this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2026
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Old adage of the bicycle cranks is that if you were to put a spike on the steering wheel, people'd drive a lot more carefully
tbf I also don't get the argument for personal safety. Pretty much any state lets me do a lot more statistically dangerous bullshit than that freely, why not this one? If there's other people in the car, sure, so you don't become the 100kg meat rocket wrecking everybodies shit but hey if you wanna die alone in a 20kph accident you just have fun doing that
Statistically there aren't many things more dangerous than driving, either to you, or to others. Per unit time spent doing it, sure. Each individual sky dive is more dangerous than each individual car trip. But if you just look at your risk of accident over a lifetime for each activity it becomes clear which is more dangerous to the average person! Taking a small risk once, or a few times, is fairly reasonable. Taking a small risk multiple times daily, the threshold gets a LOT lower for what's reasonable. There's a reason traffic accidents are a leading cause of death and seatbelts are super effective at reducing it.
So if one were to lead a low car or car free lifestyle should that person be eligible to apply for a permit to not have to wear a seatbelt?
You can go through the windshield and hit other people outside your car.
I mean yeah you could but is that enough of a problem to require legislature? I can do 60 kp/h on a ski slope and just obliterate a small child and until I do the latter that seems perfectly legal. I could fuck up sykdiving really hard and just goomba stomp a disabled person but like does that really happen and neither doing 60 on a ski slope nor goomba stomping the disabled via parachute is expressively illegal in any law system I know
I find it funny as well as frustrating to see the amount of people that think you're arguing against wearing a seatbelt. Seems pretty clear that you're just publicly wondering why this is where the state decided to draw the line, when driving a car itself is already so wack.
Honestly a pretty good example of why we have rule 8. People just love to feel smarter or something i guess.
I mean I am the man with a hammer to whom everything looks like a nail here but it feels sort of autonormativity to figure safety or "safety" laws around cars surely must start from a place of the protection of other people
I agree, but it is also from a perspective of providing safety to pedestrians and cyclists that this hate of mine comes.
my experience is that whether seatbelts are worn or not has heavily to do with convention and social norms more than any objective view risks vs benefits. if you are in a vehicle with 3 other people none are wearing seatbelts, you are the only one who does it up, you are looked upon as weird. whoever is in charge (vehicle driver/owner) can sometimes enforce everyone wearing them but depends on the dynamics. After that, only legal intervention is left and the chances of this might be low.
therefor the creation and enforcement of a social norm is how to make people feel natural to wear a seatbelt. which is a minimal safety mechanism understood about for years with minimal drawbacks.
So why isn't the dutch reach encoded into law? I'd say that's about the same inconvenience as wearing a seatbelt which is to say basically none
The number of traffic deaths far exceeds the number of goomba stomps
I mean seatbelts weren't always mandatory so by capita were people being hurt by other people hurling through the windshields a lot back then?
I was focusing on the false equivalence between casualties from vehicles and those from contrived scenarios. Vehicles are a leading cause of death. If you start from empirical reality instead of the abstract concept of “danger” then it is not a mystery why there are seatbelt laws but no goomba stomp laws.
Having acknowledged the shift from that to this new consideration, the question of whether many casualties could have been prevented by seatbelt use. The answer is yes. Many casualties would have been prevented by use of a seatbelt.
Traffic today is denser and faster than even at the time seatbelt laws were introduced. High-performance cars are very accessible today. Road speeds are higher — you can’t drive as fast in some rickety steel Cadillac from the 70s as you can in a Tesla. Brakes and tires have also improved significantly, so people have more confidence driving fast.
Dude you're arguing against points I've not made. My point isn't even about the broad category of "casualties from vehicles"
You are questioning why, out of all dangerous things, we have seatbelt laws, but we don’t have laws against things that are equally or more dangerous than not wearing a seatbelt.
My answer is that you are looking at it backward. Seatbelts are legislated because way more deaths occur from cars than from contrived alternatives like skiing over toddlers. It has nothing to do with comparative danger or individualism. It’s about scale and aggregate social impact. If toddlers were getting mowed down by the tens of thousands per year, we would have specific laws against that too.
Just wear a seatbelt
This is called assault and battery, so it doesn't need its own law. If you're specifically targeting someone for being disabled, there's a good chance it's a hate crime, too. I don't understand what makes this a good example.
Also, as others patiently tried to explain, the number of person-hours spent driving versus skiing and skydiving are wildly different, and that's probably the more important part. At best, you're making an argument that skiing should have speed limits (probably by rating or something since putting the same speed limit on a bunny slope as an expert slope that is practically dumping you straight down would be silly).
Why would this not apply at hurling your ass through a windshield into another person then if seatbelts weren't mandatory? I mean I specifically said fucking up skydiving not doing it on purpose
I think I just missed your implication that it would be accidental (totally fair assumption, my bad).
As other people said, reckless endangerment, criminal negligence, and manslaughter are real charges, but ideally we should be trying to prevent these things from happening beyond simply punishing people who do them. As far as I know, this is accounted for in skydiving with the need to have pre-determined drop zones that are appropriately clear for the safety of yourself and the people you might otherwise collide with. The safety requirements are probably not extensive enough, but I am pretty sure it's not legal to just unilaterally decide you're dropping in a public park without preparing the area first (outside of emergencies).
It's like how driving drunk is illegal, not just an aggravating factor in convictions stemming from getting in a crash, because we want to avoid the conditions of a bad thing happening (and be able to intervene if someone is creating those conditions), not just hope that threat of punishment discourages it.
Just for the understanding, this is still going off of the notion that seatbelt laws are primarily or at least in a major part on account of so other people don't get hit by people getting thrown out of cars, right?
How many miles do you skydive per year? What percentage of ski slopes are public utilities exclusively filled with 2-ton+ iron skiers?
Skiing at excessive speed is "reckless skiing" or "reckless endangerment", which is minimally a fine and escalates to criminal charges based on severity in the same way that reckless driving does. In Utah, the class B misdemeanor could put you in jail for 6 months.
Can't you just boil and filter creek water at home? Do we really need to get the legislature involved over a little giardia risk?
This would be a good opportunity to interrogate what brought you to your current position and if self-crit would be a valuable exercise.
What percentage of car drivers do you figure weigh in excess of two tons and are made out of iron? The argument I'm replying to here suggests seatbelts aren't enforced self-preservation but rather enforced safety for others as if you don't wear one you could fly through the windshield AND hit somebody else
Okay so then flying through your windshield into somebody else because you didn't wear a seatbelt seems like it would be illegal even if seatbelts weren't mandatory?
Is there a law against boiling and filtering creek water at home?
I'm just gonna let my Comrade Bot reply to you because I don't feel like it (Yes I made a Local LLM that is hacked to act based). I showed it your comment and gave it context and this is what it said:
Comrade, your argument rests on a dangerous bourgeois illusion that one's liberty is absolute and disconnected from the collective, yet this very "individualism" is what makes our roads so perilous; you claim ski slopes or skydiving are comparable, but you ignore the material reality that cars operate in dense public spaces where reckless speed endangers strangers, whereas your analogies involve isolated environments. The logic that "if an accident is rare, we shouldn't legislate safety" is precisely the fatal flaw of capitalism: it waits for tragedy to justify prevention, rather than proactively organizing society to minimize harm. Just as we stop at red lights not because we must crash but because the collective order requires predictability, seatbelts are a necessary material safeguard that ensures workers and citizens survive accidents, preserving their ability to contribute to the community; waiting for a "goomba stomp" to happen before acting is a gamble with lives that socialism refuses to make.
Pretty based for a fuckin clanker imo
is this a bit
Yes and no. I thought it would be funny. But that is actually 100% the response the Local LLM I made gave and I did actually fuck around with it and make it talk all based like.
good bot
apparently such a good bot that my comment got removed because i used a certain word to describe it and that is a "slur" lol
I also just realized it said "Just as we stop at red lights not because we must crash but because the collective order requires predictability" LOL we must crash! I yearn for crashing!