If “if” were a skiff, we could go fishing. – Louisiana saying
The world is an immense machine made up of an inconceivably-large number of independently-moving parts, any number of which could potentially act upon others in such a way as to precipitate disaster; once entropy is added to the mixture, it becomes literally impossible to predict the total number of things that might go wrong in one’s immediate environment on any given day. Fortunately, it isn’t necessary to do so; the overwhelming majority of such possible events are so exceedingly unlikely that they can essentially be ignored. A much smaller subset of possible events is likely enough that the prudent person takes precautions against them; deciding whether an eventuality is worth protecting oneself against is part of the give and take necessary for material existence. A blasé attitude toward likely dangers may soon lead to disaster, while excessive concern over highly unlikely ones will inevitably lead to crippling anxiety; functional people fall somewhere in the middle. For example, any sensible whore insists on measures to protect herself from sexually transmitted infections, but she wouldn’t complete very many calls if she insisted that prospective clients provide recent bloodwork proving that they were free from the Black Death. The former is likely enough to be cause for concern, but the latter is not; a sane and sensible person can tell the difference.
Unfortunately, Western society is no longer sane or sensible; things were bad enough when authoritarian governments enacted criminal laws to intrude into every area of public and private life, but the modern American obsession with “safety”, coupled with the dangerous belief that every mishap can be blamed on some specific person or persons, has created a nightmare scenario: Not only can individuals be ruinously sued for situations they could not realistically have prevented, they can also be prosecuted for refusing to be paralyzed into complete inactivity by anticipation of every remote possibility of danger. Furthermore, modern governments think nothing of inflicting onerous or even ruinous restrictions on the entire population in a futile attempt to prevent rare occurrences; consider the immense economic and societal costs of the numerous measures to “raise awareness” and protect children from abduction, despite the fact that only 0.014% of all “missing” legal minors are abducted by strangers, and the vast majority of those are older teenagers. Or how about attempting to trample the Constitution and make life far more dangerous for escorts by banning Backpage in a futile effort to stop a few dozen underage girls in the entire country from advertising there? Or imposing shockingly paternalistic restrictions on the buying or selling of foodstuffs for millions of people on the off-chance that a tiny number of them with insufficient willpower to either control themselves or violate the ban will be made marginally healthier by such a law?
Besides the intrinsic evil of restricting personal liberty, the tremendous waste of resources that could be better used elsewhere, the suppression of opportunities for moral growth and the generation of innumerable new excuses for arrest and prosecution of individuals, “What if?” laws produce one more important effect: a degeneration in the quality of life for everyone affected by them. After my hysterectomy, the hospital endocrinologist insisted that I should consider other “options” rather than hormone replacement because oral estrogens increase the risk of cancer. In other words, he actually tried to convince me that going through menopause (with its attendant aging effects) at 28 years old was somehow a valid choice, and that a reasonable woman might indeed choose a half-century of old age in order to lower her risk of a terminal disease near the end of that period. Luckily, I was given that choice, but some people are not so fortunate; nanny-state laws often remove options entirely, condemning them to lives of sickness, pain or other conditions which drain life of everything that makes it worth living in the name of “preventing” something that in all likelihood would never have come to pass.
One Year Ago Today
“July Updates (Part One)” reports on the effective repeal of Louisiana’s “Crime Against Nature By Solicitation” statute, the lawhead war against lemonade stands, and the persecution of yet another escort review and advertising site.
Again. spot on. I wonder if any of the Safety Czars realize that none of us gets out of this world alive?
We whores are on the front line of that. We daily risk disease, and disaster from psycho customers. But we take sensible steps to prevent, or mitigate those risks.
None of us are meant to live forever. nature has come with with unlimited ways to see to that, and we humans have added quite a few of our own.
I suppose one could live a perfectly safe life, sitting in a padded room, touching no one, eating only sterilized food and drinking distilled water. And in the end, they’d die. But what they would have lost was a life.
