> No one said that

If the precautionary principle should always prevail, then yes, that's what's being said.

In this case, it's difficult to even disentangle what the status quo is. Pornography, this group's bogeyman, is millenia old. Computer games, decades. The combination is a bit novel, but it's also more precedented than these bans.

> I have seen zero evidence that any of these games are harmful

Yeah. I see evidence they're demanded by the people who we're putatively protecting, however. And I see lots of evidence of other harmful things that aren't banned. Herego, why the fuck are we kneejerking on this?

There's probably a fundamental political question underlying a lot of these discussions: do you default to letting people do things or not?

My long-held belief is that there's a certain hubris to saying that you know best for everyone. So I default to letting people do things, since preventing them is exerting power over them. With that framing, you would need evidence that something is harmful if you're going to exert power over other people to prevent them from doing it.

I fail to see how. We have entire sections of our brain dedicated to aggression and adrenaline management. Knowing how to recognize a threat, fight, and flight is every bit as base as knowing how to breed.

Murder is illegal, but games and stories about murder are protected free expression. None of the games in question involve actual people, let alone people being harmed, and so why wouldn't they be treated the same way?

By that logic, one would think that gay people would at least also be heterosexual because they're drowning in an ocean of heterosexual material.

It's kind of interesting that you're claiming a slippery slope argument, when the words we use to describe incest Oedipal and Electra complex come from wildly popular pre-CE fictional accounts of incest.

As for violence, that's because such acts on film were illegal. Pornography was tightly regulated before this era of free speech. Even now the UK, is constantly trying to maintain BDSM porn as criminal [1] and Australia has similar tight restrictions [2]. This is to say nothing of the countries where pornography is completely banned: China, North Korea, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkmenistan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iceland, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Malta, Myanmar, Sudan, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Yemen.

So if the question is why do you see more of Y in XXX, it's because it is now allowed so content is created to satisfy needs that were already there.

[1] https://reason.com/2014/12/02/uk-bans-fetish-porn/ [2] https://www.kptlegal.com.au/resources/knowledge/pornography-...

Both points are true. I chose these examples in response because they are relatively simple, clear cut examples of "not your business", yet people still try to dictate other people's lives around them.

These people are on one end of the authoritarian spectrum. The other are anarchists, usually ancaps in places I frequent, and they are just as wrong because they are ignoring how people in the real world will actually behave. Negative externalities are precisely the thing that they ignore, minimize, or try to redirect your attention by linking you to a 2 hour video which is supposed to address it but doesn't.

Well, at least they do generally get out of other people's lives though. But it's a system which doesn't work and when it fails, leads to the rise of authoritarians. I wish people were able to understand that policy is a multi-dimensional spectrum and extremes on any one axis are unlikely to lead to stability.

I agree with the trans example because 1) it's a great example of one individual being allowed to do something that directly harms another individual; 2) it's fairly easy to prove that someone who grew up with male bone and muscle structure does not suddenly get the female structure because of a reassignment surgery or hormones. I am all for letting people do what they want with their bodies but their freedom stops at interacting with other people's bodies.

I cannot agree with the toddlers example: 1) it's possible it does some damage but as I said, to even consider it, we need proof; 2) even if they are bad at life, it doesn't automatically harm another individual - don't hire incompetents and they won't harm your business. They might harm society in general but society does not IMO have any right to force people to optimize for society's goals. The balance might change if this was true and happened on such a scale that society measurably declined but then I am still of the opinion that we should have mechanisms how a group of people should be able to get together separate themselves from others. We have no right to force the Amish to start using modern tech, even if a few more able bodies would probably be beneficial on some scale. Similarly, if the majority feed TikTok to their toddlers and a minority does not, they should be able and allowed to form their own society with its own rules, as long as everyone participates willingly.