Is Ford Allowed to Tell Me When I Can't Drive?

Maybe. Or maybe this is all downstream of a lot of political and cultural foolishness.

Transcript

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How did we get to the point where Ford is now looking to install cameras on your trucks that if you look a little bit stressed out can just shut off your truck for you and there's no place to appeal it or to you know get your truck turned back on. Well, let's see there's a bunch of different things going on here. The one thing they're gonna say is we're trying to cut back on drunk driving. Like, congratulations, you're dri you're cutting back on all stressed driving, including when somebody finds out something stressful on the highway or someone's looking a little bit drowsy on the road and they're like, eh, I need to get off, and suddenly their truck shuts down one mile before the rest area. Or you know, there's a an emergency on the farm, and you gotta hop into your car and get going, but your car won't start because it detects elevated levels of discalm within your spirit, and so it says you aren't safe to drive. In other words, kind of the uh extension end of what we call safetyism, but safetyism actually seems to be, if I could call it that, a side effect of governmental overreach seeking in any excuse. There's a couple different things going on here. First of all, why can they say that they're doing this for your good, for your safety? Well, there is a degree, which I will agree the government should have a hand in some specific moderation of companies that are large enough that the only entity larger than them is getting to be the federal, state, or local legislative or judicial branch of government. Walmart, for example, operates in about every single state in the union. So if one state has a problem with what Walmart is doing, and Walmart has this uh policy across all the states, of course, you're gonna have to get the government involved, because the government's the only entity that can enforce upon a upon a company that is in more than one state. Otherwise, Walmart could have rules for thee, but not for me, rules for Texas, but not for Idaho, etc. etc. And so I do agree that there needs to be some, some, only some level of government oversight of private business. For the most part, though, it should be left to the business. Government, however, does not think like Cincinnatus, who was willing to lay down his plow for the defense of Rome, finish defending Rome, and then pick his plow back up and get back to work, which I note he did twice. Governments do not like giving that up for some several reasons, and I'd like to point out the primary of that is that every position that is created by the government is a government position that does not necessarily translate well back into civic society at the end of that government program's lifespan. And so the incentives there are to stay active, to find more things to do in order so that you do not lose your job, or to work for corporations on behalf of corporations in the government, so that when you are retired from your position in the government, you will, as the shoe manager did, have built up for yourself friends in other areas who can pick you up when you've fallen. Again, incentives are upside down. And so we get actually to another section where things are completely bunk and bonkers. Safety isn't. Now, the idea of we're doing this for your own good to keep you safe is so appealing because what are people gonna do? Say, I don't want to be so safe. Well, actually, men generally will. Whereas women, I will say, are far more concerned for the well-being all the way around of people in and out of their spheres of influence. Whereas a guy might say, ah, that person's responsible for themselves, or they'll, you know, lick their wounds and get back to work, or they'll just wipe their wipe the cutoff on their shirt and get back to doing stuff. A woman is going to take more personal notice of a thing because that's just what makes women women, it makes them good mother and figures. So women are more likely to look at things in terms of being nice, being moral, being safe. Men are not. This would not be an issue if women were not a significant voting block. And so a politician, in order to win the mind the hearts of a majority of women and a subset of men who say, Yeah, I do feel like I fancy getting home with all my fingers intact. Their big incentive, then, is to make laws and rules that say you cannot take as many risks as you may seem, as you may deem fit and worthy for your time and attention. This, of course, takes the decision making out of the hands of the person, as Roosevelt said, in the arena, and it puts the decision making as well as the critique of the decision on the person in the stands, on the critic. So that then means that a person can be held responsible for something they themselves did not do, such as is the case of big policies that are made to stop criminals when the people that it affects most are not the criminals who did it. You might say, well, if you're not a criminal, then it doesn't really matter, does it? Well, it actually still does, because then if it can be misinterpreted against you, somebody will find a way to interpret it against you. And so it actually starts to become more and more and more and more and more popular for government people to start making things so they can justify as oh, we're just doing this for the safety of everybody involved. We're looking to increase safety, we're looking to make the numbers of safeties go up and the number of unsafeties go down, and so on and on and on and on. It spins and it spirals and it spirals and it spins until finally you have a government that will use excuses like we need to make sure there are no drunk drivers on the road to say we need to make sure that somebody is employable enough to push to push a button that we tell them to push because their job relies on it. And that button in this case is now you gotta install into your car that you make a feature that tells people they cannot drive when they are stressed out that is going to have an absolute bunderball blast of a time in the cities. And there's more factors too. There is insurance companies who like the factor that they can install this in and then use it as a point of leverage to pay for or not pay for something bad happening to somebody else. You know, if you can stop somebody from getting in a bad driving situation, well, wouldn't you? Shouldn't you? Well, again, it treats adults like children who cannot regulate themselves. Yeah, some people abuse the right to drink and the right to drive by combining the two unsafely, but that in no way justifies it. And here's another thing you gotta remember is that people who follow the rules will follow the rules. People who break the rules will break the rules, so really this ain't gonna change much of anything except for penalizing people who will continue to follow the rules. Why? Because now the rules hinder them. People who didn't follow the rules before don't follow the rules now. So incentives lined up to keep government people employed, incentives lined up to make people vote one way or vote the other, incentives lined up to pay less for one thing and pay more for another thing. All of these end up lining up with Ford installing a camera in the new trucks that'll shut the truck off if it detects that you are in a dis state of particular disquietude. And you might say, well then just don't buy the trucks. Well, that that that'll work for maybe a little while. But remember, eventually them trucks, them trucks will hit the uh used car market. Then what? So maybe Ford does have a right to do with its trucks what it deems fit for its purposes. Maybe, just maybe, this infantilization is not actually going to make matters better, and it will actively make matters far worse than they need to be. Also that somebody can say they're more moral than you. Why does it all come back to the gosh darn blue button, red button?