Future of porn (and this site) is really uncertain right now…

[hntnhole]

As we all celebrate the Winter Solstice - as our forebears have for countless millennia - long before the artifices of religiosity surfaced in humankind - let's remember that each of us is important, each of us is necessary, each of us has an equal voice, and we need to keep fucking each other. 

That's the paramount issue.  That's the necessity that binds us together, even over the ether.  Fucking is what really counts.

[PozBearWI]

7 hours ago, ErosWired said:

One of my degrees is in journalism. One of the first things we learn in the discipline is the necessity of context. Again, if you feel the need to further explain your original point, you have every opportunity to do so. I’m certainly not going to engage you any further.

Clearly that degree in journalism did not benefit you.  The facts speak for themselves.  My request sir is that you don't misquote me.  Otherwise I really don't give a crap what you say.  

[mpjockstrap]

On 12/16/2022 at 2:42 PM, hntnhole said:

Not much difference between the two that I can see; two sides of the same damn coin. 

I'll try not to be too specific as to politics but yes and no.  There's only one coin, and if one is a US citizen, it's the ONLY coin of the realm.  Personal freedom to do as one will so long as what is done harms no person nor infringes their equal right.

The Republican establishes infringement based on an imposition of morality.

The Democrat establishes infringement based on public safety and the tenet expressed in the Declaration that all are equal.

Of the two, the Democrat is more "American" and the Republican the more repressive and totalitarian.  A republican will violate personal freedoms faster than water pours down a cliff, all while telling you that such infringement or outright voiding of freedom is vital to the survival of the nation.

What the Republican is actually doing is hastening the demise of the nation.  The Democrat does the same but the motive is more purely in line with the states ideals of life, liberty, and prosperity.  Unless the issue at hand is weapons, then the Democrat becomes a totalitarian as well.

 

Our lifestyles expressed here are a counterculture that the Democrat would defend and the Republican would willingly crush out of existence.  A gay nightclub was shot up, people killed, and the Republican voter cheered.  The Democrat voter sought some way (almost always ineffective) to stop it from happening again.

 

Which side do you wish to be associated with?  They are NOT two sides of the same coin 

 

 

 

[hntnhole]

Thank you, mpjockstrap, for your response.

I am a life-long registered Democrat.  I have never voted for a Republican.  I am a dyed-in-the-wool Progressive Liberal.  I have never missed an election, even when I was traveling quite a bit building the businesses with my life-partner. Since you're in Illinois, you may be familiar with the remnants of the old political "machine" built by Richard J, and continued (with a few intermediate interruptions) by Richard M.  I was a part of that organization for a number of years, in two different wards.  It was Tip O'Neill that made famous the old phrase "all politics is local", and it's entirely true.  

The phrase "two sides of the same coin", as I used that phrase, applies to 1) registered voters who did not bother to vote, and 2) registered voters who vote not for the common good, but their own personal benefit, or in support of their personal biases, or who vote their own self-based notions, as opposed to what's best for the common good.  Thus, the phrase was properly used.  Citizens to whom numbers 1 & 2 above apply, are indeed nothing more than two sides of the same damn coin.  

Again, thanks for your response.

[harrysmith25]

On 12/16/2022 at 3:06 PM, rawTOP said:

As I mentioned in my thread about blocking the state of Louisiana - Utah has been blocked for a while now because they've been aggressively anti-porn. Well, one of the Senators from Utah just introduced legislation that will do two things…

1. Require sites with porn to verify the age of visitors.
2. Redefine "obscenity" to include 99% of porn.

You can read about it here: [think before following links] https://www.xbiz.com/news/270761/utah-republican-senator-mike-lee-introduces-bill-to-outlaw-all-porn-nationwide

 

But the real problem is that the guy wants to redefine what's "obscene" (#2). Right now only things like scat and blood are clearly obscene. 

........

As you can see this is FAR beyond the silly, amateurish game of whack-a-mole that UK conservatives are trying to play. This is full-on "American Taliban" or the US version of Iran's Morality Police. It's actually criminalizing porn.

As a result I won't be surprised if it passes. Then there will be lawsuits. But those will end up at a stridently conservative Supreme Court. This entire thing started because Clarence Thomas asked Congress to redefine obscenity back in 2020. He knew that with a different definition of obscenity he could outlaw porn. So the legal challenges are doomed to failure - all they'll do is delay the inevitable. As stupid and trite as it sounds, outlawing porn will be to men what Dobbs was to women. In some ways it may be worse since porn is part of the daily life of most men - so the effect will be felt constantly.

