4 ms·

I don't think the discussion is about the truth or untruth of the motivations behind "15 minute cities", but the fact the author of the article clearly believes

I don't think the discussion is about the truth or untruth of the motivations behind "15 minute cities", but the fact the author of the article clearly believes that disagreement with the policy is disinformation and should be made illegal. The author is not writing in good faith in the first place by taking the weakest and most conspiratorial arguments and holding them up as "the" opposition, and they think it is a shame this Online Safety Act did not make disagreeing with them illegal. I caveat this with the statement that, were I dictator, all cities would be 15 minute cities, and I would bulldoze all subdivisions and American-style suburbs, which I regard as ridiculous encroachments on my preferred rural home.

didntcheck 3y ago
Exactly. If one wants to make the point that people are mixing up 15MC with ULEZ and other traffic-restricting measures, sure, any pertinent point of fact is welcome. But instead there's been a fairly transparent attempt to take advantage of a contemporary political moral panic, and go with the lazy option of insinuating that anyone with fairly pedestrian (heh) objections to current council and government policy is a dangerous QAnon alt-right anti-vaccine... whatever other completely unrelated folk devils you want to throw in. Politicians have realized that they can drag the most random topics into the "culture war", declare that disagreeing with them is a "conspiracy theory", and enjoy free repetition of that thought-terminating cliché by allegedly "anti-establishment" journalists desperate to find a new frontier to declare their moral superiority in And for the record, I tend to agree with the majority of the proposals anyway, but I can still object to the extremely bad faith response to locals exercizing their democratic right to question them. And confused at the number of people who will openly say "fuck cars" and explicitly advocate for making driving more difficult (as a primary goal), then claim it's a conspiracy to say they ever supported that

didntcheck 3y ago

Exactly. If one wants to make the point that people are mixing up 15MC with ULEZ and other traffic-restricting measures, sure, any pertinent point of fact is welcome. But instead there's been a fairly transparent attempt to take advantage of a contemporary political moral panic, and go with the lazy option of insinuating that anyone with fairly pedestrian (heh) objections to current council and government policy is a dangerous QAnon alt-right anti-vaccine... whatever other completely unrelated folk devils you want to throw in. Politicians have realized that they can drag the most random topics into the "culture war", declare that disagreeing with them is a "conspiracy theory", and enjoy free repetition of that thought-terminating cliché by allegedly "anti-establishment" journalists desperate to find a new frontier to declare their moral superiority in And for the record, I tend to agree with the majority of the proposals anyway, but I can still object to the extremely bad faith response to locals exercizing their democratic right to question them. And confused at the number of people who will openly say "fuck cars" and explicitly advocate for making driving more difficult (as a primary goal), then claim it's a conspiracy to say they ever supported that