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The day I accidentally killed a little boy

bbc.co.uk

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Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#381

Post by hycaria »

jacquesm wrote: post #216
rdiddly wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And all of you saying "same here" because your children are so precious, you all swore off driving cars, right? Because other people's children are precious?

What a nasty little comment. No, we did not all swear off cars, but we will do our damnest to drive slow in areas where children are known to be about, keep our vehicles in top shape so that when you need to swerve or do an emergency stop there are as few variables in the equation as possible, will not do drugs, will not drink and will keep our eyes on the fucking road . By your standard we should all jump off the ne…

Can we just at some point admit that we inevitably will lose people in accidents and that the trade off is just not worth it?

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#382

Post by leonroy »

jfoucher wrote: post #173
Pigo wrote: post #7

I can barely bring myself to read stories like this now. I never really thought about it before my son was born, but there's always this dread you live with in the back of your mind. This little helpless person has your life in it's hands. The world and fate is trying to take them out, and if they succeed you'd never recover. You can learn to live with pain, but I don't believe you ever get over something like that.

Haven't read the story yet, don't know if I will. I just wanted to reply to your comment with a personal anecdote. My eldest son died in an accident when he was about 2 ½ years old. The dread wasn't there before. I didn't think anything like that would happen to me. You do learn to live with the pain, even I sometimes cry for what would have been futile reasons. But I still couldn't bring myself to enter the church a…

Completely agree. After my second child was born I focused my efforts into earning and saving and took a long period of unpaid time to spend with my baby. I had to keep my monthly burn rate super low and learn a lot about budgeting but it was one of the most rewarding periods of my life.

There’s always more work (it honestly never ends if your skills are valuable). But time with your kids is very precious - and that becomes very clear in retrospect.

I’ve noticed my relationship with my three year old has become closer as I’ve put more time and effort in engaging with her. There is really no replacement for quality time with your kids - no amount of toys or treats makes up for it.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#383

Post by kohanz »

jacquesm wrote: post #364
sambe wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or does it? http://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/news/15255796._I_was_to...

Good find. Have another one. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2098608/Kidnap-attem... There are plenty of these examples over the years. It is not that it does not happen, it does happen, but it is pretty rare. My point was that you can not simply dismiss all these cases out of hand as fantasy.

Agreed, it's rare, but does happen:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/child-s-disap...

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#384

Post by sambe »

jacquesm wrote: post #364
sambe wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or does it? http://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/news/15255796._I_was_to...

Good find. Have another one. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2098608/Kidnap-attem... There are plenty of these examples over the years. It is not that it does not happen, it does happen, but it is pretty rare. My point was that you can not simply dismiss all these cases out of hand as fantasy.

This person is also accused, not found guilty (from the link, and no quick Google turning up a conviction).

It does very rarely happen. But even of the subset of events that aren't totally fabricated, many turn out to be more innocent than they are made out to be.

People getting their worldview from these sources are going to be unnecessarily worrisome about such things, which is really the point of the grandparent.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#385

Post by jacquesm »

wffurr wrote: post #372
jacquesm wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks to me as if you have missed out on the last 100 years or so of social developments. If you want to go back to an age before cars then that is fine by me but no amount of guilt tripping language is going to make that happen. I cycle where and when I can, I drive when I have to. In fact, I would be highly surprised if you biked more than I do, which - incidentally - got me rather severely injured a while ago.…

One big reason I drive as little as possible is specifically because it's dangerous to everyone around me, even though I believe myself to be a cautious driver. 40,000 deaths a year in the United States, top cause of death in every age group to 1 to 44 (killing someone with your car counts as "unintentional injury" in the CDC's reporting) is an ongoing moral tragedy of huge dimensions. So sure, life can never be "ris…

Even if everybody drives as little as possible - and with the cost of driving leisure driving is not quite as prevalent as it once used to be - there will still be substantial risk. That risk can be decomposed into a number of factors:

- mixing different kinds of traffic

- the existence of different kinds of traffic

- speed differences between the various kinds of traffic

- situational elements such as poor visibility

- not adapting to circumstance

- breaking the law

and so on.

