Saturday, December 05, 2009

Miranda the Devine, and end government nanny state interference now, except when required to run a nanny state summer education campaign ...







This site has campaigned long and hard for some crucial adjustments to the molly coddling offered up by the nanny state with its world government socialist objectives.

1. Speed limits: instead of personal responsibility - drivers taking care of themselves and their cars by driving at the speed they think they can handle - the streets, highways and byways are littered with speed limiting signs. When in the bush, I like to take the car up to the old hundred mile an hour mark as a protest, and so far not a single person has been killed. Abolish all speed limits, especially outside schools. If kids are smart, they'll survive, and if not, what use were they anyway.

2. Seat belts: for far too long, the old saw that seat belts save lives has been peddled around the traps (as for air safety bags, they're as expensive as they are ineffective). Seat belts should be made optional extras, purchased according to whim and desire, as opposed to nanny statist desires to remove consumer choice. Ban air safety bags, and make seat belts optional.

Child safety seating for cars must be banned. If a kid's head isn't strong enough to withstand the impact of a car crash at a decent speed, what makes you think they'll be able to play football?

3. Rules of the road: why do we have to suffer under the onerous yolk of burdensome rules of the road, when it's really a simple matter. Get out on the highway and you crash and you're not on the road anymore. This Darwinian approach - reflecting best driving practices in the heart of Paris, Rome, Beijing and in South Africa - is much more effective than textbook nanny state pedantry. This will be especially useful in driving cyclists off the road, as suggested by our muse and inspiration, Miranda the Devine, who can't stand lycra-clad louts like Tony Abbott.

4. Brakes: these too should be optional extras. Any good driver knows that you drive using gears to slow down and speed up, and that is all. Drivers of automatics shouldn't be on the road, but if they are, point 3., the Darwinian principle, will take care of them if their skill levels aren't up to the requisite level. Sure there'll be an increase in the work for crash repair firms momentarily, but how much better that will be in stimulating the economy than shoving pink batts in the ceiling courtesy of the government.

5. Work place safety: I don't know how many times I've heard sheep bleating about the dangers in the workplace to eyes and hearing, which has resulted in the compulsory wearing of safety glasses, and ear plugs and such like, often in hot and difficult conditions. These are tremendously onerous and expensive for employers, uncomfortable for employees, and obviate the obvious need for personal responsibility. Once again the nanny state intrudes into all aspects of our lives. Let rock musicians go deaf like they used to in the good old days.

Sadly there is some evidence that working conditions in nineteenth century cotton mills was responsible for this kind of enfeebled thinking. So what if a few children were scalped when their hair was caught in the machine, hands were crushed, fingers lost. Is that any reason to stop children working or to make expensive safety measures optional extras subject to personal choice?

What's wrong with children earning their keep, or thinking people should be left alone to help themselves and not expect others to protect or keep them. Child schooling laws are a disgrace.

Why not a special prize for any factory that can hang out a sign saying "It is '0' days since our last industrial accident"?

How about a club for people who lose a finger at work? The 'we gave safety the finger' club.

6. Domestic safety: the notion that electrical appliances, electrical wiring, gas plumbing and such like should conform to national or state standards is one of those bizarre bits of nanny state regulation which denies the reality that people are better off testing their own appliances, and wiring a house how it best suits them. Any fires, electrocutions or such like surely are a part of natural selection.

Do your bit to test an electrical appliance today. Stick a fork into a toaster to make sure it's working, shove a knife into a power socket to make sure there's a current, and stick the handle of a saucepan of boiling water out over the edge of the stove to see if your kid has the wisdom to avoid a scalding.

Not satisfied with such simple tests? Devise better ones: test the uselessness of fire alarms by setting fire to a deep fryer full of oil, carefully hide upthrust rakes under a pile of leaves, be sure to leave cheap heaters running until they burst into flames, and why not check the safety of fireworks by holding them in your hand and looking directly down the at the wick as you light the fuse?

7. Swimming pools: fortunately we don't have to write anything about this as Miranda the Devine explains everything in Home truths on pool drownings.

No one wants to impose more guilt on already grieving parents this summer but the truth is there is no substitute for vigilance.

Indeed the last thing we need is any cost to the swimming pool and spa industry or their customers, when we can instead demand that the government (always the government) mount a summer publicity campaign, so it can in turn be criticized by members of the commentariat for mounting a feeble publicity campaign when some kind of direct action is needed.

Just as brakes tend to give drivers false o'erweening confidence, so an isolation fence lulls a pool owner into a false sense of security.

In much the same way as safety latches on child care centres and pre-schools are an outrageous waste of taxpayers' money.

But - gulp - it has to be asked. Wouldn't a government funded publicity campaign only contribute to the number of people employed by government, increasing over-bureaucratisation, which some think of as a benign, if annoying malaise that will pass quickly, but which realists like Ronald Reagan know is as much a threat to liberty as communism? (Pettyfogging bureaucracy is just creeping totalitarianism).

Here's our thinking. People can't be saved from themselves, and people don't deserve to be saved. Take this story of an eighteen year old and a swimming pool:

He had one foot in the backyard swimming pool (really!) when he noticed a cement box near the edge of the pool. It was full of electrical wires supplying power to the jacuzzi. Curious, Charles started to fiddle with a fistful of wires. He was immediately rooted to the spot by 240 volts of electrical current surging through his body. (here).

Now really would a fence have saved this kind of incompetent? Is there any point in ensuring wires are tucked away safely when any galoot can get them out and fiddle with them?

Hence the Darwin awards, which honor those who improve the species by accidentally removing themslves from it.

Now a few sceptics or cynics out there might think that Miranda the Devine would most improve the species by actively removing herself from writing about it, but we say pshaw to that.

Miranda the Devine is at the forefront in our fight against all kinds of petty rules, regulations, safety standards, and other kinds of pettifogging humbugging bureaucratic obscurantism.

Make safety the last priority:

Take the consultant called in recently to define the "strategy and objectives" of a big metropolitan rail network project. He told me he was stuck with senior management who thought safety was their first priority, "ahead of moving an ever-increasing number of people across the network". He told them the only safe train network is one that has no trains.

The only safe world network, or house, or workplace or pool is the one that has no rules! Let planes fall from the sky, let trains crash, let buses tear down awnings, let careless parents drown their children, all signs that we're free, free to do as we like, free to be as we want. Free to choose to die! Free to contrive accidents as we please!

Join with us. What have you got to lose: campaign to remove all laws and regulations and safety nonsense. Don't let the nanny state do gooders get in the road of your right to be a blithering idiot, or stop you from reading Miranda the Devine.

Sure a few people will crash, but it's their fault, sure a few children will drown, but that's the fault of careless parents, sure the factories will return to the good old days of trouble at mill, but what's wrong with that. Where's the harm in matching the working conditions prevailing in the Chinese coal mining industry?

Where's the harm, up against the likelihood our liberty will be lost to communism?

Now sign along, sorry, that should be sing, unless of course you're one of those do gooders who believe we should worry about minorities, with our protest song below (you can also go search youtube for the proliferating abundance of sign montages), as we all protest interference in our god given right to compete for a Darwin award, unencumbered by nanny state thinking.

Disclaimer: this site is not sponsored, funded or financed by a swimming pool or spa builders' association, government bureaucrats demanding taxpayer money for exotic safety campaigns, or the united order of oddfellow anarchists.





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