nihil architecture blogs

There’s been a lot of confusion and fighting over this so called ‘Mosque’ that’s being built at Ground Zero. Opponents noting the insensitivity, proponents saying this is religious freedom and one of the principles that Nation Under God was built on. Then there’s still the debate of Okay, it should be legal, religious freedom says it is, but is it wise?.

Well, wise, maybe not, probably not, but only because of the stupidity of man. Why is this ‘insensitive’? Is it ‘insensitive’, if a crime is done by Christian people to place a church close to that site? Many of the most infamous US criminals were Christians of course. Don’t ask me how they combine this, and don’t ask me how people combine Islam with suicide bombings either; people find their ways. There seems to be a sliding scale of acceptability of bigotry here. If your girlfriend was a bitch, to hate all women thenceforth is unacceptable and bigoted. If your boyfriend was one, to hate all men, well, that’s more acceptable. If you’re robbed by a black man, to then say all black people are scum goes too far and is præjudiced. But to think the same after being robbed by some obscure ethnicity such as Slovenes, that’s more acceptable again. To don’t trust punkers after a group of them beat you up, that’s just a nice argument to demonstrate why supposedly they [all] are scum.

So what is this ‘considering the sensitivity of the issue’ really but compromising for the bigots that can’t see the difference between different people who just happen to all profess being ‘Islamic’; that’s really all it is. Islam, unlike various schools of Christianity is not monolithical in nature, there is no One Supreme Authority such as a pope, there are no churches and people above churches, no bishops and so on. There are people who say they are Muslim, and they of course each all mean a totally different thing with it. For some, being Muslim is little more than faith into The One God and his righteousness and almightiness, and to others, this involves covering women in elaborate cloths. So basically, wise as it may be to be ’sensitive’ to avoid further polarization, it’s still basically giving people what they want for their bigotry and ignorance.

And ignorance is quite the word to describe what most people know of this place, on the right we have a picture of how it’s going to look. Looks kind of like modern architecture nay? And it’s more like a plaza than a Mosque really. These are some of its features accordingly New York Daily News:

• An auditorium
• A theatre
• A swimming pool
• A child-care area
• A basketball court
• A performing arts centre
• A book-store
• A fitness centre
• A restaurant, serving kosher dishes
• … last but not least, an Islamic praying centre

Obviously this thing has more in common with a plaza than a Mosque, indeed it’s modeled after 92nd Y. It’s just a plaza with a place people can also pray, how insensitive.

To put matters worse, the thing is not planned at Ground Zero at all, rather so near, three blocks to be præcise… do we really have to pay that much for bigots that people who are part of some religion cannot built a modern art centre three blocks away from some sight that other people who are part of the same religion did some crime?

And I think the simple answer is yes, it’s stupid, but we have no other option. It will polarize people even more and lead to more deaths if they do not give. Just because people are so damned stupid and do so damned little research. Stupid people—alas—are surprisingly powerful when in large groups, and alas surprisingly numerous. Thank you Sarah.

Kay, let’s say a random person murders a kitten or mistreats a child or beats up what-ever, naturally we—or most people—would beat that person up if we had the chance, or at least severely punch him in the face to make sure he does not carry out his intentions or threat to empty a can of liquid on the poor cat and drop an object warmer than said liquid’s ignition temperature on the cute critter.

Now, some would call this altruïsm or a desire to protect the cat or what-ever victim at stake here, can’t say I’m absolutely sure of that. I don’t mean the clichéd story of feeling better for yourself. I mean another facet to it, because people are simply too selfish to care that much about cats or even children or even their best friends.hat’s in any such of this cases always strangely præsent is that the people that are out to protect these people put a lot more focus on the aggressor than they do on the victim.

In fact—people seem to completely stop caring if there’s only a victim, but not a tangible aggressor, and seem to care a lot if there’s an aggressor, but not tangible victim, the so called ‘victimless crimes’ that exist in various jurisdictions that some (a few) people find stupid and should be repelled.

In the case that a certain person has some suffering going on but there’s no tangible aggressor, as in, it happened by pure accident or it was even due to downright bad luck, people tend to have a lot less of an emotional response. For instance, take these two examples.

• A woman by sheer accident without any one really being at fault has nude pictures of herself thrown on the internet.
• That very same woman is photographed in the shower and uploaded to the internet.

Now, in both cases the victim is humiliated, ashamed, a victim, but in the latter case, there is an aggressor, some-one whom we can blame for this thing. The latter always provokes fierce responses from most parties getting notice of it, often a desire for retribution, the first will merely provoke either a small dose of sympathy, fake sympathy, or simply laughing at that woman.

When I was quite young, seven years old I think, I saw a couple of people capturing frogs and bullying them. So knight in the shining armour that I was, I raced to there, liberated the frogs, and got beat up for that by the guys. A mate that was there with me wanted to follow them to beat them up, I was more like ‘You might call an ambulance first?’, he didn’t even think of that, he didn’t care for my suffering, he cared for making the person that caused it pay, not to help me who was lying pretty battered there.

However, looking back in retrospect, I also have to conclude another thing of myself: I would not have stopped to rescue those frogs if they got trapped on their own, and as hell not risked several injuries for that. Only the fact that there were some aggressors into play galvanized my desire to free those frogs, I wasn’t trying to help the frogs, I was trying to at some way compromise the action of the aggressors if I look deep down inside, and I think that almost all people would do the same.

Same with animal rights activist group, all their actions have one thing in common, the suffering is always due to human influence, due to some-one they can place blame on. They (read: we, I pay for that too and chain myself to fences) are not out to help animals they are out to compromise the efforts of people that are trying to hurt them, a completely different thing. Yet we (they) tell ourselves that we want to help animals, in reality we just want to make people pay we don’t like, don’t like for for instance doing cruel shit to animals. It’s also the same in every trial, in every news report about it, the news isn’t  about that some person has greatly suffered, the news is about that some person has caused great suffer to another.

Almost never is there a report about suffer in the news if it’s not done by some crime or some goof-up of some-one. The only exception I can think of to this rule are reports about mass natural disasters, and it makes you think why we all still remember 9/11, but have forgotten about natural disasters that caused so much more destruction hmm? There’s never news about some old grandmother sitting at home feeling like shit, but if she got into that position by some human error like the wrong drug præscribed oh as hell it would have come into the papers. We don’t care about suffering, we care about the people that cause it.

Then of course comes the even more interesting situation of an aggressor, but no victim. How can there be an aggressor but no victim? Let’s say you have this stereotypical really sweet girl that likes to help people, she cleans up for her boyfriend, makes him sandwiches, the whole she-bang, well, she doesn’t mind to that, it probably gives her a nice feeling, maybe she likes to cook, who knows? But still a lot of people will target their criticism at the boyfriend for ‘taking advantage of her’, regardless of her not minding. I’m not saying that he should take advantage of her, or that people shouldn’t target complaints, I’m just saying that they don’t target it to help the girl, the so-called victim, but to punish the guy, the so-called aggressor. It’s not about some-one getting hurt, it’s about some-one doing a thing people don’t like. They will most likely try to make the girl realize that she shouldn’t do that and should mind, now assuming they succeed in doing that, from an utilitarian perspective they’ve greatly failed then; the girl has lost one fun activity to do, and the guy get’s less sandwiches, no one-wins, every-body loses.