Un-Critical Mass of self-righteous twits inflames Vancouver Craigslist

Critical Mass, the mob of cyclists who commandeer city streets the last Friday of every month, blocking traffic, disrespecting the rules of the road, and generally showing contempt for motorists and pedestrians, sometimes getting in fights and generally infuriating those caught in their web, has been garnering a lot of negative talk in Vancouver, notwithstanding their apparent ability to garner sympathy from or morally blackmail Mayor Gregor Robertson by fraudulently invoking the name of cycling advocacy (the police are tacitly assisting the CM civil disobedience by warning motorists to stay clear of downtown on the unhappy Fridays; the police presently intend to do nothing to stop the event).

I noticed one message on the Craigslist bicycle sales page calling on cyclists to respond to a CBC article on which there were a lot of anti-Critical Mass comments. The Craigslist poster assumed the bike traders would be pro-Critical Mass. But I have yet to see any follow-up message in support, and I have now seen about ten anti-CM comments (though someone is flagging some of the comments for deletion, as, I suppose, politics is not Craigslist's raison d'etre. However the original comment is not yet deleted.) Most cyclists see Critical Mass as doing little but increasing the level of resentment that is directed at cyclists, thus endangering all of us.

Anyway, I thought one comment was worth preserving, testifying as it does to the power of bicycles to save us from nihilism, up to a point - coarse language follows:

I work for a living,I graduated from Emily Carr art school,I love bikes more than any other monetary posession,I have more handmade bikes than days in the week,I got my first Sex Pistols record in London in 1977,,,Fuck you Fixie welfare asshole tatood squeegie Twatts making car drivers hate me even more......

I'm not sure how to read this ode to hard work, private property, and punk rock, but I was just thinking that Dag is maybe going to have to rethink his ontology of the "death hippie".

A "Fixie" by the way is a single or fixed-gear bike, as used in velodrome track sprinting, and which is now a trendy item on the road among a certain young crowd apparently more interested in racing than coasting or breaking.