It is functionally forced. You cannot live in America without a car except in a handful of cities. This was by design. It was a group effort of multiple companies, from the oil companies to the tire manufacturers. They've all lobbied to spend public funding on car-based infrastructure instead of public transportation.
Additionally, they brainwashed a significant portion of the populace to actively ridicule, harass, and even physically attack anyone who tries to live outside that "everyone must have a car, else they're a tree-hugging hippie and should die in a fire" mentality, or anyone who doesn't drink the "climate change is a hoax" kool-aid. Fuck the giant oil corporations right in the eye. Massive corporations (like "big oil" and "social media") manipulate minds on a huge scale, and they've trained both sides to be eternally at each other's throats so that they can fairly safely continue to trash everything in their quest for "infinite profits".
Honestly it's like there's an entire position to the argument that just does not recognize the agency of people.
They weren't people who decided to attack or harass others - THEY WERE BRAINWASHED.
If anything bad happens, it's the 10 billionaires at the top who poisoned them, every other human is a saint would never think to attack or harass anyone on their own accord.
Americans have started buying pickup trucks en masse, and it's a total coincidence that it happens to have become the most profitable sector for car manufacturers and a sector they've turned all their marketing to. It's all the people who free-agencied their way to the same conclusion which just happens to agree with what the car makers want, and it didn't happen in Europe where the laws about emissions and safety don't exclude small pickup trucks, and that's also a total coincidence where millions of people just free-agencied their way to the same conclusion as each other (but different to Americans).
You know how jaywalkers are at fault when hit by a car? Who do you think spread that idea around America? "Automobile interests in the US took up the cause of labeling and scorning jaywalkers in the 1910s and early 1920s"[1]. And that isn't the case in other countries. People who saw the same marketing messages from the same people to believe the same things, who would think it.
> People who saw the same marketing messages from the same people to believe the same things, who would think it.
Yes, except all of the people who don’t.
Let’s do a little experiment. Pick any 1 position or belief that I don’t hold and you brainwash me into it. Of course, you won’t be able to. Why not?
Edit: by the way are you even from the US? Or are you just speculating about what it’s like over here? Because the way you speak about jaywalking is completely alien to anyone actually living over here. Everyone jaywalks all the time; No one ever actually gets in trouble. And when cars hit people, it’s definitely the people driving that get in trouble
