For those who haven't been following along, I'm pro-porn. I believe in allowing people to engage with their sexualities in any way they please that doesn't harm others without the fully informed consent of those others.
Alarmist hand-wringing is nothing new. The internet didn't invent it. You need only look at the satanic ritual abuse cases of the 1980s to see how far alarmist hand-wringing can take people.
The one I'm addressing today is, as you've no doubt figured out, about pornography. Specifically the most recent alarm being sounded that because of all their exposure to pornography on the internet, men (always just men, isn't it?) are losing interest in partnered sex. The reasons cited for this are various, and not really the focus of this blog post. No, the focus of this blog post is to make lemonade.
You see, if we accept the current alarmists at their word. If we accept that they are doing real science, and that the issues they are bringing up are real. Then we come to one inescapable conclusion. All the efforts to limit access to child porn have been contributing to the molestation of children.
If all the porn that men (again with the not so subtle sexism from these alarmists) have access to in virtually limitless quantities on the internet really is "rewiring their brains" such that they're no longer interested in sex with real women, then the only morally correct thing to do is to immediately halt any and all efforts to stop or slow the distribution of child porn on the internet, and indeed start subsidizing that industry.
I realize some may object to taxpayer dollars going to support the child porn industry, but to quote an entirely different group of alarmists, "if it saves just one child."
Now, of course, I don't believe that pornography has these horrific effects on the (male) libido. I don't believe the alarmists who attach the term "addiction" as though it can damn a perfectly safe, healthy activity by pointing out that there exists some small group of people who develop addictions and compulsions associated with it. I don't believe access to porn hurts the viewer in any way.
But I figure this argument will either shut up this particular batch of pro-censorship alarmists and provide some measure of protection for free speech by using my own boogie-man status against them, or they'll stick to their guns and start lobbying for government subsidized child porn. Either way, I consider it a win.
Showing posts with label censorship. Show all posts
Showing posts with label censorship. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Saturday, June 1, 2013
We Can't Be Associated With You
I've mentioned before that I get barred from a lot of online forums. I am a pedophile who doesn't see anything wrong with my sexual orientation, and I am a vocal and unapologetic advocate for the rights of young people.
Quite often, the ban comes in the form of a fairly obvious and unapologetic expression of disgust at my views, positions, and/or existence. The runners of said sites establishing themselves as effectively declared enemies, and acting on the sincere belief that I'm evil and need to be silenced. In a strange way, they're some of the most respectable sorts who act to silence me, since their intentions are clear and displayed in the open for all to see. So certain of the righteousness of their position, they often hold no fear of leaving what I've already said as a matter of public record, and allow that record to speak for itself, which suits me just fine.
Slightly less often, legalistic loopholes are used to justify the bans, citing some rule or another that's been deliberately written in vague language for the sake of later selective enforcement. These are the sites that pretend to uphold a standard of free speech and pretend that censorship isn't a part of their ideology or mission statement. These are the places that tend to have drawn out exit processes, since almost no one on the internet has thought to prohibit the sorts of things I want to say. As a result, most of that overbroad language isn't actually broad enough on a simple reading, and the staff at such places is very reluctant to actually invoke and use the "we can ban anyone for any reason" clauses that are always a part of the boilerplate. They recognize that censoring me is admitting that they can't defeat my ideas in a free marketplace, and so a ban is an admission of failure on their part. These are actually some of the most satisfying notes to leave on, since typically by the time they've rewritten their rules for the purpose of getting rid of me, I've emboldened others who'd previously stayed silent.
It's only in recent years that I've encountered a peculiar third group of censors. This one actually seems to understand how public relations works, and as such, I've come to the conclusion the are the most threatening and insidious of the lot. They communicate via emails and private messages, away from the public eye, that they are oh so sympathetic to what I'm saying, but that they can't risk the public blowback of being associated with me or my ideas, before imposing secret restrictions on my posting or jumping straight to a ban outright.
