luciaphile
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Ok since someone is not looking at the bigger picture here. Let me explain myself.
I'm against "environmentalist" like the fundamentalist kind who only attack on these issues just to get attention, or because they just like trees, or believe humans are all evil, or worship mother nature, or run these kinds of groups like cults.
As someone who works in the profession of building/designing buildings that will sometimes go on undeveloped sites its important for an architect to develop a sense of environmental stewardship as well as principals of good conservation.
What these people practice in groups like Save the Bayou are not that. They are drones who do not govern themselves by logical reason and are instead guided by pure emotion which leads them to formulate silly opinions about the earth and the environment which are both naive and completely ridiculous.
A professor I had in college once told me that "tree huggers" are dumb (my synopsis). You are not going to positively change the environment, protect, preserve....whatever it is by going up to a tree and hugging it. By the way, he wasn't some raging conservative or bagging money from big oil. He was professor of Building systems at my architecture school who truly believed in global warming and was very liberal. He also had also developed many HVAC systems for 20-30 years.
Environmentalism that we know today is not the environmentalism that existed before the 1960's and 1970's. Probably the first great "environmentalist" was Teddy Roosevelt. However if you asked him what an environmentalist was in his time he would probably tell you it was about conservation, and stewardship. Fast forward to the radical counter movements of the 1960's and 1970's when this wasn't the case. Instead environmentalist was essentially co-op'ed by progressives. They changed the notion (just like they changed the idea of liberalism) and brought about environmentalist movements that no longer were environmental goal oriented, but politically oriented. Not to mention they were no longer about a balance between human and nature, but a world view which humans were the enemy and nature was elevated to the position of deity making it pretty much a sin for humans to do anything to the environment because we were essentially evil.
You can have an environmental group, but that doesn't mean that it is "Environmentalist" in the notion that many think about today. BPA is a conservationist group as well as restorationist one. It seeks to bring back a natural order of things through human intervention. While it is always smart to ask questions and not blindly follow something, it's another to completely write it off on the basis that "oh they are going to cut all these trees! It must be bad! Protest!" BPA isn't perfect, but its logical and is a sound solution to not only Buffalo Bayou, but probably all our bayous going forward.
Oh dear, the bigger picture.
On the one hand, the Bayou Preservation Association, an organization I know little about but would guess - is probably not deeply-pocketed but successful enough to have staff and the money to launch a major restoration project on Buffalo Bayou, with a long list of members many or most of whom would not balk at the word environmentalist; and with an explicitly environmental purpose, if we are to do them the courtesy of taking their mission statement at face value - I don't see anything there about health care or the arts or women and only a little bit about education. I am getting a pretty strong vibe: environmental group.That group in charge of, or at the very least almost certainly leading the push for, a project you claim to support.On the other hand, a likely small and probably well-meaning group of folks who differ on the need for the project, or may not grasp the difference between native vegetation and privet (I haven't the time to learn their specific objections). And who have created ... a Facebook page.
And your takeaway is that the environmental movement is the enemy?I would feign surprise, but why bother. Environmentalists bad, the last bad people in fact: this is the one-note chorus of the times, and when people are all parroting something in unison, it generally means someone has gone to the trouble of brainwashing them.It is not coincidental that the movement has never been weaker, and that the odds are all against the environment.Oh, those powerful baddies, the environmentalists ...Your conclusion is exactly backward. Environmentalism was so mainstream in the sixties and seventies that Nixon was perfectly comfortable with it, and was arguably its most effective presidential advocate in modern times. But it was threatening to both left and right, and they, and their mindless dogsbodies, libertarians, with the easy cooperation of the media (worst: Wall Street Journal, second worst: Washington Post; probably Rush Limbaugh, or maybe Fox News, are worse, but the WSJ and WP are influential because "respectable") have colluded in the last 15-20 years to convince the public that concern for the environment is "elitist," the very opposite of "progressive." Oh, and kind of "airy-fairy."*
Precisely because environmentalism is not about people {though people are in so many ways its beneficiaries, and not just because of clean drinking water!}. Indeed, it is sceptical of the future, of the whole idea of limitless human progress without cost, and above all we cannot tolerate that. Down the memory hole!
So leftists with the eager encouragement of neocons (by all means, do our work for us!) were successful in belatedly assigning ideological baggage to the environmental movement, that the people in the trenches, who were busy establishing parks and preserves, and saving or recreating wetlands (thank you, Ducks Unlimited!) and bringing species back from extinction, and working to ban DDT, and keeping sewage out of rivers, and fighting the damming of the Grand Canyon, and bringing the science of ecology into being, and monitoring the health of the ocean, and starting even things as simple as campaigns to encourage people not to litter - yes, that was environmentalism! - never had. Or reverse the formulation: curtailing domestic population growth, something Americans were in near agreement on in the seventies, is now a completely taboo subject. That was done by the right, neatly co-opting the language of the left.
Caring about nature, simply qua nature, has been turned into something you have to apologize for. Witness how the first thing out of anyone's mouth is: "Well, I'm not an environmentalist, but..." and then nine times out of ten they proceed to say something that proves their sympathies, their natural home, lie with environmentalism.It is not a dirty word, and what it is about has not much changed, only become more refined as we knew more, until the last fifteen or 20 years -- when those efforts to undermine environmentalism began to bear fruit in terms of changing the dialogue within environmental groups.Now, we are told, it's not about biodiversity, it's about "people in the environment." See as a single example last month's New Yorker article on the damage that has been done to the Nature Conservancy by a CEO who is convinced its mission has something to do with people, and with fooling the free market into ... doing something or other. His legacy so far is some sort of $10 million mapping software. The Conservancy's actual mission of "conserving land and water" - for wildlife, specifically endangered species - and the work people do and have done for that organization, which if you know anything about this, is hardly considered anti-Establishment: he loftily considers all of that old-school thinking. He has indicated that he considers preserving landscapes, work at the species level - to be part of that outmoded thinking.I wonder where he got that idea?If people matter, it is because life matters. That should be axiomatic.The backlash against the environment has been skillfully and cynically orchestrated and has so weakened the environmental movement that it will die with the last of the Boomers.
Take the billboard issue, which reared its ugly head this week: once our grandmothers and their garden club would have readily signed a petition to remove the blight of billboards. The issue was seen for exactly what it is, scenic roads: no less and, crucially, no more. Is it better to live amid beauty or ugliness, when one has the luxury to choose. Is it better for people, if you like: a matter of common sense. Try it in 2014: don't you care about people and their jobs? Are you a radical that hates people, hates the free market?!! Hates freedom?Teddy Roosevelt: two threads to the history of environmentalism in America unite in T.R.. One might be called professional or practical perhaps, the other owes much to the Romantic movement. Although T.R. is usually identified with Gifford Pinchot, and thus with former strand, Pinchot's stewardship of the national forests resulted in some very bad practices from which American forests have yet to (will probably never) recover. And the two of them sometimes wanted forests to be where they didn't even belong. That was the Progrssive faith in wise stewardship. But it was other spirit, the purely romantic attachment to wilderness felt by Teddy Roosevelt, that we honor in him, and that holds up even better to scrutiny now. It was this impulse that led to the mad, heroic all-nighter of the Midnight Forests, which even my husband - professional conservationist, worshipper of T.R. - admits led to some odd public land designations.Anyone attempting anything like the Midnight Forests now - would be quickly branded a radical. And it was radical, no question.Were he living now, T.R. would be depressed all right. And you would never have heard of him.
*What a brave stance your professor took there. I've never heard anyone make fun of tree huggers before! Especially not on an urbanist blog!Maybe he was thinking of John Muir, who said of the redwood forest bought and named in his honor, "This is the best tree-lovers monument that could possibly be found in all the forests of the world."John Muir with his dozens of ascents of American mountains, without equipment, before climbing was heard of as a sport in this country.Well, I'm a tree-hugger. That's pretty much all I am. I'll never apologize for that, just because some people really do hate nature, and some others feel threatened by anything that is not human-centric, and some couldn't care less either way, but find it easier to make money when environmentalists are marginalized.
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You sir need to reread what I posted. Plus you need to learn the definition of hysteria. I show no support for what this group is saying or doing. I support the city and the development plan. I'm certainly not hysterical, and I'm only providing rational for why these people are insane.
