It's For The Children

[Vito]

Whenever I hear, "It's for the children...", or some version thereof, I immediately suspect two things:

1. Whomever is saying it is using rank emotionalism to reinforce an agenda that most likely is neither rational nor moral enough to stand on its own merits.
2. There will be hordes of self-righteous, bleeding-heart, guilt-ridden lemmings who dutifully fall in line behind the crusaders.

So it is with the recent California proposal to force all websites that accept posts from minors to provide them with the ability to delete their content.

California gives teenagers an 'eraser button' to delete their web mistakes

Force. :fpalm: And they actually believe it's a good thing, as though it’s actually going to…er, what, exactly? Teach people to be more circumspect, or more responsible?

Not that I blame anyone who regards the inability to edit one's own content as barbaric. But it only takes one instance of that on any given website to let me know whether that inability is part of the rules of engagement. After that, I know that it's post-at-your-own-risk, and anyone who continues to post there and then whines about it should have known better.

Of course, that's not what we're dealing with here in California, which is legendary for meddling in people's lives in a never-ending, futile attempt to protect them from the consequences of their own stupidity, usually at everyone else's expense.

The price of freedom is personal responsibility. We don’t have to like it, but it’s still a fact. The more of our responsibility we transfer to the state, the more it costs us in freedom of choice.

That includes the freedom to make mistakes, and the freedom to learn from them. The more we surrender those freedoms, the stupider we get. By trying to protect “teens” from the consequences of their actions, we’re just turning them into irresponsible morons who won’t even have the chance to learn from their own mistakes.

When the state has finally managed to intrude itself upon every aspect of freedom of choice and people have lost all ability to learn from their mistakes because everything that is not required is forbidden, maybe then we'll all realize that the solution to all our problems never really was Big Brother in the first place.

But hey, losing still more of our freedom of choice is a Small Price To Pay…After All, It’s For The Children<img class="emojione" alt="" title=":tm:" title=":tm:" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/emojione/assets/png/2122.png?v=2.2.7"/>.

 

[Anonymous]

:twisted:  :twisted:  :twisted: 

:face: 

 

[Anonymous]

Every time I hear "It's for the children..." I think... scam alert.

Doing this puts all of the responsibility on the site owner. If the person posts something stupid and then, before they delete it, someone else copies it to another site/location... it will be blamed on the web site owner. That's BS and will cost the site owner millions in legal fees.

I smell Dianne Feinstein or her cronies on this.

 

[gravel]

Shortsighted. Spoken words can not be deleted, and those that hear them have a long memory. A delete button is a political maneuver but does nothing to remove content from the internet. Once its out there, its out there.

 

[Puff Daddy]

:twisted:  :twisted:  :twisted: 

:face: 

Well now look what you went and did to Yak. Got him all fired up.

Now how many websites will simply go to an age verification statement required (like tobacco websites already use) before allowing any access. Put the responsibility right back on the little bastards where it belongs. I can't be responsible if he lied on the age verification page.....

 

[KevinM]

The key to public (and a lot of personal) rhetoric thes days is to hide behind some mushy umbrella-like phrase that will: a) block further analysis and b) allow the speaker to demonize opponents. "Oh, you're against children?"

My least fav is "Level the playing field." It's been used in defense of more wacky projects than you can shake a stick at. "You mean you're against fairness?"

 

[Anonymous]

I was able to read the full story on this and it's exactly what I feared. There is no "delete button" for posts on the web. The web is full of people who post stupid stuff and get bit for it. For forums there will have to be an "undo" for quotes. Screen shots will need to be outlawed and printers too. Cameras? Illegal. Storage devices? Illegal.

Laws like this proposed as an "update" and "keeping up with the times" just shows law makers lack of knowledge on how a computationor device works.

Posts on the web are a Pandora's Box. There is no putting the post back in the box.

In other words... don't get drunk and put pictures of your butt on the internet and expect it to go away by clicking on a delete button the next morning.

