"If it’s a 10-item list, it can only include so many things."
So narrow-minded. You need to liberate your agenda to become truly transformational.
You are still trying to appeal to the Democrats' traditional base, namely base ten. Granted, in base ten, a 10-item list can include only ten items. But why not hexidecimal? Why not sexigesimal! A 10-item list can include sixty items!
Once you have liberated your mind, you'll see that a 10-item list can include as many things as you like.
But by all means, eschew the traditional binary. A 10-item list with only two items is never going to win elections.
Matt is erasing the lived experience of those of us that spend way too much time in the corporate world, where 10-item lists with more than 10 items are the norm.
I'm sure #4 is popular, but you can take my credit card travel rewards from my cold dead hands.
As for #10, when the inevitable security leak happens and people are able to see who's viewing Internet porn, I wonder if some women would be surprised that that list includes literally every single man. (Researchers in the UK tried to study the effects of porn consumption but had to abandon things when they literally couldn't find a control group.)
Right, the issue with #10 is not that it’s bad on the merits, but that in today’s technological and political climate this amounts to building a database of people’s identifying information alongside exactly what porn they’re watching. We don’t really have a good way of proving age online without handing over a copy of your ID, which contains a lot more information than just that.
In order to create an account on Epic, Sony, Nintendo, etc. for my kids, I had to 'prove' that I was over 18 by doing something that is ostensibly only possible for someone over 18, for example, a one-cent charge to a credit card. I believe the same is true of anyone creating such an account, i.e., my kids couldn't have just lied about their age and created an account.
I'm not saying that is a perfect solution, but it does show that in a space where parents are (rightly) concerned about their children being exposed to strangers online, companies come up with not-so-intrusive, clever-ish ways of proving age without handing over ID or creating a national registry.
#10 is a good idea politically, but it becomes unworkable if you measure its success as all-or-nothing because you'd have to solve piracy first. If implemented, I could imagine a lot of parents (like myself) would be happy to see some positive, bipartisan action, as would a lot of social/religious conservatives who like the idea of banning things they find morally repugnant. It's really hard to imagine, however, a huge constituency willing to protest openly that it's a little more difficult for them to surf porn on the john.
Exactly. A second benefit of the reform Matt is proposing (although not one that I'd trumpet loudly to the religious conservatives) is that forcing pornography behind paywalls could help mitigate some of the worst and most exploitative practices in the industry. Jon Ronson did a mini-podcast series in 2017 on the effects of 'free porn' on the industry, which were predictably terrible: https://www.engadget.com/2018-07-17-the-butterfly-effect-audible-irl.html
In a similar vein, Bari Weiss interviewed a woman who talked about the other side of that issue, where she has built a lucrative career on OnlyFans by building a brand of sorts. I was shocked by how much money one can make charging for what is basically a digital nudie booth. It seems like a much healthier model than PornHub (which I gather was the focus on Ron Jonson's podcast) and it automatically excludes a lot of teenagers because they're typically broke and don't have access to credit cards... or at least cards that their parents can't audit.
How do you do that when so many porn companies could just easily be based in a different country. Sure you could put a block on individual sites nationwide, but with VPN, it would be useless.
The existence of VPN and torrenting hasn't put much of a dent in the ability of American media companies to command huge premiums (and market share) for cable television and streaming services. I think in practice, what we see is that most people would rather pay a small fee every month for something that's legal, easy to use, and feels more ethical and safe.
VPNs don't really make media free, they just allow you to get past global walls. E.G. they fool your computer into thinking you're in the U.K. so that the Netflix account you pay for will give you access to British exclusive content they have for that market. As for torrenting, yeah, people would generally rather pay of a streaming service than go though that hassle but that may not be the case with pornography companies, which some people would rather not give their credit card info to.
I don’t have a problem with picking the low hanging fruit and if that’s all the law is written to accomplish I think that’s fine.
I think I’m quite suspicious about the language being narrowly tailored enough to only do that and make a big difference though. I feel like you can either have enforcement with lots of places for collateral damage or you end up making people use relatively easy work arounds.
That's perhaps the point. Its like in the 80s when Tipper Gore held those hearings on effects of music on today's youth. The hearings were farcical to say the least (there's a good "You're Wrong About" podcast about this that showed how the hearings were in part about the Music industry's lobbying efforts against blank tapes. But I digress).
Slapping warning labels on music basically made no difference whatsoever. In fact, it was a probably a net positive branding mechanism considering artists target audience were kids trying to rebel against their parents.
My point is, some sort of similar "ineffective" policy targeting adult websites could serve the same purpose. Actual effects of the policy are negligible, but it's a signal to culturally conservative voters that you're not totally in thrall to far left values.
It's silly, I know. But all you have to do is look at the last guy in charge to see that blustering about various policies but not actually doing anything substantial can be effective politically.
I think this is one of those you need to see the language in the bill things though. Like I could see it being written in a super broad way that made all kinds of things illegal or a narrow way so it was more of a messaging thing.
I mean the last time they tried something I Like this Craig’s list couldn’t have personals anymore. I mean the history of regulations is full of unintended consequences.
I remember reading about how Rhode Island legalized prostitution by accident. But actually served as an example of how legalization could work. But of course it was promptly repealed.
A one-cent charge to your credit card gives the credit card companies a database of who is looking at porn. Any company asking for a one cent charge is actually doing it to reduce friction for your future payments - they often say it’s for age verification to get people to agree, but there’s no such requirement for games.
Credit card companies already know about every purchase you make with a credit card; the OP was worried about a database leaking and others were worried about having to hand over ID and/or the porn sites keeping records (that could also be leaked). I am just pointing out that there are ways of providing reasonable evidence that you are an adult without handing over all of your personal information to a porn site.
As for the game sites, they voluntarily enforce age restrictions to avoid (more) regulation and legislation. They offer other means (that I forget at the moment) that do not involve credit card transactions, that is just the one I picked so it's the one I remember. I watch my kids interactions over their shoulders and games like Roblox and Fortnite really do appear to be keeping the kids shielded from random strangers; they also offer a whole host of parental controls that certainly cost them to develop and maintain. I'm not buying the notion that they are just scamming me for my credit card info.
Maybe just have the site post a question like "who sang 'Billie Jean'?" and give the visitor five seconds to answer so they can't run to ask their big brother.
I found this sub-thread entertaining - but I am 37. I think we need to remind ourselves that people who turn 18 today are younger than Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
I don't know who sang Billie Jean, and I'm 40 years old. Your idea would be pretty unfair toward, say, people who immigrated to the U.S. as adults and who don't have a good knowledge of American pop culture references.
My federal law would have these sites post three questions in succession. If you fail to answer any of the three, then you're locked out of the site for the next 24 hours.
It won't be a perfect solution, but it preserves anonymity and *mostly* cuts out under 18 year olds. And if it unfairly locks someone out, well, there's no sacred right to browse porn sites.
Now I'm picturing recent immigrants compiling study guides of common American pop culture references, so that they have the knowledge to be admitted to their favorite adult website :)
American pop culture? Maybe! But I pity the 10 year old hoping to see porn who has to answer the question of "what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?"
(The only valid response, of course, being, "what do you mean, an African or a European swallow?")
What if we did it the other way around, as an opt-in system? Browsers can tell websites “I’m a minor” and then if the websites show restricted content to them, they are on the hook for it. It would be super easy to check if a website was compliant. And I think Google and Apple would be happy to build that feature into Android and iOS and make it hard to circumvent.
Currently, parental control systems work by maintaining a running list of all questionable content in the universe, which is a never-ending task. Shifting the burden onto the websites without making them solve the problem of who is a minor seems like a good middle ground.
And finally I think an opt-in system is more likely to pass first amendment scrutiny.
Even that doesn't do it. (source: I work in alcohol law, and a big part of the job is dealing with age verification and fake IDs). You can buy essentially perfect copies of American state drivers' license or ID cards online with modified age information on the card. Even if each porn company is forced to query a state database, that only works if each person's unique identifier in the database remains secure and private; there's also a huge market in forged or stolen credentials (Social Security numbers, Driver's License numbers, etc.)
Lots of men, me included, give zero shits about porn. But tbh, take the same tech we use to check ID for online booze and weed purchases, mandate them for porn, and while we’re at it, social media, aka intellectual porn.
Marie - since you were wondering why the conversation is heated... :)
"An acquaintance of mine is a teacher at an elementary school. One day, in the teacher’s lounge, several female teachers were talking about a student who was 10 or 11. This boy had brought pornography to class (presumably he had printed it off the Internet but I don’t recall).
The female teachers were absolutely convinced that he must have been molested. Ten years old was much too young for a boy to want to look at images of hardcore sex. They started to call social services to figure out who was molesting the boy and how they could get him out of his home.
The male teachers, who until this point had sat around silently, finally exploded. They did an impromptu survey of the age they all took an active interest in sex. The ages ranged from 8 to 12. Were any of them molested? They all said no. Puberty kicked in and it was off to the races.
The women didn’t believe it. This caused a lot of interesting conversations because they were absolutely dumbfounded that boys that young were thinking about sex. The men, on the other hand, basically called the women stupid. How could they not know that? It’s what consumed their entire childhood once their bodies “woke up”."
I believe it. To me it’s a matter of “is” vs “should be.” Should it be easy for a 10 year old boy to access hardcore porn online to print off? No, it should not.
Also, a study that can’t find a man who has NEVER seen porn doesn’t mean that everyone CARES about porn or even regularly accesses it.
Fair enough and I don't know how strict they were about the "never seen porn" thingy.
But one thing I wanted to ask - what do you think you're achieving by depriving male teenagers of access to porn? What's the reason(s) for your position? Or is it purely moralistic/religious or "aesthetic"?
Their brains are still developing and a lot of the hardcore stuff can really mess with you psychologically. Why can’t they use R-rated movies and Victorias Secret catalogs like guys did in the 90s? I also do not think minors should have legal access to booze, cigarettes, gambling or drugs. But, ultimately, this would not have been in my top 10. I’m mostly disturbed by how defensive the SB commentariat is about it.
You talk about depriving male teenagers of access to porn, but mention a 10-11 year old with porn at school in your earlier comment. Do you see an argument for keeping porn away from a 10 year old who wants to access it?
I personally would probably trade strict limits on under 14 access for looking the other way on 14+ but I imagine that would just alienate both sides.
The ferociousness comes not from the check itself- if it was still in a traditional store just show the ID would be enough. The problem comes online with storage. Effectively the proposal becomes “de-anonymize” online porn -which is much more provocative.
I can’t recall people being so upset about anything else on this blog. And after just having had the conversation about more diversity of identity being important here…
They were also pretty upset when Milan said that legalized gambling has bad effects. Certain subjects seem to trigger a libertarian response in certain readers.
I could make an argument against TikTok. It is giving a lot of useful info to the Chinese government. Trump wasn't wrong in wanting ByteDance to sell the US component.
Also - TikTok is wonderfully addictive and, just like porn or sales or compounding and interest rates in general, it wouldn't be a bad thing to explain to youngsters/teenagers the psychological mechanisms it is triggering...
Fair, but if you want the stuff for booze to improve, make porn gated behind the same thing. Porn companies are usually the pioneers for making tech more streamlined. I’m convinced porn is why we have YouTube.
but please remember, always : "Pornography Usage Increases With Religious Upbringing and Church Attendance" and "pornography consumption is most heavily concentrated in religious and conservative states".
They are only looking at the very small % of pornography -subscribers-.
People who are so dumb that they pay for porn.
I'd chalk this up to it being less acceptable to talk about porn in these states, and so a greater (though still small overall) % of the male populace doesn't know about the ubiquity of free porn.
Re: a possible leak, you think they don't know now! There's a reason the EU considers your IP address to be private data. They absolutely know who is looking at what. There's just no market for the data (because credit card companies don't like porn), so they aren't using it aggressively. But it's all right there in their logs. Porno ads could follow you around like mattress ads if there was market for it.
They absolutely do sell those data to 'brokers' (in the US) because it reveals demographic information that can be combined with other telemetry to target ads, etc. For example, there is a very high probability that an IP address that accesses porn sites comes from a household with at least one male. Combined with the time of day, amount of time spent, days of the week it is accessed, etc., a broker can sell it to Meta or Google or whomever, who combines it with IMEI or cookie data or whatever and serve ads for razors or ESPN subscriptions or whatever else.
Very true, although I think handing over something with your name or bank account information on it would "feel" less anonymous, even if it really isn't.
With that said, I'm not sure any of this would matter much politically. The modal man is not basing his vote on access to free porn; it's just a non-issue. And a man who did base his vote on that probably would be willing to put up with the minor annoyance/privacy invasion of an identity check, even if he didn't particularly like it.
But I think most adult men would just...watch less porn, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
That is... a very naïve set of statements. Pornhub gets more traffic per month than Netflix, and it doesn't get that traffic because people don't like it. The party that takes people's access to free and seemingly anonymous porn usage will in fact likely pay a price for it even if people don't necessarily tell pollsters about it specifically. It's something that would affect people's lives much more obviously than 90% of what Washington does.
It's not naive at all. I am well aware of the massive amount of traffic that Pornhub and other sites attract, and I am well aware of the massive number of people (a group that includes virtually all men, and I am a man) who watch porn on the internet.
My argument has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not people like porn. It's about whether people *value* porn. There is a difference between "thing you do because it is kind of enjoyable and easy" and "thing that you actually value." The vast majority of men like porn, it's true, but they like it in the same way that they like, I don't know, arguing about politics with strangers behind a screen. If MY suddenly instituted a new policy tomorrow where you need to pay an extra $400/year (beyond the base subscription) to access the comments section on Slow Boring, I almost certainly wouldn't do it, even though I *like* commenting here. Ditto for porn.
I do think it would be a strike against Dems for some people, but it would also be a boon for Dems for some people. My guess is that the group that thinks we should make a real effort to prevent kids from seeing porn and cares a substantial amount about that is bigger than the group that wants to maintain seamless porn access for themselves and cares a substantial amount about that (the "and" bit being very important there - parents care a lot about their kids!). And, as I said, the people that really value porn a lot might grumble, but ultimately they'd probably just register or pay some money or whatever and move on.
You say that as if there's some big campaign to limit porn access right now... there isn't. No one in power is even seriously proposing this, not even evangelicals Christians. There's some degree of "concern" about kids having access to porn but most people just see it as a fact of modern life and move on. The sentiment isn't even as strong as it was during the 70s when porn was still relatively hard to access. If there was a popular crusade against porn, then sure, maybe making some sort of compromise for political capital might be worth it but that's not the case at all.
Yes, I know. I was referring to a hypothetical scenario in which item #10 on Matt's agenda were an actual legislative priority, and the political considerations that would come into play in that hypothetical scenario. Which is the subject of many comments on this thread!
To be fair, you are correct that the odds of this happening are pretty much nil.
I assume most men do view porn and it does not bother me at all. What's surprised me in these conversations is how defensive men seem about it and how unwilling they are to accept inconvenience in accessing it.
With regard to security leaks, aren't there paid porn sites and things like OnlyFans that also have credit card information? Do they have security leaks all the time, and if so does anybody give a shit who's on the list? For just basic age verification you could even do a one time $0.01 credit card verification like R C described in another comment, and not store the card information.
I take it you've never been much of a consumer of porn? Things were much more difficult/annoying before streaming video came in. You were pretty much stuck with still images unless you were willing to give your credit card number to various websites that looked like fronts for the Russian Mafia and download a bunch of files you were pretty sure would give your computer viruses. Pornhub is mostly successful because it at least seems much safer and more anonymous and people do NOT want to go back to the old days.
Like, imagine you enjoyed streaming movies through Netflix and suddenly someone decided to pass a law that would force you to go back to getting your movies through cable TV and VHS all to supposedly help some kids you don't know and who will probably just get around the restriction anyway.
As to site security, look up what happened to the site Ashley Madison.
I actually do have first hand experience with both finding porn in the old days and with Pornhub, and I definitely agree that the modern sites are much better and safer than virus-laden websites or shady peer-to-peer files. If anything the success of Pornhub and xTube and whatever else seems like it could make it easier to implement a solution with the bigger trusted sites.
The analogy seems more like if Netflix decided to make me enter a passcode or something before streaming an R-rated movie to make sure it wasn't a minor accessing my profile, and that would be a little annoying but not that big of a deal.
I also don't think a PornHub leak would be as salacious as Ashley Madision, given that the latter was focused on enabling actual real world infidelity.
I'm willing to believe that the technical and privacy challenges are too difficult to implement a workable solution. I just don't get the strong resistance of porn consumers to even consider possible regulation.
Yeah having it be as difficult to access as tobacco seems fine.
Funny thing about Ashley Madison though, while there were plenty of real men on that site looking for sex with someone other than their partner, there were extremely few women. Weren't most of the female profiles bots?
The Ashley Madison leak seemed genuinely humiliating for those affected, since it revealed them as extremely gullible and also lacking enough game to just cheat on Tinder or whatever like a normal person.
You're kind of writing Bernie's and AOC's talking points for them there. "The people who oppose interest rate caps would prefer that poor people struggle against insurmountable financial odds and stay poor forever just so that they can get an upgrade on their international flight to the Maldives."
I hope people can understand that the alternative for poor people paying high interest rates is not paying low interest rates but receiving no credit at all. Maybe that's the goal, but let's be honest with our paternalism.
But yeah I also want to be able to go to the Maldives on points too.
> I hope people can understand that the alternative for poor people paying high interest rates is not paying low interest rates but receiving no credit at all
Research on payday loans suggests this is actually better.
1. As a welfare enhancing policy this makes sense because rates can get so bad that eventually only the financially illiterate take the deal.
2. And politically you can stick it to greedy banks by capping rates.
Yes, for every credit card use or payday loan that turned out well, there are dozens of cases where it turned into a massive financial black hole. I'd be more willing to allow them if bankruptcy was more accessible and easier, but instead we've made that harder to access.
I think Matt specifically addresses that in the post. But sure, the folks who understand that but agree with the policy proposal say it's still a better outcome.
I don't see why the credit card company wouldn't be maximizing revenue per customer. You are getting flights to the Maldives because of vendor fees your vendors are paying. Poor people pay high interest rates to make up for the risk of extending them credit. It's not a cross-subsidy except to the extent the credit card company can't tell which kind of customer you are. But if you're travelling to the Maldives, the credit card company knows.
The consequence of capping interest rates will be that some current customers don't get credit cards, or have to pay fixed annual fees instead.
The other dynamic are the transaction fees. Everyone pays the fees today (not everyone carry’s a balance). Ostensively the fees are match the rewards. I wonder if lower interest just generally would mean higher fees.
There was one place (cant find the reference right now) they made a rule about merchant fees, and when it when into effect the credit card drastically reduced rewards. I suspect the people who are picking cards based on rewards are not the ones paying interest.
This is correct (I work in consumer banking— you’ve heard of my company, you probably have one of our cards. I’m also a woman, for what it’s worth). It depends on the corporate strategy to a certain extent, but generally the better rewards go to the higher FICO scores. If we could wave a magic wand, everyone would use their card all the time and always pay it off. We’d lose the interest but gain the interchange fee and wouldn’t have to write off a bunch of bad debt.
Why? There's absolutely no way to make a draconian porn ban that affected everything. But it's totally possible to increase the difficulty of finding porn.
For example, child porn is not widely available like regular porn. I assume it's out there on the dark web somewhere because people get arrested for it, but you don't stumble into it when you do a Google Image search, like regular porn. Even 4chan deletes child porn posts. Why? Because 4chan knows they'd be shut down if they ignored the anti-child porn laws.
If there were laws about regular porn, you'd still be able to find it pretty easily because there's huge demand for it, but it would be marginally harder. The most convenient way to get it for adults would be to just show proof of age instead of figuring how to join a private IRC group or whatever. Teen age boys would still want to look at porn, but they don't have much money, so the market wouldn't cater to them, it would cater to the people with money.
The primary thing that restricts child porn is not really the enforcement regime, which despite its many high-profile hits is still fairly paltry and weak.
What restricts child porn is the overwhelming degree of social sanction against the consumption of that material, a sanction so severe that it effectively amounts to social death for those who receive it. Registries are a policy tool that are on the merits almost useless but have the effect of amplifying and enabling this social sanction.
I personally believe this law idea is good, not because it's going to do much, but because it's time for us as a society to push back on the idea that it's totally normal and okay for "literally every man" to consume video porn, including the vast majority of teen boys. Obviously we don't want a social sanction on the level of CP, but we also don't want a reduction in demand nearly so drastic as that either.
I work in criminal defense, and I've worked a lot of child porn cases, and I can tell you child pornography is readily available through regular internet channels. We've never had a "dark web" case that I can think of.
Yes, and it seems like there are many people interpreting the primary goal of #10 to be no teenager ever finds porn. As a parent of an early tween I would be happy if I didn't have to worry as much about him or one of his friends accessing porn out of curiosity. Put it behind the internet equivalent of a brown paper wrapper.
child porn is *absolutely* widely available. yeah google is pretty good at hiding it, other search engines aren't always. and if you are looking for a search engine to find it, you will.
