The Reign of the Biker

[I]t is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons, things, situations, seem alike. -- Pater

Today's Daily News gives us a splendid sample of the Liberal Mind ever fatuous and self-satisfied, even -- especially -- in dissolution:

Bike lane fan sez: Bad Bramhall

Brooklyn: Re Bramhall’s World (Dec. 1): The rise of cycling in New York City will continue to make our streets safer. Of the 269 traffic deaths in 2010, only 18 related to bicycle crashes.

A DOT report from August 2010 states that the addition of 200 miles of new bike lanes improved pedestrian safety. Controlling for other factors, crashes involving pedestrians on streets with bike lanes were 40% less deadly than on other streets. The study goes on to note that bike lanes have a “traffic calming effect, lowering speeds and increasing driver attention.”

So I ask: Why does Bramhall continue to demonize cyclists, even in the context of accident prevention and awareness programs such as Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan’s new safety signs?

Bramhall’s perspective is stuffy and outdated. Let him long for New York City before the DOT addressed these safety issues if he likes. I’ll continue to grow in the 21st century with the rest of the 99%. Weston Ulfig

First of all, Weston Ulfig? Really?

But anyway, one notes the triumphant note of "progressive-ism" and "chronological bigotry," as if "continual growth" were ipso facto good [rather than, as Baron Evola notes, the mark of an inferior temporality unworthy of the attention of the superior Aryan individual, oriented to the Timeless and Complete] and one was self-evidently correct by dint of having been born yet further into the Kali Yuga.

But note as well the Liberal love of "statistics," at least when they can be found, or bent, to support their side.

René Guénon has already exploded the "Illusion of Statistics" in Chapter Ten of his Reign of Quantity, noting the evident absurdity of treating supposedly separate things, to say nothing of persons, as absolutely identical and interchangeable, the key prerequisite to the whole idea -- itself emblematic of the Reign of Quantity -- of adding them up and "analyzing" them with mathematics.

"Ulfig" -- if that is his name -- fails to grasp, or else tries to rhetorically hide -- the reason for the citizen's outrage at the antics of his "biker" buddies; as noted here before, New York cyclists like to call themselves "bikers" as if they were Hells Angels, and that by itself should give you a clue as to the problem. "Ulfig" should learn that auto accidents and bike accidents are entirely different and cannot be statistically compared.

Auto accidents are, well, largely accidents. Few are the sociopaths that go around causing them deliberately -- except, admittedly, on Wall Street:

When one is hit by a biker, however, one can be 100% positive you were hit, not by a temporarily distracted soccer mom but rather by a smug bastard who thinks he has the right to roll at top speed through a pedestrian crosswalk in the wrong direction because of his "low carbon footprint."

Jeez, even Fred Armisten gets it.

Glad to hear you like "living in the 21st century," "Ulfig." What's not to like? 9/11, War on Terra, collapse of the middle class, etc. Sounds like you were made for each other.