this post was submitted on 01 May 2026
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These gotcha statements you’re throwing around aren’t working.
If you have something you’d like to say that is counter to my take, by all means refute it.
I'm not going to bother, since the point of trolling is to waste my time. I've studied American history, so if you want to argue your alt-history, it's up to you to prove that the U.S. wasn't built by rail.
I didn’t claim the US wasn’t built by rail, you’re making that assertion on my behalf for some reason.
I’m speaking to European and US history here, you may be ignorant/uninformed about the slant I’m taking but that doesn’t make it less true and I’m unwilling to argue in bad faith with you.
I said that Europe has the rail it does because of the wars of the 18th and 19th century. I also asserted that if the USA was beset by the wars of Europe the same way that it would have developed a similar rail infrastructure.
The rail infrastructure of the US never matched Europes, and it had no reason to. If you have something to say about my claim that the wars of Europe drove the mass adoption of rail then I’m all ears.
I’m similarly not making any claims about the dismantling of the rail infrastructure we did have, but shockingly the pushing of roads wasn’t just “auto industry” there was genuine “roads > rail for national defense” belief even if it was/is misguided ( even if deliberately so circling back to the auto industry )
Okay, now that is at least debatable. Maybe there was genuine belief that roads were better than rail for defense purposes, or maybe the Secretary of Defense was the ex-CEO of GM. In any case, the belief that the Interstate Highway System was intended for military purposes is an urban legend, not supported by the original proposal documents, nor by the public statements of people backing it.
But the idea that the U.S. just never developed a rail system like Europe has now is in the same level of ridiculousness as claiming that Julius Caesar was a small man who sold pizza, or that Napoleon invented dynamite. It's just such common knowledge that rail was so ubiquitous that it shaped the nation, and the physical legacy still manifest everywhere.