For me, living in a city is a horrible existence. So living in the unspoilt countryside a car is pretty useful to get around.
A car is freedom. Do you really want to be completely dependent and beholden to some public transport system?
Per the link, I view a car as slavery, and, per The High Cost of Free Parking, car infrastructure is much more expensive than is commonly realized. Owning a car is being a slave to car payments, to saving for the car, to the insurance company, to the repair shop, to the driveway or parking lot, to paying around $10,000 a year in TCO.
Lots of people don't want to live in a city.
Which is good! They shouldn't. The challenges come from the way we've structured an entire society to subsidize parking.
To some extent that's changing, with people like Glaeser, Shoup, and Yglesias in the intellectual vanguard. The issue is also getting more prominent in part because the startling cost of living in many cities and inner-ring suburbs is causing intellectually curious people to ask both why this is happening and how it can be alleviated. Both questions go back to politics.
Slavery, until fairly recently has meant 'owning another human' - I mean, hell, I'll buy the use of slavery to mean 'having a choice between doing what another human wants and dying'
My problem here is expanding it to mean 'having to pay a small fee or suffer discomfort'
Slavery was turned into "owning another human" by abolitionists who wanted to play up its squick factor. It was previously just a state of submission and would be interchangeable with "servant".
The sense jseliger is using it is in the sense attested from the 1550s: that a car owner has lost resistance to a habit or vice; in this case, the "habit or vice" is the acceptance of car infrastructure in city design and the habit of looking at the world through the needs of one's car, namely to find parking, to calculate finances based on a car's needs.
Because, keep in mind: Slavic peoples were and are white.
In this sense, it's more accurate to compare it to jokes about how Polish people are stupid, how the British are always stuffy, how the French don't know how to shower, how Americans only care about money, how women are emotional, etc. A germ of truth, but mainly the kind of overgeneralization we call "stereotype" today.
Huh. I would have called those examples racism. Maybe "European racism" if I wanted to make a racist statement myself. The joke is that Europeans are just as racist as Americans; they are just more refined about it. The implication, if you tell the joke properly, is that the Americans aren't as educated or refined as the Europeans, and thus can only handle the five colors.
But certainly, from the time of the rise of nationalism onward there has certainly been discrimination and violence along ethnic lines. (and perhaps before? I'm actually really interested in racism before the advent of nationalism, and I don't have much any information.)
But is that proper? calling it racism even when it's not based on Blumenbach's white/black/red/yellow/brown categories? I mean, dividing people into the aryans/poles/slavs and treating them differently based on that classification looks like the same thing to me, save for the fact that the classification takes more effort than Blumenbach's method does.
Yeah, but this breed of joke is basically timeless and global. Read old folklore of any culture and it's full of these backhanded compliments and unsubtle digs at neighboring villages and provinces. Tribalistic derogation (yeah, I just made that term up) basically happens anytime you have two sets of people who can be distinguished at all. Here in Seattle, it's Huskies and Cougars because football teams.
A lot of people can't tell the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant, for instance, but they've cheerfully gone to war over the distinction quite a few times. Is that a race war? It seems less than useful to do so.
Actually, it now occurs to me to look up the etymology of "race": http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=race&allowed_in_fra... I'm not sure what the Arabic ra's has to do with anything, but the earliest attestation there is 1520s. Interesting that the root similarity with other meanings is due to the way a river branches; that would never have occurred to me.
Nationalism, as I countenance it, is a 20th century phenomenon, which leaves a period of 1.5 to 4 centuries for your interest if you agree. I group nationalism, racism, sexism, etc. under the larger umbrella of tribalism, though, which may or may not be academically sane. Nationalism doesn't seem to become a thing until nation-building became a thing as a retrospective reaction to colonialism; you could call some ancient prejudices nationalism but... that doesn't feel right to me.
...I am rambling now.
Some people suggest that one of the reasons Napoleon was able to do so well militarily in the earlier years was this "Levée en masse" - most other countries at the time being a little hesitant to arm and train the peasantry, for fear they might demand rights. Civilization says that it's the Republic, not Nationalism that is the prerequisite for conscription, but eh.
On racism, yeah, what you are calling Tribalistic derogation - when it is based on inherited characteristics and actually ends in discrimination, functionally sounds a lot like racism, even if it happened before the term was coined.
How did that work in, say, the 16th century? I mean I'm sure that an Italian in France would face some discrimination, but would that be true of his kids? or would his kids or grand-kids be considered French even though they looked a little different?
Start putting McMansions and Applebees in the countryside, and it becomes spoiled rather quickly.
If you have a partner, it's not about the freedom of owning a car. Many couples/families own multiple cars. You can still own a car for "freedom" but live your daily life with one car less.
One car less.
With a car you are dependent and beholden to a public transport system. They are called roads and highways.
Countryside is not 'unspoilt' if it features roads and cars, let alone houses and agriculture.
If you want city living badly enough, there are countries that still have viable cities.