What I find depressing in the LBO discussion is that the radicals have turned their faces against working class aspirations, leaving right-wingers like Joel Kotkin to champion their ambitions for self-betterment. No wonder suburbanites vote Republican, if they have to put up with the blanket condemnation of their lifestyles from radicals here.
The argument that these aspirations are unsustainable seems too conservative to me. After all, the resource that matters is human effort, and that is being bent to making homes where people want them, as opposed to where 'smart growth' says they should live.
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Ha!
James, this is almost precisely what you wrote the last go round.
LBO-ers are snooty elitists who don't understand the aspirations of working people...folk want to live in dispersed circumstances so our housing policy should be focused on making that work...any and all technical and environmental problems will be solved though human ingenuity...right wingers are more in touch with these factors than "radicals".
And the remarkable thing is that list-members like Chuck Grimes have offered detailed, ground-level explanations, not theory-dependent, moralistic denunciations of what Wojtek calls "da people" and your clockwork reply is, "listen, it'll sort itself out, let's do it baby!"
It's like you just walked out of the 1939 World's Fair and can only repeat what you heard in the GM exhibit.
It's 2006; techno-utopianism has outlived its shelf life. And I say this as a technophile.
.d.