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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   25285 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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Dispatches from the War on Horny/Payment Processors: the other shoe has dropped for Pixiv.

A year and a half ago, Pixiv made signs that they'd be clamping down on content on some of their services to appease Visa and MasterCard. Today, Pixiv announces that US and UK users will face restrictions on content they can upload. (Specific details here.)

Currently remains to be seen how much this affects the Western artists who are on Pixiv, but it doesn't bode well. Some think this portends a coming era of digital pillarization, and while I won't rule out the possibility that things will get so walled off that VPNs become a necessity, it's hard to say how likely that actually is.

EDIT: This may be the rationale for the change.

Via conversations with the people who are most affected by this, those who use sites like Pixiv commercially, they seem to believe that there's a cabal of anti-porn American Evangelicals behind payment processing restrictions. This seems to be approximately a consensus. When I tried to question them on alternative hypotheses involving a Visa/Mastercard Duopoly, even the "moderate" suggestion that excess chargebacks is the primary motive for not wanting to deal with adult content, there was a lot of pushback. Didn't even risk discussing right-wing hypotheses involving debanking or Operation Chokepoint. My impression was that they pattern match all politics they dislike to political groups they dislike regardless of whether there's actually a link.

Texas HB 1181 was passed near-unanimously. It contained two requirements for porn sites: age verification, and a surgeon-general style warning. Nothing about payments.

There’s clearly some interest in suppressing pornography. While I can’t say whether they provided MasterCard or Visa with the impetus, I expect they would endorse payment processors’ restrictions.

The prevailing Twitter conspiracy is that it’s the British to blame. Because the UK has been trying to age verify porn since like 2015 (even though, as of yet, this hasn’t been implemented afaik) many of the world’s major age verification software providers are located in the UK and they’ve lobbied extensively both in parliament and as part of UK trade missions abroad. There was one in Japan recently.

(even though, as of yet, this hasn’t been implemented afaik)

I still don't understand why this is some impossibility. Is it really that huge a technical issue or does British policy just move at a glacial pace?

They keep changing what they think the standard should be and they’ve just attempted another major reorganization of the media regulator which is technically responsible for this. But yeah, very little has happened in the UK with Brexit (and for two years COVID) taking up pretty much all legislative and government energy.

MindGeek claims to have the tech fully ready to go for a UK-standards version (and that's the subtext behind PornHub, a MindGeek subsidiary, not complying with the American age verification versions), and MindGeek says that it's actually in use in Germany since 2015. It's definitely the political economy of things.

No one who is suffering politically likes to be told "actually you have no enemies, it's all an illusion, move along nothing to see here". It's natural to want someone to blame. (And frequently, there is someone who can be blamed to at least some degree.)

When you look at:

  • The mass exodus of porn from tumblr
  • Patreon instituting overtly political/moralistic guidelines for what content is allowed on the platform (they went out of their way to say hypnosis porn is banned, what the fuck)
  • Total porn ban on all the biggest social media sites, facebook, instagram, tiktok, youtube
  • The extreme difficulty of getting adult content published on major distribution channels like Steam or the Apple/Google app stores
  • The desexualization of media in general due to the rise of wokeism, particularly the sorts of casual non-explicit sexualization that would be appealing to a straight male audience
  • Japanese adult game developers increasingly ditching porn altogether to comply with regulations on mobile app stores and to gain access to the Chinese market, which also has its own strict regulations

you start to get the impression that a lot of people really don't like porn. It's not an isolated incident. And this is all before we even get into the laws against loli manga in many countries, people literally going to jail for lines on paper that clearly depict fictional characters.

Some of these have nothing to do with payment processors either. I receive no payment for putting up free porn on tumblr or youtube, but I'm still not allowed to do it.

The porn artists might be more inclined to believe the "it's just a totally random confluence of business factors" theory if they felt that public sentiment was on their side. If they felt that people really did believe in a principle of free artistic expression, and it really was just the credit card companies who couldn't get on board for some reason. But you ask people about these porn bans and the typical response you get is something along the lines of "of course, this content is totally perverse and obscene, and probably harmful to children and society too, and no one in their right minds would actually want to be caught paying for or even looking at this stuff, and certainly no one will miss it if it's gone... but it's not being banned because people don't like it, don't be silly, it's really just those pesky chargebacks, sorry kid it's just business..."

Do you see why porn artists might get suspicious? Where are their allies? Who is actually willing to support them?

Granted, blaming it on Evangelicals is also wrong. But the basic impulse to see it as a political issue rather than a purely economic one is, I think, quite correct.

The extreme difficulty of getting adult content published on major distribution channels like Steam or the Apple/Google app stores

Difficulty publishing porn on steam? I find that doubtful.

/images/17139872510847902.webp

Jap publishers have more esoteric content like loli and beast, which steam takes down immediately. Ironically I think guro is also taken down on steam, even though you can flip to the next screen and download gore simulator 20000.

So I get downvoted because some Japan tier messed up porn genres, ones I haven't even heard of are.. not allowed on Steam.

Got it.

Not that it matters, but it wasn't me. For what its worth you're right, and the steam rules are, as others have noted, remarkably nebulous. I think there're incest-adjacent visual novels on Steam, and literal nazi dating sims, but those haven't attracted the eye of sauron. It is more likely Steam is reactive than proactive, and it only needs a moralizer to flag a game and put it under review. Look (not so) hard enough and almost all the adult games will have something objectionable.

Steam is so weird about it they even removed a completely safe for work game just because it had art by Muk. There's been feuding review teams at Valve since the old Hatred scandal, so their policy is schizo.

Traditionally for adult Japanese games sold on steam like Muv-Luv and Subahibi they were censored and you had to download a separate patch from an external source to put the porn back in. Maybe Valve has gotten more permissive recently and I missed the memo.

I think there are some games on the store that are straight-up uncensored, no patch needed.

they went out of their way to say hypnosis porn is banned, what the fuck

I am not so surprised that someone wants rape via mind control be kicked out of their platform (or is it somehow something else?)

To my understanding the consumers of hypnosis porn are indulging in the fantasy of they themselves being hypnotized. Something about giving their ego the justification to fantasize about indecent acts with plausible deniability.

OK, I was not expecting this one. So it is fiction, about pretending to be forced into some sexual acts, via nonexisting method?

How many layers of indirection people need here?

Still, it technically includes depiction of rape somewhere so I am not so surprised that they get rid of it.

I think "character/person hypnotized into sex" is more prevalent in illustrated form rather than in live-action. More live-action stuff is probably the preserve of seriously niche and weird fetishes like sissy hypno (one of the genres where, as Aqouta and Prima mention, the viewer is the one that's supposed to be getting mind-controlled).

So it is fiction, about pretending to be forced into some sexual acts, via nonexisting method?

Yes it is fiction, typically mind control erotica features elaborate magic/sci-fi scenarios that aren't possible in real life.

How many layers of indirection people need here?

It's not about indirection. It's very direct. Contra @aqouta, for most people into hypnosis porn (the people who self-insert as the sub anyway; others might self-insert as the dom), the idea of a total loss of control, of utter submission and objectification, ego death, etc., is the entire point. That is the object of erotic fascination. It's not a preliminary step to another thing.

Someone who wants porn about X is not the same as someone who wants X.

Well, obviously it is fictional depiction of such acts, maybe at most only fans-style porn.

Well hypnosis is fake so it doesn't really matter.

Hypnosis is actually not fake, it just doesn't work the way people think it does. It's used in modern (Western) medicine it just doesn't really work well and the real version isn't mega useful so you don't hear about it a lot.

well, between you, @AhhhTheFrench and this in-depth discussion I'm hoping to continue with @jimm, We've now covered all the possible positions on the subject of hypnosis. I'd certainly be interested to see more discussion about the facts of the matter.

Some of that was deleted (or I otherwise can't see). Missed the previous discussion in the weird psychopathology thread line.

I invite you to read the wikipedia page, which links to some actually studies on the matter (ex: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/apt.13706)

Basically the most evidence based approach to hypnosis concludes that it seems to function similar to mindfulness meditation, biofeedback, and other similar modalities where someone hacks their cognitive state and level of arousal, which is often easier to do with assistance from an external resource then by a person on their own.

Obviously this implies a limited level of clinical utility but it can help with psychosomatic adjacent pathology and any time "mind over matter" is more directly relevant.

I was fortunate enough to experience some training in this during my medical education and while I personally was not hypnotized I witnessed some of my colleagues experiencing it....and it was ultimately very unexciting and contrary to media portrayal (which is as this usually goes).

It seems most reputable people who do this emphasize the limitations and the fact that it can't really make you do stuff you don't want to do already.

What do you think would happen to the reputation of the hypnotist that hypnotized your colleagues if he surprised the women with orgasms?

This is bog standard shit in the erotic hypnosis community, and the reason you didn't see it in your medical education isn't that it's not possible.

More comments

shoot, I mangled the link. here's the correct version. For what it's worth, my understanding of hypnotism is the same as yours, but @jimm has a very, very different perspective.

Well, obviously it is fictional depiction of such acts, maybe at most only fans-style porn.

If we want to drill down to chargebacks, we could still argue at some higher level that society is too prudish around sex work, which explains the high chargebacks. Chargebacks presumably come from men ashamed about their porn habits, because society constructed things such that porn consumption is shameful (e.g. what if the wife looks at the credit card statements? Easy to just claim it was a fraudulent purchase and charge back, no?).

Much like with firearms, your interlocutors are probably coming from a different cultural perspective, where sex work and porn are normal and healthy, where actually paying for porn is something of a point of pride (in opposition to just getting it for free).

As for whatever links evangelicalism has to credit card policies...well, okay, you likely have a point, though I do wonder about the political donations of Visa and MasterCard, if any.

What I would like to propose is to regulate payment processors in a similar way as ISPs. Either they become common carriers, which means that they are required to do business with any to-their-best-knowledge legal endeavor (and open themselves up to court cases if they refuse) and are shielded from liability, or they remain free to pick their customers and will remain fully liable for any damages causally downstream from their transactions ("What do you mean, you did not know that the car rental agency would lend a car to someone who might run over some kid? You decided to do business with them.")

