Kind of like how Republicans wamt to police your sexual partners. Pretty sad in this day of age. Who cares how people spend money and what they spend it on.
If you’re so concerned about kids, launch a parental education campaign. Or age verify with the card.
If you’re a parent, you shouldn’t be attaching your payment methods to kids’ accounts anyway. That’s financial suicide.
You don’t understand, I’m very concerned about the future for my child who I want to put no effort into raising. Why would I parent my kid when I can just have everything I don’t want them exposed to banned? I’m a responsible parent who’s definitely not just trying to enforce draconian puritanical standards I don’t follow on everyone else.
Hands crying kid iPad so they can watch weirdly sexual AI videos of Elsa without stopping for 6 hours straight, because interacting with her is interrupting me binge watching “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” which reminds me how puritanical I am
Won’t somebody please think of the children?!
Not like that!
Hmmm… That’s a pretty valid argument. Now, normally, I’m not a big fan of hitting kids. So that’s why I’m gonna hit you instead. Get over here, you little shit!
According to Knitting Cult Lady, cults always demand purity from its disciples, including those forced in (e.g. people raised in cults as kids), and there’s an exception for the godhead-dude (who is often a lech).
It’s not about children. It’s about forcing obedience and virtue signalling. It’s a nazi salute that shows to fellow party members you’re one of them.
Real children’s issues are about pulling kids out of precarity: food, housing, contact with family, education, healthcare, quality of life. Anyone who is saying their cause is to protect children who hasn’t prioritized these specific things is engaging in a bad-faith argument.
Funny part is that one of Jesus’s favorite disciplines was a prostitute. I don’t think Jesus was has as prudish as his followers are.
I get that it was a typo, and you meant to say “disciples”, but I like it better this way.
Like Jesus was studying for a career in sex work.
“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone…”
The time is now if you’re looking to start your own payment system
I would be greatly entertained if valve went into payment processing and out-competed these absolute shitshows of companies.
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Does not work around the necessity to get all major retail banks or the central bank on board, as they outline in their FAQ.
There’s no magic bullet, if you want to act as a payment processor you only have a handful of options:
- Do a bank wire (but it’s not pre-authorized so you’re just providing a deposit account for your customers, like PayPal)
- Use Visa/MC (which PayPal falls back to if you have no money in your deposit account)
- Use regional payment processors where they exist (e.g. Bancontact/iDEAL in the Benelux, which Stripe conveniently abstracts for the retailers; however most countries don’t have such a widespread alternative to American payment processors)
- Use physical cash
- Agree on a protocol to pre-authorize transfers on behalf of your customer with all banks your customers are likely to be using (in the EU you can do that with SEPA mandates, which PayPal does support as well)
In practice the EU is doing that last thing with Wero (which already has partnered with all major retail banks in Benelux+France+Germany) and Brazil successfully did the same with Pix. It’s not that the technical part is particularly hard, it’s that convincing the banking sector to adhere to and commercially promote a new standard is a long, expensive, arduous process that requires strong political connections.
The CEO stepped down and there is a new one in charge
Fuck you dollar jesus.
Society has never been able to keep NSFW content out of the hands of viewers / end users, and have tried multiple times. Singles (a The Sims -like with actual sex – if kinda clinical; it was a German game) was pressured off shelves in Target, Gamestop and Electronics Boutique. It came back with underwear stapled on, which was quickly hacked off.
This is how we ended up with official / unofficial patches that re-unlock all the naked bits in games like Huniepop, Nude keys, nude codes and nude patches became the convention which ushered video games into the same perversity level of cinema. (We’ve already had countless fan-made nude patches for non-romantic games).
And of course they’re going too far, pressuring distribution services to cut LGBT+ content whether it’s porn or not. Before they were emboldened by Trump, there was already pressure to de-list specific themes (an incomplete list: rape/NC; fictional child sex abuse/child experimentation; incest; and depending on the assessment, furry content within a certain threshold.¹ ). Anyhow we know the white Christian nationalist movement (from which the Heritage Society’s Project 2025 and the Seven Mountain Mandate come) is looking to criminalize porn and make it difficult to access.
1: This is still weird to me, enough to geek out about it here. Furry hate gets strangely specific. It breaks down like this:
- Those who disapprove of all furry content that is adult-themed (contrast the 1983 movie Rock and Rule vs. 1973 Disney’s Robin Hood ) this group probably only exists because there’s a significant fanbase for furry porn / erotica.
- Of those that remain, those who disapprove of furry content featuring explicit sex (e.g. “Omaha” the Cat Dancer first published in 1976, by Reed Waller and Kate Worley.)
- Of those that remain, those who disapprove of furry content that is exclusively erotic (I can’t find the specific ones I’ve read, which isn’t many.)
- Of those that remain, those who disapprove of erotic furry content that features species-accurate genitals, which is the threshold VISA was in, and is too spicy for some lemmings. I don’t fully understand why this is a subcategory.
The thing is most porn games and most LGBT+ centric games are labors of love, first, and a revenue source second. They will get made and get out, more so, when entire demographics and communities are stripped of a voice or of acknowledgement. It also puts less spicy porn in the same category as unethically spicy porn (e.g. CSAM). If the public has to use the same methods as terrorists and child predators to get their fix, it makes those groups less illegitimate. In for a lamb, in for a sheep.
Anyhow useful websites are here:
Of those that remain, those who disapprove of erotic furry content that features species-accurate genitals, which is the threshold VISA was in, and is too spicy for some lemmings. I don’t fully understand why this is a subcategory.
