I feel like this article is really missing out the part where oil interests are intentionally funding hatred of other modes of transportation. The PragerU video on "The War on Cars" is a good example. They are funded by oil companies, and this is public information that is easy to find. And they use that platform to prevent other modes of transportation from being safe or viable.
Bicycling industry lobbyists need to step up their game
I think one of the main points in the article is that there is no group of cyclists able to come together to lobby and tbh, I don't see how it's really possible. It's something I've been thinking for a while.
I am a cyclist and a driver. I am not personally in a lobbying group for either. However, like another poster said, oil companies and car manufacturers have the money and reasoning to come together to lobby on behalf of drivers regardless of my actual wishes but they've got lots of my money from having bought and maintained a car. Cyclist manufacturers aren't exactly large, have much money or are as combined into a few multinationals. There is no fuel industry either.
I don't really know any other cyclists like me who are more casual, and use it for local journeys. I want better segregated lanes, better and more secure parking (my bike got stolen recently), the police to actually care about bike thefts, and more considered routes/junctions. There are social groups of long distance weekend cyclists but tbh, they have completely different priorities and interests to me. Even when I used to commute my cycling habits were completely different so my requests would be different.
I've been to the Pacific Cycle corporate headquarters, the current owner of well-known brands like Mongoose, Schwinn, GT, and Rioadmaster, supplier of most of the bicycle-shaped objects sold by mass-retailers like Walmart and Target.
That's right, into the very belly of Big Bike!
And, uhh, they're not very big. I'll bet more people work at the Toyota dealership just down the highway. That is to say, bicycle industry lobbyists don't stand a chance against automobile lobbyists.
Agree. Bad media is bad.
We're not 'wokerati'
But we are, though: cyclists are "better people" than drivers. And the right hates better people.
Huh, interesting article, thanks!
the study didn’t attempt to determine whether people more oriented toward the common good are simply more likely to ride bikes, or whether riding bikes actually increases people’s interest in the common good.
I'd be curious which is the chicken and which is the egg.
I think cyclists secretly love cars. Otherwise why do so many end up on a car hood or under its wheels? It's probably one of those BDSM things really...
They're afraid the lycra will awaken something in them
Stupid Sexy Flanders
Look, I'm generalizing here, but there seems to be an almost intentional effort on the part of many journalists and journalistic outlets to misunderstand "The Right".
Its the charity part, which, like I get the journalistic training and the importance of giving someone you might disagree with the the charity required to have a conversation, but "The Right" has been using this act of good faith to further their agenda. We shouldn't be giving them charity. Period. They've broken with the good faith required to support that charity. "The RIght" aren't arguing or acting in good faith, and so charity shouldn't be extended to them. They are captured by a kind of cynicism that is not compatible with civil society.
I have a hypothesis about the right. Some of what happens is to protect the ego.
Consider bike riding. Riding a bike is better for the environment and their health. This prompts questions like "why am I not being better for the environment? Why am I not being better for my health?"
One option when faced with that sort of uncomfortable question is to reject thinking about it and get mad at other people. Do not consider anything negative about oneself. That's uncomfortable and difficult. Being mad about other people is easy.
This resolves the cognitive dissonance, though in its own expensive way with its own tradeoffs.
Yes, a friend clued me in years ago that the key to understanding the conservative mindset is their deep shame and self-hatred. A lot of people say it's fear, but that's only partly true. Everybody is motivated by fear; liberals just fear other things.
But for conservatives, it's fear that they're worthless and inferior. That's why so much of their ideology concerns groups that they denigrate and oppress in order to feel superior. This is why they have bicyclists in their crosshairs recently.
And not just bicyclists. It's not enough just to have a car. Oh no! They have to have a truck. And not just a truck, but a grotesquely enormous truck, with a grill that juts 6 feet straight into the air, perhaps with a lift kit, too. That way, they can roll coal on and intimidate drivers of smaller, weaker vehicles, like Prius drivers.
It's a performative doubling-down on the behavior that they subconsciously feel others are judging them for, in order to redirect the shame and self-hatred outward as anger at others.
I drive a Prius and can confirm. Large trucks act threatened by my existence on a regular basis.
I am so tired of the "everything I don't like is woke" crowd. How long did it take for the "everything I don't like is communist/socialist" crowd to be publicly ridiculed for having such juvenile worldviews?
How long did it take for the "everything I don't like is communist/socialist" crowd to be publicly ridiculed for having such juvenile worldviews?
well, looking at McCarthyism... too long
How long did it take for the “everything I don’t like is communist/socialist” crowd to be publicly ridiculed
They must be getting the last laugh because they are still around that's why we [as in US] can't have good health insurance.
The “everything I don’t like is communist/socialist” crowd has never been ridiculed, what the hell are you thinking?
It is LITERALLY the American hegemonic ideal.
Okay I am going to play a devil's advocate here. So of you are not wrong. Many of these people are lashing out at charge unnecessarily, though I do think it is important to look at why. First the politicians and talking head that are driving this are just trying to make hay out of non issues for their own personal agendas. Fuck them they are toxic, but why are there so many common people so willing to buy in. Simply because they are scared of losing their way of life and ability to support themselves. I don't mean losing the "right" to drive giant trucks, but losing what their parents and grandparents had. These people have seen it with the loss of good quality blue collar work. The work their parents and grandparents had, which one person could support a family and buy a house with. They have seen how the loss of manufacturing, steel, lumber, etc. jobs have affected others and they are scared that they are next.
They have the exact same existential dread of the future that the rest of have and or more or less the same reasons, they are just reacting in a different way. Just like how some people react to the loss of a family member with sadness and some with anger.
Hard right politicians have found that they can swing some of these people to their extreme views by capitalizing on this fear and offering a solution. Obviously isolationism and hate are not good longer term solutions, but they sadly do work well in the short term. I firmly believe many people that are just kind of going along with the hard right are only there because see no other solution being offered to their problems. Remember many Germans were not Nazis but they let the Nazis take power not because they agreed with them, but because no one offered anything else. Yes it is a lie but it is very important to remember why the lie exists. Sadly ignoring or dismissing it will not make things better.
I genuinely wish I had a solution, but I don't maybe smarter people than me do.
It’s pretty simple when you realize that conservatives are addicted to hate. In order to prioritize their hatred, they target people who make them feel like an asshole and people who are in their way. You can boil these down to people who make them uncomfortable.
Yeah, you gotta reframe it. "Don't you miss when people used more traditional ways to get around? Give me a horse or a bicycle any day".
They will agree to fucking anything if you preface it as "traditional"
The truth? It stems from fear based mentality and personal insecurity. If you spend enough time evaluating the conservative mindset you come to realize it is grounded in fear and a disdain for oneself. They don't want more cyclists because they think it's an affront to them personally, as if they would need to start cycling to fit in.
Because car is freeeeddddooommmm.
And as we know all too well from history, enabling other freedoms (women's suffrage, marriage equality, or now getting around by bike) disrupts those already established freedoms!
For many drivers, a car is debt in addition to a large recurring expense.
Debt == freedom?
Yea thats pretty much the lie we are sold and forced to participate in for most of car centric North America.
A lot of people miss the fact that cyclists are just people getting about the place. As for example when you hear people say, 'Oh, it's only middle-class men who cycle, so why should we build bike lanes?' as though it's somehow the case that middle class men who choose to cycle just like... deserve to die? It's a really common argument that people make and they've not even thought about the obvious implication of what they're saying.
Even if it were true that all or most cyclists were middle-class and male, which it isn't, I'm never sure whether it's the maleness, the middle-classness, or the cycling that has apparently warranted the death sentence.
It’s pretty much just rural vs urban divide.
Bikes don’t work well in rural or suburban communities and so if you are for it, then you are one of the “urban liberals” and so I must oppose you at all costs.
Of course there are also urban conservatives that are against cycling but we have a name for those, ~~idiots~~ people with a financial interest in the current car centric infrastructure
Bikes don’t work well in rural or suburban communities
It can work to an extent in some of those places too, it's just the infrastructure and sprawl has gotten so bad. Small towns in Europe often have quite good cycling infrastructure and public transport, for example.
But I agree with your overall point that the culture and politics of surburban/exurban/rural areas are a big part of it (along with the history that drove people from the cities to these areas in the first place).
Pretty sure bikes have serviced rural communities since well before cars were a thing
I’m wokerati! But no shit, we’re doing what the left wants, so of course the right is mad. It doesn’t matter if it’s for our health, cheap transit, or the environment or any other reason we aren’t guzzling oil to get somewhere and so they’re mad
Riding a bike, my fellow patriots, is a clear sign of deviance and disloyalty to the core values of our great nation. The leftist elites have brainwashed these so-called "cyclists" into believing that their petty little two-wheeled devices are some sort of symbol of environmental progress. Nothing could be further from the truth!
Cycling is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt at undermining our cherished car culture. They claim they're fighting climate change, but their real motive is to erode our freedom - the freedom to drive wherever we want without pesky road taxes or emissions regulations.
These cycle-huggers think they'll win our hearts by peddling (pun intended) around our cities in their lycra ensembles and smug smiles. But let me tell you something: we won't fall for their tricks. We love our SUVs, our loud exhausts, and our cheap gas - and we will protect these cornerstones of American life, come what may.
As true Americans, we must unite against this cycling menace. Our roads should belong to those who value their country enough to keep its economy thriving with their fuel consumption. It's time to put an end to this two-wheeled insurrection and defend the freedom of movement that makes us great.
There's a couple of things at play here:
Where the infra (say it's the road) isn't adequately engineered to accommodate cycling and driving at the same time, it's going to give drivers the experience that the road is a scarce resource and when resources are scarce, some folks are going to think in eliminationist terms (e.g. if those people just didn't exist, everything would be fine) or the part of their brains that descends from people that wiped out competing clans and took their resources rules the moment and they set about violently defending 'their' resources.
The folks most-triggered at being made to share the road with cyclists really do some mental gymnastics to frame it in a way that they're really the victims here and it's cyclists, not the road engineering, that are the problem. Oh, poor me those cyclists don't pay taxes and I subsidize their use of my roads bla bla bla and eventually that comes out in the form of vehicular assault to teach cyclists a lesson to stay off their roads. It's bullshit all the way down of course, but that way they get to feel like the good guys while still bullying and murdering cyclists.
Also, it's not by accident that the 'everything is woke' people are the first to engage in whatever moral panic that's directing political violence at today's boogeyman- whether it's trans people in bathrooms, or gay people generally, or pregnant women that have ideas about bodily autonomy, their targets are always a tiny vulnerable demographic and uniting to put them in their place is an exercise in maintaining or restoring what they think order ought to look like. If they're not putting people into the bottom rung of whatever hierarchy they think they're defending, probably they think it's the end of order or civilization or the like and they've failed in their duties to uphold order. Keeping them agitated about (and acting out about) moral panics is an effective way for lobby groups to pit people against scapegoats to keep their ire focused away from themselves or their patrons.
they find the concept of the do-gooder infuriating and the idea of minding their own business untenable.
Indeed!
The GOP want to maintain civil liberties.
Just not YOUR civil liberties.
This is an article in a British paper, written by a British journalist, about her experience in Britain, and names multiple British people.
There is no mention at all of America, nor Americans.
So what does your republican party have to do with it?
Far right conservatives around the globe are using the same playbook.
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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