Last year

 
The year 2024 was a year of profound disappointments for many people, including myself. In addition to the challenges and painful setbacks that made the headlines, more insidious failures have crept under the radar of much of the mainstream press, such as the grim news that more people than ever before have needed to resort to food banks. 

Over the year, many of our opponents have taken the mask off. Their arrogance, their conviction that only their money and power matter, once relegated to the fringe voices they could deny, is now on full display. Their contempt for the poor is unrestrained. Their determination to maintain the order they sit atop increases in step with the daily manifestation of its failure. Hoarders of wealth so great as to have no meaning proclaim the meaninglessness of all things. Where inequality renders the wealth of the world's richest so great as to be meaningless, it makes poverty and insecurity more and more miserable. 

On all sides in politics, positions have grown more and more sclerotic, with cultural choices fusing with politics. More and more of our daily choices, from food to transportation have been labeled political and made into measures of our consistency and fidelity to various positions. As our positions have become more and more fused together, advocating for specific changes in the name of justice has become increasingly difficult. Instead of calling for one measure of decent treatment for one community, whether the homeless and outcast people on the street or Indigenous people facing pollution and despoliation of their lands, we are expected to advocate for a portmanteau of causes. The same disease has afflicted conservatives, leading to political paralysis  and changing politics from a search for solutions into a zero sum power game. This sclerosis naturally produces profound inconsistencies in all political coalitions, which must be papered over with absurdities we are expected to accept on pain of ostracism.

A verdict and a question

The conviction of Donald Trump by a New York jury actually raises a number of questions, some trivial and some decidedly not.

From the beginning, Donald Trump's behaviour has appalled me. His casual cruelty disgusts me, and his contempt for the very idea of service angers me at a deep level that frankly surprised me. His profound divisiveness and heedlessness incompetence frightens me, particularly when I consider the power of the office he has held and wants to reclaim. I and others appalled and enraged by Donald Trump should probably ask ourselves how much we really want to celebrate the conviction and possible incarceration of an elderly and by all accounts rather pathetic individual on a relatively minor, if squalid crime. 

On the trivial side, I wonder how the US Treasury Department, which provides security for American presidents and former presidents, will decide which agents have to accompany Donald Trump to prison. Musical chairs, perhaps? Offering danger money or hardship pay?

The jury verdict on Donald Trump does not, in fact, mean he will go to prison or even jail: not soon, and quite possibly not at all. Courts have routinely sentenced people guilty of worse things than any of the charges against Mr. Trump to fines, community service, or probation. As well. Mr. Trump still has avenues of appeal.

Yet another modest proposal

There is no such thing as he "war on the car". Whether we view cars as their physical reality, tin boxes with a wheel at each corner, or as concepts, or as cultural tropes, cars are not moral agents and do not have a right of self defence. If we as a society choose to limit or even eliminate the operation of private automobiles in our society, or particularly in our cities, we can do so. It requires no war and no conflict. We are not in a war; we are having a debate. 

In the empty spaces between the words...

Does "make America great again" signal a desire for a recovery of American self confidence and more products made in the United States, or a last clutch at a white supremacist social order? Either, or both, depending on who you ask. 

Does "defund the police" refer to a proposal to shift responsibility for social and mental health issues from the police, jails, and prisons, and redirect the associated funding to health and social service agencies, or does it mean disbanding all police agencies? It depends on who you ask; I have heard both interpretations of the slogan asserted with conviction.

Does the slogan "land back" mean Indigenous nations should have increased jurisdiction over resource development, land use, and environmental decision making within their traditional territories, or does it mean packing "white" people back to their place of origin?

 

Does the chant "from the river to the sea" call for a single, democratic, non-confessional state with room for all believers between the Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea? Does it mean a single Palestinian Muslim-majority state from which Jewish inhabitants, or most of them, have fled or forced to leave? Does it mean a single Jewish Israeli state from the Mediterranean, as a Likud slogan has advocated, or even beyond the Jordan, as some advocates of "Biblical Israel" claim?

Next steps

This morning, we celebrated a victory. We hoped, briefly, Doug Ford would respect this city, respect the law and constitution, and let the election, already seriously, disrupted, go ahead. By this afternoon, we learned to our distress he was willing to try to break a long and honourable Ontario tradition of respecting the constitution and the principle of judicial review, in order to enforce his will.

