Careful now - by pointing out fraud you’re inflicting a moral injury on a vulnerable population. Of all the marginalized groups, surely the criminal is the most marginalized and thus the one most worthy and valuable in the progressive stack.
“To save free speech we must stop funding people who theorize in bad faith, endlessly looking for ways to undermine reality so as to put themselves in power.”
>To save free speech we must stop funding people who theorize in bad faith
To believe this in a meaningful, rational way would require one to constantly call out administrations and propagandists, after months and years of debunking evidences the methods to serially operate in bad faith.
In the absence of any calling out: We can reasonably surmise they are either captured by political cultists and not processing rationally - or that they are simply operating in bad faith.
Granting, however, that some percent of folks simply get off on bad actors and the harm they do to those who never earned that. For them, cruelty brings it's own buzz and that is enough.
The problem is that critical theory at the foundational level (Adorno, Foucault, even Butler) is an extremely useful and coherent way of thinking about power and situated perspective.
Unfortunately the revolutionary praxis that emerged from it is what we typically see in the academy under the label of “critical theory”, which smuggles in a lot of “liberation” ethics under the guise of critique — so it’s no longer “this is how to think about power”, but rather “power is evil and should be destroyed, or even better given to me”. Foucault literally called these people “saviors” and he didn’t mean it nicely.
(It doesn’t help that this praxis is simplistic, ties into friend/enemy emotions, and gives people “something to fight for” in an era where meaning is hard to come by.)
No matter how contaminated the bathwater, though, I think the baby is probably worth saving.
That assumes they would vote in accordance with the future needs of their children. My experience in local politics around housing leads me to believe that most would not do this. Most would happily take the extra votes, but would vote in their self interest even when it conflicted with their children’s future self interest.
Because city planners and Nimby homeowners do not want it to be easy to build new building buildings. Every extra dollar you can force a proponent to spend, increases the odds that the project will no longer be economic to build, and simply not be built. For those most active in city politics, this is a win.
It goes way beyond design.
Early housing reformers in the 1920s, explicitly called for punitive fire regulations for multifamily buildings to make them on economical while admitting that they would not ask for any fire regulations for single-family buildings whatsoever.
This is just standard nimby style writing, describing every element of a proposal in a maximally negative and catastrophic light.
That the writer studied architecture tells you all you need to know - they have nothing of value to add and can only critique endlessly out of a misguided belief that the aesthetics of buildings can bring about a collectivist utopia. It’s the original home of social engineering and central planning.
No thread with 1000 comments will have anything original or anything of value. Inevitably it is just partisans throwing the same talking points at each other back-and-forth until one party gets tired and the other declares victory.
On the one hand, everyone says they want more floor space not less.
On the other hand, every city in North America America structures its land use policies around limiting total floor space.
Given this contradiction, it’s not surprising that some people feel forced to trade off floor space for the right to stay in the city.
The only way it’s going to be resolved is if planners let go of the idea that floor space is dangerous and must be tightly controlled, or if we invent TARDIS technology so that the insides of buildings can be larger than the outsides.
> In Mead’s telling, the Samoans, having “no conviction of sin,” had “the sunniest and easiest attitudes towards sex.” They regarded lovemaking as “the pastime par excellence … based on the general assumption that sex is play, permissible in all hetero- and homosexual expression, with any sort of variation as an artistic addition.” Romantic love does not occur in Samoa, she further claimed, while many of the emotions that “have afflicted mankind” had been eliminated—“perhaps jealousy most importantly of all.” The islanders’ relaxed attitude towards sex meant that “frigidity and psychic impotence do not occur.” Instead, the “exceptionally smooth sex adjustment of adult Samoans [was] preceded … by a period of free lovemaking and promiscuity before marriage by adolescents.”
> Freeman provides a darker—but, he insists, more accurate—picture of Samoan sexual behaviour, replete with numerous anecdotal and recorded accounts of sexual repression, jealousy, and violence.
Headline seems to sum it up reasonably accurately.
At a small company I used to work for, a couple of marketing adjacent people occasionally advocated for a modal newsletter sign-up pop-up on the homepage.
Each time it came up, I would argue against it, believing that it was not only a bad experience and that people would click away, but that few people would actually sign up.
Eventually, a more assertive marketing person came on board, made the case for the pop-up, and won the argument. We added the pop-up.
The result?
I was wrong. 100% wrong. Not only did our site metrics not suffer in any way, but tens of thousands of people signed up to the newsletter and it became a much more important communications and conversion channel than it had been.
To this day, I still hate it, and I hate pop-ups in general, but I try to have some humility about it. I have no doubt that my previous intransigence cost the company some business.
>I was wrong. 100% wrong. Not only did our site metrics not suffer in any way, but tens of thousands of people signed up to the newsletter and it became a much more important communications and conversion channel than it had been.
You were absolutely correct that it's a bad experience, and that probably a lot of people hated it and think less of your company for doing it. But since every site behaves this way it's not a deal-breaker for people anymore. People either find a way to get around it or just suffer with the crappiness of the modern web and your metrics just go brrrrr.
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