Olives @olives@qoto.org

Sometimes, there is a "report" which allegedly supports someone's point, but there won't be a link to it, so I will have to figure out what that is about and track it down to discover that it is again cherry picked or exaggerated.

There is also the problem where something which I debunked like five months ago will be carried from person to person where it might suddenly seem like a new point, but when you dig into it, it turns out it isn't.

If my AI takes aren't satisfying enough, they kind of should do though, it is because each month, there has been someone talking about how the "situation has changed", and then, you read a bunch of documents and it turns out it practically hasn't. My time is limited.

If you are really sure it has, in some way in which it really hasn't before, I might take a look at it but I'm done spending days reading things for now to figure out that someone is exaggerating.

Commit a crime involving malware and get arrested. Mundane.

Commit a crime involving malware where writing the code might have been assisted by "AI" (it's not known to be reliable) and get arrested. Big AI crackdown! We are showing AI! The worst confirmed!

"Twitter and Reddit are kept on app stores purely because of revenue"

This is paraphrased. Julie's take here is really quite something. Could it be that if you arbitrarily remove very popular apps, it could create huge problems? If anything, it would be far more scandalous, if they were arbitrarily removing apps, particularly ones from competing companies. #auspol

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/30/texas-republicans-vote-death-penalty-abortion-providers
"#Texas Republicans are open to applying the death penalty to abortion providers, a new proposal from the state party indicates.

Over the weekend, during the Texas GOP convention, Republican delegates voted on a party platform for 2024 that proclaims “abortion is not healthcare, it is homicide” and suggests striking a state law that protects abortion providers from being charged with homicide. In Texas, capital murder is punishable by the death penalty. Killing a child under the age of 15 can qualify as capital murder, the most severe form of homicide."
#HumanRights

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/may/30/drones-tracking-released-immigration-detention-detainees-andrew-giles
"The government is using drones to track people released from detention"

"“There is so much being done for this cohort: spot checks, random house checks, as well as the use of drones that I just touched on.”"

"In Senate estimates on Wednesday, Australian Border Force officials revealed that 76 of the 153 people released are subject to electronic monitoring and 68 are subject to curfews, which are generally from 10pm to 6am."
Even if it is a murderer, isn't this really excessive?
#auspol #privacy

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-69055945
"Sara needed some chocolate - she had had one of those days - so wandered into a Home Bargains store.

"Within less than a minute, I'm approached by a store worker who comes up to me and says, 'You're a thief, you need to leave the store'."

Sara - who wants to remain anonymous - was wrongly accused after being flagged by a facial-recognition system called #Facewatch.

She says after her bag was searched she was led out of the shop, and told she was banned from all stores using the technology."
#privacy #FaceRecognition #ukpol

https://edri.org/our-work/la-quadrature-du-net-takes-legal-action-against-the-french-governments-censorship-of-tiktok-in-new-caledonia/
"Through an emergency proceeding (reféré-liberté) filed last week, La Quadrature du Net asked the Conseil d’État (Council of State) to suspend French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal’s decision to block the #TikTok platform in #NewCaledonia."
#France #FreeSpeech

https://edri.org/our-work/be-scanned-or-get-banned/
"In the latest in a string of alarming developments, the Belgian government has proposed a new supposed ‘solution’ to the #ChatControl (Child Sexual Abuse Regulation) deadlock in the Council. Providers of private communications services must ask people to consent to faulty AI-based scanning of their private chats, they suggest – or be banned from sharing images, videos and URLs!"
#privacy

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/05/alaska-supreme-court-takes-aerial-surveillances-threat-privacy-seriously-other
"In March, the #Alaska Supreme Court held in State v. McKelvey that the Alaska Constitution required law enforcement to obtain a warrant before photographing a private backyard from an aircraft. In this case, the police took photographs of Mr. McKelvey’s property, including the constitutionally protected curtilage area, from a small aircraft using a zoom lens."
#privacy #FourthAmendment

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/05/30/asia-pacific/society/entrepreneur-south-korea-porn/ Entrepreneur fighting to produce porn in #SouthKorea. I wish him luck. #FreeSpeech

I think that when it comes to taboos, Dr. Lehmiller recognizes that using "fetishism" as a category is less stigmatizing and implies less than going for that *other thing* per convention.

