I believe the ‘it’s not race, it’s class’ argument often becomes a center-Left fallback position from points further Leftward. Having endless such discussions conceptualizes our relative positions, along with our deep need to know where we stand in a hierarchy, towards a more center-Left platform in America.
I also believe this corrupts some of what’s genuinely possible here in America.
Of course, the telos of liberatory Marxism lurks very much behind such discussions (never achieved, because it’s ‘no-place’), in its old and nieuw-school variations (identify injustice–>blame the class to be overthrown–>organize the ‘oppressed’ towards political action, with violence if necessary–>(E)quality!
The old and new media pulpit jockeying is also interesting, and I feel a twinge of envy, crusting over into mild disdain, picked at with sweet regret, when I read how much money David Brooks has received from Facebook.
Isn’t this a kind of new money bet-hedging in the opinion and influence market?
A wise bet?
Let’s check in at the Club, where all these problems are being worked out in real-time:
‘The dilemma is that this present is defined by a radical distrust of the institutions of industrial society, and of the elites that control them, and of their statements and descriptions of reality. The conference organizers got our predicament right. At every level of contemporary social and political life, we are stuck in the muck of a profound crisis of authority.’
‘One remembers Weber’s epitaph for the Protestant Ethic, as he contemplated a devitalised bourgeoisie spiritlessly tending the petrified mechanism their ancestors had raised. Adapted, without apology, it might also be used to depict that petrified Utopia of the New Ruling classes of the East.‘
‘Rulers without honour, administrators without heart, priests without conviction, this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilisation never before achieved.’
Previous ‘elite’ links on this site, arriving at some yet predictable, unrealized truths: Via Marginal Revolution via American Affairs: ‘The Western Elite From A Chinese Perspective:’
Addition: Apparently, talk of a happy, healthy collective reaching one-world harmony has quite the appeal, in whichever context it may appear. Now this Romantically Primitive, collectivist, politically Left movement is in control of very important parts of the political economy.
Instead of a reasonable, scientific approach, which would require using the mathematical sciences to be in dialogue with the Natural World (beyond value judgment), many postmodern primitivists move forwards with a kind of Environmental Idealism. The ‘Self’ is often primary, when the collective categories aren’t primary. Emotions often win-out over ‘reason.’ The ‘Environment’ tends to be conceptualized over (N)ature, where a new, empathetic technocratic elite triumphs over its charges, ‘capitalism’ and/or any existing political order.
Notice the assumption that everyone should hate sprawl, or at least, all right-thinking people should hate sprawl.
After documenting a fair amount of failure and wasted money in El Paso, our author finishes with:
‘It may not be the city revolution that was depicted in Plan El Paso, and that the city council of the time hoped they’d see. But the revolution has started in small segments of the city, and for some people, that’s enough.
“We see the green shoots of a trend heading in a new direction,” King told me. “To walk around El Paso, you know that El Paso’s biggest achievements are still ahead of it.”’
El Paso isn’t likely to be Austin, nor the Bay Area, nor Park Slope anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean the revolution won’t come!
In fact, I’m guessing El Paso is El Paso, and having passed through a border town with a high Mexican population and not a lot of natural resources, I saw some decent things going for it.
As for the urban revival, The People want to be healthy, and happy, and in tune with Nature and the collective! We will show them the way!
“Only when humans are again permitted to build authentic urbanism — those cities, towns, and villages that nurture us by their comforts and delights — will we cease the despoiling of Nature by escaping to sprawl.”
As previously posted:
Whatever your thoughts on sprawl, here are some of the groups, who, in my opinion, are involved:
–Greens and activistswho want to control and regulate the energy sector according to their understanding of nature. Or they at least will control much lawmaking and the political process through activism, while directing massive amounts of federal taxpayer money to developing this vision (chosen and controlled by politicians whom they favor). Whatever’s going on with the climate, they’re usually willing to overlook the political waste, corruption, higher costs of gas and basic services and fewer jobs that could make us like Europe, without many of the benefits.
