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Ken [NY)
December 20th 03, 06:17 PM
On 19 Dec 2003 09:15:24 -0800, Jym Dyer > wrote:

>> Ken (NY)
>> Chairman,
>> Department Of Redundancy Department
>
>=v= This has absolutely nothing to do with California, New York
>City, New Jersey, or even Rush Limbaugh. Not even much to do
>with bikes, except for a sort of moronic coinage that doesn't
>even deserve 15 minutes of fame.
>
>=v= I know you're into redundancy and all, but mass crossposts
>are rotten things that overwhelm newsgroups, especially when
>they start off with ranting flames like that column.
> <_Jym_>
>
>P.S.: Also, didn't somebody suggest you change your .sig
>to the more-redundant (NY, NY)? Heck, why not get an email
>account at thecityofnewyorkcity.com while you're at it?

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___________________________________
email:
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when we take the time to celebrate the birthday
of an imaginary rodent?
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Scott Eiler
December 21st 03, 03:05 AM
Ken [NY) wrote:

> On 19 Dec 2003 09:15:24 -0800, Jym Dyer > wrote:
>
>>=v= I know you're into redundancy and all, but mass crossposts
>>are rotten things that overwhelm newsgroups, especially when
>>they start off with ranting flames like that column.
>> <_Jym_>
>
> Dear recipient:
>
> You have reached the automated troll help line.

<and so on>

Uh, Jym's not a troll here in our *bike* group, is he? And his point is
WELL TAKEN.

--
-------- Scott Eiler B{D> -------- http://www.eilertech.com/ --------

"It seemed an unlikely spot for a sensitive songwriter from Greenwich
Village... She ordered the 20-ounce steak."
-- Lin Brehmer, Chicago DJ, describing his meeting in a steakhouse
with Suzanne Vega.

Dave Carroll
December 21st 03, 04:42 AM
Could you please stay on topic? I subscribe to this list to participate
in discussion regarding bicycles and bicycle politics, not to deal with
reactionaries articulating poorly conceived legislation about the voting
rights of youth. Please refrain from trolling, or at least remove this
newsgroup from your list for such rants.

DC


On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 14:40:03 -0800, Dave Simpson wrote:

