IS
CHARACTERISTIC CLAPTRAP …
… as can be
seen by considering insurance sector statistics for first approximation could
be taken to label 1/8th drivers by age, occupation, mileage, history
for their association with x7 higher accident rate. This means half of all
accidents are associated with people whose attributes probably also predispose
them to high usage of mobiles for personal and commercial purposes, reflected
of course in target emphasis of product advertising.
Mobile
usage going pro rata with accident incidence alone in fact suffices to account
for the “4 times” cited in the coercion campaign that ironically centres on Classic
FM whose audience must be almost devoid of mobile-maniacs judging from its
advertising vacuum for such products. Correspondingly, mobile usage for 7/8th
drivers incurs negligible additional accident risk so the campaign is indeed
not just coercive claptrap but all the more for concentrating its promotion on
an innocent but susceptible majority ~ a psychological strategy that would no
doubt be deemed “undesirable” by the ASA were their people not so strongly
allied by correctness culture / career consolidation to the perpetrators
themselves!
For
those who like to see symbolic stuff: let p, q, r respectively be expectations
for low accident incidence, low mobile use, safer group membership and take
primes to distinguish their accident-prone counterparts, so above statements
translate into p’=7p, r=7r’ or pr+p’r’=2pr and, with q’=7q, prq+p’r’q’=
4*(2pr)q ~ whence the “4-tmes” asserted and inferred above. This result arises
because mobiles provide a meaningful marker for the high-risk group or rather
have been presumed to do so for the purpose of making the point but one which
is most probably a deal nearer the truth than the advertised assertion.
A
comparable deconstruction can be created against coercive correctness claims
that speed traps catalyse improved road safety, showing rather that they
predispose to victimising the substantially harmless majority rather than
selectively sampling the high-risk people rightly targeted by the insurance
sector using statistically sound hindsight! Because the substantially low-risk
group (as labelled by insurers on the basis of real data) is so much bigger
than the high-risk one, only a small fractional contribution from them (1/7th,
eg as occasional offenders caught unawares on unfamiliar roads) is needed to
exceed the numbers of those labelled high-risk by the insurers. Who amongst
even the self-righteous enforcers can honestly claim that they don’t offend
even at this low-level incidence?
So
that’s the distinction then ~ intensity of mobile usage is very probably a reliable
marker for risk but speed traps almost certainly penalise unselectively across
the whole population. If their proponents cared about “honesty, truth and
decency” they would publish statistics conceding the lack of correlation
between categories of trap offenders and insurers’ own ground-truth figures.
There is no doubt they are largely uncorrelated as testified by the vigorous
vocal backlash from otherwise invariably silent Middle-Englanders who have been
rudely criminalized courtesy of the coercive correctness cowboys!
In
sum, more meaningless manipulative messages from a motley mob whose daft
deliverables to date have most notably included the disappearing Dome debacle,
the Y2K Armageddon that never was, bus lanes with <1% utilisation for fear
of retribution conveyed via covert cameras or overpaid plods soon to be
supplemented by GPS drones eavesdropping everyone everywhere whilst armies of
anonymous apparatchiks know everything about everyone but nothing about
anything, all escaping remonstration because the gullible GB public nowadays
only knows all about soaps but never sees the suds for what they are ~
Orwellian pulpers ensuring that topical vox pop centres on the virtualities of
that East End Square so as to stop well short of the realities that Westminster
politicians pompously purport to portray. We are inundated with inspirational
initiatives, often as not asserted to be internationally envied, but they are
seldom properly probed even by pious press pundits for the wafer-thin waffle
that often as not conceals an Emporial emptiness.