Elsewhere (179)
Via dicentra, Darleen Click finds a mother whose environmentalist pieties have produced a nightmare teenager:
I can do nothing right in my teenage son’s eyes. He grills me about the distance travelled of each piece of fruit and every vegetable I purchase. He interrogates me about the provenance of all the meat, poultry and fish I serve. He questions my every move — from how I choose a car (why not electric?) and a couch (why synthetic fill?) to how I tend the garden (why waste water on flowers?) — an unremitting interrogation of my impact on our desecrated environment. While other parents hide alcohol and pharmaceuticals from their teens, I hide plastic containers and paper towels.
The mother in question, Ronnie Cohen, is a “freelance journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area” who writes about “social justice issues.”
And Andrew Stuttaford quotes Peggy Noonan on lofty border policies:
Rules on immigration and refugees are made by safe people. These are the people who help run countries, who have nice homes in nice neighbourhoods and are protected by their status. Those who live with the effects of immigration and asylum law are those who are less safe, who see a less beautiful face in it because they are daily confronted with a less beautiful reality — normal human roughness, human tensions. Decision-makers fear things like harsh words from the writers of editorials; normal human beings fear things like street crime. Decision-makers have the luxury of seeing life in the abstract. Normal people feel the implications of their decisions in the particular. The decision-makers feel disdain for the anxieties of normal people, and ascribe them to small-minded bigotries, often religious and racial, and ignorant antagonisms. But normal people prize order because they can’t buy their way out of disorder.
I spotted a not dissimilar attitude, albeit in a different context, while watching this BBC documentary on the preservation and listing of despised Brutalist architecture – specifically, the notorious Park Hill estate in Sheffield, which embarrassingly dominates the city’s skyline. Note the romantic enthusiasm of the presenter, architecture critic Tom Dyckhoff, for this locally infamous eyesore, which is known chiefly for muggings, prostitution and the joys of dodging objects hurled from upper floors. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mr Dyckhoff does not live in, or near, Sheffield.) Note too, around 18:25, the views of Martin Cherry from English Heritage, who airily dismisses the preferences of Sheffield residents and insists that the local population will eventually come to embrace this “demanding” and “difficult” piece of “progressive” architecture.
Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.
Life imitates art: A clown car. (Skip to the 0:30 mark if impatient.)
A clown car.
It was driven from Gallifrey, I presume?
“Typo of note.”
https://twitter.com/HouseOfGubbins/status/643140630672224256
Two typos, I think.
That mother needs to make her son pay rent.
The car certainly does appear to be bigger on the inside. Or maybe the people are smaller. Maybe it’s all staged and there’s a trapdoor in the road through which extras are coming up via the floor of the car.
insists that the local population will eventually come to embrace this “demanding” and “difficult” piece of “progressive” architecture.
Christ, that’s ugly. Don’t tell me, Mr English Heritage doesn’t live there either…
Don’t tell me, Mr English Heritage doesn’t live there either…
No, he doesn’t. There are several counties between Mr Cherry’s home and… that. Despite which, he says, “Ugliness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.” Which is easier to proclaim if you don’t have to behold the thing in question on a regular basis. Evidently he isn’t the one who’s meant to find it “difficult” and “demanding.” That’s for the peasants. He’s improving them, you see.
” finds a mother whose environmentalist pieties have produced a nightmare teenager: ”
What sort of person writes about her own child in public like that?
Immigrants arriving illegally do not make the rules. Nor will they necessarily, having proved what you can achieve by breaking the first law of the host country you arrive in, bother much about following laws in future.
I suspect Park Hill may be the ideal place for them to reside, especially since they have been ‘done up’ in fetching yellow and orange hues.
despised Brutalist architecture… locally infamous eyesore… Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mr Dyckhoff does not live in, or near, Sheffield
It’s interesting to note that the most ardent advocates of modern architecture are frequently those who don’t have to live with it themselves. For instance architects Richard Rogers (who was advocating quite recently the preservation of another carbuncle, Robin Hood Gardens) and Norman Foster do not live in one of their excrescences, but a rather pleasant 19th century terrace in Chelsea: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pembridge1/8115158301/in/photostream/ and an elegant 18th century Swiss chateau: http://www.letemps.ch/rw/Le_Temps/Quotidien/2009/05/20/Soci%C3%A9t%C3%A9/ImagesWeb/WEB%20ch%C3%A2teau%20de%20Vincy–469×239.jpg respectively. I could go on, but I don’t think I need to, do I?
insists that the local population will eventually come to embrace this “demanding” and “difficult” piece of “progressive” architecture.
