and those companies aren't heavily regulated.

In Europe they regulated exchange fees down to something like 0.3%. They just said the fees shall be low and lo, they were low.

They could also easily regulate that credit card networks can't block obscene content.

> Should private payment processors be free to choose whose money they process?

We shouldn't have private payment processors. Access to the economy should not itself be a product that you have to buy and then worry about whether you own it or it owns you.

> we have a lot more porn than censorship

How do you know what you're missing? IMO media platforms are heavily censored in comparison to ~10 years ago, to the severe detriment of American pop culture.

> it looks like it's causing more damage

what damage is it causing?

I don't think there's a good way to compare the amounts of these things. I think the best you could do is ask how many bits would be flipped/added/removed had the thing not existed/happened.

Porn might involve large media files which gives it an up-front advantage re: "more", but it doesn't create shockwaves the way censorship does. Remove a porn video and the world stays largely unchanged. Undo an act of censorship and, well, maybe the world stays unchanged, or maybe everything is different.

I would say we are already pretty severely censored. We no longer have social tools to vet misinformation. We can't publicly insult dumb people and their wrong ideas to their faces. There are people -professional trolls- who, while they should not be deplatformed, should have their ideas publicly scrutinized and yes, humiliated. But we can't do that, because it's cyber bullying, or whatever.

Irl, if a crazy person gets on a soapbox and starts shouting at everybody, then people can shout back. Online, anybody who flamebaits is protected by the platforms and can censor the responses. They delete opposing comments, shadowban users, harsh language usually gets automatically deleted by the platform - and all that shouting-down is actually just counted as "engagement" which algorithmically boosts and spreads the bad idea further. The argument just directly profits the person with the bad idea, and incentivizes them to come up with even worse ideas to make everybody even madder.

This kind of censorship is causing a whole lot of problems right now.

Maybe that's true of intellectual property, but are you claiming something more general?

> there's a lot of sex trafficking going on in the porn industry, but not so much in the censorship industry

[citation needed]

I'll grant that there is sex trafficking going on at least in the fringes of the porn industry - but that's at least in part because of censorship. If porn production was widely legal and appropriately regulated, there'd be significantly less market for the edgy stuff filmed in Eastern European basements (i.e. the exact same argument as for marijuana legalisation).

There are also a bunch of regimes around the world who love censorship, and also engage in a bunch of human trafficking. For example, the UAE is notorious for both widespread censorship, and an entire class of foreign workers in various forms of indentured servitude (which for women is often prostitution)...

There's no evidence in actual psychological literature that porn is harmful to people beyond making some religious folks feel a little more shame than normal. Porn addiction isn't an actual psychological condition.

I question the bit about sex trafficking. From my perspective a lot of consenting adults are making a lot of money by willingly participating in the industry. If someone is abusing that and forcing someone to participate, that's already a crime that should be prosecuted. It's not an excuse to shut down commerce between consenting adults.

[dead]

Take a good look at the world around us, and note especially how the countries in which sexual expression and by extension porn are heavily censored also coincidentally have some of the most sexually repressive and hostile attitudes towards women and consensual intimacy between adults of any kind in real life. People being allowed to express sexuality in sometimes crude and commercialized ways is not what you should be pointing at if you want to mention a dangerous progression of society toward violent attitudes around sex.

In the original days of TheRedPill one of the first things recommended was to drop porn IIRC (also workout and get paid more)

The manosphere is probably a very large umbrella of all kinds of views only united by one common trait - being a man.

Although you're not wrong that society is hyper sexualised and dating has become increasingly transactional

I was with you until the last two paragraphs.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with hip hop.

> One can make a very strong argument that the manosphere stuff is rooted in poor sexual attitudes of men that only got worse with tons of porn.

This has no bearing in reality. The "manosphere" is mostly neo-conservative guys who are sometimes even performatively against porn.

> Every other game has basically stripper-level female characters now days.

This used to be a lot more pervasive 20 years ago than now? Altogether with the "hip hop" thing, just feels like prejudiced, outdated arguments without data to back it up.

> that the manosphere stuff is rooted in poor sexual attitudes of men that only got worse with tons of porn.... The Christian right is wrong about so much, but the progression of our society has finally made them mostly correct on this issue.

I have news for you my friend, the Christian right is fucking people up way more than porn.

So is the NoFap/incel movement.

There are some pretty fucked up people who see women as breeding machines. This is tied pretty closely to the great replacement conspiracy theory and similar white nationalist conspiracy theories.

People who believe this junk promote the idea that porn is bad because they want young men desperately horny so they breed with women either with or without their consent. This is the same reason it was a major priority for them to deny women's rights to their own bodies.

Your characterization of hip hop shoots the messenger. It's the stories of an oppressed people, if you don't like the violence in their stories, blame their oppressor.

It's the same with porn and the Christian Right. If people feel incomplete and try to fill that gap with a porn habit, the porn is an indicator of a problem, not the problem itself. Filling that gap with right wing propaganda doesn't address the problem, it just changes it into something that can be used for political advantage.

You're missing the root causes here.