Get in the car, loser

Unbeknownst to them, Browns owner Jimmy Haslam and State Rep. Tom Patton vindicated the Unabomber.

The best mental health tip that I have is to quit drinking Tito’s Handmade Vodka before you hit the terminal stage of alcoholism and almost ruin your life.

My second best tip is to avoid driving a personal vehicle as much as possible.

I used to be like a lot of Americans. It’s not that I ever enjoyed driving outside of long road trips, but I didn’t see anything wrong with driving 2.5 miles to the grocery store and raging at some asshole who couldn’t drive as well as me, the only perfect driver in the history of driving.

But then I almost killed myself in a single-car crash in 2020, and the anxiety of being behind the wheel every day became too much to bear for my sanity, let alone anyone unfortunate enough to ride in my car.

Roughly 2.75 years and 12,000 miles later on my bike, I have developed views on cars that can be fairly described as “Unabomber-like.”

Yes, the Unabomber was a stone-cold psychopath who killed in the most cowardly manner possible. Worse than that, he graduated from the University of Michigan.

But for all his flaws, he was in his bag when it came to personal automobiles and what they did to our cities that were once more regal than Europe’s.

See for yourself:

A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on. For example, consider motorized transport. A walking man formerly could go where he pleased, go at his own pace without observing any traffic regulations, and was independent of technological support systems.

When motor vehicles were introduced, they appeared to increase man’s freedom. They took no freedom away from the walking man, no one had to have an automobile if he didn’t want one, and anyone who did choose to buy an automobile could travel much faster and farther than a walking man.

But the introduction of motorized transport soon changed society in such a way as to restrict greatly man’s freedom of locomotion. When automobiles became numerous, it became necessary to regulate their use extensively.

In a car, especially in densely populated areas, one cannot just go where one likes at one’s own pace; one’s movement is governed by the flow of traffic and by various traffic laws.

One is tied down by various obligations: license requirements, driver test, renewing registration, insurance, maintenance required for safety, monthly payments on purchase price. Moreover, the use of motorized transport is no longer optional.

Since the introduction of motorized transport, the arrangement of our cities has changed in such a way that the majority of people no longer live within walking distance of their place of employment, shopping areas, and recreational opportunities, so that they have to depend on the automobile for transportation. Or else they must use public transportation, in which case they have even less control over their own movement than when driving a car.

Even the walker’s freedom is now greatly restricted. In the city, he continually has to stop to wait for traffic lights that are designed mainly to serve auto traffic. In the country, motor traffic makes it dangerous and unpleasant to walk along the highway.

Note this important point that we have just illustrated with the case of motorized transport: when a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily remain optional. In many cases the new technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves forced to use it.

I don’t mean to make a habit of quoting the Unabomber in these hallowed pages, even if he did miss me with the criticism of public transportation.

However, the Unabomber’s prophetic analysis about motorized vehicles was on my mind yesterday when reading about the latest developments in Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam's attempt to move the team to the industrial hellscape that is Brook Park.

From Ken Pendergast of neo-trans.blog, who has been a step ahead of everyone on the Browns’ Brook Park fiasco:

At the same time, those who were wondering if a new Red Line rapid transit station would be built next to the Brook Park stadium site to connect it to downtown, Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority CEO and General Manager India Birdsong said last week there are no such plans.

The Browns said there are no plans to provide a direct pedestrian path to the planned stadium from one of the existing Rapid stations — at Brookpark Road or a Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. The latter is actually closer to the center of the stadium site as the crow flies. Apparently the Browns want to collect as much parking revenue as they can.

It’s here that Haslam, who, in my opinion, should be in prison for fraud, shows what this proposed move is actually about.

According to Forbes, Haslam is worth roughly $8.5 billion. But instead of doing something cool with that money, like blogging from Titty Island, he wants to extort multiple levels of government to help him wring every cent possible from his putrid product.

Cleveland could bulldoze the lakefront stadium tomorrow and erect Haslam’s vaunted dome stadium, complete with a golden shrine to its (“allegedly”) criminal owner.