There are 7 billion people and a lot of them die every day. We choose as a society about the trade offs between safety, liberty and convenience. When people tell you the raw numbers it sounds bad. When they tell you the probability you’ll die in a car accident in your lifetime they may think of it differently
> I’ll tell you the commercial they’d like to do, if they could, and I guarantee you, if they could, they’d do this, right here. Here’s the woman’s face, beautiful. Camera pulls back, naked breasts. Camera pulls back, she’s totally naked. Legs apart. Two fingers, right here and it just says, “Drink Coke.” Now I don’t know the connection here, but goddamn if Coke isn’t on my shopping list that week.
-- Bill Hicks
Oh yeah, it's always "us as society" when things get pushed by actual individuals working at specific companies with whatever means they can grab, to whomever they can push it on, side-effects and consequences down the road be damned. "We as a society" decided Colin Powell should lie his butt off in his presentation about Iraq before the UN.
Never mind car crashes, if the people who get killed in wars of aggression saw more than the raw fact of them having being tortured and/or murdered, if they just saw the profits for select individuals, and the way faceless masses cheer "liberty and convenience!", they'd be more than cool with it, that's obvious.
A society is made up of acting and thinking individuals, and referring to decisions made "as a society" is not really from that realm. Start with your own position, or with why you don't have one in favor of such abstractions that hold no water.
