You know what's not good? Racism, xenophobia, closing borders to refugees fleeing war torn and politically unstable regions. But on the flip side the spread of covid-19 can be directly attributed to global trade and travel, our energy consumption that is killing the planet is made worse by all those long distance flights, drives, and even trainrides (gasp, speaking ill of the sacred locomotor) that simply not doing would be the environmental answer. The fact is there should be no global trade, or travel, or any major movements of people beyond maybe a few hundred miles from where they're born unless there's a catastrophe or necessity warranting such a mass movement of people or good.

Industry should be localized, there should be no hubs for specialized industry, with instantaneous communication the knowledge can be shared around the globe, specialists who have skills that no one else has or goods that no one else can manufacture should still travel around the world but we must reduce that. We need to determine what is essential and what isn't, we shouldn't send container ships to America and send them back empty, we shouldn't view any particular part of the world as a workshop, we should be extracting the raw resources we need equitably and sustainably as possible. All of this is going to require some system of borders that enforce equality, not hamper it.

I envision a global government, ran by the ideas of Marx, it has full control of the economy, nothing challenges its power. Wouldn't it make sense for this government to divide the world into districts around population centers, take into account cultural, geographic, and practical boundaries. Wouldn't people need some kind of ID, wouldn't this ID be used to enforce some kind of travel restrictions in the case of a pandemic or emergency, but why stop there? Who should be flying, how many flights should people be taking in their lifetime, who actually as a reason to fly, why does someone have a right to relocate across the world when they don't need to.

And let's talk about race, and culture, and all the things traditional defenders of borders use to justify their bigotry. Shouldn't we try to mix ethnicities so that there's no dominant group anywhere? Make the whole world the same shade of brown. You want to talk about who has a right to use environmentally damaging travel it's climate change migrants, it's non-whites, it's the foreigners. Ireland and Japan should have people who look the same in the future, everywhere should have mixed races. We should also encourage a single global language to ease communication.

These borders shouldn't be definite either, they should be guidelines more than anything, like you shouldn't travel a certain distance from your home so someone the next town over can go a bit farther east than you but you can go further west. We should end supercommuters, public transportation should only go so far, we should support forceful relocation of people in climate change prone areas, we should view travel as more of a privilege than a right. I like trains as much as the next soylent drinking socialist but instead of digging tunnels and making elevated platforms for them in cities, why not ban cars and make people walk? The solution sometimes is to just have less infrastructure.

    • RNAi [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      1st post ever.

      Yep, I was giving him doubt beneffit, BUTT

    • watchingpornwithdad [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      3 years ago

      I don't care if the earth is dying I need a train from New York to Los Angeles both cities I'm never going to be able to afford living in!

        • watchingpornwithdad [he/him]
          hexagon
          ·
          3 years ago

          Dude dude dude (bong rip) what if instead of retrofitting current infrastructure we just build a bunch of new housing projects and force people to live in Kowloon walled city density urban areas.

          • Wheaties [comrade/them]
            ·
            3 years ago

            not mutually exclusive options, and a lot of people are going to be displaced by glacial melt in the next decades. It would be nice to the housing ready for it.

      • blight [any]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        Commuting is dumb but the problem is that wage labor demands it and is uses fossil fuels, not that it's globohomo or whatever. The reason people can't afford to live in big cities is capitalism :walter-shock:

        • watchingpornwithdad [he/him]
          hexagon
          ·
          3 years ago

          Line up every person who regularly commutes from LA to NYC for work and give me a gun, now not everyone of them is unjustified, but I'm guessing a lot of them are. Also how many people should live in a city? Certainly there is such thing as too many, even if we fixed the housing market and gave everyone a house a place like Manhattan would definitely cap out under ten million. The rest of New York City would have a much larger cap but we would need to expand into Jersey, Yonkers, Nassau, etc. Hyperurbanism is just as bad as suburbanism, just look at Hong Kong and their cage homes. We need to clearly define the square footage someone deserves.