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Comment by shakow | Hacker News Reader

> in that it's not suffering from the idea of an ideal standard of divine beauty embedded in the universe

Frankly, it's your take that feels extraordinarily modern. Do you really believe that people living at this time, being familiar with centuries of style movements (from Greco-Roman antiquity to Italian Renaissance through Baroque and Bronze age Egypt) that were all considered to be beautiful, would cling to an ideal standard of beauty?

Why do modern humans believe that for some reason, they discovered thinking very recently and that all their forefathers were obscure brutes?

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You can find people today arguing for a single absolute standard of beauty. Usually they mean "neoclassical architecture".

And indeed it's what the original author from that time was arguing against, the "bigotry" mentioned. So it was clearly an attitude held by some people at the time.

> You can find people today arguing for a single absolute standard of beauty. Usually they mean "neoclassical architecture".

And I'd call them imbeciles, why you think that "the people like that exist" is argument for anything ?

>And I'd call them imbeciles, why you think that "the people like that exist" is argument for anything ?

I agree, I don't understand these sorts of arguments. While I suppose deference to anecdotal evidence has always been around it seems more and more prolific as of late, and more often than is used as justification for a baseless argument simply because others argue baselessly.

They are not only arguing in favor of neoclassical architecture, I have met plenty of people who believe that Bauhaus is the only standard of beauty and that every space should look and feel like an Apple Store.

Bela Lagosi is dead! he is dead!

I'm not saying there were no dumb people in the past, I'm saying that being amazed that most people of the past could not see further than their nose is a very naive take.

I can find identical twins joined at the hip today, too .. that does not mean it is prevalent or even important to note in every example

They also sometimes argue for Art Deco any others. Basically anything that is the anathema of CAD-drawn monstrosity of rebar concrete sheetmetal and glass by an establishment celebrity architect with overblown ego.

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