But there are presumably a lot of people who aren’t very motivated to find it who have been prevented from finding it. Same could be true for conventional porn.
Online poker is in no way as available to Americans now as it was in 2005. Do Americans still play online poker illegally? Yes, but many fewer play now.
But those sites already had to take payment in some form, which made them easier to regulate.
In fact, I believe it was the credit card companies that successfully applied pressure a couple years ago to the free porn sites to get them to delete about 80% of their content because it was unverified. Now all content comes from production companies that maintain legal records or amateurs who provide verification videos.
I can't imagine it's true that less people play poker online in the US in 2022 than 2005. And if it is true it's because poker was particularly popular in 2005, not because of internet regulation
The numbers fell off a cliff in 2006 with the passage of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Act and never came close to recovering. Poker didn't magically get much less popular in January of 2007.
Not to mention that if it did you could make a pretty convincing case that it did so precisely because the passage of UIGA meant that fewer people could easily access online poker and therefore lost interest in the game generally.
The World Series of Poker gets bigger every year, card rooms have expanded, poker streaming is booming. I don’t think it works to say poker was more popular in 2005 than today.
Credit card rewards are also paid for by increasing merchant fees, which is why a lot of merchants are now putting a surcharge on credit use. This seems very inefficient since cards are a lot more efficient/safer than cash generically so essentially it's the bloat of the rewards that is making merchants not want to accept them anymore. I like rewards too but abolishing them would be good.
Yeah, rewards are cool and all, but TBH, would give them up in a hot second if we could just do the transaction and lose the side hustle, and in exchange, lower transaction fees to as close to zero as possible. At the end of the day, it is an odd market distortion.
The rewards won't be abolished. Some merchants will charge more for cards because they are either dumb (don't understand the cost of handling cash) or can't negotiate a good deal with the credit card company. But you don't see Amazon doing this and, in fact, many vendors offer their own cards with even better benefits.
Whenever I see one of those cheapo businesses that get big mad about taking credit card transactions and charges a surcharge, I am always tempted to pay in pennies just to make a point.
The travel rewards are largely funded by the merchant fees, as evidenced by AmEx having both the most generous rewards (see 5x MR on Platinum airfare, 4.5x MR on Everyday Preferred groceries, etc.) and the lowest percentage of revenue being from interest (higher AFs and higher merchant fees). The folks who earn the travel rewards are, across issuers, more likely to always pay-in-full, which is the main reason no one has been able to dethrone the AmEx Platinum (Citi has already given up (Prestige is closed to new applicants and likely to see further benefit erosion) and Chase seems pretty unhappy with the Sapphire Reserve... Cap1 is nibbling but will likely end up in Citi/Chase land and the others are all basically staying away): the interest-dependent model doesn't work in that segment.
Why do you think the credit card company is taking a loss on you and making it up from lower-income borrowers? I think it's reasonable to assume the credit card company is also making money on your credit card use.
re: Credit Cards, I am not sure you lose the points in a scenario where you have interest caps. Corporate Cards have those programs, and most of those never see interest charges that go to consumers.
I think the list should be more focused on inflation and productivity. It's what people care about, and it's also I think relatively actionable. Matt has said this elsewhere: US policy has been dedicated to "job creation" for 20 years, and that is now getting really harmful. Tariffs, "buy American", union requirements, permitting, environmental review etc.
Real question, are you a parent of a child age 8 or older? Because if you were I think you would find the inclusion of real porn limits to be the most salient issue on this list, possibly tied with universal free school meals.
I’d much rather they do that by taking popular measures to unfuck the education system than implement a wee bit of the PRC’s real identification verification infrastructure online, thank you kindly.
I am much more concerned about my child’s experience in my city’s public school system in ten years’ time than her accessing porn online.
I understand that, but I think it’s also an objectively terrible idea and should be replaced by something like a national civics education standard that appeals to the mushy middle.
This seems… unrealistic. I think you believe this is more important than everything else and impute that as a major concern to other parents without any real supporting data.
I don’t believe there’s any evidence to suggest this is actually the case.
For example, I am much more confident in my ability to constrain my child from accessing porn than I am in, say, preventing her from being bullied in middle school.
I am also vastly more confident that I as a parent can play a constructive role in teaching her about sex and how to preserve her safety and fulfill her emotional and physical needs than that I can do the same regarding basic academic matters.
Put succinctly, I’m way more concerned about the quality of my area’s public schools than about whether she sees porn and I have to sit her down and explain its lack of realism to her.
I don't disagree that the quality of my child's school is more important, but it doesn't feel like something the federal government is going to solve AND it feels a lot harder to get a coalition to agree on what "quality public schools" means.
I mean, a federal “mushy middle” civics curriculum to rein in both DeSantis and my city’s woke-ass school board would be an immensely reassuring start, much more important than any of this.
I suppose any bill for a "mushy middle" civics curriculum would create some sort of panel of historians and leading civic individuals that would devise its contents, but something makes me think that Republicans would still seize on the debate over the curriculum's contents to try to embarrass Democrats. For one, it would be characterized by the extreme right fringe as "federal government brain washing" and interference in local education, a "federal power grab" of sorts. Secondly, conservatives would likely attack it for not being sufficiently patriotic about America and its history, even if it was pretty rah-rah-America-is-great--look at how they relentlessly attacked Obama on this front, despite his patriotic narrative about how great America's ideals are and how it has grown closer through time at living up to them. Third, the curriculum would unleash a lot of extremely toxic takes from leftists wanting to inject all sorts of 'critical' ideas into it--the left would also likely characterize the curriculum as brain washing, and would try to tar Dem politicians for supporting it. Wonder what Dems' allies in the teachers' unions would think about having to teach a new "federal mandate"... Just could imagine this being a giant mess.
I think a lot of parents wouldn’t be happy with a “mushy middle” plan except insofar as it prevents the other side from dictating to them, which I have to imagine would mean a lot to rural parents in NY or CA, or urban ones in TX or FL.
Yes! If you are a parent with kids number 10 is an issue. It’s also a serious issue for the left that when you post about it a thousand liberal people come after you claiming you are essentially Hitler and you are advocating some new holocaust. It’s just porn folks, it’s a suggestion of sensible regulation of a well known vice.
Liberals would rather concoct a fantasy nightmare about some privacy issue that seems like it comes from the deranged ramblings of one of those libertarian dudes who forced the census to start anonymizing information than admit that their primary issue is that they, personally, would rather not have to deal with any additional inconvenience when accessing porn.
I think that is part of it, but I don't want automatically to assume bad faith on the part of people making these arguments against regulation. I think there is a legitimate privacy and security concern. However, to not even want to approach a way to reform the system isn't going to be sustainable. My guess is that Republicans are going to massively overreach when they take congress but some of that overreach may not poll as poorly as liberals hope. If the Republicans are the only ones for regulation, then a lot of middle of the road folks will be like "Well they are overdoing it, but the left wants to practically hand a laptop loaded with furry porn to my 6 year old". That situation will be much worse for security and privacy because Republicans will use it as a tool of discrimination and marginalization against the groups they don't like as soon as they have the power.
"if you were I think you would find the inclusion of real porn limits to be the most salient issue on this list"
I'm sure that this is an issue of concern to parents --- just as violent video games were a concern to parents 15 years ago. They were so much of a concern, that Hillary Clinton campaigned to limit children's access to violent video games back in 2008 (and before). This was popular and common sense. Exposing kids to violence would of course make them more violent, right? There were academic studies that backed up this common sense too. Well, it turned out that common sense and academic studies got it wrong. Violent media (including video games) doesn't increase violence. If anything, it does the opposite [1,2] (both by Matthew Yglesias).
So, yeah, I'm sure that a lot of parents today are concerned that porn will harm their kid. And I'm sure that campaigning to limit access to porn is popular. I'd also bet dollars to donuts that porn is no more harmful to kids than violent video games. The academic studies that say otherwise won't replicate (psychology articles rarely do) --- just as the violent video game studies didn't replicate.
The most salient issue for parents should be an actual problem --- not a repackaged video game panic.
Most readers of this blog are rich enough to afford school meals and educated enough to know how to configure adult content filters, so they don't care about those.
I’m not a parent. What I meant is this seems like an issue you could easily legislate. Republicans wouldn’t oppose it. So its electoral value is likely to be limited.
If it's broadly popular and you could get republican support, doesn't that mean it's an even better idea to include in the list? You're trying to win over voters, so popular things are a good idea, and if you're saying something that even appeals to conservatives then you're more likely to persuade voters to support you. Not to mention that you create a bit of a bind for the opposition- either come out against it (which would be unpopular) or come out and say (GASP!) your opponent's idea is a good one that you support. All of these seem like good outcomes, and far better than the endless smashing our faces into walls advocating for unpopular ideas that have no hope of ever becoming law.
No. You want to push popular ideas your opponents oppose. If there'd broad agreement and you hold the White House and both chambers of Congress, you should just do it.
Having said that. I've been shocked by the amount of disagreement with Matt's porn proposal in this comments section. I thought it was weak because it was a no-brainer, but clearly that's not the case, so I stand corrected on that.
You're talking about what to do when you're already in power. The point of this exercise is to focus on what you should run on to get into office in the first place. There's a huge difference between "we have the votes to do this, so should we do it?" and "I'm hoping to get you to support me for office, so here's what I want to talk about".
Actionable, sure, but try running on a "don't buy American" or "environmental reviews are too costly" platform and see where that gets you.
The whole purpose of the exercise is to have good ideas that are also politically popular and feasible. There are better policy ideas out there, but they're less popular, more technocratic, less likely to successfully pass Congress, etc.. All the things you're talking about are things that need to be done quietly to avoid a public backlash, which makes them things you absolutely don't want to be loudly proclaiming your support for as a politician.
I agree with you that inflation should be a target but I’m having trouble coming up with policies that would do that. I’m all for killing the Jones act, but that’s going to piss off labor, and I’m not sure it’s worth it. Do you have other thoughts?
I feel like the Jones Act might actually be a viable target if only because as a share of the electorate the interests it's pissing off are, AIUI, vanishingly small. The countervailing narrative that "you're paying too much for everything for no reason and the U.S. doesn't even have a competitive merchant marine to show for it!" is a reasonable bread-and-butter sales pitch.
Force longshoremen's and dock workers' unions to accept automation at seaports, and force railroad unions to accept more automation on cargo rail. I know this is a very sacred cow for the Democratic Party, but it would actually have some noticeable effect on prices. American seaports, especially LA/Long Beach, are very inefficient compared European and Asian seaports, and that is reflected in the price of goods.
What are the odds that the democrats can do anything about inflation between now and November that would actually make a significant dent in inflation numbers? My amateur guess is roughly 100,000/1. If the focus is ONLY on inflation then the democrats are setting themselves up to debate solely on a losing issue for them. They absolutely want to campaign on doing something about inflation, but talking solely about a policy that makes you look terrible is not a good way to win an election. It would be like Giannis arguing that the MVP voting should be solely focused on free throw shooting percentage. The democrats need to try and steer the discussion towards subjects that they can make compelling appeals to voters on. One should be coming up with inflation messaging that deflects republican attacks. But they need to bring up other things after that deflection occurs or else we're going to see lots of republicans essentially saying "look at gas prices. Look at grocery prices. That's after the Dems have been in control for 2 years. On election day, look at those two things, and it will be clear who you should vote for." And they'll win easily if that's what the discussion is solely focused on.
Worse than that, it's not just 'between now and November', it's extremely difficult for Congress to have meaningful control of inflation in any case. Firstly, Congress does not control the Federal Reserve, who set their own decisions on whether they're more bothered about inflation or growth or unemployment or whatever.* Secondly, inflation is driven by many factors, many of which are beyond Congress's control. Congress cannot prevent failed grain harvests in Canada, cannot prevent the Ever Given from blocking the Suez Canal or Vladimir Putin from blockading Ukraine's Black Sea ports, cannot have any impact on China's zero covid policy and the closure of factories in Shanghai, and while they did have some control over pandemic stimulus measures, they also had no way to accurately predict the course of the pandemic or the speed with which red state governors and electorates would get tired of restrictions, or what proportions of covid relief would be necessary or wasted, would be spent on bills or new jetskis or on state tax cuts.
It's a commonplace to say that Presidents are given both too much credit and too much blame for the state of the economy, and it's no different for Congress. A Congressional 100% effort on reducing the effects of inflation might have some minor impact at the edges but it probably wouldn't be noticeable for the average voter who is paying no attention. There's not a 'reverse inflation' button that they're just perversely neglecting to press.
My * was meant to be a footnote that personally I dislike central bank independence and wish parties would end it, but I accept that opinion is outside the Overton Window for now.
"First trimester abortions and abortions with bona fide life or health of the mother reasons constitute the overwhelming majority of actual abortions" The other substantial sympathetic group of second and third trimester abortions is where the fetus has no or little chance of survival (or is likely to be massively disabled, like "in a coma for the rest of its life" disabled).
The case that particularly comes to mind is of a friend who had a 34-week abortion of an anencephalic fetus. For those with some Greek, that's not literally "no head", it's the absence of most of the brain and skull. It has enough brain for the minimal life-preserving requirements (maintaining heartbeat), though it requires a ventilator and to be fed through a tube. But it has no chance of long-term survival; a few weeks after birth is the most it can expect, and there is no ability to respond to stimulus. It's effectively born into a persistent vegetative state.
Anencephaly is normally diagnosed earlier, but they missed it for my friend and she ended up having a very late abortion of a fetus that had zero chance of developing into a baby. Could she have continued until birth? Sure, but why the heck should she?
I'd also want to look at making sure that women can afford early abortions. Even if that's just a government-guaranteed repayment plan so no-one ever has to save up for an abortion and so delay it.
Agree that exceptions are also required for fetuses that cannot survive outside the womb. Matt tweeted an example from Louisiana last week where a woman's water broke at 16 weeks and the pregnancy could no longer continue, and rather than have a sad but quick, humane abortion (which was what she initially chose), she had to go through hours-long labor and delivery of her doomed fetus. Heartbreaking.
Yeah, it was 20 years ago and I was a terrible friend to her at the time and, unsurprisingly, we drifted away after that. I like to think that I'm a better and more caring person now, and I do raise her story because I hope it will help someone else in that situation.
Agree that abortion is justified in these cases but they are exactly the edge cases that Matt points out as causing things to get tied up. We're talking about a federal law that stops states from prohibiting abortion in certain circumstances. These edge cases can be taken up at the state level. Will some states insist on Draconian laws that don't allow abortion in these cases? Sure but trying to prevent that makes the perfect the enemy of the good
If my choices are “protect first trimester open access and immediate threat to mothers life” or “nothing,” I choose the first. But if my choices are “argue to protect access in just the specific edge cases we mostly agree on” or “argue for open second and third trimester access bc of edge cases”, I’m going with the first.
The argument for the second is that there's very close to 100% overlap between those two sets (to first order, nobody carries a pregnancy for 30-weeks without intending to bring it to term) so enumerating edge cases or assessing them just introduces bureaucratic overheard and possibly-incomplete enumeration into what are almost definitionally already heartbreaking 'edge cases' for all involved. Thus there's not really any tangible gain for those who are amenable to option (1) in the first place but significant overhead and frictional losses relative to just adopting option (2).
The problem is that arguing for abortion on demand through the third trimester forces you to argue full-term fetuses aren’t human beings, which is pretty disgusting to most people. If you say “we only want to allow the cases that are basically compassionate euthanasia” you win back the moderates and you actually help people in really awful scenarios.
1) energy dominance: Matt’s plan plus air conditioning and heating subsidies for low income households during hot or cold months
2) housing abundance, use the commerce clause to impose Texas style land use policies on blue states. Villainize high income urbanites who prioritize their home values over affordability.
3) A national HOPE scholarship. In Georgia, college tuition is very cheap for students who maintain good grades and almost free for those with excellent grades. Make this national. Impose stiff taxes on college administrative costs to reduce bloat and DEI bullshit.
4) First trimester abortion on demand, guaranteed access when two doctors say there is a serious risk to the health of the mother.
5) Legal marijuana.
6) Health care abundance. Open borders for English speaking doctors and Spanish speaking doctors with bona fire job offers. Federally chartered medical schools. Better pay and working conditions for medical residents. You shouldn’t have to amputate your twenties to become a doctor. Drug prices pegged to Canadian levels.
7) Tax capital gains at the same rate as labor income and use the proceeds to fund child allowances.
8) More roads and bridges for stressed out commuters. Federal laws to prevent NIMBYS from litigating construction projects. Streamlined environmental impact reviews
9) Free contraceptives for anyone who wants them.
10) Humane prisons for low level offenders. Murderers, rapists and child molestors should go to to traditional prisons. Young offenders who stole stuff or got into a fight or sold drugs should go to something like a CCC camp where they can sleep in dorms, engage in healthy outdoor labor, and mix with the opposite gender on weekends as long as they avoid drugs and liquor and follow program rules. The purpose of these camps would be more to teach clean living than to impose pain. Those who break the rules go to traditional prisons.
Basically, I take successful red state programs and nationalize them, I offer young people cheaper college and legal pot, I offer women free contraceptives and early term abortions, and I go hard on material benefits for the 10th to 90th percentiles of the income distribution.
I think this is a great list and it personally demonstrates the value of list making to me. I think #8 is a terrible idea, because I'm an urban transit rider who drives only on vacation, and some of these others wouldn't be my top priorities, but they're really good, popular ideas and I'd feel comfortable advocating for them to a wide range of the population.
I could nitpick here and there, but overall I like your list better than MattY's and I think it would have a more positive impact on average Americans' lives. You out-Matted MattY! Kudos! I especially like your point #10.
Put it this way: If a wizard let me borrow his wand and wave it just once, and I had a choice to magically make either your #10 or MattY's #10 come true, I would pick yours.
I agree with Tabitha below that I don't really like your #8, because of induced demand. "If you build it, they will come" and your new road will be just as crowded as your old one was, now with extra CO2 emissions.
"Better pay and working conditions for medical residents" = as the wife of a former medical resident, I approve.
"Induced demand" is the idea that traffic expands to fill the available space. If you add an extra lane to a road, more people will drive there. I don't have exact references on hand, but multiple studies have show this. I don't know whether it applies to housing.
It's different for housing and cars. Everyone has to live somewhere, and once you move into a house/apartment/any kind of building, that building is going to stay in place regardless of how much or little time you spend in it.
With cars, you are much more free to choose what to do on a daily basis (of course, your choices are constrained by things like the necessity to get to work or school). Depending on your life circumstances, on any given day you can drive your car, carpool, work from home, take a taxi/Uber, take public transit, or ride your bicycle. The level of congestion on your local road is one of the factors that affect your choice. Wider road = less congestion = more likely to drive your car rather than carpool/WFH/take public transit.
If I'm driving more specifically because congestion is lower then I would stop driving more once congestion gets bad again and go back to carpool/WFH/public transit.
Love the HOPE scholarship idea. Not sure you can both increase doctors' pay AND peg health care prices to Canadian levels. (I'd love to pay Canadian rates but it will mean doctors get a big paycut -- which I'm fine with, I'm not a doctor)
He is just proposing better pay for residents which shouldn't be that expensive since it's a small number of years and they get paid like $50,000 in residency.
The open borders for English speaking and some Spanish speaking doctors would push down wages.
If Argentine and Mexican doctors were able to take jobs in Miami, it might become a hub for elective procedures, radiology, etc.. Thid would also encourage doctors in developing countries to brush up on their English and greatly increase their wages.
" Open borders for English speaking doctors and Spanish speaking doctors with bona fire job offers. "
And there would be new business opportunities for services trying to figure out the credentials and background check of international physicians, a process which takes months for already US employed physicians.
The biggest problem is what counts as porn is in the eye of the beholder - for example, on Reddit, there's lots of people who post themselves, of their own volition, for free, in various states of undress, doing everything from standing there to various sexual acts. No sob stories of being pressured, but people who just want to show themselves off.
Now, I know, yes, sure, stop the people from posting themselves having sex for free, OK, sure. The other problem is of course, Reddit for the most part doesn't post any porn. It links to various free sites that let you post videos and pictures. Those sites are pretty good at moving to domains where American law doesn't really apply to them, and I'm sure there are incentive-related reasons why even corporations who aren't pro-porn would want to make sure that Reddit isn't on the hook for every link submitted.
But, even getting past that, what's the difference between Olivia posting herself naked in her backyard and a statue of David with his willy hanging out, except time and subjective views of artistic skill? Is a topless woman with a dildo by her inherently sexual? Etc. Etc.
I'd also point out putting restrictions on porn breaks apart the Bro-Feminist Alliance that could be once again w/ Roe being overturned. You think secular conservative dudes in New Hampshire want to input their credit card or DL # everytime they want to jerk off.
