Gaashk
16d ago
Lol.
The highlight of my social life was going to people's houses for Bible studies where they recounted their dreams, a funeral wake, and "Slavicing" (visiting everyone's houses for Russian Christmas, where people exchange silverware and eat moose stew and Crisco with berries).
Gaashk
19d ago
Personally, it's less about theological points than about Beauty. Catholics built plenty of beautiful churches in the past, but the Orthodox are still building them, even though there are a lot fewer members, and so it might only be one per city. That one will generally be beautiful. They will cover it in mosaics and iconography, swing huge chandeliers on feast days, embed eagles into the tiles, have a beautiful dome with Christ looking down. Many of the churches in America are new and aren't fully finished yet, but are as beautiful as the parish is able to make them. The chanting is as beautiful as the choir members are able to make it, depending on local skill levels. They do generally work pretty hard at it, and still care about the beauty in a way that Catholics used to, but often don't anymore, even when they've inherited grand and storied cathedrals. They're one of very, very few groups that are still making everything as beautiful as they're able to in Current Year, which is almost as important as theology. Of course Dostoyevsky, coming from an Orthodox tradition, would say "beauty will save the world."
I grew up Evangelical, and joined the Orthodox Church in college, when there was a Greek mission inhabiting a lovely old Catholic Church within walking distance of my dorm. I like standing silently, and liked learning to cook tofu and lentils from my charming Greek Godmother, and it was all very lovely. It continued to be lovely when I moved for a Great Books program, and found a church within walking distance, with a wonderful, experienced priest who I could listen to for hours, and did. I went to Matins, Vespers, Paraklesis, book clubs, and anything else that was happening there. And then I was in the Republic of Georgia, which has wonderful old churches and a lot of energy from rebuilding after communism, and also a very beautiful chant tradition.
The small children in Georgia came and went, I think, though I didn't watch them closely. They looked like they spent a lot of time playing in the courtyard (and there were courtyards for them to play in). I think that Orthodoxy does have room for families that walk up the hill to the church who's names day it is to light a candle and have a party. They would spread feasts (Supras) during fasting periods, and some of the people wouldn't eat some of the things, especially the women, but it wasn't that big a deal, they would still cook roast chicken for whoever wanted it. But Americans aren't like that, and ultimately my husband and I are American, and feel miserable coming and going from the church service to the children's room and back as necessary.
So every once in a while I post here about how I don't know what to do. The plan has been Just Do It for about five years now, and maybe one of these years it will take. My husband is more willing to go to an Orthodox Church with me than any other kind of church, was enthusiastic about naming the children after saints, having icons in the house, and playing Russian chants on the speakers. He's not at all enthusiastic about standing still and getting small children to be still for three hours, and would probably be happy as an alter server (or any role, really, other than getting the children to be still) if only we could Just Do It long enough to get there.
Gaashk
13d ago
I figured people were mostly driving to their friend's house, or a bar (or other location, such as fishing), drinking there, and driving home sooner than is a good idea. I've never actually heard of an American drinking in the car. There are lots of signs at parks about not bringing glass bottles, but I don't think I even disapprove of them buying a pack of cold beers, driving to a park, drinking it with their friends, then driving home -- just that they shouldn't be drinking the whole pack by themselves. Authorities clearly don't care about it, since they allow bars to serve not only beer, but hard liquor, in places that clearly need to be driven to, full of people who very obviously drove by themselves, and are not carpooling with a designated driver (nor is there public transport available).
Gaashk
19d ago
No, I wouldn't have even pretended. I would, at worst, have sighed a bit at his puns.
Gaashk
3mo ago
There's a fair bit of talk both in person and in the news about downsizing the Department of Education, possibly moving student loan servicing to another department, and federal requirements around students with special accommodations.
I'm interested if anything will happen with the (massive! extremely expensive!) special education edifice.
Some articles from the past couple days:
- "Trump's Education Secretary Doesn't Know What IDEA Is and Special Needs Parents Are Outraged"
- "As Education Department Slashes Nearly Half Its Staff, Special Ed Worries Mount"
- The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)
I've been personally hearing a lot more (hushed, furtive) negative talk among teachers about IEPs and small groups (children who aren't able to be in a regular classroom due to their conditions) lately, though that could just be my own work environment. Like many controversial things, there are usually a few children who are essentially black holes in the context of large systems, such that while most children will need and be given, say, 1/10 of an adult's attention (and learn the material), two or three will end up with five full adult's attention (and it's entirely unclear whether or if they're learning anything). There are some children in the middle, who may need the attention of one adult, but will then clearly learn things and become productive members of society, and they are generally not talked about negatively, even though it's rather expensive. It might still be less expensive in the long run, anyway.
