What? D: You don’t have $7,000 to spend on a bakfiets that couldn’t even fit all your stuff anyway?

“We?”

I’m not sure if you just couldn’t understand my statement and attempted sarcasm here or if this is a genuinely bad response that unironically blames the bike. I’m clearly pointing to culture as the root cause of this, particularly the predominance of neoliberal politics and settler-colonial relationships with the land, so I assume it’s the former but that doesn’t apply.

You misunderstand, what you said was rude enough on its own to warrant animosity. You fundamentally do not understand what you are talking about because you lack the basic empathy and systemic knowledge to even identify the problem; you have presumed that by the grace of god you have divine answers and never questioned why you think what you think. Who benefits from such a shallow narrative?

“Personally I think an hour long commute by bike would be much more pleasant.”

I know that may come as a shock to you, people are not just dumber than you. Most people do in fact make good decisions based on what resources they have available to them, and time is extremely limited for us poor peasants who have to work for a living. It does not matter if you think infrastructure is the only reasonable barrier and most people are just big lazy dumdums, because infrastructure is not getting fixed in most places in this country. As with many Canadians, I do not live in a place where it is safe or practical to use a bike regularly, that is a fact. The closest grocery stores to me are about forty minutes round trip by bike and would require me to traverse a six lane highway to access, that is not acceptable when it is a ten minute drive with nearly zero risk to my body. Yes, that is too much time because again, this may be shocking to you, people with work and responsibilities also have significantly limited energy in their day that would be expended not only by the biking itself, but the stress of risking your life to make the trip. People who work fucking forty to sixty hours a week on swing shifts with kids are not obligated give up whatever time and energy they have to maintain their health and home to force the use of a bicycle to make up for being forced to have a car. It is pointless.

Your comfort is irrelevant, I do not give a shit if this reality makes the world more incomprehensible to you. Grow up, not everyone has your resources and you’ve been privileged enough to get what you’ve had.

Unreal level of pompous douchebag energy here, I will not be paying attention to you and I will not read whatever bullshit response you cobble together.

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I’m so tired of privileged people in the city talking down to everyone else like we don’t know how cities work (“different threat models” fuck outta here with that bullshit). I’ve lived in cities ranging from 200k to 700k and guess what? There isn’t bike infrastructure; you share the road and there’s some adequate bike-lanes in affluent neighbourhoods that I don’t give a shit about. In the city I’m currently in, bike-lanes share a merge with turning lanes f so nooooobody uses them because they don’t want to get nailed by some douchebag in a light truck who can’t even see past the steering wheel. Nobody is talking about a conspiracy, this is the reality of neoliberal politics and the ruins of suburban sprawl. When I say, “authorities” I’m referring to the systems of power that operate in opposition to workers and the land that relegates decisions for infrastructure to affluent land-owners who couldn’t give a shit less about sustainability or accessibility. I also saw you put “wear warm clothes” as a response to someone saying that dangerous winter weather makes bikes impractical like you’re on some Marie Antoinette shit. Don’t talk to me like you understand any of this when it’s obvious you haven’t actually had to live in different places in this country.

Regardless of that, car-dependency makes biking distances prohibitively expensive in the one way that you clearly have never had to think about: time. I do not have the fucking time to bike to my dentist or grocery store – even if I had a backfiets that could actually carry groceries – when everything is spaced out to accomodate cars. It’s nice that you have time for that, most people have work and responsibilites that puts their time at a premium and that makes biking a very low priority on how to live sustainably. I cannot afford to bike. Everything you’ve said speaks from the distorition that individual choice is a primary vector for change when we know that systemic causes for decisions, like driving instead of biking, provide more effective explanations and paths to real change. You subscribe to the very narratives that are used to reproduce this unsustainable way of life and have the gall to sit there and act like you know better than others. -

Not even a joke, someone on a bike was struck by a car and killed just a few blocks away from me this very morning; fourth one in the past few years in this area.

“Buy a bike,” is such privileged shit, dude. Most people in Canada do not live in a place where bikes are a viable option. I don’t have an extra three hours in my day that also puts me at substantially higher risk of bodily harm. If they’re not affluent hobbyist the most common bike rider is someone who cannot afford the expense of a vehicle and are exploited much more heavily by our public transport system.

Car dependency is certainly an existential issue that manifests in Canada’s city planning, cost of living, and environmental footprint. What you just said, that people’s choices are the problem, is exactly the narrative the state and capitalists would like you to subscribe to. It is a systemic issue remedied only by decades of consistent advocacy and action.

Why don’t you take a look at the authorities in Canadian territory that have fought tooth and nail to defend system we have for the better part of the last century?

The fact that so many of you think this is about the cars your drive is a great indicator of how successful neoliberal propaganda has been in framing climate change to liberals. Industrial carbon emissions are not only multiples times higher than whatever we’re all doing with our cars, it has also increased according to Canada’s own report. Private jets from one rich asshole outpaces us all. This is not a community issue about the use of electric vehicles, it is us versus the wealthiest people who don’t even have to fucking drive themselves places.