Plus, stricter regulations in places like India don't really make teenage boys act better, it just means that anything vaguely sexual on Youtube gets tons of views and lots of odd comments from Indian guys. That doesn't seem like the healthiest thing either.
It's also just wildly, blatantly, stupidly, unfeasible. Pornhub is a thing for the same reason Spotify is a thing, because distributed peer 2 peer networks make it absolutely fucking impossible to stop people sharing music and completely destroyed the old business models. Free porn on Limewire was just a ubiquitous as mp3s. The tube site business model, let alone more recent advances like onlyfans, is way more constrained and ethical than the the free for all days that we'd be heading back to if the Feds decreed that all legitimate porn needs to be behind a paywall.
Pornhub just recently deleted a huge portion of the videos on the site after they got blowback from one Nicholas Kristof column. There didn’t even need to be a law! If there was a law they would dramatically change their model or close down. Yes, there would still be plenty of porn shared on p2p but just that change would hugely cut down on how many young people were seeing porn (my 9-year-old doesn’t know what p2p is and I’m not about to tell her).
"Most people don't speed when they drive" citation needed....
I think if you set a fee high enough that reddit etc don't want to pay it if they host something that's unpaywalled but reasonable enough that they don't go bankrupt if users mess them up, you might get something workable.
Kind of like the speeding tickets you mention. I don't want a ticket, but the rare ticket doesn't ruin me (I haven't gotten one in years, but I have gotten them before and they were annoying and I didn't want them but they didn't shut me down)
But... BigTech isn't wrong that there are real tradeoffs. If the cost were so high that reddit had to validate every video link you posted, it simply wouldn't let you post video links, which would also be a real cost.
I think it's tricky to set it at the correct level, but I agree it's probably not impossible.
He didn’t second-guess his motives. He observed that he is treating this as a highly upsetting proposal and implied that this level of upset is disproportionate. I think that’s all fair game.
You don't think Manchin is concerned about inflation? That would make him pretty unusual among moderate Americans. Heck, I'd say pretty unusual among Americans full stop.
You seem really worked up about advocating for a Chinese-style authoritarian system where everyone's porn viewing habits are centrally tracked via ID by Big Brother. For your own good citizen, of course. I'm sure they'd never leak or get hacked, leading to everyone knowing Bob Jones was watching X Video at Y Time. The government's cybersecurity is well-known to be flawless. I, too, think that totalitarian Big Government solutions are generally the way
I don't get this take. Were we living in a Chinese Style authoritarian system in 1992 before there was massive amounts of freely available porn online? Does the fact that netflix, Hulu, etc. all require submit a CC to pay for content mean we're living in a totalitarian nightmare?
I was in middle school in 1992. Everyone knew where their Dad's Playboys were. Most of the boys at school passed around copies of Hustler, Penthouse etc. (One boy was famously busted by his Mom with a literal duffel bag full of them- the stuff of middle school legend....) Somehow we all survived. As dirty magazines have been a thing for the whole 20th century, I'll take a wager and say that every generation of boys got them illicitly.
I just cannot believe that after Prohibition, the War on Drugs etc., people still can't imagine how the black market will work. Especially on.... the Internet. As 96% of the world's population lives outside the US and isn't subject to its rules, and porn is in Extremely High Demand, there will be countless websites outside the scope of American jurisdiction. And who's the most tech-savvy crowd best positioned to use a VPN and find them? That's right, boys under 18.
I noticed you don't use your full name here, John. But you'd be comfortable with your full name leaking along with a list of all the adult websites you've visited in the last few years, once these websites inevitably get hacked? You're cool with that?
Do you actually see no difference in scale between “some kids know where their dad’s dirty mags are and pass them around to a dozen friends” and “every kid can access a practically infinite number of pornographic videos from the privacy of their room”? You can’t possibly think that “we survived” an era where you could see a Hustler every few months means that there could be no possible adverse effects from the cup-runneth-over situation we have now.
Is something stopping people who pay for porn sites now from having their data hacked and released? The Ashley Madison leak suggests not. But am I failing to account for scale myself? Sincere question.
I don't think that children should be viewing hardcore pornography- I think their parents should monitor their electronic devices and stop it. If your response is 'gee, it's really difficult to monitor what websites they're visiting', I would invite you to consider how difficult that becomes when you scale up to the 73 million children in the US.
I think large-scale government bans that create black markets are in general a terrible solution to any problem. Sometimes they work when the product in question is logistically difficult to get (I dunno, a rocket launcher or something), but man when I look at 'porn on the Internet' or 'websites in general', that sure looks logistically easy to route around restrictions. Like nailing jelly to a wall
I'd be more comfortable with my full name leaking along with the adult websites I've visited than the vast number of silly comments I've made on substacks :)
We're not talking about prohibition - that's just a ridiculous example. We ended prohibition, but would you suggest that we remove all age & ID constraints for alcohol or pot? Some 10 year old kid can roll up and order a coke and rum with a magic brownie to take the edge off a hard day at school?
As for people not following US laws, they are doing this to get paid. Make a system where its easy for them to get paid if they ID, but it costs them money if they don't and 90%+ of them will follow the easy money.
Do sites track that stuff? I guess I can imagine metrics reasons why they would. But if so, isn’t that vulnerable to being hacked and released right now?
In the 90s, we had movies about single teenage boys having intercourse with pies and a way higher rate of teenage pregnancy. Instead of looking at internet porn teen boys got into way worse trouble.
Anyway, people care about internet anonymity, especially with something as incredibly personal, incredibly wound up in shame and sexuality as porn. You also can't just think about it in terms of internet porn either being PornHub (free) or OnlyFans (paywall). Any and every site where users are allowed to host their own content has had a porn community full of people pseudonymously sharing their own NSFW content - Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Youtube, DeviantArt, WordPress, *chan boards, fanfiction archives - those horses left the barn a long time ago. That would take us into a separate discussion about Section 230 and the expectations of sites making a good faith attempt at keeping order. They do that currently, but not even a company of Youtube's scale can keep copyrighted material off of it, and they get the benefit of having an algorithm that can compare against a massive database of copyrighted material. They know what they're looking for and they can't find it all.
The only way of truly keeping kids away from porn is to de-anonymize the people consuming it, hence the paywall idea. If you went to a shady store and bought a porno in the 90s, you showed them your ID, but they didn't need to make you a store account. You could pay in cash, only one person really needed to know your shameful secret. But that wouldn't be the case with porn now. For good and for ill it would mean that every account could be tied back to a real person. That information would be valuable (and dangerous) in a data breach.
I don't care if Netflix knows that I'm catching up on Better Call Saul, what harm would that do if it was leaked? But while some people just want to watch some naked people of their preferred gender and that information would be pretty minimally embarrassing (although it could possibly end some marriages), some people (like Ted Cruz) enjoy some scandalous fantasy material that could be used to hurt them and some normal, everyday people are into shameful, degenerate things that are completely harmless but immensely embarrassing if they were to become public knowledge (like people sitting in pies and crying, thanks BCS for telling me that exists...).
I don’t understand why “you can access this material, but you’ll have to accept the risk that it’ll become public knowledge that you did so” is an assault on freedoms. Someone could hack what library books I’ve checked out; that’s not an assault on my freedoms, as long as the FBI aren’t the ones doing the hacking.
Well also there are some pretty serious first amendment issues to implementing this scheme. So I think it's probably a good idea on net for Democratic Party officials to try, but I'd also be very pessimistic they'd come up with something that's both effective and constitutional. I'd bet they'd have to pick one of the two.
He's not making principled first amendment claims, though there's also no first amendment right to host porn. The core of the argument seems to be (1) who can even say what porn is and (2) horny teens will just look at Michaelangelo's David instead.
"there's also no first amendment right to host porn"
Well, there is in the sense the government's power to restrict such hosting is limited. You are correct, however, that hosting companies have no obligation to allow it.
Think like Republican strategists! #10 is a frankly a terrible policy idea and pretty unworkable, which is why it will almost certainly never get off the ground. But because its so infeasible it's a great #10 point on a ten point plan, it signals cultural conservatism without having to do a lot of work.
A Democrat admin that won on this entire platform would eventually get around to #10, they would have a bunch of hearings where democrat senators can force the Pornhub CEO to testify before congress, which will mostly be them yelling at at him about being a filthy pervert endangering women and kids. Tons of great TV. Then MAYBE they pass a bill demanding a study on the harm of porn and technology feasibility of blocking it. Study takes until the next election cycle to complete, harm results are inconclusive, technology is difficult to implement., DOA. But all those congressmen and women running for reelection have great clips for their ads of yelling at the Pornhub CEO!
"Those sites are pretty good at moving to domains where American law doesn't really apply to them, and I'm sure there are incentive-related reasons why even corporations who aren't pro-porn would want to make sure that Reddit isn't on the hook for every link submitted."
The government took the legitimate overseas poker sites out of the US market in one fell swoop, and the number of Americans playing online poker is still a small fraction of what it once was. I don't think it's nearly that difficult.
Online poker has a rather huge vulnerability in the form of payment processing. Jesse was discussing sites like Reddit providing links to non-US sites. As far as I'm aware, the US government never purported to prohibit discussion forums from having links to foreign gambling sites.
What we're fundamentally talking about here is forcing a handful of exploitative tech platforms out of business in favor of OnlyFans and similar business models. I think the labor/worker protection angle materially justifies Matt's proposal, independent of any benefit on the psyche of America's adolescents.
One of the things that annoyed me as a teenager was that I had much easier access to violence than porn. For example, I found that deeply hypocritical that sex was taboo, but I could easily watch "Saving Private Ryan". I would guess that the number of people machine-gunned by Slow Boring commenters is lower than the number of people who have had sex with Slow Boring commenters (even though most commenters here are American, and to the best of my knowledge the US is a more violent country than the average rich country both in terms of crime and in terms of wars it has recently fought).
Can someone make a good case about why teenagers watching porn is a more serious problem than teenagers watching people get machine-gunned in Normandy or teenagers machine-gunning people on Call of Duty?
Devil's Advocate Argument: As you point out, people are more likely to have sex than they are to be in a combat scenario, as such learning warped lessons about sex from porn is far more likely to be brought into the actual bedroom than learning warped lessons about violence is to be brought to the battlefield.
I don't believe that I could come up with any better argument myself either. However, I don't believe that this is a strong argument in a country with not totally infrequent school shootings.
edit: Just to clarify, I don't believe that Call of Duty causes school shootings, just as I don't believe that porn harms your (prospective) sexual life.
I would guess that the probability of a kid sexually assaulting a peer is not actually so different than the probability of a kid physically assaulting one.
I'm glad you also drew the connection between porn and violent video games. I think that concern over children accessing porn is just the continuation of the previous moral panic over violent video games. Back in the '00s, there was a panic about how violent video games (with very primitive graphics by today's standards) would turn kids into a bunch of serial killers. Or something. Ask Hillary Clinton, who got in on the issue [1].
Of course, this all turned out to be bullshit. Crime rates kept dropping. Kids didn't become more violent. Violent video games didn't make kids more violent. If fact, per MY, violent video games probably reduced violence [2]. So, now a new moral panic was needed. How about porn! In fact, the anti-video game crew was already making the connection. To quote HRC from back in the day: "We need to treat violent video games the way we treat tobacco, alcohol, and pornography." [1] Of course, porn concerns parents, just as video games used to concern parents, and there are some studies saying that porn will cause permanent harm to children, just as there were some studies suggesting that violent video games caused harm to children. However, I'm guessing that this will all prove to be bullshit too. The studies won't replicate. Perhaps they'll even anti-replicate. Life will go on. Someone will find a new moral panic.
That's what makes #10 on MY's list all the more annoying. It's the modern version of HRC's opposition to violent video games (which MY knows full well is bullshit). I'm sure HRC's team did polling on it and found that there was support for curtailing access to violent video games --- just as MY can point to support for curtailing access to porn. However, just because there was support doesn't mean it was an effective policy. I guess that it's a fairly cheap bone that you can throw conservatives, so if it really wins votes, I'd bite my tongue and go along with it. But it seems like there should be a bone that you can throw conservatives that's actually beneficial...
I don't contest the thrust of your argument, but Saving Private Ryan seems like a poor example. It doesn't glorify violence - it exposes the brutal reality of war lest people glorify it (or forget the gratitude we owe to those who have borne the battle). The shock value is part of a legitimately educational purpose. Ditto the brutally violent Schindler's List. I doubt anyone who sees those movies thinks they're watching a jolly good time or is inspired to emulate the Germans.
Not to mention that its not a scenario that teenagers will find themselves in and therefore be able to mimic. A much more analogous scenario to me is watching kids play sports- they're constantly copying the things that professional athletes are doing, whether it's pregame rituals, high-five/handshakes, moves that they see the stars do, and other behaviors that they pick up from superstars on TV. Very few of us will ever be trying to storm a beachhead and secure a toehold for tanks to come behind us, so we're not given a chance to try and reenact what we saw stars do (and obviously we would have been trained in boot camp and elsewhere so we wouldn't have to try and pick up appropriate actions from movies and tv shows). But we don't see lots of videos of "proper sexual behaviors between consenting adults", so I can absolutely imagine people picking up behaviors/positions/actions that they see in adult entertainment and incorporating that into their actual sex lives. It seems kind of bonkers to me that people even disagree with this or argue that it's not happening. We can absolutely have a discussion about whether it's good or bad (I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other yet), but to pretend like it's not happening because of comparisons to things like war movies or glorified violence in movies and tv shows seems willfully ignorant to me.
Maybe so. My argument isn't about violence glorification necessarily. I had mere exposure to violence in mind. We could have a whole separate argument about violence glorification. Maybe people who recently watched Top Gun 2 are more willing to bomb the Iranian nuclear reactors in real life?
I definitely think that violence, especially the gratuitous cruelty and torture type violence that seems increasingly prevalent, can be equally if not more morally injurious than watching porn. A distinction I see is that in healthy people the desire or enthusiasm for violence is much weaker and less compelling than sexual desire, and therefore much less likely to get out of hand or become difficult for a not fully mature person to handle. Particularly when you are talking about viewing porn in conjunction with masturbation and orgasm, you are dealing with some extremely powerful brain reward systems.
I think you can see this in the difference between how people relate to violent content versus pornography. If someone sought out websites with just the most violent parts of movies, or maintained a library of violent images and clips, or continually sought out new and different violent content as the old stuff got boring, that would seem deeply concerning. But that's all completely typical behavior around porn, to say nothing of the people who end up with an obsessive relationship (I'm hesitant to use the term "addiction") to porn, e.g. spending excessive time viewing porn, wanting to cut back or stop but feeling unable to, and sneaking or hiding their porn use from loved ones.
I don't have links to back this up. However, I could see the case for porn influencing people's views on how sex works for most people. Violence in media is usually so over the top, that even children almost universally see it as fantastical or at least not to be emulated, unlike certain sex acts in porn.
Now substantively, this seems like a better case for good sex-ed, than whatever scheme Matt is talking about, but thats not the exercise here. Sex ed is very controversial. Still, I'm skeptical that it would even work. The Tories in Britain proposed something similar. I have no idea how that worked out. I guess I'm not opposed on principle, but I'm skeptical of the practicalities.
I used the example of "Saving Private Ryan", because one of the "selling points" of the movie is that it's so realistic that it reduced actual Normandy veterans to tears. I googled quickly a moment ago, and I did find more than a few articles, so my memory is probably correct on this.
Still, I don't think a lot of kids can emulate that. Maybe it leads to more kids joining the military. I almost fell for that kind of glorification as a kid. However, o know a lot of people get weird ideas about sex and how it's "supposed to work" from porn.
I don't think there's much reason to think something like the most famous beach assault landing in history that took place during the largest armed conflict the world had literally ever seen before is something that a teenager is going to think tells him much about his day-to-day lived experience. That's hugely different than an adult scene which the same teenager could assume is a relatively accurate depiction of what sex "should" be like. It's really a very apples to oranges comparison.
Okay, what happens if you take a mediocre movie about a violent bank robbery (something that has happened many times in many countries) vs something rare like a celebrity sex tape (where most people don't expect to have sex with that celebrity)? My argument wasn't concerned about whether some specific depiction was about a rare enough event, or was done in a tasteful manner. It merely concerned exposure to violence vs exposure to sex.
The little fact that those people aren’t actually machine gunned ? Snuff videos did become a thing in recent years (e.g. by ISIS)and are justly treated with far greater opprobrium than porn.
Where I come from we have a joke that goes a little bit like "I regret becoming a plumber, because the real job is very different from what porn had me expect.".
I still think it’s significant that porn generally (or by definition ?) is filmed prostitution. That’s what makes it meaningfully different from some very spicy r rates scenes on hbo.
It’s all about context. The depiction of extraordinary violence used by the Nazi army against American soldiers undertaking to save the world may be tough to watch, but at least there is a point to it. The depiction of consequence-free sex - sometimes extreme, often one-sided, and that is very much not part of a normal, committed relationship - isn’t exactly offering up a good life lesson.
Definitions are hard. Call it compulsive behavior if that makes you more comfortable. In any case, a large chunk of people wish they could stop watching pornography but still wind up watching it anyway.
Fair, just looking around it looks like the addiction model is a lot more controversial than I realized. That said I think this is an open area of research and whether it is or isn't is still unknown.
Also- ever heard of “sexual harassment “? I believe she coined the term or at least the very concept. We are all living in MacKinnon’s era, to some extent. She is one of the Greats.
The basic assumption that it's even remotely close to the realm of the possible for government to meaningfully constrain the flow of porn on the internet is simultaneous laughable and a legitimately dangerous authoritarian impulse. Chasing that particular type of dragon creates tyrants real fast.
Now hold on. There are lots of authoritarian dangers lurking but requiring a age verification system with *some teeth* (likely having to provide cc info) is not the type of draconian regime most people envision when it comes to big government internet control.
Are you a parent? I think once you have kids, this is something that becomes more of a concern. It often feels like my kid has access to a beer keg where all they have to do is write “yes” on a sheet of paper and they can drink all they want. That’s a really crappy regulatory regime for a vice.
You’re right, but how would you enforce that without the draconian internet censorship? Whats to stop all the porn sites operating fully from abroad, beyond the reach of the us government? Beer sold abroad literally can’t reach your child, but the only way to stop your child visiting a Russian website is by installing a great wall (or iron curtain ?) over the internet. Wouldn’t it be better to encourage parents to voluntarily install parental control apps in their kids devices - and if those currently don’t do a good enough job to try to improve them?
I think you are getting hung up on the specific example and ignoring the broader point.
The gate keeping device is verifying age through a credit card, after which point you can then access the service. It would be a requirement for any pornography sellers who want to sell through the US. It would require a new regulatory regime like the one that governs alcohol but that doesn’t mean we need a great firewall necessarily.
We do have parental control apps but the number of screens my kids have access to in a day that I don’t have control over is bonkers, especially in the summer.
The point of policy should be to make a better society right? Why not make a society where it’s harder for children to access hardcore pornography? I genuinely don’t understand the pushback on this one.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the internet. "any pornography sellers who want to sell through the US." is absolutely not a thing that exists in any technical sense. Creating any system in which such a thing exists would be massively draconian.
Yes, Google can sanitize search results and Pornhub is pretty good at killing kiddie porn before you see it. That is not the problem you have. The problem you have is one no one has figured out. The problem you have is "How do we shut down The Pirate Bay?". Even China struggles to keep their citizen's browsing inside the state approved walled garden.
Yea, the point is that the paywall concept is incredibly easily bypassed. It will never be a meaningful constraint for entirely technical reasons. Overcoming the technical hurdles absolutely requires chasing the goal down an overwhelmingly authoritarian nightmare long before you start to achieve actual results.
And for a lot of parents that barrier will be sufficient. If your kid wants something they are going to try and get it. The degree to which they are willing to make the effort depends on the strength of that desire.
No one thinks the government is trying to send jackboots to your cul de sac because you have to verify your age to order a bottle of Captain Morgan over an app.
It's not that teenagers will bypass the pornhub paywall to access the site. It's that forcing pornhub to put up a paywall will divert users to un-paywalled unregulated international and p2p services. The content will remain as accessible as ever, just as easily as ever, you'll just have higher traffic in the parts of the internet where no cares if you share kiddie porn and beheading videos along with the more ethically created varieties of contraband content. This is the world that existed before tube sites. It will simply return.
Your claim reminds me of people who argue strict gun regulation is impossible because there would be 1-to-1 replacement with 3D-printed firearms.
These arguments are usually made by very smart, ideological, and technologically savvy people, who tend to underestimate 1) the level of tech illiteracy of the general population and 2) the huge practical effect size that can result from small barriers to access (see, unfortunately, the success of the conservative movement at disabling huge chunks of the social safety state through work requirements, drug-testing, etc.).
