"Uncomfortable" as in "offends my American puritan-inspired sensibilities".
"Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature". George Bernard Shaw, "Ceasar and Cleopatra".
(Slightly off topic: Feynman had a nice story in one of his books about how the main in a Japanese guesthouse he stayed walked in while he was naked and having a bath. She didn't flinch and just went on about her business like nothing had happened, and he was thinking what a fuss/embarrassment etc that would have caused if it happened in a hotel in the US -- when it's just an adult being naked with another adult present. It's not like everybody hasn't seen genitals before or it's a big deal.)
I've been waiting for the inevitable rhetorical attack that Silicon Valley's slowly-but-surely increasing crackdown on everything that happens to offend SV is itself a form of cultural imperialism. Without endorsing or rejecting that argument myself, I think it's inevitable that we're going to start hearing it soon. As the aspirations of SV grow ever more global more conflict of this sort is inevitable. By that I mean that I don't even blame SV culture itself necessarily, because the details of what SV culture is doesn't matter, there is no culture that could run a centralized global social network without these sorts of problems becoming ever-larger, the only difference is where the flash points would be.
>I've been waiting for the inevitable rhetorical attack that Silicon Valley's slowly-but-surely increasing crackdown on everything that happens to offend SV is itself a form of cultural imperialism. Without endorsing or rejecting that argument myself, I think it's inevitable that we're going to start hearing it soon.
As a non-American, I endorse the argument myself.
The US has a quite particular culture, and yet most of its population (from all my experience) seems to consider it either (a) the pinnacle of human culture that others countries should/do aspire, or (b) the natural state of civilization (what things just "are", with everything else being inconceivable).
Add to that the geopolitical force and might of the country, and the fact that its companies control most of the internet infrastructure, and it gets troubling that a country with very specific interests that it pursuits globally, and where Janet Jackson showing some tit was considered a major cultural "thing" the media and people wrote about for weeks, gets to decide such policies.
>* there is no culture that could run a centralized global social network without these sorts of problems becoming ever-larger, the only difference is where the flash points would be.*
Well, the EU for one has a much broader range of cultures within nation member states, and a much broader cultural and historical and geopolitical perspective.
> Janet Jackson showing some tit was considered a major cultural "thing" the media and people wrote about for weeks
I've heard people who work in radio describe the Janet Jackson Superbowl incident as a watershed moment. Not only did weeks of meetings and memos about "standards and practices" follow, but to this day it remains a moment in their careers that sticks out as a clear "before/after" point, a "life will never be the same" event."
At first, I thought they were exaggerating and being facetious or joking, but it actually was a major event for everyone in their industry: before the Janet Jackson incident, every radio program at their station broadcast live. If a caller on the air started swearing or saying "obscene" things, they would chide the caller and apologize to the listeners. Now, every program broadcasts with a 20-second delay, and they have a board operator with a "dump button" in case anything "obscene" is said. (As one talk show personality sardonically remarked, "What, are they afraid we're going to start talking about Janet Jackson's nipple?")
In most countries this would have been a little side note and forgotten the next day. The US is wasting a lot of time and energy on debating trivial things while the real stuff is going on behind the scenes.
If we (the US) did not waste so much time, energy and other forms of wealth on what is essentially busywork, we would be forced to deal with the full ramifications of how we have transformed our world.
>...but it actually was a major event for everyone in their industry: before the Janet Jackson incident, every radio program at their station broadcast live. If a caller on the air started swearing or saying "obscene" things, they would chide the caller and apologize to the listeners. Now, every program broadcasts with a 20-second delay,
A profanity delay has been used in radio for _much_ longer than that. The first tape delay was introduced by WKAP in 1952. The delay is usually more like 7 seconds, not 20 seconds.
There's also the associated tall tale, best told by people in broadcasting. Of course, i'm going to butcher it.
The poor editor is sitting with their finger on the beep button, but a segment surprises them. "Those fuckers <long beep> ..." goes out over the air. It's 5:30 on the drivetime news, prime listening time. The host apologies to the audience and everyone tries to move on.
The general manager calls in, demanding to speak to the editor. Editor is terrified of losing their job. GM asks with as much fury and fire as possible, "Since you didn't have a problem with fucker, i have to know what the hell did they say after that that you decided was sooo much worse you had to beep it out?"
The editor turns bright red, everyone laughs and station pays a small fine. The story gets retold when there's a new audience or a retirement. Guys who tell their version of this story relish the details. even though you see it coming a mile away, almost all of fun comes from those great storytellers.
"Well, the EU for one has a much broader range of cultures within nation member states, and a much broader cultural and historical and geopolitical perspective."
I would say that, exactly as you phrased it, that's multiple cultures. "The EU" can't run a "Facebook", it would be "The French" or "The Polish" or something like that. The EU is definitely in a place where increasing the amount that one of the dominant cultures imposes on the rest decreases the ability of the EU to function. (I'm talking first derivative here, which as you may recall eliminates the original value; I'll leave it to the reader to decide how far the EU is or is not already down that road.)
>I would say that, exactly as you phrased it, that's multiple cultures. "The EU" can't run a "Facebook", it would be "The French" or "The Polish" or something like that.
It would have a base country where its HQ are yes.
But it would still have employees from multiple EU countries, and operate within EU's laws, guidelines and cultural frameworks -- giving it a much wider perspective than 10.000 Americans (+ some wannabe Americans that came there to study/work) in a building in San Francisco.
"and operate within EU's laws, guidelines and cultural frameworks -- giving it a much wider perspective than 10.000 Americans (+ some wannabe Americans that came there to study/work) in a building in San Francisco."
10 years ago I would have disagreed with that statement. Now I can't. SV has gone nearly ideologically monolithic. It may be literally the greatest danger facing SV right now, not that anyone in SV sees it that way of course. I don't live in SV, and I am starting to see people in my real life (not just on the internet, where all kinds of crazy things get said that don't really mean anything) start naming it as a problem. I haven't had to reassure anyone that I work for 'an SV company, but not that kind of SV company' yet but it's probably less than a year away at this rate.
So, are you referring to ideology of neoliberal economics mixed with social justice in the form of minority rights, or right-libertarianism, or something else?
In my humble European opinion, neoliberal economics mixed with social justice gone a little too far and puritanism intrinsic to the Anglosaxon culture but not shared by the rest of the world.
... which is exactly why something like Mastadon is important: the entire concept of a centralized global social network with one party in control of content moderation makes absolutely no sense; I don't see how this issue is "rhetorical". It happens to be that America is "puritan": that's not false and is a problem; and if it had been some other country with some other issue, then the comment would have been exactly as valid.
Oh, it has already started, and it has even lead to new laws targeting SV companies in Germany.
> Why can facebook ban completely legal nude images within of minutes, but don’t even respond to requests from the police or even courts to ban a post promoting the Nazi party and suggesting genocide?
Facebook is in a difficult position, but I would bet that free speech laws (which they don't necessarily have to abide by, but would still want to be mindful of) and general public perception of nudity in US had a lot to do with that contrast.
Germany is a particularly sensitive case with respect to Nazis, but from experience and those of others, European countries in general also tend to be far more accepting of nudity.
Being a nerd hasn't been politicized anywhere near as much as being a woman, being an ethnic minority, or being LGBT. Furthermore, there's active efforts to shut down "problematic" parts of nerd culture. The recent Google fiasco with James Damore is a highly relevant example - creating a safe space for dispassionate debate about controversial ideas is the number one reason why I like nerd culture.
Lol what nerd culture do you participate in. It's "dispassionate debate" until an outsider tries to participate and then it's fire and brimstone.
So long as ideas "follow the narrative" (regardless on how grounded in evidence or just made up) nerd culture will accept you. Otherwise, it's probably the most toxic and politicized groups around.
