Let me turn that around on you.

You think people should be charged with a crime they haven’t done yet? Because that is exactly what happens in some DUI arrests.

Of course not, but then maybe the problem is not the DUI law, it is the fact that you cannot fight it if you cannot get a good lawyer, which cost money. Basically your justice system is fucked up.

Sleeping it off in your car but have the engine on because it’s cold/hot outside? DUI.

Slippery slope. How can police know that you just turned on the engine but not moved instead of driving and then stopping because you fall asleep ?

Then there are the idiotic open container laws where even an open alcoholic drink is legally a DUI, even if the driver isn’t drinking.

That is a stupid law, I agree, but it is the law.

A block from his house, he cracked open a beer. Now even if he had chugged it, there’s no way he’d be even slightly drunk before he got home.

Well, he should not have done it. He know the laws. I can feel pity for him in the specific case, but he breaks the stupid law.

The arrested him for DUI in his own driveway, due to idiotic open container laws, despite blowing a 0.

That was the problem here. The laws is written so you fail either way. Here if I have an open wine bottle in the car but I blow a 0, nobody could do anything to me.

But assuming I agree with you, what would be your suggestion to avoid people driving around while drunk ? Or to avoid minors to access porn material ? Aside the charade "parents need to educate they children" that obviously you cannot take for granted.

If they hurt someone, then they get charged with a crime. If they do not there's no injury to anyone else so it's not a crime.

I don't like the idea and where it could take us.
In the case of DUI, I think the idea behind the law is to avoid that a drunken driver hurts someone, with potentially lethal consequences, not only punish them if he do it.
Once a drunken driver killed someone is too late, even with the harsher punishment.

Again, your problem is not the law itself, it is the fact that your law and the justice system is designed in such a way that you are always set up to fail, in a way or another, be for the stupid DUI charge if you are sleeping in your car, the open container law or the way too expensive justice system. That is what you should fight.

I don't like the idea of actions that don't hurt others being a crime.

It's about consistency. If we make it illegal to do things that MIGHT wind up hurting someone there's no limit to what we can make illegal.

I don’t like the idea of actions that don’t hurt others being a crime.

Me neither, but I like even less the idea that an action that is, demonstrably, dangerous to other should not be stopped until it provoke damages.

It’s about consistency.

You are right. And it is about consistency the starting point from which we are discussing: minors should not be able to access porn. Now, in the real life there is such law and it in on the seller to check, exactly because you cannot count on the fact that a parent is 24/7 with his child, so I don't see why we should not try to enforce the same law on the Net, it is only on a different media.
Now, I agree that checking on the net is way harder than in real life, but minors are minors and porn is porn. If it is dangerous to see a naked woman on Playboy is also dangerous to see her on Playboy.com.

If we make it illegal to do things that MIGHT wind up hurting someone there’s no limit to what we can make illegal.

I see your point, but I simply think that if something is proven to hurt someone, like DUI, then maybe it is right to make it illegal.

If you wanna know what is actually happening here it is:

To me, that is a conspiracy. Turning it into a business is the way to remove political oversight, but the profits don't hurt.

Capitalism isn't a conspiracy, it's the current Politico-economic system.

A market economy is our politico-economic system. If billionaires conspire to distort the markets against the interest of the people, and unbeknownst to them, then that's a conspiracy, normalized by calling it Capitalism.

In this case it's old American money. The idea doesn't come as an investment opportunity from the trust. They are not creating a better future for children with the age verification as the last missing piece. Conspiracies are not magic. You know how it was implemented but you can only guess why.

Proven? To whom?

Excessive alcoholism is known to cause harm. Should we make being an alcoholic illegal? Wouldn't that make it harder for alcoholicsnto try to get help, for fear of being arrested instead of getting help, much like what happens to drug addicts?

People get hurt constantly while fishing, too. Should we make fishing illegal?

The problem is where do we draw the line. You want to draw it at some possibility of harm to others. I want to draw it at actual harm to others.

Which of these is more or less likely to wind up being stretched over time?

You aren't thinking about bureaucrats and politicians 20, 30, 50, or 100 years down the road. "We'll just fix the laws when it becomes a problem!"

