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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.
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