If these people were given the choice, I'm willing to bet almost all of them would prefer to have the freedom to live in the country and the privacy of a car.

They're poor so who cares eh? Nice attitude.:crash:

This thread among many others indicate that the "backlash" correctly represents the efforts of a few LCF posters to make this list a platform for advocating their political and social theories and beliefs. Living car free and bicycling issues are a sideshow or irrelevant to these ranting "advocacy" efforts.

Really? And here I'm thinking that if they had the choice, most of them would want to stay in the city, and live in better housing. After all, there is a huge and voluntary migration into cities going on all around the world right now.
Wow you read my mind, that's exactly my attitude about poor people.:rolleyes:

Yet in the previous post you invited people to talk about that:
Talk about the bad parent. It's like "here Johnny, have a cookie. Hey! Who said you could have a cookie!"

/end thread

I'm guessing more than a few people here have not lived outside of the western world for very long.

For most people they have no other choice, and statistically most people stay in the same wealth class they were born into, and very few things are voluntary.

See what happens when you fail to pay taxes, as an example.

Especially in China.

Migration into cities that have insufficient housing and employment for the rural refugees. They come to the cities not because there is great opportunity, but because there is fractionally more than the near total absence of opportunity in the economically depressed outer areas from which they come. This has many potentially troubling consequences for the cities, but the causes for these migrations should concern us all. The long term impacts of this change may include a lot of unforeseen pitfalls.

+1. I think you would get backlash at the auto show than you get here. ;)

Even more so in Africa and South America. Worldwide, most people want to live in cities. This has been known for thousands of years. As soon as agriculture is able to feed excess laborers, the cities begin to grow. This was as true in Babylonia and Thebes as it is in Kinshasa or Seoul today.

Another thing about people voluntarily moving, you mentioned to cities, but the government says more people are leaving the north east and moving to the south west than ever before. From a more practical source Check out Atlas Van Lines site. http://www.atlasvanlines.com/migration-patterns/

An no matter how anyone tried to sugar coat it Tree Huger is a social derogatory term. Almost everyone has a story of some workers losing a construction job because of a Kangaroo rat, or some other useless reason. But there is a face that people see when they think of Tree Hugers and that face is ELF and to a degree Green Peace. And it is a true backlash because you may or may not remember the French sunk the Rainbow Warrior. There was no real out rage because everyone seems to feel they are strange people to start with. I donated to get a new ship built but only because of why the old one was sunk not because I support their cause. I think that is a lost cause. ( I suppose anyway) But in reality most people seem to see environmental issues as anti working man issues. Stop a Dam from being built and you keep good paying jobs away from the area. Stop the Keystone Pipeline and you hurt the economy. And it does no good to say the oil will not get used because if the US doesn't get it the Chinese will. And how does the idea spread in Washing state? It spreads from Coffee cup to coffee cup and glass of Oly to Oly or Rainer Ale. That is where I first heard the term in a local pub from local people living in Seattle.

Argumentum ad populum

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


"Ad populum" redirects here. For the Catholic liturgical term, see Versus populum.
In argumentation theory, an argumentum ad populum (Latin for "appeal to the people") is a fallacious argument that concludes a proposition to be true because many or most people believe it. In other words, the basic idea of the argument is: "If many believe so, it is so."
This type of argument is known by several names,[SUP][1][/SUP] including appeal to the masses, appeal to belief, appeal to the majority, appeal to democracy, appeal to popularity,argument by consensus, consensus fallacy, authority of the many, and bandwagon fallacy, and in Latin as argumentum ad numerum ("appeal to the number"), andconsensus gentium ("agreement of the clans"). It is also the basis of a number of social phenomena, including communal reinforcement and the bandwagon effect. The Chinese proverb "three men make a tiger" concerns the same idea.

"...he does it for reasons that are in his (best) self-interest and that he has nothing against our car-centric transit system and nothing in common with us tree huggers. HOW BIZARRE !" (emphasis mine)

Oops.

