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I just saw "child safety guidelines" from a pediatrician visit which said not to allow your child out to play from 11AM to 3PM, because of the sun.
Didn't anti-sunlight safetyism peak years ago? Why has the advice continued to get crazier? Is this pediatrician a lone vampire groomer, or is the whole AMA like this?
It wouldn't make me so angry if the children in question weren't pasty obese maggots who desperately need sun and exercise. The doc made a choice to ask "so, are they being exposed to the evils of natural light? Oh, they sit inside and play Minecraft, eating Totino's™ Pizza Rolls™ all day? Good, good, check that health problem off the list. Now, are there any guns or motorcycles in the house? Because they can lead to dangers like going outside and doing things."
I'm not a parent, but everything I've seen of education and child-raising recently has been throwing up giant red flags. How are motte parents dealing with this stuff?
The CDC remains batshit insane on the matter:
Personally, I'll be continuing to run without a shirt all summer. Since 2020, my position has become that the safetyists are wrong about basically everything.
Even seatbelts?
I still wear mine. But I'll never forget a woman in my highschool. Her family was on vacation, got into a car accident, and she was the only survivor. She was thrown from the vehicle because she wasn't wearing her seatbelt.
Still ended up paralyzed from the neck down and an orphan.
Tragic, but that really illustrates why being thrown clear is not a good thing.
There's a lot of safetyist excesses but people don't remember that until the 70s you'd be impaled by the steering column in case of a crash. There's been a tremendous amount of actually useful improvements by the safetyists that nobody notices or thinks about anymore because they've become the air we breathe.
The problem is the safetyists have no brakes. Nothing's ever "safe enough".
Clearly we need meta-safetyists to invent safetyist brakes. Of course then we will need meta-meta safetyists..and so ad inifinitum.
This is generally called "the enemy tribe". The fact that, all else being equal, they'll outcompete you if they take more calculated risks is why safety cannot be first.
External enemies are the ultimate check against internal risk aversity, and when they stop existing that begins to spiral out of control. I don't see any external enemies around right now and life is generally better than it's ever been, so people just pay the toll and suffer the loss of dignity/productivity quietly since the bill will never come due... right?
Which suggests that in a climate without external threats safetyism does lead to (or contributes to) life being better than it has ever been? If there is no-one to compete against then your people don't need to be taking calculated risks (which will presumably lead to greater levels of injury/death).
In other words you only need to pull the goalie when you are losing. If you are winning, play safe.
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I think it's more likely that safetyism suffers from evaporative cooling. Most people who decry safetyism today still wear seatbelts (see this very thread), which was the safetyist perspective a hundred years ago (and remains the safetyist perspective in many countries today). Indeed there are some people who are never satisfied.
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Okay, but in the meantime, cars keep getting safer?
Hard to say. Not a lot of movement since 2009, but there's a lot of confounding factors. But we keep getting more and more expensive features added in the name of safety.
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