If you've been following my content for a while, you will probably have already seen these but I prefer to focus on other things.

I thought of adding more to the additional section but I'll just leave it at adding a few freaky fantasies are common links.

We noticed #AI related matters can be a spot to peddle anti-porn pseudo-science. For the past half year or so, I've kept an eye on some discourse. Generally speaking, I don't deal in individual arguments, I deal in general rules. I'm not commenting on copyright, privacy, or anything else here, including the possibility someone might clone Sam's blog. If that's your problem, it's going to do fuck all about that.

Rather than spend much of my time conjuring up lengthy takes, I'll refer to a copy of my new porn science post (more after that quote):

Despite the scant / non-existent evidence for porn being such a bogeyman, it keeps getting cast as a scapegoat which is quite frustrating, so I am going to have to go over this... Again.

Even if online porn "might" be "problematic" to someone out there, it would not be anywhere remotely near proportionate to engage in censorship (or privacy intrusive measures, which among other things might pose a security risk), especially as it can be free expression to someone, and expression which someone might casually share as part of their more general interaction / engagement with others.

Sometimes, restrictions can lead to services becoming inaccessible entirely, rather than simply limiting them to people over a particular age.

A typical recommendation is sex education (perhaps, teach someone about respecting others boundaries?), not censorship (which is harmful in it's own ways). I don't mean criticizing someone for telling an offensive joke.

The science isn't really showing porn is this awful thing:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224499.2015.1023427
https://psyarxiv.com/ehqgv/
Two studies showing porn is not associated with sexism. One carried out by German scientists, another carried out by Canadians.

https://qoto.org/@olives/110462274531891870
American scientists carried out a meta analysis of 59 studies. They found porn isn't associated with crime. A meta analysis is a study where someone studies studies.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31432547/
Nor does it necessarily seem this is the case among adolescents (the meta analysis also points to that). Here, the minors who used more porn engaged in less sexual aggression.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-sex/201601/evidence-mounts-more-porn-less-sexual-assault
https://qoto.org/@olives/110400288665794817
There are even studies (across the United States, Japan, Finland, and more) showing that porn is associated with less crime, even among criminals.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31042055/
While an older Dutch study showed there might be worse levels of "sexual satisfaction" among adolescents using porn, a Croatian lab failed to replicate that.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0747563222001637
This is a meta analysis on sexualization in video games. It finds that studies tend to pick cut-offs where it's difficult to distinguish signal from noise. This increases the number of false positives.

There are also results which contradict the theory of sexualization being harmful. In the end, it fails to find a link between this and sexism, and this and mental well-being.

I'm also usually sceptical of apparent links, as the "scientific pile on effect" (as one described it) drives people to go looking for "links" between porn and "something bad" however tenuous it might be, or methodologically flawed an approach it might be (and later, that something is debunked, or the "link" is a phantom due to methodological limitations).

I could add it doesn't matter if they're "child-like" or "fictional children", (this is far, far more likely to hit someone good than someone bad who don't need it, and a bad actor could still do bad things)*. This necessarily excludes involvement of abuse or invasions of privacy. If it were actual real children, I'd oppose that on ethical grounds (though, I still wouldn't want to burn down the Internet / sites, because of unwanted bad actors). This is covered above but it is also kind of common internet sense.

While I'm not making a point about anything in particular, to inoculate you against potential problematic arguments, it's worth mentioning the basic precept that correlation does not imply causation.

Let's use ice cream as an example. Everyone loves ice cream, right? Well, I like ice cream. This also happens to be used as a classic example by others for this sort of thing.

Anyway, ice cream is correlated with crime. No one would say ice cream causes people to go out and commit crimes though. Just because there is a "correlation" doesn't mean it is meaningful. And that's not the only way in which correlation might not imply causation. For instance, warm weather is a far more compelling explanation for this phenomena. That might come in useful somewhere...

Here's a couple which were added for auspol:

https://reason.com/2015/07/23/despite-all-the-panic-millennial-teens-h/ U.S. data shows teens are having less sex with each other (in a world with more porn).

Misapprehensions about porn can be more about expressions of sexual orientations than porn. In fact, we've seen an Australian news outlet specifically singling out "anal sex" as a negative thing not that long ago, who would that disproportionately impact? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29702013/ Also, moralizing can be harmful (and ineffective).

