Why did people
fall in love with cars?
I mean, why did they used to fall in love with cars?
It wasn’t because of speed or sex appeal – though those
things certainly helped. It was because cars were freedom incarnate. As a
teenager, you counted the days to your sixteenth birthday because on that day,
you were let out. Free to drive anywhere your wheels could take you. No longer
controlled or supervised or monitored. On your own and as you please.
This freedom is under attack – has been for a long
time, including via
skirmishes that have made the process of acquiring a driver’s license torturous
and endless, insofar as teens are concerned. They are effectively
debarred from driving in any meaningful sense until they are practically no
longer teens, via prohibitions levied against their driving with friends who
are also teens or at night, without the supervision of an adult and via brutal
“zero tolerance” polices, which criminalize the tracest amounts of alcohol or
“drugs” (the arbitrarily illegal ones) in their systems.
Which delays
their becoming adults and also stifles their desire to become adults. Which is
probably why the current generation of teens shows the least interest in cars
and driving of any generation since the dawn of the automobile age more than
100 years ago.
But now the real
battle is about to commence.
The one that will
determine whether adults are to be debarred from driving in any meaningful
sense – via the force-feeding of automated (as distinct from “autonomous”)
cars.
Which will be controlled
– just not by you. Hence the farthest thing conceivable from “autonomous.”
Black is white. Freedom is slavery. You are a customer of the IRS.
But who will
control these automated cars?
Well, for
openers, the cops – i.e., armed government workers. Which is to say, the
government. And the bureaucrats, who will use the cops to enforce their every
edict. No more “getting away with” . . . anything. Everything will become
a closely-monitored, tightly regulated, by-your-leave privilege, revocable at their
whim.
A Reuters news
story details a recent meeting of “stakeholders” – which includes everyone
except, of course us – hashing out our automated car future. Apparently, we
have no stake in the automated car future. As always, we are not even
consulted; the decisions are made on our behalf, in secret conclave. Not unlike
(exactly like) the conspiracy which led to the force-feeding of the federal
Constitution – which empowered a small elite to control everyone else, without
their consent.
Well, here we
go again.
A 39-page
summary issued from this closed-door meeting, which was held back in March –
couched in the now-usual boilerplate of “safety” and “security” – included
“concerns” expressed by “public safety officials” (i.e., armed government
workers and government workers generally) about the necessity (as they regard
it) to “… interact with or even control” automated vehicles “in the event of an
emergency.”
Italics added.
You can perhaps
visualize such “emergencies.”
If not,
visualize the odious “lock downs” (a very deliberate – and accurate – choice of
words; words formerly applied to prisons but now that the country is itself a
prison . . .) which have become common whenever the government decides there is
an . . . “emergency.”
Well, what
exactly constitutes an “emergency”?
Whatever the
government says it is. Anything the government says it is. There is no law
defining “emergency,” which means the government can simply declare one,
whenever it likes. Hut! Hut! Hut! Shelter in place!
And let’s be
precise about another meaning.
There is no such
thing in real life as “the government.” It is a rhetorical device at its most
benign; a sleight-of-hand at its worst – used to obscure the fact that it’s not
some all-wise/all-knowing entity but just other people, the sole difference
between them and us being they have arrogated to themselves power over us.
How they got this
power – and what gives them the moral right to possess it and exercise it
against us – are two questions that ought to be asked (and answered) more
often.
Anyhow, the
government declares an “emergency” – and then a “lock down.”
Technically,
these “lock downs” aren’t The Law . . . yet.
You could get
in your car – your not-automated car – and leave the area.
But if your car
is automated . . .and if the government controls it . . . then you are
locked down. And not just overt lock downs. There are also the subtler ones –
where you go and when and how.
No longer under
your control.
Which is key to understanding the nudging behind this
loathsome automated car rigmarole. The pretense is that it’s all about
saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaafety – but this as fatuous as
Obamacare being about “affordable” medical care.
Fatuous because the assertion rests upon the imbecility of
technological infallibility. Computerized, electronic infallibility. Imagine a
cell phone big enough to throw a saddle over and let it take you for a ride at
70 MPH – hoping the OS doesn’t lock up in the middle of a curve.
Or the sensors
don’t see the curve because it suddenly got foggy.
It might work
at first – and maybe even for awhile. But unless these devices are very
regularly thrown away and replaced with new ones, they will degrade and develop
hiccups – because everything does. Hiccups can be trouble at 70 MPH when
there’s no steering wheel or brake pedal and you have become just a meatsack
sitting behind where the wheel used to be.
And hiccups side, the automated future means that
instead of being able to just jump in your car and go where you please, when
you please and how you please – you’ll be carted around as they please, when
they please and how they please.
If they please.
If we let them.
…
Got a question
about cars – or anything else? Click on the “ask Eric” link and send ’em in!
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