In a sense, it's easy to empathize. After all, I know full well what the risks are of being associated with me. I am me, after all. Merely by letting me speak, when so many places engage in outright bans, does come across as a tacit endorsement of my words in the eyes of some idiotic members of the public, so one can see what they would have to fear.
The problem is that they're liars.
I take no issue with forums where the subjects I care about are censored entirely. Where the entire conversation simply is not allowed to happen, and anyone bringing it up is told to knock it off and/or banned. That is not what happens with those sites who utilize this friendly public relations tactic.
When you censor only one side of an argument, and allow the other free reign, that is what an actual endorsement of a viewpoint looks like. Just because the site runners and administrators don't join in on the pile-on doesn't change the fact that they've taken a side and acted as an enemy. What makes them different and worse than the first group is that they've chosen not to declare hostilities, preferring to pretend to their readership that the site is actually an open forum and that the apparent homogeneity of opinion is a fact of life rather than a product of their censorship.
These are the sites who will most often retroactively wipe away the record of any argument that didn't go their way, while leaving dozens of threads where they believe their preferred viewpoint came off better intact.
The fact of the matter is that even at my most aggressive, I don't go where I'm not invited. I never bring up pedophilia or youth rights subjects in a space where no one had breached the topic first. I do care about, and respect the fact that not every space is appropriate for this conversation. But when the conversation is happening, when someone has brought up the subject, and it's continuing, someone needs to step in and say something, speak unapologetically for the opposing point of view. The risk otherwise is that those who thoughtlessly follow the crowd will leave the mainstream viewpoint unexamined, and those who fear reprisal will be cowed into silence, creating the illusion of consensus when the truth is anything but.
I don't recall if I've said this before in one of these posts, but I care as much as I do about putting forward the idea that there is nothing wrong with pedophiles because when I was younger and figuring out my sexuality, I desperately needed to hear it. I needed to have the point that pedophiles are not the same thing as child molesters stated loudly and unapologetically, because I was afraid of what I was feeling and what the cultural gestalt told me that meant was coming. When I saw someone stand up to the crowd, that helped me, and since then, I've tried to become that voice for the next person who needs to hear it.
Quite often, the ban comes in the form of a fairly obvious and unapologetic expression of disgust at my views, positions, and/or existence. The runners of said sites establishing themselves as effectively declared enemies, and acting on the sincere belief that I'm evil and need to be silenced. In a strange way, they're some of the most respectable sorts who act to silence me, since their intentions are clear and displayed in the open for all to see. So certain of the righteousness of their position, they often hold no fear of leaving what I've already said as a matter of public record, and allow that record to speak for itself, which suits me just fine.
Slightly less often, legalistic loopholes are used to justify the bans, citing some rule or another that's been deliberately written in vague language for the sake of later selective enforcement. These are the sites that pretend to uphold a standard of free speech and pretend that censorship isn't a part of their ideology or mission statement. These are the places that tend to have drawn out exit processes, since almost no one on the internet has thought to prohibit the sorts of things I want to say. As a result, most of that overbroad language isn't actually broad enough on a simple reading, and the staff at such places is very reluctant to actually invoke and use the "we can ban anyone for any reason" clauses that are always a part of the boilerplate. They recognize that censoring me is admitting that they can't defeat my ideas in a free marketplace, and so a ban is an admission of failure on their part. These are actually some of the most satisfying notes to leave on, since typically by the time they've rewritten their rules for the purpose of getting rid of me, I've emboldened others who'd previously stayed silent.
It's only in recent years that I've encountered a peculiar third group of censors. This one actually seems to understand how public relations works, and as such, I've come to the conclusion the are the most threatening and insidious of the lot. They communicate via emails and private messages, away from the public eye, that they are oh so sympathetic to what I'm saying, but that they can't risk the public blowback of being associated with me or my ideas, before imposing secret restrictions on my posting or jumping straight to a ban outright.
In a sense, it's easy to empathize. After all, I know full well what the risks are of being associated with me. I am me, after all. Merely by letting me speak, when so many places engage in outright bans, does come across as a tacit endorsement of my words in the eyes of some idiotic members of the public, so one can see what they would have to fear.