> Ken in NY quoted:
>
>> The Bike-Path Left
>> Saddam? Osama? Whatever, dude!
>
> If people actually say that and they are over age 25, they should be
> shot.
>
> No, say the Dim-O-Crats! We must save the children (of all ages)!
> We can't hope to manufacture all the votes we need, after all.
>
> (These days, it would be a good idea not merely to raise the age of
> majority for everything, including voting, to 21 years, but even
> stricter measures, while unpopular to the kiddies [of all ages], would
> improve the nation -- ban the vote for those under age 25, and test
> people of minimum age or more for the suffrage based on minimal
> criteria appropriate for voting, including questions that these
> "whatever, dude" losers cannot answer, such as "Who is the Vice
> President of the United States?" The qualification test scores should
> be used to weight the votes. Get the junk voters out of the polls,
> even if it will destroy the Democrats' Ignorant-Vulgar Vote bloc!)
>
>
> [Reposted below -- good reading.]
>
>> The Bike-Path Left
>> Saddam? Osama? Whatever, dude!
>>
>> BY MARK STEYN
>> Wednesday, December 17, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST
>>
>> Like Susan Lucci at the Emmys, Howard Dean is getting better at
>> putting a brave face on things. When Saddam Hussein fell from power,
>> the Vermonter said churlishly, "I suppose that's a good thing." When
>> Uday and Qusay bit the dust, the governor announced that "the ends do
>> not justify the means." But on Sunday, Dr. Dean was doing his best to
>> be fulsome, if you can be fulsome with clenched teeth. Nonetheless, he
>> congratulated "our extraordinary military on an extraordinary victory
>> and an extraordinary success." They gave Miss Lucci the Emmy
>> eventually, and maybe by Labor Day next year, when the good doctor is
>> thanking Don Rumsfeld for the souvenir vial of Osama's DNA he FedExed
>> over, the voters will be feeling sorry enough to give Howard the
>> prize, too. But this weekend that pileup of "extraordinaries" made the
>> governor seem, well, ordinary.
>>
>> It's odd that when something big happens, as on Sunday, the Democratic
>> candidates seem irrelevant to the story, like asking a lacrosse expert
>> what he thinks of the Super Bowl. They get interviewed and they trot
>> out their lame clichés, about the need to "internationalize" Iraq, by
>> which they mean not Tony Blair, John Howard, the Poles and Italians,
>> but Kofi Annan, The Hague, the French, the Guinean foreign minister,
>> all the folks who proved unwilling and unable to deal with Iraq before
>> the liberation and who have given no indication of being likely to do
>> any better after. The Democrats' indestructible retreat to this dreary
>> line gives them the air of a gormless twit in a drawing-room comedy
>> coming in through the French windows every 10 minutes and saying,
>> "Anyone for tennis?" You can't help feeling that, on the big questions
>> roiling around America's national security, the Dems don't really have
>> speaking parts: if this was Broadway, they'd have been written out in
>> New Haven.
>>
>> There was a revealing moment on MSNBC the other night. Chris Matthews
>> asked Dr. Dean whether Osama bin Laden should be tried in an American
>> court or at The Hague. "I don't think it makes a lot of difference,"
>> said the governor airily. Mr. Matthews pressed once more. "It doesn't
>> make a lot of difference to me," he said again. Some of us think
>> what's left of Osama is already hard enough to scrape off the cave
>> floor and put in a matchbox, never mind fly to the Netherlands. But,
>> just for the sake of argument, his bloodiest crime was committed on
>> American soil; American courts, unlike the international ones, would
>> have the option of the death penalty. But Gov. Dean couldn't have been
>> less interested. So how about Saddam? The Hague "suits me fine," he
>> said, the very model of ennui. Saddam? Osama? Whatever, dude.
>>
>> So what does get the Dean juices going? A few days later, the governor
>> was on CNN and Judy Woodruff asked him about his admission that he'd
>> left the Episcopal Church and become a Congregationalist because "I
>> had a big fight with a local Episcopal church over the bike path." I
>> hasten to add that, in contrast to current Anglican controversies over
>> gay marriage in British Columbia and gay bishops in New Hampshire,
>> this does not appear to have been a gay bike path: its orientation was
>> not an issue; it would seem to be a rare example of a non-gay
>> controversy in the Anglican Communion. But nevertheless it provoked
>> Howard into "a big fight." "I was fighting to have public access to
>> the waterfront, and we were fighting very hard in the citizens group,"
>> he told Judy Woodruff. Fighting, fighting, fighting.
>>
>> And that's our pugnacious little Democrat. On Osama bin Laden, he's
>> Mister Insouciant. But he gets mad about bike paths. Destroy the World
>> Trade Center and he's languid and laconic and blasé. Obstruct plans to
>> convert the ravaged site into a memorial bike path and he'll hunt you
>> down wherever you are.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Howard Dean catapulted himself from Vermont obscurity to national fame
