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  • its a policy designed to combat centuries of racism and sexism which has put people at a measurable disadvantage. its actively anti-racist and anti-sexist, but i imagine you're just looking to be outraged. the reality is that a lot of companies will basically just hire white men for most roles unless they have to do otherwise. this is one way of trying to fix that observable injustice.

  • lots of people thought Jung was bullshit way before JBP came around.

  • herd immunity relies on people maintaining immunity. if you can get the vaccine, you should, regardless of if you've caught the virus.

  • if you're gonna make bad faith arguments about me wanting to take cars away or whatever, even when i explicitly talked about the inclusion of car based transportation in equitable future transport solutions for non-urban areas, don't bother to respond at all. if you want to continue to insist that cities are yucky and bad, and intimate that not having cities is somehow a more equitable and realistic solution to the problems cities face than actually ameliorating the issues real people have right now, you can do that i guess.

    And not in suburbs? I find that difficult to believe.

    i looked at the breakdown. suburbs do constitute around half of the population, with urban at 31%. the census includes suburban populations as extensions of densely populated urban cores. so i was wrong about that. it still leaves like a third of all people in urban areas, which are still people who deserve equitable transport.

    …says the one who’s advocating for something that would ruin my entire family’s lives.

    what the fuck? like, forreal, under what circumstances is improving public transit supposed to impact your life negatively at all? again, never once advocated for the removal of all cars forever in perpetuity. i, and basically everybody else who wants better public transit, wants a larger diversity of transport solutions, to mitigate the energy costs and provide more people with more options for getting around. having strong public transit just by consequence of its utility makes less people need cars. you may genuinely believe public transit is slow, useless, and inferior to cars in some objective way. as somebody who has lived in cities for my whole life, i'm telling you that these sorts of resources are extremely valuable for people, especially people living with disabilities, people who cannot drive, people who are poor, and people who are unhoused. given that you've accused me of ableism for pointing out in passing that food deserts exist, i'll just throw it back at you. what if you can't drive? what if you don't have a car? paratransit is public transit, and allows disabled people to live more full, independent lives. making public transit more accessible to more people can do nothing but improve the standards of living for people who need it or can benefit from it, and will do basically nothing if you decide you're too good for it, as you obviously have.

    Why should it be in the hands of Uber, Lyft, Greyhound, Amtrak, and the airlines? At least the car is yours to keep, and doesn’t take you on a sub-optimal route to artificially cost you more money.

    public transit isn't those things? like, how am i supposed to take this as a serious argument? i'm not advocating for private services, i'm advocating for public transportation resources. there are actually pilot programs for public services like Uber and Lyft, fleets of cars that can transport people cheaply from place to place if they don't have a vehicle in the city. as for Amtrak or airlines, well, the initial thrust of my whole deal was that commercial airlines are kinda shit, and i agree with the stance of a number of railway unions, which is that railway services should be made public, rather than held by irresponsible, exploitative corporate middlemen.

    Public transportation is dangerous. People just don’t think about dangers that don’t immediately and spectacularly kill you like a car crash does.

    i've lived in cities all my life. never ever been pickpocketed. legit don't know anybody who's had an experience like that, don't know where you got the idea that that's some sort of common city living experience, other than by watching movies or something? and pandemic notwithstanding (busses kept going during the pandemic because people needed them), cars are just more dangerous overall, and are extra more dangerous when lots of people are driving all at once, and where people walking on the street are common casualties of vehicle accidents. now, you could take that as an argument that everybody should drive everywhere to protect themselves against the constant threat of fast moving metal boxes, but i think its frankly an unacceptable state of affairs. if people want to walk, or cycle, or whatever else, the infrastructure of their community should make that a viable option for them. right now, with the exclusive focus on car-based infrastructure? it isn't.

    Then you’d best hurry and invent practical fusion power, because as long as energy remains scarce, so will transportation.

    this one's just obtuse. we can take incremental steps towards our ideals. public transportation objectively costs less energy to transport more people than cars do. that's one of the reasons why a lot of climate policy groups advocate for its expansion. scarcity should not stop us from attempting to provide the most resources we can to the most people possible, especially people in disadvantaged circumstances. like, you seem at least vaguely left leaning, why is this a point of contention? are you just quipping or something?