The funnest stuff is on the fb page. You could just imagine them with tinfoil hats lol. One commenter was like, 'oh this looks like a great spot some condo's'. The rest are nothing but sheep.
Honestly, I just can't stand ignorance of this caliber.
http://www.bayoupreservation.org/
By any definition, an environmental group.
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Wow. This is some of the most naive garbage I have seen in a long time lol. I actually feel sorry for them.
1. Most of the "natural" vegetation that is there right now isn't even natural to the bayou. The stuff that was there for long ago was ripped up when they were redirecting the flow of the bayou to help try and control (which of course trying to control any river/stream/creek/bayou is futile).
2. All recent efforts have been to restore the bayou to what it would have been long ago. This includes adding vegetation that is native to Houston, and even creating wetlands to help curb flooding while also creating new habitats for animals that do call the bayou home or will call it home in the future.
3. In one of the post this loony tune 'claims' this:
The dotted red lines show the riparian forest and wetlands to be bulldozed and scraped on both banks of Buffalo Bayou and into Memorial Park. According to the HCFCD, 80 percent of the targeted area will be stripped of trees and vegetation. Note the areas to be cleared of trees extends into the interior of Memorial Park towards the maintenance facility. This is for access by heavy equipment to the bayou.
This is a textbook example of environmentalist cherry picking things which they want to hear and then regurgitating it without any context. It's no different than if you tried talking to an extreme creationist!
The plans are actually return the bayou's natural twist and turns meaning this is a complete reversal of flood prevention policy which is fantastic! It means that instead of fighting the flood they are going to instead use natural forces.
I mean lets not play around here. All that vegetation that is there is not "virgin" xD pffffft give me a break.
4. I'm ashamed that so many of these people are so easily fooled by this nonsense and it apparently has over 1000 likes!
I don't understand why environmentalism hasn't yet been deemed a cult because that's what it is! What people should practice is good stewardship of the land/environment we live in as well as common sense conservation.
Now of course this is just my opinion on the matter, and maybe I am wrong, but from what I have read and analyzed this is actually for the betterment.
Not to rain on your hysteria, but you do realize that the group that's trying to do these things that you applaud - is an environmental group?
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There was a good bookstore, I think on Shepherd at Alabama. It was part of a small chain of may be three or four. I didn't buy many books there, but it had a fantastic selection of foreign newspapers and magazines. I'l load up every couple of weeks.
I worked at the Bookstop out on Memorial. There was a substantial magazine selection. That was the internet, I guess. I remember an elderly gentleman with a number tattooed on his forearm would come in most weeks to buy a copy of Der Spiegel.
I was sixteen and found it great fun to work there. My favorite of my co-workers was a somewhat shady, eccentric laid-off petroleum geologist, for whom the Bookstop was pretty much the last stop. He liked to buy books for me, in an effort to get the nonsense out of my head, but disdained our store and preferred to buy them at Detering's.
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277 out of the 278 Republican members of Congress are white. With Cantor's loss the other night, all of them will be Christian. So, yeah, not surprising you don't find a lot of support by "others." By the way, this phenomenon goes hand-in-hand with the Southern strategy.
Race - or geography?
It may be the racial composition of the Republican party you want to change, for idealistic reasons, but if instead you're simply looking to achieve certain racial quotas in Congress itself, or like most progressives, to get to a Democratic majority more quickly than will happen organically, then you pretty much have no choice but to make an end run around the rural voters who continue to choose Republicans (what the hell, Kansas?). The wikipedia article on apportionment offers a kind of solution in "weighted" voting strength, whereby the vote of a member of Houston's congressional delegation, say, would be worth a good deal more than that of a representative of a distant, rural Texas county.
There is a slightly problematic, queasiness-inducing, Hunger Games aspect to it, but it evidently does not require a Constitutional amendment. I candidly have no idea how it would be pursued, but I'm guessing the path would lay through the 9 most powerful people in the country (you've gotta love unintended consequences!).
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Thanks, mkultra. The Texas Monthly article helps to fill in the picture.
