I think you could argue that this is an example of cognitive dissonance. It is uncomfortable to come face to face with new information that contradicts your beliefs or actions, and it requires energy if you want to integrate that new information into your worldview and adjust your actions. It is much easier to deny that information, even when it is clearly true.

For example, when it came out that aspartame might cause cancer, if you (like me) have eaten/drunk a lot of products containing it or have had a strong belief that it was completely safe, then it may be more comfortable for you to criticize WHO or think “well, it’s not really relevant for me because my family isn’t predisposed for cancer.” If you didn’t care about aspartame or artificial sweeteners before, you will probably readily accept that there may or may not be a cancer link.

In Danish we say “endestation” instead, which can be translated as butt-station. Sometimes the endestation is Middelfart, or somewhere on Lolland.

Having your groceries delivered or buying a moped or motorcycle might be an option for you. I don’t think anyone on here would begrudge you using a car in that situation, though.

I think the anti-rural sentiment you sometimes see, mostly stems from how unsustainable and car dependent the lifestyles a lot of people who live outside cities are. People who find a job in a city to get a high pay, move out of said city to get a garden and then commute back and forth between their home office and their work office, with very little concern for how they effect the world around them. They take no personal responsibility and don’t want to take collective responsibility either, because that could threaten their lifestyle.

People who live in suburbs, villages or rurally because that is where it makes sense for them to live, isn’t an issue. It makes sense to move to the countryside when you retire and no longer have to be anywhere. It also makes sense to live in the countryside if that is where you work or if you work from home. Some of these people would benefit greatly from owning a car, while others can get by just fine with a bicycle or their own legs.

You can also do a lot to lessen the dependence on cars outside city centers. You can easily run metros and trams into the suburbs and encourage a higher density (more row houses and smaller apartment complexes). Rurally you can encourage people to build villages (clusters of houses) instead of every house being spaced evenly apart, and you can run bus lines through those villages.

I get that, but those were the kind of nuances and perspectives that I was talking about. You can think that drunk driving is a bad thing that should be prevented, without resorting to black/white thinking like: drunk drivers are bad and they should be thrown in jail.

Maybe they should be, but what is the downsides of that policy? What is the reduction in drunk driving and drunk driving accidents expected to be? Who are the drunk drivers and when do they drive drunk? What do they do in other places/countries? Anything about our country/area in particular that causes people to drive drunk? Is there anything else we could do that is more effective and/or less expensive? Could an alternative solution be to run busses through the night? Involve parents? Require alcolocks to be installed in cars?

It’s not about whether you are a good or a bad person, or about what your beliefs or values are. In my experience, poorly educated people are just more likely to think in absolutes, which makes sense, because analytical thinking and the ability to view things through different “lenses” and from different perspectives, is something they try to teach you in school.

Understanding that things are nuanced is not the same thing as not having opinions.

You can acknowledge that drinking alcohol can cause addiction, act as a social lubricant, and decide if you want to drink. You can even have an opinion on what you think alcohol’s role in society should be and what should be done to prevent drunk driving.

Black/white thinking. Everything is either bad or good, the problem or the solution.

There are multiple companies running routes between Stockholm and Turku or Helsinki, as well as Helsinki and Tallinn, and they can be fairly cheap to use. It really just is a matter of improving the connections, if you want people to be able to continue on to other European cities. A tunnel or a bridge would be ideal, but they are a big investment and you can make it work without.

I used to travel from Denmark to Åland (between Finland and Sweden) and back a couple of times a year as a child, and have also occasionally continued on to the Finish mainland. The train ride though Sweden is not bad and neither is the boat ride, but having to use three different ticketing systems, making sure you have enough but not too much time, and just that you know where to go and have your tickets in order, can be.

Maybe not high speed, but you could theoretically run a train line from Helsinki to Talinn and Stockholm. In Southern Denmark you could take the train from Rødby to Puttgarden, across the narrow stretch of water that separates Denmark and Germany. The train would just roll aboard the ferry, and then exit at the other end. As far as I know, that line has been closed down temporarily, and will run through the tunnel they’re building, when it opens up again.

More realistically, you could work to improve the train-ferry connections. The train should take you all the way down to where you board the ferry, there shouldn’t be long waits when you switch from one mode to the other and it should be seamless to purchase a ticket from Helsinki to Berlin, even if part of the trip is on a ferry.

Of course not as fast as traveling over land, but it makes more sense considering the geography, and I personally think it should count as a train connection, if the ferry is included in the train ticket.

Ireland is probably a bit more tricky.