I have mixed feelings about it. Kids with various conditions should have as good a life as reasonably possible. Their parents and siblings shouldn't necessarily be expected to stop everything to support them full time for the rest of their lives. But at what cost? It's not reasonable to deprive their classmates, who might have a condition but be able to learn curricular things of an education. It's not reasonable to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on interventions to obtain a tiny improvement in the utility of one person.
Apropos Zvi's recent post on education, it's probably not even reasonable to keep dragging a child who's clearly miserable with an enormous school and is trying to run away most days through a daily cycle of "transitions" the they hate every 40 minutes or so (sometimes every five or ten, in the classrooms that use "rotations" with bells and special behaviorist noises).
Perhaps nothing will come of it. Should the edifice change? in what way?
Gaashk
13d ago
Thanks for the update! I don't necessarily have anything useful to say about it, other than that it does, indeed, sound cultish and destructive.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I worked at a large corporate coffee chain for a while, and the entire charm of the job was a series of short, easy, straightforward interactions. Someone wanted a mediocre but predictable latte and a smile. I would smile and make them a latte. It was positive and predictable for all concerned. Everyone was happiest during the rush phase of the day, when these small positive interactions happened in quick succession. Everyone was least happy during the slow part, when we had to engage in daily cleaning tasks like restrooms, mopping, drains, and sometimes odd customers who would try to chat about my ethnic background or something.
The interaction described above sounds quite unpleasant from the perspective of the worker, more than remaking a coffee. But, yeah, mostly it's because he isn't actually a customer.
Gaashk
1mo ago
When one of my nephews was a kid, they were very sensitive and lacking in confidence, so his parents signed him up for a taekwondo class. And he did like it, and it made a huge difference in coming out of his shell.
That might be one of the strategies that's kind of male coded, and much more likely to work on a boy than a girl. As annoying as it is in adventure stories, there are valid reasons why the male characters go through training that has elements of hazing, and the female characters generally don't. (So I would prefer to have less of the silly "classic adventure story, but now a WOMAN who realizes she's actually great already and doesn't need to be trained all that much" films). Aella really likes being valued more for her innate characteristics than for accomplishments she has to work hard for, and I'm unsurprised she didn't connect with the prospect of working hard at karate to advance swiftly past the toddlers around her. But I guess I'm also unsurprised that her father would be annoyed by that, and want a young Aella training montage instead.
Gaashk
19d ago
It's more that it stresses my husband out than that other people are actually judging us. He's very much a walk up a hill, light a candle, walk around it three times kind of churchgoer, as were many of the men in Georgia. He's spent some time in Muslim areas, and liked the part where he would get up on the middle of the night to eat dates for Ramadan, or go to a cow slaughtering or something.
Gaashk
19d ago
Different worlds.
Grandparents, aunts, and uncles don't necessarily charge money money or complain. But they don't necessarily do anything, either. My uncles and aunts, who were on reasonably good terms in general, never ever babysat my brother or I. My parents never, ever babysat my younger cousin. They just didn't. We still got together for holidays. I tried to meet up with some in-laws to introduce the cousins, but it didn't work out, they were a bit busy, this seems normal, I guess. I went to a wedding with three young children, and got some compliments on managing them, but no offers of help.
My parents and in-laws will watch the kids sometimes, a couple of nights a year, if we make all the arrangements to get together and find a space.
Gaashk
20d ago
Was he flirting with her? Were you? Was she someone you wanted to go out with?
I just got off of a road trip on I-40, and mostly want to register my dismay at the state of the semi truckers there, related to 3 and especially #4. It is Culture War, because most of the truckers in question are Indian.
Truckers should all go the same speed in the right lane of a two lane highway! They should not be leapfrogging each other, trapping small vehicles between them, as they pass excruciatingly slowly, often on hills and curves! If they cannot manage this, their trucks should be on autopilot the entire time they're on the interstate! It is both unsafe and extremely annoying, drivers often can't even use adaptive cruise control if available, because the truckers will cut them off in the left lane, then go 10mph slower.