You're actually backwards on this one. The 3d printed guns movement is expressly attempting to mimic the concept of p2p distributed distribution of media because it has already proven to be incredibly resilient against vast and aggressive state efforts to constrain it. The whole theory is that that existing the Pirate Bay model is SO robust that even guns will prove unregulatable if you can replicate it, let alone porn.
In any other context you would agree that putting up minor barriers significantly decreases consumption, this is the Sunstein and Thaler "sludge" phenomenon. P2P services are very niche compared to streaming.
P2P was the biggest thing in the world before streaming services learned to compete on convenience. There's no reason to believe that balance wouldn't flip back if the regulatory environment killed the streaming provider's comparative value.
Search engines will have a part in this and those parts of the internet do exist but they are much harder to access (for the average person). That's a good thing, there should be illegal things that are hard to get. It doesn't mean things shouldn't be regulated.
This is descending into a "well, people are going to commit crimes anyway, like, what's the point in law".
I agree. We seem to do a decent job of keeping illegal types of pornography off of mainstream sites. I don't really see how putting up more barriers for the legal types of pornography is this impossible challenge.
Keeping porn off legal sites is an entirely and wildly distinct and simpler challenge than keeping users on legal sites. That's the problem. As soon as you constrain legal access that tips the competitive advantage away from legal sites and to sites that border on impossible to regulate.
You have the history of the concepts of the internet and the “information superhighway” wrong by 180°, which goes a long way to understanding how confused you are about how any of this works.
The thing is, Obama's FTC had a fair bit of success cracking down those, but enforcement largely lapsed under Trump (unsurprisingly) and I haven't heard whether Biden has done anything to reinstitute the prior approach or if it no longer works for some reason.
1. Amount of comments on the anti-porn plan suggests this one might swallow the agenda, so to speak.
2. How much does the agenda matter versus having a snappy name? I was never sure how many Republicans knew what was in the Contract With America in the 90s, but the framing was terrific in a way that, say, Build Back Better is not. So how do we brand this 10-point plan? What’s the theme?
Yes, but is that a bug or a feature? Matt's explanation for it suggests that he wants it to devour the conversation, so that Democrats can slip items 1-9 past voters who would oppose those items if they heard about them.
"Voter ID laws, for example, are very popular and now have a discernible impact on election results."
Is this a typo? My understanding is that Voter ID laws actually don't have a discernible impact in recent elections, and haven't since the data basically started (unless you include like grandfather laws or literacy clauses as voter ID laws for some reason)
Does he perhaps mean "have a discernible impact" as a contested issue? Because I don't think they have an impact in their implementation as he says in the next paragraph.
I genuinely wonder about the porn thing given how much porn is out there on unauthorized channels if another law could do any good.
I feel like I’d be fine with some kind of reasonable regulatory regimes involving id checks and payment verifications but I wonder how effectively you could enforce this without rather draconian measures.
People are really really good at not paying for things on computers and I mean Pirate Bay is still up despite the continuing pressure of all the creative industries in America. Like to really, truly stop it you would need to really bring down a quite stifling level of censorship.
There is actual harm for several reasons: 1. Exposure at a very young age (elementary school) 2. Normalizing violent acts demeaning to women- women then report unreasonable expectation from partners 3. In a certain number of cases it creates addictive dependency inhibiting the ability to have normal sex and in some cases normal life generally.
Read up about it. It actually is harmful. I would also add that the industry generally is extremely exploitative and it would be better if it didn’t exist. Just like we wouldn’t want our kids going to prostitutes we shouldn’t want them watching them.
However not every just end justifies the means. The social harm here is real but the proposed solution is worse still to society, in my opinion.
Is this inherently problematic? Leading to awkward questions, sure. But I don't think children are inherently capable of seeing porn. They'll just find it boring.
"2. Normalizing violent acts demeaning to women"
I just pulled up two porn sites to check this. Of the 48 videos on each front page, judging from the titles (I didn't watch them) exactly *zero* contained violent content. Unusual sex acts, sure. Demeaning sex acts, probably (although that of course depends on what you find demeaning). *Violent*, no.
Now, the selection on the front page might be skewed by my search history, but…I think you overestimate the prevalence of violence in porn.
"3. In a certain number of cases it creates addictive dependency"
Bullshit. "Porn addiction" is a useful cover for gay and bisexual religious men who get caught watching the kind of videos that turn them on. But it's not real, and there are major philosophical problems with the concept (do you also consider obese people "food addicted"?). H/t MJS for posting this cite elsewhere in the thread: https://www.healthline.com/health-news/researchers-say-porn-addiction-not-real-022214
I don’t exactly disagree but this past school year a 9 year old asked me what porn was because people joke about it on the bus. For the record I didn’t answer that, and punted to mom.
Like we’ve decided that 18 is the arbitrary line and so it shall be. If you wanted to make it 15 or 16 I’d listen respectfully to an argument but it’s got to be somewhere.
I'm starting to wonder how old some of the commenters on here are. This comment and some others that talk about middle schoolers behavior reflects a dramatically different upbringing than I recall. I'm 40, and I definitely don't remember joking about porn in elementary school, and I don't remember thinking very much about sex at all until high school. It certainly wasn't the constant subject of conversation and attention that some of the comments on here seem to suggest was the norm for every boy/young man.
I'm a decade younger than you and by middle school (7th and 8th grade here, so 12-14) Family Guy was at its peak and most kids I knew were watching it, so kids were definitely aware of and joking about porn. Before that, I can definitely remember "this one time, at band camp, I stuck a flute up my pussy" being quoted endlessly by other fourth graders who had heard it from older siblings or watched American Pie with them.
I mean, I'm in my late 30's, and by 4th/5th grade, I was hearing R-rated jokes and commentary either on the school bus or in class, and I went to a fairly normal middle class school.
back in the good old days, entire families slept in one room cabins and toddlers watched their parents have sex. they also watched the barnyard animals screw throughout their childhood.
Nine year old me had some very ignorant conversations about sex with the other boys in the back of the school bus. I was much less knowledgeable than a 9 year old in 1820. My suspicion is middle class decency was once a cultural achievement (look pa, we can afford a bedroom for ourselves and a second bed just for the little ones!) that has morphed into an expectation.
Sure that’s not inherently a problem but: 1) we don’t want 12 year olds to stumble across porn and 2) there’s a lot of stuff on the free internet that’s creepy and non-consensual and exploitative and this could help that.
That's my other point - in places where porn usage is restricted, it doesn't make the guys stop looking for sexual content. It just makes other content more sexual by their attention.
Hell, I could argue that a big section of a segment of women on Twitch is a porn replacement for teenage boys, and that doesn't seem overly positive to me.
Indeed, there's some strange parasocial relationships people are forming through sites like twitch and onlyfans, not to mention the *real* weirdos who write comments on substack.
I wonder if it’s a porn replacement in the traditional sense or more like a hostess bar in Japan where men will pay very attractive women to talk to them but not actually go there usually.
My bigger concern isn't the teens, it's the adults: If MindGeek (who own most porn) has an enormous list of subscribers and someone hacks that list and publishes it, then that's going to be the scandal of all scandals.
Not really because every guy would be on that list. And I mean that quite literally. There are no post-pubescent males in this country who haven't watched porn.
True, but tastes differ, hence potential for blackmail… however in my opinion opening the gates for and normalizing internet censorship that could then be used for additional content beyond porn is the far bigger concern.
I think the objective here is not to completely stop it, but to make it hard enough for teenagers to access that they only see a small amount. Sure, there are going to be kids sharing USB sticks of porn with each other, there are going to be people downloading torrents from The Pirate Bay, but this is different from just going to PornHub.
No Richard, I don't think that's the objective at all.
I think the objective is to be seen picking a large, public fight with the pornography industry for the purposes of signaling to cross-pressured, culturally conservative swing voters in the hopes of winning slightly more of their votes.
The actual impact on pornography consumption is totally irrelevant.
Sure but that’s the thing teenage nerds are people with a lot of time and very little money and will jump through a ton of hoops.
I say this as someone who learned command line oses and ftp and simple programming and scripting to steal stuff off of Usenet in the 90s. And like we can’t even enforce the laws we already have.
Why is this going to work better than the UK's system, which according to everything I've read, including from right-leaning newspapers, was an utter disaster?
Basically: because the UK 's system was centralised, and the MY proposal is "if you want to run a porn site, you have to have a paywall". Big sites would put their own paywalls up, small sites would switch to onlyfans or equivalents, ie companies that run paywalls.
The disaster was that you were going to be able to get a "free" porn pass from the government to prove you were an adult to porn websites, and the government was subcontracting that to MindGeek (the biggest porn company in the world), so they would have a giant list of every single Brit who ever accessed porn.
Yea, Matt is missing that the rise of free digital porn is simply akin to the rise of digital music. Tube sites and streaming services are the model because P2P networks killed the old models. The most draconian sort of age gating would simply result in the rebirth of KaZaa or something.
If shuttering pornhub and xvideos would get you something then like maybe that’s worth it but I’d like you to show you could enforce the laws on the books and get rid of all the sites currently streaming models paid content without their consent in a reasonable way before making vast new laws.
As someone who was a teenage boy in the P2P era... The provenance of the shit on there was far less ethically constrained than the tube sites of today.
It wouldn’t be perfect, but I think it could be at least as effective as the gambling bans were, which is to say: not going to stop determined folks, but significantly less than now. I think the bigger issue here is a First Amendment one, but I don’t know that this puritanical court will be as permissive as previous ones.
I don’t think it would be as effective as gambling bans because gambling requires connection to the real world for there to be money involved.
Most porn is much more like software and media piracy. Which we basically just gave up on fighting for teenage nerds and settled into make it easy for adults to pay and make the consequences really bad for businesses using it.
That's the thing - we didn't beat piracy. We just made the alternative (Netflix et al) so cheap 'n' easy it was pointless. But, the whole point of Matt's policy is to make it more difficult.
Well, it’s easy for people who have credit cards, which doesn’t include underage folks. So if the point is to make it so that parents can keep their kids from seeing bad things, requiring a credit card is a pretty good way to do that.
Bob in Atlanta may say he doesn't want his kids seeing porn, but he's not going to be happy about the party that makes him put in a credit card when he didn't have too before.
Pirate Bay may still be up, but the vast majority of people pay for access to movies and tv shows, whether that be through streaming services or just outright buying digital copies. I'm a relatively savvy technical person compared to the average American user, and I've never once used PB, and I can guarantee you that an overwhelming majority of my friends and family have never even heard of it. So sure, if you changed the model you'd still have ways to get around it. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't have a huge impact.
Right but if there are already abundant leak sites that are up despite them being illegal how is passing a second law going to stop that. It might wreck pornhub and videos and a few other brand name sites but teenagers who want something illicit are a lot more like software pirates than Netflix customers in my estimation.
There were (and from what I can tell, still are) abundant leak sites for lots of forms of entertainment, such as movies, tv shows, music, etc. But because it's both illegal and known to be illegal the vast majority of people use legitimate websites for those forms of entertainment.
That makes it harder to find the other sites. Not to mention the law would, presumably, give the government enforcement mechanisms. The threat of stiff penalties is a deterrent to entry into the realm for other potential outlets.
Sure, it's an immensely difficult challenge if your goal is the eradication of teenagers being able to view porn. But that's a pretty wild goal that I don't think anyone actually has in mind.
The age thing is just a deeply weird proposal for a party with a 79 year old President. Add to it that it would obviously require a constitutional amendment it seems like a waste of one of your top ten
It’s also something that I am the most uncomfortable with, because we shouldn’t be discriminating based on age. Why not just go for term limits of say 18 years.
I was thinking about if you could do it without a constitutional amendment, and I think you could but in a way that would have to be supported by every congress. Congress is the judge of its own membership and has the power to expel members, so if you could get broad political agreement (even if short of a constitutional amendment) then everybody should declare "Don't both running for Congress if you're 80 years old or older in the 2028 election, because when you get to the capitol we'll expel you and send you back home again."
The problem with expelling members is that it effectively punishes voters in the affected politician's district/state by depriving them of representation until a replacement is appointed/elected.
Yeah, i suppose that's true. I was considering more the technical argument of if there's a legal path to do it without a constitutional amendment than if it's necessarily a good idea. (Though since "a person's age" is not exactly something that will be unknown, you'd think that actual expulsion would be unnecessary. The mere threat would prevent anyone from running unless they were aiming for a "go ahead and expel me if you dare" confrontation.)
I like wonder about voter Id laws. Like it seems there really could be an easy compromise which is like yes you need a voter Id law and the state has a positive responsibility to make sure anyone can get one. Yes even that 98 year old black woman who was born in a one horse town and doesn’t have a birth certificate that the media drags out for these.
I think a national ID system would make sense here. When I got my license the RMV people said I would need an REAL ID to board domestic flights and go into government buildings after 2023 so I got one of those instead of the regular ones. Looked it up when I got home and it seems like the fact that we already have federal standards moots the privacy concerns (and it’s not like Google and Facebook don’t already have tons of information on me that they sell to advertisers).
I’d be okay with this, but it seems like there’s still the weird set of edge case people for whom getting an id isn’t possible.
These people probably don’t matter that much In The Who wins the next election sense but are critical in the norm that everyone should be able to vote.
Are you thinking a voluntary ID like a passport? Or something universal and automatic? I have no problem with a universal federal ID, but it is absolutely anathema to libertarians and conservatives. I think it'd get way more backlash than it's worth, when you can just require states to recognize a free & voluntary federal ID.
To be clear I'm totally on board with any proposed national ID system not being tied to driving, I just think it makes sense to build off of the existing driver's license system.
People are so used to seeing abortion fought over in the courts that they apparently think legislators passing laws to protect abortion rights is unconstitutional.
Dobbs says pretty clearly that states have the power to regulate abortion. The federal government can't interfere with it. There are probably limits to this; even Rehnquist's dissent in Roe said that an abortion law that had no exception for the life of the mother would fail rational basis scrutiny, but that's not at issue, certainly not in the Mississippi law.
Not a lawyer but I don't think that's the right interpretation. Dobbs was about a state law so the opinion was specifically about whether or not the states could regulate abortion. I don't think Alito specified a view on if Congress could. Kavanaugh (the fifth majority vote) in his concurrence specifically referenced States or Congress as bodies who could regulate it.
No, that is not *at all* the ruling. Dobbs says that states and the federal government have *unlimited* power to regulate abortion; their regulations are not constrained by the constitution. It says nothing about federalism concerns, and in fact the Court has tended to allow the federal government to regulate (and preempt) almost anything under the Commerce Clause.
I might have overstated #1, but it's still unclear. The relevant law now is Rucho v. Common Cause (2019 - https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/18-422_9ol1.pdf), which found that partisan gerrymandering was not federally justiciable, but it leaves open the possibility of relevant federal law.
In Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Comm’n (2015 - https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/13-1314_3ea4.pdf) the court found that independent redistricting commissions were found permissible even though they bypassed the state legislature, which the constitution specifically grants the power to district. That was 5-4 and an iffy decision, if you ask me.
Both the 14th and 15th amendments conclude with "The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article." That's why e.g. the Voting Rights Act is constitutional. Rucho v. Common Cause found it wasn't justiciable, because Congress hadn't passed any legislation on the topic, and the Court was too timid to fashion an interpretation of its own accord.
If the Court tries to endorse the "independent state legislature" theory, I can't wait to see the firestorm. That'll induce a constitutional amendment so fast the justices' heads will spin.
Pretty sure they could just tie a bunch of money to it and it would pass legal muster. AKA, the federal government is going to pay a bunch of money to cover the costs of elections and improve voter security. We're going to require use of a federal ID. States that adopt these practices get it all paid for, those that don't have to come up with the money themselves.
"If it’s a 10-item list, it can only include so many things."
So narrow-minded. You need to liberate your agenda to become truly transformational.
You are still trying to appeal to the Democrats' traditional base, namely base ten. Granted, in base ten, a 10-item list can include only ten items. But why not hexidecimal? Why not sexigesimal! A 10-item list can include sixty items!
Once you have liberated your mind, you'll see that a 10-item list can include as many things as you like.
But by all means, eschew the traditional binary. A 10-item list with only two items is never going to win elections.
Matt is erasing the lived experience of those of us that spend way too much time in the corporate world, where 10-item lists with more than 10 items are the norm.
Sub-bullets !!
As a programmer, this speaks to me... but it's BS and doesn't compute.
"You know, there is an element of seriousness in what you say."
There is always an element of seriousness in what I say. I'm serious!
I'm sure #4 is popular, but you can take my credit card travel rewards from my cold dead hands.
As for #10, when the inevitable security leak happens and people are able to see who's viewing Internet porn, I wonder if some women would be surprised that that list includes literally every single man. (Researchers in the UK tried to study the effects of porn consumption but had to abandon things when they literally couldn't find a control group.)
Right, the issue with #10 is not that it’s bad on the merits, but that in today’s technological and political climate this amounts to building a database of people’s identifying information alongside exactly what porn they’re watching. We don’t really have a good way of proving age online without handing over a copy of your ID, which contains a lot more information than just that.
In order to create an account on Epic, Sony, Nintendo, etc. for my kids, I had to 'prove' that I was over 18 by doing something that is ostensibly only possible for someone over 18, for example, a one-cent charge to a credit card. I believe the same is true of anyone creating such an account, i.e., my kids couldn't have just lied about their age and created an account.
I'm not saying that is a perfect solution, but it does show that in a space where parents are (rightly) concerned about their children being exposed to strangers online, companies come up with not-so-intrusive, clever-ish ways of proving age without handing over ID or creating a national registry.
#10 is a good idea politically, but it becomes unworkable if you measure its success as all-or-nothing because you'd have to solve piracy first. If implemented, I could imagine a lot of parents (like myself) would be happy to see some positive, bipartisan action, as would a lot of social/religious conservatives who like the idea of banning things they find morally repugnant. It's really hard to imagine, however, a huge constituency willing to protest openly that it's a little more difficult for them to surf porn on the john.
Exactly. A second benefit of the reform Matt is proposing (although not one that I'd trumpet loudly to the religious conservatives) is that forcing pornography behind paywalls could help mitigate some of the worst and most exploitative practices in the industry. Jon Ronson did a mini-podcast series in 2017 on the effects of 'free porn' on the industry, which were predictably terrible: https://www.engadget.com/2018-07-17-the-butterfly-effect-audible-irl.html
In a similar vein, Bari Weiss interviewed a woman who talked about the other side of that issue, where she has built a lucrative career on OnlyFans by building a brand of sorts. I was shocked by how much money one can make charging for what is basically a digital nudie booth. It seems like a much healthier model than PornHub (which I gather was the focus on Ron Jonson's podcast) and it automatically excludes a lot of teenagers because they're typically broke and don't have access to credit cards... or at least cards that their parents can't audit.
https://www.honestlypod.com/podcast/episode/26e0ab75/americas-sex-recession
How do you do that when so many porn companies could just easily be based in a different country. Sure you could put a block on individual sites nationwide, but with VPN, it would be useless.
The existence of VPN and torrenting hasn't put much of a dent in the ability of American media companies to command huge premiums (and market share) for cable television and streaming services. I think in practice, what we see is that most people would rather pay a small fee every month for something that's legal, easy to use, and feels more ethical and safe.
Yes. But teenage boys are exactly the sort of group to not pay small fees and to use VPNs. And that’s the targeted group.
VPNs don't really make media free, they just allow you to get past global walls. E.G. they fool your computer into thinking you're in the U.K. so that the Netflix account you pay for will give you access to British exclusive content they have for that market. As for torrenting, yeah, people would generally rather pay of a streaming service than go though that hassle but that may not be the case with pornography companies, which some people would rather not give their credit card info to.
I don’t have a problem with picking the low hanging fruit and if that’s all the law is written to accomplish I think that’s fine.
I think I’m quite suspicious about the language being narrowly tailored enough to only do that and make a big difference though. I feel like you can either have enforcement with lots of places for collateral damage or you end up making people use relatively easy work arounds.
That's perhaps the point. Its like in the 80s when Tipper Gore held those hearings on effects of music on today's youth. The hearings were farcical to say the least (there's a good "You're Wrong About" podcast about this that showed how the hearings were in part about the Music industry's lobbying efforts against blank tapes. But I digress).
Slapping warning labels on music basically made no difference whatsoever. In fact, it was a probably a net positive branding mechanism considering artists target audience were kids trying to rebel against their parents.
My point is, some sort of similar "ineffective" policy targeting adult websites could serve the same purpose. Actual effects of the policy are negligible, but it's a signal to culturally conservative voters that you're not totally in thrall to far left values.
It's silly, I know. But all you have to do is look at the last guy in charge to see that blustering about various policies but not actually doing anything substantial can be effective politically.
I think this is one of those you need to see the language in the bill things though. Like I could see it being written in a super broad way that made all kinds of things illegal or a narrow way so it was more of a messaging thing.
I mean the last time they tried something I Like this Craig’s list couldn’t have personals anymore. I mean the history of regulations is full of unintended consequences.
