They’re afraid the lycra will awaken something in them
Stupid Sexy Flanders
Feels like I’m wearing nothing at all!
I have a hypothesis about the right. Some of what happens is to protect the ego.
Consider bike riding. Riding a bike is better for the environment and their health. This prompts questions like “why am I not being better for the environment? Why am I not being better for my health?”
One option when faced with that sort of uncomfortable question is to reject thinking about it and get mad at other people. Do not consider anything negative about oneself. That’s uncomfortable and difficult. Being mad about other people is easy.
This resolves the cognitive dissonance, though in its own expensive way with its own tradeoffs.
Yes, a friend clued me in years ago that the key to understanding the conservative mindset is their deep shame and self-hatred. A lot of people say it’s fear, but that’s only partly true. Everybody is motivated by fear; liberals just fear other things.
But for conservatives, it’s fear that they’re worthless and inferior. That’s why so much of their ideology concerns groups that they denigrate and oppress in order to feel superior. This is why they have bicyclists in their crosshairs recently.
And not just bicyclists. It’s not enough just to have a car. Oh no! They have to have a truck. And not just a truck, but a grotesquely enormous truck, with a grill that juts 6 feet straight into the air, perhaps with a lift kit, too. That way, they can roll coal on and intimidate drivers of smaller, weaker vehicles, like Prius drivers.
It’s a performative doubling-down on the behavior that they subconsciously feel others are judging them for, in order to redirect the shame and self-hatred outward as anger at others.
I drive a Prius and can confirm. Large trucks act threatened by my existence on a regular basis.
You’re overthinking this. I mean, you’re right in general, but I have a hard time believing all this is going through their heads when they see a cyclist.
I think it’s just different. Conservatives dn’ t like seeing change or difference. Clearly only cars should be on the road, and everything else is change, different, an affront to the “rules”
I don’t think it’s happening consciously. Most people don’t introspect that clearly or often
But you may also be right that a generalized, acontextual, resistance to change may be a factor. Like if bike lanes were common and someone wanted to remove them, a lot of basic conservatives would resist that just because it’s a change.
It’s pretty simple when you realize that conservatives are addicted to hate. In order to prioritize their hatred, they target people who make them feel like an asshole and people who are in their way. You can boil these down to people who make them uncomfortable.
Look, I’m generalizing here, but there seems to be an almost intentional effort on the part of many journalists and journalistic outlets to misunderstand “The Right”.
Its the charity part, which, like I get the journalistic training and the importance of giving someone you might disagree with the the charity required to have a conversation, but “The Right” has been using this act of good faith to further their agenda. We shouldn’t be giving them charity. Period. They’ve broken with the good faith required to support that charity. “The RIght” aren’t arguing or acting in good faith, and so charity shouldn’t be extended to them. They are captured by a kind of cynicism that is not compatible with civil society.
I frequent both right and left wing areas of the web to try and keep tabs on what everyone is talking about, and literally the only place I’ve ever seen this sort of anti-cyclist circle jerk is on reddit.
It absolutely happens many other places, including Facebook, nextdoor, local blogs, and get this, irl. I have been threatened more than a couple of times directly, and even more times indirectly. People fucking hate cyclists. All because they dare to not drive a fucking car (sometimes).
I used to be annoyed by cyclists because from my perspective I thought I could easily kill them by accident and they were clogging up the road. That was a very selfish attitude but it was mine. I don’t know if that’s what others are thinking but the hatred is very, very real.
Really? Try riding a bike in a city once.
It definitely still happens in the conservative tabloids, although that has been around for many years already.
Really? I’ve seen it literally on fuckCars, here on Lemmy!
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A lot of people miss the fact that cyclists are just people getting about the place. As for example when you hear people say, ‘Oh, it’s only middle-class men who cycle, so why should we build bike lanes?’ as though it’s somehow the case that middle class men who choose to cycle just like… deserve to die? It’s a really common argument that people make and they’ve not even thought about the obvious implication of what they’re saying.
Even if it were true that all or most cyclists were middle-class and male, which it isn’t, I’m never sure whether it’s the maleness, the middle-classness, or the cycling that has apparently warranted the death sentence.
Making it seem like it’s predominately something done by middle-class men, or even rich people, helps to undermine public support for it because of the image people have of a stereotypical male cyclist, ie a well-off person riding a $1400 bike with a bunch of lycra clothes and tech gear pretending they’re training for the Tour de France while they go through their midlife crisis. It’s much less relatable an image for many people, who might say “Well, why do they need to ride on all the roads? They can just go on the paths in the park, or if they have so much money, they can go to a purpose-built facility.”
If you frame it as though it’s just going to benefit a bunch of people perceived to be living it up, you can drum up opposition from poor people, who don’t want their taxes going to fund some BS project that only benefits people who are already doing alright. Your aunt that’s busting her back trying to make ends meet and is trying to get back and forth to work and the shops on a bike one step up from a Wal-mart special can be much more relatable for many people who are struggling to keep up, can’t really afford their car payment and might even use a bike if there were dedicated bike lanes. So people looking to discourage building out bike infrastructure will naturally prefer that everyone thinks the only ones who would benefit from these developments would be some middle-manager who owns his home, rides a bike that costs more than your rent and that has gone on more vacations in the last year than you have in the last two decades.
