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It is quite possible that a weak economy is not a result of people doing the ‘wrong’ things. Unfortunately, sometimes savvy consumers are the worst thing for an economy---I believe this is a potential negative for the region. People who throw around the money are often not the smartest people in the room. That is a problem we have to face, this new-hippie, (perhaps, rightly) cynical, culture is not going to foster high spending, it is not going to encourage economic growth. No one wants to spend money in Portland except on alcohol, bikes and food. You can understand why though. And, it is not an inherently negative thing. But, I think it does present a stumbling block for growing a local economy that needs to be addressed (assuming you are concerned about a weak economy).

posted 2 years, 3 months ago
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Despite whatever anyone may say about the low level of education of the workforce in the region, I don’t believe it! The reason that companies want to employ people in Portland is because the workforce is more intelligent then in most places, this may not be through traditional forms of education---but the culture itself actually values education for its own sake, and there are few cities like this in the U.S. The culture of Portland values thinking (free and otherwise) and that is the prevailing strength of the city. The quality of life is secondary, and if the quality of life is stronger here then in other cities it is a direct result of this 'thinking/intelligence' factor.

posted 2 years, 3 months ago
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Wow. Does a chainsaw also kill dead 2x4s? Or, does it kill that ugly, enormous, purple sofa in the living room when you chop it apart? How terribly awkward to introduce the notion that a tree is living, and this, somehow, makes it similar to the fact that a gun is intended to kill. A baseball bat is, dare I say it, made to play baseball with---it wouldn’t exist if baseball didn’t. How can you make a similar claim about a gun? What other thing would you use a gun for? Paperweight? But, wait, that wouldn’t be responsible or safe.

Hey, how about this one, is a finger designed for the same reason as a tampon because you can use it to stop the flow from a dike? If you happen to use a tampon to stop your village from flooding, because your finger swells up and you are tired, it doesn’t mean that the tampon was invented first to plug dikes. A tampon exists for another purpose entirely, just like a knife can also kill people, but it is not made for that reason. A gun is made for the primary, and really the only reason, that it can kill people, guns that can’t do this are usually loaded with water and used by children at parties. And, water-guns are not really the same are they? So far, I can’t imagine another practical task around the house that you can accomplish with a handgun. Can you?

posted 2 years, 3 months ago
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A gun’s sole purpose is to kill people, that is its complete intent, its complete architecture. A kitchen knife is made to be used to cut things in a kitchen. A chainsaw is made to cut things down or apart. In what way do you envision that a gun meets the requirements of being that kind of tool? Or of being commensurate with a kitchen knife? What other viable function do you suggest a gun has? Perhaps, you will next be suggesting, that an atomic bomb is the new garden spade! And, really where do you draw the line with these false comparisons?

posted 2 years, 3 months ago
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It is hard to put your finger on any kind of trigger as to why people own guns. These machines of certainty are one of kind, there are no other comparable devices to make inferences from. Guns kill, and that is the only thing they do, that is their entire purpose. Even if one uses them as a form of entertainment through target practice, that entertainment is ultimately a kind of training, a kind of preparation, and surely there are other, smarter, ways to entertain yourself.  People rarely own guns as a practical means to self-defense---not in this country, not in this time period, not in a place that is ultimately very safe, and would be much safer if Pandora was simply put back in her pathetic, paranoid box. Guns are controversial hot-buttons, because they are the epitome of brute, cowboy thinking, that is all so many are sadly capable of---that is the prevailing reason the majority of people own guns, all these other cockamamie ideas as to why people own guns are a ruse.

Guns are a style, they are an aesthetic of a people gone wrong, they are a mascot for a people so in love with themselves that their alleged childish ‘right’ to own a killing machine supersedes the safety of everyone else. There is really nothing pertinent to say to these people, there is no reasoning that can work on sagging minds so thoroughly infected with delusions of red, white and blue grandeur. Oh, the irony of it all, going to war to stop these mythical weapons of mass destruction, but in our own backyards the same monkeys promoting the war want the right to carry their metal bananas.

posted 2 years, 3 months ago
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Last night’s State of the Union was fairly intelligent and savvy. Savvy in that it was clever enough to attempt to disarm many potential objections before the fact, rather then after the controversial points were stated. President Obama seemed to do a go job of thinking like his opponents and anticipating how they might feel, while making a strong case for his own direction. He openly reasoned with us. Sometimes if you empathize with how someone might feel, even if you are in opposition, it helps to ease and deflate their objections by getting rid of some of the fighting spirit and anger.

