Gaashk
11mo ago
I think "trads" propose things like making it easier to raise children on a single salary, and harder to get divorced.
Why not?
Partly because they couldn't use drugs or alcohol for the majority of their adult life. And most women would be having maybe 6 kids -- not that nobody has ever had more, but many women shouldn't for health reasons.
But, also, a good job is, in part, something that structures people's days and weeks, gets them out of the house even if they're feeling a bit depressed and it's cold and dark outside, gets them to interact with other people, and ideally offers some amount of "autonomy, mastery, and purpose." So the gamification idea makes sense. Parenthood can offer some of that, since the parent needs to find a way to care for their children, and will go do things with them, and can generally find some sort of rhythm to the day, week, and year that works for the family, especially as the babies get a bit bigger. Eventually, they can talk and expect different days and holidays and so on, and it's actually pretty fun to decorate with them, or garden together, bake together, and so on. So, as jobs go, stay at home mom is a bit unstructured, but it makes up for it somewhat in progressing in an interesting way, especially with several children. Surrogacy does not offer that. And if some government were to try to institute something like the military, but while pregnant, then it's probably better to join the normal military, and do support stuff while not pregnant.
Gaashk
11mo ago
the temptation for whoever builds it is always going to be optimising it for society's benefit rather than for the benefit of the chump in question
I think this is very hard to avoid, unless the person asking for help has extremely clear goals that they are articulating well, and the person trying to help him actually knows how to get them. There's an autism program I sometimes interact with, and it's very clear that the goal is mostly teaching them to interface with a large institution. It isn't even clear what else it could be about, since there's a pretty rigid schedule that includes interfacing with a different teacher, therapist, or situation every 45 minutes or so. It seems like a smaller setting with l fewer transitions would be better, but maybe then they wouldn't even feel like they had anything to teach.
Gaashk
11mo ago
Apparently the best Eastern European place for surrogacy has moved from Ukraine to Georgia, due to the war. A quick search leads to, for instance, this, where at least one woman came from another Central Asian country by lying to the husband she doesn't like, and at least some women are having up to six babies for the agency.
I can't tell based on a short search how popular it is, but the four to six number sounds about what I would also expect from a woman who was into motherhood, and had found a husband to support her. I've heard of exactly one woman in my personal sphere who had 20 children, and then shortly died, leaving them to raise each other. You can get families like the Duggars by some combination of good health, religious belief, and media attention.
I'm not so much saying that there aren't women who are willing to have a basically normal amount of children, some of whom they sell. Just that having 20 and leaving them at an orphanage is too far.
Gaashk
11mo ago
I’m saying both that your allusion to “orphanages” suggests that you don’t know what you’re talking about, and that even the underclass doesn’t want to be “just wombs” professionally for 30 years. Not that you aren’t in good company, Socrates suggested it on the Symposium, just there are reasons you’ll mostly see that system in bleak dystopian novels.
Gaashk
11mo ago
Or just pay like 10% of the most motherhood-friendly women to produce 20 children and raise them in an orphanage (they can visit of course) , that also works and intrudes less in people's personal lives.
Orphanages???
This exists, it's called surrogacy, there are couples who will pay for it, and there would be more if it were subsidized, as there's a waiting list for adoption of young children, though 20 sounds excessive. There probably isn't any way to make giving birth more than a couple of times for someone else not extremely low status. There was a thread a bit ago on DSL where a poster was talking about considering surrogacy so that his hot young wife doesn't lose her figure, and there's no way for the relationship between him and the surrogate, or the well off gay couple and the surrogate not to be pure power dynamics at scale.
Gaashk
11mo ago
The "not that many" is key. This one specific man you don't like or spinsterhood is a bad deal. But so is 100 messages a day from random men on an app. I'm not sure what approach rate is ideal, but maybe it's something like six realistic choices.
