‘Cities should be better designed so that we don’t have to use cars’

…Which I agree with. And it’s incredibly frustrating to me that, on the one hand, Republicans actively don’t give a shit about sprawl, and on the other hand, Democrats don’t want to ruin the charm and character of their lovely urban single-family neighborhoods with half acre plots of lawn in order to build dense housing that can make light rail economically viable. E.g., the people that should be on board with this shit talk a good game until it’s their own neighborhood.

I recognize my own hypocrisy here, because I moved to a rural area to get away from a city, and I am now finding that it isn’t rural enough because I can sometimes hear my closest neighbors. I just want to live in a shack like Ted… :(

Well. Yes. This is true though. And that’s a ‘problem’ with a lot of things; they can be ‘true’ when looked at from a certain perspective, but not necessarily useful in any meaningful way. For instance, pain is a sensation, and that sensation is not, by itself a ‘bad’ thing. It’s just sensory information. Pain in the context of BDSM can evoke positive judgements in the person experiencing the sensation. An identical sensation experienced in the context of being physically abused by an intimate partner will likely evoke a negative judgement. Your judgement about those sensations is based on your context and past experiences.

But at the same time, looking at a larger picture here, if times are getting tougher, then rather than looking inward to the self and your own perception, it makes more sense to look outward to community, to try and change circumstances in a way that is positive for the entire greater community.

It really depends on where you are though. Much like other public policy debates, a lot of this comes down to where someone lives. People that live in dense urban areas can very reasonably go without cars, and trains (specifically light rail) make a lot of sense. Once you get out of urban areas, suddenly trains don’t make any sense at all, and the ability to realistically take public transportation evaporates.

This is compounded by urban planning that doesn’t prioritize dense housing. Everyone says that we need more and better housing, but no one wants high rise apartments and condos in their neighborhood of single-family homes. That ends up leading to the kind of urban sprawl that makes public transportation impossible to work. Until zoning is taken out of local hands–so that wealthy communities can’t prevent high-density housing–you aren’t ever going to see this kind of thing change. (BTW - this is overwhelmingly happening in the US in communities that have a Democratic supermajority; that’s why housing is so expensive in California, because new housing isn’t being built.)

Mutually assured destruction.

There’s no path for Putin to use nuclear weapons that doesn’t involve the utter annihilation of Russia. I would be willing to be that that will be a bright line for NATO, because once it’s clear that Putin will use nuclear weapons when he’s not getting what he wants, it’s clear that there’s no other choice that preserves independence other than retaliating with nuclear weapons.

…Why should we be concerned about Putin saving face? This is his fuck up, and he was given ample opportunities to put the brakes on before he ever invaded.

RIP Vicki and Sammy Weaver.

…But that’s not what Christian nationalists are working towards. They want to teach their religion, not teach about all religion.