Bad Therapy is largely about that kind of thing. The premise is that there are always risks to any intervention, and when the target audience isn't suffering from debilitating mental illness, the risks outweigh the benefits.
My father experienced something similar with his sister, due to a "repressed memories" therapist.
The identity preference ratchet is something else, though, from what I've heard. Something more like Marxist class warfare, but for identity groups. Cain and Able, Kulaks, misdirected Leviathan, that kind of thing.
There might sometimes be a steel man for people to use HR scary words about discrimination and toxic environments when they really just have kind of a shitty manager who's bad at managing or something. As far as I can tell, unless it's absurdly obvious and well documented, if an employee complains that their manager is bad at their managing job, they will be met with disinterest, possibly irritation towards them, rather than the manager. Perhaps they will get in trouble for wanting clear directives or trying to enforce their own boundaries in the face of the shitty manager at some point. They will probably not get a better manager. If they go on about HR scare words, on the other hand, the company will go out of its way to protect them from reprisal, and they might actually get put under someone else. That's a win for the employee! So that's what they're incentivized to do.
Gaashk
29d ago
Second this, and also plenty of places are still very nice to travelers even when they don't have much money, either because it's fun, or because their culture demands it. Perhaps both. I've wandered around the Republic of Georgia as an average looking young foreign woman, and they were universally both extremely hospitable (impromptu BnB in their house for cheap, free wine, show me around town, introduce me to their local English speaker), and fairly protective. People would think it very shameful if a foreigner got in any kind of scary situation in their town. Kind of the same ethos as Abraham and family, or the Odyssey -- you deserve the wrath of the gods if you aren't hospitable to wanderers.
Gaashk
1mo ago
One of the odder real life interactions I've had with a (presumably) trans woman was at a ranger station. Women rangers wear pants and don't wear makeup while at work. But this male one was wearing a skirt and makeup. Clearly he was making a statement, rather than trying to blend in with his female co-workers.
In my experience, restaurant trips with a four year old are fairly rushed, but as others say, it depends on the four year old, and how much they like the event in question. The local fancy tea house allows children starting at four, so presumably there are some kids that age that do well. IME, four year old girls especially are really incentivized by wearing pretty dresses, drinking from fancy dishes, and getting pretty treats, and will try to behave well to be trusted with fancy things and experiences. I have less experience with little boys, but could certainly see them working to be able to choose from a buffet or something.
I don't necessarily find it very helpful to think about taking young children to formal events in terms of discipline. I wouldn't expect them to be able to behave for vague reasons like "this will embarrass my parents" or "I will get yelled at an hour from now." If the situation is very uncomfortable, and they aren't all that naturally compliant, they will whine and nag, and a parent will probably have to remove them and go for a walk around the building or something. If they're crying loudly over a long period of time in a restaurant, then the parent is not acting very responsibly, and probably shouldn't have brought them.
Also, working in an elementary school, it's pretty clear that 1/10 of children or so are just not cut out for quiet, slow, calm activities, and even when there's something they want to earn, they just have a terribly hard time controlling themselves, and mostly fail.
Another thought - time of day is still important at that age. Tired children are not usually well behaved children.
Gaashk
6mo ago
Looking at the article, it seems clear that the main problem isn't exactly the $5,000, but rather that she spent it descending into addiction and uselessness while an unemployed adult.
"I went to rehab and then spent several months living with my parents until saving enough to rent a closet-size room in L.A. From there, I tried to engage in the “healthy” activities sober people are supposed to love. But there was no amount of hiking, hot yoga, or acai bowls that could stop me from constantly fucking up, and every relapse got progressively worse until I stopped trying altogether." If this were a working class man, people would have given up on him by now.
It reminds me a little bit of that piece from a decade or so ago by a woman who was raised middle class, got a degree in English or something, and then alienated her family and spent several years slumming in cheap hotel rooms, writing about spearing roaches and feeling exhausted all the time. I think it was this person https://www.wesjones.com/ehrenreich.htm
Clearly, not a "substantial person," that's the point.
Gaashk
7mo 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.
Gaashk
11mo ago
And yet, she’s still the standard, still frequently adapted, still culturally important in a way that Marvel Girl Boss is not.