This kind of existential threat is why I've come down really hard on right wing comments on this site the last few years. This was sadly predictable and if you voted Republican over the past ~decade you brought us to this point. 

🤞

Clarence Thomas. Apparently everything revolves around him... he has been mentioned in other posts here by your other moderators

So anyway, the guy who loves censoring others is complaining about being censored. Wow.

It's hard or impossible to have a full and frank conversation about the political situation in America because you've banned people from questioning the official "results" of the 2020 election. You clearly enjoy doing that to try and make Trump's (many) supporters as speechless as you were the day Hillary got fucking downed by Trump after losing states the Dems hadnt lost since the days of Ratt and Judas Priest.

Remember the key point-  you yourself have an irrational and poisonous regime that wants to censor people from being able to say what they feel is the most important thing to say about the current world they live in. Then you want to know their opinions on someone else censoring you LOL

So erm, we can't discuss whether Thomas going on the warpath is an act of "revenge" by him. 

Your censoring of us is revenge for daring to elect Trump in the 1st place. Maybe if you concentrated on what's good for the whole country instead of getting revenge on red "America" (I am not American), what with you being the cocktail-sipping sneering New Yorker that you are.... you might not be in this situation.

Did you know it's possible to remove a Supreme Court justice with a vote in both houses of Congress. If you feel he's such a danger to society and sanity perhaps that should have been done some time during the time when Dems had both houses of congress. (A Supreme Court justice was once removed simply for "political bias". Hard to believe by modern standards cause we fully expect the Supreme Court to be a battle of political ideologies between a bunch of robe-wearing eggheads.)

But instead you guys spent all your time in the last 2 years taunting us, psychologically torturing us by banning us from saying what we need to say (and shout). 

People elected Trump because they obviously felt Islam was a lot scarier than Christianity, because it is.

You've forgotten even about the fact of him being anti-Islam in the 1st place, because you never accepted or analysed your 2016 defeat. That defeat came about because since the year 2001, 'you' (i.e. all leftists) decided it makes you "sophisticated" if you suck up to a religion that none of us even gave any thought to, until two planes hit two huge buildings in New York (and the Pentagon).

You got carried away with your pseudo-intellectual New York hobnobbing fantasy world, and you paid for it in humiliation of 2016. But your ego would never, EVER allow you to even think it was your fault - you never even did the slightest of searching for reasons, and even when people like me try to bash you over the head with them you still ignore them. 

What is it with this current life you have in America? Where you guys say Biden got 7 million more votes than the other guy yet all you do is panic, claim to be being besieged by  rednecks, and say  "democracy is under threat". What the hell is that? Did you win huge and send the "evil people" packing? Or not? What's going on?

During Trump all you did was shout "Russia collusion". And now since 2021 you've just generally gone completely insane for a whole 24 months, shouting "insurrection" over and over -  so eager to show off your "Wannabe Shakespeare" badge. LOL. 

This is just an opinion from a British guy who celebrated the victory in 2016 by trying to get laid as many times as possible, instead of wasting time talking to the likes of you. Who would want to waste precious time on Earth talking to Hillary fans (nor would I want to talk to the 19 people who went to Biden's election rallies in 2020). You seem to love talking to, and about us, though.

If you want to understand things better and not be blindsided by the world I suggest you get a bit further away from Manfuckinghattan than you are now. Really dude, maybe at your age it's time for a change, you might even thank me for suggesting it

[BootmanLA]

On 1/1/2023 at 8:31 PM, harrysmith25 said:

(I am not American)

This right here renders most of your opinion moot and pointless, not because non-Americans can't have opinions about our government, but because you're unlikely actually reading any significant amount of real, factual news about our elections. 

On 1/1/2023 at 8:31 PM, harrysmith25 said:

Did you know it's possible to remove a Supreme Court justice with a vote in both houses of Congress. If you feel he's such a danger to society and sanity perhaps that should have been done some time during the time when Dems had both houses of congress. (A Supreme Court justice was once removed simply for "political bias".

Where to start with this ignorance?

