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The right wing has seemed to gain some ground on the porn-being-viewable-by-children issue. North Carolina has passed some legislation requiring age verification for adult sites. I remember Matt Walsh at least advocating for this quite strongly. Not only that, but it's not the first state to do this; laws in Louisiana, Virginia, Utah and Montana also require age verification. Pornhub's response is to block access to its website in these states, stating the following:
That statement by itself actually boosts my opinion somewhat of Pornhub; a device level safe search would probably be the best approach to this. Parents could set the birthday of the child in question, a password locked setting, and the phone could then block access to many of these sites. There probably exists some amount of parental options like this, right? I have no knowledge of them, but I doubt they quite reach the level I'm talking about here. If any of you know anything about child safety tools currently available to parents for Android or iPhone, let me know. I'm sure there's a ton for Windows and Linux, and maybe macOS too. You could even get pretty scary and start talking about algorithms that determine if local files are porn or not.
There would certainly be some ways to skirt this, but as always there are ways around any law, really, if someone is motivated enough. Even with a border wall, some Latino illegal immigrants would manage to climb or swim around it, or get in some other way. Despite all the background checks in the world, one could choose to 3d print their own gun. When lawmakers create legislation, they're not counting on that legislation stopping everyone; just stopping most people is satisfactory.
However, none of that is on the table right now. What is on the table are these current laws; Virginia doesn't specify how the sites should verify that users are 18 or older, but others like North Carolina require an external commercially available database containing user age information. The porn sites check with this database and verify the user. At least in theory, if sites like Pornhub and e621 don't decide to self-immolate in response.
I think the arguments for this are pretty obvious. For conservatives, porn is pretty obviously bad for kids, and as that article says, over half of 13 year olds have seen porn by that age. Pretty bad! Requiring some ID would at least nail the mainstream sites that they use. That alone could do a lot. And asking for this database isn't too much; we ask for IDs in various other contexts. Alcohol and cigarettes come to mind. And buying porn in person would require the same. I'm pretty sure you can buy tobacco online, though I do not know the method for verifying the age of customers.
But there's plenty of ammo for people to dislike this law, too.
What I'm mostly disappointed in are these redditors that seem to take it for granted that the legislation is a bad thing. Because they assume it's just about exerting control and the Republicans are fascist dictators and Reddit has porn anyway and it's all performative theater. I don't think these are convincing arguments. The people passing these laws are probably the same types that go for things like the Brady Campaign, they're not supervillains doing evil things for the sake of it.
I keep getting reminded by stuff like this that for conservatives in general, liberty is not a chief end in itself, it is more of a means to an end. I keep getting confused about this because conservatives so often use pro-liberty language in their arguments, and a subset of conservatives actually are fairly libertarian. But conservatism as a whole isn't.
Conservatives want the right to own guns because they like guns and they value the idea of forcefully resisting bandits and oppressive governments. At least, some bandits and some oppressive governments. At the same time, they tend to favor keeping recreational drugs illegal. Many of them would support increasing limits on porn availability. Many of them would also view the re-introduction of military conscription favorably.
I must be some kind of sucker because obviously conservatives as a group are not libertarians, and the more intellectual of them are often quite open and explicit about that, but I somehow keep getting misdirected by their tendency to spout pro-freedom type of rhetoric into thinking that they are more libertarian than they actually are.
Oddly, I do not seem to have this blind spot with progressives, it always seems obvious to me that progressives are not primarily liberty-oriented despite their use of the same sort of pro-freedom rhetoric that conservatives use. It is probably because I live in the US so for the most part I view conservative threats to liberty as being weak and defanged. If I lived in Russia or Saudi Arabia I would have the opposite perspective.
quoth someone from elsewhere:
Many (though certainly not all) conservatives are operating in this mindset. Your freedom to watch porn/do drugs/be gay/generally not conform to societal expectations is not only of no interest to them, it is an active threat to their freedom to live in a society ordered to their preferences. Some will even make the case that these things are not Real Freedom ("I must tell you, That their Liberty and Freedom, consists in having of Government; those Laws, by which their Life and their Gods may be most their own.")
The fundamental problem with "liberty orientation" as a framework is that liberty means different, contradictory things to different people. Most everybody agrees that your right to swing your fist ends at my nose, but once we move from metaphor to application things almost immediately lose clarity.
