Cycling forums attract their fair share of anti-car eco warriors from the left. They nearly all work in state jobs of some sort and have a rather endearingly laughable view of how the world works.
The best I ever heard was from someone who claimed that the motor industry was subsidised out of taxation and the economy would be stronger if it disappeared because "People would spend their money on things other than cars". He could not see how money was actually made, being under the impression that the more the government printed the richer we got.
I did reply after I had wiped the tea stains off the monitor, but he still couldn't see it.
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Conversely, is there such a thing as a conservative cyclist? I have no grievances with cycling per se, just with the people who tend to to it. You know the type, the kind of people who think that life was better in the dark ages.
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Conversely is there such a thing as a conservative cyclist?
Cyclists reflect the general make up of society. Most club members drive and many are enthusiastic motorists and bikers too. Unfortunately it is the minority Critical Mass types who make all the noise.
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Conversely is there such a thing as a conservative cyclist?
Boris Johnson, Dave Cameron ??
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There is something of a skew to the Torygraph in the backroom. There are three reasons we have the Telegraph - the Saturday motoring section, the crossword, and the fact that we get it for £41 a quarter by Direct Debit. Otherwise it would be he Grauniad, to complement the fortnightly Private Eye. I have always been addicted to cars and motoring; clearly I need counselling.
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>>Does this brand the socialists among us hypocrites?
Please forgive the bluntness of my answer, but, yes!
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I suppose I'll have to buy a tractor then. :-(
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Toyed with the idea of locking this one, but if you can keep it on the motoring side of politics, it can stay.
Cheers
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we get it for £41 a quarter by Direct Debit.
How did you manage that?
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>> we get it for £41 a quarter by Direct Debit.
How did you manage that?
We got a mailing a few years ago and took it up. If you have ever responded to a 'reader offer' or sent in the crossword they have your name and address details. Talking to a number of people we seem to be on different rates - we started at about £20 a quarter which was a serious bargain and they've gradually tweaked it up. I think the offers might have been geared to survey responses as well - we only used to get the Saturday DT so maybe we got a good offer for a 7 days a week subscription. They send us vouchers which we hand in to the newsagent - nearly all shops and supermarkets accept them.
Googling I found this -
subscribe.telegraph.co.uk/campaigns/73/SUDD.html
If £76 quarterly doesn't appeal you could try sending a crossword or two in!
Very good motoring section I believe ;-)
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Good point, Smith, the motor car is indeed one of the great triumphs of popular capitalism with its emphasis on individual independence and self-expression.
Some in the anti-car lobby would rather see a more comprehensive public transport system that would be a great triumph of the state with its emphasis on collectivised achievement & activity. No thanks, guys. I do not want to be a 'client of the state' and be limited to the confines of a public transport sysem.
Others in the anti-car lobby are just tree-dwelling miserablists who blame their own internal angst on popular capitalism and seem to want us all to regress to the middle ages. They just want to share out their misery with the rest of us. This particularly applies to the 'local food' and 'seasonal food' movement. No thanks, guys! I regularly eat & thoroughly enjoy food & drink from all over the world and when it used to be out of season.
This is also why the Great Global Warming Hoax perpetuates despite global temperatures continuing to fall. It's a great opportunity for 'statists' to regain collective state control over production & transport. And it explains why the BBC is such an agitprop for Global Warming: the BBC is state organisation so it views the world through state-tinted spectacles.
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I believe that public transport is most effective in the big cities and conurbations. Had I grown up in such a place my enthusiasm for motoring may never have been realised.
My concern is that politicians who rarely venture out of London never actually see how owning a motor car can benefit people. If you lean to the left and see the whole country as one big conurbation, then I suppose it is only natural you should strive for a socialised 'utopia', where everyone travels by regulated means.
What the car actually does, is allow people to choose where they live in such a way as to enjoy urban facilities and rural felicities, as the late L.J.K. Setright put it. Politicians could do well to realise that there is a world beyond Greater London.
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Smithsonian:
I thought "deja vu".
www.honestjohn.co.uk/forum/post/index.htm?t=68722&...f
Why start another thread?
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Indeed - should have spotted that - prepare for docking.
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Any chance one of you guys could restore the title of my latest thread as it is more accurate?
In any case, I thought the two were different enough to warrant a new thread, could you perhaps bring my new questions to the top?
Edited by Smithsonian on 10/11/2008 at 13:46
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Looking at it from any part of the political spectrum, private cars have their pluses and minuses. The gains of flexibility and personal autonomy tend to be valued by the right, whereas the left tends to focus more on the inefficiencies of mass car ownership and the social costs imposed on others by car use. Environmental concerns tend to weigh more heavily with the left, because a left-wing perspective is more inclined to assess the wider costs of individual choices.
These attitudes do vary by place. In cities, space limitations make mass transit so much more efficient that even the right is inclined to support it, whereas in rural areas it is harder for public transport to achieve sufficient economies of scale.
The choices become unnecessarily polarised, though. Those who focus on the apparent individualism of the car tend to ignore the paradox that a huge collectivised infrastructure of roads is necessary for cars to be usable, and the left tends to overlook the economic importance of flexibility. Much of this stems from deeper and under-acknowledged political choices, e.g. we have user-pricing for the railways whereas roads are paid from the consolidated fund as a public good; and shared ownership of cars (which could be a huge boon in rural areas as well as in cities) is very difficult to manage because of a legal framework based on a presumption of individual ownership. (Concepts such as insurance for named drivers and individual registered keepers make life difficult for anyone trying it).
