site banner
PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   28388 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

10
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

A federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction against at Texas bill aimed at curbing porn access by minors. According to the text TX House Bill 1181 requires porn websites employ "reasonable age verifications methods" and display a series of notices about the alleged side effects of porn consumption (page 4 of the pdf). (I say alleged because I haven't read enough of the research to have made up my mind on the subject.) I went into this thinking the judge was issuing the injunction based on compelled speech grounds, the health warnings. However, as I read along, there are some head scratching lines. For example from page 26-27, under the heading "The Statute is Not Narrowly Tailored:

Although the state defends H.B. 1181 as protecting minors, it is not tailored to this purpose. Rather, the law is severely underinclusive. When a statute is dramatically underinclusive, that is a red flag that it pursues forbidden viewpoint discrimination under false auspices, or at a minimum simply does not serve its purported purpose. See City of Ladue v. Gilleo, 512 U.S. 43, 52 (1994). H.B. 1181 will regulate adult video companies that post sexual material to their website. But it will do little else to prevent children from accessing pornography. Search engines, for example, do not need to implement age verification, even when they are aware that someone is using their services to view pornography. H.B. 1181 § 129B.005(b). Defendant argues that the Act still protects children because they will be directed to links that require age verification. (Def.’s Resp., Dkt. # 27, at 12). This argument ignores visual search, much of which is sexually explicit or pornographic, and can be extracted from Plaintiffs’ websites regardless of age verification...

...In addition, social media companies are de facto exempted, because they likely do not distribute at least one-third sexual material. This means that certain social media sites, such as Reddit, can maintain entire communities and forums (i.e., subreddits), dedicated to posting online pornography with no regulation under H.B. 1181. (Sonnier Decl., Dkt. # 31-1, at 5). The same is true for blogs posted to Tumblr, including subdomains that only display sexually explicit content. (Id.) Likewise, Instagram and Facebook pages can show material which is sexually explicit for minors without compelled age verification. (Cole Decl., Dkt. # 5-1, at 37–40). The problem, in short, is that the law targets websites as a whole, rather than at the level of the individual page or subdomain. The result is that the law will likely have a greatly diminished effect because it fails to reduce the online pornography that is most readily available to minors.

I can't put my finger on why, but this feels Kafkaesque in its logic here to me. "Your law isn't doing enough so it's an overreach." I'm almost certain if Texas had put in requirements about social media or search engines, the court would have struck that down as being overreaching. Lawyers, help me understand why I'm wrong here.

Outside the legal logic and jurisprudence at play here, I'm a little unsure of where I fall on the ethical issues at play here. I don't have anything against porn as long as everything going on is consensual, legal, and not, for lack of a better term, too weird. (I don't really know where that line is and I don't think it's terribly germane to the discussion.) I don't really think age restrictions are unethical. I certainly don't buy that they're too difficult to implement, since gambling sites require age verification and have been able to pull that off. (Web devs, help me understand why I'm wrong.) Nor am I really sure I buy the privacy arguments either here. I guess people just paid cash for their porn back in the day but there was still someone behind the counter who knew that you bought it and, in theory, could be compelled to testify that they saw you buying Naughty Nurses 7. (No idea what kind of court case would hinge on that information, but it's theoretically possible AFAIK.)

As far as the health warnings go, I'm not sure where I fall on that. On the one hand, I don't generally favored compelled speech, whether it's my coworkers asking for me to give my pronouns, trigger warnings, the government telling me I have to say the pledge of allegiance, people telling me I have to stand or kneel for the national anthem. On the other hand, I'm very much in favor of strict consumer labeling laws, since customers can best express their market preferences when they have the most information about their competing choices.

I can't put my finger on why, but this feels Kafkaesque in its logic here to me. "Your law isn't doing enough so it's an overreach."

That's not what they are saying. They're saying that when your law is curiously specific, it's probably you're up to no good. For instance, you forbid red lights on buildings, but not yellow or green ones, on the grounds of "traffic safety" (not confusing these lights with traffic signals), when it just so happens that red lights are associated with one political party and green lights with another.