Maybe "dispassionate" is the wrong word. Like, it's debates that are about ideas, not about people advancing the ideas or a power struggle between the underlying ideology. Or, like, Emacs vs Vim is all in good fun. The Emacs users don't try to get the Vim fanboys fired so that they don't spread pro-Vim heresy.
There's some topics and environments where I feel safe speaking my mind before I figure out what the prevailing political winds are and what my boss believes. Emacs vs Vim is one of them, no matter how animated the debate is. Gender politics is not one of those contexts. There's a really significant difference there.
> Emacs vs Vim is one of them, no matter how animated the debate is. Gender politics is not one of those contexts. There's a really significant difference there.
Yes, you're right. There is a really significant difference between discussing Emacs vs Vim, and discussing gender differences. Which is to say: one is meaningless, and one affects the lives and livelihoods of half the population of our planet.
Yup. That is, in fact, the justification used to make the tradeoff against the discussion norms I need in order to feel safe participating. The Cause is just so very Important, and that importance is used to justify all sorts of anti-social behavior. Shaming, lying, doxxing, no-platforming, not taking your opponent's arguments in good faith, and even physical violence.
Please do not insinuate that I don't care about the lives and livelihoods of women. I do, and that's why I put as much effort as I do into thinking about and discussing community norms, discourse norms, and other meta-level stuff. I generally agree with the aims the social justice types want, disagree vehemently with the costs they're willing to impose on people to get them, and do not feel like I can safely participate non-anonymously to achieve either of those goals. Talking about discourse norms, at the very best, gets insinuations that I'm a Bad Person by misrepresenting me as being one of The Enemy. Working on object-level stuff enables some extraordinarily shitty behavior by The Good Guys. It's quite frustrating.
> Yup. That is, in fact, the justification used to make the tradeoff against the discussion norms I need in order to feel safe participating.
Do you think it's not?
And further: why do you need to participate? It isn't about you, it doesn't affect you. It's not your struggle, and it's not the kind of thing you can get anywhere deducing from first principles. If you don't feel safe contributing to the discussion, then don't contribute to the discussion. If there's a thread talking about some issue in C++ programming, I might read, but I don't contribute. I have plenty of opinions about C++, but no real experience, so I've got no place to participate in the discussion. And that's okay! I don't have to be involved in every discussion.
> It's quite frustrating.
You think you're frustrated, imagine how other people feel! "My opinion isn't valid or wanted" is a new feeling for you, but not a new feeling with to the women in your life. Maybe ask them how they handle it?
Not necessarily. Identity politics is when issues get defacto interpreted through the lens of social identities, even if that identity is irrelevant or even meaningless for the matter at hand.
Observing that there is such a thing as nerd culture does not really qualify. It typifies a particular set of practices and norms that set it apart from more mainstream sensibilities.
Worked in Japan for a year. The female janitors would clean the men's bathroom at any time, usually while many men were using urinals. At a Mountain hut on Mt Fuji, the men's urinal (more like trough) was next to a coed sink with only a 4 ft high divider. Many public bathroom had toilets or urinals easily visible when the doors were open, which were further often propped open. Most interesting experience, by far, was a urinal on the 4th or 5th floor of a high end shopping mall in Yokohama which was 1 ft from a floor to ceiling glass window overlooking the waterfront and a train station bustling with people.
I was pretty entertained by the cultural differences and thought immediately how none of these things would ever happen in the US.
I remember watching a b-grade Chinese kung-fu film. This side of the river had the master with six sons, that side had the master with six daughters. The second master really wanted a son and was overjoyed when his next child was a son. He was prancing about happily in front of his naked infant son, bent over and lightly flicked the baby's penis, then kissed it like you'd kiss a baby's cheek. It wasn't remotely sexual, fit in with the character, and was just a passing moment, but I remember sitting there and thinking "you'd never see that in a western film..."
Seems pretty convenient too, if you want to walk to the urinals you don't need to touch any doors or go around any bends. Just go through the arch, take a whiz, and exit to the sink.
> She didn't flinch and just went on about her business like nothing had happened, and he was thinking what a fuss/embarrassment etc that would have caused if it happened in a hotel in the US -- when it's just an adult being naked with another adult present. It's not like everybody hasn't seen genitals before or it's a big deal.
I'd caution against using a single situational anecdote and drawing conclusions about an entire culture. For one, it's highly likely that many maids in the U.S. (especially at a dedicated guesthouse or bathhouse) would also have a more minimized reaction to guest nudity and privacy. The experienced ones have seen some shit.
At work there were a few times when an older lady who worked in facilities/janitorial would come into the washroom when I was at the urinal. I was facing the other way so it was no big deal but I thought it was funny.
For the women's washroom the cleaners are required to shout Facilities! a few times before entering. It's odd though because women are in stalls and men are skin to the wind at urinals. But I do find US and Canada are becoming incredibly prudish. I've read even gyms are installing individual showers/rooms since the new generation don't like to be seen naked.
Even scents are illegal or not PC "this is a scent free workplace" signs are ubiquitous. But people in other countries laugh at how ridiculous that is.
> But I do find US and Canada are becoming incredibly prudish. I've read even gyms are installing individual showers/rooms since the new generation don't like to be seen naked.
I don't think wanting some modicum of privacy is "prudish". I don't want to use a communal shower. I've always found that creepy.
I remember my middle school was built right before I started. They built separated showers in the gym for the girls and a communal shower for the boys. I remember thinking that was so bizarre. I also remember literally no boys ever using that shower.
Is there much of a gap between "creepy" and "shocking"? Defecating in public is unsanitary, gross, indecent, none of which apply to simply being naked.
Trying to equate taking a dump in public with using a common shower is very much considered prude. Of course the stigma attached to the term plus the subjectivity involved makes it fuzzy.
Yes. Creepy and shocking are different. Odd that you think these are synonyms but "gross" isn't. Also amusing that you claim indecency and don't realize that's the cry of the prude.
There's also nothing about unsanitary about public defecation. On the street, yes. But a toilet or latrine is no less sanitary when you take the walls down. It's just not private any more.
I'm not a fan either, but I think the point is more that other cultures, and even earlier US generations, didn't see it as creepy.
But some of those generations would be creeped out by women wearing pants and short skirts, men wearing jeans everywhere, and people talking openly about sex and menstruation.
Cultural expectations have certainly shifted. I just don't think "prudish" is the appropriate word. No one, e.g., thinks it's prudish to want privacy when taking a shit. The fact that nudity is involved isn't, to me at least, sufficient to label it "prudish".
My experience is that it's no big deal if everyone else is doing it. On the other hand, it's rare to find a critical mass of men who don't care about being seen naked unless your gym has a bunch of men over 50.
My wife is very anti-scent, and her workplace I believe has anti-scent rules, but some people don't care and wear thick perfumes anyway. Not everyone can stand to have to sit next to someone who wears a thick fog of perfume all day, especially if they are allergic or have trouble breathing because of it, so they ban it at many work places. It's like that annoying teen who sprays half a bottle of Axe bodyspray and stand in the same room, it feels like someone is spraying the can down your throat! It's almost worse than having people smoke next to you!
Artificial scents are the most potent trigger for asthma attacks (along with tobacco) and asthma attacks kill many times more people than terrorism does, every year.
Not so much finding scents (any amount) unpleasant but one person demanding everyone should not wear any scent just because that one person doesn't like it.
That mindset of I don't like X so nobody else should either. And in a similar way for gym locker rooms some people are uncomfortable so the gym must remodel the entire locker room!
My experience in Germany was the same - nudity isn't uncomfortable & strange unless you interpret it that way. Women would bare their breasts at the schwimmbad (public pool), and there would be a distinct lack of the double-takes and cat calling you'd expect in Anytown, America. On that same note, which of us males haven't been exposed to a half dozen old man dicks in a YMCA locker room? Nudity just doesn't matter unless we decide it does, and rebellious exposition in America isn't going to solve it.
