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Safety: The Modern Lie That Cripples Our Future

Some extremists seem to proclaim that safety is the purpose of life.

Safety: The Modern Lie That Cripples Our Future

We now believe as a society that we’re entitled to safety — that such a thing exists — providing us with a false sense of how the world works. Some extremists seem to proclaim that safety is the purpose of life.

Bill Whittle and Alfonzo Rachel host two new episodes of The Virtue Signal each week thanks to our Members. They not only fund these shows so thousands may watch for free, but they access backstage content, comments, and their own blog. Join them.

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21 replies on “Safety: The Modern Lie That Cripples Our Future”

Alfonzo: self righteousness vs. cocaine joke made me lol.
Bill and Alfonzo: Thanks for this video and its logical discussion.
Bumper sticker:
“Safety addiction is as irrational as ignoring Science.”
One more thought: 
I was never more offended by leadership idiocy than when Andrew Cuomo mouthed off about if his policies ‘would save just one life, it would be worth it’
No!!
REAL leaders have to decide who dies when death are the only two options! They have to decide between the deaths of Covid victims AND THE DEATHS CAUSED BY THEIR LOCKDOWN POLICIES! There’s a horrible logically balanced ‘in between’ of those two choices, but Cuomo didn’t want to have to make it. Worse, he wasn’t even interested in asking the question.
Did anyone in the mainstream press ask Cuomo “How much time did your administration spend on calculating the deaths that would be caused by your policies before implementing them?” 
Nope. Which is why my participation with mainstream media these days is effectively zero. 
Anyway, thanks again Bill and Alfonzo!

Safety does not exist all you can do is mitigate risks. That is a personal decision and one every single business does daily. There is very limited needs for government to get involved because Insurance companies beat you to it.

I think Alonzo hit a nail there. If you only believe that you get what you get in this one life, and you have to get as much out of it as you possibly can, then their concept matches that vision. Others among us know that there is more beyond this life.

Risk assessment and mitigation is as subject to the law of diminishing returns as much as any other application of judgement. At one extreme is a kid playing with explosives in a busy intersection at rush hour. At the other is a guy living in a conditioned and controlled bubble at the bottom of a mineshaft with a mountain above him standing between him and any possible threat.

Extremes are never a good policy. Finding the right balance between extremes is something only an individual can do and only for themselves. Beware of extremes and extreme people. It doesn’t matter if they’re extreme right or left or any other flavor. The end of the road marked “Extreme” is always the same place.

It’s not just safety that’s the issue here, there’s a much bigger problem and the safety mania is just a facet and a symptom …

Tweakers are going to be the death of us all. By “tweakers” I don’t mean the colloquial sense of the word that refers to amphetamine addicts. I mean the dictionary definition of “tweak” —
Tweak (verb) 3. To adjust finely.

One of the bizarre repercussions of the internet and the information age is this strange phenomena wherein everyone becomes expert on everything and is in a weird competition to be more expert than the next person. The result is a finely detailed approach to “the right way to do something” that far exceeds any kind of reasonable and sane real world application. It’s the “I know more and better than you so do it my way” syndrome and it is affecting human psychology in a very peculiar manner.

Here are some examples that I’ve personally experienced, these are just a few because I could literally write a book on this so … Bear with me for a few paragraphs.

I smoke pipes and cigars. So that’s a topic I’m interested in. I look up stuff about both on the internet to learn more. When it comes to pipes and pipe smoking according to the “experts” I’m doing it all wrong. According to them I should have a collection of at least 31 pipes costing north of $100 each, all of which are my favorites, so I can smoke each pipe no more than once a month to let them “rest” between uses. With every use each of those pipes must be lovingly and carefully cleaned and prepared in a process that takes more time than it does to smoke a bowl of tobacco. Don’t forget to wax them all with pipe wax and flush them with pipe cleaning solution at least once a month. If you don’t do this you will not enjoy your pipe smoking experience as much as you should.

