Schadrach

Yeah pornhub seems pretty legitimate and safe these days.

Yeah, they got threatened a few years ago with essentially banking cutting them off if they didn’t make a concerted effort to purge anything shady, which they achieved by purging basically all end-user uploads that weren’t verified models or studios.

Too bad there aren’t other porn sites with massive libraries of content that apparently no one in power has noticed.

The states aren’t banning PornHub from being accessed there, PornHub are blocking themselves from being accessed from those states so as to not need to comply with new state laws requiring ID proof of age to access because they don’t want to handle personally identifying information of end users. So basically you’re just waiting for law enforcement to notice and charge them, and then find out if they’re run out of somewhere the state can reasonably do anything about it.

I mean the point of all rating systems in the US was fear of government regulation of content and having to fight that particular legal battle. It basically exists because moral busybodies were upset about Night Trap, Mortal Kombat and Doom.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure they realized they were never going to convict her of anything. Protected speech that also references a wildly popular killing is just not something you’re going to be able to convict over.

The implication is that someone is going to come off as a likely mark and for example get invited into a private user group with people “joking” with things like the Happy Merchant or being ridiculously over the top in a way that’s hard to take seriously to ease people in to taking white supremacist ideas seriously.

Ever seen the South Park episode about the Passion of the Christ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passion_of_the_Jew)? The idea is basically that that is constantly happening online anywhere it’s not sufficiently prevented.

The ADL considers Pepe a hate symbol, which I agree with is daft but that’s kind of key to their data and they are considered experts in the field by most. They scanned Steam with some automated tool looking for hate symbol images, came up with like a million hate symbols detected. If something contained more than one detected hate symbol, it got counted as however many hate symbols the tool detected (so for example Pepe saluting a swastika would count as a Pepe and a swastika).

Almost 55% of those were Pepe. The next highest was the swastika at 9%. A literal majority of hate symbols they detected with that tool were Pepes, at more than 5 times the rate of the next most common symbol. It’s literally included to make the problem bigger in the hopes that most readers either won’t look that deep or won’t know what Pepe is.

EDIT: Another fun one is if you go look at their hate symbol index, about an eighth of two digit numbers are either hate symbols or part of a hate symbol.

I am a big GOG enjoyer myself, but when I need to use steam for anything, I have never encountered such content.

You’ve never seen a Pepe meme on Steam? I’m not kidding there either - if you dig into that ADL link and follow it to the research, they have a list of top extremist and hateful symbols on Steam and the swastika is number 2 at 9 percent of detected symbols. #1, representing something like 55% of extremist and hateful symbols their automated detector found on Steam was Pepe.

Perhaps there is such content in private or otherwise not very visible spaces (such as user profiles), where they will not get reported, but that is true for any site with user content. I call BS on this being an issue.

If you dig into their research, it’s mostly private user groups and profiles. Game discussion pages are moderated by their respective devs or whoever the devs appoint but user groups are moderated by their owner/appointees and user profile pages aren’t really moderated at all unless you’re doing something actually illegal in the US.

So unless you go looking at the user profile pages of white supremacists, or go searching for white supremacist user groups you won’t run into much of it.

The two could be combined. Any shooting of three or more executives would be a mass shooting of executives. By a mysterious masked man that no one can identify.

Steam has also been hosting numerous outright neo-Nazi groups for many years (PDF) and never really stepped up effectively against them. User reports and media attention has limited effect.

As a general rule, steam discussion boards for a game are moderated by whoever the developer assigns that power to, and steam user groups are moderated by the group owner or whoever they delegate that power to and Steam doesn’t particularly care so long as you aren’t doxing, openly coordinating harassment, or doing something explicitly illegal in the US.

That’s also the general tilt they’ve taken with what’s allowed on the store since they opened the floodgates - if it’s not illegal and it’s not going to get them sued, it’s probably allowed if properly tagged. Which is why you can find Sex With Hitler side by side with Super Lesbian Animal RPG.

Worst they do is block it from specific regions if the local government requests it - see that game where you essentially play as Hamas fighting against the IDF that they recently blocked from the UK, the one where the largest part of the game description is arguing that the game isn’t antisemitic hate speech just because the enemy are Jewish. The call to block it came after a new patch that apparently added a scenario based on the Oct 7 attack.

Epic Game store, good: free games, bad: Epic and Tim Sweeney.

Sums up how I feel about them. I have lots of games on my Epic account. I have paid for none of them, and refuse to change that. If it’s an Epic exclusive, it will eventually either release on other platforms, become an epic store free game of the week, or be an epic store freebie on amazon prime. I have enough games in my library I can wait.

So even if this saves HB from further persecution by the Talibangelicals

I know right? Man who is soon to no longer be politically relevant had to make his son who is only politically relevant because of the father immune to prosecution for any and all crimes he may or may not have done over the last decade to prevent the GOP from using him to politically attack his father who will no longer be politically relevant at the same moment they gain the ability to hypothetically start the process to do so.

It’s just blatantly corrupt in the same way (but not the same scale) as what we all expect Trump to do. This is Biden getting to be a little blatantly corrupt, as a treat.

