Gaashk
8mo ago
In general, I like Peterson, though he's been going a bit too far into right wing punditry for my tastes, and I'm not fond of the Daily Wire, which he has recently allied himself with. He mentioned going to the training and recording all of it, which does sound mildly entertaining.
It makes some sense for the College of Psychologists of Ontario to want to distance themselves from him, and he really does seem to have turned into more of a pundit or preacher lately, which is probably somewhat at odds with being a psychologist. In that vein, maybe public money shouldn't be going to psychology, and the courts should tell them to handle the situation themselves. Go ahead and excommunicate the heretic, that's their own business, but they shouldn't receive public funds from the state run healthcare or university system.
Whether B is a problem or not depends on whether or not the person in question was in fact vindictively spreading a pack of lies. If they are, I would rather they were called on it than that it was politely obfuscated behind a wall of disclaimers. If they aren't or it's uncertain, then yes, that's bad on his part.
On F, Peterson phrased that poorly, he should have been more careful (as he likes to say he usually tries to be) and said that what the doctor did should have been criminal. Maybe he should have said evil instead? But I doubt the exact phrasing is really why the College of Psychologists was upset about it.
Ultimately it's probably fine if Peterson goes all in on his transformation to being a secular pastor. Evidently the demand is there, and he's hardly able to engage in professional psychologist duties already. He was talking with Jonathan Pageau the other day about working on fairy tales. I just hope he doesn't go too all in on constantly complaining about #CurrentThing, which tends to ruin that kind of work, even if from the conservative side.
Gaashk
11mo ago
This seems likely to be more the norm than the exception, historically. Spin offs and retellings of King Arthur, Robin Hood, St George, Coyote, Tarzan, or whomever is probably normal, with an actually new story every decade or so.
At the same time, I agree that whatever's going on now feels like something of a wasteland.
Maybe this has to do with the tendency to mine the same stories too quickly. But I used to binge read King Arthur anthologies, and the entire Wizard of Oz collection, so I'm not sure that's it, either. Maybe something more basic, like that the stories are just not good stories, for various reasons. I'm on board for an Ant Man story, but not the one they have, by report, actually produced. I'm on board for a How Raven Stole the Sun retelling, but not as a three hour CGI fest. If someone with the aesthetics of Miyazaki decided to retell it (that would be odd, but supposing an equivalent folktale), I would absolutely be on board. I don't so much feel inundated with retellings, as that there's a specific "memberberry" version of those retellings that's insufficiently universal, pandering too much to specific target demographics. A war movie about Judith and Holofernes could be fine and interesting, but not the way it would probably be produced in actuality. Companies are recycling too narrowly, from their own slate, rather than from the broader catalogue of world civilizations.
Gaashk
1yr ago
I'm thinking about this from the female side at the moment, as a mom of two young girls. They are, of course, interconnected, but actually physically implementing public works projects is a young man's task.
As I understand things, people got washing machines, vacuums, off the rack clothing, children started going to school younger and staying longer, cheese came pre-shredded, veggies come frozen and chopped in bags, and so on. On the one hand: great! Hand washing and ironing clothing is horribly tedious. On the other hand, by the 60s there wasn't all that much left, and despondent housewives sitting alone at home, vacuuming for the third time that day became a trope. It's as easy for a man as a woman to type, so there were suddenly lots of secretaries and stenographers and whatnot. Lower class women could work at Macy's instead of making custom dresses at a small shop. This is ambiguously good -- there are a lot of tragic stories about impoverished women slowly losing their eyesight in centuries past, unable to replace their handwork with anything less visually exacting as they aged. But it's difficult to enjoy leisure when one is mostly just stuck at home alone all day operating various cleaning devices.
At the same time, female offices are kind of miserable, and most of the tasks can be automated anyway. I worked in an office a few years ago where I spent hours every week physically filing paperwork. This paperwork was, as far as I could tell, not required by law. Something about their business cycle made it easier to hire a relatively low skilled part time position year-round, rather than hiring a mid-skilled technician once for a couple of months. Probably related to the administrative assistant's desire to have assistants herself, ultimately for status reasons. There was all sorts of bad behavior around this, like setting up her chair to stare directly at her assistant's monitor at all times, and going on and on about how she couldn't go eat lunch until she had dispensed enough tasks to her subordinate. Alas.