What's worse about images straight from a phone? That photo if unfiltered contains GPS information (metadata) on where you are. What's that knock on the door? Ole Creepy McCreeper and his band of stalkers.

I periodically remind my kid of this. There is no undo.

"Level the playing field" is another favorite of mine too. I think anyone working 40 hours a week should make a living wage and have access to real healthcare. The problem is "level the playing field" actually means, pawn off all the cost and expense to the middle-class tax payers. Lawmakers dust off their hands and pat themselves on the back and claim "Job Done!".

 

[loco pony]

"Its for thr children............" , says
Bobo the clown in his candy van.

 

[Kyle Weiss]

Great thread.

California = :fpalm:

I've been posting via computer for over 25 years, from BBS setups, to Prodigy/AOL, on over to what we know as the Internets. I suppose some "digital street smarts" came along with all that.

We can still teach kids/people not to crap in the middle of the floor in public, and they adhere to this (for the most part). It's almost a given. There's reason and rhyme to it. Why suddenly we need some kind of "online image protection" is beyond me.

Make a mistake, learn from it--not make a mistake, and we'll pretend it never happened.

I the doom of society is tuning the fiddles (lyres?), and eyeballing combustibles for modern Rome.

8)

 

[gramnum1]

This is so lame. Yet another example of big government getting in the way of a thousands businesses.

 

[Anonymous]

50 years ago, pedophiles were just creeps. People knew who they were & kept their kids away from them.

Now they're the most pressing threat to civilisation there is.

WHY ?

Because if the Bolshevics just came right out and said they were establishing a police state (instead of just doing it quietly, & getting :face: kicked around for trying to point it out in warning), people would have rebelled.

SO. What is the one group Nobody will stand up for ?  The one marginal group that won't fight back ?  Bingo.

So now the nose of the police state camel has an "in" that nobody can resist -- it's fo de chilluns, right ?  And it metastasises from there. By design.

But they don't have a working memory hole yet to consign everything that annoys/threatens them to.

Figure it out, fellow Bozos.

It ain't about kids.  It's about making stuff go away. Forever.

:face:

 

[bosun1]

Some quotes:
Wikipedia:
Henry Louis "H. L." Mencken (September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956) was an American journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, critic of American life and culture, and scholar of American English.[1] Known as the "Sage of Baltimore", he is regarded as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the first half of the twentieth century. Many of his books remain in print.


Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.
H. L. Mencken

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
H. L. Mencken

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H. L. Mencken

Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.
H. L. Mencken

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
H. L. Mencken

In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
H. L. Mencken

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
H. L. Mencken

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
H. L. Mencken

Henry Louis "H. L." Mencken (September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956) Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Since he died in 1956, none of this 'modern' stuff should be a surprise.. It is just so common now that no one is ashamed of getting caught any more..

 

[Anonymous]

I also see this as baby steps to government control information.

The internet is one of the last bastions of free speech. It is on a slope inching towards a government and lobbyist controlled "AOL". You will see what Big Corp wants you to see. You will pay what Big Corp wants you to pay. You will like it, buy the advertised products... or you lose it.

Will To Power.

Big Corp needs more money.
Private prisons need more customers.
Big Corp has Congress on speed dial.

People are owned by Big Corp. Credit debt? You sold your soul to the company store (sing along). Don't pay up? Debtor's prison is not too far off.

It's all Will To Power. There is no escape. Fight where you can but assimilation is inevitable. The masses have more voting power than you. And they ain't none too smart.

 

[Vito]

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
       H. L. Mencken

That!^^^ :cheers: 

I often wonder what people think when they read that. Do they just dismiss it and go about their business? Do they write off Mr. Mencken as a cynic? Or worse yet, do they think he's making it up?

He's not. He has identified the modus operandi of every two-bit thug who ever wanted to assert some power to control others people's lives, ever since the dawn of human civilization. "Look, everybody...there's the Bad Guys over there. Make me your leader and together we'll whup dey ayusses..."

