Im honestly so confused by the current conservative agenda.
They get butthurt that the Jan 6 rioters go to jail, but they send in people on horseback to take down college protestors in tents who aren't breaking any windows. They want "free speech" on facebook, but they want to ban all porn. They think that the 2nd amendment is important to protect our freedom, but they think that the 1st amendment is just a suggestion.
I dont think there is anything nefarious here. I just think its ridiculous populism. It is as if an entire political party was being led by that old guy at the bar who talks to the TV and tells you what he thinks they should do, frequently with suggestions that would cause many more problems than his alcohol-soaked brain can comprehend.
It's all just different forms of social control, to impose their beliefs in you. Aziz Rana calls it "the freedom to oppress", but you can think of it as basically my team's freedom to impose our will on your team. That's the gist of it. The people they disagree with don't deserve freedom. The goal is no such thing as universal rights, only group based privileges. Hope that clears things up on how things are gonna keep going down in the SC/politics.
And by groups, he means the wealthy. Because the truth is those rich sociopaths can’t enjoy what they have unless they know others can’t get access to it.
He meant white too, his book starts with the origins of US British colonization, in Ireland first and in US later. But yes, the wealthy support white supremacy became because it keeps the working class divided into racial groups instead of fighting the minority. You promise poor whites *some* relative upward mobility on the backs of poor non white (slaves, diapossesed native Americans, and immigrants). That's the second part of the argument Rana makes. It's a good book, I recommend it!
The ultimate goal is to eliminate the outgrouo so that the ingroup never has to fear again. The system falls apart without an enemy though, so they will resort to restricting freedoms further and further
It’s called hiding behind a wall of righteousness. The religious right have done this for years, and now it’s seeped into every aspect of the republican mind
Frank Wilhoit: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
All conservatives believe is they are above the law, and anyone they don't like should be hurt by the government.
They know they will be able to look up porn and that their business will not be banned by the government, but they don't like sex workers and the sex industry, so it's fair to attack it.
The problem is, that everyone leaves out the beginning, which states we have NO OTHER SYSTEM in the world, but Conservatism.
There are no leftists, no righties, no libs, no gop'ers no progressivism....only conservatism, because no one here knows (and humanity may be incapable of understanding via action/deed...even though some understand the theory), what anti-conservatism actually looks like in practice, because it exists nowhere, based on Wilhoit's definition.
***The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.***
It's immediately, and eventually, totally corrupted by conservatism, any where the theory begins to actually germinate.
That it's constantly used to attack only modern conservatives in the same vein as the "conservatives wont abandon conservatism, they'll abandon democracy" quote, is a misconstruing of it's actual intent.
[https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288](https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288)
I vehemently stand against nearly everything modern conservatives are after, and especially the MAGA idiots, and also stand firmly against conservatism as Wilhoit's comments define it....but it's important to actually use Mr Wilhoit's observation correctly, and few people do.
I think people quote the statement without the rest because the semantic argument is a dumb waste of time.
Also the statement along the lines of the law either protects and binds everyone or it protects and binds no one is nice to imagine but in reality, conservatives are quite adept at making it bind but not protect others and protect but not bind themselves.
They want their own rules to be forced down the throats of Americans. Not equal amendment rights. If you think conservatives have a platform other than “fuck you, do what we tell you to do” then you’d be wrong.
> I don’t think there is anything nefarious here
50 years of conservative ideals would like a word with you. At this point I don’t know how anyone can think these people are less than evil.
It’s doublethink. And I’m actually really impressed by the past couple of years of what conservative politicians have been able to brainwash their followers.
I NEVER thought that they could get their people behind hurting and hating VETERANS. I always thought that was one of their biggest supporters.
But when they got them to love RUSSIA?! That was amazing to me. Growing up, Russia was always the Republican enemy for being communists. And they got people supporting Putin.
And hey this, they even have the republicans wanting to cut foreign military spending AGAINST our enemies and establishing US geopolitical strength and a massive amount of natural resources. Imagine that happening during the Iraq wars.
Then they got them to support more nanny state stuff. More surveillance and control. Absolutely amazing.
I wonder where they’ll go next. Make them love China? Be against the police?
1) current Republican leadership at all levels has been replaced by the far right, or Trump sycophants. Those who hold to the ideologies of the GOP of Reganomics have been forced out, and while there are some who get elected to office still, they always face challenges from the far right.
2) those who have taken over don’t give a shit about financial policy beyond how it directly impacts them, leaving them instead to focus on/stew on social issues they don’t personally like. And given that many of these same people attend churches or social groups that work primarily on a victimization mentality (they are coming after us, it’s us against the rest of the world, etc) they carry that way of thinking over to their politics.
3) the downside of the internet and social media is that those same people (once referred to as things like “that crazy uncle”) have the ability to connect over long distances. Where once they were the outlier they found their silos/safe spaces/groups to echo off each other and even ramp up each other’s vitriol.
4) they are louder than everyone else and perfectly happy to shout people out of the room. Many of them also exist off of generational wealth and are more than willing to throw that at politics to “protect themselves”, where everyone more moderate instead focuses on actually building and protecting the wealth they may have or are working toward.
5) thus the political machine, backed by the very profitable outrage machine that 24-hour news channels have become, remains well funded especially in areas where there isn’t actually a lot of counter-political ideology (otherwise known as safe “red” districts). And by way of fundraising for candidates and transfers to pacs and super PACs the money goes to more contested grounds for advertising and political hype. All while they are able to pass stupid shit rules at home.
And thus we are faced with the nature of today’s political landscape. And don’t get me wrong there are some left wing groups that could be accused of the same tactics in politics to push their agendas, but they are a much smaller part of the political machine so democrats overall appeal to their party and independents (who are willing to look beyond the impact of policy just on their own lives at least) as moderate overall.
They've been very open about how nefarious they are being. There was a Conservative convention not too long ago were people who are running for office or are already in office openly saying on stage that they want to get rid of democracy and replace it with Christianity and the Bible. They've been saying the quiet part out loud for a while now
Oh it’s nefarious. Project 2025. Also Russian influence over republicans is being used to completely implode the country and drive it to a christofascist autocracy. Of course civil war is also an option.
The hypocrisy and b.s is so clear that you feel stupid that you have to debate about it .
I rather argue with kids , at least they might grow out of it
> I dont think there is anything nefarious here.
I do. It's Christian fascism. They've got weird as fuck religious hangups melded to a political philosophy that can best be summed up by [this clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QriZJ-X3wbU). It's all about power wielded by people who think they're literally ordained by God. It's dangerous as fuck, and people need to treat it as such.
Populism is the right word for it but I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with that word. It seems to actually mean “rule by the idiot masses.” And I guess I haven’t abandoned all hope that we can have a world where a majority of people aren’t raving idiots. I guess I’d rather call it “Idiocracy” than admit that anytime big numbers of regular people get their say, it will end in dystopia.
I don’t know… is this making any sense?
This has ALWAYS been an American problem. Our TV shows and movies are more violent than the rest of the world, but they’re more open to sex than we are.
I lived in a place where the kisses were clipped out of TV shows. So it’s not *only* an American problem. But among white western nations, America is certainly toward the prudish end of the scale.
They know we're too poor to skip a day or week or year of work to overthrow a tyrannical government, so they can do whatever they want to us. None of us are willing to make the sacrifices a real revolution would require of us, so we surrender to fascism without a fight. Peaceful protests get violently squashed, and we won't do shit about that.
Corruption 101
America will most likely never experience a French like revolution of the people .
We will probably gather supporters, fix one or two issues .
Then new season of a show comes out and we forget we’re fighting for our freedom
You can find a corrupt judge a lot faster than a movie enjoyable movie on Netflix .