posted 2 years, 3 months ago
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Ecological frugality, oddly reminds me of the perils of places like Wal-mart and Costco, yes, they save money, but what fun are they? Even despite their manufacturing and employment concerns, who wants life reduced to these austere levels? If I could buy the whole world at Costo, then what would be left of the world? If I did everything possible to save earth, would I even want to live on it anymore. The similarity between Wal-mart and Greenpeace is that their penultimate goals are rooted in efficiencies. Wal-mart wants to spend less money, so they can make more of it, and Greenpeace wants to reduce consumption, so the earth has more left of it for future people to consume.

posted 2 years, 3 months ago
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skeptictank,

Yes, that is exactly the sort of thing, the sort of problem I am talking about---the irony of it all. What is it all for? What are the savings for? What are we saving the environment for? So we can live these contrived evangelically restricted lives where we paint a picture of the outside world as bad and us as good. What if we fix everything? What then?

What exactly do people attempt to achieve with their creativity? Who are they going to market this to? I won’t accept for a second that they don’t intend to market it. I assure you that almost all of the creative people here would like to get popular, they would not mind economic success. Perhaps, somewhat unfortunately, the modern world thrives on people spending money. Not everyone is that enamoured with the superficial idea, that growing your own veggies is a superior way, this primitive philosophy is actually pretty boring and half-baked to many people, and its efficacy is in dispute. And, anyway, we have to think beyond environmentalism, it is an unsophisticated dead-end. I am not against environmentalism, but it is a negative, critical ideology, that is inherently and obviously not about the new, it is entirely consumed with criticizing the past. It is like only ever reading literary criticism. It might be prudent to actually read the literature, or even go further and write it.

Environmentalism has a lot in common with religion, because it is consumed with what is wrong with the world, and the ‘god’ in this case is how we can make it right. Of course, you may say, well, but it is rooted in science and fact, whereas religion is not---maybe, but the ultimate question, the question behind it all, ‘whether the planet is worth saving?’ cannot be answered with science, and resolutely requires faith. People forget this question or they don’t even think about it, they just forge ahead with their zealotry. Perhaps, this is why environmentalism has often seemed at odds with religion, not just because of science, but because it is a conflicting sort of faith. For the traditionally religious, if god thinks the planets needs saving, he can do that himself.

It is an artificial battle, that gives people a direction and a force to oppose. And if conservatives and liberals are the same at all, it is in this area, they both achieve success and power by creating an enemy---and, this similarity is also the problem, the ideologies are so fueled with commentary on the opposition, they are so heavily weighted to what we are against, rather then what we are for.

posted 2 years, 3 months ago
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The reason there are few jobs here, is because many of the good things, the things we love about Portland and Oregon, may be somewhat self-defeating and unsustainable. One of the biggest economic problems, is the cynicism of consumers, oddly people don’t mind paying high prices for food here and they seem to drink the booze a lot, but few people are shoppers. For some reason expensive food and restaurants are perfectly acceptable but forget about expensive clothing or anything else. While I admire the desire to get away from commercialism, I think the application is largely lopsided and misguided. It can also end up with detrimental results. You need money coming in to support what is here. You can’t sustain a city with consumers who don’t want to spend money. It is wonderful that people feel freedom to be slackers but who is going to pay for that? How can you keep that going? Somebody has to make the money, somebody has to bring the money in to the local economy. We can’t all be cynical insiders, someone actually has to do the living and the buying to keep things afloat. It is almost ironic that there are so many designers here, because the culture will never support actually buying things from them. It is as if we all have hopes and dreams to be stars, but we expect the rest of the less-informed country to support and pay for them, to be our consumers. There is such a limited local money-spending base.

posted 2 years, 3 months ago
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It might be fair to say that Portland’s acclaim is essentially, ideological in nature, that people move to Portland because they identify with the way of life lived here, and it is the way they feel life ought to be lived. Of course many may like the landscape, but that surely is not the only, or main, draw. Whereas people probably move to places like Florida and southern California because they like the warm weather. This Portland ideology is liberal in its roots, but its flowers seem to appeal to certain people across the spectrum. Portland is and has been for some time a tolerant place, and one of the biggest problems for the future is will Portland become less tolerant as the population changes?

