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It's Edmund Burke vs. Thomas Paine for the 50 millionth time. "Slowly and carefully prune away the rot" vs "Revolt and replace the institutions entirely". Jesse/Trace are advocating for the former, and interestingly enough much of the current conservative crop falls into the latter mindset, despite Burke being probably one of the most central figures to Anglosphere conservatism.
Not to go all Hlynka, but the modern right somewhat dovetails with the left in the sense that they have largely shifted from a Burkeian mindset to a Paine-like one overtime. I partially think this is the right seeing how successful revolutionary, scorched-earth tactics were on the left, and realising that advocating tactics characterised by stability and moderation don't work when you're fighting with people who really would like to (possibly violently) overhaul society. But more broadly, I think revolution is attractive to a general political coalition when they're heavily ousted from institutions and placed on the back foot, whereas gradual change that prioritises stability is preferred when these coalitions' beliefs are tolerated within said institutions - the risks and costs of overhauling the system in such a case just outweighs the potential benefit of marginal status gains. The likes of Trace are attempting to appeal to a gradualist version of conservatism that looks like a worse and worse value proposition as time goes on and the left's Long March through the institutions becomes increasingly apparent.
Personally, despite differing with conservatives on many things, I espouse a lot of heterodoxy that's anathema to progressives and would happily warm my hands on the embers of the torched institutions.
Why is modern architecture so bad, and more importantly why is it so common in spite of this?
The utter vacuity of modern architecture (and art) is probably not lost on many users around here. My distaste for modern architecture has been around for a while, but I never felt very strongly about it up until I visited Toronto and saw just what kind of effect that sort of construction had on the urban landscape - I found a city filled to the brim with ugly water-stained concrete-and-glass skyscrapers, some constructed by the likes of Mies van der Rohe and I.M. Pei; a city where traditional vernacular architectural styles were typically absent, found only in select areas like the Distillery District and St. Lawrence Market. It was an utterly depressing cityscape, and after I contrasted it with the very many examples of cosy and inviting vernacular architecture in South Korea - some of which were actually new traditional hanok neighbourhoods funded and supported by the South Korean government - I found myself deeply wanting to know why an entire society would willingly subject themselves to the pernicious and subtle form of psychological torture we call "modern architecture".
The gulf between what I perceive most people like and what architectural theorists like is truly incredible, and that shows up in many enthusiast forums. In true gatekeeping fashion, /r/Architecture seems to consider talking about the broad concept of "modern architecture" in a critical way as showcasing one's plebian-ness and disqualifying one from offering opinions on the topic. The general take seems to be that modern architecture is clearly too complex to broad-brush, after all post-war architectural styles span the range of heroic modernism, post-modernism, 60s space age, 70s modern, 80s neo-brutalism, 90s cookie cutter, contemporary, and so on. The blanket claim that one doesn't like all of it seems to be perceived as such a ridiculous and broad statement that no credence should be given to it whatsoever, then as a counterpoint people will recommend a piece of purportedly groundbreaking, humanistic modern architecture that... doesn't look substantially more pleasing to your average person than the concrete blocks people recall when they think of modern architecture.
This is because there is a broad common thread spanning most of these architectural trends, and among these are a "clean slate" philosophy, a conscious refusal to adopt local, pre-modern styles, focus on clean shapes and simplification and minimalism, and design and expressions meant to be adapted for the "age of machine". It's a trend that persists when you look everywhere from early pioneers like Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe to contemporary starchitects like Zaha Hadid, and even if certain architects weave in vernacular sensibilities every now and then, it will often be expressed within the larger context of this new post-war mode of architecture, for example in an ironic and highly simplified manner like is done in postmodernism. To engage in such obfuscatory pedantry so as to not properly engage with the critical opinions of laymen who aren't as well-versed in architecture-speak (whose opinions on what constitutes good architecture significantly differ from that of the academic world, and who often feel deprived of any say over the urban environments they live in) rubs me the wrong way. So for ease I'll refer to the phenomenon in question as "modern architecture", instead of listing out every single style it encapsulates.
I've seen a number of explanations posited to explain why "modern architecture" is so common, and I've attempted to look into them in order to investigate if they have any credence whatsoever.
1: The general public actually enjoys "modern architecture", and demands architecture in that style.
It is not uncommon for architects to suggest to detractors that the style of building is the client's fault, and not to blame the architect. So is this true, do clients actually ask for modern architecture? This is probably the explanation that is easiest to address - the literature is actually shockingly consistent on this: People hugely prefer traditional vernacular styles over post-war styles of architecture, and this preference is consistently found across groups regardless of political identification or race or sex.
This is practically a formality, but here goes. A 2007 poll of 2,200 random Americans conducted by the AIA found a strong preference for traditional styles after presenting them with a list of 248 buildings deemed important by AIA members, with participants strongly preferring buildings that evoked Gothic, Greek and Roman traditions. It is necessary to note that tastemakers did retort to this, with the rebuttal of urban design critic John King including the assertion that architecture cannot just be evaluated via a photo, as well as the assertion that the list did not reflect the ideas of architectural experts but the opinions of the general populace (this one I find somewhat funny, considering it's a tacit acknowledgement that the preferences of architects are out of line with the general populace). In a similar vein, yet another study of 2,000 US adults who were shown seven pairs of images of existing U.S. courthouses and federal office buildings (consisting of one traditional and one modern building) showed that 72% preferred a traditional look, and this was the case regardless of whether one was Republican or Democrat or Independent, female or male, white or black (so no, liking traditional architecture isn't a "right-wing thing", as it is sometimes portrayed). The preference for traditional architecture was also consistent regardless of what socioeconomic status the respondent belonged to, suggesting the disparity in prevalence of traditional architecture and general-populace preference for it isn't an issue of class divide where the richest people can specifically commission buildings and decide what gets built. Neoclassical buildings were most favoured, and brutalist buildings were most disfavoured. A British replication of this result can be found in a YouGov survey, which polled 1042 respondents asking them which building out of four they would prefer to be built in their neighbourhood - the result came out 77% in favour of traditional and 23% in favour of modern. The president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Ruth Reed, responded to this with the assertion that traditional buildings are expensive and unsustainable (a point I will examine later).
But perhaps John King is correct that a photo doesn't properly capture how a piece of architecture actually feels - this is actually a critique I think holds water, there are many places I like far more in person than I imagined I would from a photo alone. Lucky for us, there's a study in Norway which used VR technology to partially circumvent that problem, capturing 360 degree videos of streets in Oslo then presenting them to participants by means of a VR headset. "It emerged that the places characterised by traditional architecture were appreciated considerably more than contemporary urban spaces. The traditional square Bankplassen got the best score, while the contemporary part of Toftes street in the generally popular district, Grünerløkka, came last." But if that, too, isn't a good enough facsimile of the actual experience of visiting a place, here is a Swedish thesis that details the results of a poll in the town of Karlshamn about what parts of their town residents like best, finding that that "the inhabitants make very unanimous aesthetic valuations of the buildings and that the wooden buildings, the small scale and the square are the most appreciated features. Studies in the field of environmental psychology find a general aesthetic preference for features that can be related to the traditional small town".
There are also other more informal polls which one can rely on, such as this bracket assessing readers' favourite buildings in Chicago - the bracket in question was populated via popular nomination, then whittled down to a final four. All of the final four are in traditional style, featuring the Tribune Tower, Carbide and Carbon Building, Wrigley Building, and The Rookery Building. It seems clear that the majority of the public, regardless of demography, prefers traditional architecture, and these results are robust and replicable across many different methodologies. And, well, water is wet. Sometimes it seems that architects are unpleasantly surprised with these results and are in disbelief/denial about the fact that the majority of the public might truly have these views, which brings me to my next possibility:
2: Architects like "modern architecture", the public does not; the excess of modern architecture represents the tastes of architects and not the general populace.
There is a somewhat convincing corpus of evidence showing that architects simply appreciate architecture in a different way from the general populace - as a starting point this study summarises some results from previous work on the topic. One study from 1973 suggests architects respond more to "representational meaning" in a building while the general layman prioritises "responsive meaning", with representational meaning having more to do with the percepts, concepts and ideas that a building conveys and responsive meaning being more of a judgemental view of whether the building is nice in a more immediate affective and evaluative way. Another study from the same year found that architects tended to prefer the person-built environment, whereas non-design students tended to prefer natural settings. This is relevant considering the fact that much modern art and architecture tended to be highly conceptual and focus on rejecting the rule of nature in favour of designing for the new era of machine, as described by Jan Tschichold in his book "The New Typography". The study in question reaffirms these findings, finding from an admittedly small sample that "non-architects gave more affective responses and descriptive responses to the physical features of the building in question, whereas architects commented more on ideas and concepts used to arrive at the physical forms".
This 2001 study showed a large discrepancy between architects' predictions of laypersons' preferences and their actual preferences. They presented a sample of 27 individuals without architectural training with colour slides of 42 large contemporary urban structures constructed in the 1980s and 1990s, and asked them to rate it from 1 to 10. 25 architects were then brought in to "predict or try to mimic a typical nonarchitect's global impression of each building". Low correlations were found between lay ratings of architecture and architects' predictions of lay ratings, and a slight trend towards less experienced architects making better estimations of lay ratings was found. Experience as an architect, if anything, seems to distance one further from the public's idea of "good architecture". While that study showed people contemporary buildings and doesn't directly touch on the traditional/modern dichotomy, it is notable that architects cannot predict lay preferences even within that narrow subset of architecture.
In addition, there are a number of studies which deal directly with that, though sample sizes are typically small. Devlin and Nasar (1989) report on the results of a study where 20 non-architects and 20 architects were shown a series of pictures of buildings which were categorised into general types: "High", which was characterised by fewer materials, more concrete, simpler forms, more white, and off-center entrances, and "Popular", which was characterised by use of more building materials, horizontal orientation, hip roofs, framed windows, centred entrances, and warm colours. Non-architects were more likely to evaluate "high" architecture as unpleasant, distressing and meaningless, while for architects the relationship between architectural style and evaluation was inverted. Small sample sizes, I know, there's not that much research on this, but the research that does exist tends to point in the same direction.
I consider it very likely that some architects (starchitects in particular) do build structures meant for their own self-edification, at the expense of the public and even the client - Peter Eisenman's House VI is one of the most infamous examples of this, a fantastic example of utter psychosis where he split the master bedroom in two so the couple couldn’t sleep together, added a precarious staircase without a handrail, and initially refused to include bathrooms. But most architects are normal working people constrained by clients' preferences and requirements, so the assertion that architects' preferences are responsible for the proliferation of modern architecture feels a bit impoverished to me as an explanation. They may have come up with the style, but it's not clear how much decisive influence their preferences have on most building projects. Perhaps it is just a dictatorship of taste - maybe architects do utilise their monopoly on skill and expertise to push their preferences through, as this comment by an architect on Scott's post "Whither Tartaria" notes, or maybe another driving factor is responsible here.
3: Traditional architecture just costs more to build, and when asked to make a tradeoff between their design preferences and low costs clients would prefer the latter.
