I strongly disagree with these opinions. Wear a seat belt if you like, it might save you from injury or death but, why does it have to be compulsory ?

This is my issue here. I wear a seat belt every time I drive, and I would be an idiot if I didn’t. The Police can advise me to wear one, but I don’t understand why I can face prosecution if I don’t bother. I’m being punished for placing myself at risk.

I don’t wish to die in a road accident, so I will wear a belt every time. When I worked for the Royal Mail I saw many of the guys in the van not bother. The logic being that for every mail bag dropped off, the ‘clunk click’ would add up to a whole extra five minutes on shift. This issue arises because the RM pay you to work a shift, say 5:30 to 14:30. Therefore you are motivated to finish at 13:00, knowing full well that that extra 1hr 30 can be spent at home, or down the pub, whilst still on the company clock. Petty. However, the post men obviously didn’t consider it a risk, though in the days of sliding side doors one of the boys had toppled a van whilst turning too quickly, not been wearing a belt, and slid out and under the still toppling van to become a dark mark on the road and little more. Again, he was the only victim of his own crime here.

There I was thinking you slept with a copy of Atlas Shrugged under your pillow.

I expect there will be some who claim it is their right to have the freedom to use their phone while driving…..

A somewhat hysterical post. I saw people getting their panties in a wad over ‘strawmen’ arguments last week. With this in mind, I’m assuming you are refering to my seat belt thread and therefore I can only conclude that this is a strawman argument you are presenting here. The notion that anybody would argue that it is their right to use their phone while driving is absurd, so you rightly ridicule it. The problem is that you are trying to use this obvious ridicule to discredit any argument made in the seat belt thread, which I see as a far less cut and dry issue. A few people over there seem to lack the critical faculties to get past the ‘but its common sense mate’ end of the argument spectrum, but I don’t see that as a reason to bitch about it tirelessly in unrelated threads.

Now, if driving without a seat belt somehow distracted the driver enough that they might kill a 3rd party then your argument would make some sense.

To use the slightly strange post formatting seen on this site:

Re #11

You will always have two apposing sides to any argument the problem comes with those who employ other means to make their own point more prominent than the other side.

A somewhat tautologous statement. By its very definition and argument has two opposing sides.

Re #10

I think the article has everything to do with the point I made. I mentioned ‘right whingers’, who I view as a different section of society from those with right wing views. The latter can argue a point well and the former get their jollies off on stupid puff pieces such as the one I linked to. Given the knee-jerk nature of the original post in this thread, I dare say it was written by a ‘whinger rather than a ‘winger.

When you post both the following statements…

“I’ve had enough of cow towing to the human rights of others.”

…and…

“I’ve had enough of my human rights being abused.”

then you cannot have it both ways.

All of this is overshadowed by “Ive had enough of our government sitting by and watching my country bow to these people.”

Which people? Just come out and say muslims, you coward.

I think there might be a ‘Primark argument’ in force with people that phone and drive. Everybody knows Primark goods are stitched together by children in the third world, but people still do it. You could probably sit all those offender drivers down in a test centre somewhere and get them to display remorse until the cows came home, but give them a few weeks and they would be back at it. Maybe this can be lumped in as a tragedy of the commons scenario. Using their logic, if it were just me that drove whilst having a phone conversation then all would be good, it is those other more feckless drivers that will have the accident.

The way I see it I’m an oddity because I turn my phone off at night. People live vicariously through their phones and we currently have a work place culture that makes you feel like you must be available at all times.

I’m thinking aloud here.

I was in a bar a few years back that was styled as an old library. Amazingly the books were real and readily accessible! One book, dating back to the 1950s, was a highschool textbook on the subject of Africa. Coverage of native African people was scant; barely half a page in total. Helpfully, the book broke down native Africans into their four ‘types’, which must have helped kids back then immensely. I seem to recall that type four was “true negro”, depicted as just short of bone-in-nose-missionary-in-the-pot levels of savagery. I wonder if this was tested at O level?

What science knows and can proves is the equivalent of how much water a gnat crapping in the ocean would displace.
If they would spend more time to see how God might have done what God did, with or without the word God, rather than trying to prove what they think is how it should have been done, there would be no quarrels as they would go about it admitting they know nothing and are onlytrying to learn what might, or might not, have happened.

Have any qualifications to back up this claim? By default you appear to class ‘science’ as a singular, collectivist unit which suggests to me that your scientific qualifications come from the university of lyfe.

The idea that they (who?) are “trying to prove what they think is how it should have been done”, whatever that means, is perversely misguided.