Wikipedia Tells UK Government It Won’t Comply with Age Verification Mandates
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
Secondly, why shouldn't teenagers have access to pornography (which isn't even the case here)? Did the people who grew up with nude magazines, cable pornography... grow up to be dysfunctional members of society? Interest in it is a normal healthy thing, and if you're really worried about it, you as a parent should be the one to do something about it, not the government, because you'll reach a point in time where they are the ones saying how you should and shouldn't raise your kids. Use the tools given to you as a parent and block your children from accessing certain sites, talk to them, and maybe parent a bit instead of letting a computer or tv educate them for you.
Also note that I'm not saying that you should monitor them 24/7. If you have a good relationship with your kid/s, if you give them just enough freedom to grow, and more importantly, if you know who they are, maybe you can trust them a bit to make decisions for themselves as they grow.
I suspect part of the reason policies like these have popular support is the twisted idea that I should be able to dictate how you raise your kids...
That's not "twisted idea," unless you think it's OK for parents to beat their kids.
The "beating" bit has nothing to do with raising children. It is not ok to beat people in general, so I don't see why one gotta make a special case of "raising kids" when it comes to physical violence. If "beating people" is already illegal (edge cases of self-defense and such obviously apply), then "beating kids" is also illegal.
I do think it is a "twisted idea" to dictate how one should raise their kids in all the minor aspects beyond the baseline, and I also believe that beating your own kids is no more ok than beating an adult.
> The "beating" bit has nothing to do with raising children.
Says you, but historically a lot of parents have disagreed.
Statements like the one I quoted in the GP are often revealed to be equivalent to something like "people totally shouldn't be allowed to impose their beliefs about X on others...except for my beliefs, which totally should be imposed on others because I've confused them with the objective laws of nature or something."
Historically, a lot of people disagreed with honor killings being not ok either (and in some regions of the world, they still do). The fact of the matter is, in the present day in western countries, honor killings are illegal and aren't accepted. The history of it is irrelevant, and so is whether the victim of an honor killing is a child or an adult (in terms of qualifying the event as legal/illegal; it might be relevant for the actual sentencing, but I digress).
But that has nothing to do with my point. My point was that if some action is considered illegal to perform on an adult subject, I would not consider it a "twisted idea of forcing your beliefs about raising children onto others" to think that those actions are illegal as well when the subject is a child.
And I am saying this as someone who is very against overbearing and controlling helicopter-parenting, and who is more on the side of giving kids a chance to explore and learn their surroundings by being potentially exposed to a little bit of controlled danger.
Except that child-rearing involves actions that would be "considered illegal to perform on an adult subject" (e.g. grounding a kid for misbehavior or putting a two-year-old in a time-out would arguably be false imprisonment if applied to an adult). There are necessary exceptions for parent-child relationships, because the latter is immature. Creating a false equivalency between children and adults isn't a valid side-step to salvage that statement about the "twisted idea."
This is lazy. Of course society should be able to dictate how you raise your kids to some extent. If somebody starts sleeping with their kids, you don't want society to react to that? Of course you do. So the question is how much society should be dictating how you raise your kids, which isn't an easy question. You have to balance the rights of the parents over the child, the rights of the child as an independent citizen, and, undeniably, the standards you want to set for society.
We do this with tricks like graduating citizenship through arbitrary stages, maybe at 13 you can do X, at 18 you can do Y, at 21 you can do Z, and at 35 you can be President, for example. While you have limited citizenship, your parents can ignore many of your civil rights. While you have limited citizenship, the government can also ignore many of your civil rights. While you as a parent have a limited right to violate the civil rights of your children, the government has an obligation to step in if you overstep those bounds (you can't kill your kids.)
Additionally, your rights as a parent to violate your children's civil rights are contingent on your obligations as set by the government (you have to feed, shelter, bathe, and educate them.) If you fail to do any of these things to an arbitrary standard, your parental rights will be taken away - which exposes the fact that parental rights are also granted by government.
Without government, we don't talk about rights, we talk about abilities. Without government, you'd have the ability to do whatever you wanted with your child because you're larger, and could keep it in a cage. In society, what you can seen by society doing with your child without society intervening is limited, because society has set rules and has the ability to stop you.
Finally, society sets arbitrary moral values. You can't sleep with your children even if they agree. A 22-year old can't sleep with a 15-year old.
I suspect you agree with all of this, so why glibly pretend the questions are easy? We need to engage with the questions; have more basic principles (than "No one should be able to dictate...") that we can apply to the questions; and to figure out what requires consensus, what requires consent, and who has the right to give that consent.
The reason we prohibit teenagers from having porn is likely from religious dogma passed down the generations without people questioning it.
Yes, trusting children to make decisions helps them grow, by allowing them to make mistakes and learn from them naturally.
That's an ignorant view ignores things like feminist critiques of porn.
> Yes, trusting children to make decisions helps them grow, by allowing them to make mistakes and learn from them naturally.
You're missing an important aspect of that, which is to give them decision-making power when they're ready for it.
If you expect a 6 year old to run the grocery store you own while you're away, then they will
Let make decisions and give them the agency to make those decisions, then they will.
The infantilization of people has caused far greater harm than almost any other thing.
> If you expect a 6 year old to run the grocery store you own while you're away, then they will...
One of the problems with our society is the tendency to take a kernel of truth and then oversimplify and take it so far that it just becomes a total falsehood. Like your example of the 6 year old and the grocery store, there are certainly stores/communities where that's reasonable, but also lot of stores/communities where it isn't. There's no general rule there.
> The infantilization of people has caused far greater harm than almost any other thing.
...and then there's the the hyperfocus that leads to a total lack of perspective.
It's attached to the things your primordial reptile brain viscerally fears the most: your kids are in danger! And terrorists will kill you!
TBH, some of them, yes. Just look at the political "elite".
Same for porn. I'm sure I could find that stuff if I wanted but it's not even close to being a default. It was all on limewire or whatever 15 years ago too. I remember trying to download Jackass episodes and getting BDSM gay midget porn. Nice one.
And yeah, like the other poster, I grew up with this stuff (late 20s early 30s now) and if anything it made me more conservative and use porn in moderation. The extreme stuff looks like hedonistic bollocks, "everything is ok as long as someone agrees", exactly the opposite of what I need to have a happy and healthy life, relationship and family.
That said, I do agree children should not be accessing adult sites, but that burden should primarily be on the parents.
If you want to be China, be China, employ something similar to the gfw and quickly become less than a 3rd world nation.
Difference is China have something to offer the global economy, people like my home country don't once they start doing this...
They should refuse to do it on that basis alone. It's just unworkable. Restricting Wikipedia for the least educated but not for the most would be exactly the opposite of their mission.
I don't understand. What the bottom of this?
Anyone who can stop their ISP tracking their forbidden knowledge is going to be bright enough to thwart this latest "think of the children" rubbish.
Same for Library Genesis, which holds over 2.5 million books, but that's rather expensive due to the sheer disk space required.
For mobile usage, 1 Terabyte micro SD cards are getting cheaper by the day, perhaps someone could make a ready made torrent release of useful information, not just Wikipedia but Project Gutenberg and many other things from the Internet Archive? Complete with search built in.
Yeah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisting
IIRC, most sex topics on Wikipedia similarly have a weird Wiki-how style illustration as well as contributed depictions (likely from exhibitionists).
Calling Wikipedia "knowledge" is being generous. That label is mostly its self-important marketing.
Wikipedia is actually a reference that's oh so cheap and easy to access that its unreliability doesn't matter. It's what you use for "answers" when it's not important that you get the right one (or for pushing an agenda onto lazy information consumers).
Nothing's a perfect "infallible information source," but you can do better than Wikipedia without needing to go as far as "buying out a university." Perhaps Kindle Unlimited plus a newspaper subscription for current events?
In fact, Wikimedia publishes data dumps that facilitate that -- or at least they used to.
If British academia relies that heavily on Wikipedia, the UK is in worse shape than I thought.