It’s poll time!
[socialpoll id=”2412282″]
I’m not sure the thumbnail captures the full transphobic awfulness of the graphic for option number three, so here it is full-size:
In case you’re wondering, Saddam is not actually mentioned in the story.
If you haven’t guessed by now, I voted for option 3, though the car seat one is lovely as well.
Here’s an archived link of Return of Kings’ front page as of today, in case you want to read any of these posts. I didn’t bother.
@guest
I have the same problem when I visit the extended family in NJ. I can’t take proper walks or get anywhere without a ride. If I want to walk for exercise, I’m confined to walking around the block. This summer I went for a longer walk looking for Pokemon gyms, and I had to basically crawl through roadside shrubberies and dive out of the way of cars every two seconds. It was terrible.
Here, I’m used to being able to go pretty much anywhere I want without needing to drive. I’ve never lived any place that was farther than 15 minutes walk from a bus stop. From there I could take the bus to the nearest larger city, and then switch to train which could take me anywhere in Europe, theoretically.
In the US I can’t even go get coffee by myself. If there’s no food in the house, I have no choice but to be hungry until someone feels like taking me to the supermarket.
The first few times I visited there, all I could think was how the hell do people live here permanently?
This thread has coincidentally brought it home to me more viscerally than usual how much the built environment we live in determines aspects of how we live. What people have said about the physical difficulty of walking away in a place where you might live surrounded by roads with no pavements, for example – I think that would be vanishingly rare in the UK (apart from in the countryside, I mean). I’m in the middle of a big city, and never drive (I rarely get driven, either).
When one of my nieces came to stay as a young teenager, it was quite disconcerting to us that for her – that first time – it was a seriously big deal that she and her cousins could just up and go into town on their own on public transport without an adult in tow; where she lived that was not really an option, and she and her sibling got lifts from adults everywhere (my brother once mentioned giving her a lift to a mall where she could hang out with her then-boyfriend for a while, and waiting for her in the carpark).
How much more of a difference could be made to people’s way-of-childhood and way-of-life as adults if cities were designed and built more for cyclists, more for pedestrians, more for people to feel safe and sure of getting around independently and easily, day or night, without necessarily having a car … (and I wonder what rich-country cities might be like in a decade or two when people have a phone app that summons the nearest driverless car, and driven cars are restricted or even banned from city centres … ??? Will driverless cars make good or terrible public transport systems, I wonder).
I apologise for the derail from RoK, though. I confess I hadn’t the stomach to go into the slimy entrails of the slug/belly of the beast. All of the covers are vile, just in slightly different ways, though I agree that endangering trans people and endangering children are the vilest 🙁
I couldn’t pick, so I did ‘eeenie meanie minee mo’. 😛 Ended up with #4.
I know too many examples of why each of those is horrible from my life.
When I substitute-taught in California I used to ask my junior high and high school students what they did when they weren’t in school, and the only two answers I ever got were ‘watch TV and talk on the phone’. (This was pre-easily available Internet; now I’m sure the answer would mostly be ‘hang out with my friends online’.) What else could they do? Everything else they might possibly want to do in the world was literally physically impossible without a parent driving them somewhere. (Oh, I forgot to mention above that my friend’s neighbourhood in South Carolina had zero bus service.) Anyone reading my or IP’s comment could probably feel the resentment that we, as adults, started to feel even during the short time we found ourselves in these environments–we were literally prisoners in our respective friends’/families’ houses, unable to get out alone and unable to even fulfil our basic needs without asking a favour of a driving adult…can you imagine what it must be like for a teenager to live like that for years?
The friend I mentioned is concerned that her son spends too much time in front of a screen, and wants to send him somewhere in the woods without internet access. I made one of my very few exceptions to saying anything to her about how she raises her kids, by asking her if she realised that this is literally the only way he can (even virtually) leave the house without her, and interact with people besides his family and schoolmates.
Driverless cars will make terrible public transport, btw. How safe will (some) women feel getting into them? How clean will they be? I can imagine getting into one where the last riders were sick, or left trash, or whatever. We know from studies that (some) women feel much safer in, say, a bus, with an easily accessible driver, than on a train, where there’s no constant visible person to get help from if needed.
I have vivid memories of it. It was not pleasant.
I’m not going to pretend that growing up in an upper-middle-class white ghetto was a hardship or anything; but I think it was deeply unhealthy, and I think it harmed my social development. I don’t think I was alone in that either.
I thought #4 was kind of ridiculous, but yeah, horrific actually.
