I’ve got a new article out in Reason; you can read it on their website, but here’s a taste to get you started:
Mastercard and Visa…announced that they will no longer let customers use their cards on the adult video site Pornhub. This new policy was prompted by political pressure, making it the latest government victory in a long, censorious quest.
Governments can define actual actions as “crimes” and threaten dire consequences for those actions, but the intangible contents of the human mind are forever out of their reach. So officials covet the next best thing: the power to stop individuals from sharing the products of those minds—ideas, fantasies, art—with others. In America they are constrained by the First Amendment, and so for centuries they’ve dreamed up ways to circumvent that restriction. The courts have rejected most of these attempts, but one has had remarkable staying power: an exception for the nebulosity called “obscenity.” This used to be a fairly hefty cudgel; most big publishers, movie producers, and so on were unwilling to be dragged into court for a principle, and most of those who were willing were too puny to put up much of a defense. That started to change in the 1980s, when cheap video equipment made it possible to churn out shoestring productions for the new and rapidly-growing home video market…
Well said Maggie, I’ve been following your blog for a few years now and its really opened my eyes on many issues.
I have to say over the last few years I’ve been feeling like its just getting worse and worse for free expression and basic human rights, accelerated by social media, the election of Trump, and other issues, most of media and technology companies have taken a hard turn on control.
There now appears to be this dreadful coalition of left,right,center politics and what have you groups calling to clamp down harder on controlling freewill. There’s hardly any political group left that talks about free expression and free speech, they almost all now support hard control of people.
There’s a lot of talk about the book 1984, but the truth is I think far worse than the almost childish world presented in that story, and it seems most people are more than willing to support such a world.
Well said. Bear repeating because this underhanded tactics is now the main avenue of attack.
Another news item today, and it’s directly relevant here: The US Comptroller of the Currency has proposed a regulation that would make access to the banking system a civil right, hopefully preventing both any future Operation Choke Point and the kind of blacklisting that Visa practices (not only against porn but against non-woke political viewpoints).
US citizens can review and comment on the new rule here.