Sure. Because we're really REALLY good at removing or rewriting broken laws..... Oh, wait. No we aren't.

Proven? To whom?

Never heard about people killed in crash caused by drunken driver ? Or pedestrians hit by cars driven by drunked drivers ?

Excessive alcoholism is known to cause harm. Should we make being an alcoholic illegal? Wouldn’t that make it harder for alcoholicsnto try to get help, for fear of being arrested instead of getting help, much like what happens to drug addicts?

No, we should just have laws try to avoid consequences for others
Are you an alcoholic ? Ok, we will help you to be ok but at the same time we try to avoid you drive while drunk. It not seems too unreasonable

People get hurt constantly while fishing, too. Should we make fishing illegal?

Point is: how probable is that someone fishing hurts someone else ? How much damage you can do ?
Again, the point is not to make something illegal because you can hurt yourself, it is about trying to have law that try to prevent you hurt someone else while doing something.
If fishing can hurt others, maybe we should have a law that, while not forbidding to fish, protect the others from what you are doing. I would imagine that you would not like to swim in the sea while someone is fishing with bombs (illegal) 2 meters away from you, don't you ?

The problem is where do we draw the line. You want to draw it at some possibility of harm to others. I want to draw it at actual harm to others.

Fine as long as you accept the consequences. I just don't agree with you.

Which of these is more or less likely to wind up being stretched over time?

Both, because you just need to redefine what "harm" means. And some people is good to do it.

Probability is not certainty.

I do not want people in jail for doing something that is probably a crime.

Every so-called crime that has no jail time shouldn't be a crime. Fees are just another way of enforcing class warfare.

Probability is not certainty.

True, but there is an history of cases about it where the probabilty became certainty.

I do not want people in jail for doing something that is probably a crime.

Me eighter but at the same time I would like to prevent some behaviors that could be dangerous to others.
I know it could be a slippery slope but honestly it would not console me to know that the drunken driver where punished *after *he hit me, I would prefer if he would be stopped *before *being able to hit me.

Every so-called crime that has no jail time shouldn’t be a crime. Fees are just another way of enforcing class warfare.

But fines works only if they are proportional to your wealth, else they are a punishment only for the poor.

We agree on the last part. But my feeling is that if a crime isn't "bad" enough to require actual jail time then it probably shouldn't be a crime at all.

Speeding, DUI, and other risky behaviors should be punished if, and ONLY if, an actual incident occurs. Because then there is actually a victim, and not just some nebulous might-have-been.

Hurt someone while drinking and driving? That's no accident, that's an intentional attack. Kill someone? Again, not an accident, but premeditated murder.

Now, if say, your insurance agency decides that you are a risk due to your alcoholism, and either drops you, or increases your premiums that's not a problem. There's no criminal punishment happening, and if it's in the contract you signed, that's expected.

But, you should only criminally punish someone after they've hurt another person. Not when they engage in risky behaviors.

We agree on the last part. But my feeling is that if a crime isn’t “bad” enough to require actual jail time then it probably shouldn’t be a crime at all.

Define "bad enough", because this is a very slippery slope. What about thefts ?

Speeding, DUI, and other risky behaviors should be punished if, and ONLY if, an actual incident occurs. Because then there is actually a victim, and not just some nebulous might-have-been.

Following this reasoning, there are no crimes until you get caught and/or there is a victim. To me this is unacceptable in a decent society.

Hurt someone while drinking and driving? That’s no accident, that’s an intentional attack. Kill someone? Again, not an accident, but premeditated murder.

And why we should not to try to avoid to have a person in jail and one killed in the first place ?

This is exactly the kind of government overreach people like me have been screaming about since, in my case, the 1990s.

"I told you so" just doesn't feel so good when what's happening is nothing less than the entirety of human freedom and liberty is being eroded before our very eyes, and those who disagree with it get labeled as kooks, and accused of hating whatever "oppressed group" of the day is in vogue.

It's just a logical extension of what happens when government becomes the arbitrator of all.

The biggest issue is that so many people see it just as you do, left vs right, instead of liberty vs authoritarianism.

