Do you know what happens to a toad joke when it's struck by lightning?

Oodelally oodelally!

"Open sounds" (which, I assume, refers to continuants) and bilabial sounds aren't mutually exclusive.

When you pronounce the /w/ at the beginning of "one", your lips round (purse) and touch each other at the corners, but they don't form a full closure. So, the oral tract is still open, but the articulators (moving mouth parts) are still touching.

This could be reworded as "the middle of your lips don't touch each other", but multiple commenters are correct in that your lips absolutely do touch each other when you say "one" in English.

It’s much easier to wear and police seatbelts

You can't be serious. It's far easier to police high BMI, since it's much more obvious and way easier to spot fat people in public who are a danger to themselves (and to that healthcare system you're so concerned about) than a small strip of fabric at a distance through the windshield of a moving vehicle.

If you could feasibility do the same for high BMI, yeah, that’d be great

Wow, "we should have cops police BMI" is definitely not the argument I was expecting. You clearly are Australian.

The imposition on the individual would far outweigh the benefit to society.

You're so close! Soooo close! Just dust off that brain and try to follow the breadcrumbs!

the benefits are undeniable.

Then it should have been super easy for someone in this thread to name one, and yet...

from Australia. So don’t lump me in with your right-wing liberals

Oh, I'm not, trust me. I'm lumping you in with one of the absolute worst countries for personal liberties in the free world. Seriously Australia, get a grip.

Once again, the problem here is that all other objects become deadly internal projectiles in the case of an accident as well. If we really cared that much about the danger from projectiles (human and otherwise), then by law, cars should come with multiple tie-downs all over the interior of the vehicle, and it should be illegal to have an object in the car over five pounds not firmly secured by them.

The reason, of course, that that isn't mandated is the same as the answer to all of the other questions in this thread: in the end it's really just about policing people's behavior and choices (and securing an additional revenue stream for cops, as well as a handy additional excuse to pull people over and violate their rights).

We shouldn't curtail people's freedom of self determination just because it will make other people have to do their jobs.

Manufacturers should be required to provide seatbelts. Failure to do so affects others negatively.

If we continue to not mandate healthy eating habits, easily preventable diseases will continue to take up extra valuable hospital resources, extra valuable emergency response resources, and simply expose more people to death of someone they know. Outlaw high BMI now!

Lemmy is a combination of control-obsessed tankies and nanny state libs - of course I'm getting downvotes. Fortunately, I'd rather be right than popular, and I guarantee you that someone read my comments here and realized for the first time just how ridiculous and hypocritical seatbelt laws are. They probably still downvoted, because accepting that what you've always been told is incorrect is difficult, but the seed will have been planted.

Yikes, I think with you having this many bad takes in such a short span, we're probably not going to reach a place where we see eye to eye on this.

The difference being, of course, that drunk driving has an incredibly high chance of negatively affecting others, while not wearing a seatbelt has an incredibly low chance of negatively affecting others.

People have a right to make stupid decisions, even ones that would be dangerous to themselves.

We know this is the case because fast food isn't illegal - it's just that people (in this thread) are too stupid to see the contradictions in their own logic. Seatbelts are just a really oddly specific example of people choosing to police other people's stupid decisions, for some reason.

it’s appropriately forcing someone who can’t be an adult to act like one.

I don't think I could have worded this in a more infantilizing manner if I tried, so thanks for proving my point I guess?

in reality this kind of law is very effective at making more mindful of their safety, even if idiots among them do it begrudgingly.

There are other ways to incentivize this behavior that doesn't involve becoming an infantilizing nanny state. Significantly higher insurance premiums for people who choose not to buckle up, for example.

Cigarettes are another great example - they're not illegal, but the government gives people financial incentives not to use them in the form of sin taxes.

There are many ways to disincentivize stupid behavior while still respecting the right of people to make those stupid choices.

You've completely misunderstood the argument.

People should be allowed to do things that are dangerous.

The people in this thread are arguing that becoming a human projectile is dangerous to other people, and I'm asking them to provide evidence of this.

Thanks for the advice - as soon as I'm wrong and make a stupid comment, I'll be sure to.

Not really sure how that's relevant to the thread though.

Infantilize adults for the sake of the children, got it.

Probably the worst take I've seen in this thread, and that's saying something.

Regardless of the severity of the offense, sovereign nations ultimately have the right to decide who is or is not allowed into their countries.