–The products of modernism and modernist architecture. Some modernists believe in utopian and semi-utopian visions of the future, or simply, a better world where people should be rounded up and live happily according the visions of a few artists, architects, and city-planners. They don’t like the suburbs too much.
–Collectivists, humanists and multicultural types who like a broad, ‘equality of outcome,’ definition of democracy and believe there will be room for everyone, all races and classes, in the new urban environment (more like European social democrats) if just the right people are in charge.
–Anyone with a monied, career or professional, personal or identity-based stake in this vision.
Bob Zubrin pointed out the problems of environmentalism, and the authoritarian impulses behind many environmentalist goals and methods, which I’ve applied to the urbanists in parentheses below:
After the utopian dreams fade, and when the money runs-out, you often just end-up with a movement which further Left types will use to gain leverage, as in Europe:
1. There isn’t enough to go around (suburbs waste resources like gas, electricity, and materials in addition to lost productivity and time)
2. Human nature needs to be constrained as a result (Trains, buses and bikes are the preferred method of transportation instead of cars…while apartments, co-ops and living units instead of houses in the suburbs are the places to live)
3. Someone needs to be in charge (Someone like Michael Bloomberg, or similarly paternalistic leaders are ok as long as they line up with the message and enforce the right laws from the top down)
4. We volunteer ourselves for the job (Someone’s got to build a vision of the future, and the vision of the artist or architect, or city planners for example, may be enough for the rest of us to live in much like occurs in modernist architecture).
If you’ve been following current cultural trends, there’s been some native New Yorker pushback against the hipsters in Williamsburg. These urban dwellers often arrive from the suburbs, moving to urban centers in search of identity, group meaning, and membership with a kind of collectivist, artistic, modernist to postmodernist impulse that lines up with urbanism. They are changing our culture in many ways.
Of course, her heart was in the ‘right’ place (actively left of the lateral line, pounding furiously for social justice), but her misrepresentation of facts likely caused real harm to people who found less opportunity as a result of that reporting.
‘In the wake of an exhaustive three-part series by Reason’s Jim Epstein, New York Times’ Public Editor Margaret Sullivan has acknowledged that the paper’s May expose of the nail salon industry “went too far” in its claims. Given that the Times’ account prompted New York Gov. Cuomo to establish a task force to investigate the industry, this is no small admission of overreach.’
It’s interesting to see activists, reporters, and government officials advancing their own interests separately under the common banner of shared ideology, looking to shape laws affecting all citizens.
If you have doubts about a rather tepid Bos-Wash, establishment liberal worldview, (which I would argue has serious structural flaws), keep an eye on the activist base, where the demands keep coming and a populist majoritarianism is often the most to be hoped for in placating activists and would-be radicals.
***Jim Epstein’s part I, II, and III on the questionable journalism found at the New York Times on nail salons in NYC. A pretty thorough fisking.
‘Elizabeth Alexander never expected to go into philanthropy. Now she’s in her third year as the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the largest supporter of the humanities and the arts in the U.S., where she’s quickly applied her vision to foster a more just society.’
‘There, she co-designed the Art for Justice Fund—an initiative that uses art and advocacy to address the crisis of mass incarceration—and guided the organization in examining how the arts and visual storytelling can empower communities.’
I like the idea that poems are actually not supposed to engage you in direct action, neither political, nor personal. They usually take some work to understand, but they can come alive on the tongue and live like wisdom in the brain for years.
Kirsch was not so impressed with the 2009 inauguration ceremony nor Elizabeth Alexander’s use of poetry to commerorate political power:
‘In our democratic age, however, poets have always had scruples about exalting leaders in verse. Since the French Revolution, there have been great public poems in English, but almost no great official poems. For modern lyric poets, whose first obligation is to the truth of their own experience, it has only been possible to write well on public themes when the public intersects, or interferes, with that experience–when history usurps privacy.’
