Posts by giovanni tiso
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Hard News: When the Weather is the News, in reply to David Haywood,
So, unless CERA can do a deal on our special circumstances, it looks like we won’t be able to stay on Christchurch.
Oh, David. Christ.
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Owen Hatherley on urban regeneration and the riots:
We've long congratulated ourselves, in London, of the fact that we have no banlieue. We applauded ourselves especially smugly when zoned, segregated Paris rioted a few years ago. It's not like it's untrue—give or take the odd exception (a Thamesmead, a Chelmlsey Wood) our poverty is not concentrated in peripheral housing estates. Edinburgh might wall off its poor in Muirhouse or Leith, and Oxford might try not to think about Blackbird Leys, but in London, Manchester/Salford, Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol, Nottingham—the cities that erupted on Monday 8th August—the rich live, by and large, next to the poor: £1,000,000 Georgian terraces next to estates with some of the deepest poverty in the EU. We're so pleased with this that we've even extended the principle to how we plan the trickledown dribble of social housing built over the last two decades, those Housing Association schemes where the deserving poor are 'pepper-potted' with stockbrokers. We've learnt about 'spatial segregation', so we do things differently now.
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All of us, all along—if we're honest for a microsecond—knew this was a ludicrous way to build a city, to live in a city. I, like most of the people now waving brooms in the air and representing the 'real London', was not born in London, and I know only two or three people who were. Occasionally, during the 12 years I've lived in the city, I'd often idly wonder when the riots would come: when the situation of organic delis next to pound shops, of crumbling maisonettes next to furiously speculated-on Victoriana, of artists shipped into architect-designed Brutalist towers to make them safe for Regeneration, of endless boosterist self-congratulation, would finally collapse in on itself.
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Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
There are a couple of significant neo-cons who were involved with both the Reagan administration, who also had some involvement with Bush Snr and Jnr, who were in the depths of the New Left some 20 years before. Their names escape me, but you wouldn’t have called them Marxists
The only guy I can think of (and it would be drawing a pretty long bow) is Abrams. But between being a socialist and being a neo-con, he was also a strategist for the Democratic party, and there are a lot more of those who switched allegiance. Yet you keep hearing that “it’s the hardliners who are more prone to sharp political turncoating”, never by way of argument, mind, but always stated as a self-evident truth, I guess because it is so comforting to liberals.
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One from the tigress of Cremona.
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Kumara Republic,
A lot of neo-cons, boomer or not, fall into that category.
I might quibble there - maybe you mean neoliberal? Neoconservatism is quite a specific ideology which has few supporters outside of the United States.
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Danielle,
I'd like to note belatedly that if you start liveblogging the apocalypse again
In two weeks and then again three weeks after that.
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
@Gio, you could always implement that yourself using RSS. Work of moments.
Brilliant. How?
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You know what would be nice? If you got an email if somebody replies to one of your posts (so long as you’ve registered your email address in the system, obviously). That way if you’ve dropped out of the conversation you can still pick it up if you’ve been addressed directly.
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Also, could we have a spellchecker, and a debugger that checks comments for internal logical consistency?
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
You know, Gio, please go lecture my next door neighbours on what a shithole New Zealand is. They’ll patiently explain why they’re in no great rush to go back to Iraq.
Wow, really? Have you discussed with them the role of the Western countries that New Zealand has been consistently allied with since it has had a foreign policy in making Iraq the place that it is?
But you've given me a great idea. I'm going to go over to my neighbours, who come from Somalia, and lecture them on what a great place my country is compared to theirs. I'm sure they will be far too polite to remind me of the relevant chapters of Italian history.