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@OracleOutlook
As an addendum, I'd like to go back to my analogy. If someone were telling me that there's such a huge, serious, problem of unarmed black men getting shot to death by police for no reason, I would still want to have some sense of the scale of the problem. If they returned with statistics on how often black men have encounters with police or how often they're incarcerated, or how often there is use of force in police encounters, etc., that might be interesting data. Perhaps some of it would have been unknown to me until it was presented to me, and I would want to update on those items.
...but I sort of don't think that most of those buckets actually capture the phenomenon in question. Certainly, there may be other relevant questions about general allocation of police forces, or people can haggle over how many encounters/arrests/incarcerations/uses of force are ultimately justified/not justified, and those would all be interesting questions that could (and should) be addressed by folks who are interested in them. But none of them really tell me much about the actual scale of the specific problem of unarmed black men being shot to death by police unjustifiably. It could still be huge! It could still be tiny!
Even if they cite a small number of high-profile examples of unarmed black men being shot by police, and even if those small number of examples are bad shoots, I would feel pretty comfortable saying, "Yes, those are bad, but I still don't really know how common it is." And so, I wouldn't really know how reasonable it is to have significant fears on the topic.
The reason I think this is a useful analogy is because I recall seeing that someone did do a bunch of work to figure this out for the case of unarmed black men getting shot to death by police, and the result was that it was quite rare. But I don't think we have anyone who has done this for the question of children being taken away for reasons like a pre-teen going to the park alone. We have a bunch of other statistics that can tell us other things about the system in general, but not this, AFAICT. It could be really common! I don't know!
Elsewhere in the thread I wrote:
I think we probably agree on more than you think, in the sense that most parents just get a warning, deal with it, and move on.
My issue is more that we have to follow the inane suggestions in the first place. Because if you stand your ground and say, "No, my six year old can play in my fenced backyard on his own while I stay in the house, I will not follow along with your weird brand new rule that you just made up that this is somehow neglect," then you do face more and more push back in the form of lawyer fees, repeated visits, and eventually your kids being taken away.
In the case of a black person being stopped for shoplifting by a jerk cop, you can look at that and say, "yeah, shoplifting is bad. I hate having to ask an attendant to unlock the deodorant." The person who is shoplifting should stop. If they complain about it I have little sympathy.
In the case where a parent is just treating their kid normally, I can't look at that as a reasonable request to stop. Just asking that the parents change their behavior here is wrong. Even if most parents will cow under the pressure, and most kids wont get taken away, it's wrong.
And this is especially relevant in the discussion of whether it is harder to have kids these days. While we have made everything else more convenient, we have made having kids less convenient. That hurts society as a whole.
I imagine some number of cops will make what seem like unreasonable requests of some number of individuals. Even if the underlying concern is something like shoplifting. A regular reading of Short Circuit and some of the many cases in which cops get qualified immunity for whatever would certainly give a person that impression. And sure, I'm sympathetic that there can be problems in particular cases there. But how often are people actually getting required to follow some inane suggestion? By your own phrasing, the example is a "weird brand new rule that you just made up", not some clear, broadly-applicable rule that the system is applying all over the place in a high percentage of cases. And how often do these inane suggestions actually lead to things like termination of parental rights? Plausibly not very often. Perhaps the inane suggestions happen more often (I don't know), and if we had data, we could discuss that, but the original claim was:
I still don't think the data bears that out. Redirecting the claim to saying that maybe sometimes some social workers make inane suggestions (without data here either) doesn't provide data to bear out that claim.
The problem is you're arguing against a real-life Pascal's Wager, or at least Pascal's Mugging. If you're the kind of parent who wants to buck CPS so your kids can have a better life, the cost of having your kids taken away from you is extremely high. The cost of having to stop doing it (that is, comply with "reasonable requests to stop") under (individual, not general) threat of having the kids taken away is also high. If you want good parents to find it reasonable to parent their own kids less strictly, then the chance of that has to be infinitesimal, not merely a few percent or tenths of a percent.
If you're the kind of black man who wants to do whatever, the cost of getting shot dead by police while unarmed is extremely high.
...stiiiilllll kinda think that I can care a little bit about the rate at which unarmed black men actually get shot dead by police. I don't particularly care whether someone labels the discussion after an old French philosopher. It doesn't really map onto that topic all that well.
The chance of a black man getting shot dead by police is higher than that of a white man or black woman, but it is still extremely small -- certainly smaller than the chance of having your kids taken away by CPS.
...for something like letting your pre-teen walk to the neighborhood park alone. This is the key qualifier. How often is that? How do you know?
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