1176
America has lost its f*****g mind.
(feddit.de)
Hey, German here. What the f*** are Americans doing at the other side of the Atlantic? Some of you already know this monstrosity. I did'nt. This is a Ford F650 Truck and when I stepped out of my Youtube Bubble I realized, it was marketed as the "biggest, baddest Truck on the road" for the everyday American. Are you guys serious?! Is the end goal really to drive a Monster Truck to McDs to get a McFlurry? Americas bloodiest wars have been fought in the middle east to secure oil, bombing nations to rubble. And all, for this bullshit? The excess, waste and decadence is mind boggling to me and people on Reddit seriously justifying this by "you know dude I'm 6,4ft. I don't fit in any other vehicle" makes me go up the wall.
Personally I'm ok with fuck cars being mainly a place for people to express their frustrations with how things are - I think that serves an important role.
I would also like to see places for more nuanced discussions about urbanism for those who are interested. I used to go to r/NotJustBikes for that, but haven't seen any similar communities emerge on Lemmy.
The problem comes when it's an echo chamber. I can get on board with reducing car dependence, that America is oversaturated with SUVs and trucks that are unnecessarily large, and that bike infrastructure should be improved. FuckCars, however, then devolves into purity cycles where perfectly reasonable things are hated. This is especially true for people who have no experience at all with how people use their trucks for work. That then spills over into all other communities in the vicinity, and then you get dumb flamewars as people call out their bullshit rather than swallowing it whole.
Well said. Circlejerks just create an echo chamber where people become more and more radical.
Expressing frustration is fine. The thing I really have a problem with is how misplaced it is in this case. Even if every big pickup truck (and big SUV; why not?) somehow magically transformed into a compact sedan tomorrow, we'd still have the same shitty car-dependency problem we have now. We'd still have the same number of cars demanding the same wide roads and huge parking lots, destroying walkability, making our cities insolvent, fucking up our health*, etc. Nothing would've actually improved in any meaningful way what-so-fucking-ever!
The arrogance of space of all cars is the thing we need to be frustrated about, and the inherent pretense of these anti-truck posts -- that of redirecting criticism of all cars to one particular type of car -- is at best a useless unintentional distraction, or at worst, deliberate disinformation designed to sap attention from efforts towards things like road diets and parking reform.
TL;DR: If you're bitching about specifically big trucks, you're not bitching about cars in general -- and we should be bitching about cars in general!
(* That one's a trifecta, BTW: lung disease from pollution, obesity from being sedentary, and poor mental health from road rage and loss of "third places" due to Euclidean zoning!)