BoingBoing


The helmet debate hits BoingBoing

The cycle helmet debate can get a little lively at times. I’m sure BoingBoing is better moderated than most cycling forums, but it’s still getting a taste of the strong feelings after Xeni made a throwaway comment about cycle helmets in a post. I’ve even commented.

I wear a helmet whilst riding, but I don’t think other people should be forced to. There’s no law that says you must, and there shouldn’t be. The problem is that some people insist that cyclists should wear helmets for their own safety, when they do absolutely nothing to make us safer. A helmet can’t prevent a driver cutting us up or tuning without indicating. All it can do is reduce the damage to our heads if one of these idiots hits us.

Anyone wanting to make cyclists safer shouldn’t call for mandatory helmets. They should call for mandatory cycle training for drivers- to make them more aware of whatit’s like for other drivers- and harsher sentences for dangerous driving.


A rambling post about…… stuff

I’ve been doing some thinking about a change of direction for Spinneyhead. Some connections fired whilst I pondered this last week and I headed off to the new home of Monitor Duty, a comics blog I posted on for a while a few years ago.

It came as little surprise that I’d been retconned(*) out of MD history, given that I called out the site’s owner on his prejudices and left when it became obvious he was using circular logic to support them. (All Muslims are evil terrorists. Any Muslim shown to not be an evil terrorist doesn’t count because they’re obviously not a True Muslim. Because all Muslims are evil terrorists.) It’s not as big a deal as Violet Blue being unpersonned by BoingBoing and I have no problems not being associated with the site except on the Wayback Machine. [For transparency I ought to admit that I have removed posts about a particular person from Spinneyhead’s archives. If you’ve known me long enough you’ll know who and why. If you haven’t, sorry, I’m not going to elaborate.]

Anyway, scanning the front page I came across a post about the assumed politics of writers. This isn’t so much a response as thoughts arising, but I’d always assume that a good writer is more likely to be “liberal” than conservative. Good fiction is about change, and conservatives aren’t about change- it’s right there in their name. Partly because of this, and a need to make political points, conservative writers lack depth in characterisation- most often trying to compensate with a detailed biography- and an inability to flesh out the antagonists. I’m thinking, chiefly, of Tom Clancy and his technothriller brethren. In particular I remember one of Clancy’s books where a character whos only action was to cut down a tree got a page and a half of biography, almost as much as the chief villain.

Authors of all political shades are capable of coming out with polemics, of course. I just think that those of us to the left of centre, and the occasional libertarian, do it so much better.

This is a response to the last bit of the post-

“We” are not winning in Iraq. There is no winning in Iraq, there is merely sacrificing fewer people to a criminally stupid decision and trying to leave the country less fucked than it is at present. We are sacrificing fewer people, thankfully, but hundreds of thousands have died because of an illegal invasion and an incompetent occupation. You can’t win with that many corpses.

I’d love to see an attempt to justify the “Obama’s more ignorant than George W. Bush ever was”, which will probably be based upon some ignorant, unchecked opinion piece from a professional liar like Ann Coulter.

The Antarctic Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve holds about enough oil for a month of use by the US. Why spoil something for so little. Get a smaller car, turn down the air conditioning, fit solar panels and learn to walk!

Yes, McCain is a lousy candidate. All the Republicans were. Don’t be an idiot. Don’t vote for him.


I'm slightly better off

Boing Boing tells me that I can now reveal to the world the gross amount of money I’ve earned from GoogleAds, if not the details of how I got the required clicks. So, drumroll please, Spinneyhead today cleared 100 dollars. Admittedly, that is since last August, but I think the next century should come around sooner.

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