We'd all do a lot better if there was less sloganising and name-calling, and more rigorous analysis of the merits and demerits of particular approaches, along with efforts to create a wider range of transport possibilities.
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>>a wider range of transport possibilities
Hear hear! Then that'll free up the roads for me!
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efforts to create a wider range of transport possibilities.
Quite. A complex system of coin-in-the-slot unicycles, powered skateboards, skyhooks and gas-filled white pogo sticks should take some of the strain off the tube and bus services...
A Soviet Minister on his first visit to France, on viewing the Place de la Concorde in rush hour, is said to have remarked gloomily: 'You'll never make revolution with these people...'
The slightly thuggish but genial individualism common among motorists (and a British national characteristic) certainly makes my blood run cold at the mention of 'shared car ownership', and I believe I am not alone. It's bad enough sharing wheels with one's nearest and dearest, let alone some unknown wally who's going to burn the clutch out and leave the thing unlocked.
Let's not go into speed limits. Too difficult. Emotional minefield. Storm in a teacup actually.
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These generalisations don't necessarily remain true.
It used to be largely true that people who owned houses were right wing - labour voters lived in council houses. Then suddenly that all changed, and home ownership became a basic human right. It complicated things for socialist chancellors wanting to make pips squeak, because suddenly the pips were just as likely to be labour voters. Thereby hangs a sorry tale involving sub prime and credit crunch ....
I think probably motoring has already passed through the cross-party stage but we didn't notice. Now people are polarising into pro and anti environmentalism, which is not quite the same thing as left and right.
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I'm sensing a feeling among some people that the business of transport is nothing but a tedious chore. This overlooks the fact that many enjoy driving in certain circumstances, where it ceases to be a faceless means of transportation and becomes a simple pleasure.
What I don't understand is why it's only those of a conservative bent who seem to appreciate the niceties of motoring. As I've mentioned before, perhaps it's also down to where you live and the kind of driving you do. An urban grind at rush hour is a world away from a cross-country blast on a sunny Sunday morning in a fine-handling car.
My biggest gripe is with those who clog up the roads by using their cars for ludicrously short journeys. The motor car was intended to liberate the human race, not to perpetuate laziness. Come on people, what do you think your legs are for!
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efforts to create a wider range of transport possibilities. Quite. A complex system of coin-in-the-slot unicycles powered skateboards skyhooks and gas-filled white pogo sticks should take some of the strain off the tube and bus services...
Cycle paths and workplace showers so that people have option of getting to work in a quick, cheap and healthy way does take the strain off both roads and public transport.
For those in cities who don't use a car every day, the choice is currently between owning a vehicle or not having convenient access to one; look down any residential street in inner London and you'll see dozens of vehicles taking up lots of roadspace while they rot away. Local car pools work well in other countries (such as the Netherlands), and give users the choice of a small and economical car for local trips or a bigger vehicle for load-lugging or longer journeys.
Not everyone would choose such an option, but for a lot of city-dwellers it would be less hassle and less expense than owning a car. At the moment, though, people don't have that option; there's nothing in between the bus/train and car ownership, unless you hire a car commercially, usually at an inconvenient location and with a hiring structure which doesn't allow for short usage such as a 3-hour trip to the DIY store.
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Not everyone would choose such an option, but for a lot of city-dwellers it would be less hassle and less expense than owning a car. At the moment, though, people don't have that option;
You are right NW, it wouldn't be for everyone, but there are certainly people whose emotional bond with the automobile is weak enough to enable them to stomach coin-in-slot 'white' town runabouts, and as you rightly imply, car ownership is both a financial burden and an administrative persecution to many people.
Perhaps when there are viable electric cars - coming soon they keep saying - some such system might be tried. But conventional internal combustion engines and transmissions, even autoboxes, are too fragile and pernickety to stand up to 'any driver' day in day out and guarantee no nasty surprises when you or I want to nip down to the off-licence for another load... .
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his first visit to France, on viewing the Place de la Concorde in rush hour, is said to have remarked gloomily: 'You'll never make revolution with these people.
History wasn't his strong point then then. Hadn't he heard of the French Revolution and the pioneering work with tumbrils and guillotines?
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Harrumph.
Despite its historic status, the French Revolution, to give it its uppercase, was a petty-bourgeois political putsch, not the great proletarian thingy that Soviet ministers had to pretend had taken place in the Russian empire...
Of course I am not running the French Revolution down. We would not be as we are if it hadn't occurred.
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Comprehensively rubbished two earth shattering revolutions in three lines. Not that I have a problem with that having found some Huguenot blood in my lines.
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>>because a left-wing perspective is more inclined to assess the wider costs of individual choices.
I don't think that is generally true. I think the assessment may still go on, but with different weightings applied to each aspect.
I find it odd that most of the middle class leftish types I know have more and more expensive cars on their drive than I do.
Edited by Number_Cruncher on 10/11/2008 at 19:49
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>>because a left-wing perspective is more inclined to assess the wider costs of individual choices.
I don't think that is generally true.
No, it certainly isn't. The Old Labour grassroots were staggeringly indifferent to the future prospects of the industry they worked in, the society they lived in, the colonial working class in other countries and everything else of the sort. They were interested in an agenda that boiled down to 'shorter hours and better pay'. At the same time, they were increasingly scornful of value for money, conscientiousness, workmanship, craftsmanship or anything else to do with quality. You couldn't blame them given what their bosses were getting away with, and I didn't. But they were wrong (albeit not as grossly and perversely wrong as their bosses and owners and leaders). Their opposite numbers in places like Sweden, Germany and France were less wrong. As in fact we can now clearly see.
Ho hum. Come on, shape up you Orientals! Feed us!
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