People get defensive and stop listening, stop thinking. You tell them about all the bad things downstream from car centrism, they realize they drive a car, and then they emotionally decide you’re a bad person for “making them feel bad”

It’s a rare person who can tank “you’re making the world worse”

I don’t mind them. It’s important to remember that the current situation is absolutely, needlessly, devastating for people every day. Humans are emotional creatures. Facts like “XYZ people die every day from cars” don’t hit the same way “look at this happy woman! She looks like your sister! And now she’s FUCKING DEAD from a car” move the needle.

Of course, there’s also the backfire effect where something makes someone uncomfortable, so they reject it. Humans are really bad at reasoning.

Computers often do what you said, not what you meant.

Honestly more experience with that might help some people who are habitually unclear in their thinking and communication

I have family just outside the city and they insist on driving in. I keep telling them just take the train. They’re like “no we’ll get lost”. It’s a train. It goes two directions. Follow the sign for New York.

and on her way to work every single leftist that she knew irl punched her in the face every single day.

But no there’s no corresponding “leftists are doing something like punching her in the face” in real life. Certainly not “every single” one. I agree that people are emotionally driven ( https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe is a good comic about it ).

There are extremists in any sect - the christian fanatics, animal rights ecoterrorists, whatever. But it’s not “the left” as a whole, or even a majority.

Unless, I guess, you consider a scenario like

“I just think gay people shouldn’t be so visible. It’s confusing to my children”

“That’s a messed up thing to say. Gay people are a part of life. Shunting them into the closet so you can avoid a mildly uncomfortable conversation is unjust”

to be punching someone in the face.

Don’t have much to add beyond “fuck cars”. It’s maddening we built our infrastructure to be so unsafe

Sure, but “you were mean to me so now I’m joining maga” is pretty silly.

Some people are like that, I guess, but if someone rudely explains how racism is deeply entrenched in the US that doesn’t mean they’re wrong. Rejecting their message because they were mean is childish.

Evokes this comic https://thenib.com/fault-right/

I mean, not everyone wants to discuss politics all the time, and that should be an acceptable position to have.

This is probably true. I mean, if I started going off about how the workers are entitled to what they produce and fucking Joanne doesn’t do shit, so why does she get a fat salary while we don’t even get paid for thanksgiving, I’d be fired. Wouldn’t even move the needle.

I live in a red state, and I’d definitely say something similar if a magat tried to strike up a conversation about politics. Most of the time I just don’t have the mental energy to get into a discussion about it.

But sometimes the smaller conversations can change people. It takes a lot, and it can be infuriating when they just don’t get it, or relapse after another bender on fox news, but interactions with people they see as in-group change minds.

I had a coworker way back that was a big homophobe, and over the months we worked together I got him from “we should just kill the gays” to “i guess they’re not hurting anyone i just think it’s gross”. I understand that there’s not always energy in the budget for that, though.

I think there’s a difference between “I affirmatively do not care” and “there’s no purely way to be ethical, and that horror has fallen under my personal bar for attention right now”

I can maybe cut a little slack for someone who’s like “I don’t really understand politics or know history, so I don’t feel confident having a strong opinion” if they were curious and honest. We all start ignorant and not everyone had the good fortune to get a quality education.

But the aggressively ignorant and apathetic can fuck right off.

Ah I see. I’m not sure where the line is between “merely wrong” and “mad”.

Like, if you tell me the population of London is 5 million, that’s wrong but plausible. If you tell me it’s twelve people that’s absurd.

So when I look at privatization I can’t see any path where it works out for the majority of people that isn’t entirely wishful thinking. There’s no mechanism where private ownership of public resources and infrastructure works out in the long term. Believing in it seems so egregiously wrong it’s another category. Like someone believing that letting the foxes watch the hens will yield more eggs. There’s no good reasons to believe that, but plenty of Fox written propaganda.

Though I am sort of backed into a corner in that I was sort of firing from the hip. I don’t have the most robust argument for my “maybe written on the toilet” posts. “Mad” might not be the best word. “Foolish and poorly informed” maybe?

To me it seems perfectly plausible that changing the incentive structure around how a company is operated would have a way bigger impact than that.

I feel confident one can change incentives and operational practices without privatizing.

So you’ve got to put yourself in the shoes of someone who fervently believes that there is a lot of waste in the public sector.

Some people are delusional but I’m not sure the value of spending a lot of time in their shoes. In the US many people fervently believe the Republicans are “better at the economy” despite evidence pointing otherwise.

And just to emphasise, the idea of privatisation was not “let some rich people become richer.” It was to sell shares in privatised companies to as many people as possible, and make investors out of all of us.

This seems like an inefficient way to share public wealth that gives advantage to the wealthy. Let’s say you’re correct and the value of the shares goes from 10 to 100. People who bought more shares profit more. People with more money on hand can buy more shares. It’s a large advantage to the wealthy.

As you said

making some decent money but yielding the longer-term benefits to bigger investors.

So it sounds like we agree? Privatizing advantages the bigger, wealthier, investors.

Cool. I’d love to feel safer riding a bike there. The stretch from like prospect Park to there feels like a death trap, riding up Flatbush.

No, their ideology was that state-run enterprises are less efficient than equivalent private ones

I dunno this seems like madness to me. Any private profit is, essentially, waste. Efficiency gains by, like, not supporting the entire public are also not real efficiency gains.

If a public service is running badly, the appropriate solution is to look into why, not let some rich people become richer off of it.

I’ve said basically to my boss at the shitty megacorp like “if I go out of my way to fix things and do more work, I get the same outcome as not doing any of that. You don’t give me paid holidays. You pay entry level wages. We both know I’m going to be laid off in December. So why would I?”

Capitalist hell-scape. Working to make some unseen ghouls rich.

It was a very popular song with people who just totally disregarded the sentiment entirely.

I was just thinking about how that seems to be a theme. Art has a message. People don’t pick it up.

Like, if you’ll pardon a genre change, the protagonists of final fantasy 7 are literal eco terrorists who blow up an allegory for an oil plant. How many of those fans love the game and didn’t give a single thought to environmentalism? Barret would disapprove

Those people are embarrassing. They’re probably the same people that say like “Dracula is just a story about a guy who bites people shut up about all this politics and feminism”.

Education is difficult and, in the US are least, under funded.

The fewer people drive, the better.

I saw someone hit a kid on a bike by Atlantic terminal, and they just drove off. Luckily the kid was fine, because I guess teenagers are indestructible and the car wasn’t going that fast. But that reckless asshole needs consequences.

If we can get the tech bros and the anti-vaxxers to destroy each other , that might be a big win