Posted on 10/06/2023 6:52:05 AM PDT by karpov
Forget race. Forget sex. Forget immigration. The mother of all culture wars is breaking out, and its subject is the car.
The automobile has long been a policy flashpoint, with the paramount issue being where it should be able to roam. This was the heart of the brutal urban-planning battles of the mid-20th century, which were fought over the need for and placement of new highways.
Yet it’s hard to describe those earlier policy fights as a culture war. Liberal urban activists such as Jane Jacobs—who famously fought off Robert Moses’ plan to build a highway interchange over Washington Square Park in New York City—didn’t hate cars or the people who drove them. In her magisterial “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” Jacobs repeatedly observed that resorting to the personal car was an entirely rational response to the failures of government urban planners to encourage smarter development.
Such humane common sense seems quaint in the context of today’s car wars. For a growing portion of the left, the automobile has become a moral ill in its own right rather than the symptomatic inconvenience of Jacobs’s telling. Partly this has to do with pollution, which was barely emerging as an issue when Jacobs was at her peak in the early 1960s but has also improved dramatically since. Much more so it has to do with carbon emissions—which are distinct from the smoggy pollution of the 20th century, despite constant efforts to conflate the two.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
A private reliable automobile is a freedom machine. When the Left takes away your car, it is meant to restrict your freedom, liberty and to control you.
100 years from now people are going to look back on a long lost golden era of travel freedom.
If we are even around 100 years from now.
battery cars will destroy private transportation
now shut up and get on the bus
Yes. And this is a key element of the so-called "climate agenda." Those most dedicated to pushing this agenda care nothing at all about "climate." They give it no thought one way or the other. Rather, it is all about what you've said here.
The silly idiot "greens," the Greta Thunbergs of the world. are rather obviously just "useful idiots" in the classical sense. Meanwhile, most of "corporate America" has fallen in line with the agenda because there is free money to be scarfed up in the short term. If someone is going to give you billions to build an offshore wind farm, and you'll get to keep the billions even after the project has failed, why wouldn't you take it, hmm? That's pretty much all that's been going on lately on that particular front.
And then there is a mix of the two -- e.g., GM's CEO, Mary Barra, who's a clueless midwit bimbo. And your ever-present shyster grifter types -- e.g., Elon Musk.
Khrushchev once said, that private cars are not necessary.
All you need is bunch of cheap taxis, and we all can move as much as we need.
Obviously, there was always somebody to hole him around.
I respectfully disagree. A hundred years from now, this era of the "green Leftists" will be seen as what they are, the generations after Malthus, accepting his idiotic and innumerate argument because they, in each succeeding generation, have be "taught" to be 1) innumerate and 2) politically active by a small group of grifters who know full well what the "numbers are." This will end, because all delusions end. Some by death -- as is your contention, but I think it modeled on the individual and a delusion -- and some by re-awakening, which is a societal phenomenon.
From the very perceptive Charles Mackay in the 1840s (paralleling the idiocy of Marx in that time), to today's continuing study and revelations of "Why People Go Mad in Groups" (Bernstein) as well as Desmet and others, we are learning slowly that those who would drive society into delusions do so for clear reasons. As even Chomsky and Herman note in "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media."
Perhaps I am more optimistic for this world going forward, but I see liberty -- or at least the yearning for liberty -- advancing, all the while the "green Leftists" of today simply repeat the Malthusian and Marxist ideology, rooted as they are in innumeracy. Liberty will out, in the long run. Lots of bumps in the road to confront before then.
Best wishes.
This 👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆 👀
Sounds like it’s time for normal people to go after the culture warriors.
Once they bought a vacation home, all that changed. Then two cars and driving always. Then my brother turned 16, and it was three cars.
My three children prefer not to drive cars. My youngest two live in downtown hi-rises and walk to work in a few city blocks. The other is an attorney, has a husband, and both have a car, but mostly ride their bikes to work. (Seattle).
Freedom of choice is important. If you choose to not use a car and choose to live in an area with adequate mass transit, I think that choice is yours to make.
I live sixteen miles from the nearest store (rural). Car necessary. I am also a door dash driver. Car necessary.
That’s why the left loves electric vehicles.
Everyone on FR can go on and on about their disadvantages, how they are more polluting than gas/diesel vehicles, how bad they are for the environment, etc.
But that’s not the point. The point is to pin people down into one location where they can be tracked around like a can of dog food making its way through its distribution environment.
EV’s are nothing but a waste of resources.
FMCDH.
I've worked in Frankfurt, Germany for a few weeks. I know how to get along in an environment with street cars and subways. I had a car when I had to go to the Lufthansa corporate offices because there was no way to get there with subways or street cars. Having traveled many places in the world, I prefer the freedom of my own vehicle to travel as necessary.
In my area, will that be Tuesday or Wednesday when the bus stops?
I had a very large farm in rural Wisconsin. Everything was at least 45 minutes away by car or truck.
I’m not concerned about this at all. It’s already proving to be their “bridge too far.”
They blew it.
When I lived in the Seattle area I buy a circle commuted to my job downtown and when I was in bellevue. But I use my cars for everything else. It did keep me healthy though.
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