Yule Heibel's Bookmarks tagged commentary → View Popular

You are here: Diigo Home > Yule Heibel's Bookmarks

Ads by Google

Expand All 1 - 6 of 6

The Quivering Upper Lip by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Autumn 2008

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.
QUOTE
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.
UNQUOTE

Tags: theodore_dalrymple, socialcritique, england, morality, commentary on 2008-12-06 and saved by 6 people -All Annotations (1) -About

more fromwww.city-journal.org

7Expand

The end of suburban sprawl

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.

Tags: sprawl, ottawa, urbanism, cities, commentary on 2008-08-09 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.canada.com

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.
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.
City of Ottawa planners, like planners across North America, have come to recognize the cost of uncontrollable sprawl, which is why they would like most new development in Ottawa to occur inside what is called the urban boundary.
Some developers, however, are outraged. The efforts of city planners to increase density inside the boundary is being dismissed as "naive."
In fact, it's the naive ones who somehow believe sprawl is sustainable. Right now, for example, Ottawa is trying to build a light-rail system, but sprawl -- as expressed in low-density living -- makes that project more difficult and expensive.
Add Sticky Note
- - exactly right!
  posted by lampertina on 2008-08-09
As the price of fuel increases, and people become more sensitive generally to their carbon footprints, anyone who's going to argue against the benefits of intensification could find himself in a very lonely position indeed.

1Expand

Paul Krugman Joins Team Density | hugeasscity

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."

Tags: hugeasscity, density, seattle, paul_krugman, james_kunstler, commentary, low_rise, mid_rise, high_rise on 2008-05-22 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromnoisetank.com

2Expand

small change: Sutra Readings - 13

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."

Tags: maria_benet, smallchange, commentary on 2008-05-22 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.smallchangeblog.com

"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.
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.)

Understanding Infrastructure | Linux Journal

Great essay by Doc, asking if Linux, open source, the web -- all these things -- are infrastructure. "What is 'infrastructure' anyway?"

Tags: infrastructure, commentary, doc_searls, linux, open_source on 2008-04-24 and saved by 3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.linuxjournal.com

3Expand

Crosscut Seattle - Green is the new gold rush? Not without government R&D

Tags: business, commentary, ecology, energy, environment, green_technologies, politics on 2007-11-06 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.crosscut.com

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."
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.
As for the politics of possibility, Nordhaus and Shellenberger make a case for a massive governmental program in developing cheap, clean energy, as the Defense Department did with microchips or jetliners. It won't happen in the private sector alone, since they "rarely initiate technological revolutions," and there is actually very little innovation going on in the energy sector today. By contrast, when the Pentagon in the 1960s effectively guaranteed the market for microchips, it touched off a revolution that drove down the costs and spread the technology to many sectors of the economy. "An investment of roughly $200 billion would bring the price of solar energy down to that of coal," they estimate.
The authors adopt a politics of hope, rather than fear. "Cautionary tales and narratives of eco-apocalypse tend to provoke fatalism, conservatism, and survivalism among voters -- not the rational embrace of environmental policies," they contend. "Young and grassroots environmentalists are more inspired by the vision of creating a new energy economy than regulating the old one." Got that Al Gore?

1 - 6 of 6

List 20 50 100

Notation: * = Private bookmark and comment|… = Clipping [?] | … = Public highlight [?]

Yule Heibel's Related Tags

Selected tags

commentary

Related tags

See More Top Contributors

Nathan Rein chicago_auctions Jeffrey Canton brian rodney Nbr ebay_guy

Related Groups on Diigo

Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University

Members (110)

bookmarks (1551)
Guild of Calamitous Intent

Members (2)

bookmarks (24)
Christians

Members (54)

bookmarks (270)

Related Lists on Diigo

Nukular Commentary

The nuclear debate from bot...

Items: 6 | Visits: 49

Created by: Energy Net
Socialism and the End of the American Dream

A collection of commentary ...

Items: 29 | Visits: 74

Created by: Gary Edwards
Web 2.0 Apps

Reviews, comparisons, face-...

Items: 16 | Visits: 53

Created by: Chris Flood

Yule Heibel's Bookmarks tagged commentary → View Popular

Yule Heibel's Related Tags

See More Top Contributors

Related Groups on Diigo

Diigo - Highlight and Share the Web!