this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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traingang
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Holy shit, his liberalism and euro-fawning is egregious here.
He praises Luxembourg for having free transit across the country RIGHT AFTER he mentions Walmart (which is far from alone there) using it as a tax haven. And earlier he talked about the income of Walmart's tax lawyers being dependent on screwing over communities elsewhere. But wow, free transit
Also Luxembourg has the highest car ownership rate in Europe and half of the people who work in the country live outside it because it's too expensive.
Walmart losing out in Germany to "local retailers like Aldi and Lidl" and because countries in Europe have "strong unions"
And of course there's the incessant praise of small businesses and "mom and pop stores" like they are somehow fundamentally different (almost every big chain in Europe began as one guy with one store). His aforementioned description of chains like Aldi and Lidl as "local" in comparison to fucking Walmart might as well read: "I don't want to lick the boot of a FOREIGN capitalist". Especially when he mentions 60 percent of Walmart stuff being made in China when talking about "money leaving the community", as if that percentage doesn't hold true for almost anything.
Liberal idealism that you can just contain their size with regulations.
He's had his issues before but now I actually dislike him, the glazing in Europe has gone too far, and I live in the country he praises the most.
i think a factor in this is that these talking points are usually produced as a result of interacting with local governments that have low ambitions and tight budgets alongside being influenced by a tiny minority of fervent conservative retirees.
"it has been done in place X so it's doable" "it's not a radical solution" "it's market based" "we've done this in the good old days" "it's gonna save us money" "it's gonna help small businesses" "it's gonna help property values". it's all geared towards addressing the anxieties of the local councils. i think it's partly deliberate for the content creators in the urbanist space to self censor so that if someone takes their arguments to their local government they have a better shot of being enacted.
kinda unrelated but this trend of "urbanism" is kind of reminding me of the "flag community" in the sense that both of these communities in online spaces turned a set of guidelines for better design into dogmatic rigid rules that must be followed and evangelized to the point of sucking life out of everything. im sure Amsterdam is a fine city but every place can't be Amsterdam and not every city planning or architecture must be replaced by european ones.
just about every place i've ever been would be improved by not being post-automobile american and if we're not gonna do land back any time soon we might as well have amsterdams instead of suburbs.
My benefit-of-the-doubt interpretation was that they're saying there's other ways of building sustainable cities like socialist micro-blocks in various architectural styles, not simply a kneejerk defense of car-centric design a la "well some of it is necessary"
sure, i'm just dying for any improvement