Biking in the city

By -
The common view among New York City bicyclists is that there activity is a very noble one. So noble, in fact that it can negate any ignoble action done while biking. So if a biker, running a red light, going the wrong way down a one-way street, runs over an old woman on a walker and breaks her hip, all of that is OK, because he did it with a low carbon footprint.

Comments

  1. Ken B2:48 PM

    There is a real effort underway to make America a class society in the sense Britain was. Affluent cyclists seem themselves as part of the overclass. Lowering your carbon footprint is an indulgence of theirs. Thus it is due deference.

    I wonder if, once your metabolism is factored in, how much cycling really does lower one's footprint. Negatively I bet compared to using the subway.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more