2 ms·

A former coworker of mine always refused to wear a seatbelt, and to my knowledge still does. He was in a car accident and had major damage to his legs, hips, an

by pc86 5y ago

A former coworker of mine always refused to wear a seatbelt, and to my knowledge still does. He was in a car accident and had major damage to his legs, hips, and back. Traction, several surgeries, you get the idea. Because he's too stupid to wear a seatbelt he incurred a lot of costs, both financial and psychological, for a lot of people. > Still wildly disproportionate and an idiotic formal response to a minor bad decision. Any interaction with the justice system has to have imprisonment at the end of the line. Not because that's the right way to do it, but because it just doesn't work otherwise. Let's imagine a scenario where a law is passed saying you cannot be imprisoned for a speeding ticket under any circumstances. As long as you don't get in an accident, you can go 150mph down the highway and you won't go to jail. Okay so you get a ticket for an obscene amount of money. But you can't pay it, or you just don't. Do we just throw our hands up and say "shucks, you got us on that one?" Even if you have wages to garnish or property to forfeit, you'd have to take those costs into account and now for a $500 ticket you're having your car repo'd or your wages garnished by 10% for months. It doesn't seem like an oppressive socialist hellscape to me to just say "you know what, you either pay your ticket or you go to jail, and if you're going fast enough, just go straight to jail."

roenxi 5y ago
I'm not certain that a 3rd party would read that as something I agree with, so I'll just note: 1st paragraph - that looks like someone bearing the costs for their bad decision personally to me. Which is why they should be the one making the decision. 2nd & 3rd - yep. That comes close to the extended argument for why it is stupid to legally mandate wearing seatbelts. The level of threat required to enforce a minor requirement is absurd. People shouldn't be subjected to that sort of legal hazard without a high bar of justification.
- scaramanga 5y ago
  Yes, it's true that there are lonely people who nobody cares about, who don't have loved ones who are effectively blackmailed in to becoming nurses and carers for them after they self-harm. Some of those people are also contributing enough to cover their medical expenses and maybe they exist in a society where somehow they aren't taking medical resources away from equally or more deserving others. On the other hand, however, a lot of people exist as parts of families and communities. They don't need to be mandated not to harm themselves in acts of sheer stupidity because they think about the consequences of their own actions and would be mortified to imagine themselves in a situation where medical resources are being expended on them for no other reason than their own narcissism. But more to the point, at times the task of a democracy boils down to deciding which of these two sorts of personality the society should be geared towards supporting or whether it makes sense to limit the amount of damage that lunatics and sociopths and can do to themselves or to the rest of us for that matter.

by pc86 5y ago

roenxi 5y ago

I'm not certain that a 3rd party would read that as something I agree with, so I'll just note: 1st paragraph - that looks like someone bearing the costs for their bad decision personally to me. Which is why they should be the one making the decision. 2nd & 3rd - yep. That comes close to the extended argument for why it is stupid to legally mandate wearing seatbelts. The level of threat required to enforce a minor requirement is absurd. People shouldn't be subjected to that sort of legal hazard without a high bar of justification.

scaramanga 5y ago
Yes, it's true that there are lonely people who nobody cares about, who don't have loved ones who are effectively blackmailed in to becoming nurses and carers for them after they self-harm. Some of those people are also contributing enough to cover their medical expenses and maybe they exist in a society where somehow they aren't taking medical resources away from equally or more deserving others. On the other hand, however, a lot of people exist as parts of families and communities. They don't need to be mandated not to harm themselves in acts of sheer stupidity because they think about the consequences of their own actions and would be mortified to imagine themselves in a situation where medical resources are being expended on them for no other reason than their own narcissism. But more to the point, at times the task of a democracy boils down to deciding which of these two sorts of personality the society should be geared towards supporting or whether it makes sense to limit the amount of damage that lunatics and sociopths and can do to themselves or to the rest of us for that matter.