SwingingTheLamp

This doesn't seem like a good-faith argument, because this is a pre-schooler's take on transportation issues. Anybody with a passing familiarity with roads can see the holes in it.

One of the tests that Strong Towns offers to determine whether your town is a strong one is this: If there was some emergency (say, a fascist takeover) that required the community to gather together, would people know instinctively where to meet? In lots of low-density, car-oriented landscapes, there's no there there, no community/symbolic spaces where people would go.

Obviously, this is an analytical tool, not guide as to what would happen in any real-world scenario. It does highlight the decline of community, and the fraying of the weak social ties that hold a community together. How do we as Americans organize ourselves to resist when so many of us don't know even our close neighbors? How do we work to reduce political polarization, which is done by daily, face-to-face interaction with people who are not like us, when we have so little community interaction that's not through a windshield?

It's a chicken-and-egg problem as to whether the destruction of community is a cause or effect of car-dependency, but what's clear is that the fascists are here and taking advantage of the fact that we've fucked ourselves over with a car-dependent landscape for too many decades.

20% of Americans are children under the age of 18 and so don’t need to drive…

Your childhood must've been very different from mine! I needed to get places as a kid, like school, friends' houses, stores, parks, the library, and more.

Believe as you wish, but if a person works for a boss that they know to be a sex trafficker, doing things sex-trafficking-adjacent, or at least illegal, for him, that's good enough for me to declare that person a sex-trafficking POS.

Also, I don't think for a microsecond that goons given this kind of power and impunity over detainees are going to refrain from sexual assault. We just haven't heard about it yet (this time).

But, well, pick your lane.

I would much rather see ex-Redditors leave the word "you" at the door, as in, telling other Lemmings who they are, what they believe, or what they're doing. Like, "you clearly think...", "you don't know...", or "you believe..."

Even if those things may be true, that kind of phrasing leads to arguments and vitriol about 100% of the time, even if the initial difference of opinion was a misunderstanding. If somebody is really a nasty troll, or bot, or shill, or tankie, or whatever, block and move on.

Right, that's exactly the problem I have with most people who call themselves libertarian. In a nutshell, they truly believe that we all should get to do whatever we want, as long as it doesn't affect others. Except, everything we do affects other people. Some of the ways are profound, and some are trivial. The libertarian-type people are so selfish, or solipsistic, they think that only their own judgement applies whether the effect infringes freedom it not.

We see that with vaccines: The government shouldn't mandate what they put in their bodies. That's infringes freedom. But they're more than happy to spread virus into other people's bodies, and if immuno-compromised people think that it's hurting them, too bad. Or the libertarian types think that they should be allowed to drive the biggest brodozer available, because it doesn't affect anybody else, and the freedom of other people who get hit and crushed under the wheels, the other drivers blinded by eye-level headlights, or the taxpayers who have to subsidize more free parking space and street maintenance, doesn't matter.

It's always the same pattern: Anything that stops me from doing what I want is an unreasonable infringement of freedom, and any effects I have on other people are just the reality of living in society and they should suck it up.

It's the same principle as what you call 9 people at a table with a Nazi. These agents deserve no nuance.

Well, President Musk has been accused of helping Epstein's trafficking, we know for sure that his Oval Office puppet was involved.

Well, you did out yourself.

Assuming they're federal agents, then yes.

We got a Nazi here.

In about 2018, I think, a team of researchers put together a mathematical model of how markets work. What they found is that wealth just naturally accumulates to a few people. It's inherent to how markets work, and it's more or less at random; in their simulation runs, every person started out in an equal position.

It's all luck. It doesn't even take being in the right place at the right time, although that helps. Since us humans operate on narratives and just-world fallacies, it's really easy for us to construct a post hoc story about why a certain billionaire succeeded. But it's all luck.

(I remember that I read about this research in Scientific American, but I don't have the link handy.)