Hold up, all this shit because of an extremist group, *in Australia, where half the M games on the market already can't be sold, is driving global payment processor behavior?!?
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Collective Shout claim it’s about harm reduction, but then push an agenda that functionally amounts to moral panic.
Their approach is identical in logic to the “GTA causes school shootings” hysteria: loud, pearl-clutching, and utterly unmoored from data.
If Collective Shout want to argue these games cause harm, then show us the harm. Not correlation. Not outrage. Not hypothetical downstream consequences. Show causation. Peer-reviewed. Reproducible.
Otherwise, they’re just moralizing bullies using the banking system as a cudgel.
On top of this, they might actually be harming their own cause. The catharsis hypothesis poses that sexual fantasy enactment might reduce risk of real world harm.
The logic is simple: suppressing a compulsion doesn't eliminate it. It just bottles up until it explodes. Redirect it into a safe outlet, and it becomes manageable.
The only reason this research isn't cited more often is because it's politically radioactive. Nobody wants to admit that it's better to let a gooners jerk off, than to escalate under repression.
The burden of proof SHOULD be on Collective Shout to provide a reasonable argument which supports their claim that censorship will reduce real world harm.
Current working theory in psychology: it doesn't. Emerging theory suggests: they're shooting themselves (and potential rape victims) in the foot.
The real solution to real-world harm involves empathy, autonomy and education.
Furthermore...
Their decision to target the payment processors - not the developers, or itch.io, or steam, is some of the most cowardly and authoritarian things I've ever seen in the gaming space.
It's economic coercion; a playbook used by religious bigots and authoritarians for decades. Financial censorship by proxy. IMO: they should fuck off.
Even Furthermore...
Wanna censor it? Good fucking idea /s
Shoving that shit into the shadows doesn’t make it go away, it just makes it untraceable, unmoderated, and unaccountable.
If you care even remotely about preventing harm, you don’t force taboo communities off the grid. You keep them where they can be seen, tracked, and contained... preferably behind legal firewalls, age gates, and content filters.
If you push them into the dark web... then congratulations... you’ve just built a Petri dish for escalation, radicalization, and actual predation.
They are religious nutjobs, they don't care about causation.
I thought they were a feminist group
Sadly from my experiences with feminist groups, TERFs have historically been the norm not the exception.
You should really look into what the Daughters of Bilitis were up to, and books like the The Transsexual Empire. A book I cannot say the full name of for it contains a slur.
Historically feminist groups have attacked transgender women and gay men for "Infringing upon what it means to be a woman."
I believe they're a religious group under the guise of feminism and child protection. If you look at their affiliate page, they list quite a few religious groups.
Feminism isn't a religion?
In what way is Feminism a religion? Do feminists pray to Lilith? Is there a Woman Church? Is International Women's Day the Christmas of this religion?
Think before you say silly things.
Feminism increasingly displays an in-group out-group dynamic characteristic of religions.
They're increasingly dogmatic with their teachings, a feminist will spout party lines without thinking about them precisely the way a christian will.
A god hasn't emerged yet afaik but a canon of saints is emerging, to include Marie Curie and Amelia Earhart.
Unironically yes, who else has any use for International Women's Day.
They've even got unhinged extremists, like these assholes in Australia.
We have examples today of the real harm of this, like in Afghanistan. It’s interesting that western societies are overall less religious as ever, yet religion keeps getting shoved down our throats… and winning.
If I'm not mistaken it's not a religious group doing it because Jesus, it's a feminist group doing it because they blame porn for the existence of transpeople
Porn and prostitution do have historical correlation with the existence of trans people. Namely that when we're kept from all other means of making money these industries help us continue to afford food and shelter.
That's one of the things that pisses me off most about all this. By calling us pornographic they're calling for us to be forced back into an exploitative relationship with the porn and sex industries.
I like how the language is ‘claims responsibility.’ You know. Like terrorist groups do after an attack
me watching clearly adult humans doing consentual sex things
some religious zealot chud: this makes you a pedo somehow
Trump doing actual pedo and rape shit and being a convicted felon
Religious zealot chuds in the US: "there's no proof"
This comment and many like it are a product of only reading the headline. Also shame on the authors for the ragebait headline.
The tweet the quote comes further classifies that they're talking about games that include rape, incest, and/or child sex abuse. I'm not sure if people are just knee-jerk reacting to headlines without understanding what's actually happening, or if they are legitimately upset that rape fantasy games are being removed. In both cases, you're stating that you are vocally in support of rape media, which is not OK.
