3 ms·

Why the ad hominems? Such people may not be to your taste, fine. But theirs is as nothing to the whiff from a tailpipe. Live and let live.

matt4077 12y ago
It's fine – I probably have a puritanical side. More than that though: I believe cities just aren't the right place for cars. It's a tragedy of the commons that car usage creates a situation where public transport cannot be funded to an adequate amount and traffic conditions scare away people who would otherwise take a bike. Cities also suffer because cars encourage a structure of big, centralised shops that are easily accessible by car, but nothing else. I do get the convenience of a mall (and the economics), but, wow, how much would I miss the social environment of a lively city. It's possibly a cultural thing … you prefer whatever environment you grew up in, and that just happens to be 'old Europe' for me. OTOH there's nothing better than a curvy mountain road or the Arizona desert in a convertible. I'm not a complete Luddite.
jerf 12y ago
When I use the term Puritanism, it's not an ad hominem. It is a description of a mentality that the United States imported in quantity, and despite what people may like to believe, it is not isolated to one side or another. This is still not the best summary I know, but one half-decent summary is that Puritanism is the fear that someone, somewhere, is having fun, or perhaps something more like, "I don't like cars and have no use for cars and therefore neither should anybody else." Objective reasons that car traffic is "bad" is in short supply. It is more a taste issue than anything else. But the proles might be having fun with their cars, and we can't have that....
- lovemenot 12y ago
  It is unreasonable to require a person, albeit implicitly, to justify their motives, when the thing they are objecting to has a material impact on their life. In this thread people are talking about noise, pollution, safety and more. Yet you side-swipe his/her motivation. Your fun is yours alone. Their motivation is theirs alone. A vehicle's aforementioned externalities are common though. We can just focus on those.

matt4077 12y ago

It's fine – I probably have a puritanical side. More than that though: I believe cities just aren't the right place for cars. It's a tragedy of the commons that car usage creates a situation where public transport cannot be funded to an adequate amount and traffic conditions scare away people who would otherwise take a bike. Cities also suffer because cars encourage a structure of big, centralised shops that are easily accessible by car, but nothing else. I do get the convenience of a mall (and the economics), but, wow, how much would I miss the social environment of a lively city. It's possibly a cultural thing … you prefer whatever environment you grew up in, and that just happens to be 'old Europe' for me. OTOH there's nothing better than a curvy mountain road or the Arizona desert in a convertible. I'm not a complete Luddite.

jerf 12y ago

When I use the term Puritanism, it's not an ad hominem. It is a description of a mentality that the United States imported in quantity, and despite what people may like to believe, it is not isolated to one side or another. This is still not the best summary I know, but one half-decent summary is that Puritanism is the fear that someone, somewhere, is having fun, or perhaps something more like, "I don't like cars and have no use for cars and therefore neither should anybody else." Objective reasons that car traffic is "bad" is in short supply. It is more a taste issue than anything else. But the proles might be having fun with their cars, and we can't have that....

lovemenot 12y ago
It is unreasonable to require a person, albeit implicitly, to justify their motives, when the thing they are objecting to has a material impact on their life. In this thread people are talking about noise, pollution, safety and more. Yet you side-swipe his/her motivation. Your fun is yours alone. Their motivation is theirs alone. A vehicle's aforementioned externalities are common though. We can just focus on those.