This is ridiculous. My Great Uncle Art smoked the same pipe until it was worn out (yes, pipes can wear out) and then got a new one. I have a collection of pipes but I didn’t get them so they could each “rest” after every use. I got them because I wanted to try this or that pipe, my preferences changed over time, I discovered that one sort of pipe worked better for me than another, etc. So now I have 3 pipes I smoke regularly and about a dozen that I hardly ever use. I clean them when they need it, not as a fetish but as reasonable maintenance. I wax them about once a year.

Guns are a big example of this. It’s like every guy who’s interested in firearms will end up with a shrinking reproductive organ if he doesn’t subscribe to the finest detail and insist that anyone who doesn’t agree is doing it wrong for everything to do with the topic. A good example is the 5.56 NATO vs. .223 Remington argument. It goes like this —

You can’t fire a .223 Remington in a rifle chambered for the 5.56 NATO cartridge. Because the chamber specs are different for the military weapons and the civilian rifles.

They’re the same thing. The 5.56 NATO was adopted for military use from the .223 Remington cartridge and the specs for the cartridge are within a few inconsequential thousandths of an inch. Period. It’s the same thing. The chamber specs are different because the military rifles are slightly “looser” to accommodate tiny differences in manufacturing tolerances and the possibility of dirty ammo.

It’s better if a military rifle fires every time than it is needful that the rifle not be built to tolerances so tight that some ammo might not work under some circumstances.

The civilian rifles are built to tighter tolerances because that’s a “varmint” cartridge and for varmint shooting you want tack driving accuracy that’s not required in a military weapon.

Some Nimrod looked up the dimensions on the military chambers (MilSpec/STANAG) and the SAAMI (Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers Institute) specs on civilian rifles, noticed that they ‘re not identical and came to the conclusion that you can’t interchange cartridges. This is nonsense. I’ve handloaded ammo for years and I don’t care which case I have available, military or civilian, they all work the same. I can’t even tell any difference in accuracy or functionality between one and the other.

I’ve heard this same argument applied for the same reasons to other military cartridges like the 7.62 NATO vs .308 Winchester and .30 Cal. US vs. the 30-06. “30-06” is pronounced “thirty ought six” and the designation MEANS “.30 caliber round adopted by the U.S. Government in 1906”. The “experts” are right in saying the chamber specs are not identical but their conclusions are all bullshit. I’ve fired tens of thousands of rounds of these calibers in my life, some military surplus, some foreign civilian and military, and many, many of them civilian off-the-shelf manufacture without a single instance of the slightest problem due to case and chamber dimensions.

Another example is automatic watches and watch winders. For you who don’t know about this topic, an automatic watch has a little weight in it that rotates around a shaft and winds the watch as you move your wrist in normal daily life. A watch winder is a device that rotates the watch on an axis that makes the little weight wind the watch.

There are people on the internet that say “OMG!! Whatever you do, don’t leave an automatic watch in a watch winder, it will ruin your watch!!!” This urban myth came about because before about 1965 or so it was possible for an automatic watch to be overwound so the theory is that your watch in a watch winder will be overwound and ruined. Overwind protection has been built into automatic watches for a half century. If a watch can handle being on your wrist in multiple and often hazardous (to the watch) environments, it can easily tolerate sitting in a nice, protected, cushioned watch winder on your desk or dresser.

There are lots of examples. There are people who post recipes and swear that if you use one milligram more salt than the recipe calls for you’ll ruin the food and die of high blood pressure. There are “experts” that say you need to wipe your feet in this direction not that direction, that you need to get out of bed on a specific side with a specific sequence of movements, that there’s a proper way to sit on a toilet and a detrimental way to do the same.

Pay no heed to this kind of “expert”, they’re not really experts they’re just trying to sound like one.

Go ahead and fix your food the way you like it, wipe your feet in whatever manner gets them clean enough for your purposes, get out of bed the way you want and sit on the can in whatever manner works for you. Ignore the “experts”, they’re just looking for clicks and ad revenue.