    Yes, and depriving people of their cars and houses would make it even worse. Your proposal is an example of crab mentality: you don’t have a car or a house, and instead of demanding those things for yourself so that your life can be as good as those who do have those things, you demand that those things be taken away from others so that their lives will be just as miserable as yours.

    full stop, never fucking said that. never said anything about taking people's cars away, and never said anything about taking people's houses away. i even made explicit mentions of car based infrastructure as part of future transport solutions in rural areas (or i guess suburban areas), but our current infrastructure is inefficient for the way that people in cities live. and great job assuming my current living conditions because i find advocacy for transportation rights important.

    i can't take the rest of your obvious disdain for urban communities seriously. people live in cities. lots of people. lots of them love it there, and do not want to leave the communities in which they have built their lives. given that there are obvious problems with transportation in these places, problems i think i've enumerated clearly, including a number of ecological consequences which will worsen with climate change (that you basically didn't mention at all in your response, other than to continue dunking on how icky and gross and morally unscrupulous our homes apparently are), your unwillingness to support a pretty important solution to at least some of these problems is disappointing to me. i'm sorry, but when your only response to the problems facing urban communities is "well that's true but urban communities are bad", i really don't know what to say to that. yes? these are problems? better public transportation could fix some of them? we should use the technology we have to improve public transit significantly, as has been successfully implemented in a great number of other countries, and as you have advocated for plane travel? a modern high speed rail system could make interstate travel cheaper than a car or a plane and way faster than a car.

    and finally, because this one really pissed me off:

    You realize that no tyrannical regime in its right mind is going to just give its own victims an easy and affordable way to leave, right? Hitler did not put the Jews on trains out of Germany; he put them on trains to concentration camps. If you’re in a state where they’re rounding up and executing trans people, and you’re trans, then trying to leave the state on a publicly-owned vehicle is suicide.

    I am a Jew. I am also trans. Expulsion was a big part of the Jewish experience in the ramp up to the Holocaust, and over half of all Jews in Germany fled their homes to escape what they saw as escalating rhetoric before the start of the war, and before the Holocaust began in earnest. Many were forced to leave their belongings behind. Eventually, as part of the escalating laws restricting the lives and livelihoods of Jewish people, in September 1941, the remaining Jews inside Germany were prohibited from using Germany's public transportation. That same month, they started putting the Star of David on their clothes. They were forced to live in designated regions of German cities called Judenhäuser. We can talk all we want about the utility and value of public transit, but the Nazis didn't want their victims to have it for whatever reason.

  • yeah i guess i did extrapolate that point out further than you meant it. my bad. i think that labeling people isn't really the point that i find aggravating, though. its applying clinical labels to people who don't necessarily have those clinical conditions. like, is psychopathy really what's going on here? can people really know that observing from afar? i don't think so, and i think its at least a little bit irresponsible to make those sorts of claims about people because they do bad things. there is nothing intrinsically pathological about causing harm to other people. like, the fact that you seem to think you can identify "clear patterns of harmful pathological behavior" is mostly the thrust of my resistance. it certainly is harmful behavior, and it may very well be pathological, but frankly neither you or i are well positioned to make judgements about the mental health of strangers, in the same way we aught not assume people have a specific physical illness.

    i think its probably good to point out that people can do bad things because of their mental illness, but we don't have enough information to just say she has this specific mental illness because she did bad things. its kinda like speculating on the sexuality of public figures, or at least those two ideas feel similar in my brain.

  • High-density population centers are bleak, crowded, expensive, and dangerous. Most people are neither willing nor financially able to live in one, and must therefore commute to work in a >personal vehicle of some kind. Public transportation is intolerably slow in suburban and rural areas.

    Furthermore, depriving people of their own means of transportation confines them to the limits of the public transportation system in their area. Freedom of movement is most people’s >only hope of protecting themselves from all manner of tyranny and exploitation, such as the anti-trans and anti-abortion laws now in effect in portions of the United States. Limiting >freedom of movement is dystopian. What good is solving the climate crisis only to replace it with something equally horrible?

    okay, i'm gonna infodump here. this is just something i really care about, and i want you to understand why its important. genuinely i don’t even care that much about whatever other point i made here, if you are for using technology to mitigate climate change, being against expanding public transportation can really only come from ignorance of the harms done by car infrastructure in urban environments, or some sort of bias against city dwelling people.