This one actually makes the second most sense to me out of the ones listed (first being explicit sex of course). To a lot of people who aren’t furries, at least in the horny sense, the emphasis put on making the genitals resemble those of real animals is a clear connection to bestiality. In order to care, you have to know, and to know you have to spend a lot of time looking at animal dicks (or spend time with people who do).
To make my point, ask yourself how you feel about other fetishes / kinks with similar properties. For example, consider ABDL. It’s a fetish that uses fairly direct references to being way too young for sex despite being adults, much like the animal dicks directly invoking, well, sucking animal dick despite not being an animals. There are tons of people who see that and immediately think it’s for pedos. Though, weirdly enough, many those same people don’t have nearly that much of an issue with various more mild but more realized forms of neoteny in porn (the industry’s obssession with 18-19yo girls springs to mind).
For what it’s worth I’m not really in that group (consentual adults yada yada), but I did have that gut reaction when I first encountered it.
Firstly, I became sexually active in a sex-positive, kink-centric community, and so have been raised with the philosophy that so long as all participants are adults (and buts safety constraints on harm caused so no-one regularly has to go to the ER).
But I am unusually tolerant of unusual kinks and have jealousy issues of inclusion, rather than exclusivity. My psychologist a decade ago would attribute it to being neurospicy. Also during the Iraq war and the CIA extrajudicial detention and torture program, I freaked out and started a (personal) dive into moral philosophy, which explores the intersectionality (or rather the separation) between what we reason out is moral or proper (e.g. equality, liberty) and what we feel is moral or proper (e.g. purity, obedience)
One of the notable studies regards the story of Julie and Mark (in short, they’re blood siblings, go on a camping trip, have sex and decide it was a good experience but not worth repeating) and subjects told this story would go to great lengths to rationalize their disapproval of the siblings’ behavior in the story. This divergence between reasoned ethics and intuitive ethics runs thick through human culture, informing business practices like RTO mandates, bullshit jobs and crunching development teams (overworking them to meet deadlines, which kills their productivity to well below non-crunch levels)
So yes. People freak out about age play and lolicon, about Rule 34 featuring the Simpsons kids, about fictional bestiality, …and about anthros with species-correct genitals, even if the characters are otherwise clearly consenting adults. Reasonably, these should all be protected by free speech, and efforts to limit speech always extend into non-sexual matters such as trans issues and queer culture, so that talking about UHaul Lesbians could soon become restricted or even criminal in the US.
I think species-correct genitalia and lolicon material should be legal and accepted as unrestricted content, but I also understand as a species, we will have to further develop our society so that it is less reactive to moral panics (also to political power consolidation) before marginalized content can be freely distributed, or, for that matter, all pervs and queers can come fully out of the closet.
And as a footnote, just as the autocratic purges come for the marginalized, the politically far-left and political enemies before cutting into larger demographics, autocratic censorship efforts come first for kink and queer content then general porn, then history and philosophy, and then language and grammar. Knitting Cult Lady, in her discussions of cult systems of control, discusses use of language to control the flock among her many topics.
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Just read about brazilian PIX system and I am baffled. Their gov bypassed payment companies all together and trump is really angry about it Lol. Epic
Couldn’t people just by steam cards with cash, load load it to their accounts and then make their porn purchases? What’s to stop other retailers from selling gift cards that can be purchased with cash to use on the pornographic stuff being sold? Edit: I just learned this issue stems from the major CC companies refusing to let companies like steam use their platform to process payments if they kept NSFW games up. My question still stands, what’s keeping steam or the player base from telling these companies to f-off and switch to a cash based gift card method?
and then make their porn purchases
The issue goes far beyond “porn games on Steam”. These same groups tried to ben other games with no sex at all, but “disturbing” themes (to them). They failed, because, big game, big pushback. But their agenda is not “no porn”, it’s “no anything we dislike”. They’re just starting with the thing they hoped would get little to no pushback for now.
The biggest reason is Steam would likely lose more money from doing that compared with removing the games the card companies are being assholes about.
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See, I’m no fan of Bitcoin. It’s pure speculation and hardly serves a purpose while burning down a rainforest for every transaction. Also the ledger makes things traceable, so it’s also a worse concept than cash.
This, however, is a good example of why the concept exists. We need a financial tool outside of the control of banks.
(Yada yada Ethereum and proof of stake.)
It’s also why American global hegemony is bad; they all tend to move in lock step with each other. If there were a few more European and Asian payment providers out there we’d be a bit more diversity of policy and true consumer choice.
If you can find his bones, I’ll ask them, but you should know that doing so says a lot more about you than it does me.
Wait till you learn that only fans models have people reply for them or bots! Loooool
Okay, devils advocate time.
What is the correct way to ban rape and anime CSAM games from Steam?
Because I don’t buy “freedom” and “none of my business” as reasonable moral positions.
I think it’s justified to want to prevent people from normalizing extreme content publicly.
I think one of the greatest moral failings of modern society is the obsession with allowing companies, rich folk, and the deranged to build systems and communities of harm because society should always be neutral for some reason.
I do agree that payment systems shouldn’t be the ultimate arbiters of what’s permissible, and general sexual content is a normal part of what it means to be human. But we should have limits.
This conversation is completely dominated by people focusing on the “censorship.” As if we don’t justifiably ban snuff or actual films of these sorts of activities.
Please think of the children? Yes, and think of the women these sorts of norms harm. Sometimes you really should care.
This conversation is always completely without nuance, as if all censorship is objectively wrong. Sex games should be legal, unless they are absurdly harmful. And yes, I realize that line is sometimes hard to draw, but we absolutely should find it.
Failing to have a reasonable way to remove something you find genuinely immoral, and defaulting to this “trick” I think is a respectable action for someone who is trying to be ethical to take, even if I don’t completely agree with all her views.