Judges make decisions that changes lives for decades then go home and watch tv .
They think God decided all that and liberals are trying to use the government to sanction sin. It makes absolutely zero sense from outside their insular culture, but if you are fully raised in and indoctrinated into that culture, it’s the *only* thing that makes sense. People are fucked, man.
Yes, but they have a pattern of allowing these to stand before tube appeal, especially conservative policies, when past courts would put an temporary stop on the law before the appeals
“Maintaining the status quo” would mean putting a hold on implementing a new law, not allowing a potentially unconstitutional law to go into effect only to be overturned later.
Well I mean, its still not reasonable. There are assloads of caselaw that basically spell out this is illegal, to the point there should be no reason for it to be seen by a full appeal, the very fact there is no way this can stand under the First Amendment, yet they wont put an injunction in despite clear caselaw resoundingly saying its illegal, means they actually are considering this to have some legal standing, when the first amendment actually does protect pornography.
In short, they are clearly looking to pull a Roe v Wade again on the 1st amendment this time.
In general, in the past, when a law clearly violated the constitution, or previous SCOTUS rulings, they put injunctions on it. That was until this current conservative court.
I'm speaking from a place of ignorance - what caselaw makes this clearly illegal?
I know laws establishing age restrictions exist in all states, so why does verification of age cross into illegality?
Congress passed the Communications Decency Act in the 1990s to try and combat pornography online. This was (mostly, save for the famous Section 230) struck down as unconstitutional under the First Amendment. See *Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union*. Quoting from [the ACLU](https://www.aclu.org/cases/reno-v-aclu-challenge-censorship-provisions-communications-decency-act), who quotes the decision:
> In a landmark 7-2 decision written by Justice John Paul Stevens, the court ruled that the CDA placed an “unacceptably heavy burden on protected speech” that “threaten[ed] to torch a large segment of the Internet community.” The court also wrote that “the interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship.”
In response, Congress then passed the Child Online Protection Act. This too was struck down under the First Amendment. See *Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union*.
Aside from the vagueness and overbreadth problems with Congress' laws, another fatal flaw that they suffered from was that there were alternatives that are not as burdensome as age verification, such as parental controls. These newer state laws are no different which is why even if they are not vague nor overbroad they are likely to be unconstitutional nonetheless.
I have not researched other laws, but the Texas law is specifically aimed at only sites where at least 1/3rd of the content is "sexual material harmful to minors", which makes it much narrower in scope than either CDA or COPA.
As you note in your comment, CDA was struck down because it
> "threaten[ed] to torch a large segment of the Internet community"
Broadly, CDA would have applied to Google or YouTube, the Texas law would not.
COPA was substantially narrower than CDA, only applying to commercial speech and only the United States, so it was not immediately obvious it would be struck down as well, as the same arguments could not be used as did CDA. The Supreme Court declined to rule on COPA, although they did reject the argument the lower court used that there could be no such thing as national community standards.
Generally speaking the court opinion held that they were unconvinced that COPA was the best way to keep pornography away from minors, and were optimistic existing laws could do so. Time has shown that they really have not, so it is very possible that the same Justices that weren't willing to rule on COPA would rule for it today. They kicked it up a lower court which ruled COPA was overbroad and declined to dispute that when it was appealed. Ultimately the Supreme Court left this an open question they might hear later.
The Texas law naturally applies only to Texas, and only applies to sources that have a very substantial amount of pornographic material. Thus in two regards it is narrower in scope than either of the earlier acts mentioned. As such, it is not obvious that it should be rejected based on past rulings. In addition, the court will likely have to examine again the efficacy of software filtering in the modern environment. It is greatly important to the court that the Texas law will not affect citizens in other states, and will also not affect entities like Google, Meta or the website of the Thai restaurant down the block.
Ultimately, you have to remember that virtually all parties involve hold that keeping pornography away from minors is a good thing. That is not what they are arguing about. They're arguing about whether Baton Rouge standards will keep sex ex videos from being viewed in Oregon and whether such an act would unduly interfere with the production and consumption of the Bachelor, Ob-gyn exams, and World's 36th Annual Bukkake Olympiad.
But as stands, SCOTUS has not even decided whether they will make a decision about the law. One circuit court has upheld the Texas law. Given the role of SCOTUS, it would be most reasonable to wait until a different circuit court rejects a different state pornography law that is broadly similar, at which point you have competing legal arguments that have been decided differently in jurisdictions at the circuit court level within the United States, which is when you may actually need a SCOTUS ruling. This may have already happened, but I haven't heard about this.
I would have the so, but this hasn’t been the case. It could be that most men there are already so completely brainwashed by the GOP that nothing the party does will change their minds.
Because of messaging. Something the democrats are horrible at or just don’t care about. The gop convinced a bunch of confused men that they are tough guys and democrats are weak. And it works like a charm. The dems have yet to figure out anything similar
Yeah, Democrats are too scared to use simple words and slogans. If Democrats just reframed what "freedom" means and pointed out how much Republicans are against individual freedoms then they could win over a lot of voters. Democrats should be constantly talking about the freedom to have bodily autonomy, freedom to smoke weed, freedom to go to a hospital without drowning in debt, freedom to go to college no matter your background, freedom to form a union, freedom to get another job or start a business without the fear of losing benefits, freedom to send your kids to daycare or preschool, freedom of unrestricted internet access. They could call it something stupid like "Biden's Freedom Plan" and harp on and on about how Republicans don't want you to have these freedoms. But Democrats are too stupid to understand how to appeal to stupid people (I don't necessarily mean stupid so much as politically uninformed).
It's a problem in many designed-by-committee slogans, especially when that "committee" is ten million social media users, the decision made implicitly by what goes viral to the point that people copy-paste the one they saw/liked most:
You get the message that appeals most to people who are *already* on your side, rather than the one that appeals most to those you want to convince. Feeling part of the righteous in-group appeals to a lot of people. Therefore, most messaging across a political divide contains toxic undertones against the listener, making them *less* likely to switch rather than more.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from working tech support, it’s that VPNs are gonna be outside the capabilities of most casual porn viewers.
About two months ago, a friend of mine that I worked for called me and said he had a tech question. He was browsing porn and got a pop-up that said his computer was compromised and he’d have to pay them to fix it. He wanted to ask me first because both he and his brother separately paid $1000 to save their computers after it happened previously. I told him to reboot his computer and told him to alt + F4 out of it next time and he’ll be fine. He had to write “alt + F4” on a post-it note to remember it.
Both he and his brother are millionaires. Not *worth* millions, *have* millions.
I work in IT too and paid VPN services are absolutely used by computer illiterate morons. Setting up your own can be tricky but a paid one can be as simple as installing an app and that's it. People absolutely use them to get around bans.
dude people do not even know what they are or what they do, how would they purchase them? lol
also from my experience, even installing an app is a big ask of some users.
People don't need to know. In these cases they simply see their porn isn't working so they ask people how to get their porn back. Then all they need is an app name and they're golden. I've seen the exact situation play out many times. I've also seen people who use VPN's honestly swear they never use them as all they did was install an app and they don't understand it's a VPN.
nah now i know you don’t work in IT, you have way too much faith in the average person’s intelligence and problem solving capabilities. the general public is horribly lost, that’s why I even have a job.
I have the utmost faith in people’s abilities when properly motivated. The problem is that your average user isn’t motivated to solve their problems because they can just call IT and have them do it. But you take a man’s porn away? He’ll go to whatever lengths necessary to get it back, even *learn*.