    like 80% of all people in the US live in urban areas, at least according to US Census data. you are in the minority if you aren't living in a relatively dense urban population. they can be dirty and expensive (though that isn't an inherent property of urban areas, just a failure of policy), but the thing about them being dangerous, or at least significantly more dangerous than rural areas, is just not factual. there are a number of studies examining the exact conditions, but if you live out in a rural area you're significantly more likely to die from injury according to some sources, and urban population centers tend to have much greater access to medical services. i'm not saying that there aren't specific health risks that come with living in cities, but there is by no means a consensus that urban areas are more substantively more dangerous than rural areas by any metric.

    you’re just kinda wrong about this one, people aren’t just willing to live in urban areas, most of them already do. could be a confirmation bias thing if you live rural, but yeah, urbanization has already had its way with us, you are firmly in the minority if you’re rural, and you’ve been a shrinking minority for decades. now, maybe that explains why you don’t see the use in public transit, but for the majority of americans this is an important climate justice and civil rights issue, no matter how much you think we’re all dirty icky city dwellers whose lifelong homes are “bleak” and “dangerous”. i don’t mean to be hostile, just check yourself a little bit. so what if our homes are bad places to live? i mean, i strongly disagree, cities can be awesome especially if you’re queer, but we still live here, and we want a good quality of life too. ignoring that urban areas exist is not a solution to the climate related problems facing urban areas, and public transportation, even as shitty as it can be, is so fucking important to the wellbeing of people across urban america, myself included. as somebody who lives in a city, i’m telling you straight up that any kind of equitable urban living environment needs to have access to robust public transportation, and the harms done by car infrastructure historically and in the present day cannot be overstated. imminent domain fuckery, building highways over marginalized communities, the immense burdens placed on urban working class people by the ownership of cars, it goes on and on and on.

    you seem to like conspiracies, so how’s this for one. the state of public transportation in the US is abysmal compared to many other nations, including nations which are far less prosperous than ours supposedly is, and that is more a consequence of lobbying than some inherent positive quality cars have over other modes of transport, especially in dense urban population centers. our current legislation about who can build what where has led to suburban sprawl, vast, “”bleak”” wastelands of energy-sucking McMansions connected by acres upon acres of heat-absorbing asphalt road (i’m joking, kind of), miles from the nearest grocery store, many of which were built specifically for the purposes of generating mortgages leading up to the 2008 financial crisis rather than building houses people actually want to live in. the realities of needing a car in the US are a consequence of laws which prevent us from making infrastructure catered towards walkable communities with plenty of green space, and were implemented with help from lobbyists to make everybody dependent on private corporations selling us expensive vehicles that require fossil fuels, rather than publicly owned, reliable, safer, and faster modes of transport. so many cities had robust networks of electric cable cars and other forms of public transit back before the car was a thing, and in so many places it was fucking gutted, torn out to make way for more cars so the robber barons of the era could make us buy their combustion engines.

    for urban living, the material realities of car ownership are miserable, dangerous, slow, and cause significant financial burden. for those reasons, the idea of car ownership as a tool for freedom of movement is kinda laughable to me. what kind of freedom needs a down payment? why should that freedom be in the hands of auto companies? how in the fuck is rush hour traffic, claustrophobic strips of sidewalk, and barren paved over earth freedom? in an equitable society, freedom of movement should be just that, freedom. it should not be locked behind financial barriers, or behind private ownership, and it shouldn’t come at the cost of our public spaces, especially when space is so valuable inside cities. the lack of plants, trees, and the black asphalt paved over every inch of land in many urban areas can increase temperatures alot compared to the surrounding countryside, and that can mean life or death for people, especially as things continue to get hotter. if you live rural, and you have a lot of wildlife around you, you might not experience the indirect costs of building a place for cars instead of people, but it has a massive influence on the quality of life of people in urban areas, especially in historically black and brown urban areas. that isn’t even mentioning the ways in which high density areas are disproportionately impacted by car ownership. when you’re out in a rural area, storing cars is not a big issue, because there is an abundance of land to put cars on. but as the population density gets higher, and people start living in apartments or other closer living arrangements, the management of personal vehicles can get tricky. in highly urbanized regions, owning a car might even be impossible, because unless you have the money to rent out a spot for it, there just isn’t any room. and if that’s all true, and there isn’t good public transport in that area, then people can get stuck in places, especially poor people, and especially people of color.

