@ZTHorse, I honestly agree with the point that prohibition of pornography just leads to more problems than it solves.
I also think that being relegated to us
only to being a porn and fetish site ends up being problematic. The fact that we can have a philosophical discussion or talk about law is an important one: although we are free to post porn if we want to, we are also free to talk about philosophy and law and about changing society. On some sites that have pornography, you often end up with more trolling and bullying than it's worth if you try to talk about something more intellectual or spiritual.
I am not against porn. I would not want to be relegated to it, either. I would be a slave neither to shame nor to vice. When I was a teenager in the 1990's, when I was on the MUCKS roleplaying, I would be talking about philosophy, futurism, science, society, and literature right in the middle of a hot and heavy sexual scene, and my roleplaying partners were people that loved to do likewise. They were not really separate things for me. They were interwoven. They had thematic effects upon our scenes. Our scenes gave rise to questions that we therefore examined.
I am not even slightly ashamed of my sexuality, but I think that the reason why is that I see myself as being my sexuality and, by the way, all of the other things that I am. I am many things. I am some things that you might not like very much at all. I may also be some things that you really like quite a lot. I might also be some things that you may never fully understand. You cannot have the things about me that you like unless you also accept the things about me that you do not understand as well. I am not about to bury the things that make me different and only show you the parts me that you want to see. Take it all, or take none. I am a whole person, not just the pieces that you like. I am using the word "you" in the hypothetical sense, here. The sentiment really applies to everybody.
See, when I sound off about how I disagree with Immanuel Kant about some things, I genuinely disagree with Kant respectfully about SOME things. One example is the discussion of anarchy v. republic.
I think that Kant's delineation of anarchy v. republic v. barbarism v. despotism was beautifully done. However, Kant attempted to make the argument that his concept of anarchy was not as good of a form as a republic, since under an anarchy, the law is merely an "empty recommendation." Kant's view was that, for freedom to really be maintained in a free society, the laws that it exercised to attempt to maintain that freedom needed to have some teeth behind them. What Kant suggested was that society needed a sort of elected dictator or policeman in order to really keep society free. This goes with his "law and order" views on deontology.
Also, I even see what Kant was attempting to do and why. Without somebody there keeping law and order, then bullies and rioters and trolls and other that engage in seriously bad behavior can tend to get seriously out-of-hand. Based on Kant's deontological views, these kinds of people could only really be controlled based on instilling a sense of law and order and a fear of the law.
This is why I think that Kant was off-the-mark in trying to argue against consequentialism. A consequentialist perspective would have resolved this a lot better in my opinion.
If you take a consequentialist perspective, there are times when you actually do have use force in order to prevent a bully from using force of some kind against others. In an online community, trolling gangs can become a serious problem, and they do act like gangs that will actually converge on someone like a mob, while trying to inflate their level of importance and create a false impression of unanimity. Sometimes, botnets and sock-puppets enter the picture, and it gets really ugly. "
The bees had declared a war" as the song goes.
Well, some communities that have tried practicing a
liassez-faire approach have failed chiefly because they assumed falsely that everyone there was going to follow them in being
liassez-faire, but people that were not able to deal with the differences of others inevitably decided to opt for vigilante justice, with experienced trolls ruling the roost like the despots of a third-world country and basically just rampant bullying that would would look like an endless Year 2000 Pelican Bay Prison Riot.
Therefore, it would briefly seem like Kant is right, that we are always going to have bullies, that we are always going to jerks, that we are always going to have people that suffer from a profound and deep and devoted lack of respect for anybody at all, and without a policeman strolling up and down the boulevard bearing a baton, they ultimately are going to get out-of-hand.
The reason why I disagree with Kant is that I do not really agree with him on the point of treating people
individually as an end unto themselves. I would agree with him on treating people
collectively as an end unto themselves. I was in a discussion with
@Tailo about this, but I think that I became a little bit confusing about my actual position. You know me. I can meander and get kind of weird. Ultimately, to succeed at
collectively treating the people as an end unto themselves, it can be necessary to treat some of them,
individually, as a means to an end.
In the one example that I saw, of what I believe is the closest thing that I have seen to a true Kantian anarchy, the way that they did it was that they encouraged people to act like leaders. There was a culture of mentorship. If you had only been on the MUCK for a couple of weeks, you would already have someone urging you to start planning your own event or game, and you would have people really cheering you on to try to do something cool and creative and original.
Well, the reason why you are eager to mentor people is that you are not just doing it for their benefit. You are doing it because you like how the community is running, and you want to perpetuate that effect. That person might benefit from you mentoring them, but that person is also a means of preserving the sense of harmony and purpose within the community. While it is a win/win interaction, the community as a whole benefits disproportionately.
When everybody is made to feel like a leader, everyone really feels responsible for their community, so you do not really need a policeman strolling up and down the boulevard bearing a baton, just maybe kept on stand-by in case the system for some reason were disrupted and started to break down. Everybody is eager to welcome newcomers. Everybody is trying to act like a responsible adult for younger people and trying to set a good example.
What Fausty and
@TogglesHappyZoo are doing is precisely an example of how I can see this working. Some other zoos wanted to create podcasts and similar things of their own, and they are mentoring those people and supporting their creativity. I think that, when that kind of culture begins to take root, the cause for freedom tends to spread.
