewhat taboo or embarrassing; since Steam is the default game platform, what it hosts helps to set the standard. So I think Steam shouldn't host NSFW games for the same reason that YouTube doesn't host porn. Itch.io, on the other hand, is pretty heavily into the pornographic/NSFW space already, and it makes more sense for it to lean into its niche.

That said I do not think the government ought to compel Steam or other companies to offer or hide certain content, from the top down.

I am willing to accept tactical compromises on issues like this - for instance, Steam hosts porn currently, but Steam tries to avoid hosting 'hateful' content, and if the definition of hateful continues to expand, I could see a case for total content-neutrality as a compromise. However, at present I think total content-neutrality is unlikely to happen. In principle, though, I agree with you that total neutrality would be a decent Schelling fence.

Collective Shout would have been better or more honest to make their cases to Steam or Itch.io directly.

They have in the past and Gaben has told them and other similiar busy bodies to pound sand time and time again. Even that one time when journos threw a hissy fit about the game Hatred existing. The pr people managed to convince a drone in valve marketing to pull the game off the store, as soon as Gabe found out he re-instated the game and fired the guy who did it.

Neutrality as a default.

A schelling fence of "Will process all transactions for legal goods." is more stable than "Will process all transactions for legal goods, except ones I morally dislike.". Yet informal sanctions by payment processors against Japan were met by much more mixed reception in the English speaking communities, that is not wholly negative like restrictions on itch.io and Steam have been. The logic of "First they came for..." was not considered.

To be expected, really. Japanese media has long faced censorship abroad, usually swept under the moniker "localization". Once the logic that consenting a Japanese adult and a consenting American adult must require the consent of every intermediary to communicate, the leap towards foreigners regulating communication between two consenting Japanese adults only requires foreigners thinking their moral code is universally applicable. A very common viewpoint in the era where particularism is disregarded.

Manga Library Z, a website legally hosting out of print manga, who director is the acclaimed manga artist and polician Ken Akamatsu, shut down in late R6 (2024) due to credit company's decision to prevent payments. (The site has since come back up, but without the option to pay with MasterCard or Visa cards). In April of last year, www.dlsite.com, removed the option to pay with the previously two mentioned cards, but also with American Express. Remaining payment option are probably unfamiliar to gaijin. Fantia was on the chopping block next month, but AmEx was still able to be used. (Fantia also supports "Toracoin", but the ways to buy it are the same as for Fantia, so it does not function as a loophole) Visa defended its conduct that was incomptable with being a common carrier on the grounds of "protecting the brand" (1).

This article is a good overview.

(1) MasterCard's 5.12.7, paragraph 2, PDF:

The sale of a product or service, including an image, which is patently offensive and lacks serious artistic value (such as, by way of example and not limitation, images of nonconsensual sexual behavior, sexual exploitation of a minor, nonconsensual mutilation of a person or body part, and bestiality), or any other material that the Corporation deems unacceptable to sell in connection with a Mark.

vs Visa's 1.3.3.4, PDF:

A Member must not use the Visa-Owned Marks:

ln any manner that may bring the Visa-Owned Marks or Visa Inc. or its affiliates into disrepute

ln relation to, or for the purchase or trade of, photographs, video imagery, computer-generated images, cartoons, simulation, or any other media or activities including, but not limited to, any of the following:

– Child sexual abuse materials

– Incest

– Bestiality

– Rape (or any other non-consensual sexual behavior)

– Non-consensual mutilation of a person or body part

These restrictions have nothing to do with the law in Japan, but are a random selection of the worst legal restrictions on speech in the developed world (there are legal restrictions on depictions of mutilation are in Japan, but that part is not used to interfere with commerce outside of Japan by MC/V, while Australian restrictions are used against Japanese merchants) with the added carte blanche "deems unnacceptable" and "bring into disrepute". They of course are too wide to be applied to all, thus the enforcer is given the lattitude to threaten almost any storefront selling media not explicitly for children. And also create a chilling effect. That "reputation of the brand" is something that is explicitly noted in the rules, is why the MasterCard's statement just over a month ago, that MasterCard will process all lawful payment was seen as duplicitous.

Japan needs to go after Mastercard and Visa, forcing them to operate in a blind carrier sort of way or start levying massive fines daily.

Some people have blamed activist religious groups on aggressively lobbying the payment processors for this crackdown.

How sure are we this was done by religious groups, rather than, say, feminist ones? Or even that this actually is somehow politically neutral? If they can exert control over payment processors, focusing on porn would show a poor judgement of priorities. Not that it hasn't happened before, of course, but I am wondering if this isn't reflexive finger-pointing.

It's frustrating to me but a lot of people seem to gravitate towards religion of some kind.

Just embrace it, bro. Trying to force humans to go against their nature is the common thread between all the dystopian social and political projects we've ever seen.

