Read it.
Feel free to read the article if you wish — I’m sure it’s very interesting and informative — but that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I’m about to get META on your ass; hang on tight.
The Independent isn’, really. Like most ‘media’ enterprises these days, it’s fashionably Lefty, although not as bad as The Guardian, which serves as the official Voice of the Labour Party the way that the New York Times and The Washington Post tag-team for the Party of Hate. (A term that I got from Scott Adams that I really like.)
The headline is the first giveaway — something like a ‘supermud brick’ would be pretty cool, but it wouldn’t be important enough to write about in so hip/cool/cutting-edge a publication as The Independent. It has to Solve a Problem in the Modern Capitalist World, preferably one that chiefly affects the UnderServed (women and minorities hardest hit, etc. etc.). Did you know that there was a ‘world housing crisis’? I didn’t. And I still don’t; Lefty journalists don’t even get out of bed for something that’s not a Crisis, preferably a World Crisis, and if they don’t see one they cobble one together, because that’s what they live for. (And what their paychecks depend on, although coals of fire wouldn’t get them to admit it.)
‘Cut carbon emissions’? A twofer! Now, just why cutting ‘carbon emissions’ is such a good thing is never addressed; they are Leftists writing for other Leftists and can presume that their target demographic is au courant with the latest Crises, of which presumably ‘carbon emissions’ is one. (Betcha money it’s connected to Global Warming Climate Change; all of the Cool Crises are these days.)
I really like the subhed: ‘The world needs more affordable housing with lower environmental impact.’ Really? Why? Again, never addressed. You’re just supposed to know this stuff. Just what is ‘affordable housing’, anyway? ‘Affordable’ for whom? Donald Trump? Mustafa bin Laden in his home in the Sudan? We never find out. I seriously doubt that the writer of the piece could define it. Affordable Housing is just one of those political fetishes of the Left, like Reduced Inequality and Social Justice and Racial Balance and Diversity that are trotted out whenever the Chattering Class wants to get an Amen.
And why is ‘lower environmental impact’ such a concern? Housing, by its nature, has a high environmental impact, since you’re putting people where animals presumably could be living. The best ‘low environmental impact’ would be not to build housing at all, but move all the people away to where people are already living — someplace like, oh, Detroit, where there is plenty of existing housing that is at present unoccupied. But no. That would actually solve the problem, and we can’t have that.
This is what makes the Left so tedious. The world is full of Crises, and a proglodyte is morally obligated to obsess about every goddamned one of them every goddamned minute of every goddamned day. The entire country is turning into an open-air sanatarium full of people with Political Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.That’s bad enough; but they are deeply determined that you will at least pretend to be POCD as well — and that I find irritating in the extreme.
Ah, well. I’ll have supermud bricks from which to make a fortress for my Last Stand.