I mean, you could apply that same rationale to anyone, particularly anyone Japanese, who finds lolicon acceptable, since both points of view are culturally subjective, but then the swipe against American prudishness would just seem petty and arbitrary.
Yes, but those are minding their own business in Japan -- they don't go out calling this or that "unacceptable" or "uncomfortable" in foreign countries -- like the article does.
But I'd take it one step further: I don't find all global cultures equally OK. I find some backwards in some areas, and I think Japan's idea of what's OK is superior here. Like I find e.g. nordic ideas about prison and EU ideas about the death penalty superior as well, but US ideas about free speech better.
The author seems to go out of their way to point out the cultural relativism between his own views and Japan, and differentiates between lolicon and child porn. I see no problem with him finding lolicon personally uncomfortable, or with the premise that Americans in general might find it unacceptable, because they very well might. I don't see him condemning it outright.
The article, however, is written in defense of distributed platforms like Mastodon as a way to enable free expression, as well as an attempt to raise the question of how to increase mainstream adoption of tools like it when those tools are primarily known for hosting controversial content. I don't believe the author or the article are as Puritanical as you make them out to be.
I don't know how true it is, but I read that the government of Japan conducted a study which showed that most people are not in favour of the material, and would support legislation against it. The number was around 80%. I'd appreciate if someone could find this source again, though I'm afraid I have lost it.
I've a very vocal opponent online about legislation against drawings that people find distasteful. I do not enjoy the material myself, but I think it is absurd and indeed without rational jutsification that countries such as Canada, the UK, Australia, NZ and some states in the US have legislation banning such material. I see no reason for the material to be illegalised. In the countries I have listed, the material is illegal to possess, nevermind sell or trade or upload online.
Is it a symbol of puritanical values? I don't know, but it certainly seems an infringement of the liberal values expounded by J.S Mill which I would rather adhere to (with small exceptions).
It fills the void of moral panic previously occupied by transvestites, homosexuals, adulterers, divorcees and witches (in that order). Give it enough time and the society will find the next deviant behavior to raise their collective pitchfork.
Are you saying that just because its a distant culture, and they're not calling 'us' out, (though all cultures do that to each other), its 'OK'? I can understand differences in culture that can be real annoying, or feel wrong, but the actual product is perfectly good. Here, we're talking about lolicon, and Japans obsession with it that has become more and more normalized. The argument usually is that its not real, which, is true, and I'd argue that if its not real, to leave it in a gray area.
But, when you normalize something that in reality is always illigal, there's a big problem. I'm talking about normalizing as in, commonly broadcasted shows have no problem with sexualization of children and making it seem romantic realtionships with middle schoolers and adults is 'cute' and normal.
Now, I don't agree with this video on that an innate attraction makes you a bad person, or a pedophile, I do agree that normalization of such things into the mainstream inevitably leads to real-life action and lack of enforcement when said terrible actions happen.
> But, when you normalize something that in reality is always illigal, there's a big problem.
I agree! It's despicible how commonplace murder and torture have become in mainstream media. I mean, come on. I've watched PG13 shows that display the main characters wantonly destroying buildings in the name of "good". Another time, they killed off the population of an entire city, again in the name of good.
And we give our children books that depict distopian scenes where children are forced to fight each other to death to appease the masses, or where they're forced to kill some "evil" queen in a twisted representation of Christian ideals.
Despicable, all of it!
/s
Yeah, we as Americans or Europeans have no room to condemn Japan with this reasoning.
>I agree! It's despicible how commonplace murder and torture have become in mainstream media.
Except, those things are purposely portrayed as bad. In this case, lolicon is portrayed as a normal and good thing. And, you're making a false comparison because torture and murder are nowhere near as common and lustful as sexual and emotional abuse of individuals, young or not.
Normalization in causation to action requires that the actions already be happening and already be acceptable to some extent, and from there it becomes more wide-spread. There are such slipperly slopes in life when we feel the need to do things that cannot be allowed.
>And we give our children books that depict distopian scenes where children are forced to fight each other to death to appease the masses
Again, distopian, which is very differnt from your own culture or beliefs. You know its supposed to be wrong.
> Except, those things are purposely portrayed as bad.
No, they're not. The children were heralded for doing a "good" thing when they lead the forces against the White Queen. Aslan died and was born again just to kill her.
Killing and torture is almost always glorified or glossed over in our modern media: Taken. Star Wars. Hannibal. Mulan. Wonder Woman. Man of Steel. Game of Thrones. Dexter. Terminator. Riddick. Logan. NCIS. Rambo. Kill Bill.
As for the setting - no, distopian universes are not that different from our own cultures or beliefs. Typically, they're our exact culture and beliefs, thrown into a situation where those cultures and beliefs can not survive. Our kids don't glorify Katniss for her personality, or for leading a revolution (killing how many in the process?); they glorify her for surviving three hunger games. Ask around.
> torture and murder are nowhere near as common and lustful as sexual and emotional abuse of individuals
That's going to need a citation.
Since we're talking about lolicon here: Children make up around 25% of the population. 9% of children are victimized. 9% of those are sexually abused. So, approximately .2% of the US population. [0]
Murders, in comparison, come in at .3%
So, yeah, just about as common. I'm guessing that, just as most studies have shown, that things in media are properly realized to be fantasy, and have no practical effect on people's behavior in real life. Video games don't make people murderers, lolicon doesn't make people molest children.
no the justifications made for violence and killing in US tv series are pretty much on that level.
or even plea bargains. it's completely normalised to set up the bad guy (who is up against having their life ruined in a US prison), trick them using that plea bargain plot device, and pretend justice has been done, because it was the good guy cops setting up the trap.
pay attention, too often those plea bargainings can only be called "just" if you assume the good guys can do no wrong, make no deduction errors, and the bad guy was basically known to be guilty except for the "law".
>Except, those things are purposely portrayed as bad.
Many lolicon manga do the same. Why is whether or not it is portrayed as bad the problem? Many are actually made interesting by portraying the siuation as morally ambiguous, such as in popular television shows.
>nowhere near as common and lustful as sexual and emotional abuse of individuals, young or not.
Why is that relevant?
>Normalization in causation to action requires that the actions already be happening and already be acceptable to some extent
Murder, violence, and war already happen, and war is acceptable (to most, though not I) - yet we have people who complain that violent videogames "normalise" violent beahviour. You haven't really provided evidence that (i) this "normalisation" is bad (beacuse this would be implying that it's bad for people to think or have opinions in a certain way) (ii) this "normalisation" has any effect upon the incidence of violent crimes, sexual or not.
>Again, distopian, which is very differnt from your own culture or beliefs.
Sherlock and House probably "normalises" drug use, even though it's set in present conditions. There are probably other examples of people doing bad things that are portrayed in media, but I'm not well versed enough in popular culture to give examples. I'm still not so sure why being dystopic has any effect or not. Would it follow that if lolicon TV/manga/art was set in a dystopic universe like the Hunger Games, it would be fine for you?
Or if the argument is based on being realistic, what is there to say of the many non-realistic things that happen in lolicon TV/manga/art, and indeed the unrealistic body proportions? Many, many anime are set with large towering robots controlled by little girls, for example.
Finally, many lolicon manga portray what is happening in a sad or twisted light, similar to how Breaking Bad shows Walt's activity, for example. There is one manga in which a girl is violently raped by a man claiming to check radiation levels in her house, for example. And this is of course ignoring the fact that many people are attracted to the material beacuse it is taboo in the first place, which is what's behind many kinks you or I would consider normal. As such, they don't want to make it real.
> But, when you normalize something that in reality is always illigal, there's a big problem.
