Mild 'pitting' of Rick; Vehement opining in GQ

The BBQ Pit
1

In this thread about cars with a security feature that makes it impossible to open the doors from the inside without the proper electronic device, Rick said the following:

[QUOTE=Rick]

It is a fairly well known fact that heat inside a parked car can kill. Yet every year, we hear about some parent that cooks their kid/cat/dog inside a parked car. Are the car companies also responsible for these deaths? using your logic, I guess so. This is all part of the It’s not my fault, you can’t blame me mentality. The parents fucked up, big time. They are responsible. Not the car company.
[/QUOTE]

Why is it that this needs to turn into a “people these days don’t take responsibility for their own mistakes, gosh darn it!” kind of discussion?

No one was talking about blame and responsibility in any way until Rick mentions in post #6:

When iamthewalrus(:3= expresses the opinion that:

. . . we get the response that I posted at the top of the OP. In General Questions. Everybody is remaining fairly factual about their quesitons, except for Rick, who can’t wait to turn this into a political statement about all those people out there who just need to blame someone else when something bad happens.

Except that nobody in that GQ thread asserted such a thing. The only thing close was a response to Rick’s already reactionary opinion in defense of the auto makers.
I’m not exactly sure what my point is, except that:

[ul]
[li]This line of argument was inappropriate for the thread in question (and the forum in question)[/li]
[li]This line of argument even in another location (GD, for example) would have been week and intentionally hostile. No one was arguing about this at all, and in the span of three posts we’ve got a hyperbolic reaction (guess the car companies should be responsible for anyone who dies inside a car due to heat stroke, huh?) that is not at all based on anything anyone had said, and then lashing out at all those people who say “it’s not my fault,” (unlike anyone in the original thread).[/li][/ul]

Certainly there are legitimate arguments why a car that is able to be easily locked so that no one can get out might not be a safe feature. To insist that there’s nothing wrong with it and any one who thinks so is just one of ‘those’ people is unconstructive and flat-out rude.
Rick is not the first/only person I’ve seen posting this way all over the SDMB, just one that caught my eye today. It frustrates me that so many people’s method of discussion here seems to be:

[ol]
[li]Read OP[/li][li]Pick up on a word or phrase that reminds one of some opinion one has that is RIGHT, and that other stupider people just don’t get[/li][li]Continue to post in the thread as if the OP were specifically about that opinion; bonus points for drawing other posters away from actual OP into your private argument[/li][/ol]
This is part of the reason why I find it so challenging to get involved in many threads here; some folks can’t help but get into a big us vs. them argument about pretty much everything. And then they start throwing around words like ‘logic’ as if they were using it themselves.

2

Try reading for detail.
In the first five responses there was one joke, and 4 wrong wild ass guesses about why the kid could not get out. IOW a 100% rate of wrong answers.
In post #6 I posted the facts about how the system works. Then in response to the OP

You will note that here the OP is asking for an opinion. I posted a bit of an opinion about who’s fault this tragedy was.
But the point is, and I stand by it is that I posted the correct factual answer in GQ before I expressed an opinion. Furthermore the OP asked for an opinion (Why would you want…?)
Then we have iamthewalrus(:3= who comes up with that wonderful comparison of a car to a walk in freezer. Nice apples to Kumquats comparison. Ever hear of a walk in freezer being freezer jacked? The radio stolen out of a walk in? “But honest officer, I parked my walk in right there, and when I came out of the store it was gone.” :rolleyes:
Give me a break.

3

Not a single person was talking about blaming anyone for anything. No one was talking about the dead kid in the linked article. It was strictly a discussion about the necessity for the security device.

You turned the discussion towards who was to blame for the dead kid in France. You started an argument with yourself, and iamthewalrus(:= took the bait. Then you got the outlet for the opinion you clearly wanted to express in the first place.

I’m not saying you did something evil and unconscionable. I’m just saying that you hijacked a GQ thread so you could go off about the people these days who don’t take responsibility. It was inappropriate.

(I agree that the walk-in freezer analogy was bad. Perhaps a better (yet weak) analogy is a gas range with a button on the front that turns both front burners on automatically to ‘high’. A possibly useful feature that has an element of danger to it. There’s an argument to be had as to whether the benefits outweigh the danger).

4

He wasn’t in France.

