Yes. It's ok to say no to porn and gore. I'm tired of acting like we need it to survive otherwise some dystopian genie will be unleashed. Get rid of that shit.
I think a lot of us probably would agree that pornographic content is generally bad for society. I think the hard part here is actually getting rid of it. I think what will end up happening is it moves to a darker part of the web and is completely unregulated. Just look at what happened in the US with illegal drugs. They didn’t just go away, and now we have less safe drugs pretty much freely available laced with fentanyl and other harmful or deadly substances. I know this isn’t exactly the same situation but we should consider what might happen when making something “illegal”.
> I think a lot of us probably would agree that pornographic content is generally bad for society.
I don’t believe that at all, in fact, I believe the opposite. I think a religious minority forcing a parochial view of morality onto people is bad for society.
You are of course free to not view it. Why do you think that you should decide for others what they should view? How do you know better than they do, what they should or should not be viewing?
Society has decided they want to do the thing that you say causes an ill. They don’t think it’s an ill. What right do you have to tell them that you know better for their life than they do?
I suspect this view is actually the majority. Chat Control, the Great Firewall, Indian VoIP control, the Spanish Cloudflare ban and so on point to many societies finding that many things are just bad for society at large. We’re all just fighting over what things are just bad for society at large.
In the US, the first amendment exists but in Germany simply displaying the flag of the Nazi party is illegal. The latter have determined that it’s just bad for society at large. In El Salvador, tattoos on a man are just bad for society at large.
It’s true that refraining does not actually solve the problem. Others must be constrained. Sometimes for their own good and other times for the sake of society.
Personally, I like the way the US is setup but what is truly adaptive isn’t clear to me. Perhaps indeed it is good that one is bone sawed because the things one is saying are just bad for society at large and I should support that whether or not I have said those things.
Only time will tell. I just hope I have some place to live that has something like the First Amendment and that has some of the freewheeling life of the US. Maybe I will only have that if I defend it and if I fail to then by its defeat it will have proven its maladaptive nature.
In Germany it’s not just swastikas that are banned. There are people in the German government who decide what is banned and what is not, and the list is a lot more than [ “swastikas” ] and it only gets larger, never smaller.
To use a tired cliche, 'freedom isn't free.' I used to roll my eyes at that, but I have recently become convinced that the only thing holding us back from a total backwards slide on civil rights is a small number of citizens fighting and speaking up.
Even in this thread, you can see any number of people gleefully encouraging censorship and the stripping of our first amendment rights. I don't mind if they end up living in a totalitarian hellhole, but I certainly won't be going quietly with them.
> Why do you think that you should decide for others what they should view?
Why not? Some people decide for others on abortion, some driving, some alcohol and drugs. Some people decide how much the government is allowed to steal from us.