It wasn't always illegal. It's not that children in Japan have been, or are being, sexualized. It's that children in American culture have been desexualized. I remember what I wanted when I was twelve, after all ;)
Indeed, the modern concept of childhood being a distinct and uniquely valuable stage of life is fairly recent, owing a lot to Victorian culture and Freudian psychology. Most of the laws specifically focused on protecting children only date back to the late 19th or early 20th centuries. The idea that childhood extends to 18 years old, implying that adolescence is actually part of childhood, is even more recent.
I don't remember the term for it, but some cultural critics have described a more general pattern of certain populations being set aside as "innocents". These people are then to be protected from being "corrupted" by the harsh realities of the sinful world. The flip side of this special status is that they're treated as intrinsically naive and not capable of having meaningful opinions, possibly even on the subject of their own needs and desires.
> The flip side of this special status is that they're treated as intrinsically naive and not capable of having meaningful opinions, possibly even on the subject of their own needs and desires.
That's certainly how it occurred for me, as a child. And indeed, adults are now treated similarly, in some ways.
I've found Lloyd DeMause's work to be enlightening.
>Here, we're talking about lolicon, and Japans obsession with it that has become more and more normalized.
Is "Japan" obsessed with it, or just a subculture native to that country (i.e otaku)?
>The argument usually is that its not real, which, is true, and I'd argue that if its not real, to leave it in a gray area.
Why? Films/books/comics/stories/etc. depicting drug use, murder, rape etc. are indeed "not real", yet few would have a problem with this. It seems to me that we are returning to the age when violent video games are considered "gray area", which is how the stone starts rolling towards their unreasonable and evidence-lacking censorship.
>But, when you normalize something that in reality is always illigal, there's a big problem.
Is there any evidence that this is a big problem in this instance? And further, what of other instances such as the ones I have outlined?
>making it seem romantic realtionships with middle schoolers and adults is 'cute' and normal.
Many people do find them cute. Not I, but people do. This does not mean that they are persuaded to act upon that cuteness. Being portrayed as normal in fiction makes no reference to how normal it is considered in real life. I can assure you that most Japanese know that such relationships are not normal, just as I know that what happens in the Simpsons isn't normal. Where's your evidence for this?
I watched this video a while ago. It mainly applies to TV and media which is widely circulated. However it is possible to have the material legal for purposes aside from distribution such as on TV. Currently in the UK and other countries, especially Canada, we are at the situation where mere possession is illegal.
>nevitably leads to real-life action and lack of enforcement when said terrible actions happen.
i went to a national park a month ago and saw quite a number of male visitors get extremely upset when the female worker closed the only male bathroom so she could sweep the floor. Busy day at Mt Rainier.
I too wish it wasn't so prude. But we live in a litigation society. I'm sure someone would be happy to sue for emotional distress finding a female janitor in their public bathroom. But somehow LBGTQIA equality trumps all that for the time being. Maybe the litigious feel too awkward?
Surely there is some foreign cultural practice you find offensive. I am not up in arms about this, but I find it pretty easy to condemn suttee, for instance.
There are some universals, but fewer than you'd think. Virtually every culture condemns killing people for your benefit, death cults, and molestation.
But there are cultures where bombing is partiotic, killing yourself to avoid shame is accepted as a part of the social order, and thinking about molestation is whatever.
I remember reading Arnold Shwarzenegger's autobiography, and hist amusement on the difference in body perception between Austria and USA (as in Austria it is a norm for mixed-sex groups to go to a beach or a sauna completely nude).
I think the distinguishing factor is that it is (or could be considered) a victimless crime. If we're going to judge other cultures (and I think we should try, to be sure of our own convictions), then I figure we should make a distinction between crimes with and without direct or known victims.
For example, a country where gay people are thrown from rooftops and mountains, is easy to judge. The people performing the practice are aware that they're doing something cruel to a specific person, and the supposed crime they are punishing has two or more beneficiaries, rather than victims.
Well there's also molestation devastates people, and users of child porn, though it be a cartoon, are habituating their desire to objectify children as sex objects. We already see huge amounts of men mistreating women due to porn culture, and now we extend the degradation to an even more defenseless and impressionable party. I don't call anti child porn Puritan, but mere human decency. If we will glorify taking advantage of the most vulnerable in our society, we do not have long left.
Maybe I am misreading the article but are you really trying to position yourself outside of the consensus that child pornography is, at least, "uncomfortable"? I'm not sure that's really a custom limited to just America's inspired puritans.
At last, something that could potentially challenge Facebook's world domination. Somebody gets a federated social network running with a substantial user base, and it runs into this.
The US position on child pornography comes from the Meese Report during the Reagan administration.[1] The Reagan administration wanted to crack down on pornography in general to cater to the religious base. But they'd run into First Amendment problems and the courts wouldn't go along. So child pornography, which barely existed at the time, was made the justification for a crackdown. By creating ambiguous laws with severe penalties for child pornography and complex recordkeeping requirements, the plan was to make it too dangerous for adult pornography to be made commercially. But the industry adapted, filling out and filing the "2257 paperwork" as required.[2] After much litigation, things settled down, porn producers kept the required records, and DoJ stopped hassling them about this.
So that's how the US got here. That's why it's such a big deal legally in the US, rather than being a branch of child labor law. Japan doesn't have the same political history.
Federated systems are stuck with the basic problem of distributed online social systems:
anonymity plus wide distribution empowers assholes. That's why Facebook has a "real name" policy - it keeps the jerk level down.
Anonymity, global connectivity, and the grant of arbitrary powers to fresh accounts with no prior reputation. You need this third piece, but websites are often too happy to gloss over it in favor of getting more accounts, more eyeballs, more community, etc.
I have lived in Japan since I was quite young (late 20s now) and don't see what the problem with lolicon is. It's not my thing, but if someone enjoys it that's their business, they aren't hurting anyone. That's just my gut feeling on the matter, I'm interested in hearing others' thoughts.
Child sexual abuse is bad because it's traumatizing children (also sexual abuse is bad, duh). But "curing" pedophiles seems to be hard, similarly to how you can't "cure" homosexuals.
Child porn would supposedly be a safe outlet for pedophiles, at the cost of possibly eroding social taboos around child sexual abuse. But the tradeoff is irrelevant, because the production of child porn is usually exploiting and abusing children, making it morally bad.
Lolicon doesn't harm any children. The only potential harm left is eroding helpful social taboos. But that seems easy enough to fix: make lolicon legal, but semi-taboo. If it's not seen as normal, it doesn't normalize anything, and you have all the positives without the negatives.
So I will view you as weird if you enjoy lolicon, but I don't have a problem with it. I would even advocate for its existence.
Somewhat related, I also can't really justify the US standard for child porn. Nude pictures of 10 year olds are bad and should be illegal. But what is the harm in nudes of 17 year olds?
>Nude pictures of 10 year olds are bad and should be illegal.
I would like a more specific standard than "nude". Namely the picture should be sexual/pornographic in nature. [0] That is to say, I don't see any problem in, for example, children skinny dipping; nor in taking pictures of them doing so.
Outlawing nude pictures of minors also creates an unnecessary legal grey area with the inevitable exemptions. For instance, I don't think any object to photographing a genital to document a medical issue, so there will be some such pictures that are considered "ok". Outlawing nudity of children in images in general inevitably leads to situtations where one would avoid taking such a picture, or prosecute someone as a result of misunderstanding the context of such a picture.
[0] Legally speaking, this has the obvious problem of defining pornographic. I think the actual standard should be to look for abuse in the creation of the image.
> I don't see any problem in, for example, children skinny dipping; nor in taking pictures of them doing so.
That also depends on who was taking the picture. People should stop calling child protective services on parents who took pictures of their own kids skinny-dipping on a camping trip. If a stranger sneaked up on the campsite to take the same kind of pictures, on the other hand, that could be problematic.