This is an often-forwarded explanation for the prevalence of modern architecture, and it was initially the explanation I found the most convincing and intuitive. However, the urban planner and author Ettore Maria Mazzola has put some work into trying to estimate the prices of traditional vs modern architecture, and he does so by using ISTAT (Italian Bureau of Statistics) data, illustrating a large number of buildings and their costs from the 1920s and 1930s and updating them to today's dollars. His findings are presented in his 2010 book on the topic, but that is hard to access so they are also outlined in this paper. According to him "[t]raditional buildings of the first decades of the 20th Century were built in average times ranging from 6 to 12 months, they cost up to 67% less than the current building, and, after all these years, they still have never required maintenance works". Of course, there are problems when you're comparing across different time periods since there are factors that differ between the 1920s/30s and now, such as differing labour costs and building regulations, and so this cannot be considered the last word on the issue.
For a far more illustrative modern-day comparison, there's this paper: "The Economics of Style: Measuring the Price Effect of Neo-Traditional Architecture in Housing" which attempts to study the price premium on neotraditional houses in the Netherlands. They investigate if the higher prices placed on neotraditional houses are due to the higher costs of construction, and from a preliminary investigation into that topic they find: "On our request they provided information on construction costs of houses that vary in style but are otherwise the same. The information provided by Bouwfonds shows that houses in different styles developed by Bouwfonds do not vary in costs. Terraced homes in the style of the 1930s have similar construction costs as houses designed in “contemporary” styles." In an analysis of 86 Vinex housing estates they find significant price premiums for neotraditional houses and houses that refer to neotraditional architecture (as compared to non-traditional houses), with a 15% premium for the former and 5% premium for the latter. They also investigate if differences in interior quality or construction costs could explain the price premium and find that the price premium barely reduces even in more homogenous samples with less room for differences in construction costs. Rather, what they find is that supply is the main factor influencing traditional architecture's prices - in the highly regulated Dutch environment there has been a lack of supply capable of meeting demand, and the price premium has been slowly eroded as more traditional housing has been manufactured overtime. As a result, cost doesn't seem to be the driver for the lack of traditional architecture, nor does it seem to be the case that the style of residential housing perfectly reflects consumer preference - there seems to be an undersupply of neotraditional housing, which then gets reflected in higher prices.
Such an analysis seems to be supported when looking at individual case studies - traditional architecture is not inherently more expensive than modern architecture. An interesting example of this is the Carhart Mansion in New York City, a traditional building which was constructed at "substantially the same unit cost as new Modernist luxury apartment buildings", according to Zivkovic Associates, the organisation that was responsible for the plans and elevations for the building. While it is true that this building was constructed as a luxury apartment building at a higher price point than many other housing markets, the fact that it features a similar unit cost as luxury modernist buildings still raises the question as to why there aren't more traditional buildings at this price point. Furthermore, it's hard to explain away the findings of the earlier Netherlands paper with the claim that traditional stylings are only cost-effective when building higher-end properties, since the similarity in cost seems to persist there too. However, there's an interesting aspect to the case of the Carhart Mansion which might explain the proliferation of modern architecture:
4: City planning boards and other approval committees strongly prefer modern architecture, and are more likely to approve modern-style constructions regardless of the wishes of end-users or architects.
The Carhart Mansion's design was opposed by many members of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), with the LPC initially being skeptical about the proposed Classical design, and with many members making statements such as "You can’t do that – the façade has to be plain and simple." According to the source linked earlier, "[t]he LPC’s concerns seemed to focus on the question of how well the design would be executed – whether the quality of the craftsmanship in the new construction would do justice to the historic buildings around it. (Oddly, this did not seem to be an issue with the earlier Modernist design!)"
This quote from the very same source is also illustrative: "If you speak with architects and consultants who appear frequently before the LPC, they characterize their perceptions of the LPC’s decisions as follows: Designs for additions to landmarks or infill buildings in historic districts that do not violate the cornice lines and overall massing of neighboring protected buildings will likely win approval, even if aggressively Modernist in style, materials and details; but new traditional designs would have a harder time being approved on the basis of style alone. Accordingly, a number of prominent New York architects specializing in projects involving landmarks have advised their clients that new traditional designs employing actual historic architectural language, such as fully realized Classicism, would likely cost them a lot more in time and money in the review process. This perception has had a chilling effect on new traditional design in historic districts in New York City and in other cities where similar views prevail."
I'm not aware of any source that properly studies this, but it's probably not implausible that planning committees' preferences and tendencies surrounding architecture differ from the public. It's not necessarily the case that architecture granted planning permission reflects what the public wants - planners are a selected group of people with certain training, and this obviously skews the preferences of the people involved in planning.
Finally, a bonus:
5: People don't like modern architecture less than traditional architecture, it's just that the traditional architecture has been subjected to a selection process which filters out all the bad buildings.
Easily falsified - see above in part 1; even modern architecture selected for their importance doesn't fare as well against the traditional stuff.
Furthermore, here is the modern day Toronto City Hall. Here is the Royal Ontario Museum, with a large contemporary "crystal" built into the original neo-romanesque façade. Here are some old photos of Toronto. I suppose I can't speak for anyone else and maybe some users of this forum will find the current Toronto architecture to be scintillating pieces of art, but I can say it's quite clear to me - a plebeian - which of those looks more appealing, and the examples of modern architecture I've offered up are serious landmarks of the city, whereas the old photos in question are just normal streets in Old Toronto.
Anyway, it's a bit bizarre to me why architecture today seems to skew overwhelmingly modern, despite the public seeming to find these buildings worse than traditional styles. So far I think a combination of point 2 and point 4 is probably what's skewing the ratio, but I've not drawn any firm conclusions.
I think the point that Hitler has an unjustifiably outsized reputation as the face of evil isn't unsubstantiated, but a far better example of a communist regime that far outstripped Hitler in terms of proportional body count would probably be Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge at large, who killed approx 25% of their population (among working-age men, the primary targets of the genocide, this figure rises to an astonishing 50-70%; very smart choice to absolutely decimate your main worker base in a primarily subsistence agrarian economy) while having power for less time than the Nazi Party.
They also grabbed infants by their legs and smashed their heads against chankiri trees to stop them from taking revenge after their parents had been killed, practiced Unit 731-like human experimentation including vivisecting people alive and injecting coconut juice into victims' veins, etc. It’s almost comical how exaggeratedly evil they were, and all these factors taken together probably makes them a very strong candidate as the worst regime in history. In this light, the fact that communism has a better reputation than fascism in the current day is beyond ridiculous - McCarthy, ironically enough, really did a great job inoculating them from criticism.
EDIT: Additional, unrelated thought: The Khmer Rouge were highly influenced by French communist schools of thought; many members of the party studied at the Sorbonne. I always wonder how the intelligentsia who promulgated such ideas managed to live with themselves upon seeing the fallout. Frankly, imagining myself in such a situation makes me viscerally understand the appeal of seppuku as a practice.
It's been a hard week, and I've been feeling a bit homesick about the country I grew up in - Malaysia. Having been born there, I didn't see it as anything particularly special, and I didn't use to understand why people would willingly go to these countries, but now I do. And I started writing about it, and it grew into a whole essay, so here you go.
I lived there for sixteen years of my life, and after having seen many other parts of the world I can confidently say there's really no other place like it. Maritime Southeast Asia is a ridiculously colourful and culturally heterogenous place, with Malaysia being no exception, and this seems to rear its head in virtually every part of society. Even the groups stemming from prehistoric Malaysia are stupidly multiethnic, with the famous current day Orang Asli hunter-gatherer population being highly heterogenous and having populated Peninsular Malaysia in distinct waves of migration. The Malay ethnic group itself is subdivided into many ethnolinguistic subgroups and the first time a coherent Malay identity arose was only during the 15th century Sultanate of Malacca, which introduced many aspects of modern-day Malay culture and syncretised the Old Malay language with Arabic and Persian influences, merging them with its original Austronesian roots. All while this was happening the first Chinese properly immigrated to the Malay peninsula, in a period of good relations between Ming China and the Sultanate of Malacca. Some of them settled down and intermarried with Malays, and an extant syncretic ethnic group and culture called Peranakans originated from this process. Minangkabau from Indonesia also came to the peninsula over the years, forming large permanent communities in many states. Tamil traders settled in the capital city of Malacca, forming yet another hybrid group called the Chetti Melakans who speak a Malay patois with many Tamil loanwords, and Malacca slowly became one of the most important cities for trade, welcoming people from many corners of the globe.
The Portuguese arrived in the 1500s and occupied Malacca as a possession of the Portuguese East Indies, attempting to snatch up this crucial choke point in order to get the upper hand over Venice. They, too, ended up forming a longstanding syncretic community in Malacca called the Kristang, a group with primarily Portuguese and Malay ancestry and which developed their own minority creole language still spoken today. Portugal also encouraged the immigration of mixed-race Catholic converts from India, and still others made it to Malacca from Portuguese colonies in Brazil, East Timor, Africa, and Macau. Then the Dutch captured Malacca and employed a lot of Malaccan Chinese, whom they found industrious, to construct Dutch buildings. The flow of Chinese and Indian immigration continued throughout the colonial period, and peaked during British colonisation specifically. British officers made their first incursion into Malaysia with the 1786 settlement of Georgetown and slowly expanded into the rest of the peninsula, and as they did so millions of Chinese immigrated to work in pepper cultivation and tin mining. By the 19th century, nearly five million Chinese had immigrated, and stable communities quickly formed. Tamil Indians were employed in plantations through the Kangani system, and their population boomed. Chinese populations took a hit during Japanese colonisation and specifically during Sook Ching, when they conducted organised mass killings of Malaysian Chinese men (an event that had wide-reaching effects, including on my own family; Japanese officials called up the brother of my great-grandfather for interrogation and no one ever saw him again), but regardless these populations remain very prominent up into the modern day.
Got all of that? Good, I've explained maybe 5% of the whole story and there are very many more cultural shifts and migrations to cover, but that would require an entire history book to fully explain. In any case, the sheer amount of cultural variety that exists here shows up very prominently in the language and cuisine and urban landscape. "Melting pot" doesn't even begin to describe it. Virtually everyone in Malaysia is multilingual, and it's not uncommon for their sentences to consist of a schizophrenic blur of Malay and Cantonese and Hokkien and Tamil and English. They're not even necessarily speaking formally recognised creoles, they're just finding the best word from every local language to convey what they mean and seamlessly blending different syntax rules as they go. Even aspects of life as mundane as public holidays have been profoundly affected by this - the list of holidays has become mindbogglingly long, just so every major ethnoreligious group's holy days can be accounted for. The religions themselves have also begun to syncretise and form strange little micro-cultures of their own; for example Chinese communities on the peninsula have long worshipped local Malay-Muslim guardian spirits collectively called Datuk Kong, and you can see little red shrines dedicated to them all around Malaysia. When Chinese devotees pray to them, they customarily abstain from consuming pork or alcohol on that day, and offerings also exclude those things as a gesture of deference to the Malay origin of these deities.
