StJohnOfPatmos
3d ago
The Netherlands would be the obvious case study. I'm not sure how exclusive their bike lanes are in relation to cars and pedestrians, but the bicycle is by far the fastest way to get around most Dutch towns and is the primary method of commuting to school or work for around a third of the population. Even the countryside has very polished and accessible lanes: since the country is geographically small, casually biking from a village to a major city is completely doable for many people.
All in all, I think bikeable cities are a no-brainer as long as there's competent central urban planning involved - its cheaper, faster, requires little space, and has health benefits. I personally hate biking in large cities, but I grew up in Vienna where bike lanes where mainly an afterthought and often set up in risky, high-traffic areas. From my visits to the Netherlands, it seems to be a totally different game there, since bike lanes dominate urban planning concerns more than cars.
StJohnOfPatmos
25d ago
I have a strange bourgeois paralysis towards these kinds of small money-saving schemes. I engage in similar lines of thought as you, reading store policies and thinking of how to game their system, but the idea of turning these thoughts into practice repels me - I picture my grandfather, neatly dressed, sitting at the head of his dark wood dining table, drinking his choice glass of wine as he always did, witnessing me run back and forth between my car and the co-op, filling 4 individual tote bags with single items in order to save maybe 20 euros once the whole deed is done. Even though he was a businessman I'm certain he would have found the whole concept utterly indecent and verging on con-man behaviour, not fit for someone from a good family whose material needs are met.
It's not even that I think these schemes are morally bankrupt. Saving money without sacrificing your consumer habits sounds smart and desirable. It's more the implied dishonesty (and I guess some sort of "loss of face" since I immediately think of my family's reaction to it?) and a certain shamelessness that stops me in my tracks every time.
Perhaps places like your local co-op have a large enough customer base with a similar class profile to mine (or one that doesn't even consider gaming the policy to begin with) that it doesn't matter if a very small minority do actually exploit their discount system.
StJohnOfPatmos
1mo ago
I don't think there's a single condensed heuristic or rule of thumb that separates good writing from the rest. Different writers seek different things, so their process and manner of attaining them is going to be different, too. Some writers are very interested in people, others in places, and others in emotional sentiments or intellectual concepts. What works for one literary pursuit doesn't need to work for another.
I think if we want to attempt to overcome this inherent ambiguity and actually try to find common ground within good writers that are good in vastly different ways, we could use Marcus Aurelius' creed of "every action receiving its proportionate worth" as a starting point. When I think of the bad writing I've read, it often comes down to the author not being able to create distinctions - all sentences are of the same length, there's a systematic insertion of adjectives before most nouns no matter how relevant the noun in question is, everything is either too descriptive or fully devoid of it, etc. In essence, there's no melody or form (in the sense of structure) to the text.
Good writers may have styles, formulas, even tropes, but can reshape them continuously to fit many different moulds - moments of levity, beauty, tension, fear, comedy, and ecstasy can all be woven into one coherent piece of writing, because the writers know which central ideas and feelings they want to determine the reading of the text, and thus calibrate each action to it's worth in reaching that end. I'm making this sound more mathematical than it is, much of it is intuitive or a matter of practice and can't be "hacked" or "figured out" through an equation.
"The first and perhaps only rule for good style is to have something to say." - Schopenhauer
This Schopenhauer quote can be horrifically misinterpreted if one assumes he's saying that writing/art only needs a "message" to be beautiful. This is obviously not true, and the measly attempts to pass off the promotion of political and activist causes as a meaningful criteria for the evaluation of art speak for themselves.
(https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/arts/design/venice-biennale-review-art-israel.html)
What Schopenhauer is talking about is more akin to a certain cognitive clarity, i.e. "having something to say" about something that one has given considerable thought, reflection, experience, questioning, etc. This is why certain writers can extract wonderful, even lengthy pieces of writing out of the simplest topics or ideas. Herman Melville immediately comes to mind as someone who can seemingly wring every last drop of poetry and insight out of any given topic related to the sea:
"And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right of way through it. Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though following the sea as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales."
There is a certain "knowing" at play here, which doesn't have to stem from actual experience per se (although in Melville's case, he had an extensive experience of seafaring), but can come from a directed focus of the mind towards something. There's something akin to philosophy or rational thought happening there, but there's equally a large space for reveries, poetry, and inspiration being given.
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
It's a completely different ballgame when the EU attempts to intervene in member states that are net receivers of EU money, as Poland and Hungary are. Neither of those states pay for other members infrastructure development, West and North Europe pay for theirs. If you've driven around those countries before, as I have, you'll see that virtually every new highway, hospital or power plant was built with EU funding.
Germany receives nothing comparable from other member states - sure, they have downstream economic interests in developing the economy of their neighbours, but in the immediate sense, Germany cannot be blackmailed by Brussels the way Budapest can.
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
I guess "petit bourgeois" is what one used to call these types of blue collar business owners.
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
I don't know if it's all that dominant on the right but one does come across quite a few "man up and do whatever your wife says like a REAL ALPHA would" takes from conservative media figures - they are right about men needing to accept that they are the foundation of responsibility and economic provision within family and society at large, but fail to understand that without corresponding power and rights, this just becomes a form of indentured servitude in which you're supposed to grin and bear any humiliation.
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
I wouldn't underestimate the rough parts of the white working class
Is the murderer in Adolescence supposed to be working class? I haven't watched it but the kid looks clearly middle-class coded, he doesn't have a working class affect or style of dress at all.
Regardless, it's somewhat silly to say "look, poor whites can be scum too" when that's never really been denied by anyone and when current violence increases and specific types of crime are almost exclusively linked to Peckham, Brixton and Birmingham and other areas with a specific demographic profile. Acid attacks are not being committed by white working class boys, nor is it white working class culture that promotes music and culture glorifying stabbing your rivals to death and posting it on social media to gloat about.
We also already have ample media about white working class criminality and violence - This is England, Peaky Blinders, all of Guy Ritchie's filmography, etc. so it's not like there's some kind of awareness being raised.
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
Yes I agree, I was oversimplifying for sure.
It's interesting to note how since the dawn of settled civilisation, there has been a clear understanding of the reciprocal nature of rights and responsibilities - you can't vote unless you serve in the Athenian army, you can't pursue a career as a Roman magistrate without financing public infrastructure, you can't hold a title of nobility unless you also physically fight on the battlefield when the king summons you to, etc.
Liberalism's lean into universalist perspectives on societies and the nature of civic cohesion completely shattered this extremely meaningful relationship of the individual to the collective - the very last gasp of this traditional understanding of civics might have been JFK's "ask what you can do for your country". Today, one can demand all rights with zero corresponding responsibilities - like the left-wing/communist alliance here in Vienna demanding full voting rights for any adult who lives here - no matter if they are citizens, net contributors to the welfare state, or if they can even speak German. They of course don't remotely understanding how this would be the deathknell of any kind of civic mindset and would rapidly push society into the same tribal ingroupings based on family, clan, ethnicity and faith that have dominated virtually all societies on Earth outside of highly structured civilisations.
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
The foundational lines of thought behind 19th century patriarchal paternalism and modern feminism are closely linked since they are both inherently bourgeois philosophies that emerged among the upper segments of wealthy, educated society as a reaction to social upheaval from the lower classes - patriarchs wanted to preserve their class standing by limiting bourgeois female interaction with the plebs, while early feminists saw early signs of social mobility and were so outraged at the thought that a man of a lower social status could have the right to vote that they concluded "we need a bourgeois chauvinism but for the girls". Look at some of the earliest suffrage posters and pamphlets - they all engage in a degree of extreme classism that we would consider almost anarcho-capitalist today.
The outcomes only differ in the sense that both have an opposing foregone conclusion - patriarchy highlights women's deficiencies and concludes "hence, men should be in charge", while feminism highlights women's deficiencies and concludes "hence, women should be in charge". The step-by-step thought processes are remarkably similar.
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
That's exactly why there is shock factor. It does happen though just infrequently.
The entire premise of the show and it's deranged state-led promotion by the UK government is specifically and explicitly axed around the depicted story being part of a "wider epidemic", at no moment whatsoever is the public treatment of it related to how "infrequent" such events are. There is no shock factor at play aside from the simulated shock of "behind every sweet white boy is a deranged sexist murderer" - which is of course demonstrably false.
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
One of the unspoken pillars of feminist thought is that members of the female sex are perpetual children and members of the male sex are perpetual adults, with corresponding levels of responsibility and agency. Of course, this is systematically denied by feminists (aside from rare gems like Paglia), but is self-evident in the practical outcomes of their ideology.
The treatment we received as 10-year old boys in school after having roughhoused around a bit or done harmless pranks was always extremely stern and guilt-laden - compared to female college students have hysterical breakdowns and being coddled in manners virtually indistinguishable from how you treat crying toddlers.
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
I actually think the very fact that they're brute-forcing the show into Parliamentary discussions and mandatory school screenings shows how little juice they've got left and how frightfully they are clinging on to whatever avenues of power they still have a monopoly on. The worlds of legacy entertainment and education are some of the strongest bastions of the liberal project, so they're tripling down on that power because they can feel it vanishing elsewhere.
If one has an anti-liberal stake in the culture war, one can actually only welcome this move - mandatory school screenings of anti-white male propaganda will only further alienate and enrage British boys, further teaching them that liberal project sees them as potential murderers who are guilty until proven innocent. If I were a double agent nestled within Starmer's cabinet, but secretly working for the Reform Party, this is exactly the kind of "let's pour oil onto the fire" move that I would suggest in order to guarantee that any British man under 30 feels permanently alienated from the Labour party.
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
The funding comes from member states. If Germany doesn't play along with Brussels, it's Brussels that's in danger, not the other way around.
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
Yes, I think EU leadership is banking on kicking the can down the road by all means in the hope that some Covid-level event will resurge and they can resurrect the police state atmosphere of the lockdowns, rallying society behind them by means of alarmism and fear. This is probably also a central function of their warmongering towards Russia - creating a siege mentality in which large swaths of the political spectrum can be labeled treasonous and banished from open discourse, probably even moving towards arrests, party bans and other forms of persecution by use of emergency powers if it really gets to the point where EU soldiers are deployed to Ukraine.
I think I'm marginally less blackpilled than you concerning demographics, the true tipping point for most Western European countries is probably still 3-4 decades away from now, which is a lot of time for upsets and shifts to happen. The EU really is a paper tiger when it comes to actually enforcing it's own internal laws, if major countries decide to opt out from certain treaties and pacts like the Dublin Agreement, there is functionally nothing Brussels can do aside from rhetorical scolding - it's not like they can send policemen to arrest Denmark's cabinet or Victor Orban. Since the Great Recession and the ensuing Eurocrisis, the EU has mainly been surviving based off of Germany's economic dominance and its internal long-lasting political dominance by status quo oriented establishment parties like the SPD and CDU. Now that these certainties are fracturing, I don't find it difficult to envision a completely neutered EU that increasingly behaves like the League of Nations, proclaiming edicts that no one feels any pressure to follow anymore since there's no actual punishment for transgressing them.
This is, of course, a cautiously optimistic view that banks on certain key elements of the democratic process being maintained and allowing for far-right victories to happen.
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
EU Leadership is playing with fire and still does not want to see the writing on the wall - the genie on anti-liberal politics has been let out of the bottle and is no longer just tethered to charismatic individual politicians who can galvanise a few percent of electors at the margins of society. 3 decades ago, it needed extremely adept figures within far-right parties to elevate their results to national relevance, like Jörg Haider in Austria. Today, just being the designated "anti-system" party nets you an instant 10-20% of voters across Europe. Their support has at this point very little to do with personality cults (which was what carried figures like Haider or Jean-Marie Le Pen back in the good old days) and is almost entirely axed around concrete policy goals and fundamental mistrust towards the establishment.
While Marine Le Pen is certainly upset about the verdict essentially being a judicial coup depriving her of a very probable presidential victory, I doubt the atmosphere within the RN as a whole is beset with gloom and defeatism at the moment. They are by now the largest single political party in France both in polling and in parliamentary representation, the most popular with the working class by far, are making massive inroads into the rural vote to take advantage of a fractured and exhausted centre-right, and are competitive with the far-left for capturing the youth vote. Compared to their predicament just a decade ago (when they were already surging heavily), the Rassemblement National has become a well-oiled machine with legions of young recruits hailing from increasingly polite and respectable backgrounds - a massive long-term lifeline for parties that traditionally were forced to recruit their party apparatchiks from dubious backgrounds due to a lack of "normal" people wanting to be seen alongside neo-nazis and such. Successor figures like Jordan Bardella are the targets of unrelenting mockery and derision by the French Left, yet they underestimate that despite his relative inexperience and lack of political seasoning, he still polls considerably higher in popularity than both Macron and Mélenchon - and was able to convince 37% of voters to support his party in this past summer's parliamentary election.
https://fr.statista.com/statistiques/1473435/cote-taux-popularite-jordan-bardella/
https://fr.statista.com/statistiques/1473510/cote-taux-popularite-jean-luc-melenchon/
All in all, I doubt this verdict will have the intended result of meaningfully weakening the European far-right; rather, it will just be another stepping stone in the polarisation of our societies, yet another heightening of the liberal project's progressively undeniable internal contradictions, bringing us yet another inch closer to the precipice - when will we jump?
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
"Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?" - Robert Habeck, 2025
Jokes aside, I think you're right that there will be more escalation and use of dirty tricks and institutional malpractice - Romania seems to be the EU's current testing ground for how openly they can get away with an outright, unambiguous coup d'état. It feels very Weimarian in the sense that not even the liberal order really believes in liberalism (separation of powers, due process, free and fair elections) anymore, just maintaining power by increasingly draconian means.
Whether violence will ramp up to the level you predict remains to be seen, I think the liberal establishment can influence these things semi-indirectly by just bombarding the population with alarmism and moral hysteria until some of the more deranged and disaffected listeners decide they need to get on the right side of History by stabbing an AfD politician (this is essentially already happening since a while and seems like the only logical conclusion of the "Nie wieder!" sloganeering anyway) - is the endpoint of all this civil war?
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
You can take a kind of functionalist position and say that Democratic politicians are what they do, and so in 2020 they were radical trans ideologues. Sure.
Honest question : how else would you qualify someone's politics, other than by their voluntary political actions?
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
There's a perception that Democratic politicians are particularly fringe or loony with respect to trans issues or immigration and in general they're not.
Maybe on a personal level, but as political figures, there was and largely still is an absolute consensus within the Democratic party on these issues or at least the supposed core beliefs underlying them. The fact that there is a diversity hire Supreme Court Justice who was literally unable to define the word "woman" during her Senate hearings and was voted in unanimously by the Democrats should attest to this. I'm sure quite a few Senators privately think she's a moron, but their political actions are what determines their politics, not what might be whispered behind closed doors.
But for Americans who personally know racists or look on social media and see examples of politicians who are overtly racist it's uniformly Republicans.
If you define racism as "being resentful of black people", sure. But if I consider racism as any undue or malicious injection of race as a marker of superiority or inferiority as pertaining to a political issue, it's most certainly been the left-liberal wing of the spectrum that's by far the most common offender. I actually remember very little hostile discussions of race in Western politics growing up - there was a kind of consensus that fixating on race was low-class skinhead behaviour and that the most one should do is be courteous and non-judgemental. Every now and then you'd get a "George Bush doesn't care about black people" moment, but those seemed more like rebellious provocations and tabloid scandals than any kind of real societal divide. Here in Europe, the big topic around race 15+ years ago was football fans making monkey noises when black players of the opposing team were on the field - again, condemned as low class, provincial behaviour mainly driven by stupidity and a lack of education rather than any kind of malice or "institutional oppression".
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
I agree with everything you say, but it seems obvious that this entire liberal consensus perspective and method of curtailing dissent hinges on having a critical mass of support - you downplay the electorate's power in this process, and I agree that institutions are the bigger players here, but there are still points of contact between the two. Think of the absolute fiasco for the progressive project that happened when those Ivy League Deans - all women who were very obviously hired for diversity points and were completely unable to handle the gravity of the situation - were questioned by Congress and unable to deny even the most outrageous accusations against the campus culture they fostered because the institutional jargon they use to defend it only worsens their case in the eyes of the public.
A Dean of Harvard getting easily out-dribbled rhetorically by some Republican congresswoman seemed unthinkable even 15 years ago (or maybe I just have rose-tinted glasses of the Democratic coalition before Obama), but the liberal project has allowed their own echo chamber to become so narrow and restrictive that they have no idea how stupid and hypocritical they sound to anyone outside of it - all while doing all in their power to push as many people out of said space as possible. There's also just been a massive cratering in terms of intellectual standards, which I guess was to be expected of any environment that punishes skepticism.
Regardless, Trump's rather decisive re-election (and it's equally significant flip side, the electorate's clear disapproval of Kamala Harris) should have been the writing on the wall for how useless this style of politics has become - the liberal establishment still has a lot of strings it can pull, but these strings are increasingly being stress-tested, dismantled, and in some cases, outright disregarded by the current administration. By keeping up this arrogant and deliberately antagonistic style, the establishment seems to be heading for a scorched Earth policy rather than any serious attempt to recapture their lost electorate - how long will it last?
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
I think I should have been more specific - I'm not really talking about wokeness or cancel culture as it's existed in the past decade per se, I agree that's it's on a downward trend and that many people are now much more comfortable with opting out of progressive discourse or openly critiquing it. Especially today, "cancelling" someone carries much less weight than it did years ago, because there's now a massive contingency of the population that considers being "anti-woke" as it's own social identity and relishes in provoking and triggering the progressive project. You can quite literally make a career off being cancelled today, and the only ones who seem to truly suffer from cancellation anymore are left-liberal people enmeshed in progressive media and activism (which in turn gives the anti-woke crowd even more incentive to keep the siege atmosphere within the Left going and watch them tear each other apart).
What I'm trying to get at feels more like a kind of bitterness or "lashing out" of the liberal project towards its supposed own subjects. The pretence of being a self-justified, End of History blueprint for civilisation that wins based on the superior civic and economic model it offers compared to the dark and tyrannical systems of "the past" seems to be evaporating - all they still offer is the rhetorical comfort of being on "the good side" and how this fulfils some supposed higher historical purpose. They no longer have a believable hegemony in assuring a high standard of living, personal liberties (I think they truly do not understand how much of an anti-system awakening the pandemic was for many people), or embodying the will of the people (Migration being the most obvious case, but also Von der Leyen being weaselled into the leadership of the EU despite not being on the ballot) - so being on "the good side" seems to have next to zero actual advantages aside from validating bourgeois sensibilities and assuring you'll be invited to the next dinner party.
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
I agree to an extent. I've had many discussions specifically around Ukraine where even non-opinionated mentions of basic facts - like how the country has always had an extreme cultural and political rift between it's Western and Eastern regions - will garner accusations of relativising Putin or "playing into his hands".
I think you're right in the sense that the subtext is always "you don't want to be on that side, outside of polite society, do you now?" Unfortunately for them, this kind of threat of social exclusion only really works if you want to be socially included to begin with, and if the power relations are sufficiently one-sided. But why would I want to be included in a social paradigm that treats me as lesser and deserving of retribution for my gender and skin colour, all while failing to deliver on the basic quality-of-life promises of it's post-war social contract? At least pre-Trump and wokeness, there was one clear side of the sociopolitical spectrum that was cooler, younger, made better art, etc. none of which is really the case anymore.
I'm very curious to see how this continues - already, the AFD is inching towards overtaking the CDU in the polls and becoming the largest party in Germany, at which point virtually every single major player in the EU (not counting Spain since it's irrelevant) will have far-right electorates. The fever must break at some point, right? Or is the doubling-down going to turn into a tripling-down?
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
Here in Europe, I actually think it’s worse than ever. Maybe it’s the war atmosphere our media and elite are desperate to drum up.
I'm increasingly fascinated by how counter-productive the current modus operandi of political discourse within the Left and Liberal wings of Western society has become.
When in a political discussion, I try to rarely make sloganeering arguments - very few buzzwords, no contentious examples, generally attempting to keep a big picture in mind, clearly distinguishing between what I believe to be a core principle and what I think could be a likely hypothesis, etc. Of course I sometimes take the bait or let spite and Schadenfreude get the better of me, but generally I think I'm pretty good at discussing politics and have been able to have nice and constructive conversations with people across the political spectrum : I think it's precisely because of the rather tentative way I go about defending or questioning ideas that the discussions almost always conclude on a cordial tone, completely irrespective of how close we are ideologically or if anyone involved was really convinced of the other's perspective.
It has long been remarked that the Left has an issue with both internal and external discourse, pushing for alienating purity tests and distorting supposedly open discussions into show trials the moment an unsavoury subtext or implication can be gleaned from the other's words - no matter how minor or semantic. From a Marxist-Leninist perspective, this makes some sense to me as an internal approach to maintain ideological unity - it has a martial aspect to it that places a very high value on cohesion and loyalty, exactly what you want from an organised Vanguard movement waiting to strike. As an external form of discussion geared towards convincing the public at large or gaining new recruits to your cause, it's obviously abysmal and essentially filters out normal people in record speed.
As a former Marxist-Leninist myself, who was in such a "Vanguard party" in my home of Austria way back during Obama's second term/Trump's first years in office (and who now, over a decade later, feels more sympathy for Mussolini than Lenin), it's been interesting to see how this internal form of discourse (which I guess we now would call wokeism or cancel culture) has also completely taken over any approach to external messaging and discussing. When I was in a Marxist org over a decade ago, we would go to worker's clubs, employee's strikes, union meetings and such in the hope of recruiting or latently indoctrinating the working-class there. The explicit modus operandi that we were taught and regularly coached on was to insist on opinions of theirs that were bauchlinks - "left-wing by gut feeling", essentially. Even though by the mid 2010's most working-class people in Austria outside of some flagship unions were already comfortably captured by the far-right, we spoke to them exclusively through the lens of what we could agree on, not what they were wrong about believing. Of course, this made for a lot of friendly conversations and momentary feelings of having made progress. But in the end, these actions had next to zero effect since most of the Marxist org members were bourgeois students slobs and therefore neither trusted nor taken seriously by the workers, and we really didn't have a good answer on immigration and the refugee crisis (since we were wrong on this issue, as the Left still is today).
Still, this approach to engaging a political conversation seemed to me productive and understanding of how politics functions - you need to get people on your side. That's easier when you make them feel like you and they already believe alot of the same things.
I won't belabour how much cancel culture et all has ruined the Left and tarnished its public image - we all know. What's more interesting to me is that even among less overtly woke or even moderate/conservative liberals, there is a growing attitude of guilt by association and implication - and a pleasure to brand someone as far-right, a nazi, a "populist", especially if said person has any kind of public presence and influence. We see this across the UK, Germany, Austria, especially when it comes to Trump or Ukraine. It's practical effect is essentially them saying "please see yourself as our political opposition and consider yourself excluded from our political project" - the exact opposite of what you want to achieve in a political discussion! Joe Rogan has of course become the archetypal example of this. The list of influential people who became right-wingers because one side of the political spectrum welcomed them with few strings attached and the other told them they were irredeemable and devoid of decency is long and growing.
What's the idea behind this kind of discourse? It seems so alien to any kind of strategic understanding of politics and campaigning to me, especially now when the liberal order is more vulnerable than ever. Are they still this oblivious to the disillusionment and loss of trust in institutions that is well entrenched in Western society today? Is it some kind of some kind of moral self-validation first and foremost? Where does this desire to grow your own political opposition come from?
StJohnOfPatmos
3mo ago
I think it's mainly over-diagnosis and excessively pathologising certain behaviour. Also parents don't want to turn down any kind of extra support they feel they are receiving.
I see where you're coming from but what you're effectively asking for is the adoption of the Third World's model for traffic, where everything flows chaotically and you're just supposed to improvise your movements without a clear structure for who can circulate where. Unsurprisingly, every single country with this kind of laissez-faire traffic mentality has horrendously high accident rates.
Here in Vienna, our main shopping street was transformed into a pedestrian zone about a decade ago - initially, the plan was for large swaths of the street to have a hybrid system where both bikers and pedestrians could share the street without any dividing markers. This had to be amended very shortly after its inauguration because it made the street experience too hectic and demanding for everyone involved, especially on a shopping street where people want to leisurely stroll and window-shop, not constantly be on the lookout for bikers trying to swerve around them. For the bikers themselves, the system sucked too, since they couldnt just bike down the street in a straight line, but had to constantly change their direction to avoid pedestrians standing in their way. It was a lose-lose situation for everyone involved and the quick addition of bike lane markers on the ground largely erased the problem overnight.
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