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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16207 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.

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'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.

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