Of course, this will not happen because the current state of affairs is not an accident. Remember Wikileaks? I am sure that the US government would have loved to lean on the ISPs to get them to voluntarily stop routing to their website. Fortunately for us, this was not a realistic option without causing a big stink. On the other hand, going to the credit card processors and telling them "Did you notice that you are barely making any money from processing transactions with Wikileaks, but on the other hand irritate us quite a lot by it?" was enough to convince them that it was not worth it.

I think this is the correct answer. It’s a power move plain and simple. The powers that be want to be able to shut down things they don’t like and are forming “relationships” with the people running the choke points. If a site can’t process payments, it can’t survive long. And if ISPs refuse to direct traffic to them, again they can’t survive. But because it’s not the government, and nobody gets arrested, it’s not technically censorship so there’s nothing wrong with it.

Of course, this will not happen because the current state of affairs is not an accident. Remember Wikileaks?

Rather more obviously linked would be Operation Chokepoint.

Slowly but surely, the old infra becomes more enshitified and the AI augmented proles become more competent. On it marches until at last the moat is so decayed that a new smaller, leaner variant undercuts the old industry, and the cycle resets.

Circle of life.

In some other contexts, I might agree with you, but I personally think that, in terms of both owner culture and user culture, Pixiv doesn't really deserve to be lumped in with the FAANG services. And, of course, it's hard to see how AI will help here, since Pixiv is an art site and AI art is still socially-unacceptable.

The discussion about payment processors earlier in the year included discussion of controversial topics (incest, bestiality, sexual exploitation of a minor, rape, non-consensual mutilation), and the change you link to today includes those.

However, the most recent announcement also says the restrictions are "to comply with regional laws", and includes much more general pornography:

  1. post any content that is obscene, illegal, unlawful, fraudulent, defamatory, libelous, abusive, lewd, invasive of personal privacy or publicity rights, harassing, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive, or encourages conduct that would be considered a criminal offense, give rise to civil liability, violate any law, or is otherwise inappropriate.
  1. post any content that appeals to the prurient interest, is patently offensive in light of community standards where you are located or where such content may be accessed or distributed, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value, or otherwise violates any applicable obscenity laws, rules or regulations.

In other words: I don't think these most recent changes are driven by payment processors. I think they're being driven by states like Texas making hosting porn more legally fraught (i.e. the same thing that made Pornhub pull out of Texas).

(i.e. the same thing that made Pornhub pull out of Texas).

Pornhub loves the kind of regulations that Texas are doing. They just dislike that they don't get to be in control of them and use them to eliminate the competition.

I was sure the “lacking value” argument was specifically addressed in a U.S. Supreme Court case. Is this taken from the pixiv announcement?

Edit: it is, but in exactly the opposite way that I thought. Miller v CA.

Texas recently started enforcing HB 1181, a viewer-age-verification law. The sort which intends to make it very annoying to distribute pornography if and only if one intends to run a business in the U.S.. Hosting a server out of Czechoslovakia is, as I understand it, still untouchable.

Pornhub’s parent company responded by cutting all services to Texas. Should a Texan IP address make a request to their site, he will receive instead an angry letter about his lawmakers’ shortsightedness, questionable legal footing, and so on. Other sites have followed suit. The argument goes that 1) the law only hurts the most compliant companies, and 2) it fails a variety of Constitutional protections.

Naturally, it was wildly popular, passing 141-2. It has also survived legal challenges up to the 5th Circuit Court. Even though one of the provisions was struck down as improper government speech, proponents insist that the rest is perfectly above-board.

So far, it’s looking like another step towards pillarization.

Okay, I've looked up pillarisation in the historical sense, but would you mind defining exactly what you mean by it in this context? I'm not 100% on exactly what is being connoted and not connoted.

I was using it in response to the OP. That tweet just says “fracturing,” so I’m not 100% sure what distinguishes it from Balkanization, siloing, or walled gardens.

Pillarization is where individuals within a society live in separate worlds on ethnoreligious lines and was derived from the prewar situation in the Netherlands, where Catholics and the two kinds of Protestants lived extremely separate lives from each other with separate sports leagues, schools, newspapers, political parties, churches, etc. A more current example is probably Lebanon, where Maronites Shiites and Sunnis are functionally the government for their specific groups. Pillarization is a long term goal of a few very conservative Christians in the USA(that’s explicitly what gab is trying to enable) but doesn’t really have much mainstream support.

Balkanization usually refers to a country breaking up into smaller territorial units- like if Texas seceded.

I’ve never heard ‘fracturing’ used in a modern context but it’s a pretty good literal translation of a variety of terms used in the classical world to describe the transition from a democracy to an authoritarian regime- eg the collapse of the Roman republic was referred to as ‘fractio’ by the chroniclers of the day, and the Greek term for the same process is στασις, which means something like ‘standing apart’.

I think but I’m not sure that ‘siloing’ and ‘walled gardens’ are references to individual steps on the path to any of those things.

You have it right on the last sentence; I could have just said "siloing," but that's already been used on different scales (like between platforms or categories, not necessarily between regions).

Would the Ottoman millet system be another example?

No, with pillarization everyone is still under the same government with the same laws. The millets were more like autonomous zones, but defined entirely by ethno-religious affiliation, not by the territory the people lived in. They had formal laws and collected taxes.

Pillarization is more like what the middle east was like before the millet system and now after. People lived in pillarized ethno-religious communities with in the various states, but there was no formal system of legal division at the level of the state.

Probably, yes, but I think pillarization implies that there aren’t clearly dominant and subordinate groups like the various Islamic implementations; Shiites are de facto socially dominant in Lebanon today and moderate Protestants in 1930’s holland, but there wasn’t/isn’t a formal hierarchy.

Czechoslovakia does not exist for almost 32 years, maybe you meant Czechia? And if yes would you care to elaborate what is going on? It seems interesting to me.

Sorry, I was using it as a generic Eastern Bloc stand-in. Really, any of the smaller countries. I don’t know the legal mechanism, but torrent or vice sites are stereotypically hosted on these more permissive domains. Kind of like how sci-hub.se currently has .ru and .st mirrors.

I know that in Slovakia we have quite “benevolent” laws, when things like EULA are not recognized, as we require intent in form of paper. Which makes sense - you cannot recognize who clicked “yes” and then keep someboy responsible, we are very much paper country in that regard. Also we consider downloading anything as legal - not uploading in torrents - but in general I saw a lot of rulings favorable to “pirates” here - as long that they were careful for normal things. Things like child porn are a big NO and you can expect to attract attention like a magnet and some large physical operation with some very “liberal” explanation of law. Don’t do it here.

I guess Pixiv couldn't just carve out Texas? Granted, I guess that's a lot harder if you're a company based in Japan, whereas Mindgeek is in the West.

And I think it’s worth noting- nobody is going to call their lawmaker demanding more access to porn(duh) and no lawmaker will go out on a limb to make porn more accessible, nor was Texas the first state this has happened in.

Massive L for our system of government. Who the hell wants to ban porn? And yet, it happened.

"TEXAS HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES WARNING: Pornography is potentially biologically addictive, is proven to harm human brain development, desensitizes brain reward circuits, increases conditioned responses, and weakens brain function."

"TEXAS HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES WARNING: Exposure to this content is associated with low self-esteem and body image, eating disorders, impaired brain development, and other emotional and mental illnesses."

"TEXAS HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES WARNING: Pornography increases the demand for prostitution, child exploitation, and child pornography."

Are these things even true?

It's true for some people, at least, or possibly much easier for some people than others, same as alcoholism.

However, there's only something like 12 scholars publishing on it worldwide, and most of the research is very bad of the type "we handed out a bunch of surveys to a 60% undergrad female body" or evaluation of an "online survey".

Banning obscenity and vice are two very popular pastimes.

Who the hell wants to ban porn?

Me.

Who the hell wants to ban porn?

Quite a few people, actually. Even on the ACX survey (not a demographic known for its social conservatism) over a quarter of respondents said that they would wave a magic wand to end pornography permanently if offered the choice. Now making something magically disappear is not quite the same as banning it for a number of reasons, but the sentiment is much the same.

You might be confused because of all those statistics indicating that 90%+ of men have used porn. Past, or even current, porn use is not inconsistent with wanting it to not exist. People don't have perfect self-control, after all, and it is Well Known that people have diminished judgement and self-control under... relevant circumstances. Many people are quite capable of disapproving even of their own vices, and think that it's bad to have widely available temptations for them and others to succumb to them.

I am almost certain that banning internet porn is part of the intention of laws like these, not an accidental consequence. For the state of Texas (and for other states with similar laws) this is the system Working As Intended.

Agreed. Times have changed. I suppose there was an era when porn was largely seen as a mostly harmless pastime of adolescent boys, who were assumed to consume it only in moderation, partly because it was relatively complicated to obtain as compared to now. Not anymore.

Those warning labels are so vague as to be insultingly trite. Impaired brain development/functionality can just be post coital sleepiness, heightened demand for sexual services can just be normal sex stuff... this is almost insulting.

When the word 'gooning' has been not only coined but escaped containment to the point fossils like Norman Finkelstein are aware of it, yeah, it's way past time.

Impaired brain development/functionality

Erectile dysfunction in <35 men has gone up from 2-5% to 20-30% in recent years.

Really no substitute for giving it a try. Just get a good hentai game(youtube link,sfw) and a free afternoon and find for yourself.

'PORN MAKES YOU SOFT WHEN YOU NEED IT MOST' or some catchier tagline would at least make coonsumers pay attention to something. In this current iteration it's as useful as cigarette warning labels. 'SURGEON GENERALS WARNING' is more naggy schoolmarm than hypnotoad.

Re porn games I get the appeal; my Skyrim mod list is basically an archive of Loverslab over the years including now deleted works, and I briefly did product development for VR Mate integration with animated joiplay-generated visual novels. Combining parasocial AI relationships with immersive VR and haptic feedback (fleshlights) is basically a recipe for total motivation death. I honestly think that would be a fucking fantastic way to manage stupid violent impulsive young men.

Texans like to complain about the influx of Californians. But the driver is the traffic.

