Comment by knorker
1 day ago
What I hate most about this latest push is that people in their 30s are trying to convince us all that blocking children's access to porn and such is the issue. As if most people don't agree with that in the abstract.
Not only people in their 30s, but it's who I see making a fuss about it. Presumably because they are now parents of children newly reaching this age.
They are completely ignoring that they are entering a debate that's been going on for longer than they have been alive, and are just arguing from a source of "common sense" gut feelings. They are literally a third of a century behind on this issue, but it doesn't stop them talking about it.
They are incompetent on this issue (nothing bad about that. I'm incompetent in most things), but they are also stupid because they don't let that incompetence stop them.
They are too incompetent to understand that they just did the equivalent of entering a room full of mathematicians with a collective thousands of years of math knowledge, and saying "how about just making 2+2=5? You could make 2+2=4, so you smart people should be able to do it". How do you even start with someone this ignorant? They don't even understand what math is.
"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" — "I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
UK Online Safety Act has a much bigger scope than porn.
In fact you've picked probably the least offensive, which is not to say uncontroversial, part of the law to argue with. Its illegal to distribute porn to minors just like its illegal to let underage people gamble on your poker app.
Yet people in factor of age verification laws for porn still have concerns with this because it's just a totally open-ended backdoor into content moderation across the internet.
"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me." -1984
I wish I could agree with you, but this is not how things work. My experience says that if there's enough people wishing for 2+2 to equal 5, that will become the socially accepted standard, and the whole society will get organized around 2+2=5. Will it be less efficient? Yes. Will people care? No.