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I dunno, maybe it was a glitch.
I saw another post that seemed to agree with me, that was flickering in and out when I clicked on it, it disappeared. weird.
I'm looking forward to AT's response.
Well Alex did censor my comments. I guess it should be no surprise.
This was his explanation that he sent me via email: "t's because you keep getting personal. I did not once guess at Rogers' motivations or inner thoughts. My criticism is based on his record, on his actions. They're calling that a personal attack, but your comments are based on your fucking retarded idea that you understand my motivations, when I haven't shared them with you. -AT"
And this is my response (which will likely be deleted from bikeside shortly), and unfortunately my last contribution to bikeside.
Alex
Its useless to dialog here as you seem to prefer tepid criticism or unflagging support. Which is quite unfortunate, because I believe bikeside has great potential to be a place, not just for ideas you approve, but a market place where the best ideas on improving LAs bikablity can compete and be accepted or rejected on their own merits.
My comments (that you chose to censor) were sincere, thoughtful and based on your quotes and your actions.
I will admit that I have no way of knowing your motivations but it is not outside the realm of reasonable criticism to speculate why a public figure choses to act how they choose to act.
I have always prefaced my criticisms of you with a great admiration for your work.
You may not believe this but I love you and I love what you do.
What I do not love is your willingness to be very mean spirited and hurtful to people who would otherwise be huge supporters of your work.
It doesn;t mean that I am right, but I think that it is much more productive to discuss these ideas openly then for you to censor my writing then to send me a private email where you call my ideas "fucking retarded" .
If my ideas are so "retarded" you would not censor them, and create policy after the fact to justify it, you would respond to them or let them be rejected based on their own lack of merit.
Its a shame that your great work must suffer under the cloud of your immaturity and unprofessionalism. I hope for the sake of the bike scene as a whole you start acting more professional and start letting your excellent work shine for what it is.
If you choose to censor me again that is your prerogative, but please do not expect me to engage in an email dialog if you are incapable of discussing this publicly.
Everyone has different policies for what comments they allow on their personal blog; however, Bikeside LA is an advocacy/lobbying organization, and the blog is a representation of that organization. Unless your comment was obscene, threatening, or harassing (I would go so far to even say racist, sexist, or anti-semetic), on a public blog, I would say post it.
AT obviously has a hard on for anyone associated with LACBC. He seems to have a personal vendetta against the organization.
I think it is critical where his motivations lie to evaluate the authenticity of his arguments. He says it's not personal like Bill Clinton said he did not have sexual relations with Lewinsky.
He and his cohorts will dogpile on anyone that disagrees with them and their smug attitude does nothing to move the dialogue.
A group of cyclist that try to dominate the discussion, circle jerk on each other and try to censor legitimate criticism are the ultimate Bicycle Doucherati.
A group of cyclist that try to dominate the discussion, circle jerk on each other and try to censor legitimate criticism are the ultimate Bicycle Doucherati
Sounds like my kind of group; I want in.
I have never done anything stupid – I always apply intelligence to my actions. Once “mistakes = stupid” one loses their ability to take risks and learn from them.
I love it... fuck, I so need a phd. Dont get me wrong, I totally rationalize all my "mistakes" too. there are a lot of people that like to point to things I've done as stupid, but I put so much thought into my stupid mistakes (oops) that I can't help but not chalk it up to intelligence.
A personal attack for Bikeside’s purposes will be any remark which:
- speculates about another person’s motivation, intentions, or character in order to undermine that person
- derogatory remarks about a person’s personal life or appearance
talk about vague. I wonder if anyone who speculates thus will be removed:
"I think this article was written for the passion of bike love and from the mind of pure intelligent criticism of only the UFO kind."
I suppose that's why he added "to undermine that person"
md2 responding to a comment by Foldie
06.15.10 - 2:42 pm
My comment is gone for ever.
Ans is my most recent one, save for my reposting it here.
My original comment was in response to a quote from this article
http://www.bikesidela.org/ted-rogers-phones-it-in-04/
I specifically responded to a comment (almost tangential) that Alex said that John Fisher of DOT was not a "strategic" target for criticism , which to me implied that the people and orgs he chooses to attack must be strategically good targets in his mind.
While acknowledging the great work alex does I said that it unfortunately gets eclipsed by the fact the he tends to "piss all over" people and orgs he disagrees with.
What offended him (as represented in his email response) is not the salty language, but the fact that I tried to speculate on his motivations.
He has every right to censor me, but I think it does a great disservice to bikeside.
Trickmilla, not gone forever, I believe this is it:
"" dispute the notion that Fisher is a good strategic target"
I think this is what it comes down to for you Alex. That Fisher is "not a good strategic target" for you, but Mowery, Rogers & LACBC are.
