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“Protect the children!” is a very good Trojan horse to sneak surveillance in. We’re not ending online anonymity in order to make persecution of dissidents more easy, we’re doing it to protect children from the harm of seeing a boob and who can be against protecting the children?
It is 100% a scheme to attach government ID to email and social media accounts. They sorely lack the power to silence and punish people for celebrating events like The Adjustment or The Neckening. Despite their direct ownership of the social media platforms, they are still unable to control them as much as they’d like. The public’s ability to collectively recognize the fraudulence and unpopularity of elite politicians and institutions is an existential risk.
I keep coming back to this. It feels like it’s a push to put a name and a face to everyone on the internet and control what they see/post. It’s being framed in an innocent way of protecting kids from porn while putting in a backdoor of censoring the internet at large and also putting the screws to lgbtq+ people.
christianity brainworms and an excuse for expanding the panopticon.
flailing about birth rates + enclosure of the internet commons + increasing repression against queer folks (they’re just going to define any depiction of a same sex couple or a trans person as “porn”) + increasing surveillance + pushing online sex exploitation into deeper precarity for even greater exploitation (just like they did to drug producers and prostitutes) + punishing the few (very very few) women who managed to turn their exploitation into success + removing a source of potential supplemental income so people work harder + they just think it’s yucky (even though they all watch porn)
Christianity, Evangelical Protestantism specifically. It’s just the rise of Puritanism, fueled by queerphobia, that you can see in lots of other aspects of life as well. Hell you can even see it if you talk to Zoomers, fashion is becoming more “modest,” they’re uncomfortable with sexual material in movies and advertising, and they’re more prudish about PDA. They’re also having less sex than previous generations.
This isn’t the fault of the zoomers, they’re downstream of this cultural push, they’re just a group you can look at to see the changes clearly.
This should be fought against in everyday life, as well as the more obvious policy aspects. Dress sluttier. Make out in public. Don’t be ashamed of sex and porn. Be horny on main.
You gotta start moonlighting as SexStalin
Can’t get people to gamble when they’re jerking off.
It’s absurd how fucked up and perverse the gambling shit has gotten, not only are there literally dozens of gambling outlets that shpuld be and recently WERE illegal just like everywhere but they’re all advertising on all fucking frequencies, paper and radio and internet and TV ads all telling you to gamble, hey, make an account and make a bet and you get $200 bonus bets we’re not just getting you hooked we swear
Like i dunno it just seems like one of the grossest fucking things that has just instantly infected every corner of american society
I fuckinv hate religion but like fuck, is this just because of the tele evangelist grifter types taking over modern christianity? I feel like it used to be like this sort of shit would at least get a significant push back by the religious but now I have expect Jesus Christ branded/sponsored gambling apps any day now
is this just because of the tele evangelist grifter types taking over modern christianity?
Christianity has been picking and choosing what they care about for a lot longer then that
I’ve hated the churches ever since Cold War Christianity was a thing, but used to be, the temperance types at least kept the gambling inside regulated brick and mortar casinos and shady bookie shops. At this point, I’d welcome the 1950s Religious Right that put McCarthy in power, just to oust their even worse modern counterparts.
You should have to go somewhere to gamble.
I mean, they’re monetizing access to the access to it. Many of the states haven’t banned it, they’ve introduced private third partiee to handle age verification. It’s just another paywall industry that’s gonna grow and fester with its own lobbying and legislation.
Right - what they’re doing now is introducing another middleman who can skim profit, and adding another point of surveillance data collection. Just normal late capitalism things.
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There’s a healthy way to deal with this and a stupid way.
Hand wringing about moral decay, being seen as doing something about misogyny and femicide, some recent headlines about normalised sexual violence (e.g. choking without consent and training), excuse to expand the surveillance state/test censorship technology/legal powers against an industry that is hard to defend vs socially acceptable ones.
An excuse to internet censorship, the circumvention is so easy and well known I doubt even the politicians think they’re having a significant affect on porn consumption. But who really knows, I’m not in those weirdos heads.
I think there’s not much to it* beyond moral panic against queerness, in tandem with the selection of trans folk as the domestic pariah group.
Of course, porn and the sexual exploitation that has always existed within that industry existed unchecked for many years, but it will continue to do so despite these performative bans. We should all be very much on board with the understanding that the empire which has used soft power to pressure capitalists into compliance (de-banking, regulatory fines, tax benefits) is a client of exploitation, not an incompetent opponent to it.
What this campaign aims to do instead is make access to expressions of bodies outside of the window that the state provides via traditional media much, much harder. Capitalism has survived 300 years by using convenience as the ultimate pacifier of the proletariat, so making something less convenient is a conscious decision we must take note of.
The policies are also convenient for asserting the (American) state as an empire.
We have seen how the Federal Reserve can bend the world economy to its will by altering a few numbers on spreadsheets: among other things, the entire Chinese local government system borrows against the dollar for its massive infrastructure/economic programs! The rate has been used twice this year to bring the Chinese govt. to deals that have become the inflatable armbands of American economic buoyancy.
Meanwhile, how does the US manipulate the economies and politics of its vassals? Well, the graciously-provided payment system that is an American duopoly between Mastercard and Visa for one thing. If the American government shifts domestic policy in one direction, it can mimic this across the Anglosphere by directing its payment services to do this, too.
Debanking is an insanely powerful tool, and along with advertisers (who are primarily driven by US political culture) the US can effectively pull the rug on anything it wishes. Trans people being made a pariah allows the empire to galvanise allied fascist movements that were stagnating with racism alone, and the banking/advertising industry turned about-face to support this at its command. Just look at how many companies suddenly dropped pride culture, and with it followed with quiet complicity with the Neo-Gestapo and Israeli bloodlust.
I know I started this with “not much to it beyond…” but I stand by that! The simple fact is this is the US Empire doing what it has done since it become the primary villain of humanity - manipulating its domestic politics and exporting the new order to its vassals along the tendrils of the international bourgeoisie.
Probably all sexual policing is a result of the crisis of the family in capitalism, which as a rule “worsens” over time.
to spite me personally
I’ve just realized it’s most likely one of many ways they are going to try and fight the shrinking economy due to low fertility rates, aside from surveillance of course.
I wonder if some of it is on the “Retvrn to tradition” spectrum.
They won’t bring back the unionization, the 90% top tax bracket, or the single income household, but they’re happy to oblige bringing back the 1950s morals and social norms. That doesn’t cost the billionares anything.
It’s funny how the capital types forgot that porn is a fairly powerful economic innovation engine. Every key internet tech, from chat services to SSL payment processing to video to broadband availability was implicitly turbocharged by its smut potential. Even the current golden calf of AI is trying to climb on the bandwagon and hump it.
Trying to juice demand for the LLM industry’s recently publicized “pivot to smut”
