What? D: You don’t have $7,000 to spend on a bakfiets that couldn’t even fit all your stuff anyway?

I’m not sure if you just couldn’t understand my statement and attempted sarcasm here or if this is a genuinely bad response that unironically blames the bike. I’m clearly pointing to culture as the root cause of this, particularly the predominance of neoliberal politics and settler-colonial relationships with the land, so I assume it’s the former but that doesn’t apply.

You misunderstand, what you said was rude enough on its own to warrant animosity. You fundamentally do not understand what you are talking about because you lack the basic empathy and systemic knowledge to even identify the problem; you have presumed that by the grace of god you have divine answers and never questioned why you think what you think. Who benefits from such a shallow narrative?

“Personally I think an hour long commute by bike would be much more pleasant.”

I know that may come as a shock to you, people are not just dumber than you. Most people do in fact make good decisions based on what resources they have available to them, and time is extremely limited for us poor peasants who have to work for a living. It does not matter if you think infrastructure is the only reasonable barrier and most people are just big lazy dumdums, because infrastructure is not getting fixed in most places in this country. As with many Canadians, I do not live in a place where it is safe or practical to use a bike regularly, that is a fact. The closest grocery stores to me are about forty minutes round trip by bike and would require me to traverse a six lane highway to access, that is not acceptable when it is a ten minute drive with nearly zero risk to my body. Yes, that is too much time because again, this may be shocking to you, people with work and responsibilities also have significantly limited energy in their day that would be expended not only by the biking itself, but the stress of risking your life to make the trip. People who work fucking forty to sixty hours a week on swing shifts with kids are not obligated give up whatever time and energy they have to maintain their health and home to force the use of a bicycle to make up for being forced to have a car. It is pointless.

Your comfort is irrelevant, I do not give a shit if this reality makes the world more incomprehensible to you. Grow up, not everyone has your resources and you’ve been privileged enough to get what you’ve had.

Unreal level of pompous douchebag energy here, I will not be paying attention to you and I will not read whatever bullshit response you cobble together.

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I’m so tired of privileged people in the city talking down to everyone else like we don’t know how cities work (“different threat models” fuck outta here with that bullshit). I’ve lived in cities ranging from 200k to 700k and guess what? There isn’t bike infrastructure; you share the road and there’s some adequate bike-lanes in affluent neighbourhoods that I don’t give a shit about. In the city I’m currently in, bike-lanes share a merge with turning lanes f so nooooobody uses them because they don’t want to get nailed by some douchebag in a light truck who can’t even see past the steering wheel. Nobody is talking about a conspiracy, this is the reality of neoliberal politics and the ruins of suburban sprawl. When I say, “authorities” I’m referring to the systems of power that operate in opposition to workers and the land that relegates decisions for infrastructure to affluent land-owners who couldn’t give a shit less about sustainability or accessibility. I also saw you put “wear warm clothes” as a response to someone saying that dangerous winter weather makes bikes impractical like you’re on some Marie Antoinette shit. Don’t talk to me like you understand any of this when it’s obvious you haven’t actually had to live in different places in this country.

Regardless of that, car-dependency makes biking distances prohibitively expensive in the one way that you clearly have never had to think about: time. I do not have the fucking time to bike to my dentist or grocery store – even if I had a backfiets that could actually carry groceries – when everything is spaced out to accomodate cars. It’s nice that you have time for that, most people have work and responsibilites that puts their time at a premium and that makes biking a very low priority on how to live sustainably. I cannot afford to bike. Everything you’ve said speaks from the distorition that individual choice is a primary vector for change when we know that systemic causes for decisions, like driving instead of biking, provide more effective explanations and paths to real change. You subscribe to the very narratives that are used to reproduce this unsustainable way of life and have the gall to sit there and act like you know better than others. -

Not even a joke, someone on a bike was struck by a car and killed just a few blocks away from me this very morning; fourth one in the past few years in this area.

“Buy a bike,” is such privileged shit, dude. Most people in Canada do not live in a place where bikes are a viable option. I don’t have an extra three hours in my day that also puts me at substantially higher risk of bodily harm. If they’re not affluent hobbyist the most common bike rider is someone who cannot afford the expense of a vehicle and are exploited much more heavily by our public transport system.

Car dependency is certainly an existential issue that manifests in Canada’s city planning, cost of living, and environmental footprint. What you just said, that people’s choices are the problem, is exactly the narrative the state and capitalists would like you to subscribe to. It is a systemic issue remedied only by decades of consistent advocacy and action.

Why don’t you take a look at the authorities in Canadian territory that have fought tooth and nail to defend system we have for the better part of the last century?

I’m telling you that it is irrelevant whether this is a response he’d find reasonable, he is not a reasonable person. Charlie Kirk thought that going to a university campus to produce soundbites for his nazi audience was a reasonable idea and I’m drawing that parallel very intentionally. Trump’s only “politically viable” options are to use this well-deserved assassination as a tool to proceed with suppression and extermination because of how deeply fascist his supporters and administration is.

You’re missing the point by acting like there’s “two sides” to this, Carney is not your friend and you do not benefit from any sort of conjured empathy for him; he wants the worst for you. This action is not justifiable like all his actions are not justifiable so long as he maintains the inherent brutality of this system.

Also, I took a look at your post history to see if there was some idea of your politics to work with and it’s clear you don’t have a lot of resolve yourself. Multiple times you talked about giving money to another genocidal monster, Joanne Rowling, just because that is the convenient option. I’m sure you wouldn’t talk that way if you were part of a group she has targeted for eradication, so I’m guessing the empathy and understanding extends so far as what you find reasonable yourself.

If the boundaries of political violence are drawn at a single bullet, then there is no hope for peace in the US or Canada. Erosion of public health is political violence, protection of commodified housing is political violence, increased police budgets oriented toward profit and property protection at the expense of unsheltered people’s safety is political violence, the continued discrimination and injustices faced by First Nations and indigenous peoples in so-called Canada is political violence, cooperation with Israel is political violence. Canada’s entire history is the maintenance of settler-colonial violence. These people are not opposed to political violence, they depend on it.

The only reason this has gotten the attention it has is because fascists are using it to proceed with their plans of suppression and eradication. Politicians recognize this as violence as they understand this form of violence can be turned on them while they are protected from the systemic violence they perpetrate. A narrative that frames their words as “reasonable” responses ignores that there is no reasoning with these people the same way there was no reasoning with Charlie Kirk. Violence is their way of life and they will only frame violence in a way that protects themselves.

His children are better off without him, he said he’d force his daughter to give birth if she was raped as a child for Christ’s sake. Empathy directed at them is obviously fake because they were victimized by their father who is now unable to cause them more harm; real empathy would be directed toward their recovery, not obfuscating the harm this man did to everyone.

People surprised by this haven’t been paying attention.

Uh, no I don’t hope he incites even more racist violence when violence against racialized minorities is on the rise. That isn’t a cool, antifascist take you seem to think it is. He’s already irredeemably awful and frustrating to chuds, we don’t need random people to pay even more with their lives and bodies just to make him look even worse before he gets got.

Guy’s a chud. Another post from this Instagram profile: “RIP Charlie you were the best of us.” This post is also explicitly calling for policy inspired by Donald Trump’s isolationist looting scheme. The account was made the day after Kirk got proven wrong and then posts this.

Pretty clear picture to me.

Yes. This is terrifying to fascists because most of them don’t think enough to consider how ideological purity would manifest in a rabidly genocidal ideology and the wealthier ones think they can insulate themselves from the violence. Charlie getting easily killed publicly by one of their own is the exact thing they thought they were safe from.

PP is a neolib who played with nazism for fun and genuinely thought there couldn’t be consequences for it.

Awesome for you and your cohort, sounds privileged. That was twenty years ago and still sounds exceptional. I’ve been to multiple universities and colleges along with family members, even programs that require a workstation pc do not provide them for you. Im working on updating one right now and at a “better” uni you have to apply for a fund through your student association. Best you normally get is rentable laptops from the library.

I’ve never seen a post-secondary school that provides computer hardware.

Ironically redditor-like comment. Wasn’t trying to bring “drama” just pointing out how differently right-wing sites treat these events.

A redditor got pissed at me yesterday for saying the Toronto Police infamously protect nazis.

Lmao, the Communist United States. My guy, that’s where fascism comes from. That’s where they make it. It’s always been a genocidal and extractivist state and capitalism emerged through its existence. Ffs their nazis are killed by other nazis because there’s just that fucking many.

Nobody is a terrorist for killing Nazis. Charlie Kirk did this for thirteen years and even though he contributed to an incalculable amount of death, he was only stopped by a bullet.

Similarly, it’s important to remember that despite millions of people pleading with JK, she is still single-handedly responsible for anti-trans and sexist laws in the UK. There are people who will die because she hasn’t been stopped. JK’s words are from a person who can and has contributed to genocide without ever getting their hands dirty. She knows that the state that tolerates fascism will always protect her.

I can’t believe adults have watched the genocide in Gaza for two years and still think everyone has the privilege of decency in self-defense.

It wasn’t even someone fucking oppositional to Kirk, it was another Nazi. Everything here is just so hollow dude ffs.

His last two statements were transhpbobic and racist. “Gang violence” means racialized violence, it’s imagined as a form of violence exclusive to undesirable non-white groups.

PP deserves to feel scared for the very same reason. Bolt-action rifles are legal in Canada and he’s made is career about targeting vulnerable groups and pandering to chuds. Now he knows that the chuds could just kill him because of memes and everyone loved seeing that Nazi eat it.

Charlie was killed by a bolt-action rifle, them’s still legal in Canada. Neolibs have been eroding every legal means of challenge to the state, a strategy that predictably has short-term payoffs at the cost of violence as the last remaining option for those who the state targets. Imagine all of the people who were killed by Doug Ford’s axing of medical care alone, it would only take one family member who realizes he won’t stop for it to happen to him. PP has decided that fascist rhetoric imported from the states was the most effective avenue to expansion of the interests of capital, and seems to have just now realized that he wasn’t prepared to play that game.