At the same time Russia is the go to country for hosting "revenge porn" sites and image forums with stolen nude photos. Because that wouldn't damage the psyche of anyone?
Fine if you decide that porn is bad, I don't agree, but that's something the Russians need to work out for themself. It's the blatant lying and use of double standards that annoys me.
It's standard practice for Russia to do things for one reason and give a completely unrelated official reason as excuse.
I'm not too familiar with the specifics of this case, but I can easily imagine this just being a case of nationalist protection. In that they want people to go to local Russian porn outlets that can be better controlled, tracked & monetized. Then again, it could also be something as simple as some Russian official being pissed off and on a personal vendetta mission.
Russian laws effectively prohibit all kinds of internet pornography. More precisely, they restrict "unlawful distribution of pornography", but never define any "lawful" way to do so.
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That said, if it weren't pornography, small rant about our judicial system:
Any judge in any city pop 50000 can issue a country-wide block for any site. Often these resolutions are too far reaching, sometimes they order to block root page (/) instead of specific page (/foo/bar), rendering whole sites unavailable. Sometimes they ban ip addresses of aws services, disrupting half the internet.
Another important thing about these hearings is that there is often no defendant. They might call in the site hoster, but hosters are never interested in defending their customers so they simply ignore the subpoena. Site owner would often discover their site was blocked after the fact.
Finally, in many cases judges don't even bother writing their own verdict. Instead they copy-paste whatever public attorney cooked up, including all the factual and orthographic errors, and sign it.
https://medium.com/@aalien/law-limits-8d733178e158 this is a very insightful post (alas, only available in Russian) from @aalien, founder of lurkmore.ru, which is arguably the most often banned site in Russia, about how this horrible system functions (or rather, malfunctions). I found this excerpt especially hilarious:
«Full list of Roskomnadzor-banned pages is available on our site. Unfortunately, that page is also banned by Roskomnadzor, because it contains "textual information about committing suicide". It's in the quoted Roskomnadzor letter, of course»
While I might find a lot niches of porn a little distasteful... or a lot distasteful in some cases, I think they're reaching a bit. Surely the kinds of people visiting these sites are already interested in seeing this kind of stuff... and thus are already 'damaged'. I feel like the cause and effect is being reversed somehow. Perhaps that's just me.
Edit for clarification: I used the word 'damaged' in reference to the parent post, it was not a word of my own choosing.
There is a large amount of anecdotal evidence that pornography has been at least a contributing factor in ruining relationships. Moreover, arguments can be made that even at the individual level, viewing of pornography is (1)habit-forming, (2)distort one's views/expectations of sex & intimacy.
I think censorship of any form is very stupid. This one included. However the notion that porn can sometimes be bad is not unfounded. Even vanilla porn, let's leave the sick/twisted stuff aside. Excepting illegal things like child porn & bestiality I doubt any consensus can be reached as to what is considered distasteful.
I agree. You could make the argument that pornography damages people's lives. Of course that doesn't mean the state has the right to censor it.
By the same token, I wonder if an argument could be made that the availability of free internet pornography has led to a decrease in sexual assaults/violence/rape. I know of no research into this, but it's not a totally implausible argument on the face of it.
The danger of discussing the issue from anecdotal evidence is that we don't know if cause and effect are reversed. There might be a huge group of porn consumers that aren't habitual consumers and don't have distorted views of sex & intimacy. It is only the ones that are stuck in habit and/or have the distorted views that make up the anecdotes.
There might be other factors at play for people that fall into destructive consumption of porn.
I used the word "damaged" in reference to the headline that it "Damages human psyche", I wasn't using this in terms of my own perspective. We're all fucked up in our own unique and fascinating ways... to the point that I'd say that labeling our tastes as fucked up or damaged almost seems ridiculous. We're all on the spectrum somewhere. Every last one of us.
By looking at the page it seems that there is a preference on a little more "mature" women on Brazzers. But can't comment on the content otherwise because I have no interest of becoming a customer.
I am not quite sure what you refer to. There are basically only niches in porn and a lot them a distasteful or even disgusting, but on the other hand reading the article it is not clear to me that porn they specialized in, the last one I saw made by that company was only special in that it did not end in a body shoot.
All societies provide restrictions on human behaviour. Grown adults do make their own choices. To become gambling addicts, to beat wifes, to lie to each other. Not all of our choices are good or correct. We should always have the humility to accept we can make bad choices and that adulthood doesn't confer some mystical ability to make only good choices.
The difference is making restrictions through compassion, as a loving parent does to a child. Compared to making restrictions out of a desire for control, like all authoritarian rulers.
Not necessarily. Adults get fat and rot their teeth out too.
We like to think that we are making our own choices, but in reality we are largely prisoners of our genetic programming. Given the choice between broccoli and a marshmallow, well, sure, some people are able to choose the broccoli. But there are strong evolutionary forces that bias us towards choosing the marshmallow every time. And of course the situation is much worse when we are constantly barraged by similar choices in every domain (including media).
When we say "people should be able to make their own choices," we pit the superego against the id (for want of better terms). We implicitly take the position that if a person's superego is weaker than their id, that person deserves to fail and suffer. Wouldn't it be better if we could make the path of least resistance also the best choice?
> Wouldn't it be better if we could make the path of least resistance also the best choice?
Maybe, but that's a far different question than whether we should ban questionable choices. I'm all for labeling nutrition info. I might be onboard with "sin taxes" on junk food. I'd probably be onboard with restricting advertising on junk food. But I'm in no way in favor of banning marshmallows.