>> very ingeniously. His campaign was tonally brilliant. He was an angry
>> peacenik, an aggressive defeatist, he got in-your-face about getting
>> out of Iraq. The problem with pacifism as a political position is that
>> it's too easy to seem wimpy, wussy, nancy-boyish, pantywaisty,
>> milksopping, etc. In that sense, his fellow Democrat, Dennis Kucinich,
>> has a pacifist mien: I'm not saying he's a pantywaist or milksop, but
>> he comes over as a goofy nebbish, as the Zionist neocons would say.
>> The main impact he's made on the Granite State electorate seems to be
>> his lack of a girlfriend, which has prompted a New Hampshire Web site
>> to try and find a date for him. Somehow one is not surprised to hear
>> this. By contrast, when Howard Dean, shortish and stocky, comes out in
>> his rolled-up shirtsleeves, he looks like Bruce Banner just before he
>> turns into the Incredible Hulk, as if his head's about to explode out
>> of his shirt collar. Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from
>> Venus, but Dr. Dean is Venusian in a very Martian way. He's full of
>> anger.
>> But only for peripheral issues. Ask him serious questions about the
>> president's key responsibilities--national security and foreign
>> policy--and the passion drains away as it did with Chris Matthews.
>> David Brooks, visiting Burlington in 1997 in search of what eventually
>> became his thesis "Bobos in Paradise," concluded that the
>> quintessential latté burg was "relatively apolitical." He's a smart
>> guy but he was wrong. All the stuff he took as evidence of the lack of
>> politics--pedestrianization, independent bookstores--is the politics.
>> Because all the big ideas failed, culminating in 1989 in Eastern
>> Europe with the comprehensive failure of the biggest idea of all, the
>> left retreated to all the small ideas: in a phrase, bike paths. That's
>> what Bill Clinton meant when he said the era of big government was
>> over; instead, he'd be ushering in the era of lots and lots of itsy
>> bits of small government that, when you tote 'em up, works out even
>> more expensive than the era of big government. That's what Howard Dean
>> represents--the passion of the Bike-Path Left.
>>
>> Vermonters marked the end of the Dean era by electing a Republican
>> governor and a Republican House. Even Vermont isn't as liberal as
>> liberals assume. What's liberal is the idea of Vermont as it's
>> understood across America: a bucolic playground of quaint dairy farms
>> punctuated by the occasional boutique business that's managed to
>> wiggle through the Dean approval process. A lot of those dairy barns
>> are empty and belong to weekending flatlanders, the rest are adorned
>> with angry "Take Back Vermont" signs, and the quintessential Green
>> Mountain boutique business, Ben and Jerry's, wound up selling out to
>> the European multinational Unilever. But these dreary details are
>> irrelevant. To Democratic primary voters across the land, Vermont is a
>> shining, rigorously zoned, mandatory-recycling city on a hill. And the
>> only way up the hill is by the bike path.
>>
>> Unlike Howlin' Howard and the Burlington Episcopalians, I'm agnostic
>> on the merits of bike paths. But earlier this year, when the antiwar
>> types held "Bridges to Peace" demonstrations on the spans across the
>> Connecticut River between New Hampshire and Vermont, I couldn't help
>> noticing they were very much a bike-path crowd. It was February and 20
>> below, so they didn't have their bikes with them, but they did have
>> snowshoes and cross-country skis, for the activities that would occupy
>> the rest of their weekends once they'd got a little light
>> demonstrating out of the way. But, under their snowsuits, they were,
>> metaphorically, wearing cycling shorts. They loved the '90s because
>> you never heard a thing about macho stuff like war: it was all
>> micro-politics, new regulations for this, new entitlements for
>> that--education, environment, "social justice." For hard-core
>> Democrats, the whole war thing is an unwelcome intrusion on what large
>> numbers of people had assumed to be a permanent post-Martian politics.
>> When you're at a Dean get-together, you realize they're not angry
>> about the war, so much as having to talk about the war.
>>
>> A little over an hour north of that Burlington bike path is Montreal,
>> the visits to which (for kids' hockey fixtures and his appearances on
>> a Canadian TV show) Dr. Dean cites, seriously, as his main
>> foreign-policy experience. Montreal is home to North America's largest
>> Iraqi émigré community and on Sunday night the streets were full of
>> honking horns celebrating Saddam's downfall. You don't have to go far
>> to see the world beyond the good doctor's bike-path parochialism, but
>> it's farther than most Dems are willing to go.
>>
>> Last weekend was confirmation, if you needed it, that this is not a
>> time for micro-politics. Many independents and a critical sliver of
>> Democrats understand that, and, in a time of war, they're not prepared
>> to stick with the bike-path left. When you put the pedal to the full
>> metal jacket, it's no contest.
>>
>> Mr. Steyn is a columnist for London's Daily Telegraph and Spectator.

