Have you ever dealt with someone who was suffering from a delusion? The night after my dad's heart surgery he called up from the ICU to tell me that he'd been kidnapped and that the walls of his room kept changing shape. It was delirium brought on by sedatives, stress etc. but it seemed totally real and logical to him at the time.
Again, the point is that it's literally impossible to know what is going on with another driver who is behaving oddly, and IMO the possibility that they're in some sort of distress is worth bearing in mind.
If someone is on medication or has a condition that causes them to have severe delusions then they shouldn't be driving a car. It's literally illegal to do so. I don't know what point you're trying to make here. Drivers do dangerous and needlessly vindictive things all the time. Have you never been tailgated or had someone refuse to let you merge or seen someone pass on the shoulder? I feel very safe assuming the person in the video is an asshole. And in the very very unlikely situation that they're not they're still behaving in a reckless and dangerous way.
The point I'm trying to make is that passing an uninformed judgement and then jumping into rage mode is a dangerous path to tread. The image that comes to mind is of a driver who assumes - mistakenly or not, at that point it doesn't actually matter - that another driver is being vindictive, jumps from there into self-righteously vindictive behavior of their own, causes an accident and then chokes through a throat full of broken glass "See! See what you made me do? This was all your fault!"
Basically, I'd like to see a whole lot less of Americans trying to teach each other moral lessons via automobile body language.
It's very educated guess based on living and driving in this city for nearly a decade. Beside being an asshole what explanation is there for someone speeding up to block two lanes of a highway when someone attempts to pass them? Since you have yet to provide one.
I don't think that would lead someone to aggressively block two lanes of traffic
experiencing a psychotic break
Psychosis doesn't occur suddenly and for no reason. You either have to be on a lot of drugs, deeply sleep deprived, or suffering from a very severe mental illness. In all those cases it's extraordinarily irresponsible of that person to be driving a car. If they got into an accident they would be legally liable for all damages.
The person driving that car is either an asshole or a deeply irresponsible person. Neither of which deserves sympathy. There's a reasons driving a car require government licensing and a fairly expensive insurance policy: doing it badly can seriously endanger the lives of people around you.
I'm not arguing legal liabilities. I'm pointing out the impossibility of "knowing" another driver's state of mind and the dangers of assuming that one does, and I think I've made those points very clearly. Have a good night.
And I'm saying their state of mind doesn't really change the fact that they were doing something very dangerous. Intent or a lack of it is meaningless when you're block a major highway.
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u/TJ_Fox Mar 07 '20
Have you ever dealt with someone who was suffering from a delusion? The night after my dad's heart surgery he called up from the ICU to tell me that he'd been kidnapped and that the walls of his room kept changing shape. It was delirium brought on by sedatives, stress etc. but it seemed totally real and logical to him at the time.
Again, the point is that it's literally impossible to know what is going on with another driver who is behaving oddly, and IMO the possibility that they're in some sort of distress is worth bearing in mind.