As for Sullivan, the Lytle story was my introduction to him, I think. But it was his visit to the Christian rock festival that sealed my devotion:
http://www.gq.com/entertainment/music/200401/rock-music-jesus
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It being June, I spent the morning reading the Sunday, April 14th, New York Times magazine. I held on to it because there was a piece by John Jeremiah Sullivan, a writer I watch for, on whatever subject. That piece turned out, unexpectedly, to be a purely Houston story:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/13/magazine/blues.html?_r=0
I read it quite breathlessly - it's that engrossing. I wanted to wait until I finished to google up the - long-lost, now famed (among enthusiasts) - recording. This was because I'm not a blues aficionado. In particular I can't pretend to enjoy those scratchy old recordings, though I am not tone-deaf to their cultural value. Just ... I've observed this deficiency about myself in connection with other things encountered secondhand, not just blues, that send people into raptures.
But then the song did not disappoint:
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Absolutely the culture can push farther into the taboo. There lingers a sense that children are off-limits, but I wouldn't bank on it.*
I have not seen GoT so don't know whether the violence therein is equal opportunity -- but I'd be surprised if the womb-stabbing is a novelty.
In the 70s the scolds went after "Charlie's Angels" (!) all because the girls were skimpily dressed and answered to the commands of a disembodied male voice. Consider that at the time that really was the worst thing the feminists could think of. The mainstream hadn't yet widened to include slasher movies. Rap hadn't displaced R&B. Overall, in those supposed years of hedonism there was a brief, weird, largely wholesome window with respect to women in TV and movies. What would have been inconceivable then, was that at the tail end of a tedious decades-long conversation about the "portrayal of women," almost the entire meat of American popular culture, bestselling books included, would be furnished by women as either victims of violence or as sexual objects - the two not infrequently conflated. Understand, I'm not even talking about pornography.
Oh, yes, I forgot - we get the occasional spunky cartoon heroine to right the ledger.
About once a year I notice this all over again, like I turn on the TV and a bunch of beautiful women are competing for bachelor Brad, or a bunch of homely women are competing to see who deserves plastic surgery the most, and not being the sharpest tool, I say something along the lines of "I can't believe {whatever latest horror} is possible post-feminism!" And invariably, my husband replies, "Then you haven't understood feminism very well."
Whatever, I'm ready for a Selden crisis.
*Or: and this is perhaps the only time you'll hear any optimism from me - a sea change might come about from our demographic shift to Los Estados Unidos. Curiously, despite the aberration of Dia de los Muertos, and despite its violence, Mexico doesn't seem to share our obsession with death and degradation. Maybe law and order are overrated. Anecdotally derived from witnessing their dedication to family, if they can retain that element of their culture, I have faith in the ability of Mexican men to protect their children, a duty American men have largely abdicated.
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I know that Kudzu is considered an Invasive species, but I think it looks really good in the Atlanta area. It gives it an enchanted look.
Granted I never visit the Deep Web, but this is the single most disturbing thing I've ever read on the internet.
Just to be clear, you do realize that everything under that shroud of kudzu is dead, not under an enchantment?
Regarding frontage roads: I guess they are a useful substitute for a well-functioning street grid beyond the freeway, so that's a point in their favor, when such a grid is not in place nor is ever likely to be.
But turning the freeway into a local road seems sort of like a conflicting purpose, and not entirely efficient.
I know, I know - messy, chaotic, dangerous: these are only and always good now.
As to the business about "I love to discover new taquerias and nail salons and mattress stores and pain clinics as I'm flying past on the freeway at seventy miles an hour": while this strikes me as more impressionistic than strictly rigorous, I wouldn't dream of disputing with people about what delights them. But since it was put on aesthetic grounds, I'll come out as saying I find "exciting discovery" freeway clutter very unpleasing, despite the fact that it's my primordial medium.
Commerce has not ceased in places where feeder roads are not built, but I suppose their absence discourages ugly commerce (or, sorry, to speak more precisely: what until recently no one - even its liveliest proponents - would have bothered to defend as other than ugly*) and I guess the prevailing libertarianism-masquerading-as-populism requires us to pretend that if commerce is not (what was formerly conceded to be) ugly, it is somehow less than genuine.
Puzzling that it should be hipsters who are usually mocked for their supposed quest for "authenticity."
