Yes, bikes are political. Since their invention, they have been political. “Bicycle riding came to embody the individuality women were working toward with the suffrage movement. It also gave women a mode of transportation and clothing that allowed for freedom of movement and of travel.” (source) Have you ever thought about the trails you ride? Are they city? Or on state land? Do you know who the original stewards of the land were? What tribes? Remember when our federal lands were at risk last year? They still are, by the way. Do you ever ponder how you’re allowed to ride there? And what happened with the areas you’re not? Well, turns out, the reasons about where and how we ride bikes are because bikes are political.

As tensions arise in Minneapolis and across the United States, Monumental Loop co-founder, Bikepacking Roots board-member, and Outdoor Alliance ally, Matt Mason, has penned a Dust-Up stating the obvious to many, but it clearly needs to be said: “BIKES ARE POLITICAL!”

Editorial note: The communities in Minneapolis are reeling right now and can really use your help. If you can, please consider donating to Support Phillips Families in Urgent Need, Support for Critical Housing Needs, and there is a massive list of grassroot aid organizations on the MPLS Mutual Aid Linktree.

This week, several bike brands spoke out against ICE operations and expressed their support for immigrants. Predictably, and sadly, the comments were filled with “keep politics out of it” or some variation of “I ride to escape politics”. At my most generous, I can refrain from assuming these folks are all bootlickers, but there’s certainly an unhealthy dose of privilege in those statements. Setting aside my own judgments, the idea that bikes aren’t political is simply incorrect. Bikes are political… and we’re doing ourselves a disservice by ignoring that fact.

Frankly, we don’t need to stress ourselves searching for examples of politics shaping where and how we ride. Bike lanes? Political. No bikes in designated wilderness areas? Political. Cattle shitting in the spring that you rode all day to reach? Political… and the ranchers know it! Tariffs increasing bike prices? Political. Every level of government, from town councils to the President of the United States, makes decisions that affect cycling.

Because “keep politics out of bikes” is such an obnoxiously ignorant statement, I won’t spend much time on it. Instead, let’s dive deeper into what is possible when we unify our voices and engage with the political world. Yes, that’s a sneaky Bob Dylan reference.

We live in a political world
Love don’t have any place
We’re living in times
Where men commit crimes
And crime don’t have any face

Over the past decade, I’ve been attempting to secure long-term protection or recognition for the Monumental Loop. Originally, the idea for the route sprang from a meeting with local, state, and federal elected officials, along with community members, in 2009. Political. At the time, there was a push from Senators Udall and Bingaman to designate nearly 500,000 acres of Doña Ana County as wilderness areas.

Ultimately, the ranching community, along with off-roaders, was able to use its political influence to squash the designation. Quick side note: the ranching community/meat industry is so proficient at politics that the government essentially pays them to degrade our public lands. It’s an infuriating example of how an industry can use political power to get what it wants, even when it isn’t supported by the majority of citizens.

By 2012, a coalition of hikers, scientists, and public lands lovers, but oddly not many cyclists, had gathered enough steam to push for a National Monument designation on the same half a million acres. In 2014, President Obama designated Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks a National Monument. Political. Because cyclists, specifically mountain bikers, were absent from the coalition, the language in the monument designation has since been interpreted to disallow any new mountain bike trails in the monument.

That’s a huge missed opportunity with lasting consequences, all because we “stuck to bikes.”

Now twelve years into OM-DP’s existence on the landscape, I (with help from a bunch of folks) have been able to get bikepackers and mountain bikers a seat at the decision-making table here in Las Cruces. Politics, it turns out, is built on relationships. Relationships can be messy and draining, and keeping them healthy requires sustained effort.

Taylor Rogers at Outdoor Alliance says, “Imagine what’s possible when you skip a few rides and instead advocate for the places we ride”.

Unfortunately, I’ve skipped more than a few rides lately and spent far too much time on Zoom! Those missed rides were replaced by meetings with Senators, a role on the Bikepacking Roots Board, a training program with Outdoor Alliance, and a personal commitment to always mention getting livestock off public land at every meeting. Is this a meeting? And what’s come of my visits to D.C, my new bolo tie, and my efforts to build relationships with lawmakers?

