I have been reading enough about Halifax being such a “shithole.” When are we going to realize that we have the power to change this? I mean, OK, so we’re not Alberta or British Columbia or somewhere “important” but we also can do better than just wallowing in how we are such a have-not anyway. Halifax can be about its people: not its “besties” or “peeps” but real people. And we need to lose the attitude and the constantly sad music about coal-mining disasters and losing men at sea. The attitude isn’t helping and Halifax is only a shithole because we are too cynical to take any pride when it’s too tidy to just wallow in it and default to the notion that we’re not supposed to be so welcoming when we only care about our own selfish adequacy or survival in spite of everybody else. The problem is us, and we have to deal with it. Halifax could be heaven on earth if we chose for it to be. -Enough Have-Not Already
This article appears in May 8-14, 2014.
Speak for yourself, OB. I do not think Halifax is a shithole and many thousands of other will agree.
YOU think Halifax is a shithole as evidenced by the fact you wish to “change this”.
Indeed, Halifax is a heaven on earth. YOU need to choose for it to be…
Yeah, I know OP. Every time I come back to visit I’m just constantly being bombarded with sad coal-mining music and stories of men lost at sea. I literally feel like a peasant working nights at the docks, fighting off goitre and swamp foot with only a measly potato and a boiled egg to show for it in the morning.
I don’t think Halifax is a total shithole per se, but as far as building a life here for young people, it is kind of depressing: very little gainful employment, not a whole lot to do and housing prices (particularly if you want to buy) are ridiculously expensive.
I’m sure housing costs are expensive out west, in toronto/montreal, etc…, but at least salaries and career opportunities exist to be able to afford said housing. *shrug*
Also: there’s TONS more to do in a place like Toronto than Halifax. Say what you want about Toronto, whenever I’ve been there, I’ve never been bored. I’m bored to tears in Halifax. There’s only so much of the same shit one can do before it becomes yesterday’s sandwich.
S’all good, fracking’s gonna ruin those important places soon enough anyway!! … then…..then they’ll come crawling back.. muahahahaha! Damn i got carried away thinking of my own version of paradise, it’ll have robots and hookers and they won’t be invited!
The powers that be get to choose. The employers, the politicians, the corporate big wigs. The only issues I have with NS are the Taxes are too high and the employers pay shit. The cost of living is ridiculous, unless you got a pad on pinecrest where your neighbor is a cig vendor or a crackheed.
I’ve posted this previously, I’m a Brit and was on Barrington and spoke with two couples who were visiting on a cruise ship, they were Brits also, and they said how dirty downtown was, and I repeat, they were Brits.
All due respect to the late cultural anthropologist Roger Miller:
“Britanniastan swings like a pederast do.
Bobbies in burkas, two by two.
Westminster’s shabby; the ruins of Big Ben.
Five times a day we hear the muezzin”
Oh, I’ve wasted my life >: (
http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb2012110…
Wait until the OFSTED report comes out about the trojan horse scheme the anti baconators tried to do by hi jacking the schools and trying to install sharia. Next stop Canada.
Dinnae fash yersel, Baz. Once they get wind of of the number of tweets that Ellen, FLOTUS and SLOTUS (Michelle and Oprah) have sent out with #BokoHaramarepoopyheads the stealth jihad will be stopped in it’s tracks and they will all happily return to selling kebabs and inventing things like algebra.
http://www.barenakedislam.com/wp-content/u…
You’ve always got your disaffected who think any place they live is a shithole. That’s got way less to do with the place than it’s got to do with them.
As for the young folks who lament the fact that they can’t get rewarding jobs around here, a few things to keep in mind. One, many people don’t get rewarding jobs ever…anywhere. Two, larger concentrations of population generally have more opportunities – that’s just common sense; but it doesn’t mean that small or medium sized places are shitholes. Three, the world doesn’t owe you a living. Four, travel anywhere else and conduct a similar poll.
As for housing prices being expensive around here, that’s laughable. Compared to what? Digby?And don’t go thinking that salaries elsewhere are so much higher that they cover higher housing costs elsewhere: not true at all. You’ve got a better chance of affording a house here than in most urban areas in North America.