    part of the reason why state level anti-trans and anti-abortion rules will negatively impact so many people when access is just a state away is exactly because the US as it exists currently has a pretty big problem with freedom of movement. especially in impoverished urban areas, many people cannot afford to leave work, cannot afford the price of gas, cannot afford to migrate to another state, and have maybe never even left their city for those reasons and more. federal and local public transportation policy allows everybody to access transportation, rather than just those who are wealthy enough or rural enough to benefit despite the costs imposed by car-centered infrastructure on urban environments.

    we currently live in a dystopian state of affairs, and making public transportation better will almost certainly improve the freedom of movement for millions of people who are not afforded the privilege of a privately owned vehicle, alongside reducing the energy costs of transportation and reducing the need for massive parking structures dug under every building, reducing the permeability of the soil so rainwater doesn't seep into the watertable, spreading everything out so everybody is dependent on cars to get around, and leading to traffic, noise pollution, high rates of accidents, and other problems specific to urban environments. not to mention that that many cars driving on roads produces enough heat energy on its own to raise temperatures in cities, and if any of that heat generation makes city dwellers turn on their AC, then the heat will get worse. look up heat islands, its a real phenomenon, and its extremely relevant to how we make the homes of most american people habitable now and into the future. if even a fraction of the space taken up by cars and their roads was allocated for green space and public transit systems, cities would get cooler, and be more robustly protected against the dangers of climate change.

    to be clear, i never said anything about making cars illegal, or otherwise preventing the ownership of electric vehicles. they almost certainly will play a role in the transportation solutions of the future, especially in rural areas. but the overabundance of cars in the US and specifically in US urban areas is not a natural state of affairs, was historically shaped by racism and oppression, and must be reformed. its a consequence of deliberate choices influenced by large, highly profitable industry giants, whose aim was and is to make us dependent on their product to go anywhere at all. hostility and distrust of public transportation is in and of itself an aim of car companies and, by extension, the fossil fuel industry that powers their dominance over american transportation infrastructure.

  • and lets be honest, nobody is "demanding devastating sacrifices" here, especially when referring to commercial air travel and eating meat. most people can't afford to travel by air very frequently at all, both in the US and especially worldwide, and for most people eating less meat is almost certainly a positive health benefit, even disregarding the many reasons animal farming is unsustainable. nothing about that trade off is devastating.

  • that's absolutely conspiratorial thinking. cultured meat has not been economically viable until very recently, and still isn't that widespread in application. electric "vehicles" are not electric planes, and while electric planes are a viable technology, its still not a scalable solution. electric cars are also not going to pull us out of this mess, because cars as a transportation tech are like, one of the least efficient ways to move people around in high density population centers.

    the reality is, the majority of the emissions created by the rich are for things that people use, eat, or require, and using less or different resources is something we need to do to address this crisis. most of the world doesn't have access to commercial planes and meat for every meal, the only reason we can eat as much as we do is because meat production is a massively subsidized industry, and we need to spend the money we're spending on that on more sustainable ways of living instead. if cultured meat is part of that? good! but in the world as it currently exists, relying on animal agriculture to provide our food is profoundly inefficient, environmentally disastrous, and unnecessary.

    genuinely, if we all lived in a world where the workers owned the means of production and just went on living the lifestyle we currently have? we would still be fucked, because the scale at which we manufacture, transport, and process resources is unsustainable. changes to how we live are going to be necessary, even if we stopped spewing carbon into the atmosphere tomorrow. the climate has changed, biodiversity has been irrevocably lost, and if we don't adapt ourselves to what our environment can handle, then lots people will die.

  • many of the advancements to our civilization are directly powering our current apocalypse, and are leading to the collapse of ecosystems right now, not whenever we figure out how do things better.

    i'm not a luddite, technology has made our lives easier in so many fucking ways, but right now we are catastrophically overburdening our planet with our consumption of resources, and we need to stop doing that also right now, and the very recent phenomenon of eating meat for every meal and moving through space faster than any human before the modern era ever traveled happen to both be luxuries we can live without, with disproportionate impacts on the viability of life on Earth.

    we don't advance as a civilization by throwing our hands up in the air and going back to the bad old days, but we also don't advance as a civilization by being utterly unconcerned with the consequences of our actions. some technologies are fundamentally not worth the cost. especially industrial animal agriculture. if we can find better ways of doing things, sure, lets put them into action, but an attitude of unchecked growth will and currently is running up against the hard ceiling of the resources the Earth can produce, and every step we take over that energy budget makes life harder for everybody. unless you have your solution ready now, and you can be sure that whatever tech it is won't expand to consume as much energy as possible just like our current tech, slowing down and scaling back industries that contribute to ecological collapse and aren't necessary for human thriving is the solution.

