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I wish journalism was concerned less with words and more with pointing out how to solve problems. This one in particular seems to be mostly a failure at city pl
by m_mueller 6y ago
I wish journalism was concerned less with words and more with pointing out how to solve problems. This one in particular seems to be mostly a failure at city planning and lack of drivers education. It seems to me that car companies should be way less powerful in the US than they were 50 years ago (in terms of % of GDP), thus there should be a way out of this. Compare good and bad cities, shame the bad ones. Get insurance firms on board. Have websites compiling these kinds of things into liveability indices. Give good cities trophies or whatever. Once home prices are affected by it, incentives should be clear.
- Jochim 6y agoThe usage of words affects people's perception of the problem though. The current wording minimises the problem to a degree that most people won't buy in to your solutions.
- m_mueller 6y agoTrying to change words together with trying to push through solutions is IMO totally OK. But only working on the wording is to me a typical symptom of an IMO particularly useless kind of politics. I give you a particularly egregious example coming out of Swiss German: Somewhere after WW2, handicapped people became a big topic. At the same time, the German word for "handicap" apparently started to become a bit of a swear word for some reason ("behindert"). So, politics changed the word to... "invalid". So now, people aren't just being labelled handicaped but actually worthless - thanks, I hate it. And then the word got calcified by introducing the state "invalidity insurance" (Invalidenversicherung) in 1960. Politicians really have a knack for butchering the language.
- ulisesrmzroche 6y agoJust because a solution isn’t provided doesn’t make criticism any less valid. That’s just a way to silence people. Only plumbers may complain about broken toilets