My minivan is proof of virility and demonstrates that I am not compensating for anything. It also moves a hell of a lot of lumber when the seats are folded down.
Try that in some bubble shaped car-based SUV or a short-bed pickup.
In the sci-fi series The Expanse, there's a Bezos-style rich tycoon character who flaunts his wealth by purposefully not getting hair treatments and instead allows his male pattern baldness to be on display. He's so rich he can afford to not care what anyone thinks, and he wants everyone to know it.
The comment is referring back to "not compensating for anything". Choosing to keep a balding head and not caring what other people think is a power move when having a full head of hair becomes trivial.
Drawing a moral equivalency to some random event in some random contemporary work of fiction as a means of moralizing isn't some kind of awesome megadunk “own” or anything—it's actually pretty lame.
> My minivan is proof of virility and demonstrates that I am not compensating for anything.
Why do people constantly equate what car someone drives with the size of their reproductive organs? I usually only see this from people who reflexively look down on people who own more expensive vehicles than them.
It's weird.
Live your life. Who cares what you or anyone else chooses to drive. I promise you, whatever vehicle you drive, nobody sane actually cares.
If you are driving these things around urban streets where my kids and I are walking or riding bikes, I certainly care what you drive. I'd prefer that it (a) has clear visibility for the driver in all directions, so you can see us, (b) is lower, lighter weight, and traveling slower so you have less chance of killing us, (c) is quieter, and (d) pumps out less air pollution because I don't want to be smelling your exhaust.
If you drive an oversized SUV which you have further lifted off the ground, removed the muffler from, and make exhaust that gives everyone a headache, people are going to assume you are a creepy asshole with no self respect or respect for your neighbors. The vehicle becomes a kind of enraged roar of emotional insecurity, from the "everyone else needs to always be thinking and talking about me, and it doesn't matter why" school of human interaction.
My daily driver is a 2300 pound miata with a stock exhaust. It's small and low to the ground and only has 181 HP. I think this is the lightest production car you can get--certainly close.
I see people in Cybertrucks and some other electric trucks--they don't have local pollution, but between the weight and the height, I'm living pretty dangerously. You always notice the big cars in the miata, but the big, heavy electrics is when I started feeling about as protected as a cyclist in it.
Still, I don't think they're creepy assholes who want to murder me or have emotional issues or whatever. I think they just like their big dumb truck, just like I like my ridiculous small car. I don't have to drive this car, it's impractical, it's dangerous, if someone kills me that'll probably ruin their day, but I do it because I like it. I'm not psychologically deranged with a death wish. Sometimes people just like different things.
I road one three days a week for my commute for about six months, but it was only about two miles. I went out of my way to be on roads with an ample bike lane.
More than drivers being aggressive towards me (helps I wasn't slowing them down, which I know can make some people aggro), I noticed that I was invisible to many drivers and had to be very cognizant of that in turning lanes and when needing to be out of the bike lean due to construction, etc.
> If you drive an oversized SUV which you have further lifted off the ground, removed the muffler from, and make exhaust that gives me a headache, everyone is going to assume you are a creepy asshole with no self respect or respect for your neighbors.
Or maybe it's just you being weird with your city-dweller assumptions?
Oh, I assure you they're a problem outside of the city as well. The whole shtick of preener trucks is performative masculinity, because otherwise you'd optimize for a vehicle that actually does things rather than one that just makes a bunch of noise/smoke for fun while not even moving that well. And so "late to the meeting of the small penis club" is just a good mental label to have some pity and not end up taking this contemporary dirtbag trend too seriously.
no this happens both in and out of cities. Just moved out of the American south where something called "rolling coal" is common practice in suburbs, cities, rural areas- a term heard fairly often. A bizarre amount of pickup owners modify diesel engines to produce thick, black smoke as a means of showing off or as a nuisance to others. I know I had a lot of lifted trucks cut me off and roll coal
Hear me out, but childhood trauma and neglect is common in rural areas. This was especially the case 30-40 years ago when family violence prevention programs were just lip service and practically non-existent.
I assume those children grew up to become maladapted adults with Cluster B traits. This manifests as antisocial nuisance behaviours such as rolling coal.
It's not "weird" to not want gratuitous nuisance, health problems, or slaughtered children. Indeed, indifference to these seems extremely weird (sociopathic), and I would appreciate it if such people stay far from civilization out in the desert or whatever.
(Though they should also be paying their fair share for the environmental costs of the CO2 emissions they pump out which are putting us on a path toward literal un-livability of the Earth, to which end gasoline should probably cost like $15/gallon.)
Can you explain why you'd characterize it as hyperbole? Larger vehicles are demonstrably more dangerous[1], especially to children, and do put out more CO2 emissions. In what other context is it socially acceptable for people to put externalities like those brought by SUVs onto those around them? The one I can mostly think of is secondhand smoke, which at least in my part of the world is pretty heavily looked down on.
[1]
> compact SUVs, full-size SUVs, and pickup trucks all result in a significantly higher probability of pedestrian death when compared to a similar collision involving a car. Compact SUVs increase the probability of death by 63%, pickups increase the probability by 68%, and full-size SUVs increase the probability by 99%
You load big furniture on the roof of or haul building materials in or tow something with a car and the same demographics that said you didn't need a truck to do those things gawk at you with judgement like they're watching a homeless man prepare to cook a pigeon he just nabbed.
It is often difficult to pickup sarcasm in text. I did not interpret OP's comment as sarcasm - probably because I've run into that sentiment quite often.
Try that in some bubble shaped car-based SUV or a short-bed pickup.