It is true that people don’t own the place, or any place----we didn’t conquer the moon by simply landing there. But it is fair to feel that a place is being changed and wonder whether the good parts, or the parts that are good to you, are being modified or ruined through those changes. For instance, if I moved here because of ideology and I feel it is being eroded, then why not be concerned? Really our problems and concerns are current and mirror those in much of the rest of the world: are we tolerating the intolerant?

posted 2 years, 3 months ago
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Maybe you are right, I can’t accurately say ‘she gets off on it.’ Not the violence that is, but she certainly gets off on the relationship because she stays with it. We don’t need to, paint this black and white picture about the relationship, the righteous person and the evil person (which I am also too often inclined to do). It is fair to say that in few circumstances do mentally ‘healthy’ people hook up and get ‘primed’ by a one-sided abuser. Yes, all parties are to blame, if anyone is to blame! And, how exactly did the man become violent in the first place, at some point he may also have been a victim, and something probably contributed to his developing violent tendencies.

I definitely question the relationship from the start, what sort of person gets involved with someone who is violent to begin with, how strong and intimate could this relationship be? I don’t believe for a second that these events are generally random (of course there are exceptions), and that holistically intelligent, mentally healthy women enter into relationships with madmen. I am not saying this takes away responsibility from the inflicter, or justifies any of the behaviour, but we definitely need to stop this coddling of people we see as victims, these lopsided irrational approaches to treatment don’t help them. Overly sympathetic therapies do not work. Therapies that try to boost the person up, by making all kinds of claims that the plane just happened to fall from the sky on the poor unsuspecting victim. If everything around me is black, then, well, I automatically appear as a shining star---but this is a farce, these approaches may get the person through a bad patch, but they are artificial and detrimental solutions that end up inflicting their own kind of damage.

Of course no one deserves to be abused, and no one deserves to allow themselves to be abused, and no one deserves to turn into an abuser. Surely being an abuser is not a healthy way of life, the abuser doesn’t deserves this path either.

I haven’t given-up, I just don’t actively care anymore, I see the relationship for what it is, two people tangoing. No one is being held against their will, she could have gotten out a million times, and for that matter so could he. Yes, I personally think she should want more from life, she should want a better relationship, but that is what I want for her, not what she wants. Perhaps you could claim she should be taught to want other things, maybe so, but I can’t provide that kind of education---and who really can? I don’t think you could ever claim ‘she wants out but doesn’t know how!,’ no, really, the problem would be more like: she doesn’t know how, to want out, bad, or strongly, enough---her desire to stay must overpower her desire to leave, otherwise she would have been gone long ago.

posted 2 years, 3 months ago
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Sometimes you just have realize you can’t do anything, and perhaps, shouldn't even bother trying. A relative has been in one abusive relationship after another, and now keeps returning to the same abusive guy over and over again. I kept trying to be encouraging, and do all those things that one does to get her away from him, but to what end? I really thought I was the person that could change things, that I had the knowledge to do so---no go! I began to realize she gets off on this as much as he does, they are both sick, and it is sad, but it is the way it is. Bad things don’t discriminate, they happen to us all, the 'good' and the 'bad' people, equally.

There are few of us that are only victims, unless we encounter a random act of violence, or are in some extraordinary circumstances. I began to realize this relationship is what my relative wants, or needs, perhaps this is an addiction of sorts, and perhaps his violence is an addiction of its own. Two addicts in some haphazard bliss. It is fair to say she is ‘more’ of a victim then he is because she is generally the recipient---that is, until the call comes that the police are at her apartment because she beat him up when she found texts on his phone from another woman. There are very few people in the world eating meals they didn’t order. It doesn’t mean we shouldn't be sympathetic and empathetic, but we also shouldn’t rush in with the overzealous commiserating and pity. Who are we to pity anyway? Just, how well are we doing?