The problem is that they're liars.
I take no issue with forums where the subjects I care about are censored entirely. Where the entire conversation simply is not allowed to happen, and anyone bringing it up is told to knock it off and/or banned. That is not what happens with those sites who utilize this friendly public relations tactic.
When you censor only one side of an argument, and allow the other free reign, that is what an actual endorsement of a viewpoint looks like. Just because the site runners and administrators don't join in on the pile-on doesn't change the fact that they've taken a side and acted as an enemy. What makes them different and worse than the first group is that they've chosen not to declare hostilities, preferring to pretend to their readership that the site is actually an open forum and that the apparent homogeneity of opinion is a fact of life rather than a product of their censorship.
These are the sites who will most often retroactively wipe away the record of any argument that didn't go their way, while leaving dozens of threads where they believe their preferred viewpoint came off better intact.
The fact of the matter is that even at my most aggressive, I don't go where I'm not invited. I never bring up pedophilia or youth rights subjects in a space where no one had breached the topic first. I do care about, and respect the fact that not every space is appropriate for this conversation. But when the conversation is happening, when someone has brought up the subject, and it's continuing, someone needs to step in and say something, speak unapologetically for the opposing point of view. The risk otherwise is that those who thoughtlessly follow the crowd will leave the mainstream viewpoint unexamined, and those who fear reprisal will be cowed into silence, creating the illusion of consensus when the truth is anything but.
I don't recall if I've said this before in one of these posts, but I care as much as I do about putting forward the idea that there is nothing wrong with pedophiles because when I was younger and figuring out my sexuality, I desperately needed to hear it. I needed to have the point that pedophiles are not the same thing as child molesters stated loudly and unapologetically, because I was afraid of what I was feeling and what the cultural gestalt told me that meant was coming. When I saw someone stand up to the crowd, that helped me, and since then, I've tried to become that voice for the next person who needs to hear it.
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Age Appropriate Content
I am a hardcore believer in the idea of free speech, open exchange of ideas, and the fundamental goodness of knowledge. Censorship in all its forms is anathema to me. The best use I can think of for a time machine would be to go back and save copies of the books that were burned throughout history.
I'm also a person who believes that children are people, and deserve to be treated like human beings. These two passions of mine combine whenever the phrase "age appropriate" is uttered to send me into a sputtering, incoherent rage. Thank goodness for the written word, where I can be articulate even in moments like these where I can't vocalize anything beyond threats and obscenities at best and animal snarls at worst.
Somehow the adults of this society have fallen into thinking that information about sex has the same effect as cracking open Lovecroft's Necromonicon. I mean this quite literally with numerous pieces of propaganda being spread that claim that children "exposed" to "age inappropriate content" display the same symptoms as those who were directly sexually abused. If I believed for one second that molesting a child would do no more harm than them seeing a RedTube video, I would have done so ages ago.
Since the dawn of the internet, an enormous industry has sprung up to censor it. Governments try to block content they don't like, and not just dictatorships like China. The likes of Sweeden have gotten into the act of censoring explicit sexual content for everyone "for the children". Home based firewall solutions have been the flavor of choice for the rugged individualists in the United States, but whether the nanny is the state or the parent, the internet is being censored.
The censorship efforts don't stop at blocking the content itself, however. After all, if the consequences were really so horrific, it would be criminally irresponsible to stop there. No, efforts are made to ensure that young people never develop the knowledge base to frame the questions that might lead to them seeing something "age inappropriate" in the first place.
Avoiding the subjects of sex and sexuality isn't a silent, seamless act. A five year old can tell when you're dancing around a subject you don't want to talk about. That's where shaming starts. They know that whatever it is you don't want to talk about, it's shameful and taboo. That is, in fact, the first thing they learn about it when you behave this way. This discourages them from asking questions, because that would mean violating the taboo they've already learned is in place.
