I wasn't actually talking about porn. I was talking about creating hysteria to deal with fears, instead of solving problems. For that porn was a good example. Don't get me wrong, I neither applaude the masses of free porn we have since the WWW, nor I'm saying there shall be free access to it for anybody at any age. I am happy that at least one needs to ask for it, and don't get it rubbed into our noses unasked everywhere we look.
But looking back over some generations it shows two things:
The fear about what would happen if not banned were exaggerated. And you simply cannot eliminate it.
This does and shall not whitewash it, since such issues are too complex to be dealt binary with.
That's my point:
Trying to solve complex problems with simple ("binary") approaches (bans/prohibition) is always doomed to fail.
Take the prohibition in Norway (1914-1927) or the USA (1919-1933) as another example:
Neither everybody became an alcoholic because of aclohol is free to buy, nor it prevented people from drinking alcohol when it was banned. All you got were some fewer of the problems you cannot completely prevent anyway for the price you got a lot more other, additional, and more serious problems instead.
Today's statistics prove: Alcohol consumption decreases - while it's free to buy. Something the prohibitionists had never believed.
If you want to prevent people from using drugs, you need to look at the reasons why people take them, and solve those. Prohibition does not solve that. This only fuels black market, or shift the demands for other drugs.
Agreed, that's not an easy, but a complex task that needs lots of effort and patience, and the whole society need to discuss openly on a mature level, while there are commercial interests to continue selling crap to the masses: cigarettes, alcolohol, porn, junk food, personal information gathering social media, ... - addiction is the key. The most money can be made with addicting products. And the addicted ones want to remain at the wheel, so the ones neither using nor selling them but seeing the problems are in a bad position to deal with.
That's why we observe this hypocritically pious behaviour took the helm: Everybody knows it's bad, but the majority don't really want to get rid of it. So they absolve themselves by placing "warning" stickers everywhere:
One US american once got a hot coffee over his trousers, now on every mug it's written: "Warning! Hot." Well, yeah, of course coffee is brewed in boiling water, and commonly served hot, if it's not clearly attributed as "ice coffee." Now billions of people have to look at this sign thousands of times because one single moron once was too stupid to drink a cup of coffee. Did this prevent any scalding? There are still people scalding at their coffee. So at soup, or any other hot dish - with or without a sign.
In every hotel bathroom is a sign: "can you imagine how much water... if you reuse the towels." At most hotels I've been the towels are replaced every day by fresh ones, doesn't matter if I throw them on the floor, or not. So why shall I need to look at this sign everytime I go to the bathroom?
By all countries I visited so far Germany, UK, and the USA are the countries of the sign fetishists - where you look, there is a sign, sombody telling you somebody.
I remember my first time I entered a bus in Edinburgh: The driver had to wait for a couple of seconds extra before I bought a ticket, because I first had to read all the signs. "Oh, it's forbidden to pee on the floor, dump my trash into the bus, or rob the driver. Good a sign told me that, otherwise I had done it."
Point is: Besides to normal sane people those things are all self-evident, it needs to be told once, not everytime again and again. At least not to me. So what makes this to foreigners like me? Of course I think:"Damned, what a bunch of imbecile morons do live here, they need so many signs continously remind them of so many things." - "Keep breathing! Warning! Stop breathing may kill you."
I wait for somebody will sue a washbasin manufacturer for his relative drowned drunken in the bathtub, so then worldwide we get a sign at every sink, basin, and tub: "Warning! Water is wet."
On every website with adult content you get this warning sign that asks you if you are under age, or not.
How much underaged do you think are prevented by this from watching porn?
Would you say "almost all", or rather "almost no one"?
Those things do not prevent anything. They are just for to absolve the providers: "Hey, we told them. If they don't obey it, then it's not our business."
Bottom line:
About how to deal with such things maturely, to actually solve problems really, was a long point I don't want to stress here. There is enough expertise and literature about that for decades. It just needs to be done - even if this means to take responsibility and withdraw some energy from selling crap to put it into doing people and society good.
addiction - responsibility - mature
All I'm saying is, all this prohibition, banning, and warning sign hysteria do not solve anything. In contrary it worsen the things. And when everybody always give in on that crap, we are lost.
Like I refuse to not drink alcohol because childs are prohibited (for a good reason),
I refuse to understand, why FreeBSD, and me, and many, many others, has to fulfill a pointless law some state in the US fabricated by half-baked ideas.
As I said in my
post #32:
Just place "This software is prohibited to be used in California" into the license.
It's like nobody gets any trouble when underaged teens click on "age 18 or older" when entering a porn site:
A pointless law pointless fulfilled.
www.gov.ca.gov
github.com
