this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
371 points (78.4% liked)
Fuck Cars
12596 readers
1071 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Sure. But you know they aren't as close as this makes it. One tool was meant to take life as the primary function. The other to get someplace.
Woman falls down stairs while carrying her baby, she killed him, accident. Woman throws her baby off the balcony, she killed him, murder. Both cases the baby was killed, both sad. But they are different.
The difference in intent makes sense. The difference in primary function does not, killing a person with a kitchen knife is no better than with a gun.
The problem with car accidents is that it’s difficult to know the intent of a person, especially carelessness kills a lot more people via cars than via kitchen knifes, and we can’t know for sure when it was an honest mistake by the driver.
Yeah, intent tends to be everything with unfortunate events.
I can argue that the woman may have fallen down the stairs with her baby on purpose. We can say she didn't take proper precautions, use the hand rails, ran down/up the stairs, only carry the baby in a safe device like a car seat, or that she simply should not allow the child to risk traversing up/don the stairs.
With a gun/balcony, the intent was pretty clear. With the stairs/car, they are both presumed accidents.
Cars will end the world in fire. Maybe already have.
Cant really do that with small arms fire.
I think if you ignore the intention of the manufacturer for a moment and focus on the acts of the individual, they'll seem closer.
Both cars and guns are dangerous devices. Both can be used for intentional murder.
Both guns and cars are so dangerous that they should not ever be used carelessly. In fact, it would be the height of recklessness to use either one without constant vigilance. You could easily kill somebody.
But with guns, people generally accept that there is a wrong way to use them, and that it's your fault if you don't have trigger discipline, or if you ever point the barrel at someone without thinking.
On the other hand, the same cannot be said about cars. Just look how people react when you mention defensive driving, a system of disciplines that make driving safer for both the driver and anyone else near the road.
People are so used to getting away with driving poorly that they are willing to accept deaths rather than even hearing about safer driving habits.
Stairs might be pretty close to the same danger level as cars. If you consider how many people don't live or work in a 2 plus story building, maybe more so compared to cars.
"Approximately one million people in the U.S. are injured on stairs each year, making stair-related accidents the second leading cause of accidental injury. These injuries result in over $90 billion in direct and indirect costs annually, according to a study published in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine. Here's a more detailed breakdown: Number of Injuries: Over 1 million people are injured annually due to falls on stairs. Leading Cause of Injury: Stairway accidents are the second leading cause of accidental injury, behind motor vehicle accidents. Fatalities: Approximately 12,000 deaths result from stairway accidents each year."
Stairs are dangerous, yes, but if you push someone down the stairs, it still counts as murder. What you're saying has nothing to do with the topic.
Are you intentionally trying to defend cars in the fuck cars community?
No I'm saying accident vs non accident is a huge difference.
But cars are used by licensed individuals who meet some minimum skill requirement. Most accidents are caused by reckless behavior from a person who is an adult who has been trained not to drive that way and who understands that other people would say that they are doing something wrong.
There is a huge gulf between a car accident and a stair accident. Far less of a gulf between cars and guns.
Are you afraid of a little discussion about cars in the fuck cars community? Do you want an echo chamber or a forum?
Is this a serious question? You're in a place called "fuck cars".
Edit: You can tell from their response that this is as far as they read.
Here is the description from the sidebar:
It's not about being "afraid of a little discussion". It's about being able to read the room. The basis for this forum is that cars are "bad". If you want to defend cars, you're in the wrong place. People here have already decided that cars are bad enough that they say "fuck cars."
If you go into the "Science" community and want to post to defend astrology, and somebody says, "Really? You're going to defend astrology in a science community?" it's not an issue of being "afraid of a little discussion" or of it being "an echo chamber". It's that everybody there has decided that astrology is not worth defending in that place.
You could have just responded with "echo chamber".
I think he's saying we need a fuckstairs forum.
Sorry, you were looking for fuckcars@lemmynsfw, this is [email protected]
Easy mistake.
Accidental and intentional killing should both be discouraged.
Discouraging accidental death is not achieved via harsh punishment. It's done through safer design and education
Safe design should be done a lot more. I am actually generally not a friend of harsh punishment, but the people who design unsafe roads need to get their act together.