...only now, they aren't even as honest as the old tribal chiefs, who at least had the decency to lead their warriors into battle. Today, the political thugs stay safe and secure while they send others to do the ayuss-whuppin'. And the dying. That's because they have to stay here and pass laws that apply to everyone but them. Hypocrites. All of 'em.

They are problem seekers, not problem solvers. They'll always cook up a new problem, and of course the way to fix it is to elect them. That's the fraud. The problems they sell are phony. They never tell you that the REAL problem is that people believe that, "The system is OK, it's just that we have The Wrong People in there. We just have to get The Right People, and then everything will be better."

No it won't. When we learn how to take responsibility for our own lives, and stop believing these jerks who want to control everyone else, THAT will be progress.

 

[Kyle Weiss]

Without problems, there'd be no heroes. Heroes and villains, in my mind, are one in the same. As Minor Threat sings, "Good guys don't wear white." Perhaps they don't, but look at it this way: modern heroism and villainy can be the argument if a baseball player is on his team, losing with the rest of them, then disappears, puts on the winning team's uniform, and goes and sits in their dugout. This wouldn't work (imagine the fallout and headlines), but it does all the time in "real" life, meaning, outside of baseball. Our bosses, companies, politicians.

Of course, the one solution to this, since switching teams while in play is pretty tough, is to change the rules. Go for the weak, unprotected spots of our minds and lives.

It's the threat of the post painful, yet slowest kick to the balls ever conceived. We're told it's gonna happen well in advance, everyone (at least with balls, anyway) relates to the result, and conjecture becomes reality. The slower the kick, but the promise of the greater force behind it, the more time anyone pulling the strings has to take advantage of everyone being on their guard. It's never the action, it's the the promise of the threat. Much more psychologically effective.

Though I have to say, even Old Tribal Chiefs were creeps. They may have had a wife, but the tribe produced many fine young girls. Youth is a commodity. We're all "creeps" in our own way. We just make a thing out of creeps, especially if they can't defend themselves and they represent a way to get people to trust those who are heroes (hell, be a hero yourself--let's go burn the witch). Not saying creeps should be given medals, but how many of them are there really? How BAD is it, honestly? If it might get out it isn't that bad, campaign. Spread fear and assumption. Change the laws. Mistrust everyone and everything. Stranger-danger! :lol:

Same goes with general safety...how much of a difference will 15MPH school zones be versus 10MPH? 5MPH? Just build jail-like compounds to keep them safe from cars AND mincing predators and be done with it? Hell, why stop there? What else can we be protected from, and how can it become so big that no one person can do it alone?

Neighborhood acquaintance of mine a long time ago, when we were about 12, was hanging out regularly with a girl down the street, working on school stuff for a project, as they were in the same class. The girl-down-the-street had a creepo daddy. Daddy liked boys. I heard the tale after the ordeal was over, but according to my friend, the father was seducing classic stuff, getting way too friendly, way too nice/cool of a guy, overly generous, etc. The creep couldn't contain himself, and figured the time had come and made his move. Boy, did it. The friend knew something was up, but didn't know what else to do. He hauled off and applied shin-to-testicles as hard as he could, grabbed his stuff, and went home. After the friend recounted this tale to me, I asked him if he told his parents, and he said, "Yes, and they told me 'good job.'" The parents went to the house and said, "Don't ever talk to my kid or my family again. Or else." No television story, no witch hunt, no trial.

Creeps will be creeps. Imagine if kids weren't targets and fearful victims (or their parents, for that matter) and everyone could just take care of things as they needed. Imagine if parents were more involved with their kids rationally rather than emotionally (not distracted or assumptive). If it wasn't the law that was taken into one's own hands, but had a simpler set of justice--not changing the world, but controlling and managing your own. Only when that doesn't work do heavier measures become necessary.

Overreach, via fear or boredom, never amounts to good things. Supplemented by assumption and false heroism, we have been convinced to dig quite the rut for ourselves with these, our modern days, huh?

Kicks in the balls work, and both sides know it. Might as well get it over with and see what happens, rather than wait for it. Always better to be kicking than being kicked...or avoiding it altogether.

8)