Sunday
Feb272011
Critical Mass Horror in Brazil
Sun, February 27, 2011 This last Friday 25th February 2011 a Critical Mass event was held in Porta Alegre in Brazil, as I am sure many of these same CM rides were held in various parts of the world.
This one ends in a horrific manner. A car driver deliberately drives at high speed through the crowd of cyclists and keeps on going.
I was sent the link to this video by Juan Salazar, a regular reader of this blog. He gave no details of casualties.
I later found this report, and miraculously no one was killed, eight were injured, one female was seriously hurt. The driver later abandoned his car and fled the scene.
Reader Comments (11)
That's indescribable. I hope - for the car driver's sake - that he/she was having a coronary event at the time. Any other explanation and I'll have lost even more faith in humanity.
According to the local (Brazilian) CM blog, the driver is scheduled to surrender to the police. Guess my faith in humanity just dropped.
http://trunc.it/em25s
Here's some links for ya:
http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/ftpm8/crazy_driver_hits_cyclists/
http://translate.google.ca/translate?u=
http://g1.globo.com/brasil/noticia/2011/02/motorista-suspeito-de-atropelar-ciclistas-deve-se-apresentar-diz-policia.html&sl=pt&tl=en&hl=&ie=UTF-8
According to the translated news story from Brasil there were injuries but no casualties. Who knows, it might even be true -- we can hope, right?
I sign the RSS feed of your blog, and I was at the accident, I also was lightly hurt and saw everything. All the details and specially ALL THE LINKS TO THE DETAILED VIDEOS were posted in our blog http://massacriticapoa.wordpress.com . Google Translator is working fine with our posts, so I ask you to read, and specially to watch the videos. IT WAS NOT AN ACCIDENT, IT WAS A CRIME!
Thank you very much for spreading this awful piece of news, everybody in the world must know about this.
Attempting to humanize our public roads, cyclists are too often seen as obstacles to progress by those who prefer speed over civility. This story is terrible but something seems to happen to humans and how they treat others once provided with extraordinary powers. Fortunately no one was killed.
Walt Disney, as far back as 1950, ridiculed what happens to Mr. Walker once he became Mr. Wheeler. "The motorcar in the hands of the average man is rapidly facing extinction".
Goofy explains motormania: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZgiVicpZGk
If this man had used a gun instead of a car this incident would be front-page news everywhere.
This is no less than an attempt at multiple murder, the worlds cyclists must not let this drop until the culprit is in gaol!
Wow - that is just beyond words.
That's attempted murder multiplied many times over.
The story & video are being circulated - hate speech unleashed.
Example of a "kind" comment: "CM gets what they give, plain and simple. A reasonable person would understand this, radicalism begets radicalism -it's proven itself over and over again." Many other comments have been removed.
It's reasonable to run over cyclist who are "hogging" the road? Can a cyclist run over a car, SUV? Can a cyclist effect the same level of injuries?
They caught the guy. He is claiming self defense.
http://road.cc/node/31482
Dave, In the light of what's been happening lately in the world, this doesn't surprise me. I am so glad that there were no fatalaties.
Ok here's something that you might (for now) dismiss as insane, but you may hear more about this in the near future. It's just started really cranking the last couple weeks.
Until yesterday, I ran a cycling group with 167 members on Meetup.com. which was a great platform for organizing groups. Meetup's hiking group here in CT has 1700 members. That group is three years old. They are impressive.
But Meetup started getting all weirdly political and on January 27, suddenly introduced a glitchy and almost completely unusable new version of the site called "Mayhem Mode", which enabled group members to "self organize", instead of having an "organizer".
This idea was born from people chatting about the gulf oil spill...
This was later tied into a partnership with Google , and Meetup's CEO, Scott Heiferman, has started getting into politics all of a sudden, travelling to Iraq, Egypt, and Wisconsin. This is all tied into the American Youth Movement, which has sites to organize political movements. A lot of kids are into this, and use that platform for Critical mass rallies and other activities. The events are downloaded right onto your handset.
This platform has been operating strongly in Egypt as of late. Heiferman has been hanging out with Mark Zuckerman CEO of Facebook, and a kid named Jared Cohen , a famous activist. I saw a recent speculation that this whole network and political movement is Jewish based. (Just repeating what someone else wrote)
Thousands of strong PAYING organizers, myself included, have bailed on Meetup in the last week. You will see this in the news soon. Meetup doesn't care. They are getting subsidized by Google, and going political.
My point? Critical Mass is part of this whole communication network and youth movement. There are millions of dollars made through venture capital on this as we speak. It's scary.
I have a video of Hillary Clinton talking about this in 2008.
Welcome to the new age of Digital Democracy. And violence such as this will probably escalate, as youth feel more empowered, the flames fanned by Facebook, AYM, Meetup , and other platforms.
I moved to a new site and am starting again, 21 members have made the jump. I just want to ride bikes in a group...I have been working my ass off the past two weeks to fix this mess and keep my riders safe. I'm pretty pissed. I'm too old for this shit.
This could be just like the Arizona shootings, another hate crime spurned by a mass media movement.
Watch the videos on ...
WWW.Movements.org
Seemed like a nice ride for a CM. If they had been all in cars how long would the traffic jam have been? If the riders were trying to snarl traffic the driver did a better job. Authorities had to shut down the street because of his attack.
Hopefully he'll get a bunch of jail time, but it seems he has money so......
Update: Apparently the driver is being charged with seventeen counts of attempted murder. This article is in Portuguese, which I don't speak at all, so I'm not sure of any of the details.
http://www.diariodecanoas.com.br/site/noticias/policia,canal-8,ed-6,ct-502,cd-311065,manchete-true.htm