This safety-tweaking stuff is just more of the same. It’s all a symptom of the same malady. It’s just that safety tweaking is something that can apply to everyone whereas pipes, guns, watches and the like only appeal to a specific audience.

We are succumbing to a system of “experts” that “know the best way to ___”. This problem is manifesting in government whereby “experts” like Tony Fauci get to tell everyone else what to do because of their expertise and with total disregard for the whole picture. The expert is actually doing more harm than good in most cases and those cases where that doesn’t apply it’s a wash.

This problem has become political because of “science” but only when it’s convenient to a narrative.

The total accumulation of human wisdom, not knowledge but wisdom, is vast. In this case there’s a bit of that wisdom that applies perfectly …

“Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.”

Nicely put. I especially enjoyed the pipe section. I have two that I used occasionally. One was my dad’s. One was a gift from a German engineer at one of the first place at which I worked. He was startled that a young American engineer was smoking a pipe. So the next day he brought me one of his old ones; a very nice, older Ben Wade. When I took it to get a new stem; the shop owner offered me a pretty penny for it used.
I clean them maybe every tenth or twelfth use. I have never waxed either. They still work beautifully. And I am still kicking.
The same can be said for whisk(e)y snobs. They like to tell people how to drink the right way.
But to your point, the number of people who tell others they are wrong is staggering. It puts to mind a couple of Heinlein quotes.
“Always listen to experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done, and why. Then do it.”
“No statement should be believed because it is made by an authority.”

There is no such thing as safety. It is a concept of judging the possibility of doing something against the possibility of getting hurt, then making a decision to do it despite the risk, and lessening the risk by using caution. There is risk involved in everything we do, including getting out of bed in the morning.

My son can drive a car like everybody else, yet if he meets a car coming the other way, he gets very nervous hoping the other driver will pass without a collision. There is no way he could handle a dark stormy night with heavy traffic. He feels safe on a dirt road in the woods, but not when he has to rely on the decisions other people will make. This is just one of the indicators of his autism.

Welllll … the vaccine works, it just works like a bicycle helmet. It will help protect you against serious injury, but you can still fall off your bike and whack your head pretty hard and some people will occasionally injured and die.

So … it’s still to your general point. Do what you can, within reason, and live your life. You take your life into your hands every time you pull out onto the highway. We just do it.

Mike Rowe has it right. If you want to live, safety can be no higher than third. Anything higher and you won’t do anything.
If you want to be “safe” we can put you in a nice padded cell. Three meals a day. Not much in the way of comfort or mental stimulation, but hey, you will be “safe”.

If you want the ultimate safety for eternity “put your hand in the hand of the Man Who stilled the waters…” because the death rate for all of humanity is 100%.

I once heard a reporter-ette, while reporting on the link between smoking and lung cancer, give out my favorite statistic of all time. She said, “The death rate among smokers is 30%!”
My immediate thought was, “Gee, I’d better take up smoking!” 😉

the world was formed and created (this civilization) by risk taking men willing to forgo a safety net that they willingly provided, if married, to their family and wives. that foundational rebar is now dying away at warp speed and what replaces it and/or how successful that new age new world order is has not as yet been written. at 73 that’s my take but that’s just me.

Donald, I was sure you would lay the blame for this noxious safety-ism on women, especially women in positions of authority or power. Since you didn’t say it, I will. Women generally are all about safety, being safe, protection ad nauseam and will impose it without restraint on anyone and everyone who will let them. That’s one reason women are pretty thin in the ranks of warriors, explorers and inventors. Besides women pushing this mind-set, we also have a Nanny state government, whose real reason for minding our business is nothing but exorbitant control, to immobilize us with fear in order to make us beg for whatever egregious conditions they impose all for the desire for “safety”. People who succumb to this really do think UBI is the ticket to a happy carefree life. HA!

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