I would be interested to see a social experiment where group A does as you suggest, and group B commits to pay men more in relation to women, gets the men to dress well, work out more at, gives them more slack in their jobs so that even the ambitious ones have time to socialize, organizes dances and parties with light drinking for mid twenties men with actual jobs, not just college students, give extremely low social status to men who abandon their children, and other things along those lines. Ban the apps!
I would bet a small amount on the latter being more effective.
It's coming from both sides. Women who spend their childhoods longing for children have about average success at it. Most women want to have children with their husband when they have one who's supportive of that, it's just taking an unreasonably long time.
An interesting three I saw: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1hvotgr/should_i_have_children/
Gaashk
11mo ago
The poems should be read aloud in his hearing. Silent reading of poems is silly and why they've faded so much.
Gaashk
11mo ago
It's possible that more of the benefits accrue to society in general than to the specific man, in a way that benefits defectors as long as society as a whole doesn't unravel (as it has been lately). For instance, having an involved father is a benefit to a boy and young man, as part of living in the kind of society where marriage is the norm.
Gaashk
11mo ago
Fair. The main other platform I use is Instagram, mostly for arts and crafts ideas. I am extremely sick of the videos with people slowly turning their canvases around, then cutting off just as the painting is revealed, as though it were a strip tease, but that seems to be what Instagram thinks I like. I'm considering quitting. It doesn't seem worth retraining the algorithm.
Facebook is also pretty good as a local newsfeed for basic restaurant, weather, construction, etc news, and neighborhood group of largely Gen X and above. Lots of attractive neighborhood sunset pictures. But yeah, the reel clickbait stuff has been gettin gout of hand lately, and it just doesn't show me some of my actual friends, which is annoying.
Gaashk
11mo ago
We still use FB to post for the grandparents and their friends. It seems basically fine for that.
Gaashk
11mo ago
I grew up reading the kinds of novels that are popular with homeschool girls. Ann of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, George Macdonald, the Bronte Sisters, the kind of novel where the girl's only friend is a horse, and it's not even her own horse. Solitude seems intrinsic to whatever culture it is my family belongs to. It's the class of pastors, teachers, and the kind of farmers who moved to the Western US. When I read novels and hear accounts from older relatives, it sounds like people were mostly reading books in their leisure time. My father recounts playing wall ball with himself in the sweltering summer heat, but mostly reading Tarzan novels that summer. My mother recalls trying to learn to write in Elvish. She didn't have school friends, due to bussing, despite the city not having black kids or ghettos. My grandmother recalls reading Les Miserables in elementary school. Maybe according to the article they weren't alone, because it would be two or three teens and their mother silently reading in the same room.
According to data gathered by the online reservations platform OpenTable, solo dining has increased by 29 percent in just the past two years. The No. 1 reason is the need for more “me time.”
This is interesting. Why do these alienated, lonely people want more "me time?"
Was going to a theater ever actually social? I used to go to movies, and the norm was to sit there quietly, and not engage with anyone, even the people you came with, in a dark room. It's more social to watch TV in my house with my family. We talk to each other and interact.
My grandparents didn't go to restaurants alone because they couldn't go to restaurants more than once a month, and it was an occasion. Take out was an occasion, even when I was a kid. I can't think of anyone I knew in real life who met up in bars.
Because I'm from a long line of bookish but high openness introverts, it's unsurprising that I'm posting on my online culture war club instead of arranging play dates and attending potlucks.
My parents still keep in touch with their five college friends, even though they've all moved to different cities. I just met up with a friend from youth group I haven't seen in four years, and it was nice.
As I write this, my husband has been talking to me about joining a lapidary club, and taking our kids to look for local rocks at a nearby wash. It has taken me most of an hour to write this post, as I made cookies, put the kids to bed, and discussed going to the mineral show.
I'm not saying that there isn't a problem, but perhaps it's a recurrent problem. Or a problem that's always with us.
Gaashk
11mo ago
This is what Turkey has. I found it basically fine, it took about once for me to notice that I needed to carry a certain amount of change.
