Interesting Links for 27-02-2012

[andrewducker]

• Paypal forces publisher to censor themselves
  (tags: writing censorship paypal )
• On feminism
  (tags: feminism )
• Scotland and Ireland in the British Parliament
  (tags: ireland independence politics uk scotland )
• Spain will not veto an independent Scotland joining EU
  (tags: independence uk scotland eu spain )
• Kripke resigns as report alleges that he

Comments

[andrewducker]

I had to look at it twice to make sure I read it right :->

[bart_calendar]

PayPal has been puritanical for a while. About eight years ago one of my clients was running a dating site for gay men who wanted to meet other gay men who didn't want to use condoms.

PayPal forced him to stop accepting PayPal payments for subscriptions because they thought it violated their obscenity clause in their Terms Of Service.

Another client was running a site where dudes could post reviews of male escorts (mostly so that before they set up a date they could figure out if the guy was going to try to rip them off and/or actually looked like the photo in his add and/or had not photoshoped his dick pick) and PayPal cut his payment processor off as well.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, Dreamwidth had the same problem, which is why they don't accept Paypal.

[bart_calendar]

Meanwhile they are happy to process payments for pretty much any get rich quick scheme or lose 30 pounds in 30 days diet rip off on the Internet.

[skreidle]

They won't fund any firearm-related transactions, either.

[danieldwilliam]

I may start refering to myself as a Friend of Nicholas.

[rosamicula]

I think the problem with benefit fraud is that no one actually knows how much there is, as these figures only reveal the ones that are caught, surely

[luckylove]

So your definition of *work* is a bill that will result in disabled people like myself losing a third of our income? I've been through the bill and the new PIP descriptors and discovered that I'm going to lose the mobility component and a premium. Please forgive me for being so horrified at people who make statements like your last sentence. In my current state of mind I have you pegged as someone who buys into the Government's rhetoric and the Daily Mail's hate-mongering and just wants all poor and disabled people to fuck off and die. I could be wrong, I frequently am, but that's how I see you and anyone else who thinks people like me should lose 33% of our income at the moment.

[cartesiandaemon]

Yeah. I thought the comment about the first ammendment was telling: the constitution doesn't prevent anyone from infringing your speech, but the case where someone is a monopoly or a de facto monopoly is one where perhaps it should...

[cartesiandaemon]

(With the obvious caveats that PayPal don't prevent you telling people in person, or of giving your ebook away for free, but it's still a significant problem that anyone has an nonaccountable stranglehold over anything published. If they have that power they cna shut down all sorts of stuff without a whiff of bad publicity, just by people thinking "I'd better not take the risk", if not at their own recognisance, at the suggestion of ill-thought-out and vandalistic government intervention.)