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by OkayPhysicist 2 days ago
This a lame cop out, and obviously flawed. There are parents that beat their kids for being gay. There are families that kill their kids for marrying the wrong person. There are families that teach their kids open bigotry. Those people are evil, and I will absolutely prescribe that they shouldn't be doing that.

Putting your kids in a panopticon is abusive. It denies them their autonomy, it cripples their social growth, and there simply is no justifying it with "but it's our culture".

1 comments

apparently a tight knick family with open / great communication does not exist, and they must be abusive if they like to know where their kids are. LOL.

Yes horrible families exist. the fact that you can’t imagine a family in between those 2 extremes is sad. we’re at an impasse here so let’s just agree to disagree. The world is not black and white like you seem to think it is.

additionally this is already possible today. a parent can attach an airtag to their kids backpack or insert it into the sole of their sneakers, and call it a day. evil people will find ways to be evil. that’s nothing new.

I used extreme examples because I was challenging the assertion that "culture" was an acceptable excuse for immoral behavior, not because I can't imagine mediocre families. The fact that damn near everyone reading it would agree that the examples I used were abhorrent was, in fact, the point: culture does not excuse abuse.

The second paragraph established that I think subjecting someone to constant surveillance is abuse, and why: it's an attack not just on their current autonomy, which is bad enough, but also their future autonomy, which I hold as categorically evil.

A justification for that belief, that attacking one's autonomy is a an attack on their person, used to be completely unnecessary in the kinds of circles that would happily associate with the label "Hacker". Sadly the libertarian (left and right) ideals that modern tech world were built on have crumbled under the weight of authoritarian influence.