Australia was a prison colony, after all.

Shh don’t bring facts in here.

The irony is that many if not most of the porn ARTISTS I have know or known of are women, in a subculture that skews male *heavily*.

And video games are just art.

So, women, drawing and writing stuff they like, being banned and losing an income stream.

I don’t think drawing or writing porn is exploitative at all.

"Protecting women" is an incoherent excuse for pressuring websites to pull romantic games that feature consensual, loving, respectful homosexual male-male relationships, with no women even present in the game.

The real motivations seemingly have nothing to do with protecting women, which appears to simply be a palatable facade for the true intention to suppress all depictions of sexuality, including the depictions that offer good-faith representation of historically marginalized groups.

> laims to be an Australian feminist organization

I'm genuinely curious to see how this plays out in the American partisan landscape.

They are however influenced by the American discourse soup of lies and talking points, in the same way that the NZ mosque shooter was.

Conservatives around the world talk to each other.

All this makes me think of war on drugs and other similar failed attempts at regulation, and of the article "the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero". The stronger the zeal to prevent porn the more expensive it gets to do so, and the more they cause legit companies like yours to close, the more profitable it gets to do it illegally. Just cranking on the symptoms without looking at the cause often has the opposite effect to the one desired, not that the people pushing for this probably care.

I'd suggest that foreign investors dictating domestic policy is a huge problem. For a core institution like banking there ought to be a law forbidding them from discriminating against otherwise legal activities except in the case that a different law permits or requires them to do so. That would also absolve them of any PR concerns because "everyone has to; legally speaking we don't have any choice".

What aggravates me the most about stories like yours is that banks are effectively public utilities. They are regulated as such, are broadly considered too big to fail (especially in Canada - believe it or not at a domestic scale, their banks are far more important than any US bank is to the American economy) and thus receive an implicit tax payer underwriting, yet are able to act like this when you're not doing any illegal activities.

I understand the risk tolerance aspect from a bank, they wouldn't want to give a massive loan to a property developer or oil driller going under water. But when it comes to basic deposit services where nobody is asking them to risk their own money, they should be forced to allow any customer who isn't breaking any laws, such as in your case.

Thank you for your story. I like to try to imagine what conversations happened behind the scenes. The fact that the suddenly hauled you into the branch, and still decided that you were too "risky" (clearly a made-up excuse) says a lot. Whatever force is behind this is powerful and it's not even remotely explained by a coalition of angry activists.

> we fell outside of their "risk appetite."

If you take that statement at face value (not sure if you should), it's fascinating to think that your business was able to operate for two decades with what I assume are the standard problems people in the porn industry face (e.g. chargebacks from customers unwilling to admit they subscribed in their SO's presence and so pretending it was a scam, etc.)

And yet seemingly none of the bank's risk heuristics based on actual transaction profiling ever went off.

Wouldn't that mean that, in practice, being in the porn industry isn't as high-risk as banks / payment processors think it is?

And would this not then suggest a gap in the market, for an (ideally vertically-integrated) bank + payment processor + card issuer + KYC provider, who is willing to

1. evaluate risk on a customer-by-customer basis (through e.g. continuous dynamic network analysis of transaction flow, with txs annotated with their KYC info) rather than by actuarial categorization; and

2. avoid seeking any investment (at any remove) by parties who would insist they avoid these types of customers?

While I'm not big on crypto. This is, in part, why Bitcoin exists and why it was created.

I'm not sure if Bitcoin is the right answer due to the 51% attack vulnerability. And a network of miners where everyone can join in principle sounds pretty yolo, but it seems the be the one of the few organizations that exist outside of government? At least, it does in principle, the fact that the whole crypto industry is a mix of scams and recreation of the actual finance industry isn't helping that case, but a part of it definitely still exists outside of it.

We need more digital systems that exist outside of governments. I'm not sure if it's feasible, but stuff like this is egregious.

I wonder what our view on all of this is in a 1000 years. People in the future probably look at us in disbelief with how we practiced our ethics.

Two things can be true at the same time, however. The US has a strong stance on freedom, which means that they'll allow most things even if they're against them. Specially when that thing generates income. But that doesn't mean they're not also a puritanical society. They just take more of a "shame you" approach than a "you're forbidden" one to force you not to do stuff.

I bet you that American organizations were involved in the societal pressure that led this Canadian organization to do this. They're just not as effective in their own country in comparison to places where it's not all about money, and values do matter.

I'm amazed that producing porn in Iceland can lead to gaol. Can you expand upon that further?

Well not equivalent, they taught their women to read after all.

But let's be real here, they were a bunch of jerks. There's a reason it took no time flat for Rhode Island to exist.

Yes that’s exactly what they were and are today

When I finally got around to reading Fukuyama, I had an "aha" moment where I realized... oh, this is how liberal democracy thinks. They think they've perfected society and everyone agrees with them, except for a few weird superstitious cults.

Then I realized that it was all wrong, countries accept western liberal democracy only as long as the free aid keeps flowing. And the libdems were in for a rude awakening if they ever ran out of kibble.

In England such laws were lobbied by NCH (7000 staff), so it's not necessarily opinion of people, especially in places like Brazil.

Several of the BRICS (& other "global south" / non-neoliberal / non-western) countries also imprison journalists and nonviolent political opposition groups, and some even have the death penalty for minor cannabis possession. "Everyone else does things this way" isn't a legitimate justification.

The groups behind are two US companies. Some random group of weirdos from Australia are just a good excuse, at best.

Also penicillin, trains, and the Haber-Bosch process.

>Religion and taboo often exist for a reason, because endless self gratification does not lead to flourishing.

So then why aren't those activists going after Instagram, TicTok, X/Twitter, etc. you know, the OG spyware, brain rot and anxiety inducing companies, because that would actually benefit society and not too many people would mourn their loss.

Why are they instead going after a dozen random horny video games nobody heard of? Oh that's right, because those random game devs don't have the power to fight back in court, unlike Meta/X, so it's an easy win for them to collect brownie points, for performative nonsense.

I'll take the hard stance on this. I don't see how Sex is anymore harmful, addicting, or dangerous as any other number of socialties. Including Alcohol, fast food, gambling, and simply getting to into any given hobby (be it video games or playing guitar).

A habit I've noticed is that a person vulnerable to being addicted to X is more prone to fall back on Y, Z, etc. even when X is fixed. So I only see "this hurts certain people" as a scapegoat. Stairs probably hurt more people in any given day than many activities, we don't base law purely on harm and potential harm.

> you can at least concede it's not entirely arbitrary content like say a sitcom

I'd actually hypothesise that if you locked three sets of teenage boys in rooms, one with only porn games, one with only social media and one with only sitcoms, that the first group would likely emerge the healthiest of the three. I'm basing this on my bias towards activity and that nobody seems to have bothered with actually doing research on porn games, the organisation pushing for these bans included [1], instead proxying research on porn as a whole for this specific category.

[1] https://www.collectiveshout.org/research

I'd have an easier time with this argument if it got equally applied to violence. It's ridiculous that exposure to sex is considered worse than to violence.

And I've seen video games cause people to destroy their lives.

What else should we arbitrarily ban based on this criteria? It doesn't seem to hold up to much scrutiny.

Not sure if you are talking about religion or porn games..

IMHO the creation of organized religion has led to far more injustice in the world than a stray nipple (outside of Helen of Troy).

I really hope you don't like alcohol or any kind of spice because historically those are coming next