The historic port towns of the straits, Georgetown and Malacca, are particularly good examples of this cosmopolitanism. They play host to a gaudy and eclectic soup of different cultural traditions, featuring everything from Dutch colonial squares that now host open-air markets operated by ethnic Chinese and Malays and Indians, to stately British government buildings and Anglican churches nestled amongst rows and rows of vibrant Wes Anderson-esque Peranakan shophouses, to fragrant, incense-filled Taoist-Buddhist-Confucian temples located just down the street from Islamic mosques and Hindu temples, to waterside heritage mansions with a fine view of traditional stilt clan villages built into the waters of the strait, and so on. Sometimes you find really unexpected things in the urban sprawl, like a polyglot letterpress printing house in Malacca that happens to be one of the oldest in the world, or an unassuming heritage home in Georgetown where Sun Yat-Sen made his plans to overthrow the Qing Dynasty, or a colourful 1850s working temple in the suburbs of Penang filled with free-roaming pit vipers that are believed to be the reincarnated disciples of a deified monk. These straits cities are unpretentious places in a perennial state of glorious decay, swamped with humidity, buffeted by monsoons and assaulted with swarms of flies and mosquitoes, but the urban fabric blends an unimaginable number of disparate traditions together in a way that feels completely natural. Outdoor markets are everywhere, and they're packed to the brim with a mindboggling array of foods that borrow influences from varied parts of the globe. There's Chinese-Malaysian fare like char kway teow and bak kut teh (respectively: wok-fried flat rice noodle and herbal pork ribs soup), there's Malay delicacies ranging from ikan pari bakar to nasi lemak to air bandung (spicy grilled stingray, rice cooked in pandan leaf with homemade sambal, and rose syrup milk), there's weird hybrid cuisines like Peranakan cuisine that offer up dishes such as asam laksa, otak-otak, cendol (tamarind and mackerel noodle soup, spiced fish cakes wrapped in banana leaf, pandan jelly shaved ice), and more. Maritime Southeast Asia features a syncretism you don't really find anywhere else and it's simultaneously overwhelming and kind of magical at the same time. You think it’s bewildering reading about it? Try living there. If you ever get the chance to visit, I recommend it and think an outsider would have a great time in spite of all the obvious third world-ness. Malaysia's a lot of things, but it's never boring.
That's the good side of multiculturalism - in fact, it's multiculturalism at its very best, seeing all of these different traditions and value systems bump up against each other and interact in interesting ways. The darker side is that multiculturalism is typically not a terminal value for most ethnic groups; it is superseded by many other group-based considerations and affiliations in spite of all the syncretism, and the "melting pot" contains all these fine little gradations of difference which quickly resolve into large-scale tribal groups once you look a little deeper. And it's necessary to note here that people are typically not actively expressing prejudice towards each other in broad daylight, in fact they live with each other quite frictionlessly in day-to-day life, but all of that finely tuned ethnic tolerance is reliant on - how do I say this - peace treaties and other such understandings negotiated between the various ethnic groups that maintain the cosmopolitan state of affairs. Not all of their terms are good or even remotely reasonable. These treaties have failed before, and when they fail, people die. Hell, Singapore was ejected from the federation in no small part because of racial politics, and all the way back at the founding of Malaya as an independent nation, the cracks in this multicultural vision were already beginning to show. Malaysia possesses one of the longest-standing and most egregious examples of racial affirmative action I've encountered, established to placate ethnic Malays after tribal conflict escalated to the point where they massacred a good number of Malaysian Chinese in Kuala Lumpur for eroding their traditional majority in Parliament and supporting the principle of colour-blindness and also just doing too well economically, with bodies disposed of in unmarked graves near leper colonies and thrown into rivers. Any vaunted dream of a melting pot without ethnic conflict was just that - a dream, and it's part of the reason I left in the first place. But I can't help but look back at all of the good stuff and feel a little bit wistful about it all. The culture is fascinating, the food is among the best you'll find in the world, and there's a buzziness and vibrancy to it that's honestly infectious.
There's probably many people who think of Malaysia as some kind of irrelevant backwater, but it's actually surprisingly developed for a Southeast Asian country. For a good couple decades the country has been charging headlong into economic modernity, and the level of infrastructure you can find in parts of Kuala Lumpur might be surprising for the average outsider. Frankly, that's not without its discontents - there's a strong nostalgia for an older, sweeter, more innocent Malaysia, one where the cities were quieter and more traditional, one where people regularly lived in kampungs and cycled through groves of primary rainforest just to visit other nearby villages. It's like the Malaysian analogue to the 80's nostalgia in the West, except possibly even more potent; my dad has regaled me with stories from his childhood about a much more rural Penang, a beautiful mix of reality and fantasy where he could ride his bike down to the beach without seeing a single modern condominium and follow isolated, traffic-free trails into the hinterlands of the island where monkeys and chickens freely roamed. Cartoonists like Lat who paint intimate pictures of childhood in a Malaysian kampung are highly popular within the country, and strike something buried deep in the heart of national consciousness that seems to yearn for the good old days, filled with stilt houses and cycle rickshaws and other icons of Old Malaysia. This idyllic image of a Malaysia that once was has become a source of national identity, as much as their melting-pot cities are, and many spots in the city now attempt to foster that traditional vibe. But the constant cultural shapeshifting hasn't stopped, and it won't any time soon.
I'm actually considering going back someday just to see all the stuff I missed when I was living there. It's a bit strange thinking about all the things you don't notice about your own home country when you grow up there, realising that you've only come to appreciate them when you're gone.
What are your favourite art hoaxes?
Pierre Brassau was the pseudonym of a chimpanzee called "Peter" whose art was exhibited and shown to critics, as an experiment by the Swedish journalist Åke Axelsson to see whether critics could tell the difference between avant-garde modern art and the scrawling of a chimpanzee. He convinced Peter's caretaker to let him play with oil paints and a brush, and included the paintings he considered the most worthy in an exhibition. The reviews were extremely positive - one went so far as to state "Pierre Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clear determination. His brush strokes twist with furious fastidiousness. Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer." Here is one of Peter's paintings, and here is a painting from the Bacchus series by Cy Twombly. I have to say, I, too, prefer the chimpanzee.
Then there's Disumbrationism. It was an entire fictionalised art movement created by one man - Paul Jordan Smith. Annoyed with the fact that his wife's realistic still-life paintings were panned by critics as being "of the old style" when she showed them in a local exhibition, he decided to make parody art under the pseudonym Pavel Jerdanowitch, and despite never having any art training or even having picked up a paintbrush in his life he "took up a defective canvas and in a few minutes splashed out the crude outlines of an asymmetrical savage holding up what was intended to be a star fish, but turned out a banana." The painting was initially called Yes We Have No Bananas, but he eventually entered it to an art exhibition under a new name Exaltation.
He ended up receiving a letter from an art journal praising the art and asking him for more information about himself, as well as an interpretation of the painting. So he invented a whole fucking backstory for Pavel Jerdanowitch (which culminated in him inventing the art style he called "Disumbrationism"), stated the painting was about "breaking the shackles of womanhood", and his name slowly became known. He was asked to exhibit the next year, and he painted another masterpiece: Aspiration. This was reproduced in the January 26, 1926 issue of Chicago's Art World, and art critics described it as a "delightful jumble of Gauguin, Pop Hart and negro minstrelsy with a lot of Jerdanowitch individuality." Later he painted Adoration and Illumination, which were also highly praised. He wrote on the latter painting "It is midnight and the drunken man stumbles home, anticipating a storm from his indignant wife; he sees her eyes and the lightning of her wrath. It is conscience at work."
Eventually he broke the hoax to a news source, and the ruse became widely known.
South Korea Travelogue
It's always weird trying to talk about a destination you think is both overlooked and absolutely fantastic. Part of you wants to keep the destination to yourself, prevent anyone else from travelling there and crowding the locations, and yet another part wants to scream from the rooftops about how the destination in question is being criminally slept on and how everyone should experience it at least once. This time, the latter impulse wins out, so here goes: I travelled to South Korea with my sister over Christmas break and it has been one of my favourite travel experiences of my life. And I've travelled a lot. It took us by complete surprise what a delight it was to travel there.
Seoul was one of the only major cities I have ever enjoyed travelling to. I don't usually enjoy cities, but Seoul was surprisingly quiet and relaxed and had a whole lot of character I didn't expect. Many neighbourhoods are full of sleepy little cafes and teahouses and restaurants, and they look so enticing you can't help but pop in for a look. And it's well worth it doing that. One time we ducked into a small, unassuming teahouse, and ended up drinking omija tea in a cosy tearoom all to ourselves. Yet another time we did this, we found a traditional foods store where we did a makgeolli tasting (probably one of my favourite alcoholic drinks of all time, to be honest). Places like Ikseon-dong and Bukchon are extremely charming and feature many modern buildings in the traditional Korean hanok style, and I recommend visiting those.
In addition, logistically speaking, Seoul is easy. The train and bus system is very well connected in the city, and it's easy to make your way everywhere you want with minimal effort. Some aspects of getting around can be annoying, such as the fact that many ATMs don't seem to be able to work with foreign cards, so it's not uncommon to go ATM-shopping for a bit before you're finally able to withdraw any amount of money. You often need cash to top up your transport (T-money) cards in Korea; you can top up your balance in convenience stores all around the country, but these only accept cash for top-up. In general, though, Seoul shouldn't pose many problems.
For the history and architecture buff, Seoul is a goldmine. Historical buildings can be found all over the city, particularly in Jongno District, and a lot of them are hardly visited by tourists. On our first day in Seoul we stumbled across Unhyeongung (a Joseon royal residence dating back to the 14th century) on our way to another destination, and were floored at how beautiful and quiet the site was despite its central location in the city. We spent 30 whole minutes just exploring the tranquil grounds of the residence and the little museum connected to it.
Even more intoxicating was Changdeokgung, a proper Joseon palace and the most authentic example of a royal palace in Seoul, having been rebuilt in 1610 after the highly destructive Japanese invasions of Korea that saw every Joseon royal palace destroyed. In spite of the importance of the site, again, there was barely anybody there. We had the whole site almost entirely to ourselves, and we could appreciate the palace courtyards virtually in complete silence. The whole palace is intricately painted in vibrant dancheong colours, and every part of it is breathtaking, but the most decorated and my favourite part of the palace has to be the Injeongjeon, the throne room of Changdeokgung. From top to toe, the throne room is covered in murals and carvings and other beautiful ornamentation. It was seriously stunning, to the point that I'm convinced I could stand and look into the room for hours on end examining every corner.
Also on the Changdeokgung grounds is the Huwon Secret Garden, a garden that was used as a place of leisure for the members of the royal family. It's intimate and naturalistic and filled with beautifully landscaped pagodas and ponds (the area around Buyongji pond, in particular, is exquisite). I highly recommend doing this if you're at Changdeokgung - you have to pay for a tour to get in, but once in you can actually choose between following your tour guide and also exploring on your own. You are also allowed to wander around after your tour ends, which was what we did and what I recommend anyone else also coming here does. The gardens also harbour resident cats, which is, in fact, the result of a single Joseon king (King Sukjong) who was so fanatical about cats that he kept these animals beside him and petted them while conducting state affairs.
