Nuxx:053240cc-c533-4b42-854b-7eead073c83f@s19g2000vbp.googlegroups.com

Path: number1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!postnews.google.com!s19g2000vbp.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail Message-ID: <053240cc-c533-4b42-854b-7eead073c83f@s19g2000vbp.googlegroups.com> From: Nuxx Bar  Newsgroups: uk.rec.cycling Subject: Re: Chapman: Abuse of Administrator Status on Wikipedia Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2009 11:24:37 -0700 (PDT) References: <3604af8b-1aaa-4b4c-8b28-04bc1c2ab5b8@j8g2000yql.googlegroups.com>  <87rht45o8v13hrrrrh5aqjbtgqqd2i0sqt@4ax.com>       <6f92c4b4-25ec-4eee-bd90-1be5a43d73e3@s28g2000vbp.googlegroups.com> <7e131e4a-8d55-4d8c-81d9-2c83f11989aa@y13g2000yqn.googlegroups.com> <6e4b4344-90bb-455c-8532-d5466d251514@v6g2000vbb.googlegroups.com> Lines: 37 Organization: http://groups.google.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 81.156.248.79 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: posting.google.com 1239215077 21806 127.0.0.1 (8 Apr 2009 18:24:37 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2009 18:24:37 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: s19g2000vbp.googlegroups.com; posting-host=81.156.248.79; posting-account=7_6kYAkAAABD6HrjM0VxehwvZOKMxm4g User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.8) Gecko/2009032609 Firefox/3.0.8 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729),gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Bytes: 3822 Xref: perfectly-safe.chapmancentral.co.uk uk.rec.cycling:694130

On Apr 8, 11:53=A0am, RudiL  wrote: > I have also been happy to remain silent over the rants about people > being made to drive more slowly leading to "thousands of deaths". This > is clearly insane, and so again I don't think it does any harm as > pretty well no-one (not even newbies on here) is going to be unable to > see through this manic deranged delusion.

No offence, but it's only "clearly insane" to people who are either rather simple or haven't thought it through.

Do you accept that drivers have to prioritise some factors above others, and that forcing them to concentrate on the wrong factors in favour of the right ones makes them more dangerous? Do you accept that making the population of drivers more dangerous increases road deaths? If so, what is so insane about stating that forcing drivers to pay so much attention to keeping their speed below an arbitrary, often stupidly low figure increases road deaths as a whole? Something only has to make each driver a tiny bit worse and that adds up to a lot of deaths across the country every year. Do you really think that it's sensible to make speed limits lower than the 85th percentile, thus criminalising the statistically safest drivers?

We had a large shift in policy towards an obsession with the speed limit 15 years ago, and since then, the falls in road deaths which we'd been getting reliably for decades have become dramatically less. The most plausible explanation by far is that large shift in policy.

> A cyclist newsgroup > should not be a place where people are allowed to try and persuade > cyclists not to cycle in a manner that increases their safety, but > instead to put themselves more at risk of being knocked off their > bikes.

Unfortunately, even if the group was moderated, it would be a brave (or foolish) moderator indeed who censored posts where people simply advocated certain ways of cycling. You can't ever really expect to stop that kind of thing on any discussion forum/newsgroup.