First, it's not just "a vote" in both houses of Congress. It requires a majority vote in the House to begin the proceeding and a 2/3 vote in the Senate to actually remove the official.

Second, neither party has held 2/3 of the seats in the Senate since 1966, so anything likely to be decided on a party-line vote (as most impeachments now would be) is doomed to failure no matter which party has a (slim) majority in the Senate.

Third, no Supreme Court justice has ever been removed for "political bias"" at all. Never happened. In fact, the only justice ever impeached by the House was Samuel Chase in 1805, and the Senate voted NOT to remove him. So your education is apparently as faulty as your logic and reasoning, such as they are.

On 1/1/2023 at 8:31 PM, harrysmith25 said:

People elected Trump because they obviously felt Islam was a lot scarier than Christianity, because it is.

"People" didn't elect Trump, because he didn't get even a plurality of the people's vote. The Electoral College of the U.S. - a body of 538 individuals - selected Trump as President because we have a stupid, antiquated, ignorant system for choosing a President that is used virtually nowhere else in the world, and it's politically impossible to change it.

As for your phobia about a religion, well, maybe that's what's scary to you. It's not scary to most people.

And if anything, it was Trump's attacks on Hispanics, south of our border, and not his nutty idea to shut down Muslim immigration, that got him the bigot vote, of which you seem to be so proud.

On 1/1/2023 at 8:31 PM, harrysmith25 said:

What is it with this current life you have in America? Where you guys say Biden got 7 million more votes than the other guy yet all you do is panic, claim to be being besieged by  rednecks, and say  "democracy is under threat". What the hell is that? Did you win huge and send the "evil people" packing? Or not? What's going on?

What's going on is the corruption of our political system, where states that are sometimes just barely Republican majority in terms of voters rig their voting districts so that their congressional delegations are 3/4 Republican or more. What's going on is the afore-mentioned insane Electoral College system we have, which keeps selecting Republican presidents despite the Republican candidate getting hundreds of thousands or millions fewer votes than his Democratic opponent. What we have, in other words, is a political system that does not actually recognize the will of the people in choosing its representatives - and that's without considering the antiquated, malapportioned, disgracefully un-democratic Senate.

[viking8x6]

On 12/16/2022 at 10:06 AM, rawTOP said:

This entire thing started because Clarence Thomas asked Congress to redefine obscenity back in 2020. He knew that with a different definition of obscenity he could outlaw porn.

The stench of hypocrisy rises to the very heavens...

Isn't this the same Clarence Thomas who was an aficionado of Long Dong Silver's work?

[Hotrawbutt4u]

On 12/16/2022 at 10:06 AM, rawTOP said:

As I mentioned in my thread about blocking the state of Louisiana - Utah has been blocked for a while now because they've been aggressively anti-porn. Well, one of the Senators from Utah just introduced legislation that will do two things…

1. Require sites with porn to verify the age of visitors.
2. Redefine "obscenity" to include 99% of porn.

You can read about it here: [think before following links] https://www.xbiz.com/news/270761/utah-republican-senator-mike-lee-introduces-bill-to-outlaw-all-porn-nationwide

Age verification (#1) has a whole host of problems. The UK has been trying to figure out how to do it for YEARS and they keep failing. In their case their idea is to have ISPs ban sites that don't comply, but that's becoming more and more impossible technically. Once "Encrypted Hello" matures and is widely deployed it will be almost impossible.

The issue for a site like this one (and my other porn sites) is expense. I'd either have to pay a service to vet every visitor to the site, or I'd have to do it myself. Both are cost prohibitive and the number of visitors who'd jump through the hoops is miniscule so the drop in traffic means less revenue - which makes it even more cost prohibitive. There's no way this site or my porn sites could continue in anything close to their current form if that happened.

But the real problem is that the guy wants to redefine what's "obscene" (#2). Right now only things like scat and blood are clearly obscene. Most porn is just a form of free speech / sexual expression. But his new definition of "obscene" is basically anything that has the primary purpose of giving you a hardon - which means pretty much all porn. If his bill passes it means all porn will need to have some aspect of "artistic merit" or other form of legitimacy. If you ever watched Paul Morris' original "What I Can't See" it's weird because he juxtaposes the blindfolded cumdump with a guy alone in a room jacking off. The compare and contrast between those two extremes made "What I Can't See" somewhat of a documentary - or a kind of editorial on male sexuality. That approach gets around the new definition. The problem is we have decades of content that don't meet the new definition. And distribution of those older videos will become a felony.

