David Megginson / is on Nostr

Tea drinker. Urban dweller. Classical guitarist. Grounded pilot. Pantheist. Jane Jacobs fanboy. Language nerd. 25-year vegetarian. 30-year Linux user. Disabled. Open-* and 🇺🇳 humanitarian aid person. Former medieval philologist. Living on unceded Anishinabe Algonquin territory.

Picture: Large reddish-orange letters spelling "Hintonburg", some lying flat on the sidewalk for use as benches.

Last Notes

2023-10-17 16:41:44

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@npub16ws…sl6a No, please don't. Safety for disabled and elderly people — and our confidence to go out safely — also matters. We don't have to put one on hold to address the other.
I can cycle a bit at this phase of my recovery from spinal injury, so I belong to both groups, but I find it very frustrating that discussions about better cycling infrastructure (which I support) often consider accessibility for the disabled as a "let's leave it for later" thing. We have to drop the ableism.

2023-10-17 16:38:25

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@npub16ws…sl6a Yes, exactly. Most of the work is regulating cars better.
And ditto (to a lesser extent) for bicycles. The situation is not at all comparable with cars (who can do the most damage), but still, pedestrians — especially those of us who are disabled — also need safety limits on what cyclists can do: no adults riding on crowded sidewalks, no riding in pedestrian crosswalks or on pedestrian-only cross signals, no blasting through red lights at T-intersections at full speed, etc.

2023-08-27 22:48:04

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@npub1ddp…2tax @npub1xl5…rqkr You're comparing the Platonic ideal of science to the messy reality of religion. There's no such thing as "pure" science any more than there is "literal" Christianity. They both get caught up in the very-human competition for status, power, and resources.
For example, why do scientists spend far more time researching heart disease than malaria? It's not for any scientific reason; it's because most people in rich countries aren't at risk from malaria.

2023-08-27 22:32:53

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@npub1ddp…2tax In that case, it was because of their religion, not despite it. The early white abolitionists in the UK and US believed that enslavement was incompatible with Jesus' teachings, and that inspired them to organise. While at the same time, others (e.g. in the U.S. south) were preaching that enslavement was god's plan.
Like science, religion is what people make of it.

2023-08-27 22:17:53

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@npub1ddp…2tax Thanks again for continuing the conversation.
Even evangelical Christianity isn't all fundamentalist. The evangelicals in England were originally protest movements against state power and the Church of England. The abolitionist movement started among progressive evangelicals, while high-church C of E was still happily accepting endowments from wealthy enslavers. /more

2023-08-27 20:21:43

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@npub1ddp…2tax @npub1zdp…vqv8 Thank you for your reply.
What you wrote is true of a subset of religious sects, but not most (and even fundamentalist sects evolve over time; just not in a good way).
Why not take an inductive/scientific approach to religion and see what's out there, instead of deducing from pre-determined dogma? 😉
(If you are a direct victim of one of those fundamentalist sects, you have my sympathy and my apology for the light-heartedness.)