Don't quote Genesis 19 on Same-sex Marriage

Jem Bloomfield, in the blog quiteirregular, writes about the collision between the stance on same sex marriage held by some churches, and the culture prevalent in university settings:

One of the major points of view that I hear is that Christianity is immoral.  They don’t use exactly that word: they’re more likely to describe things as “discriminatory”, “oppressive” or “unjust”, but that’s the general gist.  There are moral principles of inclusion and justice which are central to their lives, which they see the Church as transgressing.  They are used to looking at the media, or at politics, and criticising the misogyny or homophobia they see, and institutional Christianity is no exception.  The same disdain for minority groups, the same discrimination.

 This strikes me as a pretty accurate set of observations, but I would go further. To interpret one of the biblical passages commonly cited against Gay men as a condemnation of same-sex behaviour requires accepting a claim nearly everyone today views as outrageous, and many contemporary governments have made outright criminal.

Logophobia redux

Rod Dreher links approvingly to an article by Elizabeth Corey in First Things that tackles the concept of intersectionality. Corey dismisses the concept as "a wholly academic invention", then promptly refutes that characterization by citing a real life example of discrimination and the ensuing legal case, DeGraffenreid v. General Motors. Corey writes:

...five black women sued General Motors for discrimination. GM had not hired black women prior to 1964, and had dismissed all but one of its black female ­employees hired after 1970 on the basis of seniority. The plaintiffs claimed that the harm they suffered could not be addressed by suing as women only, because GM could point out that it had indeed hired women (white women) prior to 1964 and had retained those that were hired after 1970. 

Nor were they willing to sue on the basis of race alone. The discrimination they suffered was not merely racial, they argued, but a result of their combined racial and gender identity. The district court dismissed this claim, observing that the prospect of “the ­creation of new classes of protected minorities, governed only by the mathematical principles of permutation and combination, clearly raises the prospect of opening the hackneyed Pandora’s box.”

Facts are stubborn things

John Adams pointed this out in his defence of British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre:

 Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence...

Facts are also oppositional, in this sense: they restrain everyone in the same way, and in doing so they bring people together.  We have an infinite number of ways of coming at he truth: the soaring beauty of music, the inspiration of religious ritual, the stories we tell, the lives we lead. But when my life and my passions differ profoundly from someone else's, what then? If I find truth in the music of Mozart's concert masses, I might not succeed at finding a common musical language with someone who finds their truth in the work of Tupac Shakur. Facts, even the hard facts made notorious by Gradgrind, may offer the only way profoundly different people can find enough common truth to live together.

Which brings us to Yusra Khogali.

Anger is a sin...

C. Le Brun.  from Wellcome Images
via Wikimedia commons

As Margaret Lawrence's lyrics about the oppression of Metis people ironically put it: "those [people] must learn that anger is a sin".

Our society, and the pundits, academics, publicists and others who speak, or claim to speak for it, frequently display a profound unease with the anger of the oppressed. That unease frequently manifests itself not in cogent criticism but in unthinking rejection, or worse, violence: the violence of a direct attack or the violence of a judicial blind eye.

The corruption of freebies in politics

By Kiwiev via Wikimedia Commons

By freebies, I don't mean swag ; I don't mean rides in jets and helicopters provided to politicians by prominent business leaders. In fact, I don't mean corruption of politicians at all, although crooks in office do cause major problems. I mean a much more serious problem: the corruption of the voters and, by extension, the political process.


Commentators have long derided political promises as bribing voters with heir own money, but the purposes of legitimate political debate include the best use of resources. The process gets corrupted when politicians promise someone else will pay. One example of this we all know: the slogan "make the rich pay", an aspiration often stated but seldom realized. Calls to tax the rich frequently give rise not to better services but rather to increasingly convoluted tax avoidance schemes. Governments have had much greater luck extracting money from people accused of crimes. Conservative governments in the eighties, motivated to reward their friends with deep tax cuts and to punish those they disdained, invented a series of creative and mischievous government financing tools, from the outright forfeiture of assets to fine surcharges.