Well, not much yet (my midwestern humility and humor showing there), but I’ve put Doña Ana County and the Monumental Loop in position to be among the first batch of routes to receive federal recognition through the B.O.L.T. Act. Political, and a huge win for a place that wasn’t on the map for cyclists until recently.

There are countless more examples of how politics shapes the who, where, and why of cycling. It’s literally an endless list. The one currently in the news is, you can’t ride a bike if ICE kills you. The sooner we recognize how powerful our collective voices can be and put them to work, the sooner we’ll have safe streets, fully funded land management agencies, well-maintained and legally protected trail systems, and a diverse, thriving community of cyclists.

Or we hide our heads in the sand, use bikes as an escape, and watch as we slowly lose everything from our constitutional freedoms to our public lands.

Bikes are political, and you are too.

Editorial note: The communities in Minneapolis are reeling right now and can really use your help. If you can, please consider donating to Support Phillips Families in Urgent Need, Support for Critical Housing Needs, and there is a massive list of grassroot aid organizations on the MPLS Mutual Aid Linktree.

If you’re new to this series, welcome to The Dust-Up. This will be a semi-regular platform for Radavist editors and contributors to make bold, sometimes controversial claims about cycling. A way to challenge long-held assumptions that deserve a second look. Sometimes they will be global issues with important far-reaching consequences; other times, they will shed light on little nerdy corners of our world that don’t get enough attention.

The post The Dust-Up: Bikes are Political appeared first on The Radavist.

Howdy folks,

I have some good news, which is that, after seven months, I’ve finally recovered from Long Covid. This is not something I particularly want to talk about in depth but it was the worst thing that ever happened to me! Anyway, sorry for the long period without posting that much, but I hope this amazing house (both laudatory/derogatory, that’s dialectics, baby) will make up for the three months I went AWOL.

BEHOLD:

Not to be over-exuberant, but I genuinely think this is the best McMansion exterior of all time. That includes all the messed up castles, the Mediterranean-style cult complexes, the Staten Island weirdness. Nothing, to me, epitomizes just how uniquely wacky these houses can be. The oversized broken pediment with the fat fake corinthian columns, the lawyer foyer transom window, the ultra-nub, the 45-degree angle, it is all there and it is all hellish, and none of it will ever happen ever again. Anyway this house is $2.5 million dollars and 10,000 square feet. Someone should buy it and give house tours to young people for whom this way of live will soon be unimaginable.

There is nothing so bold to me as the idea of a canted lawyer foyer flanked by two equally huge windows. The fact that the house is more populated by vases than people…something something a vessel for wealth, ah!

Someone on TikTok is going to find this house and set all the pictures to that terrible vaporwave nostalgia song. “tuscan kitchen [black heart emoji]” (as is their right, just like blogging is my right)

If you were a rich person muralist, please get in touch with me (patreon@mcmansionhell.com) I want to hear YOUR stories!!!!

I mean, if I had a giant mysterious wardrobe I, too, would be fernmaxxing (I am 32 years old and will not be talking like this. I am getting generationmogged and have to draw the line somewhere.)

If someone says to you “we should go to Venice in May” ABORT ABORT ABORT. you WILL pay 15 euros for gin and tonic. you WILL get pickpocketed or puked on by British people. you WILL be eaten by mosquitoes. Go in November when no one’s around and you can have a good cry about how everything dies, sinks into the ocean, one might say, and how futile it is to try keeping it alive on horrible wooden stilts. The gondolier will tell you wistfully about how the dolphins returned to the lagoons during the pandemic lockdown. Then he will look at you because their leaving again is your fault.

I hate putting the word “cuck” in this blog. Ten years ago, that would warrant an angry parent email. Now children say cuck to each other in elementary school because they learned it from a Charlie Kirk assassination fancam.

This is kind of like one of those 19th century galleries but for 400,000aires who mostly think of art as a piece of furniture.

I used to not believe in the mobbed up pizza place (no one likes an ethnic stereotype) but there was one I went to in Coastal New Jersey that was unmistakably mobbed up. Guys coming in and out of the back in suits, cash only, no GrubHub, no delivery. It wasn’t called Vito’s though. That would be stupid of me to disclose.