*I sometimes forget that we've crossed a cultural divide in my lifetime, and It's getting harder to find the language for my opinions.
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My husband assures me, when I've had my doubts, that all things are indeed measurable and that economics is a perfectly valid science - the trick is to find a perfectly disinterested practitioner of it.
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I deal with economics, numbers and budgets professionally. To say that the fiscal situation of our government at all levels is dysfunctional would be a comical understatement. The entire enterprise is based on an approach that would get anyone in the private sector thrown in jail. Deception is baked in to the language they use intentionally. Actual positive economic outcomes are only going to happen out of dumb luck when all of your planning, analysis and communication is based on a system that ignores plain reality.
This is a bit of a peeve of mine, if you can't tell.
I don't deal with such things and don't pretend to understand them.
But the economists - right and left - are always united in their rosy optimism: they insist that the debt doesn't mean what we think it means, that we don't understand fiat currency, that growth is inevitable and means the bill will never come due, and moreover that it must never come due, or the result would be disastrous.
We think we're so over religion ... but they're like any other priestly caste, and we the laity are not expected to understand, but only have faith.
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I think it's gaudy. Can you image having a building over 3,000 feet tall in Houston? It would look absolutely ridiculous---and not just in Houston but ANY American city. Not to mention, the wind stresses on something that tall during a violent hurricane I think would limit anything like that here in Houston....or any coastal town (NYC, Miami, Nola, ect)
I don't know what these things mean to the people who build them, when it seems plain to others that they are a substitute for achievement, and must derive from of a sense of inferiority.
But that is a patronizing, Western view, perhaps.
Setting that aside, building one here could be be a shorthand way of suggesting that Houston identifies more closely with the developing world, than with America. What use is national identity in 2014?
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^ Wonderfully stated, NenaE.
Though of course it's the anti-preservationists that have all the explaining to do, theirs being the radical position.
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I was reading this thread earlier and it occurred to me to wonder how much peoples' reaction to the original topic would be influenced by what I could call the hipster-trendophilia syndrome. Awhile back, it occurred to me that there was an axis that existed, one that tended to shuttle young acolytes between places like Austin, Portland, SF, Santa Fe, Boulder, et al., in their quest for jobs that would pay just enough to enable them to exist in some place that satisfied their need to feel fulfilled in some way.
Insofar as those people received satisfaction in their quests, the places they perceived as vital instruments tended to wind up being shining icons in the minds of many other young (and not-so-young) idealistic people. I'm not saying that those feelings are necessarily bad ... but, there does to be some sort of starry-eyed innocence in the worship that those places seem to receive.
Saw this today: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2014/03/us-cities-highest-levels-income-segregation/8632/
It strikes me that what "hipsters" want is only what (few things) they've been taught to want. Despite their self-reflecting devices, I don't see anything unusually narcissistic in the current twenty- and thirty-somethings. If anything, there is far less of the smugness and self-involvement of, say, the Boomers, or the pure materialism of my own cohort.
Among large metros, Richard Florida finds, "San Antonio has the highest level of income segregation, followed by Memphis, New York, Houston, Washington, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Dallas, Denver, and Austin." (SA is #7, Houston is #13, Austin #32.)As befits a generation that has come of age knowing nothing but a meritocracy, and nurtured on the promise of egalitarianism, I could see where young people might be attracted to certain cities because those cities feel like the momentary fulfillment of that promise, even as the rest of the country trends a different direction.Austin doesn't fare nearly as well as Portland in this regard (Portland evidently being the second-least-income-segregated large metro in the country) but it certainly trails other Texas cities.
Indeed, the retreat of the wealthy into enclaves may be said to be a hallmark of the Texas model:
"The most highly segregated metros are actually smaller and medium sized, many of them in Texas. El Paso tops this list, followed by second and third-ranked Laredo and McAllen. College Station comes in sixth place. San Antonio, which is first out of large metros, is eighth overall, and Brownsville is ninth. Outside of Texas, Bridgeport, Connecticut is fourth; Trenton, New Jersey fifth; Memphis eighth; and Jackson, Tennessee tenth."
I know most urban enthusiasts will file this development under "Dynamism!" but if you're a certain age, it's a little strange, not at all what was expected.
