Greetings again, folks, from here in beautiful southwestern Connecticut! We didn’t get really hit by the storm, but the rain came back this morning with a lukewarm vengeance. Seems like the neighbors in RI did get hit kinda bad, though.
On to the roundup…
I wanted to try and take the most positive note possible out of a bad situation: Welcome to America for our new Afghani-and-soon/eventually-to-be-American brothers and sisters fleeing their country.
Far too many of us are quite honestly the same jerks and supporters of imperialism who screwed up your country to begin with, but I hope at least the rest of us can manage to make your new home as welcoming as we can.On last week’s (today’s) Strong Towns Upzoned podcast: One of the reasons why modern Americans are so obsessed with freezing their neighborhoods in amber, is that this is what happens when you tell an entire generation that the best expression of their right-wing political identity is as “conservatives” and that this therefore means bringing change to a crawl.
Also: Skeptics are somewhat right - state pre-emption of Single Family Detached Only zoning alone probably won’t fix the housing crisis.
But the skepticism does point to the core political problem here which needs to be solved: any reform has to keep the planning commissions from merely replicating the gentrification problem - namely, prevent them from using their power on a case-by-case basis to discriminate against building anything anywhere they don’t like.
In other words, you need to break the complex which gives too much say to asshat NIMBYs in the name of “protecting people from government overreach”. It’s a disgusting failure that, like a lot of American failures, substitutes an idealized myth of an empowered citizen for a reasonable scheme of regulation.Just wanted to point out that Strong Towns is a great example of an organization making Matt Yglesias’ “Elite Persuasion” category of strategy work for them. It’s well-suited to their sector: Planning professionals are a lot easier to politick than rank-and-file NIMBYs, because most planners want to actually do a good job at being planners, and they have the power to actually do something about it.
(Last Monday’s) Pod Save America: I already love Jane Coaston from Vox’s The Weeds and now in her role at NYT, so she was a stellar guest host from my perspective. Seriously, go listen to her; she made PSA 10x better than it usually is.
Anyways, she had a great line about the COVID vaccine: “How people think about this is often tied to how vulnerable they view themselves to either the disease itself, or the requirements of government”.
And she accidentally calls out the entire game of national politics! That is, if you take COVID out of the context and think more broadly. Right now, the Southern White Power Complex knows that they risk losing a society based on them being at the top of the heap - if not always nationally, at least in their own backyard. And thus, they hate government because it’s a threat to their power.We shouldn’t conflate, nor allow the opposition to conflate, the tolerance of ideological diversity and viewpoint diversity with tolerance of which media universe one chooses to inhabit. Jane and her friend Matt Yglesias are perfect examples: They’re people who inhabit (and even make up!) the sane, sober world of the mainstream media, but also have some pretty divergent views and ideology from that of the mainstream left. Moreover, they’re proof that you don’t have to completely agree with the left’s entire political program in order to agree that Fox is a cancerous propaganda machine.
Fox, for its part, wants us to elide this distinction, because they want to use the cover of legitimate disagreements within the mainstream media as a way to sell their propaganda as something more legitimate than it really is.
The tried and true strategy of “name and shame” probably suffices here: Let’s embrace real viewpoint and ideological diversity without fear of giving ammunition to the propagandists who abuse it by pretending that their propaganda is “diversity”.