As you can see this is FAR beyond the silly, amateurish game of whack-a-mole that UK conservatives are trying to play. This is full-on "American Taliban" or the US version of Iran's Morality Police. It's actually criminalizing porn.

The problem is that the bill is likely to get a lot of Democratic support. Take a moment and read the article in Deseret News about the bills (Deseret News is a well-respected, Mormon-affiliated newspaper) - it's all about "protecting the children". What Democrat is going to pick pornography over protecting children? I mean Kamala Harris co-sponsored FOSTA/SESTA which was a disaster for sexual freedoms and has made the lives of sex workers far more dangerous. The Democrats are better than the Republicans on sexual freedom, but they're not great. So it's actually likely that this bill will get a fair amount of Democratic support.

As a result I won't be surprised if it passes. Then there will be lawsuits. But those will end up at a stridently conservative Supreme Court. This entire thing started because Clarence Thomas asked Congress to redefine obscenity back in 2020. He knew that with a different definition of obscenity he could outlaw porn. So the legal challenges are doomed to failure - all they'll do is delay the inevitable. As stupid and trite as it sounds, outlawing porn will be to men what Dobbs was to women. In some ways it may be worse since porn is part of the daily life of most men - so the effect will be felt constantly.

 

So what happens if it passes? Well, we're all kinda fucked. Presumably the idea of a paysite could still survive. They'd just have PG-13 pics and videos on the tour. BUT will Visa & Mastercard want to process the transactions now that the content has been legally declared "obscene"? Even certain types of piss play can cause sites to lose Visa/Mastercard right now because they might be obscene. If the credit card companies pull out of adult, then you're left with crypto - but it's against the terms of service at places like Coinbase to use their service for porn. Zelle won't be an option since that's organized by banks that don't want to be involved in porn either (even when it's not legally obscene).

Assuming some sort of payment service is available a company like MindGeek (which owns most of the major tube sites including PornHub as well as many paysites including Sean Cody) could possibly survive. They would have their own age check service (they already built it when they thought the UK was going to mandate it), and there would be enough content on their free and paid sites to make it worth the hassle for guys to get verified. But I don't see a viable solution for all the little sites (like mine).

Move to another country? Maybe - but we're talking felony-level offenses and most countries have extradition agreements with the US.

 

This kind of existential threat is why I've come down really hard on right wing comments on this site the last few years. This was sadly predictable and if you voted Republican over the past ~decade you brought us to this point. When Trump got elected I said at the time that the danger was what he would do the courts. Well, it's happened. All I can say is "fuck you if you voted for Trump!" (or you didn't bother to vote).

🤞

Maybe the next thing will be the burning of books

We all know how much radicles like that

[ellentonboy]

Wait?  Isn't Clarence Thomas in an inter-racial marriage.  So some of things he is proposing to eliminate may have implications on his  own personal life.  Unless, everyone is "Grandfathered" in so to speak.

I really don't think this is going to happen, I am hoping and praying that gay marriage is here to stay.  But I do look at life with the glass half full, so maybe being naive will be my downfall.

[BootmanLA]

4 hours ago, ellentonboy said:

Wait?  Isn't Clarence Thomas in an inter-racial marriage.  So some of things he is proposing to eliminate may have implications on his  own personal life.  Unless, everyone is "Grandfathered" in so to speak.

I really don't think this is going to happen, I am hoping and praying that gay marriage is here to stay.  But I do look at life with the glass half full, so maybe being naive will be my downfall.

To be fair to Thomas, the decision that got rid of bans on interracial marriage (Loving v. Virginia) rests on several legal underpinnings. The first is that by using race as a means of distinguishing what government permitted you to do, it was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, which specifically prohibits race-based discrimination. This provision is explicit in the text of the Constitution, and Thomas does not quarrel with that decision because it is derived directly from the text of the 14th amendment.

That stands independent of the issue of substantive due process that Thomas addressed in the abortion decision last year (Dobbs v. Jackson), which also underpin the decision striking down bans on same-sex marriage. (Loving also cited substantive due process, but as a separate reason to strike down the interracial marriage ban; so as noted, even if substantive due process were rejected as a no-longer-valid interpretation of the Constitution, bans on interracial marriage wouldn't be affected.)