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The whole thing seemed bizarre, and in retrospect like it was always going to be a PR disaster for TxDOT, but probably not -- it happens all the time. It was only due to the family's herculean efforts that anyone heard about it. After I read the article in our local paper to x, he called somebody he knows and likes at TxDOT, one of their people who works on environmental impact statements and mitigation and such, to find out more, and that fellow still hadn't even heard of the issue. ("Too small, maybe," said x, but also: "Their culture is overdue for change.")
I wouldn't for a moment expect TxDOT to ever justify a bypass, but the family had said they were more than willing to sell them whatever land they needed to go around the trees. In the event, TxDOT has now admitted that the "urban design" they will pursue will not cost anything more, which seems like a rare moment of truthtelling, probably accidental.
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From the Chron...
Looks like we rank #20, down from #19 last year.
Some highlights....
LA is #1...no surprise there.
San Francisco is #3 and San Jose is # 8
Austin is #4...good job Austin, you've got worse congestion than NYC
NYC at #6
Seattle is #9
Vancouver is #12...hmmm
Portland is #16...wait... how can a model city have such bad congestion?
Houston is #20...down from #19 last year
But don't our guiding libertarian lights continually suggest that congestion is just a sign of affluence?So cities should be clamoring to be #1 on that list.
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The swamplot posting, though it may be mistaken, indicates the house was built in 1906.I grew up in a part of Houston where every building dated from the same couple of decades. Upon moving to another city, the novelty factor of older buildings (most often in tandem with very old trees) immediately coverted me into an avid pedestrian.I wouldn't be overly concerned about the judgment an architectural historian would render on a given house. To leave anything of significance to academics to decide is pretty much a category mistake.Relics are everywhere treasured; I do think the word "historical" does more harm than good, as it invites pedantic attack. "This is a fine example of old Houston" is of course sufficient justification for the desire (no worries, it's completely toothless!) to see this house saved.But, to engage for a moment: the "let's not preserve anything because really, we have no history, because George Washington didn't sleep here" argument I've seen on swamplot is more interesting than it deserves to be; it confusingly seems to presuppose that we will have no history going forward, either, or that we are outside of the stream of humanity.As if, what has happened in southeast Texas the last hundred years has not been felt all around the globe. Or that history only happened east of the Mississippi or is memorialized in Longfellow poems, and somber, sweetly pretty battlefields.The idea that preservation, in a city of hundreds of square miles, is the enemy of affordable housing is risible, but not unexpected. I have noticed that in Austin, affordability is being cynically trotted out to justify all manner of unpopular wholesale changes; and manifests also in an effort to strip owners of protected houses of the tax break they receive in token return for the expense of maintaining an older structure. {I think the affordability trope is "Austin, you're wearing a sheet!" updated for the twenty-teens. Time was, whenever any sort of environmental initiative came up, the Chamber of Commerce folks would egg on the Eastside activists to decry it (insert any random thing, like water-quality) as racist. In fact, they won the day to some extent, successfully coupling ridiculous, unrelated things. They managed to routinely suggest that blacks and Hispanics never swim at Barton Springs, or enjoy parkland or clean water, or care about endangered species -- without themselves being accused of racism. Quite the magic trick. The enviros, their minds blown by this confusing turn in the dialogue, tended to submit. It echoes still, in the new expanded single-member-district city council that will kill the goose and forcefeed it identity politics from now on.}Just know that, where I live, if the home survived as late as 1985 (a big if), then it would likely have received historic protection; if not, and the owner (typically, this role is played by a newbie real estate investor in town) hoped to get away with razing it, he would be well aware that he was gambling that the community would not be paying attention.We'd still get the $400,000 townhouses - they would be built next door.
The house would remain, probably as a law office, as lawyers seem to like those classical proportions.The process would be perfectly "predictable" for all concerned, and most of all, whether at the time or in restrospect, not really a big deal.
And when the Lovett house is torn down: well. something that's been done tens of thousands of times in Texas towns (though, usually, what you got instead was a fast-food restaurant, soon defunct, on the main street) cannot at this point be described as a big deal, either. But be candid, Houston chooses that path as a marketing tool - "We're freewheeling!": for no other reason. It may be canny, though it's almost certainly unneeded. Houston's really not that fragile.
