Look at the ban on mobile phone use while driving. If I take the bus, within a mile I'll have seen a half-dozen people negotiating the narrow, twisting streets while holding a phone to their ear. Enforcement would need a police officer on every corner and that's simply unaffordable.
Well, it seems the solution lies with those interfering Righteous busybodies.
Okay, I have to say I regard any sort of driving without due care and attention as a bad thing, especially as I was never quick to get out of the way of a speeding vehicle and as I get older I get slower. I would very much like that driver's full attention on the road ahead, thank you. It is no consolation to me if you've just closed the deal of the century and become wealthy enough to laugh off a Leg-iron-shaped dent in your Mercedes.So no, I do not support flouting the law.
Some laws though, are so badly constructed as to be just silly. The phone law is one. We already have dangerous driving, careless driving, driving without due care and attention, and more laws that already cover driving while phoning, eating, drinking, putting on makeup, recording the passing scenery in oils, playing Buckaroo with the kids in the back, skinning a stoat and injecting heroin. We don't need a specific law for each of those things. Just look for the careless drivers, the ones who aren't paying attention, and the reason they are not paying attention is almost irrelevant.
The state of their driving is all that is relevant and if they can drive like a pro while producing perfect crepe suzettes on a camping stove duct-taped to the passenger seat, let them get on with it.
What we really don't want is Righteous idiots lining the streets, cameras at the ready, acting exactly like Stasi and photographing everyone going past. Because that is what they will do.
It costs nothing to take a photo with a digital camera. No processing or film costs. Why take the chance on missing something? They will photograph or video every car then go home and pick out the ones they can hold up as evidence of evil-doing. Every single car.
This will be lauded as a Great Thing because most people are stupid and cannot recall all those photographers arrested for taking one photo in a public place.
Indeed, in the comments...
I support it all the way, looks like another
case of them copying the success of Thailand. In Thailand they have a
unique way of tackling crime. It states; THE INFORMER OF ANY OFFENCE IN
THAILAND WILL RECEIVE HALF THE FINE IMPOSED ON THE OFFENDER. One
incident with me when I drove my son inlaws car with all the familly to a
restaurant and got out holding a bottle of whisky. A Thai man
photgraphed me drinking and was waiting for me to get into the car when
we left. He lost out because my con inlaw went home in his car and we
went shopping by taxi.
- william Swithin, expat/Thailand, 23/11/2011 It's easy to support a new oppression in a country you don't live in but aside from that, this man was spied on by someone. The man watched him arrive, watched and photographed him while at the restaurant with the intention of reporting him to the police and stayed there to watch him leave. And he is fine with that! He thinks it's a good thing! The informer gets half the fine. I'll bet there are people who make a living as informers.
That the idea of forming a new Stasi has been put forward is no surprise at all. What I find incredible is that someone who has been subjected to Stasi-like surveillance actually likes it. That is just weird.
So the policing of the smoking ban in cars will not be hard. The snoops and the busybodies will do it. Their cameras will not differentiate between a cigarette, an Electrofag and a toothpick because they will be cheap and crappy cellphone images taken through the reflections on the windscreen.
These Righteous drones will rail at any comparison of themselves to the Stasi, but that is exactly what they already are.
Update - Just realised something. There was never any need to make this unpaid volunteer scheme official. The idiot drones willing to do this already exist. All the Righteous had to do was get the idea into the newspapers where the drones could read it.
And they have.
