Resolutions Schmezolutions ✌️

Same Sh!t Different Year

Greetings Bike Nerds

Happy Gregorian new year to those who are celebrating 🥳 To me, every day is the start of a new year, so I prefer to start anew every morning. Gives the 1st of Jan less gravitas and less power as well. This also falls in line nicely with my boredom with resolutions. They are usually a rule that someone else made up, that I am using to beat myself up with. Why bother? The only resolution I ever successfully stuck to was giving up Carls Jr’s fried zucchini wedges for a year. I was miserable.

You could just have a resolution for a day. You stick to it? Cooool. You don’t? Meh, tomorrow is another day!

I’m about to fly back to London, after having spent 3 weeks with family in San Diego. Every time I return it's like SoCal renewed their deal with the devil: sunshine 364 days of the year in exchange for polluting perma-gridlock. There are people who enjoy this.

All this to say, I will likely have the worst jet lag of my life so far (I actually had issues flying East to West this time around - first time that’s ever happened), so I am just sending an email to say hello hi, we are still alive and have just reopened the repairs workshop. You can book a service by emailing repairs@lbk.org.uk. Classes will also be commencing this week. Everything is up on the website.

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📯 NEW CLASS ALERT 📯

We have a new class! It's a test class for part 2 of our 3 part Wheel Building series (because we luuuurve scaffolding knowledge.) Please welcome Part 2: 'How to Lace and True a Wheel' to our class smörgåsbord.

Part 1: "How to Replace a Spoke & True a Wheel" is the foundation, and is required for Part 2, so if you haven't done that yet, best get started there if learning how to build your own wheels is your resolution of the day.

Part 3: "How to Measure Spokes/Lace/True a Wheel" will be coming soon. You can see the scaffolding of knowledge quite clearly here. We are working backwards from having a nice and true wheel, which is a lot of muscle memory. Repetition is the key to successful wheel building!

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I have two final things to add.

1. free Palestine and

2. Fuck nazis

For those of you who don’t use the Substack platform or their Twitter spinoff “Notes”, a quick primer: Jonathan Katz wrote an article in the Atlantic about how nazis are on Substack - Marisa Kabas created the Substackers Against Nazis campaign asking why the organisation doesn’t enforce their Terms of Service with Nazis, like it does with sex workers. Substack wrote back and said blah blah free speech blah blah.

The ripostes to their response have been entertaining and enlightening:

No, Substack: You can’t have both the dystopian nightmare and “Flopsy Bunny’s Very Busy Day.”

Margaret Atwood

Substack's Dilemma

“McKenzie’s apologia deeply annoys me because it treats me like I’m a moron. It’s the equivalent of yelling over the wall of my walled garden “don’t worry, those guys three gardens over really just like Hugo Boss, and also they have some points on tax policy.”

Ken White

Substack Has A Nazi Opportunity

There is also a fun deep dive from

James Hanlon

And some dystopian speculation from

JD Goulet

To be clear, my tiny brain’s take is this:

Free Speech Absolutists are like All Lives Matter Karens. Yes, in a vacuum, obviously. But we don’t live in a vacuum, we live at the intersections of power structures, systems of oppression, and drastic economic inequality. Which means that our speech is subjected to these intersections as well. To bodge Orwell: all speech is equal, but some speech is more equal than others.

Substack is not simply an email platform like MailChimp where you pay to play, it's one that has the power to amplify and monetise voices. It has already done both for a known white supremacist. Substack also claims to want to get more involved in politics 😒 so one wonders what path they are going down.

Content moderation isn’t censorship. It’s like ratings for films or rules for Petrarchan sonnet rhyme schemes (ABBA ABBA CDE CDE). There are parameters within which to express oneself, in order to create an environment welcome for most people. Obviously you can’t please all of the people all of the time, but that doesn’t mean you don’t try to do what’s best for most.

I am keeping a close eye on what those who have far more knowledge on this are reporting. And if Substack dig their heels in, I will consider leaving this platform. But I don't want to, because this space has made me excited about writing again. Our newsletters have a home, I get actual feedback to what I'm writing, generous readers pay us for our work, and world bike domination grows closer every day. It looks like Substack are starting to listen, so I’m hoping they snap out of it.

I leave you with my favourite anti-war song as I go panic pack.

Ride on,

Jenni x