Of course, discouraging questions is more thorough than that. When adults do respond to questions about sex, they always give as little information as possible. The idea, of course, is that they should only give them as much information as they explicitly ask for, lest they be "exposing" those children to sexual knowledge. The trouble with this method is, again, a five year old can figure out that you don't want to give a complete answer for some reason, and will thus be discouraged from asking those followup questions that this method theoretically relies upon.
If you're old enough to ask the question, you're old enough to know the answer. The whole answer. If you can articulate the question of how to define acceleration mathematically, you're old enough to learn calculus. If you're old enough to ask about sex, you're old enough to get a thorough overview of the subject matter.
But what of that most universal followup question to the clinical minimalism so many people prefer? "Why would anyone want to do that?" It's the most important question in any discussion of sex, and it's the one that's explicitly left out of sexual education curriculums and parental lectures alike. Surely answering that question will just make them go out and do it, right?
They asked the question. They're going to want to know the answer, and it can either come from you actually answering the question, or it can come from them experimenting in whatever unsupervised time they have available. And they'll wait for the unsupervised time because, again, by not answering the question, you're communicating that the subject is taboo and that any further attempts to get answers should be hidden from you.
I'm not above exploiting the violent hysteria and frothing hatrid people have for my kind in order to advance my causes, and this is one that matters to me. The children who are most vulnerable to child molesters are the ones who are most ignorant and have been taught most thoroughly that sex is a taboo. If they don't know what sex is, they've no reason not to believe that this new "game" is legitimately just that. Your efforts to silence their awkward questions also silences any hope of them telling you they've been molested.
I'm also a person who believes that children are people, and deserve to be treated like human beings. These two passions of mine combine whenever the phrase "age appropriate" is uttered to send me into a sputtering, incoherent rage. Thank goodness for the written word, where I can be articulate even in moments like these where I can't vocalize anything beyond threats and obscenities at best and animal snarls at worst.
Somehow the adults of this society have fallen into thinking that information about sex has the same effect as cracking open Lovecroft's Necromonicon. I mean this quite literally with numerous pieces of propaganda being spread that claim that children "exposed" to "age inappropriate content" display the same symptoms as those who were directly sexually abused. If I believed for one second that molesting a child would do no more harm than them seeing a RedTube video, I would have done so ages ago.
Since the dawn of the internet, an enormous industry has sprung up to censor it. Governments try to block content they don't like, and not just dictatorships like China. The likes of Sweeden have gotten into the act of censoring explicit sexual content for everyone "for the children". Home based firewall solutions have been the flavor of choice for the rugged individualists in the United States, but whether the nanny is the state or the parent, the internet is being censored.
The censorship efforts don't stop at blocking the content itself, however. After all, if the consequences were really so horrific, it would be criminally irresponsible to stop there. No, efforts are made to ensure that young people never develop the knowledge base to frame the questions that might lead to them seeing something "age inappropriate" in the first place.
Avoiding the subjects of sex and sexuality isn't a silent, seamless act. A five year old can tell when you're dancing around a subject you don't want to talk about. That's where shaming starts. They know that whatever it is you don't want to talk about, it's shameful and taboo. That is, in fact, the first thing they learn about it when you behave this way. This discourages them from asking questions, because that would mean violating the taboo they've already learned is in place.
Of course, discouraging questions is more thorough than that. When adults do respond to questions about sex, they always give as little information as possible. The idea, of course, is that they should only give them as much information as they explicitly ask for, lest they be "exposing" those children to sexual knowledge. The trouble with this method is, again, a five year old can figure out that you don't want to give a complete answer for some reason, and will thus be discouraged from asking those followup questions that this method theoretically relies upon.
If you're old enough to ask the question, you're old enough to know the answer. The whole answer. If you can articulate the question of how to define acceleration mathematically, you're old enough to learn calculus. If you're old enough to ask about sex, you're old enough to get a thorough overview of the subject matter.
But what of that most universal followup question to the clinical minimalism so many people prefer? "Why would anyone want to do that?" It's the most important question in any discussion of sex, and it's the one that's explicitly left out of sexual education curriculums and parental lectures alike. Surely answering that question will just make them go out and do it, right?
