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Which is precisely the point. Children are political weapons. Precisely crafted to shut down any opposition to whatever it is you're pushing. Oh you're against this? Pedophile.

You don't argue with these people. You summarily dismiss them. You recognize the game they are playing and you refuse to play it.

Call attention to their methods instead: they are exploiting and weaponizing children to push their big tech friendly surveillance agenda.

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The flaw in 'calling attention to their methods' is that you rarely have a meaningful opportunity to argue against a bureaucratic system that operates this way.

Whether individuals inside the system are true believers or cynical operators, the response to calling out their methods will be identical:

If they genuinely believe the rhetoric: They will simply double down and say, 'Yes, and protecting the children makes this absolutely necessary.'

If they know it is a manipulation tactic: They will still reply with, 'It is for the children,' because they know it is an impenetrable PR shield that gets them their way.

In either scenario, the bureaucracy is entirely immune to the criticism.

Exposing the game might help persuade third-party observers, but it does absolutely nothing to stop the bureaucratic machine from using that exact same line to steamroll the agenda forward.

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Yep. And if not child abuse then terrorism.
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Drug trafficking money laundering child molesting copyright infringing terrorists.
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The statement “These are child safety laws” premises that the laws would save children - so the way to refute is to ask for proof. Outside of vaccines I doubt there is anything concrete that will directly benefit children. There is no argument that holds up to scrutiny. They also don’t have any good way to measure safety, though Goodhart’s Law would have an impact.
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>Outside of vaccines

Will you allow an argument against this?

I mean, I want to show an example where it is only a problem when someone else is not as convinced as yourself, one way or the other.

>so the way to refute is to ask for proof..

No use. The same proof will not be convincing for everyone. Let us take vaccine. The proof for a Vaccine for X saving Y lives is often the following.

"Before the vaccine there was Y deaths per year from X. But after vaccines there is zero deaths from X".

The implication is that vaccines saved X lives. This could convince most of the people. But someone can ask. Are those kids who are not dying of X (thanks to the vaccine), are dying of something else?

Now the picture is not so clear.

See, same data, different results depending on how deep you want to probe,

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