I love this Copenhagen blog, Cycle Chic, showcasing people looking good while riding bikes. Dresses, heels, suits … European bikers put the bikers in the U.S. to sartorial shame!
To do my small part, I have been riding to work in heels this week. It is really just as easy as riding in sneakers.
There’s also this blog on the same site, which features, amongst news & videos, gorgeous sans-people bike photography.
* Photo from Cycle Chic
Yesterday, I linked via twitter to this “manifesto”:
Dear Old People Who Run the World,
My generation would like to break up with you.
Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences.
You wanted big, fat, lazy “business.” We want small, responsive, micro-scale commerce.
You turned politics into a dirty word. We want authentic, deep democracy — everywhere.
Some others I know found it similarily irritating, began to retweet, and before long the author, Umair Hague, was calling us all cynics, who just couldn’t or wouldn’t see the, like, utter revolutionariness of his ideas. So Julian Sanchez did a little digging, and …
Browse over to author Umair Haque’s Havas Media Lab and you’ll find quite a lot more of the same: Breathless announcements that the Past is Behind Us and we can Break the Tired Old Rules to create a future where Rising Tides Lift All Boats, if only we repeat the word “authentic” enough times. Pages upon pages of it, but utterly insubstantial—there’s no there there. It’s easy to make fun of, but why bother? Well, Havas Media Lab is a spinoff of the global communications firm Havas, the world’s sixth largest (or, if you prefer, “big, fat, laziest”) ad agency. You’ll notice Havas clients like Nike and Wal-Mart occasionally name-checked on lists of good-guy innovators alongside more obviously community-centric businesses like Etsy. So if you notice that Haque’s “manifesto” sounds more like a marketing spiel than any sort of genuine reform program or statement of substantive principles—that’s because it is.
Via Hit & Run, a really lovely post from Dan Mage, who defends libertarians against accusations of being uncaring—
I tell people that libertarianism simply puts the responsibility for caring about other people back on you. It’s much easier to say that that “the government should do something about it,” than to take any personal responsibility for your life, your community, your country and the planet.
—but takes aim at libertarian corporatists, libertarians who balk at workers’ rights, and those who believe a libertarian philosophy somehow excludes cooperation and community:
People would have to start working together … and somehow that idea offends people, like it’s some kind of “commie” thing. What good is individualism however when it manifests as a self-serving conformity and obedience? How is “going it alone” as a corporate pawn an expression of individual freedom?