Ron Wallenfang
December 22nd 03, 12:32 AM
I read Steyn's column on the "bike path" left, and found it right-on. I say
that as an almost daily bike commuter in Milwaukee, winter and summer. On
any given local "bike-path" issue I might happen to agree with them ("them"
in Milwaukee is exemplified by the local alternative newspaper, the Shepherd
Express.)

But there's a practical transition from day to day issues to secualr
theology that leaves me in the dust. A good local example is the mantra
that bike paths are a substitute for freeways, and other good roads.
Nonsense! On cold and other bad weather days, there aren't enough bike
commuters to make a dent in the other traffic. If there are 3 bikes out a
1000 workers in the building I work in, that's pretty good on a bad weather
day. The "bike path" left will at least look serious when they have their
"bike to work" week in January instead of June. Doing what they do now is
just sappy sentimentalism. If Gov. Dean were a rabid bike commuter, I would
at least understand his leaving th Episcopal Church over a bike path. As it
is, I can only scratch my head.



"Dave Carroll" > wrote in message
...
> Could you please stay on topic? I subscribe to this list to participate
> in discussion regarding bicycles and bicycle politics, not to deal with
> reactionaries articulating poorly conceived legislation about the voting
> rights of youth. Please refrain from trolling, or at least remove this
> newsgroup from your list for such rants.
>
> DC
>
>
> On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 14:40:03 -0800, Dave Simpson wrote:
>
> > Ken in NY quoted:
> >
> >> The Bike-Path Left
> >> Saddam? Osama? Whatever, dude!
> >
> > If people actually say that and they are over age 25, they should be
> > shot.
> >
> > No, say the Dim-O-Crats! We must save the children (of all ages)!
> > We can't hope to manufacture all the votes we need, after all.
> >
> > (These days, it would be a good idea not merely to raise the age of
> > majority for everything, including voting, to 21 years, but even
> > stricter measures, while unpopular to the kiddies [of all ages], would
> > improve the nation -- ban the vote for those under age 25, and test
> > people of minimum age or more for the suffrage based on minimal
> > criteria appropriate for voting, including questions that these
> > "whatever, dude" losers cannot answer, such as "Who is the Vice
> > President of the United States?" The qualification test scores should
> > be used to weight the votes. Get the junk voters out of the polls,
> > even if it will destroy the Democrats' Ignorant-Vulgar Vote bloc!)
> >
> >
> > [Reposted below -- good reading.]
> >
> >> The Bike-Path Left
> >> Saddam? Osama? Whatever, dude!
> >>
> >> BY MARK STEYN
> >> Wednesday, December 17, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST
> >>
> >> Like Susan Lucci at the Emmys, Howard Dean is getting better at
> >> putting a brave face on things. When Saddam Hussein fell from power,
> >> the Vermonter said churlishly, "I suppose that's a good thing." When
> >> Uday and Qusay bit the dust, the governor announced that "the ends do
> >> not justify the means." But on Sunday, Dr. Dean was doing his best to
> >> be fulsome, if you can be fulsome with clenched teeth. Nonetheless, he
> >> congratulated "our extraordinary military on an extraordinary victory
> >> and an extraordinary success." They gave Miss Lucci the Emmy
> >> eventually, and maybe by Labor Day next year, when the good doctor is
> >> thanking Don Rumsfeld for the souvenir vial of Osama's DNA he FedExed
> >> over, the voters will be feeling sorry enough to give Howard the
> >> prize, too. But this weekend that pileup of "extraordinaries" made the
> >> governor seem, well, ordinary.
> >>
> >> It's odd that when something big happens, as on Sunday, the Democratic
> >> candidates seem irrelevant to the story, like asking a lacrosse expert
> >> what he thinks of the Super Bowl. They get interviewed and they trot
> >> out their lame clichés, about the need to "internationalize" Iraq, by
> >> which they mean not Tony Blair, John Howard, the Poles and Italians,
> >> but Kofi Annan, The Hague, the French, the Guinean foreign minister,
> >> all the folks who proved unwilling and unable to deal with Iraq before
