31 August

The Australian magistrate at the forefront of addressing ‘sovereign citizen’ type arguments in Australia made the interesting observation that many come into the movement after some kind of traffic offence. I post a lot about cars and roads not just because I like cars. Cars are at the centre of our entire culture, in multiple ways that go well beyond transport. Watch drivers on the road. If you want to see status games, you’ll find plenty out while driving. The people who can’t stand anybody in front of them and who will speed up until they’ve cleared any vehicle in their line of sight. The so-many people who hate anybody overtaking them, and who will speed up to try to prevent it. Being overtaken to them is a loss of status, on the road. The flow of single vehicles that becomes clumps of handfuls of cars ‘racing’ each other to be head of the pack. All of that is status games. There’s a pecking order out on the road, beginning with which vehicle you drive out there, and then flowing over into how you drive it. And the laughable belief humans are tremendous drivers, with some of the slowest reflexes of any living animal, playing status games with multiple tonnes of high-speed metal.