I grew up in the 60s-70s in a suburb of car-centric L.A. Even so, my dad took me with him on the bus to fetch our car at the repair shop after a minor-ish* crash. I was four going on five and thought it a grand adventure.
I quit doing the “I survived childhood without seatbelts/car seats/safe cribs/etc.” after I had internalized the concept of privilege because I had the enormous privilege of having a stay-at-home mom, as well as being an only child, which makes a HUGE difference!
*Of course, in that accident, I went head-first into the windshield and ended up at the ER with a mild concussion. Because? No seat belt!
That archived ROK front page is a treasure of hilarious headlines. Some of them link to archive, some to actual ROK.
I looked at the “10 ways women are like dogs” thing. The author is Max Roscoe. If you remove the redundancies, it boils down to five points:
1. You have to assume authority over your woman because society isn’t otherwise training her for her proper role. An untrained woman will be unhappy, unsatisfying as a pet, and difficult to handle, she will even try to boss over you.
2. In training her, be proactive and consistent. Focus on positive reinforcement, both in words and small presents.
3. When judging a new woman (presumably because you might adopt her), look for stereotypic cues of character in her grooming and behavior (I guess, as opposed to looking just at her tits).
4. Accept that she can’t serve as your intellectual best friend. Like, she’ll understand the tone of your speech, but not much of the content.
5. If she turns out to be untrainable and unsatisfying, “next” her and maybe get a dog. (There’s no mention of finding her a new home, despite earlier pontification on how women need a man to watch after them).
Heh, I remember when the authors of Freakonomics argued against using car seats for children 2 or greater. I believed them at the time, although now it seems their conclusion was done based on faulty evidence and overreaction to a single study.
For the RoK poll, I went with #3 only because fuck transphobia although encouraging life threatening behavior under the delusion of ‘toughening up’ is toxic masculinity and so incredibly damaging it deserves the shittiest shit award.
@Cars and the US discussion
Whilst I never had a great social life as a kid while living in France, I noticed this huge cultural difference as well. I typically walked everywhere I needed to go (except a few friends who were simply too far away) and if we ran out of eggs, my mom would give me money and I’d walk down to the local supermarket to buy eggs. As a teenager I could take public transportation to get into Paris and literally go anywhere I wanted (though I never took advantage of this as much as I could have). In fact, this option was faster than driving because driving in Paris is an exercise in futility.
Then I get to the US for college in Upstate New York and good god I’ve never felt so trapped! A trip to the mall was a 2 hour goddamn bus ride. Even getting goddamn groceries required a 30 minute walk across lousy streets that are clearly designed for cars rather than people.
America is a car culture, and I really never realized it until I spent 4 years of college and literally had to beg my friends to go… anywhere!
How boring. I knew this was common but I had no idea this was the norm.
@ Janet Walenta I didn’t click the YouTube link yet, but your comment gives me some clues of what it’s about. And it leaves me disgusted but not surprised. It’s a big movement involving women so of course.
I wanted to go to the march in person, but sadly can’t (but I donated the price of a plane ticket to their cause via Facebook, to help pay for things like porta-potties).
On topic, by title alone I found myself gravitating to 4, since it involves child safety, and for all the reasons everyone else already gave. Masculinity is apparently so fragile that life-saving safety measures make society feminine, and that’s bad?
@ moocow
I’m spotting a theme.
@Alan:
Canadian humorist Eric Nicol had a bit related to that in his book The Roving I. From memory:
@ jenora
I think the most dangerous aspect of driving abroad is that in the UK flashing your headlights at someone means “After you”, whereas on the continent it appears to mean “Get out of my f*cking way”.
Still, that’s what your E111 medical card is for.
The US did not become car-centric overnight, or by accident, and fixing it will not be an overnight thing, nor will it occur without mindful planning. Driverless cars are not going to remake the American lifestyle. Even if there wind up being fewer cars on the road (I am not convinced) there won’t be any less road.
Meanwhile the big names of “walkable communities” are sticking said communities out in suburban greenfields where you can’t reach anything else without a car, and pricing them such that only wealthy families with cars can buy their way into them. We have a development in Louisville called Norton Commons, which involved no less than Andrés Duany, that is not only a traffic nightmare getting in and out, but nobody who works there can afford to live there. The community is in an uproar right now over the idea that some nurses and police officers might move in (such riff-raff). So it’s walkable only if you are rich and only if you have a car to get to work.
Well, I checked the link, and was like, I knew it.