> >> the liberation and who have given no indication of being likely to do
> >> any better after. The Democrats' indestructible retreat to this dreary
> >> line gives them the air of a gormless twit in a drawing-room comedy
> >> coming in through the French windows every 10 minutes and saying,
> >> "Anyone for tennis?" You can't help feeling that, on the big questions
> >> roiling around America's national security, the Dems don't really have
> >> speaking parts: if this was Broadway, they'd have been written out in
> >> New Haven.
> >>
> >> There was a revealing moment on MSNBC the other night. Chris Matthews
> >> asked Dr. Dean whether Osama bin Laden should be tried in an American
> >> court or at The Hague. "I don't think it makes a lot of difference,"
> >> said the governor airily. Mr. Matthews pressed once more. "It doesn't
> >> make a lot of difference to me," he said again. Some of us think
> >> what's left of Osama is already hard enough to scrape off the cave
> >> floor and put in a matchbox, never mind fly to the Netherlands. But,
> >> just for the sake of argument, his bloodiest crime was committed on
> >> American soil; American courts, unlike the international ones, would
> >> have the option of the death penalty. But Gov. Dean couldn't have been
> >> less interested. So how about Saddam? The Hague "suits me fine," he
> >> said, the very model of ennui. Saddam? Osama? Whatever, dude.
> >>
> >> So what does get the Dean juices going? A few days later, the governor
> >> was on CNN and Judy Woodruff asked him about his admission that he'd
> >> left the Episcopal Church and become a Congregationalist because "I
> >> had a big fight with a local Episcopal church over the bike path." I
> >> hasten to add that, in contrast to current Anglican controversies over
> >> gay marriage in British Columbia and gay bishops in New Hampshire,
> >> this does not appear to have been a gay bike path: its orientation was
> >> not an issue; it would seem to be a rare example of a non-gay
> >> controversy in the Anglican Communion. But nevertheless it provoked
> >> Howard into "a big fight." "I was fighting to have public access to
> >> the waterfront, and we were fighting very hard in the citizens group,"
> >> he told Judy Woodruff. Fighting, fighting, fighting.
> >>
> >> And that's our pugnacious little Democrat. On Osama bin Laden, he's
> >> Mister Insouciant. But he gets mad about bike paths. Destroy the World
> >> Trade Center and he's languid and laconic and blasé. Obstruct plans to
> >> convert the ravaged site into a memorial bike path and he'll hunt you
> >> down wherever you are.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> Howard Dean catapulted himself from Vermont obscurity to national fame
> >> very ingeniously. His campaign was tonally brilliant. He was an angry
> >> peacenik, an aggressive defeatist, he got in-your-face about getting
> >> out of Iraq. The problem with pacifism as a political position is that
> >> it's too easy to seem wimpy, wussy, nancy-boyish, pantywaisty,
> >> milksopping, etc. In that sense, his fellow Democrat, Dennis Kucinich,
> >> has a pacifist mien: I'm not saying he's a pantywaist or milksop, but
> >> he comes over as a goofy nebbish, as the Zionist neocons would say.
> >> The main impact he's made on the Granite State electorate seems to be
> >> his lack of a girlfriend, which has prompted a New Hampshire Web site
> >> to try and find a date for him. Somehow one is not surprised to hear
> >> this. By contrast, when Howard Dean, shortish and stocky, comes out in
> >> his rolled-up shirtsleeves, he looks like Bruce Banner just before he
> >> turns into the Incredible Hulk, as if his head's about to explode out
> >> of his shirt collar. Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from
> >> Venus, but Dr. Dean is Venusian in a very Martian way. He's full of
> >> anger.
> >> But only for peripheral issues. Ask him serious questions about the
> >> president's key responsibilities--national security and foreign
> >> policy--and the passion drains away as it did with Chris Matthews.
> >> David Brooks, visiting Burlington in 1997 in search of what eventually
> >> became his thesis "Bobos in Paradise," concluded that the
> >> quintessential latté burg was "relatively apolitical." He's a smart
