Gaashk
16d ago
Was he flirting with her? Were you? Was she someone you wanted to go out with?
Gaashk
16d ago
We had a baby in a 500 sq ft apartment, didn't want to continue that way, threw out and gave away a bunch of our possessions, and moved across the country in a single vehicle to a place where we could afford a 2400 sq ft house on one income for five years (though we're going to have to make some changes soon). This is fine, because we aren't working white collar finance jobs that require a city. Also, we like that kind of thing. There are real industries as well, several of the fathers in my homeschool group growing up worked for the missile company, for instance.
Inconveniently, trading kids is just not a thing in American culture, even church culture, even with cousins (or when I was a kid, actually. My introverted parents were responsible for all childcare despite living in the same area as grandparents and siblings). If the kids are invited to something, I have to stay there and supervise them the entire time, and do nothing else. Everything is Childcare, including church, and hanging out with mother friends, and going out to restaurants. C'est la vie.
Gaashk
16d ago
Now to broaden this outside of just Christianity, I'm curious what the Motte thinks of symbolism as a whole?
I remember really liking "Being as Communion" by Fr Alexander Schmemann, though it's been a while, so I don't remember it in any detail. Also "The Universe as Sign and Symbol" by Fr. Nikolai Velimirovich, though in general his poetry compilation "Prayers by the Lake" is better. In general things like holy water and blessing more things, not only Communion, is good -- we should bless things more. There's a grape blessing, blessed oil, blessed basil, and so on. This is good! I don't have a strong opinion on whether anointing people with oil from a shrine does something in particular or not, but still think that kind of thing is a good tradition.
Last night I was listening to Jonathan Pageau talk about art and stories and Orthodox art and so on, and it was mostly what everyone has known and talked about most of my whole life, but still good. (My example, not his) The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was an excellent book because it relied heavily on Christian symbolism, to the point of being basically about that, with also some sailing involved. The movie of the same was not very good because it stripped out most of the symbolism and replaced it with a video game style quest plot. If the entertainment industry were replaced by deists comfortable with Christian symbolism, that would be an improvement. His example was Snow White, both on account of the new movie, and because his small publishing company has made their own storybook version of the tale, and the illustrations do look very nice. I'm still not going to buy it, I don't like Snow White much, but would recommend it to anyone interested.
Gaashk
16d ago
Because if half the country wants them here, and can leverage the courts to ensure free education and healthcare, then they will. The US system allows cultural trench warfare, the current term of art appears to be "No Kings."
Gaashk
16d 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.
my mental model of a trucker is still a fat white guy with a hat.
There are still a lot of those, and a smaller number of black and hispanic guys, but they mostly stay in their lane, probably on cruise control, and if they get over it's because someone is stuck on the side of the freeway or something. My guess about the leapfrog guys is that they think of themselves as therefore working harder than the cruise control guys. The aggressive Indian drivers seemed to be an I-40 specific phenomenon (there are new truck stops springing up there, serving Indian food as well), it isn't noticeable on N/S highways, and was less of an issue on I-10, it looked like there were more highway patrol enforcing the laws there.
"Elefantenrennen" (elephant racing)
Haha, that's a good term, I hadn't heard it before.
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
17d ago
Parts of Chicago do it as well, despite the acceptable public transport infrastructure and decent city planning.
Gaashk
27d ago
Ultimately, even pro-choice women mostly want humanity to continue another generation. So we have a volunteer military, and volunteer motherhood. If people stop volunteering, then that society deserves their slide into irrelevance and possible subjugation that will follow.
Gaashk
27d ago
The first fear is having a child who is not, ah, as fortunate as the preceding three.
I was worried about that with my third as well, since I was around some of the kids who had lost the genetic lottery, and it really sucks. I think the odds of having an unbearably bad condition that isn't detected in early scans, and isn't caused by bad behavior on the mother's part is pretty low, though. (I did not personally get the tests done other than ultrasounds). I'm going on a road trip this week on a busy freeway, which is also not risk free, there are plenty of somewhat small risks that are worth taking.
