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This is going to be a comment comparing two insanely hot topic political issues, so it'll be a downvote magnet, but oh well. I see kind of an analogous situati

This is going to be a comment comparing two insanely hot topic political issues, so it'll be a downvote magnet, but oh well. I see kind of an analogous situation with gun control. Seemingly every single year a new restriction/fee/ban/permit/etc is passed, under the guise of "saving the children" or a similar feel good excuse that's given at the time. But the question for me is, how do you differentiate between 1) people that are passing such laws truly in attempt to "save the children", and 2) people that are passing the laws because they ultimately just want to get rid of guns, little by little, and are using "save the children" as an excuse to slowly move forward in that direction. Similarly with cars over the last decade, how do you differentiate between people who 1) truly care about safety/climate and are passing these laws for those reasons, and 2) people who just want to get rid of cars, and so are doing what they can to make driving as difficult, expensive, and miserable as possible year over year, using "save the pedestrians", "save the climate" as an excuse.

PaulHoule 3y ago
I have this cat which started sitting on the couch next to me where my hand would land just above her tail on her back and I would scratch here there and she’d start having spasms (ticklish?) where she would lick or bite anything in front of her. Pretty soon she got really sensitized and even a little bit of irregular petting would cause her to start shaking her head and have another spasm, even being super careful and being perfectly regular would flip her out and we are thinking about what to do about it. I was in a glass on geoengineering that got dispersed in the first Covid wave and in the last class I described it as “a fire drill for global governance”. Little did I realize how much the pandemic would set us back. We paid for COVID-19 vaccines with being able to vaccinate the population for things like measles in the future. You still find people online who are red-in-the-face angry about decisions that could have been wrong years ago. But they suddenly found meaning in their life when they could wake up every morning and share a bunch of newspaper clippings about how the government was wrong about this and that. Meanwhile, other people wear two masks because somebody else isn’t wearing one and will talk you ear off about how deathly afraid they are they’ll die of covid. Either way we lived though this crisis but it is not like the Marines where “that does not kill you will make you stronger” but instead the culture has become anti-resilient and ever trauma just makes people weaker. Right wingers have become like my cat. 5 years ago you could talk about “15 minute cities” and the only one who cared were the people who listen to John Lennon’s Imagine and really believe it. Now that kind of talk immediately brings people with their knives out.

PaulHoule 3y ago

I have this cat which started sitting on the couch next to me where my hand would land just above her tail on her back and I would scratch here there and she’d start having spasms (ticklish?) where she would lick or bite anything in front of her. Pretty soon she got really sensitized and even a little bit of irregular petting would cause her to start shaking her head and have another spasm, even being super careful and being perfectly regular would flip her out and we are thinking about what to do about it. I was in a glass on geoengineering that got dispersed in the first Covid wave and in the last class I described it as “a fire drill for global governance”. Little did I realize how much the pandemic would set us back. We paid for COVID-19 vaccines with being able to vaccinate the population for things like measles in the future. You still find people online who are red-in-the-face angry about decisions that could have been wrong years ago. But they suddenly found meaning in their life when they could wake up every morning and share a bunch of newspaper clippings about how the government was wrong about this and that. Meanwhile, other people wear two masks because somebody else isn’t wearing one and will talk you ear off about how deathly afraid they are they’ll die of covid. Either way we lived though this crisis but it is not like the Marines where “that does not kill you will make you stronger” but instead the culture has become anti-resilient and ever trauma just makes people weaker. Right wingers have become like my cat. 5 years ago you could talk about “15 minute cities” and the only one who cared were the people who listen to John Lennon’s Imagine and really believe it. Now that kind of talk immediately brings people with their knives out.