‘In “Sea Change,” Graham becomes Prospero, casting spells by spelling out her thoughts to merge with ours, and with the voices of the elements. The result is a mingling of perceptions rather than a broadcasting of opinions. Instead of analysis, the poems encourage emotional involvement with the drastic changes overwhelming us, overwhelming the planet.’
and:
‘Strengths and weaknesses, flows and ebbs, yet every poem in “Sea Change” bears memorable lines, with almost haunting (if we truly have but 10 years to “fix” global warming) images of flora and fauna under siege. Jorie Graham has composed a swan song for Earth.’
—
And still also more on institutional capture and old piles of money, as posted:
‘Ken Stern knows an awful lot about nonprofits, having spent the better part of a decade as chief operating officer, then president of NPR, one of the best-known, and controversial, nonprofits in America.’
Charity has limits.
This blog likes to keep an eye on NPR, as they’re a child of the 60’s, and but for the work of LBJ’s Great Society lobbying to include ‘radio’ in the Public Television Act of 1967, they might not be around. Many NPR stories, in reaching out to the wider world, often return to the touchstones of feminism, environmentalism and some form of diversity multiculturalism. Amidst high standards for journalism and production values lies the tendency towards positive definitions of equality, justice and peace. They tend to assume their ideals are your ideals as they filter new input from the world.
In turn, many feminists, environmentalists, and multiculturalists/activists rely on foundation money and/or private donations, and/or public institutions, for survival. They aim for broad definitions of the public good, and seek to influence both the culture and political outcomes.
Everyone’s starting a non-profit these days:
‘The ability to survive, even thrive, with programs that have been proven not to work is just one of the many oddities ‘With Charity for All’ documents in the topsy-turvy, misunderstood, and mostly ignored world of nonprofits’
Non-profits have become big business, partially following the ‘greatness model’ that worked so well for the boomers, when the getting was good. Unfortunately, there are limits to any model, and we’ve got serious economic issues and a lot of political dysfunction. The money has to come from somewhere.
Shakely again:
‘To clean up the messy nonprofit landscape, Stern offers some suggestions that are sure to cause concern in some nonprofit quarters, including increased government oversight, increasing the application fee to cover the cost of better IRS review and, most radical of all, putting a life span on the charitable status afforded nonprofits, then requiring a renewal after a certain period of time (maybe 10 years). It’s an admirable goal, but in a sector where the stated goal of private foundations is self-preservation and “once a charity; always a charity,” is the mantra, it ain’t gonna happen. Stern knows this, of course, but it doesn’t stop him from asking this and many other valid questions about a sector that is loath to engage in self-evaluation’
It may be as simple as following the money.
On Stern’s third point, putting a life span on the charitable status afforded nonprofits, Stern might agree with David Horowitz, of all people. He’s a red-diaper baby, an ex-Marxist activist cum anti-Leftist, anti-Communist crusader. Making foundations and constantly agitating is what he knows how to do.
Horowitz argues that such foundations as Ford (which donates to NPR) have become vehicles for the interests of political activists, portraying the matter of as a fight between capitalism/anti-capitalism and/or socialism. He mentions the Tides foundation here. They are big money, he points out, and Obama’s political career was largely made possible by activist political organization, and the money and manpower behind them:
——————–
Stern and Horowitz potentially agreeing on some regulation of non-profits makes for strange bedfellows. Obama, true to form, was seeking a permanent form of activism. Activists, and the political idealists with whom they often find common cause, often don’t produce anything of value independently, and must rely upon existing institutions for their support.
It’s worth thinking about who wants to be in charge, and why, and what that means for everyone else. Following the money never hurts, and it’s a necessary evil, just a politics is. If you tend to agree with the ideals, you tend to focus on the sausage, not how it’s getting made.
This blog wants to focus on what keeps our society open, healthy and dynamic, and what maintains our political and economic freedoms. The pie ought to be growing.
