I've been thinking more about the poo-print condo and why I find the prospect of living there so horrifying. It's not so much that people are expected to pick up their dogs' droppings. If you have dogs in a place so crowded that dog poop gets in the way as much as it would on your kitchen floor, without even having a chance to decompose properly and disappear, then of course people have to clean up after them. It's just that these crowded people are so fundamentally unconcerned with each other that they don't naturally clean up after their dogs; instead they have to be forced to take responsibility by means of a DNA test. It's the worst of both worlds: neither intimacy nor autonomy; neither camaraderie nor privacy.
The challenge of civilization is to make bearable the choice of people to live in large numbers together while interacting closely in complex ways. When it goes wrong, it really goes wrong. In Heaven, I imagine, all men can "live in each other's trousers," as the Prince of Wales suggested to Camilla Parker-Bowles, in perfect joy. Otherwise, as Sartre said, "Hell is other people."
It hasn't worked out so idyllically, by the way, for Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall now that they're free to merge as much as they'd like. People choose to triangulate their marriages for a reason: the mistress keeps the wife at a distance, and vice versa. If you marry the mistress, it's not quite the same.
What those people in the poo-filled condo need is either a divorce or a better marriage.
5 comments:
I was reflecting on the question of cities as I was passing through Atlanta today. I think there must surely be a correlation between the left-liberal's concentration in cities, and their desire to strip people of the freedom to make bad choices. A few minutes in Atlanta traffic and I was beginning to feel the urge to strip multifarious people of the right ever to drive again.
Privilege. Privilege. Rights don't get licensed.
And so it becomes entirely legitimate to strip some people of their privilege.
Eric Hines
Funny you should say that, because I've got a license to keep and bear arms, too.
That must be a thing between you and Georgia. I keep and bear arms in Texas, and I have no such license. Nor am I expected to have one.
Texas does license concealed carry, but that's a certification that I know what I'm doing, not a permission to do so.
Eric Hines
Georgia doesn't distinguish between open and concealed carry -- that is, between different forms of "bearing" arms. In fact, it makes little distinction between different kinds of arms: knives are treated the same way as handguns.
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