5

[QUOTE=Throatwarbler Mangrove]
He wasn’t in France.
[/QUOTE]

The Caribbean, my bad.

6

Considering the fact that there wasn’t technically a question with a factual answer in that thread, I don’t see how the forum it was in is relevant. The derived factual question, that is, “What is the purpose of…” was answered twice before Rick’s statement the OP of this thread quoted (once by rick, and once in the very first response). Rick put a single sentence at the end of a detailed post, and you’re pitting him for that? The “GQ” thread would have been “hijacked” anyway, partially because it was in the wrong forum, and partially because the kids parents are idiots; how could that -not- be mentioned in the thread?

7

[QUOTE=Eonwe]
I’m just saying that you hijacked a GQ thread…
[/QUOTE]

No, he didn’t.

8

Wait, so in that thread full of speculation, supposition, wild ass guesses and unsupported hypotheses, Rick who actually provided some factual information, is the person you decided to pit?

That’s dumb.

9

Of course Rick is the one being pitted. The poor guy was feeling left out of all the fun, what with his always helpful and detailed, experienced answers to questions automotive. He got lonesome being one of the only people on this board who is always professional and above the fray. Once, just once, he wanted to see what it would be like to be an ordinary poster. You know, the kind that get pitted for reasons obscure. This was his chance!

10

Is there really any such thing as a “mild” pitting? Maybe we need a Slow Cooker forum or something for that kind of action.

11

Maybe I’m totally off-base here, but let me try to spell out more plainly what I mean, just so I can be clear that no one here agrees with me.

My summation of the thread in question is as follows, post by post:

[ol]
[li]Link to article about boy who died in a car that could not be opened from the inside. Baffled question posed: what the heck does a person need that feature on his or car for?[/li]
[li]Guess at purpose of such a feature.[/li]
[li]Joke about locking keys in car[/li]
[li]Guess that car may have been a police vehicle at some point[/li]
[li]Similar guess that car had been police vehicle. Also bafflement[/li]
[li]Excellent factual response by Rick about the purpose of this sort of car lock. *Accusation that vehicle owners are fools/idiots to have had this accident. Calls vehicle owners stupid. Claims that the car company is not to blame in the death of the child, the car owners are.[/li]
[li]OP returns, not really responding to the answers given in previous post, but still posing the same question.[/li]
[li]iamthewalrus(:3= gives opinion about safety of car lock, and responds in disagreement to Rick’s claim that the car company is not at fault.[/li]
[li]Post about experience with this sort of car lock from 1989[/li]
[li]Rick’s reply to iamthewalrus(:3=, using iamthewalrus’ ‘logic’ to extrapolate that he/she must also blame car companies for all deaths in cars due to heat.[/li]
[li]Re-iteration of Rick’s explanation of the purpose of the locks.[/li]
[li]iamthewalrus(:3= talks about why in his/her opinion the locks could be unsafe and possible options for making it more safe.[/li][/ol]

. . . etc etc etc

It seems very clear to me that all of the discussion, including “is the lock safe” is relatively on topic and GQ-ish, even if the answers are of the opinion variety. It also seems very clear to me that questions about ‘is the car company responsible for the death of the kid’ is at best a hijack, and at worst fishing for a fight in GQ. Since the ‘responsibility’ assertion was made out of the blue and as an argument right from the get-go, followed by a mini-rant about the sorts of people who might disagree with him, I feel that Rick was [you were] out of line.
Maybe I’m extra sensitive today; I listened to a local newscast on my way to the grocery store that was full of sweeping generalizations about how white people react to black people, so I admit I was a little on the defensive when I logged on this afternoon.

On the other hand, I don’t think I’m wrong in observing a general tendency towards turning any current event no matter how small into an argument about people who think rightly and people who think wrongly. I’m just kind of sick of it, which is really the point of this thread.

12

Yaknow, I’ve been thinking about this, and I think the OP is right. Since the second response was, indeed, the factual response, the thread should have been shut down after that, and discussion ceased. I blame the mods. :rolleyes:

Again, I ask, how could the safety of the locks be discussed without expressing responsibility? “The locks are safe when operated by competent individuals.” Pretty much sums it up.

13

[QUOTE=John Mace]
Is there really any such thing as a “mild” pitting? Maybe we need a Slow Cooker forum or something for that kind of action.
[/QUOTE]

But then we might get trapped inside it and die.

