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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16042 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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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.

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.

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

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.

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