Donald Trump's promise to force the Mexican government to pay for a massive public works project on the southern border of the US has a precedent: Ronald Reagan's government sent Oliver North on an unconstitutional fund-raising tour through the palaces of depots to obtain funding for the "contra" mercenary terrorists the US Congress had explicitly refused to support. Mr. Trump has extended this idea in two ways: proposing a major infrastructure program employing hundreds of thousands of Americans, and planning to take the money by some form of coercion rather than beg for it.

The sales force for war is out

...and experience suggests we can expect another round of trashing for Neville Chamberlain. That guy. Every hawk with a war to sell, or a conflict to stoke, or a peace initiative to shut down, drags out the same carpet beater and flogs the very dead horse of Neville Chamberlain's unavailing concessions at Munich. Even ones who can't say exactly what Chamberlain did at Munich.

Neville Chamberlain died in November of 1940: Winston Churchill gave the eulogy at his funeral, and even with bombs raining on London, could say of Chamberlain's policy:

But it is also a help to our country and to our whole Empire... [that] we were guiltless of the bloodshed, terror and misery which have engulfed so many lands and peoples, and yet seek new victims still. Herr Hitler protests with frantic words and gestures that he has only desired peace. What do these ravings and outpourings count before the silence of Neville Chamberlain's tomb? Long, hard, and hazardous years lie before us, but at least we entered upon them united and with clean hearts.

Many people in the present day who know far less than Churchill take a far less charitable view. Why does this matter? Do I really intend to waste time defending an old, white man whose maintenance of the imperial system undoubtedly fed the great conflicts of the 20th century?

The value of a tell

I have seen a number of comments about the movement calling themselves the "alt-right"; these comments argue we should not accept these peoples' name for their movement, but rather call them fascists, racists, national socialists, misogynists, and plain haters. An Internet activist has written a Google Chrome plug-in that renames "alt-right" to White Supremacy or neo-Nazi. The Associated Press has also updated their style guide to require quotes and a full definition whenever writers use the term "alt-right".

I sympathize with the impulse, but if we reject the name "alt right" we stand to lose potentially useful information. The name a person or a group gives themselves is always a "tell"; it gives away more about the people who take the name than they intend.

Obligation of the cyclist, responsibility of the community

I have said it before. I still believe it. I'll say it again: cyclists have two absolute ethical responsibilities. One, to everyone that loves us and waits for us at home, to take care of our own safety. Two, to our fellow vulnerable road users, meaning other cyclists and pedestrians, to do them no harm.

I don't believe cyclists have any other absolute obligations. It makes sense to ride with good "style", to adhere to the traffic laws (if only to avoid the expense of traffic fines). Treat all other road users with courtesy and insist on courtesy in return. Advocate for respect and room for cyclists on the road. All these things matter, and as a cyclist I try to do them; I don't believe they rise to the level of a moral obligation.

That brings us to the cyclist who rode into an elderly couple and knocked them down, The man escaped severe injuries, but the woman suffered serious fractures and succumbed to her injuries earlier this month. The cyclist fled the scene. Don't do this. Don't ride like this. Don't duck your responsibilities like this. Don't do it, not because it hurts the image of cyclists, not because it gives irresponsible pandering politicians an opening to call for restrictions on cyclists, but because it hurts people. It kills people. It kills vulnerable road users just like us, people we have a responsibility not to injure. Don't flee the scene because the law forbids you to do so; don't flee the scene because leaving another human being in the street, in pain, someone you injured is wrong. It's wrong when motorists do it, and using a two-wheeled human powered vehicle doesn't make it right.

The big reveal of Donald Trump

The conservative website the Federalist (via Rod Dreher) has a story up, regarding what they claim to regard as suspicious timing of the revelations about Donald Trump's history of assaulting and harassing women. Mollie Hemingway, the author of the article, quotes an "opposition researcher" named Luke Thompson as follows:

First, notice the mix of local outlets and national outlets. There’s a great mix of print and broadcast as well. Start with the NYT to get eyeballs on the web and TV. CNN picks it up immediately. Ok. Now you’ve got a story rolling. Within an hour, you start to get multiple waves coming out of local outlets. These get picked up. Within ninety minutes you’ve got reporters reporting on existing reporting. The cycle is locked in. Nobody’s assessing the stories. And here’s the kicker: the victims live in FL, OH, even UT. THEY’RE ALL SWING STATES! It’s masterful to be honest. 

