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Yes, he's an old curmudgeon, but there are valid questions and true insights in this piece, which among other things basically asks, whatever happened to self-control and isn't there something plain wrong with thinking that it's now imperative to let it all hang out all the time.
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Certainly, many Britons under the age of 30 or even 40 now embrace a kind of sub-psychotherapeutic theory that desires, if not unleashed, will fester within and eventually manifest themselves in dangerous ways. To control oneself for the sake of the social order, let alone for dignity or decorum (a word that would either mean nothing to the British these days, or provoke peals of laughter), is thus both personally and socially harmful.
I have spoken with young British people who regularly drink themselves into oblivion, passing first through a prolonged phase of public nuisance. To a man (and woman), they believe that by doing so, they are getting rid of inhibitions that might otherwise do them psychological and even physical harm.
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Well, well ...an opinion piece in the Ottawa Citizen (republished across the CanWest newspaper empire, therefore also in Victoria's Times-Colonist), unsigned, that lays out the tenets of anti-sprawl and pro-urbanist thinking succinctly and favorably. (Except that while the title calls it "suburban sprawl," the author calls it "urban sprawl" in the first paragraph. Odd.)
Of interest for a Canadian perspective is that the article hints at the realities of infrastructure funding in Canada.
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Some years ago it started to become clear the post-Second World War race to suburbia was damaging North American cities. The result was long anti-social commutes (anti-social because we live in our cars) and outrageously expensive infrastructure -- funded by taxpayers -- to extend services to these outlying neighbourhoods.
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Ottawa residents know well the negative effects of sprawl. It's hard to create a sense of civic identity when a city is made up of disparate communities separated by vast tracts of land. And yes, the economic inefficiencies of this kind of arrangement are legendary.
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danb comments on Paul Krugman's recent NYT column, which he wrote while in a Berlin mid-rise/ low-rise neigjborhood. I posted a comment back about amenities, and whether it's possible to create architecture w/ amenities when you're building on small (10K) city lots and trying to stick to low-rise (or low mid-rise at best). File under "commentary."
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to achieve viable densities in Seattle with midrise we’d have to take out a whole lot of single family, which isn’t likely to happen any time soon
Maria posted another thought-provoking entry based on her reading of the Sutras, which in turn resonated with something I had just read on Jonah Lehrer's blog, and prompted me to a lengthy-ish comment. File under "commentary."
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"The techniques of yoga," says Shearer, "are methods of purifying the nervous system so that it can reflect a greater degree of consciousness and our lives can become an increasingly positive force in the world." (Patanjali, 1982). So why not just circumvent all that practicing and go straight for the effect of a settled nervous system by taking one of the myriad pills Big Pharma has been pumping out regularly? Ativan may be more effective in averting our fear of death than years of headstands… Zoloft, I hear, has cured many of the suffering they endured because of issues of attachment.
Don't get me wrong, I am not advocating against medication here. A damaged nervous system can hardly be rendered whole by practices of purification, be they headstands, breathing exercises, or meditation, alone. But these practices, along with the proper medical intervention at the right time, can bolster an experience of wholeness – which is what health is, after all. In our rush to cure suffering through the shortcuts offered by fixing the brain, we forget that the mind is something more than the sum of neural networks.
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In this case, the tradeoff involves creativity. Some of my friends who relied on crushed Ritalin during college used to joke about how the drugs were great for late-night cramming sessions, but that they seemed to suppress any kind of originality. In other words, increased focus came at the expense of the imagination. It makes perfect sense that such a cognitive trade-off would exist. Paying attention to a particular task - like writing an article - requires the brain to ignore all sorts of seemingly unrelated thoughts and stimuli bubbling up from below. (The unconscious brain is full of potential distractions.) However, the same thoughts that can be such annoying interruptions are also the engine of creativity, since they allow us to come up with new connections between previously unrelated ideas. (This might be why schizotypal subjects score higher on tests of creativity. They are less able to ignore those distracting thoughts, which largely arise from the right hemisphere.)
Great essay by Doc, asking if Linux, open source, the web -- all these things -- are infrastructure. "What is 'infrastructure' anyway?"
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He reframed the discussion about coping with global warming by saying it was a golden opportunity to make money. One week earlier, Seattle business leaders were hearing the same siren song at the Chamber of Commerce retreat in Vancouver. A bank president declared, "Green is the new gold."
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One big factor that this rosy scenario leaves out is the role of government. Here, the seminal thinkers are Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, authors of a new book, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. The authors argue against the high-regulation model for battling pollution and other environmental woes, or approaches that raise the cost of dirty energy. You can read about the controversy they have stirred up with greens in this essay.
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