I don't think I'll have a fourth child, especially since I'm closer to 40. My pregnancies were pretty easy, I was eight months pregnant, starting long road trips in the middle of the night and carrying around my toddler in the summer heat. The births were basically alright. It's both age and finances that would prevent me from having another. We need to be able to both work sooner rather than later, and get our finances in order, our current situation isn't long term sustainable even without an additional car payment for an expanded vehicle.
Gaashk
1mo ago
How is it? He’s one of the writers who I like in short form, but get a bit lost in his longer works.
Gaashk
1mo ago
The purpose of the beatings is to get the child to behave well, for the parents' values of what constitutes well behaved, without having to constantly fight and renegotiate. In GKGW that's defined by instant, unthinking obedience without negative repercussions rebounding on the trainer. The program is to only do one beating if they get the proper level of deference, so the winning strategy is to go with that (and it sounds like Aella did most of the time, and also relates that to her unusual tastes in drugs).
Inconveniently, that doesn't work all that well on people, or at least the children of the sort of people who defy social norms to homeschool their kids in a weird cult in a time and place where that isn't really done. Also it's bad. There may be people it does work on, though one of the several misjudgments of the program is that unthinking obedience, once achieved, isn't actually valued all that highly in the civilization these kids belong to, anyway. It doesn't even seem to be all that highly valued by the Biblical God (c.f. Jacob wrestling with the angel/God, Abraham bargaining with the angels/God, Jesus sweating blood in the garden, etc), so even from a traditional strict Christian perspective, they're very fringe in not just their methods, but also their aims.
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.
We were in an explicitly Christian homeschool group, and when I was young, my parents would take me to church and related events, weekly park meetups, and other homeschooling and church adjacent things. It was fine, I think. I don't remember too well. I was in Girl Scouts, with mixed results. I wasn't very good friends with the other girls, who went to a Christian school together. I tried attending the school for fifth grade, and dropped out after a semester, because it didn't help my social problems, and the curriculum wasn't anything better than I'd been doing at home. In retrospect, fifth grade is probably a bad time to try out school for the first time. I never tried again, but went to community college starting at 16, and liked it a lot. My husband was in Boy Scouts and had a much better experience, made it up to Eagle Scout level, but isn't sure about it anymore (and was in public school, so probably less socially needy). My parents are both bookish introverts, who did not enjoy public school and made few friends there.
As an autodidact, I had the problem I mentioned of going out into the world and assuming all sorts of things were common knowledge that...weren't. I wonder how avoidable that really is; experts are famous for forgetting that their "jargon" isn't common knowledge, after all. It may be that any good education, no matter where it comes from, will set graduates up for that. Did you have that experience too?
That wasn't much of a problem for me, but I'm closer to the average interests and IQ than, for instance, Jason in the link, and my specialization is novels and art, so all my male friends in college could out-nerd me. Also, I joined the Orthodox Church (literally Byzantine liturgics) at that time, and everyone my age there out-nerded me all the time.
I guess my main experience has been that it's important to go find the little pockets of quirky book people, and move there. I've moved a fair bit in my 20s. There are all these interesting little subcultures, interesting little Great Books colleges, interesting little bookstores that run their own seminars, all sorts of things, and I just had to kind of follow them around. My husband and I are very high in trait Openess, and we've discussed that if the kids are having a lot of trouble in the local environments, we'd probably try moving, perhaps countries, or at least across several states, as close to a first resort. Which has mostly worked for me as an adult, anyway.
Edit: Ha, my mom talks about learning to read at three, by her father "reading the newspaper to her." She was especially unhappy that mandatory bussing (there weren't even black neighborhoods, it was just because that's what the other cities were doing) disrupted her ability to even get decent friendships out of school, or bike there and back herself
Gaashk
1mo ago
What are some of the most important things you've learned since having kids?
I'm not sure. Parenting advice tends to be either vacuous, or too specific to be worth giving out generally.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I don’t think that’s fair. Who doesn’t value being young and attractive?
Sure.
I don't necessarily think that she's wrong. When four year olds are asked what they want to be, and the boys say firefighter, and the girls say princess, they aren't wrong, even if the boys could literally become firefighters whereas the girls could only metaphorically become princesses.
