Thank you, I needed to hear that. Intellectually I know that this too shall pass, but some days it is easy to lose sight of this fundamental truth and despair.
He watched a pedestrian cross the road on a green pedestrian light, and complained about the pedestrian not looking
On the one hand, the pedestrian would be safer if they made sure it is safe before crossing. As a pedestrian and a cyclist I'm constantly looking around.
On the other hand, the only reason there is danger in the first place is because of motor vehicles driving fast around pedestrians.
We don't blame women who get assaulted for "not being careful", we blame the people who have assaulted them. The burden of safety should be placed first and foremost on the people who put others in danger.
Well, they pay a small price for their freedom to travel. It's everybody else that has to suffer the externalities of their choices.
Let's tax antisocial behavior, so that these externalities are internalized. Carbon tax, vehicle weight per passenger tax, vehicle volume per passenger tax, etc.
And here I was walking to work trying to suck some coffee through a damp piece of cardboard, while it turns out that the suburban Panzer IV commuters were to blame? What's next?
The clean drugs will kill you eventually, the street drugs will kill you today.
The most common way people die of heroin/opiate overdose happens when they have reduced/stopped their consumption for a while and then something happens in their lives that makes them go back to it. On the first time they use it again, they overdose because they have lost some of their tolerance.
This very common path to overdose will happen whether the drug was pure or not. The root cause is that there is fairly narrow band of dosage in which you get high but don't stop breathing altogether.
Providing pharma grade hard drugs isn't the panacea that some people believe. Nuance is necessary. I haven't even touched on the very real downsides of living next to a clinic that provides services for people addicted to drugs.
Plenty of street drugs are addictive and dangerous even in their pure form. See for example the opiate crisis where many people started their addiction with pharmacologically pure prescription opiates.
In my opinion, and personal experience, it also has a lot to do with not having enough time and energy to think about anything other then putting food on the table
On the other hand, let's not pretend that we don't all waste time on Kardashians, Lemmy and other inane activities. I think the bigger problem is that we are overwhelmed with information, much of it inconsequential stuff, and that detracts from our ability to focus on and prioritize important but difficult topics.
Require vehicle safety standards to test for pedestrian and cyclist survivability first and foremost.
Require a commercial license to drive large and/or heavy vehicles such as pickup trucks. Take it away when a driver gets caught driving unsafely.
Require vehicles to provide better visibility through the windshield, like Europe does.
Design street lanes to be narrow and winding, so that drivers intuitively choose to drive at speeds that are safe for people outside the vehicle. Raise pedestrian crossings at the same level as the sidewalk so that drivers habitually slow down when they see a crossing.
In other words, value the safety of the people outside the vehicle above the speed and convenience of the drivers.
It's my understanding that pilots don't get to choose their callsigns. Instead, it's their teammates who choose them, which is why they are often jokes at the expense of the pilot. E.g. the callsign of Ewan McGregor's brother was OB-2.
We need to transition out thinking from "personal responsibility", which essentially puts the blame on individual people as if we existed in a vacuum, to "how can we improve the system so that this is less likely to happen in the future?". This applies to all sorts of societal issues, from homelessness, to pedestrian/cyclist deaths, to obesity.
Is that the best argument you can put forth against what I'm saying? I can give you some more ammunition: I'm queer, disabled, atheist, an immigrant and vote green. Or perhaps those are collectives that you don't feel comfortable discriminating openly.
For example, a “women’s only” group may be for a group of women who are healing from a sexually violent relationship, so they really don’t want to see men there.
"Maybe that whites-only parenting group could be healing from some trauma caused by POC and they don't really want to see POC there."
Do you see the problem? A POC causing you trauma is not a good reason to reject POC people in general, and a man causing you trauma isn't a good reason to reject men in general either.
A group dedicated to victims of domestic violence could easily encompass both men and women who have suffered from it, whether the perpetrators were men or women. Cis & trans, it bears saying.
A person who has a blanket phobia of people of a particular gender or ethnicity needs therapy to address their sexism/racism. "I don't feel safe around men" has the exact same energy as "I don't feel safe around black people".
Different strokes for different folks. Instead of shitting on something, we can simply say "it is not for me because of X and Y".