By Michael Vadon (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0],
via Wikimedia Commons

Ms. Hemingway  probably has the case backward here. In May of this year, with Mr. Trump as the presumptive Republican nominee, James Fallows started a regular feature on the Atlantic Monthly site called "Trump Time Capsule" in which he detailed things said and done by Donald Trump, and things publicly known about him, that no previous presidential candidate had said or done before, at least in living memory. Mr. Fallows made no bones about his belief these things disqualified the Republican candidate from the presidency:

...if Donald Trump were the Democratic nominee, I would not vote for him. 

I believe he should not become president mainly because of his temperament. Presidents make an astonishingly large number of hour-by-hour judgment calls. Nothing about Donald Trump’s judgment is reassuring from my point of view. His Tweets are highly entertaining! But so is Tosh.0 Again, I’m not trying to persuade anyone. I am just laying out my logic.

How not to argue for the rights of cyclists

When cycling on streets and roads where motorists may have permission to operate their vehicles, cyclists have the right to decide our lane positions for ourselves. Human vision has a narrow acute range: the optimum resolution of our eyes covers just a few degrees. To cope with this limit, aviators train to scan the sky in small sections; without this training, surface motor vehicle operators focus on the road in front of the vehicle. Cyclists occupying the center of the lane have the best chance motorists will see and avoid us. Visibility plays a particularly critical role at intersections, and there cyclists riding to the side have the greatest chance of coming into conflict with motor vehicles.

There you have the safety case for cyclists riding in the center of the lane. It exists in tension with another safety imperative: separating traffic operating at different speeds, to avoid the need for sudden changes in speed and to minimize the consequences of an impact. Those two hazards: getting sideswiped by a driver passing too close and getting hit by a driver who sees us too late define the choices for cyclists. Taking all the risks and the known limits of drivers into account, it makes a lot of sense for cyclists to ride in the center of the lane when we don't have, at minimum, an adequate bicycle lane, and, preferably, a protected bike lane. Most of us who ride in North America can't count on bike lanes every where we go, or even most of the places we go. Most of us need to take the lane, and taking the lane serves us best when we do it without fear and without apology. At an absolute minimum, cyclists have, and ought to vigorously defend, a right to make our own choices about where in the lane to ride.


I ride in the center of the lane because I consider it safer. That covers it in three words: I consider it safer. John Forester and some of his supporters clutter the issue with irrelevant and frankly offensive detours from the single objective that matters: getting everyone from point 'A' to point 'B' alive and uninjured, notwithstanding the presence of two-tonne steel bombs.

Politics through the window (please, just not Windows 10...)

Politics, as an art, a practice, and discipline and a commitment has one real purpose: to make good policies for the peace, welfare, and just ordering of the polity. Politics aims to find solutions that allow us, as disparate, imperfect people, to live good lives together in a functioning community.

It also makes for terrific theatre.

The public eye: Nina Davuluri and Amanda Marcotte

It started with a flower.


Nina Davuluri, Miss America 2014, visited Central High School in York Pennsylvania, and Patrick Farves gave her the flower and asked her to come to the prom with him.

Anyone who has had any involvement with planning a high school prom, or even just observed the process from a distance, knows that while not all high school formal dances aim for this, or achieve it, a cultural expectation exists that those who participate in a prom will find it a magical experience, an excursion into a fairy tale world, a Cinderella dance where all the coaches turn back into pumpkins (or, more accurately, rental stretch hummers) in the morning. Likewise, anyone who shops for food and reads the magazines and tabloids in the checkout lane knows that a whole industry dedicates itself to convincing us that some people, collectively known as celebrities, live in this enchanted world all the time.

An invitation to the prom, therefore, does not necessarily entail a sexual invitation, still less an invitation to any sort of relationship. An invitation to the prom may well mean nothing more than an invitation to share a fantasy. When someone to extend it to a person supposedly living the life of a celebrity, what does that mean? If you treat the proposition as an equation, and cancel out the absurdities on both sides, it comes out to a simple acknowledgement of the other person's humanity. I don't know how Mr. Farves saw his actions; more than anything else, it looks as though he saw the event as a cheerful prank.

But it caught the attention of Amanda Marcotte the feminist blogger, who saw the whole thing in a much darker light.  She has of course the right to see these matters anyway she chooses, but I find her arguments interesting. She wrote:

Every year around prom, there’s a “cute” story wherein a teenage boy gets himself some attention by putting a famous and beautiful celebrity he’s never met on the spot by asking her to prom, knowing full well that she would rather be at home pulling out her toenails than go on a date with some random teenage boy she’s never met.

