☕️ TEN-MINUTE CITIES ☙ Sunday, April 16, 2023 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠
The non-blessing of 15-minute cities; Bud Light ventures back out in public and gets shellacked; OMG studies trans prisoners; mRNA vaccines in meats; and an encouraging story from Texas.
Good morning, and Happy Sunday, loyal C&C supporters! Your bonus roundup today includes lots of topics folks have been asking for, like: my essay on the blessings, or lack thereof, of 15-minute cities; Bud Light emerges from self-imposed exile with CEO’s non-apology and a test tweet gone wrong; OMG takes on trans prisoners; the latest on the “mRNA vaccines in meat” issue; and an unintendedly encouraging story out of Texas.
🗞💬 *WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 💬🗞
🔥 Let’s talk about 15-minute cities. They are nothing but repackaged socialism, perhaps more accurately described as actual fascism, but without all the goose stepping and funny mustaches. I will explain.
To set the table, I ran across this short video yesterday by a gentleman who understands the whole 15-minute philosophy, as he should. David Thunder is a philosopher, political scientist, and university professor, currently serving as a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Navarra in Spain.
Thunder gets it, almost.
He really doesn’t care for the idea of 15-minutes cities, at all, which he eloquently described in his video as “highly-adversarial” technocratic social engineering, which “views citizens as pawns or children who need to be shepherded this way or that in accordance with a master plan thought up by clever social engineers and city councillors.” Thunder doubts these puffed-up social engineers are half as clever as they think they are, ruefully observing “the amount of hubris reflected in this is enormous.”
Thunder — an ACTUAL intellectual — knows enough to know what he doesn’t know, and is modestly offended by technocrats who, in his words, show a “lack of imagination” and display “a kind of prideful hubris [in] the idea that ‘we know best’ … [a] special class of people who because of their background and training can decide for everybody else what’s best for them and how they should live.”
What Thunder misses, or maybe he’s hinting at, is that 15-minutes cities are just more of the same old socialist central planning, tasteless political SPAM repackaged into a quaint European tin and relabeled as “new! organic! gluten-free! sustainable! fair-trade! high-protein food product.”
“The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism” was penned in 1988 by renowned conservative economist Friedrich Hayek, and is widely considered his most important book.