One thing that irritates me greatly about Child Liberation is how it is framed in terms of soaring principles -- children are now Enslaved and they deserve to be Free.

And these principles have...no merit? We both know they would if applied to any group of adults placed in similar situations.

And what does this freedom involve? Not the right of toddlers to cross the street when the whim strikes them. Maybe not the right of 6-year-olds to use heroin. No, there are still limits. Big limits. It comes down to the right to take competency tests instead of being judged by chronological age. The right for a more sympathetic hearing when they sue for emancipation. Those sound like policy details and nothing like a leap from Slave to Free.

Limits can be based on common sense. Such as not hiring the average woman to take on a job that entails hours of heavy lifting; or not hiring someone with cerebal palsy to do construction work. They do not need to be arbitrary. Nor would we argue to sell drugs or prescribe meds to people whom we know are physically incapable of handling them, much as doctors will not currently prescribe narcotics to patients with a history of drug addiction.

As for competency tests, they were suggested by Epstein as being a preferred alternative to an outright blanket ban of rights for someone's first 18-21 years of life, to give kids an opportunity to prove their merits and enable them to earn rights when they have proven they are ready for them. They are not favored by all youth liberationists, and some (like me) only favor them as a temporary measure for a generation or two until enough younger people are granted opportunities to prove the point. They constitute an attempted concession to contemporary mainstream adult concerns. Yet it's interesting they are not seen as such with you, and I think that lies more with the precedent they would set than anything else (e.g., bureaucratic red tape). I know that nothing irritates you more than any form of major opposition to the status quo you favor. Some tweaking here and there is permissible to you, but beyond that...well, you know.

Given human mortality, children are Us. If someone wants to have a life of fun and freedom and pleasure, having kids is a bad deal.

Unless we worked to change the system so that the entire community can help raise kids, and to also help kids raise themselves.

People choose to have them because they fundamentally want part of themselves and their culture to go on.

Yet kids are autonomous individuals despite sharing their parents' DNA, and they have no obligation to favor the culture they find themselves within if they believe it can be improved. This is one major reason why adults want continued power over their kids and kids in general: they want to insure they control the education process for their first 18 years so kids are (hopefully) sufficiently indoctrinated into accepting the status quo and to have sufficient time to hammer their own values into the heads of their kids rather than allowing them access to information that may enable these youths to decide for themselves what values they want to follow.

They want the best for them.

From what you just said, Ethan, it seems clear these parents want the best for themselves and the status quo they have been trained all of their lives to be loyal to more than anything else. This doesn't mean they do not love their kids, but it does mean they do not respect them.

And since this current power disparity results in the greatest amount of infliction of all sorts of abuse on every conceivable level to younger people, and you well know this, your defense of parental power is based on a disingenuous support for the world order you are used to, not for kids. And your claims that members of your own community, who desire no power disparity at all, would be a bad thing for kids under a system of mutual freedom is beyond empty. You aren't against things like power disparity, injustice, infliction of harm or trauma etc. per se. You apply these concerns in a very selective and hypocritical manner, which are ultimately based supporting a status quo that preserves adult hegemony. And, of course, presumably one where men are put in their proper place.

If the last survivor of a couple wills their property to anyone but their kids it is considered strange.

Yet it's not considered strange for parents to tell their kids whom they can or cannot associate with, what type of religion to practice (if any), how they go about getting their education, what information they can access, etc. Taking care of the material well-being of their kids is not the only important thing parents need to do in order to foster emotionally healthy kids.

When adults reach consensus that they were systematically mistreated as kids, they change society to protect their own kids.

Provided said mistreatment took a form that they personally disapprove of and did not internalize so as to inflict upon their own kids in the future. Further, you will see relatively few of them in this day and age willing to give up their power, or even to see that as the main problem underlying their mistreatment. They have simply been conditioned all their lives not to think in that way, and to only fight for changes that do not challenge the existing power structures too much. And too often the changes they fight for actually entail increases in adult power to monitor and control other adults, or to more heavily monitor and control the lives of kids.

That's why teachers can't flog students any more.

The best and most beneficial changes come about by adults who are able to remember what it was actually like to be a younger person; to see things from their POV despite now having freedom and power they lacked during those years. Many of these adults become youth liberationists, free-rangers, or unschoolers. Other adults, however, merely protest teachers doing that on the basis that they do not want other adults doing what they feel only they should have the right to do with "their" kids, because they did not explicitly grant teachers permission to do the same; or it goes against their personal parenting style.

But what if teachers abuse kids in ways the parents personally consent to, as was almost always the case when I attended grammar and high school? The use of humiliation and other sometimes serious forms of emotional abuse were a regular part of the teachers' disciplinarian tool kit, yet few parents protested that. They respected adult authority more than their kids' dignity or emotional well-being. After all, they would argue, kids are not likely to die as a result of being humiliated or insulted, right? Well, guess what? I almost did die due to suicide, largely over the way I was treated by peers and teachers alike. And my peers were often imitating or duplicating the power structures and behavior patterns they witnessed among the adult staff.

My problem was considered an inability to fit in, not the behavior of the teachers and the students who were mostly imitating them. Again, loyalty to the status quo trumped all else. Which is why youth liberationists are going to bring this system down around your ears. Because unlike you, we care about far more than simply passing on our DNA, or continuing the culture as it now exists, or keeping our hegemony intact. And sorry, but our desire to have romantic relationships with willing youths is not our sole "puerile" motivation, but you're free to go on a tirade and accuse us of that if such a histrionic outburst would help you vent your frustration over being challenged a bit.

It's also getting harder to do sexual things to them against their will (and remember, we're all against that, right?)

Not if what happens to them occurs within the insular nuclear family home of today, bro, which leaves community scrutiny almost entirely out. And the concern of pro-choicers is that these rights extend in both directions. If it's only allowed in one direction, then it's a violation of their human rights. And contrary to sexual matters being almost the sole concern of mainstream "concerned" adults, we are concerned with the whole lot of rights they are denied. With full community scrutiny of all intergenerational interactions, any such instances of adults trying to act abusively towards kids would soon become noticed, and if the community collectively deemed it warranted, an intervention could be initiated.

So when we get around again to kids choosing to have sex, it's not a matter of grand principles of youth liberation, it's once again a matter of particular values and detailed policy decisions.

Particular moralizing values that no agency should be allowed to impose upon others in a democracy. And detailed policy decisions need not be a problem if policies are reasonable and objective. Grand ideals often underlie policies, and if the former are democratic then the latter will result in a society that values freedom over tyranny in the form of Nanny State laws and policies based on mistrust of everyone, hatred or lack of respect towards certain demographics, and sweeping assumptions sans evidence.