> Lolicon doesn't harm any children. The only potential harm left is eroding helpful social taboos. But that seems easy enough to fix: make lolicon legal, but semi-taboo. If it's not seen as normal, it doesn't normalize anything, and you have all the positives without the negatives.
I think the approach should be similar to violence. We have plenty of video games where the player is encouraged to steal, murder, slaughter or otherwise engage in unacceptable behaviour but society hasn't become less clear that these things are wrong. Everyone knows that murdering a random pedestrian with a golf club on the street is wrong but we still let people play GTA.
I've thought about this over the years myself. There are several issues here. First is the age of consent, it varies from 16 to 18 throughout the US. So 18 catches all the states, but it's not illegal to have sex with a 16 year old in many places.
Second, sexual maturity has physical, emotional, and intellectual components. There have been 21 year olds that I am not attracted to because they're too immature, and there have also been 15 year olds that I have been attracted to because they are (or appear to be) sexually mature. Somebody had to draw the line somewhere, 18 is an arbitrary designation that probably doesn't catch enough of the edge cases.
Third, there's a big difference between having sex with someone and paying them for sex work. I've seen my share of depraved porn and I guess my feeling is that it would be harmful for a student in high school to be making it. But again I understand it's an arbitrary number and a society where the age of majority was calibrated to 16 years old might work, who knows.
What about porn featuring unpaid minors? Well, it's basically just volunteer sex work, there's no real difference between amateur porn and professional porn in terms of consent. I think for the later years it's mostly about protecting the transition from teenager into adult, not about stopping pedophilia.
I don't think there's really an easy answer to any of it... my opinion is subject to change, etc.
I was mostly addressing the moral question ("what is the harm..."). And also equivocating all the way down the line, if you didn't notice.
A federal law that results in some states allowing the possession and sale but not the production of certain goods sounds strange to me, do you have any examples?
I just want to cherry-pick one thing that you said without offering commentary on the rest of your comment.
> But "curing" pedophiles seems to be hard, similarly to how you can't "cure" homosexuals.
I understand what you mean here, but I think you could have made a better analogy. Homosexuality is not predatory. It doesn't seek to exploit anyone, even indirectly. Pedophilia, when practiced, exploits children (directly or indirectly). Certainly, you can be homosexual or a pedophile and reject the inclinations that you have. Being a "practicing" homosexual does not harm anyone--except perhaps those with delicate sensibilities--while being a "practicing" pedophile does. "Curing" homosexuality implies changing someone's harmless disposition. "Curing" pedophilia implies rehabilitation of someone who actively seeks to exploit children for their own pleasure. Governments and organizations have no place deciding whether someone should be "cured" of homosexuality because it doesn't affect or benefit any member of the public. There is no need. Governments have a responsibility to keep children safe, though, and rehabilitating sexual predators is a crucial part of that.
The distinction is an important one. A better analogy would perhaps be a comparison to addiction. Addiction is very hard to treat, and there is no truly successful cure for it. Addicts don't harm people, but the people procuring drugs like heroin and cocaine often do.
Pedophilia is not predatory either, just like homophilia isn't.
Plenty of celibate 'adult-lovers' prove that just because you can't get what you desire, doesn't mean you will act on it.
Even if you want to act, I'm sure there are plenty of adult sex workers who will help you with your fantasies. Still no exploitation involved.
As for your comparison with addiction, that is actually a victimless crime. Even procuring drugs (including harddrugs) doesn't lead to harm to anyone. Ask Portugal. Only when your laws make drugs so expensive that only Wall Street bankers are able to afford their addiction (and guess where a lot of cocaine addicts are!) does it lead to problems.
> Plenty of celibate 'adult-lovers' prove that just because you can't get what you desire, doesn't mean you will act on it.
But there are also prison cells filled with pedophiles that do produce or consume child porn. Children _cannot_ consent and do learn from abuse. Homosexuality exploits exactly nobody across the entire world population. You said it yourself: pedophiles _desire_ something that we can all agree is harmful, and even if some individuals show restraint, exploitation happens. That's inarguable, and pedophilia carrying stigma is not unwise. Drawing a comparison between homosexuality and pedophilia blurs that distinction between and normalizes stigma against LGBT people. That community doesn't need or deserve any more demonization.
> As for your comparison with addiction, that is actually a victimless crime. Even procuring drugs (including harddrugs) doesn't lead to harm to anyone.
Addiction is a condition, and a lifelong one at that. You don't get rid of addiction, though addicts can live sober lives. In that way, it's not so different from a predisposition like pedophilia. I can empathize with both of these cohorts because they got dealt a bad hand and they can't change it.
Just because addiction shouldn't be a problem doesn't mean it is not, and just because drug use is "victimless" doesn't mean addicts and their families don't suffer and drug traffickers don't do terrible things. Have you ever seen the aftermath of a meth lab explosion? Or driven past the wreckage from a drunk-driving accident? What about seeing a family member fall victim to prescription painkillers, fueling an industry hell-bent on creating addicts? And then watch them sneak away in the early morning to withdraw money at the ATM so they can get a quick hit of something to take the edge off until they can get their prescription renewed because two pills doesn't cut it anymore?
Your final assertion might not be completely false, but it is a vast and undeserved oversimplification. People predisposed to addiction will always be predisposed to addiction. Portugal might have low rates of death from opioids and other drugs (because they're actually treating it), but they're eighth in the world for alcohol consumption. 3.8% of people in Portugal die from alcohol, which--depending on how you measure--can be more than double what we have in the US.
Children and young people getting a hold of lolicon comics, where pedophilia is normalized through the story, can harm them for life. No one seems to have the imagination to think about this.
Adults looking at it is of course harmless, but don't make it easily available on the internet. If you do I'd say you're acting immorally and I support legal repercussions. I know people who have been messed up when they were very young and found it.
There are lots of vices and tasks that adults can usually handle but minors may not. Alcohol, tobacco, drugs (in as far as these are legal in a given jurisdiction), voting, operating heavy machinery, driving cars…
In Japan sexually explicit comics are strictly 18+, clearly marked as such, and are sold as you would sell liquor or cigarettes. Making sure children don't have access to these is a matter of public awareness and parental guidance — it seems to work pretty well there.
> I know people who have been messed up when they were very young and found it.
Messed up from lolicon (i.e., Japanese comics featuring minors in sexually evocative situations) or messed from access to porn in general (or even actual child pornography)?
As I said explicitly, messed up from freely available lolicon comics and content on the internet. The vices you list all require physical exchanges with others or would usually be noticed by adults nearby, and so they aren't really comparable.
True, unmonitored access to the internet can expose minors to things that can have an adverse effect on their psyche. But let's limit ourselves to freely available online content. Singling out lolicon (or any other form of drawn porn) seems dangerously inconsistent to me.
Violence, hate speech, gore, (adult) porn; even written fantasies containing content that may stimulate forms of destructive behaviour — the list is endless! Either you shield children from all of it (which is sensible for young children, but not tenable for teenagers) or you educate, guide, train, and accompany your child as they learn to handle an ever increasing amount of freedom. Parenting and education are key here, not banning everything that may harm a child's mind.
One might argue that the reason people get messed up if they are exposed to certain types of content at a young age is not because of the nature of the content itself, but because of other people's response (or lack thereof) to it.
When everyone else is either judging you or trying too hard to pretend that nothing happened, you internalize a sort of guilt or shame that can haunt you for life. People who have seen terrible shit in their childhood but turned out okay, on the other hand, often report that they had someone to help them understand what was happening without rushing to a judgment.
I don't know who would judge a child for seeing lolicon, since no one would know about it but the child. I would agree interpersonal emotional support and therapy needs to be a more available and acceptable resource for everyone.
> I don't know who would judge a child for seeing lolicon, since no one would know about it but the child.
