Socialist Hellhole III!

[elfs]

Victor Davis Hanson bemoans:

Go to Europe and see the left-wing desired future for America: dense urban apartment living by design rather than by necessity; one smart car; no backyard or third bedroom; dependence on mass transit; political graffiti everywhere demanding more union benefits or social entitlements; entourages of horn-blaring, police-escorted technocrats racing through the streets on the hour; gated inherited homes of an aristocratic technocracy on the Mediterranean coast, Rhine, Danube, etc., exempt from much socialist and environmental law; $10 a gallon gas; sky-high power bills; racial segregation coupled with elite praise of illegal immigration and diversity; and unexamined groupthink on green issues, entitlements, and the culpability of the U.S. Drink it all in and you have the liberal agenda for an America to be.

Because in the United States, "gated inherited homes of an aristocratic technocracy ... exempt from much of the law" never happens. Right? Right?

Hanson is just as delusional as the Green Party. Damn, and I used to think he was actually a serious thinker. Maybe he was, back in the early 1990s. But now he's just a polyp among polyps all along Limbaugh's backside.

Comments

[mouser.livejournal.com]

entourages of horn-blaring, police-escorted technocrats racing through the streets on the hour

I'm a bit dense this afternoon. What?

smart car plus $10 a gallon gas plus green issues = ???

[gromm.livejournal.com]

Uh, yeah, they have sky-high power bills in that socialist hellhole known as France.

Oh wait...

[tagryn]

IEA statistics for 2010 (pg 43) show France with 27% higher price-per-kWh for household electricity than the USA; gasoline prices are 60% higher than for the U.S., and 47% higher than for Canada.

[caraig.livejournal.com]

Is... he talking about Europe? Or New York frickin' City? Because aside from the $10/gallon gas, it sounds like the US.

WHY won't anyone call these people out on their blatant... ARGH!

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

New York City, as everyone knows, is actually part of Europe.

[tagryn]

Perhaps Manhattan, but that's not exactly typical U.S., either. The no-car lifestyle which one can get away with in NYC (and a fair part of Europe, from what I've seen) is much out of the norm for the United States. When I hear commentators like Andrew Sullivan demanding that gas taxes get raised to European levels, then reveal that he doesn't drive a car...yeah, not much credibility there on understanding how most citizens live in the U.S.

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Between this and Mitt Romney's braying about Obama's "European vision for America", it's looking like we're in for a solid 18 or so months of delusional people talking about the horrors of a fantasy Europe that they have never, ever visited. You'll excuse me while I just nip out back and shoot myself in the head.

(That said, even in this general context of awfulness, "dense urban apartment living by design rather than necessity" in re Europe may actually win the prize for the dumbest thing that I have heard so far this year.)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Well of course Europe has, "dense urban apartment living by design"! They don't need tons of storage space because they don't by tons of $h1t on-sight like a 5 year-old in Toys-R-Us would. And like Americans currently do.

[tamino.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I actually rather like enough sound isolation from my neighbors so that I can crank up my music.

I like dense and urban in the sense that I don't like being forced to use my car, and I get twitchy when I can't walk to a train station or a coffee shop, but I don't like apartments and I *hate* high-rise apartments. Ugh.

The times I come out in favor of density are mostly when it comes to these vast residential suburbs filled with houses that look the same, on absurdly-named streets, without so much as a shopping center (maybe, if you're lucky, a 7-11) in walking distance...