Toban Black

I wrote this statement for a blog about Coulter in Canada events -
http://counteringcoulter.wordpress.com/to-bjorn/

That statement is a response to an e-mail (quoted at the bottom of that page) from a ‘Free’ Press organization.

Here’s a bit more background -
The ‘Free’ Press Society (which was backing the Ann Coulter in Canada events) had sent out hundreds of event RSVP e-mails by mistake. The Countering Coulter blog then was set up to take advantage of that opportunity to reach people who had RSVPed for the event here in London, Ontario, Canada. Someone out here sent those people a message (much like this post) to ask them whether they would want to use the blog to communicate their concerns about the Coulter in Canada event in London, Ontario. After a guy from the ‘Free’ Press organization sent out an insulting and confusing rant about that e-mail and that Countering Coulter blog — in a message to the same e-mail addresses — I put together the reply on the blog page that I’ve linked to above.

In that writing I tried to hint at the limited effectiveness of blogging and e-mailing in general. Online activism and dialogue (via Twitter, and Facebook, and so on) are very overrated, and I didn’t mean to reinforce the rhetoric and false hopes about ‘digital revolution’ and ‘digital democracy’ (Here are some relevant posts.)

To put this another way -
Free speech only can happen when there already is equality and justice in our everyday lives (with or without digital technologies).

On that Countering Coulter blog, it also should be clear that I wasn’t approaching free speech as a vicious barking contest — in which ridiculous and blatantly false claims are fine and good.

When we respond to ‘libertarians’ and blunter neo-conservatives, it’s also important to distinguish hate speech from tolerable free speech. I didn’t try to draw any such lines in the writing on that blog page, but I have put some time into those sorts of conflicts, in the past. (Comments which I bothered to post here and here come to mind. I also put myself in the middle of a nasty hate speech conflict in a former Indymedia group here in London, Ontario; the Indymedia project went down in flames during that battle — which also was a matter of milder sexism, and other problems.)

In some cases, tensions and gaps in understanding are too far gone to warrant the time and effort required to take sides in a conflict. And those counterproductive spats happen a lot more on the Internet. The remarks on the “Other viewpoints” section of the Countering Coulter blog are cases in point.

A lone cyclist — surrounded by automobiles
in London, Ontario, Canada

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As I noted in a previous post, our streets are battlegrounds. The automobile drivers definitely have the upper-hand in these battles -

A post on the Baltimore Spokes site -
“Half of traffic fatalities are not in cars (in June)

Elana Schor on the Streetsblog New York City site -
“WHO report highlights global health risk of traffic” (in June)

[Read more →]

    
Automobile branding

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Little drivers

[Read more →]

A car advertisement on the back of a local bus

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Andy Rowell on the Oil Change blog -
“Electric Vehicles May Increase CO2”
(I think it’s too much of a stretch to say that electric vehicles are “all the rage”; but some people definitely are looking toward them as ’solutions.’)

Brad Aaron on the Streetsblog New York City site -
“Do Your Part: Buy an Audi, Drive Fast” (in October)
(Evidently the author is using the word “transit” to refer to mass transit — such as buses.)

Fred Pearce in The Guardian -
“BMW’s ActiveHybrid X6 Accelerates Nonsense About High-performance, Low-emission Cars” (in September)

Brad Aaron on the Streetsblog New York City site -
“Ad Nauseam: Toyota’s (Passive-Aggressive) Ransom Note to America” (in October)

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Here are some related posts on this blog -
http://tobanblack.net/blog/?tag=automobiles

[via Bouphonia]
(Click to enlarge)

That image…
is a metaphor for the divisions that separate the ‘First’ ‘World’ from the ‘Third’ ‘World’
and
it captures the ultimate dream of people who seek to profit without accountability for the consequences of their enterprises

Surbordination and exploitation are the lowest common denominators there.

[Read more →]

Back in 2005, Keri Smith offered some insight into problems that come with with ads on blogs — and ads that surround blogging.
Here are exerpts that I’ve snipped out of three of those posts -

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“As a blogger who has over time established a somewhat regular audience, I have been approached by many companies asking to advertise on my site, and in some cases endorse their products through my writing. have always had a policy to not do anything that goes against my own beliefs …
And so I would not advertise nor endorse any product or company that I do not fully believe in. But even then I struggle with advertising in general.

As a member of a culture that is so laden with advertising I become easily winded, oversaturated, numb to it all. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to find any public space WITHOUT some form of advertising.” “One grocery store I was in recently has televisions throughout the store selling products in every aisle! As one who was weaned on television at a young age, this is too much even for me.” “I have a hard time and resent being told what to look at as I walk through my day.”

