Check this out. I read something on Facebook that made me angry. So I looked it up to understand it better rather than just click SHARE.
Sorry – ranty, rambly semi-get-off-my-lawn you-know-what-the-REAL-problem is kinda post with probably-unpopular opinions that I don’t expect anyone to care about but it DOES help me sort things out in my head…
I was thinking about how Trump will PROBABLY get away with outright making up values on his financial documents because “caveat emptor” AND how my blinds need to be covered in a paragraph or two of legalese warning that you could accidentally hang yourself with them. About how there’s no legal need for “organic” foods to be anything recognizable as “organic” but there’s got to be language on any product that, if ground up and snorted might cause cancer – like a guitar pedal – warning it’s a potential carcinogen. Drugs advertised on television don’t have to be proven to do what they claim they do, but they’ve got to have a legal warning that “if you’re allergic to this drug, you shouldn’t take this drug”.
I was thinking about the absurdity of who we protect and why. How we care about “market pressures” up to a point, how capitalism only safeguards us capitalists if there’s SOME requirement for truth in advertising, and about how democracy only works if there’s SOME requirement for truth in politics. Neither structure works with an absolutist reading of the First Amendment. We got away with it as long as information moved slowly enough that you had to go through effort and expense to publish something, but now – disinformation and rage-posting and social media undermine any but the most stout-hearted attempt at being a decently-informed consumer of either product or government.
In the American relationship with government, I absolutely understand that we’re generationally scarred from a system in which we felt that it was dangerous to allow our government to tell us what’s true and what’s not – but we shouldn’t also have to Live in a system that’s an absolute free-for-all of falsehood. I don’t have any REAL idea of how we can turn back the clock on this concept of malleable veracity, but I also have no real hope for the future unless we can.
Fringe used to just… occupy the edges… with a nice, big portion of structural sanity occupying the middle of our politics. Now it’s ALL fringe. Nothing much left in the centre to support all the frothing, panicky, extremists that have taken over the nation from left AND right.
I wish I could have optimism about the world.
But I don’t.
(special credit to Brian Dunning’s article about spotting misinformation that starts out with the idea that if it makes you angry, you should fact check the Hell out of it – and that he realized he needed to do extra work because he was letting labels and bumper stickers effect his view of people – that’s a terrible synopsis, but it’s an admirable conclusion : https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4910 )
I went down a rabbit hole recently reading about Section 24220 in Biden’s Infamoustructure Bill from November of 2021. There are people reporting it as a drunk driving measure, others saying it’s a KILL SWITCH for your car, etc – I’m not diving into that too extensively. Short version is that Congress has told the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to come up with rules and regulations for implementing built-in passive inebriation sensors that could be used to correct for driving if it’s determined that you’re being too chaotic on the road. Passive means “NOT a breathalyzer” and probably means driving behaviour, though how that’s distinguishable from distracted or simply bad driving I’m not sure.
https://www.congress.gov/117/plaws/publ58/PLAW-117publ58.pdf#page=403
In all fairness, yes – this kills around 10,000 people a year in the United States (and Congress being Congress, they can put a dollar amount on this as well, claiming the estimated economic cost for alcohol-impaired driving in 2010 was 44 billion dollars – [I somehow doubt Congress ACTUALLY values EVERY person’s Life as equivalent to 4.4 million dollars, I’d be curious as to how they do their math here – especially since I remember looking this up when the Pandemic started – and it was more like EIGHT million* : https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/11/upshot/virus-price-human-life.html ])
What I find fascinating is that most recently the National Transportation Safety Board ACTUALLY filed a report saying “you know what kills people? Speed kills people!” (2k MORE than “just” alcohol** – and it’s probably a safe bet that there’s a good deal of overlap here) and basically said, “you know, if you really want to cut down on traffic deaths you’ve got all these sensors on your car, and the GPS knows where it is, put those hands together and you know what the speed limit is. Make cars that DO the SPEED LIMIT and you’ll save a lot of Lives!”
https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20231114.aspx
But – Congress didn’t try to implement THAT – presumably because fighting drunk driving is an easy lobbyist sell (supported by MADD, etc) whereas no-one wants to simply tell people to just slow the Hell down, even though that’d also provide an effective 15-40% cut in fossil fuel consumption. Hell, it’s why we have cars that can go 100mph even though the highest speed limit in the US is 85. We have the freedom to be stupid. Even when that freedom can send us slamming into others…
(reminder of when I went to the police about a man taking advantage of a family member and they were very clear that the law protects from “fraud, not people making stupid decisions” [to believe in fraudulent people taking advantage of them])
I’m exhausted by it all. And then add in all the idiot articles and YouTub- no – that’s the thing isn’t it? They’re NOT idiot articles and YouTube videos! They’re intelligently skewed articles and YouTube videos carefully tailored to miss the point of what’s going on and get people to get JUST angry enough to click “share” and “subscribe” and to vote they way they were already going to vote, but not angry enough to actually write a letter or research anything or DO anything.
Sigh. I’m gonna go read the warning labels on the plastic bags that came with my new television that if I ground up and snorted would TOTALLY probably cause me cancer so that I can go back to Hulu and be reminded that I shouldn’t take Xanax for my anxiety if I’m allergic to Xanax and by the way one of the side-effects of Xanax is to cause anxiety.
*I’d absolutely be open to the math that collateral deaths are valued at 8 million dollars, and then there’s property damage, and then the actual drunk causing the accident is valued at zero
**actually, reading more about this I guess it’s important to note that LAST year our drunk driving numbers were up, killing 13,000+ people…