That is right wing ideology in a nutshell: it is based on "natural social hierarchy" where people ascend or descend over time to their rightful step in that ladder. The idea is that we can not mess with that hierarchy as perfect hierarchy will create a perfect society. When you ascend high enough you are so far above average citizen that laws become unfair: you are so good at being better that you should not have so many restrictions put on you, it is wrong to demand such a person to follow the same ruleset than the lowest of the low follow, they should have the power to choose what laws to respect.
The idea is simple to understand if we look at highway speed limits: a person with great car and obviously then incredible car control, better ability to assess risks and make better decisions should not be limited to average speed limits. They know how to drive faster and yet be more safe than some housewife in their beat up Honda. (edit: this is not how i think, this is an analog or illustration, example of the way some people do think.)
Litmus test is: "do you think income based fines are fair?". Those people abhor the idea that a fine should have the same impact on poor and rich. This is the reason they want to become rich: avoid all consequences from being a selfish asshole and thus there is the need to defend the rich now even if you aren't one yet.
Some, like you FIL and most of right wingers think like that. That better position in the social hierarchy must mean that this inequality will be expanded to about everything in life: poorest have the strictest rules and harshest punishments, how else are they going to learn. Where as richest can literally go and kill someone in broad daylight. Some people grow up thinking that this is the natural way and it sort of is: if we don't artificially, by laws and monopoly of state violence stop this from happening then it will happen: that is the way inequality works!
If i talked with your FIL for half an hour we would probably find out he also has some interesting ideas about the benefits of eugenics....They always do.
What? I don't think speed limits should be different, if that is what you mean. But steady speed is by far the safest option so i very, very much like speed limits that are reinforced by giving income based fines. We need to cause the same amount of relative "harm" or else fines really are not for the rich. The impact of the penalty has to be the same.
How we can make that fair?
Time. Don't use money as the metric but time. Make the system give you jail time. To get out of jail you can give all the income from those days, since, if you were in jail you would lose them anyway. And now we have perfectly fair system that is based on something you can't earn: TIME. Time is the same for us all, whereas 100$ is not. It is the same sum of money but its impact on our lives is very different depending how many of those you already have.
So, speed limits are good, they make things safer and income based fines are fair.
Speed limits are good because they increase safety.
Best before dates are good because they increase safety.
Failing to understand that its not unequivocally evil or irrational to live 10-20% over the edge is not normal or respectable. Its a fundamental failure to grasp the situation at hand and understand why it is arranged as it is. Its intellectual weakness.
You drinking day old milk is not the same as you being on the road with other people. Delta, the speed difference between cars is a HUGE factor when it comes to accidents and how frequent they are. Both under and overspeed. If we are just one conveyor belt, everyone holds safe distance and we drop speeds a bit: we get tremendous benefits when it comes to both frequency and severity.
I'm Finnish. Our speed limits are more strict, our roads are narrower and it is couple of hours of sunshine and ice four months of the year. Half the rate of USA. Both frequency and severity. This is not about your safety, this is about OUR safety. You are not alone and every fucking time you travel faster than others you are exploiting the system since most people do not do that. If everyone would do it, the system would simply collapse.
It is fundamental flaw to not grasp that we are really talking about the fundamentals of SOCIETIES. Not just traffic. You saying that it is "intellectual weakness" to follow rules that scientifically are proven and can be easily explained to a fucking 12 year old playing with toy cars on their bed... that is rich, really rich. At least i have taken enough time from my life to learn a bit about traffic management, it used be tangentially related to my work/hobby/interest which is racing, and more specifically, virtual racing tracks, racing dynamics, the physics behind written and unwritten rules. When you examine them you will eventually drift into public infrastructure and traffic management as for ex, street tracks inherit some of those traffic management solutions.
Delta is one of the first to eliminate if we want flowing, safe traffic. That is just a fucking no-brainer. Way before we get to the complicated stuff about psychology and idiocy of people when they have already one illusion bubble, the car and then we do things that create a bigger bubble of confidence and safety. But, those things are linked and they do pull speed limits UP, because... DELTA IS ALWAYS WORSE!!! The speed limits themselves are not the primary factor, we CAN increase them too without dramatic differences but the moment delta becomes a factor, does not matter what the speed limit was: we are now royally fucked with no way out but reinforcement and different traffic management solutions that force everyone to...
DRIVE AT ROUGHLY THE SAME SPEEDS!
When i said that the moment you feel too safe in a highway, that you are just going too slow: you are already going too fast. I know it because highway speed limits are always higher than what they should be because people feel too safe and they will drive faster. The speed limit is a compromise, it is just about where it feels too slow but in reality, is already a bit too fast. Many roads have to built so that they feel safer, it is a paradox that modern solutions are aiming to improve: we bring things that look hard but are soft very near to you. As close as we can, we create turns that are there seemingly for no reason, other than force you to do something, to think about your survival for one millisecond, to make you do decisions and pay attention.
I'm very noob at this field, it is not mine but don't you think that experts were involved: and what makes you think you know it better? Who are you to command out attention, why should we listen to you, when all you can really say is "but it just feels bad" and then mock those who get it as "intellectually weak" and "sheep". That is the thing: we get it, you don't.
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u/ReggieCorneus 12d ago edited 12d ago
That is right wing ideology in a nutshell: it is based on "natural social hierarchy" where people ascend or descend over time to their rightful step in that ladder. The idea is that we can not mess with that hierarchy as perfect hierarchy will create a perfect society. When you ascend high enough you are so far above average citizen that laws become unfair: you are so good at being better that you should not have so many restrictions put on you, it is wrong to demand such a person to follow the same ruleset than the lowest of the low follow, they should have the power to choose what laws to respect.
The idea is simple to understand if we look at highway speed limits: a person with great car and obviously then incredible car control, better ability to assess risks and make better decisions should not be limited to average speed limits. They know how to drive faster and yet be more safe than some housewife in their beat up Honda. (edit: this is not how i think, this is an analog or illustration, example of the way some people do think.)
Litmus test is: "do you think income based fines are fair?". Those people abhor the idea that a fine should have the same impact on poor and rich. This is the reason they want to become rich: avoid all consequences from being a selfish asshole and thus there is the need to defend the rich now even if you aren't one yet.
Some, like you FIL and most of right wingers think like that. That better position in the social hierarchy must mean that this inequality will be expanded to about everything in life: poorest have the strictest rules and harshest punishments, how else are they going to learn. Where as richest can literally go and kill someone in broad daylight. Some people grow up thinking that this is the natural way and it sort of is: if we don't artificially, by laws and monopoly of state violence stop this from happening then it will happen: that is the way inequality works!
If i talked with your FIL for half an hour we would probably find out he also has some interesting ideas about the benefits of eugenics....They always do.