“Retiring” and “resigning” are different things. He may have been near retirement age, but the statement he made makes it clear this was a resignation for a cause. With a good reason.
Quit framing the war as the cause. From the article:
A spokesperson for the UN in New York sent the Guardian a statement about Mokhiber, saying: “I can confirm that he is retiring today. He informed the UN in March 2023 of his upcoming retirement, which takes effect tomorrow. The views in his letter made public today are his personal views.”
So he informed the UN in March 2023 that he wanted to step down and now he did it.
Attacking SUV drivers is precisely the wrong way to go about reversing the surrender of the public realm to the automobile and it is exactly the right way to start another immature culture war , alienating a lot of potential allies in the fight to reclaim out streets .
Exactly this. There are some clear use cases for cars and even for SUVs (possibly only if you literally live or work on a large farm). There’s no case for driving an SUV in a city. It’s antisocial behaviour at best and actively threatening at worst!
It makes the roads safer and that saves lives. It reduces pollution, saving more lives. It also saves space. That doesn’t save lives, granted, but it’s still a good thing.
If we accept any use cases for cars (and I do, personally), even if it’s primarily in the short to medium term while we build better urban infrastructure, then we should also advocate for those cars to be as small, as safe and as clean as possible.
A street filled with VW Golfs instead of Land rovers, still afforded the vast majority of space in town, still given priority at every turn and still transporting one or two people at a time, doesn’t move us much further forwards .
As is covered in the article, explaining the environmental impact of SUVs to SUV owners does not change their mind or encourage them to get a different car; it is effectively ignored.
So that is where ideas like the deflators come in, you make it more inconvenient, maybe that will work where polite discussion did not.
To be honest, I’m sick of trying to politely persuade people to stop killing other people with their idiotic cars. All cars are bad, yes. SUVs are the worst. It’s perfectly reasonable to try to solve a wicked problem by going for the worst offenders first.
I’m glad to see this discussion starting gathering attention. In general, I think we should start looking more and more at car sharing over car owning: nobody needs an SUV every day, but you might enjoy a longer trip driving one. So short term rental should be incentivized to decrease the overall number of cars on the road and parking lots.
As with everything concerning international law: it depends on the weapons and strategic alliances of each entity.
There are several reasons why China is ramping up ICBM production, the possibility of a country in debt “switching sides” in order to avoid payment, is likely one of them.
This was the entire point. If you loan out money that immediately gets paid to construction firms you own, you’re effectively just charging people (with interest) to be neocolonialized.
Never make a loan with the Chinese government. They intentionally bankrupt you to "borrow" your asset (in many cases, important sea ports) for 99 years. They update that contract every year to lend it fir the next 99 years. You effectively gave away your asset to China forever.
That's also what the occupiers of China did to China itself before the end of WW2 – seize Chinese ports indefinitely.
It’s a fundamentally different problem here: it’s new infrastructure, which in this day and age is barely profitable in terms of first-order effects (fees, fares, etc.) but is significantly profitable in terms of second- and third-order effects (economic growth, new businesses, yada yada).
If you could build a new subway in New York, spend zero capital, but have to give up the fare revenue for that subway, why wouldn’t you?
Also, the India/US alternative is to… Just outright give the Indian Adani group a majority stake in their port expansion. So much better. So much. Truly.
I do feel many of these nations should just straight up rent ports and such to China instead of taking the loans, in exchange for a lump sum payment, with restrictions for military use/limitations, and usage in support of war.
Might not get quite as much money, but seems far more favorable than the outcomes of belt-and-road loans (not just in the unlikelihood of debt repayment, but how the funding is used [vendor/company restrictions]).
Living in a city with many bicycle lanes along major streets, the toxicity of exhaust gases worries me and doesn’t come as a surprise. Sucks that most people don’t know or care about that
theguardian.com
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