Typically, responsibility is put on individuals to behave in a manner that is reasonable to them, instead of looking for a scapegoat whenever someone behaves in a manner which could be argued to be negative. This isn't to discount external factors (i.e. socioeconomic ones) entirely but there isn't always something sensible which can be done. People live their own lives.

We might also want to look at how alcohol is handled. We tend to look at this through the lens of personal responsibly, that someone is reasonable for consuming it responsibly, and not behaving inappropriately. Now, alcohol is not the same thing as porn, it is an actual substance, not some pixels on the screen. It further illustrates though how strange and unusual the idea of censorship here is.

Quite a few things which might get blamed on "the porn" are actually general mental health issues which could be dealt with more normally, and crucially, without conflating it with porn (which might even detract from dealing with someone's actual issues).

In fact, online censorship has increased in quite a few ways over the past few years and it doesn't appear to be any sort of panacea. It has, however, created a number of harms in it's own right, including even murder by practically forcing some sex workers to work with more dangerous clients. It also provides a space for abusive bigots to dwell in.

An addendum (from another post which might be useful to add useful context, we won't delve too deeply into this section):

An additional bit on why "porn censorship" (perhaps, even some themes) is bad.

Some points about censoring fictional content there (censorship is a bad idea):

It might fuel someone's persecution complex, especially in the context of *. The idea of a dangerous world where people are out to get them. Feeds anxiety, alienation. It's happened a fair bit. It doesn't seem to do anything positive.

Someone might be more inclined to see someone as an idiot or crazy (that's not wrong, lol). In any case, it poisons the well as someone is not seen to be credible or competent in these matters at all. Promoting distrust doesn't seem like a positive outcome.

It violates someone's free expression. People have these things called rights, that's important. This point comes from the original post, I'm aware I've covered this here more generally, still there may be value in reaffirming it.

Bad people don't need it. They could still do bad things. Good people are who'd suffer.

It violates the Constitution. Multiple constitutions.

Punishing someone because they resemble someone unpleasant isn't good. Also, due process still applies, in any case...

Can be a coping mechanism.

End quote of new porn science post.

Now, I need a drink. Okay, I'm kidding there. But, really, I don't have time for this or the patience. It's not even a new argument. It's the same argument. A tired one. Why did I put this after? When building a building, you require a foundation.

If you've been following my posts for any length of time, you already know I have more to say than that :)

"There is also a bit of appeal to the stigmatizing and pseudo-scientific concept of "deviance". It's a lazy approach where someone tries to conflate a bunch of random sexual phenomena in a vain attempt to try to demonize it all. It's an attempt to remove nuance from complex discussions."

For instance, I've specifically criticized that. As Dr. Lehmiller points out(1,2,3), dark fantasies are actually pretty common and not even abnormal. Even if they weren't, it would still be lazy and harmful to stigmatize them on that basis.

As a rule of thumb, if a take feels like it's gone down the lanes of QAnon, focusing overly or exclusively on wicked people as if no one else exists in the world. It probably is.

1 https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-myths-sex/202003/why-are-rape-fantasies-so-common Why Are "Rape Fantasies" So Common?

2 https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-myths-of-sex/202212/why-animated-porn-is-so-popular Why Animated Porn Is So Popular

3 https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-myths-sex/201911/our-7-most-common-sexual-fantasies Our 7 Most Common Sexual Fantasies

I see someone from Finland complaining about the new government. Appears to be more right wing.

That's kind of a shame, it's not everyday you see a Prime Minister who likes to party.

Did you know there are a couple of "think of the children" groups which will define teens sharing porn with each other as "abuse"? Keep an eye on those definitions.

One appears to be from India. The other from the U.K. and run by a former cop.

I think it's interesting to think about all the little ways in which they nudge things though to get particular figures.

Maybe, this example is less interesting right now, but maybe something similar might crop up in a different context.

Theoretically, that is supposed to be an issue for Jeremy to deal with. These kinds of activists aren't known to be truthful.

I'll comment on it, if it intersects with something more relevant to me.

We've always known that "think of the children" people are known to bend the truth though. A notorious example being wildly inflated figures on sex trafficking which some attribute as a driver for laws against prostitution.

It would also be argued that these laws actually make people less safe.