<div> </div> <div>To all, </div> <div> </div> <div>Let me echo Comrade Heartfield's comments and say that demonising the car is just damned silly. Better demonize the knife, the arc welder, the pneumatic jackhammer. I know it's a popular lefty sentiment to think that the very act of getting into a car is selfish and destructive, but it's not. You simply don't have the right to judge whether a person has a "good enough" reason to get into his or her own car. It's just none of your damn business. </div> <div> </div> <div>People want to do the right thing. The voters of Seattle taxed their own cars, wasted a couple hundred million dollars and three popular votes supporting a Monorail concept they themselves subsequently rejected unworkable and absurdly expensive. People will try. </div> <div> </div> <div>Do better for them. Come up with something that makes their lives better, not some new form of discipline based on an ecological righteousness. Motor scooters are cool. Electric motor scooters are cooler. Change the laws in cities to favor scooters over cars. How about that? </div> <div> </div> <div>Forget these totalizing, Utopian notions and figure out something you can sell to the public. If people will spend money on something as stupid as the Seattle Monorail, they will give anything a chance. </div> <div> </div> <div>peace</div> <div> </div> <div>boddi</div> <div><br><br> </div> <div><span class="gmail_quote">On 11/16/05, <b class="gmail_sendername">James Heartfield</b> <<a href="mailto:Heartfield@blueyonder.co.uk">Heartfield@blueyonder.co.uk</a>> wrote:</span> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid"> <div><font face="Arial" size="2">Doug writes:</font></div> <div><font face="Arial" size="2"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"></font></font> </div> <div><font face="Arial" size="2"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3">"Well of course. This [my argument that we are substantially dependent on motorisation] </font></font></div> <div><font face="Arial" size="2"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3">is hardly news to anyone, even the most avid <br>car-hater. But that's not to address the point whether being so <br>car-centered makes for a good society, or is ecologically <br>sustainable."</font></font></div> <div><font face="Arial" size="2"><font face="Arial" size="2"></font></font> </div> <div>These are just idle speculations, it seems to me. </div> <div>If you really think that the car is a problem, then the obligation is on you to propose how we might live without it.</div> <div>And to address that challenge seriously, you need to explain how the distribution of food, goods, labour, leisure could be achieved without motorisation.</div> <div> </div> <div><font face="Arial" size="2">None of the projections for climate change indicate anything like the accelerated risk to human life that the abolition of the car (and I appreciate that is putting words in your mouth) would entail. </font></div> <div><font face="Arial" size="2">The daily reproduction of the American (as the European) population relies upon motorisation.</font></div> <div><font face="Arial" size="2">Take the car away, and sentence your fellow citizens to slow starvation, within the year.</font></div> <div><font face="Arial" size="2"></font> </div> <div><font face="Arial" size="2">No solution to the problem of CO2 emissions that fails to substitute an equivalent to gasoline-powered engines would meet the demands of developed societies.</font></div> <div><font face="Arial" size="2"></font> </div> <div><font face="Arial" size="2">Saying get the train, or cycle (speaking as a London cyclist of 20 years) simply makes no sense.</font></div> <div><font face="Arial" size="2">On British statistics, around 85 per cent of all journeys are by car. Around ten per cent by train.</font></div> <div><font face="Arial" size="2">For the train network to reduce car journeys by one seventh, it would have to double in capacity.</font></div> <div><font face="Arial" size="2">To halve car journeys, it would have to multiply five times.</font></div> <div><font face="Arial" size="2">Seriously, who thinks that is going to happen? Even after a soicalist revolution.</font></div> <div><font face="Arial" size="2">Or is it enough just to say things that mean nothing.</font></div> <div><font face="Arial" size="2"></font> </div> <div><font face="Arial" size="2"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><br>"Moore's position on the evacuation of New Orleans is demented. The <br>major reason the city couldn't be evacuated quickly is that the plan, <br>such as it was, was so auto-centric. A more collective system would <br>have gotten more people out more quickly."</font></font></div> <div> </div> <div><font face="Arial" size="2">It seems to me that a lot of New Orleanites owe their lives to their cars.</font></div> <div><font face="Arial" size="2">I'm not sure what you mean by a "collective system".</font></div> <div><font face="Arial" size="2">If you mean Soviet Communism, or even West European Socialism, all I can say is that they too demonstrated a callous disregard of human life.</font></div> <div><font face="Arial" size="2">My youthful experience of 'collectivism' taught me that a system that imposes planning irrespective of the opinions of its individual citizens rarely achieves results.</font></div><font face="Arial" size="2"> </font> <div><br>"I will concede he has a point on the car = individualistic and public <br>transit = collectivist argument. So you've completely gone over to <br>the individualist/libertarian view of things, James?"</div> <div> </div> <div><font face="Arial" size="2">Engels mocked those German socialists who thought that public ownership was socialism, saying that they must think that the Prussian Government's tobacco factories were the workers' republic. </font></div> <div><font face="Arial" size="2"></font> </div> <div><font face="Arial" size="2">Public transit is not socialism, whether it is the London Underground or the train to Auschwitz. Will there be cars under communism. I suspect so. But in any event, a social system that refuses to engage the individual voluntarism of the mass of its citizens will end in barbarism. </font></div><br>___________________________________<br><a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk" target="_blank">http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk </a><br><br></blockquote></div><br>