Sure, that's the plausible deniability reasoning. But the end result, whether you agree with the on the surface reasoning or not, is the removal of all adult media whether or not it is offending. This coupled with the lumping in of LGBT issues with Adult media (and often lumping in with egregious media like rape and abuse fantasy) means that the end result is removal of adult games AND games which feature LGBT characters and storylines.
and uh, if you actually did read my comment, I did say consenting. me saying I enjoy content where clear adults are consentually enjoying sex is not endorsing rape fantasy games, and is a bit of a Twitter ass conclusion to come to.
and uh, if you actually did read my comment, I did say consenting. me saying I enjoy content where clear adults are consentually enjoying sex is not endorsing rape fantasy games, and is a bit of a Twitter ass conclusion to come to.
The article you commented on is explicitly referencing media where consent cannot be given. So, I'm not sure why you commented about consenting adults in the first place, because that had nothing to do with the topic.
I expect this group is rife with paedos.
Here's something I've noticed. Whenever someone describes a group, individual, activity, or anything else with more than 2 negative adjectives in a row, they're probably saying something deeply unstable. This is one of those times.
It's a Christian fascist org, so there's a 100% likelihood of mental illness.
Wait is it Christian or is it Feminist? I'm hearing both
I don't see anything religious on their website. Is this disclosed somewhere im missing?
I take offense to this generalization. When I call someone an honorless gormless bitch ass motherfucker I'm relieving stress so when fists start flying I ain't blinded by my own anger, my instability is only mildly correlated to my verbosity.
Let me sit you down when I say this... but if you're getting into fights even after relieving stress... it either doesn't work, or you're behaving in an unstable manner.
Oh no fights are fun. Tis the curse of my kin, seriously damned near every man on the German side of my family treats fights like a fun time waster. Not saying it's not instability just that my verbosity is perpetual regardless of my mood or actions, well unless I am physically exhausted then I communicate with a handful of words like a caveman.
Also just cause I'm somewhat calm going into a fight doesn't mean that the person I hurled insults at is.
Tbh, its only a matter of time before the entire organization gets doxxed and the internet does what it does.
I look forward to eating popcorn when it happens.
Turns out some of them are probably kid diddlers
Are we wagering this absurdity is built on projection?
cause I'm wagering this absurdity is built on them projecting.
It always is. These are the type of folks who have that feeling of shame wash over after they bust a nut to something they "despise."
That literally all these types of groups are. They want us to feel the same shame, too. I wish folks could just keep their shit to themselves. Have rules for your own home, sure, but eat shit and rot if you think you should be able to tell me how I should live my life.
I draw the line at abuse, but yeah, otherwise agree.
Someone should check this groups computer ls and closets because they are projecting and those fuckers should have no impact on what us Americans or any other country wants to buy. This needs to be reversed Asap.
OK now I am not one to lob accusations without evidence, but for any of you kind government agents or AIs reading this, let’s say from anywhere within the Five Eyes since we’re talking about Australia:
We have another fanatical religious conservative organization here that is publicly labeling opposition groups pedos. You know how this has trended in the past. Keep an eye on these people.
Don't be silly. Government surveillance isn't for the protection of the people, it's for the protection of the government.
Has the NSA ever caught a terrorist with their massively invasive privacy violating programs, spending the money on that instead of making people better to not become terrorists? Ask the NSA, they'll tell you they haven't stopped a single one.
Government surveillance is in service to these people, why else would they care about the privacy and consent of adults in their free time?
We have another fanatical religious conservative organization here that is publicly labeling opposition groups pedos.
projection. they want a monopoly on skeezing on the kiddos.
for some reason people will bend themselves into pretzels to give religious people a pass on buggery. here in washington state, we passed a law mandating the reporting of abused children. conservatives and religious types want to keep these children in their abuse.
some people on lemmy just license their comments as anti-ai license
Which anyone with half a brain expects to be promptly ignored by web crawlers
I truly don't understand how Visa/MasterCard/etc can be pressured. They are basically infrastructure.
What's someone going to do, stop using credit cards if they don't stop a store that person doesn't even patronize from selling morally hazardous goods?
I don't get how these campaigns are even effective.
The thing is they are American corporations who care to much about their public image. I would be highly suprised if they national payment platforms would also accept this. (ideal/bankcontant/wero/etc)
They pressure payment processors through reputation damage and regulatory threats - these companies are terrified of being associated with anything that could trigger banking regulations or get them labeled as "enabling" problematic content in the media, its purely a risk management desicion for them.