They asked the question. They're going to want to know the answer, and it can either come from you actually answering the question, or it can come from them experimenting in whatever unsupervised time they have available. And they'll wait for the unsupervised time because, again, by not answering the question, you're communicating that the subject is taboo and that any further attempts to get answers should be hidden from you.
I'm not above exploiting the violent hysteria and frothing hatrid people have for my kind in order to advance my causes, and this is one that matters to me. The children who are most vulnerable to child molesters are the ones who are most ignorant and have been taught most thoroughly that sex is a taboo. If they don't know what sex is, they've no reason not to believe that this new "game" is legitimately just that. Your efforts to silence their awkward questions also silences any hope of them telling you they've been molested.
Monday, February 4, 2013
Whispering In The Dark
Much of the material I've posted so far is not new. I've been posting on the internet on various forums, discussion boards, blog comments, and the like for years, refining my arguments and discarding the old ideas that I once held that couldn't stand up to proper scrutiny. Many of my blog posts are ones I've been refining for years in debates and discussions, slightly edited for the blog format.
I've also been banned from a lot of places. I don't post abusive content. I don't troll. I don't drag conversations off topic. What I do is talk openly about pedophilia and acknowledge the fact that I'm attracted to prepubescent girls.
Now, as a rule, I tend to avoid any messageboard where young girls in my age of attraction are allowed to post. I do this for my own legal protection, and to remove from the arsenal of my opponents the ability to accuse me of being on the board for the purpose of picking up kids. That doesn't actually stop them from using that tactic, mind you, but I do put in some effort to make that a non-issue regardless.
People have the right to set whatever rules they like in their own spaces. I can't deny them the right to throw me out any more than I can deny the KKK the right to ban civil rights activists from their forums. The owners of a space can censor and restrict freedom of speech for any or no reason.
This is not me acknowledging that they have some moral right to do so, mind you. That is only me acknowledging their practical ability to do so. The fact of the matter is that I actually value freedom of speech. The free marketplace of ideas is something I value so greatly that I very much will defend, to the death, the right of those who want me raped and murdered to spout their bigotry as loud as they please in the public forum of their choosing.
How could I not value the free marketplace of ideas when it is that very thing which has allowed me to grow and develop my moral and ethical philosophy to the extent that I've managed? If my ideas had never been subject to the brutal scrutiny of my detractors, I might never have abandoned faulty ones I once held, and I might never have seen the contradictions between some of my old ideas. If people had not been so free to try to publicly tear down my arguments, I never would have been pushed to build a case and defend them properly.
But those who hate me will no doubt be heartened by the fact that I'm getting tired. I can force myself into otherwise open messageboards which choose to censor my ideas, in the hope of a few days of argument and potential growth, but it's feeling less and less worth my time to invade these "public" spaces in the face of the draconian censorship efforts made to scrub their forum clean of any trace of my passing.
So I'm left with the question of what to do now. That's part of why this blog exists. I've been getting sick of my virtual posters being torn down before anyone but the censors had a chance to see them. At least if someone ever finds their way to this blog, it'll be here long enough for them to read and consider the arguments herein.
But what good is this blog without people willing to engage with me? What is the value of making arguments that I'll never be able to say have stood up to vigorous attempts to eviscerate?
Whenever I'm banned from someplace, the same platitude is always handed out. "There are plenty of other places on the internet for you to talk, so I don't have to be bothered by the implications of not letting you talk in mine."
In practice, what these people might as well have said is: "Freedom of speech is the freedom to whisper in the dark where no one can hear."
This blog has a strict no censorship policy. Adbots and generic spam will be cleaned out for the sake of facilitating actual conversation, and porn links will be removed to protect the blog legally, but I will never censor anyone's view on the subject at hand, whatever it may be, and however that view is articulated.
I want people who disagree with me here. I want intelligent opposition who can point out the faults and flaws in my arguments. I want overemotional idiots spouting profanities and death threats at me. I want to hear from those who agree with me on a principle, but think I've got the details wrong. And I want any other opinion, good or bad that you have.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)