What ultimately seems to be the saddest part about domestic violence is not the actual abuse, but rather the desperation that allows one to receive it, that there is such a strong need to feel some-kind of love that we are willing to accept it in order to hold onto the relationship. I don’t think people ask or are to blame for being the recipient of violence, but I do question their judgment and really their overall taste if they get into a relationship with the person in the first place. What kind of relationship could you possibly have if you go into it with no idea that the person you have chosen is violent? In the end, all the people involved need help.

posted 2 years, 3 months ago
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Portland is often its own worst enemy, there is no middle ground, unfortunately almost every development that actually happens ends up being done by the people who are persistent. And persistent people don’t always have the best taste. Everyone is in opposition to everything in Portland---everyone is a critic (me too). In order to get by the forces of evangelical environmentalism or evangelical anti-commercialism you have to be average and half-baked so you don’t ruffle any feathers. What we are left with is the wrong people, doing the right things, wrongly. They are the only people that have the patience and the political savvy. We have democratized aesthetics, and aesthetics don’t work well that way, unless you want average results. It is interesting how a city that is presented as being a creative place, often ends up stifling creativity by the lopsided ideologies of its residents. It is kind of like this idea generally proposed by liberals, that they don’t want to have kids, so what you end up with is all the wrong people giving birth---it’s self-defeating. Someone needs to build things, someone needs to develop things, and someone is going to anyway, so why not encourage development that does happen, to be edgy, not just in ideology, but in its aesthetics.

posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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It has always been a disappointment that Portland seems to not use the river at all, the only thing that seems to define it are its bridges. Without the bridges many of us would not even realize the river exists. Most of the riverbank seems to be cut off from the rest of the city by roads, so it makes it difficult to get to. When I heard they were developing the south waterfront I was thrilled, but it was a short-lived excitement.

The development is aesthetically hideous! It is an appallingly generic, unsophisticated, styless place. The whole development looked dated from the beginning. What a total waste! And bad aesthetic decisions like these ruin it for future development. Did any of these, architects, planners and designers ever go to Vancouver (Canada of course) to see what a modern skyline could look like. None of the buildings at the south waterfront are stepped-back at all, so from many angles it looks like an ugly mass, because you can’t see between the buildings. But, that is only one of the problems, the buildings are poorly designed to begin with, their overall aesthetics are at best mediocre. How could this monotonous blob have happened in this city? And what is that awful particle board color that appears on so many of the buildings. It would be hard to imagine that this development could have been more badly done.

posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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How do we know these devices and technologies are superior? If everyone had a gadget would they no longer be effective? Isn’t novelty part of the success? Do kids feel as though they are using and learning in a special way, so it increases their interest? What will happen once these gadgets become the standard, or the norm, won’t students have about as much interest in them as they do in textbooks? Or is their something inherent about these devices, that makes them a superior learning tool?

posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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P.S. I guess at least there is something to make fun of in Portland---perhaps, that in itself is an achievement. No matter how annoying, cliched, and stifling, I find so much of the culture of Portland, there are few other places in the country I would want to live.

posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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From what I know of Portlandia, which isn’t much, it seems as though the same tools the clips make fun of, are the same tools the show is meant to appeal to. The aesthetic of the show seems to have the same hipster kitsch, quirkiness, ‘cleverness’, that it attempts to make fun of. A bunch of people cooing, and slouching around, at how oddly, asymmetrically, self-consciously, funny they are. This show seems to be, yet, another attempt at more commentary on what people are doing, or were doing, rather then something new---much like my comment here.

posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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Yes, I suppose many of us would argue it should be illegal to view the images of an adult rape. But, you mention that it is because rape is a crime, but that is not really the reason, or not the only reason. Because I don’t think many people would consider viewing the images of car theft as illegal, or even the images of murder. I think perhaps, we feel that pornography itself is part of the sexual act, or an extension of it. So it is not just that we are viewing images of a crime taking place, but that the pleasure that might be derived from viewing images of that crime, is perhaps a crime in itself. We must feel that the child or adult is being violated again because someone is getting sexual pleasure from looking at them in the images. But, I am not sure how accurate that is, it is very complex, and perhaps our (correct) repulsion clouds our views surrounding the issue.

posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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Is it illegal to view the images of an adult rape? What about a child looking at child pornography? What do we mean by child, anyway? Is this any minor or someone who is actually a child? What if you were the victim of abuse as a child and you yourself publish the images as an adult? Of course this is a bit ridiculous, but it is possible. I think images themselves are never a crime, it is the actual event that is the crime, that needs to be prosecuted and that needs to be stopped.

posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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How ever much we may not like it, the mere viewing of any image, whatsoever, should never be a crime in a free society.

posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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