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Re: [ProgSoc] Time for a letter to your local rep?



Nathan de Vries wrote:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/12/31/2129471.htm
What's the complaint?

That is, how can you describe why this is a highly undesirable course of action?
The problem with policy like this that is held to "protect children" 
can't be argued against on its own terms. If you accept the premise 
(i.e. that this "protects" "children") then any argument you make 
against it will logically lead to the outcome that "children" will not 
be "protected". I can't imagine getting very far with such an argument.
You might say it's "bullshit", which it is, for a number of reasons, but 
that's not likely to get you very far either. You'll be arguing blind 
against parties who feel they are "informed" because they had a team of 
analysts butcher some numbers in Excel. You could try to expose the 
flaws in the assumptions and the methodology, but, apart from lacking 
visibility of it in the first place, you'd quickly discover that the 
requisite time and intelligence to comprehend such arguments would be 
too long and too high. It's almost impossible to explain to people of 
average intelligence why they are wrong, especially when they already 
have it in mind that they are right and when the salient aspects of the 
subject matter are intangible (how do you determine that you've 
"protected" a child's mind, or that you haven't? How do you quantify 
matters? How do you qualify them? What do you value?).
It's such a nuanced issue that I can't think of a satisfactory argument 
that could be compressed without loss to a useful length. Maybe we 
should just go and buy one hundred books on science, psychology, 
history, philosophy, mathematics, etc. and have them delivered to our 
*representatives* (note: not "bosses", not "leaders") instead.
Seems rather futile to me.

I thought Matt said this wasn't going to happen..?











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