The passage expresses an interesting repugnance: people don't generally pull out their toenails voluntarily. Marcotte here appears to equate any date with any random teenage boy with torture. She provides an important clue to her thinking later in the piece, when she writes:

I don’t think it’s cute when girls pester Justin Bieber for dates, either.

As someone who wishes Bieber well and hopes he gets his life together, I still have to say: on the record now, and when Ms. Marcotte wrote the piece in question, the problem with pestering Justin Bieber for dates has much less to do with the "pestering", but with the recent behaviour of Justin Bieber. If I had to advise any random young woman about asking Mr. Biever out on a date, I would have something to say about getting into a car with someone who has a charge of drunk driving on his record, I see no reason any young woman who wants to date Justin Bieber should not consider herself attractive enough to set her sights on him.

Identity politics and cycling

Councillor Doug Ford's reported response to a plan, recently approved by a city committee, to install a bicycle parking station with showers can stand as a textbook example of identity politics in all its absurd glory:

taking away parking space down here at City Hall that is creating $70,000 worth of revenue, and — ready for this, folks? — they’re putting in showers for the bike riders to come down here, to a tune of $1.2 million.

To get the obvious question out of the way: assuming the bike facility lasts ten years, it will cost about $120,000 a year, plus whatever revenue the parking authority would lose when the lot filled up; that comes to at most $190,000. Since the health effects of sedentary lifestyles increase health care costs by about $10,000 per year per person, the new facility will break even when it attracts twenty new riders: seven percent of its capacity. Putting a bike parking station at City Hall actually makes a great investment. And the words Doug Ford uses strongly indicate he doesn't care.

Whether cyclists get a secure parking station with showers or not, we already "come down to" City Hall and downtown Toronto. I cannot believe Doug Ford has never seen the full racks of bicycles that line the eastern side of Nathan Phillips Square. Describing cyclist as some essentially alien force that the city should resist and exclude defines his supporters: they don't ride bicycles. They are important people with urgent business; they drive cars. Or, since they live in Toronto, they sit in traffic and drum the steering wheel.

This kind of identity politics obviously limits people's freedom. If you share the Fords' belief in a limited servant government, but ride a bicycle, you don't really belong in "Ford Nation". That limits the transportation choices of Ford supporters, and limits the political choices of cyclists. But by limiting freedom, by constructing an identity their followers are invited to conform to, political movements, and the men and women who lead them, bind a core of true believers around them. It makes for a cramped and limited society, but it also makes for devoted followers and at least for a time, it makes good politics.

Electric bicycles

In the Toronto cycling community, electric bicycles represent a point of contention. Some people strongly support the inclusion of electric bicycles as regular bicycles for all city purposes; others vehemently oppose this.

I believe that two factors should determine the treatment of electric bicycles: pollution and safety. Where pedal bicycles can mix safely with electric bicycles, we should allow electric bicycles; where they cannot, it makes sense to prohibit electric bicycles. Likewise, the distinction between an internal combustion powered vehicle and an electrical vehicle should depend primarily on the emissions of the latter.

We have a fair bit of evidence regarding emissions levels from internal combustion powered vehicles; this evidence indicates that motorcycles, scooters and mopeds emit more pollution than cars. For someone looking for a low speed vehicle for limited uses, a strong environmental case for electric scooters over internal combustion vehicle does exist.

That leaves the critical question of safety. I see this as a two part question. First, can electric bicycles or electric scooters safely mix with regular pedal bicycles? Second, will we get better infrastructure if we build it for both limited-speed electric vehicles, or bicycles alone? Although I have found studies and a video investigation of pedal bicycle stopping distances online, I have not yet seen any controlled comparison of the stopping distances of electric scooters and pedal bicycles. The regulations and safety requirements for both vehicle types would appear to permit a wide latitude in brake quality and design, so I question whether such a study that addressed a well maintained vehicle would cover all the bicycles, electrical and other, that I could expect to encounter.