Children usually want to tell everyone about what they saw. If they keep it to themselves, it's often because they understand that someone else would judge them, punish them, get angry at them, feel disappointed at them, etc. for seeing it. Their friends might have told them that it's taboo. Their parents might have acted really awkwardly around similar content in the past. Or a predator might have said that what happened in the shed is a cute little secret between them.
Whatever reasons they have for trying to hide it, it's a symptom of a society that discourages talking frankly and objectively about certain kinds of things.
Is there some study you could link to? I would think that IF there is any harm (and I doubt this since porn is very historically normal and even in classical art) it would be not significantly worse than the generic case for any such porn.
That could be likely to happen if the lolicon art were remotely realistic. I talk to artists a lot and see a lot of different art float by in their media feeds, and the lolicon stuff is almost always extremely stylized ot the point that they're entirely fantasy creatures with only a passing resemblance to humans. At the same time there's still a visceral shock to seeing the occasional rare picture where the characters actually look like human children.
> They're not illegal in the US. So maybe your incorrect assumptions are why it is confusing for you?
You need to be careful about this. In many jurisdictions possession of such an image is a "strict liability" crime and you are guilty--even if that nude image is of your own child.
Now, normally this isn't a big deal as humans in the system normally treat these images as they were intended.
However, add a nasty divorce into the mix and you can wind up in very deep trouble.
Didn't say or imply that there weren't consequences.
If you aren't rich enough for appeals court then none of your rights matter and it is helpful to be aware of what the collective conscious believes is legal / illegal.
That's one factor, the other is the culture around youth appeal through drawings. Mangas were filled with teenage erotism. So lolicon is not a huge stretch from there.
I admittedly find it bizarre, to say the least. But the opinions and discourse here are definitely challenging my intolerance. I also haven't lived in Japan, so I can only repeat an observation I read from someone who had, which was that the consumption of this type of media or cartoon rape-porn seemed to be fairly acceptable to do in public (openly reading such content in a crowded subway for instance was not uncommon). Which could reasonably make people feel uncomfortable or belittled, especially if you're in the same class of fictionally victimized people.
On the other hand, I suppose people in the States are free to walk around wearing swastikas. So, I guess the takeaway is that, in either scenario, you're just an asshole legally exercising your rights?
Making a scene in public is considered to be immature here, so most of the time people ignore "deviant" behavior on the subway. Making someone (especially the kind of person who watches porn on a train) lose face by shaming then is likely to make that person very, very angry.
Yeah, I couldn't find anything during a quick search that indicates that Japan has a higher rate of child sexual abuse than countries where ethical/drawn child pornograpy is banned.
I would be interested to know if the reason why (to put it bluntly) porn in Japan is so extreme is due to their cultural repression of sexuality. The reason I ask is that many Asian countries have similar social stigmas around sexuality, and they also have similarly extreme forms of porn.
Not to mention the existence of hentai, yuri, and ecchi. All of which don't really have widespread western equivalents, despite western cartoons being fairly popular.
Hentai etc are descendants of shunga pics; you've probably seen Hokusai's "The Great Wave Off Kanagawa". You may have seen "The Dream of
The Fishermans Wife" (NSFW)
In social interactions maybe ? Japan seemed to be a very repressive/elitist society. You had to be polite in everything, and sexuality is often the opposite of that (you could probably have sex through polite chat beforehand, but I'm sure it requires maturity that most people don't have)
Just because people have a different view of sexuality, and confine it to a specific time and place, doesn't mean that it's a repressive society. You have to realize that most Asian cultures are heavily focused on context, and place, and not just the pure, isolated act.
I remember reading an article talking about how all the tentacle porn in Japanese hentai exists because USA banned the depiction of genitalia in the media after WWII, so they had to become creative about it.
Actually it's the other way around.
Post WW2 the allies actually removed most of the censorship laws.
But the premise might be correct tho the material predates Allied occupation by 150 years.
United Nations data show that Japan is still, in fact, the world’s largest producer and consumer of child pornography. Its usage is widespread, with as many as one in 10 men admitting they’ve watched it or that they own it, according to the book Sexnomics, by economist Takashi Kadokura.
Almost 80 percent of the child pornography transferred over the Internet is said to come through Japan. According to Interpol, Japanese “entrepreneurs” at home and abroad are also major producers of child pornography in the world market.
That Interpol statistic seems to be an estimation from Interpol in 1999, when child pornograpy was legal in Japan, so it's not relevant at all anymore.
Crappy journalism in my view not to mention that the statistic you use is from a different century.
I'm interested in if this statistic (1 in 10 men) includes comics (which one would be justified in believing are harmless) or 'real' CP, as in, requiring the abuse of a real child and its recording. The number is surprisingly large if the latter is true, though it does little to indicate that child abuse is higher in Japan (or at least, this statistic does not show this anyway), and further, the necessary link to the production of pornography showing fictional characters, which would have to be fulfilled to justify the making of lolicon art/literature illegal.
I'm from Australia. I personally don't find it morally objectionable (because it's not hurting anyone) though I would consider it to be a grey area. I believe that lolicon is illegal here (or at the very least not explicitly legal), because it's effectively a depiction of child pornography. That's the reason most people find it objectionable, effectively due to the (entirely justified) taboo around underage sexuality and the worry it will lead more real child pornography.
It is also illegal in Canada (similarly with stories), some US states, some European countries, and England, Wales and Northern Ireland (though only drawings rather than stories as far as I know).
Yeah, now I remember reading the news about that case a few years ago. I think that decision is understandable, though I don't agree with classifying something that is obviously not child pornography as "child pornography".
Also note that in Australia "supreme court" does not mean that its rulings determine federal common law, that rests with the High Court of Australia (the next court up)[1]. So on paper, other States could have different laws on the topic (but I haven't checked whether the case was appealed to the High Court).
Thank you for your information on the system, I had no idea, I'm only vaguely familiar with the system in England and Wales. It's worth noting, however, that the fact it is illegal is specified in the state code rather than being decided by this court case. There is a similar case which I think is rather silly that a man in Australia was convicted of having 'Simpsons porn' which featured two underage characters from the Simpsons.
> It's worth noting, however, that the fact it is illegal is specified in the state code rather than being decided by this court case.
Ah, you're right (I didn't read the whole document). In case you're interested, in other states there is a different criminal code (called the Crimes Act (1990) in NSW)[1]. The section on "child abuse material" (15A) is quite vague on what limits there are for something being "material depicting child abuse" and there is also a catch-all statement saying that something is also considered child abuse material based on " the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults".
In general I would be surprised if it was legal in any state. I also checked, and it's considered "objectionable material" in New Zeland[2].
As another poster points out Japan does not have a higher rate of actual child sexual abuse. So, does the lack of any actual harm influence your opinion?
You have to take into account that in Asian countries the reporting of sexual abuse is likely much lower because of social stigmatization. From what I've heard second-hand it's perceived as being shameful for your family to be a victim of such abuse, and I imagine that would affect the statistics.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with whether it causes actual child sexual abuse, it's just something to consider.
There is some bias in that reporting. The US rate of autopsy 8.5 percent the Japan rate is 11.2%. So, if your comparing the US with Japan it's the US that's more likely to miss something based on national rates. As to the second, US rape victims are often told not to report and prison rapes are frequently just ignored.
From a sociology standpoint you need to be careful when doing cross country comparisons. But, reported statistics are not simply accepted at face value.
I own a Mastodon instance and love its federation options. For instance, I could decide to outright disconnect from that instance (in Mastodon speak, to "block" it) so that my users don't see it (and vice versa). I chose in this case to "silence" it, which means:
- My users can still talk to its users and see posts from people they follow.
- Posts from that instance don't show up on my "federated timeline" (which is a timeline of all posts made by my users and by the people they follow on other instances; great way to find new interesting people).
- I don't cache any media sent from that instance. The default is to cache images locally: if a user on a tiny instance has 10,000 followers on a busy one, the busy one don't make the tiny instance serve up 10,000 copies of every image.
