1437
America has lost its f*****g mind.
(feddit.de)
Hey, German here. What the f*** are Americans doing at the other side of the Atlantic? Some of you already know this monstrosity. I did'nt. This is a Ford F650 Truck and when I stepped out of my Youtube Bubble I realized, it was marketed as the "biggest, baddest Truck on the road" for the everyday American. Are you guys serious?! Is the end goal really to drive a Monster Truck to McDs to get a McFlurry? Americas bloodiest wars have been fought in the middle east to secure oil, bombing nations to rubble. And all, for this bullshit? The excess, waste and decadence is mind boggling to me and people on Reddit seriously justifying this by "you know dude I'm 6,4ft. I don't fit in any other vehicle" makes me go up the wall.
People prefer to jerk themselves off instead of having genuine and difficult discussion. Actual improvements require compromise and accepting your position doesn't work as an absolute. And who wants to do that when you can just demonize the other side instead to feel good about yourself?
To be clear, it's not as if think the kind of dipshit who wants an F650 pickup truck (or any kind of "mall crawler" in general) constitutes any kind of legitimate "other side" to be demonized in the first place. "Having genuine and difficult discussion" is for situations in which multiple valid points of view exist, but people trying to defend these monstrosities are just plain wrong in the same way that a moron trying to argue 2+2=5 is wrong, and that's the end of it.
It's so beyond-the-pale absurd it's not even worth circle-jerking over, and I'm sick and tired of this community's attention being wasted on it.
Personally I'm ok with fuck cars being mainly a place for people to express their frustrations with how things are - I think that serves an important role.
I would also like to see places for more nuanced discussions about urbanism for those who are interested. I used to go to r/NotJustBikes for that, but haven't seen any similar communities emerge on Lemmy.
The problem comes when it's an echo chamber. I can get on board with reducing car dependence, that America is oversaturated with SUVs and trucks that are unnecessarily large, and that bike infrastructure should be improved. FuckCars, however, then devolves into purity cycles where perfectly reasonable things are hated. This is especially true for people who have no experience at all with how people use their trucks for work. That then spills over into all other communities in the vicinity, and then you get dumb flamewars as people call out their bullshit rather than swallowing it whole.
Well said. Circlejerks just create an echo chamber where people become more and more radical.
Expressing frustration is fine. The thing I really have a problem with is how misplaced it is in this case. Even if every big pickup truck (and big SUV; why not?) somehow magically transformed into a compact sedan tomorrow, we'd still have the same shitty car-dependency problem we have now. We'd still have the same number of cars demanding the same wide roads and huge parking lots, destroying walkability, making our cities insolvent, fucking up our health*, etc. Nothing would've actually improved in any meaningful way what-so-fucking-ever!
The arrogance of space of all cars is the thing we need to be frustrated about, and the inherent pretense of these anti-truck posts -- that of redirecting criticism of all cars to one particular type of car -- is at best a useless unintentional distraction, or at worst, deliberate disinformation designed to sap attention from efforts towards things like road diets and parking reform.
TL;DR: If you're bitching about specifically big trucks, you're not bitching about cars in general -- and we should be bitching about cars in general!
(* That one's a trifecta, BTW: lung disease from pollution, obesity from being sedentary, and poor mental health from road rage and loss of "third places" due to Euclidean zoning!)
"These monstrosities" will exist in anything short of a significantly de-growthed society. OP's picture is not typical of an F650. They are usually converted to flat bed towing, refrigerated box trucks, utility cranes, ambulances, and dump trailers. If you don't believe me, well, here's a listing of used ones. Notice how many have anything like the original bed.
In Europe, Volvo and Mercedes make trucks just like it for the same kind of market. All Ford did here was take the cab of an F250 and put it on a beefier frame and drive train.
These are work vehicles, bought by people who do work. Unless you're suggesting an immediate de-growth to the point that we no longer haul anything heavier than a cubic meter of gravel in a single trip, they will be necessary.
I wrote "F650 pickup truck." I also, pointedly, did not write "F650 chassis-cab commercial vehicle" or anything similar. I generally choose my words pretty carefully when writing these comments.
Maybe you should make sure you read what a person actually wrote before falling over yourself to post a dishonest strawman argument.
Communicating poorly and then acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness. Since these barely even exist as pickup trucks, who's making the strawman, here?
Well, at least you admit that you misunderstood instead of doubling-down on the claim that I was talking about commercial vehicles. That's, frankly, better than I would've expected had we been discussing this back on Reddit, so thank you.
The person who posted the thread, of course. That's part of [or at least adjacent to] what I was complaining about to begin with!
Like you're doing, right now?
While this is true, what is the point of having genuine and difficult discussion on Lemmy / Reddit / social media (especially about societal issues) anyway?
Are lawmakers going to look through Lemmy threads to get legislative ideas? Probably not, right?
Fair enough, but it's still possible to discuss something without devolving into an ideologically pure circlejerk. I'd like to say it doesn't matter, but this is how we ended up with so much fake news in the US. Bubbles can be really bad when they start to change your perception of reality.
We ended up with a lot of fake news in the US for a lot of reasons, but I don't think Fuck Cars is likely to turn into a launchpad for the country's first left-wing authoritarian.
In other words, I think people are getting all jazzercized up about something that's essentially meaningless. But that's life too I guess. 🤷
EDIT: This country is very strange. People do nothing about right-wingers going on shooting sprees, but someone posting a slightly annoying image about how big trucks have gotten and everyone forms a line to decry it for "balance" reasons.
Oh I completely agree this is fairly inconsequential, but it's the sort of thing we should practice regularly anyway. The consolidation of an ideology is the first step in the death of the ideology.