Gaashk
11mo ago
Yeah, I've become significantly worse at contributing to church events since having a family. In my experience, it's the stable single adults, and couples with older children who hold things together.
Gaashk
11mo ago
I really liked Scott's Different Worlds post, and wish that he (or someone) would investigate that further.
De Becker seems to think there are people who are always being stalked, and have to be super cautious all the time, and may often be in dangerous situations. He worked with celebrities and abuse victims, so maybe that's true for them.
I'm not that far in, but de Becker just mentioned that if someone is jogging in the park and gets an uncomfortable feeling, they shouldn't try to use peripheral vision, they should take their headphones off, stop for a second, turn, and make eye contact with anyone looking at them. I'm not subtle at all, and probably give off that vibe anyway.
Gaashk
11mo ago
I wasn't very far in and probably haven't described it very well. Maybe I'll try again next week when I've read more of it.
Gaashk
11mo ago
There are definitely people that I don't particularly like or get along with, who seem to be doing the best they can, and them and I clashing is not due to anything nefarious on their part. I might use words like annoyed, irritated, clashing, or something but not afraid, apprehensive, or nervous.
Conversely, there is no shortage of people who are likable on an interpersonal level but completely lacking in moral fibre (e.g. charming con artists who'll butter you up before absconding with your life savings).
I think de Becker agrees with this, to some extent. He talks about people who are trying to get something their mark doesn't want to give, and describes various strategies of being extra nice, offering unsolicited help, using "we" a lot, and being generally nice and charming. The main difference is that he says that people feel apprehensive anyway, but try to explain it away because "he's so nice and helpful." I'm not sure how to evaluate that claim, he seems to be mostly be making it based on his own experience and interviews.
I'm probably misrepresenting him somewhat, since I had read less than a quarter of the book at that point (and still less than half). Not dealing with fake "repressed" memories does seem like a weakness -- what if they just made some of the details up subconsciously? I haven't read far enough to know if he deals with this.
He says things like: if you are a woman putting groceries in your car or something, and a man comes up to help you, and you feel even a little bit uncomfortable about it, stand up, face him, and say "no" definitively and forcefully. If he's a decent guy, his feelings will be a bit hurt, and you will get no help. If he isn't, he'll keep testing your boundaries, be very firm about them, insisting and not just going away is a sign that he's up to no good. There's probably someone who needs to hear that? I don't really have opinions about it, but am a bit curious to see where he's going.
Gaashk
11mo ago
The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker (1998). The main premise is that if you have a negative gut feeling about a person or situation, go ahead and follow it out of the situation, don't try to come up with a bunch of justifications for why things are actually alright, there's no reason to worry. There probably is a reason to worry, you're picking up on something, even when you aren't able to articulate what or why in the moment. He says he's spent a lot of time interviewing victims, or close misses after violent incidents, and they usually eventually tell him details that explain some of the signals that made them nervous after the fact, and sometimes do manage to get out before the going gets bad -- for instance a man who asked into a convenience store, and then immediately out again shortly before a shooting.
It seems plausible enough. I've never been in a really bad situation, but every time I haven't liked someone immediately, tried to make up excuses for them in my head, thought and thought about it, tried to like them, it turned out that, no, we actually could not live or work together. Probably most people, most of the time, do really have reasonable instinctive boundaries.
It's all about the head and neck support. Holding a baby upright on your lap while aggressively driving a car is a terrible idea. Holding them flush with your torso is better. Car seats that have three point harnesses and appropriate angles for the back and neck are better. Babies have very weak necks, and their brains can slosh around when shaken hard, because their necks aren't controlling the motion.