I’m sorry, I’m just not sophisticated enough to see that shit pile as beautiful.
I’m sorry, I’m just not sophisticated enough to see that shit pile as beautiful.
That does seem to be the assumption. As if to find the thing unattractive is to fail some high aesthetic “challenge.”
It’s utter cock, of course, and it’s a conceit typical of the type. Even on its own terms, the project seems confused in almost every way. Aesthetically, historically, socially – and of course financially, as the listing has made any kind of redevelopment all but unviable. Even the Guardian found the eyesore’s listing incoherent and absurd.
Aging SF lefty surprised when the Chekist she raised turns on her.
There’s going to be a lot more of her type in the coming years.
Mommybloggers like to humblebrag about their success in bringing up their children to be ferocious little ideologues. Compare with My Son Is A Really Militant Feminist And It’s All My Fault.
“Even the Guardian found the eyesore’s listing incoherent and absurd.”
Mind you, that’s Stephen Bayley, who used to be a regular at the Telegraph. Although to be fair, the Groan did print it.
It appears the son has the typical mental defectiveness of most liberals, but he got a double dose. He will never ever be a happy person because life is not and cannot be perfect. It is not supposed to be. If it was … we would all have over-paid, do-nothing government jobs and no ambition or we would all be muslim. Take your pick. Just don’t be a conservative that is a death wish.
Mind you, that’s Stephen Bayley, who used to be a regular at the Telegraph.
And I’ve since found a couple of articles in which Guardian bods attempt to depict the project as sexy and fab, at least in theory. But really, it’s a disaster. The Grade II listing prohibits demolition for new building, and severely restricts the scope for any renovation. It’s simply not economic.
Originally budgeted at somewhere in the region of £100M, the redevelopment – which over a decade later has had to be scaled down, is still unfinished and years behind schedule – has gone to the brink of collapse several times, so far requiring another £30M of taxpayers’ money to make up part of the growing shortfall. If the estate is ever finished, the flats will be sold or rented privately and be hugely overpriced, given their location in the shell of a notorious sink estate. According to Sheffield City Council’s website, there is currently “no set date” for the project’s completion.
A turd rolled in glitter, as some of the locals might say.
I can do nothing right in my teenage son’s eyes.
I can’t help but think that at least some of this is the son having found a surefire way to annoy his mother, pieties or no.
There’s a reason why authoritarian regimes focus on youth indoctrination. The combination of enthusiasm, ignorance, and gullibility is awfully useful.
Here’s where I studied mathematics. You can just feel the warmth and humanity emanating from this brutalist piece of crap.
On the other hand, if there were ever a nuclear attack this is where you’d want to be.
Daniel Hannan, quoted here, on the latest imagined saviour of the Clown Shoe Left™:
We live in strange times.
I’m glad that Professor Cherry and all those foreign architects and planners admire the Park Hill Estate. That must make all the people who were forced to live in or near it feel so much better.
Anyway I have a cunning plan to get rid of it – just tell the USAF that ISIS have a cell operating from there.
We live in strange times.
I’ve arrived at the point where when I feel the urge to say something sarcastic, my cynicism asks “why bother?”.
We live in strange times.
We live in dumb times.
The latest from Franklin:
Mmh. Smell the diversity.
And over at Tim Blair’s: Eco-hipsters eat weeds, and also weed killer.
not long ago, a retirement home nearby was demolished and a much bigger replacement built elsewhere.
the wreckers ran the whole thing thru a giant crusher that turned all the concrete into gravel and separated the rebar for recycling.
I wonder which generation is the one to stop thinking outside the box? you know, the 1st ‘george orwell 1984’ bunch. its happened to a couple countries so far, all communist, but gawd help us when the whole world goes that way; there wont be anything different to compare to, nothing to strive toward and hope for. heh heh, then they can reoccupy that ugly beast in sheffield.
from David’s Daniel Hannan link (15:32)
” Fred Z
September 14, 2015 at 1:37 pm
Most politicians are high level confidence tricksters who will say anything, anything at all to achieve power. All of their mental abilities and training are directed at this target. As a result they have no brainpower left over for technical matters, so conspiracies of Unions, bureaucrats and crony capitalists can talk them into crazy things.
If you think “conservative” politicians are any different you should look very hard at David Cameron.”
end of quote.
hmmm. so there are others out there who can see through all the propaganda.
Rabbit,
My UW experience was entirely by correspondence. Seems I dodged a bullet.
