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I don't know what your comment about percentages means. But I would venture to state that there are more sober drivers than drunk drivers at almost any given time, so I'm not sure what your other comment means either.
Also interesting fact, according to the book I mentioned earlier (The Culture of Public Problems by Joseph R. Gusfield), a surprising number of drunk drivers would be found when cops would do their DUI checkpoints and then estimates make those numbers even larger. So what Gusfield claims is interesting is not that drunk drivers get into accidents, but that there aren't as many accidents as we should expect by drunk drivers. There's the fact that all other attempts to stop fatalities from drunk driving (such as designing safer cars) have been shot down and ignored by the U.S., which is odd, and that most studies of drunk driving rates do not control for other things that increase the odds of having a car accident, such as gender, age, or driving experience. With this in mind, to then blame all drunk driving accidents on alcohol may not be accurate because potentially confounding variables are ignored.
I'm not saying people should drink and drive, but it's certainly interesting to think about how we have come to understand drunk driving and the ways in which it reflects a specific view of "valid" knowledge and reality.
Can you really not understand what he means?!!
Basically - in the USA 32% of fatal automobile accidents involve drunk drivers, so with your logic you would say "well 68% involve sober drivers so its actually safer to drink drive"
But as you said there are a lot more sober drivers than drunk drivers on the road so that is not the case.
This is one of the most regular examples of someone trying to be postmodern and intellectual that I have ever seen. We have come to see drunk driving as bad because all you have to do is go down to the ER and its staring you in the face.
Where did you get 32% from the numbers Deekay stated? And did
you read at all what I said? Aside from you obviously not understanding confounding variables or the fact that we don't really have as accurate of a way of proving that drunk driving is as bad as our society claims, no where did I say that drunk driving is not a bad thing. I'm not a fucking idiot. I just said that what this book is doing is looking into the social mechanisms behind
why we have decided to handle drunk driving by calling it an individual decision and laying all of the blame on individuals deciding to drink and drive when there are other ways to understand this process and other steps to take to lower the rates of drunk driving fatalities.
But, let me assume that you skimmed my post and never read the book (nor do you ever plan on reading the book) before claiming that it's "trying to be postmodern and intellectual." Do you understand what "postmodern" means? Because if you read the book, it's not postmodern and it's not "trying to be intellectual," it
is an intelligent book. So now you just sound like a fucking idiot by attacking a book based off of a few facts that I took from it that I thought were interesting. It wasn't even a summary of the entire book.
Oh, and by the way, Gusfield predicted your anger over someone suggesting that there is another way to understand drunk driving.
EDIT: Rereading my post, you might mean that I'm trying to be postmodern and intellectual, which I don't even know how to respond to.