They're trying to model it off of the Surgeon General's warning on cigarettes, which are obnoxious, but balanced out by the fact that smoking literally causes 5-20% of all deaths in the United States.

They aimed for Koop, but got Proposition 65

People don't like it being harped on, and while I widely understand why a bunch of snakes pulling every get rich quick scam using it has given it a bad reputation. Crypto going mainstream is the only solution to this problem.

Quite right. As time passes, cash will diminish. It's more convenient to swipe a card or scan a QR code.

Either we end up using privately run cryptocurrencies or state-run central bank digital currencies. Right now there are some issues with transaction costs, scams and volatility on the crypto front.

However, if we end up using CBDCs, human freedom is caput. CBDCs allow total financial surveillance and total financial suppression. It goes beyond debanking, you could make people impossible to transact with. This is the key technology that allows for totalitarian social credit schemes, the seeds of which we see in China. CBDCs are seductive to governments and central banks - taxes become impossible to evade! Monetary policy can be implemented hour by hour! Criminal assets are easy to seize, money-laundering is impossible. But they also enable the mainstreaming of the debanking tactics we've seen with Paypal and high-profile wrongthinkers. After cash people will probably stop thinking of money as something concrete and physical, it becomes an abstract, malleable concept. Your UBI money can only be spent on the right goods, made by the right people. Maybe the climate means you can't buy more than a certain amount of real meat each week, perhaps you can't fly more than what's strictly necessary for your work. Your stimulus money has to be spent in 30 days before it disappears. Billy might pay different prices on the same good to Aisha or Joe. Your politics are dangerous and unacceptable? Good luck getting a website, accepting donations or doing anything at all.

It's more convenient to swipe a card or scan a QR code. Either we end up using privately run cryptocurrencies or state-run central bank digital currencies

And why would you need a digital currency for this and not current electronic cash? Many people even in Russia already live basically without using physical cash at all and that doesn't stop them evading taxes.

Electronic cash is basically the same thing as a CBDC, they just haven't added all the AI-enabled fine-grained control and monitoring yet. They can print and freeze money at will, it's just a hassle for them to do so.

Taxes are easy to evade all around the world because the administrative capacity and technical methods are poorly developed, especially in Russia. But they won't be poorly developed forever. China's social credit scheme is pretty benign at the moment, you just can't get certain train tickets if you're a scammer, have to put down deposits to rent an e-bicycle. But it won't stay that way forever, they're testing and developing it over time.

It definitely annoys me that "access to the financial system writ large" has become so utterly critical to doing anything useful that it immediately has a totalizing effect on what anybody can do, anywhere in the world, even on the internet.

Maybe there's one bank/payment processor that holds out and willingly acts to handle the 'controversial' transactions, but that just removes things one layer back, as other banks and processors will eventually blacklist that bank. And thus rendering that bank mostly useless for any other purpose. If it doesn't shut down it'll struggle to remain solvent.

Lets say that some pornography company was wealthy enough it could 'become its own bank' and processes payments on behalf of users and extends credit and otherwise runs all its own transactions and only has to interface with the financial system to purchase the services it needs to operate. Once it is known as the 'porn bank' it'll probably be impossible to find any other financial services willing to interface with them unless they comply with all the sames restrictions the other banks are working under... which defeats the purpose of 'self banking' to begin with.

It comes down to the fact that the financial system is a tightly connected web, and the main value any bank or payment process can provide is access to the network, so maintaining that access is their primary concern.

From the moral standpoint, it bugs me when there's very little evidence(indeed, I've seen none) that digital artwork depicting heinous, illegal, or otherwise disgusting acts is actually causing harm to nonconsenting parties. The reasons we find CSAM objectionable and worthy of legally crushing are generally not present when it comes to digital art. One party or group wants some art, the artist produces it and gets paid, nobody else even need be aware of what it contains!

It'd be nice to think of our financial system as mostly as set of dumb tubes that transmit the data representing our money around without caring much about the start and endpoint... with a lot of protections in place to mitigate fraud, theft, and user error. But ultimately a financial company is operated by humans who are subject to legal jurisdiction of some country or other, and have to maintain access to the global finance system if they want to take that money to any other jurisdiction, so in reality the 'rules' are set based on what all participants are willing to tolerate.

Anyhow, this is ultimately the impetus for the protagonists in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon to create a private, heavily anonymized bank/data haven in a location outside of the U.S.' sphere of influence. And in order for them to pull it off it required a chain of events that seems even more fantastical now than it did then, such as finding an island nation that is independently wealthy yet also politically stable enough to act as a headquarters for such an endeavor.

It’s largely the fault of the Clinton admin, which began the push to essentially put the SEC and IRS in charge of the entire global financial sector after a panic about rich people not paying taxes. Step by step they destroyed Swiss banking privacy, went after tax havens (not to destroy them, just to make sure they handed every shred of data over to the American government) and eventually established the current regime in which every bank in the entire world that might remotely engage with anyone doing business in or around or via the United States is subject to the whims and reporting requirements of the American government.

The US extradites foreigners for financial crimes even if they had no American victims, did not occur on American soil and had nothing to do with the US, simply because in some vague or distant way they relate to the US financial system. It is bullshit, but who can stand against America? Its European and Asian vassals certainly can’t.

I had noticed that under the current regulatory regime, the U.S. government in theory should have information pertaining to literally every large monetary transaction that takes place with any regulated bank attached to it.

So almost all of them.

Also can't help but feel like this will eventually enable an end-run around the need to actually investigate crimes and make arrests to enforce the law. Instead they can just haul you in to ask why you made that strange $5000 transaction on July 23, 2026 when you happened to be visiting a known purveyor of badthink?

Frustrating, but inevitable because there's no way that government would CHOOSE to turn blind eyes to the wealth of transaction data that is now electronically accessible.

Eventually? It already happened.

https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/federal-government-flagged-transactions-using-terms-maga-and-trump-financial

Fincen started to fight money laundering and international tax fraud. Now it's being used to make dossiers on domestic political opponents. Shop at Cabelas, you're on a list.

All the worst case scenarios have already happened so fast nobody noticed. The Democrats have complete institutional control of the government and zero qualms about abusing it.

Guess I can understand WHY China, Iran, Russia and such would not want to be plugged in as part of the U.S. extended financial network, since that's basically giving them root level control of your citizens' finances, let alone your government's.

And with the implementation of the Corporate Transparency Act, it is also way harder to hide behind corporate structures.

Pretty crazy how while constant culture warring was going down during Trump's term, the Fedgov just quietly picked up all the tools it needs to surveil every aspect of the financial system from top to bottom without any alarm whatsoever.

I've thought for a while that partisan infighting is the true opiate of the masses. But not in the sense that it makes us happy and relaxed.

The booze-and-meth of the masses. Get 'em all riled up and take away inhibitions so they get distracted brawling each other.

"access to the financial system writ large" has become so utterly critical to doing anything useful that it immediately has a totalizing effect on what anybody can do

Well, when you put it like that…what’s the alternative?

I met someone, once, who’d been working in Saudi Arabia when her employer switched from paying cash to paying checks. She explained that they used to bring in a giant sack of cash on paydays. Now they could turn it into a bookkeeping problem rather than a logistical one.

These enormous institutions developed by providing a valuable service. People wanted to store their savings. They wanted to distribute promises instead of cash. Eventually they wanted all the records generated automatically, without any humans needing to slow the process down. At what point did they move from a private to a public good?

Because the alternative to private banking, with its private right of refusal and freedom of association, is treating it like we do the roads. A central actor has to step in and say “we know this policy is irrational for any of you as individuals, but we’ve judged the total benefit to be greater.” And that’s not going to happen so long as the central “irrationality” is something unpopular as pornography.

Well, when you put it like that…what’s the alternative?

I think in the hypothetical ideal in my mind, the payment processors/financial system are 'forced' to be agnostic as to the source of funds they receive, even if they themselves will decline to send money out to certain uses or to take certain types of people or businesses as customers. Money is money when it comes in, as long as all else is legal and fraud protections are cleared.

I suppose it should in theory be 'impossible' to have your funds locked away from you, and your funds should always be withdrawable to some base physical currency or transferable to a different bank, so you will never have to forfeit money sitting in your account because the bank determines it came from some sketchy source.

Government doesn't like this because people will evade taxes and launder money and pay for activities the government dislikes.

Society at large might dislike this because various vices are enabled by an open payment process.

But the point is that if you are operating in sketchy-but-legal industries and you have a contract with a payment processor to help you receive money from your customers, you should not be getting 'debanked' completely without warning and should be able to know you can get those funds out of the bank without too much hassle, even if they ultimately decide to stop processing your payments.

It definitely annoys me that "access to the financial system writ large" has become so utterly critical to doing anything useful that it immediately has a totalizing effect on what anybody can do, anywhere in the world, even on the internet.

You're not wrong: despite general libertarian sympathies, I do think there is a role for utility-type regulation in a number of new critical roles that didn't exist a few decades ago. Credit cards and cashless payments are certainly one.

I'd toss out email and online identity infrastructure as another that doesn't get much press: I've come to realize that my dependence on my Gmail account (which I've had since it was an invite-only beta) would be almost impossible to replace. Maybe with a lot of work I could replace it with one provided through Microsoft, but that wouldn't really fix the problem. Practically hosting your own email is basically impossible, from what I can tell, due to spam blocking mechanisms. Given Google's propensity to sunset things (or really, the level of risk of corporate spontaneous failure), I think it'd be a pretty serious crisis if their email and identity servers went down for a day. Or worse, permanently.

I'd point to the common carrier rules for other utilities as a reasonable example of what could be done. I think expanding those to include things like credit card payments and email would be possible. However, those have their own concerns with fraud and such that might prevent applying the existing rules as-is.

Hey, what do you know, I just migrated off Gmail last week, and would love to talk about my experience. I'm now using ProtonMail (https://proton.me/mail) with a Proton Unlimited subscription, and have my own domains through Cloudflare. Here's what I did:

Step 1: Create a free-tier Cloudflare account and transfer/buy a domain or three. I have had (mylastname).tech for a while, which makes my email address firstname@lastname.tech, and I like that. But if you want to buy a .vodka or .christmas domain for your primary email, go for it. I was using Gmail and Google Domains, but with Google Domains shut down I had to migrate, and ultimately Gmail doesn't play nicely with Cloudflare so I needed a new email solution. Domains will generally cost $10/year.

