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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25645 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.

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.

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.

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