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As others have said, the classical conservative idea of liberty is liberty towards something. In a Christian context, this is liberty towards love:
What you are thinking of is often described as license, or unlimited ability and right to do whatever you want, whenever you want. Liberty is quite distinct, and in fact many conservatives argue that the highest forms of liberty and freedom are liberty from the flesh, or liberty from our own addictions and negative inclinations.
This is entirely consistent with restricting porn. By watching and becoming addicted to porn, you are actually putting chains on yourself and reducing your liberty, since your compulsion begins to take control over you. That's the line of thinking, anyway.
Why stop there? If we prescribe what people are allowed to eat, we could liberate them from being overweight. If we restrict what people can read, we could liberate them from dangerous ideas polluting their minds. If we institute a draft, we could save people from becoming aimless drifters.
Under that Orwellian definition of liberty, Saudi Arabia would score much better on liberty than the US.
Lol, very fair! I'm not necessarily saying that I agree with the definition, but it is a more coherent philosophical point than most think.
You have to subscribe to the Christian worldview to agree with it though by and large, although I think there's truth even outside that framework. But Christians imposing Christian morality on non Christians via the law is not a good idea imo.
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Liberty is, in a classical conservative mind, the tendency for things to tend towards their proper place and stay there. This is because everything has its telos, its right purpose, inherent to its nature and probably written into the laws of reality itself by God, and going against it just doesn’t lead to flourishing.
To take an example, to cross thread a screw instead of using the right one- it works fine, up until you have to take it out and put it back in again. And that’s because you exceeded the operating parameters; using the correct screw would have saved this. And nearly everything is a lot like that; there is a proper role and purpose for everyone and everything, and going against it may not cause obvious damage upfront, but it will quite quickly.
There was a recent AAQC about high powered career women quitting high powered careers because those careers weren’t making them happy; in a classical conservative society where homemaking and child rearing is acknowledged as the proper role for most women, they wouldn’t have cross threaded themselves, because there would have been friction, albeit probably not actual forbidding- there were female doctors in the 19th century. As a classical conservative today I recognize that some women doctors are probably necessary but most women are happier staying at home, and thus think there should be a fairly low quota for women entering medical school.
Likewise, on this issue, kids shouldn't be looking at porn, and they shouldn’t be using drugs. Obviously some of them will do so anyways, but putting up friction can meaningfully change the calculus so that they tend more towards things kids should be doing.
For other issues, I think it should be illegal to sell cold beer for off premises consumption(people use it for drinking and driving, but it’s trivial to put it in your fridge at home), schools should teach heteronormativity, and the welfare system should be reformed to explicitly favor poor married couples over single motherhood or long term cohabitation.
I think you meant "shouldn't be looking at porn" here.
You're correct, I do.
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I think of it as conservatives erecting boundaries so that people can be as free as possible within them. In this case, wanting kids to wander the kid internet doing kid stuff and not being able to access porn.
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As someone that suffers from the same blind spot, I think this is correct. If, like me, you're a financially comfortable, thirtysomething guy with no particular religious conviction, you have probably not felt any sort of constraint from conservatives on how you live your life. On the contrary, conservatives have mostly fought for you to keep your guns, keep your money, and generally deal with less nanny-state compulsion. Progressives, on the other hand, have been a driving force for endless minor insults, grievances, and compulsion that are impossible to stop noticing once you start noticing them. This isn't a product of the eternal positions of the sides, just the result of being a white guy in the PMC class of the 2020s.
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It depends. I consider myself conservative yet I wouldn’t support banning porn for adults nor do I support banning most recreational drugs (even if I would argue most people shouldn’t use them)
But kids are always a tricky area for liberty minded people. There is a real problem since (1) kids don’t really understand the long term costs, (2) have a fuck ton of hormones clouding their judgment, and (3) the future self problem. It is one reason I steadfastly support all bans of so called gender therapy for minors.
I’m not sure how I feel about the topic of OP. But I recognize (maybe rationalize) that one can be pro liberty but realize that doesn’t apply for a 9 year old.
As ever, one of the problems with banning things for just ThosePeople, regardless of who ThosePeople are, is that enforcement mechanisms will tend to antagonize everyone rather than just ThosePeople. Banning the sale of alcohol to teenagers (or at least young teens) is probably a pretty decent idea, but the United States has such an idiotic culture of officious enforcement that convenient stores just make a policy that everyone needs to scan an ID, even if they're obviously elderly. Whether the juice is worth the squeeze winds up being an object-level question, but I think it's best to set out with the assumption that the enforcement will be done by excessively officious and petty bureaucrats in the context of a litigious system that favors maximally annoying policies for everyone involved.
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