It’s so funny that for a month we collectively pretended that every man alive cared about the roman empire. Just the kind of cute thing we used to do online before cultural microphenomena became primarily driven by incel forums.

That’s right, folks, McMansion Hell is TEN YEARS OLD this year, and there WILL be a party in Chicago in July. (More details later.) Anyway, heinous back facade. What were they thinking.

If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams. (Don’t worry! This doesn’t adjust for inflation! Now’s the perfect time to join!) By the way: new subscribers can buy a year of McMansion Hell for just $12!

Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar! (I would seriously appreciate any and all tips because I am now, like, $3000 in medical debt from having Long Covid, a disease doctors and insurance companies famously believe in and cover. If you are the woman who hacked up a lung next to me on my flight to New Mexico, not even an N95 could beat your germs and I feel entitled to financial compensation.)

Anyway! See you next month!

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) bought data from the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ precise movements over time, in a process that often involves siphoning data from ordinary apps like video games, dating services, and fitness trackers, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document obtained by 404 Media.

The document shows in stark terms the power, and potential risk, of online advertising data and how it can be leveraged by government agencies for surveillance purposes. The news comes after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) purchased similar tools that can monitor the movements of phones in entire neighbourhoods. ICE also recently said in public procurement documents it was interested in sourcing more “Ad Tech” data for its investigations. Following 404 Media’s revelation of that ICE purchase, on Tuesday a group of around 70 lawmakers urged the DHS oversight body to conduct a new investigation into ICE’s location data buying.

This sort of information is a “goldmine for tracking where every person is and what they read, watch, and listen to,” Johnny Ryan, director of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) Enforce, which has closely followed the sale of advertising data, told 404 Media in an email.

What you should know about Kansas' evil Senate Bill 244. Plus, more trans news from around the country.

The post Trans Kansans Aren’t Going Down Without a Fight appeared first on Autostraddle.

Full disclosure up front: I sit on the board of Bluesky. That said, I had absolutely no idea this lawsuit existed until recently. Which, honestly, tells you something about how much of a legal non-event it was. But the underlying story here—about the NFL treating social media the way it treats television broadcast rights—is worth digging into, because it reveals something deeply broken about how major sports leagues think about the internet.

The 2025-2026 NFL season just wrapped up, and along with it came a federal court ruling in a case called Brown v. NFL that most people missed entirely. Two football fans—one in Illinois, one in California—sued the NFL under the Sherman Act, claiming the league violated antitrust law by barring its teams from posting on Bluesky. The fans wanted to follow their teams—the Bears and the now-champion Seahawks—on the platform they actually use, rather than on Elon Musk’s X. The court dismissed the case for lack of standing, and honestly, that was probably the right legal outcome.

The fans couldn’t demonstrate a concrete injury—the information they wanted was still available, for free, on X. As the court put it, their grievance reduced to being “denied the ability to obtain real-time NFL team information on a private platform with which they are ideologically comfortable.” And “I don’t like Elon Musk” is not an antitrust injury. The Sherman Act targets conspiracies that restrain trade and harm competition—not content distribution preferences. You can’t force a private organization to distribute its content on the platform you like best, just as we’ve called out attempts to force social media platforms to carry content they don’t want to carry.

But the fact that the NFL is legally allowed to be this myopic doesn’t make it a smart business decision. You can be entirely within your rights and still be making a spectacularly bad call.

Since 2013, the NFL has had a “content partnership” with X (dating back to when it was the useful site known as Twitter). The deal lets X publish real-time highlights, and in return the league gets… money, presumably. As the court noted in its ruling:

Since 2013, the NFL and X (formerly Twitter, Inc.) have had a “content partnership.” It allows X to publish real-time highlights from football games, such as touchdowns. During the offseason, reporters post on X with news about team practices and other NFL-related topics, and fans on X discuss teams’ acquisitions of free agents and other roster changes. For example, during the NFL draft (the high-profile annual event in which teams select eligible players to join their rosters), X published more than one million posts concerning the NFL; these appeared on users’ screens more than 800 million times. The NFL has repeatedly renewed its partnership with X. Fans do not pay money to receive NFL news on X.