I've mentioned this before, but there are two types of due process currently recognized under Supreme Court precedent. The first - procedural due process - is the guarantee that when the government denies a person his life, liberty, or property, it can only do so with due process - there must be hearings, there must be a public decision, there must be means to appeal the decision to higher authorities, and so forth. That's the original, and primary, form of due process. It's why if the government wants to take your property to expand the road on which it sits, it has to go through a process to take the property and pay you fair compensation for it. It's why fines levied by administrative agencies of government can be appealed to higher levels and, depending on the circumstances, challenged in court. And so forth. This doesn't affect marriage rights, generally speaking.

But the Supreme Court also recognizes (at least for now) substantive due process, by which it means that certain types of laws are unconstitutional because they violate a (typically) unenumerated right under the constitution, meaning attempts to regulate such conduct are outside the legitimate functions of government. Substantive due process is what protects (among other things) the right of parents to control the education of their children, the right to marry (in general, as well as the right to marry someone of the opposite sex, but not necessarily the right to marry someone of any age), the right to engage in private, consensual, noncommercial sex acts, the right to use contraception, and so forth. It's these rights, and the general doctrine of substantive due process, 

[hntnhole]

22 hours ago, Hotrawbutt4u said:

Move to another country?

Geez .... what other country is there that welcomes men like us ???  I know Switzerland has excellent privacy laws, but I moved here from Chicago to get away from snow, winter  ... Maybe we can grab an island in the South Seas somewhere, and turn it into a gay paradise .... ruled only by the Proclamation of the Penis.  Article One could say "whatever makes a guy's Cock hard is totally legal", and that would be the extent of the Government.   

I can dream, right?  Actually, really glad I did everything I've done while I could.  

[BristolBTTM1977]

On 12/16/2022 at 3:06 PM, rawTOP said:

So what happens if it passes? Well, we're all kinda fucked. Presumably the idea of a paysite could still survive. They'd just have PG-13 pics and videos on the tour. BUT will Visa & Mastercard want to process the transactions now that the content has been legally declared "obscene"? Even certain types of piss play can cause sites to lose Visa/Mastercard right now because they might be obscene. If the credit card companies pull out of adult, then you're left with crypto - but it's against the terms of service at places like Coinbase to use their service for porn. Zelle won't be an option since that's organized by banks that don't want to be involved in porn either (even when it's not legally obscene).

In the UK Prowler Poppers, who sell, well, you guessed it, poppers, is now only doing business via bank transfer as visa and mastercard have decided they do not want to be associated with poppers due to the confusion a few years back over of they would become class c drugs

[Sfmike64]

5 hours ago, BootmanLA said:

To be fair to Thomas,

 

NEVER, EVER give Clarence Thomas the benefit of the doubt. His wife should be in prison for fomenting insurrection. He's a nasty piece of work and has been for thirty years. He should never have been confirmed. 

Both of them think the rules they want to apply to others don't apply to them. They're both awful people.
 

[BootmanLA]

27 minutes ago, Sfmike64 said:

NEVER, EVER give Clarence Thomas the benefit of the doubt. His wife should be in prison for fomenting insurrection. He's a nasty piece of work and has been for thirty years. He should never have been confirmed. 

Both of them think the rules they want to apply to others don't apply to them. They're both awful people.
 

There is a difference between "giving someone the benefit of the doubt" and "being fair to". The former is something you do when you're not sure, exactly, how they feel or believe or would act in a given situation. The latter is for where the person's position is well established and well known, but may be mischaracterized by some. That's the case for Thomas.

It's easy to point a finger at Thomas and yell "Hypocrite!" because of his opposition to the legal foundation for same-sex marriage, while he himself is in an interracial marriage, given that both were outlawed at one time. But the fact remains that the legal reasons for striking down one are unrelated to the legal reasons for striking down the other. Racial discrimination is expressly prohibited by the Fourteenth Amendment. Sexual orientation discrimination, including in marriage, is not. I might wish, as you might, and many of us might, that it were protected expressly, but that isn't the case.

[alwaysready]

let's face it: the far right insurgents are gunning for all things re: our community. they are in control of a # of state legislatures, esp. in the south, and also hold attourneys general offices in many states. 'porn sites' are an ez target. i hope for the best, but will not be surprised to see this site and others vanish.