Children and young people getting a hold of lolicon comics, where pedophilia is normalized through the story, can harm them for life. No one seems to have the imagination to think about this.
Adults looking at it is of course harmless, but don't make it easily available on the internet. If you do I'd say you're acting immorally and I support legal repercussions. I know people who have been messed up when they were very young and found it.
There are lots of vices and tasks that adults can usually handle but minors may not. Alcohol, tobacco, drugs (in as far as these are legal in a given jurisdiction), voting, operating heavy machinery, driving cars…
In Japan sexually explicit comics are strictly 18+, clearly marked as such, and are sold as you would sell liquor or cigarettes. Making sure children don't have access to these is a matter of public awareness and parental guidance — it seems to work pretty well there.
> I know people who have been messed up when they were very young and found it.
Messed up from lolicon (i.e., Japanese comics featuring minors in sexually evocative situations) or messed from access to porn in general (or even actual child pornography)?
As I said explicitly, messed up from freely available lolicon comics and content on the internet. The vices you list all require physical exchanges with others or would usually be noticed by adults nearby, and so they aren't really comparable.
True, unmonitored access to the internet can expose minors to things that can have an adverse effect on their psyche. But let's limit ourselves to freely available online content. Singling out lolicon (or any other form of drawn porn) seems dangerously inconsistent to me.
Violence, hate speech, gore, (adult) porn; even written fantasies containing content that may stimulate forms of destructive behaviour — the list is endless! Either you shield children from all of it (which is sensible for young children, but not tenable for teenagers) or you educate, guide, train, and accompany your child as they learn to handle an ever increasing amount of freedom. Parenting and education are key here, not banning everything that may harm a child's mind.
One might argue that the reason people get messed up if they are exposed to certain types of content at a young age is not because of the nature of the content itself, but because of other people's response (or lack thereof) to it.
When everyone else is either judging you or trying too hard to pretend that nothing happened, you internalize a sort of guilt or shame that can haunt you for life. People who have seen terrible shit in their childhood but turned out okay, on the other hand, often report that they had someone to help them understand what was happening without rushing to a judgment.
I don't know who would judge a child for seeing lolicon, since no one would know about it but the child. I would agree interpersonal emotional support and therapy needs to be a more available and acceptable resource for everyone.
> I don't know who would judge a child for seeing lolicon, since no one would know about it but the child.
Children usually want to tell everyone about what they saw. If they keep it to themselves, it's often because they understand that someone else would judge them, punish them, get angry at them, feel disappointed at them, etc. for seeing it. Their friends might have told them that it's taboo. Their parents might have acted really awkwardly around similar content in the past. Or a predator might have said that what happened in the shed is a cute little secret between them.
Whatever reasons they have for trying to hide it, it's a symptom of a society that discourages talking frankly and objectively about certain kinds of things.
Is there some study you could link to? I would think that IF there is any harm (and I doubt this since porn is very historically normal and even in classical art) it would be not significantly worse than the generic case for any such porn.
That could be likely to happen if the lolicon art were remotely realistic. I talk to artists a lot and see a lot of different art float by in their media feeds, and the lolicon stuff is almost always extremely stylized ot the point that they're entirely fantasy creatures with only a passing resemblance to humans. At the same time there's still a visceral shock to seeing the occasional rare picture where the characters actually look like human children.
The first article from 2004 has two anthropologists say they "believe" evolutionary psychology can explain exclusionary behavior, while the second has the line "While extrapolating this to mean that the babies are racist or bigoted is probably a step too far...it does raise interesting questions". I wish that's all I needed to firmly hold something as fact, it must feel nice.
Or to put it another way, the protesters are revealing their own identities by making their info public.
I am skeptical of how useful this is in the long run. It's therapeutic for some of my fellow leftists ("haha, this person's name is sullied for life, I imagine") but real, permanent change is less easy than this.
The idea of "meaning" is synonymous with agreement. Individual words "mean" things because we agree on the mapping. "Subjective, individual meaning" seems to just refer to personal thoughts and interpretation. It's fine to have personal thoughts, but "the author's meaning" is what they ultimately attempted to make others think is the message within the work. So to make comparisons between properties of the author's meaning and personal "meanings" is comparing apples to oranges, no?
The Switch has a huge amount of potential, but it lacks the games still. None of the big releases so far use the platform to its fullest: they're really good video games, not necessarily good _Switch_ games. BOTW, Splatoon 2, Mario Kart 8, and Mario Odyssey all seem like they are just Wii U games with better internal quality, only sparsely interfacing with new Switch features.
Nintendo also shed beloved handheld features like Streetpass, didn't include obvious features like Bluetooth audio, and are really messing up their online services ... the internet Splatoon fanbase seems to roundly regard the Switch online experience a failure for the context of 2017
i have a really weird and contrarian opinion, which is that Splatoon online is good because it's bad. I swear I actually believe this, though, not just trolling.
voice chat is difficult and terrible, so nobody really uses it! that's a major plus in my book. most people will never run into more vile people than when gaming online.
the multiplayer is unbalanced, issues with lag and disconnection often mean that the outcomes of matches just aren't fair. this is good, because it sort of limits how seriously you can take the game. just relax and have fun instead of a hypercompetitive 3-hours-a-day online sport.
the inconvenience of parties/team up is good, it means it's hard for people to get an us-vs-them mentality or want to just dominate weaker players.
i'd be really shocked if this is all intentional on Nintendo's part; it's probably just hubris and not-invented-here syndrome.
but in practice it feels almost like all the online inadequacies are a kind of traffic calming -- like putting trees and islands in the middle of a busy road to get people to slow down. it makes things more welcoming for people like me who normally loathe online games.
