If you tailgate, you lose. I just wrote a piece about people who have real trouble with the various “Race doesn’t exist” arguments. This is a classical example of tailgating:

If race doesn’t exist then genocide doesn’t exist. So one does not dig into quotes from the Genocide Treaty to defensively argue that race does exist. The answer to that is in the TITLE of the thing.

When I first got to college, I ran into an example of fatal tailgating. I was sixteen when I got there, so the fact that the Korean War jet pilots were talking about the Old Men who had fought previously in WWII and were in the air in Korea did not sound odd to me.

The Korean War rookies had just reached twenty. The Old, old men who were staggering toward the convalescent home, they were talking about were in their middle or LATE twenties, since it was five years between WWII and Korea.

Tailgating killed a lot of the latter old men. Oh, well, thy were so old they were soon for the graveyard anyway.

The OLD MEN tended to tailgate. That is, though they had been trained otherwise, when the fight started they went into dogfight mode, the ideal of which was to keep your nose directly on the enemy plane’s tail and HANG ON.

At 200 miles per hour, the enemy’s weaponless tail in front of your machine guns was the ideal place to stay. But staying on someone’s tail at 600 Miles per hour was a VERY different proposition. The older guys naturally fell back on this tactic automatically when the actual fighting started, and they ended up spinning blindly with vertigo in the middle of nowhere, which made them excellent targets in the lightning quick movements of jets.

Tailgating here is something you have to train yourself to stop doing.

It doesn’t kill you, but it sure as hell gets you shot down.