People underestimate the psychological push of the horny. There's a reason the most virus-riddled websites are pornographic ones, it lures people who are already in a somewhat frantic state of mind
Doesn't matter how dumb they are, they'll keep looking. What else are they going to do?
and they don’t know what that means, is what i’m trying to tell y’all.
deadass, even being on reddit makes you more exposed to this kind of shit, the average person does not know things that you take for granted, i promise.
i’d literally have nothing to complain about if people
were capable of “2+2=4” level thoughts on a consistent basis.
IT is realizing you’re surrounded by idiots, then also realizing you’re someone else’s idiot, so we should all just try to be civil with each other and solve the problem together
If it was that easy to get around the regulation why wouldn't all porn sites just redirect Texas traffic to their servers outside the US? I doubt there are many of them who _only_ have servers in the US.
If it’s a US based company then they could be sued for noncompliance by the Texas state government. Technically, so could a foreign company but good luck collecting.
Most small sites don’t care, they aren’t run out of the US and there’s nothing Texas can do about them. Just like pirating sites except even harder to handle since you can’t just DMCA them to take them down and no one cares about Texas’s law, you aren’t going to get domains to complete shut down a site because they aren’t listening the same way as pirating can. The only reason pornhub is corporations is because it is US based and they’re doing so more as a statement hence their total shutdown in these states with a message about the law makers.
Yeah, they’d have to go this route, but even then many out of country sites would still be very hard to block because they end up having multiple access points or domains. The same way pirating sites get around takedowns by just changing hosts and setting up a redirect link.
I dunno man, looks like to me like Texas is all bark, no bite. Nobody who lives there has the the balls to stand up for themselves and their freedoms. It's a joke state. "Everything is bigger in Texas", especially the cowards. See also: Uvalde.
Not just age verification.
Identify verification.
No more looking at porn without leaving a clear trail that can and will be used to blackmail you into complete obedience to the state.
Protest? Run against an incumbent?
Well, here’s your porn history showing up in an ad online for everyone to see.
That is unfortunate to see, while this law is limited to 33% "content harmful to minors", which generally targets websites such as Pornhub, if these identification laws are found to be constitutional, it is likely that at least some states in the future will begin to target more mainstream websites with lowering or dropping the percentage. It is important to note that the standard "content harmful to minors" doesn't limit enforcement to hardcore porn, there is mainstream content which reasonably could fall under the definitions, and states have been trying to expand what content falls under such a definition beyond the standard used in previous court cases. Even if this law ultimately ends up being found unconstitutional, an emergency stay should have been granted with the Texas attorney general already having filed lawsuits against several companies, which they have to defend even if it is found that the law in question wasn't constitutional.
One thing to note is that while it is easy to say that these websites should just implement age verification, that beyond the reluctance for people to upload sensitive data, it isn't particularly cheap to use the third party age verification that these bills proposed, and these laws generally don't seem to allow a devise level implementation which would be far less costly and could be implemented with less privacy issues. Along the lines of the costs involved, Tennessee is expected to pass a law (which is just awaiting a signature from the Governor) that would require such an age verification be done for each user every 60 minutes for websites that would be covered by the law.
Christofascists have realized that arguing "We should ban porn because it offends us and therefore it should be illegal" is a losing argument, so they've switched to arguing "We should ban porn because it harms children and therefore it should be illegal".
Religious freaks absolutely cannot stand the idea of other people having the freedom to do things that they morally disapprove of.
I think religion harms children, should we ban that too? All people do is brainwash their children to have their beliefs and be scared of their fears. How do I know? was brough up in a baptist church in TX that tought me to hate and fear everything outside of church and god. Think goodness I was able to snap out of it at an early age.
Are they trying to ban porn? I thought it was just age verification. It’s still technically illegal for people under 18 to watch porn. If they want to actually ban porn, fuck that lol.
The problem is they aren’t just age gates it’s you upload your ID to a porn site to verify Identity thing cause this isn’t about kids at all it’s about censorship cause they’ll claim even innocuous LGBTQ content is adult content. Anytime a law is about protecting kids it’s actually about censorship and violating privacy
Well if they extended the law to other things like you’re saying I would have an issue with it. Are you just assuming that this will lead to other bans? From my understanding this is just porn as of now. But I guess the issue is what they define porn as, and using that loosely. I also share your privacy concern, as that is a good point I didn’t think of.
I will say, take porn out of it, the internet is doing harm to kids (and some adults lol) with social media etc. So I do agree with some degree of protection for younger kids.
Yes not this specifically but KOSA is the internet wide version that many see as a censorship tool masquerading as protecting kids.It’s a slippery slope the congresspeople behind KOSA are definitely anti LGBTQIA and see all of it is inappropriate for children if it isn’t heteronormative it’s sinful and inappropriate.
To answer your point about younger kid people should be attentive parents and not make the internet worse for everyone in the name of protecting kids
To your last point, people should do a lot of things, but people suck and that’s why there needs to be some form of protection. I mean look at what social media has done to younger kids, especially younger women. The internet is too wild of a place lol.
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Gotta download that stuff and save it locally -- never assume you'll have private or unlimited access to anything you keep online.
Don't keep your personal photos or videos in cloud storage unless you have them locally. Even then you can't assume they're private. All it takes is a court decision or some kind of warrant for someone else on the server and they're suddenly up for grabs.
Gonna be honest, if you download it (outside of VR use, and even then) you probably consume it too much.
For the time being at least, just use VPNs. Safer anyways for a number of reasons. Plus you can get past intentional ISP throttling when those assholes do that.
Blackmail ops in Texas into high gear!
There are already massive amounts of systems to block porn for kids.
This is just another personal freedom *grab without consent*.
The point its not using a VPN or not is that the government is getting more and more into their lives. And as a party that praise less government it doesn't look good.
So do all porn sites request ID there now or just the popular ones? Are sites being blocked? Seems like there are plenty of porn sites that have no real motivation to follow some US state's laws.
Pornhub and the three other sites owned by the same company (Redtube, Youporn, and Gaytube) plus xHamster are the only ones I know for certain that are being blocked in Texas. But some others have blocks for certain content even in the U.S., so I use a VPN going through the U.K. or the Netherlands.
Small sites would come and go. It's not going to matter and they know it. The only real effect this law will have is getting rid of moderated porn hosting.
Like them or not, pornhub has increased their moderation a lot the past decade. It's not 100% clear of everything, but it's at a point where the average user doesn't get to see the filth it once hosted willingly. Abuse, rape, drugs, children, voyeurism... You definitely don't happen across these videos without trying extensively and they're deleted quickly after reports. They created a better space for viewers and creators. Not perfect but better. Going back to thousands of small sites is going to destroy that.
I am in one of these dumb ass states and can tell you that out of the big 3: pornhub, xhamster, and xvideos, only xvideos doesn't do it. The problem is most porn sites link back to these three sites and you never know until you get the age check notification.
They don't ask for ID verification. They just block you from loading the page at all because the major sites recognize actually collecting and verifying IDs is too risky. They're held liable for children that circumvent the system using fakes, and for any sort of data breach that would reveal the IDs to a third party, so in every state that's passed these laws so far the company opted instead for a global ban rather than even attempting to follow the verification requirements.
I don't live in any of these states, but I can set my VPN to Texas and load Pornhub to see what happens. Here's the only page that it will show you: https://i.imgur.com/BHyIvME.png
Not that there aren't 100 other sites that load fine. Anyone who is outside the jurisdiction of random US states just ignored the change completely. Most of the links on the first page of Google still work. People joke about VPNs a lot, but I doubt they'll get much traction if the only sites even paying attention to the new requirements are the top two or three players.
Realistically, the page is a protest action. If such laws pass and are upheld in a significant portion of their customer base they will eat the costs of enforcing the law. It's the porn site equivalent of subreddits going dark in protest of Reddit monetization. Or Uber saying it will pull out of Minnesota.
