"... a locus for the free flow of ideas and a leveling ground where some distant memory of 'all men are created equal' is felt and enjoyed by citizens of an increasingly unequal polity.... No matter how robust the fortification, mass murderers will find the gaps, reducing the entire public realm to an ungovernable Hobbesian hellscape of perpetual violence. Individual buildings will no longer be stitched together in an urban unity but isolated in a sea of mayhem. This is how ancient empires collapsed — with myriad small-scale efforts to fortify and defend public spaces that were no longer governable by larger entities.... Good buildings, especially schools, libraries, houses of worship and places of entertainment, used to greet us with a promise.... Now, they will greet us just as we greet our fellow citizens, with wariness and suspicion."
Writes architecture critic Philip Kennicott, in "When we reimagine American public space as a fortress, we lose/‘Hardening’ the built environment won’t defeat mass murderers anyway" (WaPo).
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We care becoming a low trust society as a result of media sources like the WaPoo. My wife and I were talking about this yesterday. We have both seen the high walls around homes in Mexico and Italy. Soon we will begin to see that here.
Fascinating. Maybe this sociocultural dynamic helps to explain the incredibly ugly Brutalist school of public architecture in the late 60’s and 70’s? The people who wrote the checks for that crap were feeling besieged —philosophically and politically and sometimes even literally— by Angry Young Social Justice types?
Now I am almost motivated to study the residential fortresses of the Pitti, Medici and other leading families of the Italian city-states, in the context of their sociocultural history, and compare it to the horrible architectural crimes committed in our cities some 50 years ago.
Yes when you can no longer tolerate your fellow citizens having free speech, even in public places, you create societal breakdown. The Bill of Rights was our common ground. Now to publicly uphold them gets one branded “domestic terrorist” by AG Garland and canceled by “private” social (disease) media companies.
London's Speakers Corner just one of those open spaces.
Until the Muslims discover it.
I have seen the “hardening” of the school buildings in my city over the last 15 years. It’s getting to the point that besides being a fortress, it is becoming more like a prison. They still have school resource officers stationed at the high school and middle schools despite the left’s calls to remove them as black students allegedly are afraid of them. It is ironic that the left is demanding the “hardening” of the school buildings while schools in large cities have simultaneously removed cops from the schools (and in some cases, metal detectors have been removed as students of color feel that they are the ones being targeted. Huh? If they don’t bring weapons in, they aren’t being targeted). And a result of these two actions, it has made it more like a prison than a school where the students who are there to learn and who follow the rules on behavior are the ones being assaulted by those whose behavior is out of control. This has been the case in the Madison, WI, schools this past year. Hardening of the schools doesn’t work on the out of control students who really want to be disruptive.
Maybe teaching morality in our school versus grooming them might help.
Walls have always been needed either to keep violent predators in, or to keep them out.
Democracy Dies in Darkness!
"The greatest loss [in 'hardening' the infrastructure] is to the ideal of public space as a meeting place free of authoritarian intrusion or oversight, a locus for the free flow of ideas and a leveling ground where some distant memory of 'all men are created equal' is felt and enjoyed by citizens of an increasingly unequal polity
Now do "social media" banning "misinformation" and "disinformation"
News flash: schools aren't "public places". They are by definition "authoritarian places with controlled traffic".
That's why hardening them to protect them from shooters makes sense
For normal society? No way
That's why wide distribution of carry permits, and law abiding armed adults, makes sense
in some cases, metal detectors have been removed as students of color feel that they are the ones being targeted. Huh? If they don’t bring weapons in, they aren’t being targeted//
BUT! They DO, so They ARE.. Which is Why They FEEL that they are.
---where some distant memory of 'all men are created equal' is felt and enjoyed by citizens of an increasingly unequal polity
Not biting on the dopey bait about "distant memory," just stating the fact that "increasingly unequal polity" is a false claim. It's boilerplate verbiage from the handbook of standard journalism cliches.
At least, if his reference is to unequal wealth, which is the conventional wisdom. The fact is, though, that as financial assets lose value, we are becoming an increasingly equal society.
Isn't it fun?
