Leave it to the Regressive Left to put a pothole on the Motor City’s road to renewal.
After decades of struggling, including becoming America’s largest municipal bankruptcy and enduring the restructuring of Chrysler and General Motors, Detroit has experienced an outburst of positive national press for being a hip city on the upswing.
Yet, to some, there lurks a great crime behind Detroit’s improving fortunes: the mass production and distribution of killer cars.
To wit, in a Twitter thread, a David Klion asserts:
It is basically immoral to drive.
You’re going to tell me that many people don’t have a choice, and/or that I sometimes drive, and you’re right. So:
It is immoral not to be politically committed to a world where no one drives. Driving is bad. It should be abolished.
— David Klion (@DavidKlion) March 5, 2018
As to why, Mr. Klion is straightforward and succinctly argues from “two unarguable premises: cars kill innocent people and cars are destroying the planet.” Ergo, he believes:
Here is who should have the right to get around in a giant hunk of metal traveling at speeds that will instantly kill a pedestrian, such that tens of thousands die every year and no one notices or cares: no one. No one deserves that right.
— David Klion (@DavidKlion) March 6, 2018
Klion is not without solutions to this scourge. Admitting he is “impatient for technology to make your car obsolete,” including “autonomous vehicles” for rural areas, he also calls for “reconfiguring sprawling metropolitan area that shouldn’t have been built around cars” to make them “more transit-oriented.”
And, yes, as one might suspect, he does equate cars with . . .
To the critics who are arguing that car culture is cool and good, I respect that argument precisely as much as the analogous argument about gun culture. Your hobby inevitably kills and maims innocent people every day. Own that.
— David Klion (@DavidKlion) March 6, 2018
Speeding to the defense of car-crazed Americans, especially those whose pickup trucks have shotgun racks, was David Burge (a.k.a., IowaHawk): “No invention has been a greater boon to human prosperity and freedom than the automobile.” Burge also had a few other choice words for Mr. Klion, here:
from my cold dead hands, motherfucker (ht @molratty)https://t.co/SmbIY1ZGGG
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) March 7, 2018
this is why I always say this country needs a 2nd Amendment for cars.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) March 7, 2018
if your vision of a utopian future is hipster coder drones shuttling between their high density urban sleep pods and their creativity cubicles by solar light rail, you can piss right off.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) March 7, 2018
‘Merica / not ‘Merica pic.twitter.com/dfwHHGIrRn
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) March 7, 2018
Born in the city that put the world on wheels, I’m partial to Burge’s views on cars. But this is not merely a parochial position, it is a philosophical one.
Klion is to be commended for his frankness and for his encapsulation of the Regressive ideology’s application to an issue.
Blame people for being unable to use a technology safely—i.e., killing others and the planet due to sundry inexcusable indulgences and foibles; deny everyone the right to own said technology; expect people who utilize the technology to “feel bad” until they’re “woke” enough to divine how to stop using it; and demand government ban and/or render antiquated the technology through the creation and implementation of new technologies (you know, like the car once was) and the “reconfiguration” of society.
Obviously, this belief that government can coercively recreate humanity and society into a terrestrial Eden in accord with Regressive ideology is the antithesis of clear thinking and, as history shows, sanity.
But while many may be tempted to dismiss David Klion as a crank, this is patently unfair. He is actually representative of the Regressive environmental movement and its contempt for the “infernal combustion engine,” in particular, and industrialization, in general. Further, it must ever be remembered that the Regressive Left has a proven strategy for turning insane ideas into “enlightened public opinion”: a Leftist academic or pundit spits out a nutty theory; the Leftist media gins up “news” treating the nutty theory as sane, and the cause or solution to a purported societal “crisis”; and then Leftist politicians hop on the crazy train and steam ahead toward and over the American people tied to the tracks.
With due respect to the Regressives who would turn the “Arsenal of Democracy” into an urban farm, please count out this child of the Motor City. I well recall the old Chevy ad: “It’s not just your car, it’s your freedom.”
And every American owns that.
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