Thanks for saying aggression isn’t okay.

And I have been endangered a lot by careless/bad drivers.

Look, I’m sure you don’t mean those questions to be insulting, but I’m struggling not to take them that way. I have good mobility and white cane skills and I worked very hard to acquire them (including doing a lot of training). I don’t take stupid risks and I do a lot of work to avoid danger.

In the end, this is the perspective I’m coming from. So no, I simply don’t give drivers the benefit of the doubt automatically. bsky.app/profile/mati...

Yes. I’ve heard drivers make jokes like that before, and generally I treat them as if not a red flag then at least an amber one, because for some people (not all) it’s a cover for real aggression.

I’m glad you don’t, but you’ve said a lot of aggressive things about pedestrians in this thread.

If my gender doesn’t matter why did you mention it?

I’m not trying to engage with the statute conversation - I just wanted to counter the claim that the firebombings weren’t attracting condemnation, because that isn’t true, and it’s good and important that it isn’t true.

Nor do you get to scream at me, call me the r word, follow me in your car, stage a near miss to scare the shit out of me, or threaten me with violence. All of which a fellow road user has done to me at one point or another. Being visibly disabled is not fun right now.

Do you have any idea what it’s like to have low vision? I promise you we do not go about the world unaware of risk or without taking care. Or unaware that some people are arseholes. But it’s not all on us, and to return to the point, *you still don’t get to hit me with your car*.

On*

The drivers who get aggressive aren’t doing it because I randomly wander into traffic, because I don’t do that. Generally they do it because I was on a pedestrian crossing at a time they deemed inconvenient or because I prepared to cross a road and then reconsidered based my my assessment of risk.

Ah yes, this is what it always comes down to - demanding disabled people not leave the house lest they inconvenience others. Knew we’d get there eventually.

And there’s an ongoing counter-terrorism investigation.

I’m not sure here you’ve gotten the idea that the North London firebombings have attracted no condemnation - they’ve (rightly) received major news coverage in the UK and several people have been charged with offences in relation to them.

If I’m responding more combatively to the other person in this conversation, it’s because she is saying things reminiscent of the kind of aggressive driver I sometimes encounter in the wild, who turn verbally abusive or uses their car as a weapon when a pedestrian inconveniences them.

Well the argument seems to be that a driver can’t be blamed for hitting a pedestrian who can’t see them. As a pedestrian with very limited vision, you can see why that might worry me.

What is the point? What I’m mostly seeing here a lot of drivers losing their collective temper.

I am a woman. More to the point I am a disabled pedestrian who would prefer to remain alive.

Assuming it was genuinely unforeseen? No. But there are medical conditions and disabilities that are incompatible with being able to drive safely. I have one of them, which is why I don’t drive. If I chose to drive anyway, I would rightly be culpable for anything that happened as a result.

You have a responsibility not to hit pedestrians with your car. That responsibility does not change depending on how deserving you think the individual pedestrian is.

The penalty for being careless should not be death.

….you do realise you are not entitled to kill pedestrians in either of these cases, yes?

No it isn’t. If a driver can’t be expected not to hit a pedestrian who isn’t looking where they’re going, then by the same logic a driver can’t be expected to avoid one who can’t see.

By this logic a driver would also have no responsibility if they hit a blind pedestrian. Which is monstrous.

Conversely, in high church Anglican environments it’s typically port.

Low church Anglicans were indeed known to use Ribena in the past, I believe. The Baptist church a lot of my fellow undergrads used to go to famously used to use Vimto.

And making people wait much much longer to apply for ILR and citizenship will make people far more vulnerable to that Reform policy if/when the latter get into govt. Labour is actively setting up the conditions for mass deportation, and it must be stopped.

(One factor in his arrest, allegedly, was that he still had his service revolver).

My great grandfather was one and it contributed to his murder - the Nazis banned Jewish lawyers from practising but made an exception for those who had served in WWI. He and his family stayed in Germany as a result. He was arrested on Kristalnacht and killed by a guard in Buchenwald.