Some cultures practice rather aggressive rocking, where they tie the baby into the cradle and operate it like an amusement park ride. They might notice if those who did that more had more brain damaged children.
makes me think every girl ought to take part in a balance-based activity
There's a reason almost nobody goes hiking with a front pack. I have gone hiking in the ice and snow with a baby in a front pack, and it is very, very slow going. Balancing normally doesn't help all that much, since it's specifically the front weight creating the imbalance, and the main thing to do is things like not walking down steep hills, not walking on slick surfaces, holding a hand for stability, putting one's feet sideways so you can see them, etc. This isn't really helped by, for instance, learning to use a balance beam in conditions where you can see your feet. Not being able to see one's feet is destabilizing.
Gaashk
11mo ago
Yeah, the devil's in the details. Firefighting, like all fighting, should probably continue to be mostly male. There are a lot of ponytails on that website, suggesting they would really like more women, which seems unlikely for physical reasons. Who's the girl in the overalls and headband supposed to be? The local police force here hired a woman with beautiful long hair and her bouvier or some such animal to give presentations, such as at elementary schools. She starter out as a vet tech, and now brings the dog around and lets the children pet it while teaching them a bit about safety. That's fine, sure, but not very central.
Of course there doesn't seem to be a reason English speaking mestizo men wouldn't be firefighters. In a heavily hispanic state like California, I'm surprised they're not, and I suppose worth reaching out to?
Gaashk
11mo ago
I remember doing Sing, Spell, Read, and Write, and it worked well -- I still remember several of the songs -- but don't know what an updated version might be. We did Saxon math, for some value of "doing," but I much prefer Khan Academy. Some school districts have an official Homeschool Liaison, who will recommend something. Also, kids can often take electives at their local public school for free or very cheap. I took swimming, and was no good at it, but it was a positive experience.
Also, any resources on being an effective homeschool teacher without formal training in education.
This is the absolute last thing you should worry about. Don't bother even thinking about this at all. I have a degree in education, and education courses are entirely useless for homeschooling. They don't really teach classroom management, but if they were going to teach a useful skill, it would probably be that one. There was an entire semester long class about teaching philosophies, where we would look at a teaching philosophy, such as the one with an ideal tutor following an ideal child around and making everything a learning opportunity for him, and would invariably conclude each time "but we're training to be public school teachers, so while interesting, this has pretty much nothing to do with us." There was an entire semester long class on specific educational acronyms. We learned to think-pair-share 28 times. None of it would be useful to you at all.
How do the kids feel about the change?
Gaashk
11mo ago
It makes sense when most things become performative, rather than -- I want to say liturgical.
Liturgy was Greek for "work of the people," in a ceremonial sense. It's great if whoever is performing the liturgy is an excellent chanter or something, but it isn't fundamentally important. It's important to celebrate the occasion, to perform the rites, for everyone to believe and say and experience the same things. But most of postmodern society is profoundly nonliturgical.
The reason to be an average dancer is so that you can attend a folk dance. It's fun to swing, or blues, or square, or circle dance, and a person, especially the man if it's the kind of dance with a lead, should be about average for it to actually be fun, and not just awkward, or an initial class. But, currently, we mostly do performative dances, or break off into little high skill niches, as has been discussed elsewhere. Which is too bad.
Since you mention potentially wanting to marry and raise kids together, some of those things do sound a bit counter to that.
This will be a struggle if you ever do have kids, but it just is what it is, they can start trying to sleep through the night at about 6 months.
My husband didn't have a car when we started living together (Chicago), but you will almost certainly need one if you get a proper household going, with children.
Hm. Yeah. It's really irritating to cook dinner, and then have your man say, no, he's got his own food that's different, enjoy though. It's also pretty irritating to be always cooking vegan food with a side of meat or cheese, though that can depend on what cuisine you both like. Also, only going out to restaurants that serve vegan food makes proposing a place to eat out much harder. I used to keep Orthodox fasts, which are like that, and mostly just didn't eat out. Which was alright, since it was meant to be penitential, but isn't great for dating. Not sure what to do about this.
A big anxiety around this for women is whether they're in danger of losing their belief based community, and if so, what you can replace it with together. One of the big problems of modernity is that there often isn't a replacement, people just become more isolated.
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