What an incredibly detailed, logical counterargument. This has completely changed my mind
Because all the ways to improve things I see are crap ideas that boil down to
When all the ideas are crap you might as well crackwise since the world is burning
Welp, this is awkward. I support most of those (disregarding the uncharitable way you spun the descriptions, anyway). I'm interested to hear why you think they're "crap."
"Let’s make driving harder not mass transit easier" -- The problem with doing it the other way around is that the act of accommodating cars makes transit non-viable, both by (a) sucking up funding in an (ultimately futile) effort to build our way out of congestion by widening roads, and (b) physically forcing trip origins and destinations further apart by shoehorning parking lots in between them, lowering density and therefore the maximum potential transit ridership along a given route. People are going to use the transportation mode they think is best for them (quickest, cheapest, etc.), and to continue bending over backwards accommodating cars is to put a thumb (if not your entire body weight) on that scale.
"Traffic circles!" -- meh, I'm not going to argue this one 'cause I agree they're overrated. They often perform better than traffic lights in terms of their level of service (LOS) moving cars, but they take up lots more space and aren't necessarily great for cyclists and pedestrians. Besides LOS often isn't the right thing to measure to begin with.
"Tax on poor people who have to be work at a certain time" -- By this you mean anything that increases the costs of driving, I assume? The problem with that kind of thinking is that it uses a current symptom of the problem as an excuse not to solve the problem. In other words, increasing the costs of driving wouldn't be a problem for poor commuters if, in so doing, we also solved their need to drive to commute.
"More zoning laws can fix the problems zoning laws created" -- I, for one, argue for straight-up repealing things like minimum parking requirements and restrictions on density. That sort of idea often gets [mis]represented as "abolishing single-family zoning," but in reality it's not about prohibiting property owners from building single-family houses; it's about ending the mandate to build single-family houses and giving them the freedom to build higher-density things instead if they want. Frankly, this common criticism is usually just flat-out backwards.
"Force upper middle class people to move to areas with poverty" -- I have almost no idea what you're talking about here. However, I suspect that, like the previous bullet point, it's another backwards argument confusing an option for a mandate.
In that case every proposed solution needs to solve the need to drive for a commute on Day 1 of implementation. If you don't want to disproportionately hurt poor people and the working class, that is.
That's the issue. It is like saying we could get rid of fire departments if we installed fire suppression systems in every home, then we get rid of fire departments.
We need to make mass transit better, once that happens people will stop driving as much by choice.
Exactly. Fixing the underlying issues to a problem takes time to propagate. It's only about 2 years after a president takes office that their policies have affected the national economy and such.
Great analogy by the way. We need the fire department until those systems are installed. In this case, it probably means avoiding congestion taxes and the like until there's viable public transit for commuting. Otherwise we're just squeezing the working class.
This is why technologies to reduce emissions on cars and electrify them are so important. We need to minimize their impact since they're going to stick around.
What happens in practice is it is easier to make roads shit then it is to make buses good. So the town makes it shit and everyone stops going there. It is better to put up with the existing bad solution and make a better replacement instead of breaking what you have even more so and hope some Messiah figure will fix it. Go check out what happened when Buffalo NY built its rail. That is a perfect example and the entire downtown died.
Glad you agree. They aren't safe and rarely a good option. Forcing cars to make sharp turns and pedestrians to walk longer distances in the road to cross.
Congestion taxes. They don't impact somewhat wealth-off people like me since we can adjust our schedule. They punish poor people who can't. It isn't even regressive, it is reverse-progressive.
My city has a rule that satellite dishes can't be street visible. When I see urban cough...planners...cough willing to admit that rules like that should not be a thing I will be inclined to take you guys seriously about density.
Gentrification and white flight. I suspect you knew damn well what I was referring to but enjoy backwards arguments
I think you're scapegoating the rail and the real problem was that declining rust belt cities just suck.
See also: https://www.buffalorising.com/2007/10/what-really-killed-downtown-retail/
No, everything you wrote is wrong: roundabouts are relatively safe because they minimize path conflicts, forcing cars to make sharp turns (and thereby slow down) is a good thing, and although pedestrians walk longer distances around the edge of the roundabout, the crosswalks themselves are generally shorter and thus safer.
The reasons I think roundabouts are overrated have nothing to do with safety and everything to do with lack of space-efficiency and how the good performance for cars comes at the expense of other street users' convenience (e.g. making pedestrians walk farther).
Oh, that's what you were talking about? Never mind then; I agree with you on that point.
Discouraging people from driving in downtowns needs to be accomplished by physically choking the traffic off with road diets and traffic calming etc. "Lexus lanes" not only create unjust privilege, they also fail at reducing capacity since they're just shifting the usage from one cohort of drivers to another.
No, I really didn't. What confused me was your use of the word "force." Nobody's forcing upper middle class people to do a damn thing. If they're moving to impoverished areas and gentrifying them, it's because they saw an opportunity they liked and took it. Conversely, if they're engaging in white flight, they're being "forced" by nothing but their own bigotry (which obviously doesn't count).
The upper middle class people have all the power in the situations you're talking about. Painting them as somehow the victims of their own choices is laughable.
Wow again wrong about everything. Laughable
The real problem was people not able to get to a place for a decade. Not having customers for ten years tends to be a bad thing.
Still wrong. You do not want cars to randomly turn. It makes them flip over. This isn't a hard concept.
Oh libertarian definition of force
"Cars can't possibly negotiate roundabouts because slowing down so they don't flip over is too much to ask of drivers" 🙄
The amount of car-brained shit like this getting upvoted around here is too damn high! WTF is wrong with you people?