Who are the actual stakeholders in refusing the tactics of ostracism, intimidation, and threats of violence on campus curently coming from the far Left?:
Jonathan Haidt continues to have interesting ideas:
—
It may be as simple as just letting the true-believers, zealots, and ideologues have their own place, having to compete in the marketplace of ideas ($80k a year….for this?). Yes, often it’s a form of capitulation, but such true-believers, zealots, and ideologues depend upon the institutions they colonize for their survival (disrespecting the rules and legitimacy of the institutions from the get-go; seeking radical transformation and control of the institutions nonetheless).
It will also require the backbone of many in academia and intellectual pursuits to stand-up to charges of thinking differently and violating the holy ‘-Isms’ from time to time. Especially when it has to do with one’s own discipline, domain, and methods.
Interesting paper presented by Erika Kiss, beginning about minute 32:00 (the whole conference is likely worth your time for more knowledge on Oakeshott).
According to Kiss, Oakeshott’s non-teleological, non-purposive view of education is potentially a response to Friedrich Hayek, Martha Nussbaum, and Allan Bloom, in the sense that all of these thinkers posit some useful purpose or outcome in getting a liberal education.
Hayek’s profound epistemological attack on rationalist thought is still a system itself, and attaches learning to market-based processes which eventually drive freedom and new thinking in universities. The two are mutually dependent to some extent.
Nussbaum attaches liberal learning to ends such as making us ‘Aristotelian citizens of the world’, or better citizens in a democracy, which has struck me as incomplete at best.
Allan Bloom is profoundly influenced by Straussian neo-classicism, and wants love, classical learning, honor and duty to perhaps be those reasons why a young man or woman should read the classics. This, instead of crass commercialism, the influences of popular music, deconstructionism and logical positivism.
Youtube is balancing interests by moving away from independent content-creators and towards larger, existing media players. Money is probably a main reason, but there’s also this:
‘Wojcicki said that she decided to start prioritizing authoritative sources in the wake of the terrorist attack in Nice, France on Bastille Day (July 14) in 2016.
“I remember reading about it and being just extremely upset and thinking our users need to know about it,” Wojcicki said.’
The human mind infers from known and unknown facts, creating order even when there are no known facts. Gossip, speculation, conspiracy theories, well-made fictions and entertaining lunacy are staples in human affairs, and always have currency.
In fact, ‘they’ is probably one of the most common beliefs amongst any polity.
While I may not agree with Wojcicki, I certainly understand a move by someone in her position towards ‘authoritative’ truth. In fact, old media outlets sold their reputations on layers of fact-checkers, which means ‘The Daily Youtube’ is looking more and more like a reality.
Surely you trust a few algorithms, a class of media and political people, and Ms Wojcicki to decide which gates to open and close?
Surely you trust them to decide which voices get heard and which get banned?
Surely you trust them to decide which ideals our leaders should embody in order to guide our Republic with the consent of the governed?
—
Strangely, at the moment, this might make me more sympathetic to the political extremes or ‘populism’ these days, when it comes to the current media and political landscape.
‘Noble’ profession journalism never so much was, though I suppose it has a place for the essential in our Republic. The essential won’t happen without the right kind of local civic engagement, either.
Here’s an interesting discussion between two people, likely led by opposing political instincts but who find themselves sharing some radical, common ground (right and left, O’Keefe and Weinstein, respectively).
How low should you go, especially if you’re out in the cold with respect to many mainstream media and political institutions?
As posted, someone’s going to be running our institutions and making rules out of a presumed universal and common sense set of assumptions:
Gurri offered an interesting take on matters socio-cultural:
The dilemma is that this present is defined by a radical distrust of the institutions of industrial society, and of the elites that control them, and of their statements and descriptions of reality. The conference organizers got our predicament right. At every level of contemporary social and political life, we are stuck in the muck of a profound crisis of authority.