“And so I make choices to not partake in a world that is about selling, (to me being exposed to advertising on a regular basis is the equivalent of emotional junk food and I truly care about my body, so there is an emotional cost to me).”

“If I am making the choice to not clutter my mind with the chaos that is advertising, (as I choose not to put junk food into my body), then I must cut down on the sites that are saturated with it.

If I am to speak frankly here, I am saddened when I go to a site of an artist or a blogger I admire and they have ads on their site. I feel a loss of respect. When companies have approached me for the same thing I admit to a moment of ‘it might make my life easier, I could focus on my personal work more, finish that manuscript’, yes I could.

But I ask again, what is the greater cost? When do we put our human needs before those of the corporations?”

[Read more →]

In London, Ontario, Canada

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Blaine Harden (in this article — late last year) -

“In the United States, with the exception of a handful of cities … car-centric transportation policies and suburban sprawl continue to make bicycle commuting rare, arduous and relatively dangerous. Although millions of Americans recreate on bikes, they ride them for just 0.4 percent of their trips to work, according to the U.S. Census.”

“In recent months, bike shops across much of the United States have been flooded with new customers fed up with high gasoline prices.”

“Yet without major changes in U.S. transportation policy and infrastructure, an earnest desire to save money on gas is not enough to turn American bike owners into everyday cyclists who ride to work, according to [some] urban planners, transportation experts and bicycle company executives.”

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Some relevant statistics -
- According to a 2009 survey, 88% of Americans consider cars necessities (source)
- “Canadians and Americans use bikes for fewer than one in a hundred trips - although in Vancouver … it’s a bit higher, at about 2.3 per cent. Compare that to the 20 to 35 per cent of trips taken by bike in the European Union and 50 per cent in China. (Unfortunately, the trend is reversing in China as the country embraces car culture.)” (from a 2008 source)
- “Germans are 10 times more likely than Americans to ride a bike and three times less likely to get hurt while doing so.” (from the same 2008 article quoted above)

Of course, cycling is just one transportation alternative. Although I’m focusing on cycling in this post (as I have in other blog entries here, in the past), I also think that rail and bus systems are two more important alternatives to cars, trucks, and vans. I’m not going to try to summarize all of the constructive alternative transportation possibilities (right now, anyway); basically I’m just questioning the entrenchment of automobiles — while looking at cycling, as one positive alternative.

[Read more →]

Michael Glotz-Richter (in this post) -
“Studies have shown that, on average, most cars are parked for 23 hours a day. Do we really want to use so much valuable space for storing vehicles?”

The start of that post conveys how parked cars are like elephants in our rooms (so to speak); that is, the post elaborates on how we refuse to acknowledge and re-assess how much space we are devoting to automobile parking.

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Matthew Blackett on the Spacing Toronto blog -
“42 Folding Bikes vs. One Car”
( “Sometimes it takes a visual illustration to make the strongest argument.” …)

(Here is a larger version of the second image shown there.)

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John Bennett (in this post) -

“Instead of making more room on the street for idle cars, we should be making room for more people. We should [claim] space to stroll, shop, sit and socialize.”

“Our unrelenting fixation on cheap and easy driving has blinded us from recognizing this simple fact: More than five decades spent adding capacity is proof that increasing the parking supply will not solve the problem. We have to decrease demand.”

“Unfortunately we’ve come to regard suburban retail [complexes], with their acres of parking lots, as the norm. As a result, we insist that a convenient parking place should be waiting for us at the end of every car trip. How much longer will we try to satisfy such an unrealistic expectation? How much are we willing to sacrifice to perpetuate this fantasy? When will we realize how much we’ve already lost in this foolish pursuit?”

(As I occasionally do, I have replaced a couple of the words there with slightly different ones that fit better with my own point of view.)

[Read more →]

“I should like to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him, who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him.”
- Étienne de la Boetie

“Fight the system
together”

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That’s Berd’s photo — from an anti-war protest in Olympia, Washington

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I appreciate the message on that protest sign because I’m approaching it as a statement about systemic inequality — well beyond one ‘tyrant,’ or a small set of ‘tyrants.’ In other words, I think it would be a mistake to approach the Boetie quotation too literally. It’s very oversimplistic to merely highlight a collection of state presidents.
There is a lot more to institutionalized hierarchies and classes.

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A guest post on the Waging Nonviolence web site -
“Toronto’s “garbage strike” elicits public outrage and labour disunity”

(To be fair, I should point out that I edited that write-up with Bryan Farrell.  There are words in there which he had added himself while we were editing it.)