That isn’t necessarily to say there aren’t any important contemporary female protagonists, just that there’s no reason they are or should be catering to heroic male action expectations.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I recently saw an item in my newfeed about The American Exchange Project
That looks fun and interesting, but very short. At only a week, it seems unlikely much exchanging will be going on, aside from generic high school acquaintance making. I looked at a town I'm familiar with, and all the choices look... fine... but very clearly vacation based.
Gaashk
4mo ago
The same reasoning as voting for anyone in the primaries: preferring him to the competition, or believing he could drum up more enthusiasm in the general election than the competition, or not really paying attention and recognizing his name more than others.
At least he has already been president, and mostly just produced a lot of media drama and didn't get as much done as some had hoped. There are worse things.
Gaashk
5mo ago
They add their underage children (or of age, but that's less relevant) as an authorized user to a specific credit card. Paid in full, on time, utilizing ~7-15% of limit, and increasing limit every 6 months-year... kid could reach adulthood with a perfect score and many years of reliable history.
I taught a middle school personal finance class for a credit union a while back, and the advice was basically this, or to at least get a credit card at 18, even if you don't need it (especially when you don't need it!) use it a bit, and pay it off in full each month.
At the same time, the American finance system seems reasonably lenient on young people with steady jobs. I walked into a car dealership with no credit but an annual work contract, and walked out with a decent car. The interest rate wasn't great, but it was in an era of very low rates, so I didn't notice that much. This was financed through the (used) dealer, and it might be much harder for someone with no credit history to finance a car they found online. As it probably should be? Many people are unable to evaluate cars on their own, independently of general trustworthiness.
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.
Data Secrets Lox seems to have more wives and mothers than here, so you might get more useful responses there (but keep in mind, they're spending time on DSL, suggesting that that's the online community of like minded people they've found, not somewhere else...)
I've been watching things like this lately https://youtube.com/@TheCottageFairy
I am also wondering about this question, with the impression that it may be underspecified.
What's missing (at least for me) isn't talking about children, animals, food, church, whatever. What's missing is actually doing those things together. I do not want to talk about preserving fruit -- I want to get together and preserve fruit. I think some of the other moms feel similarly, but none of us is good at organization, so the best we manage is going to the zoo or museum together every couple of months. I don't really want to talk about education, I would much rather form an educational co-op, the moms in my community are mostly better educated than the average school teacher, but again... organization. Other moms have mentioned kind of wishing that we all lived closer together, so that we could form some sort of loose commune sort of thing, but I don't think that's exactly it, either, so much as norms around not going to others houses casually or without a lot of warning and coordination. I lived in some other places on the edge of Europe where that was not the case.
The natural mode of socialization with women and small children should probably be something like handwork, like all the old stories with the mother spinning or baking or weaving or something, and talking at the same time. We should do this together, but I am also not an organizer, and we were all socialized into reading all day every day as kids. I'm starting to see some of the downsides of that culture. I listen to podcasts (with at least two people discussing something; I've been listening to Personality Hacker and selected Jordan Peterson interviews lately) while I do handwork, because it has some of that effect.
In my case, I'm mostly bringing this on myself by not going to church, because I find the specifics of my own church very stressful with small children. This is mostly because the church service does not include built in activity, except some parishes that have the boys help serve in the alter, so it's a really stressful back and forth, in and out of the service, scolding the children for speaking too much or too loudly, the children confused, frustrated, and bored.
Edit: If your kids are at least 10, and you live in the US, I'd recommend 4-H. Lots of down to earth families, and moderately structured, goal based activities; my mom and I both made a decent number of friends this way when I was a child and teen.
Gaashk
9mo ago
I recommend taking a look at the Saint John's College reading list (https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-books-reading-list)
Gaashk
2mo ago
On vouchers, I tried to look up what's happening in Arizona, since it passed a pretty expansive voucher program a couple of years ago, but it's hard to find much information aside from the standard "democrats think it's bad" and "republicans think it's good, and also costs less per student than public schools." An article says there are currently 68,455 enrolled in the voucher program, with $7,200 available per child, vs $13,000 per public school student. I would expect the very high needs children to be in the public education system, and for it to be basically impossible to create private programs on that voucher budget that meets federal requirements, but haven't heard anything about it. Google says that responsiblehomeschooling.org says there are 38,983 homeschoolers (but the link is dead now?), which would make almost twice as many voucher students as homeschoolers. I don't see any qualitative reports on what kinds of schooling arrangements people are choosing, so it's kind of hard to have an informed opinion. I'm basically in favor, since as far as I've heard from people like Caplan and DeBoer, kids learn about as much in any modern, structured educational setting, so they might as well do it somewhere they and their families like. But all the articles are biased (mostly from the anti side), so it's hard to tell how things are going.