Hmmm…:
‘The senior people, largely white and male, seemed to believe that, in punishment for the sins of their fathers, trust had fractured along identity lines. Women today were thought to trust only women, for example. Muslims trusted Muslims, and no one else. Some archetypical essence of “woman” or “Muslim” made internal communications possible, and separated each group from the rest of the human race. It was, to be sure, a disaster of biblical proportions – the story of Babel told in the times of the tweet – and it left the men in charge desperate to put forward individuals of a different sex and skin coloration, to say the things they wanted to hear.
For younger elites, trust involves a sort of cosplay of historical conflicts. They put on elaborate rhetorical superhero costumes, and fight mock-epic battles with Nazis, fascists, “patriarchs,” slave-owners, George III, and the like. Because it’s only a game, no one gets seriously hurt – but nothing ever gets settled, either. Eventually, the young cosplayers must put away their costumes, take one last sip of Kombucha, and set off, seething with repressed virtue, to make money in the world as it really is.’
‘One remembers Weber’s epitaph for the Protestant Ethic, as he contemplated a devitalised bourgeoisie spiritlessly tending the petrified mechanism their ancestors had raised. Adapted, without apology, it might also be used to depict that petrified Utopia of the New Ruling classes of the East.
‘Rulers without honour, administrators without heart, priests without conviction, this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilisation never before achieved.’
There’s a popular narrative that drug companies have stolen the soul of psychiatry. That they’ve reduced everything to chemical imbalances. The people who talk about this usually go on to argue that the true causes of mental illness are capitalism and racism. Have doctors forgotten that the real solution isn’t a pill, but structural change that challenges the systems of exploitation and domination that create suffering in the first place?
No. Nobody has forgotten that. Because the third thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is that everyone is very, very woke.
Pink and a bit soft-bodied, with a somewhat jazzy Middle-class bathing suit and sandy sideburns, to me He looked from the back like one more professor.
And from the front, too—the boyish, unformed carriage Which foreigners always note in American men, combined As in a professor with that liberal, quizzical,
Articulate gaze so unlike the more focused, more Tolerant expression worn by a man of action (surgeon, Salesman, athlete). On closer inspection was there,
Perhaps, a self-satisfied benign air, a too studied Gentleness toward the child whose hand he held loosely? Absurd to speculate; but then—the woman saw something
Maintaining a healthy skepticism:
Previous ‘elite’ links on this site, arriving at some yet predictable, unrealized truths: Via Marginal Revolution via American Affairs: ‘The Western Elite From A Chinese Perspective:’
Who are the actual stakeholders in refusing the tactics of ostracism, intimidation, and threats of violence on campus curently coming from the far Left?:
Jonathan Haidt continues to have interesting ideas:
—
It may be as simple as just letting the true-believers, zealots, and ideologues have their own place, having to compete in the marketplace of ideas ($80k a year….for this?). Yes, often it’s a form of capitulation, but such true-believers, zealots, and ideologues depend upon the institutions they colonize for their survival (disrespecting the rules and legitimacy of the institutions from the get-go; seeking radical transformation and control of the institutions nonetheless).
It will also require the backbone of many in academia and intellectual pursuits to stand-up to charges of thinking differently and violating the holy ‘-Isms’ from time to time. Especially when it has to do with one’s own discipline, domain, and methods.
Interesting paper presented by Erika Kiss, beginning about minute 32:00 (the whole conference is likely worth your time for more knowledge on Oakeshott).
According to Kiss, Oakeshott’s non-teleological, non-purposive view of education is potentially a response to Friedrich Hayek, Martha Nussbaum, and Allan Bloom, in the sense that all of these thinkers posit some useful purpose or outcome in getting a liberal education.
Hayek’s profound epistemological attack on rationalist thought is still a system itself, and attaches learning to market-based processes which eventually drive freedom and new thinking in universities. The two are mutually dependent to some extent.
Nussbaum attaches liberal learning to ends such as making us ‘Aristotelian citizens of the world’, or better citizens in a democracy, which has struck me as incomplete at best.
Allan Bloom is profoundly influenced by Straussian ne0-classicism, and wants love, classical learning, honor and duty to perhaps be those reasons why a young man or woman should read the classics. This, instead of crass commercialism, the influences of popular music, deconstructionism and logical positivism.