At 15, I was diagnosed with adolescent onset arthritis. I was told I’d likely be in a wheelchair by 30. I saw people in their twenties who were. I said to hell with that, and decided that I’d use my body up well before that, so I lived hard, and had as much adventure and fun as I could manage. And now I’m past 50, and a physical wreck, but still not wheel chair bound. I made up my mind that despite the pain, I was going to stay active. I may (It’s becoming obvious I can’t) win against arthritis for ever, but I can win one more day.
The idea that we can control our environment completely, and can filter out all risk, is a wrong one. Because with some risk comes the fun, and a life without that is no life at all.
Extremely well-said! I’ve never understood why the fear of death (or even worse, or mere pain) absolutely paralyzes some people; since both are inevitable, being afraid of them is like being afraid of hunger or sleep.
Kudos on beating your arthritis off for as long as possible; Grace has it in both legs due to a motorcycle accident in her 20s, and she still doesn’t walk with a cane yet though her doctors insisted she would need one by 35 (she’s 54 now). Similarly, my doctors insisted I’d be “dependent” on pain medication for the rest of my life after I fractured my lower spine in 1995; I haven’t taken even a single pain pill for it yet, and don’t plan to. I sometimes wonder if physicians don’t tell people things like that in order to trigger their natural obstinacy and thereby inspire them to fight.
Thanks, although it’s becoming clear that I am fighting a losing battle. I’ve given up playing guitar, and piano. The joints in my hands are pretty damaged, these days.My knees are shot, and the vertebrae in my neck are very worn. But- I certainly will have some stories to tell in the OAP home!
And to me, that’s the point. Since none of us will last forever, it’s best to fill life with adventures. I’d hate to live out my years and do nothing.
We’re all fighting a losing battle; try as we may Death always wins in the end. That’s why I’ve always (since at least my mid-teens) viewed him as an opponent rather than an enemy, a lover rather than a destroyer. None of us will win against him, so any contest with him cast as a war is a doomed one. I’m just playing hard to get, letting him chase me barefoot and giggling through the garden, and when he corners me at last – as he inevitably must – I will succumb to his embrace tired and ready, without fear or anger.
“I USHERED SOULS INTO THE NEXT WORLD. I WAS THE GRAVE OF ALL HOPE. I WAS THE ULTIMATE REALITY. I WAS THE ASSASSIN AGAINST WHOM NO LOCK WOULD HOLD.
– ‘Yes, point taken, but do you have any particular skills?’
— Death consults a job broker (Terry Pratchett, Mort)”
I love DEATH. He never can remember how the Knight moves in Chess, either. 😉
the saying we have in Greece to mock this mentality goes sth like ”if my grandmother had balls,she would be my grandfather”.
Ha! I’ve heard that one as well! 😀
The version I’ve heard is, “If my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle.”
Or simply my ball-bearing aunt, I suppose.
Penn and Teller had a great episode about this. The insidious thing is that worrying ourselves sick about things that are unlikely to happen can increase the chance that other things can. Imprisoning your children inside can increase their obesity. Burning resources to prevent child abduction takes those resources away from stopping real abuse and neglect.
Human beings have to *weigh* risks and manage risks. “Preventing risk” is an oxymoron.
Another one which doctors are only starting to warn about (though I was saying it literally 20 years ago) is that an overly-sanitary environment is the main cause of children’s allergies and food intolerances. Such things are almost unknown in places where kids still play in the dirt.
Exactly. This trend towards super-sterile conditions has increased autoimmune problems, now the third biggest killer behind cancer and heart disease. Lupus, multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease etc. have all become more prevalent, some of them have even quadrupled in the last few decades.
You might want to read up about some more myth-making.
http://glpiggy.net/2012/07/02/political-conventions-and-hookers/
Good item for Saturday. Thanks!
