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Comment by ultrarunner | Hacker News Reader

And it's completely obvious bullshit. Consider any more salient issue affecting children: the leading cause of death for children under 18 is car crashes. The response to this large and growing problem is to a) blame the victims (they shouldn't have been in the road / they should have walked a mile out of their way to return to the spot 100 feet across a road / they weren't wearing construction vests & waving flags / walking to school isn't allowed in the first place) or to wave it away as the cost of doing business.

Were there a shred of consistency in actually advocating for children's quality of life, I could forgive those who are duped by these underhanded tactics. As it stands, there's no actual concerted "save the children" bandwagon that we're being invited to hop on to.

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The pretext of child abuse prevention is used as a plausibly-deniable dog whistle to automatically discredit and demonize anyone who dares speak out against the proposed law.

It's got nothing to do whether the law would be actually effective at curbing such abuse, whether it will have harmful (seemingly-) unintended consequences, whether other solutions would be more effective or have less potential for unintended consequences, or whether the problem is actually widespread enough to even worry about compared to other risks that affect children.

Very well said, but even if we were talking about just CSA, this is still bullshit: the one thing you can do to help prevent child sexual abuse is to talk to children about sex, taboo-free, and have quality sex ed starting at primary school children. Emphasising consent, explaining what is sex and how it works, how it's not okay for an adult to do it with you, how it's not okay for anyone to touch you without your express consent, inculcating healthy views about relationships and sex from an early age, etc.

Unfortunately this is uncomfortable for some people (understandable, it's pretty awkward to talk with a 7yo about sex), but it's what politicians should be pushing if they were really about "saving the children". Monitoring cell phones is not it.

> As it stands, there's no actual concerted "save the children" bandwagon that we're being invited to hop on to.

Maybe one should be created, with a prioritized list of issues, and loudly inform people that if issues at the bottom are being prioritized the proponents may have other motives than the ones they claim.

Impossible. If you rank avoidable deaths by quantity, men arrive in all the top 10 categories, so I’m pretty sure no-one would want to make this list anyway.

Don't say that out loud.

Clearly nobody is suggesting that on average men flock towards more dangerous higher paying professions which until recently also meant higher wages.

Wouldn't want people to make the connection between risk and reward as a factor in economics.

Yes, CEO is a high-risk profession (you can really hurt your back golfing all day), but coal miner is not.

Plus what does this have to do with mortality in children again?

no, you hurt your general well being by working very late, too little sleep, being stressed etc.

Yep, that's why CEOs work less hours than the average American worker... Come on man, dont buy into the propaganda.

They complain about CEOs but they are like 0.1% of the population. Men also flock in the bottom jobs. They don’t even see 90% of the men.

But yes, the transition between CEO and homeless is surprisingly sudden. It’s indeed a risky job.

Can't understand if this is satire.

Yeah, but I don't know what this has to do with children.

If there were a political bandwagon around reducing child deaths, I'd probably still suspect ulterior motives. Also, if it were based on just death counts, I view murder differently from accidents. It's like when people try to compare lung cancer and 9/11.

Agreed on all counts. Even discussion of the statistics on firearms-related mortality tends to sidestep the proportion of suicides. People seem forever to be more interested in pushing their own positions than the hard work of solving the problems, even just one person at time.

> the leading cause of death for children under 18 is car crashes.

Are you sure about that? In the US, firearm-related injuries became the leading cause of death among people aged 1 to 19.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmc2201761

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