Beauty, ugliness, youth, strength, and decay: Via Mick Hartley Bruce Davidson at Magnum’s ‘Subway (NYC subway during the 1980’s).
Recommended.
Was a subway ride in the early 1980’s really that wild, violent, dirty and dangerous? Why am I taking such pleasure in the beauty of the images?
NYC holds a place in many, many people’s minds (mine included); however small a place and however much based upon words, images, and hearsay.
February
A chimney, breathing a little smoke.
The sun, I can’t see
making a bit of pink
I can’t quite see in the blue.
The pink of five tulips
at five p.m. on the day before March first.
The green of the tulip stems and leaves
like something I can’t remember,
finding a jack-in-the-pulpit
a long time ago and far away.
Why it was December then
and the sun was on the sea
by the temples we’d gone to see.
One green wave moved in the violet sea
like the UN Building on big evenings,
green and wet
while the sky turns violet.
A few almond trees
had a few flowers, like a few snowflakes
out of the blue looking pink in the light.
A gray hush
in which the boxy trucks roll up Second Avenue
into the sky. They’re just
going over the hill.
The green leaves of the tulips on my desk
like grass light on flesh,
and a green-copper steeple
and streaks of cloud beginning to glow.
I can’t get over
how it all works in together
like a woman who just came to her window
and stands there filling it
jogging her baby in her arms.
She’s so far off. Is it the light
that makes the baby pink?
I can see the little fists
and the rocking-horse motion of her breasts.
It’s getting grayer and gold and chilly.
Two dog-size lions face each other
at the corners of a roof.
It’s the yellow dust inside the tulips.
It’s the shape of a tulip.
It’s the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in.
It’s a day like any other.
You know, the Bonfire Of The Vanities was about very similar circumstances: The satire of the liberal intelligentsia is pretty rich, as well as the Southern Gentleman’s WASP ‘rejuvenation.’ You just know Christopher Hitchens had to get-in on that action:
From the Late Show in 1989 with Howard Jacobson.
New York City is unlike most other places in America. Was Tom Wolfe seeing things clearly, as they really are?
The journey of The Western Self bears proper care.
According to some folks at The New Yorker magazine, the only answer to injustice is radical and revolutionary equality.
To be fair, the logic embedded within much radical chic usually reveals itself to be cool at first, the same old murderously bad doctrinaire utopianism a little later on:
Not the ‘right’ kind of emptiness for Richard Brody, at The New Yorker, in Todd Phillips’ ‘The Joker.’
‘“Joker” is an intensely racialized movie, a drama awash in racial iconography that is so prevalent in the film, so provocative, and so unexamined as to be bewildering.’
Brody’s review is as much about historical events (The Central Park Five), and moral judgments surrounding these historical events (racist and nothing else, Trump is horrible) as it is about the movie.
Apparently graffiti art does have a price, and it may be much more than $$$:
Ruling that graffiti — a typically transient form of art — was of sufficient stature to be protected by the law, a federal judge in Brooklyn awarded a judgment of $6.7 million on Monday to 21 graffiti artists whose works were destroyed in 2013 at the 5Pointz complex in Long Island City, Queens.
Would you be willing to undermine property-rights and the rule-of-law?
A NY Times beat reporter shared in the suffering of those graffiti artists whose 5pointz canvas was whitewashed in preparation for demolition by owner Jerry Wolkoff.
‘One street artist, who would give his name only as Just, had at least two works painted over. He spent hours early Tuesday gazing at the whitewashed buildings, leaning against a red-brick wall across the street. Then he bought himself a tall glass of beer, which he sipped slowly from a brown paper bag.
“Heartbreaking,” he said. “This is not just about graffiti — it’s about the unity of people who met here from all over the world.” He paused and took a drink. “That’s what really hurts.”
Once the real-estate market began heating-up in NYC, Wolkoff decided to whitewash his building overnight..
