The Hazards of Ensuring Safety

By Selwyn Duke

Back when my family vacationed in Miami Beach, it wasn’t uncommon for the hotels abutting the shoreline to have high diving boards. I mean sometimes really high — maybe even the kind you see on Olympics telecasts. It was a scary jump for me as a child, but I think I mustered the courage once or twice. But I couldn’t as an adolescent. You see, the boards were closed down by then (circa 1980), an obvious victim of our society’s increasing litigiousness. Insurance regulations, you know.

And it’s far worse today, as we’re being lawyered and insured into an antiseptic, killjoy state. As an example, it’s just been announced that elementary schools in Cabell County, West Virginia, are removing all swing sets for fear of litigation. A school official cited a recent lawsuit in which the district had to pay out $20,000 after a boy broke his arm jumping off a swing à la Superman.

Read the rest here.

Comments

[Philip France]

Two points to add color to Selwyn's astute article:

1. The briefcase mafia (trial lawyers) and radical judges who, rather than interpret existing law make it up as they go along (Dr. Savage's poignant saying, "the stench from the bench is making me clench."). We need tort reform and we need politicians that advocate repealing laws that do violence to our Constitution and that erode our idividual liberties (seat-belt and helmet laws are minor examples).

2. Selwyn's main points mirror and summarize a terrific book that I just finished reading. It is "The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness" by Dr. Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr., M.D.

In this book, Dr. Rossiter details the step-by-step process whereby a human child grows to adult competance by becoming a sovereign being with self-interest (NOT selfishness) by understanding his own value as a sovereign unit while simutaneously tempering his self-interest with mutuality and voluntary cooperation with others (because it is also in his self-interest to do so).

He then points out deficits during that growth process either through neglect, trauma and/or abuse that brings about the sociopathy described by Selwyn in his article.

He speaks of the narcissistic personality disorders prevalent in adults that were children of material privilege but bereft of the comfort and assurance of loving and attentive parents. He also shows how deficits in the growth to maturity arising from the same incidents of neglect, trauma and/or abuse that cause what psychiatrists identify as "transference nuerosis"; the signature of the modern liberal/radical leftist in which such a subject transfers deep-rooted inner pain and anxiety and attacks a society of ordered liberty that is based on individual sovereignity and mutuality through voluntary cooperation with society.

There is also a lengthy chapter dedicated to 1st-person "confessions" of the benignly and radical liberal/leftist that perfectly describes the rants that we read from our fellow-posters Yoyo, and to a much more serios degree, Robert Berger.

It is worth the price of admission.

[MalikTous]

More reasons to despise excess government. Seatbelt and MC helmet use would be better encouraged by allowing insurance companies to compensate users for their statistically lower claim frequencies and value per claim vice enacting draconian laws. When I waa a kid, bicycle helmets were for bike racers and shows, now everyone uses them (or should) but I'd prefer to see it encouraged by media vice demanded by some stupid law. I no longer drive cars due to excessive costs and ridiculous ID requirements. I no longer fly due to draconian yet ineffective 'security' provisions and excessive ticket costs. I vote against the major parties for their hand in letting this garbage happen in spite of my votes and petitions against it.

[john bailey]

"For fear of litigation"...probably the four most used words around any school board meeting. Threats of litigation become a motivational force, a mandated means to cause any person or group of persons to act or feel a certain way. I remember the high and low diving boards....you had to be able to swim to get to the cemented stable platform where they were situated....and there were at least three lifeguards on duty...one on the platform, one in a canoe, and one in a raised seat on shore. They were all equiped with a loud whistle, and when it sounded you stopped what you were doing and listened. This was called respect for authority and discipline. Without these two ingredients, a classroom ceases to be a classroom for learning and becomes a classroom for mischief. Some regulations are very necessary....as a hat for motorcycle riders....which gets at the prevention of physical injury. Other regulations, encourages and fosters a platform for destruction of the human "conscious", a collective abscence of the ability to feel guilty when doing something wrong. When this became very manifest...I suppose we switched from paper bottled milk jars delivered to the front door steps, to stoppers and closures that would require a "jack hammer" to open. There is much to be said in Selwyns topic. A friend of mine completed an outdoor structure for this man....and he refused to pay him for an excellent job. He asked him why he refused to pay him...and his response was..."Sue me, I am an attorney". Frivolous lawsuits abound...and become the bread and butter of the income of most attorneys. In my humble opinion, the ACLU is the most "destructive" force in America today...and is solidly very liberal in all that it does.