Michael K said...
We care becoming a low trust society as a result of media sources like the WaPoo. My wife and I were talking about this yesterday. We have both seen the high walls around homes in Mexico and Italy. Soon we will begin to see that here.
No.
I think the next election will be unstoppable. It isn't just Democrats that are getting defeated, but also the Republicans that are just Regime toadies.
Slowly but surely we are running the shit bags out.
The polity is winning this one and over the next 3 years the Barbarians and their Regime masters are going to start getting driven back.
You are going to see a very strong push towards strong policing and public safety over the next few years especially in places that have been hit hardest by the Soros push to destabilize our cities.
As to schools, "hardening the target" shouldn't mean the buildings so much, but the real target, the people inside them. This can't mean the kids; they are too young to be "hardened." It has to mean volunteers from the teachers and staff, on behalf of the kids and themselves.
Police have proved time and again that they are not up to the job. They take too long to get there (minutes away when seconds count), and once there they seem less than eager to engage the shooter.
The teachers and staff are already there, inside the building, and familiar with the layout. If at least some of them were trained and armed, at least half the battle's already won. Shooters like gun-free zones, so don't be a gun-free zone. Be a good-guys-with-guns zone, and shooters will stay away in droves.
And if some shooter is still crazy enough to attack a school known to have armed teachers and staff, the engagement is certain to be faster and and likely to be fiercer and more effective than the police might provide.
"Shoot up my school and my students . . . not today, you bastard!"
Society is shaped by the pressures society places on the individuals through social constructs like laws.
1. The Regime is trying to eliminate the ability of the individual to protect themselves.
2. The Regime is trying to implement selective enforcement of laws.
3. The Regime is trying to censor all information and thought that opposes it.
It is obvious what kind of society this would form. We have seen it repeated throughout history. This is the standard societal construct of rulers and ruled. It is the normal mode of history.
The United States was formed to have citizens that could bear arms and protect themselves.
We were meant be free to say and do what we want within the laws we develop.
And we were meant to have these laws evenly applied to every single person including a Rapist President and his gun waving crack smoking child raping son.
How many black people are in prison right now for smoking crack that were convicted in court without video evidence of their crimes?
The Regime cannot support itself and it's supporters cannot defend what they are doing honestly.
It is going to fall. We are in the slowly phase.
Soon it is going to be in the Fast phase.
For 200 Alex; What would you say if you wanted mass gun confiscation, when asked what your profession could do to help?
Very privileged and historically myopic take. Part of the woke impulse, in its productive and important sense, comes out of the precise problem that most of those institutions/buildings were not considered safe for many people. Indeed, the founding of our many denominations comes out of non-safe places of worship leading to new congregations forming, from Martin Luther to Puritans to Richard Allen and onward. Religious persecution has happened all through history and the pax publica is almost always an illusion except for the most privileged (and even that bubble gets popped on occasion).
Public spaces are safe for those who control the public space but those not in control have often both made them unsafe and experienced them being unsafe. Lincoln was killed in a theater, after all, and Kennedy while riding in a convertible on a city street.
The massive reaction against Covid was in very large part because it wasn't limited to outsiders or others but got into the lives of those who thought they were protected and safe because of their privilege.
You are going to see a very strong push towards strong policing and public safety over the next few years especially in places that have been hit hardest by the Soros push to destabilize our cities.
I hope you are right but I am not optimistic. We are heading into an era of economic chaos. The Democrats seem determined to destroy our civilization in hopes of building some Utopia. Of course, they have never built anything and live in a fantasy world but much of the damage has been done already.
The risk of a kid being killed in school is essentially zero — just as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. The risk of increasing stress and anxiety for some kids via active shooter drills and “hardening”:schools is about 100%.
But at least CYA administrators will feel that they “did something”.
It’s For The Children, don’t you know.
Fortifying the infrastructure I always took to mean protecting electric transmission and distribution, same for natural gas and telecommunications and so on. I never considered elementary schools infrastructure.
You ought to have contests.