Short version is that for the most part forum moderation for each game is left up to the devs or whoever they appoint, and users can create user groups and curators without much if any restrictions and they don’t particularly give a shit what content the game you want to sell has. The only real exceptions are if it’s illegal in the US, which applies to very little (for example no CSAM).

I find it interesting that the federal government threatening a private entity with legal repercussions if it doesn’t restrict the speech of it’s users isn’t such an obvious violation of the first amendment that lawyers aren’t climbing over each other to fight this one.

And if you don’t see the problem with it, imagine we agree that the federal government should be allowed to restrict what expression can go on on internet platforms content-wise, then imagine Trump and his cronies deciding where the borders lie. They already want to revive the Comstock Act.

The moment you give people a little finger wrt their requests, one of those people will take the whole hand. The same likely applies to modding.

I suppose that depends on which finger.

It’s almost like people ignore men’s issues and scapegoat them at every opportunity for the sake of women.

Men will never ever get the benefit of the doubt, but when we try to demand it we are just crybabies.

Welcome to society. Frankly, it’s malagency (mis-assignment of agency, specifically in a fashion that often makes men responsible for things that happen to them even when they really aren’t and often absolves women of that responsibility when they really should have it) all the way down.

Malagency as a lens predicts reality better than a lot of other gender focused lenses. “What would happen if women are believed to be less responsible for what happens than they really are and men are believed to be more responsible for what happens than they really are?” tends to map to reality better than “What would happen if everything in society were created by men to benefit men at the expense of women and to oppress women?” Especially once you stop looking narrowly at the top few percent of men, where the two lenses give similar results.

and the cops saw a man fighting a woman and shot the man by default.

Something like 95% of people shot by police are men. This of course is not discriminatory on the grounds that men are evil, violent savages unlike every other group that are disproportionately shot by police who are innocent victims of oppression.

“Gamers” are also a group one elects to be a member of, while one is categorized into a race, sex or gender from birth. One is elective, the other is descriptive. No one chooses to be black, or white, or born with male or female genitalia, etc, etc. And a lot of negative views are often along the lines of a rare bad thing being more likely performed by a certain demographic being extrapolated to accuse that demographic of being dangerous or harmful in general (usually an out-group, though under some ideologies it’s only acceptable to have this view with a target perceived to be the in-group - as regards blame they essentially reverse the perceived in- and out-group roles).

To turn it around on you though, imagine we picked some other elective group (a hobby, a political or ideological leaning, that sort of thing) that you are likely to look positively upon (and maybe even be a member of) and did the same kind of thing. Let’s say…feminists? Would it be acceptable to accuse feminism or feminists of anything negative I can point to any group thereof doing, and if you aren’t one of the ones who actually does that then you should not take offense, right? Not feel defensive at all, not question or challenge the assertion at all, right?

They’re marching in the hopes that someone will attack them in a fashion they cannot reasonably flee from? Or does Ohio have stand your ground and we could knock the part about fleeing off?

Pardon them for what? Unless their possessing firearms wasn’t in line with the law, or that “physical altercation” mentioned that questioning apparently went nowhere reemerges as a thing then I don’t know what they’d need pardoned for based on the article.

The marching with Nazi shit and spewing whatever hateful bullshit is protected speech, because speech protections in the US are extremely broad.

And that’s before getting into whether or not the hypothetical crime is federal (which he could hypothetically pardon) or state (which he can’t).

The Bible actually gives instructions on how to induce an abortion

It really doesn’t. What it does is describe a religious rite that’s a sort of combined paternity test/abortion if she’s unfaithful. The idea being that the priest does his thing, she drinks the dusty water and if the child isn’t her husband’s she’ll miscarry on the spot. If she doesn’t miscarry, then God has proclaimed it’s his kid and he should have more faith in his wife.

There’s nothing in the description of it that would tell one how to trigger an abortion without divine involvement.

The true culprit is men,

Being pro-life or pro-choice isn’t strongly genedered. It’s not like men as a class oppose abortion and women as a class defend it. I think you’d be shocked at the sheer number of women out there who oppose abortion, and the number of men who don’t. It would be more accurate to say that a swath of religious folks (Catholics and certain flavors of evangelicals) oppose it, and those in their social reach get pulled along with them, along with traditionalist conservatives who are all about controlling sexuality.

Texas killing this child for losing a pregnancy

Texas didn’t kill her for loosing a pregnancy - Texas killed her by making her losing the pregnancy take too long by terrifying doctors out of speeding the process along, causing her to be in and out of hospital ERs repeatedly while doctors essentially played “hot potato” with her despite all of them knowing what needed done out of fear of being thrown in prison for a century if they did it, causing her to eventually develop sepsis and die.

It’s much, much worse than “killing her for losing a pregnancy”, and exactly how awful it is and how it got to that point needs to be spelled out in detail. Otherwise you’ll have people pointing out that the Texas law has an exception for medical emergencies, and it needs pointed out and doubled down on that by the time the doctors were reasonably certain that a conservative Texas court would agree with them it was a medical emergency (aka she’d already developed a systemic infection), she was already doomed.

Puerto Rico periodically votes on whether or not to pursue becoming a state, becoming a state doesn’t win except in one vote that was specifically a non-binding vote on the topic and that had much lower turnout than other votes on the idea.

DC was literally created specifically to not be a state, so that no state held the seat of the federal government.