> >> guy but he was wrong. All the stuff he took as evidence of the lack of
> >> politics--pedestrianization, independent bookstores--is the politics.
> >> Because all the big ideas failed, culminating in 1989 in Eastern
> >> Europe with the comprehensive failure of the biggest idea of all, the
> >> left retreated to all the small ideas: in a phrase, bike paths. That's
> >> what Bill Clinton meant when he said the era of big government was
> >> over; instead, he'd be ushering in the era of lots and lots of itsy
> >> bits of small government that, when you tote 'em up, works out even
> >> more expensive than the era of big government. That's what Howard Dean
> >> represents--the passion of the Bike-Path Left.
> >>
> >> Vermonters marked the end of the Dean era by electing a Republican
> >> governor and a Republican House. Even Vermont isn't as liberal as
> >> liberals assume. What's liberal is the idea of Vermont as it's
> >> understood across America: a bucolic playground of quaint dairy farms
> >> punctuated by the occasional boutique business that's managed to
> >> wiggle through the Dean approval process. A lot of those dairy barns
> >> are empty and belong to weekending flatlanders, the rest are adorned
> >> with angry "Take Back Vermont" signs, and the quintessential Green
> >> Mountain boutique business, Ben and Jerry's, wound up selling out to
> >> the European multinational Unilever. But these dreary details are
> >> irrelevant. To Democratic primary voters across the land, Vermont is a
> >> shining, rigorously zoned, mandatory-recycling city on a hill. And the
> >> only way up the hill is by the bike path.
> >>
> >> Unlike Howlin' Howard and the Burlington Episcopalians, I'm agnostic
> >> on the merits of bike paths. But earlier this year, when the antiwar
> >> types held "Bridges to Peace" demonstrations on the spans across the
> >> Connecticut River between New Hampshire and Vermont, I couldn't help
> >> noticing they were very much a bike-path crowd. It was February and 20
> >> below, so they didn't have their bikes with them, but they did have
> >> snowshoes and cross-country skis, for the activities that would occupy
> >> the rest of their weekends once they'd got a little light
> >> demonstrating out of the way. But, under their snowsuits, they were,
> >> metaphorically, wearing cycling shorts. They loved the '90s because
> >> you never heard a thing about macho stuff like war: it was all
> >> micro-politics, new regulations for this, new entitlements for
> >> that--education, environment, "social justice." For hard-core
> >> Democrats, the whole war thing is an unwelcome intrusion on what large
> >> numbers of people had assumed to be a permanent post-Martian politics.
> >> When you're at a Dean get-together, you realize they're not angry
> >> about the war, so much as having to talk about the war.
> >>
> >> A little over an hour north of that Burlington bike path is Montreal,
> >> the visits to which (for kids' hockey fixtures and his appearances on
> >> a Canadian TV show) Dr. Dean cites, seriously, as his main
> >> foreign-policy experience. Montreal is home to North America's largest
> >> Iraqi émigré community and on Sunday night the streets were full of
> >> honking horns celebrating Saddam's downfall. You don't have to go far
> >> to see the world beyond the good doctor's bike-path parochialism, but
> >> it's farther than most Dems are willing to go.
> >>
> >> Last weekend was confirmation, if you needed it, that this is not a
> >> time for micro-politics. Many independents and a critical sliver of
> >> Democrats understand that, and, in a time of war, they're not prepared
> >> to stick with the bike-path left. When you put the pedal to the full
> >> metal jacket, it's no contest.
> >>
> >> Mr. Steyn is a columnist for London's Daily Telegraph and Spectator.
>

Jym Dyer
December 27th 03, 06:41 AM
> Uh, Jym's not a troll here in our *bike* group, is he?
> And his point is WELL TAKEN.

=v= Thanks, and I do think my point stands. My followup
was to-the-person as well as to-the-point, so perhaps he
thought that was trolling, but I was trying to make that
light-hearted. Oh well.
<_Jym_>
The City of New York City, New York

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