As you note, porn sites have no moat, and they'll capitulate sooner than later because every day they're losing customer base to sites that are just staying open. It's a truism that the most successful corporations are more heavily regulated by the government. This is always going to upset them but that's why they end up lobbying politicians. But porn is in a special space where pretty much no politician wants to be associated with the stigma of it. Their only recourse is litigation and appealing to the consumer.
Texas isn't the only state with this kind of law. Most websites are only doing something if they are larger and get bothered by one of the states in question. And if they do something it might just be to disable direct access based on IP for legal CYA.
I'm kinda surprised it's the Texas law hitting the Supreme Court as they aren't the first state to get this kind of law.
It's not hitting the Supreme Court as yet though. This is literally the Supreme Court denying them being fast tracked into a SCOTUS hearing.
At some point later, SCOTUS will decide whether they will hear the case. They have not even decided whether they will make a decision.
obviously kids shouldnt watch porn but the religious fanaticism behind the intent of this law + the surveillance state making itself more obvious deters me from any serious effort made to stop the exploitative porn industry
The easiest way to think about it is: everyone hand waves this because VPNs exist. People who know what to do can get around it. But at its core, any law that is passed on a population whose first instinct is to break that law undermines the rule of law.
That's interesting, but it only seems to affect VPNs based in India. Ones that aren't based there still work there and aren't required to store user data.
There are lots of legitimate reasons for VPNs but they probably also want to track businesses closer soon like in the East in autocracies. You can see serfdom style grabs against labor happening like this.
[China outlaws VPNs and they love that model](https://www.voanews.com/a/china-s-vpn-usage-nearly-doubles-amid-internet-censorship/7488465.html) as seen by their actions but with a religious slant, neo-tsarism essentially with [Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality (OAN)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodoxy,_Autocracy,_and_Nationality) or a [Russification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification).
Now even in China users get around it, and you can't really stop VPNs fully, but you also now have committed a crime and they have you leveraged, for using a personal freedom that should never be illegal. Making personal freedoms that everyone does illegal so that they may not get you now, but if you speak out, they got you... on whatever they want.
One problem is if that three platforms are facing lawsuits in Texas, and have to defend those expensive lawsuits, for an issue that is in direct opposition to existing First Amendment case law (and did so without comment).
Leaving adult content aside, a similar issue from the same state and through the same 5th Circuit, last month the Supreme Court declined to [issue an stay](https://www.texastribune.org/2024/03/15/us-supreme-court-west-texas-drag-show/) against a Texas university banning a drag show for being a drag show. This appears to be a clear violation of the first amendment and prior case law, the university president who made the decision acknowledged that "the law of the land appears to require" allowing the drag show while he was blocking it, and the courts likely will ultimately find it as such. But in the mean time the courts are unwilling to stop this university from blocking the first amendment rights of its students so they are unable to perform such a show.
Cons when you look at porn as a grown adult 👀👀👀👀👀
Bunch of creepy mofos all up in your biz and watching.
They are such errand boy chumps, this data will be used at blackmail on many of them. Quit hitting yourself cons!
There are already massive amounts of systems to block porn for kids.
This is just another personal freedom *grab without consent*.
I’m not surprised by this but looks like the appeal is still going thru but we will have to wait and see what happens.
Honestly this age verification garbage is going to get quite a bit of people hacked especially considering republican led governments will use some third party companies that will do the scanning for photo ids and then some point soon that company gets hacked and that data is almost guaranteed to be stolen.
lol that’s because when Americans escaped the persecution of England they brought all the puritans with them.
Now they just want to persecute other Americans.
The UK is working on similar legislation. Same with Canada and Australia. The conservative movement right now is actually well-aligned across the anglosphere and isn't bound tightly by national borders.
i swear this is intentional, coupled with the anti abortion to cause unwanted pregnancies that will be brought up under nonideal circumstances to create more uneducated voters
Republicans talking about freedom is a joke. Republicans are the most repressive no-freedom group in the world
Next to the Taliban, North Korea, Russia, and Iran. They hypocritically say they believe in small government. In reality they want to control government mostly by police state control regarding every aspect of your life. Make no mistake November will be a deciding factor as to whether we remain a free nation.
Johnson uses a Covenant App to keep a lid on his porn, and allows his son to lecture him about it when he gets overstimulated….I wonder if that tracks users too-in secret of course.
This is what the nanny state looks like. Porn? The government decides. Pregnant? The government decides. Sexual identity? The government decides.
Im honestly so confused by the current conservative agenda. They get butthurt that the Jan 6 rioters go to jail, but they send in people on horseback to take down college protestors in tents who aren't breaking any windows. They want "free speech" on facebook, but they want to ban all porn. They think that the 2nd amendment is important to protect our freedom, but they think that the 1st amendment is just a suggestion. I dont think there is anything nefarious here. I just think its ridiculous populism. It is as if an entire political party was being led by that old guy at the bar who talks to the TV and tells you what he thinks they should do, frequently with suggestions that would cause many more problems than his alcohol-soaked brain can comprehend.
It's all just different forms of social control, to impose their beliefs in you. Aziz Rana calls it "the freedom to oppress", but you can think of it as basically my team's freedom to impose our will on your team. That's the gist of it. The people they disagree with don't deserve freedom. The goal is no such thing as universal rights, only group based privileges. Hope that clears things up on how things are gonna keep going down in the SC/politics.
And by groups, he means the wealthy. Because the truth is those rich sociopaths can’t enjoy what they have unless they know others can’t get access to it.
He meant white too, his book starts with the origins of US British colonization, in Ireland first and in US later. But yes, the wealthy support white supremacy became because it keeps the working class divided into racial groups instead of fighting the minority. You promise poor whites *some* relative upward mobility on the backs of poor non white (slaves, diapossesed native Americans, and immigrants). That's the second part of the argument Rana makes. It's a good book, I recommend it!
The ultimate goal is to eliminate the outgrouo so that the ingroup never has to fear again. The system falls apart without an enemy though, so they will resort to restricting freedoms further and further
They ARE currently being led by that guy lmao
It’s called hiding behind a wall of righteousness. The religious right have done this for years, and now it’s seeped into every aspect of the republican mind
Because to conservatives who committed a crime is far more important than what crime was comitted.
This is one of the sentences that need a comma
Frank Wilhoit: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” All conservatives believe is they are above the law, and anyone they don't like should be hurt by the government. They know they will be able to look up porn and that their business will not be banned by the government, but they don't like sex workers and the sex industry, so it's fair to attack it.
I think that quote goes over people's heads. It basically boils down to: "we're right, so we do we want. You're wrong, so you do what we want."
The problem is, that everyone leaves out the beginning, which states we have NO OTHER SYSTEM in the world, but Conservatism. There are no leftists, no righties, no libs, no gop'ers no progressivism....only conservatism, because no one here knows (and humanity may be incapable of understanding via action/deed...even though some understand the theory), what anti-conservatism actually looks like in practice, because it exists nowhere, based on Wilhoit's definition. ***The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.*** It's immediately, and eventually, totally corrupted by conservatism, any where the theory begins to actually germinate. That it's constantly used to attack only modern conservatives in the same vein as the "conservatives wont abandon conservatism, they'll abandon democracy" quote, is a misconstruing of it's actual intent. [https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288](https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288) I vehemently stand against nearly everything modern conservatives are after, and especially the MAGA idiots, and also stand firmly against conservatism as Wilhoit's comments define it....but it's important to actually use Mr Wilhoit's observation correctly, and few people do.
