The crux of it right there.
When it has to do with me, or any individual, I do not care how learned you are, how informed your opinion, you do not get to dictate to me what to do with my person.
Give me the research, give me your knowledge, but do not protect me from myself. That is the heart of “liberal elitism”.
I don’t know about the stupid side, but the selfish jerk is probably just me wanting to take personal responsibility for ME.
It’s not about protecting you from yourself. That’s the flaw in your thinking. It’s about protecting society from having to pay the price for your bad choices. You want everyone else to pick up the tab when you ruin yourself. I thought conservatives were very much against that.
Until society has to pay you disability for the rest of your life, or pay welfare for your wife and kids if you die. How is that personal responsibility?
You want total autonomy? Go buy an island.
Welcome to the wonderful world of cost-benefit analysis! Or as I like to call it, “actually thinking about things”.
Some things have benefits. Some things have costs. Some risks are high. Some are low. Some corrective measures are arduous and not worth it. Some corrective measure are not arduous at all.
So yeah, let’s think about things.
Sharp knives are not a problem in most places. In England they’re apparently a problem. I’m not in England so I don’t need to worry about that, though, so I’ll just note that their usefulness seems to be significant and their level of fatality seems pretty low. (Accidental injuries that leave you able to deal with them and clean up after them yourself aren’t a problem. Well, they are for you, but not for me.)
Driving after dark - it does seem like a startling percentage of accidents happen at night. However the utility of being able to move around at night is massively high for some people, and for many of them there are no better alternatives. So there is need to continue to allow it. We mandate headlights, though, because they help and there’s no damn reason not to. (Same as there’s no damn reason not to mandate helmets.)
Scuba diving - I haven’t run the numbers, but the activity is probably reasonably non-fatal on its own. Of course, for it to be scuba diving, it must include some of that pesky safety equivalent that you seem opposed to. For those who wish to dive without air tanks, that’s got a different name, and I gather it’s not a frequent enough activity for society to really care how many of them die messily. This differentiates it from motorcycling.
Wearing a seatbelt (for yourself) - It keeps you off the streets. As in, literally, by way of the windshield and leaving a nice red mess. For those in the back seats, it reduces the load on the medical system patching together your uninsured arse.
Shooting guns at a range - You wanna go there? You really do?
Swimming pools - Swimming pools tend to self-regulate for liability reasons. Stay out of the pool unless there’s a lifeguard or at least an adult present! And if you croak in your own private pool, well, at least you’re dying in the privacy of your own home. Better that than splattering your brains all over the road.
Seriously, this is not all that complicated.
But you didn’t answer the question. As things stand right now, do you think people should be able to make the choice to not wear a helmet?
I edited this post to change the quoted material back to what it was originally. Even though you were responding to points - you are not allowed to change the text in the quote box. Don’t do that.
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Do you think society should pay for the costs of those who don’t and become maimed or killed as a result? Do you personally want to pay for this?
People have the right to pay for their own private roads to drive on and pay for their own private hospitals to go to when they crack open their skulls because they rode without a helmet.
And their own first responders to scrape them off the pavement.
Can we say this thread is entirely off topic now?
I see you answered a question with a question. Why is that?
No, I don’t think society should pay, nor do I want to personally. I’m fine with not paying. That you think society should pay and also use that as justification for nannyism is part of elitism.
You just did the same thing. Why is that?
So what do you say to the guy that now needs disability for the rest of his life because he didn’t wear a helmet? Sucks to be you, just die then?
What do you say to the kids of the guy who died because he wasn’t wearing a helmet? Sorry kids, guess you don’t get to eat because I’m not paying for your government assistance?
It’s not nannyism, its reality, it’s real people’s lives. It’s not elitism, it’s pragmatism, it’s being aware how we affect everyone else. This conservative insistence that each man is an island unto himself is just lunacy.
I will plead ignorance, but I won’t attempt it again.
IF is the keyword.
You automatically make the assumption that said bad thing is going to occur and then society will be left holding the bag. I suppose if you had decades of science backing up those assumptions, it MIGHT be a good law to have on the books.
Most of them do not though.
It is like future policing. You might rob that bank so we are going to forbid you to buy a gun.
You might go broke so we are going to force you to save money.
I do not disagree that we as a nation of laws look at things that hurt our nation critically and legislate accordingly. But lots and LOTS of laws do not look at much and still they want to think they know better. That is liberal elitism (in some cases), in others, it’s just plain old elitism.
So we have part of the definition: elitisim is partially nannyism, which is when you think that things should be paid for.
The alternative, of course, being the belief that if a person dies in the street because they decided that helmets were for mere mortals, they should be required to remove their own corpse, via their bootstraps.
The thing about dealing with things at the societal level, though is that it stops being “if” and becomes “it’s happening right this second, to somebody”. The argument “It might not happen to me, because I pray right or am lucky or whatever” loses all its teeth when you start talking large populations.
Sure, you might get lucky and survive your motorcycle ride to the corner and back. But what society sees is that people aren’t surviving. It might not be you dying, but people are dying, and society has to deal with that, one way or the other.
So looking at this from a societal level, the arguement “It might not happen, so I’m going to act in a way that will make it way worse if it does happen, and believe that everybody in society should do the same” translates to “I actively seek to make things worse.”
Acknowledging reality and recognizing the effects we can have on society is not elitism or nannyism. Refusing to acknowledge those things is head buried in the sand fantasy thinking that nothing we do can possibly affect anyone else or society as a whole. Makes sense that climate change denial is a conservative thing since it relies on the same magical thinking that we can’t possibly have an effect on the world.
Ok, when does “this is happening everyday, all the time” and “it rarely happens” go from sound law to nannyism?
You probably don’t want to look up statistics of motorcycle crashes that result in disabilities (that society picks up the tab for)vs motorcycle crashes that don’t but I can help you a bit. It doesn’t happen on a very large scale.
Which is why it is Nannyism.