Daniel Hannan forgot to mention that Jeremy Corbyn’s hobby is photographing manhole covers. I jest not.
Jeremy Corbyn was born in 1949. Stalin was still in power then. Since then we have been through the Korean War, the 1956 Hungarian revolution, the Prague Spring and its subsequent repression, the Communist takeover of Viet Nam and Laos, the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, the fall of Eastern European Communism, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Tiananmen Square and the recent upswing in Russian revanchism. We have also seen free markets and the rule of Law lift billions out of utter destitution, leaving mainly untouched those areas where the Left still has sway. Despite all this, Corbyn still cleaves to the most disgusting, barbarous ideology that has been seen on Earth since the Conquistadors put the kibosh on Aztec thoracic surgery. That’s not misguided. That’s evil. Just because he looks like a geography teacher shouldn’t let him off the hook. He is a wicked man busily surrounding himself with wicked (mainly) men and a few wicked women. We should not be afraid to state, plainly and repeatedly, what he is and what he stands for. To do any less is to acquiesce in his vileness.
A turd rolled in glitter,
I come for snark. I stay for the poetry.
A turd rolled in glitter
Stands proud on the Sheffield skylines.
Considered by locals as litter,
but not by the Guardian’s by-lines.
Apologies to Betjeman.
What sort of person writes about her own child in public like that?
I think the kids these days are calling it “humblebragging.”
She’s actually proud to display her workmanship: “look at what a Righteous Warrior I’ve produced,” she says, pretending to be annoyed by his eco-Nazism.
Were he equally as obnoxious but on the other side of the spectrum, she’d be too ashamed to write about it at all.
Not using her real name, anyway.
For another nightmare teen sent off to college, see http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article34096314.html
Her struggle to be taken seriously by people who identify as male, not least her father.
I can’t help but think that at least some of this is the son having found a surefire way to annoy his mother, pieties or no.
As noted above, he’d be a conservative if he was in the game of annoying her.
My experience is that it is all about social positioning within the same age group. Kids take ridiculous positions and do ridiculous things to show that they are holier (in his case) or tougher (chavs) or more free of social convention (sluts) or so on.
And since the default position among “sensitive” young things is vegetarianism and social justice, the extremists would want to make a name for themselves get a long way out there.
I don’t think the mother should charge him rent. She should just refuse to feed him. He’d die of starvation if he had to feed himself using his actual budget tied to his (imagined) principles.
Check the updates. I may have cowed the diversitymongers into something resembling civilized comportment.
I may have cowed the diversitymongers into something resembling civilized comportment.
Well played, sir.
So did the AARW bods appreciate you pointing out their moral and administrative errors? Did they thank you for sparing them further embarrassment, before going away to rethink some of their fundamental assumptions? Or were they just pissed at being caught red-handed?
Columnist prone to errors, incoherence and glaring double standards doesn’t like comment sections.
Somewhat related.
Tom Dyckhoff?
Is that actually someone’s name?
Isn’t ‘hoff’ German for ‘head’?
Columnist prone to errors, incoherence and glaring double standards doesn’t like comment sections.
Don’t talk back.
Don’t talk back.
It seems we’re supposed to believe that the zealously moderated Guardian comment sections – in which almost any hint of WrongThought™ is promptly erased, along with any complaints about unwarranted deletions – would otherwise be heaving with “sexism, racism and homophobia,” along with “threats and harassment.” But this is someone who regards mild mockery and factual correction as “attacks” and therefore wicked. And I can’t help noticing Ms Valenti’s attempt to associate criticism of her outpourings with railing against “scientific certainty,” as if the two were comparable.
Apparently, daring to ridicule Ms Valenti’s many errors constitutes “upholding power structures instead of subverting them.” Subversion being implicitly defined as agreeing with her.
Brutalist Architecture Fans: Ok, look. Ugly is ugly. Take a picture, then let us tear the damn thing down and build a nice building. Improve the world.
Isn’t ‘hoff’ German for ‘head’?
Kopf. But I like the way you think.
Speaking of The Guardian, we now have Sexism In Spaaaaace !, along, of course, with racism, abelism, cis-patriarchy, and more microaggressions than can be counted.
Damn that Pioneer 10 and its probably all white engineers and their slide rules and crew cuts.
Subversion being implicitly defined as agreeing with her.
It’s because she’s so modest.
It’s because she’s so modest.
It seems to me the only things Ms Valenti is subverting are intellectual standards.
‘Columnist prone to errors, incoherence and glaring double standards doesn’t like comment sections’.