Also a bit related to #5, commercial trucks should not be cutting smaller vehicles off, with or without signaling, ever, and I do have a lot of sympathy for people who speed up into their spaces to avoid having stuff flung into their windshield from a poorly secured truck, even hay is pretty annoying, but the gravel trucks have big signs saying "not responsible for cracked windshields," and indeed it's pretty hard to prove to the police. I once had a crowbar fly off a truck and impale my windshield, nearly killing the front passenger.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I left the Motte for a week, because I felt kind of embarrassed and irritated based on last time I tried posting here, but did want to post on this.
Anyway, yes, it came across as very odd, especially from Caplan. I had more sympathy for Scott, since he did not write a book about how easy raising kids is, has young twins, and comes across as more self deprecating.
Both Scott and Caplan are writers, which is unusually incompatible with small children. I've mentioned before that I really enjoyed Virginia Woolf's take on that in A Room of One's Own -- mothers were almost never writers, even when they were educated for it, since writing (and she was focusing on poetry) takes an unbroken chain of thought through multiple hours of the day. I would be interested to hear more about George MacDonald's writing habits, since he was poor by modern standards, and he and his wife raised eleven children, and he was en unusually excellent writer. All his stories have the characters wandering around among the heather at sunrise, thinking, and I imagine him doing the same. It's probably no coincidence that his best work is in fairy tales, so he probably told them to his children. David Friedman talks about how much more he enjoyed his children once they learned to read. Dickens sounds like he had a pretty tumultuous home life.
I listened to a storyteller a few months ago, who tells stories to rooms full of children at schools, and also publishes books. He said that his process is to tell the stories to the children first, a lot of times, for months and months, maybe dozens of times, see what gets good responses, and then writes it down afterwards. That's my impression of ancient storytellers as well. I knew a priest who told unusually excellent sermons, but almost never wrote them down, but I think his process was similar: he would watch the people in real time, and iterate off of that. Scott doesn't seem to have a process anything like that, as much as I like Unsung and shorts like the one about the Hinge of History, and wish he would write more fables.
There was a passage in The Road to Wigan Pier, as I recall, where Orwell was talking about how the British underclass weren't really educated to be literate, but that when charity workers would come around and offer books and classes they mostly weren't interested, and Orwell thought that was just as well, reading and writing weren't much compatible with the lives they were leading. Which seems reasonably likely. There's a lot of noise about lower than hoped for literacy rates in America, <a href=https://kittenbeloved.substack.com/p/college-english-majors-cant-read">where "literacy" is, for instance, understanding and appreciating something like Bleak House, but the hoped for outcomes of that campaign are under discussed. I remember my uncle (who owned multiple businesses, was athletic and had a teacher wife and three children) talking to my dad (who reads Kierkergaard out of personal interest) about not reading books. He didn't like reading books, he liked playing sports and doing business stuff. He was probably functionally illiterate, by the Bleak House test. That might be a perfectly valid strategy, actually! Meanwhile, the kids are in bed, and I'm here writing this, which isn't necessarily an improvement, or any more civilizationally useful, even if I can read Dickens just fine.
Gaashk
12d ago
Interesting, I wonder if there's any way to tell whether that practice is contributing to crashes very much.
My intuition would be no, in comparison to drinking tequila or vodka at a bar, but maybe I'm wrong.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I am not a stay at home wife, but both husband and I have tried it out, and it is not significantly easier than paid work, and we're both more prone to depression when house parenting than most jobs we've had.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Yeah, I think most of the state is mostly Democrat because they want to use the oil money for daycare, extra school, extra Medicaid, and whatnot. But not the "LGBTQ for 5 year olds" kind of school, just the "too bad we don't have more high achieving kids here, maybe we can teach the ones we have to read and do math if they just sit in a classroom for more hours" kind. It's not like the sheriffs want to enforce the governor's orders about disallowing guns or wearing masks alone in the desert, so they don't.
Gaashk
7mo ago
There's some battle of the sexes going on, but 44% of women still voted for Trump, and an actual majority of white women. The very active pro-life organizations that are out running crisis pregnancy centers, right to life dinners, and petitions for heartbeat lives are largely supported by women.