If someone finds you trespassing in their garden, they make you leave. If you're drunk in Kroger, once again, they make you leave. This is perfectly in keeping with the nature of the crime - if you're in a place where you're not allowed to be, including nations, you have to leave.

I fully agree with a legal path to emigrate to any and all countries, but only if done ahead of time and through the proper legal channels. (And it goes without saying that once those channels have been gone through, resident status should not be revoked without serious reason to do so, followed by due process.)

Breaking a country's laws by entering illegally is already serious evidence against your being a good citizen; plus, regardless of how good a citizen you are, countries have a right to decide which non-citizens are or are not allowed to enter their countries in the first place, based on any and all conditions they alone deem relevant.

If you break in to my house and then ask me for a job, even if you'd be the best worker in the world, I'm still gonna respond with, "Get the hell out of my house", and I'd be right to do so.

Responding with nothing but an endless list of fallacies is the clearest sign that one has no worthwhile argument to make, so I think I'll be ending my engagement with you here.

Whataboutism is only when the topic brought up has no direct relevance and is used to distract from the conversation.

Multiple times in this thread others have brought up tax or insurance costs, which makes discussion of those costs and people's attitudes toward them directly relevant to the conversation, especially when it comes to how contradictory and hypocritical those criticisms are in the first place.

It sounds like you’re attempting to think critically though, which is a good starting point. If you'd like a more direct defense of the idea that lack of seatbelt use drives up insurance costs, here you are:

1. We can offset that cost by only raising premiums for those who choose to drive without a seatbelt

and

2. The slight increase in cost is more than worth it either way.

Thanks for the detailed and empathetic response. I'm going to disagree with you again here, but I don't bear you any ill will for your opinion, especially in light of your wife's experiences.

I don't think I've had any real life experience color my view on this, thankfully - I've always worn my seatbelt and have never been targeted by cops. My strong reaction to this issue (and I've had literally all of the conversations currently happening in these comments over and over for years now, on here and on the other website) is due to just how ridiculous and self-contradictory it is for people to actually support seatbelt laws based on the arguments you're seeing in these comments.

I'm pretty sure the deeper truth here is that people (or most people at least - I don't think this is true of you, based on your comments here) actually don't care about the safety and trauma they always bring up in these comment sections, not really - I think they just take it personally for some reason that someone else has the audacity to make stupid decisions (even though they themselves are also frequently making stupid decisions they don't notice, and which have their own set of externalities - those stupid decisions are fine, of course), and it makes them feel morally superior to impinge on those individuals' right to make their own choices freely, especially when they have the easy refuge of flimsy "safety" arguments to retreat to. They're moral busybodies, and it's infuriating.

And pointing to nanny state European countries infamous for "protecting" their citizens from the audacity of making their own decisions doesn't settle the argument. Two countries can do the same thing for very different reasons (and if you think European cops defend the working class and not capital I have a bridge to sell you - each of those countries' cops have their own socially acceptable groups to harass instead).

I'm also a part of the tax-paying public, and I'm not happy that seatbelt laws are strict. You spend far more of your tax money on the crazy number of people who need early, intensive medical care due to dozens of different kinds of unhealthy life choices. In fact, I'd argue that the one-time costs of car crash deaths stemming from loosening seatbelt laws is far cheaper than the years or decades of intensive, expensive treatment for preventable conditions arising from other knowingly stupid choices, and yet, once again, for some reason it's stupid choices regarding seatbelts of all things where people come out of the woodwork to be worried about the toll on people and the economy.

Or to act worried so they can feel morally justified (literally) policing the actions of others, at least.

Again, thank you for your comment and your perspective.

Absolutely - we make decisions every day on the assumption that the people around us are making smart decisions as well, and that's not always the case, and other people sometimes suffer negative outcomes as a result of those stupid, but legal, decisions.

And when you've come to the point where you're having to fabricate the kind of incredibly specific scenario you're proposing to get even a hypothetical externality, you're probably dealing with a situation that should be left to individual choice.

I'd also be completely fine with immunity to charges of manslaughter against anyone hit while not wearing a seatbelt, or something of that nature (and significantly higher insurance rates too, of course).

I understand the counter-argument that you'd probably suffer increased trauma in this incredibly specific scenario that you've concocted, but death is a fact of life, and with how far removed we are in this scenario from the likelihood of direct negative outcomes, I still feel that the agency to make one's own choices far outweighs any hypothetical marginal social good of legislation.