City of Ladue states

While surprising at first glance, the notion that a regulation of speech may be impermissibly underinclusive is firmly grounded in basic First Amendment principles.9 Thus, an exemption from an otherwise permissible regulation of speech may represent a governmental "attempt to give one side of a debatable public question an advantage in expressing its views to the people." First Nat. Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, 435 U. S. 765, 785-786 (1978). Alternatively, through the combined operation of a general speech restriction and its exemptions, the government might seek to select the "permissible subjects for public debate" and thereby to "control ... the search for political truth." Consolidated Edison Co. of N. Y. v. Public Servo Comm'n of N. Y., 447 U. S. 530, 538 (1980).10

The specific issue there was that the City of Ladue banned all residential yard signs except "For Sale" signs, "residence identification" signs, and signs warning of safety hazards, and further allowed churches, commercial organizations, and non-profits to have signs residences were not allowed, all under the excuse of "avoiding visual clutter".

(it appears, however, that this is dicta; the court decided against Ladue on other grounds)

I think this is a bad application of that principle -- if the law was tailored to require age verification from some porn sites but not others (or defined "porn site" in such a way to make that effectively true if not technically true), that would be cause for suspicion under this principle, but requiring age verification for porn sites but not non-porn sites such as search engines probably doesn't. At least if you accept that there's sufficient government interest in requiring age verification for porn, which as far as I know the courts generally do accept.

I think this is a bad application of that principle -- if the law was tailored to require age verification from some porn sites but not others (or defined "porn site" in such a way to make that effectively true if not technically true), that would be cause for suspicion under this principle, but requiring age verification for porn sites but not non-porn sites such as search engines probably doesn't.

When the state argues an interest is Compelling, it's not merely arguing that it's important, or really important. It's arguing that it's so important that it's justifiable to restrict basic constitutional rights in furtherance of that interest. If pornography is harmful enough to minors to warrant speech restrictions, then what difference does it make what percentage of the total content on a site meets the definition of pornography? The only reasonable definition of a "porn site" in this case is any website that contains pornography.

The state could easily argue that occasional incidental harm from pornography on sites which were not dedicated to it is one thing, but exposure to sites dedicated to porn is far worse, and quantity has a quality all of its own. It certainly is not clear that age-restricting sites dedicated to porn but not search engines which may incidentally contain porn is an attempt to engage in a prohibited content-based restriction. What would that prohibited restriction be?

They could easily argue it but then they'd be further undercutting their assertion that it's a compelling state interest; that's a pretty easy way to get that argument shut down. For example, back in the 80s or early 90s a town in Florida passed a law prohibiting the slaughter of animals, and members of the Santeria religious community, who engage in animal sacrifices, objected on religious grounds. The town countered that it had a compelling interest in preventing the kinds of problems that can arise from having a lot of dead animals around. The problem was that the law contained so many exceptions as to make this assertion laughable. Farms were exempt, slaughterhouses were exempt, butchers were exempt, hunters were exempt, etc. Evidently, the only people this law actually applied to were those who slaughtered animals for religious reasons, whom it was clearly designed to target. This isn't an exact analogy since the town passed a supposedly neutral ordinance as a pretext for banning religious activity it didn't like, and I'm not sure that's the case in Texas, but the point is that when restrictions of fundamental rights are at stake you don't get to hedge your arguments and create balancing tests and the like. If the interest is compelling, you're expected to act as though it is.

Realistically, though, there's a further complication to this that would probably prevent things from getting that far. Practically speaking, no one is "incidentally" exposed to porn from dedicated sites the way you argue they theoretically could be on Google Images. If you're on PornHub or XVideos you didn't just stumble across it, and as far as I know no one is arguing that incidental exposure is the problem. Google Images isn't nearly on level with dedicated porn sites, but for someone trying to use it for porn (or someone for whom it's the only source of porn due to the law) it can easily deliver more content than you would get if you bought out your entire local newsstand. Arguing porn for minors is only a problem if the total amount available exceeds 10 terabytes isn't likely to get you very far.

What would that prohibited restriction be?

Requiring verification to access content. It's a restriction. Imagine if you had to create an account, submit photo ID verifying it was you, and wait for approval before reading any news story online. And suppose this wasn't the website's doing, it was a legal requirement for all news sources. Buy a newspaper, show photo ID. Do you think this would pass constitutional muster?

Requiring verification to access content. It's a restriction. Imagine if you had to create an account, submit photo ID verifying it was you, and wait for approval before reading any news story online. And suppose this wasn't the website's doing, it was a legal requirement for all news sources. Buy a newspaper, show photo ID. Do you think this would pass constitutional muster?

No, but I think it might pass muster for porn. That is the question that needs to be decided.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats