We don’t even need trains to drive themselves. We just don’t need cars. That’s it. There doesn’t need to be automation. There just needs to be a change in our infrastructure.
Why does every faux leftist want to take out cars away? Is it just cause they’re mostly children online and they’ve never had a job let alone own a car…
Beware anyone who would restrict your freedom of movement
Lmao you think cars are freedom, not just another means of control. That’s hilarious. Henry Ford would be proud of your ignorance.
I’m a grown adult who’s tired of being a slave to my car and my town’s hostile infrastructure. Sorry you’re too much of a dork to get that cars and modern American roads absolutely fucking suck. Sorry you hate poor people and want to force us into constant debt and chain us to useless metal coffins.
I don’t want to take anyone’s car. I want a world where hardly anyone needs a car and therefore get rid of theirs willingly. I want a world where I can walk most places I need to go and can ride a bus or train or my bicycle everywhere else. But ok buddy.
Taking public transit in a place where public transit is well-funded and well-designed is a goddamn delight. You want freedom? I can go wherever I want, I don’t have to park, and there’s a tram or bus every ten minutes so I’m not even worried about my schedule. I don’t even fucking like walking and I would love to live in a city where that was an option.
Naturally this is not an experience most Americans have had because even our best city public transit is blown out of the water by what other countries are doing. It’s not easy to explain how life-changing that level of transit access is!
And if you really must drive, well, the roads are a lot clearer when everyone else is on a train.
One or two bad movies does not make for an inflection point in these troubled times, true. But there is something about this accumulated slippage of quality, and the emotions and ideas presented to us, that reflects something cheaper in the culture. We have been awash in remakes of nerd shit for nearly all of the 21st century, and the loop between past and present grows tighter. Every couple of years, they give Ghostbusters another shot; three actors have played Spider-Man in the last 15 years; the charming and seminal Disney cartoons become laughably crappy live-action interpretations; there’s a fucking sequel to The Shining, which climaxes with the phantasms of the Overlook Hotel, now in CGI form, showing up to exact vengeance on the film’s villain; they did another Space Jam, one that conceptualized every Warner Bros. movie ever made — The Matrix, Casablanca, Harry Potter, etc. — as existing within the same interconnected metaverse of marketable IP.
The homogenization of Hollywood, and the race to monetize every piece of intellectual property under the sun, is nothing new. In 2017, The Ringer dedicated a week of coverage to “good bad movies,” the zany action movies and hokey dramas that are objectively sort of ass but subjectively enjoyable, and how they no longer exist. More than any referendum on taste or quality, I think what characterizes a good bad movie is the ease with which you can just… watch it. It doesn’t require any prior knowledge, any informed context. Meanwhile the highest grossing movie of 2019 was Avengers: Endgame, a three-hour film that would be completely incoherent without having memorized at least a half-dozen movies before it.
The banal credo of “let people enjoy things” that’s often trotted out to dismiss any criticism of the modern goop that I am complaining about avoids the basic reality that the only people who get to enjoy these things are the ones who don’t need to read up on Wikipedia beforehand. I think of someone like my mom, who could be your mom, or anyone else — a person who just likes to go to the movies, and watch something that doesn’t feel like it was autogenerated by an AI, or something that doesn’t require knowledge of 16 other movies to understand, or something that doesn’t joylessly stretch beyond two hours with no justification. Pleasure should be a democratized pursuit, not exclusively claimed by the nerds. The world gets worse and worse, and the very basic entertainments meant to provide some temporary distraction become more of a punishing, involved experience requiring your fealty the moment you walk into the theater.
all the right-wing judges besides clarence thomas were picked by bush and trump, meaning the decision to overturn roe v wade was made by two presidents who never won the popular vote
Source. It’s like so bad I can’t even think straight. Don’t let anyone pretend the US is a democracy.