Every bit of graffiti scrawled there over 40-years was at his discretion.
Personally, I don’t take pleasure in the erasing of people’s hard work and creativity, nor in the breaking-up of a graffiti-collective which traveled far and wide to get to 5pointz, nor even in the iconic stature they gave the place, but David Thompson sums it up pretty well:
‘The moral of the story, gentlemen, is buy your own canvas’
The pathos in the Times article stops short of a familiar ‘art will unite all races, classes, & genders,’ type of Leftist political ideology.
I”m getting a sense that even should graffiti become a longer-lasting vehicle for artistic expression, beyond the street, it likely began for many non-taggers possibly in affect, driven by ideology, or the boredom and rebellion of the suburbs and people looking for some meaning in their lives.
What are they overlooking? What are they looking for? What do the people looking at the work might think they’re looking at?
Or perhaps it would have been better to celebrate the way street-culture and graffiti has interacted with money and market forces through tourism. 5pointz arguably was a tourism draw.
From The Times piece:
‘Though street art is meant to be temporary, 5Pointz became known as a graffiti museum. And the medium itself, once considered a symbol of urban unraveling, became a sought after gallery-worthy commodity, with work from street artists like Banksy commanding millions of dollars. Which is one of the reasons the whitewashing of 5Pointz’s walls was greeted with such vociferous dismay. “What?! What did they do?!” cried a tour guide named Hans Von Rittern, as he raced out of a tour bus early Tuesday, his arms wide, his face crumpling as soon as he caught sight of Ms. Flaguel. They embraced tightly and wept.’
I can think of some possible messages being sent by the law:
–You don’t have to work and own something to have ownership in it (normalizing a collectivism which rejects the property-rights of others…thus your property rights as well…for what’s to stop the next guy from tagging over your tag?). Someone else owns all this building anyways, so screw him, and screw the guy who came before me too.
–The value of artistic creation is yet again associated with money in the modern world (partially out of guilt, I suspect), and not so much with self-expression, technique, craft, freedom, and moments which can elevate and expand, offering meaning within a process.
–The criminality associated with graffiti is also tactily rewarded/overlooked by a court of law (there are real victims to the kinds of activity that can accompany tagging). I would much rather have lawmakers and law enforcers hold a simple line, rather than set the wrong incentives.
It can’t have been a good day for those who lost something. It’s hard out there.
Here’s a video:
More broadly, romanticizing the logic of the street, and taggers, comes with its own risks. Celebrate the spirit of creative lawlessness and turf warfare with the full acceptance that there ain’t much law involved. I’m sure 5pointz served as an escape, and a positive environment for many, but all the other things going on in these neighborhoods aren’t so uplifting, hence, it’s importance.
MacDonald draws her own conclusions from some salient facts:
‘The stories that the homeless tell about their lives reveal that something far more complex than a housing shortage is at work. The tales veer from one confused and improbable situation to the next, against a backdrop of drug use, petty crime, and chaotic child-rearing.’
Here is the best I’m able to explain the logic behind West Coast homeless policies: ‘They‘ don’t want to build enough houses/provide enough jobs/help our fellow human beings, but if ‘we’ rise up against the oppressor, in personal liberation (sexual, spiritual, political) and collective moral concern (empathy, healing, community), ‘we’ can solve the homelessness/mental illness/drug addiction problems within x years.
The ‘capitalist system’ and ‘corporations’ are generally morally suspect, but even as ‘we’ individuals explore the frontiers of our emotions and (S)elves, modeling our lives collectively on some of their successes (neo-liberalism), ‘we’ can build the ideal society and a better global world. Let’s make ‘our’ dreams practical with real work and labor, modeling and deploying the successes of the sciences beyond medicine and psychiatry; implementing all available knowledge into political and social institutions with taxpayer money.
—
Many people on the West (Left) Coast have come from somewhere else, sometimes as black sheep, sometimes as familial and social refugees, sometimes for a job, a career, etc. I see these shared ideals are doing a fair amount of of work to bind people together.
