by pona-a | 2025-11-16 18:10:14+00:00
> Calling it a rhetorical exercise is… well sure.

It was a rhetorical exercise - I mirrored your exact wording to make that clear.

> Disingenuousness is a high bar for the argument you formulated...

I misunderstood your objection. I thought you were dismissing my argument as insufficiently sincere - that because I was constructing a hypothetical rather than drawing from lived experience, it lacked weight. But I see now you were raising a different concern, and you are arguing in good faith.

> Further, you assumed that I had no standing to ask people to go deeper into the field. Yet, once I make the mistake of saying that I know what that feels like - yet am making the request I am (to look into this field) you double down.

I do not, as that'd be a contradiction. I'm saying we must choose: either we ground our arguments in principle and reason, or we enter an escalating contest of naming a greater atrocity, flip-flopping between mutually exclusive positions every time one side succeeds in evoking greater horror.

> Further, you assumed that I had no standing...

I'm not questioning anyone's standing. I'm arguing that personal experience - yours, mine, anyone's - lies outside the scope of this legal principle. Blackstone's ratio doesn't specify what the ten guilty persons did, nor does it require you to witness the depravity of their crimes before accepting it. That omission is deliberate and load-bearing.

> I don’t know how to put it man - better people than me need to pay attention to where the gears of technology and speech engage with the fleshy parts of our information machinery.

I share your concern, but reach the opposite conclusion.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. I have lived through the corruption of a state and the slow erosion of liberties that came with it. Now I'm watching the same pattern repeat in the nations we thought incorruptible.

If we accept mass surveillance for child abuse today, what gets added tomorrow? Sodomy? Gender degeneracy? Feminism? Child-free propaganda? Insults to religious feelings? These weren't pulled from a hat - they're lifted from the criminal code of a country bordering mine.

You may think you'll be the one writing that list, but why would the government need your permission when the elections are finally rigged, dissent is impossible, and the economy is decoupled from most of your labor?

Beyond the visible machinery of our society stand concrete pillars, holding up against the gravity of power. Without them, the entire structure would collapse. These pillars take centuries to construct - they require the surgical blade of crisis to make the incision, tonnes of compressed bone to wrench the opening, and rare wisdom to incorporate durably the great design. When you demolish them to alleviate contemporary fears, you will never have the chance to rebuild them. When one pillar falls, others follow, until inevitably the people find themselves crushed once more beneath the iron boot, each time with less breathing room than the last.

> Hell - something like sharing threat intel across major tech firms, is a challenge even today.

We have not exhausted our means to police crime without surveilling everyone's private communications. Traditional detective work, international cooperation, infiltration, informants - these tools still work. Had the billions invested in building a surveillance state been appropriated instead to these proven methods, organized CSAM rings would be decimated by now, not thriving in the jurisdictions we refuse to pressure diplomatically.