• Miles O'Brien
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    301 month ago

    He probably didn’t mean to kill the guy

    Are you his lawyer?

    When you run someone over, you DO NOT have the defence of “I didn’t mean to kill anyone”, and if you have to ride over a curb to do it, you will never be able to convince me that wasn’t the plan from the start.

    Running this man over wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t an oopsie-doodle where someone got mildly hurt by an inattentive or incompetent driver.

    This was “I’m big and I don’t like this person for X reason, hahahaha run little man. Wait did that motherfucker just tap my car with his fist? OH HELL NO GET STOMPED ON BITCH”

    I’m stereotyping the internal monologue, but the point is the same. “jumped curb, injured cyclist, cyclist hits car, driver decides to run him over in response” there is no way to spin that as “it wasn’t intentional”

    Idk if you bike on roads often, but I do, and I have heard this argument so many times after almost being hit (or ACTUALLY being hit) and it just pisses me off when I hear it. Nothing against you.

    • Daniel Quinn
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      231 month ago

      Woah woah there friend. We’re on the same side here. I cycle my kid to school and then onto work nearly every day and I’m regularly on the receiving end of some seriously scary and dangerous assholes behind the wheel. They feel entitled to the whole damned road, and I’m sure they fantasise about running us over. I’ve been tailgated, screamed at, nearly clipped multiple times by people “just wanting to catch the light” or some nonsense. They are dangerous assholes and should be banned from the city.

      I’m just saying that if you’re going to pretend that everyone behind the wheel of a car is fully aware that they’re pushing two tonnes of steel and glass around at high speeds, then you’re not working with facts. Cars are literally designed to stoke the illusion of comfort and immobility, that you’re just “on the road” without a Giant Metal Cage around you. You take a human and put them in that situation they will inevitably drive like fucking psychopaths. That doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t go to prison forever, but it’s important to understand where this coming from.

      The problem is the normalisation of a dangerous pattern.