Nowadays, physical proximity means less and less. Relationships are even becoming less integrated. Yes you can interact with other people, but only as coworkers and paid professionals. Don't cross any weird lines. Even asking someone to engage in friend activities is getting more rare as most people prefer online friends, since they have more in common with them. The throughly modern American asks "Why would you need to be in physical proximity to someone anyway unless it was necessary for work? That's so creepy!". Lately, Tinder and friends have really stripped the last actual need for non-work physical proximity with any indivuals who have not been pre-screened via the algorithm.

Knowing that the US is probably one of the most segregated countries, this makes me smile :-)

I don't think that's accurate. Europe is almost entirely European, Asia is almost entirely Asian, Africa is almost entirely African. Even Wisconsin at 86.5% white is less white than most European countries. And Milwaukee itself is 40% black and 17.3% Latino.

The countries that come anywhere close to the US on diversity are predominantly the other countries in the Americas.

Of course Asia is full of Asians; but they represent an incredible diversity of ethnicities. In some areas, they are geographically mixed, in others not.

Moreover, if you can bisect Asians into Japanese and Koreans etc. then you can bisect whites into Irish and German, Latinos into Colombians and Venezuelans, blacks into Jamaicans and Haitians etc. And if you're going to play that game then why aren't the racially segregated areas still internally diverse in the same way? Certainly they are as much as the countries that consist almost entirely of that category of people are.

My original comment was to explain how the statement, "Knowing that the US is probably one of the most segregated countries . . . " is incorrect.

This has to be sarcasm, right?

If not, this view is very wrong because it views diversity in a manner that's purely and literally skin deep.

Which means there aren't a lot of people of any race who are culturally Japanese in Africa or culturally African American in Europe.

The category "white people in America" has that level of cultural diversity inside of it. It includes millions of first generation immigrants from all of those places. Plus millions of people descended from those cultures who over the past centuries have developed them into something uniquely American, melding them in a thousand cities with the cultures of all the other immigrant populations that have come here since then.

And we can't pretend that no country in Europe has ever sinned. Or any country anywhere for that matter.

Segregation is probably a more chronic problem there than it is or was ever here.

  But Saint-Denis is not a rich neighborhood.

  It's what the French call a "banlieue."

  Literally translated, the word means "suburb," but 
  it has come to be associated with the depressed, mostly 
  immigrant neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city
  where unemployment is high and opportunity scarce.

  "If you look at the situation of people, you 
  understand the path they have taken to become a 
  terrorist or whatever you call it," Villain told 
  CBS News correspondent Vladmir Duthiers. "Exclusion 
  makes the terrorist, in my opinion."

  .
  .
  .

  The French government does not keep statistics 
  based on race or religion, but surveys have found 
  unemployment is as high as 30 percent in these immigrant 
  neighborhoods.[1]

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/paris-banlieues-seeds-of-terror...

Segregation in France is absolutely nothing like what you see in America where, outside three or four major cities, different races, no matter how rich or poor, are absolutely cordoned off from one another and do not ever attend the same schools [1]. If you actually go to Saint-Denis you will find everything from Russian Jews to Moroccan Muslims to Nigerians to good ol' fashioned ("from before Napoleon took over the world") French families. It's an extremely diverse hood, the kind you'd only saw 30 years ago in America's largest cities.

[1] https://www.vox.com/2018/3/5/17080218/school-segregation-get...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/16/segreg...

If that’s the case then I disavow all things “modern.” Nothing exciting to me at all about putting up walls between me and the people I actually see in person.

Maybe this is why I deleted my facebook a few years back, call when a few texts become a back and forth conversation, push for meet ups, and don’t use Tinder. I really don’t want to live in a world where the majority of our human-to-human communications is tapping on glass.

You baby-boomers need to speak for yourselves only and keep me out of it.

(Assuming you mean "modern" as in contemporary. If you mean the more canonical "modern", sorry for the react.)

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

- the media

— the capitalist class

Regarding the chances of arrest, that makes sense to me. I suspect the police are rationally responding to the likelihood of violence.

Regarding the fellows who are considering mass murder, I suggest you notify the police.

Regardless, I like it. I think you're using it to describe businesses that do things like sell carbon credits or do humanitarian work?

If you give tuition money to a few poor kids via a non profit, you don’t solve the college debt and education accessibility problem, but it makes people who did it feel better.

Or pay someone to plant a tree when you fly to offset the carbon.

One could always not give tuition money to a few poor kids. That fails to solve anything too.

I really dislike the knee-jerk, blanket dismissal of people who are trying to do small but good things.

"If nothing we do matters then the only thing that matters is what we do." - Joss Whedon

Basically, it isn't. The theory that everyone should do a little bit is based on the idea that if 1000 people each solve 0.1% of the problem then we solve 100% of the problem. Which in general isn't a bad idea.

The problem comes when somebody tries to sell it with bad math. Because then you have a hundred million people each solving one trillionth of the problem, which accomplishes effectively nothing. And worse than nothing, because then you have a hundred million people each thinking they've done their part and no further action is required, even though no one has made the slightest dent in the actual problem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJDgxH8aRGs

This has the taste of conspiracy, but I do believe you're right. There's a lot of money to be made this way.

  I had not considered that planning cities like this
  was meant to be community-hostile, but I can easily
  see how this is meant to breed a dependence on 
  corporate solutions.

I guess the angle I don't see answered is why would you need 'corporate solutions' say home surveillance solutions, private security solutions and other security & theft deterrence apparatus and solutions if you didn't have any hostile communities to be begin with?

