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this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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Some confused arguments reveal confused people. Some terrible arguments reveal terrible people. For example: I don't give two fucks what Nazis think. Life's too short to wonder which subjects they're not facile bastards about.
If someone's motivation for making certain JPEGs hyper-illegal is "they're icky" - they've lost benefit of the doubt. Because of their decisions, I no longer grant them that courtesy.
Demanding pointless censorship earns my dislike.
Equating art with violence earns my distrust.
Perhaps. But pretty much everyone has a stupid take on something.
There's obviously a limit there, but most people can be reasoned with. So instead of jumping to a conclusion, attempt a dialogue first until they prove that they can't be reasoned with. This is especially true on SM where, even if you can't convince the person you're talking with, you may just convince the next person to come along.
Telling someone why they're a stupid bastard for the sake of other people is not exactly a contradiction. You know what doesn't do observers any good? "Debating" complete garbage, in a way that lends it respect and legitimacy. Sometimes you just need to call bullshit.
Some bullshit is so blatant that it's a black mark against the bullshitter.
Sure, and I don't think that's the case here. If someone is literally arguing that a certain race should be exterminated that's one thing (report, down vote, block, and move on), but someone arguing that lolicon is just as bad as CP is something completely different entirely.
I'm just arguing that it's generally better to have the conversation than to completely shut them out. I really hate cancel culture, so I will always call out anything that seems similar. I believe in letting people explain themselves, to an extent, and my limit is if they're actively promoting real harm to actual people (e.g. encouraging violence against some group).
Someone arguing child rape is only as bad as drawing Bart Simpson naked is some kind of fucked up.
As other subthreads should thoroughly demonstrate - I don't have to respect someone, to call them out. A position you recently endorsed. The end of polite and civil discussion between equals doesn't mean the yelling has stopped.
I'm not saying you shouldn't call them out, in fact I'm 100% in favor of calling out BS. What I'm saying is to not shut down the conversation if the other side is willing to explain themselves or open to learning more.
One thing I absolutely loved about Reddit was joining communities where I was a minority and having a good faith discussion with someone I wasn't ideologically aligned with. A lot of times I got completely shut down, but sometimes I had really good discussions and better understood the other side's perspective.
So all I'm saying is you (and everyone here honestly) should seek to enable that kind of discussion instead of just stopping at the first sign of disagreement. Someone saying lolicon is as harmful as CP is probably just misinformed.
I have yet to see that, because I make a solid effort to have polite and civil discussion and I usually get it reciprocated.
If you're aggressive, you'll get aggressiveness back, but if you're inquisitive and polite, you'll likely get the same in return. Some people can't be reasoned with, but I have found that many are open to hearing other perspectives, provided I go out of my way to be polite.
The guy here saying CSAM and drawings are the same keeps insisting he's not saying that and then immediately saying it again. I'm still here calling him a stupid bastard. As often as he needs to hear it. Again: if you're worried about the thread stopping, I am not your concern. But I'm not about to give dolts like that some undue fair shake, after the fifth time they sneer "reading comprehension!" in response to rubbing their nose in the inescapable meaning of the words they keep saying.
Sometimes you get assholes no matter what you say.
That's not why I value blunt honesty, in some contexts, but it's a counter to the most common criticism of blunt honesty. Bending over backwards to appease unreasonable people is worse to do and worse to read than someone barging in to accurately and lucidly call bullshit.
I'm responding to this comment you made earlier ITT, emphasis mine:
It's quite an extreme position to me to completely shut someone out because they hold a relatively popular opinion (e.g. lolicon and CP are treated under the same federal statute in the US). You constructed a strawman (they didn't say they were equivalent), and then you jumped to saying you don't care about their opinion about anything because of it. That's ridiculous and unnecessarily inflammatory.
I'm not saying you should try to appease everyone, just that you should consider toning things down a bit and inquire instead of accuse. If we want a polite and civil discourse, everyone needs to make an effort. I certainly try, and I respectfully ask that you do the same.
What you're asking for is what I'm very obviously doing, here. Again: "shutting someone out" does not mean the talking stops. I am almost pathologically inclined to continue bickering with someone, for the sake of a potential audience.
