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Comment by zeko | Hacker News Reader

While McMansions do seem kitschy and aesthetically unappealing to me, that is my subjective feeling.

I find it inappropriate and offensive that this author decides to be the sole authority on aesthetics of PRIVATE properties, appealing to some sort of an unassailable, celestial authority that mainstream architecture is and promoting boring, utilitarian designs. Just how far down the slippery slope of the rabbit hole do you want to go? Why not box people in grey Soviet apartment buildings?

All of this sounds to me like arrogant ramblings of people who like authoritarianism and can't grasp the concept of personal freedom and that people like homes that are wacky and extension of their own egos and sense of pride in their financial success.

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>I find it inappropriate and offensive that this author decides to be the sole authority on aesthetics of PRIVATE properties, appealing to some sort of an unassailable, celestial authority that mainstream architecture is and promoting boring, utilitarian designs. Just how far down the slippery slope of the rabbit hole do you want to go? Why not box people in grey Soviet apartment buildings?

This is a straw man. The author isn't against interesting designs, just careless ones. And interpreting this article as a advocating authoritarianism is reading a lot into it.

Exploring the wider picture and integrating the issues at hand isn't a straw man argument, it's called thinking as well as not being naive to the ominous specter of slowly creeping authoritarianism.

People find "careless" designs interesting. Who is he to dictate how private property should look? He is utterly intolerant of personal freedom and promotes sterile, totalitarian looking architecture.

Where is he dictating anything? It's a blog. People use blogs to give their opinion. Is that too much freedom for you now?

In another post, the author states outright that she likes many styles [0], so the idea she promotes "sterile, totalitarian looking architecture" is off the mark. The original post itself includes a diversity of good examples, so I'm not sure where that came from.

I guess I find it hard to take your claims seriously until you explain why you've concluded the author wants to enact her tastes into law rather than just discuss them.

>People find "careless" designs interesting.

I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. It just that in some (many?) cases, careless designs are less likely to be widely appealing or stand up to scrutiny.

[0]: http://mcmansionhell.tumblr.com/post/148836824926/man-i-love...

> All of this sounds to me like arrogant ramblings of people who like authoritarianism and can't grasp the concept of personal freedom and that people like homes that are wacky and extension of their own egos and sense of pride in their financial success.

He's complaining about stupidity such as having a row of windows, with each window being a different random style.

If I was a web designer, and I insisted that every letter on a website was in a different font, everyone else would tell me to stop being such an asshole.

These homes aren't wacky, they are built by builders who kept cutting costs and cutting costs until they were left with the most cost efficient subset of features.

Another analogy to software, imagine if to save on dev time, a random half of every dialog box in an app was just left blank. Maybe some of those buttons were needed, maybe they weren't, whatever, it got out on time!

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