I remember reading about how Rhode Island legalized prostitution by accident. But actually served as an example of how legalization could work. But of course it was promptly repealed.
A one-cent charge to your credit card gives the credit card companies a database of who is looking at porn. Any company asking for a one cent charge is actually doing it to reduce friction for your future payments - they often say it’s for age verification to get people to agree, but there’s no such requirement for games.
Credit card companies already know about every purchase you make with a credit card; the OP was worried about a database leaking and others were worried about having to hand over ID and/or the porn sites keeping records (that could also be leaked). I am just pointing out that there are ways of providing reasonable evidence that you are an adult without handing over all of your personal information to a porn site.
As for the game sites, they voluntarily enforce age restrictions to avoid (more) regulation and legislation. They offer other means (that I forget at the moment) that do not involve credit card transactions, that is just the one I picked so it's the one I remember. I watch my kids interactions over their shoulders and games like Roblox and Fortnite really do appear to be keeping the kids shielded from random strangers; they also offer a whole host of parental controls that certainly cost them to develop and maintain. I'm not buying the notion that they are just scamming me for my credit card info.
Maybe just have the site post a question like "who sang 'Billie Jean'?" and give the visitor five seconds to answer so they can't run to ask their big brother.
“What is Jenny’s phone number?”
Dial it on this rotary phone: https://youtu.be/oHNEzndgiFI
I’d really like to like this more than once.
I remember questions about the Mommas and the Papas as age verification for Leisure suit Larry and it was very charming.
I found this sub-thread entertaining - but I am 37. I think we need to remind ourselves that people who turn 18 today are younger than Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
I don't know who sang Billie Jean, and I'm 40 years old. Your idea would be pretty unfair toward, say, people who immigrated to the U.S. as adults and who don't have a good knowledge of American pop culture references.
Even people in the most far flung of countries knew who Michael Jackson was.
I was asked Michael Jackson's net worth a couple of days ago by the neighbor of an ex-colleague in suburban Kabul.
He also asked me if Michael Jackson was still alive so yes, there are still some limits to how far news can spread. But MJ was pretty famous.
My federal law would have these sites post three questions in succession. If you fail to answer any of the three, then you're locked out of the site for the next 24 hours.
It won't be a perfect solution, but it preserves anonymity and *mostly* cuts out under 18 year olds. And if it unfairly locks someone out, well, there's no sacred right to browse porn sites.
It really is an awesome song; check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi_XLOBDo_Y
Is Billie Jean your lover?
Are you the one?
Are you the kid's Dad?
Congratulations! You get to enter the site!
:-)
Fair enough. Thanks for sharing.
Now I'm picturing recent immigrants compiling study guides of common American pop culture references, so that they have the knowledge to be admitted to their favorite adult website :)
American pop culture? Maybe! But I pity the 10 year old hoping to see porn who has to answer the question of "what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?"
(The only valid response, of course, being, "what do you mean, an African or a European swallow?")
What if we did it the other way around, as an opt-in system? Browsers can tell websites “I’m a minor” and then if the websites show restricted content to them, they are on the hook for it. It would be super easy to check if a website was compliant. And I think Google and Apple would be happy to build that feature into Android and iOS and make it hard to circumvent.
Currently, parental control systems work by maintaining a running list of all questionable content in the universe, which is a never-ending task. Shifting the burden onto the websites without making them solve the problem of who is a minor seems like a good middle ground.
And finally I think an opt-in system is more likely to pass first amendment scrutiny.
Even that doesn't do it. (source: I work in alcohol law, and a big part of the job is dealing with age verification and fake IDs). You can buy essentially perfect copies of American state drivers' license or ID cards online with modified age information on the card. Even if each porn company is forced to query a state database, that only works if each person's unique identifier in the database remains secure and private; there's also a huge market in forged or stolen credentials (Social Security numbers, Driver's License numbers, etc.)
You may appreciate this, though you probably already heard about it given your job.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/05/digital-drivers-license-used-by-4m-australians-is-a-snap-to-forge/
Yup; it's a hard problem. Unfortunately state regulators are not terribly sympathetic.
Lots of men, me included, give zero shits about porn. But tbh, take the same tech we use to check ID for online booze and weed purchases, mandate them for porn, and while we’re at it, social media, aka intellectual porn.
Thanks for this; the ferociousness of this line of conversation from some guys here makes me doubt my sanity.
Marie - since you were wondering why the conversation is heated... :)
"An acquaintance of mine is a teacher at an elementary school. One day, in the teacher’s lounge, several female teachers were talking about a student who was 10 or 11. This boy had brought pornography to class (presumably he had printed it off the Internet but I don’t recall).
The female teachers were absolutely convinced that he must have been molested. Ten years old was much too young for a boy to want to look at images of hardcore sex. They started to call social services to figure out who was molesting the boy and how they could get him out of his home.
The male teachers, who until this point had sat around silently, finally exploded. They did an impromptu survey of the age they all took an active interest in sex. The ages ranged from 8 to 12. Were any of them molested? They all said no. Puberty kicked in and it was off to the races.
The women didn’t believe it. This caused a lot of interesting conversations because they were absolutely dumbfounded that boys that young were thinking about sex. The men, on the other hand, basically called the women stupid. How could they not know that? It’s what consumed their entire childhood once their bodies “woke up”."
I believe it. To me it’s a matter of “is” vs “should be.” Should it be easy for a 10 year old boy to access hardcore porn online to print off? No, it should not.
Also, a study that can’t find a man who has NEVER seen porn doesn’t mean that everyone CARES about porn or even regularly accesses it.
Fair enough and I don't know how strict they were about the "never seen porn" thingy.
But one thing I wanted to ask - what do you think you're achieving by depriving male teenagers of access to porn? What's the reason(s) for your position? Or is it purely moralistic/religious or "aesthetic"?
Their brains are still developing and a lot of the hardcore stuff can really mess with you psychologically. Why can’t they use R-rated movies and Victorias Secret catalogs like guys did in the 90s? I also do not think minors should have legal access to booze, cigarettes, gambling or drugs. But, ultimately, this would not have been in my top 10. I’m mostly disturbed by how defensive the SB commentariat is about it.
You talk about depriving male teenagers of access to porn, but mention a 10-11 year old with porn at school in your earlier comment. Do you see an argument for keeping porn away from a 10 year old who wants to access it?
I personally would probably trade strict limits on under 14 access for looking the other way on 14+ but I imagine that would just alienate both sides.
The true "Great Awokening"
The ferociousness comes not from the check itself- if it was still in a traditional store just show the ID would be enough. The problem comes online with storage. Effectively the proposal becomes “de-anonymize” online porn -which is much more provocative.
I can’t recall people being so upset about anything else on this blog. And after just having had the conversation about more diversity of identity being important here…
They were also pretty upset when Milan said that legalized gambling has bad effects. Certain subjects seem to trigger a libertarian response in certain readers.
Because it's one of Matt's worst takes post-2003? "Spoilers are totally fine" and "Ban TikTok" are worse, but it's difficult to think of others.
I could make an argument against TikTok. It is giving a lot of useful info to the Chinese government. Trump wasn't wrong in wanting ByteDance to sell the US component.
Also - TikTok is wonderfully addictive and, just like porn or sales or compounding and interest rates in general, it wouldn't be a bad thing to explain to youngsters/teenagers the psychological mechanisms it is triggering...
“Spoilers are totally fine” is easily worse, “Ban TikTok” is clearly a slatepitch and a great one at that.
The guest post making fun of pro-lifers made people pretty upset
That was more a matter of its tone and quality of argument rather than its content, I think.
It's just motivated reasoning.
Don't want any wrenches thrown into the current system that they like.
So it is just "impossible", or there will just be a black market, or X other reasons.
But I think that this clearly can be done, and probably should be done.
Even though it will be annoying to me as well
Do people just not realize that “the tech we use to check ID for online booze and weed” is a delivery person looking at your ID when they drop it off?
The stuff we use for online booze purchases isn't all that good (source - I wind up defending a lot of the resulting administrative accusations).
Fair, but if you want the stuff for booze to improve, make porn gated behind the same thing. Porn companies are usually the pioneers for making tech more streamlined. I’m convinced porn is why we have YouTube.
So how come researchers cannot find a control group for their porn-is-affecting-us studies?
Are they only asking college students?
Men in their 20s, I think.
https://www.joshuakennon.com/pornography-study-failed-after-researchers-couldnt-find-a-single-man-who-hadnt-viewed-x-rated-material/
but please remember, always : "Pornography Usage Increases With Religious Upbringing and Church Attendance" and "pornography consumption is most heavily concentrated in religious and conservative states".
They are only looking at the very small % of pornography -subscribers-.
People who are so dumb that they pay for porn.
I'd chalk this up to it being less acceptable to talk about porn in these states, and so a greater (though still small overall) % of the male populace doesn't know about the ubiquity of free porn.
Re: a possible leak, you think they don't know now! There's a reason the EU considers your IP address to be private data. They absolutely know who is looking at what. There's just no market for the data (because credit card companies don't like porn), so they aren't using it aggressively. But it's all right there in their logs. Porno ads could follow you around like mattress ads if there was market for it.
They absolutely do sell those data to 'brokers' (in the US) because it reveals demographic information that can be combined with other telemetry to target ads, etc. For example, there is a very high probability that an IP address that accesses porn sites comes from a household with at least one male. Combined with the time of day, amount of time spent, days of the week it is accessed, etc., a broker can sell it to Meta or Google or whomever, who combines it with IMEI or cookie data or whatever and serve ads for razors or ESPN subscriptions or whatever else.
Very true, although I think handing over something with your name or bank account information on it would "feel" less anonymous, even if it really isn't.
With that said, I'm not sure any of this would matter much politically. The modal man is not basing his vote on access to free porn; it's just a non-issue. And a man who did base his vote on that probably would be willing to put up with the minor annoyance/privacy invasion of an identity check, even if he didn't particularly like it.
But I think most adult men would just...watch less porn, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
That is... a very naïve set of statements. Pornhub gets more traffic per month than Netflix, and it doesn't get that traffic because people don't like it. The party that takes people's access to free and seemingly anonymous porn usage will in fact likely pay a price for it even if people don't necessarily tell pollsters about it specifically. It's something that would affect people's lives much more obviously than 90% of what Washington does.
It's not naive at all. I am well aware of the massive amount of traffic that Pornhub and other sites attract, and I am well aware of the massive number of people (a group that includes virtually all men, and I am a man) who watch porn on the internet.
My argument has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not people like porn. It's about whether people *value* porn. There is a difference between "thing you do because it is kind of enjoyable and easy" and "thing that you actually value." The vast majority of men like porn, it's true, but they like it in the same way that they like, I don't know, arguing about politics with strangers behind a screen. If MY suddenly instituted a new policy tomorrow where you need to pay an extra $400/year (beyond the base subscription) to access the comments section on Slow Boring, I almost certainly wouldn't do it, even though I *like* commenting here. Ditto for porn.
I do think it would be a strike against Dems for some people, but it would also be a boon for Dems for some people. My guess is that the group that thinks we should make a real effort to prevent kids from seeing porn and cares a substantial amount about that is bigger than the group that wants to maintain seamless porn access for themselves and cares a substantial amount about that (the "and" bit being very important there - parents care a lot about their kids!). And, as I said, the people that really value porn a lot might grumble, but ultimately they'd probably just register or pay some money or whatever and move on.
You say that as if there's some big campaign to limit porn access right now... there isn't. No one in power is even seriously proposing this, not even evangelicals Christians. There's some degree of "concern" about kids having access to porn but most people just see it as a fact of modern life and move on. The sentiment isn't even as strong as it was during the 70s when porn was still relatively hard to access. If there was a popular crusade against porn, then sure, maybe making some sort of compromise for political capital might be worth it but that's not the case at all.
Yes, I know. I was referring to a hypothetical scenario in which item #10 on Matt's agenda were an actual legislative priority, and the political considerations that would come into play in that hypothetical scenario. Which is the subject of many comments on this thread!
To be fair, you are correct that the odds of this happening are pretty much nil.
I assume most men do view porn and it does not bother me at all. What's surprised me in these conversations is how defensive men seem about it and how unwilling they are to accept inconvenience in accessing it.
With regard to security leaks, aren't there paid porn sites and things like OnlyFans that also have credit card information? Do they have security leaks all the time, and if so does anybody give a shit who's on the list? For just basic age verification you could even do a one time $0.01 credit card verification like R C described in another comment, and not store the card information.
I take it you've never been much of a consumer of porn? Things were much more difficult/annoying before streaming video came in. You were pretty much stuck with still images unless you were willing to give your credit card number to various websites that looked like fronts for the Russian Mafia and download a bunch of files you were pretty sure would give your computer viruses. Pornhub is mostly successful because it at least seems much safer and more anonymous and people do NOT want to go back to the old days.
Like, imagine you enjoyed streaming movies through Netflix and suddenly someone decided to pass a law that would force you to go back to getting your movies through cable TV and VHS all to supposedly help some kids you don't know and who will probably just get around the restriction anyway.
As to site security, look up what happened to the site Ashley Madison.
I actually do have first hand experience with both finding porn in the old days and with Pornhub, and I definitely agree that the modern sites are much better and safer than virus-laden websites or shady peer-to-peer files. If anything the success of Pornhub and xTube and whatever else seems like it could make it easier to implement a solution with the bigger trusted sites.
The analogy seems more like if Netflix decided to make me enter a passcode or something before streaming an R-rated movie to make sure it wasn't a minor accessing my profile, and that would be a little annoying but not that big of a deal.
I also don't think a PornHub leak would be as salacious as Ashley Madision, given that the latter was focused on enabling actual real world infidelity.
I'm willing to believe that the technical and privacy challenges are too difficult to implement a workable solution. I just don't get the strong resistance of porn consumers to even consider possible regulation.
Yeah having it be as difficult to access as tobacco seems fine.
Funny thing about Ashley Madison though, while there were plenty of real men on that site looking for sex with someone other than their partner, there were extremely few women. Weren't most of the female profiles bots?
The Ashley Madison leak seemed genuinely humiliating for those affected, since it revealed them as extremely gullible and also lacking enough game to just cheat on Tinder or whatever like a normal person.
You're kind of writing Bernie's and AOC's talking points for them there. "The people who oppose interest rate caps would prefer that poor people struggle against insurmountable financial odds and stay poor forever just so that they can get an upgrade on their international flight to the Maldives."
I hope people can understand that the alternative for poor people paying high interest rates is not paying low interest rates but receiving no credit at all. Maybe that's the goal, but let's be honest with our paternalism.
But yeah I also want to be able to go to the Maldives on points too.
> I hope people can understand that the alternative for poor people paying high interest rates is not paying low interest rates but receiving no credit at all
Research on payday loans suggests this is actually better.
1. As a welfare enhancing policy this makes sense because rates can get so bad that eventually only the financially illiterate take the deal.
2. And politically you can stick it to greedy banks by capping rates.
Yes, for every credit card use or payday loan that turned out well, there are dozens of cases where it turned into a massive financial black hole. I'd be more willing to allow them if bankruptcy was more accessible and easier, but instead we've made that harder to access.
I think Matt specifically addresses that in the post. But sure, the folks who understand that but agree with the policy proposal say it's still a better outcome.
I don't see why the credit card company wouldn't be maximizing revenue per customer. You are getting flights to the Maldives because of vendor fees your vendors are paying. Poor people pay high interest rates to make up for the risk of extending them credit. It's not a cross-subsidy except to the extent the credit card company can't tell which kind of customer you are. But if you're travelling to the Maldives, the credit card company knows.
The consequence of capping interest rates will be that some current customers don't get credit cards, or have to pay fixed annual fees instead.
Or provide security. Some "starter" cards today require a large fraction of credit line to be held by the card in escrow to secure the loan.
I didn't know that - also make sense.
There must be models for programs to build people's credit. Maybe a program to make secured credit cards more easily available.
Is there a discoverability problem? I'd be surprised if these products weren't heavily marketed to the relevant demographics already.
The other dynamic are the transaction fees. Everyone pays the fees today (not everyone carry’s a balance). Ostensively the fees are match the rewards. I wonder if lower interest just generally would mean higher fees.
Travel points are paid for by merchant fees...
They are, in part. They're also paid for by high interest rates from people who carry balances.
There was one place (cant find the reference right now) they made a rule about merchant fees, and when it when into effect the credit card drastically reduced rewards. I suspect the people who are picking cards based on rewards are not the ones paying interest.
This is correct (I work in consumer banking— you’ve heard of my company, you probably have one of our cards. I’m also a woman, for what it’s worth). It depends on the corporate strategy to a certain extent, but generally the better rewards go to the higher FICO scores. If we could wave a magic wand, everyone would use their card all the time and always pay it off. We’d lose the interest but gain the interchange fee and wouldn’t have to write off a bunch of bad debt.
The only way to slow the progression of internet porn is dial-up. Pure and simple. 14Bps
Reject modernity. Embrace tradition.
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/598/
Assume in a regime where you mostly have to pay for porn some current consumers would drop off
There is absolutely no way to do this. Technology is a real blind spot for Matty.
Why? There's absolutely no way to make a draconian porn ban that affected everything. But it's totally possible to increase the difficulty of finding porn.
For example, child porn is not widely available like regular porn. I assume it's out there on the dark web somewhere because people get arrested for it, but you don't stumble into it when you do a Google Image search, like regular porn. Even 4chan deletes child porn posts. Why? Because 4chan knows they'd be shut down if they ignored the anti-child porn laws.
If there were laws about regular porn, you'd still be able to find it pretty easily because there's huge demand for it, but it would be marginally harder. The most convenient way to get it for adults would be to just show proof of age instead of figuring how to join a private IRC group or whatever. Teen age boys would still want to look at porn, but they don't have much money, so the market wouldn't cater to them, it would cater to the people with money.
The primary thing that restricts child porn is not really the enforcement regime, which despite its many high-profile hits is still fairly paltry and weak.
What restricts child porn is the overwhelming degree of social sanction against the consumption of that material, a sanction so severe that it effectively amounts to social death for those who receive it. Registries are a policy tool that are on the merits almost useless but have the effect of amplifying and enabling this social sanction.
I personally believe this law idea is good, not because it's going to do much, but because it's time for us as a society to push back on the idea that it's totally normal and okay for "literally every man" to consume video porn, including the vast majority of teen boys. Obviously we don't want a social sanction on the level of CP, but we also don't want a reduction in demand nearly so drastic as that either.
I don't agree but appreciate the rational and coherent case you made, rather than the fuzzy hand-waving matt and other commenters did
I work in criminal defense, and I've worked a lot of child porn cases, and I can tell you child pornography is readily available through regular internet channels. We've never had a "dark web" case that I can think of.
Unrelated to this, but the phrase "I've worked a lot of child porn cases" is something I hope I never can say. It would ruin me.
I can’t even fathom putting my personal feelings aside to pro bono defend someone who consumes child porn because they deserve representation.
That would bleed through and I’d botch the job terribly.
Yes, and it seems like there are many people interpreting the primary goal of #10 to be no teenager ever finds porn. As a parent of an early tween I would be happy if I didn't have to worry as much about him or one of his friends accessing porn out of curiosity. Put it behind the internet equivalent of a brown paper wrapper.
child porn is *absolutely* widely available. yeah google is pretty good at hiding it, other search engines aren't always. and if you are looking for a search engine to find it, you will.
But there are presumably a lot of people who aren’t very motivated to find it who have been prevented from finding it. Same could be true for conventional porn.
there are not a lot of (male) people who aren't motivated to find conventional porn
Online poker is in no way as available to Americans now as it was in 2005. Do Americans still play online poker illegally? Yes, but many fewer play now.
But those sites already had to take payment in some form, which made them easier to regulate.
In fact, I believe it was the credit card companies that successfully applied pressure a couple years ago to the free porn sites to get them to delete about 80% of their content because it was unverified. Now all content comes from production companies that maintain legal records or amateurs who provide verification videos.
I can't imagine it's true that less people play poker online in the US in 2022 than 2005. And if it is true it's because poker was particularly popular in 2005, not because of internet regulation
The numbers fell off a cliff in 2006 with the passage of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Act and never came close to recovering. Poker didn't magically get much less popular in January of 2007.
Not to mention that if it did you could make a pretty convincing case that it did so precisely because the passage of UIGA meant that fewer people could easily access online poker and therefore lost interest in the game generally.
The World Series of Poker gets bigger every year, card rooms have expanded, poker streaming is booming. I don’t think it works to say poker was more popular in 2005 than today.
I don't know how much those other avenues show that poker overall recovered, but there was a huge crash in 2006-2007.
Credit card rewards are also paid for by increasing merchant fees, which is why a lot of merchants are now putting a surcharge on credit use. This seems very inefficient since cards are a lot more efficient/safer than cash generically so essentially it's the bloat of the rewards that is making merchants not want to accept them anymore. I like rewards too but abolishing them would be good.