Fine. Lots of organizations have deals with social media platforms. But this just seems like self-sabotage: the NFL apparently used this partnership as justification to tell its own teams they couldn’t even exist on a competing platform. Multiple NFL teams—including the New England Patriots—had set up accounts on Bluesky, started posting, and were building audiences. And then the league office stepped in and told them to shut it all down.

From the ruling:

Initially, multiple NFL teams, including the New England Patriots, had accounts on Bluesky to communicate with fans….

As alleged, however, the NFL later instructed its member teams to delete their Bluesky accounts. But for this instruction, at least some NFL teams would use Bluesky. The Patriots’ vice president of content, Fred Kirsch, for example, has stated: “Whenever the league gives us the green light[,] we’ll get back on Bluesky.”

Yes, the (Super Bowl-losing) Patriots’ VP of content is publicly saying his team wants to be on Bluesky and is just waiting for the league to let them. This wasn’t a case of teams being uninterested. Teams saw the audience there, set up shop, and were actively communicating with fans—and the NFL made them stop.

As Front Office Sports reported at the time, the league specifically told the Patriots to take down their Bluesky account. The league apparently hasn’t even approved Threads—Meta’s X competitor—for team real-time updates either.

So the NFL has essentially decided that when it comes to the kind of real-time updates that fans actually care about, X is the only approved outlet. Everything else is locked out.

This is “broadcast-brain” thinking applied to the internet, and it’s spectacularly dumb.

The NFL is treating social media platforms the way it treats regional sports networks or its Sunday Ticket package: as exclusive territories to be carved up and sold to the highest bidder. In the television world, that model makes a certain kind of sense—there’s a limited amount of spectrum, a limited number of cable channels, and that scarcity creates value. But social media doesn’t work that way. There’s no scarcity. Posting an injury report on Bluesky doesn’t remove it from X. Cross-posting is literally free. The entire point of social media for a brand is to be everywhere your audience is.

And the audience, increasingly, is on Bluesky. As Mashable noted last year heading into the season, the NFL community on Bluesky had already hit a kind of critical mass:

You need the presence and regular posting of big names to legitimize a platform. It certainly helped that folks like Kimes and a large portion of the NFL writers at popular sports sites like The Ringer made Bluesky home. And last season it felt like Bluesky hit terminal velocity, where enough people joined that you could fully exit to the site for football content. And with the migration of the professionals, the shitposters naturally came along, too. Because that’s where the discussion was happening. There is genuine, easy-to-find, fun NFL talk on Bluesky with minimal interruptions from, say, weird ads or angry reply guys you might find on X.

That’s a real community. A vibrant, engaged community of exactly the kind of hardcore football fans that the NFL should be desperate to cultivate. These are, as Mashable noted, the “ball knowers.” They’ve moved to Bluesky because, well, X kind of sucks now for following sports. As Mashable also noted:

Bluesky does have a leg-up in some areas — Elon Musk’s site recently has proven unreliable for NFL fans. The site crashed the morning free agency launched, which is one of the most important days for NFL social media. And the sports tab — which used to be an easy, fun way to follow games in the Twitter days — degraded into near uselessness years ago. And, in general, X has morphed with Musk’s image, which is focused more on AI and politics — not things like following football. Of course you can still follow the NFL on X, but it does involve wading through more junk than it used to. Bluesky offers an interesting alternative in that regard.

So the most engaged, most knowledgeable football community has moved to Bluesky. The teams themselves want to be on Bluesky. And the NFL’s response to all of this is… to ban its teams from showing up.

It’s the digital equivalent of a local blackout (something we’ve been calling out for well over a decade)—punishing your most dedicated fans because of some deal you cut with a middleman in an effort to create an artificial and unnecessary scarcity.

Meanwhile, the platform the NFL is propping up with this exclusivity arrangement is one where fans who tuned in for the Super Bowl halftime show got to watch a significant chunk of the X user base have a full-blown racist meltdown over Bad Bunny performing. The NFL specifically chose Bad Bunny to appeal to a broader, more global audience—and the audience that actually appreciated the choice? They were on Bluesky where there was an overwhelming wave of support for the performance. The league is betting its real-time presence on the platform where its expansion strategy gets shouted down, while blocking teams from the one where those new fans are actually showing up.