Anyway, these sorts of positions can and should be automated already, and probably will be in reality soon. Where does that leave us? With a lot of home health aids, teachers, food service workers, and retail workers, apparently. Of those, most can be pithed of the more meaningful portions of the jobs, with only the tedious parts remaining. Medications can be automated; bedside manner cannot. Academic instruction can be automated; classroom management cannot. POS and much of food preparation can be automated; people feeling special because a somewhat attractive woman delivered their food in a polite way cannot. The parts of retail that can't be automated are mostly things like sweatshop labor, stocking, warehouse work, and deliveries. Amazon can pretend as though they've been automated by remaining surprised that someone might go to the bathroom more than average.
Community organizing, meetups, and church ladies have genuine value, but are not exactly scalable. You want probably 5 of them in a group of 100.
I'm not certain where this leaves us in the upcoming era of automated typing work. Faux homesteading and homeschooling families are still pretty fringe. I'm not completely sure even where I want things to go, though my aesthetic sensibilities head in the direction of more handcrafting and church like communities.
Gaashk
12d ago
The other famous case recently was teachers in NYC schools. They proved that the test was fine to one judge and then lost on appeal and had to shell out $2 billion.
What was their test like?
It seems trivially obvious that a high school math teacher should have to pass a math test slightly higher than whatever they'll be teaching. Or that a bank employee should be able to do whatever kind of math they might use for their job.
It seems unlikely that the extra friction and expense of requiring kindergarten teachers who can pass even Algebra II is worth it, as long as they're literate, patient, enforce social norms, and willing to stick with the phonics and counting curriculum. I vaguely remember having to pass an algebra test as an adult, some years after taking the course, in order to continue teaching a subject that involved no algebra at all, but a lot of enforcement of social norms and some design stuff. It seemed a little silly, and I do think I would have been pretty pissed if I had failed and needed to both re-learn algebra and pay a fee to re-take the test.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I'd argue that the housing issue is actually downstream of the cultural issues. There are a bunch of large houses around me that could easily accommodate six or even eight people living them, but currently there are only two. People can and do raise children in their parents' house if it's respectable in their culture. One of the interesting things about current trends, is that it doesn't really seem to make much difference; countries with all different housing situations and acceptable arrangements are falling together.
Also, there are large areas of the US where it isn't all that hard to buy a house. I live next to a city of under a million people, and didn't bother saving any money in my 20s. I had a baby in a one room duplex, and we realized why families have houses, so we asked a local agency that helps people buy their first time home if we could buy one or not. They said, yes, up to $x. Then a year later we had bought a house, and it was all basically straightforward aside from a regionally specific appraisal issue on the first house we tried to buy. We aren't making a lot of money. It doesn't make any difference, birth rates are going down just the same.
Gaashk
3mo ago
Our neighbor's son has (apparently intentionally, because he fixed it for about a week) damaged his muffler and gotten an unusually early job, such that he roars off, waking us up each morning at 4am. Since we are not on good terms with these neighbors in general, we don't have any plausible way to bring it up, other than calling out of the blue or yelling down the street. We can't even reasonably leave a note (no box), or knock on their door (it is way behind their gate). Also, they would be unlikely to care if we did bring it up, because they have shown themselves to be inconsiderate in general, then lie when called on it.
The neighborhood is generally quiet and dark, and we do not want to sleep with earplugs just for this one five minute disturbance.
What should we do? It's starting to mess up my husband's sleep, especially, he's been having increasing trouble getting back to sleep.
Gaashk
7mo ago
I've been watching the new season of Wheel of Time, and kind of like it. I haven't read the books and don't plan to, so that might affect my enjoyment, but in general they seem rather fun, with alright actors and nice costumes. I'm especially enjoying the costumes.
A couple of years ago, I was driving up to Chimayo, New Mexico, and there were signs all along the road forbidding people from just walking outside for their annual pilgrimage "because of Covid." There did not seem to be any conscientious objectors. This did not look like the actions of believers who thought that their traditions had a meaningful impact on reality. I've tried going to Catholic churches sometimes, but at least around here they seem even more ethnic than the Greek churches.
At the same time, why equate Catholic culture with "the right?" It seems like it agrees with other rightists on some things (traditional family structure), and has a lot of room for disagreement on others (how best to help the poor, economic matters).
Religious colleges and seminaries more generally seem to have been doing poorly lately, and I'm not certain what's going on. Young men attend American Orthodox seminaries hoping to become priests, and drop out to wander the world in sorrow instead. They are allowed to marry, so that's not an impediment there. The ones who stay seem to learn a decent amount of liturgical ability, but struggle with even extremely kind, vibrant, theologically conservative parishes. I'm not sure what's going on. A while back I almost studied at St Vladimir's, but withdrew my application after some consideration of "what are you going to do afterwards? [edit]Marry a priest?" and when to an equally useless but charming Great Books college instead. I've had friends try to attend Evangelical colleges as well (e.g. Moody), and didn't seem to have gotten much out of it. The only part one talked about was how he'd signed a covenant not to drink alcohol on breaks -- nothing about his studies or anything. I feel concerned, but in a distant kind of way, without any particular ideas about how to shore things up.
