Lawmakers across the country (United States) are trying to protect kids by age-gating parts of the internet.
An internet devoid of unacceptable “deviations” from gender and sexuality too. Given the effort to erase trans and gay people from public spaces, this seems like a parallel effort to destroy their digital ones too.
Not just any rant, a blatantly discriminatory one!
You DO see the contradiction where you claim to not care about somebody’s sexuality, yet get offended when you hear about it, right? And what’s worse, you don’t just get offended, but you turn around and directly insult those people by insisting they have a mental illness!
What you’re really saying is that you’re so offended by someone else’s harmless actions that you wish they would disappear.
Literally the entire point of pronouns is defeated if people don’t know what pronouns a person uses (and this applies to more than just trans people too), so there is some use for people that put them in their name.
Beyond that though, even if there’s no need to say or publicly display something, that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t say it, and it definitely doesn’t mean one should be forbidden from saying it. There’s no need for people to tell me about their hobbies, or wear t-shirts or put up bumper stickers with messages on them, or put up religious symbols everywhere. Perhaps I’m tired of seeing messaging for political candidates I don’t like, and wish they’d keep their preferences to themselves, or perhaps I don’t care if people are married, they could just keep it between themselves rather than wear some rings to tell the world about it. But you know what? If I were to support making it illegal to say and show and wear an express such things, especially on the internet where the stakes are even lower, I’d be closer to the leader of something like the Taliban or North Korea, than to a good citizen of a democracy.
Even if you think saying/displaying/supporting something is “attention seeking”, well, people have a right to do that. To try to restrict that would be to restrict the right to free speech itself, because you cannot communicate with someone without first getting their attention.
Personally, i am all in for that.
I really don’t think you are, because most people don’t realize how broad things will get. While right now, the targets are trans and gay people, people who write and pass these sorts of laws don’t want to stop there. When I said “deviations”, I wasn’t just speaking about ‘us queers’, but also about men with long hair, women with flat chests, literally anyone who doesn’t mould themselves into the right wing’s view of “Man” and “Woman”. I don’t think you want the colour of your shirts policed, or for cops to come in and throw a woman out of the restroom because she wasn’t “feminine” enough to someone.
I really don’t give 2 shits if you’re trans or gay or whatever. Just keep it in front of you. No need to put your pronouns in your name, or put a trans flag everywhere.
If you don’t care, then why does it bother you so much to see them merely existing in public or online?
I’d like to suggest that you ignore pronouns or pride flags since they clearly don’t appeal to you, but like many things in life, what doesn’t matter to you might matter to one of the other 7 billion or so human beings on the planet with you, and putting the pronouns in the bio or displaying a pride flag actively communicates safety and creates a welcoming atmosphere, while also helping us find like-minded people and make friendships.
You seem like a pretty solid poster except for this one pretty bad take. Don’t let dramatic internet discourse and a few attention grabbing media personalities or allies shape your viewpoint for an entire group.
I know you probably already know this but I don’t want good posters leaving Lemmy because of silly disagreements or pet peeves. There are annoying people pushing toxic discourse on any issue. Generally people will live and let live if you don’t personally attack them. Someone specifying their pronouns isn’t attention seeking behavior (usually) it’s just a courtesy. Your comment is just begging for the kind of responses that will require you to give people the kind of attention you claim to hate giving them.
I get downvoted a lot too. But after reading this, I think the downvote buttons might actually mean you’re right, because there are a lot of retards on lemmy who drool their way through life and have no idea what they’re talking about.
Because you’re right. I can tell by the downvotes. The more you get, the fighter you are
These laws aren’t about children, that’s just a talking point to sell laws that tame the potential anonymity of the internet for private profit.
If American society gave the slightest shit at all about our children, we wouldn’t have literally starved our K-12 system into utter ruin for over half a century to cut the taxes of the corporations and already rich assholes killing the planet and those children’s future on it for private profit. We wouldn’t then say selling public education to for profit industry in the form of charter schools is a solution.
The United States doesn’t give a shit about its children. Not one tiny bit. Now our beloved economy? We’d throw all our (non-wealthy) kids into a fucking volcano if Wall Street told us it would protect that.
Not to mention, do people really believe that people shouldn’t be allowed to see sexual content until they’re 18? I started looking up titties when I was eleven, and as I understood it, the generation before mine either inherited or stole porn mags and tapes from older brothers/dads or got somebody to buy some for them. Given how useless sex ed was on the actual sex aspect of things, how are teenagers supposed to figure out anything besides anatomical structures?
The fundamental premise just seems weird to me, why are we trying to hide away pornography like it’s this shameful corruptive thing? I maybe knew a handful of weird kids that listened to the 18 year old restriction (all on extremely religious grounds), so the idea of actually trying to enforce it seems kinda crazy. I don’t know, it just reeks of the idea that masturbation is a sin, but everyone’s so uncomfortable with the notion of teenagers + anything sexual that nobody wants to touch it.
I just feel like the next couple generations are gonna be weird with the tug of war between book bannings, LGBTQ+ bannings, religion in schools/out of them, and all the other proxy wars being fought using schools as the battle ground. Not to mention all the shootings.
These laws are dangerous, kids are going to sneak a peek at adult things and when they do going to pornhub is far safer than having to avoid strong filters by joining a private discord group full of creepy old guys.
Honestly these laws are a groomers dream, keeping kids naive and then funnelling them in to poorly moderated or purposely immoral porn sharing communities creates actual dangers which aren’t present when a teenager sees some videos from the front page of pornhub.
What we actually need to do it have real conversations about things
For that to happen people would have to agree with the basic fact that “teenagers wanting to watch porn is normal”, which generally doesn’t go well. But ultimately it’s such a touchy topic that the people honestly wishing to protect their children cannot even do it effectively. Some don’t know how to handle it, many just ignore the matter altogether.
Then we end up with these moral panic-driven measures that at best help no one, or, more cynically, enable the erosion of people’s rights and unjustified persecution.
I love how this “sticking it to big tech” is also funded by big tech. The general goal of someone like Facebook with this legislation is pass a bunch of rules that only large companies like them can comply with, and watch mastodon instances and other attempts to detrown them end in FBI raids and more regulations.
Not to mention none of this will actually protect children. When I was 14 I told an adult online about my life and they helped me make it through some rougher periods until I got to 18. I know the internet is highly imperfect but I think gate keeping kids out of it will just lead to more underground abuse and abuse that they don’t find was abuse until they are adults.
Exactly, they don’t view children as people, they view them as objects and extensions of their parents/guardians.
There is no Porn Big Tech big enough to be able to afford this legislation. From the article:
As recently as May, only a quarter of people trying to access Ford’s site even clicked the link to verify their age and only 9 percent of those users completed the process. Ford said it costs his company around $1.50 per person to verify their age, and there’s no promise that those who follow through will buy anything. Pornhub’s response has been far more aggressive, blocking all traffic from some of these restrictive states rather than paying the extra cost.
Remember it is part of the GOP’s published plan for 2024 and beyond to ban pornography.