This ding-dong's false equivalence is equally obvious. They've contradicted their contrary insistence within the same sentence as some of those insistences. Most recently they've blamed it on the laws where this study took place. Last I checked... Stanford is in California. American laws do not say diddly fuck about drawings of Bart Simpson's dick. There's public-facing sites where you could find one in a heartbeat. The FBI is not out a-hunting them. Their legal troubles will mostly come from the Walt Disney Corporation.
Not that any country's laws could possibly make child... sexual abuse... materials... somehow include computer renderings of fictional characters.
Why is that the highest goal?
The creeping demand for "civility" above all else is a detriment to conversational honesty. That doesn't mean anything-goes. Screaming escalations and blatant trolling are not the same thing as identifying bullshit and saying 'that's bullshit.' Saying so is not polite or civil, but surely it's important. Rules saying otherwise have been a gift to bullshitters. Moderation never comes down hard and fast enough on their fallacies, abuse, and manipulation, compared to how mods pounce on direct call-outs. Even in language and tone that would scarcely raise eyebrows face-to-face. As if 'do you still beat your wife' is ambiguous, but 'hey, get bent' is inexcusable.
Long ago and far away, the point of reference was a cocktail party.
Most forums are not debate clubs, or kindergartens, or any other equivalent scenario where a quiet 'what are you fucking talking about' would get someone ejected. They're indoor-voice banter. Constructive, ideally, and sober enough to side with well-spoken rationale over ingroup posturing... but somewhere that 'here's why you're wrong, jackass' will be judged on 'why' more than on 'jackass.'
And sometimes the person you're talking to is obviously drunk or stupid or both, but you can keep calmly telling them how they're wrong about everything that comes out of their mouth. Debate is not what's happening. Civility won't help. But you can keep it reasonable, and frankly, that's better.
It's illegal if it's deemed to be "obscene.". See (a)(3)(B), emphasis mine:
I'm not sure if a cartoon dick pic would be enough, but it's not far off.
Here's a Wikipedia article about the Protect Act that created this law, and it has links to relevant case law if you want to review it.
I never claimed that. I merely said we should push for civility first, as in give people the benefit of the doubt. Or in other words, let them make a fool of themselves instead of jumping at the opportunity to try to "cancel" someone.
That's all I'm asking for. I obviously can't control how you choose to use your speech, but I can respectfully point out when I think you or anyone else has gone a bit too far.
There are plainly websites where Simpsons porn is openly available. If it was as illegal as actual images of child abuse, I cannot imagine where you think they're hosted. Secret wizards on the backside of the moon would still get raided by the FBI. In practice, that law's inclusion of drawings is unenforceable nonsense, because - as I keep telling the idiot who I assure you I am still bickering with - drawings are not children.
Child rape is different from drawings.
Child rape is worse than drawings.
Any argument to the contrary, on any basis, no matter how dry, is kinda fucked up. Saying so, to him or to you, doesn't mean I've engaged in some campaign to silence him, or prevent others from considering his position. It means I've judged his words on their merit and I expect he's just an idiot.
I am not joking when I say this person has contradicted their own hair-splitting within one sentence. They will outright sneer as if I have imagined all claims of equivalence... in the same comment as insisting two wildly different problems are by-definition the same thing. Dude legitimately failed at argumentum ad nuh-uh. And I spotted this trajectory from the outset. Unless you feel I've tricked him into adopting this position, it was always right there in his mind, and that was in evidence.
At this point I'm legitimately worried about that guy failing Piaget metrics. Whatever diplomacy you want me to extend to people by default, it has been spent.
Just because the federal authorities don't aggressively enforce a law doesn't make it legal. Look at marijuana legislation, the federal government could shut down dispensaries in various states, but it chooses not to. Yet you can still be prosecuted for possession and distribution in those states.
So it's one of those limbo areas where the federal government has decided not to strictly enforce the law. But the law still exists.
As for the person you replied to, I'm merely pointing out how early in the thread you jumped to conclusions. Maybe you were right about them in this scenario (I didn't check the rest of the thread after posting), but you could easily have been wrong. I really like this quote:
Let them prove themselves one way or another.
They had.