I’m telling you that it is irrelevant whether this is a response he’d find reasonable, he is not a reasonable person. Charlie Kirk thought that going to a university campus to produce soundbites for his nazi audience was a reasonable idea and I’m drawing that parallel very intentionally. Trump’s only “politically viable” options are to use this well-deserved assassination as a tool to proceed with suppression and extermination because of how deeply fascist his supporters and administration is.

You’re missing the point by acting like there’s “two sides” to this, Carney is not your friend and you do not benefit from any sort of conjured empathy for him; he wants the worst for you. This action is not justifiable like all his actions are not justifiable so long as he maintains the inherent brutality of this system.

Also, I took a look at your post history to see if there was some idea of your politics to work with and it’s clear you don’t have a lot of resolve yourself. Multiple times you talked about giving money to another genocidal monster, Joanne Rowling, just because that is the convenient option. I’m sure you wouldn’t talk that way if you were part of a group she has targeted for eradication, so I’m guessing the empathy and understanding extends so far as what you find reasonable yourself.

If the boundaries of political violence are drawn at a single bullet, then there is no hope for peace in the US or Canada. Erosion of public health is political violence, protection of commodified housing is political violence, increased police budgets oriented toward profit and property protection at the expense of unsheltered people’s safety is political violence, the continued discrimination and injustices faced by First Nations and indigenous peoples in so-called Canada is political violence, cooperation with Israel is political violence. Canada’s entire history is the maintenance of settler-colonial violence. These people are not opposed to political violence, they depend on it.

The only reason this has gotten the attention it has is because fascists are using it to proceed with their plans of suppression and eradication. Politicians recognize this as violence as they understand this form of violence can be turned on them while they are protected from the systemic violence they perpetrate. A narrative that frames their words as “reasonable” responses ignores that there is no reasoning with these people the same way there was no reasoning with Charlie Kirk. Violence is their way of life and they will only frame violence in a way that protects themselves.

His children are better off without him, he said he’d force his daughter to give birth if she was raped as a child for Christ’s sake. Empathy directed at them is obviously fake because they were victimized by their father who is now unable to cause them more harm; real empathy would be directed toward their recovery, not obfuscating the harm this man did to everyone.

Nick Fuentes was caught watching gay porn after a stream and one of this followers just killed Charlie Kirk. These people do not care if their leaders do something they condemn because part of the point of this ideology is to have power over reality through the ability to lie and cheat with impunity. They don’t care, and reproducing their values uncritically in no way benefits us.

Dude, Nazis aren’t going to be convinced to stop being a Nazi just because you also start acting like a Nazi. That’s actually one of their objectives.

I don’t use slurs that aren’t directed at groups I’m a part of. We do that to denote respect for groups that are harmed by those slurs.

What you’re referring to is the historical use of a term compared to its contemporary or colloquial meanings. “Idiot,” was indeed used in the past to refer to people with disabilities or mental illnesses, that is very much not the dominant understanding of its meaning today. “Idiot,” today has the meaning of poor intelligence or foolishness, but is not associated with conditions that people imagine result in those poor qualities.

Something like the “r” word is very much associated with mental, genetic, and learning disabilities that are, by its very use, argued to be the cause of the victim’s perceived poor intelligence. They’re calling the person that word regardless of whether they think they have any disorders because they associate those disorders with poor intelligence and also poor social value. It being an insult is dependent on the devaluing of disabled people.

“Idiot,” or “stupid,” do not carry those connotations in culture, they’re only insults referring to the intelligence of the individual(s) they are directed at.

With all that being said, it’s often seen as low-class or immature to resort to these insults at all. You should never use the “r” word as it is a slur directed at an extremely vulnerable group of people and its use reinforces their devalued status.

People surprised by this haven’t been paying attention.

No I’m not trying to say that you’re wrong, I’m just asserting that there isn’t doubt as to whether this is ableism. I don’t want that to discourage you from pointing out bigotry when you see it.

Yeah this is very apparent all over social media. It’s the consequence of liberals who think disagreeing with the overt fascism seen in MAGA allows moral purity in their actions. They don’t actually interrogate internalized values they hold from capitalism and settler-colonialism that devalues groups of people, they just know which groups are more or less “wrong” to target. They feel emboldened by a visible and decisive enemy, which makes them less self-conscious about the bigotry they foster uncritically.

It’s not too close, this is ableism.

That’s ableism. These people don’t look the way they do and don’t act they way they do because of any genetic disorder. They also aren’t going to fucking see this so the only people being insulted by this are people who are disabled, great job.

We’re talking about actual fascists here and you guys are insulting with eugenics and appearance ffs.

Eugenics, nice. Total own dude you really got me.