this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2025
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My wife works in a hospital and receives patients from car crashes. If driving without a seatbelt was legal she would find another job.
Intact she has worked in a country where no one, even kids are required to wear seatbelts, and she doesn't want to work like that now
Not everyone's cut out to work in medical care - it's a tough field.
While true, this is a dumb take reflecting why rules like this are important.
Death is a fact of life, and the existence of it is not a sufficient justification for curtailing freedom of choice to engage in dangerous behaviors.
Especially when the entire purpose of that curtailment is so that bastard cops have more of an opportunity to attest brown people. Y'all are getting played.
I see this topic really affects you, it is clear that real life experiences has colored your view on this, and you deserved to not be harassed. (Good luck with this under this administration)
But the fact remains that seatbeltlaws are in place in many countries, including countries where cops dont harras brown people. So this argument doesn't hold water. Nixon did infact talk about racial targeting by illegalizing marijuana, not seatbelts
My wife is a hardy woman, who has treated kids in hospices, people with knifes stuck in their brains, women receiving cecarians that didn't get sedated properly by the anaesthesiologist because their drug use affected how they took the sedation, she regularly treats new amputees, changes bandages of burn victims, washes the asses of elderly, and has to see people where the pavement scraped away half their face. She is 37, and has seen a lot of shit during her career, and what she gets in return is patients that ask why they sent a child in to treat them because she looks like a teenager when she doesn't wear makeup.
She, and the rest of the tax paying public are very happy that seatbelt laws are strict, I dont want to pay my tax money on the crazy amount of money each road fatality cost (its more than you think), this is both true in countries where you don't have free health care like yours, as well as the rest of the western world. It's expensive, both in money, and the toll on the people who will treat you.
If you want to get a little bit of compassion for the people who work in health. Feel free to watch the TV show The Pitt (2025), season one, is set up like every episode is an hour in the shift of the ER. And every 5 minutes my wife says this happened to me, this is realistic, that's how it actually is, that's a realistic amount of blood, that happened to a colleague of mine etc
No, they deserve to be harassed.
Thanks for the detailed and empathetic response. I'm going to disagree with you again here, but I don't bear you any ill will for your opinion, especially in light of your wife's experiences.
I don't think I've had any real life experience color my view on this, thankfully - I've always worn my seatbelt and have never been targeted by cops. My strong reaction to this issue (and I've had literally all of the conversations currently happening in these comments over and over for years now, on here and on the other website) is due to just how ridiculous and self-contradictory it is for people to actually support seatbelt laws based on the arguments you're seeing in these comments.
I'm pretty sure the deeper truth here is that people (or most people at least - I don't think this is true of you, based on your comments here) actually don't care about the safety and trauma they always bring up in these comment sections, not really - I think they just take it personally for some reason that someone else has the audacity to make stupid decisions (even though they themselves are also frequently making stupid decisions they don't notice, and which have their own set of externalities - those stupid decisions are fine, of course), and it makes them feel morally superior to impinge on those individuals' right to make their own choices freely, especially when they have the easy refuge of flimsy "safety" arguments to retreat to. They're moral busybodies, and it's infuriating.
And pointing to nanny state European countries infamous for "protecting" their citizens from the audacity of making their own decisions doesn't settle the argument. Two countries can do the same thing for very different reasons (and if you think European cops defend the working class and not capital I have a bridge to sell you - each of those countries' cops have their own socially acceptable groups to harass instead).
I'm also a part of the tax-paying public, and I'm not happy that seatbelt laws are strict. You spend far more of your tax money on the crazy number of people who need early, intensive medical care due to dozens of different kinds of unhealthy life choices. In fact, I'd argue that the one-time costs of car crash deaths stemming from loosening seatbelt laws is far cheaper than the years or decades of intensive, expensive treatment for preventable conditions arising from other knowingly stupid choices, and yet, once again, for some reason it's stupid choices regarding seatbelts of all things where people come out of the woodwork to be worried about the toll on people and the economy.
Or to act worried so they can feel morally justified (literally) policing the actions of others, at least.
Again, thank you for your comment and your perspective.
You argument is literally whataboutism.
Whataboutism is only when the topic brought up has no direct relevance and is used to distract from the conversation.
Multiple times in this thread others have brought up tax or insurance costs, which makes discussion of those costs and people's attitudes toward them directly relevant to the conversation, especially when it comes to how contradictory and hypocritical those criticisms are in the first place.
It sounds like you’re attempting to think critically though, which is a good starting point. If you'd like a more direct defense of the idea that lack of seatbelt use drives up insurance costs, here you are:
and
I'm afraid you made that up.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
Oh, and
Ad hominem.
Responding with nothing but an endless list of fallacies is the clearest sign that one has no worthwhile argument to make, so I think I'll be ending my engagement with you here.
Sure, let me rectify that and give you an argument.
Driving on a road is about discipline and predictability. Discipline is following the rules, like speed limit, using specific side of the road, using blinkers, stopping on red, etc. That is all necessary, for the driver's behaviour to be predictable to the other road users, both drivers and pedestrians. I'll assume that I don't need to argue that predictability of behaviour in 1 ton caskets going 150km/h is desired?
Given that, refusing to follow belt enforcement rule is a good indicator that the driver decided they can pick and choose which of the rules they want to follow, which makes them undisciplined and suggest to other road users they might be unpredictable.
The law enforcement of that rule intrinsic value lies not in life saving, or monies, or whatever, but in reminding the driver that they need to follow all the rules and behave in a predictable manner.
You can just say "I was wrong and made a stupid comment," you know.
You don't have to double and triple down on literally everything you say.
Try it sometime. It's rather nice.
Thanks for the advice - as soon as I'm wrong and make a stupid comment, I'll be sure to.
Not really sure how that's relevant to the thread though.
Yeah. Who knows, bud.
Hopefully you become intelligent enough to figure it out someday