Gaashk
10mo ago
I will now reveal my normie tastes in movies...
Looking at the lists, in addition to Avatar II doing well, Mario Bros also did really well, suggesting that people just don't want to see Elemental or the new Indiana Jones all that much. I watched Mario Bros on streaming (and enjoyed it), but might have gone to the theater if circumstances lent themselves. It has about the right combination of nostalgia for those who grew up with the games, actual fun and an alright plot, Jack Black making a fool of himself, and no particular wokeness. Everyone likes super talented Peach, it's pulled off well, with humor and fondness.
The rumors are, Indiana Jones is about setting the franchise up for Harrison Ford to be replaced by a younger woman. I don't know if this is true or not, since I haven't watched the movie, and don't plan to, but it certainly doesn't make it sound fun. I also didn't see Black Widow, because it sounded like it was about setting it up for Florence Pugh to take over from Scarlett Johansen, or that series about the guy with the metal wings taking on the mantel of Captain America, or the special about a woman taking over for Hawkeye. In general, movies about someone taking up the cape of someone else sound boring, it's much better when they just show up with swagger and without much explanation, like 007. This seems to be a common failure mode of long running hero shows. Assuming the rumor to be true, I don't think the recent trend of replacing older male heros with younger female heros is necessarily about wokeness per say, but more about stodgily following the tropes of the moment, even when people are tired of them and they've become stale.
Elemental looks... probably fine? Kind of like Zootopia, but for elements? I liked Zootopia, though not enough that I would have bothered seeing it in theaters. I haven't heard any rumors about it, it just seems kind of basic. Looking at a mainstream review, it sounds like they tried making a ham fisted racial allegory, but it didn't really fit, only fleshed out two of the four elements, and even the mainstream reviewers don't like ham fisted racial allegories. That's kind of how Bright was -- there was an attempt made, and Will Smith is fun enough to watch, but it was also kind of a mess. I'll probably watch it in a year when it comes out on Disney+, but will wait until I'm subscribing for a month for other reasons. I'm not sure if it makes sense to shorthand this to "woke," since the complaint is coming from the mainstream reviewers -- interracial love story (but with elemental spirits! who are not particularly magical, and basically just New Yorkers) probably just not a great concept, and would be really hard to do so well that a mass of people will go to the theater to see it immediately.
As an aside, I see that Spider Man: No Way Home did really well, and having watched it: why? It's terrible! So bad! Apparently fan service, done right, does bring in the cash.
Gaashk
1yr ago
Like some others here, I have never heard "ethnicity" used to refer to anything other than ancestry in the past several decades I've heard the term. The person of Chinese descent living in Hungary is ethnically (Han or whatever his biological ancestors were), and culturally Hungarian, if it's important to make the distinction. Or if not, he is Hungarian, and racially Asian.
This may be because I'm American, and the usage is different in Europe. But if it's different, it's not recently different. If a person's biological ancestors are from France, but he's raised by Greek Americans, he is ethnically (some kind of French) and culturally American or (regional) American or Greek American, depending on how much he participates in Greek specific cultural customs. Calling him ethnically Greek would not so much confuse people as simply miscommunicate his background. And nobody calls anyone ethnically American unless they're emphasizing that they don't know where their ancestors are from.
Gaashk
18d ago
Probably that it's not super relevant to other groups, like noticing that Bhutan is doing well on some indicators. It's not like either joining the Amish or replicating their community structure is a real possibility for most people at this point.
Gaashk
3mo ago
I wish that this were a transcript, not a Youtube clip. Personally, I do not like starting a separate thread as a way to get around writing a submission statement. Why were you interested in this? What do you want to talk about? It looks like pretty standard stuff about people not having as many children as they would have wanted, and this being bad for society, and also for those who never become grandparents. That seems true enough.
Gaashk
5mo ago
I don't think this is actually that different from the situation of normie grill pill Americans trying to enjoy franchises they grew up with, but where the messaging has taken over the characters and story.
The main thing is that, recently, it isn't "otherwise good."
But also, I don't think most people are able to set their BS thresholds consciously.
Personally, I'll put up with a fair bit if the actors, costuming, makeup, and lighting are good. Still, I'm about to give up on Neil Gaiman adaptations, because while I enjoy the aesthetics, the LGB relationships have become just about the whole thing. Also, the Strong Females of Marvel (still enjoying Loki though; hope they don't pull anything extra dumb in the last episode...). The nonsensical ethnicities in Wheel of Time would doubtless be obvious to anyone, anywhere, but I'm basically willing to overlook it, because this season the acting, music, and costuming were basically good (and as a non book reader, the plot was intelligible, all things considered, unlike season 1). Which I think is more the median American position -- it's forgivable to mess with races and sexes a bit in the name of The Culture, as long as you're actually making an effort in general.
Gaashk
7mo ago
I vaguely remember someone mentioning Hanania a week or so ago, blogging about how most books are rubbish, or outdated and not worth reading, while his book is unusually good, and absolutely deserves people's attention. That was the only other time I remember hearing his name. It looks like it was discussing this post https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-case-for-reading-one-particular
A cursory look suggests that Levine vilifies his and the readers' outgroup, and probably praises the in-group (conservatives love America! Probably...).
On superficial skimming, Hanania seems to have mixed feelings about the outgroup (the laws are structured to incentivize wokeness in the workplace?), and also mixed feelings about the Conservative in-group, and likes to dunk on them: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/populism-makes-worse-people
I think most people have terrible views on social and political issues. It’s not that they disagree with me, but rather that they don’t make the bare minimum effort to have opinions that are logically consistent or humane. The stronger they feel about their views, in general the dumber they are. It seems to me that most people get into the world of ideas because they’re compensating for some kind of deep personal insecurity by imagining a world where their status would be higher.
This is probably fine if he wants to talk with his very specific readership and X bubble, but it's hardly surprising the unwashed masses aren't much interested in buying his book. You're probably right and there's more to him, but he comes across as something of a prick, which is all it takes to not buy his book, since not engaging with a book is the default.
Gaashk
8mo ago
We're wondering if we should try to have a third child or not. Currently we have two daughters, 4 and 1.5, and I'm 36. If we were going to try, it had better be soon. Several of my mid-thirties friends are currently pregnant with a third baby, and some others have already had three or four. I feel worried about getting pregnant, but there might be something wrong with the baby, since I'm getting older?
Gaashk
10mo ago
Speaking of fundamental things I'm missing out on... I can't figure out how to click this link? It looks like it's pointing toward "furiouslyrotatingshapes.substack.com," and when I click on that, it takes me to a Motte page search. When I paste it into my browser, it takes me to a substack that appears empty. This is not the first time this has happened to me. What am I missing?
Gaashk
1yr ago
I'm grading some district reporting requirement art tests. Each art teacher has an identical test, and grades about 300 of them a year. The current iteration is marker, crayon, pencil, and paper, where we grade them by hand, then manually enter the number for each question into a database. It is horribly tedious, because grading them requires judgement and ambiguity (is that doodle textural? It's not very good texture, but they aren't very good at drawing...), but we aren't actually learning anything very useful from them, and they aren't actually aligned with the national standards. The other teachers and district office are open to a different approach, as long as it produces a numerical score and is less useless than the current iteration. The kids have Chromebooks they could bring, if needed.
Ideally, we would be assessing the national art standards (students can come up with an idea, produce something using that idea, connect it to some existing art, and articulate what they made the choices they did), but we haven't been able to figure out a way to assess that in half an hour or so and grade it in about two minutes, so currently we're assessing elements of art and a few common concepts (line, color, texture, symmetry, variety, geometric vs organic shapes).
It there a way to design an automated test in the future, which isn't primarily a reading comprehension test?
Gaashk
18d ago
Patriarchy, gender norms, media restrictions, simplicity, social competition predicated on virtue, increased exposure to nature and an emphasis on tradition can all be emulated
What if those aren't really what make the Amish special, and you've invested all that energy, but your daughter turns out to be Aella, or the lady who wrote Quivering Daughters, or Samantha? It's not like traditional, strict, "umbrella of protection" patriarchal Protestantism has not been tried recently.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Media companies and fast food companies are pretty dissimilar, and it seems like different things are going on.
I feel fairly hostile toward media companies in general right now, and am sort of rooting for Netflix's price hikes and making households smaller and nearer to result in mass loss of subscriptions, even if it destroys the company and they cease to exist. But then I haven't paid for Netflix (or Disney+, despite having daughters who love Disney shows) for years. But that doesn't mean that it's a moral issue, exactly.