Step 2: Create a Proton account and buy at least Mail Plus so you can add your custom domain. You can do parts of this with a free account, but I decided it was worth paying a little for the extra features, especially the ability to send mail from my domains.

Step 3: Proton has a wizard that guides you through setting everything up to receive email from your domain, and a help center article with pictures specifically for Cloudflare. The steps include setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC so your emails don't get sent to spam, and enabling the catchall address so that you get all emails sent to your domain.

Step 3a (optional): You can also configure Cloudflare to receive your emails and forward them to your proton mail address. This gives you Cloudflare's protection and tracking. This is what I did, and this is what you'd do at the Proton free tier.

Step 4: You may experience some pain, because you get to change your email address on all your accounts to point to your new domain. I had already done this a while ago. The nice part about this step is that you can create a new email address for every place you interact with. I use amazon@mydomain.tech for Amazon, themotte@mydomain.tech for here, and linkedin2@mydomain.tech because I was starting to get spam at my old linkedin address and it's easy to set a rule to autodelete them now. But it's not actually that painful: you can change a few of your main accounts and worry about the rest later, because...

Step 5: Forward your Gmail to your ProtonMail. I did this in the Gmail settings, but you can also use ProtonMail's EasySwitch tool to do it for you.

Step 5a (optional): Set up a tag in ProtonMail for emails forwarded from Gmail, then rule to automatically set it. Any time you get an email that's not actually from Google the company telling you about your Google account, that's a reminder for you to update whatever account it is. Or, as I'm discovering, a reminder to unsubscribe because why was I actually subscribed to this shit in the first place?

And that's pretty much all I needed to do. I'm creating occasional filters, folders, and tags to sort things how I want, but it's been a very straightforward and easy process. And now I'm not tied to ANYONE. If Cloudflare and ProtonMail go out of business or decide to blacklist me, I can move my domain to another registrar and pick a different webmail host, and my online accounts will remain mine.

Edit to add additional thoughts: I continue to use a KeePass database for password management, and since it's encrypted at rest I am comfortable using Google Drive to backup and sync it. I'm not planning to switch to Proton's password manager since I like the open source option. I haven't moved my calendar yet, and that might involve moving my wife over to Proton since we share calendar items all the time. I may never do that. For now it's easy enough to just open the Google calendar when I want to see my schedule.

Practically hosting your own email is basically impossible, from what I can tell, due to spam blocking mechanisms.

I keep hearing that, and I keep not knowing what on Earth are people talking about. Are you planning on running a newsletter? Because if not, it's perfectly doable. I wouldn't recommend it because of it's low bang / buck ratio, but it's nowhere near "basically impossible".

I think @gattsuru could dig up the relevant link, but I remember a blogpost from a guy who tried running his own server, only to be sandbagged hard by Gmail and the like.

There's a pretty common issue in the tech community where someone writes a blog post about their experience, and after a long game of telephone a caricatured version of it becomes The Truth. It's been a while since I heard that one, but every once in a while someone still repeats the "98% of programmers can't code FizzBuzz" thing, for example.

I dunno, I played around with self-hosted email, the only time anything landed in spam was when I setup some cronjob that regularly sent mails. Never saw problems with manually sent stuff, and since I almost never send emails as it is, I cannot imagine tripping any spam filters in the course of normal usage.

If you're just trying to receive e-mails, Mail in a Box works pretty well 99% of the time. If you're largely just sending yourself notifications, with an account that's not used anywhere else of significance, it works 98%ish of the time. ((And even that's overkill; a basic postfix relay works.))

If you're trying to send e-mail, it can be messy, and worse unpredictably messy. Mailinabox tries to solve the absolute horror story that mail config turned into, and to be fair a lot of the tedious config-twisting stuff is no longer as frustrating as it once was. You can do it... for a while.

The issue is not that you might send enough e-mail to hit an automated spam filter yourself, or even the risk that you might misconfigure things in a way that a bad actor can abuse -- that's a concern with near-any server, and there's a lot of things like a SIP PBX where you just recognize and mitigate it. With e-mail, however, your domain and/or IP address can end up on sizable DNSBLs because some IP address half an octet away fucked up, or because some sysadmin in Europe had a stick up their ass that day. Surprisingly big-name people can misconfigure their own stuff, and break because you're not big enough to have been made an exception, and not even have reporting turned on: it's happened to me.

E-mail can be done fine for a toy project, or where you're measuring reliability by licking your finger and sticking it in the air rather than by count of nines. If you're going to move the system you use to handle your bank account's verification to it, or how you send bills to customers, you gotta be willing to put a lot of effort in and realize it may not work.

E-mail can be done fine for a toy project, or where you're measuring reliability by licking your finger and sticking it in the air rather than by count of nines. If you're going to move the system you use to handle your bank account's verification to it, or how you send bills to customers, you gotta be willing to put a lot of effort in and realize it may not work.

Ok, thank you! That's exactly what I suspected, and not what I'd characterize as "basically impossible".

Practically hosting your own email is basically impossible, from what I can tell, due to spam blocking mechanisms.

If you haven't already done so, look into paying for a domain name and email hosting. There's a bunch of companies which sell these services, and owning the domain lets you change which is providing your email while retaining the same address. It's not all the way to hosting your own email but it sounds like it could be close enough for the problems you're worried about.

Same. My gmail account at this point is probably more important to my identity than my social security number or driver's license number, at least on a day-to-day basis. It really worries me that this is in the hands of a private company, which could take it away on a whim, or get hacked.

How far are you willing to take this, though? See what they're talking about in San Francisco relating to preventing grocery store closures due to "food deserts" and "underserved communities". Ensuring access to food is more important than ensuring that porn companies maximize their revenue (after all, they can still sell magazines and DVDs). I don't see how you can set a reasonable standard without opening the door to further regulation.

This is a good point, and I don't really have an answer to the question. Most (but not all) common carrier laws I can think of only require that utilities accept all comers -- AT&T can't deny phone lines to sex ships -- but some also go so far as to define specific performances like service areas -- AT&T doesn't run wire to my house specifically.

I could perhaps imagine a rule that provides that no payment processor can deny a customer the right to engage in any 'legal' transaction that is <$500 in a single day with a $10,000.00 total limit on a rolling 30 day basis, which is cumulative for the customer in question across any processors they use.

In exchange, the banks/processors get some kind of 'chargeback insurance' up to that $10,000.00 limit, analogous to FDIC insurance on deposits.

So "basic guaranteed processing" is a fundamental 'right' which any regulated bank has to provide.

I'm certain there would be abuses of this system, and second order effects.

But yeah, the idea is to HOPEFULLY prevent average citizens from being 'debanked,' and allow certain 'sketchy but legal' companies to eke out an existence if they have enough customers and not have to worry about an arbitrary policy change from one of like three major companies putting them out of business.

right to engage in any 'legal' transaction

How do you determine this? Is it hooked up to some sort of imagine recognition software that scans the image, determines content (including guessing the apparent age of a fictional 2d character), and then cross-references that with the laws of both the host country and the customer's current location? Sounds complex!

That would be for the government to investigate, ultimately.

But point being if a person isn't breaking the law, then they should not be getting debanked.

But point being if a person isn't breaking the law, then they should not be getting debanked.

I think we all agree on that in principle. But in practice it's not that easy to determine whether someone is breaking the law. The banks all default to safetyism, so they debank someone if there's even the slightest chance that the might be breaking the law, or just causing trouble. Maybe we need some sort of government bank account with a "right to banking" for anyone that hasn't been formally convicted?

It sounds like what Faceh is after is a presumption of innocence when handling transactions. The banks wouldn't need to prove the transaction isn't part of a crime, just process them. Now, how that squares with the normal fraud screening banks do is another question.

This is the kind of problem that crypto currencies were meant to solve.

To elaborate:

  1. Cryptocurrencies are a bit like cash in that transactions are never reversed (I know it can be done, but its mostly not done). This is important when the products might be embarrassing and for digital goods which can't be fully "returned" once you have access.
  2. Cryptocurrencies do not have to actively endorse all the transactions that go through them. If a government doesn't like a transaction going through a traditional payment processor, they can lean on and pressure the people running that payment processor.
  3. Cryptocurrencies can have a degree of anonymity. Bitcoin doesn't have great anonymity, large-scale actors like government can figure out who owns specific wallet addresses. But personal anonymity is pretty easy compared to credit cards. Its not a payment to pornhub on your financial statement, its a payment to wallet [string of characters]. Which is often enough to hide from girlfriends/wives.

I'm not sure if I'm supposed to have sympathy for these websites/users, because the failure of traditional payment processors to handle this sort of thing was recognized and predicted before cryptocurrencies existed. When bitcoin/cryptocurrency was first released/invented it wasn't a bunch of people saying "oh look at this cool toy, we have no idea what its for, but it seems neat!" No, they were specifically saying "yay! we have solved this hard problem of digital payments that has been plaguing us for the last decade on the internet! These are the cool things we will now be able to do: [same list as above plus other things]."

For any kind of business that once needed cash to function: switch to crypto or die a slow death as payment processors leave you.

Is there a crypto coin that is actually practical for this? The first one everyone thinks of is bitcoin. But bitcoin is slow, it has huge transaction fees (about $25 right now), and like you said it's not that anonymous. Etherium is better (about $1 now) but that's still not great for a use case where most people just want to tip a few bucks, and fewer people have heard of it. There's probably some altcoins that work better, but I don't know if there's any others that have widespread adoption so that non-technical people have heard of it and will trust it. Plus you have to, you know, convert it back into fiat, because at the end of the day that's still how we pay for things in the real world.

I don't know any of the practical details/solutions. The companies that sell sketchy products should have been trying to figure this stuff out for the last decade. If they'd dumped a cumulative 1 billion into solving problems like these how many roadblocks would remain? That is just 1% of the industry in a single year.

They didn't do that so obviously a bunch of roadblocks and practical problems remain in place.

