this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023
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I wish I could find it and share the actual quote, but someone on Twitter (iirc) posted something like, "the best way to approach urbanism and biking to conservatives is to say 'I'm for traditional neighborhoods that use independent transportation methods without government overreach' or 'I want fiscally responsible transportation methods'."
To no one's surprise, these refer to walkable cities, using walking or biking, and include buses with the second quote.
As always, the way to get to them is using buzzwords
At least the appropriated buzzwords are used correctly. We're not twisting words like hearing "affordable healthcare" and using an ingrained Rush Limbaugh decoder to hear "death panels". We're just preserving the poison that was already in their buzzwords.
Limbaugh's gone, but the playbook is the same.
you may get them to agree to it in a conversation or two, but they're going to forget after 10 seconds of FoxNews or a Facebook rant. They certainly won't do anything like organize or boycott oil money, or even something as small as voting for city council measures to increase public transportation
I mean, sure. And that might stick for a conversation or a few days. But come back in a week, after their ears have been pumped with Agenda 21 China Takeover Shari Law Communist Prison State talk radio gibberish. You'll be right back to square one.
At some point, it isn't the quality of message but the quantity. If you want to trick your Evangelical Homophobic Constitution Party voting uncle into supporting 15 minute cities, you need to configure his AM radio to play Well There's Your Problem podcast episodes in place of whatever crap Clear Channel is transmitting.
Well there's our problem. There's no way you'd get my Evangelical Homophobic Constitution Party voting uncle to even listen to There's Your Problem because within the first two minutes they'll say "So the problem is Capitalism," and he'd go back to Limbaugh reruns.
The first two minutes of any WTYP episode is Rocz or Liam fighting with the recording interface, to comic effect.
And I think that's one of the selling points of a lot of these indie leftist shows. They're entertaining in a way the old grouchy wingers aren't. Admittedly, it's very Millennial/Zoomers humor. So maybe Alice joking about bombing the local golf course isn't going to be Uncle's speed.
Is Well There's Your Problem very leftist? I listened to a couple episodes and I got more of a politically uninvolved vibe, so I got bored
YMMV. The crew feels like the left-most fringe of /r/neoliberal if you aged them 20 years, gave a few of them actual experience in civil/architectural engineering rather than just State Uni B-school, and shaved off the knee-jerk hatred of Bernie Sanders / Jeremy Corbyn.
They tend to be more on the technical side of the FALGSC spectrum, so you get less "this is the politician/union leader who you should be organizing with" and more "this is the highly technical reason why you shouldn't let your nation's largest failson administer the construction of a transcontinental railway".
I enjoy it because I'm genuinely interested in the science/engineering/math behind a lot of these industrial scale failures. It is cathartic, particularly when I'm grinding through my own workplace engineering/accounting crisis of the day.
This but not sarcastically. I'm politically conservative, and for the same reasons that I'm an environmental conservationist. Framing things in a way that makes sense to the listener is just good messaging.
yeah except the problem isn't messaging to the sensibilities of individual conservative people, the 15 minute city concept is offensive to oil and automotive money. The private car industry has had a strangle on urban planning since the 1950s and they're not going to release it just because some words get swapped around. They'll only change it through destroying their power, and that's the part that politically conservative people aren't going to fathom nor support.
Also the messaging of "get anywhere you need to go through 15 minutes of walking or cycling" is already as good of messaging as it's going to get. That sounds like absolute utopia on its face. Conservatives have somehow twisted that already perfect message to mean no one would be allowed to leave a grid or that people are going to be shot in the street for thoughtcrimes. They think it means cars will be outright illegal, or I've even seem some claim the concept means parents and children will belong to different sectors and won't be allowed to see one another.
They'll also point to crime rates in large cities and cherry-pick statistics that suit their arguments without doing any in depth analysis. Especially when they can parrot irresponsible politicians. They don't care that cities like Baltimore and St. Louis have it really bad right now because all they every hear about is Chicago. And as with other topics, the problematic ones will reject any new information you present that doesn't match their pre-determined conclusions.