A personal experience I had with silly safety concerns was the birth of our daughter. The delivery was a scheduled c-section so we show up and my wife is prepped and ready to go into the operating room and I’m suiting up in the cheap scrubs that dads get. The booties won’t fit over my shoes, so I take my shoes and socks off, put the booties on and follow the parade in. My wife is on the table ready to go and a nurse suddenly sees I’m not wearing shoes and she starts to freak out. She tries to force me out of the room because there could be sharp objects on the floor contaminated with blood and I might get stuck or cut and get infected with who knows what. I pointed out the blood she’s worried about is my wife’s who with all the regular check ups for her pregnancy is the one person in the room certified to have no major blood born diseases and after 15 years of marriage and our now third child if she has something I’ve already got it, thanks. She wouldn’t let up, logic clearly being foreign to her, until the anesthesiologist stepped in pointed out that I was right and that she was delaying the procedure. Things went just fine, I managed not to step on anything and now I just wish my now 13 year old daughter will quickly outgrow the petulant phase.
You were lucky – I got kicked out of my wife’s last birth. They started giving her an epidural and had her on her feet in the bed and she was in pain and I was pretty concerned. Sometimes my “WTF?” face looks a lot like an “Imma bout to strangle someone” face – and the nurse booted me right the fuck out.
I didn’t say a word – just left.
They called me back in though before my daughter was born. 😀
The nurses said that no-one was allowed in while an epidural and catheter (you need one if you get an epidural) are put in.
Oddly enough, when I had my spinal tap, they had my dad stay in (mostly so he could make sure I stayed in the right position — it tickles like you wouldn’t believe).
Hmm, deadly cancer causing hormones? Like… the pill?
I sometimes think that doctors forget that everyone doesn’t take everything they say as if they were just trying to protect themselves from a law suit. Over kill, however, is way less scary than the alternative, which is when they play down the danger so they can test out new drugs or techniques, or just because they want more money. I have a 50 percent hearing loss in my left ear, and hey offered to “fix” it if I didn’t mind not putting my head under water for 6 months and never scuba diving ever, and also potentially having inner ear problems, and accelerated hearing loss. Oh, and since the surgery was explorative, it might not work.
No thanks!
I noticed you talked about paternalistic food bans, and of course one of the biggest problems with food is that it has its own equivalent of the neofeminists, the radical vegans. (Think PETA and their ilk.)
These are people who have no problem spreading lies about nutrition because they simply believe that “the ends justify the means,” much the way the neofeminists approach heterosexual sex. (In fact, there is a large amount of crossover between the two groups.)
And since these groups are an intellectual vanguard, who wait around with legislation at the ready for lazy legislators who just want to pass feel good legislation and don’t particularly feel like becoming informed, you get suspicious things like the “happy meal toy ban” which I wouldn’t be surprised has it’s roots in the radical anti-meat movement.
While I don’t have a problem with people who don’t eat meat for moral reasons, or even want to convince others of their position, these radicals have no problem with lying, bullying, violence or the destruction of property to accomplish their aims.
This is a really good article, that illustrated a very interesting.
I know we don’t agree on a lot of things and I think that your some of ideas are very close to those of the groups you hate the most. I do admire your moral character and think you’re… an honest courtesan. Like, if you were elected to public office, you would not go bonkers and start arresting your opponents and lining your pockets with tax money or anything.
And I cannot express how much better you are than almost any other blogger on the internet. There is a white nationalist brony on the internet. A racist who thinks that a cartoon aimed a little girls justifies his bigotry. That Princess Celestia, magical pony ruler of Equestria had a pet was one of the reason he cited as to why she was better than Jesus. And the way he organized the data made it look just as important as any other plot point.
Also, excellent unintentional argument for inherent paternalism of opposing regulation of the economy.
I just like to clarity that it’s my place to say favoring the worship of a magical Pegasus-Unicorn over Christianity is wrong. It’s just that the way he organized his poster gave equal weight to his point about pets compared to more effective arguments.