Yeah, rewards are cool and all, but TBH, would give them up in a hot second if we could just do the transaction and lose the side hustle, and in exchange, lower transaction fees to as close to zero as possible. At the end of the day, it is an odd market distortion.
The rewards won't be abolished. Some merchants will charge more for cards because they are either dumb (don't understand the cost of handling cash) or can't negotiate a good deal with the credit card company. But you don't see Amazon doing this and, in fact, many vendors offer their own cards with even better benefits.
Whenever I see one of those cheapo businesses that get big mad about taking credit card transactions and charges a surcharge, I am always tempted to pay in pennies just to make a point.
The travel rewards are largely funded by the merchant fees, as evidenced by AmEx having both the most generous rewards (see 5x MR on Platinum airfare, 4.5x MR on Everyday Preferred groceries, etc.) and the lowest percentage of revenue being from interest (higher AFs and higher merchant fees). The folks who earn the travel rewards are, across issuers, more likely to always pay-in-full, which is the main reason no one has been able to dethrone the AmEx Platinum (Citi has already given up (Prestige is closed to new applicants and likely to see further benefit erosion) and Chase seems pretty unhappy with the Sapphire Reserve... Cap1 is nibbling but will likely end up in Citi/Chase land and the others are all basically staying away): the interest-dependent model doesn't work in that segment.
Doesn't it seem perverse that the credit card benefits we enjoy are subsidized by lower-income borrowers who pay higher interest rates?
Why do you think the credit card company is taking a loss on you and making it up from lower-income borrowers? I think it's reasonable to assume the credit card company is also making money on your credit card use.
re: Credit Cards, I am not sure you lose the points in a scenario where you have interest caps. Corporate Cards have those programs, and most of those never see interest charges that go to consumers.
I think the list should be more focused on inflation and productivity. It's what people care about, and it's also I think relatively actionable. Matt has said this elsewhere: US policy has been dedicated to "job creation" for 20 years, and that is now getting really harmful. Tariffs, "buy American", union requirements, permitting, environmental review etc.
Porn seems the weakest inclusion on the list.
Real question, are you a parent of a child age 8 or older? Because if you were I think you would find the inclusion of real porn limits to be the most salient issue on this list, possibly tied with universal free school meals.
Absolutely.
Matt's rationale for including it is a good one.
It signals to parents and cultural conservatives that you Democrats don't absolutely hate them and take at least some of their concerns seriously.
I’d much rather they do that by taking popular measures to unfuck the education system than implement a wee bit of the PRC’s real identification verification infrastructure online, thank you kindly.
I am much more concerned about my child’s experience in my city’s public school system in ten years’ time than her accessing porn online.
Many orders of magnitude more concerned.
All of the zeros more concerned.
Agreed.
Though the existence of a bigger problem doesn't mean we shouldn't tackle a smaller one.
It's basically a sop to centrists and conservatives, to try and drag the Dems image back towards the middle, from the current crazy-town it is in.
I understand that, but I think it’s also an objectively terrible idea and should be replaced by something like a national civics education standard that appeals to the mushy middle.
This seems… unrealistic. I think you believe this is more important than everything else and impute that as a major concern to other parents without any real supporting data.
I don’t believe there’s any evidence to suggest this is actually the case.
For example, I am much more confident in my ability to constrain my child from accessing porn than I am in, say, preventing her from being bullied in middle school.
I am also vastly more confident that I as a parent can play a constructive role in teaching her about sex and how to preserve her safety and fulfill her emotional and physical needs than that I can do the same regarding basic academic matters.
Put succinctly, I’m way more concerned about the quality of my area’s public schools than about whether she sees porn and I have to sit her down and explain its lack of realism to her.
I don't disagree that the quality of my child's school is more important, but it doesn't feel like something the federal government is going to solve AND it feels a lot harder to get a coalition to agree on what "quality public schools" means.
I mean, a federal “mushy middle” civics curriculum to rein in both DeSantis and my city’s woke-ass school board would be an immensely reassuring start, much more important than any of this.
I think it's hard to design a "mushy middle" civics curriculum that will be more popular than "No Child Left Behind" or Common Core.
I suppose any bill for a "mushy middle" civics curriculum would create some sort of panel of historians and leading civic individuals that would devise its contents, but something makes me think that Republicans would still seize on the debate over the curriculum's contents to try to embarrass Democrats. For one, it would be characterized by the extreme right fringe as "federal government brain washing" and interference in local education, a "federal power grab" of sorts. Secondly, conservatives would likely attack it for not being sufficiently patriotic about America and its history, even if it was pretty rah-rah-America-is-great--look at how they relentlessly attacked Obama on this front, despite his patriotic narrative about how great America's ideals are and how it has grown closer through time at living up to them. Third, the curriculum would unleash a lot of extremely toxic takes from leftists wanting to inject all sorts of 'critical' ideas into it--the left would also likely characterize the curriculum as brain washing, and would try to tar Dem politicians for supporting it. Wonder what Dems' allies in the teachers' unions would think about having to teach a new "federal mandate"... Just could imagine this being a giant mess.
NCLB had majority support when passed, no?
I think a lot of parents wouldn’t be happy with a “mushy middle” plan except insofar as it prevents the other side from dictating to them, which I have to imagine would mean a lot to rural parents in NY or CA, or urban ones in TX or FL.
That said, an issue not being federal hasn't stopped candidates from trying.
Yes! If you are a parent with kids number 10 is an issue. It’s also a serious issue for the left that when you post about it a thousand liberal people come after you claiming you are essentially Hitler and you are advocating some new holocaust. It’s just porn folks, it’s a suggestion of sensible regulation of a well known vice.
Liberals would rather concoct a fantasy nightmare about some privacy issue that seems like it comes from the deranged ramblings of one of those libertarian dudes who forced the census to start anonymizing information than admit that their primary issue is that they, personally, would rather not have to deal with any additional inconvenience when accessing porn.
Which, you know, too bad, I don't really care.
I think that is part of it, but I don't want automatically to assume bad faith on the part of people making these arguments against regulation. I think there is a legitimate privacy and security concern. However, to not even want to approach a way to reform the system isn't going to be sustainable. My guess is that Republicans are going to massively overreach when they take congress but some of that overreach may not poll as poorly as liberals hope. If the Republicans are the only ones for regulation, then a lot of middle of the road folks will be like "Well they are overdoing it, but the left wants to practically hand a laptop loaded with furry porn to my 6 year old". That situation will be much worse for security and privacy because Republicans will use it as a tool of discrimination and marginalization against the groups they don't like as soon as they have the power.
"if you were I think you would find the inclusion of real porn limits to be the most salient issue on this list"
I'm sure that this is an issue of concern to parents --- just as violent video games were a concern to parents 15 years ago. They were so much of a concern, that Hillary Clinton campaigned to limit children's access to violent video games back in 2008 (and before). This was popular and common sense. Exposing kids to violence would of course make them more violent, right? There were academic studies that backed up this common sense too. Well, it turned out that common sense and academic studies got it wrong. Violent media (including video games) doesn't increase violence. If anything, it does the opposite [1,2] (both by Matthew Yglesias).
So, yeah, I'm sure that a lot of parents today are concerned that porn will harm their kid. And I'm sure that campaigning to limit access to porn is popular. I'd also bet dollars to donuts that porn is no more harmful to kids than violent video games. The academic studies that say otherwise won't replicate (psychology articles rarely do) --- just as the violent video game studies didn't replicate.
The most salient issue for parents should be an actual problem --- not a repackaged video game panic.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2019/8/5/20754769/trump-video-games-mass-shooting-el-paso-toledo
[2] https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1529908549547085833
Idk man, video games are cool though.
Personally, I'm the parents of two children over the age of 8 (11 and 9) and I'd put # 6 and # 8 at the top.
Most readers of this blog are rich enough to afford school meals and educated enough to know how to configure adult content filters, so they don't care about those.
I’m not a parent. What I meant is this seems like an issue you could easily legislate. Republicans wouldn’t oppose it. So its electoral value is likely to be limited.
If it's broadly popular and you could get republican support, doesn't that mean it's an even better idea to include in the list? You're trying to win over voters, so popular things are a good idea, and if you're saying something that even appeals to conservatives then you're more likely to persuade voters to support you. Not to mention that you create a bit of a bind for the opposition- either come out against it (which would be unpopular) or come out and say (GASP!) your opponent's idea is a good one that you support. All of these seem like good outcomes, and far better than the endless smashing our faces into walls advocating for unpopular ideas that have no hope of ever becoming law.
No. You want to push popular ideas your opponents oppose. If there'd broad agreement and you hold the White House and both chambers of Congress, you should just do it.
Having said that. I've been shocked by the amount of disagreement with Matt's porn proposal in this comments section. I thought it was weak because it was a no-brainer, but clearly that's not the case, so I stand corrected on that.
You're talking about what to do when you're already in power. The point of this exercise is to focus on what you should run on to get into office in the first place. There's a huge difference between "we have the votes to do this, so should we do it?" and "I'm hoping to get you to support me for office, so here's what I want to talk about".
They're not talking about it, and even if it's bipartisanly popular there's value in leading on a bipartisan issue. I think it's a good call.
That was my thoughts. He’s trying to cater to main stream Democrats win what he needs to do is cater to Main stream Democrats and moderates.
Actionable, sure, but try running on a "don't buy American" or "environmental reviews are too costly" platform and see where that gets you.
The whole purpose of the exercise is to have good ideas that are also politically popular and feasible. There are better policy ideas out there, but they're less popular, more technocratic, less likely to successfully pass Congress, etc.. All the things you're talking about are things that need to be done quietly to avoid a public backlash, which makes them things you absolutely don't want to be loudly proclaiming your support for as a politician.
I agree with you that inflation should be a target but I’m having trouble coming up with policies that would do that. I’m all for killing the Jones act, but that’s going to piss off labor, and I’m not sure it’s worth it. Do you have other thoughts?
I feel like the Jones Act might actually be a viable target if only because as a share of the electorate the interests it's pissing off are, AIUI, vanishingly small. The countervailing narrative that "you're paying too much for everything for no reason and the U.S. doesn't even have a competitive merchant marine to show for it!" is a reasonable bread-and-butter sales pitch.
I'm trying to imagine a world in which the Jones Act is an attention-grabbing issue in an election.
That's what this exercise is, by the way.
Force longshoremen's and dock workers' unions to accept automation at seaports, and force railroad unions to accept more automation on cargo rail. I know this is a very sacred cow for the Democratic Party, but it would actually have some noticeable effect on prices. American seaports, especially LA/Long Beach, are very inefficient compared European and Asian seaports, and that is reflected in the price of goods.
What are the odds that the democrats can do anything about inflation between now and November that would actually make a significant dent in inflation numbers? My amateur guess is roughly 100,000/1. If the focus is ONLY on inflation then the democrats are setting themselves up to debate solely on a losing issue for them. They absolutely want to campaign on doing something about inflation, but talking solely about a policy that makes you look terrible is not a good way to win an election. It would be like Giannis arguing that the MVP voting should be solely focused on free throw shooting percentage. The democrats need to try and steer the discussion towards subjects that they can make compelling appeals to voters on. One should be coming up with inflation messaging that deflects republican attacks. But they need to bring up other things after that deflection occurs or else we're going to see lots of republicans essentially saying "look at gas prices. Look at grocery prices. That's after the Dems have been in control for 2 years. On election day, look at those two things, and it will be clear who you should vote for." And they'll win easily if that's what the discussion is solely focused on.
I think “we did something and it will start working in a year, sit tight” is at least better than “there’s nothing we can do.”
Worse than that, it's not just 'between now and November', it's extremely difficult for Congress to have meaningful control of inflation in any case. Firstly, Congress does not control the Federal Reserve, who set their own decisions on whether they're more bothered about inflation or growth or unemployment or whatever.* Secondly, inflation is driven by many factors, many of which are beyond Congress's control. Congress cannot prevent failed grain harvests in Canada, cannot prevent the Ever Given from blocking the Suez Canal or Vladimir Putin from blockading Ukraine's Black Sea ports, cannot have any impact on China's zero covid policy and the closure of factories in Shanghai, and while they did have some control over pandemic stimulus measures, they also had no way to accurately predict the course of the pandemic or the speed with which red state governors and electorates would get tired of restrictions, or what proportions of covid relief would be necessary or wasted, would be spent on bills or new jetskis or on state tax cuts.
It's a commonplace to say that Presidents are given both too much credit and too much blame for the state of the economy, and it's no different for Congress. A Congressional 100% effort on reducing the effects of inflation might have some minor impact at the edges but it probably wouldn't be noticeable for the average voter who is paying no attention. There's not a 'reverse inflation' button that they're just perversely neglecting to press.
My * was meant to be a footnote that personally I dislike central bank independence and wish parties would end it, but I accept that opinion is outside the Overton Window for now.
"First trimester abortions and abortions with bona fide life or health of the mother reasons constitute the overwhelming majority of actual abortions" The other substantial sympathetic group of second and third trimester abortions is where the fetus has no or little chance of survival (or is likely to be massively disabled, like "in a coma for the rest of its life" disabled).
The case that particularly comes to mind is of a friend who had a 34-week abortion of an anencephalic fetus. For those with some Greek, that's not literally "no head", it's the absence of most of the brain and skull. It has enough brain for the minimal life-preserving requirements (maintaining heartbeat), though it requires a ventilator and to be fed through a tube. But it has no chance of long-term survival; a few weeks after birth is the most it can expect, and there is no ability to respond to stimulus. It's effectively born into a persistent vegetative state.
Anencephaly is normally diagnosed earlier, but they missed it for my friend and she ended up having a very late abortion of a fetus that had zero chance of developing into a baby. Could she have continued until birth? Sure, but why the heck should she?
I'd also want to look at making sure that women can afford early abortions. Even if that's just a government-guaranteed repayment plan so no-one ever has to save up for an abortion and so delay it.
That is so tragic :(
Agree that exceptions are also required for fetuses that cannot survive outside the womb. Matt tweeted an example from Louisiana last week where a woman's water broke at 16 weeks and the pregnancy could no longer continue, and rather than have a sad but quick, humane abortion (which was what she initially chose), she had to go through hours-long labor and delivery of her doomed fetus. Heartbreaking.
Yeah, it was 20 years ago and I was a terrible friend to her at the time and, unsurprisingly, we drifted away after that. I like to think that I'm a better and more caring person now, and I do raise her story because I hope it will help someone else in that situation.
Agree that abortion is justified in these cases but they are exactly the edge cases that Matt points out as causing things to get tied up. We're talking about a federal law that stops states from prohibiting abortion in certain circumstances. These edge cases can be taken up at the state level. Will some states insist on Draconian laws that don't allow abortion in these cases? Sure but trying to prevent that makes the perfect the enemy of the good
If my choices are “protect first trimester open access and immediate threat to mothers life” or “nothing,” I choose the first. But if my choices are “argue to protect access in just the specific edge cases we mostly agree on” or “argue for open second and third trimester access bc of edge cases”, I’m going with the first.
The argument for the second is that there's very close to 100% overlap between those two sets (to first order, nobody carries a pregnancy for 30-weeks without intending to bring it to term) so enumerating edge cases or assessing them just introduces bureaucratic overheard and possibly-incomplete enumeration into what are almost definitionally already heartbreaking 'edge cases' for all involved. Thus there's not really any tangible gain for those who are amenable to option (1) in the first place but significant overhead and frictional losses relative to just adopting option (2).
The problem is that arguing for abortion on demand through the third trimester forces you to argue full-term fetuses aren’t human beings, which is pretty disgusting to most people. If you say “we only want to allow the cases that are basically compassionate euthanasia” you win back the moderates and you actually help people in really awful scenarios.
Make travel costs for abortion something free via a refundable tax credit could work too.
My 10 point plan:
1) energy dominance: Matt’s plan plus air conditioning and heating subsidies for low income households during hot or cold months
2) housing abundance, use the commerce clause to impose Texas style land use policies on blue states. Villainize high income urbanites who prioritize their home values over affordability.
3) A national HOPE scholarship. In Georgia, college tuition is very cheap for students who maintain good grades and almost free for those with excellent grades. Make this national. Impose stiff taxes on college administrative costs to reduce bloat and DEI bullshit.
4) First trimester abortion on demand, guaranteed access when two doctors say there is a serious risk to the health of the mother.
5) Legal marijuana.
6) Health care abundance. Open borders for English speaking doctors and Spanish speaking doctors with bona fire job offers. Federally chartered medical schools. Better pay and working conditions for medical residents. You shouldn’t have to amputate your twenties to become a doctor. Drug prices pegged to Canadian levels.
7) Tax capital gains at the same rate as labor income and use the proceeds to fund child allowances.
8) More roads and bridges for stressed out commuters. Federal laws to prevent NIMBYS from litigating construction projects. Streamlined environmental impact reviews
9) Free contraceptives for anyone who wants them.
10) Humane prisons for low level offenders. Murderers, rapists and child molestors should go to to traditional prisons. Young offenders who stole stuff or got into a fight or sold drugs should go to something like a CCC camp where they can sleep in dorms, engage in healthy outdoor labor, and mix with the opposite gender on weekends as long as they avoid drugs and liquor and follow program rules. The purpose of these camps would be more to teach clean living than to impose pain. Those who break the rules go to traditional prisons.
Basically, I take successful red state programs and nationalize them, I offer young people cheaper college and legal pot, I offer women free contraceptives and early term abortions, and I go hard on material benefits for the 10th to 90th percentiles of the income distribution.
I think this is a great list and it personally demonstrates the value of list making to me. I think #8 is a terrible idea, because I'm an urban transit rider who drives only on vacation, and some of these others wouldn't be my top priorities, but they're really good, popular ideas and I'd feel comfortable advocating for them to a wide range of the population.
I could nitpick here and there, but overall I like your list better than MattY's and I think it would have a more positive impact on average Americans' lives. You out-Matted MattY! Kudos! I especially like your point #10.
Put it this way: If a wizard let me borrow his wand and wave it just once, and I had a choice to magically make either your #10 or MattY's #10 come true, I would pick yours.
I agree with Tabitha below that I don't really like your #8, because of induced demand. "If you build it, they will come" and your new road will be just as crowded as your old one was, now with extra CO2 emissions.
"Better pay and working conditions for medical residents" = as the wife of a former medical resident, I approve.
Can you explain the induced demand concept? Wouldn't this also apply to, say, housing?
"Induced demand" is the idea that traffic expands to fill the available space. If you add an extra lane to a road, more people will drive there. I don't have exact references on hand, but multiple studies have show this. I don't know whether it applies to housing.
right and if you build more housing, more people will move there and things will get expensive right? How is that logic any different?
It's different for housing and cars. Everyone has to live somewhere, and once you move into a house/apartment/any kind of building, that building is going to stay in place regardless of how much or little time you spend in it.
With cars, you are much more free to choose what to do on a daily basis (of course, your choices are constrained by things like the necessity to get to work or school). Depending on your life circumstances, on any given day you can drive your car, carpool, work from home, take a taxi/Uber, take public transit, or ride your bicycle. The level of congestion on your local road is one of the factors that affect your choice. Wider road = less congestion = more likely to drive your car rather than carpool/WFH/take public transit.
you get how that's wrong though, right?
If I'm driving more specifically because congestion is lower then I would stop driving more once congestion gets bad again and go back to carpool/WFH/public transit.
housing is not free
On 6, instead of federal med schools, strangle the AMA and Medicare cartel on residencies. That will greatly increase the number of physicians.
Love the HOPE scholarship idea. Not sure you can both increase doctors' pay AND peg health care prices to Canadian levels. (I'd love to pay Canadian rates but it will mean doctors get a big paycut -- which I'm fine with, I'm not a doctor)
He is just proposing better pay for residents which shouldn't be that expensive since it's a small number of years and they get paid like $50,000 in residency.
The open borders for English speaking and some Spanish speaking doctors would push down wages.
If Argentine and Mexican doctors were able to take jobs in Miami, it might become a hub for elective procedures, radiology, etc.. Thid would also encourage doctors in developing countries to brush up on their English and greatly increase their wages.
Ah, my mistake. Yeah I'd have no issue with residents making more and established MDs making less -- seems completely reasonable.
" Open borders for English speaking doctors and Spanish speaking doctors with bona fire job offers. "
And there would be new business opportunities for services trying to figure out the credentials and background check of international physicians, a process which takes months for already US employed physicians.
What part of a process which already takes months for US employed doctors were you having trouble with?
Bring back the old HOPE scholarship, too!
The biggest problem is what counts as porn is in the eye of the beholder - for example, on Reddit, there's lots of people who post themselves, of their own volition, for free, in various states of undress, doing everything from standing there to various sexual acts. No sob stories of being pressured, but people who just want to show themselves off.
Now, I know, yes, sure, stop the people from posting themselves having sex for free, OK, sure. The other problem is of course, Reddit for the most part doesn't post any porn. It links to various free sites that let you post videos and pictures. Those sites are pretty good at moving to domains where American law doesn't really apply to them, and I'm sure there are incentive-related reasons why even corporations who aren't pro-porn would want to make sure that Reddit isn't on the hook for every link submitted.
But, even getting past that, what's the difference between Olivia posting herself naked in her backyard and a statue of David with his willy hanging out, except time and subjective views of artistic skill? Is a topless woman with a dildo by her inherently sexual? Etc. Etc.
I'd also point out putting restrictions on porn breaks apart the Bro-Feminist Alliance that could be once again w/ Roe being overturned. You think secular conservative dudes in New Hampshire want to input their credit card or DL # everytime they want to jerk off.
Plus, stricter regulations in places like India don't really make teenage boys act better, it just means that anything vaguely sexual on Youtube gets tons of views and lots of odd comments from Indian guys. That doesn't seem like the healthiest thing either.
It's also just wildly, blatantly, stupidly, unfeasible. Pornhub is a thing for the same reason Spotify is a thing, because distributed peer 2 peer networks make it absolutely fucking impossible to stop people sharing music and completely destroyed the old business models. Free porn on Limewire was just a ubiquitous as mp3s. The tube site business model, let alone more recent advances like onlyfans, is way more constrained and ethical than the the free for all days that we'd be heading back to if the Feds decreed that all legitimate porn needs to be behind a paywall.
Pornhub just recently deleted a huge portion of the videos on the site after they got blowback from one Nicholas Kristof column. There didn’t even need to be a law! If there was a law they would dramatically change their model or close down. Yes, there would still be plenty of porn shared on p2p but just that change would hugely cut down on how many young people were seeing porn (my 9-year-old doesn’t know what p2p is and I’m not about to tell her).
Right and it’s not like people don’t try posting porn to YouTube; it just gets shut down instantly. Same could happen for YouTube.
"Most people don't speed when they drive" citation needed....
I think if you set a fee high enough that reddit etc don't want to pay it if they host something that's unpaywalled but reasonable enough that they don't go bankrupt if users mess them up, you might get something workable.
Kind of like the speeding tickets you mention. I don't want a ticket, but the rare ticket doesn't ruin me (I haven't gotten one in years, but I have gotten them before and they were annoying and I didn't want them but they didn't shut me down)
But... BigTech isn't wrong that there are real tradeoffs. If the cost were so high that reddit had to validate every video link you posted, it simply wouldn't let you post video links, which would also be a real cost.
I think it's tricky to set it at the correct level, but I agree it's probably not impossible.
You seem really worked up about maintaining free access to porn.
This comment feels out of line. I don't think it's great for comment sections to be second-guessing motives like this.
I think everyone here has access to Twitter, which is the space that God created for imputing motive.
Jack Dorsey thinks he's God now?
...
Yeah, that tracks.
He didn’t second-guess his motives. He observed that he is treating this as a highly upsetting proposal and implied that this level of upset is disproportionate. I think that’s all fair game.
Once you can identify motivated reasoning, it's actually usually advantageous to identify someone's motivations.
It makes for better negotiation, and fewer gish gallops.
Unless you think Manchin is actually concerned about inflation, and that's why climate legislation and tax reform is untenable.
You don't think Manchin is concerned about inflation? That would make him pretty unusual among moderate Americans. Heck, I'd say pretty unusual among Americans full stop.
Most people who acquire wealth by asset appreciation don't really care about inflation.
I spend lots of time with such people (i.e. hedge fund and PE people) and can assure you that is not the case.
Also, most people care about more than their own bottom line in any event, and I don't see why Machin would be different.
You seem really worked up about advocating for a Chinese-style authoritarian system where everyone's porn viewing habits are centrally tracked via ID by Big Brother. For your own good citizen, of course. I'm sure they'd never leak or get hacked, leading to everyone knowing Bob Jones was watching X Video at Y Time. The government's cybersecurity is well-known to be flawless. I, too, think that totalitarian Big Government solutions are generally the way
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach
I don't get this take. Were we living in a Chinese Style authoritarian system in 1992 before there was massive amounts of freely available porn online? Does the fact that netflix, Hulu, etc. all require submit a CC to pay for content mean we're living in a totalitarian nightmare?
I was in middle school in 1992. Everyone knew where their Dad's Playboys were. Most of the boys at school passed around copies of Hustler, Penthouse etc. (One boy was famously busted by his Mom with a literal duffel bag full of them- the stuff of middle school legend....) Somehow we all survived. As dirty magazines have been a thing for the whole 20th century, I'll take a wager and say that every generation of boys got them illicitly.
I just cannot believe that after Prohibition, the War on Drugs etc., people still can't imagine how the black market will work. Especially on.... the Internet. As 96% of the world's population lives outside the US and isn't subject to its rules, and porn is in Extremely High Demand, there will be countless websites outside the scope of American jurisdiction. And who's the most tech-savvy crowd best positioned to use a VPN and find them? That's right, boys under 18.
I noticed you don't use your full name here, John. But you'd be comfortable with your full name leaking along with a list of all the adult websites you've visited in the last few years, once these websites inevitably get hacked? You're cool with that?
Do you actually see no difference in scale between “some kids know where their dad’s dirty mags are and pass them around to a dozen friends” and “every kid can access a practically infinite number of pornographic videos from the privacy of their room”? You can’t possibly think that “we survived” an era where you could see a Hustler every few months means that there could be no possible adverse effects from the cup-runneth-over situation we have now.
Is something stopping people who pay for porn sites now from having their data hacked and released? The Ashley Madison leak suggests not. But am I failing to account for scale myself? Sincere question.
I don't think that children should be viewing hardcore pornography- I think their parents should monitor their electronic devices and stop it. If your response is 'gee, it's really difficult to monitor what websites they're visiting', I would invite you to consider how difficult that becomes when you scale up to the 73 million children in the US.
I think large-scale government bans that create black markets are in general a terrible solution to any problem. Sometimes they work when the product in question is logistically difficult to get (I dunno, a rocket launcher or something), but man when I look at 'porn on the Internet' or 'websites in general', that sure looks logistically easy to route around restrictions. Like nailing jelly to a wall
I'd be more comfortable with my full name leaking along with the adult websites I've visited than the vast number of silly comments I've made on substacks :)
We're not talking about prohibition - that's just a ridiculous example. We ended prohibition, but would you suggest that we remove all age & ID constraints for alcohol or pot? Some 10 year old kid can roll up and order a coke and rum with a magic brownie to take the edge off a hard day at school?
As for people not following US laws, they are doing this to get paid. Make a system where its easy for them to get paid if they ID, but it costs them money if they don't and 90%+ of them will follow the easy money.
Not to mention all the viewing data, e.g., which videos watched, for how long, etc.
Do sites track that stuff? I guess I can imagine metrics reasons why they would. But if so, isn’t that vulnerable to being hacked and released right now?
In the 90s, we had movies about single teenage boys having intercourse with pies and a way higher rate of teenage pregnancy. Instead of looking at internet porn teen boys got into way worse trouble.
Anyway, people care about internet anonymity, especially with something as incredibly personal, incredibly wound up in shame and sexuality as porn. You also can't just think about it in terms of internet porn either being PornHub (free) or OnlyFans (paywall). Any and every site where users are allowed to host their own content has had a porn community full of people pseudonymously sharing their own NSFW content - Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Youtube, DeviantArt, WordPress, *chan boards, fanfiction archives - those horses left the barn a long time ago. That would take us into a separate discussion about Section 230 and the expectations of sites making a good faith attempt at keeping order. They do that currently, but not even a company of Youtube's scale can keep copyrighted material off of it, and they get the benefit of having an algorithm that can compare against a massive database of copyrighted material. They know what they're looking for and they can't find it all.
The only way of truly keeping kids away from porn is to de-anonymize the people consuming it, hence the paywall idea. If you went to a shady store and bought a porno in the 90s, you showed them your ID, but they didn't need to make you a store account. You could pay in cash, only one person really needed to know your shameful secret. But that wouldn't be the case with porn now. For good and for ill it would mean that every account could be tied back to a real person. That information would be valuable (and dangerous) in a data breach.
I don't care if Netflix knows that I'm catching up on Better Call Saul, what harm would that do if it was leaked? But while some people just want to watch some naked people of their preferred gender and that information would be pretty minimally embarrassing (although it could possibly end some marriages), some people (like Ted Cruz) enjoy some scandalous fantasy material that could be used to hurt them and some normal, everyday people are into shameful, degenerate things that are completely harmless but immensely embarrassing if they were to become public knowledge (like people sitting in pies and crying, thanks BCS for telling me that exists...).
It's just a bad idea.
I don’t understand why “you can access this material, but you’ll have to accept the risk that it’ll become public knowledge that you did so” is an assault on freedoms. Someone could hack what library books I’ve checked out; that’s not an assault on my freedoms, as long as the FBI aren’t the ones doing the hacking.
Well also there are some pretty serious first amendment issues to implementing this scheme. So I think it's probably a good idea on net for Democratic Party officials to try, but I'd also be very pessimistic they'd come up with something that's both effective and constitutional. I'd bet they'd have to pick one of the two.
He's not making principled first amendment claims, though there's also no first amendment right to host porn. The core of the argument seems to be (1) who can even say what porn is and (2) horny teens will just look at Michaelangelo's David instead.
"there's also no first amendment right to host porn"
Well, there is in the sense the government's power to restrict such hosting is limited. You are correct, however, that hosting companies have no obligation to allow it.
Think like Republican strategists! #10 is a frankly a terrible policy idea and pretty unworkable, which is why it will almost certainly never get off the ground. But because its so infeasible it's a great #10 point on a ten point plan, it signals cultural conservatism without having to do a lot of work.
A Democrat admin that won on this entire platform would eventually get around to #10, they would have a bunch of hearings where democrat senators can force the Pornhub CEO to testify before congress, which will mostly be them yelling at at him about being a filthy pervert endangering women and kids. Tons of great TV. Then MAYBE they pass a bill demanding a study on the harm of porn and technology feasibility of blocking it. Study takes until the next election cycle to complete, harm results are inconclusive, technology is difficult to implement., DOA. But all those congressmen and women running for reelection have great clips for their ads of yelling at the Pornhub CEO!
If people are that stupid/easily manipulated, I think abolishing democracy makes the most sense.
"Those sites are pretty good at moving to domains where American law doesn't really apply to them, and I'm sure there are incentive-related reasons why even corporations who aren't pro-porn would want to make sure that Reddit isn't on the hook for every link submitted."
The government took the legitimate overseas poker sites out of the US market in one fell swoop, and the number of Americans playing online poker is still a small fraction of what it once was. I don't think it's nearly that difficult.
Online poker has a rather huge vulnerability in the form of payment processing. Jesse was discussing sites like Reddit providing links to non-US sites. As far as I'm aware, the US government never purported to prohibit discussion forums from having links to foreign gambling sites.
“Is a topless woman with a dildo by her inherently sexual?”
Not if it’s tastefully done.
What we're fundamentally talking about here is forcing a handful of exploitative tech platforms out of business in favor of OnlyFans and similar business models. I think the labor/worker protection angle materially justifies Matt's proposal, independent of any benefit on the psyche of America's adolescents.
One of the things that annoyed me as a teenager was that I had much easier access to violence than porn. For example, I found that deeply hypocritical that sex was taboo, but I could easily watch "Saving Private Ryan". I would guess that the number of people machine-gunned by Slow Boring commenters is lower than the number of people who have had sex with Slow Boring commenters (even though most commenters here are American, and to the best of my knowledge the US is a more violent country than the average rich country both in terms of crime and in terms of wars it has recently fought).
Can someone make a good case about why teenagers watching porn is a more serious problem than teenagers watching people get machine-gunned in Normandy or teenagers machine-gunning people on Call of Duty?
Devil's Advocate Argument: As you point out, people are more likely to have sex than they are to be in a combat scenario, as such learning warped lessons about sex from porn is far more likely to be brought into the actual bedroom than learning warped lessons about violence is to be brought to the battlefield.
I don't believe that I could come up with any better argument myself either. However, I don't believe that this is a strong argument in a country with not totally infrequent school shootings.
edit: Just to clarify, I don't believe that Call of Duty causes school shootings, just as I don't believe that porn harms your (prospective) sexual life.
I would guess that the probability of a kid sexually assaulting a peer is not actually so different than the probability of a kid physically assaulting one.
I'm glad you also drew the connection between porn and violent video games. I think that concern over children accessing porn is just the continuation of the previous moral panic over violent video games. Back in the '00s, there was a panic about how violent video games (with very primitive graphics by today's standards) would turn kids into a bunch of serial killers. Or something. Ask Hillary Clinton, who got in on the issue [1].
Of course, this all turned out to be bullshit. Crime rates kept dropping. Kids didn't become more violent. Violent video games didn't make kids more violent. If fact, per MY, violent video games probably reduced violence [2]. So, now a new moral panic was needed. How about porn! In fact, the anti-video game crew was already making the connection. To quote HRC from back in the day: "We need to treat violent video games the way we treat tobacco, alcohol, and pornography." [1] Of course, porn concerns parents, just as video games used to concern parents, and there are some studies saying that porn will cause permanent harm to children, just as there were some studies suggesting that violent video games caused harm to children. However, I'm guessing that this will all prove to be bullshit too. The studies won't replicate. Perhaps they'll even anti-replicate. Life will go on. Someone will find a new moral panic.
That's what makes #10 on MY's list all the more annoying. It's the modern version of HRC's opposition to violent video games (which MY knows full well is bullshit). I'm sure HRC's team did polling on it and found that there was support for curtailing access to violent video games --- just as MY can point to support for curtailing access to porn. However, just because there was support doesn't mean it was an effective policy. I guess that it's a fairly cheap bone that you can throw conservatives, so if it really wins votes, I'd bite my tongue and go along with it. But it seems like there should be a bone that you can throw conservatives that's actually beneficial...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/04/21/hillary-clintons-history-with-video-games-and-the-rise-of-political-geek-cred/
[2] https://www.vox.com/2019/8/5/20754769/trump-video-games-mass-shooting-el-paso-toledo
That seems convincing, and it had never occurred to me. Thanks.
I don't contest the thrust of your argument, but Saving Private Ryan seems like a poor example. It doesn't glorify violence - it exposes the brutal reality of war lest people glorify it (or forget the gratitude we owe to those who have borne the battle). The shock value is part of a legitimately educational purpose. Ditto the brutally violent Schindler's List. I doubt anyone who sees those movies thinks they're watching a jolly good time or is inspired to emulate the Germans.
Not to mention that its not a scenario that teenagers will find themselves in and therefore be able to mimic. A much more analogous scenario to me is watching kids play sports- they're constantly copying the things that professional athletes are doing, whether it's pregame rituals, high-five/handshakes, moves that they see the stars do, and other behaviors that they pick up from superstars on TV. Very few of us will ever be trying to storm a beachhead and secure a toehold for tanks to come behind us, so we're not given a chance to try and reenact what we saw stars do (and obviously we would have been trained in boot camp and elsewhere so we wouldn't have to try and pick up appropriate actions from movies and tv shows). But we don't see lots of videos of "proper sexual behaviors between consenting adults", so I can absolutely imagine people picking up behaviors/positions/actions that they see in adult entertainment and incorporating that into their actual sex lives. It seems kind of bonkers to me that people even disagree with this or argue that it's not happening. We can absolutely have a discussion about whether it's good or bad (I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other yet), but to pretend like it's not happening because of comparisons to things like war movies or glorified violence in movies and tv shows seems willfully ignorant to me.
This is a convincing argument.
Maybe so. My argument isn't about violence glorification necessarily. I had mere exposure to violence in mind. We could have a whole separate argument about violence glorification. Maybe people who recently watched Top Gun 2 are more willing to bomb the Iranian nuclear reactors in real life?
I definitely think that violence, especially the gratuitous cruelty and torture type violence that seems increasingly prevalent, can be equally if not more morally injurious than watching porn. A distinction I see is that in healthy people the desire or enthusiasm for violence is much weaker and less compelling than sexual desire, and therefore much less likely to get out of hand or become difficult for a not fully mature person to handle. Particularly when you are talking about viewing porn in conjunction with masturbation and orgasm, you are dealing with some extremely powerful brain reward systems.
I think you can see this in the difference between how people relate to violent content versus pornography. If someone sought out websites with just the most violent parts of movies, or maintained a library of violent images and clips, or continually sought out new and different violent content as the old stuff got boring, that would seem deeply concerning. But that's all completely typical behavior around porn, to say nothing of the people who end up with an obsessive relationship (I'm hesitant to use the term "addiction") to porn, e.g. spending excessive time viewing porn, wanting to cut back or stop but feeling unable to, and sneaking or hiding their porn use from loved ones.
I don't have links to back this up. However, I could see the case for porn influencing people's views on how sex works for most people. Violence in media is usually so over the top, that even children almost universally see it as fantastical or at least not to be emulated, unlike certain sex acts in porn.
Now substantively, this seems like a better case for good sex-ed, than whatever scheme Matt is talking about, but thats not the exercise here. Sex ed is very controversial. Still, I'm skeptical that it would even work. The Tories in Britain proposed something similar. I have no idea how that worked out. I guess I'm not opposed on principle, but I'm skeptical of the practicalities.
I used the example of "Saving Private Ryan", because one of the "selling points" of the movie is that it's so realistic that it reduced actual Normandy veterans to tears. I googled quickly a moment ago, and I did find more than a few articles, so my memory is probably correct on this.
Still, I don't think a lot of kids can emulate that. Maybe it leads to more kids joining the military. I almost fell for that kind of glorification as a kid. However, o know a lot of people get weird ideas about sex and how it's "supposed to work" from porn.
I don't think there's much reason to think something like the most famous beach assault landing in history that took place during the largest armed conflict the world had literally ever seen before is something that a teenager is going to think tells him much about his day-to-day lived experience. That's hugely different than an adult scene which the same teenager could assume is a relatively accurate depiction of what sex "should" be like. It's really a very apples to oranges comparison.
Okay, what happens if you take a mediocre movie about a violent bank robbery (something that has happened many times in many countries) vs something rare like a celebrity sex tape (where most people don't expect to have sex with that celebrity)? My argument wasn't concerned about whether some specific depiction was about a rare enough event, or was done in a tasteful manner. It merely concerned exposure to violence vs exposure to sex.
The little fact that those people aren’t actually machine gunned ? Snuff videos did become a thing in recent years (e.g. by ISIS)and are justly treated with far greater opprobrium than porn.
Where I come from we have a joke that goes a little bit like "I regret becoming a plumber, because the real job is very different from what porn had me expect.".
I still think it’s significant that porn generally (or by definition ?) is filmed prostitution. That’s what makes it meaningfully different from some very spicy r rates scenes on hbo.
I can think of HBO shows that contain pornographic scenes themselves (Game of Thrones), so I don't think that this is a very meaningful distinction.
The sex on Game of Thrones is simulated and is in service of a story. It is definitionally not pornographic.
We can agree to disagree, but this is the first time it occurred to me that someone might not consider some specific GoT scenes as porn.
It’s all about context. The depiction of extraordinary violence used by the Nazi army against American soldiers undertaking to save the world may be tough to watch, but at least there is a point to it. The depiction of consequence-free sex - sometimes extreme, often one-sided, and that is very much not part of a normal, committed relationship - isn’t exactly offering up a good life lesson.
Porn is addictive in a way violent movies aren't
No it isn't
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/researchers-say-porn-addiction-not-real-022214
Definitions are hard. Call it compulsive behavior if that makes you more comfortable. In any case, a large chunk of people wish they could stop watching pornography but still wind up watching it anyway.
Fair, just looking around it looks like the addiction model is a lot more controversial than I realized. That said I think this is an open area of research and whether it is or isn't is still unknown.
Sure you’re not confusing her with Catharine A. MacKinnon (who is still alive and well and writing as far as I know )?
Bygone eras have a tendency to make comebacks , if not repeating themselves, at least rhyming. We shall see who says the last word.
Also- ever heard of “sexual harassment “? I believe she coined the term or at least the very concept. We are all living in MacKinnon’s era, to some extent. She is one of the Greats.
The basic assumption that it's even remotely close to the realm of the possible for government to meaningfully constrain the flow of porn on the internet is simultaneous laughable and a legitimately dangerous authoritarian impulse. Chasing that particular type of dragon creates tyrants real fast.
Now hold on. There are lots of authoritarian dangers lurking but requiring a age verification system with *some teeth* (likely having to provide cc info) is not the type of draconian regime most people envision when it comes to big government internet control.
Are you a parent? I think once you have kids, this is something that becomes more of a concern. It often feels like my kid has access to a beer keg where all they have to do is write “yes” on a sheet of paper and they can drink all they want. That’s a really crappy regulatory regime for a vice.