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Actually it's just architecture, with British influences. And the British architecture has classical influences. Pretty much all architecture has influences from some earlier style.
I found that post perplexing, too.
But I would be happy to hear, from an architecture maven, a précis of the notion of "real" versus "fake." Does a building have to be located very precisely in space and time to qualify as real?
My first encounter with the idea of real was the story of the Velveteen Rabbit, and I guess I'm still struggling with it.
Was he not real because he was not yet loved? As an unlovable child I found that troubling; it seemed a very tenuous basis for existence.
Was he still less real because he was made of velveteen rather than costlier velvet? (I would probably have been wearing polyester, so I had to work that out about the velvet.)
Or was he not real because he was a secondary image of something else? How many true originals are there?
Or was it because the model was a living rabbit?
Are houses made of wood fakes of the trees we came down from? Are houses made of rock fakes of caves?
And "rights": what is their reality? Do they precede the idea of property, like a physical constant? When they are violated at the point of a gun, are they still real in theory? But what was the use of them then, if they break down so easily?
If they are just a useful mutually-agreed-upon fiction, to what do they owe their existence? Do they spring from culture, in fact a particular culture? If the latter, is it possible that threats to the culture might threaten these magical property rights, or any "rights"?
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And still they come.As anyone will attest, Austin has done almost nothing of any significance to improve its transportation infrastructure.It would be just fine if Houston's growth could be attributed to its welcoming willingness to expand I10, because it would suggest a measure of control over the process. (And in a larger sense, there is, of course.)But a recent roundup of "what cities people are moving to" listed Austin (July 2011 metro area population: 1,728,247) at #3, with a net domestic migration of +30,669; while Houston (5,976,470) was #5, with +21,580 in the same period.
Austin has done so little in that way, in fact, as to nearly eliminate roadbuilding or other transit efforts as a possible factor in attracting people; almost certainly less of a factor, anyway, than the constant publication of such lists ...Of course, this is mostly irrelevant, as Texas' population growth is overwhelmingly due to natural increase and international immigration, not people pulling up stakes and renting U-Hauls in other cities.
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A few people are paying attention, and have gone to expense and trouble to offer an alternative. I expect TxDoT is waiting for them to die:
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The view espoused by pfg was once mainstream, and, may I respectfully suggest, it is, even at this date, not really something he should have to apologize for. History may yet judge indifference to limitless growth, to have been the radical view.In my stamp collection there's one showing a happy nuclear family. It says "Family Planning."It's an 8-cent stamp.I read one of those "that used to be us" pieces the other day, only it wasn't about American manufacturing, it was about Africa, and written by a noted Kenyan economist. It boiled down to, please, leave us the hell alone.There is nothing any more "natural" about Africa's rampant population growth in the 20th century, than China's reduction in its birth rate.In a way, it was the final thing the West did to, or "for," Africa. Unfortunately, it probably means we can never leave them alone now. Which is a shame, because we put a certain value on life in Africa, and that economist believes, heartbreakingly, that it was too low.But then, maybe human life everywhere will be worth a little less when the population is ten billion.
Nature will deal with us, perhaps harshly. To me this is really a twofold discussion: one, about the preservation of certain values related to conservation, and how best to defend them, and if they're worth defending. I admit I am no humanist. But plainly one may fret over population for humanitarian reasons.
Interesting, then, that it is the supposed proponent of the value of human life, who has suggested that others should kill themselves.
Telling, even.Committing demographic suicide hasn't really proven to be the best way to advance our cause, but come one, por favor gracias: 'Romeo and Juliet, are together in eternity, we can be like they are, baby take my hand ...'-
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Have you ever noticed who people who talk about the population problem always talk about it as if all those other people are the problem? I suggest voluntary "population reduction centers" where people who are concerned about overpopulation can make a personal and immediate contribution by voluntarily removing themselves and therefore become part of the solution.
The going theory is that we will be a world of old people as the great demographic transition takes place (mainly, I think, the Arab world and parts of sub-Saharan Africa not yet having gotten the memo).
Of course, we could easily stack the world's entire population in a cube inside Houston's loop -- but only a third-rate mind would still raise such a hoary canard, right, as if we were talking about a game of musical chairs?
