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There are numerous valuable child protection laws and services against which your knee-jerk would be unwarranted. It just happens to be warranted this time arou
by mypastself 5y ago
There are numerous valuable child protection laws and services against which your knee-jerk would be unwarranted. It just happens to be warranted this time around.
- ohdannyboy 5y agoHe didn't say that all measures to protect children should be rejected out of hand. He is just saying that if someones argument starts and ends with fear baiting around children then they probably have ulterior motives.
- squarefoot 5y agoThanks, that's exactly my point.
- mypastself 5y agoThey professed unfamiliarity with the details of the situation, so they could not have known that the emotional appeal was the full extent of the argument.
- onepunchedman 5y agoIt's the same excuse the EU are currently using to infringe upon its citizens' privacy and require messaging application providers to install backdoors. It's an appeal to emotion, and since we have to assume that these legislators are intelligent, it's a disgusting overreach.
- mypastself 5y agoThey are indeed overreaches, but even a valuable child protection law or service might presumably be pushed with an appeal to emotion. It’s better to familiarize yourself with the situation before dismissing it out of hand. While preserving a healthy dose of skepticism, of course.
- onepunchedman 5y agoI agree that one should look into what is being proposed and its implementation, but in both these instances backdoors are being introduced. Once backdoors are in place any government can petition access, malicious actors have attack vectors, and all of this for one proposed quasi-legitimate use-case.
- mypastself 5y agoWe are in agreement here.
- onepunchedman 5y agoNice :)
- xbar 5y agoTrue. More generally, "think of the children" is representative of a class of moral imperative arguments. Such arguments are easily abused by policy makers as they are an emotional short-circuit of logical reasoning. Being skeptical of people who make such arguments is healthy.
- jaywalk 5y agoThat doesn't mean that "think of the children" shouldn't raise warning flags. The fact that good child protection laws exist doesn't invalidate the fact that "child protection" is frequently and increasingly used to push through bad laws.