I think people quote the statement without the rest because the semantic argument is a dumb waste of time. Also the statement along the lines of the law either protects and binds everyone or it protects and binds no one is nice to imagine but in reality, conservatives are quite adept at making it bind but not protect others and protect but not bind themselves.
Okay buddy. Thank you yet again, for proving my point.
They want their own rules to be forced down the throats of Americans. Not equal amendment rights. If you think conservatives have a platform other than “fuck you, do what we tell you to do” then you’d be wrong.
And the only appropriate way to respond is "fuck you, I won't do what ya tell me!"
> I don’t think there is anything nefarious here 50 years of conservative ideals would like a word with you. At this point I don’t know how anyone can think these people are less than evil.
It's just fascism. Nothing new. The inconsistency and hypocrisy are a feature, not a bug.
It’s doublethink. And I’m actually really impressed by the past couple of years of what conservative politicians have been able to brainwash their followers. I NEVER thought that they could get their people behind hurting and hating VETERANS. I always thought that was one of their biggest supporters. But when they got them to love RUSSIA?! That was amazing to me. Growing up, Russia was always the Republican enemy for being communists. And they got people supporting Putin. And hey this, they even have the republicans wanting to cut foreign military spending AGAINST our enemies and establishing US geopolitical strength and a massive amount of natural resources. Imagine that happening during the Iraq wars. Then they got them to support more nanny state stuff. More surveillance and control. Absolutely amazing. I wonder where they’ll go next. Make them love China? Be against the police?
1) current Republican leadership at all levels has been replaced by the far right, or Trump sycophants. Those who hold to the ideologies of the GOP of Reganomics have been forced out, and while there are some who get elected to office still, they always face challenges from the far right. 2) those who have taken over don’t give a shit about financial policy beyond how it directly impacts them, leaving them instead to focus on/stew on social issues they don’t personally like. And given that many of these same people attend churches or social groups that work primarily on a victimization mentality (they are coming after us, it’s us against the rest of the world, etc) they carry that way of thinking over to their politics. 3) the downside of the internet and social media is that those same people (once referred to as things like “that crazy uncle”) have the ability to connect over long distances. Where once they were the outlier they found their silos/safe spaces/groups to echo off each other and even ramp up each other’s vitriol. 4) they are louder than everyone else and perfectly happy to shout people out of the room. Many of them also exist off of generational wealth and are more than willing to throw that at politics to “protect themselves”, where everyone more moderate instead focuses on actually building and protecting the wealth they may have or are working toward. 5) thus the political machine, backed by the very profitable outrage machine that 24-hour news channels have become, remains well funded especially in areas where there isn’t actually a lot of counter-political ideology (otherwise known as safe “red” districts). And by way of fundraising for candidates and transfers to pacs and super PACs the money goes to more contested grounds for advertising and political hype. All while they are able to pass stupid shit rules at home. And thus we are faced with the nature of today’s political landscape. And don’t get me wrong there are some left wing groups that could be accused of the same tactics in politics to push their agendas, but they are a much smaller part of the political machine so democrats overall appeal to their party and independents (who are willing to look beyond the impact of policy just on their own lives at least) as moderate overall.
They've been very open about how nefarious they are being. There was a Conservative convention not too long ago were people who are running for office or are already in office openly saying on stage that they want to get rid of democracy and replace it with Christianity and the Bible. They've been saying the quiet part out loud for a while now
Oh it’s nefarious. Project 2025. Also Russian influence over republicans is being used to completely implode the country and drive it to a christofascist autocracy. Of course civil war is also an option.
Well that’s a difference between fed, state and local police
The hypocrisy and b.s is so clear that you feel stupid that you have to debate about it . I rather argue with kids , at least they might grow out of it
It’s because they are a cancer on society and aren’t actually interested in making life good for everyone.
I hate to break it to you but it’s definitely nefarious.
> I dont think there is anything nefarious here. I do. It's Christian fascism. They've got weird as fuck religious hangups melded to a political philosophy that can best be summed up by [this clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QriZJ-X3wbU). It's all about power wielded by people who think they're literally ordained by God. It's dangerous as fuck, and people need to treat it as such.
Populism is the right word for it but I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with that word. It seems to actually mean “rule by the idiot masses.” And I guess I haven’t abandoned all hope that we can have a world where a majority of people aren’t raving idiots. I guess I’d rather call it “Idiocracy” than admit that anytime big numbers of regular people get their say, it will end in dystopia. I don’t know… is this making any sense?
Violent war images: fine. Two consenting adults engaging in sex for those who wish to view it: banish that!
This has ALWAYS been an American problem. Our TV shows and movies are more violent than the rest of the world, but they’re more open to sex than we are.
I lived in a place where the kisses were clipped out of TV shows. So it’s not *only* an American problem. But among white western nations, America is certainly toward the prudish end of the scale.
Texas is a Christofascist state.
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They know we're too poor to skip a day or week or year of work to overthrow a tyrannical government, so they can do whatever they want to us. None of us are willing to make the sacrifices a real revolution would require of us, so we surrender to fascism without a fight. Peaceful protests get violently squashed, and we won't do shit about that.
Corruption 101 America will most likely never experience a French like revolution of the people . We will probably gather supporters, fix one or two issues . Then new season of a show comes out and we forget we’re fighting for our freedom
You can find a corrupt judge a lot faster than a movie enjoyable movie on Netflix . Judges make decisions that changes lives for decades then go home and watch tv .
in a largely Christofascist country.
That's right! We Republicans believe in small government and personal freedoms! There's no contradiction here, move along.
At least they can buy all the guns they want and lifted pickup trucks that never haul or leave the road.
*Christo-fascists decide
At least they have good pot in Texas, right?
No no no. Texas and conservatives are all about freedom. This is just freedom guys. Can’t you tell?
They think God decided all that and liberals are trying to use the government to sanction sin. It makes absolutely zero sense from outside their insular culture, but if you are fully raised in and indoctrinated into that culture, it’s the *only* thing that makes sense. People are fucked, man.
Taxes? The government has no right to tell me what do do with my money.
The freedumb party strikes again
Looks like they are only leaving it in place while the full appeal is heard by the Supreme court.
Yes, but they have a pattern of allowing these to stand before tube appeal, especially conservative policies, when past courts would put an temporary stop on the law before the appeals
It's still likely it will be ruled unconstitutional but this is worrying...
Courts are supposed to be biased towards maintaining the status quo, not upending what is normal while it reviews the case.
“Maintaining the status quo” would mean putting a hold on implementing a new law, not allowing a potentially unconstitutional law to go into effect only to be overturned later.
Stop dousing the rage bait with your facts and reason!
Well I mean, its still not reasonable. There are assloads of caselaw that basically spell out this is illegal, to the point there should be no reason for it to be seen by a full appeal, the very fact there is no way this can stand under the First Amendment, yet they wont put an injunction in despite clear caselaw resoundingly saying its illegal, means they actually are considering this to have some legal standing, when the first amendment actually does protect pornography. In short, they are clearly looking to pull a Roe v Wade again on the 1st amendment this time. In general, in the past, when a law clearly violated the constitution, or previous SCOTUS rulings, they put injunctions on it. That was until this current conservative court.
I'm speaking from a place of ignorance - what caselaw makes this clearly illegal? I know laws establishing age restrictions exist in all states, so why does verification of age cross into illegality?