  • i really want to know where you got that figure, because a quick google search does not verify a median inheritance of 70k. there are some figures which report a mean inheritance of around that, but most are significantly lower, and this document suggests both that the median inheritance is around 8k across income groups, and that less that 7% of people are will receive any inheritance at all when averaged across all income groups. (the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to receive an inheritance).

    and sure, most people who start a business can take out a loan, but there are a vast quantity of people who can't take out a loan, because they have bad credit, or do not want to take out a loan they know they will never be able to repay if they fail to get their business off the ground. rich people can afford to take more risks, can afford to not spend excess money that they have on making sure they get to eat next month, and thus are conferred specific structural advantages when starting, maintaining, and growing businesses.

    i'm not saying that 28k can automatically turn him into a billionaire. i'm simply pointing out the truth, that Elon Musk did, in fact, benefit from structural advantages which cleared barriers to entry that the vast majority of people do not have the resources to bypass.

    i get that people would really like it if he was some rags to riches story about a poor kid ascending up the ladder, but no. it isn't true about musk, and it isn't true about most billionaires. their wealth is unprecedented, sure, and they have leveraged their resources beyond what most people can conceive, but it bears repeating. statistically, most of the monstrously wealthy started out wealthy, had access to resources that the average person will never have from the start, and were only in a position to grow their wealth because they had money to burn on things other than food, shelter, and physical health.

  • its not easy to become a billionaire. but i think that its disingenuous to suggest that 28,000 bucks of dad's money for your startup isn't in and of itself a privilege of the wealthy. starting a business is completely out of scope for most people. it can't make you a billionaire, but you can't be a billionaire unless you can start a business, and you can't do that without money to spend on that business in the vast majority of cases.

    and the skill of running a business is just not impressive to me. there is no way to cultivate skill at entrepreneurship without doing entrepreneurial things, and that's just way easier to do if you can afford to fail, and have a way of making yourself the boss of other people. most people can't afford to fail, so they can't take risks with quantities of money they'll probably never accumulate in their lifetime.

  • i mean, that's still way more wealthy than most people. i don't think i know anybody who had 28,000 buckaroos of money to burn on their child's business venture. and the article that you linked does say that musk's dad made around 400,000 dollars off the emerald mine, which is... still more wealth than most people will see in their lifetime. according to Errol, he sent money he made off the emerald mine and by selling his yacht to Elon and Kimbal to pay for living expenses while they were studying in the US.

  • thinking that farmers should do work with nothing in return as a method of ending food insecurity is ignorant to the work being done to address food insecurity. nobody is proposing farmers should work for free. food stamps, subsidized farming, community owned farmland, urban gardening, universal basic income, food banks, all of these things and more are how we eradicate starvation, and how many other developed nations have successfully reduced food insecurity.

    systems which allow people to starve are indefensible in a world where we can make enough food for people, and we absolutely can do that.

  • people should not starve. we have the resources to ensure nobody starves. it isn't a naive statement, its a moral imperative.

  • to be honest i'm not sure i agree with that. but that doesn't seem like the position drdiemz is defending. they seem to want less ideology in schools, or none at all, which is... both impossible and undesirable.

    pedagogy is ideological. the way we teach children, the things we teach them, the things we don't, all that requires a specific ideological framework. free access to knowledge, freedom to choose what to believe, teaching diverse perspectives, those are ideological imperatives not shared by all ideologies. i think we should impress upon our children the value of free access to knowledge, of liberation, of the social forces which have led to them having access to schooling and literacy when before only the wealthy did. and to be honest, from the behavior of a large quantity of the ideological right wing, they seem to think that's an active threat.

    the fact is that ideologies which prioritize the well being of other human beings, their liberties as individuals and as communities, are better, and their ability to learn about any ideology unrestricted is facilitated by the implementation of socially progressive values in their schooling environment. its why i'm always wary of people who seek to minimize politics in the classroom. everything is political. the way in which students are taught is political, the organization of classrooms is political, the certification of teachers is political, the funding for schools is political. every single part of every person's life is shaped by politics, and if you aren't engaging students with politics, you are withholding information from them that they should be given.

  • it was exactly like they were having an actual drag show. maybe not the modern cultural understanding of one, but they were dressing up as women to play feminine roles in the context of a performance, which fits under the definition of a drag show. it was a common practice in both the British and US militaries.