So again, my users can talk to their users just like normal, but no one on my instance sees anything unless they specifically opt in to, and any content I dislike never travels through my network or gets stored on my server. I'm happy with that arrangement.
I'm all for decentralized communication but I don't think the example of the article is particularly convincing and I wonder if the article is asking the right questions.
So the uncomfortable reason why Mastodon is so popular in japan is that Pixif operates a large Mastodon node which is used to share/discuss questionable images.
Discussions about lolicon aside, does any of this actually has something to do with the detail that Mastodon supports federation?
The article states that decentralisation is important to allow different rules for different communities. However if, e.g. if Pixif disabled federation or switched from Mastodon to something proprietary, would that change anything? Similarly, Reddit is highly centralized technically but - currently - provides freedom for each subreddit to define their own moderation rules (within the restrictions of Reddit, the company).
I feel there is a difference between the "decentralisation" when talking on the social or the technical layer and that difference should be kept in mind.
Reddit cannot allow lolicon or Nazi imagery because it's illegal in some countries, and the company would risk fines by allowing it. Mastodon has no such problem as long as the server is in a country that allows the content.
Mastodon also avoids the problem some Youtube creators are facing with demonetization. If a video is controversial, Youtube may decide not to show ads on it at all (nor pay the creator) because some advertisers don't want to be associated with the content. I don't know if any Mastodon servers use advertising at all, but if they did they could be more fine-grained in matching content to advertisers. A similarly federated video-sharing network could serve controversial video creators.
You answered your own question re: the connection between the problem identified in article and Mastodon's structure. A major premise of the article is that Mastodon solved usability issues common to decentralized platforms, and provided a functional space for Pixif's content that wasn't possible with Twitter's rules.
I say this as someone who really wants Mastodon to succeed, and hopes for the emergence of mastodon-esque alternatives to Facebook and reddit. A problem with decentralization is that it tests the limits of our tolerance for noxious content. (If you don't think Lolicon qualifies, substitute whatever counts for you as noxious.)
We even have great long-running correlations between people consuming more porn and domestic abuse and rape dropping. When you give people outlets to less than desirable thoughts, they can vent their desires better than to have them bottle up until they explode and hurt people.
Pedophilia, zoophilia, necrophilia are all some of the last fetishes that need to be recognized as real, that you can't just eliminate them from society, that actually expressing them is usually unreasonable (I guess a case could be made someone could will their cadaver to get a necrophiles sex toy, and then nobody is participating non-consensually) and that if we give people with those fetishes more reasonable ways to cope with them than just the good old Christian violent denial and eventual meltdown strategy used to deal with most social taboos in western societies we might be able to actually cut down on real violence and harm inflicted.
> We even have great long-running correlations between people consuming more porn and domestic abuse and rape dropping.
Do you have sources for that? I've heard that studies have found the opposite, but I've only heard that from less-reliable hearsay, so it'd be nice to have something in response.
If I remember correctly, the US has a ban on "simulated child porn" largely to avoid prosecutors needing to disprove defendants' claims that their images are photomanipulations or realistic CGI rather than actual photographs of children. However, I think that ban is explicitly limited to photorealistic images (as the logic of the defense would suggest) and thus wouldn't cover cartoon-style drawings or CGI.
Once "art" depicting child porn becomes acceptable, would some individuals (adults/children) eventually consider it acceptable to perform the actual acts on a child?
This topic is very similar to "do video games cause violence". There are many examples of media that depicts things that are illegal which we don't find to be objectionable (or to be a cause of people commuting said acts in real life).
What you are suggesting is that it's better to criminalize media because someone may interpret that media as license to commit a criminal act.
A person who commits a criminal act should be charged with the crime against that act. We should not be seeking to ban media because someone may say "it gave me the idea to do this illegal action."
No, just as art depicting rape, murder, gang violence etc. does not mean that people eventually consider it acceptable to perform those acts on others.
> It’s a constant struggle for Tor to recruit “everyday” users of Tor, who use the service to evade commercial surveillance.
That doesn't seem to be a struggle at all. All kinds of users leverage Tor for all kinds of reasons.
The struggle is to recruit everyday users who have the inclination, technical expertise, and rhetorical skill necessary to defend the technology against all kinds of fearmongering tactics.
There is a general lack of such people. If the same set of interests bent on defeating Tor set their sights on TCP, you can bet that technologists would be struggling to find ways to defend it that could resonate with the general public.
My understanding is that there's a huge difference between the proportion of sketchy Tor traffic (largely generated by bots?) and the proportion of sketchy Tor users. People often seem to conflate these two things.
This really shows the advantages to a federated social network. People have all sorts of sensibilities about what is acceptable content, and a one-size-fits-all moderation approach like on Twitter will never work for everybody.
On the topic of Mastodon, I wonder if the reason it hasn't caught on so much (outside of this use case) is precisely because it's federated.
When a new social network comes along, I often sign up ASAP just to try to grab SCdF, because I'm a human and vane. I will usually give it a bit of a crack once I've done that, but the need to squat my username is a big (and I realise, stupid) driver for me.
I've known about Mastodon for awhile now, but I don't feel any pressure to sign up and check it out because there is no danger of someone else taking my username. Worst case I could just host my own instance against my domain.
Social media have a tremendous number of factors contributing to success or failure. It's hard to pin it to single factors.
Technology is almost never the initial driver, though it's also quite frequently a determining factor at scale.
The most critical key factor is probably in achieving a coherent and compelling founding cohort. Both Usenet and Facebook effectively started at selective-admissions academic institutions -- Usenet at UNC and Duke, then spreading through the early Arpanet. Facebook, of course, at Harvard.
Usenet failed for numerous reasons, including superior alternatives (largely blogs and mailing lists), but also because for various reasons (cultural and technical), hostng Usenet feeds was both not profitable and an increasing liability. Spam, warez, pr0n, and various other activities created risks, and there was no real option for advertising or other means of revenue generation.
(Universities hosted Usenet as long as they did in part because it addressed an institutional need: communications and collaboration across distances. There was no effective alternative at the time.)
Facebook has managed to do what Usenet couldn't, which is to survive, so far, the Eternal September. At 2.2 billion users, it's the largest single integrated social networking system ever. Something I note with appreciation despite pretty much despising the company and what it's doing.
As to Mastodon: I'm on it, I'm asctive. It's faded a bit since April as initial interest is giving way, but it remains active. And GNU Social of course rocks on (and rags on the New Upstart to Get Off Its Lawn....)
> Facebook has managed to do what Usenet couldn't, which is to survive, so far, the Eternal September.
I think Facebook's Eternal September is coming in the form of "Facebook is what my parents use". I don't think it'll disappear, but it's going to go into a lull because they'll start seeing dropping numbers of their core demographic as they get older and younger people don't join up as much as they used to 5 years ago.
> As to Mastodon: I'm on it, I'm asctive. It's faded a bit since April as initial interest is giving way, but it remains active. And GNU Social of course rocks on (and rags on the New Upstart to Get Off Its Lawn....)
I'm sure you know this, but Mastodon is just an implementation of the same protocol that GNU Social uses. So distinguishing between two implementations in the same fediverse is a bit of a stretch IMO.
Facebook's biggest risk is probably some new "Harvard network" emerging. Maybe not literally Harvard, but equivalent. It would hive off FB' high value users, leaving the network with a negative death spiral dynamic.
Goggle could fund these until doomsday out of petty cash and drive Zuck insane fighting them off (and buying them off).
Or having to crank up ads revenue and alienating users. The eqivalent of bad-service defections in many businesses. Squeezing customers works until it doesn't.
In this instance it's not technology exactly, it's more that the design of the social network means I don't have to feed my narcissism by signing up straight away.
