World News

32492 readers

595 users here now

News from around the world!

Rules:

Please only post links to actual news sources, no tabloid sites, etc
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, propaganda, etc

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

166

Monster pickup trucks accelerate into Europe as sales rise despite safety fears (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

45 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The engines rev, the guitars thrum and a gruff narrator lays out why the vehicle occupying the driveway is more than just a machine. “A truck is a tool,” he says, “but a Ram – a Ram is life.”

So begins an advert for the Ram 1500, a pickup truck slightly bigger than the Panzer I tanks of Nazi Germany and almost as heavy. It is growing in popularity in Europe, with the number of Rams arriving on the continent up 20% in 2023 from the year before, according to registration data from the European Environment Agency. Road safety and environmental campaigners in the UK and Europe are aghast as the latest, most extreme cases of North American car bloat – giant pickup trucks – are increasingly crossing the Atlantic.

“Europe should ban the Ram,” said Dudley Curtis from the European Transport Safety Council. “This type of vehicle is excessively heavy, tall and powerful, making it lethal in collisions with normal-sized vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists.”

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Windex007 0 points 2 months ago (2 children)

No, I was just trying to drag out of you how you see the incident without priming the pump. How does one minimize the killing of hundreds of unarmed students? I knew people like you existed, I just never had the opportunity to witness someone actually do it, and I was curious how it's done.

You roll 20 additional days into it as a buffer, and count injuries as equivalent to murders, and let them happen anywhere.

It can't be the "Tiananmen Square Massacre" for you because then couldn't draw in PLA members who had heart attacks and died elsewhere that day because they weren't at the square. You need to create a context where they're all the same thing and the geography of place really damages the ability to do that.

You just dilute a massacre to make it not a massacre by expanding the time and places. Super interesting. It's a distinctly different approach to propegands than you'd typically see in the west or Russia.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You're making a lot of false assumptions here that lead me to believe that this is not actually, as you claim, your first time encountering this viewpoint, and your intention isn't to learn or honestly engage but to discredit and spread your own dishonest talking points.

[–] Windex007 -2 points 2 months ago

Oh, no, I'm absolutely not trying to engage as if this person is holding the objective truth because they aren't. I'm not either. They just have had a different brainwashing than most so I'm interested in the flavour. I'm interested in hearing their views, fact checking them, and using that to reverse engineer the intiontions of those who are feeding them a moral rationalization.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

"What we actually are hoping for is bloodshed, the moment when the government is ready to brazenly butcher the people. Only when the Square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes" - Chai Ling

But they didn't get it, so they had to exaggerate armed skirmishes into "they machinegunned sitting student protestors"

It can’t be the “Tiananmen Square Massacre” for you because then couldn’t draw in PLA members who had heart attacks and died elsewhere that day because they weren’t at the square.

You can literally find photos of protestors posing with burnt and mutilated bodies of PLA soldiers