I gotta say, as an immigrant, I am NOT feeling great about today's election results in the Netherlands.
And as a former resident of the UK, I clearly remember how Brexit was just a stupid joke made by a small party ... until it wasn't.
It's so frustrating to me to see the problems created by right-wing neoliberalism and then having people respond to that by moving further to the right. 😬
@notjustbikes Being an immigrant to France post Brexit myself. I get really nervous every time there's an election.
Because Marine Le Pen and her cohorts must be salivating at this.
I just feel quite sad that no one appears to have learned from the UKs stride to Fascism. But then the warning signs for the UK were started with austerity. Brexit was just the huge crack that appeared.
@notjustbikes@Compassionatecrab It’s shocking that someone like this would win in the Netherlands. But #DonTheCon won here in the US. I am one of many people who believe he was installed by Putin’s asymmetrical warfare. Maybe something similar?
@notjustbikes a chunk of the electorate are stupid and/or nasty. Simple as that. Until recently though they didn't have a voice. Now we have populists everywhere who discovered the lucrative stupid/nasty market.
@notjustbikes right wing parties certainly flirted with the stupids in the past (Nixon's "silent majority") but knew how to mollify them and where to draw the line. Now there are few people left with living memory of where that path goes and generations of spoiled narcissists who look for someone who indulges their base desires.
@notjustbikes aren’t you the guy who mocked US bicycling advocates, saying it’s a lost cause and we should give up and move to the Netherlands like you?
Why not take the same approach and simply move again to a third, non-fascist country?
The idea that people with privilege should simply jet-set to some other place where things are good, instead of working to make things better, is a toxic one. It has much to do with the rise of figures like Wilders or Trump. I hope this is a learning experience for you not to take good streets or good politics for granted.
@scott@notjustbikes strong disagree on un"fixable within a generation", 1. #eBikes, and 2. #GlobalWarming doesn't give us time to mess around much longer. The grid streets and streetcar suburbs are just a few dozen steel bollards or jersey barriers away from a connected low stress bikeway network, and the truly sprawling suburbs aren't dense enough to matter (if they were, add some five over ones and trolleybus lines to create the 15 minute neighborhoods.) Politics yeah but boomers are dying.
@enobacon@scott@notjustbikes that's the most frustrating thing. Yes, we are a generation away from having all the fancy infrastructure of the Netherlands, but that fancy infrastructure is simply to have safe biking next to cars.
We don't need all that fancy infrastructure, we just need to remove cars. That could be done in a decade with political will.
I'm running the risk of giving Not Just Bikes a better argument than they actually have but:
I think the problem is exactly that - it's not engineering or bollard deployment, that's easy. A decade is a great estimate. The project of changing the political will in America, however, is a significantly longer timescale. "Not in your children's lifetimes" - because your kids' peers are already being indoctrinated into the culture
@pleaseclap@Andres4NY@scott@notjustbikes I can't overstate how important an actually good voting method is to representing the actual political will in the government. SF, NYC, NL, come on. Do you really think the people around you are accurately represented by your elected leaders? The strong man / tall pole / plurality winner (I know y'all have "RCV" and "proportional" party list, but if you only choose one or only count one at a time, it's all the same deal.)
@pleaseclap@Andres4NY@scott@notjustbikes and I don't think the kids are indoctrinated the same way, many might be unable to see it yet until they've put on the bike-ray goggles, but the circular logic brain rot that brought us to this point is far from resonating with youth, at least the ones who are at all concerned about climate change, which seems to be most of them. Maybe it takes one kidical mass ride and they're fully radicalized.
And then yeah you're right, ranked choice voting might be an accelerant but you've got the problem of how established power networks own and monopolize decision-making state by state, university by university, etc - the shadow brokers have kids, too, and their kids are the future's ivy league grads with seats on 4 boards
I'm pretty sure ranked choice is a reasonable tool for pushing back over time but it's not a poison pill, you know?
@pleaseclap@Andres4NY@scott@notjustbikes perhaps I've failed to explain how much of a non-solution "rank choice" IRV is for electing a representative government. The power brokers decide who is electable in all of those plurality-first methods, but STAR voting simultaneously weighs preferences across the entire electorate to determine which two candidates are most preferred overall, allowing more consensus and giving less pull to the Strong Man / power brokers / media moguls.
@pleaseclap@Andres4NY@scott@notjustbikes so SF, Alaska, NYC, Seattle, Portland have all been sold a fancy form of status-quo vote counting with a shell game where they shuffle the votes around, everyone is confused, gives up on understanding it, and doesn't realize they're basically still doing the same choose-only-one method. People have multiple overlapping preferences politically, that they need to be able to express on the ballot and have counted to find a representative compromise.
@randomwolfguy@scott@notjustbikes Wilders not directly tear down bicycle paths, he will most likely try to prevent the funding of maintenance of them and let them deteriorate over time...
@notjustbikes neoliberalism is the antithesis of right-wing. please learn the history of the term. neoliberals are just people who care about policy, and also consider second order effects.
a huge swath of today's yimby georgist urbanist cycling fanatics are the quintessential definition of neoliberalism.
@Jubo@notjustbikes In fairness Holland is one of the less PVV-prone places (though not by much) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Dutch_general_election#/media/File:2023_Tweede_Kamer_Municipalities_Map.svg
@kevincianfarini A far right party has secured majority in votes. The leader is pushing against immigrations, banning certain religions, hints of wanting to leave the EU... this kind of thing. He’s a mix of Trump+Brexit (wouldn’t be surprised if supported by the same groups too).
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