Poor Information Design and useability is how we lost the space shuttle Columbia.
I know it’s been over half a year, but can you dredge up a link to that guy? He seems like a perfect example for a study in ‘doing it wrong’.
This is JUST for you! 😀
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/07/02/video-are-you-ready-for-bronycon/
This for you:
When I was a little kid my Mom used to send me out to play. My buddies and I ran around like little hooligans, having dirt bomb fights at construction sites, playing backyard football or cowboys and indians (sorry, I mean cowboys and native americans) in the woods nearby. We knew when it got dark to go home for dinner.
That was normal then. Today the kids all have “play dates” under adult supervision. My Mom would likely get arrested for child abuse.
Check out Free Range Kids.
You tell ’em sister!!
Heh, there’s THOUSANDS pages of safety rules I have to follow in my job – and if I followed them all, it would take me three months to do a one month mission and, there’s really no way the government is going to pay to keep me out here for three times longer than I already am.
And you know what? The government doesn’t expect me to follow those rules – they expect me to “pick and choose” which one’s I’ll follow to balance off between mission and safety to get the job done.
But – they don’t say that. They won’t tell anyone that those rules are simply there as a “cover your ass” method to push liability down to the lowest level. If I get hurt – under the bus I shall go! “Well, you know – Krulac was trained over and over again on the specific safety procedures and he chose to ignore them anyway – it’s too bad he’s in the hospital!!”
LOL!!
Hey … how many “passwords” do you have to remember? If you’re like me you have like 50. They tell you – “Don’t make them all the same” … “Don’t write them down to remember them” … “Don’t make them something easy to guess – make them random” … “Include at least 15 characters and mix up upper and lower case and special characters!!”
LMFAO!! It’s impossible to remember 50 totally random passwords unless you write them down or cheat on the other rules – like using the same p-word over and over again!
Lunacy!
I made it to Kodiac, Alaska today and the scenery here is simply gorgeous! I lost fuckin’ 12 pounds this deployment because the cook here was the worst I’ve ever experienced. I’m out of here and headed into town for a steak to put these pounds back on!!!
I recommend LastPass (http://lastpass.com/) as a password management tool. All those rules for passwords are really important for making passwords that actually keep people out and it is necessary to follow them.
Usually they say not to write them down in a place people can find them, not that writing them down at all is bad.
Here’s good cartoon about passwords.
If you really are trying to be NSA secure though, then you want bio-metrics or token (a key, something you have) plus a passcode (something you know).
Otherwise you are just letting the Spaniards into the pantry!
hahaha, ironic that my government makes me a criminal if I don’t sign up for Selective Service and also a criminal if I should go out to the desert and do shrooms….
they’d gladly have me kill or be killed for oil and say it’s all for freedom-whose the real criminal….
It’s wild that shrooms and such are banned in the name of safety, when shrooms are about as safe as it gets. You couldn’t eat enough of the things to OD, not if you tried. What’s dangerous is that you could end up eating some OTHER kind of mushroom. A danger which pretty much wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the ban.
So much for safety.
[…] My column from Monday, about how institutional obsession with “what if?” destroys lives. […]
Consider the average of death and disability from using automobiles. On an average day in the US there are about 123 deaths from automobile accidents, and 685 additional injuries. We tolerate these because driving automobiles supports a freer life and a higher standard of living. Driving is a vital part of our society, although the lifetime risk of dying from an auto accident is about 1%, injury about 5%.
Yet, we spend millions of dollars per life saved to reduce tiny probabilities of injury. STudies are done about supposed lives saved from new policy. I don’t recall seeing a study which relates less wealth to lives lost. How many lives would be saved if regulatory costs decreased by $100 per person each year? It may be more than the live saved by imposing the regulations.
Once computers drive cars better than people do, that risk can mostly be eliminated.
And that day is a-comin’ soon.