This post by Jane Galt makes some very interesting arguments. To wit:
You know, you would think that a large group of people who have all read Guns, Germs and Steel, and taken its message that “geography matters” to heart, would pay just a leetle bit of attention to it when they start chastising America for not being more like Europe.
The following is also very true:
Moreover, the lesson from America so far is that it is impossible to grow cities with the population densities necessary for successful mass transit from scratch. The only cities where mass transit is successful are the ones that grew around mass transit, notably New York and Chicago, and even in those cities, space constraints (the lake in Chicago, the small size of Manhattan) made a sizeable [sic] contribution to supporting the necessary density. Europe has public transportation not because it made the tough moral choices about land-use, but because its cities were largely built up before the car was invented, and because during the fifties, when productivity boosts were putting mass-produced automobiles in the hands of American workers for the first time, Europe’s workers were busy recovering from the nasty war they decided to hold in the forties.
This is also very true, and something that non-Americans should keep in mind:
Y’all apparently don’t even need the “natural” part to produce the disaster. A heat wave that wouldn’t even make a New Yorker reach across the sofa to turn up the fan killed as many people in France as the worst-case scenario for American losses to Katrina. They were apparently not saved by Europe’s admirably high fuel prices, its finer moral sensibilities about the poor, its stronger committment [sic] to taking care of its citizens, or [COUGH] its enlightened attitudes on matters of race and ethnicity.
And finally, this gem still makes me laugh:
…European leftists have apparently learned, to their vast dismay, that America is a cruel and gluttonous place, building our so-called economy on cheap oil and the shattered lives of workingmen, whom we kill when they become inconvenient.
Basically, just remember this: North America isn’t Europe.
Boy, and people say Americans don’t know their geography!