This kind of control-freakery from the NFL shouldn’t surprise anyone who has followed the league’s behavior over the years. This is the same organization that has spent decades aggressively lying to bars, restaurants, and small businesses about the scope of its “Super Bowl” trademarks, sending threatening letters suggesting you can’t even say the words “Super Bowl” in an ad without a license—something that has never actually been true.

The NFL’s institutional DNA is “control equals value,” and they apply that logic to everything, from what a church can call its viewing party to which social media apps their teams are permitted to use.

The problem is that control-based thinking only works when you actually can control the ecosystem. You can (sort of) control which networks broadcast your games. You can control which streaming service gets Sunday Ticket. You cannot control where fans choose to talk about football on the internet. The conversation is going to happen whether the NFL’s official accounts are there or not. The only question is whether the league’s teams get to participate in it.

Any organization whose core business depends on fan engagement should be finding fans where they are, not herding them onto a single platform because you cut an exclusivity deal. Especially when that platform is increasingly known for being a hellscape of AI slop, political rage, and engagement-bait, while the platform you’re blocking your teams from is the one where people are actually talking about your product with genuine enthusiasm.

The NFL generates billions in revenue. And yet, when it comes to social media strategy, it’s stuck in a 2005 mindset. That’s not how any of this works anymore.

Someone at NFL HQ needs to understand that when your most passionate fans have moved to a new platform and your own teams are begging for permission to follow them there, the smart play is to let them go.

If you run a company whose entire value proposition is the ability to see patterns, predict outcomes, and connect dots that others miss, you’d think someone in the building might have flagged that suing a small independent magazine over unflattering-but-accurate reporting would only guarantee that millions more people read it.

And yet, here we are.

Palantir Technologies, the infamous surveillance and data analytics giant chaired by Peter Thiel, has filed a lawsuit against Republik, a small Swiss online magazine, over a pair of investigative articles published in December. The articles, produced in collaboration with the investigative collective WAV, detailed a years-long, multi-ministry charm offensive by Palantir to sell its software to Swiss federal authorities. The campaign was, by all accounts, a comprehensive failure. Swiss agencies rejected Palantir at least nine times, with concerns ranging from data sovereignty to reputational risk to the simple fact that nobody needed the product.

The reporting was based on documents obtained through 59 freedom of information requests filed with Swiss federal agencies. The key finding was an internal Swiss Armed Forces report that concluded Palantir’s software posed unacceptable risks because sensitive military data could potentially be accessed by U.S. government intelligence agencies. As the Republik article details:

The authors of the report state that using Palantir’s software would increase dependence on a U.S. provider. It also poses the risk of losing data sovereignty and thereby national sovereignty.

Above all, however, the army’s staff experts say it remains unclear who has access to data shared with Palantir. The following sentence from the Swiss Army report is particularly relevant: “Palantir is a U.S.-based company, which means there is a possibility that sensitive data could be accessed by the US government and intelligence services.”

As if it’s any sort of surprise that European governments are wary of betting on US tech companies with close ties to the US government. It’s not like reports of US spies co-opting US tech companies for surveillance efforts haven’t been front page news over the past twenty years. And now, this administration—with its willingness to antagonize everyone in Europe, and its close ties to Palantir and Thiel? It’s no freaking wonder that the Swiss government was like “yo, maybe pass.”

So how does a sophisticated data intelligence company respond to well-sourced investigative journalism based on official government documents?

By suing the journalists, of course.

But here’s the thing that makes this even more absurd: Palantir isn’t even claiming the articles are false. The company isn’t suing for defamation. It isn’t seeking damages. Instead, it’s invoking a Swiss “right of reply” statute, alleging that Republik didn’t give the company a sufficient opportunity to respond. Palantir wants the court to force the magazine to publish lengthy counter-statements to each article.

According to the FT:

Palantir’s lawsuit, filed in January, is not seeking damages or making libel claims against Republik, but instead alleges that the company was not given sufficient right to reply under Swiss media law. The company objects to Republik’s presentation of the public documents and believes its right to reply has been wrongfully denied.

….