Bitcoin has not been slow, nor has it had high transaction fees, for quite some time now. If you want you make a payment in Bitcoin you use something called an L2, or a layer 2, (an example is called lightning).

This is fast and with negligible transaction fees. Bitcoin L1 is still used as a final settlement layer.

This is mostly transparent to the end user, btw. The interaction is “pay Alice”, and the underlying technology is as opaque to the user as TCP, or various caches and proxies are to a person posting on this forum.

Ah cool, this is the first I've heard of that. Seems like great tech, but how much adoption does it actually have?

I think PayPal (ironically) made a big deal about adopting Lightning a few years back.

I think the bigger problem for shady companies switching to crypto is that they are going to have expenses they cannot pay in crypto, necessitating entities that will swap their crypto for fiat. These entities are almost certainly, if they do business in the US, required to abide by KYC and AML laws. Maybe randos looking at the blockchain don't know address X is Pornhub, or whatever, but whoever is changing Pornhub's crypto into dollars has a legal obligation to know. So the angle of attack can easily shift from payment processors to whoever is doing their currency exchange. Crypto is censorship proof as long as you only ever have to use crypto but that's not a sustainable state of affairs for most people or businesses.

These entities are almost certainly, if they do business in the US, required to abide by KYC and AML laws.

Wouldn't Pornhub (or whomever) and its affiliates be complying with AML rules if they did KYC on customers who pay via crypto? And therefore whatever crypto Pornhub uses to convert to fiat to pay its bills is clean? Or, at least, not their liability?

Yes. The problem isn't the Pornhub customers identity (although that is a general problem in crypto) it's that whoever is doing the crypto->fiat conversion for Pornhub needs to know who Pornhub is and so needs to at least tolerate their business. The benefits of being anonymous (or pseudonymous) when using crypto disappear once you need to turn the crypto into cash.

Yes, agreed. In fact, you probably have less anonymity when you use crypto given all of the KYC intersected with blockchain analytics.

(Yes yes I'm aware of Monero)

There is always El Salvador?

On September 7, 2021, the Bitcoin Law came into effect and bitcoin became legal tender in El Salvador, making it the first country in the world to do so.[24] As part of this adoption, the government began requiring all businesses to accept it.[25] Under the law, transactions in bitcoin are not subject to capital gains tax, and foreign bitcoin investors who invest over ₿3 in the country are eligible for permanent residence.[26]

It seems quite easy to interpose a cut-out for crypto-to-fiat conversion, so that your only real exposure is to tax authorities. The only challenge is ensure there are enough socially acceptable crypto use cases that you don't draw too much attention.

I am not sure what you mean by a "cut-out." Like, a third party that works with the crypto exchange doing the conversion instead of Pornhub? Unless that third party is also paying all of Pornhub's cash bills it seems like that would be the same as working with the exchange. I guess the idea is the exchange might object to Pornhub but not the third party?

Yes, something along those lines:

I guess the idea is the exchange might object to Pornhub but not the third party?

When big money's at stake, plausible deniability is usually all that's needed to keep things moving.

The problem with crypto is that it's used for a lot of fully illegal things, and so the government has cracked down on it quite a bit. It's also somewhat difficult for the average person to use, at least marginally more complicated than something like Paypal. Then there's the issue of risk, where plenty of people use crypto as a form of speculation so you can never be sure if the crypto held will have the same value as before unless you're using a stablecoin. Then there's the risk of exchanges just running off with your money like FTX did.

Most people beyond the small niche of ideological libertarians only use crypto when they're doing something sketchy or illegal, otherwise conventional banking is the easier option with far more guarantees for standard transactions.

Then there's the risk of exchanges just running off with your money like FTX did.

This risk can be fully mitigated by following the mantra "Not your keys, not your coin".

Are you suggesting everyone just not use exchanges, or only use exchanges that let you still "hold your keys"? That's fine for committed crypto enthusiasts, but most people just want the financial system to work hassle-free. It's like the difference between an iPhone and some hacky Linux system.

I'm suggesting that you use exchanges to convert your coins and then immediately move them to a wallet under your direct control. Coins shouldn't be left on exchanges for extended periods of time.

I mostly agree that crypto is not very useable. I personally don't use it.

My post was originally just that first sentence, and as I tried to write anything after it I just kept expressing frustration at these companies and users of crypto that have wasted it.

Going through the problems:

  1. Not easy to use.
  2. Value is not stable.
  3. Funds are not secure.
  4. Risk of government crackdown on use.

I think the first problem is something that porn websites could solve. They are web companies, they know how to build useable things on the web. They have more resources than paypal and venmo had in their early days.

The second problem of stable value is solved (as you point out with stablecoins), but people just choose not to use it. Because speculation and gambling is more fun than a boring currency that just does its job of facilitating transactions. This could be better solved by the porn websites and other places that need crypto uniting behind a stable online currency.

I think the funds don't need to be quite so secure if you aren't using crypto as an investment vehicle or speculation device. Store your money in traditional banks / stocks / etc. And then just transact into crypto when it is specifically needed. And yet again porn websites are some of the places that are better suited for dealing with security issues. They still live in a wild west style internet, because they don't enjoy as many protections as traditional businesses. If some hacker messes with a bank website they could have the feds come after them. If that same hacker does the same thing to a porn website, they won't get in trouble at all.

Some governments, like China, have cracked down on crypto. I did have more worries about government crackdowns on crypto back in the early days. The US and western crackdowns on crypto have mostly been because of the problems of crypto. People getting their money stolen, or using it as speculation / asset bubbles. I don't think the Western government crackdowns would necessarily stop if those problems went away, but I think it would blunt a lot of the political momentum.

Most people beyond the small niche of ideological libertarians only use crypto when they're doing something sketchy or illegal, otherwise conventional banking is the easier option with far more guarantees for standard transactions.

The sum of my frustration is that if you are one of those businesses selling "sketchy" things this whole crackdown by payment processors has been predictable and visible for at least a decade. And the solution and their salvation has also been available and sitting there for a decade. Its like they've just been sitting on a railroad track waiting around. Now that the crossing bars are down and the warning lights are flashing they start screaming "no please! don't run me over!" Get off the tracks you idiots!

Maybe its just the nature of people to not treat upcoming disasters as real until those disasters are already upon them. If so, then I'll also say that its in my nature to have no sympathy for them when their lack of preparation bites them in the ass.

You make good points. I usually balk whenever I see crypto as the only option for payment, but if these businesses actually invested in a bit of digital infrastructure to make stablecoin payments hassle-free then it'd probably be fine. And considering the other option is "go out of business", it seems kind of strange that they haven't done this yet.

There's been a number of other things going on in this space, either from financial drivers or more straightforward legal ones. You've already gotten a post on gumroad, but itch.io has been doing a slow-march version where they don't block adult content sales as a category, just individual pieces of adult content, which has kept going apace.

I've not found good proof that there's something Operation Chokepoint-like going on, but with the timing and the variety in impacted content, it's increasingly hard to believe that this is all occurring randomly.

On the direct legal attacks, in the furry sphere, some places have complied with local bans (eg, e621 blocks North Carolina, while others have largely ignored them and hoped they don't get made examples. There's good reason that they're rather paranoid about having to keep name-identifying records, since people have blown zero-days on FurAffinity.

Oof, didn't know Itch was forced into this kind of stuff, too.

Right now users just need to manually set their location to Japan to see R18 content, but who knows how long that will last.

In other news DLsite gave up trying to placate visa and MasterCard, but I'm told they can still be used to buy things through a third(?) party points system or rakuten card.

DLSite has always(?) had a points system, and as you mention, there's other payment methods, though a number of them are particular to Japan/Asia.

I will ask the same question that I've asked repeatedly: if porn is so bad and the NWO wants to get you addicted to it, then why do they make it so very difficult to distribute? Why does it seem like they're clamping down harder over time? Even pornhub can't take credit cards anymore, they only accept ACH transfers and crypto.

Porn (in the very broadest sense of the term) is one of the only authentically countercultural genres of art today, as evidenced by the severe institutional restrictions it faces. Seems pretty straightforward to me.

Because they don't want people making and distributing porn independently of party control. Even the "liberatory queer sexuality" team want it managed like the government affiliated "kids BDSM" clubs in Germany.

Or the Sozialwerk.LGBT+ club for kids 13+ in Switzerland that made the news recently, with the big box of sex toys on the table.

These groups don't want natural sexual expression, and certainly don't want it tainted by capitalism! They want it broadly repressed and its release carefully managed by Licensed Queer Social Workers.

Please explain to me how the existence of a single "government affiliated kids BDSM club" is evidence they don't want people "making and distributing porn independently of party control"? Homemade, freely available porn gets billions of views every day on reddit and twitter, and of course there are many dedicated porn sites.

To be explicit, your reasoning is deeply flawed and your conclusions are nonsensical, it's like a rdrama comment. It's the 'one single coherent actor is behind every single news headline that annoys me and that thing is the PedoNazis' theory of politics

Germans being sexual degenerates is hardly a recent development.

But they're also one of the worst offenders attacking popular content for arbitrary reasons. They'll order takedowns of "big titty high school ninjas 7", but give government art grants to obese men dressing up in latex women masks to perform home castrations and penis bisections on themselves.

They want to ban independent production of pornography for the same reason they ban independent schooling: so it can be run by men like Helmut Kentler.

Perhaps government actions are often arbitrary? Maybe the person who did the former has different values, and has a different job, than the person who did the latter?

I think do_something has the more accurate perspective on this. Yes, the sorts of people raising hell about sexually-explicit LGBTQ educational books being challenged in libraries are ironically against many things that are sexual-but-anime-flavored (and Lord help you if you like lolicon/shotacon), but the truth is probably more that the ascended progressive movement has many facets to it, not all of which are on the same page.

The explanation that fits is that the progressive movement is against straight male sexuality. The objectionable sexual anime-flavored things are generally that. Drag queen story hour, explicit LGBTQ educational books, and the other examples of them promoting sexuality to minors aren't.

I think there has been a change in recent years, brought on the effects of children having 24/7 access to porn during the pandemic. The porn is blamed, rather than government policy that prevented children from doing anything other than sitting down in front of an ipad and browsing the internet all day, but hey ho what are you going to do.

