> Loos made ornamentation sound like something practiced only by primitive peoples or criminal deviants.
Loos didn't make ornamentation "sound like" something practiced only by primitive peoples or criminal deviants. That was his main point. His argument is
1. We're more evolved than primitive people.
2. Primitive people, degenerates, and criminals ornament themselves and their environments.
3. Therefore we've evolved beyond the need to ornament our selves and environment.
A simple difference in taste doesn't quite capture Loos' racism. Loos attempts to build a reality where he and un-ornamentalists are more civilized, cultured, and morally superior to others and ornamentation is evidence of such. He uses ornamentation to construct a difference and then uses that difference to validate his superiority.
Loos' argument rests on othering "primitive people" and makes makes six total references toward the Papuans to accomplish this. It's short so I'll list each one.
1. Comparing them to children - "At the age of two he[the child] looks like a Papuan"
2. Describing them again as immoral children - "The child is amoral. So is the Papuan, to us."
3. As cannibals - "The Papuan kills his enemies and eats them."
4. As a reckless ornamenter - "The Papuan tattoos his skin, his boat, his rudder, his oars; in short, everything he can get his hands on."
5. Again compares them to children, and implies they are degenerates - "But what is natural for, a Papuan and a child, is degenerate for modern man."
6. That "we" are more progressed than primitive people. - "People progressed far enough for ornament to give them pleasure no longer, indeed so far that a tattooed face no longer heightened their aesthetic sensibility, as it did with the Papuans, but diminished it."
I can't stress enough how childish Loos himself comes across in the piece. It's a temper tantrum of an article and I'm honestly surprised it's taken seriously, or at least was. I'd encourage folks to read the original[1]. It's a five to ten minute read.
1. https://www.archdaily.com/798529/the-longish-read-ornament-a...
And I should keep my eyes more open for those things.
Funny how there's two complementary phrases that should ring the same alarm and are often used for the same (usually racist/classist/etc.) people:
- We've progressed beyond X, thus X is bad (and we're better for not doing X) - We've always done X, thus X is good (and we're better for not doing Y)
(The parenthetical obviously just being an excuse for unfounded hate.)
Since JSON is a subset of JS, I would have expected `.` to be the delimiter. That jives with how people think of JSON structures in code. (Python does require bracket syntax for traversing JSON, but even pandas uses dots when you generate a dataframe from JSON.)
When I see `/`, I think:
- "This spec must have been written by backend people," and
- "I wonder if there's some relative/absolute path ambiguity they're trying to solve by making all the paths URLs."
JSON Patch uses JSON Pointer (RFC 6901) to address elements, but another method from (very) roughly same time is JSON Path [0] (RFC 9535) and here's one of my favorite mnemonics:
- JSON Path uses "points" between elements
- JSON Pointer uses "path separators" between elements
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSONPath