Of Censorship, Safetyism, and Autonomous Vehicles
Cthulhu Authoritarianism has many tentacles, and they are all attached to the same rotting zombie carcass.
Substack Notes has been alive with the sound of censors this past month, as a regime fellating clown named Jonathan M Katz, who writes both at The Atlantic and here at Substack, has been given more attention than he deserves because he claims that Substack has a Nazi problem. For nearly a month now, this merchant of Thought Terminating Clichés and various of his allies have been calling for Substack to rid itself of the Nazi menace, which by any metrics, amounts to a small handful of anonymous nobodies that get very little engagement. These folks would probably have remained in obscurity, where they belong, if not for the highly amplified mewling of Mr Katz and his fellow cabbages, whom are members of the Soft-Hand E-Mail job Caste, and are paid very handsomely to produce this mewling.
Mr Katz and his ongoing attempt to ruin Substack with the imposition of a censorship panel or somesuch other mechanism has been met with the appropriate immune response, which has included many wonderful Substackers pushing back against this authoritarian nonsense with many impassioned essays, with this one from
Now, having read the title of this post, you are probably thinking to yourself, “What on Earth does this have to do with Autonomous Vehicles?”
Grab a coffee, buckle up your seatbelt, and let’s go for a quick drive, shall we?
Flying under the radar of the headlines of the day, and of all the noise made by would-be Ministers of Information, the development of autonomous vehicles has faced a few potholes and traffic cones.
From the world of Autonomous Truck development, we find that TuSimple is completely abandoning the US market.
When TuSimple went public in 2021 it was flying high as the leading self-driving trucks developer in the United States. Now — after a string of internal controversies and the loss of a critical partnership with truck manufacturer Navistar — TuSimple is exiting the U.S. altogether.
The publicly traded company said in a regulatory filing Monday that it’s laying off the majority of its U.S. workforce and selling assets here as it exits the country for Asia. About 150 U.S. workers, or 75% of staff in the country, will be laid off. The remaining 50 workers will wind down TuSimple’s U.S. operations, including the sale of assets, and assist with the company’s shift to the Asia-Pacific region, according to the filing.
Our friends over at The Verge ask some good questions about the lack of delivery on the past decade of Autonomous Truck marketing hype.
Plans to deploy driverless trucks come at a fraught time for the technology and autonomous vehicles in general. Multiple firms focused on self-driving trucks have recently pulled back operations or folded entirely, and a high-profile robotaxi accident in San Francisco is sending shockwaves across the industry.
These setbacks are reflective of an industry that has not matured as quickly as some experts anticipated. Up until recently, many in the industry predicted that autonomous trucks would be on the road before self-driving vehicles were let loose in cities because highways are much less complex operating environments.
However, while robotaxis are moving customers in three major American cities and being tested in over a dozen more, driverless trucks remain stuck in neutral.
Robotic four wheeler development is having multiple issues at several big names in the game.
Tesla issues massive recall of more than 2 million vehicles over autopilot safety concerns.
Back in October, Cruise took its entire RoboTaxi fleet off the road and several weeks later their CEO resigned, which was all downstream from an incident where one of Cruise’s Satanic RoboTaxis dragged a woman down the street.
And to top all of that off, it has to be emphasized again that autonomous cars are a “Top Down” market development - consumers are not asking for them and continue to view them with skepticism and suspicion.
Yet despite all of this, the boosters for this technology remain relentless in promoting it, and when you see the rationale behind most of the marketing, it becomes clear what is going on here.
Mainstream media has been blaring some version of this claim, incessantly -
Self-driving cars are actually better than humans at obeying traffic laws. They don't drive drive too fast. They don't text and drive. They don't drive drunk. They don't fall asleep and drift into oncoming traffic.
And neither do the vast majority of drivers; do we make all rules for the exception? It is always interesting to see that they never cite the relative safety of most drivers, and how many trillions of miles are driven every year without incident.
Well, Biden wants to make rules for the exception, and I’m not sure what’s worse - the mandated imposition of various surveillance technologies on new cars, or robotic cars where you won’t even have the opportunity to take the wheel, or actually go anywhere if your subscription to the robotic car service is having some issues.
What is happening here is the chipping away of your mobility rights in the name of Safetyism, and the citation of the ‘dangerous exception’ as requiring more stringent repression for all is what we are seeing with both cars and speech. Katz and the rest of them who would censor Substack are playing the same game - they find an extremely tiny minority of people with objectionable views, and use that minority to justify a censorship apparatus that will always be a threat to everyone else.
The thought that maybe, just maybe, it is up to the reader to choose to ignore that minority never enters their minds; a risk exists, like drunk or tired drivers exist, that you too might develop wrongthink and become a problem for their tender sensibilities, so your agency must be stripped away. Submit your writing for review by blowing right here, or you can forget about driving anywhere.
I posted this in another piece recently, but it is worth watching if you missed it, and making note that the same people shitting their pants about Road Safety or Muh Climate are more often than not the same people who also want to control what you read.
To Hell with all of them.
A brilliant weave of two apparently unrelated case studies. The safetyist ideological strain is a particularly potent one, innit? Outrage against dangerous exceptions is a helluva drug.
I've worked in several industries over the years. Saw it taking place in the mid-1990's with the laws governing pyrotechnics & explosives. It quickly creeped into the high-powered rocketry groups. After 9/11, there was a sudden bum-rush to over-regulate anything and everything remotely associated with chemicals and their suppliers. Emergency room doctors became self-proclaimed societal hall safety monitors wrote emotional pleas to make sparklers illegal - BAN everything!
Nary once was there a call to punish or regulate irresponsible parents, who, in some near-catatonic, beer-fueled stupor, handed their 3-year-olds with a lit sparkler to begin with.
The CPSC of course was all over it back then, "Ban them all!" - but silence on the more lethal and dangerous basic kitchen appliances and implements that every year rack up more injuries and fatalities than the public usage of fireworks does in 10 years.
This bizarre "savior complex" is continually amplified by the MSM has been responsible for much of the freedom erosion and appears to be much of the foundational impetus for funding the dark coffers of stuffed-shirt politicos.