Technically it was a train, and they were experiencing a transcendent connection across time with their older selves, in a deliberately unsettling and transgressive scene meant to evoke the rawness of adolescence being laid bare before the worst cosmic horror -- an eldritch carrion-eater who feeds on destroying the souls of children -- as a way of reclaiming strength from vulnerability. At any rate, depiction is not endorsement.
But yes, considering how many actual adults misinterpret and mischaracterize that scene, I don't recommend that particular book to children -- not because they'll be damaged by it, but because they won't have the wisdom of age to understand it.
Meh, she's a dingbat and a narcissist, and while it's unfortunate that she screwed up so bad on her quest for attention that she became an internet byword for dumb blonde, narcissistic dingbat, take your choice, she was always a right-winger and a supporter of people of Vance's ilk, and so this is just another case of chickens coming home to shit on the roost.
You're deeply misrepresenting the position. We're not desperate to keep the duopoly. We're desperate to keep it from collapsing into a dictatorship, and you're over there trying to kick its legs off.
Nonsense. If you work outside of the system that exists, you won't ever make meaningful change on that system. You'll only ever make it harder for the people who have accepted reality and are working from within the system to change it. You can't do that from the outside short of a full catastrophic collapse, no matter how much noise you make.
In this case it's not who you're fighting for. It's what arena you're fighting in. We're fighting in reality. You're fighting in an imaginary storybook world.
It always staggers me when I remember that for roughly sixty million years during the Carboniferous Period, there were trees but no microorganisms capable of decomposing them.
Just sixty million years of branches falling off and trees falling down and... just sitting there on the ground, not rotting at all.
Explain to me how you solve the mass transportation issue in non metro areas. I live in Montana, where cities are an hour or three apart by vehicle, but even in said cities, outside of the main commercial areas, people are spread out. Like, really spread out. There is a single bus stop eight blocks from my house, with exactly four scheduled pickup/dropoff times. My kids go to school with other kids who live twenty miles away. Commercial rail doesn't exist, except for a single cross-country Amtrak line with a station four hours away from here.
Images like this are illustrative, but they completely ignore the physical reality of how vast swathes of the US are laid out. You can't just flip a switch and have bus stops on every corner and rail lines connecting your major cities and residential areas. That's a massive undertaking that would cost way more in up front infrastructure than maintaining and augmenting existing highway program already does.
How do you change the culture away from cars where there is literally no realistic way to do it for 99% of people in areas like this? And how do you push for infrastructure change when there is no anti-car culture? It's a chicken and egg problem where you have no chickens and you have no eggs.
I look forward to seeing the directors Vania Heymann and Gal Muggia at the Oscars in ten years or so. Serious Michel Gondry and Daniels vibes from this one.
Happy beanniversary. The standard gift is beans.