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Cars are rewiring our brains to ignore all the bad stuff about driving
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this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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The study seems a little bs.
They ask questions like, should a person smoke in public? And then ask if car fumes are a problem to the public.
Well they are not really comparable, like you don’t need to smoke and you can smoke elsewhere. I literally need to drive to work and can’t just drive through a forest.
They also ask about personal property being left in the street and stolen. People said that if someone leaves their stuff in the street and it’s stolen, then it’s their fault. But when it switched to cars, it was suddenly not their fault.
Well where else can I leave my car? If I leave my iPhone in the street, that’s a bit different.
I’m in the boat of people who wish that we did not need cars, but sadly my city is nowhere close to having a decent public transport.
You can be forced to do something while still being aware of the issues. Your interpretation seems to be: I can't change it therefore it makes sense to mentally ignore it. But being forced to drive while being aware that car fumes are toxic to health aren't mutually exclusive positions.
@vividspecter @M500 It's also important to note that there's a huge difference between a social critique and a personal insult.
The lack of viable transport alternatives is a systemic issue. It's not a personal moral failure.
It is not a personal moral fault to drive where no good alternatives exist.
The solution is not a different personal transport choice. The solution is systemic change to how transport, infrastructure, and planning are delivered.
The survey looks at how people have been socially conditioned to accept the systemic issues.
It involves a lot of blame shifting, and victim blaming.
It involves dropping or changing a number of socially accepted rights and wrongs as soon as a car is involved.
Except that wasn't the question asked:
All it asks is whether people "shouldn't" do x. If I understand people must do x, I'm not gonna say they "shouldn't" just because I'm aware it has side-effects.
Furthermore, I went through the actual study and honestly the other questions are not any better. I'd say this study proves precisely nothing about car brain.
I don't recall reading comments on any article that mentions study results where there isn't someone doing exactly this. If I'm to believe comments like yours, no legitimate study has ever been reported on
When any study is reported on, suddenly every Internet user is an excellent judge of what constitutes a good study.
Curious, are you a scientist or some other authority on such matters? Seriously want to know.
If you follow your logic to its full conclusion, you're essentially saying
This is not a very useful line of thinking. The existence of dissent over most studies does not mean all the dissent is invalid.
As for your other question, no I'm not a scientist, just a student
I don't follow this. I supposed to pick one or are both opposing views true at once?
What I'm actually saying is that it would be nice, if literally once in life, a study offered a conclusion and that was that. Sometimes it weighs on the soul to think that all information is potentially false and that no source can be trusted.
I am all for questioning data and finding the truth. But as I said, the fact that it's never a thing that everyone can agree on literally anything, is exhausting.
The idea that they must do x is the normativity they're testing. You must drive a car isn't an absolutely true statement, it's an assumption you make based off your experiences, but many people do fine without a car.
Just like the statement a man must date a woman isn't true. It may be true for you who are heterosexual and for everyone you know who is dating but it's not absolutely true. So questions like should a man be able to marry another man may seem wrong to someone who "understands" men can only be romantic with women but that's a false assumption. That normativity and those assumptions then hurt people who live outside those norms.
Sure but that proves nothing beyond that people think it's more necessary to drive through certain areas rather than smoke there. It's not indicative of any special car brain.
Your still viewing things from a motor normative lense with statements like I need to drive to get to work and I need to park my car. This sort of thinking naturalizes things that are actually part of a system that can change if we decide to. We can collectively decide to ban cars and humanity could continue to thrive, there's nothing necessary about cars. They may be personally necessary in the current system, but the system itself isn't, and this is critiquing the system not individual decisions.
The point of critical theory like this is to look at things we take for granted or think are necessary, show that they actually aren't natural or necessary, and expose some of the problems we ignore because we think the problem is required to live.
You have to step outside the system and look at it like you don't come from car centric culture and with the knowledge that it's a choice and not necessary. From that point of view questions like why is it ok to spew toxic fumes in a populated area? Makes sense since you know the system is a societal choice, not just the way things have to be.
With that knowledge you can try and change the system. That doesn't mean never driving, because it may be necessary to live, but driving less and taking public transit when you can and advocating and supporting public transit and biking infrastructure over car infrastructure.
You seem to have no idea that there are places with zero options aside from cars right now. I live in such a place. You criticized the statement "I need to drive my car and I need to park it." I do advocate for better but there are no legitimate qualifiers to that statement. I still need to. Period.
You seemed to have missed the part where I said
You may need to drive because the system forces you to do so to live. But that system that forces you to drive isn't necessary and we can work to change it. If you are working to change that than good. If you dismiss problems with the current system by naturalizing it with unqualified statements like "I need to ..." Then that's a problem, you should instead say "I'm forced to..."
Like if the government is restricting your speech statements like "I need to not criticize the government" makes that seem unchangeable and just the way things are, if you say " I'm forced to not criticize the government" or qualify it with "I need to not criticize the government because it's repressive" then that shows there's nothing natural about it and that some system is preventing you from doing something, not nature. Then you can recognize the system can change and work towards changing the system, instead of accepting it and moving on.
There's always the option to not live in those places.
Not if you can't afford to move. And other people would still live there even if you could. So I'm just advocating and it's slowly working.
If they'd asked a question about a bike locked up to a bike rack that would probably be more equivalent. I think if they'd asked if you left your car unlocked with the keys in thr ignition then people would say that's your own fault if the car gets stolen too..
Yeah true, I'm just saying that's what I'd expect the survey responses would probably be like, and maybe "fault" is to strong a word 😅