I will ask the same question that I've asked repeatedly: if porn is so bad and the NWO wants to get you addicted to it, then why do they make it so very difficult to distribute?

answer is simple, there is no NWO

again, there is no central ruling cabal but many forces in play. Some push porn and that nearly all deviations are fine, some run financial puritanism or their lawyers told them that not processing problematic porn payments would be a good idea. And many more in between.

Porn is a huge liability as some subgenres are risky or even illegal. From relatively small things similar to other content platforms such as copyright issues but to wacky stuff like gore and bestiality to outright illegal content such as child abuse or revenge porn. There are other items that are similarly problematic be it "bath salts", gambling-like businesses, legal drugs and so forth.

Legal drugs is just because of federal policy though, right? If Congress repeals the federal weed ban tomorrow, it’ll be sold at Walmart and CVS in months. The reason weed is still a shady business is because banks can’t do business with them because the feds say it’s still illegal, they just don’t enforce the law against states that have legalized.

Sure, what they share with porn is that they are age restricted and represent health or other legal risk to customers and in general are mired with similar web of local/regional/state regulation. Similar issues exist if let's say small craft beer company wants to open webshop and searches for payment processor. Nobody wants to be on the other side of a lawsuit when kids get alcohol poisoning by buying booze with mum's credit card.

Porn is inherently low status. Even in the 80s, being caught going into a porn store to rent a VHS was the height of embarrassment, made fun of on sitcoms etc.

It’s not just that horniness is embarrassing. The level of cringe was much greater that, say, merely catching your friend picking someone up at the bar for a one-night stand. The idea that you watch porn instead of actually getting laid makes you - in the eyes of much of society - a loser.

This is what really makes selling porn online so difficult to make profitable. Terms like “post nut clarity” (which, yes, has a real-world meaning but is most commonly used in relation to porn) speak to the shame of the whole enterprise. Men don’t want to feel like the kind of men who pay for porn.

There’s more deniability when it’s free. If I relentlessly make fun of Disney adults for 10 years and then go with my brother and his kids when they invite me along, my cognitive dissonance is limited. If I spend $300 for a ticket and rock up with Minnie Mouse ears and a rockabilly dress and a Snow White tattoo, I’m going to feel like a fucking loser.

Men don’t want to pay for porn because it makes them feel like losers. I don’t see why that’s not the obvious answer. When men had to pay to access it, more swallowed their pride. Now that it’s free and plentiful online, only the most committed coomers do.

Even in the 80s, being caught going into a porn store to rent a VHS was the height of embarrassment, made fun of on sitcoms etc. It’s not just that horniness is embarrassing. The level of cringe was much greater that, say, merely catching your friend picking someone up at the bar for a one-night stand. The idea that you watch porn instead of actually getting laid makes you - in the eyes of much of society - a loser.

I guess so, but again, there has been massive social change since then in that regard, including dating and so on. For example, the notion that the Sexual Revolution might have deleterious long-term social consequences was almost completely fringe back then, as opposed to today.

In the 80’s? The days of the moral majority? Opposition to the sexual Revolution was if anything more mainstream than today.

The Moral Majority indeed got a lot of attention. On the surface it could indeed appear that the Christian Right is influential. But the social reality was that the abortion rate, the rate of adolescent sex and alcohol consumption, violence, and teenage pregnancy were all peaking in the late '80s and early '90s. It was also the time when the distribution of porn in VHS format was becoming normal in the first place.

If I spend $300 for a ticket and rock up with Minnie Mouse ears and a rockabilly dress and a Snow White tattoo, I’m going to feel like a fucking loser.

In Japan this behavior wouldn't even be noteworthy. The tattoo might be seen as gauche, unless of course it washed off and was applied to your cheek or something. I knew a girl once named Mitsuki because her mother loved Disney--in Japanese Mitsuki is a play on ミッキー or Mickey, where the ッ there represents a pause, unless it's a big ツ in which case it's just TSU, as in Mitsuki. She's a lovely girl, I still follow her on Instagram.

But we were talking about porn, sorry for the derail. It's true a non-Japanese person engaging in this (Disneyphile) behavior would probably be seen as a square peg--probably not a fucking loser though. More like a white girl in a kimono. Noticeable, but not in any bad way (I'm talking Japanese perception here). My former girlfriend (not Japanese) used to walk around Osaka age 25 wearing a Curious George backpack because she imagined she could get away with it here. And true enough, probably she did. But I knew better.

Edit: As for porn, it's illegal here to show genitalia in porn, so there's a giant underground, of course. I think the same stigma on porn buyers that you mention applies here.

2nd edit: After reading the pocket pussy comment below, I reflected on the ubiquity of the Tenga in Japanese drug stores. I've never seen anyone buy one though.

It’s not just that horniness is embarrassing. The level of cringe was much greater that, say, merely catching your friend picking someone up at the bar for a one-night stand. The idea that you watch porn instead of actually getting laid makes you - in the eyes of much of society - a loser.

Tangentially related but this paragraph reminded me of a passage from C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity:

If anyone says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity contradicts him at once. But, of course, when people say, “Sex is nothing to be ashamed of,” they may mean “the state into which the sexual instinct has now got is nothing to be ashamed of.”

If they mean that, I think they are wrong. I think it is everything to be ashamed of. There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips.

I prefer Diogenes the Cynic to C.S. Lewis on this count:

[While masturbating] in public, he wished "it were as easy to banish hunger by rubbing the belly."

While Diogenes is a little intense as an example, I think it's much healthier to think of the sex drive as something natural which needs attention from time to time, rather than making it the central focus of your life, or something shameful. I prefer moderate indulgence to sanctimony.

I prefer moderate indulgence to sanctimony.

I might take that, if the offer was credible, but I hope you understand why I soured on the promises of only moderate indulgence.

Lewis in heaven, looking down at mukbang, disappointed that his imagination was so limited.

Really the food analogy is spot on.

Feeling hungry - no shame

Eating a bit of junk food - no shame, everyone does it.

Overindulging on occasion - understandable, forgivable, but not to be lionized.

Eating 15 double cheeseburgers a day for six months and gain 100lbs - commit seppuku immediately, kys to rid your family from shame.

Can't get away from ol' Lewis on this forum. I prefer Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg "Never be ashamed of who you are". Walk out of that porn store with your pocket pussy held high. It is the act of acting shameful that brings the scorn. Walk out to your Ferrari in a nice suit and people will even try to copy your bold pocket pussy purchase.

C.S. Lewis would probably agree as he was probably a bisexual if not gay

Your thesis was tested in the Sexual Revolution, and it seems to me that it's more or less bankrupt at this point. The tide isn't going the other way because Lewis Enthusiasts spammed Lewis quotes. It's going the other way because the results of the Sexual Revolution are so obviously, inescapably, unendurably wretched. You can argue either "Simping Is King Shit" or "It's your turn to swipe left" as much as you like; the percentage of people who not only aren't buying it but who are viscerally appalled by the evident results continues to rise organically and exponentially over time.

Shame is an innate and necessary part of the human mind. It's a warning alarm, and it exists to warn you of the existence of a serious problem. Turning off the alarm doesn't make the problem stop existing.

Shame is a low class cultural marker. If nothing is a threat to you then you have no shame. The rich and famous certainly have very little of it if it exists at all, mostly just a cultural nod to the lower classes when at that level, and you only feel it in defeat. It is a fear based emotion that only has the power you give it.

Shame is a low class cultural marker.

Shame is a human constant in all social classes.

If nothing is a threat to you then you have no shame.

No human has ever or will ever exist in a state where nothing is a threat to them.

The rich and famous certainly have very little of it if it exists at all, mostly just a cultural nod to the lower classes when at that level, and you only feel it in defeat.

For every shameless rich person, I can point to ten drug addicts shitting themselves on a sidewalk without apparent shame. Further, it seems to me that the absence of shame is the marker of defeat, when one is no longer even trying for goodness and virtue.

It is a fear based emotion that only has the power you give it.

This at least is true, as far as it goes. Unfortunately, fear is a necessary and entirely rational response, because there are better states and worse states, and many of the worse states are extremely wretched. Rational fear is a motive force, a protective force. Its absence is a sign of insanity.

The drug addicts are on drugs and "have no choice". The rich guy cheating with 8 different mistresses only "feels shame" insofar as he is found out and it affects his status when they play it on the news. He doesn't feel a "natural shame" when he is fucking #6, or maybe he wouldn't do it. That dumb podcaster science guy being almost the perfect example.

That said, I agree with you personally, and I would never cheat on my wife, but I come on here to exercise the rational part of my brain, not the boyscout part. My behavior isn't always governed by reason. Nor is that the case for most people. But a perfectly rational actor would not feel it. I also have to disagree with the fear portion of your comment. Most is not warranted in this day and age, vestigial nonsense, like people who say they won't sit with their back to the door.

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Let's say you fail to keep a promise, a promise made to someone you have a great deal of respect for. Is it appropriate to feel shame then? Or maybe some other emotion?

It might be culturally appropriate, but it has no innate value beyond signaling regret for your actions to others in a group.

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Naming your product orfice.ai is almost as bad as calling your new programming language Lolita...

I hate the current year so much. The awful combination of performative histrionic prudishness and obnoxious, ubiquitous safe-horny normie-fap-bait.

Furries go around naming projects after horse diaper fetishes and nobody gives a shit because uwu programmer socks tee hee, but this gets their panties in a twist?

Brother, I’ve got to say that I think you’ve been had.

That YouTube video and “oriface.ai” is top tier rage bait. I mean, real chef’s kiss level.

On par with “it’s ok to be white” or “Islam was right about women.” Or any entry into the Sokal affair.

It’s absolutely beautiful, I laughed for a full ten minutes after watching that short video. I couldn’t believe it, it was an absolute miracle of trolling, perfectly designed to infuriate a maximum amount of people and trivially accomplished through ai trickery.

A toast to the geniuses at oriface.ai, May their enemies be made ridiculous. Legitimately the funniest thing I’ve seen online in months.

Or your image processor GIMP.

Shame is an innate and necessary part of the human mind. It's a warning alarm, and it exists to warn you of the existence of a serious problem. Turning off the alarm doesn't make the problem stop existing.

