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It's amusing to read this, then flick down to the discussion about how the handmaid's tale doomposting is obviously totally ridiculous. "They want to take away the wilderness from us" is the handmaid's tale for dudes.
Do you guys even have any wilderness left in Europe besides the alps? I kind of thought it was all farms and pastures.
There are other mountains in Europe, forests of Scandinavia and Russia, some deserts in Spain. But you're broadly right, Western/Central Europe is like the US east of the Mississippi.
East of the Mississippi still has a tremendous amount of wild land, I don’t think there’s really any analogy there.
I’m not sure anywhere in the USA is analogous to western & Central Europe where the type of intensive cultivation that completely blankets the land has been going on for nigh near a millennia.
We have had such an abundance of land since our inception that the type of clear cutting and terraforming that leads to the kind of landscape of endless cultivated or formerly cultivated land you see from Spain to Czechia was simply not needed or economically viable.
Looks like you're technically correct, eastern US is 54.25% forest, more forested than Russia. EU-27 is 40% forest.
This is after about a century of reforestation. Parts of the East coast used to be just as intensively cultivated/settled as any part of Europe. Massachusetts now has significantly more forest than it did in the 1920's, for example.
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Laugh it up, while you still can.
Is it really extrapolating much to assume that the system in your car that's mandated by the State to know and record your position, speed and have the ability to turn off the engine could also prevent you from doing other things that are not in the interest of the State that aren't specifically mandated by the bill? Are slopes ever slippery?
I'd attempt to fix the analogy with HT to make it more accurate, but that book's setting never really made any practical sense. Patriarchal theocracy already exists and it doesn't really look like that bourgeois rape fantasy. It's just Islam. Women are right to be afraid of its resurgence in the west, but the way the story frames it misses too much about the reasons that make that sort of society arise to be of any use except as agitprop.
Would be tyrants of both theocratic and modernist flavors do exist.
Meanwhile, on reddit, a conversation like this is happening:
I'm not speaking in any sort of loaded language here like this fictitious quote, but even if we remove that from the equation, it seems to me that women who want to retain secure and uncontested rights to abortion are right to be concerned at the moves their political opponents are making and right to think that the ultimate goal is to restrict their license.
I'd contest the low resolution idea that the "party" (presumably the GOP) would actually advance that political agenda significantly, but some people are indeed trying to do this and making moves to make it easier for them to do so, it's no hallucination.
I don't really get what you're trying to say here. Why deride people being aware that politics have an important influence on their life? We're not in the 90s anymore, endless present and liberal consensus is not the order of the day.
Simply that the syllogism:
Does not, in general, hold. Fantasizing about "they are going to take away the wilderness" makes perhaps even less sense than fantasizing about project 2025; at least that is an actual report produced by an actual think tank rather than a motte comment about what the out group is going to do next.
This is just "the slippery slope fallacy exists".
The logic is perfectly sound if you are able to find legitimate argument that the "political opponents" have a desire or interest to do Y, or that X is materially conducive to Y.
In both examples, there is plentiful evidence for both propositions.
Requiring strict proofs for suspicion of political activity is a stupid and idiotic policy that can only lead you to be ineffectual at the actual game being played.
You sound like a conservative defending civil unions for homosexuals on the ground that there is no evidence they will lead to marriage. If you want to be as politically ineffectual as that, be my guest. But I prefer to deal with the world as it is.
There is in fact zero evidence that anyone wants to enact the handmaidens tale or take the wilderness away from people. Speed limiters (which I think are dumb btw) are totally unrelated to that goal, in the same way that abortion restrictions are totally unrelated to making women into chattel.
Please don't be that bad faith here. There is extensive evidence that people want to curtail freedom of movement for various social planning reasons and extensive evidence that people want to restrict abortion rights for religious reasons.
Just because you decide to phrase it in hyperbole and made up hypotheticals doesn't refute that. It should tell your something that you have to distort the point that much.
H... Hyperbole? I'm literally quoting the guy in this thread for one point and the leftist protesters for the other point. If your point is that "abortion curtailment -> women are chattel" is a bad faith argument, take it up with your nearest college campus.
Also the "curtailing freedom of movement" evidence is (entirely? Almost entirely?) actually curtailment of freedom of driving through city centers. However, people moved around for a hundred thousand years before they could drive through a city center, so in some sense I am actually more partial to the "women as chattel" catastrophism.
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