The atheist movement in the 2000s seemed genuinely anti-religious.

I don't know if I agree on that. It might have been comitted to shitting on Islam as much as it was to shitting on Christianity, but it was no stranger to bizarre religious beliefs.

itbwas no stranger to bizarre religious beliefs.

What do you have in mind?

There was a pretty big memetic overlap with rationalists, so all the mumbo-jumbo about uploading your body and freezing your brain was pretty popular, but Scientism is the elephant in the room here, I think.

I agree with @WandererintheWilderness. Speculation about future technologies is in a separate category from religious beliefs.

Soft disagree on that one.

Much of it is very plainly wishful thinking in the face of mortality.

One of my last AAQCs was about how tiresome I find the "you're only speculating about possible future technologies because you're afraid of death" "argument". As I argued there, even if that's the underlying psychological motivation for why people are speculating about said technologies, it doesn't really tell us anything about how likely said technologies are to come to pass.

When someone's speculating about how different future societies might be to our own, before accusing them of wishful thinking, just think about how bizarre our society would seem to someone from five hundred years ago. I'm sure hundreds of years ago when Alice said "in the future, we'll be able to treat infections easily, and smallpox will be eradicated, and amputation won't be the first port of call for damaged limbs, and only a small proportion of women will die in childbirth", Bob would be there to condescendingly pat on her head and tell her that her childish wishful thinking would get her nowhere. Or, as a comic recently shared in these parts wittily put it, "ME GO TOO FAR!"

As I argued there, even if that's the underlying psychological motivation for why people are speculating about said technologies, it doesn't really tell us anything about how likely said technologies are to come to pass.

That's true. And it may as well be true that after death, we all go to heaven. I wouldn't know either way. Granted, one of these may well become observable one day, unlike the other.

"ME GO TOO FAR!

That things never yet ceased to amuse me.

how tiresome I find the "you're only speculating about possible future technologies because you're afraid of death" "argument"

It's not an argument, you're correct. It's part observation, part speculation, on my part, something I find interesting in its own right. I don't mean to make any point about what future technologies will or won't be capable of. I also don't intend to pry open the brains of third party futurists to try and find out whether I'm even right or wrong about my theory. It's just my completely personal view that I'm putting out here for the sake of a conversation about the parallels between futurism and religion. If that isn't interesting to you, but futurism itself is, then I understand that but I also think we can have our cake and eat it by just having both discussions, with no need to shut down one for the other.

I'm sure hundreds of years ago when Alice said "in the future, we'll be able to treat infections easily, and smallpox will be eradicated, and amputation won't be the first port of call for damaged limbs, and only a small proportion of women will die in childbirth", Bob would be there to condescendingly pat on her head and tell her that her childish wishful thinking would get her nowhere.

Yeah, guilty as charged, I'm a Bob. I leave it to the Alices to prove me wrong.

I'll grant you "bizarre", but calling cryo a religious belief is some serious begging-the-question. Unwarranted optimism about a dodgy medical technology is just that: unwarranted optimism. Snake oil isn't a religion.

@FtttG

Simple cryogenics is one thing, I was talking about the uploading of your consciousness to the cloud and stuff. There's a whole bunch of ideas that are essentially recreating a religious worldview inside a secular one - mind uploads, simulation theory, Yud's posthumous consciousness reconstitution inside a virtual paradise vs. Roko's Basilisk.

Is it religion when people want to enter a state of being unbound by the laws of the universe as we currently know them and/or don't want anything hostile to do it first?

Y... yes?

It's a shame that posts as short as this will never be recognized as AAQCs.

Was it religion when people wanted to fly despite common knowledge at the time being that people can't fly?

It just seems like you're latching on the worldly parts of religions when their defining feature is having esoteric claims about the universe.

More comments

Atheism+ most likely.

Apparently the most recent controversy was sparked by an Australian Christian feminist organization called Collective Shout. They are the anti-porn and anti-prostitution type of feminists though, so left-wing media coverage generally just describes them as "conservative" or "Christian".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Shout

I'd argue that media coverage is misleading, though - Collective Shout and Melinda Reist are best understood as feminists. Their own self-description is entirely secular, and their feminism tag suggests some crossover with the movement. I searched their website with the tag 'Christian' and most of what I found was references to the male lead in Fifty Shades of Grey.

I can see no evidence that Collective Shout are a Christian organisation of any kind. Reist herself is a Christian, but that on its own hardly seems like an issue.

In that case, I'll add a fourth point to what cjet said: globalization sucks so fucking much, man. The fact that a noname group, from a country that lost a war to emus, can pull this off is so ridiculous...

I think the payment processors are somewhat laundering their policy change through these moral groups. That is why I listed the lack of competition as the biggest problem.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats