British politicians aren't IT savvy

[DrZoidberg]

Great Britain has just banned porn depicting incest and choking.

I'm assuming they will now ban Internet in the UK. Since that's the only way to enforce this.

And someone really needs to tell them that all those porn stars aren't really brothers and uncles. Its just acting.

Porn showing choking or incest to be banned from early November, government says

The move follows a review into pornography regulation in 2025 by Conservative peer Baroness Gabby Bertin

www.bbc.com

Its like British politicians are trying really hard to make the British people despise them even more and to confirm they really are utterly and totally detached from reality

 

[Derec]

UK, where you can marry your cousin, but can't watch people pretending to be cousins...

 

[bilby]

The Australian government are no better.

Today I discovered that my iPhone now automatically blocks access to the Wayback Machine website, because I might be a child trying to use it to access content prohibited by law.

To turn off this block, I had to go into parental control setting that I didn't know existed; AND then "prove" my age to Apple (which as I have a credit card in my phone's wallet, was trivial to do - but really, it would also be trivial to do if I were a child, as two minutes of access to an adult's credit card is hardly the most challenging thing to arrange, particularly if you don't incur any charges on it).

I was a bit irritated to be made to go through this pointless charade, just because some pollie is channelling Rev. Lovejoy's wife from The Simpsons.

 

[Bronzeage]

There is a principle of management that has very wide ranging applications, In it's simplest form it states, "The more specific and finely defined a rule is, the easier it is to evade."

If you want to ban "incest porn", you have to define it. A valid definition has to draw the lines between what is this particular thing and what isn't. Many years ago, I was a volunteer editor for an erotic story forum. We had an editor bot that scanned all submissions because we had a fairly high standard for things like grammar and punctuation, so beginning writers often needed help to get their story accepted. There were other rules concerning subject matter. Certain scenarios were not allowed, under age, cruelty, bestiality, etc. Bestiality was a strange one. Sexual situations involving animals were not allowed, but if your animal was actually a supernatural being in the form of an animal, it was okay. In other words, you couldn't fantasize about sex with a dog, but you could if it was a fantasy dog.

Strange as it sounds today, all of this sort of thing was once illegal in most places. Pornography was a strictly black market, back rooms, under the counter and that sort of stuff. There was a movie producer who was arrested and put on trial because a scene portrayed a man and a woman having sex. It must have been a fairly tame scene because his defense was straightforward. They weren't actually having sex. It was simulated sex. The producer was acquitted. It gets complicated when you try to write a rule to restrict implied sex.

The main objection to incest porn is it portrays the exploitation of minors, which is fair, but the people in the video(or whatever medium) are adults and are not related. This means the objection is to the idea of incest, not the simulation of it. Actions can be outlawed, but outlawing an idea has never been successful, no matter what the idea may have been. Like the trial of the movie producer, it's a waste of time and resources and eventually everybody decides it's not worth the effort.

 

[Ford]

Even here in the "wild wild west" of Arizona it appears that even the "liberal" politicians don't grasp that the statewide ban on internet porn (of all kinds) can be circumvented with one click over to a VPN.

Or do they? We're at an interesting intersection of tech and politics at this point in history. There are a good lot of older politicians who don't have a grasp of it (or is it IT?) and still think the internet is a "series of tubes," but there are also younger staffers, consultants, and outfits that absolutely understand that if you really want to get a "wink and a nod" message to your core supporters, you have someone put out an outrageous (dog whistle) statement on a platform (like X) and when called out delete it and pretend that the internet is not forever.

And while I have no doubt that the biggest user of Truth Sociopath has no idea how "the internets" works, the people around him like his diaper dumpster lady absolutely do. His idiot sons seem to have figured out crypto rug-pulls quite well, and while the organization's AI game is nowhere near as creative as that of Iran, they've still got enough game to fool MAGA fools into thinking that Trump has the physique of Rambo and the aura (that's a word the kids use in place of "rizz" now) of Jesus.