Okay, here are my exact words:

You've hit the nail on the head! Almost anyone admitting to being CF or CL around here feel they must immediatley add a disclaimer to their comments making it clear that they do it for selfish reasons only and that they have nothing against our car-centric transit system and nothing in common with us tree huggers. How bizarre! Meanwhile, the truth, sober as a judge, just won't go away:

Pine Island Glacier's retreat 'irreversible'

As you can see, "bizarre" does not refer to you or to anyone in particular, but rather to the preceding sentence and to the fact that mentioning that one cycles for the benefit of the commons in any way is frowned upon by many here. I do believe that that situation is most unusual. Some would go so far as to prohibit any such comments.

My original reason for being carfree--in 1973--was because of the environment, and specifically fossil fuels and global warming. For the last 40 years, that's been my primary motivation for being carfree. Of course I enjoy riding bikes and walking. I love the exercise and I love saving a lot of money. But the main reason has been the environment.

So I have to laugh when I hear that people won't do anything for environmental reasons, including drive much less. I am living proof that people can do this. If I can do it, anybody can.

Yes, environmentalism is unpopular among people who make their living by cutting down old growth forests, or people who build pipelines. But it remains one of the most popular movements overall. People who are reasonably intelligent can understand that pollution hurts their planet down to their local community.

Nobody likes to see polar bears drowning or Yellowstone Park burning down. People will usually do the right thing when they know what the right thing is. The truth always comes out eventually, no matter how much money greedy millionaires like the Kochs spend on spreading lies.

Bull****

Is cursing supposed to win the argument? You can do better!

One can do no better than to be exact in word and succinct in meaning.

This is the crux of the debate. We all agree this is happening The question is: how does that meme get perpetuated? I suspect it gets a lot of subliminal help from industry and their PR strategists who work to plant the idea in everybody's head.

I remember addressing that in another thread. Are those people moving to the country, or to southern and western cities?

You (and a few others) seem unable (or unwilling) to grasp the distinction/concept between a poster providing the rationale for his own car free behavior, and a poster repeatedly posting about the nation(s)'s various political and social ills and what "we" all must do in order to save ourselves.

It is their raison d'etre hence it will never end. It is futile. All is lost.

I'd agree as far as this list is concerned. It has become a swirling (cess)poll of political and social posturing by a few posters who cannot resist interjecting P&R "discussion" preaching points into as many threads as the mods will allow, rather than anything concerned with posters' living car free or with a reduced reliance on privately owned motorized vehicles.

Perhaps you could lead the way by starting a few threads of the type you purport to be interested in. I've noticed you gravitate to the very types of conversations you claim to detest and avoid the "nuts and bolts" threads like the plague. Bellyaching about the so-called political nature of some of our posts seems to be your only stock and store.

Though the owners of the site may object, I find blank electrons preferable to politically charged electrons on this site. I don't think there are many topics on car free living that aren't intelligently covered already in the commuter and utility lists with less politically charged detours.

The few topics that are of particular concern to those concerned with eliminating/reducing the use of a motor vehicle have already been addressed. The problem on this list is that the answers provided are almost always are written from the perspective of individuals with no family responsibilities, and with no empathy (or a lack of concern) for those that do have other responsibilities than just getting themselves back and forth to work and the grocery store. When the limitations of such responses are pointed out by myself or others, the list gets a barrage of posts from the usual suspects preaching how the current political/social structure needs to be overhauled so that this or that or every car free person can thrive in a candyland of a future utopia.

I can grasp the distinction but I don't see why I need to. Why is it so offensive to you if people express political opinions generally relevant to the topic of car-free living? Why so insistent on limiting the discussion to whatever you think the bounds should be? Ironically you're doing the same that you accuse me or them of. You could easily restrict yourself to only posting about your personal decisions and choices if you want, and you could start threads about that, but instead, it seems that the majority of your posts that I have seen are intended to mock and ridicule and reprimand other people, with the implication that they should change their behaviour. Why not live up to your own admonitions quoted above and try not to say what "we" must all do?