Even if you're coming in winter like we did, I highly recommend it - the gardens are still incredibly beautiful, especially if you arrive in early to mid December when there's still some autumn colours on the trees. Also, there are other royal palaces in Seoul we visited during our trip - specifically Gyeongbokgung and Deoksugung, but out of all of them, I recommend Changdeokgung the most. It's extremely quiet for such an important historical site, especially if you travel off-peak, and it's very worth your time.
Our next major non-palace historical site, visited on the second day in Seoul, was Jogyesa Temple, situated conveniently in between the two major palaces of the Joseon Dynasty. We were fairly surprised to find that the decoration and painting on Korean Buddhist temples are even more ornate than that of their palaces (due to their Confucian ideals, Joseon held that the king should set an example for the people and not inappropriately flaunt their wealth). When we arrived, there was a ceremony going on, and inside the temple we could hear loud chanting and banging of drums. The amount of energy coming from this temple was absolutely electrifying, and yet again, tourists were absent - everyone who had visited alongside us seemed to have gone to pray, and they were standing in front of the temple with strings of prayer beads clutched in their hands and their heads bowed.
Near Deoksugung Palace, we visited yet another relatively unknown site: Hwangudan Altar, a sacrificial altar for the Joseon Dynasty, built by King Gojong in 1897 upon his ascendancy to the throne and his establishment of the Empire of Korea. He performed the Rite of Heaven at this site, the first time a Korean monarch had done so in centuries. During Japanese colonial rule, much of the site was demolished, but the Hwanggungu - the octagonal three-story pagoda which stood on the site - still stands, surrounded by high-rises. You can even still see the drums for sacrificial rites there beside the pagoda. I highly recommend pairing this with a visit to Deoksugung Palace, it's extremely surreal to see this piece of historical architecture surrounded by modern buildings, with nobody around - many of Seoul's residents themselves don't even seem to know it's there.
On our second and final night in Seoul, we saw a lantern festival at Cheonggyecheon, the 10-km long rehabilitated stream that runs through the city. A whole parade of lanterns, made out of traditional lantern paper and placed in the water, lit up the whole stream in red and yellow. These lanterns were modern ones, designed and placed so as to recreate a Joseon royal procession, and despite the fact that the festival was busy it was still a very good experience.
Next day we went to Seogwipo, on the south of Jeju Island. While the town itself is significantly less well-kept than Seoul, it's still a lovely place to visit in winter - the whole island is filled with blooming camellias this time of year, and you can see rows of these flame-red trees lining the streets and alleyways of the island. Tangerines seem to grow everywhere, on roadsides and in farms and every nook and cranny you can imagine. And these tangerines are the best tangerines you'll ever taste in your life. Some varieties are sweet and mild, others are tangy and strong, every single one is delicious.
While Jeju is a great destination to travel to - don't get me wrong, it is beautiful - do note that some of the big tourist sites are a bit commercialised and it's a bit difficult if you don't have a car (we can't drive, so this option was closed to us). Buses on Jeju are somewhat few and far between especially in rural areas, and you can find yourself having to wait a bit especially if you want to travel to particularly remote parts of the island. If you're doing Jeju, I'd imagine the best way is to rent a car and drive yourself to every destination or perhaps get a taxi app like KakaoT so you can go directly to all the sites, instead of having to wait 40 minutes for bus 220 to arrive so you can begin to travel to your destination.
The coastline is spectacular at many points, and since the entire island is one big shield volcano extending down to the ocean floor, black sand beaches and rugged volcanic cliffs can be found encircling the island. Some notable places we visited include Jusangjeolli, a columnar basalt formation plunging straight into the ocean, Oedolgae, a volcanic basalt pillar standing tall near the coast, and Seongsan Ilchulbong, a heavily eroded tuff cone which is a popular place to see the sun rise on Jeju. Oedolgae and Seongsan are particularly scenic and I highly recommend them, especially in winter when Seongsan Ilchulbong is relatively uncrowded.
One of the most memorable experiences I had in Jeju was walking up to a small snowy hermitage (Jonjaam) on the upper slopes of Mount Hallasan. We walked along a forested path for about a kilometre or so, and ended up stumbling upon a colourful gate covered in fluffy white powdered snow. A few hundred metres up from there, a whole series of small shrine halls emerged from the icy forest, painted in traditional Korean dancheong colours and almost entirely smothered in snow. A traditional and ancient Buddhist stupa, made out of Jeju volcanic rock, lay at the very back of the temple grounds. We removed our shoes and escaped the cold by darting into the main temple hall, and inside was a colourful little chamber, with a number of people inside praying to a figure of Buddha.
Later that day we took a bus to Samseonghyeol, a shrine dedicated to a folk myth about the founding of the Tamna Kingdom. Tamna was a sovereign state that existed on the island of Jeju from ancient times up to its absorption by the Joseon Dynasty in 1404, though for much of its history it was a tributary state to many other larger Korean kingdoms. There's no record of how it was founded, but the folktale holds that it was created by three divine founders that emerged from the ground in the 24th century BC, and the holes they supposedly arose from are still preserved in Samseonghyeol. The site is pretty diminutive in and of itself, but it's guarded by dol hareubang statues and situated in a small, enchanting forest, and an array of Joseon-era shrine halls surround the site. Memorial services are still held here, commemorating the founding of the island. I can attest that walking here at dusk felt like being in a scene from Pan's Labyrinth. It was pretty magical. If you're already in Jeju city, I recommend seeing this.
Seogwipo is surrounded by waterfalls, the most famous being Jeongbang and Cheonjiyeon. Jeongbang is part of the Yeongjusipgeong, the ten scenic wonders of Jeju Island. It empties straight into the ocean, with a storied history and many legends relating to it. Probably the darkest bit of history relating to the site is that it was a place where civilians were executed during the 1948 Jeju uprising, with their bodies disposed of over the waterfall. Jeongbang, however, is fairly crowded at times, and of the two, I much prefer Cheonjiyeon, which was much quieter and surrounded by a lush subtropical forest and a small stream filled with huge ducks. While walking to the site, you can also see a little cave which Paleolithic humans on Jeju used as a settlement. Much more interesting and pleasant, in my opinion.
In Seogwipo proper, we found that the Seogwipo Maeil Olle Market was one of the most interesting places to explore. It's a charming local market in the centre of the city, and the middle of the street is lined with little benches set beside a stream so you can eat whatever you buy in situ. You can find a lot of fresh tangerines and persimmons from there, as well as a lot of famous market stores selling various food items like bakery items and fresh mandu dumplings. Jesong Bakery sells a heavenly black pork bun - I could eat that for days on end, it's highly recommended. There is also a five-day market in Seogwipo (and Jeju) which opens once every five days, based on a traditional Joseon-era model, but unfortunately the one in Seogwipo wasn't open when we visited. But it's very nice to see that in spite of how modernised South Korea is, these Joseon traditions still continue up into the modern day.
The final region we visited in Korea - and my absolute favourite - was Gyeongju. This city used to be the capital of the Silla Dynasty, an ancient Korean state whose history extends back into 57 BC and who once ruled the entire Korean peninsula until its breakup in the late 8th century and its surrender to Goryeo in 935. If in Seoul there was the very distinct possibility of stumbling upon historical sites, in Gyeongju you literally can't miss it even if you try. The city is filled to the brim with the tombs of ancient Silla kings and their shrines, and you can see these gigantic tumuli and beautiful painted shrine halls juxtaposed against streets filled with modern cafes built in the traditional hanok style. There's also a large amount of archeological sites in the eastern historic district of the town, and you can wander through the site on your own seeing the moats and gardens of ancient palaces (now reconstructed), the ruins of pagodas from ancient temples, and even the oldest astronomical observatory in East Asia. Hell, even Gyeongju's KTX train station has a stone chamber tomb on the site. I am not joking.
One of the most interesting places in the entire region lies just outside of Gyeongju, called the Five Royal Tombs. The Samguk sagi (History of the Three Kingdoms) states that these are the tombs of the original founders of the Silla Kingdom, specifically the first Silla king Park Hyeokgeose and his queen consort Aryeong, its second king Namhae, its third king Yuri, and its fifth king Pasa. That history is now impossible to substantiate and it may be that the site was built later during the 6th century to honour and commemorate the old kings of Silla, but exploring this place was a great experience - the tombs on the site are surrounded by a peaceful little forest, and the shrines and steles on the site are beautiful. There's even a small, intimate bamboo forest near the shrines which we walked through, it's an experience that's very quiet and tranquil. We strolled in the site for a while, taking in the atmosphere, and we were rewarded with a sighting of a deer. The ever-so-popular Arashiyama forest doesn't have anything on this.
Gyeongju is also filled with spectacular Buddhist temples, the most important ones being Bulguksa Temple and Seokguram Hermitage. Bulguksa is historically significant as the site where the oldest extant woodblock print in the world was found - this discovery was only made in 1966, when the Pure Light Dharani Sutra was found during repairs of Seokgatap Pagoda. Historical significance aside, though, this is just a great temple to visit. Even the temple grounds themselves, absent the temple, are gorgeous. Before we even caught a glimpse of the temple proper we had already passed through gates painted with elaborate dancheong, and saw a small but impressive Korean temple garden out front, complete with landscaped ponds and a small bridge. But it's the front facade of the temple that's most impressive - it's large and imposing and adorned with an array of stairs and balconies. A variety of colourful lanterns were hung up inside the corridors of the temples and out in front of the shrine halls, and when the sun shone through them they cast ever-changing patterns of colours on the ground. Entering the shrine halls revealed many Buddhist statues and murals on the inside, about as intricate as the throne room of Changdeokgung. Again, you could admire this place for hours.
Further up the mountain that Bulguksa is on (Mount Tohamsan) there's the nearby Seokguram Hermitage. The path to the hermitage is lined with more lanterns, and there's a small bell tower which you can pay a fee to ring (we did). The hermitage on the outside is small and unassuming, but it's actually just the entryway into an expansive 8th century grotto which contains a large statue of Seokgamoni-bul (The Historical Buddha) calling the Earth to witness, surrounded by detailed reliefs of devas, bodhisattvas and disciples. We couldn't actually enter the grotto, due to concerns about preservation visitors can only view it through a glass pane, but it in no way takes away from the beauty of the site - we were still able to get close and see just how impressive the Buddha inside is.
One of my most favourite unknown and completely untouristed places around Gyeongju is Mount Namsan, a sacred site for the Silla Dynasty which contains many ancient carvings, sculptures and statues many of which are so old that they predate Charlemagne. We visited the west side of Namsan first, taking a route up the mountain that started from Sambulsa Temple and descended via the Samneung valley. There's a large number of Buddhist sculptures and carvings on this route through the mountains, such as the Stone Standing Buddha Triad in Bae-dong, the Stone Seated Buddha in Samneunggye Valley, the Two Line-Carved Buddha Triads, a headless statue of Mireuk-bul (Future Buddha) and a relief of Gwanseeum-bosal (Bodhisattva of Compassion). There's even a bunch of royal tombs at the base of the mountain and a charming little working hermitage, Sangseonam, up in the peaks. Visiting the west side of Namsan is an embarassment of riches.