But what you feel shame about is culturally formed. Kids don't feel about being naked or touching themselves until they are trained to do so. Catholics don't feel shame about the things they feel shame about until they are trained into it.

And that means your alarm can be false. Like people who internalize that they should feel shame about approaching members of the opposite sex even respectfully or who feel shame about feeling sexual attraction at all.

So you can't use the alarm to tell you there is a serious problem. All it can do is warn you that you have internalized that X is a problem. It doesn't do much to tell you if X is a problem really.

My grandfather was raised in an ultra strict Quaker offshoot, where any contact with the outside world was seen to be wrong and that music was sinful. He felt ashamed of listening to a choir in the less strict Church of Ireland he later moved to. Is hearing a Christian choir a serious problem he should have been alerted to? Or was his sense of shame miscalibrated because his society was simply wrong?

In other words, I agree shame and shaming is an intrinsic part of the human condition and that it exists to bring together societies through incentivizing behaviors your society see as positive. What it can't do is actually tell you if those behaviors are or are not positive in and of themselves. Because shame is sub-conscious.

And just like with feeling shame about a choir, the seeds of the sexual revolution lie in the fact that if you shame too much it becomes just as much of a problem as shaming too little. We historically shamed too hard and too deep and as with all oppression, a revolution will form. The previous norms of sexual shaming were crushed, because they were not moderated, because so many people ended up being shamed that they were in fact able to overthrow the shame mongers. That is the lesson I personally think all ideologies need to learn. Shame too many people (whether for sexual immorality or for racism or sexism or whatever), then there is a tipping point.

You might argue the results have been wretched, but obviously enough people felt the previous situation was ALSO wretched enough in order to overthrow it.

And just like with feeling shame about a choir, the seeds of the sexual revolution lie in the fact that if you shame too much it becomes just as much of a problem as shaming too little. We historically shamed too hard and too deep and as with all oppression, a revolution will form. ...Shame too many people (whether for sexual immorality or for racism or sexism or whatever), then there is a tipping point.

It doesn't seem to me that the shaming norms immediately prior to the Sexual Revolution were particularly strict, from a historical perspective. Nor does this comport with my understanding of how revolutions generally work; they generally don't happen when conditions decline past some critical threshold, but rather when things are getting better, but people think they should be getting better faster. Is that not your understanding? In any case, it's hard to believe that 1950s America leaned harder on shame than, say, Puritan America. Why didn't Puritan America result in a Sexual Revolution, under your model?

The previous norms of sexual shaming were crushed, because they were not moderated, because so many people ended up being shamed that they were in fact able to overthrow the shame mongers.

Historically speaking, I do not see the Sexual Revolution being driven by people who had been shamed reaching a critical mass. Rather, what I observe is people who were not being shamed buying into the idea that the shame-enforcement system they were already on the right side of could be dismantled without cost or consequence, that the fences against sexual misconduct were pointless and that tearing them down would have no downsides and only benefits, because We Had Progressed. Without a broad-based commitment to the big lie of Progress and all the "little" lies that supported it, the sexual revolution would not have happened. Without Enlightenment champions like Marx and Freud selling unmoored Utopianism to an Enlightenment society desperately eager to believe them, the sexual revolution doesn't happen.

Likewise, I think this is why the Sexual Revolution and the rest of the works of the Enlightenment are not going to last much longer. The lie only works when it hasn't been tested or when the results of the test can be concealed. We've been running the test for decades now, and the systems that work to hide the results are breaking down. Once our society completes its current trajectory, the ideological precursors that created and maintained the Sexual Revolution will no longer be capable of sustaining any degree of credibility.

But what you feel shame about is culturally formed. Kids don't feel about being naked or touching themselves until they are trained to do so. Catholics don't feel shame about the things they feel shame about until they are trained into it.

Is it culturally formed, or is it culturally deformed? We agree that people can be made to feel shame about things that should not be considered shameful. The question remains whether there is a coherent cluster of behavior that is naturally shameful to humans, which can be altered through significant effort, or if it's all just a random walk. I think it's the former.

I'm sure kids aren't born being ashamed of nakedness or of touching their genitals. On the other hand, they aren't ashamed of casual cruelty either; they have to learn that other people exist and to empathize with them, but that doesn't mean that empathy itself is a cultural construction that we can take or leave as we will. I think modesty is similar: you aren't born knowing it, but you learn about it soon enough unless others expend a great deal of effort trying to hide it from you, and even then sooner or later it'll be back.

The Sexual Revolution pitch was that we could remove shame from sex completely, that everyone could have all the sex and everything would be fine. That pitch has been gradually walked back as the resulting disasters become increasingly undeniable. The relatively slow pace of that walk-back has been, in my view, only achievable through large-scale deceit and the intentional obfuscation of the horrors the Revolution's architects unleashed and refused to recognize.

Likewise, I think this is why the Sexual Revolution and the rest of the works of the Enlightenment are not going to last much longer. The lie only works when it hasn't been tested or when the results of the test can be concealed. We've been running the test for decades now, and the systems that work to hide the results are breaking down. Once our society completes its current trajectory, the ideological precursors that created and maintained the Sexual Revolution will no longer be capable of sustaining any degree of credibility.

Really? I think that a bunch of people will feel vaguely burned by the SR as adults and retreat towards conservatism, but this won't lead to lasting change and the youth will be even more progressive and sex-positive and weird, and the cycle will repeat just like it did the past two generations.

The question remains whether there is a coherent cluster of behavior that is naturally shameful to humans, which can be altered through significant effort, or if it's all just a random walk. I think it's the former.

Nature changes with time, though, for some people at points in history it was natural and healthy that it was shameful to not own a proper number of livestock. Now, that's not true anymore. People look at their situation and try to judge what should and shouldn't be shameful. Instincts in our genes are evolved, too, and as the environment changes the value of an instinct changes. Better to justify the kind of shame you want than just say it emerges naturally.

Without Enlightenment champions like Marx and Freud selling unmoored Utopianism to an Enlightenment society

There was a clear utopian dimension to Marx. I've never heard anyone argue against that.

Freud is a more complicated case. He also had some utopian impulses and was on record as thinking that the release of repressed sexual instincts would be a positive social development, but this was also tempered (especially in his later work) by a recognition of how the self-contradictory and self-destructive nature of the psyche can upset utopian social aspirations (it was really Lacan who took this aspect of psychoanalysis and ran with it, and he was consequently much more overtly politically conservative than Freud, but the seeds of it are already visible in Freud).

I recommend reading Freud's essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle before you write him off completely.

The Sexual Revolution pitch was that we could remove shame from sex completely, that everyone could have all the sex and everything would be fine.

I don't think that was the pitch, because like every change, there was no single one movement responsible for it. What you had was a coalition who wanted slightly different things, one part wanted gay sex to be accepted, another wanted women to have more freedom outside of marriage, another wanted men to have more freedom without getting married, another felt sexual urges in general should not be shamed as much, etc. etc. There were few would if you asked would have said for example, should we stop shaming sex with animals or corpses? Almost no-one wanted to remove shame from sex entirely.

To be clear almost everyone is shamed under the old model. They just use that shame to behave differently. Every kid who felt guilty about masturbation. Every husband who felt shame at cheating, or even having thoughts of cheating. Every woman who felt shame at sex outside of wedlock, or who had a sex drive society felt was too much. Every gay person who felt shame at being attracted to their own sex. All of those groups constitute probably a majority of people. That's what I mean by a tipping point.

Now as for why Puritan America did not change, well Puritan America was a result of people fleeing from cultures that shamed differently. There is a reason we call them Puritans after all! So they in fact are a product of a "Revolution" of their own (among other things of course). But even more the 20th Centuries Sexual Revolution I would say the sexual norms of the Puritans did not last, they were relaxed within decades. It's just in the New World there was a lot of space for people who felt differently to just..go somewhere else. And practice things differently. But that isn't the case in the US anymore.

Just to point out, I do think shame is important, as is empathy. They are evolved mechanisms given humanity is a social species. And they are important in ensuring societal stability. I'm not saying that shaming sex is bad, or that not shaming sex is good. I am saying that our history shows that shame has limits and ANY society or culture that wants its beliefs and conditions to continue is on a tight rope. Can't shame to much for too many, can't shame too little. Both will result in the destruction of your system. The good (depending on your point of view!) news is that also is true for whatever comes next. I think there are signs that the shame mechanisms invoked by "wokism" are also going too far and will fail.

Social dynamics mean we are not good at simply arriving at a pretty good spot and just staying there. We almost always push too far, or not far enough.

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I'm consistently impressed by the reasoning level of people I don't agree with. That is why I stick around.

Looks like you replied to a comment that was not yet approved. And since we're on the subject - can you also approve my latest post?

Grah. Done and done, thanks for the heads-up.

Yeah weird given the poster has been around a while now.

It's because his aggregate comment score is in a crater.

We really should disable that aspect of the feature imo.

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People get autofiltered when they accumulate downvotes. I don't know if it was always like that, or we pulled some "feature" from rDrama that doesn't fit us, but it seems like this is how things are now.

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I always find it a pity that CS Lewis' most successful work is Narnia series, considering so much of what he wrote exploring the human condition is so eloquent and excellent.

I feel the same way about George Orwell, 1984 and Animal Farm are great but I find his nonfiction even more insightful.

The one doesn't take away from the other. All those kids that love the Narnia series wouldn't have been reading "Transposition" if the Narnia books had been less popular.

I momentarily read that as "Transmetropolitan" and was very confused.

That is a good point. It's easy to skip the introductory literature of an author for their more comprehensive works once you know the depth of their writing.

On the other hand, It's not like Smith or Dostoevsky wrote children's stories, so either way can work?

Men don’t want to feel like the kind of men who pay for porn.

Sure, but that doesn't seem like a good explanation for why payment processors would actually ban it. Unless you're alluding to the chargeback theory - but I'm skeptical that that theory can entirely explain their behavior without the need to invoke additional moral/political explanations.

Now that it’s free and plentiful online, only the most committed coomers do.

