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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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I don't think free access to furry porn is the basis of technology. But will a society that limits their sons' access to the newest technology (and especially if it requires either a blanket ban or the parents' active involvement) reach the heights that are equivalent of going to the moon?

If you did not notice, we already went to the moon in an era where sodomy was a criminal offense, porn was almost nonexistent. Again, this is false choice - you can have technologically advanced society without "freedoms".

In fact, we live in such a society right now. Progressive puritans are the ones who promote their religious ideas such as the original sin also known as a privilege based on your race, sex or sexual orientation. We have blasphemy laws with their very own taboo words that cannot be spoken - such as a faggot or nigger or tranny and many more. They have their own structure of sins in their broad istophobic categories such as racist, sexist, homophobe and transphobe around which they have requirements for everybody. Is this not a threat to technological advancement, or is it just a protection of progress, liberty and modernity - or is it a RETVRN to religous dogma in a new skin?

I am not talking about freedoms as a broad social system of things being acceptable or not. I'm talking about parents denying their kids access to smartphones or Internet as one of the measures for upholding lacks of freedoms. In order to assuredly safeguard your kid from porn today, to my knowledge, you have to not buy him a smartphone, not connect his computer to the Internet, keep him away from friends who could provide him with theirs and prevent him from saving up enough of his own money through allowance/summer jobs. I do not believe that's how you raise an above-average innovator today. In the past helicopter parenting was merely stifling; now you'd have to go half-Amish to achieve the same result. And Amishes do not launch rockets.

Sure, let's move it from individual action - although even there I can have many arguments, such as that tech execs and innovators actually do not give smarthpones to their children and send them to schools that ban the technology and stick to older methods of education. But that is besides the point.

What if a conservative government just nuked OnlyFans and Pornhub and other similar websites from orbit tomorrow, similarly to how government recently acted against disinformation channels that they deemed as dangerous - such as Russia Today or what they did to TikTok citing nebulous national security reasons. In your eyes would it mean it represents a dangerous RETVRN ideology, a threat to progress and liberty and modernity and technology and all that, meaning we are now on a slippery slope toward energy blackouts and airplanes falling from the sky?

You could argue that the rich, smart and highly-engaged parents' children are really the only ones who are needed for progress, while the rest can either brainrot themselves or live in digital hothouse conditions until independence, yes. How many schools are there that can prepare children for a life amidst technology while banning it within their walls?

If government simply nuked OnlyFans and Pornhub, then no, I wouldn't say it is damning to progress. On the other hand, if they started cracking down on VPNs, proxies, mirrors, torrents and all other less-easy ways to access wrongthink/wrongfun, that seems like it would negatively affect flourishing, through sheer friction introduced to the infoscape. Not to mention political resentment. I hear the recent riots in Nepal correlated with a crackdown on social media.

If government simply nuked OnlyFans and Pornhub, then no, I wouldn't say it is damning to progress. On the other hand, if they started cracking down on VPNs, proxies, mirrors, torrents and all other less-easy ways to access wrongthink/wrongfun, that seems like it would negatively affect flourishing, through sheer friction introduced to the infoscape. Not to mention political resentment. I hear the recent riots in Nepal correlated with a crackdown on social media.

I don't think so. There is illegal porn content already, which is heavily prosecuted and punished by the government absent bans on VPNs or torrents. We can just expand that no problem. But for me this was just an example and a thought exercise for the test of logic. It definitely is possible to have RETVRN to some semblance of normalcy without sacrificing technology to some magic of absence of abstract liberty to coom.

The government enjoys massive political will among all strata of society to prosecute CP with great prejudice, just a bit less than actual child molestation. I think expanding that to arbitrary definitions of coomery will be a bit harder than "no problem".