Jim Ledbetter: Your article on the economic woes of this country and the economists you quote completely miss the point.

Economists LOVE to make the argument that Americans must retool for a different marketplace because it means that all the blame for the anemic economy can be placed squarely on the shoulders of the working man: He costs too much. He knows too little. He’s not flexible enough. We need him to be fully qualified and experienced in our high-tech position but cheap enough to be competitive against his counterparts in India and flexible enough to work unpaid overtime after moving to a different city. Pardon me while I gag.

For the love of god, employers are not hiring because people aren’t buying their products and services. People aren’t buying their products and services because they, by being un- and under-employed, don’t have the money to.  It’s really as simple as that.

Obama’s problem is not that there is no government solution, as you suggest, but that governance and politics in general is the art of the compromise and as it stands the only thing compromised here was the obvious answer: A large, direct injection of cash into the economy through government works programs. FDR did it. China shrugged off this last economic bust by spending a trillion on infrastructure. But our current circumstance forces half-measures, and even those come at the cost of political expediency: Greasing the right palms, kickbacks to the right subcommittees and special interests, tax cuts for the rich and ever more corporate welfare.

The problem isn’t our stupid workers, it’s our stupid Congress, stupid.

J. David Goodman laments that there isn’t much of a fixed-speed bicycle market in China, and posits that it’s because there’s not too much of a Hipster community to foster such. Consequently he wonders how we might foment such in China.

Two things pop into mind:

• Fixed-speeds suck. Fixed-speeds are more a scenester thing based on some romanticized vision of 80s New York bike messengers. Slaloming one’s way between cars is a cute concept if one wants to buy into a “underground culture,” (which is about as authentic as the Trust Funders’ “slumming it” sections of Williamsburg) but when the bikes are more expensive than mountain bikes (my preferred mode for actual work) and road bikes while offering less control, support, efficiency or safety than those, what the hell is the point?
• If one is buying into a “counter-culture” in China, one becomes a punk. If Hipsterdom can be defined as an apolitical reaction to the ever-changing and largely arbitrary fads of an entrenched consumer culture, then there first needs to be an entrenched consumer culture that trumps politics. And quite frankly, let’s hope it never ends up that way: The last thing we need are more yuppies-to-be dictating what color keffiyehs the “radicals” will wear when they twitter their “protests.”

And while we’re talking about connoisseurs of kitsch, let’s get rid of hipsters here, too. It’s funny: In America we went straight from a conformist/non-conformist dichotomy to a universal heterogeneity that’s almost completely meaningless because of a lack of authenticity in how people adorn themselves.

In other words, we cover ourselves in white noise.

The problem with media isn’t so much that there is too much information – anyone who watches network news knows that, more than likely, less actual information is imparted to the viewer than before – but a form of saturation of spectacle has taken effect: Disinformation, advertising and just straight nonsense take equal space and are given equal credence. In a sense, fashion is the physical iteration of just that.

So just as I will probably never buy an e-reader for the fear that actual books – y’know, pure unadulterated sources of information, distilled, from cover to cover – would end up being portioned and chopped up like newspaper articles now, both in print and online, with spliced-in nonsense at every turn, I have absolutely no idea what somebody’s saying when they walk outside with a t-shirt displaying a sports team that doesn’t exist, jeans with holes and other forms of wear that they didn’t themselves put there, and a cell phone that performs its secondary abilities better than its primary function.

They are, quite literally, walking disinformation. They cancel me out, and they’re not even making a political point.

The State Department got involved with Google’s issues with China, and China took note.

Setting aside the sovereignty issues of imposing what they view is an explicit attempt by America to undermine their media control – in that the US views Twitter, Google, YouTube et al as tools to encourage citizens of the world to clamber for freedom of press and expression – they simply point out that only once in their history has a foreign power succeeded at breaking into the Chinese market.

So the question I suppose is, is internet addiction as powerful as heroin?

Nathan Thrall is grasping at straws. For starters, Albania is a Muslim country like China is a Christian country.

For seconds, if they happen to like us not because they’re necessarily paragons of democracy but because those we bombed happened to be their enemies, then what do we gain as a country from their friendship?

Bush liked to go there because it was a rather innocuous, isolated country that was practically the only one whose populace wasn’t actively protesting his presence. If North Korea treated Bush that way, he’d have gone on state visits to North Korea more often.

It seems the article has very little to do with promoting world peace efforts or democracy and more to do with alliances of convenience, a smarmy CIA-like cynicism towards foreign affairs that should send chills down the spines of those who wish a more stable world to live in.

To D,

Laconic version: City populations and city cultural influence can be seen as a exponential, rather than a linear, relationship.

Loquacious version: The weirdest conversations I’ve had as an urban planning major in college were with fellow student who had not come from the Center of the Universe™* and thus were somewhat miffed that I expressed something of a cavalier disdain for their hometowns. Read the rest of this entry »

I wonder how deeply the commentators of this Times article on China’s handling the Uighur old city of Kashgar feel in their sense of liberal humanism.

I mean, on the one hand, it’s smack dab on the forefront of China’s reputation of bulldozing (oftentimes quite literally, at least when it’s not bombing them) the traditions and institutions of its ethnic minorities, most evidenced by making every city, town and village straight to Kazakhstan look like Newark, NJ. After all, Kashgar’s known for having a lot of Uighur dissidents to the Chinese Community Party.

This seems to be a lot of what the commentators seem to note, taking the architectural loss to be a parable of the destruction of the culture. But they keep heading back to the topic of tourism, and that irks me; like they care for the Uighurs only in the sense that their “habitat” might not be there for future visits – for them to look and leave.

It may be an unfair picture I’m painting of the commentators, but they first struck me as somewhat bourgeois humanists – like how the environmentalist movement was started by people who drive everywhere and run air conditioning, this movement to preserve the cultural and architectural heritage of these aboriginals is run by people who live in modern apartments. I did a double-take as Kituwah to read Americans decrying China for Manifest Destiny.

The story in this, to me, on the other hand, is not so much the loss of the architectural layout of the old city, but the inadequate compensation for its citizens. This isn’t an anthropological parable; this is a public advocacy piece. Cities get renewed constantly: Italy, as a first world country, has been trying to save its cultural heritage as well, what with a recent earthquake, but its people come first. The story might as well be set in Newark.

I’m not saying so much that the Chinese government is necessarily working in good faith with the Uighur citizenry – indeed, this sounds like an excuse to develop on cheap land – but at the same time at least they’re building apartment buildings, if boring ones, which is more than I can say for this government.