Badger and the Regeneration Game
BADGER is a big fan of the public’s participation in politics, especially local politics.
He also thinks social media can play a small role in providing people with information upon which they can base their opinions.
That means he avoids Pembrokeshire’s Facebook groups like the plague.
If there’s a barking-mad take on events, you can find it on Pembrokeshire’s Facebook pages and groups.
And find them you will, in profusion.
Some people have questions that require straightforward and factual answers.
For example: “Does anyone know what changes have been made to the bin collection times for the Bank Holiday?”
The right answer is either: “It’s here, on the Council website [with link]” or “I’ve looked it up, and the answer is [x]”.
The wrong answer is: “I blame the Council for increasing our Council Tax and not collecting the bins on Monday. I, for one, will never recycle anything to help tackle ‘global warming’ because it was chilly the other day.”
And yet, the wrong answers in that vein proliferate. One contributor - well, at least one - apparently just types the first thought that comes into his head on every topic. He makes things up. When his error is pointed out, he either doubles down or changes the subject in a gear-grinding way, suggesting his thought processes are as random as the beats of a butterfly’s wings.
The words “thick as mince” are often over-used. But, by gum, readers, Badger looks at what passes for allegedly informed comment and insight and can’t help thinking about how badly care in the community has failed.
Badger doesn’t expect too much from some of our County Councillors, so he is often surprised and delighted when they make a point worth making supported by real evidence. However, suppose you’re going to criticise or critique someone or something. In that case, you should do your homework before (metaphorically) jumping up and down and waving your knickers in the air.
Even worse is the species of entitled prick who insists councillors should respond to their insane ravings on Facebook because they can’t be bothered to communicate civilly via email.
Some new research has highlighted why people are so permanently enraged when they engage online.
Those who socialise in online communities often become alarmingly hostile, toxic, and verbally violent to one another.
Marius K. Luedicke, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, Olivier Sibai, Birkbeck, University of London, and Kristine de Valck, HEC Paris, conducted a study on online behaviour.
They aimed to find out why, although people typically join online communities to socialise peacefully, online communities are often riddled with verbal slander, trolling, and hateful flaming.
They discovered that online communities often became hostile, creating hateful spaces, a phenomenon known in sociology as brutalisation.
Specifically, the researchers identified three kinds of direct, structural, cultural, and mutually reinforcing forms of violence: sadistic entertainment (verbal conflict and exploitation performed in front of an audience for their entertainment), clan warfare (competing subgroups vie for dominance), and popular justice (members violently enforce community norms).
The researchers theorise that frustrated desires for entertainment, social status, and justice are the main reasons for endemic verbal violence.
A l though moderators can step in and curtail the tirade of lies and abuse, and assuming they’re not encouraging bolshie twerps to share whatever pieces of their mind they can spare, they are usually volunteers with better things to do with their lives than police the ding-dongs and bullies who poison public debate.
Expecting someone to recognise patterns of bad behaviour and correct them or stepping in to halt abuse and block mischief-making morons is too much of an ask for most people who moderate social media pages or groups.
And, because public debate, when supported by evidence or at least an effort to familiarise yourself with it, is an unalloyed good, it’s easy to see why it’s easier to let the furious fulminate irrelevantly, as long as they stay within the law.
The problem is that when people conduct themselves like playground bullies and talk over or insult others, informed debate dies, and you end up with an aggrieved rabble all shouting at once.
On no subject, except perhaps the scandalous landfill at Rudbaxton, is so much hot air and toxic fumes expended as the regeneration of Haverfordwest Town Centre.
We start from brass tacks: if locals cherished and valued small shops in a thriving town centre, they’d bloody well still have them. They didn’t, and they don’t.
Boo-soddinghoo.
The trade-off for greater choice and lower prices is bigger chain stores that can offer their customers the benefits of economies of scale.
The superstore model is under pressure as online shopping expands, especially for clothes and consumer durables.
Badger heard someone suggest that the multi-storey urinal that passed for a car park for Haverfordwest town centre did not need to be demolished. He agrees.
It should have been launched into space by a giant catapult in the middle of the last decade.
You don’t keep something beyond its useful life, especially when it costs more to keep than to dispose of. This county—this country, readers—is plagued by that sort of thinking.
It’ll do is NEVER good enough.
A new car park makes sense. Does it need to be a transport interchange?
Well, you need somewhere for the buses to run to and from, and there’s no land available near the railway station.
As for all that nonsense about “enhancing the public realm”: how sodding lovely does a bus station need to look?
When it comes to the “signature bridge”, Badger can take or leave it. Without a way of linking the train station to the bus station and the bus station to a town worth visiting, the whole project falls on its arse, anyway.
If the central government thinks an area needs “levelling up” (whatever that means), it should do what’s needed. Don’t leave your mess for others to clean up.
Councils should get enough money to deliver services people need based on their residents’ needs and deliver them.
As things are, you get a photo of your local MP, MS, or a Welsh Government Minister in a hi-viz vest and hard hat gazing at a couple of breeze blocks, and then it’s someone else’s problem.
All those MPs, MSs, or Welsh Government Ministers who insist they know what towns really need? Well, readers, they walk away whistling to the next photo op without a backward glance at the rubble.