Where I live cycling is common, we have a cycling culture. Almost nobody wears helmets. Even so, people drive quite a bit too, and the cyclist of one moment is the driver of the next. Accidents - while not as common as in the states - can and do happen. And just like we are not going ban children from traffic we are not going to get anywhere by demanding we ban cars or cyclists. That is just this side of silly and will not get us anywhere. Improvements are made because of reasonable argument, not by shrilly demanding society stops working to comply with one´s personal demands.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#386

Post by lostlogin »

naasking wrote: post #338
BearGoesChirp wrote: post #155

All the people talking about being unable to handle/comprehend the death of their child, and especially the one line of conversations about the impact of losing one child when you have many more, made me think about something. For most of human history, losing some children was expected. Child mortality rates for most of our history have been abysmal. As species, what impact did that have on us? Child abuse has a lon…

> All the people talking about being unable to handle/comprehend the death of their child, and especially the one line of conversations about the impact of losing one child when you have many more, made me think about something. For most of human history, losing some children was expected. Child mortality rates for most of our history have been abysmal. Exactly, the preciousness of childhood and children in general i…

> Certainly our ancestral parents felt the loss, but not nearly so keenly

Having recently read a few accounts of early European settlers in New Zealand, nothing about their accounts would make me think that they felt the loss less keenly. New Zealand was colonised by Europeans relatively recently but older accounts of loss don’t make me think any loss was somehow less either.

I’d agree that the loss was less unexpected.

Unsure how you would measure this effect though.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#387

Post by Myrmornis »

daeken wrote: post #318
alien_at_work wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're talking about trigger warnings, this is the crux of the so called "SJW" movement: it's a bunch of emotion from ignorant people. Actual studies show that trigger warnings are actually more damaging than not having them [1] [2] [3]. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-cod... [2] http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/cover_story/2016/09/w... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTU3hxg…

I'm unsure if you posted the wrong links, or if you mistook those for science. None of those links reference any "actual studies" whatsoever, let alone peer-reviewed scholarly studies regarding the impact of trigger warnings. Additionally, the first article linked is one of the worst long-form stories I may have ever read. It's scattered, making a claim and then jumping to another without justifying it in any way, sh…

I don't know much about Jonathan Haidt but in fact in the 3rd link there (youtube) Haidt does reference actual studies. See around 6min20s.

I don't think Haidt is some sort of evil troll, are you sure you've really listened to him?

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#388

Post by ajeet_dhaliwal »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #129
ajeet_dhaliwal wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sad that people can be so stupid in India, they often end up killing the wrong person or don't know the full facts of what happened.

This happens everywhere, not just India. This happens in the United States in the prison system, for example.

You’re right of course, I just mentioned India because the parent poster was asking about the instant mob justice approach that sometimes occurs there in serious traffic collisions.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#389

Post by leonroy »

parasubvert wrote: post #360
LordKano wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, that happened when I became the father of two little girls. My radar is up whenever I am in public with my daughters. I notice if strangers look for too long in their direction or if I see someone hanging out where children are, without a child of their own. Occasionally, I'll spot another father like me. We'll lock eyes for a moment and it's clear that we recognize each other (for what we are, not necessaril…

Is that kind of paranoia productive? Especially considering we are at historically low crime rates. A very young child needs supervision and precautions to prevent them from hurting themselves, as this article sadly shows, and even then, its blind bad luck sometimes. But otherwise I can’t think any of my family (two young kids, 1 year and 8 years) or friends (many kids of various ages) being super cautious about thei…

Excellent points. There was an article where the author interviewed a bunch of kids a few decades back and examined how they played and then revisited them 20 years later to see how their kids played.

The original group of kids played across a very large area (something like a couple square miles of woodland) and roamed across their hometowns with little oversight.

Two decades later their children by comparison were very closely monitored and played in controlled areas or fenced yards only.

The reasoning of the parents being that crime and abduction have risen when in fact they’ve fallen by a huge amount.

There’s no real sane reason behind it - I’m a parent and there’s no way I’d let my kids play in the local woods alone despite doing so myself as a kid. The world ‘feels’ less safe and it’s very hard to overcome our feelings even when we know they’re irrational.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#390

Post by jacquesm »

hycaria wrote: post #381
jacquesm wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a nasty little comment. No, we did not all swear off cars, but we will do our damnest to drive slow in areas where children are known to be about, keep our vehicles in top shape so that when you need to swerve or do an emergency stop there are as few variables in the equation as possible, will not do drugs, will not drink and will keep our eyes on the fucking road . By your standard we should all jump off the ne…

Can we just at some point admit that we inevitably will lose people in accidents and that the trade off is just not worth it?

That is exactly what happened. It is why we have the world we have. And I am fine with changing that world to a better one but the path had better be incremental and realistic or it simply will not happen. And even then there will be some risk of accident.
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