The karate story is weird. Plenty of parents would be upset and embarrassed if their seven year old walked into a trial karate lesson, saw that the other kids were smaller, and proceeded to throw a tantrum about it, then hide in the bathroom sobbing. That's significantly worse than the average public school kid who's parents spent way less effort instilling discipline into. It's more in line with the public school kids who have behavior action plans in place. It's not too surprising that her parents would be pretty shocked, they must have actually believed in the early obedience regime, or why go to so much trouble? It turns out they were wrong, and would have gotten better a psychological grounding by reading Notes From Underground.
I'm mildly interested in her due to the overlap of Christian homeschooling, which my childhood was adjacent to, and the Bay Area Ratosphere, which I became interested in from Scott's writings. I want one of them to write a social novel, something like Tom Wolfe, about their culture. And there are several fine writers there, but as far as I know they're all bloggers, not novelists. (Unsung excepted, but it's philosophical fantasy more than social observation)
Adding:
“aella is lazy and superficial, because child aella cried after being publicly embarassed”
Something that I find interesting about her stories is their ambiguity. It's unclear whether she was being publicly embarrassed (by her parents enrolling her in a class of much younger children), or if they were doing the normal thing, she would have worked her way out soon enough had she chosen to pursue it, and she just felt embarrassment due to social anxiety or something. I took it as the latter, because she related it to not liking to hit a piñata because the other kids would look at her, not to something most people would find humiliating. The freaking out, crying, begging her parents to let her leave, probably in front of the instructor, and trying to run away does sound very embarrassing, for both her and her parents.
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.
Yeah, that's true. And, indeed, a lot of homeschool moms of daughters, especially, still do a lot of tasks that are sort of like labor -- they'll garden, sew, raise and milk goats, make dairy products, bake, and so on. I suppose Zvi and Scott didn't talk about it because apprenticing children as writers or psychiatrists wouldn't really happen until they're well into their late teens, and able to drive and be independent anyway.
There are plenty of cultures that never had that many free range girls, but did have a lot of obligatory embroidery, lacemaking, and whatnot. There appear to have been respectability arms races in the past with who could make the most elaborate clothing that might have been about as onerous as the current saftyism idleness race.
I do want to go to art markets with my kids when they're a bit older, make crafts, raise eggs and whatnot, especially since we have summers off.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Yeah, it seems like it would certainly be desirable both for the kids to have somewhere they want to walk/bike, and to be allowed to do that.
Other countries are much more relaxed about this. Kids in Japan can ride public transport by themselves without a problem. European kids do stay outside in some cases in carriages. It works fine and I think the kids are better and less neurotic for it.
I had heard about that, though some people push back that it works because Japan is full of Japanese people, and a lot of places in Europe have also stopped allowing it lately. Like the the map about the historic childhood ranges near Rotherham.
Apparently my whole feed is late 30s bloggers writing about child rearing now, even the ones I subscribed to for the AI news.
Today it's Zvi, continuing last week's discussion from ACX about free range kids, with a side of Aella's very odd childhood and perspective on allowing children agency.
Zvi, as usual, has dozens of somewhat interesting links, and is worth checking out. A lot of it is related to the issue that reporting parents for potential abuse or neglect is costless and sometimes mandatory, but being investigated imposes fairly high costs, and so even among families that are not especially worried about their kids getting hurt walking to a friend's house or a local store, they might be worried about them being picked up by the police, and that can affect their ability to do things other than stare at screens or bicker with their parents. I have some sympathy for this. When I was growing up, inside the city limits, there weren't any kids I knew or wanted to play with in the immediate neighborhood, or any shops I wanted to go to, and my mother was also a bit worried about getting in trouble with the law, so I mostly played in the yard. But perhaps there would have been, if wandering were more normalized? I asked my parents about this, and they said that when they were younger, they also didn't necessarily have neighborhood friends they wanted to visit, and also mostly played in their own yards and houses, but they could have wandered around more if they'd wanted. That was in the 60s, and I'm not sure it's heading in the same direction as the ratosphere zeitgeist or not. My dad does remember picking up beer for his grandma as a kid, which is also mixed.