How much direct religious/traditional rebellion is involved, and how much religious overlap from religious doctrine to human rights doctrine there is I take on a case-by-case basis: Protesting and activism tend to act as unifying virtues in themselves.
I’ve experienced a lot of freedom, genuine tolerance, and intellectual opportunity here, but also many naive and shallow assumptions about Nature, Human Nature, and political organization.
Reality knocks.
[I’ve removed an older post, as that’s enough opinion to last]
‘I share many of the New Urbanist ideas for cities, but I can’t cast my lot in with the group because they are screwball-daft when the subject of cars comes up, and will entertain any inconvenience as long as it’s anti-car. I don’t want to ride a got-damned bicycle to work. Most people don’t. Period.’
“Living in that tiny space made my life so much bigger,” Cohen told The Post. “My book is about living the life you want in whatever size you choose — it’s not just about learning to live smaller, but smarter.”
The simple life has its appeal.
Of course, individual choice eventually comes into conflict with planned communities and group obligations, to say nothing of taxes and regulations borne by other individuals…
I’m guessing Seattle’s Yesler Terrace project is still mostly pipe-dream, but if elected, I promise a social-worker, a community garden, full kindergarten empowerment and adult employment in every cell block:
‘The new neighborhood will bring together people from many walks of life, ethnic backgrounds and income levels. Partnerships will help strengthen the social fabric of the community by providing open spaces and community centers for gathering, and programs to increase health, academic achievement and economic opportunity.’
“Only when humans are again permitted to build authentic urbanism — those cities, towns, and villages that nurture us by their comforts and delights — will we cease the despoiling of Nature by escaping to sprawl.”
As previously posted:
Whatever your thoughts on sprawl, here are some of the groups, who, in my opinion, are involved:
–Greens and activistswho want to control and regulate the energy sector according to their understanding of nature. Or they at least will control much lawmaking and the political process through activism, while directing massive amounts of federal taxpayer money to developing this vision (chosen and controlled by politicians whom they favor). Whatever’s going on with the climate, they’re usually willing to overlook the political waste, corruption, higher costs of gas and basic services and fewer jobs that could make us like Europe, without many of the benefits.
–The products of modernism and modernist architecture. Some modernists believe in utopian and semi-utopian visions of the future, or simply, a better world where people should be rounded up and live happily according the visions of a few artists, architects, and city-planners. They don’t like the suburbs too much.
–Collectivists, humanists and multicultural types who like a broad, ‘equality of outcome,’ definition of democracy and believe there will be room for everyone, all races and classes, in the new urban environment (more like European social democrats) if just the right people are in charge.
–Anyone with a monied, career or professional, personal or identity-based stake in this vision.
Bob Zubrin pointed out the problems of environmentalism, and the authoritarian impulses behind many environmentalist goals and methods, which I’ve applied to the urbanists in parentheses below:
After the utopian dreams fade, and when the money runs-out, you often just end-up with a movement which further Left types will use to gain leverage, as in Europe:
1. There isn’t enough to go around (suburbs waste resources like gas, electricity, and materials in addition to lost productivity and time)
2. Human nature needs to be constrained as a result (Trains, buses and bikes are the preferred method of transportation instead of cars…while apartments, co-ops and living units instead of houses in the suburbs are the places to live)
3. Someone needs to be in charge (Someone like Bloomberg, or similarly paternalistic leaders are ok as long as they line up with the message and enforce the right laws from the top down)
4. We volunteer ourselves for the job (Someone’s got to build a vision of the future, and the vision of the artist or architect, or city planners for example, may be enough for the rest of us to live in much like occurs in modernist architecture).
If you’ve been following current cultural trends, there’s been some native New Yorker pushback against the hipsters in Williamsburg. These urban dwellers often arrive from the suburbs, moving to urban centers in search of identity, group meaning, and membership with a kind of collectivist, artistic, modernist to postmodernist impulse that lines up with urbanism. They are changing our culture in many ways.