Fast food companies do seem to be genuinely struggling with high price and low quality labor costs, especially, and things are what they are for them. Which doesn't mean I'll keep buying their food, of course. At some point I'll pack my own sandwiches for road trips, though that point is not quite reached. Today we were on a short road trip, deciding between fast food and a local Asian buffet. We went with the buffet, partly because we wanted it more, but partly because it was only about $5 - $10 more for four people than the fast food. It's not wrong for Sonic to cost as much as a good buffet. I'm not outraged. I just don't really eat there anymore. I'm not in the least worried that America will run out of reasonably convenient places to eat, so it's not really a problem if a bunch of fast food chains end up going out of business. There's nothing special, wonderful, and irreplaceable about Wendy's, even if it's slightly less convenient to have to plan a trip to a grocery store for food ahead of time.
Gaashk
4mo ago
We're planning to go to old town and walk around looking at the luminarias. Maybe we will eat tamales, as is tradition.
I have a four year old, so she's really into stockings and Santa and elves and whatnot.
Gaashk
4mo ago
Do you ever feel like there are just... too many men on this planet?
No. But sometimes I feel like there are too many men who don't know or want to know how to build or maintain anything, who sit around complaining on the internet about ugly houses and poorly maintained infrastructure.
Gaashk
5mo ago
We've bought an aging manufactured home, and are trying to figure what maintenance we should do. Unfortunately, if I, as a naive person who doesn't know that much yet, try searching for information online, I just get a bunch of contractor sites telling us to hire them to do work that won't result in a clear end state that we'd be in a position to evaluate. Things like "re-level" it every three years or something (there wouldn't be much evidence whether this had been done properly or not). The only thing I've found that's clearly measurable by me at this point is "wait for the house to fall apart in some obvious way, replace it with an entirely new structure."
Are there good sources of information to help a homeowner figure out what to even hire someone to do, and how to tell if they did in fact do a good job of it?
Gaashk
6mo ago
Perhaps we're heading off in the wrong direction with Thomas Kikade and little cottages with docks on the lake to hang in the bathroom. Liberals are meant to be cutting edge individualists, but the telos of Conservative art is Mount Rushmore. There isn't a shortage of good small time traditionalists, making retablos and icons and Native American beadwork and oil paintings of the Grand Canyon and bronze sculptures of elk and so on. That's all fine, it has a thriving market. Now we have better and better image generation programs, and can make more attractive images than we know what to do with.
The big issue is that conservative American artists are all just doing their art alone, in their own small studios, maybe selling it at a local gallery or a craft fair or something, and it's hardly ever brought together to make something grand. Even conservatives themselves are probably too shamed to commission something like Mount Rushmore at present.
If you really want to see a political entity promoting some Conservative Art in Current Year, there's the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces (no, really, if you haven't see it, take a look https://youtube.com/watch?v=zYfdVnGHVEE ) Excellent details, craftsmanship, lighting, chanting -- very beautiful.
What would you be interested in seeing America build? We're unlikely to build a grand cathedral at this point. The Washington National Cathedral is quite nice, and I wouldn't mind more of that; is that what you're looking for? If you get a chance, go visit Saint Anthony's Monastery near Florence, Arizona. It's worth it just for the gardens, which are good conservative art in their own right. I want to work on a giant mosaic of Saint Innocent of Alaska or something. But Americans are too idiosyncratic. We end up with a bunch of eccentric individuals making little versions of House on the Rock instead.
When American conservatives are doing well, they end up with things like the Milwaukee Natural History Museum, the San Juan County Historical Society Mining Heritage Center, parks and plazas with life sized generals on horseback. Utah has good parks, museums, civic buildings, and at least a couple of pretty cool cathedral sorts of things. If I were Head Culture Commissioner of the Right, I would ask for more formal gardens with attractive shrines, and more things to be built from stone and carved from wood, with formal mosaics embedded in them, with spires and domes. I would absolutely not commission more little paintings of dockside cottages and Precious Moments figurines, the market can handle that just fine on its own.
I don't think very many people have a problem with things like West Side Story, with an entire culture swap?
Or things like The Princess and the Frog, where the black heroine has a reasonable place and culture. I don't remember anyone complaining about moving the setting, because it made sense.
The Little Mermaid might have been interesting if they had an entire Black Mermaid culture, complete with a black king, and a sensibly different aesthetic than Ginger Mermaids. The problem isn't that mermaids must be ginger, but that they didn't really do anything interesting with the changes, which seems lazy and boring.
It might be interesting to have an Othello where everyone is black, except Othello, who is asian or something, and the Jew is some other minority people have opinions on. But having his race stand out and get commented on suggests that he should at least look like he comes from a different group than everyone else.
The problem with lazy race or gender swapping is that it's lazy, not that it never makes sense to clothe stories in contemporary culture.
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