(unedited, meandering thoughts)
Something seems to be going on, not just between men and women, but just as importantly, women and their mothers. There seem to be a lot of women, of the making histrionic remarks on Facebook variety, who are into looking at the faults of their mothers, and "re-parenting" themselves at 35. I've heard from acquaintances about their mothers gently nudging them about how if they want a family, now is the time to do it, they're in their 30s, there won't be another chance -- and the women getting frustrated and offended about that. Why are Korean mothers in law so demanding? It sounds like they've had hard lives, but also they're not stupid, and should have noticed their bad reputation, and that they're scaring the younger women. From the thread below, LLL has been important partly because mothers stay out of their daughters' business when it comes to childbirth and feeding of infants, though sometimes they step in to babysit every now and again.
I was listening to a podcast a few weeks ago, where they were talking about the female archetype with Maiden, Mother, and Crone, and how the Mother and Crone archetypes are currently rather broken. There aren't very many older women I respect and want to be like. My own mother is fine, and it's basically fine if I'm like her, but I feel this in general, like older women are kind of just playing around, with very little purpose. Perhaps this is related to the trivializing of women's work and running the household. I was reading the other day about Matushka Olga of Alaska (1916 - 1979), who's community considers her a saint because she was well loved, a good midwife, and was always making warm clothing to give to people. They talk about people in the other villages wearing socks and mittens she made for them, and how happy they were about it. George MacDonald is a lovely writer, who's books are full of very old but still lively grandmothers and great grandmothers at their spinning wheel. Sometimes they spin wool, or magical thread that will let the adventurers always find their way home. He said he remembered going to his grandmother's little cottage, where she was always spinning, back when that was important and necessary work, and loved the sound of the spinning wheel, and the stories of his grandmother. My godmother knitted me a huge wool scarf that I would wrap up to my nose when the cold winter winds blew, for years. I moved a few times with only a suitcase since then, but it was the coziest scarf I've ever warn, with both wool and effort.
It's nice that I can just order a totally adequate coat online for less than four hours of labor and have it delivered to my house, where my dishwasher and laundry machine are running in the background. But despite quite a lot of training in home economics sorts of tasks, I don't make much of anything, because it feels redundant. Many of the women in my community make art, and sometimes I go to the local gallery, or the studio tour. It's nice to paint the hills, or "work with printed textures" or whatever, but it seems disconnected and trivial, like it's a visual expression of a crisis of meaning. The whole lifestyle of sending a six week old baby to daycare so you can go file papers in an office to pay the mortgage in the neighborhood with the adequate schools so that your daughter can get a college degree so that she can send her newborn infant to daycare while she sends emails thing is... not ideal. And then you retire and go to workshops where you paint the hills or make abstract acrylic collages or something, and babysit the grandkids a couple of times a year, if you're fortunate enough to have any grandkids. It sounds a lot worse in S Korea. You work in some dull office all day to send your kid to cram school at night so that she can go to college to get a job that lets her send her kid to cram school. Nobody receives love and recognition for vacuuming her mother in law's house every day.
Maybe I'll take my kids to church tomorrow. Apparently they had a tamale making event today, and a potluck tomorrow. They built a new building, with a metal dome that's still under construction, and it looks rather nice. Someone is hand carving an iconostasis.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I'll tell you what the real scissor statement part of that story is - I can't possibly have been the only guy to read this guy explain how he told his girlfriend he was cold and immediately think 'cuck' can I?
I wouldn't take it that far, but do also feel that stealing a scarf because your man is cold seems more snarky than caring. Could be in a fun, flirty way, it would depend on specifics.
If it's actually cold, because it's cold out and he isn't dressed warmly enough, go into the hotel and drink a coffee with him. A scarf won't help all that much. What, the hotel happened to have one of those enormous chunky knit wool scarves on hand that's kind of a long blanket? Really? If he's not particularly cold and is just saying stuff, the way everyone in Phoenix mentions that it's hot every day, then a scarf will also not help, there's nothing to be helped. I have a lot of scarves, and do like wearing them as wraps, but no man would be willing to do anything like that unironically.
Gaashk
5mo 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
19d ago
I can't say I've never encountered communities like this, but certainly not in the US. I know some Albanian families overseas who wouldn't consider it unusual and a bit of an imposition to babysit at below market rates.
you could do her job perfectly well
While it's true that he could almost certainly do all the actual tasks, it's very likely that he couldn't do it happily, without becoming bored and alienated, which is actually quite rare and valuable. Assuming, of course, that his description is accurate.