Congress passed the Communications Decency Act in the 1990s to try and combat pornography online. This was (mostly, save for the famous Section 230) struck down as unconstitutional under the First Amendment. See *Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union*. Quoting from [the ACLU](https://www.aclu.org/cases/reno-v-aclu-challenge-censorship-provisions-communications-decency-act), who quotes the decision: > In a landmark 7-2 decision written by Justice John Paul Stevens, the court ruled that the CDA placed an “unacceptably heavy burden on protected speech” that “threaten[ed] to torch a large segment of the Internet community.” The court also wrote that “the interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship.” In response, Congress then passed the Child Online Protection Act. This too was struck down under the First Amendment. See *Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union*. Aside from the vagueness and overbreadth problems with Congress' laws, another fatal flaw that they suffered from was that there were alternatives that are not as burdensome as age verification, such as parental controls. These newer state laws are no different which is why even if they are not vague nor overbroad they are likely to be unconstitutional nonetheless.
I have not researched other laws, but the Texas law is specifically aimed at only sites where at least 1/3rd of the content is "sexual material harmful to minors", which makes it much narrower in scope than either CDA or COPA. As you note in your comment, CDA was struck down because it > "threaten[ed] to torch a large segment of the Internet community" Broadly, CDA would have applied to Google or YouTube, the Texas law would not. COPA was substantially narrower than CDA, only applying to commercial speech and only the United States, so it was not immediately obvious it would be struck down as well, as the same arguments could not be used as did CDA. The Supreme Court declined to rule on COPA, although they did reject the argument the lower court used that there could be no such thing as national community standards. Generally speaking the court opinion held that they were unconvinced that COPA was the best way to keep pornography away from minors, and were optimistic existing laws could do so. Time has shown that they really have not, so it is very possible that the same Justices that weren't willing to rule on COPA would rule for it today. They kicked it up a lower court which ruled COPA was overbroad and declined to dispute that when it was appealed. Ultimately the Supreme Court left this an open question they might hear later. The Texas law naturally applies only to Texas, and only applies to sources that have a very substantial amount of pornographic material. Thus in two regards it is narrower in scope than either of the earlier acts mentioned. As such, it is not obvious that it should be rejected based on past rulings. In addition, the court will likely have to examine again the efficacy of software filtering in the modern environment. It is greatly important to the court that the Texas law will not affect citizens in other states, and will also not affect entities like Google, Meta or the website of the Thai restaurant down the block. Ultimately, you have to remember that virtually all parties involve hold that keeping pornography away from minors is a good thing. That is not what they are arguing about. They're arguing about whether Baton Rouge standards will keep sex ex videos from being viewed in Oregon and whether such an act would unduly interfere with the production and consumption of the Bachelor, Ob-gyn exams, and World's 36th Annual Bukkake Olympiad. But as stands, SCOTUS has not even decided whether they will make a decision about the law. One circuit court has upheld the Texas law. Given the role of SCOTUS, it would be most reasonable to wait until a different circuit court rejects a different state pornography law that is broadly similar, at which point you have competing legal arguments that have been decided differently in jurisdictions at the circuit court level within the United States, which is when you may actually need a SCOTUS ruling. This may have already happened, but I haven't heard about this.
That clears it up - thank you!
Hopefully not but we will have to see...
The fact that they decided to take it up and not leave it to the lower courts is all we need to know.
This alone will turn Texas blue, at least their balls
I would have the so, but this hasn’t been the case. It could be that most men there are already so completely brainwashed by the GOP that nothing the party does will change their minds.
Because of messaging. Something the democrats are horrible at or just don’t care about. The gop convinced a bunch of confused men that they are tough guys and democrats are weak. And it works like a charm. The dems have yet to figure out anything similar
Yeah, Democrats are too scared to use simple words and slogans. If Democrats just reframed what "freedom" means and pointed out how much Republicans are against individual freedoms then they could win over a lot of voters. Democrats should be constantly talking about the freedom to have bodily autonomy, freedom to smoke weed, freedom to go to a hospital without drowning in debt, freedom to go to college no matter your background, freedom to form a union, freedom to get another job or start a business without the fear of losing benefits, freedom to send your kids to daycare or preschool, freedom of unrestricted internet access. They could call it something stupid like "Biden's Freedom Plan" and harp on and on about how Republicans don't want you to have these freedoms. But Democrats are too stupid to understand how to appeal to stupid people (I don't necessarily mean stupid so much as politically uninformed).
It's a problem in many designed-by-committee slogans, especially when that "committee" is ten million social media users, the decision made implicitly by what goes viral to the point that people copy-paste the one they saw/liked most: You get the message that appeals most to people who are *already* on your side, rather than the one that appeals most to those you want to convince. Feeling part of the righteous in-group appeals to a lot of people. Therefore, most messaging across a political divide contains toxic undertones against the listener, making them *less* likely to switch rather than more.
They’ve been making “Soyjak-Chad” memes before Facebook and 4chan even existed
Or they just use a VPN.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from working tech support, it’s that VPNs are gonna be outside the capabilities of most casual porn viewers. About two months ago, a friend of mine that I worked for called me and said he had a tech question. He was browsing porn and got a pop-up that said his computer was compromised and he’d have to pay them to fix it. He wanted to ask me first because both he and his brother separately paid $1000 to save their computers after it happened previously. I told him to reboot his computer and told him to alt + F4 out of it next time and he’ll be fine. He had to write “alt + F4” on a post-it note to remember it. Both he and his brother are millionaires. Not *worth* millions, *have* millions.
Do they work in sales? Any idiot can get rich working in sales
Old money, but had lucrative careers of their own.
Next time, tell them you can fix it for $500 bucks
Literally made that joke, lol. I don’t think it was received with the humor it was made in.
95% of people are too stupid source: i work in IT
I work in IT too and paid VPN services are absolutely used by computer illiterate morons. Setting up your own can be tricky but a paid one can be as simple as installing an app and that's it. People absolutely use them to get around bans.
dude people do not even know what they are or what they do, how would they purchase them? lol also from my experience, even installing an app is a big ask of some users.
People don't need to know. In these cases they simply see their porn isn't working so they ask people how to get their porn back. Then all they need is an app name and they're golden. I've seen the exact situation play out many times. I've also seen people who use VPN's honestly swear they never use them as all they did was install an app and they don't understand it's a VPN.
nah now i know you don’t work in IT, you have way too much faith in the average person’s intelligence and problem solving capabilities. the general public is horribly lost, that’s why I even have a job.
I have the utmost faith in people’s abilities when properly motivated. The problem is that your average user isn’t motivated to solve their problems because they can just call IT and have them do it. But you take a man’s porn away? He’ll go to whatever lengths necessary to get it back, even *learn*.
People underestimate the psychological push of the horny. There's a reason the most virus-riddled websites are pornographic ones, it lures people who are already in a somewhat frantic state of mind Doesn't matter how dumb they are, they'll keep looking. What else are they going to do?
They watch a Youtube video about guns then blamo here comes today's sponsor Nord VPN along with a coupon code.
and they don’t know what that means, is what i’m trying to tell y’all. deadass, even being on reddit makes you more exposed to this kind of shit, the average person does not know things that you take for granted, i promise. i’d literally have nothing to complain about if people were capable of “2+2=4” level thoughts on a consistent basis.
I'm a sysadmin and 70% of IT people are pretty dumb too.
IT is realizing you’re surrounded by idiots, then also realizing you’re someone else’s idiot, so we should all just try to be civil with each other and solve the problem together
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If it was that easy to get around the regulation why wouldn't all porn sites just redirect Texas traffic to their servers outside the US? I doubt there are many of them who _only_ have servers in the US.
If it’s a US based company then they could be sued for noncompliance by the Texas state government. Technically, so could a foreign company but good luck collecting.
Tbh I’m in Texas and no websites are doing this except stuff like bigger main ones pornhub. I can still lookup and access anything I want to watch.
For now, many smallest sites presume this will be taken down in court (It's still likely it will) but this is worrying.