The east side of Namsan contains some of the most spectacular single sculptures on the mountain. We first visited the Stone Seated Buddha of Mireuk-gol Valley, which is a single Buddha statue dating to the Later Silla period, backed by a nimbus adorned with heavenly carvings of flowers and vines. It's an impressively detailed sculpture, surrounded by a small temple and the forests of Mount Namsan. Next up were the Rock-Carved Buddhas in Tapgok Valley, a stunning 9-metre tall rock covered from top to toe with carvings of Buddhas, bodhisattvas, heavenly deities and pagodas on every side - the south face in particular was particularly impressive, with a standing sculpture of a Buddha carved straight out from the rock and a triad of reliefs to its right. The last sculpture we visited on the east side of Namsan was the Rock-Carved Seated Buddha in Bulgok Valley, a humble Buddha sculpture inset into a rock with a small candle placed in front of it. I have to say it felt extremely surreal and dreamlike to see these ancient carvings and statues in situ - empires have risen and fallen since then, and yet these statues are still there sitting quietly in the forests and valleys.
On our final day in Gyeongju, we visited Yangdong Folk Village, a Joseon folk village from the 15th century filled with picturesque hanoks and village shrines. It's fairly isolated - you have to take a long bus ride from Gyeongju that passes through farms and mountain ranges - but that also means it's been able to maintain a good amount of cultural preservation. The town is populated by the descendants of its original founders, and the hanok houses of the village date back to early Joseon; they've adopted some modern technology but they still maintain the traditional clan structure and still practice the rituals and folk customs of the yangban, the traditional Joseon upper class. There was, again, hardly anybody there when we visited, and most of the people we saw in the village were not tourists, but villagers, working the farms, hanging up their laundry, and so on. It was serene and extremely quiet, and the village was most definitely not a manicured tourist site; there was limited tourist infrastructure, and it had a distinctly lived-in and slightly messy feel to it that made walking around feel all the more voyeuristic. The fact that we were strolling into people's courtyards and houses was made all the more apparent because of this, and despite the beauty of the architecture it barely even felt like a destination - it felt like a place where people just lived day-to-day. Despite the fact that Korea is often seen as a hyper-modern society, this is a fairly recent development; even now there's a weird, intangible feeling that old Korea still lurks behind every corner, and nowhere was the feeling stronger than it was in this living echo of the Joseon Dynasty, nestled deep in the mountains.
People stated on travel forums that two days was plenty for Gyeongju and that there was really not that much to do, but I'd wager they were unaware of how much there was to see in and around the town (to be fair, none of it is well-marketed to international tourists, you have to do some serious sleuthing to find them). For our part, we spent four nights and three days in Gyeongju and felt it was not enough - we sought out sights from 9am to 9pm every single day, and still we missed so much. We didn't have time to visit many sites, such as the grotto of Sinseonsa Temple, Chilburam Hermitage and its Buddhist carvings, Oksanseowon Confucian Academy, Golgulsa Temple's cave shrines and bas-reliefs, Girimsa Temple and its beautiful Vairocana Buddha triad as well as its statue of Avalokitesvara, the underwater tomb of King Munmu, and so on. Even if we'd spent a whole week there, we would not have seen everything - there are literally over a hundred ancient historical sites in the mountains around Gyeongju, and if you enjoy history and archaeology more than doing Cool And Buzzy Tourist Things, they're worth visiting.
These are not all the places we visited in Korea, but adding them all would take too long, so I'll start wrapping things up here. A few final notes on Korea: Aside from the very strong Miyazaki vibes much of the sights in the country have, there's a lot more to note that I haven't had the opportunity to expound on too much. Firstly - this is just a piece of advice - if you ever want to go to Korea get Naver Maps and the Kakao taxi app. Google Maps alone is insufficient for getting around SK, and can't give you very accurate directions or bus/train times. Secondly, the food is fantastic - do try the black pork barbecue, braised cutlassfish and Udo peanut makgeolli in Jeju, as well as the ark shell bibimbap and hwangnam-ppang in Gyeongju. Finally, Korean people in general are ridiculously nice. We've had more random acts of kindness towards us in this holiday than in any other combined, and the people there are sometimes comically direct but they will go out of their way to help you. The second we touched down in Incheon airport and had trouble finding the airport bus, some random Korean guy saw us struggling and helped us find it. Bus drivers have gone out of their way to help us find the right bus routes for our destinations. Just really fantastic.
Lots of people on travel forums who have travelled to both countries seem to think Korea is a worse Japan, but my sister has visited Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka before and preferred her experience in Korea by miles - found it far more tranquil, untouristed and comfortable than Japan. But that's the end of my rambling about Korea - I think it's worth every traveller's time, and it's no skin off my nose if people don't go since it means I have it all to myself for the foreseeable future, but damn it's a great destination.
I would note that feminist treatment of women as perpetual children and men as perpetual adults is highly selective and inconsistent. They'll selectively absolve the woman of all responsibility and place all fault on the man when these poor darlings are "pumped and dumped" and taken advantage of and supposedly manipulated into sex acts that get retroactively interpreted as predatory once the outcomes of the sex don't result in what they want. They will put out pieces of special pleading explaining how women's special circumstances justifies them being treated more lightly when dealing with them in multiple contexts, sexual, professional, criminal and so on. The same people who pull such shenanigans will generally not acknowledge that women's lack of agency and unique delicateness should ever affect how they get treated when they are in the running for leadership roles or positions which require one to take on a huge amount of responsibility. There is no consistency here, it's all "Who, whom".
The even more irritating thing is that much of these same beliefs are also sincerely held by social conservatives (including many users in this space), who tend to typecast women as "potential victims" and men as "potential problems"; they view women through a lens of what others can do for them and men through a lens of what they can do for others. They are exceptionally paternalistic towards women, have a tendency to place all responsibility and blame upon men, and will virtually only recognise "innate sex differences" in ways which justify special and preferential treatment for women. The acknowledgement that men and women are not the same only ever gets used in one direction, and this hypocrisy seems to be common in mainstream political thought on gender.
My grandmother died at the start of the month, after a long year of close brushes with death. I wasn't there for the bitter end - I was in Sydney while she rotted away on the other side of the world, crippled by a tumour she would never get over.
The last time I ever saw her, it was over a call. She wasn't responsive enough to say anything or even give any indications that she was there, and it was disconcerting to see just how unrecognisable she was. The way she looked was halfway between human and mummified corpse. Her eyes were half-open and defocused, and her arm, now shaped like a long, attenuate claw, jerked up and down haphazardly. My family tried to convince me she could still hear and understand; they were almost certainly lying either to me or to themselves, drawing spurious correlations out of random noise so they could hope there was something there.
Even if she could hear me, everything I could say would just have been a pathetic insult. "How are you doing?" Terrible, thanks. "I hope people are taking care of you well." My catheter is uncomfortable, and the nurses won't do anything about it. "I've been pretty good on my end." Fuck off. I ended up telling her about my day, and the last thing I said to her was something laughably trivial and inconsequential, hilariously stupid in hindsight. There was nothing particularly graceful or poignant or even sad about it. I was never close to her - quite the opposite; she had done a good number of ethically questionable or downright repulsive things during her life - but seeing someone I once knew turn into a flesh puppet, flailing around aimlessly on the bed like a poorly rigged 3D model, was profoundly disturbing in a way that's hard to articulate.
Shortly after the call ended, a blackout fell over my apartment building. This had never happened here before, and it was night time so the entire room was blanketed in darkness - all there was to do was sit in the silence and think. Walking out into the corridor presented a scene from a horror movie; the halls of the building were lit with a strange liminal yellow-orange light, and the background hum of the building - which I usually take for granted - had completely died out. It took two or three hours for the power to come back on.
A couple hours after the call and the strange blackout, my grandmother died. It appears her husband took her death extremely badly. He initially seemed in denial about what had happened - he was surprised to realise her body was cold, and refused to let the undertakers take her away, snapping at anyone who tried. For a while he kissed and slept beside her deteriorating corpse, and by the time they managed to pry her away from him she was disintegrating so badly they had to rush out a cremation. Her ashes are now in an urn at the home she once lived.
Ever since then, this has popped up repeatedly in my mind. I'm not even in mourning - I'm more relieved that people can start moving on now, since everyone was being held in stasis for the longest time - rather, it's something else. I've thought about death a lot, but the existential dread of seeing someone wither away like that is really potent, and the weird, coincidental timing of the blackout doesn't help. I certainly won't try to find any meaning in it; that would be doing the same thing my family did when they insisted she could still understand, but this is probably one of the most terrifying coincidences that has happened in my life, and I am still rattled by it despite my agnostic nature.
I don't know if I should even post this, to be honest. If this comment gets deleted later, don't be surprised.
EDIT: Thanks to everyone for sharing their condolences and their experiences with the death of family, it's much appreciated. I don't think I'm going to delete this now, but it did feel strange posting about something so personal on an anonymous online forum.
My prediction is that the DNC will just double down. They did it when Clinton lost, there's no reason to believe they won't do it again. I expect that after this there will be a lot of hand-wringing about how Harris lost because she's a black woman, gigantic screeds on the supposedly pernicious nature of misogyny and White supremacy in America will be penned, and Trump will be scrutinised for any hint of wrongdoing a la the Steele dossier. Expecting the DNC, their voter base, and their institutional apparatus to have any self-awareness at this current point in time is, I think, completely unrealistic. The strategy they've been going with for a while now is just to claim that it can't be anything they've done, it must be these horrible voters who are the problem. See also these exemplars from other countries: Brexit, Australia's Voice, the Irish referendum on women and family. Every time the voters vote "wrong", it is a sign that democracy itself is flawed. Perhaps much of this will be driven by strategic party-political considerations, but I think many members of the DNC certainly still believe that this tactic will help them garner support for 2028. They certainly have enough institutional clout to (try and) make it work.
Besides, the current tribal political landscape is not conducive to self-examination - oddly enough I'm reminded of the situation in many former communist countries. ln Mao's China, the horrific failure of the Great Leap Forward was attributed not to the communist system that produced it, rather it was attributed to the members of the cadres trying to sabotage their great political project. Despite the fact that the cadres acted the way they did because of the incentives created by the system, they were portrayed as secret members of the Kuomintang plotting a bourgeoisie revolution under the noses of the communist authorities, and Mao's reputation remained untouched. The ideological can never admit that what they're doing isn't working - rather, it is because their enemy is just too strong and too powerful, and it needs to be railed against even more until it goes away. These kinds of narratives are very easy to capitalise on, and I doubt one failed election will stop the DNC from using it.