Both my own experience and observation of developments in Toronto over the past decade convinces me personally that wherever possible, the city should provide separated infrastructure for commuting cyclists and pedestrians. This conviction stems primarily from my own experience on multi-use trails, from the Martin Goodman to the West Toronto railpath, but it also stems from the cases of two fatal bicycle-pedestrian collisions over the past six years. This implies that, for cyclists, the desirable infrastructure will cater to medium speeds, those ranging from about 15 kph to about 40 kph. The actual speed range of electrically assisted bicycles and electric scooters fits into this range.

Better infrastructure, meaning infrastructure that people actually use, creates a self-reinforcing process: as more people ride bikes, the political support for cycling infrastructure increases and the social tolerance for the currently common acts of motorist on cyclist harassment diminishes. That in turn, raises the number of cyclists, and experience in other jurisdictions suggests that the rising numbers alone play a significant role in cyclist safety. I believe the question of including electrically assisted bicycles and electric scooters in cycling infrastructure turns in large part on three questions: if we adapt existing infrastructure or plan proposed infrastructure to accommodate electric bikes and scooters, will will people who now ride electrical bikes join us in pressing for more infrastructure construction? If we do not do so, and exclude electric and electrically assisted vehicles from bicycle infrastructure, will current electric bike riders convert to pedal cyclists, or will they just drive cars? Finally, will the annoyance factor some cyclists appear to feel at  sharing infrastructure with powered vehicles lead them to avoid such shared lanes or paths?

These days, they come for the dictionary first...

Joe at Biking Toronto wants to ditch the word cyclist, and at first sight he seems to have a good argument. Goodness knows, with both the friends and enemies of cycling engaged in a demented race to pile more and more baggage onto this poor two syllable word, it should make sense to just chuck it and start over. Look at all of the attempts to define a cyclist: someone who wants to save the planet but won't bother to stop at traffic lights, an impoverished elitist, an altruistic member of a self-interested minority. Can we save this word? Do we want to save this word?

Speaking for myself, yes I do want to save the word cyclist. I want to cut the straps and let all the baggage fall off, but I want to keep the word. A cyclist can vote BQ, Conservative, Liberal , NDP, or Rhinoceros. A cyclist can obey all the laws with great care, or can proceed through the world making up his or her own laws. A cyclist can believe in capitalism, anarcho-syndicalism, or any other economic system; in representative democracy or absolute monarchy. A cyclist can love the planet, hate it, or believe it doesn't matter because the world will end next Tuesday. Only one thing makes a cyclist: the use of human-powered, wheeled transportation. Anyone who has used a bike reasonably recently can call themselves a cyclist.

The word "cyclist" describes those of us who ride bicycles with an elegance and brevity that the words "people who happen to ride bicycles" will never achieve; but I have two more basic reasons for not wanting to give up the word.

First, to the noisy minority that shows up in newspaper and blog comments after every story involving cyclists and whips themselves into a froth (and they do constitute a minority), the problem has nothing to do with words. I do not know what many of those people really object to, but they focus their venom on human-powered vehicles and those who ride them. Just as advocates for people with cognitive impairments gave up the word idiot, imbecile and retarded when these words each evolved from a medical diagnosis into a schoolyard taunt, if we start calling ourselves people who happen to ride bicycles, we'll start to read abuse directed against PWHTRBs. These days, before they come for the communists or the trade unionists, they come for the dictionary. Let us not kid ourselves: the ultimate target has nothing to do with the words we use, or even the actual technology that moves us. They want our freedom.

This brings me to my second point. Some years ago, on a visit to the ancient seaport of Marseilles, I encountered a young street tough who asked me for money. When I had none to give him, he snarled "Juif". What should I have told him? The truth? Je ne suis pas un Juif would hardly have sounded dignified. In the end, I had no good (verbal) answer for him and just treated his comment as a stink in the air, not worth acknowledging. The point for us: when someone attacks us, it may seem to make sense to separate ourselves from the kind of people we think our accusers must really dislike. But that kind of denial preserves neither our dignity nor our rights. If we propose to drop the word cyclist as a way to distance ourselves from those dirty lawbreaking anarchists, we might as well forget it and preserve our dignity.Maybe I see myself as better than cyclists who ride badly, arrogantly or confrontationally; maybe I don't. But to many of our opponents, just riding a bike makes me just the same as all the cyclists they criticize. Maybe we need to debunk their stereotypes, but we sure shouldn't surrender to them.