That's nice and all, but there's quite a lot of us, and certainly more than enough to keep a number of content providers afloat. (Sometimes in surprising ways: the original writer of the Burned Furs manifesto has made a small part-time career in monsterfucker porn.) Fek is at 9k USD a month still, and while I actually appreciate the mechanical stuff he did with Spellbound (cw: technically has one girl, but gaaaaaaay) enough that I kinda want to see it cloned in a not-porn game, given the repeated hiatuses after burnout if anyone was going to get reasonably-motivated chargebacks, he'd be the first hit.

There’s more deniability when it’s free. If I relentlessly make fun of Disney adults for 10 years and then go with my brother and his kids when they invite me along, my cognitive dissonance is limited.

OK, but is that really analogous to what's going on with free internet porn? Most people aren't getting invited as the personal guest of a paying customer. They're either pirating it, streaming it from some sketchy website that pirated it, or watching free preview stuff. So that's more like you make fun of Disney, but then spend an hour every day sneaking in through the fire escape or watching the free trailers of their movies 100 times because you're too cheap to actually pay for it. And then everyone else does that too, so you feel like a sucker for paying, and meanwhile Disney itself is going bankrupt so they have to cut costs to basically nothing which turns the quality to shit.

They're either pirating it, streaming it from some sketchy website that pirated it, or watching free preview stuff.

There's loads of porn available for free. Twitter, reddit, boorus, 4chan, discord... People who pay are suckers or have more money than sense.

It is quite commonly seen that onlyfans/livejasmin is more a parasocial relationship than a sexual gratification one, fulfilling an emotional need that the dopamine hit of an orgasm cannot satisfy Similarly, the concept of ownership and personal control over porn consumed materials fulfils an emotional need that jerking it doesn't quite cut. Creating your own porn by filming with/out consent actually falls in the same psychological space as commissioning, paying for stuff other people produce and thus having the transaction... these actions are rightly viewed as deviant and violating of social norms, but they do happen and so long as people exist there will be strange niches beyond our comprehension that will be filled.

True, there are those people who'll spend hundreds or thousands on gacha girls to get their waifu. Still seems like being a sucker.

I gave Genshin a go, there's some fun to be had. Lots of effort went into the game, it's very big and very pretty. But it's not worth paying for more spins on the roullette wheel, as many have remarked: https://youtube.com/watch?v=M5Hfd4wX2GE

Paying for these emotional relationships is still kind of hollow and artificial. Whether it's pokimane or Beidou or some onlyfans girl it's all still fake. The other party doesn't care about you, they care about your wallet. They're exploiting an emotional weakness in a way that a disciplined and discerning man should observe and reject.

I mean it’s cope all the way down. If I hate Disney and make fun of it, then go with my brother and have the best time and love it and think it’s the happiest place on earth, clearly I do, in fact, objectively, enjoy Disney as an adult. But I can tell myself that I only went to spend time with my nieces and this satisfies the internal cognitive dissonance.

Similarly, we can imagine that a man who maybe isn’t hugely sexually successful (which of course describes most people) might watch free porn because it’s easy and there and free and there’s nothing wrong with a little onanism now and again, but actually handing over his card details to pay for it (or buying Bitcoin or whatever to do it, I confess I’m not sure how it works) puts into more stark relief the fact that he’s choosing to sit at home at masturbate in a dark room instead of engaging in any kind of self-improvement or socialization or trying to get laid or a relationship in real life. Paying is what turns you from a mere man into a hobbyist, a gooner, a connoisseur, a creepy guy with a funny mustache masturbating under a newspaper in a public park.

Again, I’m not defending this logically. It is, like so much of life, pure cope, but spending money on something often has loser connotations. Consider the difference between using a free dating app and paying a matchmaker, for example, the latter makes someone seem more desperate by default.

Again, I’m not defending this logically. It is, like so much of life, pure cope, but spending money on something often has loser connotations. Consider the difference between using a free dating app and paying a matchmaker, for example, the latter makes someone seem more desperate by default.

You might be right, but it really depends on the context. Saying "paying money is for losers" sounds... odd... out of context.

Consider a more direct analogy: the strip club. I don't know if you've ever been to one... I get the feeling maybe you haven't? But the general expectation is that you pay. Basically the more you pay, the more attention you get. It's not only about the sexual attention, some guys really enjoy the feeling of splashing that cash. Others just feel guilty if they don't tip. Usually there's no explicit rule but it would be really weird if a strip club customer just sat there, just watching, not paying for anything. It would be even weirder if they also snuck in the back to avoid even the minimal door fee, and then bragged to all his friends about how "only losers pay the door fee." Or to make it even worse- they didn't even sneak in, they just like, found a window somewhere in a dodgy alley, with a shitty view, where they can kinda see, and that's good enough for them to get off as long as they don't actually care about having fun or tipping the girls or anything at all besides having a quick shameful orgasm. And then everyone else starts doing this too, so the club loses money, and now the only people working there are these crazy drug addicts doing it for "exposure" or whatever.

That seems like a really bad state! And yet that's become sorta the norm for online porn these days. I'm not old enough to have seen era when playboy was big but that seems a bit more um... classy and healthy.

The difference between the strip club and porn is just the “you wouldn’t download a car” meme, though. Obviously if people could illegally download a car, they would. Online piracy is a crime that most people don’t really consider a crime, like driving slightly above the limit or DUI before the ‘80s.

One thing about "downloading a car" is that car companies tend to be huge, faceless entities. It's easy to think that Ford or whatever won't lose any sleep over me personally taking a car without paying for it. But of course when everyone starts doing that, the company goes out of business and then no one has any cars.

To bring this back on topic, Pixiv is mostly a community of small artists. I don't have any specific stats, but I really don't think most of them make much money. For example this guy talked about how hard it was to make any money at all as a doujin artist. You can talk to them on twitter and they'll respond, and the prices they charge for art are pathetically low. When you're talking to a real, individual person, and you can tell that they're struggling to make a living from their art, it feels rather sociopathic to just blatantly pirate it and not support them in any way. But of course all the restrictions on Pixiv make that way more of a pain than it would be in real life.

I've also heard- anecdotally- that they get most of their money from Japan, because Japan has such a strong culture against piracy compared to the west. Even though their country has less money, they support the artists much more than we do. It really shows how fragile this stuff we take for granted can be. I don't want to see the entire internet turn into the equivalent of a dead shopping mall.

You mean... no-one has any new models of cars (except for iterations made by the open source community, who have more free time now on account of not having to pay for a car on account of cars being downloadable.)

But they still have access to all the old models of cars. Because they can download them.

The reason people don't think piracy is stealing is because they have a good intuition for when they're being scammed by being charged monopoly pricing instead of the actual cost of creating value.

Most of my favorite artists live off of donations. That we give to them freely because we like them.

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I mean, I really don't think there's any sort of conspiracy here- it's pretty easy to see why Visa and Mastercard don't want to be associated with this stuff, and why websites bend over to appease them. But the end result is kind of gross. We end with an internet saturated with porn, but it's very difficult to sell it for money, which means that a lot of it is really low quality, disgusting shit, and people who make it can't earn a living. It's also really hard to predict what will get banned and when, which tends to put a damper on porn as a "countercultural genre of art." I feel like we're approaching a point where to get anything really subversive you have to learn japanese and either pay for it in crypto over the darkweb or fly to japan to buy it in cash.

... Who are you arguing with?

Visa and MasterCard see pornography as high risk because they get a lot of chargebacks, so they charge adult services producers a much higher rate for payment processing.

Movement to the high risk list has certainly been used politically in the past, but this is pretty standard.

Who are you arguing with?

I'm arguing against the view, which I have seen expressed by social conservatives often enough, that we live in an irredeemably sexualized society that has thrown off all measure of restraint. Sometimes this includes a conspiratorial component that the pornography industry promotes porn explicitly for its deleterious social effects. This view has been argued for on TheMotte before - "The technocrats pretend to believe in that so that they can trick normies into hypersexual practices that obliterate communities."

In fact the primal fear of sexuality is still operative the same as it ever was, and in some aspects has possibly intensified, compared to previous historical eras. (Not that I'm arguing that this fear is necessarily irrational or misguided. Some things do indeed deserve to be feared. When we are confronted with such a deeply rooted psychological impulse that has endured through so many changes in the outward form of social organization, its etiology demands careful consideration. I'm here to understand, not to moralize.)

Visa and MasterCard see pornography as high risk because they get a lot of chargebacks, so they charge adult services producers a much higher rate for payment processing.

Sure, that would be fine if opposition to porn was restricted to payment processors. But it's not just payment processors.

I’m reminded of 1984, where the Party pumps out cheap tawdry pornography, but labors to keep the proles under the incorrect impression that it’s illegal.

Everyone has some kind of bone to pick with porn, and except for social conservatives it’s usually not the sexual content.

Aside from chargeback theory, there’s intellectual property rights violations galore, ties to sex trafficking, age verification issues, etc.

Everyone has some kind of bone to pick with porn

...which helps confirm my original thesis that it's countercultural!

Consider the time immediately before the Russian Revolution. Everyone has a bone to pick with the Tzar. Does the Tzar represent Culture or Counter-culture?

"Socially dominant but clearly on the way out" seems like a coherent social category to me.

I'm no expert on Russian history, but if enough people hate the Tzar enough, then the Tzar could be counterculture and supporting him could be counterculture as well. I think there's a strong argument that supporting Trump during his presidency was also countercultural for example, despite him being "the most powerful man in the world".

Porn is not the Tzar though and I imagine the analogy will break down quickly if we try to push it too far.

Visa and MasterCard see pornography as high risk because they get a lot of chargebacks, so they charge adult services producers a much higher rate for payment processing.

I think this would be plausible for a wide-spectrum ban on porn, if still uncertain since these companies have little trouble working with businesses that have increased chargeback risks otherwise and just slamming on fees.

I don't think it's remotely plausible for the common levels of specificity involved, here. There may well be higher (or lower) rates of chargeback for incest porn, or hypnosis or forced TF kink, or dragon dongs with too much red dye, but I'm incredibly skeptical that a) card companies have the data to actually know that, b) that these rates are so much higher that they can't be resolved by fees, and c) that there's no more immediate and less-financially-direct motivation.

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!


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