You’re absolutely right! As a middle-class man who cycles and just doesn’t want to die, I still find it very annoying.
The same argument is used to attack veganism, even though the diet aspect of it is cheaper (as long as most meat imitations are avoided, although those will get cheap too in the long run).
I’ve read that vegetarianism is cheaper than meat-eating, but veganism is more expensive, but I’m sure you’re right that it depends on what exactly you eat! In any case, it’s quite an odd argument for anti-vegans to make: ‘You can afford to do something good and that’s why you shouldn’t’?
@frankPodmore @vividspecter Since middle aged, middle to upper class white men are also most likely to drive monster trucks for everyday transportation & recreation, we could also argue that for the safety and comfort of all we should do everything possible to get that group onto bikes instead of trucks.
But instead, they turn around and blame traffic problems on women taking their kids to school!
The truth? It stems from fear based mentality and personal insecurity. If you spend enough time evaluating the conservative mindset you come to realize it is grounded in fear and a disdain for oneself. They don’t want more cyclists because they think it’s an affront to them personally, as if they would need to start cycling to fit in.
Because car is freeeeddddooommmm.
And as we know all too well from history, enabling other freedoms (women’s suffrage, marriage equality, or now getting around by bike) disrupts those already established freedoms!
For many drivers, a car is debt in addition to a large recurring expense.
Debt == freedom?
There’s a couple of things at play here:
Where the infra (say it’s the road) isn’t adequately engineered to accommodate cycling and driving at the same time, it’s going to give drivers the experience that the road is a scarce resource and when resources are scarce, some folks are going to think in eliminationist terms (e.g. if those people just didn’t exist, everything would be fine) or the part of their brains that descends from people that wiped out competing clans and took their resources rules the moment and they set about violently defending ‘their’ resources.
The folks most-triggered at being made to share the road with cyclists really do some mental gymnastics to frame it in a way that they’re really the victims here and it’s cyclists, not the road engineering, that are the problem. Oh, poor me those cyclists don’t pay taxes and I subsidize their use of my roads bla bla bla and eventually that comes out in the form of vehicular assault to teach cyclists a lesson to stay off their roads. It’s bullshit all the way down of course, but that way they get to feel like the good guys while still bullying and murdering cyclists.
Also, it’s not by accident that the ‘everything is woke’ people are the first to engage in whatever moral panic that’s directing political violence at today’s boogeyman- whether it’s trans people in bathrooms, or gay people generally, or pregnant women that have ideas about bodily autonomy, their targets are always a tiny vulnerable demographic and uniting to put them in their place is an exercise in maintaining or restoring what they think order ought to look like. If they’re not putting people into the bottom rung of whatever hierarchy they think they’re defending, probably they think it’s the end of order or civilization or the like and they’ve failed in their duties to uphold order. Keeping them agitated about (and acting out about) moral panics is an effective way for lobby groups to pit people against scapegoats to keep their ire focused away from themselves or their patrons.
they find the concept of the do-gooder infuriating and the idea of minding their own business untenable.
Indeed!
The GOP want to maintain civil liberties.
Just not YOUR civil liberties.
This is an article in a British paper, written by a British journalist, about her experience in Britain, and names multiple British people.
There is no mention at all of America, nor Americans.
So what does your republican party have to do with it?
Far right conservatives around the globe are using the same playbook.
I also didn’t read the article, although I was clued in By an earlier comment, but …. A lot of these comments could have been about the US. Conservatism seems to have the same hatred problem everywhere you go. All the big truck comments probably were from the US: that can’t be as prevalent in the UK
Yeah my bad I didn’t read it, just kind of browsed through and left my two cents on the headline.
I love cyclists. Always let them go first.
I just hate the bike racing people who think public traffic is their personal sporting grounds. Meaning they don’t have to follow the rules of the road because it might mean they don’t get to break their speed record that day. Or that close down entire roads just so they can race one another.
They should find a hobby that isn’t in public traffic. Imagine if tennis closed down train tracks just so they can use the train tracks to put up their net.
How many roadies do you encounter that they slow you down for more than a minute a day really? Way to channel your hate i guess, i know how irrationally angry it can make you to sit in a car.
I assume this is unpopular but I’ve decided not to get annoyed if I see people breaking the rules of the road. Sometimes I think “what a prick” or “he’s going to kill himself doing that” but it’s not worth anything more.
Fearing change.
Because if they’re riding bikes they might not be buying $70k cars. How are the poor car companies going to afford to survive now? Someone think of the shareholders.
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because they’re antisocial, hetero normative, fascist wannabe, assholes that despise wholesome solutions to the world’s problems. there’s only one way to deal with these sociopaths.