See who can make the best poem out of
"The idea of public space
As a meeting place"
It has always been understood that fortifications are useless without a garrison to defend them, and to sally forth and rout the invaders at the propitious time. Soros has found a way to neutralize our garrisons, and no amount of additional fortification will replace them. I suspect Soros understands that there may be a limit to how long people will retain sympathy on spurious racial grounds for criminal vermin who are destroying the city they live in. But the plan seems to be to drive all the honest cops out of the police forces before the voters can get rid of the criminal DAs. Once the police have become the STASI, the Left will be all for enforcing the laws. Against people who try to defend themselves against the gang-bangers and the Antifa terrorists.
If you want to talk about a national security risk, how about putting all or most of your eggs in one basket, like all the government agencies and employees in Washington DC? On that reason alone, they should be distributed across the country. There are certainly communities that could use the influx of generous government paychecks.
We all need to maximize safety by militarizment of all public life. It's the least we can do for freedom.
"Now, they will greet us just as we greet our fellow citizens, with wariness and suspicion."
Is he talking about architecture or social distancing and mask mandates? Is the whole piece a giant metaphor? "No matter how robust the fortification, mass murderers [virus particles] will find the gaps."
If they don’t bring weapons in, they aren’t being targeted
I remember this story in Dallas of a high school kid being suspended because a resource officer found a club in laying visible in student's car. The "club" was a miniature baseball bat that the student member of the baseball team had received as a type of trophy and left in the cabin of the car. Had they checked the trunk, the student also had baseball bats, because he was a member of the school baseball team. Alas, the "club" was considered a weapon (but not the bats in the trunk) and the student was punished.
Blogger Howard said...
We all need to maximize safety by militarizment of all public life. It's the least we can do for freedom.
Nancy and the FBI are taking care of that. Fences around the Capitol, arresting the GOP candidate in Michigan, hundreds still rotting in Garland's gulags.
In protecting endangered species, there was an ongoing problem described by the acronym "SSS." It stands for "Shoot, Shovel, and Shut Up." It describes what ranchers did when they shot, say, a protected wolf that was eating lambs on their ranch instead of deer in the park next door. Very hard to stop such culling if the main incentive against shooting a rogue wolf is punishment when/if caught, and being caught isn't likely.
So now the Park Service sometimes will pay for domestic animals killed by a protected wild animal, thus gaining rancher support - perhaps grudging support - for the wild animals' continued existence.
What does this have to do with safety in public places? Well, the government and police used to encourage the public to help protect society and their neighborhoods and work places against the criminally inclined, and reward those who did so. Now one stops a shoplifter or mugger at significant risk of job loss, civil litigation, and criminal prosecution. This is the use of punishment against those victimized by crime, to prevent them taking action against criminals. This is the reverse of the way the Park Service solved the problem of SSS. And this will lead to SSS.
So expect to see more SSS in future, from the public, towards malefactors. This behavior is being created by incentivizing it.
"The Democrats seem determined to destroy our civilization in hopes of building some Utopia."
I'm not sure that's accurate. It seems to me that the members of the Democrat coalition who are more or less sincere -- possibly the majority -- do not have any very clear vision of where they are going. Rather, they seem to believe that if you remove every aspect of our society with which they find fault, what remains will necessarily be a perfect society.
"Good buildings, especially schools, libraries, houses of worship and places of entertainment, used to greet us with a promise.... Now, they will greet us just as we greet our fellow citizens, with wariness and suspicion."
Now do the U.S. Capitol and the White House.
Meanwhile, we have people advocating strict censorship of the internet because they don't want a "party without rules."
That kind of control, and the stricter gun control that's advocated, indicate the way things are going.
This battle was lost after 9/11 when the bollards went up everywhere (or maybe some time later after Americans learned what "bollards" were).
Of course, schools are going to be more locked down and fortified now than they were 50 years ago when recent grads could pop in to see how things were.
The ship has sailed.
They need to determine how people with no morality or fear of death come into being. Something didn't get instilled in them from the get-go.
A good offense is the best defense.
"“We have to harden our stores and provide safety for our people,” the Times quoted Schultz as saying at the conference. “I don’t know if we can keep our bathrooms open.”
Starbucks.
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