My impression of the past is mostly formed by British and Scottish novels, where lower class children would rove around in packs, causing trouble (a la Oliver Twist), and upper class children would have governesses, tutors, or go to boarding school, where they were supervised a bit less than now, or about the same amount, and the boys would oppress each other a bit. Upper class girls could go for a walk in the garden with their governess. The police probably have an interest in stopping children from forming spontaneous gangs, which the suburban families were seeking to avoid. The not firmly classed rural children (educated, able to become teachers, but not able to enter high society) are represented as roving the countryside a bit (Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, George Macdonald novels), and get into a bit of trouble, but there were only a few families around, and everyone knew who everyone was. My grandmother grew up in such a place, then divorced before it was cool, and taught in the South Pacific. I can't tell if wandering through the heather or prairie a lot is better or worse than reading lots of books and playing in the backyard.
The free range stuff, while it may be important for some people, seems a bit orthogonal to the Everything is Childcare problem (probably more about lack of extended family), since the age at which a child could feasibly be wandering the countryside or neighborhood (8? 10?) is the same age when they can be quietly reading novels or playing with their siblings or being dropped off at events while their parents drink a coffee or visit a bookstore or something. Unless that's also not a thing anymore?
Anyway, I don't necessarily have a firm conclusion to present, other than that that people are talking about it. @Southkraut gave me a bit of pushback for writing on screens in my daughter's presence, which I felt a bit bad about, but also not. I do agree with Zvi and Scott that it's probably bad if Everything is Childcare, and parents aren't allowed to read an article and post about it because the children might be infected by the proximity to a screen. (The children are painting. They have used their agency to decide that they want to paint, asked for the paints and supplies they need, and the older one has made a little notebook full of concept sketches)
Gaashk
1mo ago
Hi!
As far as I can tell, the biggest thing is that some families do quirky homeschooling because they like that kind of thing, and then maybe their ideology guide what they do for it, what books they read and groups they join, but in general they're just into that kind of thing. Bryan Caplan and David Friedman's families sound like that, my mom was like that, and this generally goes well. If it turns out the child wants a lot more structure or interactions than the parents are providing, or the parents get super stressed over the whole thing, they can find a school and go there, or do some other arrangement. This is interesting and aesthetic. How well it goes depends on both the personalities of the parents, and also the kids. I liked it quite a lot, and especially liked doing a lot of 4-H clubs and reading a lot of books. Sewing club with Jane Austen film watching and tea was lovely. College was fine, but it might be worth having the child take a real math class at some point, most families aren't up to teaching math that well even when they know it, because it's a subject that benefits from extrinsic motivation.
Other families do it for strict religious or ideological reasons, but are not really suited to it, and years later their daughters write blogs about how awful the whole thing was, but they didn't say anything at the time for fear of getting into even worse trouble. Some of my childhood friends have done that. Aella has a lot to say about it. It mostly seems to come down to situations where some super intense ideologically opinionated parents believe that Public School is Bad, and the Homeschooling is more moral, and then go on to subscribe to very specific advice about child rearing that doesn't necessarily work out for the parents or children in question. The can go either way -- intense punishment focused child rearing, or negligent attachment parenting, but with no checks, and taking it too far. It seems to go especially poorly when the children in question were adopted, and do not share a bond from infancy and similar proclivities, though biological children sometimes inherit the same personalities that led to their parents rebelling against the mainstream. Anyway, I do feel quite suspicious when some mother says that they don't necessarily like the process of homeschooling, but are doing it because her husband read some super scary articles about Groomers in the Public Schools, so now it's the Only Moral Way.
We are not currently homeschooling, and don't have any plans to. We do use tablets, though I feel a bit bad about it. Here's an interesting post from Zvi this morning on a related topic. We are very heavily in the Everything is Childcare phase of parenting, even with the public schooling, and I might have different opinions in the future. The child in public school especially really likes organized activities, structure, friends, rainbows, unicorns, and Disney princesses at this point in her life, and I might have a very different experience with another child, or at a different stage.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Also, people were bored. Nobody wanted to hear that we had solved everything and we just had to a) wait for laissez faire economic growth to solve all our problems and b) accept that anything which wasn't solving itself just had to be that way. They/we wanted change and adventure. I always think that was a big part of the response to Covid - people were longing for a Big Problem in which we could all Do Our Part.
Yeah, I think this is a big part of the Fourth Turning stuff.
Surprised he wasn't even flirting.
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