For decades, the libertarian movement, as seen by the left, has been largely associated with the right, simply because of their professed support of the free market, and dislike of gun control

But that same movement has been seen by the right as largely associated with the left, because of their views on things like the drug war, enforced morality, and anti-corporatism.

Has there been a large shift of alt-right into the libertarian movement over the past few years? Yes. Absolutely. And I despise it with a passion.

But there are still quite a lot of us truly anti-authoritarian libertarians out there who despise both left, and right leaning authoritarianism.

But when I bring up issues of authoritarianism, I get "BoTh SiDeS?!" bullshit responses. Because YES, as we can see, BOTH SIDES do their own fair share of this authoritarian bullshit.

They differ in methods, yes. But the bottom line is an encroachment on personal privacy. Plus, property rights are just a logical extension of personal privacy rights.

Theft has a victim, what are you talking about???

Without an actual victim there is no crime.

Without an actual victim there is no crime.

And I understand this. What I don't like is the idea that to try to prevent that there will be victims is bad.

If billionaires conspire to distort the markets against the interest of the people, and unbeknownst to them, then that’s a conspiracy, normalized by calling it Capitalism.

That's not distorting the markets, that is what they are for. The market isn't some magical deity who's only been stopped because their will is being misinterpretated by the billionaires, they are the market. They control the market. The purpose of a system is what it does. The "Free" market is as much of a myth as when MLMs say the state will "dissolve away" to produce true Communism with the workers owning the means of production. The moment a "free" market is made, it instantly gets manipulated by people with money and the market stops being free anymore. That's part of the reason why so many rich cunts babble on about "free" markets, because it gives them power The billionaires fucking with the market and the law isn't an aberration of the system, it is the system. Once you realise that, everything falls into place.

This isn't a conspiracy, this was pretty much done out in the open. To call it a conspiracy suggests there was some amount of subterfuge. Like Carnegie UK published papers on why they think the OSA is a good idea in 2022, the Online Safety Act 2023, plus the additions made in '25, are publicly viewable here. The transcripts of the debates are here on Handsard.

You know how it was implemented but you can only guess why.

Oh Oh! I can guess why!

The whole reason why the bill was made and written as it was is money. We live in a period of surveillance capitalism where various companies make fuck tonnes of money from your data. Google, Facebook and the like didn't make their money from merely "running ads". They took the data you gave them through cookies and your posting and used it to more accurately target ads at you. Then, they started selling your data to other data brokers who then sold it to anyone with enough money. We've all heard the story about how target knew a teenage girl was pregnant before her father did, and we all know about Cambridge Analytica, Brexit and Trump. Facebook will literally monitor your emotional state through your posts and target you with ads for loans when they think your emotionally vulnerable.

So, we all know data brokers are hungry for data to sell, and as one Murray Bookchin once said: "Capitalism can no more be 'persuaded' to limit growth than a human being can be 'persuaded' to stop breathing". So guess what? Investment firms saw a load of moral panics and calls for digital ID. They invested in firms like YOTI (they are not required to say who invested in them, nice and convenient) and started doing research for the government through their think tank arms to convince the government that the OSA is a good idea. The bill says that stringent age checks must be done to view certain pieces of content, but not how, so that means websites have to hire YOTI and co to do that for them or do it themselves. If they can't afford to they either have to shut down because they don't care about the little guy.

So now data brokers have some very valuable data they can take from you: Your unedited face, your passport/drivers licence (plus all the biometrics that come with that) and (alongside that), your sexual habits, more controversial views, and your neuroses! The government can buy that off them (not that they couldn't already find that out), but also so can the people with the big bucks, COMPANIES! On Grindr? Well now your health insurer can increase your premiums if they think you are promiscious. Got political views? Well now they can be manipulated for an outcome favourable to large corporations. Your employer can buy your data and see if you have been saying things they don't like, annorexic people can be given ads for gym memberships and health fads. Oh, and all this can be sold to the government, be it yours or someone else's.

It's all money, it's no shady conspiracy, literally it is business as usual and it sucks.

It's business as usual and it is a conspiracy.

So guess what? Investment firms saw a load of moral panics and calls for digital ID. They invested in firms like YOTI (they are not required to say who invested in them, nice and convenient) and started doing research for the government through their think tank arms to convince the government that the OSA is a good idea.