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I have a very smart friend who is also a talented decoupler, who could easily be a very quality contributer here if dealing with Culture War issues didn't make him bleed from the eyes. He is literally the only person I know whose Facebook posts about politics did not make me lose respect for him. Over the years, we have had a number of conversations about contentious CW topics that flirted with the border of Adversarial Collaboration, long detailed discussions handled with fairness, civility, and mutual respect.
Until the topic of student loan forgiveness came up. That discussion was unusually heated. He seemed almost frantic, heated about PPP loan forgiveness hypocrites and just not giving the expected degree of decoupled consideration for arguments about how the loan forgiveness was an overall terrible policy. He seemed personally invested, felt personally attacked, in a way he hadn't in conversations about abortion or gun control.
The thing is, my friend is a teacher. Education is a big factor in his identity. He has taught maybe a thousand students who might benefit from the forgiveness plan. Attacks on that plan are an attack on his class identity. Politics is the mind-killer, and it is a sad fact that a rationalist's Art is most likely to abandon him when he needs it most (or, rather, he will fail the Art). And so my arguments sparked an uncontrolled emotional response that was missing from other, less identity-laden topics.
The second thing is, I've been on the other side of that coin, back when we had our multi-day deep dive into the gun control literature. Gun control hits me emotionally as an attack on my class identity. When I hear a gun control proposal, before I hear a single specific detail or spend a second considering merits, some lizard part of my brain interprets it as "Fuck you, your father, your father's father, and your father's father's father". (Does the word "father" still mean anything to you?) I've begged off having spontaneous discussions about it in person, even with close family, because I don't want to spike myself into rage and other unpleasant feelings. During that deep dive, my excellent friend was so calm, fair and rational that he overrode that concern, and I ended up learning a lot and having a great time.
And I'm thinking about this now, because I notice a similar reaction to the trans discussion downthread. The idea that my children might be brainwashed into taking evolutionarily self-destructive choices, and I can't even attempt to oppose it without facing the full wrath of the modern State, kindles a pre-rational, animal panic/fury response. I find myself getting heated to an unusual degree just thinking about it. I don't think I'm particularly "anti-trans". I was willing to be accepting two decades ago, when I first learned it was even a thing. But something about the thought that the phenomenon might hit my kids triggers an atavistic survival instinct. That reaction doesn't trigger when I consider my son dressing like David Bowie, or my daughter playing sports. It doesn't happen when a peer goes trans. It triggers at the thought of one of the two corporeal incarnations of my DNA and memes getting sucked into a fraught psychological memeplex, and particularly at the thought of them being medically sterilized.
Imagine an alternate world where any time a kid expressed suicidal ideation, government employees would firmly nudge them towards euthanasia, and would jail you as a parent for protesting. That's roughly the level of emotional hit - some part of me considers this an existential threat.
But what are the odds? 0.3%? That's not that much worse than the odds of childhood cancer, or other kind of unexpected death that a healthy mind doesn't overmuch worry about, and deals with gracefully if it comes. But now it's apparently something more like nearly 2%? That hits me in the Papa-Bear-Who-Wants-Grandkids-In-Space-Forever. And it seems very likely that a lot of that is social contagion or could otherwise be wildly reduced with a minimal degree of skepticism towards youth fads.
So, two points. One, I think it might behoove activist types (assuming we're not in pure conflict theory) to try to notice when one of their pushes is hitting this sort of reaction and figure out a path to undermine or alleviate it.
Secondly, a question for the community: What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify? What CW issues feels like molten hot war to the hilt, where your instincts fight to throw aside all reason and charity? Any thoughts about why?
Maybe not super popular here, but NIMBYism. IMO, the level of entitlement of certain suburbanites rivals that of woke college students. You don't have the right to arbitrarily control land you don't own. You don't have a right to consistent and large increases in property value. You had kids and now people need somewhere to live. Your neighborhood is not "full" it has fewer people than it did 50 years ago. Your car creates tremendous costs on other people that you don't even acknowledge, and your way of life is incredibly subsidized. You don't want the gas tax to go up, even though that was originally how the federal government was supposed to pay for those highways you need. You do everything possible to reduce traffic in your own neighborhood while driving to everywhere else and objecting to anyone else who doesn't want you to drive in their neighborhood.
Environmental review gets used as a bludgeon to stop anything that might help the environment, or is applied wildly inconsistently. Half the land area of downtowns, the most valuable space in the country, is devoted to highways and parking lots. We can find money and space to make 6 lines of roads for only cars, but bikes get to stay in an 18-inch space between stripes of paint which oh by the way regularly crosses over turn lanes or is next to the line of cars whose drivers will door you without a second thought. Our engineers design infrastructure that is simultaneously something cars are expected to hit, and pedestrians are supposed to stand next to.
Why we ever let this sort of thing become normalized is beyond me.
Also, opposition to nuclear. We might never have heard the phrase "global warming" if "environmentalists" hadn't thrown a fit in the 70s.
Which country?
The only consistent alternative to NIMBYism is Kyle-Rittenhouseism -or Goetzism for the older version- in America.
You've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?'
You can't simultaneously assert the right of one urban demographic to burn down, tear apart, annihilate downtown and then turn around and complain about food deserts, sprawl, bulletproof windows, shrink prevention devices...
Getting pushed onto subway tracks is 'part and parcel of living in a big city', yet it's not everybody's cup of tea.
This is the US, though I believe that Canada and Australia tend to have similar policies.
I never asserted any such right, and I do believe that people have the right to defend themselves and carry firearms. Also, most of these have nothing to do with policies that enforce car-dependent sprawl, which date back to shortly after WW2 and are clearly not a reaction to the 2020 riots.
How often does this actually occur? I'm going to register the prediction "far far far less often than people die in car crashes." Does it really make sense to base your entire urban development policy on events that are so incredibly rare, rather than ones that are common? Most American cities have become a lot safer in the past few decades and there are only a handful that are still very dangerous; the reference to Bernie Goetz is at least 25 years out of date. Certainly places like New York and even Chicago aren't dangerous enough to prevent plenty of suburbanites from commuting in. And "urbanism" can apply to small towns which aren't even anywhere near a big city--Not Just Bikes has videos on the finances of several such small and medium towns.
In any event, non-NIMBYism doesn't mean everyone lives in the inner city. For example, this video praises a suburb of Toronto known as Riverdale, and this video, the people behind an urbanist channel point out they have very rarely lived downtown and prefer to live in mixed-use areas outside of downtown. Perhaps I'd be more sympathetic if so many NIMBY's didn't explicitly cite "neighborhood aesthetic" or "property values" when opposing even the mildest bit of development; most sprawling suburbs are ridiculously far from being downtown and even decades of development into a slightly denser suburb won't make them anything like a big city.
That right implicitly exist in America.
The people living in big cities with the highest population densities, in short 'urbanites' are the ones electing lax-on-crime government, supporting crime and rioting.
Sprawl is intimately-related to white flight, which has been a thing for quite a while. Local example : affluent neighborhood votes against a bus line coming through. Why? On one hand they would benefit from their kids being able to take public transit, or just being able to ditch their vehicle once in a while, on the other hand having a bus line come through their neighborhood means having people from the other side of the bus line (ie poor people) commute through and potentially stop in their neighborhood. For the same reason these people pay premium to live in gated neighborhoods, they vote against bus lines.
Riots are not unfrequent. In living memory, notably the 1967 Newark riots, 1992 Los Angeles riots, 2014 Ferguson riots. Unrest also followed the death of Trayvon Martin, in an altercation with a member of a neighborhood watch, just the kind of people that would oppose policies that would help more Trayvon Martins to show up in their neighborhoods.
25 this year apparently. But subway-pushers are not the only criminals in NYC.
Bernie Goetz is simply the avatar of the American vigilante. More recent example is Rittenhouse. Americans are simply not going to live next to one another without violence, simply because a whole 13% of their population commits a lot more violent crime than the rest.
America itself can be very peaceful locally. Sprawl is just a way to pick your neighbors when the federal government made every other tool illegal like redlining, Jim Crow etc.
For the record I actually support reducing the influence of the car, but I understand that it simply is not practical in America without ramping up the efficiency of the police or relaxing self defense and gun control laws in big cities.
This is exactly the opposite than what the urbanites are voting for, so it's not surprising that anybody that gets to work remotely would move to safer, less dense areas.
I don't think even most city-dwelling Democrats actually supported the riots, but so? What do you think is actually going to happen? Do you think that living slightly closer together would cause suburbs or small towns to radically change their voting patterns?
Voting against a bus line is whatever. I'm thinking about zoning laws that say "you own this land and pay thousands of dollars a year in property taxes, but you are legally barred from building anything except a single family home of this size and which your neighbors have say over how it looks." In my mind that's not the proper role of government. If you want to keep someone out of a space, that's up to the owner. You don't get to buy 1 acre and control everything that happens for a mile every direction.
That's not very frequent at all, especially since you're typically referring to events in 1 city. An individual's chance of being affected by any of these riots is quite small, even among people living in a downtown; for someone living in an outskirt or suburb, the chance is smaller still, and would be unaffected by making that suburb slightly denser (it's not like rioters pause their destruction while they wait for the bus to the outer part of the city).
Millions of people choose to live along the Gulf Coast or the Southeast Atlantic, despite a regular threat of storms that are more destructive and probably more regular than that. For example, Hurricane Ian from this year, which is already passed out of the collective memory, inflicted 50 times as much property damage as the Rodney King riots and killed over twice as many people.
NYC has a violent crime rate of about 0.005 per year per person, in contrast to the nationwide car crash rate which is about .02 per person per year. Unfortunately I can't easily find good statistics on how bad most crashes are, but even a "small" crash can result in injuries and thousands of dollars of damage.
Focusing on deaths, the comparison is much easier--more than 3 times as many people die in car crashes as in all homicides combined (and that's not counting vehicle crashes that kill people not in cars). You are almost certainly much safer taking the NYC subway to work than driving a comparable commute.
I don't think that reducing NIMBYism is going to radically alter the demographics of many neighborhoods. Many walkable places are quite desirable, with apartments in mixed-use developments being snatched up by yuppies. Lots of people probably rent in a neighborhood they might like to buy in, but can't afford to. People who are very poor are still not going to be able to afford to live in nice middle-class neighborhoods, and really sprawling areas can still exist for the people who want them.
I went to college on the South Side of Chicago, in a very nice, walkable, dense neighborhood. It reaches a population density of, I believe, 18K per square mile, despite consisting of mostly single family homes, duplexes/triplexes, and small apartment blocks. And despite being surrounded by some of the most notoriously dangerous urban areas in the country (which, by the way, are on the outskirts, not downtown) very little of that trickled in. Yes, sometimes, it does. But for how close it is physically, and how easy it is to walk or bike or take the bus into the neighborhood, it happens pretty infrequently. And, if Zillow is to be believed, it's still very desirable.
This I'm really curious about, do you have data? I know many people left the Bay, specifically. And Austin seemed to explode in popularity--not as woke or dense as the Bay, but pretty blue nonetheless, and certainly not a small rural town.
edit: one last thing. Some of the ritziest places in the country are either in cities (NYC's Tribeca and similar areas, Chicago's Golden Mile, etc) or are in small, remote towns but which still manage to be walkable. Fire Island, Vail, Telluride, etc. The former bans cars and the latter 2 are dense, with pedestrian plazas, free buses, mixed-used development, duplexes and apartments, etc. It's entirely possible to build these places without succumbing to urban blight and crime.
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Was this reply meant for a different comment? I've read it 4 times now and don't understand how it relates to the above comment about bike lanes and mixed development
Well my point is simply that because the government made tribalism/racism illegal across the board, Americans will come up with any available reason to preserve their way of life without explicitly coming across as 'racist/tribalist'.
'Property values', 'neighborhood aesthetic' etc are just code words for 'we don't want to become the latest mostly-white town turning into Detroit, Philadelphia, NYC...'.
Warranted or not that fear is a major driving force behind the awfulness of American urbanism. The suburbanite is backed against a wall and will keep running farther away as long as possible.
Luckily for everyone else, there is still a lot of space left in America to run to, potentially until the founding stock of the country goes extinct, and it can finally finish devolving into the Brazil that our overlords demand.
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