If you try to discuss what "per-capita" means, it doesn't matter. They'll point to the fact that there were 100 murders without any regard to the fact that it may be out of a half million people or more. They won't acknowledge the different kinds of drug crimes that happen in their own towns like meth production.
The problematic people refuse to accept the fact that poor economic conditions lead to higher crime rates. They'll give the "get an education, get a better job, people flipping burgers shouldn't earn $15 / hour." arguments. They don't care because often they haven't experienced it, and even those who have lack the empathy to see that the impoverished people in the country aren't so different from the impoverished people in big cities.
I could continue this rant but I think I'll end here. I'm trying to be cautious about using the word "they" as a blanket statement. Not all people who are conservatives believe these things, but you can't deny that a fair portion do. It's hard for us all to find a common ground and speak the same language.
i mean I'm gonna be honest, I think conservatives at their core have an underlying belief in misogyny, transphobia, or racism that informs all their subsequent beliefs. It's their starting point. So when you try to get into very complicated things like how to set up urban planning to facilitate better transportation, conservatives are gonna come at that with their underlying biases on which humans are inherently better than others.
So that's gonna be a main reason for why discussing this stuff isn't going to seem like the same language. They start every thought with "but how does this help rich white people?"
The conservative mind is a wild place
The only halfway good argument against 15 minute cities is that kids aren't safe on their own. Which is true in terms of how cities are currently set up where kids might have to cross a six lane highway to get to school. Or they might be forced to walk across someone's yard and the house could belong to a deranged racist with a gun just waiting to start trouble with whoever walks by.
But these types of problems are remedied by having more dense urban areas to begin with. I've been to Japan and China and one of the most striking differences over there are how you'll see kids walking around unaccompanied by adults. Kids exercising more independence and autonomy at a younger age is a good thing. Not to sound too boomer, but I think it instills a sense of community and responsibility into kids if they're not always reliant on their parents driving them everywhere until the age of 16.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Enough!
First paragraph is spot on. It's business propaganda, through and through.
I wish cars were illegal
How is "15 minute city" bad messaging? Like how does that term lead other conservatives to leap to complete dystopia where no one can leave there zone and they will be hunted for sport?
Because imposing Draconian border regimes and terrorising violence on those deemed inferior is exactly what they themselves would do.
Honestly, for a lot of rural dwellers and exurbanites, "city" is a scare word all on its own.
They're not who need to be convinced, though, it's the urbanites and suburbanites. There are more conservatives in cities than our in the country, it's just that in the country we're in the majority and in the city we're not. The urban conservatives are the target audience for this message.
yeah that's another bucket of worms onto itself. "City" is already charged in conservative language to mean something bad. It's like how "urban" is sometimes used to mean "black" in a negative way.
Maybe they've distorted it in the same way the BLM slogan was distorted? Like, when conservatives heard "black lives matter", it got translated to "only black lives matter" in their weird little absolutist brains. Maybe "15 minute city" translates into "you can only go 15 minutes from the bus stop or train station" for them.
It's great messaging that has no real reason against it. This is a problem for people who have power and money based on urban sprawl, and so they need some kind of argument. If they can't find one even halfway reasonable, then they must create a strawman version of the original idea. Conservatives are already primed to believe that leftists want to control every aspect of your life, and so it's a simple leap to believe this is yet another attempt at control. In turn, this reinforces that same belief for next time. It's the cycle of bullshit.
This is a fool's errand, because it will just make them think cars should be regulated less
Libs (and a lot of leftists) are always looking for the magical incantation. The thing they can utter that will make conservatives realize how ignorant their views are. It's at once a cynical and cruel belief (that conservatives are sub-human) and completely naive. Convincing conservatives they are wrong is often impossible, but there are two ways to do it when it is possible. 1) spend a long time in honest and empathetic interaction, and 2) take power and show them. The second way is exemplified by the ACA (despite its many flaws): conservatives threw an absolute tantrum and made it extremely unpopular. Democrats passed it, and now it's popular to the point that Republicans couldn't repeal it despite campaigning on it for 7 years.