Thats not strategy son, that's strategery.
I'm constantly amazed how the amazing activism you do on behalf of the cycling community in LA is dampened by your willingness to piss on anyone and everyone who disagrees with you."
I don't see what's wrong with your comment at all (or the Dude Abides' comment--name-calling, yes, but obscene? no). Also, some one on that board called me a "self-absorbed artist with histrionic personality disorder" and I neither complained nor responded. AT didn't remove stuff until it started to upset him; the insult at me was just removed later.
you are pretty awesome danceralamode!
I almost don't want to know how, so I can just going on believing that there a user at MRDC called danceralamode that has magical web abilities i will never understand.
trickmilla responding to a comment by danceralamode
06.15.10 - 3:20 pm
AT obviously has a hard on for anyone associated with LACBC. He seems to have a personal vendetta against the organization.
Alex has done some really amazing things for the bike community, and just as many times he has tried to tear it down. Is AT an advocate for the bicycling community or a watchdog of the LACBC? It's hard to agree with any of the good things that they have done when you are so proactive about pointing out their flaws. you might even say it's difficult if not impossible to be both things at once.
that said, i've read both articles and both are blobs of speculation regarding why cycling in LA is so dangerous. the fact is that there's plenty of blame to go around, and in my own speculative opinion, Ted Rogers deserves the least of it. And that's not to say that AT doesn't have some good points; it's the nasty way he portrays them and the unwillingness to hear criticism that leads people to stop reading his blog.
my advice to AT? stop attacking your friends. if it isnt your intention, it's certainly your effect. if you want to tear down an article by ted rogers, critique it point-by-point, but don't expect him to be present for every story in the bike community that he writes about. people can make their own judgements about his armchair journalism, but we're all better off that he is writing about it, agree with it or not.
just because you think it and it's edgy doesnt mean its fit to print. that's the crucial weakness of the blog movement: guys like AT are not their own best editors. i hope he steps it up.
"The principle is that Bikeside’s discourse will henceforth exceed a certain minimum level of civility. This will not be an environment for unsophisticated trolling. Bring your A-game trolling if you want to troll on Bikeside."
Translation:
Don't call me out on my bullshit or I will censor you!
Here's the problem: AT is seeing you call him immature and unprofessional as an attack not as a criticism. There is a difference. He could have criticized Ted without making it a personal attack, but he didn't. Your comment is a criticism of AT's behavior, but since he can't tell the difference between something based in malice and something that is trying to be constructive, he will delete it.
This should be hot linked so people can track back to the uncensored discussion.
Alex emailed me again and called me "unethical" because I quoted from the personal email in which he called my analysis of his motivations "fucking retarded" and said I had taken his words out of context. Fortunately for him his entire email is posted above so it is fully contextualized.
I've only been really mad at alex 1 time. When he tried to sabotage the bike safety awareness poster project that I worked on with Roadblock, LACBC, DOT & LAPD.
Other than that ... I merely find his constant attacks of fellow cyclists to be really sad, and yes I do think it unfortunately hurts his credibility and at times does overshadow some of his amazing work.
------
I think I've begun to understand Alex a little better.
He's a mathematician & his writing, his ethics, his thought process always seem very literal to me.
He will argue something to death based on its face value, its literal meaning, what is "provable" and never back down.
There no proofs for human behavior though.
And it helps to consider connotation and subtext when looking at things and trying to understand people.
Alex claims that people are wrong who call the Ted Rogers piece a "personal attack" that there are no "personal" "attacks" in there. He may be right in a literal sense but then again so many people reading the piece feel that the tone is that of a personal attack, that there is some sort of grudge involved, that this goes way beyond the critique of a piece that attempts to assign some of the blame for LA Bike woes with somebody who has held high rank at DOT for a long time.
Alex will argue this to the end and feel that he has won. But in the end no matter what he says we still have our perceptions. Because a text will always be composed of more than its literal meaning, it will always have a subtext.
The logic of math is not the same as putting words together in a sentence, and putting sentences together in a paragraph and so on. If Alex merely posted a response to Ted's article, refuting his assertions, then no one would complain. The fact is, Alex launched an attack. His choice of words, the way he framed it as a four-part series, the sweeping allegations he makes in the introductory post, all read as an attack. (I am a professional writer and editor, I'm not talking out of my ass here.)
