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Notes from the Under Dog L.'s avatar

On the Marxist note, I just gave an exam in response to a video essay called "How Did the World Get So Ugly," in which Sheehan Quirke shows how the sewer pumping station built in London in the mid-nineteenth century features a glorious interior of columns, arches, and gimcrackery compared to the concrete dome that functions today. The prompt asks, "What does Quirke mean by "the power of design?" What must an object do in order to qualify as a powerful design?" (The answer is that it should function, but also be beautiful, "do more.")

A student responded that Britain designed beautiful things in the Victorian era to oppress other countries, by showing their wealth...in other words the response was rooted in past offenses, completely missing the point of comparison between the beautifully designed objects of that past, and the cheap schlock we live with today.

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John L Weitzel's avatar

What confounds me is that there is this dominant thought that no one is born bad, but people are bad because of their environment. Thus, changing the environmental conditions will change someone’s behavior. But rather than seeing intact families as a positive agent of change, they want to control the environment through political and economic means. This presumes, I think, that they assume all individuals are the same, no individual differences, born tabula rasa. Therefore, a one size fits all political environment controlled by a positivist philosophical system will make the most people happy—where happiness is defined by pleasure rather than human flourishing. What do you think about that?

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