Re: "safety"

[richard bies <bies@domain.elided>]

Soapbox.

I like TJCallahan's comments.  It recognizes that "safety" may be an
emotional agenda to which the rational analysis of risk may not apply.

There is no such thing as safety in any absolute sense -- there is only
relative risk.  "Healthy" is a similar non-sense agenda term (for how
many decades has the agenda been how much more "healthy" margerine is --
the supposedly "un-healthy" components are the same -- real butter does
contain a calcium component -- which helps prevent osteoporosis.  The sin
is that butter tastes better.  Want a real zinger in the health field?
To avoid Parkinson's, smoke.  That's what the hard science shows.)

As it is "safer" to force all under twelve to wear a helmet on bicycle --
the injury rate did <not> decline (The helmets do not prevent the injuries
which actually occur).  The actual agenda is more subtle -- motorcyclists
(whatever the efficacy of helmets in that context) have been unacceptably
successful in resisting helmet laws as a matter of personal freedom --
this snubs the Power Trip of the activists -- motorcyclists must be forced
into helmets.  Thus if the helmet cause is introduced while people are
still under the charge of over-protective (and irrational emotion-laden
"safety" buying) mothers, resistance to helmet laws will dissipate.  (The
myth of absolute safety is curcial to activists -- nothing annoys them
quite like pointing-out that we all die anyway.  Of course, personal
freedom is a non-starter with the activists -- the objective of the Power
Trip is forced assent.)

Big Brother has come to be of the wrong sex -- it's more like Big Mother
(although PC'ness has turned against the old "hair on the palms" myth.)


r.m.bies

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