naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
The advantages to behaving like a lady are so great, I don't understand why more men and women don't try to give their daughters this advantage. Do they just not know? Do they think this behavior is incompatible with also being intelligent, educated, and highly-paid? Do they think it's just too hard?
It has been my experience that many of them think it is oppressive. The idea of having and maintaining behavioral standards that might sometimes (or worse, often) conflict with one's immediate impulses is routinely presented to young people as evidence of sexism or even racism. The replacement of "no sex before marriage, sex after marriage even sometimes when you're not in the mood" with "sex whenever you want, and only when you want" is an example of this shift in expectation development. Everyone reacts to these developments in their own way, but broadly speaking I would say it has resulted mostly in a great deal of hurt and confusion among young people today.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10d ago
Damn. Wouldn't it be cheaper to hire a live-in private tutor for every five children?
This is to a very real extent what some families are discovering about voucher programs. The state of Arizona seems to have the most developed "direct payment" program, with "Empowerment Scholarship Accounts" that put $6,000+ per child straight into a parent's hands. If you've got four school-aged children to homeschool, the state will put $24,000 directly into your hands to purchase learning resources. If you've got a co-op with ten kids, that's $60,000 to pay a co-op teacher.
And that $6,000 is actually saving Arizona money, because Arizona normally spends about $12,000 per enrolled student on public education. Imagine New York following suit at the 50% mark--the state spends about $37,000 per enrolled student, so they could offer $18,000 per student to parents instead.
The amount of money in American public education is utterly staggering. Teachers complain about their pay (who doesn't?) but how much are teacher's union representatives, highly compensated superintendents, armies of DEI staffers, etc. actually contributing to improved childhood education? I'm pretty comfortable that the answer is "not contributing anything at all," but even if I charitably allow that half of what they do is worthwhile, the level of graft would still be measured as tens of billions of dollars each year. Public education is overwhelmingly a jobs program (and influence laundering machine).
naraburns
nihil supernum
10d ago
IED plans . . . for the low performing kids are required
I'm sure you mean IEP, but as typos go, this one's a certified banger.
naraburns
nihil supernum
21d ago
There is an old saying, old enough that many Mottizens may be too young to ever have heard it, that "it takes a Nixon to go to China." The aphorism points to a political tendency where certain political moves are too "on the nose" for the party that seems most likely to do them, which strangely allows the other party to get away with it. Reverse the polarity and you get the occasional observation about conservatives being hawks but progressives actually starting wars and conflicts (though Trump has, I think, successfully brought that particular observation into closer parity).
So yeah--I wasn't kidding when I said "Trump is a lib," at least by the standards of the US culture war circa 1990. Small government conservatism had its last apparent gasp in about 2009 with the "Tea Party" movement. Trump has already demonstrated both his willingness to mail everyone a check (during COVID) and the consequences of doing so (rapid, albeit not immediate, inflation). Interesting that the total budget didn't really go back down even though I'm no longer getting direct deposits from the federal government. How is all that money being spent now, instead? Who is getting enriched by the profligate feds if it's not individual citizens? But another way of looking at all that is to say--well, now we have more data. Let's try it again!
A Democrat in the same position might face heavy opposition on such a broad distribution, even from their own party--see also "Obamacare," as well as interminable arguments over how "equal" distributions shouldn't be made because there are more important voting demographics some people who are in greater "need" than others. Trump isn't going to give us real welfare reform but it might actually take a Republican to manage it, and for the moment, he's the "Republican" in that position. He faces the slim but far from impossible prospect of an impeachment with conviction if the midterms go sufficiently badly for him. As per the usual, he has presented the idea in a garishly populist and self-serving way, but like Nixon going to China, Trump has continuity with his first term in office as the man genuinely shifting the Overton window on UBI.
For better or for worse.
naraburns
nihil supernum
27d ago
see 2003 in the United Kingdom
the broader Blue Is The Warmest Color problem
Can you please elaborate on these? I don't quite understand the references.
I'm not @gattsuru, but I assume the reference to the UK is the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which overhauled their consent structure. It kept the age of general consent at 16, but with penalties for authority figures having sexual contact with under-18s, and established strict liability for such contact with under-13s. But most of the news coverage seems to have been focused on the "equalizing" effect it had on heterosexual versus homosexual contact (previously, the "age of consent" was different in part based on sexuality).
This is presumably related to the movie Blue is the Warmest Color, which portrays a lesbian relationship beginning between a 15-year-old and a woman in her early 20s.
The cultural correlations between homosexual conduct and child abuse are sufficiently strong that even in the mid-20th century it was common to use the word "pederast" to describe a gay man as such. There are various reasons for the perceived correlations, and the "gay rights" movement has worked hard to disentangle the concepts in public perception, which is probably one reason why the Sexual Offences Act was seen as so important at the time. But at the same time, a lot of really popular LGBT media continues to positively portray a variety of statutorily problematic (i.e., ephebophile-not-pedophile) relationships.
Congratulations! I'm sorry to have missed your announcement, so I'm glad you brought it up again here. I have seen enough people take the opposite trajectory from yours that I find it comforting to read about people making good choices and improving their lot.
I had never heard of "magnum opus dissonance" previously, and it does seem to fit many people's reactions to the reception of their own work here.
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