I agree that ideally, a total ban wouldn't be necessary. For example, in the 1950's (in America), it wasn't illegal to get a divorce, but there was intense social pressure not to. And even if something is illegal, that doesn't necessarily prevent people from acquiring it. It's just not the path of least resistance.
It doesn't help that we're constantly bombarded with advertising for food that has been scientifically formulated for 'maximum bliss' which poisons our mind towards trying and eventually becoming addicted to said foods...
Are you then suggesting that we put these same humans as the decision maker for what is "bad" vs "good"? This cuts both ways, in that I can't trust someone else to dictate what I should or shouldn't consume because they have their own id/superego in conflict when making that decision.
Generally speaking, laws are inventions of the superego designed to rein in the id when the superego is resting. We practice this on an individual level when our superego sets a goal and commits to it despite the protests of the id.
I think the bigger problem with what I suggested is that you have to trust someone else's superego to design good laws.
That's kind of my point. I completely agree that humans are bad about making their own choices, but I don't think that taking choices away from them is the right answer either. IME, better education about those choices, and less pressures about those choices are the solutions.
That sounds well and good, but "better education" is a bit hand-wavey, isn't it? When we educate someone, aren't we, in a way, taking away their choice to do certain things? Sure, in principle they can still make completely free choices, but it is often very difficult to deviate from one's programming.
Somewhere along the line, someone has to accept the responsibility for programming others. It's simply a fact of being human that your consciousness will be shaped by factors beyond your control. Maybe it's time for us to abandon the ideal of the Unconstrained Man and instead embrace the arbitrary.
The Digital Economy Bill is currently in the Lords. It's actually going to the Committee Stage tomorrow.
That's the bill that will force age verification (with security implications subsequently) as well as banning "non-conventional" pornography in the UK.
Well, for one thing, the Lords as presently constituted being instrumental in something that is later see as important to the nation but on which the Commons alone would have failed is fuel for the argument against abolishing the Lords, further eroding their role, or replacing them with an elected body, which seems to get proposed every few years.
Yep ;-) and they are taking steps towards becoming more repressive, including the new Snooper's Charter. I'm not saying that porn is/isn't damaging to the human psyche - but repressive regimes are. And co-incidentally repressive regimes love banning things. Probably from the logic of if I don't like it you shouldn't.
I guess it's quite a random choice, because this is not really "Russia blocks" but "local court blocks", and "local" here is no joke: "Bolshaya Chernigovka village" [1]
"To understand the logic behind those obviously absurd and inefficient bans, one should look deep into the very essence of the "checklist system" (палочная система in Russian). Once there's a law in place, requiring the police, the prosecution, the courts, the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Communications to find and censor "bad" websites, it means that they have to find and ban some URLs every other month, just for the record. It does not matter much, whether those sites are actually bad, or how many million other sites do carry the same content, but haven't been included in the current version of filtering blacklists. There is only one relevant KPI for every single official in the chain: a checklist, showing how many sites they've blocked in every given month.
There is one district prosecutor in Ufa, who initiates the whole judicial process of blocking Russian copies of Hitler's Mein Kampf online, one mirror at a time. For every copy there's ample paperwork, starting from police investigators, who conduct primary finding of fact, then the district prosecutor's office, that petitions the district court to ban the copy in question. The court passes its ruling, citing the URL as stated in the filing. Then the Ministry of Justice in Moscow enters the URL into Extremist Materials' List, and Ministry of Communications updates its Banned Websites' Registry. Even before the cycle is completed (usually takes 2 to 6 months), the process reopens with another copy of same book, on a different URL. Five years since the initial inclusion of Hitler's manifest in the federal Extremist Materials' List, which is today, there are still some 300 copies of Mein Kampf in Russian, freely accessible online, and five years from now, there will probably be 3000. But every single civil servant, involved in the blocking process, duly receives his salaries, promotions and other benefits of government service, as long as he doesn't forget to submit the updated checklist to his superiors. That's how this system works, and there is absolutely no point in trying to evaluate its efficiency in conventional terms of common sense or public good."
So what is the implication from the fact that it is impossible to block porn for people who are not "an adult that has a fully formed identity and personality"?
Not too easy if you're working two jobs to provide for your family. By giving all the responsibility to the family you sacrifice those vulnerable children who weren't as fortunate as yourself growing up.
I think we both realize that solving the two job problem is much harder. Hands off government and giving people the freedom to fuck up their life is great for middle class kids in super supportive families, but can be disastrous for less fortunate children.
> I think we both realize that solving the two job problem is much harder.
No, it's not harder than solving the problem of how you let the government substitute for absent parents without creating a regime that exerts authoritarian control of the adult population through its control of content.
I'm not from the US. I live in Sweden where it isn't as common with people working two jobs. But sure go ahead continue patching society because it is hard to solve the actual problem. So I'm not arguing for a hands off government, I'm actually arguing the opposite.
OK... but since when has Russia been moralistic about anything? Some of the nastiest most immoral webhosts on the planet ever have operated out of Russia for years.
Could this be Russian purveyors pulling strings to get "the competition" shut-out locally on some comically absurd moral pretext?
If you start to debate the merits or costs of porn to the human psyche, you've already lost.
Delegitimization and criminalization of vice is an old, old, old, old, old trick in the book to stir people up against a "degenerate" "other" as a means to engineer their consent for their leaders to accumulate power and wealth.
It also provides a convenient way for dissidents to be delegitimized or arrested when police "find" (i.e. plant) evidence of drugs/porn/what-have-you. Old trick, works as well today as it has for thousands of years.