Most small sites don’t care, they aren’t run out of the US and there’s nothing Texas can do about them. Just like pirating sites except even harder to handle since you can’t just DMCA them to take them down and no one cares about Texas’s law, you aren’t going to get domains to complete shut down a site because they aren’t listening the same way as pirating can. The only reason pornhub is corporations is because it is US based and they’re doing so more as a statement hence their total shutdown in these states with a message about the law makers.
The only way this will have any effect is if Texas starts forcing ISPs to block sites that don't comply.
Yeah, they’d have to go this route, but even then many out of country sites would still be very hard to block because they end up having multiple access points or domains. The same way pirating sites get around takedowns by just changing hosts and setting up a redirect link.
What a HUGE waste of time lol
They will just blame the Democrats for anything they don't like instead. Their whole thought process at this point is "Democrat=Bad, Republican=Good".
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That's very true, it may never happen
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You need to affect a man's rights before the men in Texas will give a fuck, I'm not surprised in the slightest
I dunno man, looks like to me like Texas is all bark, no bite. Nobody who lives there has the the balls to stand up for themselves and their freedoms. It's a joke state. "Everything is bigger in Texas", especially the cowards. See also: Uvalde.
There’s gonna be a lot of cattle fuckin’.
Not just age verification. Identify verification. No more looking at porn without leaving a clear trail that can and will be used to blackmail you into complete obedience to the state. Protest? Run against an incumbent? Well, here’s your porn history showing up in an ad online for everyone to see.
That is unfortunate to see, while this law is limited to 33% "content harmful to minors", which generally targets websites such as Pornhub, if these identification laws are found to be constitutional, it is likely that at least some states in the future will begin to target more mainstream websites with lowering or dropping the percentage. It is important to note that the standard "content harmful to minors" doesn't limit enforcement to hardcore porn, there is mainstream content which reasonably could fall under the definitions, and states have been trying to expand what content falls under such a definition beyond the standard used in previous court cases. Even if this law ultimately ends up being found unconstitutional, an emergency stay should have been granted with the Texas attorney general already having filed lawsuits against several companies, which they have to defend even if it is found that the law in question wasn't constitutional. One thing to note is that while it is easy to say that these websites should just implement age verification, that beyond the reluctance for people to upload sensitive data, it isn't particularly cheap to use the third party age verification that these bills proposed, and these laws generally don't seem to allow a devise level implementation which would be far less costly and could be implemented with less privacy issues. Along the lines of the costs involved, Tennessee is expected to pass a law (which is just awaiting a signature from the Governor) that would require such an age verification be done for each user every 60 minutes for websites that would be covered by the law.
lorem ipsum hub: 67% lorem ipsum repeated, 33% porn
For every video uploaded, a string of lorem ipsum 2x longer will be automatically added to the site.
Its still very likely the bill will be found unconstitutional.
Christofascists have realized that arguing "We should ban porn because it offends us and therefore it should be illegal" is a losing argument, so they've switched to arguing "We should ban porn because it harms children and therefore it should be illegal". Religious freaks absolutely cannot stand the idea of other people having the freedom to do things that they morally disapprove of.
“We’re doing it for the children” they say as they slash funding for student meals and make it easier for school shooters to get guns
There are already massive amounts of systems to block porn for kids. This is just another personal freedom *grab without consent*.
Let’s the parents police their kids. Isn’t that what conservatives are pushing with schools?
I think religion harms children, should we ban that too? All people do is brainwash their children to have their beliefs and be scared of their fears. How do I know? was brough up in a baptist church in TX that tought me to hate and fear everything outside of church and god. Think goodness I was able to snap out of it at an early age.
Are they trying to ban porn? I thought it was just age verification. It’s still technically illegal for people under 18 to watch porn. If they want to actually ban porn, fuck that lol.
The problem is they aren’t just age gates it’s you upload your ID to a porn site to verify Identity thing cause this isn’t about kids at all it’s about censorship cause they’ll claim even innocuous LGBTQ content is adult content. Anytime a law is about protecting kids it’s actually about censorship and violating privacy
Well if they extended the law to other things like you’re saying I would have an issue with it. Are you just assuming that this will lead to other bans? From my understanding this is just porn as of now. But I guess the issue is what they define porn as, and using that loosely. I also share your privacy concern, as that is a good point I didn’t think of. I will say, take porn out of it, the internet is doing harm to kids (and some adults lol) with social media etc. So I do agree with some degree of protection for younger kids.
Yes not this specifically but KOSA is the internet wide version that many see as a censorship tool masquerading as protecting kids.It’s a slippery slope the congresspeople behind KOSA are definitely anti LGBTQIA and see all of it is inappropriate for children if it isn’t heteronormative it’s sinful and inappropriate. To answer your point about younger kid people should be attentive parents and not make the internet worse for everyone in the name of protecting kids
To your last point, people should do a lot of things, but people suck and that’s why there needs to be some form of protection. I mean look at what social media has done to younger kids, especially younger women. The internet is too wild of a place lol.
"Ban GoP because it harms children" should be a thing
icky sense intelligent worm whole zephyr grandiose frightening six elastic *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Not much different than Jack Thompson and the video games cause violence argument. A losing battle .
Time for another *Hustler Magazine v. Falwell* case to redress.
Gotta download that stuff and save it locally -- never assume you'll have private or unlimited access to anything you keep online. Don't keep your personal photos or videos in cloud storage unless you have them locally. Even then you can't assume they're private. All it takes is a court decision or some kind of warrant for someone else on the server and they're suddenly up for grabs.
Gonna be honest, if you download it (outside of VR use, and even then) you probably consume it too much. For the time being at least, just use VPNs. Safer anyways for a number of reasons. Plus you can get past intentional ISP throttling when those assholes do that.
Judge much?
Too much for what? Your tender sensibilities or your sweeping health generalizations?
“There were no noted dissents from the court’s one-sentence order.”
Wow torrenting just got really popular in Texas for some reason
Blackmail ops in Texas into high gear! There are already massive amounts of systems to block porn for kids. This is just another personal freedom *grab without consent*.
It’s been shown that Bible Belt states are the biggest users.
Well, of course they did. I doubt the dipshits even know what a VPN is.
Vulgar Porn Network
The point its not using a VPN or not is that the government is getting more and more into their lives. And as a party that praise less government it doesn't look good.
Will blame it on Biden somehow
Vagene Peen Network
I started using a free VPN the same day it went into effect.
So do all porn sites request ID there now or just the popular ones? Are sites being blocked? Seems like there are plenty of porn sites that have no real motivation to follow some US state's laws.
Pornhub and the three other sites owned by the same company (Redtube, Youporn, and Gaytube) plus xHamster are the only ones I know for certain that are being blocked in Texas. But some others have blocks for certain content even in the U.S., so I use a VPN going through the U.K. or the Netherlands.
Small sites would come and go. It's not going to matter and they know it. The only real effect this law will have is getting rid of moderated porn hosting. Like them or not, pornhub has increased their moderation a lot the past decade. It's not 100% clear of everything, but it's at a point where the average user doesn't get to see the filth it once hosted willingly. Abuse, rape, drugs, children, voyeurism... You definitely don't happen across these videos without trying extensively and they're deleted quickly after reports. They created a better space for viewers and creators. Not perfect but better. Going back to thousands of small sites is going to destroy that.
I am in one of these dumb ass states and can tell you that out of the big 3: pornhub, xhamster, and xvideos, only xvideos doesn't do it. The problem is most porn sites link back to these three sites and you never know until you get the age check notification.
In TN it only asks if you are 18 or older. So do you actually need ID verification if you’re in Texas for example?
