Comment 109413

By Pxtl (registered) - website | Posted February 20, 2015 at 09:43:57 in reply to Comment 109406

Every charge he levels against "activists" can be leveled against people he agrees with. I haven't been to nearly as many of these meetings as I'd like, but I've seen the same domination of meetings from people I firmly disagree with.

NIMBY's, callous folks who don't care about the kids in their neighborhood, and the occasional outright lunatic appear in these meetings and try to dominate conversation. And you see the same online, since the barrier to entry is even lower. To try to paint this as an exclusive problem of the complete-streets/urbanism set is absurd.

And also, while I appreciate backpedalling on his discussion of "unemployed activists", if he wants to correct anybody it's should be the CBC, because the implication of his words was pretty freaking clear and if he didn't say those words then the CBC misquoted him.

And yes, if you ask somebody politically disengaged, you might get answers that would agree with whitehead. But if you talk with them for 5 minutes (regardless of your political leanings) you can get them to change those answers. To me, somebody whose opinion is one step away from tabula rasa isn't a silent majority, it's a silent abstention from the conversation.

Look at his "silent majority" in the bus lanes thing. The "silent majority" was actually a 50/50 split, and when you gave the public the option of fixing the bus-lane instead of killing it, that was your silent majority.

So yeah, Whitehead crying for the "silent majority" sounds pretty absurd after the bus-lane thing.

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