 

[bilby]

The main objection to incest porn is it portrays the exploitation of minors, which is fair

Well, not necessarily. Incest porn in which all parties are consenting adults is not at all uncommon. A porno in which two actors in their thirties play the roles of a brother and sister having sex would presumably be banned under these new rules. Which seems odd. Having said which, I haven't looked into the detail of how "incest" is actually defined in this law - perhaps they specify "involving a character who is implied to be below the age of consent". But if so, I haven't seen that reported - the BBC report sugggests that portraying characters below the age of consent is banned as well as, not as part of, the ban on portrayals of incest.

It also strikes me as odd to throw incest and strangulation into the same category; It seems to me like an attempt to get people nodding along "Oh, yes, strangulation is definitely too extreme to be allowed", and then adding incest only once everyone is too worried about being seen as a fan of erotic asphyxiation porn to object.

I don't see them as being at all equal - one necessarily entails actors pretending to risk severe injury or death (and so is inherently violent, even where consent is implied), while the other does not. But maybe that's just me.

 

[Bronzeage]

The main objection to incest porn is it portrays the exploitation of minors, which is fair

Well, not necessarily. Incest porn in which all parties are consenting adults is not at all uncommon. A porno in which two actors in their thirties play the roles of a brother and sister having sex would presumably be banned under these new rules. Which seems odd. Having said which, I haven't looked into the detail of how "incest" is actually defined in this law - perhaps they specify "involving a character who is implied to be below the age of consent". But if so, I haven't seen that reported - the BBC report sugggests that portraying characters below the age of consent is banned as well as, not as part of, the ban on portrayals of incest.

It also strikes me as odd to throw incest and strangulation into the same category; It seems to me like an attempt to get people nodding along "Oh, yes, strangulation is definitely too extreme to be allowed", and then adding incest only once everyone is too worried about being seen as a fan of erotic asphyxiation porn to object.

I don't see them as being at all equal - one necessarily entails actors pretending to risk severe injury or death (and so is inherently violent, even where consent is implied), while the other does not. But maybe that's just me.

Take away the title and turn down the sound and all commercially produced porn is just people in sexual situations. As for strangulation and other forms of violence, that sort of thing is shown on video all the time, involving fully clothed people. It would be interesting to read a statute written so it actually made strangulation porn production a viable prosecution.

 

[DrZoidberg]

As long as we are ok with depicting violence and murder on TV, all porn (produced consensually) should be legalised, as its less offensive.

Someone really needs to explain to the British people that the actors on the telly are just pretending. Luke didn't actually destroy a Death Star. Gandalf isn't really a wizard. Hogwartz is not a real place.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Even here in the "wild wild west" of Arizona it appears that even the "liberal" politicians don't grasp that the statewide ban on internet porn (of all kinds) can be circumvented with one click over to a VPN.

Or do they? We're at an interesting intersection of tech and politics at this point in history. There are a good lot of older politicians who don't have a grasp of it (or is it IT?) and still think the internet is a "series of tubes," but there are also younger staffers, consultants, and outfits that absolutely understand that if you really want to get a "wink and a nod" message to your core supporters, you have someone put out an outrageous (dog whistle) statement on a platform (like X) and when called out delete it and pretend that the internet is not forever.

And while I have no doubt that the biggest user of Truth Sociopath has no idea how "the internets" works, the people around him like his diaper dumpster lady absolutely do. His idiot sons seem to have figured out crypto rug-pulls quite well, and while the organization's AI game is nowhere near as creative as that of Iran, they've still got enough game to fool MAGA fools into thinking that Trump has the physique of Rambo and the aura (that's a word the kids use in place of "rizz" now) of Jesus.

In every country there's typically a feasibility committee of experts politicians can ask when they want to pass new laws. These comittees often say no but the laws are passed anyway. Because politicians, cynically, want to be seen doing something, rather than actually caring whether their new law actually works as they say they do.

Sweden has layer upon layer of laws to protect women from sex crime. The problem with these laws is that we already had a law against rape. These added later laws don't do anything. There's no real point trying to apply them when we already have the stronger rape law. People still try. It does create a legal nightmare where nobody is quite sure what is allowed or not. It's good for lawyers though.