Here are the results of the last two votes by the Watcher’s Council! December 26, 2008 Winning Council Submissions First place with 2 2/3 points! – The Razor – The Symbol of Oppression Second place with 1 2/3 points -……

The Council has spoken. This week’s winning entry was Bookworm Room’s Selfish is as selfish does as she gives voice to every parents concern and she provides some observations to support her conclusions. The runner up this week was Mere Rhetoric’s O…

I agree about the “slow down” part. If the speed limit is 40 and the car in front of you is doing 25, do you run them off the road? No, you try to pass them responsibly, and you should do the same for bicyclists.

I agree with Y (#39) about Critical Mass, or at least what I heard of them a few years back. They were about flouting the road laws – at least back then they were – and were engaging in highly provocative acts of rebellion against those road laws, solely for their own benefit. Talk about “special”.

Critical Mass, however, is not behind compromise of that sort, however.

Thanks for proving my point. The idea that cause you are now in a “pack” of bicycles that a car can’t drive over you and your friends, is pretty “fantastic” one may say.

I was a skateboarder before I really started biking everywhere. Skateboards are not part of traffic, they are in and out of it–we assume we can’t be seen. Skateboards are really fast in two ways that bicycles and cars are not–they can turn on a dime, and they can accelerate from 0 to 15 in one second (That’s faster than a formula one race car.) As a skateboarder there was never any reason to pay attention to traffic laws, they simply made no sense. Skateboarding is a crime.

Bicycles are a different case. First of all, for you law lovers out there, bicycles are allowed to take the full lane if riding two abreast. Why? Because it is really dangerous passing a bicycle on a narrow winding road, like the one Bookworm was driving too fast on. Unfortunately, when most drivers see a bicycle they just start passing with out considering if it is safe for the bicycle. That road Bookworm is talking about is used by bicyclists all the time, including Lance Armstrong. They do often ride very fast and it is terribly dangerous to have cars trying to pass them, sometimes multiple times (because bicycles are faster on the straights, cars on the turns).
As for running stop signs, it’s a problem for cars too. In San Francisco, where every intersection is a stop sign, most motorist are running at least a little bit. For a bicycle the stop signs are just horrible. Like you are really going to pop out of your clip and put your foot down every block?
And think about this, bicyclists are higher than most cars so they can see better.
I’m not into special entitlements. I’m just saying, we have an imperfect compromise that wasn’t designed well for anyone. Unless you are going to fix it, quit whining and slow down!

A mob does not function as an individual, thus the mob has no “self-survival’ instincts. Or at least, it has a different priority on such things.

I have a choice, I can either feel complacent in the protection of the law and assume the law will protect me by limiting the actions of the vehicle operators or I can take the much safer bet and change my personal behavior so that car drivers don’t get an opportunity to hurt me, period.

This is the difference between what is known as “vigilance” and what is known as vice corrupted “entitlement”.

You are not entitled to life. It is a right only given to you because of the strength of arms of others. And if people become weak enough, then you will die if you also lack the strength as well.

People who are paranoid have this fear of people out to get them. Society looks down on such people and does not respect them. And yet society looks upon the Critical Mass bicyclists as some sort of evolution on human potential.

Neither are as bad as they are stereotyped. The bicyclists are not suicidal when challenging cars, they just don’t understand the reality of death. The paranoids fear others, but it need not control their actions or make them unreasonable.

A person that does not recognize and accept the fact that when they are on foot or on a bike, that they can be easily killed by a car, is living in what is known as a fantasy land reinforced by delusions and insane psychological disorders. This is a reality that society has blinded many people to, given the wealth and security modern day America provides. But that is only a thin veneer.

When people lose their self-survival mechanisms and common sense, bad things will happen. When people, paranoid or otherwise, allow their fears to guide their actions, like Nixon or paranoid delusional freaks, then they become animals rather than sentient human beings with a self-aware consciousness. You have to find the middle road between sense and insensibility, between reality and fantasy, and between virtue and vice. Course, virtue itself is one of moderation or to be specific: to act correctly in the correct situations. We call that “moderate” but in reality, it is not moderate it is only an “average”: an average of extremes in either direction, when those extremes fit the situation.