Gaashk
4mo ago
There's a new Open Thread on ACX today.
Am I just imagining it, or were SSC open threads way more interesting a few years back? I remember spending an unreasonable amount of time reading them, and would re-load them and scroll through hundreds of pages of half read comments to see updates. Now they seem kind of dull for the most part?
Adding: also, they seem more difficult to participate in. If I do ever comment, someone either slaps it down dismissively, or there's simply no response.
Another thought: maybe all the interesting stuff is happening on the hidden open threads?
Gaashk
7mo ago
The moderately charitable interpretation is that she feels that you have said, about her friends, without knowing them very well, that they are transparently shallow in important (to them) areas of their lives. And, by extension, that she has poor taste in friends. Depending on how important the friends have been to her, and how seriously she takes them, that could hurt a lot. It doesn't do much to assuage these hurt feelings to say that you will be base level polite the one time this might come up. You said you've so far met one, once. How often do you actually use pronouns for a person to their face? While also still thinking she has poor taste in friends, and that her friends are pretentious and shallow(one possible interpretation).
Something that she might like, and that wouldn't necessarily be a lie on your part, would be to assume an attitude of curiosity about her interpretation of her friends' actions. Why does she think they identify as nonbinary? Why is she friends with them? What does she like about them? Does she really think it likely that the two of you might have children who turn out trans or nonbinary, unexpectedly, and should be fully supported in that? That would be more cause for concern than that she wants to defend her friends.
There are people I like (nay, respect! Admire!) who are into astrology. I'm not completely sure why. My best guess is that astrology is a way to talk about personality and life event things that are otherwise harder to talk about, the way I tend to use personality systems. But, also, it seems like it might be interesting to have a respectful, curiosity rather than incrimination based discussion about it, as a thing I know very little about. But if my husband said that they liked it for some distasteful reason that implied they were bad people, I would be angry about that.
Gaashk
10mo ago
I do agree with this interpretation.
Allegedly, Lewis said in response to a letter asking about Susan's further story: “I could not write that story myself. Not that I have no hope of Susan’s ever getting to Aslan’s country; but because I have a feeling that the story of her journey would be longer and more like a grown-up novel than I wanted to write. But I may be mistaken. Why not try it yourself?” (The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 3: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy; I did not check the reference myself to see if it was real)
Lewis, in contrast to his critics but in keeping with much of Christianity, does seem to believe that it's something of a tragedy for a woman to grow up, be in sexual relationships, and intentionally prevent herself from bearing children. That not preparing for children aspect seems part of what Polly is getting at about staying in that lipstick and nylons stage as long as possible and not continuing to grow up, and her condemnation thereof. I remember Merlin chastising Jane in That Hideous Strength for being on birth control, saying that she could have conceived a great Arthurian hero, but the time is past, and now he will never exist.
Now that I think of it, there does seem to be a dearth of good novels that I, at least, have read, with fully adult women as protagonists, compared with fully adult men. Middle aged, they either did or didn't end up married with children after at least one sexual relationship, but the story isn't entirely about the children. It seems like middle aged woman stories tend to be sad, and perhaps the one Lewis didn't want to write would have been. The best job of it I can remember off the top of my head is Tolstoy.
Gaashk
10mo ago
Turchin's opinion of Stalin seemed somewhere between neutral and "he got the job done," and seems basically neutral about piles of skulls in general. Sure, he would prefer not to be shot in a purge, but he's also something of a Tolstoyan -- things happen as they must, because of the forces of history, and sometimes all the cliodynamics professors are sent to the hard labor camps for world historical reasons. He's very Slavic, and not much of an optimist about this.
He seems to like the New Deal era partly because, unlike the Civil War, it did not result in piles of skulls. He also speaks well about British colonialism, because at least it wasn't their empire that was falling apart at the time.
