Re: Filters are folly.
Filters are not folly.
I put one at the top of the stairs which only allowed objects smaller than my child or much larger/stronger than my child through or over.
Few people thought I was stupid. I certainly talked to my children about the dangers of stairs. Despite understanding what I was saying, I didn't remove the filter straight away and we went on many training runs up and down the stairs together. If ever I was doing things upstairs, I'd often take the her up with me, close the stair-gate and pop her down while I got on with the jobs. I don't think it ever crossed my mind that I might be too lazy or stupid to remove the stair-gate and spend all my time supervising the child. I rather thought it was a good idea to let them explore the environment on their own, within certain prescribed boundaries.
Even after the star-gate was gone, she didn't have unrestricted access to the park down the road. Outside the front-door was out of bounds, for a while, regardless of whether she actually wanted to visit the park, or just sit on the doormat.
Pre-puberty, children don't really have a "sexual nature." It isn't something they really come up with except by imitation and the desire to "be grown up." To them, sex is just a bit weird and yucky and not interesting. An 8 year-old and an 15 year-old are not the same.
The (correct) proposal that sex is both healthy and natural rather obscures the fact that there is a lot of rather unhealthy sex available for viewing on the internet and on TV. The human race has managed to have sex just fine without the internet. The kids don't need it and it's generally unhelpful to their education. If my kids are going to the internet to find out about sex, I think I've probably failed in a big way. Sex on screen is rarely educational and almost always misleading. From the ultra-thin models, to the air-brushing and pristine hair, to the extreme expertise even of first-timers, to the constant ecstasy and the merry-go-round of partners. Sex on screen doesn't reflect real-life and even when people know that, the constant repetition of the lies is difficult to counter. Hence, no uncontrolled TV in the house. The internet is more difficult to control because it actually has a useful use, unlike TV, which doesn't.
It's worse when you introduce all-out porn. The sex on screen may be fake, but the sexual experience of the watcher is real. Sex becomes something conducted utterly at their own discretion with absolutely no need to consider anyone else. It is utterly selfish with any whim catered for at the click of a mouse. No real partner can or should have to live up to that. There are lots of subtle lies out there. When it comes to children, they have, by definition, not completed their training to be knowledgeable, rational and responsible adults. When you first put them on a bike, you hold it and take complete control. As they learn, you relax the controls. You don't give your 3 year old a sharp knife because they want to cut a piece of paper. You filter their access to the kitchen knives. They know they are there, they just can't reach them.
I would be the first to suggest that the way the government has gone about things with national network level filters is folly and to be utterly resisted, but there is no particular reason to suggest that the entire idea of filters is always wrong. It should be enabled by request on a per-account basis with real-time logging to an agent so you can tell what's going on when things mysteriously fail.
Sadly it appears that people are behaving like the government. They take a few nice sound-bite arguments against these particular filters and make an argument against any sort of controls in any situation, in much the same way as the government takes sound bites for some good ideas and turns them into a completely inappropriate argument for infrastructure which shouldn't exist.
Straw-man arguments on both sides obscure the issues and ruin the debate.