And in case anyone didn't know, yes, I am the one who wrote the blog post, on my personal blog, about having some bad experiences at the Bicycle Kitchen. I tried to be nice about it, frame it as an honest and respectful complaint, and most people saw it that way. But not Alex. In the midst of me and another commenter having an actually productive conversation on Bikeside about the Kitchen incident, Alex butts in and becomes volatile again:
"Amanda,
By your own measures you don’t measure up. You had a bad experience at the Kitchen, and you were perfectly willing to blog that. Then you had a good experience at Bikerowave . . . but you never wrote that up. You say that “we have a responsibility to make our community strong by encouraging and helping each other out” yet you have been more discouraging to the volunteers of bike repair collectives than anyone else in recent memory.
You still have an opportunity to make right, but I think it behooves you to acknowledge your failure to be positive as regards the bike repair collectives."
Here is my two-part response (yes, I get pissy...Alex talked to me when I went to Bikerowave and was practically ordering me to write a good post about them.)
"Well, geez, Alex, some of us actually have jobs. But if you had actually been to my blog lately, you would see that my most recent post states that I have a number of posts to write and catch up on, which I haven’t had time to do since the LACM incident, which occurred right after my visit to Bikerowave.
My post about the Bicycle Kitchen was about the Bicycle Kitchen alone. I did not talk about bike co-ops in general nor do I anywhere mention the Bikerowave. Once again, I ask you to take a reading comprehension course along with a writing course so you can learn some tone. And yes, so you don’t have to guess, I’m being harsh here.
Furthermore, my blog is a PERSONAL blog about my PERSONAL experiences. I do not claim to be a journalist nor am I a lobbying organization that claims to speak on the behalf of the cycling community while ripping apart anyone who has a differing view or opinion. Nope, Alex, that’s you."
"One more thing, Alex. I didn’t say “we all have a responsibility to make our community strong by encouraging and helping each other out.” I said that’s what Ted is reminding us of. Learn some reading comprehension already."
I ask forgiveness, readers of MR, for getting so pissed off with him, but he's bitching at me for not writing a blog post that he wants me to write (when it's my blog) and when I was on LACM and he asked me to do all these freaking TV interviews for him. He knows I've been doing all that stuff at his/Bikeside's request.
Right? Except that I really wanted to write a post about Bikerowave and how much fun I had there. Just like I was going to write an update about another blog post and how things were totally different the second time around. You know, part of my idea, was that to show people who are new to cycling, learn from my experience, do this and don't do this the first time you go/do/try/whatever, here is how to navigate this world and not have make my mistakes. Anyways, I'm going to write about Bikerowave anyhow, if not just to give props to the cool people I met there (aside from the one who spent the evening trying to get me to blog about it--WTF I am nobody, nobody reads my stupid little blog, why do you care so much?!)
I love how I am reduced to the mathematician when it serves people's negative viewpoints. Apparently mathematicians are horribly uncreative people whose thought processes are not much more sophisticated than an abacus. At times like these I'm never a photographer, or a brother, or a runner, or a double century rider, or a guy who's fun to hang out with.
I removed posts that were nasty and vitriolic and openly attacked the character of another person. It's a simple standard that I'm choosing for Bikeside - baseless unequivocal personal attacks won't have a place in the comments. Love it or hate it, that's the standard. No one guaranteed you that every site on the internet would be a free speech zone where you could openly troll. Roadblock has been known to remove posts or entire threads from MR.com, so Bikeside is not the first to the standards of discourse party.
Here's some of the things Milla originally wrote:
"I'm constantly amazed how the amazing activism you do on behalf of the cycling community in LA is dampened by your willingness to piss on anyone and everyone who disagrees with you."
"your willingness to be mean-spirited to those you don't agree with?
Or maybe it was my suggestion that this is really about strategy for you. Angling to find the best people to attack or support to get your way."
Danceralamode:
"Once again, I ask you to take a reading comprehension course along with a writing course so you can learn some tone."
"The Dude Abides":
"I don't care what your cv says or the fact you don,t own a car, you sir are a douchbag. Those who have real jobs and try to spend our free time advocating cyclist causes have more moxy than you will ever have. Hit the streets and shut your mouth."
"My first comment was censored because it lacked the vision of being a lap monkey of the bike doucherati and the circle jerk mentality these people have."
Anyway, it's not about being thin skinned or intolerant of criticism. I'm getting absolutely slammed by the Ted brigade, and most of the slamming remains posted and available to the public. It's about what do we want from Bikeside comment discourse? If it's a 100% free speech zone, then this would be a bad policy. However, it's my desire that it be a substantive discussion focused on facts. Speculation about another's state of mind, intentions, & thought processes is just that - speculation - and it doesn't provide enough benefit to the discussion to out weigh the nasty environment it creates.
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Ridazz Roulette!
Borfo Save the drama for yo mama
Hey borfo post your cat porn on some other thread...this is serious business!!
when is this ride?
Hey, add this kitty!