On Thu, 26 Jul 2007 08:46:49 +0930, Michael Warner
<
[email protected]> wrote:
>On Tue, 24 Jul 2007 11:50:23 -0700, Zoot Katz wrote:
>
>> garages: time spent watching automobile commercials or attending
>> consumer education meetings to improve quality of the next buy.
>
>Americans go to meetings to learn how to buy cars? Wow.
They attend automobile trade shows in droves.
They get invitations to coffee klatch, wine & cheese parties, buffets
and barbecues from the local automobile dealerships where they're
customers.
And to clarify, Zoot Katz did not_write what has drawn these idiotic
responses form from the unwashed, it was written by IVAN ILLICH.
Zoot Katz posted a quote - in quotation marks with the attribution.
Get it?
Here's a few more of his quotes to twist your knickers.
"The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man's metabolic
energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man
outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other
animals as well. Bicycles let people move with greater speed without
taking up significant amounts of scarce space, energy, or time. They
can spend fewer hours on each mile and still travel more miles in a
year. They can get the benefit of technological breakthroughs without
putting undue claims on the schedules, energy, or space of others.
They become masters of their own movements without blocking those of
their fellows. Their new tool creates only those demands which it can
also satisfy. Every increase in motorized speed creates new demands
on space and time. The use of the bicycle is self-limiting. It allows
people to create a new relationship between their life-space and
their life-time, between their territory and the pulse of their
being, without destroying their inherited balance. The advantages of
modern self-powered traffic are obvious, and ignored. That better
traffic runs faster is asserted, but never proved. Before they ask
people to pay for it, those who propose acceleration should try to
display the evidence for their claim."
---
"The bicycle also uses little space. Eighteen bikes can be parked in
the place of one car, thirty of them can move along in the space
devoured by a single automobile. It takes three lanes of a given size
to move 40,000 people across a bridge in one hour by using automated
trains, four to move them on buses, twelve to move them in their
cars, and only two lanes for them to pedal across on bicycles."
-- Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity, Toward a History of Needs, 1978.
http://ranprieur.com/readings/illichcars.html
---
"The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North
Americans seem to believe that they always should, may, and actually
can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately
this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts."
--
zk
