I wish I were still young enough and ignorant enough to think "God, what a Loser! I would Never be that stupid!
Ever take Ambien sleep pill? Ever see someone state that the “Ambien Defense” to actions criminally/ethically/morally abhorrent was FAKE? That the person was trying to blame a pill for their own, depraved, action?
I quit taking Ambien after 2 police calls, a window broken out from inside and finding myself dismantling my steering column - and I have no idea of how to do that, and,more importantly, no idea how to re-assemble it.
None of those actions were “My idea” - the lesson with Ambien really is: "Get in bed, then swallow the pill. Never get out of bed after taking the pill.
For all to say “My keys? Sure! But this was a baby! Entirely different!” is like saying “Ha! trying to blame a pill for his crime!”.
Reality is a bit more complex than a school test with “Right” and “Wrong” answers.
It seems to require an age of somewhere between 35 and 50 years to grasp that “it ain’t all that different”.
Maybe the reason a tiny baby can make all that racket is because they ARE easy to overlook.
The idea of putting a baby behind you, out of your sight, on a car trip - which will put the baby to sleep and do a hypnotic effect on the driver (try to stay awake driving I5 from Redding to LA - I did that exactly ONCE - CA99 is slower, but it keeps you awake) is probably a really bad idea.
If there is only the driver + sleeping (silent) baby out of driver’s sight, I am going to guess “Baby gets forgotten”.
If you are going to put the baby in back, put someone else in back with baby. If it is just you and baby, put baby on seat beside you.
Instead of moving the baby to avoid the airbag, there should have been a switch to disable the airbag.
I’m sure you’d prefer that women be so afraid of being thought sexist, that they let the man who does happen to be a rapist get close enough to grab them.
Yep, and for this reason its probably not worth it to try to argue Manson and Hilarity out of their mindset. We are working against strong psychological imperatives, fundamental to their identity as parents. It isn’t going to be broken by a bunch of know it alls on the net. You can’t reason someone out of a conclusion they didn’t reason themselves into, and all things considered it may be kinder to leave their bubble intact.
Until some horrific accident happens to their children and people with those same attitudes howl for their blood because there’s no way that any parent who cares about his or her child could possibly have let that happen?
Unfortunately, you can’t just let it go, because people with this kind of blind spot to a basic fact of human existence can affect public policy and hurt other people.
[Bolding mine.] My newer (2014) car apparently has a sensor that does just that. I have no babies, but when I’ve taken one of my cats to the vet, and buckled their carrier into the front seat, there is a light on my dash that indicates that the passenger side airbag has been turned off.
So if I see a big black dude, and cross the street just to avoid him, I’m not being racist? After all, I have no way of knowing if he means me harm or not. I don’t feel safe because I know I would not be able to fight him off if he does, especially because I have been physically assaulted before. Therefore, he should not feel personally insulted, and if he does, he’s an idiot.
That sound about right to you?
OTOH, on the actual subject of the thread, I’m on the “there but for the blessings of fate go I” camp. I honestly hope Manson and Hilarity never have to find out how wrong they are.
Yes, big dudes who go about in public learn to be conscious of the perception their size creates are they become big, unmannerly idiots. My husband is a big dude with dark olive skin who is frequently mistaken for Hispanic which in the part of the United States where we live most of the time is a minority as discriminated against and targeted for police harassment as blacks. Women cross the street all the time when he’s out in casual clothes. The only exception seems to be if he’s wearing a Star Trek T-shirt (word of advice those seem to cause women to read strange men as completely harmless and safe). Does he feel insulted when a woman crosses the street or clutches her purse when she sees them? No, because, he’s a gentlemen. Because he has female relatives who have told him about the problems they have had from strange men and he would rather be avoided than make a woman bothered and uncomfortable.
If anything, the quoted article is astonishing for how few cases happen each year in the US, considering that:
there must be millions of new parents with small babies in a Population of 270 mil.
because new mothers don’t get paid time off from work (like in most Western European countries), but couples Need the income, sleep-deprived parents are behind the wheel more often
because of the size of the Country and lack of infrastructure, there’s a greater Need to drive a car
because the US is more southern latitude than Europe, it gets hotter much more quickly, fatally for a small child.
It’s not just that People Forget keys. Several years ago, there was a Headline about a MI5 employee - a spy, in other words - forgetting a whole Laptop in the subway. And he wasn’t the only one. So yes, human Brains are not wired to on alert 100% and remember perfectly, but can be thrown off track. Accidents happen because several circumstances align to a chain; with millions of People every day, it’s a statistic certainty that in one instance, circumstances will align.
In the article, it was a Change in Routine: the father was absolutly sure he had dropped his kid off at the usual childcare when he arrived at work, but when starting out, the plan had been to drive to another Location, as day care was closed. So he started out with Plan B, during the Routine of driving switched to “normal Plan A” and arrived at work with the Baby out of sight, and convinced it was safe.
Forgetting something due to distractions, auto-Pilot and Change in routines is not a Moral decision, but a matter of how your brain works - if you are a human. If you are a Computer/ android, and your brain perfectly constructed to never Forget any Task, then your Assertion would be true.
You’re basically claiming that your brain works different from what not only many real-life incidents, but also hundred of psychologial tests on Attention span, Memory, retrieval etc. have found about human Brains.
Men as rapists, meanwhile, is a conscious decision depending on a lot of cultural definitions. Wrong comparison.
If you read the article, the Argument is that all cases of children dying should be carefully investigated, to seperate the bad parents who know they are leaving the kid in the car when they go into the Supermarket, but don’t care = intentionally neglectful; and those parents who take very good care of their children until their Brains fail them once, and tragedy results.
Somebody who causes an accident by speeding while drunk is treated differently by the law from somebody who causes an accident obeying all the laws but being distracted for one second. Obviously every Driver should try their best to not be distracted, but it still happens.
My point was that it wasn’t all about him. The fact that he and you completely missed it certainly doesn’t make either of you look smart.
I don’t think the big black guy should care if you are afraid of him or not, as long as you don’t call the police and accuse him of threatening you or something equally dishonest.
Nice how you cut off the first part, where I said that the statement that all men are potential rapists did not mean that every man is capable of rape. The statement has nothing to do with you indignant individual males who swear that you would never rape someone. It’s about entirely rational fear, because rapists do exist. Please stop trying to make it all about you.
Oh good grief. I am not howling for anyone’s blood. I’m not going to “hurt other people” with my very strong belief that I as a parent would never ever accidentally leave my babies in a hot car to die. Which I know as an absolute incontrovertible fact. I did read the article mentioned above and I don’t think the behavior needs to be criminalized, in that I do recognize that some parents apparently do have a part of their brain that goes missing. I’m not even saying I never subjected my boys to substantially dangerous things, like hiking where there were rattlesnakes, or where we might be caught in an electrical storm. I’m just saying that for me, putting the kid in the car and then forgetting I had put him in the car is about as unthinkable, for me, as taking a shit then forgetting to wipe. Obviously not for everybody, as some of you seem to think maybe that could someday happen to you. (And god knows it may someday happen that I forget to wipe, but by then I’ll be so old there won’t be any chance of my endangering children, 'cause I’ll be in some kind of home.)
No, we don’t think it may someday happen to us. We just thank the gods that it *didn’t *happen to us when we were parents of little kiddies. But we DID know that it COULD have happened to us. Do you not see the distinction?
Good luck with the rattlesnakes and the lightning all the same. You sound like an awesome mum who gets her kids out there and experiencing LIFE. But keep in mind it’s not the dangers of the novel that kill kids, it’s often the mundane…