I totally get that. That theory's interesting and I agree the game shouldn't aspire to have the same sort of player experience/base as those of CoD or PUBG.
The lack of voice chat is no problem for me, though the app is terrible at what it tries to do (voice chat with your own team) which is something I'd want to do with casual friend players. Instead I just end up using Skype.
What unique Switch features need to be exploited, exactly? In a sense, the Switch really is a portable Wii U. The most amazing feature, IMO, is how they've managed to make a portable system with local multiplayer (without requiring multiple systems), which plenty of games support.
I've played four or five different multiplayer games on it and it's indeed great. But they're leaving a lot of potential innovation on the backburner:
The touch screen and the the Joycon accelorometers/advanced rumble aren't used at all in many games, or if they are, it isn't anything innovative. ARMS is an exception, though, but I really don't think many people bought the game.
The Mii avatar you create can't do much of anything. On the Wii U, Wii and DS there was a bit more you could do with those.
Amiibo aren't really useful except for small in-game bonuses
The companion app is currently lackluster. They could have made a Mario Kart 8 section where you compare your scores to your friends, a BotW section that would interface with your game... for now it's just a Splatoon app with a few nice features, with only one main feature actually communicating back to the game.
I guess those middle two aren't Switch-specific, but there are a lot of Nintendo-specific things that they should really considers spending time cultivating.
These are essentially all legacy features. I see the Switch as something of a retreat from the highly proprietary hardware features that attracted spotty-at-best 3rd party support and even Nintendo sometimes struggled to shoehorn in (see the gimmicky motion controls in Zelda/Metroid games on Wii). It's simply a great classic console experience you can play anywhere.
The "advanced rumble" is hardly so. It's a gimmick. The accelerometer/gyroscope was present on the Wii and Wii U. What the Switch has going for it is its portability, not any particular feature (although the touch screen is good for a few games).
I think that HD rumble is actually pretty great. It's not essential, but games are better for having it. In Mario Kart 8, it conveys the "texture" of the road. TumbleSeed does a fantastic job mimicking the feel of something rolling across a board between your hands.
It's especially nice in handheld mode, where the user doesn't have a decent speaker system to emphasize things (and may not even have the sound turned on at all). In those situations, the user may not be able to hear the sound effect when they get hit by a shell or drive off the road. But with the rumble, the punch of it is still there.
Mario Kart 8, Splatoon 2, and ARMS make good use of the controller gyroscope, HD rumble, ad-hoc multiplayer, multitude of control options, and portable mode. What other console features should they be using?
It is a bad trend, and thoughtful American writers like Glenn Greenwald have written strongly against it. But the idea a government censoring the internet is a more extreme, less arguable perversion of human cooperation...
So how _does_ the plastic get into the ocean? Clearly litter washes into rivers during storms and thus ends up in the ocean, but that seems like it must be a relatively insignificant source. Are there countries who are dumping barges full of trash out at sea? Which ones?
Victoria BC actually pipes all sewage right out to sea currently. So anything w/ micro plastic beads gets sent right into the ocean. This is also the case with the storm drainage system, so anything left on the road also right into the ocean.
There's one for you. People here actively protest against building a tertiary system for tax reasons and because they think they don't need it (there's actually a lot of people who even think that it's less environmentally friendly to have it dealt with on land). It's been an on going debate for over 30 years.
When you wash clothing that contains artificial fibres you dump a load into the water system, and depending where you live some will end up in the sea. All those acrylic fleeces and blankets shed thousands of particles each wash.
Some cosmetics contain plastic microbeads, and when you use those and wash them off you dump the microbeads into the water system.
There is a lot of macroscale dumping of garbage - and the plastic stuff just accumulates over a time, until sunlight and wave action break it down.
However, a lot of this plastic _starts_ as micro-plastic particles: microbeads from cosmetics and polyester fibres from clothes (water from washing machines is full of this) - these are in household waste water and often end up in the ocean.
Probably mostly from clothes and possibly from ropes, but I'm just guessing that plastic microbeads haven't been around that long. It seems as such a fantastically stupid idea.
material is engineered to last, not decompose. in the sea Or land.
yet people use it every day. and when those news show up they show shock at a perfectly predictable outcome. then proceed to continue to use said product.
plastic is designed to not decompose. people use plastic. people get shocked that it didn't decompose. people forget about shock one second later and pop another nespresso capsule in the nasty coffee machine.
Yes, and all those silly folks who get upset about reactor meltdowns, surprised that radiation is harmful over and over again, are hilarious. That's totally the dynamic on display here.
If someone dumped their trash on your lawn, you wouldn't be surprised or emotional in the least? Just sighing and saying "Tragedy of the commons..." doesn't seem like the best attitude for a social animal to have
I see the logic here, though I would forgive people who didn't grow up on the internet for treating chat like real life (where no-one says "hello" without a moment's pause after). I think people are slowly catching on that they can do what the post describes
That argument would hold more water if the economy were a zero-sum game.
It's fine if the wealthy choose to give away some or all of their wealth, but it must be voluntary. Anything else is called "theft" - or the closely related concept of "taxation".
the article seems to be OK with it being voluntary (more or less?). I think it's just making the point that it's immoral not to give it away. maybe instead of "stealing" excess wealth we can just shame it more than we do now.
From the essay: "For example, it is sometimes claimed that CEOs get paid too much, or that the super-wealthy do not pay enough in taxes. My claim has nothing to do with either of these debates. You can hold my position and simultaneously believe that CEOs should get paid however much a company decides to pay them, and that taxes are a tyrannical form of legalized theft."
Adults looking at it is of course harmless, but don't make it easily available on the internet. If you do I'd say you're acting immorally and I support legal repercussions. I know people who have been messed up when they were very young and found it.