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UK's Tories Promise To Enact Age Limits For Viewing Online Porn
An anonymous reader writes with this news from the UK: The Conservatives say they will force hardcore pornography websites to put in place age-restriction controls or face being shut down if they win the election. The culture secretary, Sajid Javid, said the party would act to ensure under-18s were locked out of adult content after a recent Childline poll found nearly one in 10 12-13 year olds were worried they were addicted and 18% had seen shocking or upsetting images. Experts welcomed the move – targeted at both UK-based and overseas websites – but warned it would take hard work to implement in practice.
To answer your questions: No, politicians are not stupid; I'll explain below. Yes, voters are often stupid; they could make the effort to understand what is going on, but they choose not to - that, in my view, is the very essence of being stupid.
If somebody want to watch porn, he will say "yes I have 18" to any question. This is a stupid waste of everyone time. Don't vote this retarded people even if you agree with their ideas.
The point is not to stop those who actually want to see porn, but to protect those who don't want to, but feel pressurised or otherwise intimidated into it, or who stumble across it. It may be difficult for a hard-core wanker to understand, but to many, not least children, porn is genuinely off-putting, and to 11 year old, it may be something they find it very hard to talk to adults about. After all, they were not supposed to look at it, on one hand, and on the other hand, they now speculate that most adults, including their parents, engage in the sort of alien activities illustrated, however poorly, in pornography. It is easy to feel alone with those thoughts in those circumstances.
The point of this kind of legislation is to force a deliberate choice: if you proceed, it is because you have chosen to; and by requiring the ISPs or whoever to take responsibility, they make it illegal to just sit by passively and make money out of it; you now have to do something to ensure that your audience is old enough to legally make that decision. It won't stop young people from lying about their age, but it will now be possible to go after those that exploit this particular vulnerability, if and when it is deemed necessary.
Politicians are not necessarily stupid; certainly not as stupid as people who have nothing to have their opinions in tend to make out. I would argue that politicians are also quite often genuinely motivated by what they believe in, rather than simply being greedy bullies. I don't agree with much of what David Cameron stands for, and I certainly don't agree with his party's ideologically motivated privatisation at all costs, but I do respect him for being competent and for genuinely seeking to do what is good for UK; the same goes for Labour, the LibDems, SNP etc. They are principled and they have certainly made more of an effort to understand thing than you seem to.