100% agree. Safer practices need to be everywhere. That said, I agree distracted driving should be punished harsher than non-distracted accidents, but proving such goes into robbing people of privacy further. I really don't want more monitoring systems.
Texting and driving should be harsh, running stop signs/red lights as well. But accidents of not seeing a stop sign at night are going to happen, or even a pedestrian crossing not at a crosswalk with no way to see them in the dark. Hopefully we find good solutions, but our losses won't be near 0 unfortunately for awhile
That's fair. I was thinking about your comment in relation to the comic, so I'm glad we're on the same page. My city is currently redesigning formerly unsafe roads into something bike, transit, and pedestrian friendly. It would certainly be easier if they were designed that way to begin with
Of course
TIL: the primary function of balconies is murder!
Similar to windows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestration
Well unless you're Michael Jackson and just want to play Simba with the child, haha
Or you’re Putin looking side-eyed at yet another traitorous regional governor!
I don't admire their situation. Then again... I can't say I could have ever accepted some of the things they did to get there. If I had money in the bank to buy a place outside of any of the counties fighting to be super powers right now I'd do so. The U.S., Russia, U.K., China, and a few others just all seem to be toxic for lack of better terms right now.
One of the biggest life lessons I learned was from watching the show Breaking Bad. I think we all have a natural disgust / aversion to evil people. While it’s important as a social function for protecting communities from bad actors, it harms our ability to understand evil.
That’s the key. Understanding evil and how good people descend into it is the best way to protect ourselves from walking down that path. It starts with recognizing that bad circumstances and unaddressed feelings of resentment and perhaps a sense of entitlement all contribute to our ability to justify and rationalize our own actions internally.
Hitler couldn’t have carried out the Holocaust without the help of millions of German citizens who rationalized in exactly this way.
Any tool or item can be used to take a life or cause injury.
It could be argued guns are designed for hunting, and cars are designed for travel, but both can be used to cause harm.
Hell even a shopping cart design to haul groceries can be used to harm. Relevant video in the link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePmc1656EVo
(Sort of a side note, but) I would argue that guns are designed to fire a projectile. That's it, nothing more. The other stuff comes in externally: What are you firing at, and why? That is what determines if you're hunting, target shooting, competing, murdering, self defensing, etc.
If you're firing a projectile at an animal for food? Hunting. At paper for practice? Target shooting. At paper for a good score compared to others? Competing. At people who aren't trying to kill you? Murdering. At people who are? Self defense. All depends on how you're using it.
Most calibers in use today were designed for military use, and their primary purpose was to be fired at a human. It just turns out they work well on animals too.
There's only a few that were designed for use on animals, most as a pest control round.
That'd be the specific caliber, not the gun itself necessarily, but also: Not really. The primary purpose is again "to fire," you have to make the distinction of what it is fired at.
Hell, most guns in the US never even shoot people nor animals over the course of their existence, most by far will only ever shoot paper or steel, so if you have to pick one it seems like they're designed for target shooting to me.
I'd argue the purpose of almost any handgun is to be fired at a human, any target practice is just preparation in case that happens.
There have only ever been two nuclear bombs dropped in anger in human history, does that mean the purpose of a nuke is to be carried around on a submarine or sit in a warehouse somewhere?
That depends on why you bought it. Did you buy it to carry and defend yourself, or did you buy it to leave in a box unloaded until you decide to hit the range?
Honestly? Yes, the point of nukes seems to be moreso MAD than actually blowing shit up.
If you kill someone with a gun and it was completely accidental, you're still likely going to do some time for it. Not so with a car.
Yea because a gun is literally designed as a weapon. If someone is wielding one and it "accidentally" goes off you were 100% being negligent in some way. With a car there are certainly situations where you can do everything as safely as possible but an accident still occurs.
Then it won't be your fault.
In (almost) every automobile "accident" someone was at fault. That person bears responsibility for whatever results from the "accident."
I think you meant to go to [email protected]
This is [email protected]
Easy mix up.
You have to put a "!" before it, My app just opened a mail to [email protected]
Whoops! Sorry
Doesn't exist. My disappointment is immeasurble.