Was this ever studied in the American or non-North American context? Are European cities and towns seeing a new found need for these things now, that were practically unheard of a few decades ago?

There's also a generic version of the word "community" that people throw around, that can mean almost anything: a town (which isn't automatically a community)... gamers ("the gaming community")... "the Native American lesbian sportfishing enthusiast community"... and so on. I don't mean that.

Anyway, something "community-hostile" would therefore be anything that creates separation and alienation. Among other types of separation, there's separation in the spatial realm, such as through sheer distance (things are far apart), or through side effects of physical barriers that are part of the infrastructure, e.g. walls built to block traffic noise, or streets themselves, especially when wide and dangerous; or through other physical barriers that are more subtle such as the windows of your own car, through which you can see, yet you could easily drive right past your friend coming the other way without knowing it, whereas that would never happen if you were both walking or on a bike or scooter. Well, you say, I can just text my friend on my phone. Exactly, and now you're dependent on the phone maker, the carrier, Apple/Google, etc. for that communication to take place.

We've lost most of our knowledge about how to create civic spaces of value.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ

The bulk of our old growth culture we just slaughtered on arrival.

A lot of it was transformed.

Also, what do you mean by “Guiltlessness as a service”?

Guaranteed by a public-benefit corporation.

Bonus: Now on the blockchain!

Before WW2, America was a culture desert. Europeans fleeing the war are the only reason NYC became an international culture hub.

Hip-hop is undoubtedly the most progressive Western art form. (Side note: hip-hop's genius appropriations of commercial symbolisms and it's will to collective empowerment directly underwrite and provide the language of the public engagement of today's millenials. It's influence is as deep as an ocean.) But while hip-hop is the only non-native wholly American cultural movement, it's American origins are a far cry from enlightment; more bound in shame. To say America created hip-hop would be an offense. Saying America stole it would be more accurate.

Blues, Jazz and Ragtime all predate WWII — and all influenced pretty much everything you hear today.

You could even argue that Breakbeat is American given its roots with the Winston’s.

American culture is vastly richer than many countries specifically because it is effectively an All Star team of traditions from everywhere. Thinking “American” is simply hot dogs and Hip Hop is to greatly undersell what has been one of the great cultural achievements in the history of the world. American culture is vastly diverse compared to, for example, France. You have Cajun/Creole in Louisiana, Tejano culture in Texas, cowboy culture in Montana, laid back “surfer” culture in California, Boston/Nee England culture, Chicago with it’s melange of Polish, Italian, African American. Where else in the world could you have sushi for lunch and watch a rodeo in the evening? To be clear, I am not saying American culture is “best,” I am just saying that to reduce American culture to Hip Hop is about like saying French culture is nothing more than Edith Piaf and baguettes. Americans even invented basketball and baseball — and most of the things I mention were in motion long before world war 2.

NYC was a culture hub long before Workd War 2. Read some de Tocqueville and learn a bit about American history before just engaging in a wholesale dismissal of America.

I am not prone to quoting Bono, but this clip is relevant: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O8aLAZ8SnvI

The actual artists out on the stage doing the music know exactly what comes from where. Culture spreads like that: someone likes a piece and adds it to their own, fusing two cultures. It's how we have American Chinese food that looks nothing like Chinese Chinese food. (the xenophobic policies that led to it is another matter)

You have a very narrow and stereotyped view of American culture. The whole of it is not a few white-majority cities in the north and one over-funded region in the west.

In my previous comment, please note when I say "hip-hop", I am not referring to music, but culture. Nonetheless...

I grew up in the south. My father was literally a clogger. I'm no stranger to folk. But, I am extremely skeptical of a lot of it's history. The mid-century folk-revival era did a real number on our conception of what's really there culture-wise. Behind the curtain, I am honestly afraid it's mostly puritanism, shame, and self-conflict. It's interesting but I think calling it a cultural movement is mostly romanticism. In terms of music, we could delve into details for days, and break down the whole history of hip-hop and jazz, and I do encourage that. There's a lot of good music there. But, I'm afraid it serves essentially the same end in terms of culture; a terribly familiar story. Hip-hop exhibits the whole of the cultural dynamic fairly explicitly, and is internationally renowned. Folk is mostly replicated in parody.

EDIT: Another thing to add... I think most people would be surprised how many contemporary folk musicians (young ones) would actually agree with me. They eventually are challenged with contending with things like: Did folk come from slaves? Or the working class? Or the fraught relations between the two? And is it reconcilable? Where did country music come from?

We may have fundamentally incompatible perspectives if you see culture and art as separate things. I grew up surrounded by hip-hop (Atlanta), but I know better than to sing along with the n word as a white person. This is because the experience of the music is inseparable from one's experience with its culture.

I am basically saying that the legacy of American folk is just too mysterious to nail down, and too precarious to draw conclusions from. I wonder if this would be the case without the mid-century folk revival, which amounted to a mass-commercialization of the white American south as a suffering working-class. The older field recordings in the Library Of Congress suggest the music was predominantly made by slaves. The old radio recordings from Nashville tell a slightly different story and seem to stitch together something of an art form, likely for the very first time. Then folk-revival was a massively commercial effort that made it all look very pretty. But the culture of it all still remains vague. Touring the south and studying it's history doesn't suggest much of any concern for culture in any higher sense. Literacy was surprisingly high but they mostly read the bible. Music seems to have occupied a space more like entertainment than cultural reflection. A likely theory is that it was very much a culture for slaves, but merely entertainment for white people. Hopefully this clarifies my comprehension. Hip-hop is a full embodiment in comparison; a whole new world of unmitigated expression.