Gaashk
10mo ago
Despite spending more time here than is healthy, none of this context looks familiar. What are you referencing? An insular Twitter fight?
Hasn't it only been about 5 years now that society has been worried about population collapse?
My mother remembers Population Bomb rhetoric when she was younger. Google says China only ended their one child policy in 2016. The trends are probably just moving too fast. If you tell a whole generation they're destroying the world by having children, it surely takes some time to pull that back with "we didn't mean you, women who were already having 2.5 children! We meant the Nigerian ones having 7 children in desperate poverty! (But, also, global warming is a very terrible disaster, you should feel bad)"
I think the Christian perspective is something like that marriage is hard, but it's alright to ask hard things of people. Traditional cultures also ask people to do things like serve in the military, fast, and stand multiple hours for public ceremonies. Orthodox churches have crowns instead of vows, and one of the several symbols involved is "crowns of martyrdom." Is staying married to an angry, unpleasant man and bearing his children as hard an ask as fighting in a war? I don't know, I've never done either, but maybe it is! And if we have a norm of people in general never needing to do hard things, it isn't surprising that the same would be true of marriages.
Gaashk
12d ago
The workers at my local Costco always seemed noticeably polite and efficient, especially compared to the neighboring Sam's Club workers, so they're probably earning it.
Working in schools has good hours, good breaks, decent benefits if they decide to become full time teachers, the same hours as your kids if they end up having kids, very portable if you decide to move, and school stabbings are quite rare almost everywhere, especially ones involving staff members and their non-gang affiliated kids.
Gaashk
17d ago
That's only managerial class and above Americans. Plenty of Americans have kids while renting, even in smallish apartments.
Gaashk
26d ago
There may be something to the accusation that some jobs have been set up in a way to favor people who are very good at showing up with to the minute timing, writing emails and reports, and other things that are convenient for managers but not exactly about the work being done, such that it's more convenient to manage a small white woman moving a few boxes than a strong black man moving many larger, heavier boxes, because her m in general office skills and agreeableness are higher. This seems to happen a fair bit in government positions, where there might be several support white women writing grants for some minority local agricultural program or something. I've seen it in politics, with full time non-minority positions devoted to "centering minority voices" in marketing materials.
I'm most familiar with education, and do sometimes see this happen. People often talk about the degree barrier, and schools being organized like mid-century factories. Recently, I saw a situation where a minority community is required to hire an art teacher. The specific community is rich in professional artisans, that and views of nature is all they're known for. But they have to hire someone with a college degree, additional education classes for certification, who can run classes that are cleaned up and ready to leave exactly when the bell rings, do a moderate amount of accurate paperwork, and write some reports. So they get an outsider. They are not allowed to exchange this position for a business or finance teacher, which they might be more in need of. This is a bit silly and wasteful. The skills for m, training the next generation of artisans is not the same as m fitting into a tightly scheduled, interlocking education system that's stressed about specials teachers providing "preps" for the homeroom teachers, and the bureaucratic money goes towards the latter.
That isn't to say that I generally agree with the woke take that surely if you removed barriers we could achieve "equity," especially in high education and prestige positions. But the structure of at least some jobs (probably the kinds of jobs the average woke activist is most familiar with) are not very tightly linked to their ostensible goal.
Huh. I am a woman, working primarily with women, and don't recall ever hearing any comments like that. I have heard people ascribe poor managerial tactics partly to the manager in question being a woman, and that a man wouldn't do that/get away with that. Also some comments about why the (mostly female managers) are not very good around "well of course it's hard to fill that role, with a lot of responsibility and not much more pay. I certainly wouldn't take the position." Different worlds, and all that, I suppose.
I've also lived a while in several native communities, and only experienced that attitude from a smattering of sullen teenagers. Shrug
In general, I would say, the healthier/less oppressed feeling women are generally at least as involved in their family and religious responsibilities as their job, and think of it as "a job," a way to make money for their other interests and responsibilities, not some kind of Career, Vocation, or Quest. The healthier Native American folks are invested both in multi generational family stuff, and heritage art/food/language projects. A kid out on some tundra who likes smoking fish, hunting moose, making stuff out of fur, and singing at church is... fine. As fine as pretty much anyone.
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.
More options
Context Copy link