As for the Republicans, I expect they will take this as a sign that populist politics are working, and it might motivate them to lean into it even more. I don't expect anyone to do anything that will decrease the temperature of the culture war. Perhaps something like a bringing back of the fairness doctrine might help prevent these partisan bubbles from forming, expose people to a more balanced information environment and stop people from creating superweapons backed by The Authorities, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
My biggest hope personally is that the DNC loses enough elections to moderate themselves significantly on the topic of idpol or discard it entirely as a part of their platform, but unless they have a very long string of losses under their belt, I think the only thing that'll happen is a doubling down. I think they'll need to be forced into having a major come-to-Jesus moment before any of this materialises. And until they stop being "woke" entirely, I'll take pleasure in their losses. I am also not of the opinion that a Trump win is a "win for wokeness", I certainly think they'll try to use a Trump win to drum up support, but I don't believe in giving your enemy what they want with the faint hope that maybe they stop stepping on you. The right way to deal with this is to make it very clear that such tantrums do not yield results, and if that entails increasing the temperature of the culture war, so be it.
This kind of shit is prime fodder for someone like hoe_math to respond to. Men who make up the bulk of an actual representative sample, to her, are Not People.
Agreed, buying it for yourself as a 40-year-old adult is infinitely more based.
Perhaps I'm missing something but are you talking about Insite? Because that was the first such sanctioned facility in all of North America, and AIUI how that went was somewhat different: Insite was started in 2003 as part of a three-year pilot study, with a special exception to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act applying to it so it could function as a safe injection site. The exception was slated to expire in 2006, but it was granted yet another three-year extension so more research could be conducted. Health minister Tony Clement eventually stated there was a lack of health benefits and denied it yet another extension, meaning Insite would close, but a constitutional challenge was brought by the operators and proponents of the facility.
The case eventually reached the Supreme Court of Canada, which ruled that the benefits for already-existing users were clear and that failing to extend the exception would violate the rights of its clients as outlined by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, specifically the Section 7 rights to not be deprived of life, liberty or security in accord with the “principles of fundamental justice”. Note that the Court did not establish a positive right to safe injection sites, but did make it so that once InSite was established, depriving its users of that benefit would be a violation of their s7 rights. Because of that ruling, BC is now obligated to continue exempting Insite.
Case in question is Canada (AG) v PHS Community Services Society.
almost all Ugandan women and girls (95%) had experienced physical or sexual violence, or both, by partners or non-partners since the age of 15
Sorry for hijacking your thread, but I'm always confused when I see the use and misuse of these types of violence against women and girls sources to prove things about patriarchy. Firstly, you're citing a UN Women-funded source, which is an organisation that is known to be hilariously politically biased, and secondly because it's only providing statistics for women. In countries like Uganda, statistics that "95% of [X population] have experienced violence since the age of 15" aren't gonna be hard to find because these countries are dangerous places in general, and presenting them without any comparative data for the relative rates for other groups really don't prove anything about the level of Male Dominance in the country.
Furthermore, in the VAWG source you're using:
"Appendix table 3.3a shows that overall, more than half of the women (56%), have experienced both physical and sexual violence or either physical or sexual violence perpetuated by their partners. Physical violence was relatively higher (45%) compared to sexual violence (36%)."
But,
"Sometimes husbands/partners perpetrate violence as a response/copying strategy to their wives’ behavior. In the VAWG survey, women were themselves asked if they ever initiated physical violence against their husbands/ partners under any circumstances within the 12 months preceding the survey. Figure 3.10 indicates that of the women who had reported violence in the past one year only 14% had never initiated physical violence against their partners, while 62% had done so once or twice, 20% had initiated several times and four percent initiated most of the time."
Going just off their self-reports, which you would expect to be comparatively favourable to the women doing the self-reporting, 86% of the women who were abused were violent to their partner themselves at some point during the past year. In other words, most partner violence captured in the survey is actually likely to be mutual abuse of some form, not unilateral male-on-female, and this should be ringing some bells in your head that the women-only statistics you're being presented do not represent the whole picture. They have also said they had a questionnaire on violence against men at some point, but for some strange, unfathomable reason the statistics on violence against men are not presented here whatsoever.
Also note that hundreds upon hundreds of studies demonstrate that women are as likely or more likely to perpetrate partner violence than men, and many of these studies demonstrate that gender symmetry in partner violence persists as a finding even when you look internationally. "almost one-third of the female as well as male students physically assaulted a dating partner in the previous 12 months, and ... the most frequent pattern was bidirectional, i.e., both were violent, followed by “female-only” violence. Violence by only the male partner was the least frequent pattern according to both male and female participants." This is consistent with results from Jordan, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia, and so on, all "patriarchal" countries by WEIRD definitions. Israeli women are more likely to escalate aggression, both verbal and physical, in a partner context than men are. This is a finding that has been repeatedly supported: "Women’s escalatory tendencies toward their spouses (M 52.36, SD 5.86) were found to be higher than were men’s escalatory tendencies toward their spouses (M 51.87, SD 5.69)." So to not study male partner-violence victimisation in Uganda before concluding the presence of male dominance is questionable, but from a brief review there seems to be quite few Uganda-specific studies that are conducted in a way which allows direct comparison of partner violence victimisation between the sexes. Though that's not surprising.
Funnily enough, the focus on VAWG in that report, if anything, suggests to me that people might be more sensitive to violence against women and girls than they are men and boys.
24% of women in 2022 reported that their husband or partner had multiple sexual partners while in 2023 ... 34% of men reported having sex with a person who was neither their wife or lived with them.
This source re infidelity has the very same issue - the quote you've provided here "24% of women in 2022 reported that their husband or partner had multiple sexual partners while in 2023 ... 34% of men reported having sex with a person who was neither their wife or lived with them" doesn't provide any countersources for women, and in addition while it's not hard to imagine that male infidelity might be more tolerated in cultures that allow polygyny, there are also other sides to the bargain in these cultures which often aren't represented properly.
For example, Baumeister's view on the differential penalties regarding adultery attempts to nuance this view. Looking at differential penalities for adultery (which he asserts was common throughout history), his perspective is that sex is a female resource that women gatekeep, and men give women resources in exchange for sex. In line with this view, the woman's contribution to the marriage is sex, and the man's contribution to the marriage is resources. Thus female infidelity is more of a violation of the social contract than male infidelity is.
Baumeister goes on to summarise the results of a cross-cultural study of marital dissolution by Betzig. "[W]hen only one gender’s infidelity was sufficient grounds for divorce, it was far more often the woman’s (54 cultures) than the man’s (2 cultures). ... These patterns reflect the assumption that sex is something the woman provides the man rather than vice versa. ... In contrast, women but not men were permitted to divorce a partner on the grounds of failing to provide other resources, including money, housing, food, and clothing. (The only exception was that in one culture, failure to provide food was a cause for a man to divorce his wife.) Thus, the woman’s obligation to provide sex appears balanced against the man’s obligation to provide resources for support."
His perspective is that there are reciprocalities in traditional marriage that have been ignored, and that authors rarely cite male obligation (the greater obligation of men to provide resources in the marriage, which is his main contribution to the woman) in order to balance their analysis of the sexual double standard (the greater obligation of women to provide sex and to not give away her main contribution to the man). By erasing half the story, it's very easy to paint a picture of oppression of women, and most people generally do not adequately address the larger social context in which this supposed "double standard" often operates in.
Finally, I would like to note that polygyny isn't all beneficial to men either. What polygyny does do is create a very large reproductive skew among men, and it's impossible to argue that male reproduction is not effectively controlled too in highly polygynous systems. In fact I'd go as far as to say a polygynous society controls the reproduction of unsuccessful men and not the reproduction of women, since it allows successful men to deprive their male competitors of opportunities. In their paper "Why Monogamy?" Kanazawa and Still propose a female power theory of marriage practices, hypothesising that polygyny arises when women have more power in a society with high inequalities of wealth among men. Using data obtained from political science and sociology indexes, they demonstrated that societies with more resource inequality among men were more polygynous. Additionally, they found that, controlling for economic development and sex ratio, when there is greater resource equality among men, societies with more female power and choice have more monogamy; but when there are greater resource inequalities, higher levels of female power are accompanied by higher levels of polygyny. Accordingly, the incidence of polygyny may indicate female choice rather than male choice and cannot be assumed to benefit men over women.
Sorry again - I just feel like Western commentators, in general, badly misunderstand other countries on this front.
EDIT: fixed a number
It's the tail-end of summer in Australia, and the weather in Sydney has cooled down significantly from the January highs. During this time of year, I start doing something I don't bother to attempt in the sweltering summer heat: I walk around my neighbourhood. This is something I do whenever I feel stuck or trapped in some way. Usually I do it at night, under the cover of darkness - hardly anybody is around at that time, and there's a refreshing crispness to the night air once the transition into the shoulder seasons begins.
In the daytime, walking in Sydney almost feels fatiguing to me, with the crowds and the harsh, direct sunlight. The city is another universe entirely once the sun goes down, after the streets empty out and the shops close. In fact, the shopfronts and offices look far more enticing to me when they're not trying to look inviting - instead of bustling supermarkets and convenience stores, there are darkened halls filled with rows and rows of vacant aisles, instead of offices there are these yawning chambers filled with desks and blacked-out computers, still lit, tantalisingly evocative in their emptiness. Often, I look through these big glass panes, wishing I could enter so I could sit silently in these dim rooms and hallways. Places like that evoke a deep longing and emptiness, and despite the fact that it's not a feeling people seem to seek out I can't help but be drawn to them sometimes.
Doing these walks at night is also a heightened experience, at least compared with walking during the day. I think part of the reason for this is because they're fairly unsettling, which doesn't sound desirable, but that discomfort is something that throws the whole experience into stark relief and helps clear the mind; the apprehension of immediate physical threat often shakes one out of that sense of mundanity and complacency that bleeds into everyday life. Fear of the dark has been imprinted into every single inch of our neural circuitry, and most of our hominid ancestors were certainly not apex predators; for much of our evolutionary history an isolated individual would have been easy pickings for sabre-toothed cats and Pachycrocuta hyenas. Even in an urban environment every single dark corner and rustle in the bushes triggers a fear response, and I find the heightened sensations almost addictive in a way.
Sometimes, the fear is caused by an actual threat. Statistically speaking my neighbourhood is relatively safe, but there are points where walking around at night has gotten dicey; probably the most unsettling experience I've had was a time when I ran into a group of people - one woman, two men - who seemed a little... off. As soon as they saw me, the woman walked right up to me, and began to ask me a barrage of questions. At first the questions were innocuous, she'd ask "Why are you out this late? What are you doing out here?", but they quickly escalated. Eventually I was being asked "What's in your bag? Do you have a gun in there?", all while the the two men were slowly advancing from the back. I turned around and began to walk away, and heard them following me. I felt almost giddy once I escaped into the safety of my apartment building.
There's a specific spot in my neighbourhood I stop at virtually every time I go on night walks. One of the apartment buildings near me has a recess which extends upwards for about twelve floors or so, and when you stand inside there and and look up, you can see towering walls of glass and concrete on all sides, all glowing with warm light. The sky, from here, seems almost as if it's receding into the distance; it's a small keyhole of blackness that looks impossibly distant from this vantage point. I wouldn't say it's a remotely good or even competent piece of architecture, the building is quite alienating, but I keep returning partially because it doesn't seem like something that should exist - it almost feels like a scene from a Gmod map transplanted straight into my neighbourhood. It doesn't feel like a real place.