I in no way think that this is everyone's reason, I just thought it was an interesting perspective to share.
> Facebook has managed to do what Usenet couldn't, which is to survive, so far, the Eternal September. At 2.2 billion users, it's the largest single integrated social networking system ever. Something I note with appreciation despite pretty much despising the company and what it's doing.
Actually, they didn’t. When parents of everyone signed up, Facebook started becoming uncool, and most younger people don’t use it anymore (which is why they bought Insta and WhatsApp).
Facebook is currently running massive ad campaigns in Germany (like, every single billboard you see, every youtube ad you watch, every 5th TV ad is from Facebook) to get users back .
> Facebook is currently running massive ad campaigns in Germany (like, every single billboard you see, every youtube ad you watch, every 5th TV ad is from Facebook) to get users back .
Eh, what? I can't comment on TV ads since I only watch ZDF and Phoenix, but I've yet to see a billboard ad in the city, or a YouTube ad for that matter.
> I wonder if the reason it hasn't caught on so much
I wouldn't say it hasn't caught on. There are nearly 1,200 federated Mastodon servers and nearly 800,000 users (source: https://instances.social/list/old), and my timelines are constantly full of new content.
Lolicon can also refer to live action stuff where the model is of age but looks younger. Also, the rules on this stuff in the US are quite murky and vary by state, rather than being simply illegal across the board as this article wants to suggest.
Porn is too ubiquitous and accepted on the common web to really drive technologies the way it used to.
For example, bittorrent started with porn, but that's not what drove its growth or made it successful. If the credit card companies didn't allow porn transactions on their networks, bitcoin would probably be much larger today. Tor is a similar story, I assume.
dA is mentioned as comparison to pixiv. Pixiv is not "about pornography", but it allows 18+ content and so does dA.
Edit: I totally misread "photography" as "pornography" here.
To address the actual question: There are photography and crafts sections on dA and you will find far less of that on pixiv. But I would not describe the whole site "being about" that.
Maybe I wasn't clear, I was referring to this quote:
> it [Pixiv] might be analogous to DeviantArt in the US, but focused on drawings, not photography.
Which to me implies the author things DeviantArt is focused on photography. I haven't checked out DA in years, but last time I checked it had nothing to do with photography, at least not the artists I looked at.
I'm perplexed as to how the author managed to find the Pixiv sign-up page offensive - if he hadn't mentioned it I would never have made the connection myself.
I wonder if the author requested permission from the artist to use that image in his article. I certainly wouldn't want my (SFW|harmless|tasteful) art used in such a context.
>It’s a constant struggle for Tor to recruit “everyday” users of Tor, who use the service to evade commercial surveillance. Those users provide valuable “cover traffic”, making it harder to identify whistleblowers who use the service, and political air cover for those who would seek to ban the tool so they can combat child pornography and other illegal content.
Wait - I thought people weren't meant to use Tor (thus its bandwidth) if they didn't need it. Or are they recruiting not just any people, but those who will contrive to browse all day / not download heavily?
Most people are on Twitter because of network effects.
Twitter made this a non-issue for lollicon users by banning them, but it's also interesting to note that it sprang up due to support from an existing website.
Most people (myself included) who are dissatisfied with aspects of Twitter are not motivated enough to try to fix them.
> “After the enforcement, there will still be high school girls out there who are going to want to earn pocket money, and the men who target these girls won’t disappear, either,” said an official from the Metropolitan Police Department.
> “The police come inside, so there are no more real JK girls at the shop. Most of the business is being arranged over the internet, through enko (compensated dating) services.”
I'm not conflating anything. I'm saying that applying American sexual standards to Japanese culture is problematic. If it's not uncommon for ~14 year old women to earn spending money as sex workers, why wouldn't pictures of naked ~14 year old women be likewise common?
One could, of course, argue that Japanese culture is backward and unenlightened. Indeed, I'm sure that many Japanese are convinced of that.
> If it's not uncommon for ~14 year old women to earn spending money as sex workers, why wouldn't pictures of naked ~14 year old women be likewise common?
Japan has a culture of child idols too, who are typically pre-pubescent in age. What you're getting at is the distinction between prostitution and pornography is merely syntactic.
This isn't morally equivalent, and the amount of overlap between JK and otaku is questionable. It's also unambiguously illegal and happening in the open, which makes the issue a lack of law enforcement rather than cultural desensitization.
The story goes: BetaMax didn't want pornography on their platform, but VHS allowed it. The porn industry went to VHS and this fact is widely credited with being the reason why VHS won the format war.
It's effectively a GNU Social implementation, that has a much nicer TweetDeck-like interface[1]. It got quite popular in the security community in April (though I don't see as many people there as I used to), and some of the main servers got DDoS'd purely through organic growth.
> So pictures of KKK members killing little black girls would be fine as long as the images were "drawn"?
Depends on the context doesn't it? You'd see things like that in a political comic strip and you'd recognise it as condemning those actions. You might see it in a White Supremacist's distribution and see it as endorsing or encouraging the actions depicted.
The use of comics & visual art to convey disgusting happenings in a publication-wide context has been used for a long time in Western media. The act of drawing the image, the act of publishing the image, I can personally find neither morally reprehensible without taking the wider context into consideration.
I'm also a fairly strong supporter of allowing media I find distasteful to be distributed (I caveat this with as long as the production of the media isn't hurting anyone). Largely because censoring everything doesn't achieve a great deal, just hides those ideas from people who in all liklihood weren't the intended audience. Having folk bring their more 'underground' affiliations into the sunlight sure helps know who to avoid.
I've seen it many times where I'll be vetting a new employee or supplier, see their Facebook profile, and be genuinely appalled by the stuff they're sharing and supporting. Do I think that free mode of 'speech' should be shut down? Pfft, no, gave me a glowing indicator not to deal with this person without having to go through the trouble of dealing with them first and realizing it to be a mistake.
Is there a fundamental difference between a) drawing KKK members killing little black girls and b) writing about KKK members killing little black girls (which you just did)?
> So pictures of KKK members killing little black girls would be fine as long as the images were "drawn"?
Much worse things are displayed in comics and described in books. What's confusing here?
It's fiction, and there's no reason I can see, except in the light of very special evidence that such drawings have an effect on the incidence of such events taking place (which is similar to when people say that violent video games cause children to become murderers later in life), to make it illegal.
Unless you have evidence or an argument, that is. It seems to contradict the notion of liberal democracy to engage in such censorship of artwork and fiction.
>So pictures of KKK members killing little black girls would be fine as long as the images were "drawn"?
Yes.
In fact there are many comics and films showing "KKK members killing little black girls" or worse, and nobody thought to censor "Mississippi burning" or something like that...
>You seem generally confused about the points you are trying to make.
Child porn and Nazi stuff have long been really bright lines in user content. Recent events have revealed more acceptance of Nazis and adjacent groups in our society than previously thought, so I guess I could see the taboo against child-porn easing up too. Very sad and scary.
The taboo against child pornography is not easing up; the reason why, to my knowledge, it is considered taboo is beacuse its production requires child abuse. However the production of drawings, comics and stories requires no such abuse, as such, I can see no reason why fictional characters portrayed in fiction should be seen as taboo. Either way, as far as I know the taboo about these comics is not easing up anywhere, as it remains illegal (which I regard as an unjustified affront to freedom of expression) and without much public discourse at all in many Western countries and US states.
"Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature". George Bernard Shaw, "Ceasar and Cleopatra".
(Slightly off topic: Feynman had a nice story in one of his books about how the main in a Japanese guesthouse he stayed walked in while he was naked and having a bath. She didn't flinch and just went on about her business like nothing had happened, and he was thinking what a fuss/embarrassment etc that would have caused if it happened in a hotel in the US -- when it's just an adult being naked with another adult present. It's not like everybody hasn't seen genitals before or it's a big deal.)