| Not entirely disagreeing, but an Occams Razor approach would imply the profit motive is more at work. Which results in more election campaign funds for a politician, funding a new constituency of child fondlers at airports, or administrative fooling with speed limits? One interesting analysis of speed limits is do people drive to live or live to drive? If, conservatively, one billion person hours per year are wasted sitting in a drivers seat, and increasing speed limits 10% caused a reduction in wasted human potential of 10% aka 100 million person hours per year, and an average remaining lifetime of a typical driver is far less than a million hours, then if less than a couple hundred extra people die per year due to the higher speed, total loss of human potential would be lower at higher speed, despite the somewhat higher death rate, which is somewhat counter intuitive. "conditioned to be afraid by reflex" Cowardly. No sense tiptoeing around it. America is a nation of cowards. Very heavily armed, dangerous, and violent, but none the less fundamentally a nation of cowards. A strong man with a gun is an asset to everyone around him; including himself. A shivering coward with a gun is a danger to everyone around him including himself. We (as in the whole world) are not in a good situation. I never fail to be impressed at how brave the .uk people were during WWII and during the IRA troubles, at least contrasted with the Americans. Despite the supposed special relationship between the .uk and .us. Maybe the .uk men could send us whatever makes them so comparatively brave, tea or soccer or monarchy or whatever it is. |
Couldn't agree more. Far too many chickenhawks.
Paradoxically, I think it's because we are so comparitively safe. The slightest threat to that safety (real or otherwise) bursts the bubble, and is a shock to our veil of normalcy, as opposed to the "shit happens" outlook in parts of the world where danger is more frequent. (I wonder if those who live in the worst inner cities, surrounded by gang warfare, waste any time worrying about terrorism?)
But in fairness, those flames have been pro-actively fanned for decades by government and business alike. It's near-impossible to realize how pervasive the propaganda machine is here unless you go out of your way to detach yourself from it.