They don't ask for ID verification. They just block you from loading the page at all because the major sites recognize actually collecting and verifying IDs is too risky. They're held liable for children that circumvent the system using fakes, and for any sort of data breach that would reveal the IDs to a third party, so in every state that's passed these laws so far the company opted instead for a global ban rather than even attempting to follow the verification requirements. I don't live in any of these states, but I can set my VPN to Texas and load Pornhub to see what happens. Here's the only page that it will show you: https://i.imgur.com/BHyIvME.png Not that there aren't 100 other sites that load fine. Anyone who is outside the jurisdiction of random US states just ignored the change completely. Most of the links on the first page of Google still work. People joke about VPNs a lot, but I doubt they'll get much traction if the only sites even paying attention to the new requirements are the top two or three players.
Realistically, the page is a protest action. If such laws pass and are upheld in a significant portion of their customer base they will eat the costs of enforcing the law. It's the porn site equivalent of subreddits going dark in protest of Reddit monetization. Or Uber saying it will pull out of Minnesota. As you note, porn sites have no moat, and they'll capitulate sooner than later because every day they're losing customer base to sites that are just staying open. It's a truism that the most successful corporations are more heavily regulated by the government. This is always going to upset them but that's why they end up lobbying politicians. But porn is in a special space where pretty much no politician wants to be associated with the stigma of it. Their only recourse is litigation and appealing to the consumer.
[удалено]
Texas isn't the only state with this kind of law. Most websites are only doing something if they are larger and get bothered by one of the states in question. And if they do something it might just be to disable direct access based on IP for legal CYA. I'm kinda surprised it's the Texas law hitting the Supreme Court as they aren't the first state to get this kind of law.
It's not hitting the Supreme Court as yet though. This is literally the Supreme Court denying them being fast tracked into a SCOTUS hearing. At some point later, SCOTUS will decide whether they will hear the case. They have not even decided whether they will make a decision.
There are free ones?
obviously kids shouldnt watch porn but the religious fanaticism behind the intent of this law + the surveillance state making itself more obvious deters me from any serious effort made to stop the exploitative porn industry
Republicans need to stop saying they’re the party of “small government” 😒
Decisions like this only undermine the rule of law.
It's only a denial of a stay
How does this undermine the rule of law? That seems a bit dramatic no?
The easiest way to think about it is: everyone hand waves this because VPNs exist. People who know what to do can get around it. But at its core, any law that is passed on a population whose first instinct is to break that law undermines the rule of law.
> everyone hand waves this because VPNs exist Until VPNs are blocked... *for the greater good*... *Under his eye*
There are a lot of legitimate uses for VPNs, I don't think they could do it wholesale. But conservative states have been surprising me lately.
Well, India just effectively banned VPNs, by requiring them to store user data. It will surely spread to other democracies.
That's interesting, but it only seems to affect VPNs based in India. Ones that aren't based there still work there and aren't required to store user data.
There are lots of legitimate reasons for VPNs but they probably also want to track businesses closer soon like in the East in autocracies. You can see serfdom style grabs against labor happening like this. [China outlaws VPNs and they love that model](https://www.voanews.com/a/china-s-vpn-usage-nearly-doubles-amid-internet-censorship/7488465.html) as seen by their actions but with a religious slant, neo-tsarism essentially with [Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality (OAN)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodoxy,_Autocracy,_and_Nationality) or a [Russification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification). Now even in China users get around it, and you can't really stop VPNs fully, but you also now have committed a crime and they have you leveraged, for using a personal freedom that should never be illegal. Making personal freedoms that everyone does illegal so that they may not get you now, but if you speak out, they got you... on whatever they want.
This is yet another attempt to apply moralism. People will find ways to ignore or skirt this attempt at censorship.
This isn’t a ruling; it is a denial of stay.
One problem is if that three platforms are facing lawsuits in Texas, and have to defend those expensive lawsuits, for an issue that is in direct opposition to existing First Amendment case law (and did so without comment). Leaving adult content aside, a similar issue from the same state and through the same 5th Circuit, last month the Supreme Court declined to [issue an stay](https://www.texastribune.org/2024/03/15/us-supreme-court-west-texas-drag-show/) against a Texas university banning a drag show for being a drag show. This appears to be a clear violation of the first amendment and prior case law, the university president who made the decision acknowledged that "the law of the land appears to require" allowing the drag show while he was blocking it, and the courts likely will ultimately find it as such. But in the mean time the courts are unwilling to stop this university from blocking the first amendment rights of its students so they are unable to perform such a show.
Cons when you look at porn as a grown adult 👀👀👀👀👀 Bunch of creepy mofos all up in your biz and watching. They are such errand boy chumps, this data will be used at blackmail on many of them. Quit hitting yourself cons! There are already massive amounts of systems to block porn for kids. This is just another personal freedom *grab without consent*.
I’m not surprised by this but looks like the appeal is still going thru but we will have to wait and see what happens. Honestly this age verification garbage is going to get quite a bit of people hacked especially considering republican led governments will use some third party companies that will do the scanning for photo ids and then some point soon that company gets hacked and that data is almost guaranteed to be stolen.
Please protect me from boobies, justice thomas.
They are trying to pass a similar law in Tennessee too. I'm honestly surprised we weren't one of the first states to have one
Texas, the state of whiny little dicks.
Physical media is back, baby.
lol that’s because when Americans escaped the persecution of England they brought all the puritans with them. Now they just want to persecute other Americans.
The UK is working on similar legislation. Same with Canada and Australia. The conservative movement right now is actually well-aligned across the anglosphere and isn't bound tightly by national borders.
I left England 25 years ago, this makes me sad.
Hey Paxton, sue Reddit you coward.
That sound you hear is many thousands of Texas “Christians” typing away searching for and learning about VPN software.
Setting: SCOTUS Discussion: Do any of us have a home in Texas? \*crickets\* Ruling: Okay. The law stands.
i swear this is intentional, coupled with the anti abortion to cause unwanted pregnancies that will be brought up under nonideal circumstances to create more uneducated voters
THANKS REPUBLICANS. s/ Just wait until they get that national abortion ban - they will go after birth control. VOTE BLUE LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT.
Great work the party of less government... great work
Uh... is Texas ok?
Hasn't been, for years!
They're overdosing on freedom down there, someone give em narcan.
Texas is going on a porn diet. And is insisting that everybody else do so too. They left "ok" behind several Authentic™ Hewmon Ted Cruz elections ago.
The Supreme Court apparently knows porn when it sees it, but won’t take a case to look at blocking porn.
The case is still pending if you read the article.
It makes sense. Minors can’t go into adult video stores. They shouldn’t be allowed to visit adult website either.
I can hear ExpressVPN installing extra servers in Dallas.
Land of the free
Republicans talking about freedom is a joke. Republicans are the most repressive no-freedom group in the world Next to the Taliban, North Korea, Russia, and Iran. They hypocritically say they believe in small government. In reality they want to control government mostly by police state control regarding every aspect of your life. Make no mistake November will be a deciding factor as to whether we remain a free nation.
> as to whether we remain a free nation Anyone against a free nation is an enemy, both foreign and domestic.
Johnson uses a Covenant App to keep a lid on his porn, and allows his son to lecture him about it when he gets overstimulated….I wonder if that tracks users too-in secret of course.
I wonder under what condition porn sites would NOT require age verification? It’s to make sure only Adults are doing adult things!
Geo fencing in 3 2 1
It's been the same case here in Louisiana for a while now. Doubt it will go away.
Soooo much government time and money wasted so we could go back to people lying when they click if they are over 18.
Get a VPN and it works. Country of small government always wants to miss with people.
Porn sites should put up directions on how to get a VPN setup in states to at do this, atleast then they can try and keep business going lmao
Great way to get blackmail on people’s porn interests