Have you read the recent ACX post about Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids? I want to have a top level post about it, but haven't thought of anything interesting to say for that. I enjoy Scott's honesty about being an introverted professional writer with twin babies and a wife who's probably something like him, and very much not a Christian twenty-something who's happy about vacuuming. His wife is apparently staying with the kids, but he feels guilty (presumably she's overwhelmed, not happily keeping a clean house and warm meals), and hires a nanny. Even with the nanny and wife at home, they are still overwhelmed.
Scott:
I was curious enough about this that I emailed Bryan and asked him how much time he spent on childcare when his kids were toddlers. He said about two hours a day for him, one hour for his wife. Relatives and nannies picked up the rest.
Which is just such a funny exchange.
Neither Scott nor Caplan sound like they could successfully do the non childbearing parts of Mrs. TitaniumButterfly's work.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Yes, and overly sensitive and socially non-compliant children are a big problem in public schools as well, who have to take them if their parents choose to send them. The staff talk about how it's because nobody is allowed to give any consequences that matter, but Aella's stories, along with other people I've heard from who grew up under the GKGW regimen suggests otherwise -- that there's really no amount of consequences that will prevail over certain very noncompliant personalities. They'll spend four years fighting with their parents about their internet friends and then run away, if necessary. Actually I want a Dostoyevsky novel about Aella's family more than a Tom Wolfe one.
I can't find it right now, but there was a post on Darcy's blog (not an influencer, kind of a small blog) where she was taking her kids to a natural history museum, and was breaking down (an adult, a mother), experiencing PTSD triggers, thinking about how her own mother believed in young earth creationism! So terrible! Very scary! My own mother was also into creationism things, and it was totally fine. Maybe they were wrong. They were probably wrong. But they were nice, and liked to talk about Mount St Helens and the way eyeballs work and whatnot. My theory is that very intense parents, who get all worked up over geologic ages, produce very intense children who get all worked up over all sorts of things, from both nature and nurture sides.
Gaashk
20d ago
I'm not sure what the rules are for truck drivers in America, but it was pretty visibly the more established white truck drivers who were hanging out in the right lane, and the new immigrant truck drivers who were passing. If there are laws punishing new drivers who are acting the same as old responsible drivers, then, sure, those are bad laws.
Also, a lot of this could be resolved by increasing stupid 70mph speed limit (113km/h) on highways to 80 or 85 as in Europe, so you can catch up if you are inconvenienced for 30 seconds behind a truck or other vehicle.
This suggests lack of familiarity with American interstates in multiple ways.
- Yes, of course the other drivers can go 80 - 85 most of the time, the cops do not enforce 70 - 75 at all. That is largely why they are upset when they are cut off by a vehicle going 75.
- Cath up? To whom? It isn't exactly about getting home 10 minutes sooner. It's mostly about not being sandwiched between large trucks.
- It's probably 5 minutes inconvenience per vehicle, spread out over a two to eight hour drive, so maybe an hour or two of being in irritating and unsafe conditions over the course of a day of driving.
The alternative is to fly, but in the American West not only is it expensive for a full car's worth of people, you still have to rent a car at the destination, and even rent car seats.
Gaashk
1mo ago
A SYSTEMIC ISSUE THAT IS EFFECTING EVERYONE IN EVERY COUNTRY SIMULTANEOUSLY
Wait.
America doesn't have enough eligible bachelorettes because it has too many promiscuous fat single moms.
(maybe, I don't have an opinion about that)
But South Korea has even fewer marriages, because their women simply don't want to be wives and mothers, it's worse than just working. Despite the women being much more likely to be thin and simply not bother having sex at all.
So we should... execute the attractive cads, get rid of welfare, and ban dating apps until (looks at South Korea) we are left with a lot of celibate women working in low wage labor?
So you could go farther down the hole. You could ban the women from working even rather sad little jobs outside the home. Then they'll become hot trad wives!
Perhaps we should just have another war at that point and let the men kill each other. The King David solution.
Or bring back subsistence farming, that has a proven track record.
I hadn't heard that, but unless the baby is born in late spring or summer, a woman in America is expected to return to work within three months of giving birth. If she breaks her contract by resigning mid year, that isn't great for her record, though teaching tends towards chronic shortage, so she's likely to find another job sometime anyway.
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