Concern about population may be as much about how it falls, as how it rises.
Plagues and famine and war, those constants, become even more horrific to contemplate, in a world of seven billion.
I think I come by my population worries honestly, livincinco. I'm descended from people who left Europe because it got crowded, not because they were yearning for freedom. The population of Texas has more than doubled in my lifetime, there are houses in the fields and all that. Because I'm a child of the seventies, I was inculcated with the idea that there were two groups we had wronged, blacks and American Indians, and I should care about them. Yet the result has been endless empty professions of empathy for the plight of the underclass, while our politicians and business leaders ensure that an ever-replenishing supply of newcomers makes their chances harder, or nil. Dismay at these changes doesn't have much to do with favoring death. I liked the fields and the creatures in them. I like the rivers and not the dams. We all have our preferences, I think you'll agree.
But then it's a third-rate mind's habit of making the political personal, so I'll not describe how I came to have an education on what it means to favor life. All of life, not merely human life, which decidedly means favoring restraints on population growth.
For now. Should we ever return to an agrarian society, it may well be a different story.
It is deeply unfashionable to question growth, obviously. Thanks to the green revolution, and only thanks to it, we've added billions of people to the planet since the last time anyone seriously discussed population. Yet the mention of it strikes people as an existential threat, which is kind of funny.
And with apologies for oversimplifying the composition of HAIF, I'm afraid this problem really isn't a few gay men and a woman speeding toward menopause. It is other people.
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Why do we "need" to grow anymore? All that's going to come out of it is more traffic, more pollution, longer lines, higher prices, fewer resources, abandoned habitats and millions of other issues. We can't physically continue to do this over time.
Overpopulation is at the root of a lot of our problems.
por favor gracias, you're waging a lonely vigil. I will come away from the internet rabbit hole that is epoxy versus cementitious grout (and within that sanded v. unsanded, and additive or not, and Mapei or Laticrete, help me, legendary tile forum guy bill v ...) to join you off-topic.
One of the few pundits still interested in population once observed that while people feign indignation at China's population policy, at the very idea of a population policy, America has one too.He pointed out that in the seventies, in poll after poll, Americans expressed concern about population and a desire that population growth should stabilize.
More signally, Americans made their overwhelming reproductive preferences clear as well, by limiting family size.So in support of the will of the people,&etc. the U.S. government took steps to carefully limit immigration. Our population has thus scarcely increased since that time.Wait a second, rewind. That's not what happened!The exact opposite.And that, friends, is our population policy, brought to you by the people who knew better, than you did, what you wanted.
Some of you will thank them, some of you will not, but it's a shame that there's not more recognition of their achievement, as it was quite fundamental.
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On a thread about roadbuilding (or not) I don't find bobruss and por favor gracias's mild invocation of nature, of what exists and must give way before the roads and attendant sprawl, to be particularly more off topic than the new glass office buildings on I-10. But I'll hand it to ya, the stamina y'all bring to parsing those buildings is impressive.
Game of Thrones and Violence in Media
in Way Off Topic
Posted
I think I may be the lone conservative on this forum, so I'll try to succinctly convey that perspective:
The issue is not what people can tolerate, in the Grand Guignol way; the channel of what is "mainstream" can be infinitely widened.
Nor is it whether movie footage is more or less graphic than reality. People used to come from miles around, children in tow, to enjoy the spectacle of a hanging. At least one may offer the excuse that this perhaps functioned as the equivalent of a cautionary public awareness campaign in a brutal time, but it is not an impulse to honor. The past is not monolithic; I'm sure that there were right-thinking people who were appalled.
Our reaction to an image, and the images we seek, may tell us something about how in touch with reality we are. And by reality, I mean less, what is really bad - than what is good.
That very graphic depictions of violence should furnish light entertainment is decadent, and decadence usually presages the end.
I understand that when conservatives say such things, all people hear is: you want to take away our fun. No, no. It just makes you wonder what's coming.
Note: I have no particular axe to grind with any one show. I myself tried to watch that "True Detective" series, but couldn't get through it. I'm bored with dead, bound girls, the victims of perverted VIP sex rings. And yes, boredom is a sign of decadence, too. :-)