Republik’s managing director Katharina Hemmer said Palantir had wanted the magazine to publish a very lengthy counterstatement to each article. Republik believed the proposed statements did not fairly address or rebut the reporting, she said, adding that the magazine stands by its reporting.

To which I say: good. Because Palantir’s demand here is absurd. Oh boo-fucking-hoo, the big defense contractor didn’t like the coverage? Pull on your big boy pants and get over it. Switzerland’s right of reply law exists so people can correct factual errors, not so corporations can force publications to run PR copy because they didn’t like the tone of accurate, document-based reporting.

And it’s worth noting: Palantir has already used other avenues to respond. The company published a blog post complaining that the Republik article “paints a false and misleading picture” and “hinders important discussions about the modernization of European software.” They’ve got the platform. If Palantir wants to push back on the story, they have many methods of doing so. Hell, they can do so on X any time they want—on what Musk and company like to call the global town square for free speech.

But that’s apparently not enough. Instead, a multibillion-dollar American defense and intelligence contractor is hauling a small independent Swiss magazine into court, not because anything the magazine published was wrong, but because Palantir wants to force the publication to run its talking points under legal compulsion.

Compelled speech isn’t free speech, guys. And this is nothing more than a blatant intimidation campaign to frighten away reporters from reporting the truth about Palantir.

The European Federation of Journalists has called this exactly what it is: a SLAPP suit—a strategic lawsuit against public participation, designed to use the weight and cost of litigation to intimidate and punish journalists for doing their jobs.

“The investigation conducted by WAV and Republik into Palantir is largely based on official documents that journalists were able to access thanks to Swiss freedom of information law,” notes EFJ President Maja Sever. “The legal action brought by this powerful multinational firm against a small Swiss media start-up is, in our view, an attempt at intimidation aimed at discouraging any critical analysis of Palantir’s activities.”

And in case you didn’t catch the irony: the Swiss military rejected Palantir in part because of fears about a heavy-handed American entity with uncomfortably close ties to U.S. intelligence. Palantir’s response to the reporting of that rejection? Behave like a heavy-handed American entity trying to bully a small foreign publication into submission. If anyone at Palantir had run this decision through their own pattern-recognition software, you’d hope a few red flags would have popped up.

Meanwhile, the lawsuit has done exactly what anyone with a passing familiarity with the Streisand Effect could have predicted. The original Republik articles were about the Swiss government politely but firmly declining Palantir’s advances—an embarrassing but relatively contained story.

Now, thanks to the lawsuit, the story has gone international. The Financial Times is covering it. The European Federation of Journalists is covering it. A UK member of parliament has already cited the Republik investigation during a debate on British defense contracts with Palantir, using the story to suggest that the British government “pivot away” from Palantir.

The Republik investigation itself is genuinely worth reading, and not just because Palantir desperately doesn’t want you to.

It paints a picture of a company that spent seven years working every angle to get Swiss federal agencies to buy its products—approaching the Federal Chancellery during COVID, pitching the Federal Office of Public Health on contact tracing, presenting anti-money laundering software to financial regulators, making repeated runs at the military—and getting turned away at every door. Sometimes embarrassingly, such as the Federal Statistical Office director apparently just ignoring Palantir’s outreach entirely.

For a company that brags about its ability to “optimize the kill chain” and whose CEO once told investors that “Palantir is here to disrupt… and, when it’s necessary, to scare our enemies and occasionally kill them,” getting politely rejected by the Swiss statistical office has to sting a little.

But suing the journalists who reported on it? When the entire basis of your lawsuit is “we want you to publish our talking points” rather than “anything you published was wrong,” it makes pretty clear you don’t actually have a substantive response to the reporting. If Palantir thinks the picture is false, the remedy is to demonstrate that the documents are wrong—not to drag a small magazine through expensive litigation until it capitulates or goes broke.

Seriously, how fucking fragile are the egos in the Palantir executive suite that they can’t handle a bit of mildly embarrassing reporting? Grow up.

A Zurich court is expected to rule on the case in March. Whatever the outcome, Palantir has already lost the only contest that matters: the one for public perception. For a company that sells the ability to see around corners, they apparently never thought to search “The Streisand Effect.”