15 September 2018

Road design

Various people comment that pedestrian and public transit city design with a side of cycling is much safer; various other people comment that much existing cycling infrastructure in Anglo NorAm looks for all the world as though it was designed to kill cyclists.

Well, yes it is in sober truth of fact meant to kill cyclists.

I don't understand how this can be considered a question.  Long-standing -- from the 1970s burst of cycling enthusiasm -- cycling infrastructure invariably has features meant to slow you down or to force you to dismount more or less as often as it can; any time the cycling path might cross a road or go under a bridge or interact with a pedestrian path.

These bits of infrastructure generally take two forms; a heavy metal gate, or a speed bump.  The heavy metal gate is invariably set a height to throw you off the bicycle forward on to your head if you hit it; just hitting the heavy metal barrier at speed might well kill you, and it's not like the things are signed at all.  It's not hard to go down a hill round a corner and get a surprise.  The speed bump is invariably carefully narrower and more steep (and thus cheaper, for requiring less material) than a car speed bump.  Also sometimes taller, and equally it functions to throw you off your bicycle into traffic.

The purpose of a system is what it does; the bicycle infrastructure is set up with a clear "get off the bicycle or we'll kill you" message.

Pretty much all cycling infrastructure in AngloNorAm is set up this way; it's created to minimize inconvenience to car traffic and to minimize startlement to pedestrians.  It thereby exists to make you get off the bike, and if you won't get off the bike, it'll kill you.

That's what it's for.

13 September 2018

Ontario politics

This is a whole lot simpler than a lot of people seem to be treating it as being.

Doug Ford has no belief that the law applies to him because it never has.

White supremacy is an authoritarian economic system based on loot-sharing.  The idea that there is no more loot -- that everything has been stolen, or, alternatively, that there's a system of laws that allows people to have and effectively defend political and property rights -- is utterly intolerable to a white supremacist.  The idea that you're not allowed to keep copying the authoritarian social norms into the future -- which is what the idea that you shouldn't bully, that the disabled and poor have rights, that misogyny is not virtuous, and so on functionally are -- is an obvious moral wrong.  That you should not loot, but work, is another obvious moral wrong.  The virtuous take, they do not strive.

If you combine these things, you've got someone driven by an intense moral imperative to create a category of lootable goods; who indeed believes it is morally wrong to have a concept of public space, public land, or public goods if those things interfere with looting behaviours on the part of his class.  It's not precisely corruption; corruption involves a recognition of wrongdoing.  Doug is absolutely certain that it is right to enforce hierarchy, to loot, and most of all, to enrich himself, because that is how you demonstrate virtue.

Laws are not applicable to him, and by extension anything he wants is legal.

That's all there is to it.