A few days ago I was listening to a radio interview, following this incident:
A US Airways flight was diverted to Philadelphia after a young Jewish man's prayer items triggered a bomb scare, Philadelphia police said.
The incident arose when the man used a phylactery, a small black box Orthodox Jews strap to their head as part of their prayer rituals, police said.
As reported by the BBC. The interviewer was asking a Scottish rabbi to tell the listeners about phylacteries (or tefillin, as they’re known in Hebrew); what they are, how they are used, their religious significance, etc. The rabbi was an informative and charming interviewee, who answered the questions, clearly, directly and simply. He didn’t do that hysterical this-is-an-outrageous-assault-on-the-freeedom-of-religious-expression thing, so beloved of militant God-botherers.
On the contrary, he thought that the sight of people strapping black boxes to themselves must seem weird to an outsider who didn’t know what was going on. He quite understood how it might reasonably cause people on a plane to get jumpy, given all the high-profile terror alerts that have been happening recently. He suggested that believers wishing to use phylacteries should use a little discretion and common sense – say informing the cabin attendants beforehand if they planned to strap black boxes to themselves on an airliner, just to avoid any misunderstanding.
I don’t share his religious beliefs, but I found his lucid, reasonable, friendly manner a refreshing change from the egotistical, blustering rudeness of so many people who I hear shouting their opinions when I turn on the TV or radio.
There was, though, one moment in the interview when I winced. The interviewer wanted to know the thinking behind putting scrolls with sacred texts inside the phylacteries. The rabbi replied that there was no thinking – it was a commandment. And that appeal to authority rather than reason sums up succinctly why I don’t subscribe to a set of religious beliefs or to any authoritarian creed.
I spend very little time listening to the thoughts of Jeremy Clarkson, who is, I think, wrong about most things I’ve ever heard him ranting on about and who is almost up there with Simon Cowell, Gordon Ramsay and Alan Sugar as one of the nation’s foremost providers of egotistical, blustering rudeness.
Clarkson has a bee in his bonnet about speed cameras. He seems to be the poster boy for that tedious army of frustrated, impotent, pompous, Pringle-sweater-wearing, Daily-Mail-reading middle-aged middle-managers who seemingly have nothing better to do with their lives than sit around the nineteenth hole with their cronies, G and T in hand, boring each other senseless with an endless whiny tirade about how speed cameras are a disgraceful infringement of their inalienable right to drive their stupid automotive substitutes for a flagging manhood with their pathetic vanity licence plates as fast as they bloody well like, because they know how to drive, unlike all those other tossers on the road, because having speed cameras is exactly like living in a police state, and how it’s got nothing to do with road safety, because it’s just another stealth tax, because blah, blah, blah, sodding blah…
Let’s just say I don’t exactly relish hearing JC and the Sunshine Band sounding their funky horns on this one.
Only an idiot would think of speed cameras as a stealth tax. They raise revenue, sure, but how many other taxes can you successfully avoid by simply following a simple instruction on a large, clearly visible sign in front of your nose? Like, durr!?
Then there’s the “bad drivers cause accidents, not speed” argument. An exasperated Jeremy Clarkson-style ‘for heaven’s sake’ has to be the only response to that feeble argument – excuse me for a moment, as I theatrically roll my eyes heavenwards. Mmm, that ceiling needs painting some time. Now where was I? Oh yes, bad drivers. For insurance purposes, most accidents are somebody’s “fault”. In reality, it’s generally more complicated than that. Driver error can be a factor, as can road conditions, speed, traffic conditions, errors on the part of more than one driver involved, mechanical failure. But saying that most accidents are “caused” by the binary alternatives of either bad driving or speed, with the proximate cause ruling out all other contributory factors, is just silly.
Some drivers, fast or slow, just drive badly. How you control this is mostly out with the speed camera debate – maybe the driving test should be tougher, perhaps the restrictions on drivers with probationary licences should be more severe, perhaps any number of things. But if you feel that most of the other drivers using the road are idiots, surely it makes sense to control the speed at which those idiots are travelling, by the threat of penalties if they drive too fast? After all, if these bad or inexperienced drivers are dangerous at 30 mph, they’re not going to get any safer if their local speed camera is binned and they decide they can push the pedal to the metal without fear of retribution.
Speed limits and cameras aren’t a panacea for preventing accidents, but elementary physics tells us that speed and inertia govern stopping times and mean that road users have less time to react to emergencies the faster they are travelling. Maybe the speed limits on some individual roads are a bit slower than they need to be, compared with others but, overall, the idea of controlling speed to reduce the frequency and severity of accidents seems perfectly sound and reasonable to me and I’m not troubled by the paranoid fantasy that a sign telling me that I should stick to a safe speed, plus a camera to enforce it, represents the oppressive power of freedom-hating safety Nazis. No, I just think they’re helping to keep my kid safe from being killed by some irresponsible twat who thinks that speed limits are for other people.
Speed limits come into the category of instructions that I’d regard as reasonable requests, as opposed to bossy commands and, as such I don’t have a problem with them.
To be fair, I do have to put in one good word for Jeremy Clarkson. He may be obnoxious and I may disagree with almost everything he says, but at least there is some thinking behind his opinions, something I can engage with and argue about. Arguments over whether or not speed cameras are a good idea belong in the realm where logic and facts, rather than authority and dogma matter. To give the Devil his due, I don’t think Clarkson’s opinions came straight out of a book that states “thou shalt not have speed cameras.”
I don’t believe it’s right to willingly do anything just because it’s a commandment. Thinking it through for yourself and listening to informed advice with a critical ear are the only ways to decide what you believe and what you should do. But don’t take my word for it. You’ve all got to work itself for yourselves. Don’t let anybody tell you what to do.
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