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.
People prefer to jerk themselves off instead of having genuine and difficult discussion. Actual improvements require compromise and accepting your position doesn’t work as an absolute. And who wants to do that when you can just demonize the other side instead to feel good about yourself?
To be clear, it’s not as if think the kind of dipshit who wants an F650 pickup truck (or any kind of “mall crawler” in general) constitutes any kind of legitimate “other side” to be demonized in the first place. “Having genuine and difficult discussion” is for situations in which multiple valid points of view exist, but people trying to defend these monstrosities are just plain wrong in the same way that a moron trying to argue 2+2=5 is wrong, and that’s the end of it.
It’s so beyond-the-pale absurd it’s not even worth circle-jerking over, and I’m sick and tired of this community’s attention being wasted on it.
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.
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!)
“These monstrosities” will exist in anything short of a significantly de-growthed society. OP’s picture is not typical of an F650. They are usually converted to flat bed towing, refrigerated box trucks, utility cranes, ambulances, and dump trailers. If you don’t believe me, well, here’s a listing of used ones. Notice how many have anything like the original bed.
In Europe, Volvo and Mercedes make trucks just like it for the same kind of market. All Ford did here was take the cab of an F250 and put it on a beefier frame and drive train.
These are work vehicles, bought by people who do work. Unless you’re suggesting an immediate de-growth to the point that we no longer haul anything heavier than a cubic meter of gravel in a single trip, they will be necessary.
The amount of pavement princesses out there says otherwise.
If we were talking about the F150 and trucks like it, sure. The F250 and up are a completely different matter. They don’t share much except the name similarity.
OP was aimed at the completely wrong target.
I wrote “F650 pickup truck.” I also, pointedly, did not write “F650 chassis-cab commercial vehicle” or anything similar. I generally choose my words pretty carefully when writing these comments.
Maybe you should make sure you read what a person actually wrote before falling over yourself to post a dishonest strawman argument.
Communicating poorly and then acting smug when you’re misunderstood is not cleverness.
Well, at least you admit that you misunderstood instead of doubling-down on the claim that I was talking about commercial vehicles. That’s, frankly, better than I would’ve expected had we been discussing this back on Reddit, so thank you.
The person who posted the thread, of course. That’s part of [or at least adjacent to] what I was complaining about to begin with!
Like you’re doing, right now?
While this is true, what is the point of having genuine and difficult discussion on Lemmy / Reddit / social media (especially about societal issues) anyway?
Are lawmakers going to look through Lemmy threads to get legislative ideas? Probably not, right?
Fair enough, but it’s still possible to discuss something without devolving into an ideologically pure circlejerk. I’d like to say it doesn’t matter, but this is how we ended up with so much fake news in the US. Bubbles can be really bad when they start to change your perception of reality.
No.
What an incredibly detailed, logical counterargument. This has completely changed my mind
Because all the ways to improve things I see are crap ideas that boil down to
When all the ideas are crap you might as well crackwise since the world is burning
That one is hilarious to me…they DID move to areas of poverty over the last 30 years. Now those places are so fucking expensive the poor people had to move.
Stay where you: you should move to where the jobs are!
Move to where the jobs are: gentrification!
Move away from where the jobs are: white flight!
No action or inaction is moral. Leaving people with the choice of not caring at all or caring but unable to do anything about it since existence itself is wrong.