The video is some douchebro talking about an article about how women would be wearing pink hats with cat ears (“pussy hats”) out of protest. That, I never heard of before, and I do agree with him that it sounds like someone is trying to use this protest to make money. But then he uses ableist slurs and says someone (but not him since he’s too far away) should go to the protest with a penis hat to troll them. I nope’d out at that point but I got the idea of what he wants.
Ran out of time to add to the previous comment:
I may not be able to fly over to D.C. for the women’s march, but was able to find a sister march in my area, so I plan to be going to that!
I guess I’ve been pretty lucky about transport and walkability in the places I’ve lived.
Montreal’s roads don’t have the best reputation, but it also has a lot of public transport options, many places are walkable, and it’s becoming more bike-friendly.
In St. Catharines (Ontario), my home for a couple of years, everything was pretty close. I could walk anywhere I wanted to in the city within about an hour and a half, and I lived two blocks away from the grocery store (I miss that!) Plus, your average bus would actually come on time.
unrelated, but i’d love a pink hat with kitty ears.
Transit: Grew up in a small town, walked everywhere. Moved to the city, walked and bussed absolutely everywhere. Took forever to get anywhere, but I’m both cheap and stubborn. Now I drive because I live in that small town, so to visit anyone I have to travel a good hour or two. Transit in north america suuuucks.
“Driverless cars will make terrible public transport, btw. How safe will (some) women feel getting into them? How clean will they be? I can imagine getting into one where the last riders were sick, or left trash, or whatever. We know from studies that (some) women feel much safer in, say, a bus, with an easily accessible driver, than on a train, where there’s no constant visible person to get help from if needed.”
Uh… what? I don’t get this. Why would a woman feel less safe in a driverless car than a man?
I’m going with “10 Things My Dog Taught Me About Women”. Because one thing I know as a former dog owner is that dogs don’t know nothin’ about women. Which is one reason why I can’t speak as a former woman owner (tongue firmly planted in cheek there folks).
I think the transphobic article is just objectively the most offensively awful.
But on the subject of “share if you survived X” – Self-selecting sample, much?
These things inherently ignore the vast numbers of people who did die before the introduction of seatbelts, or pasteurization, or vaccines, or adequate Child Protection, or food regulation, or…
The “pussyhats” thing is real, but the hats are being crowdsourced and sent to the marchers for free. Basically you get the pattern, knit a hat (or 10) and mail them out to be handed to marchers. It’s a silly name for an interesting idea (although I dislike the rationale behind the pinkness of the hats), and unless someone is doing a wrong thing there is no exchange of money involved. If the douchebro thinks otherwise, he is just a typical douchebro spouting off before he has all the facts and not caring that he’s ignorant about the topic.
I’d wanna say “ALL OF THEM”, but I think I’ll go with the car seat one. Yeah, sure: put your kids in danger, and then have the audacity to complain that the family courts won’t give you custody. This idea is genius, I must say. [/sarcasm]
@epitome of incomprehensibility:
Heck, I live in Toronto, and I’d say that Montreal has a better public transit system than Toronto does, and Toronto’s is fairly decent. Montreal also has better bike support than Toronto does, culturally as well as financially. (Toronto’s first attempts at setting up a bike-share system like Montreal failed.)
Of course, Montreal has the ‘advantage’ that, like New York, the core of the city is on an island which restricts outward growth and forces a higher population density in the core. Toronto, on the other hand, has way too much sprawl and large sections where there’s barely enough population to make running transit out there pay for itself.
(Toronto also had to deal with an actively antagonistic provincial government in the form of Mike Harris who pulled all funding from the Eglinton subway line that was already under construction when he took office in 1995, forcing them to spend more money to fill the holes back in. It took another fifteen years before they finally re-started construction on an extended version of the line using streetcars underground instead of subway cars.)
The Pussyhat site has the hat pattern.
I only needed to get a traffic citation for not having my seat belt on the one time, haven’t gone without buckling up since. My present car beeps if someone in the vehicle isn’t wearing theirs (I think the way it works involves a sensor triggered by weight on the seat but am completely unsure about it – but my car knows if someone is in the front passenger seat and the airbag activation light doesn’t go on if it’s only my purse there.) so it gets really annoying until I snap and say “BUCKLE YOUR SEAT BELT OR ELSE!”
All of those ROK pieces should be taken out back and shot, then cut into tiny pieces and set aflame, the ashes gathered and put into a canister that is shot out of the Earth’s atmosphere with a route into deep space plotted for it’s course.