Thread by @17cShyteposter

Right, all these arguments comparing mRNA vaccines to seatbelts doesn't make me think "Oh, all right then, how stupid of me"

It actually makes me begin to perceive seatbelt laws—as laws—as not American, but ""American""

As in contrary to the fundamental American character

https://twitter.com/amasppelb/status/1436020071030312963

And by contrast to the vax, I have no objection to seatbelts, as far as I know there are no real tradeoffs (please tell me there isn't a seatbelt-pill)

But that only makes the insistence on seatbelt laws stranger: custom should have accomplished the same as laws, very fast.

Delegating these decisions to insta-law by the Law-Givers, instead of leaving it to the people to organically adopt as custom, which then becomes tradition, suggests to me an imposition of values from a Managerial Class onto a Managed Class.

And I dunno, maybe this was even good back when our Managers were people who could invent things that would actually save thousands of lives, with zero drawbacks, and could just say "It's good for you, trust us, do it or else"

That being obviously not the case now, and in fact the opposite—maybe the hard opposite—it is arguably an unalloyed bad to accustom a hard-headed, we'll-figure-it-out-ourselves people, the strongest virtue *of* that people, to give that virtue up

The legal/managerial process of robbing a Wild West-minded people of their inborn ability to organically adjust to things for themselves also neuters us of the ability to invent things for the remaining frontiersmen to run wild with

It's just interesting that the greatest CARS peaked in the '50s through early '70s, when none of these laws and regulations existed, and now we're all driving these horrible embarrassing contraptions that are the automotive equivalent of eating the bugs and living in the pod