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Europe considering banning VPN for 'children protection'
(www.europarl.europa.eu)
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this post was submitted on 08 May 2026
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Here's an idea: how about parents don't give their kids internet access the second they're ejected from the womb and actually monitor how they use electronic devices instead? Why do these lawmakers insist on making this everyone else's problem?
Surely you know they're just using that as a way to get people to accept it. They don't care about the children - except as a source of revenue.
No, I'm aware. This is essentially "think of the children", take #894561.
we know that it's always either "think of the children" or "terrorism" but a huge majority don't, so we need to say it each time on the off chance that they pay attention beyond the headline.... for once.
I've lost faith. I've come to realize there is a small minority of humans with the biological capacity to be individuals and think critically. I almost wish I were one of the "normal" people. I'd have a social life and a job.
i'de have a careers, money in the bank, and a family. lol
the truth of the matter is that they just aren't aware and only they can make themselves aware; a truly bitter pill.
This is probably why civilizations collapse after 500 to 900 years. The morons become the majority, then only the smartest and healthiest survive the fall, wonder around for a few hundred years trying to pull it together, then the cycle repeats.
there are morons for sure, but i believe that the overwhelming majority are just not informed and my own experiences with studying american propaganda thanks to things like the freedom of information act has convinced me that they were intentionally not informed to benefit the epstein oligarchy.
I don't think Epstein figures particularly prominently. He was just one of many. There's no doubt it is being done on purpose. Well educated, intelligent people can see through the lies by using the tools of critical thinking. Morons just believe what they "hear" most frequently and trust only what they're told to trust.
epstein is more of a recognizable name to me rather than a definition of the scope or longevity.
i'm starting to believe that there's more to it than this: the epstein revelations spurred me into other rabbit holes from other revelations from sources like the freedom of information act where the american gov't effectively publicly admitted to creating propaganda about controversial topics like north korea; yet self-selective-trusting maga morons and well educated, critical-thinking-espousing liberals alike both believe the propaganda anyways despite some of these revelations being in the public domain for decades at this point and will reject the proof when you show it to them.
this extends to even more modern propaganda regarding ukraine and it's all making me believe that it's deeper than one group being morons and the other more educated.
You are likely correct. The liberal side has it's unthinking zombies just like the right, and I was focusing on intellectual skill rather than political affiliations.
People need to internalize one of the most important rules of critical thought: hold your beliefs loosely and keep your identity separated from your beliefs.
Fail in that, and even genius level people will discount or deny objective facts that cast doubt on their beliefs.
i agree, but it still goes deeper than that. i used the liberal/maga divide because liberals seem to place a higher premium on critical thinking than maga supporters do and also as a basis to show that critical thinking alone often isn’t enough -- based on the rabbit holes I’ve followed:
i’ll keep using north korea as an example, since it’s the clearest case I can think of right now. The us gov't has already admitted to manufacturing propaganda and this fact has been public domain knowledge for decades at this point, yet much of that propaganda is still widely believed to be true nonetheless. wikipedia and american history books probably repeat this narrative more often than others, portraying north korea as a hermit kingdom with despotic rulers. If you approach this with critical thinking, you’d naturally conclude those portrayals are accurate based on the information that's readily available to you on wikipedia and history books. But if you dig deeper into the references that these sources used in wikipedia and those history books, you’ll find that nearly all -- if not all -- are either directly or indirectly funded by the U.S. government. ie usaid, national endowment for democracy, radio free asia, etc.
so even if you follow this one tenet of critical thinking -- keeping your identity separate from your beliefs -- you’ll still end up believing the propaganda, because the seemingly objective evidence already aligns with what you likely believed in the first place and is repeated from all sources that are fostered by the american gov't. it's only sources not elevated by the american gov't that either have a neutral or favorable characterization of north korea, but they're so few in number and presence that it takes additional effort to find them -- just like the freedom of information act revelations.
it was never about kids
Responsible parents? Please. Parents are more susceptible to peer pressure than their fucking children.
“Well all of Timmy’s friends are being extorted for child porn Roblox and I don’t want him to feel left out!”
There's a lot of things that lawmakers put into law to protect people from their own dumbass decisions. Places where wearing seatbelts are mandatory have less car related deaths, same with helmets on motorbikes. Both things people should have the common sense to do without laws, but they don't. Furthermore, places where pool fencing is mandatory have less child deaths due to drowning, but that doesn't stop some people from not having a pool fence where it's not mandatory. There's hundreds of "common sense" things like these, that if they weren't actual law would be completely ignored.
So actual protections for children's use of the internet being made into law isn't necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. And if be all for them if they were reasonable and realistic, but they never are. No matter how much you want to make it so, expecting everyone to do reasonable things to protect themselves and those dependent on them without some sort of incentive is unrealistic.
Of course in saying all that, banning VPNs and all the laws people want to implement similar to it, have nothing to do with protecting children and everything to do with controlling people.