And Halifax is “boring”? If you think that you must seriously need your entertainment served up on a platter. That, or you’ve got some really esoteric tastes.
What’s to change, exactly? As places go we’ve seriously got it better than most.
It doesn’t matter what city in the world you live in, life is what you make of it.
I’ve always wanted the section of SGR between South Park and Barrington made to be completely vehicle free. They could easily divert the buses. Plant some trees down the middle, level the roadway to sidewalk level, get some restaurants and bars to move there and have patios, like several cities and towns in Europe have done. What could be nicer than sitting outside on a glorious summers day, or evening, drinking a beer or a glass of wine waiting to eat dinner.
The panhandlers could be moved on.
This is possible, but it requires action by City Hall, and as I’m old and the chances of it happening are almost nil, I’ll apply Groucho Marx’s line ‘In the mean time, I plan on dying’.
WHAT IS A SHITHOLE? A PROBLEM IN AESTHETICS
“The problem is us, and we have to deal with it. Halifax could be heaven on earth if we chose for it to be.” Enough Have – Not Already
What is the subtext here? What is really going on? Clearly, the issue is one of aesthetics, that category of philosophical reflection concerned with the nature of beauty or, in the present case, its absence. The definition of beauty – that possessing a “Combination of qualities, as shape, proportion, colour, in human face or form, or in other objects that delights the eye” (The Concise Oxford Dictionary) – is uncontentious enough. However, the difficulty arises when we attempt to give substance to these attributes. In other words, is a shithole, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder or are there objective criteria such that a shithole is a shithole no matter who is doing the looking?
“Enough Have – Not Already” (whatever that might mean) appears to take the subjective view, that Halifax could be heaven on earth if we chose it to be. There is a undeniable attraction to the view. One only has to introspect the dimensions of one’s own aesthetic appreciation and, of course, the variations in such appreciation seem to be endless and not just in terms of individual objects but also in terms of categories of objects. Think of music, painting, sculpture and so on. There are those who, for whatever reason, reject complete categories of artistic achievement but, for present purposes, we will assume that cities, taken as such a category, embody to varying degrees, aesthetic qualities on the basis of which they might be distinguished. So the question devolves into this: What makes a city beautiful or, on the contrary, a shithole?
Whether a city is beautiful or not depends, in great part, on its meaningful historical heritage. It need not be of great age as in the case of Rome, for example, where age tends to overwhelm rather than to inspire reflections on beauty – although, of course, this is not always the case – but to be beautiful a city must have a significant historical dimension. But what does having a “significant historical dimension” mean?”
It means that all historical dimensions, so to speak, are not equal. To be significant a historical dimension must not be culturally opaque, meaningless to the viewer. What is it, for example, to be a citizen of Shanghai, Mumbai or Lagos? Who knows? For the viewer – and here we’re talking about the Canadian viewer of European extraction – Shanghai, Mumbai and Lagos are little more than piles of bricks and mortar. This does not mean that they are shitholes, just that they are aesthetically meaningless when contrasted with places like Florence, Paris or London.
In the same way architectural scale is a determining factor in the aesthetic appreciation of cities. Even though they are on the same continent as us many cities are ruled out as objects of aesthetic contemplation. Think of the the towering architecture of cities like New York, for example, which oppresses rather than inspires. They lack a human scale, reducing man to the scale of the ant. And then there is the further criterion of a city’s “ambience,” that elusive quality which gives some their distinctive appeal while consigning others to the status of shithole. Can one speak, for example, of the ambience of a place like Brasilia or Chicago? Hardly. They are just impersonal conurbations like “Frangeles” or “Chipitts”.
So there we are. We can see that whether or not a city is a shithole depends both on subjective criteria as with “Enough Have- Not Already” but – and this is important – objective categories as well in which such criteria have their natural homes. The subject-object dichotomy of aesthetic appreciation which has always dogged philosophical analysis of the concept of aesthetic appreciation has, as a consequence, been overcome.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
A pleasure as always.
Cheerio!