These walks put me in strange moods. Sometimes I get the urge to follow in the footsteps of a Holden Ringer or Anton Nootenboom and walk in one direction, with just a backpack or trolley for my belongings, and only stopping to sleep or to rest. It would be so easy for me to walk west, and in a very short span of time, I'd exit my neighbourhood and cross into the suburbs. Eventually I'd leave the Sydney urban sprawl entirely, travel across the spectacular mountains and canyons and eucalypt forests of the Great Dividing Range, and enter the sprawling western plains. These lush farms would give way to cattle ranches, and the ground would slowly turn ruddy under my feet, red earth stretching far into the distance as storms gathered on the horizon. And I would keep walking, right into the charred centre of the continent, past dunes and mesas and large swaths of beautiful jump-up country, and when the towns eventually became too dispersed for me to feasibly travel them I'd divert my route southwards, to more populated areas of the country, until I could walk west again. I'd walk, and walk, and walk, until I wore myself out, until there was no more ground to cover, until I finally reached the sparkling shores of the Indian Ocean.
Often I think about - and romanticise - the lives of premodern merchants travelling the sea routes of the Maritime Silk Road. Unlike its overland counterpart, where merchants usually traded in a singular local area they specialised in and goods travelled the whole length of the Silk Road only by changing hands many times, a merchant travelling the Maritime Silk Road could travel a very long section of the trade route in one go. It connected societies as disparate as Persia, Java and China, and at its most northerly extent the route went all the way to Korea and Japan. Undoubtedly this was an unenviable and dangerous job, and they'd be vulnerable to a whole litany of risks ranging from storms to piracy during these long, lonely months spent at sea. But there is something exceptionally evocative about a life spent moving around constantly; much of your contact with the world would be the ocean, and your fragmented contact with human societies would consist of these brief vignettes of far-flung lands with cultures and traditions completely alien to yours. You'd be placeless, constantly moving, seeing things most people would never get to experience in one lifetime.
Such an experience is increasingly less common nowadays. The convenience of modern travel makes it easier to get around, but in an odd way, it also makes the world smaller and less interesting. Yes, the world has slowly become more homogenised due to how interconnected everything is, but part of it is also inherent to the mode of travel we use now. Travelling from Colombo to Guangzhou no longer requires you to sail into Southeast Asia and navigate around the Straits of Malacca, stopping at port towns all the while to restock and refuel; instead now you have the opportunity to travel straight from point A to point B, missing everything in between and depriving you of many valuable experiences you wouldn't have otherwise sought out yourself. I enjoy having the ability to shortcut between destinations as much as the next person, but I also deeply feel that something has been lost; it's a specific type of experience that many premodern couriers and merchants would have had, but is alien even to many modern travellers. The endless wastes in between your destinations are worth seeing to some extent, even if just to give you a visceral appreciation of how big and empty much of the world actually is, and sometimes there are things of value to be found in them.
I think there's a deep-seated need in me to roam, and as strange as it sounds, taking walks late at night satisfies that specific brand of wanderlust just a little bit. You're taking in a view of your city that isn't necessarily meant to be experienced by people, and you're not doing anything or going anywhere; you're walking just for its own sake. The very fact that there's not that much to do at all recontextualises your environment and makes it the sight in and of itself, and granted you don't always find something truly interesting, but when you do it pops even more because of the context in which you found it.
Perhaps, over the weekend, I'll take the train to the CBD in the early hours of the morning, and just walk around.
I would say they're not mirror images; namely, that 19th century patriarchal paternalism was far more consistent and reciprocal than things are today. Sure, men were the heads of the household with some legal power like owning the property that came into the marriage and being able to enter into contracts, but that came with a corresponding responsibility - husbands had a legal responsibility to support their wives and any children born out of the marriage, and what was considered "necessaries" for a wife (and kids) was dependent on socioeconomic status. So a rich man could not simply leave his wife in rags, feed her gruel and claim she was technically being supported. The courts would not accept this.
The next thing to note is that the husband, along with taking ownership of all of his wife's property, also took responsibility for all of her debts before marriage. Husbands continued to be responsible for all family debts contracted after marriage as well. A wife could also buy necessaries on her husband's credit (this was called the law of agency), and had the ability to act as her husband's agent. This is important because it means all debt contracted on behalf of the family's maintenance (whether made by the husband or the wife) was held to be the husband's debt. And defaulting on the debt meant he could go to jail. In the 18th/19th centuries, the vast majority of imprisoned debtors in England and Wales were men (all estimates of the sex ratios of imprisoned debtors are over 90% male), and it is likely that coverture was a very big reason why.
Now? The male end of the responsibility is still being socially upheld under a veneer of female helplessness and victimisation, and at the same time, women are equally as capable as men and all of that agitprop distinctly non-agentic framing that emphasises their need for special protections shouldn't impact your evaluations of their suitability for leadership positions that require one to exercise agency. You don't want to be a misogynist, do you?
Top level posts really should have more effort put into them, but yeah it also squares with my own experience. The most fervent liberals I have seen in real life are the white boomers/Gen Xers in my organisation, who are so intent on their commitment to progressive ideology that they will wax lyrical about representation in their organisation and complain about how Trump is a slippery slope towards dictatorship every two weeks in front of the entire office (as a matter of fact, at the time of writing this I have just got off work after being forced to sit through one such diatribe).
Their viewpoints are so ridiculously canalised they can't even entertain how anybody in the organisation could ever possibly disagree with them on good-faith grounds. To them, it's just Being A Good Person, and the fact that the majority of America voted for Literally Hitler isn't something they can reconcile. They need a form of validation to cushion their own sense of self, and the establishment news media is there to provide them a comforting blanket that can shield them from the ugly realisation that they failed to win hearts and minds, that they are out of touch with what matters to the majority of people.
Trying to manage end-of-year job burnout at the moment.
I'm pretty exhausted and can barely even bring myself to competently write this comment, let alone work on clients' returns. I've been making an oddly large amount of stupid errors recently, which isn't really common for me; I'm generally known for having a fairly high quality of work, and often catch other people's mistakes rather than the other way around. My job has a very production-line quality to it; there is always another job, and the goal is to get the greatest amount of client work done with a high accuracy and in the shortest amount of time.
This failure to focus is... quite bad, considering that my job is one that requires a pretty large amount of sustained concentration - for every client I handle, I receive on average like forty different financial docs, each containing disparate pieces of info about their financial situation. I get provided with a gigantic corpus of tax legislation and accounting best practices (the former, especially, can get indecipherably complex) and have to identify which laws and guidelines to apply. There’s a lot of info missing often, and the gaps necessarily have to be filled in with some assumptions. My job is to receive incomplete and poorly arranged info from the client, decipher how to treat it based on a knotty, vague, conflicting tax code, and transform it into something comprehensible. When you're burned out, this appears almost insurmountable, paralysing to the extreme, and doing it quickly doesn't seem possible.
That level of concentration is really hard to maintain day after day for a sustained period of time; the job is monotonous and taxing at the same time (as much work in such fields is, to be fair). This funk has been slowly settling in throughout the entire year, but it's begun to really hit me after rushing out a bunch of urgent client work last week, and I've gotten into a pretty big slump. Even after work I can barely focus on anything I care about, and it feels almost like my brain is buffering whenever I try to concentrate at all. I find myself staring passively at my screen a lot, I've done that multiple times now writing this embarrassingly short comment.
This fucking sucks. Any advice for how to force your brain to hard reset over Christmas break? I'd very much like this feeling not to carry on to the new year, I don't think a whole year of running on fumes would be particularly healthy.
Your sense of suspicion at all these competing narratives reminds me of my own experiences, though perhaps my upbringing was even more atypical. I grew up in Malaysia and came into contact with many parts of the culture there, but was raised by parents who'd spent time in Britain and who homeschooled me in a very different environment than most other people would ever experience. I knew people who were staunchly Christian and prayed often to the Lord, de facto Taoists who actively made offerings to spirits and arranged their homes in line with feng shui geomantic principles, staunch atheists that somehow still clung to hints of superstition here and there, and so on. When I was sixteen, I moved to Australia (where I now live) and interacted with yet another cultural milieu.
A consequence of this strange muddled background is that I notice I don't really feel kinship with any way of thinking and virtually never identify with any major group or subculture, so there's this persistent tendency for me to feel like an alien wherever I go. I travel for fun a lot and come into contact with a lot of people from different cultural backgrounds, and it often seems like the way they mentally structure and interpret the world are completely incongruent with each other.
Anyway, reality (at least from our perspective) isn't so much an elephant as it is a Necker cube. There are two possible 3d interpretations of this cube, but we can't see both views at once since the interpretations are so diametrically opposed to each other that it's impossible to maintain both orientations in our minds at once. Yes, there is the problem of the Elephant, where different people come across different information about the world and draw different conclusions about it on that basis, but even when everyone agrees on the fundamental factual points of contention there is inevitably going to be subjectivity in how one puts them together and fits them into an internal narrative of the world.
Oftentimes we don't have direct access to seemingly simple things like cause and effect (insert quote about how all science is actually just correlation here) and even the same data points can lead to wildly different understandings of the world depending on the system interpreting them. At this point we can model quantum phenomena very well but what it actually implies is untestable and completely beyond us. So much of what we know about reality lies on the surface of a black box. We don't and perhaps will never have direct access to many aspects of how things work, and until that happens I suspect it will be like the Necker cube: analysing a 3d object through the lens of a 2d plane, and debating how it's actually oriented. There is a capital-T Truth out there, but whether that's accessible to us or not is another question.
That's before we can even get into things like moral outlook, which... well that's a crapshoot. Hume's is-ought problem still remains intractable today. I seriously doubt an AGI would be able to synthesise many aspects of worldview together as a result; there will always be big Unknowns (in more domains than people think, IMO) where all we can do is gesticulate at an answer.
I genuinely think you're typical-minding here. There is a contingent of people so intent on hating Trump supporters that when there's a conflict between their idea that 1) Trump supporters are horrible human beings who support Bad Things and 2) this person I know is good and principled, they'll resolve the cognitive dissonance by sacrificing 2) to protect 1), instead of entertaining the idea that there's a remotely valid train of thought that might allow someone reasonable to consider supporting Trump.
It seems quite bizarre for me as well that this would be someone's reaction, but people can indeed be so afflicted by political derangement so as to do this - they see casting your vote for Trump as tantamount to ushering in the American equivalent of the Third Reich. It's just such an illegitimate position to them that they refuse to humanise their supporters; it's a close-to-irredeemable action that overrides much of the positive personal qualities you may have had and makes them see you as barely even human once you've done that. I am only slightly exaggerating.
So, I went to Toronto in June of this year to meet my partner. It feels surreal for two reasons, one being that I never expected my life to become the plot of a bad romantic comedy, and the other being that it makes me the only member of my family to have ever been in North America. It was also an interesting dichotomy - I loved spending time with my SO, but detested the city. I couldn't stop noticing just how ugly and unmaintained the city is, and couldn't help wondering how it got this way. Disclaimer: I spent much of my time downtown.