14

Especially if somebody farts .

15

Consider for just a minute what the possible outcomes could have been if:
A) Car did not have dead locks
and
B) 13 year old kid got out in the middle of the night.

The child could have been mugged, kidnapped, beaten up, molested, or murdered. Plus probably a half dozen more bad things that I have not yet thought of. At this point no one would have looked twice at the car. Or maybe he doesn’t wake up and dies of heat stroke.
Leaving a child in a hot car is a BAD idea. Leaving a 13 year old in a car is even stupider. Thirteen year old children are not world renown for their smarts and reasoning ability.
The parents leaving a 13 year old child alone in a car is world class stupid. On the stupidity scale this puts them somewhere between a box of hair and the OJ jury. The fact that the car is equipped with deadlock has nothing to do with their stupidity. They were world class stupid. The only difference the deadlocks made was that they made it easy to find the body, instead of having the kid do a Natalee Holloway.

16

[QUOTE=silenus]
Of course Rick is the one being pitted. The poor guy was feeling left out of all the fun, what with his always helpful and detailed, experienced answers to questions automotive. He got lonesome being one of the only people on this board who is always professional and above the fray. Once, just once, he wanted to see what it would be like to be an ordinary poster. You know, the kind that get pitted for reasons obscure. This was his chance!
[/QUOTE]

yeah, but all I got was this mild pitting. :mad: The slow cooker of pittings apparently.

17

[QUOTE=Eonwe]
OP returns, not really responding to the answers given in previous post, but still posing the same question.
[/QUOTE]

That’s because Rick’s response, while excellently factual, didn’t answer my question. He was explaining how you can use the deadlock on some European cars to lock the car from the outside so the doorlocks cannot be opened by someone on the inside, to prevent someone from breaking the car window from the outside, climbing into the car, and then opening the door.

But the car in the OP was a high-security SUV with unbreakable windows. So my question is, if your high-security SUV is equipped with unbreakable windows, as in the link to the Ford Explorer I found, why would you want to lock the doors so someone inside couldn’t get out? If they can’t break in, in the first place? How would you be assuming that they’d get IN there? You went off and left your bomb-proof, kidnap-proof, terrorist-proof armored car unlocked?

And then, what are you gonna do with him, once you’ve got him locked in there? People don’t drive these things around in well-policed Decatur, Illinois; they buy them for the Third World.

I have no idea why folks are discussing the incident in Guadeloupe; all I wanna know is, whaffor the special feature? I’m starting to lean towards “totally unnecessary widget aimed at paranoid executive-types on an expense account”.

18

I swear I have landed in some bizarro world SDMB.
DDG The link in your first post was to the story about the kid that died. No mention of brand or anything else. You brought up the locking the bad guy in the OP.
I replied to that post in post #6, and corrected your errors of fact.
In post #7 you posted a link to a a Ford Expedition.
now in this thread you are ranting about a Ford **Explorer **, and complaining that I did not answer your question.

Now in front of the entire SDMB, the squid, the goats, and hamsters allow me to apologize.
**DDG I am truly very sorry that I did not answer a question in my post that was asked nine minutes after I posted my response. I mean what is the dope coming to if questions that have not even been asked are not answered?
::: Hangs head in shame:::
I promise I will try to do better in the future. My only excuse is my crystal ball is in the shop this week for its 30,000 prediction service. As you are aware this is a major service and takes several days.
Once it comes back, I promise I will do better. **

To answer your question, the reason for the lock the car so you can’t get out is so if you are driving and someone tries to hijack the car from the inside (You thought they were a good guy but they turned out to be a bad guy), they can’t get away. (see the movie Air Force One for more details.) Pretty hard to kidnap someone if you can’t get out of the fucking car.

19

[QUOTE=Rick]
To answer your question, the reason for the lock the car so you can’t get out is so if you are driving and someone tries to hijack the car from the inside (You thought they were a good guy but they turned out to be a bad guy), they can’t get away. (see the movie Air Force One for more details.) Pretty hard to kidnap someone if you can’t get out of the fucking car.
[/QUOTE]

Wait, I’m confused. Wouldn’t that mean you’re sealed into the car with the (presumably armed) hijacker? And wouldn’t that just make them more inclined to kill you and get the locking/unlocking remote from you?

Or did I misunderstand?

20

This thread makes my head hurt.