This does ignore the very real possibility of your driving, unseatbelted, and involved in an accident that that could leave you in a hospital bed for the rest of your life. That has happened to a lot of people. When I quoted that 70 billion in one year, that kind of thing is what it was talking about. The cost of your decision will outpace all your insurance (probably mandated) and all your wealth. WE will spend more on your decision than it would take to send a couple of kids to school for all their lives.
And it can prevented with a seatbelt. It makes you safer. It saves lives, it reduces hospital expenses, is so simple.
The problem with your argument is that I accomplished exactly what I wanted. I got to tell you off for being an asshole, and I made an argument you were apparently unable to refute.
Again, nothing about this thread suggests that anyone is advocating using shame to stop these people. People are using the Pit as as place to vent, a place to say what you want to say to people’s face but can’t.
And there remains a wide gulf between those who are uncertain, and those who deny their own eyes, seeing all the vaccinated people who are fine, and choose to believe it is still somehow dangerous. They see all these people around them getting sick, and even people dying, and they continue to ignore reality.
And, that BTW, is the answer to your other “real question.” Even if the vaccine came under Trump and I somehow forgot how to do basic research online, I would still know how to talk to my doctor and listen to my nursing friends. I would still see all the people around me who were vaccinated and weren’t harmed by that vaccination. I’d see the people getting really sick and even dying around me. I’d see all my friends in the nursing profession saying to get vaccinated… I’d see the children who were dying and want to protect my own kids.
And I’d remember that my mom was unable to get a bed at the hospital because the beds were all full with COVID-19 patients.
If you’re so privileged that you’ve not faced the tragedy of this disease, then kindly stop trying to shame me. You claimed it doesn’t work, so why the fuck are you trying it?
ETA: Note that this guy was also remanded to the Institute of Mental Health in Singapore for about two weeks. One doesn’t have to look very hard to guess why.
So far he just seems like your garden-variety libertarian, a little too dazzled by the power of the slippery slope argument. Slippery slope arguments are useful sometimes, but they’re meaningless on a large scale. Kind of like using your weed whacker for large-scale timber operations.
Also, I hate that bullshit argument – “so you’re saying that…”
But unlike the sovereign citizens, who are usually somewhat unbalanced, there’s hope for the libertarians.
I oppose laws prohibiting drug use. After 50 years of the ‘War on Drugs’, it’s quite clear they don’t work. I believe that money could much better be used on educating people about crack & providing quality rehab.
I gave examples of your ‘for the good of society’ policy in action, you claim you don’t support these laws, but you think there’s a flaw in my logic. So long as you are convinced that government overreach can’t happen (and certainly not to you), I can’t penetrate that dream world, so let’s let it go.
When people don’t wear seatbelts, traffic accidents become more costly due to personal injury
Costly traffic accidents = higher insurance premiums
Higher premiums impact me regardless of my own personal choice to wear seatbelts
When the government requires seatbelt use, society’s use of seatbelts increases
As seatbelt use increases, the cost of traffic accidents goes down
As the cost of traffic accidents goes down, market forces reduce the price of insurance
Your personal use of a seatbelt does not affect me. Society’s use of seatbelts does affect me. You’ll note a direct parallel with our current situation.
You have no problem dumping individual choice for ‘the greater good’, ignoring laws and the Constitution if that’s what’s you think is needed at the moment. You are preaching exactly the same logic Conservatives use (see anti-abortion laws in every state they control, and maybe look at their anti-voting laws too), but I bet you consider yourself liberal. Surprise, you’re not nearly as open-minded as you’d like to think.
Well, yes, sometimes the greater good has to be put ahead of individual choice.
I don’t know what laws you think I’m ignoring, but the Constitution provides a framework for, among other things, deciding to what extent the greater good can be prioritized over some vague right to “individual choice” (whatever that means).
One can’t live in a complex, fast-moving, incredibly diverse society, and reap the benefits of such a life, and still say that your own choices must at all times be paramount. There are trade-offs.
If someone is unwilling to make those trade-offs, that’s fine, but there are no free rides. That person should go live off the grid somewhere.
There are. You have to be a certain age to purchase; many states restrict who can sell and what hours they can sell; there are laws about manufacturing, distributing, etc.
There are. You have to be a certain age to purchase; many states / localities limit where you can smoke.
OK, you got us there.
There are. You can get ticketed for crossing outside of a marked crosswalk, just like you can get ticketed for not wearing a seatbelt.
There are - for certain industries. Long-haul truckers still have logbooks and must rest after a certain amount of driving.
We, as a society, have a whole bunch of laws protecting us from ourselves.
In short, there is always a balance to be achieved between individual freedom and the collective greater good for society. There is and will always be debate over where on the continuum the dividing line should be, but slippery slope arguments that insist that any movement in either direction will inevitably result in the line being abruptly flung out to the far extreme are not realistic or constructive.
Don’t know that they are REGULATED - there’s no one at the door checking brown bags for contraband candy bars. You could say that the school lunch program, with their rules on dietary content, are regulating the lunches, but there’s nothing keeping a parent from sending their kid to school with nothing but a stick of butter for lunch. (actually, at our local grade school, if the kid is constantly bringing in inappropriately unhealthy lunches, they do send information home on what constitutes a good lunch)
And you’re guarantying that your not wearing a seatbelt will not have direct impact on others how exactly?
IOW If you get into an accident and roll over you’re controlling the direction your body is flung how?
Yeah, wasting a perfectly good anti-anti-vaxxer thread on this guy. There’s lots more anti-vaxxers who are killing a lot more people right now than this blockhead.