Probably just worried Trump will over regulate them if they don’t fall in line with the Christian Radicals.
Cryptocurrency is the solution here, and unfortunately that's an unpopular take here.
That's because 90% of cryptocurrency marketing consists of "THINK OF THE GAAAAAAINS YOU CAN MAKE!" instead of "You can use this to buy things without government censorship".
The entire crypto industry has based itself around being a speculative asset, not a currency.
Which is really unfortunate. If you avoid the most popular coins (Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc), you avoid most of the scams and speculation and end up with a decent currency that respects your privacy and has low fees.
Not when exchanges still govern taking money out. They are businesses like everything else and will be just as risk averse
You don't need to use an exchange. You can use a local wallet to store your funds, and then no company controls who/where you send it to.
It's pretty easy to switch between cryptocurrencies, so they can surely find an exchange that is friendly to their business. That's way better than the credit card situation where there are only four major processors--Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and American Express--and only two of those actually matter.
None of what you said addresses the problem I mentioned.
Then I guess I don't understand your problem.
Payment processors like Visa and Mastercard control a huge chunk of the market, which gives them a lot of say in what transactions are allowed. Even if you avoid credit, most debit cards go through those two companies, so they can restrict what transactions you can make.
With cryptocurrencies, there's no restriction at the point of sale. Your problem seems to be that converting crypto to fiat could be problematic, and they'd potentially be stuck with "useless" currency. My point is that's a much easier problem to solve:
- if their exchange stops converting a given currency, they can convert to one they do accept
- if their exchange bans their account (e.g. due to the nature of their business), they can switch exchanges
- there are ATMs that dispense cash for crypto
- if no exchange will work with them, they can make direct exchanges with regular people (i.e. "launder" the money)
- they can also spend the currency directly
There are a ton of options to convert crypto to fiat, there are far fewer to select a different fiat payment processor.
One benefit to payment processing for crypto is that there's little in the way of material limitations on processing payments. The blockchain for a given coin already exists, your job as a processor is primarily to convert those on-chain transactions into and out of other currencies. Only requiring intervention at the point of entering or exiting dollars to and from the system changes a lot of the dynamics.
Ah yes, now anyone who enjoys wanking themselves off in private, is also a Pedo, because they ran out of mean words.
Not just any pedo, but a brain-rotted pedo.
It's been wild watching that word lose every last bit of meaning over the past few years
This whole thing smacks of the "anyone who has a sexual proclivity I claim not to share must have all sexual proclivities I claim not to share" logic. i.e. the logic that got gay people flagged as child molesters back in the bad old days. And occasionally still today.
Such logic might actually be rooted in projection, which is a deeply disturbing thought. Deeply closeted people desperately clinging to heteronormativity and traditional gender roles because they think that if they don't they they'll do something abhorrent. Maybe even to someone who can't consent. Or they already have and they desperately want to hide away from it.
Yes, for the love of all that's holy and secular too, ban the games with apparent child sexual abuse. Children can't consent. Leave everything else the hell alone.
I don't even play video games with sexual themes, but I do play ones that contain 18+ violence. I assume those will be next on the chopping block.
Reminder that child beauty pageants are A OK.
Sponsored by Visa 🤔
Thanks for saying it. What kind of fucking parent puts their kids on display in an event that will invite actual pedophiles to start actual concoctions that would cause permanent harm on them? Ah, but fictitious media that may actually help keep those urges in check needs to be removed.
And then there's the bullshit thought that a service that serves as a replacement for cash transactions can decide what I buy?
I need to get off of this fucking world.
Digital violence causes school shootings, don't you know? Ignore the non-American rates, they don't matter.
That is so dumb. How would such a small group have that much pull? It seems like gooners would vastly outnumber them.
In the 90s, in my country, a single person made a webpage stating that Microsoft minesweeper promotes war and violence, so since windows 95 if the Windows locale is set to my language, minesweeper becomes "flower field" and you have to find flowers instead of mines
And if you step on the flower you DIE.
tbf, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild enforces those principles too.
That sounds like the whatever version of engrish and I love it
These people are loud, most gooners don't want to be loud about it
There's a few groups like this in Australia, unfortunately.
Australia didn't even have an R18+ rating for games until 2013 (R18+ is similar to AO or NC-17 in the USA). Before then, all games with a higher rating than MA15+ were illegal in Australia. Many games had an Australia-specific version with blood/gore reduced, some things edited out, etc. to reduce the rating. The original release of GTA4 in Australia was heavily censored.

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