• burliman@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Once again, a vice is blamed for its own sake, “for the children”, instead of the thing people are running from, or the hole they are filling. It’s the Right’s version of virtue signaling.

    Porn addiction is just an addiction, and removing porn will not remove addiction in people. Thirst can’t be cured by drying up the well. Saying nothing about the constitutionality of this, restricting potentially addictive content through nanny state ID systems is worthless… check history. South Korea plan was dropped, UK plans for the same thing were dropped. It’s not only ineffective, as kids will always find a way through the cracks, but it also extremely difficult to implement and erodes the bedrock of privacy. We’re not solving addiction, we’re just building a surveillance state under the guise of protection. Solutions are in addressing the root causes of addiction and fostering resilience, not in this game of whack-a-mole that sacrifices our privacy.

    • TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      I get wanting to keep porn away from children, but on the flipside I don’t trust governments with a history of criminalizing homosexuality with my porn history. Looking up, it seems that these states even kept laws against sodomy in their books.

      • Bakachu@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        I had to look this up, and this is so nuts, but there are currently 12 states that stilll have sodomy laws as of late 2023: Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas.

        I think a lot of people might not realize that sodomy is often legally defined as anything that is not PIV intercourse. So most foreplay and obviously any sex practiced by homosexual couples. I absolutely don’t get why there isn’t a stronger push to get rid of this and other dumb laws against offenses that are widely committed and/or are hard to enforce.

        Well I guess this one kind of makes sense in this current state of political turmoil.

        • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Because they’re all federally illegal (until they aren’t) by Lawrence v. Texas. And of those 12, 2 definitely would overturn if Thomas has his way (Lawrence was one of the decisions he said he wants reviewed) and 2 are iffy. Texas would gladly enforce anti sodomy laws today if they could.

        • pete_the_cat@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          I just looked it up to confirm because I’ve only known it to mean butt sex, but the Wikipedia article on it agrees with you.

          I don’t think any of those states actually enforce those laws though, most likely because it would be difficult to get evidence of such acts. Just because the law exists in the books doesn’t mean it’s still upheld, tons of states have “dumb laws” that aren’t enforced (you can’t keep an alligator in a bath tub, you can’t beat your wife with a stick thicker than your thumb, you can’t drive on Sundays, etc…) but we’re never removed because the process is too arduous.

      • ohlaph@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        We were all kids once, we found a way. I did, other kids will. Sure we can make it harder to access, but blocking it isn’t the solution that republicans think it is.

        • jtk@lemmy.sdf.org
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          10 months ago

          It’s not a solution to the problem they say they’re looking to solve. It’s more government control, it’s big brother, it’s everything they say they don’t want, so it’s obviously exactly what they wanted.

          • TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            Yeah, the moral scandal of shouting that kids are being exposed to sex is just too effective at enabling all kinds of overreach.

            But if you say that sex education, teaching about consent and risks and how to seek help, is far more effective at protecting children than any sort of censorship, they’ll act doubly scandalized. And parents who don’t want to talk about sensitive matters with their precious little angels fall for it every time.

      • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Exactly, additionally I don’t trust governments that consistently fail to understand artistic merit in sexually graphic art and sought to ban it to maintain free expression.

    • GraniteM@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.

      –Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government

    • pete_the_cat@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      This isn’t even about porn addiction, it’s definitely a “think of the children!” scenario by the right-wing pearl clutchers. Meanwhile, there’s tons of horrible shit on the Internet freely available that they don’t seem to care about, along with nudity in movies. Also I love how that article claims that “residents will have to go to the deep dark corners of the internet to get their porn once pornhub is blocked” as if hundreds of other porn sites not owned by that company don’t exist 🤣 The Internet and tech improvements are literally driven by porn consumption. IDK what the number is now, but like 5-10 years ago it was “40% of all internet traffic is porn related”.

    • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      We’re not solving addiction, we’re just building a surveillance state under the guise of protection.

      That’s a feature of all of these types of schemes, not a bug.

    • itsprobablyfine@sh.itjust.works
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      10 months ago

      Hey I agree with you but might want to use a different metaphor in the future. Drying the well won’t stop thirst, but neither will anything else, except well, death I guess.