Originally Posted by Bklyn
There is a real debate here, and it's a cultural one. I entered this discussion because I was struck with the vehement one-sidedness of the original post. Why is Critical Mass such a lightning rod? Why is it that some cyclists are so quick to suspect the worst of CM?
But we're not actually debating anything here. It seems many people have a guilty party and are willing to accept any supposition that points to that guilt and dismiss any those that doesn't. This isn't a forum for debate. It's like being on jury duty with a bunch of precocious teenagers who've traded in their Dungeons & Dragons for Ayn Rand. For those so afflicted, I wish you a speedy recovery from adolescence.
These are good points; we're getting pretty bogged down in semantics here.
I think if we look at it with as objective a lens as we can, we'll see that a) we don't have nearly enough hard evidence, just a bunch of conjecture and a couple of facts, and b) from what seems clear, everybody screwed up here. The panicked driver and the enraged, mobthinking cyclists both are to blame for their actions.
What does remain, for me, is that this is a situation that an unsuspecting driver was thrown into. The CM riders, in contrast, know what they're doing and where, and they had to know that they were going to freak this driver out as they rode around her.
I'm not going to rehash all of the same arguments against CM that have been made over and over again.
But this incident highlights what many see as CM's problem. So I'll ask, as I have before, for a clear and focused answer to this question:
In what ways, specifically, do CM rides
advance the cause of cyclists' rights?
And how, specifically, do the riders achieve this goal?