Originally Posted by
Feldman
I'm Jewish and both sides of my family emigrated from Eastern Europe in the late 19th century, so some of my relatives probably did to. No sir or ma'am, looking at the continuing and increasing slaughter of pedestrians by American drivers, I don't find this comparison inappropriate the least little bit. I think America's transportation and energy use policies are edging towards being a moral equivalent to the Holocaust unless we change tack drastically.
False equivalency is false. Until you can tell me where thousands of cyclists and pedestrians are being rounded up, put into cattle cars and systematically gassed in droves, the comparison is specious on its face.
I agree that this country is doing a really bad job of protecting cyclists and pedestrians from drivers, but that's an entirely different category of wrong from systematic genocide, both in morality and in scale. I don't care if you're Jewish or not, using the Holocaust for rhetorical purposes in this manner is just in terrible taste.
If you want to argue that energy policy is going to eventually lead to a humanitarian disaster on a scale as big or bigger than the Holocaust there might be something to that, but this is not the forum for that and it would have nothing to do with how pedestrians and cyclists should get along.
The Jews in the shtetl my family was from were all gathered together in a field, machine gunned and buried in a mass grave they may have been forced to dig themselves. That was 4000 people, shot in groups of 250 each. I'm not seeing anyone do that to cyclists or pedestrians.