It's a ridiculously Soviet-looking city considering that it isn't actually in Russia or any of its previous satellite states. Much of their architecture, including their public spaces, looks like it's trying to be a soulless pastiche of Le Corbusier or Walter Gropius; structures supposedly built for the public that actually looks like it hates the very people it's meant to serve. They are featureless blocks of concrete that evoke no joy, and in line with the modernist architectural ethos ornamentation is basically absent. Also, if there is any doubt about the unpopularity of modernist and postmodernist architecture alike, look at "America's Favourite Architecture", very few of the buildings people actually chose as their favourites are from the post-war period. The response from many architects was that the list didn't reflect the opinions of "architectural experts", which isn't insular and elitist at all. Good to see that people who build for the public actively couldn't care less about their aesthetic preferences, and in fact are incapable of predicting their preferences at all.
The starkest example of the shift in architectural trends is probably the current Toronto City Hall. The new City Hall is a featureless, barely geometric concrete block, framed by the treeless, austere Nathan Phillips Square - apparently supposed to be a public gathering space. Now compare it with Old City Hall, which is still there but no longer in use. I think most people would view Old City Hall as a much more appropriate building for its purpose, and find it more pleasing to look at. Another example of the modernist turn is exemplified in the Royal Ontario Museum, a building that looked like this in 1922. Then it had a (now-defunct) planetarium and terrace galleries attached to it in 1968 and 1984, then in 2007 oh my god what the fuck is that. There is not an iota of respect for any of their architectural traditions. Old buildings that are part of the city's heritage just get "iterated upon" and superseded by horrific modernist/postmodern/deconstructivist blocks with no relation or connection to the previous style the building used to have.
The same pattern can be seen in public art. This infamous piece of public art, named Zones of Immersion, is displayed in the tube in Union Station, one of the TTC's major transportation hubs, and it succeeds marvellously at offering your average commuter the indescribable experience of being loaded on a train headed straight for Auschwitz. According to the artist, Stuart Reid, "This window into our contemporary isolation offers faces and body language, blurred and revealed poetic writings from my journal entries, and rhythms of colour that punctuate the ribboned expanse." I, too, would like to be reminded of the bleakness and misery of everyday life every time I try to go to work. This is a very clear example of an artist being distanced from the very people they are designing for, and pursuing clout in an increasingly small and incestuous sphere of "art fanatics" who have long disappeared up their own ass in the endless pursuit of social status. It wouldn't be so bad if everyone wasn't forced to look at it every day.
As if it wasn't bad enough that the city is by and large a mix of seedy strip malls and truly unpleasant brutalist blocks, on top of that there's the sheer lack of maintenance of any of these spaces. The train stations are some of the best examples of this - the poor state of the TTC is well known at this point among Canadians. These tubes are depressing spaces often badly disfigured by water damage, missing tiles and ceilings, and just in general seem to be falling apart at the seams. Here and here are some illustrations of normal scenes in the tube system. The same applies to many of the buildings, where their already unfriendly-looking concrete surfaces are further marred by water stains and damage, and nobody seems to have given it any care for decades. Other aspects of the city's design also worsen the experience, such as how when you walk around the city centre on hot days an awful stench will often waft out of the gutter grates (Yonge in particular smells like human faeces). Oh, and then there's the homelessness problem, which I won't get into here but really worsens the sense of dinginess and disrepair that the city already possesses. Downtown, there is at least one encampment every kilometre you walk.
The general vibe of the city is also information-overload in the worst way; an instance that sticks in my mind was when I was walking in the town centre and all at once the following was happening in a crowded square:
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Someone playing a flute in an absolutely fucking ridiculous way that somehow almost reminded me of Kazoo Kid.
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Someone trying to proselytise the glory of God to random passers-by.
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Somebody with burns trying to solicit money by sitting naked in the street showing the grisly scars all the way down his body.
There was probably more happening that my brain filtered out so as to preserve my sanity.
All of this could've been compensated for if there were many particularly interesting things to see, but the issue is that there just isn't very much that's worth stopping and looking at. The Royal Ontario Museum and perhaps the Distillery District are virtually the only things worth visiting, the Art Gallery of Ontario is only worth stopping by for the Group of Seven paintings (which are, to be fair, beautiful to see in person). The CN Tower and everything around it are unashamed tourist traps built and maintained largely for vanity purposes, without all too much to do there. The beach on Centre Island was hardly a beach at all, and seemed dirty enough that I didn't really want to step on the sand barefoot (though I am almost certainly spoiled with the best beaches in the world due to living in Australia). Outside of that, I can't remember anything else particularly memorable about the city.
In short, I didn't like Toronto. It was unpleasant enough that once I got out of the airport in Sydney, I walked into the train station at International and heaved a massive sigh of relief at how spacious, light, quiet and well-maintained it all seemed.
I'm in a similar position of being glad that he's here providing a differing viewpoint, but come on, a couple of days?
Really, I'm not. Progressives like these actively drag down the standard of discourse in this forum with their shit-flinging (this applies to other people of varying political stripes too, but the OP here seems to be one of the worst and most prolific offenders in this forum as of late).
I'm willing to engage with other left of centre people who participate here and even say I appreciate their participation in spite of our ideological differences, but this ain't it. It's such obvious bait that it barely even warrants attention from me - I basically look at a post of his, roll my eyes and move on. Even Darwin wasn't this consistently terrible, in spite of his penchant for doubling down on transparently incorrect statements. This on the other hand is an utterly vapid waste of time, there's barely even anything to counter: it's badly-written fanfiction that builds up to the ultimate reveal of "A MAGA said something ick, checkmate rightists".
It's also my observation that women don’t get more abuse than anyone else when they play games. They don’t get more harassed than men on the internet in general either (if anything it is the opposite), and this finding has been replicated when looking across the board, even in samples which are most likely to attract online criticism like politicians and journalists too. And men don't just experience relatively harmless acts - serious online abuse is also more likely to be directed at men by the way. But people are much more sensitive to harsh comments and threats directed at women than they are when directed at men, who are generally expected to be able to take it and/or dish back; we have no such expectation that women do so.
"Online harassment" in general is one of these very many areas wherein women actually receive preferential treatment but the popular consensus somehow seems to believe it's the opposite based on what people find emotionally salient. Women really dislike being in male spaces wherein they will sometimes be treated like men (bullying and threats will be slightly adapted based on gender to optimise for mental damage regardless of who they are insulting, but the phenomenon isn't distinct), and many men take offence on behalf of female dignity when women are treated like men too. And as soon as any large number of women enter a space, the norms quickly adapt to cater to feminine sensibilities. I've seen these attempts at social enforcement in real-time, too - I was once in a close-knit private server populated almost entirely by men, and the only woman in there was a girlfriend of one of the men who would routinely storm out of calls in response to any off-colour joke (as an aside they later broke up and she started dating one of his friends in the server immediately after, which spelled the end of the whole thing).
EDIT: added an extra sentence. I will also leave this very angry, drunk-narrated two part video here. Part 1, and part 2. Bit vitriolic, but I agree with it.
Didn't expect my random travel post about South Korea to appear here - I was just spitballing about a place I enjoyed a lot, but I appreciate that people thought it was interesting enough to nominate.
I do have some photos of the trip which were not included in the initial post. Here's a link to them. Frankly I hesitated from uploading them initially because I was skeevy about how amateurish they look, but perhaps they help provide some context for what the trip was like.
This has nothing to do with wellness, but as a Southeast Asian, I need to urgently talk about all the war crimes Adam Ragusea committed against pad thai in this video:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=puHSU9ZaZPY
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too much sugar in recipe
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advocates using worcestershire sauce in pad thai
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puts soy sauce in pad thai
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puts ketchup in pad thai
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puts ginger in pad thai
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snaps rice noodles in half
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boils rice noodles instead of soaking in warm water
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uses what looks like extra virgin olive oil to cook everything
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no tofu
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puts green onions and cilantro in the dish (the only herb that goes into pad thai is garlic chives)
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uses fresh chili instead of dried chili flakes
Every step is wrong. Every step. This is the first time I've come across a recipe of his I actually know something about and he fucks up everywhere.
I can't believe a certain orange-shirted YouTuber hasn't reviewed this yet, honestly.
So, let me see if I'm understanding this situation right:
Per a 2021 article by Axios, Harris was "appointed by Biden as border czar." Their wording: "Why it matters: The number of unaccompanied minors crossing the border has reached crisis levels. Harris, appointed by Biden as border czar, said she would be looking at the "root causes" that drive migration." Yet another 2021 article by Axios says this very same thing, saying that Harris was "put in charge of the border crisis" and calling her border czar.
So Axios in 2021 (and many other such media outlets) call Harris "border czar" when they think it might make Harris look good and bolster her importance. Axios then conveniently disavows this label and issues a correction to their own article only three years later, in 2024, once it's discovered that the situation at the southern border might not reflect well on Harris now that she is running against Trump. Note both the second article calling Harris border czar and the one saying she was never border czar were written by the very same journalist. One moment it's Huzzah, Harris is border czar and the next it's You guys, Harris was never border czar, the Republicans just made that up, and we have always been at war with Eastasia. Democrats have already produced internal memos telling their people how to fall in line on this issue.
My understanding of this whole situation is that this is one of the things that are technically true, but that these pedantic fact-checks are obviously partisan and misleading (and designed to lead you to a different conclusion than it actually warrants). Yes, the term "border czar" doesn't exist, and so technically Harris cannot have been border czar. But "czar" is an unofficial term that is generically used to describe people in positions of power like this, going back to the Bush era. Clearly the media thought it was an appropriate term in 2021, but not in 2024, and the fact that they're now going back and "recontextualising" their previous articles based on whether or not it's politically convenient is an extremely bad look.
It is correct that her role was not to literally manage everything regarding border policy, and she was not directly in charge of the border. She did, however, have a responsibility to try and stem the core cause of the border crisis, engage in diplomacy to do so, and to work with these countries to enforce borders, something that she also admits to in this tweet. If she really did what she was tasked to do, she should be able to confidently reply that she offered solutions to these problems that weren't taken up, not to claim that she holds zero responsibility on one of the few issues she was asked to assist with. As Biden himself states:
"In addition to that, there’s about five other major things she’s handling, but I’ve asked her, the VP, today — because she’s the most qualified person to do it — to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help — are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border."
"[T]he Vice President has agreed — among the multiple other things that I have her leading — and I appreciate it — agreed to lead our diplomatic effort and work with those nations to accept re- — the returnees, and enhance migration enforcement at their borders — at their borders."
This entire thing just seems like one of these comically exaggerated Ministry-of-Truth-esque things that happen often in election cycles, the last one being the total 180 on Biden, where before the debate they were proclaiming that Biden was in the best shape ever and that all the alt-media outlets talking about his mental decline were just conspiracy theorists, then right after that shitshow of a debate that they couldn't BandAid over, all of a sudden the calls to resign started up and it turned out his party had been silent about his decline for years despite knowing about it.
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