Speed kills…except when it doesn’t.
It didn’t just happen that a majority of the populace bought into the hysteria manufactured about a virus that doesn’t kill 99.8-something percent of the otherwise healthy population. They were primed to buy into it – by decades of programming about saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaafety being the single most important thing in life. Even to the extent of stifling the expression of life.
It goes back generations and has many facets but the most obvious antecedent is the ululation chorus regarding the Danger of Speed – defined by the ululators as any speed beyond that posted on a sign standing by the side of the road. Such speed killed, they said.
Or rather, asserted.
Of a piece with the assertions made recently about “asymptomatic spread” (and not wearing a “mask”) killing.
Usually, “granny” – the hypothetical old person whose actuality never had to be proven before the asserted asymptomatic, non-“masking” putative killer was actually proscribed and punished.
Perhaps you see the correlation?
Apparently, a lot of us just don’t want to. Onwards.
It was never a defense – either in court or by the side of the road – to point out to a cop or a judge that driving 65 rather than 55 (often, on a road that it was previously legal to drive 70 on) had not resulted in any harm or even a screech of the tires. Just as it never made any impression – against the hysterics’ feelings to the contrary – that a person who isn’t sick and hasn’t got any symptoms of sickness cannot spread a sickness he hasn’t got by failing to wear a “mask” – or standing closer than six feet to someone else.
What matters – in both traffic court and the open-air lunatic asylum that was once a relatively sane country – is that something bad might happen. That there is risk. It does not matter that nothing did happen, nor that the risk is attenuated even to statistical non-existence. As, for instance, in the case of young people being at any meaningful risk of dying from the ‘Rona, which they aren’t.
The slightest risk that a hypothetical one among them – even if it is only one hypothetical out of an actual 100,000 of them – is sufficient warrant to impose palliatives and punishments upon all of them, just in case.
Because you can’t be too safe.
And if it saves even one life.
These mantras of the deranged – accepted by the stupid – have become as commonplace as injunctions of the past such as a penny saved is a penny earned. Millions of people who cannot grasp the wisdom of saving anything tangible – including the lives of their children, to say nothing of saving their childrens’ having a life worth living – are willing to lay waste to everything for the sake of preventing the hypothetical something bad from happening to hypothetical “someones” whose specific existence never need be established.

It’s a wonder anyone even goes outside anymore, let alone for a drive.
Yeah, well, FederalGovCo all too obviously has some ideas about how to put a stop to all that—for our own good, natch. Do read the rest; the above is just prelude to the really good part.
Is anybody else out there besides me more than a little bit bemused at how EVERY SINGLE LAST DAMNED SO-CALLED “PROBLEM” WE FACE TODAY seems to have the exact same solution: a humongous expansion of government’s size, power, and reach? Funny, innit? But not in a ha-ha kind of way.
Update! For some reason, I’m reminded of one my favorite old punk-rock chestnuts.
- Entries
Life sucks, get a helmet.
$9.95, made in China.
How good do those government approved helmets work?
🙂