You’re right, but how would you enforce that without the draconian internet censorship? Whats to stop all the porn sites operating fully from abroad, beyond the reach of the us government? Beer sold abroad literally can’t reach your child, but the only way to stop your child visiting a Russian website is by installing a great wall (or iron curtain ?) over the internet. Wouldn’t it be better to encourage parents to voluntarily install parental control apps in their kids devices - and if those currently don’t do a good enough job to try to improve them?
I think you are getting hung up on the specific example and ignoring the broader point.
The gate keeping device is verifying age through a credit card, after which point you can then access the service. It would be a requirement for any pornography sellers who want to sell through the US. It would require a new regulatory regime like the one that governs alcohol but that doesn’t mean we need a great firewall necessarily.
We do have parental control apps but the number of screens my kids have access to in a day that I don’t have control over is bonkers, especially in the summer.
The point of policy should be to make a better society right? Why not make a society where it’s harder for children to access hardcore pornography? I genuinely don’t understand the pushback on this one.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the internet. "any pornography sellers who want to sell through the US." is absolutely not a thing that exists in any technical sense. Creating any system in which such a thing exists would be massively draconian.
Sure it is, there are plenty of things you can search that google will show no results for or put them in 10000th place.
Yes, Google can sanitize search results and Pornhub is pretty good at killing kiddie porn before you see it. That is not the problem you have. The problem you have is one no one has figured out. The problem you have is "How do we shut down The Pirate Bay?". Even China struggles to keep their citizen's browsing inside the state approved walled garden.
Yea, the point is that the paywall concept is incredibly easily bypassed. It will never be a meaningful constraint for entirely technical reasons. Overcoming the technical hurdles absolutely requires chasing the goal down an overwhelmingly authoritarian nightmare long before you start to achieve actual results.
It will be easily bypassed by *some*
And for a lot of parents that barrier will be sufficient. If your kid wants something they are going to try and get it. The degree to which they are willing to make the effort depends on the strength of that desire.
No one thinks the government is trying to send jackboots to your cul de sac because you have to verify your age to order a bottle of Captain Morgan over an app.
It's not that teenagers will bypass the pornhub paywall to access the site. It's that forcing pornhub to put up a paywall will divert users to un-paywalled unregulated international and p2p services. The content will remain as accessible as ever, just as easily as ever, you'll just have higher traffic in the parts of the internet where no cares if you share kiddie porn and beheading videos along with the more ethically created varieties of contraband content. This is the world that existed before tube sites. It will simply return.
Your claim reminds me of people who argue strict gun regulation is impossible because there would be 1-to-1 replacement with 3D-printed firearms.
These arguments are usually made by very smart, ideological, and technologically savvy people, who tend to underestimate 1) the level of tech illiteracy of the general population and 2) the huge practical effect size that can result from small barriers to access (see, unfortunately, the success of the conservative movement at disabling huge chunks of the social safety state through work requirements, drug-testing, etc.).
You're actually backwards on this one. The 3d printed guns movement is expressly attempting to mimic the concept of p2p distributed distribution of media because it has already proven to be incredibly resilient against vast and aggressive state efforts to constrain it. The whole theory is that that existing the Pirate Bay model is SO robust that even guns will prove unregulatable if you can replicate it, let alone porn.
In any other context you would agree that putting up minor barriers significantly decreases consumption, this is the Sunstein and Thaler "sludge" phenomenon. P2P services are very niche compared to streaming.
P2P was the biggest thing in the world before streaming services learned to compete on convenience. There's no reason to believe that balance wouldn't flip back if the regulatory environment killed the streaming provider's comparative value.
Search engines will have a part in this and those parts of the internet do exist but they are much harder to access (for the average person). That's a good thing, there should be illegal things that are hard to get. It doesn't mean things shouldn't be regulated.
This is descending into a "well, people are going to commit crimes anyway, like, what's the point in law".
Why do many US-based websites now ask you to agree to accept cookies?
I agree. We seem to do a decent job of keeping illegal types of pornography off of mainstream sites. I don't really see how putting up more barriers for the legal types of pornography is this impossible challenge.
Keeping porn off legal sites is an entirely and wildly distinct and simpler challenge than keeping users on legal sites. That's the problem. As soon as you constrain legal access that tips the competitive advantage away from legal sites and to sites that border on impossible to regulate.
You have the history of the concepts of the internet and the “information superhighway” wrong by 180°, which goes a long way to understanding how confused you are about how any of this works.
If I’m a politician, I’m going to include telemarketing spam calls as my priority.
The thing is, Obama's FTC had a fair bit of success cracking down those, but enforcement largely lapsed under Trump (unsurprisingly) and I haven't heard whether Biden has done anything to reinstitute the prior approach or if it no longer works for some reason.
They hit the mainstream sites. But there are literally the ps of thousands of other smaller sites.
1. Amount of comments on the anti-porn plan suggests this one might swallow the agenda, so to speak.
2. How much does the agenda matter versus having a snappy name? I was never sure how many Republicans knew what was in the Contract With America in the 90s, but the framing was terrific in a way that, say, Build Back Better is not. So how do we brand this 10-point plan? What’s the theme?
#1 is a great observation. This is at least the 2nd thread that it has devoured, would probably do the same to a national conversation.
Yes, but is that a bug or a feature? Matt's explanation for it suggests that he wants it to devour the conversation, so that Democrats can slip items 1-9 past voters who would oppose those items if they heard about them.
Agreed, and since this is an attempt to find a unifying Democratic policy agenda rather than a divisive one, the porn plank has gotta go!
You're saying the porn plank should be stripped?
"Voter ID laws, for example, are very popular and now have a discernible impact on election results."
Is this a typo? My understanding is that Voter ID laws actually don't have a discernible impact in recent elections, and haven't since the data basically started (unless you include like grandfather laws or literacy clauses as voter ID laws for some reason)
Probably, yeah. I’ll ask and make a correction if necessary.
It surely is a typo based on context and on him literally saying the opposite a couple of sentences later…
Also came here to ask about this, this sentence doesn’t follow with the next paragraph.
Does he perhaps mean "have a discernible impact" as a contested issue? Because I don't think they have an impact in their implementation as he says in the next paragraph.
I genuinely wonder about the porn thing given how much porn is out there on unauthorized channels if another law could do any good.
I feel like I’d be fine with some kind of reasonable regulatory regimes involving id checks and payment verifications but I wonder how effectively you could enforce this without rather draconian measures.
People are really really good at not paying for things on computers and I mean Pirate Bay is still up despite the continuing pressure of all the creative industries in America. Like to really, truly stop it you would need to really bring down a quite stifling level of censorship.
What is the harm in a 16 year old boy watching porn? He’s thinking about sex all the time anyway.
There is actual harm for several reasons: 1. Exposure at a very young age (elementary school) 2. Normalizing violent acts demeaning to women- women then report unreasonable expectation from partners 3. In a certain number of cases it creates addictive dependency inhibiting the ability to have normal sex and in some cases normal life generally.
Read up about it. It actually is harmful. I would also add that the industry generally is extremely exploitative and it would be better if it didn’t exist. Just like we wouldn’t want our kids going to prostitutes we shouldn’t want them watching them.
However not every just end justifies the means. The social harm here is real but the proposed solution is worse still to society, in my opinion.
"1. Exposure at a very young age"
Is this inherently problematic? Leading to awkward questions, sure. But I don't think children are inherently capable of seeing porn. They'll just find it boring.
"2. Normalizing violent acts demeaning to women"
I just pulled up two porn sites to check this. Of the 48 videos on each front page, judging from the titles (I didn't watch them) exactly *zero* contained violent content. Unusual sex acts, sure. Demeaning sex acts, probably (although that of course depends on what you find demeaning). *Violent*, no.
Now, the selection on the front page might be skewed by my search history, but…I think you overestimate the prevalence of violence in porn.
"3. In a certain number of cases it creates addictive dependency"
Bullshit. "Porn addiction" is a useful cover for gay and bisexual religious men who get caught watching the kind of videos that turn them on. But it's not real, and there are major philosophical problems with the concept (do you also consider obese people "food addicted"?). H/t MJS for posting this cite elsewhere in the thread: https://www.healthline.com/health-news/researchers-say-porn-addiction-not-real-022214
I don’t exactly disagree but this past school year a 9 year old asked me what porn was because people joke about it on the bus. For the record I didn’t answer that, and punted to mom.
Like we’ve decided that 18 is the arbitrary line and so it shall be. If you wanted to make it 15 or 16 I’d listen respectfully to an argument but it’s got to be somewhere.
If you don't think kids in elementary school were joking about porn before the Internet showed up, I have some bad news for you.
I'm starting to wonder how old some of the commenters on here are. This comment and some others that talk about middle schoolers behavior reflects a dramatically different upbringing than I recall. I'm 40, and I definitely don't remember joking about porn in elementary school, and I don't remember thinking very much about sex at all until high school. It certainly wasn't the constant subject of conversation and attention that some of the comments on here seem to suggest was the norm for every boy/young man.
I'm a decade younger than you and by middle school (7th and 8th grade here, so 12-14) Family Guy was at its peak and most kids I knew were watching it, so kids were definitely aware of and joking about porn. Before that, I can definitely remember "this one time, at band camp, I stuck a flute up my pussy" being quoted endlessly by other fourth graders who had heard it from older siblings or watched American Pie with them.
I mean, I'm in my late 30's, and by 4th/5th grade, I was hearing R-rated jokes and commentary either on the school bus or in class, and I went to a fairly normal middle class school.
Pretty big difference between joking about it and seeing some.
back in the good old days, entire families slept in one room cabins and toddlers watched their parents have sex. they also watched the barnyard animals screw throughout their childhood.
Nine year old me had some very ignorant conversations about sex with the other boys in the back of the school bus. I was much less knowledgeable than a 9 year old in 1820. My suspicion is middle class decency was once a cultural achievement (look pa, we can afford a bedroom for ourselves and a second bed just for the little ones!) that has morphed into an expectation.
Sure that’s not inherently a problem but: 1) we don’t want 12 year olds to stumble across porn and 2) there’s a lot of stuff on the free internet that’s creepy and non-consensual and exploitative and this could help that.
That's my other point - in places where porn usage is restricted, it doesn't make the guys stop looking for sexual content. It just makes other content more sexual by their attention.
Hell, I could argue that a big section of a segment of women on Twitch is a porn replacement for teenage boys, and that doesn't seem overly positive to me.
Indeed, there's some strange parasocial relationships people are forming through sites like twitch and onlyfans, not to mention the *real* weirdos who write comments on substack.
I wonder if it’s a porn replacement in the traditional sense or more like a hostess bar in Japan where men will pay very attractive women to talk to them but not actually go there usually.
My bigger concern isn't the teens, it's the adults: If MindGeek (who own most porn) has an enormous list of subscribers and someone hacks that list and publishes it, then that's going to be the scandal of all scandals.
Not really because every guy would be on that list. And I mean that quite literally. There are no post-pubescent males in this country who haven't watched porn.
If you required ID verification etc then the percentage who haven't watched it would go up.
Having to provide any sort of identifying information would definitely deter people who don't care about it much.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that the list becomes somewhat more selective and therefore a bigger deal if it gets out.
True, but tastes differ, hence potential for blackmail… however in my opinion opening the gates for and normalizing internet censorship that could then be used for additional content beyond porn is the far bigger concern.
I mean this would be the greatest showing of hypocrisy since prohibition though.
Couldn't it be handled like credit card information, where MindGeek verifies certain information about someone, but doesn't store that verification?
I think the objective here is not to completely stop it, but to make it hard enough for teenagers to access that they only see a small amount. Sure, there are going to be kids sharing USB sticks of porn with each other, there are going to be people downloading torrents from The Pirate Bay, but this is different from just going to PornHub.
No Richard, I don't think that's the objective at all.
I think the objective is to be seen picking a large, public fight with the pornography industry for the purposes of signaling to cross-pressured, culturally conservative swing voters in the hopes of winning slightly more of their votes.
The actual impact on pornography consumption is totally irrelevant.
Sure but that’s the thing teenage nerds are people with a lot of time and very little money and will jump through a ton of hoops.
I say this as someone who learned command line oses and ftp and simple programming and scripting to steal stuff off of Usenet in the 90s. And like we can’t even enforce the laws we already have.
Yeah, I think the idea is that teenage nerds will still be able to get it, but non-nerd teenagers will have to have nerd friends.
That explains why Ted Cruz supports it, but what’s the left’s excuse?
:)
Why is this going to work better than the UK's system, which according to everything I've read, including from right-leaning newspapers, was an utter disaster?
Basically: because the UK 's system was centralised, and the MY proposal is "if you want to run a porn site, you have to have a paywall". Big sites would put their own paywalls up, small sites would switch to onlyfans or equivalents, ie companies that run paywalls.
The disaster was that you were going to be able to get a "free" porn pass from the government to prove you were an adult to porn websites, and the government was subcontracting that to MindGeek (the biggest porn company in the world), so they would have a giant list of every single Brit who ever accessed porn.
Yea, Matt is missing that the rise of free digital porn is simply akin to the rise of digital music. Tube sites and streaming services are the model because P2P networks killed the old models. The most draconian sort of age gating would simply result in the rebirth of KaZaa or something.
If shuttering pornhub and xvideos would get you something then like maybe that’s worth it but I’d like you to show you could enforce the laws on the books and get rid of all the sites currently streaming models paid content without their consent in a reasonable way before making vast new laws.
As someone who was a teenage boy in the P2P era... The provenance of the shit on there was far less ethically constrained than the tube sites of today.
It wouldn’t be perfect, but I think it could be at least as effective as the gambling bans were, which is to say: not going to stop determined folks, but significantly less than now. I think the bigger issue here is a First Amendment one, but I don’t know that this puritanical court will be as permissive as previous ones.
I don’t think it would be as effective as gambling bans because gambling requires connection to the real world for there to be money involved.
Most porn is much more like software and media piracy. Which we basically just gave up on fighting for teenage nerds and settled into make it easy for adults to pay and make the consequences really bad for businesses using it.
That's the thing - we didn't beat piracy. We just made the alternative (Netflix et al) so cheap 'n' easy it was pointless. But, the whole point of Matt's policy is to make it more difficult.
Well, it’s easy for people who have credit cards, which doesn’t include underage folks. So if the point is to make it so that parents can keep their kids from seeing bad things, requiring a credit card is a pretty good way to do that.
Bob in Atlanta may say he doesn't want his kids seeing porn, but he's not going to be happy about the party that makes him put in a credit card when he didn't have too before.
Pirate Bay may still be up, but the vast majority of people pay for access to movies and tv shows, whether that be through streaming services or just outright buying digital copies. I'm a relatively savvy technical person compared to the average American user, and I've never once used PB, and I can guarantee you that an overwhelming majority of my friends and family have never even heard of it. So sure, if you changed the model you'd still have ways to get around it. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't have a huge impact.
Right but if there are already abundant leak sites that are up despite them being illegal how is passing a second law going to stop that. It might wreck pornhub and videos and a few other brand name sites but teenagers who want something illicit are a lot more like software pirates than Netflix customers in my estimation.
There were (and from what I can tell, still are) abundant leak sites for lots of forms of entertainment, such as movies, tv shows, music, etc. But because it's both illegal and known to be illegal the vast majority of people use legitimate websites for those forms of entertainment.
That makes it harder to find the other sites. Not to mention the law would, presumably, give the government enforcement mechanisms. The threat of stiff penalties is a deterrent to entry into the realm for other potential outlets.
Sure, it's an immensely difficult challenge if your goal is the eradication of teenagers being able to view porn. But that's a pretty wild goal that I don't think anyone actually has in mind.
The age thing is just a deeply weird proposal for a party with a 79 year old President. Add to it that it would obviously require a constitutional amendment it seems like a waste of one of your top ten
It’s also something that I am the most uncomfortable with, because we shouldn’t be discriminating based on age. Why not just go for term limits of say 18 years.
I was thinking about if you could do it without a constitutional amendment, and I think you could but in a way that would have to be supported by every congress. Congress is the judge of its own membership and has the power to expel members, so if you could get broad political agreement (even if short of a constitutional amendment) then everybody should declare "Don't both running for Congress if you're 80 years old or older in the 2028 election, because when you get to the capitol we'll expel you and send you back home again."
The problem with expelling members is that it effectively punishes voters in the affected politician's district/state by depriving them of representation until a replacement is appointed/elected.
Yeah, i suppose that's true. I was considering more the technical argument of if there's a legal path to do it without a constitutional amendment than if it's necessarily a good idea. (Though since "a person's age" is not exactly something that will be unknown, you'd think that actual expulsion would be unnecessary. The mere threat would prevent anyone from running unless they were aiming for a "go ahead and expel me if you dare" confrontation.)
I like wonder about voter Id laws. Like it seems there really could be an easy compromise which is like yes you need a voter Id law and the state has a positive responsibility to make sure anyone can get one. Yes even that 98 year old black woman who was born in a one horse town and doesn’t have a birth certificate that the media drags out for these.
I think a national ID system would make sense here. When I got my license the RMV people said I would need an REAL ID to board domestic flights and go into government buildings after 2023 so I got one of those instead of the regular ones. Looked it up when I got home and it seems like the fact that we already have federal standards moots the privacy concerns (and it’s not like Google and Facebook don’t already have tons of information on me that they sell to advertisers).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_ID_Act
I’d be okay with this, but it seems like there’s still the weird set of edge case people for whom getting an id isn’t possible.
These people probably don’t matter that much In The Who wins the next election sense but are critical in the norm that everyone should be able to vote.
Are you thinking a voluntary ID like a passport? Or something universal and automatic? I have no problem with a universal federal ID, but it is absolutely anathema to libertarians and conservatives. I think it'd get way more backlash than it's worth, when you can just require states to recognize a free & voluntary federal ID.
I have no problem with a federally-administered national ID but I'm dead set against it being based on having a driver's license. Many people have no reason to get one (https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2018/10/number-of-licensed-drivers-usa/#:~:text=Across%20all%20age%20groups%2C%2084.1,population%20has%20a%20driver's%20license.) Why should needing to drive a car be at all linked to proving your identity for voting?
To be clear I'm totally on board with any proposed national ID system not being tied to driving, I just think it makes sense to build off of the existing driver's license system.
I think it should be the other way around. You should get a federal ID and then if you need a DL, you can get that added to it.
Should 'porn' really be a priority? I thought teens were having less sex and using contraceptives more. What problem are you trying to solve?
I know this is a political platform, but at least 3 of the items (1,2, and 9) would require a constitutional amendment.
People are so used to seeing abortion fought over in the courts that they apparently think legislators passing laws to protect abortion rights is unconstitutional.
Dobbs says pretty clearly that states have the power to regulate abortion. The federal government can't interfere with it. There are probably limits to this; even Rehnquist's dissent in Roe said that an abortion law that had no exception for the life of the mother would fail rational basis scrutiny, but that's not at issue, certainly not in the Mississippi law.
Not a lawyer but I don't think that's the right interpretation. Dobbs was about a state law so the opinion was specifically about whether or not the states could regulate abortion. I don't think Alito specified a view on if Congress could. Kavanaugh (the fifth majority vote) in his concurrence specifically referenced States or Congress as bodies who could regulate it.
No, that is not *at all* the ruling. Dobbs says that states and the federal government have *unlimited* power to regulate abortion; their regulations are not constrained by the constitution. It says nothing about federalism concerns, and in fact the Court has tended to allow the federal government to regulate (and preempt) almost anything under the Commerce Clause.
(IANAL, just read Volokh Conspiracy)
Pretty sure anti-gerrymandering would not need a constitutional amendment but is covered by the section 4 of article 1.
I might have overstated #1, but it's still unclear. The relevant law now is Rucho v. Common Cause (2019 - https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/18-422_9ol1.pdf), which found that partisan gerrymandering was not federally justiciable, but it leaves open the possibility of relevant federal law.
In Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Comm’n (2015 - https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/13-1314_3ea4.pdf) the court found that independent redistricting commissions were found permissible even though they bypassed the state legislature, which the constitution specifically grants the power to district. That was 5-4 and an iffy decision, if you ask me.
Both the 14th and 15th amendments conclude with "The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article." That's why e.g. the Voting Rights Act is constitutional. Rucho v. Common Cause found it wasn't justiciable, because Congress hadn't passed any legislation on the topic, and the Court was too timid to fashion an interpretation of its own accord.
If the Court tries to endorse the "independent state legislature" theory, I can't wait to see the firestorm. That'll induce a constitutional amendment so fast the justices' heads will spin.
(IANAL)
Pretty sure they could just tie a bunch of money to it and it would pass legal muster. AKA, the federal government is going to pay a bunch of money to cover the costs of elections and improve voter security. We're going to require use of a federal ID. States that adopt these practices get it all paid for, those that don't have to come up with the money themselves.
I’m pretty sure 1 is on firm ground--Congress has broad authority in this area, and the ban on multi member districts is just a statute.