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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.
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.
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.
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