As one of the below the line comments says, ‘Has really inflammatory articles which are basically clickbait, and wants to shut down comments…’
‘We live in strange times’.
I’m still in touch with one of my uni tutors (very good historian, excellent teacher). He is very anti-Tory, hates Blair, and tends to go off on one about Israel.
He is utterly horrified at the fact that Corbyn is now Labour leader. He remembers the 1970s and 1980s, and knows full well that Labour has basically gone over the cliff. How many other voters like him have drawn the same conclusions?
Damn that Pioneer 10 and its probably all white engineers and their slide rules and crew cuts.
They definitely needed more diversity. Just think; the mission might have succeeded if they hadn’t left it in the hands of these CisHetPatriarchalShitlords ™:
In the U.S., elected local governments needn’t always defer to the tastes of their architecturally-trained betters.
Take for example the Orange County Government Center in Goshen, NY – considered a “masterpiece” of brutalist architecture by the likes of NYT critic Michael Kimmelman and the World Monuments Fund, who put it on their watch list alongside Macchu Picchu and the Great Wall of China. The problem was that the taxpayers of Orange County and their elected representatives weren’t so fond of the place, and grew tired of the expense of maintaining its “striking brutalist style” characterized in part by 87 flat, multi-leveled, chronically-leaky roofs.
Well, how dare they. Unlike NYC-domiciled Kimmelman, Organe County taxpayers didn’t understand that their government center, built at the public expense, “wasn’t designed to win a popularity contest.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/arts/design/clock-ticks-for-paul-rudolphs-orange-county-government-center.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=mini-moth®ion=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below
Fortunately, that argument didn’t cut any ice in the courts. Demolition was allowed to proceed this summer.
David!!! Just the sort of artwork you’ve been looking for!!!
PORTLAND, Ore. – A Portland artist’s unusual painting is making national headlines. . . . . . .
Columnist prone to errors, incoherence and glaring double standards doesn’t like comment sections
One minute we’re told women are being silenced, the next they give us a hundred mealy-mouthed justifications for censorship.
You’ve got to love feminists. There truly is nothing they say that they aren’t afraid to contradict the next day and say “that’s different” – the Golden rule of feminism.
‘The plaque also clearly portrays the human figures as white, and Stuart added: “I would be uncomfortable with sending out any images or messages that include Western-dominated material.”’
Actually the plaque portrays the human figures as gold as the plaque is made of gold or gold plated.
Any alien visitors might be disappointed.
“The plaque shows a man raising his hand in a very manly fashion while a woman stands behind him, appearing all meek and submissive,” she said. “We really need to rethink that with any messages we are sending out now. Attitudes have changed so much in just 40 years.”
The woman is clearly not behind the man. They are side by side (their feet are level).
She is not showing any signs of submissiveness – her head isn’t lowered, her hands are beside her side.
Those accusations are lies.
The looking “white” is in the eye of the beholder, but I remain unconvinced on that too.
The looking “white” is in the eye of the beholder, but I remain unconvinced on that too.
Good point, the guy looks a little Polynesian, and the gal a little oriental, but then we get into the whole body shaming thing, and the whole depilation business which smacks of cisheteropatriarchal imposition of beauty standards on the female unless, of course, radio waves have gotten to the aliens first, in which case they will conclude that these two are just porn stars.
Can’t argue with that.
“The looking ‘white’ is in the eye of the beholder, but I remain unconvinced on that too.”
It was the 1970s, not the 1870s. I’d be willing to bet that this argument was actually had at NASA during the planning stages, and that they’re supposed to be “racially neutral” or some such. FWIW, they look vaguely hispanic to me.
Brutalism is fine when it’s a fiction; sadly for some what worked as a film set (and probably the only thing about that film that worked) had to be endured in real life. Don’t get me started on the locations used for A Clockwork Orange, or we’ll be here all night.
Elsewhere, migrant and refugee mobs are spilling across the border from Serbia into Hungary, battering down walls, breaking gates, and attacking the police. The Hungarians have so far responded in what is really a very civil manner to an invading horde: tear gas, water cannons, no casualties.
The Serbian prime minister nonetheless had the audacity to demand of the Hungarians “stop firing tear gas into our territory”.
Chutzpah.
“Jeremy Corbyn’s hobby is photographing manhole covers. I jest not.”
I’d want to know more before mocking him: Some manhole covers are rather beautiful.
https://sites.google.com/site/manholecoversunited/japan
http://www.japanvisitor.com/japanese-culture/manhole-covers
Still, it’s a shame to pass up an excuse for mocking a commie.