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>There becomes a point where if you don't want to implement the best idea we've got to address the problem

The assumption here is "something must be done". The fact is that liberty and safety are intrinsically at odds. If we're going to make progress, the question we have to face is how many rescued children is worth how many units of liberty. It's distasteful to present the issue so bluntly, but it's the implicit calculation we do in other cases, e.g. preventing child deaths in car accidents. We all implicitly agree that some amount of death and disfigurement of children is worth the economic and social benefits of cars. Similarly, how much liberty should we give up here?



> "The fact is that liberty and safety are intrinsically at odds."

If you own an Apple iPhone, and you have photos on it, and you enter into a contract with Apple Computer to use their cloud service, and you upload photos to the cloud service for them to host on their servers, do you have the "liberty" for them to not be allowed to stop you abusing the service in egregious ways? This isn't a matter of freedom and liberty while you can still you can refuse to use iCloud and refuse to use iPhones. Where, by comparison to your example you have much less option to opt-out of travelling by road, using products driven to you on roads and working with people who travelled by road to get to you.

> "it's the implicit calculation we do in other cases, e.g. preventing child deaths in car accidents. We all implicitly agree that some amount of death and disfigurement of children is worth the economic and social benefits of cars"

We don't all agree in the same way; the amount of agreement is continually changing. Where roads are dangerous, authorities lower speed limits and add traffic calming measures and citizens agitate for cycle lanes and pedestrian zones. Where vehicle exhaust makes for poor air quality, people demand cars must have catalytic converters and be subject to emissions control regulations. When pedestrians die in crashes, car manufacturers add external crumple zones. Around schools, people are employed to stop traffic and help children cross roads safely. We pay educators to teach children about road safety and pay for campaigns aimed at educating drivers about pedestrian awareness, drunk driving, distracted driving, the risks of speeding, using fairly graphic imagery of children being hit and killed to drive home the point. We mandate that older cars have regular checks to make sure they're still road worthy and still have functioning brakes and tyre tread and working lights for safety reasons.

I'm often arguing against cars and the harm they do to humans, but it's not the "either you ban cars or you hate children" boolean you're suggesting it is where everyone who benefits from cars is happy to sacrifice children for those benefits and thinks the current amount of sacrifice is just fine thanks and wouldn't change it if they could.


You can turn off a iCloud. CSAM cannot be turned off or even viewed. Only evil is done in the dark.


Of course but at least call a spade a spade, the units of liberty you're willing to trade to solve the problem is basically the metric of how much you care about it.

It's a fine position to take that the harm due to that much invasion of privacy and government involvement in our private lives isn't worth but means precisely that you care about the problem less than someone who is willing to make that trade.


I don't think that follows. One can maximally prioritize children while also believing that all children are better served by a society that protects liberty over immediate safety. How you weigh these issues turns on how you weigh the N-th order effects. It's probably not too controversial to say that eliminating all cars would harm children more and thus children as a whole benefit more from cars than their elimination. But it would be disingenuous to characterize this calculation as caring more about economic benefit than children.




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