The engines rev, the guitars thrum and a gruff narrator lays out why the vehicle occupying the driveway is more than just a machine. “A truck is a tool,” he says, “but a Ram – a Ram is life.”
So begins an advert for the Ram 1500, a pickup truck slightly bigger than the Panzer I tanks of Nazi Germany and almost as heavy. It is growing in popularity in Europe, with the number of Rams arriving on the continent up 20% in 2023 from the year before, according to registration data from the European Environment Agency. Road safety and environmental campaigners in the UK and Europe are aghast as the latest, most extreme cases of North American car bloat – giant pickup trucks – are increasingly crossing the Atlantic.
“Europe should ban the Ram,” said Dudley Curtis from the European Transport Safety Council. “This type of vehicle is excessively heavy, tall and powerful, making it lethal in collisions with normal-sized vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists.”
Oh fuck he is trying to make me say “tiananmen square massacre” now Xi is going to personally come to my house and eat all my grain with his giant spoon.
Or maybe I say June 4th incident because it didn’t happen in tiananmen square and massacre isn’t the right word for it, considering it was armed PLA vs western armed protestors with around equal casualties before it ended.
No, I was just trying to drag out of you how you see the incident without priming the pump. How does one minimize the killing of hundreds of unarmed students? I knew people like you existed, I just never had the opportunity to witness someone actually do it, and I was curious how it’s done.
You roll 20 additional days into it as a buffer, and count injuries as equivalent to murders, and let them happen anywhere.
It can’t be the “Tiananmen Square Massacre” for you because then couldn’t draw in PLA members who had heart attacks and died elsewhere that day because they weren’t at the square. You need to create a context where they’re all the same thing and the geography of place really damages the ability to do that.
You just dilute a massacre to make it not a massacre by expanding the time and places. Super interesting. It’s a distinctly different approach to propegands than you’d typically see in the west or Russia.
