Obama wants to raise gas pricesFollow

As Xsarus points out, the amusement comes from your own inability to admit to your double standard. You can point to any aspect of land use/management and say "Social engineering!". Build a road? Social engineering; you're encouraging car use and movement along that area and people to travel, work and live in those joined places. Right now they're expanding a road outside my workplace (with state money no less!). Widening it from two lanes to four lanes which requires having the sidewalks immediately adjacent to the road rather than separated by a wide grassy easement. This will encourage movement along this road, encourage people from point A to travel to point B to spend money or rent an apartment or whatever. It will discourage people from walking along the road. Social engineering! A planning council decides to make plot A available for low density housing and plot B available for high density housing or low density commercial. Social engineering! A city board decided to give Toyota a ten year property tax break on a parcel so they can build a warehouse there encouraging local growth, people to work close to their workplace and having businesses open near there rather than two towns over. Social engineering!

The only funny part is that you try playing the "Social Engineering!" card like we're all supposed to say "Golly no!". The reality is that you fail to prove that it's anything nefarious or devious or whatever because you can't. You just know that you don't like it so you'll throw out your usual pseudo-intellectual garbage catch phrases like "Social engineering!" or "Liberal indoctrination!" or whatever and expect people to think you have a point. You have no point except to whine about things you don't like and making yourself look stupid by not just admitting that you're whining.

I'm pretty sure you're violating the cross thread policy of this forum right now, gbaji.

It's not my double standard though. It's yours. You're the one who refuses to acknowledge that there are social engineering aspects to any transportation and infrastructure spending, including the construction of rails instead of highways. I have *never* said there weren't social engineering aspects running the other direction as well. I've just been trying to get you to acknowledge that said connection exists in the first place.


The major difference is where the money is coming from and where it's going to. If you have to massively jack up the cost of gas in order to both fund the construction of rail systems *and* create a cost efficiency reason for people to use them instead of driving cars, then we can say that one is more "natural" than the other and that the social engineering objective is more powerfully driving the construction of rails compared to the construction of highways.


The point being that even if both solutions were "equal", one would be no better than another, meaning that arguing for rails instead of roads is a non-starter at best. However, they are not equal. But despite this, you support a course of action that would require massive government intervention to make them more equal. And the reason? Purely to get people to use rails instead of roads. Thus, while we can say that road construction has some social engineering aspects to it, the entire motivation for rails is social engineering. In one, social engineering is a necessary side effect, while in the other it's the whole objective.


You have to use manipulation in order to force people to use rails. No one had to force Americans to drive cars and use roads. We chose to do that all on our own. Surely you can see the difference?

No, I didn't. Are you illiterate? I was pointing out the hilarity of your double standard to sit here and cry about "social engineering" when the term is either completely empty (except as a charged phrase to get a reaction) or, given any sane definition, fits for a great myriad of things that you never once gave a **** about. This isn't about "social engineering", this is about you getting your panties in a wad and hoping if you should your phrase of the week enough, people will be shamed into agreeing with you.

Man, you're not very sharp tonight, are you? Did you drink a lot before posting?

Right. Happened all by itself with outside interference there at all.

Before you start hooting, I'll note that I'm referring to not only the actions by private companies but also government decisions which helped influence the fall of urban mass transit. No "social engineering" there at all!