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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31065 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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I think the city is portrayed in a utopian-dystopian way. It’s not hell, but it has significant problems. And this makes sense, the author is a green socialist, she isn’t a follower of Schwab’s ideology and has in fact been paid to provide the ‘take’ of someone from a different movement for the WEF blog.

I think that's a fair description for the privacy concerns; I don't think it's accurate to describe those left outside as the "poor people struggling to survive" (note even the WEF page describes them as "discontents". More importantly, it's very obvious and overt that the "you will own nothing and be happy" isn't and very obviously isn't supposed to be part of the "significant problems" side.

The point is that attaching the “you will own nothing and be happy” quote to the WEF is like describing the New York Times as a Trump supporting newspaper because you quote a line from a single Op-Ed written by a Trump supporter that was commissioned for the sake of ‘ideological diversity’.

That's be a far stronger position were there a few dozen 'no we don't want this and in fact want the opposite of this' arguments to point toward, rather than something that gets promoted under other terms for everything from air compressor to carpet tiles.

((And, uh, also if Auken or involved editors were shoved out of the organization in a giant high-confrontation mess over the matter.))

It isn’t. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of people employed as ‘food writers’ across the English-speaking world, to say nothing of non-food writers that cover the subject or hobbyist food bloggers. The NYT’s “food journalism” section alone has several dozen employees and its own subscription service.

That would be a useful rejoinder, if still not within the limits of your original "some human interest stories by food blogs ", if it were just the NYT's food journalism section. Instead it's the Opinion section (complete with Learning Network study questionaire), a small section on cricket flour in Climate FWD, applauded by a comedian (?) giving relationship advice. And that's just one outlet.

Sure, it's all a bunch of people bringing up this stuff (or rewarding it when it comes from outside), and it being happily rubberstamped by layers of fact-checkers and editors), and no one bothering with any objections. Sure there's tons of random things like that.

And then there's a pretty wide variety of common things that don't, and it becomes noticeable.

I suppose they do say that eating beef is bad for global warming, but if you did believe in global warming then the impact of cattle farming on methane emissions would probably be important to you, I guess (I can’t say I care about it).

Yes, people who care about things care about them. But that's going from 'it's not happening' to 'and it's good that it is' pretty quick.

Except, again, when they do talk about housing regular people this isn’t really about the US or West at all... The only example that features normal blue collar Westerners is the example of the British ‘pod’ housing company, which not only embraces that vessel of suburbanization (the car), but which also looks like a pretty nice update to the awful, squalid and cramped Victorian terraced housing in which many of the local working classes live.

Naraburns below linked to this piece with a smorgasboard of Western-specific focuses; the Times has lauded "the winner of the small space/tiny home competition sponsored by the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development". For other examples on broader restrictions against conventional housing, see here for one that highlights an American local law!, natgeo about specifically average American home sizes.

They're just people interested in the matter! And it's not that aggressive yet. But they're just people interested in it here. The pretense that this is solely for the developing world (and parts of the UK no one likes) runs into some problems given that.

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