[American Dirt]

Originally Posted by fflint

I don't find that claim convincing at all.

Thanks for your response. My recollection is that the majority of my sentences began in the first person, so I was making no attempt to position my opinion as anything other than that. My experience after having lived in Cambridge is that it effectively shrouds its homogeneity of thought under layers of racial and cultural diversity. But I wasn't fooled.

Originally Posted by fflint

Ah, now I see why you're "convinced" and I'm not--you believe you've just given an accurate description of Cambridge. Did it ever occur to you that MIT and Harvard are actually part of the 'establishment,' and those glitzy riverfront office towers are not full of impoverished revolutionaries after all?

Right on. Which makes the anti-establishment ethos that much more disingenuous. Sure, many of the staff at HarMIT might shop at the food co-ops, but far too many still consider themselves immune from the corrupting forces of large corporations or bureaucratic institutions, when the fact is they are hiding behind two of the largest employers in the state of Massachusetts. Cambridge is also filled with places that attract the bourgeois bohemians--corporate chains like Trader Joe's or Global Gifts or the quintessential Whole Foods. It's like a giant manifestation of that book/website "Stuff White People Like".

Originally Posted by fflint

Is wild conjecture about supposed community agreement on someone obscure like Joel Kotkin a primary measure, right here and now, of a real-world community's true homogeneity? So much opinion, so little fact to base it on.

Empirical observations are often more powerful than fact. Anyone can pull various facts and assemble them into a context to create an argument; nonetheless, among the fundamentals of an argument is that it depends on a careful selection of the right facts, while excluding those that harm it. Kotkin is polarizing, no doubt--my suspicion remains that most people in Cambridge would not like his ideas, largely because he doesn't hold a great future for cities like Cambridge.

I've presented my opinion and we have agreed to disagree. Out of curiosity, do you have any places in mind where the reaction to a provocateur like Kotkin would yield widely disparate results, with a greater balance of "pro" and "con"?