Gaashk
1d ago
I don't think Americans think that about most wars we get involved with, either. There's rarely a chance to vote against them.
Gaashk
1d ago
Except the UMC-raised men don't have the same financial status now as the UMC women did when they were growing up; they're earlier in their careers and thus lower on the finance/status ladder than the women's fathers were.
It seems like a person would have to be awfully stupid not to notice this about their own life?
The latter are actually double whammy, as higher rents hurts UMC men's ability to save for a home/family, and higher home prices means that their diluted savings don't go as far when it comes time to get married and buy a place.
Hence why in America women generally contribute to housing costs. I'm not sure about the statistics, but Americans mostly seem to buy houses when already engaged/married/ready to have a baby. Do they not in Korea? If not, why not?
Gaashk
3d ago
Does anyone know what's going on with the student loan consolidation by April 30th thing?
I tried briefly looking it up because a friend asked (they have Stafford loans, if that matters?), and it looks complicated and confusing, but like the government is trying to pressure people to consolidate their student loans this week, dangling the possibility of forgiveness "over the summer", but without any concrete promises. Are they trying to push something dubious legality through again?
Gaashk
5d ago
Yeah, though losing his clinical license had more to do with off the cuff podcasts and irritable tweets. I disagree with Canada that irritable tweets deserves that kind of response, but it did sound like the social media presence that gave them the ammunition.
Gaashk
7d ago
As a (presumably) functional adult, I'm not surprised. I have a job and kids, and am also like that. I use social media in exactly the same way my family used to use magazines, and I suppose if it disappeared, I'd go back to that. When I was a teen I would go sit at a library for a couple of hours at a time reading magazines -- at least message boards are interactive.
It's plausible it's a lot different for people with addictive personalities (I have never been even a little tempted to gamble more than a few dollars, get extremely drunk, smoke, or do drugs), young teens, and people with a lot of time on their hands and no particularly useful or interesting activity easily at hand.
Gaashk
11d 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.
Gaashk
13d 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
7d ago
Watching tv or movies and then reading a grammar book is a bit too long a journey
I've sometimes spoken with people who grew up in poor villages where they were the only person who could converse in English, and were thus brought to talk with me. This is what all of them did. I've heard an interest in online gaming with a voice chat component is helpful, since it's interactive. Spaced repetition software is helpful for vocabulary. I've never heard of a Best Book for Learning English. At least English is a language with a nearly inexhaustible backlog of possible inputs.
Gaashk
10d ago
I think you meant to respond to @non_radical_centrist directly
Gaashk
1mo ago
There's been some buzz lately around Bad Therapy, by Abigail Shrier (also known "Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze").
The central thesis is that therapy, to the extent that it's effective even a little, comes with risks as well as benefits, and it's a bad idea to engage in recreational or mental hygiene therapy, in the same way that it's a bad idea to get unnecessary physical operations done. She argues that it's an especially bad idea to do this to children, who don't come into it with a fully formed self understanding, and that parents and schools have been engaging in way too much therapeutic activity without monitoring for harmful results. For most children, it's a better idea to try giving them as much freedom as is culturally reasonable and try telling them firmly to stop behaving badly and do better (and this is what better looks like), rather than trying to figure out if something's wrong with them psychologically. It probably isn't, unless adults introduce that. To back those assertions up, she conducted interviews with some psychiatrists, psychologists, other mental health professionals, as well as teens and their parents.
Caveat: the book is primarily about and intended for middle class, essentially functional families that are assumed not to engage in abusive behavior, and therefore doesn't spend a lot of time worrying that the reader, released from the constraints of the therapeutic model, will start escalating from naming feelings to hitting or starving kids or anything like that. I don't know if this is warranted, but do suspect that families who are practicing overly authoritarian child rearing (e.g. "To Train Up a Child" by Michael and Debi Pearl) are in an entirely different informational ecosystem. That seems likely.
There are three main threads: therapists, schools, and parenting practices. There's a lot of culture war fodder in each of these, especially an argument to massively downgrade the SEL components of schools -- that to the extent people actually go along with them, they aren't just a waste of time and money, but actively harmful. But more than that, to lay off the SEL inspired ways of talking about problems. Working in a public school, I find this somewhat convincing. There are kids who may or may not have psychiatric problems, I can't really tell, but as far as I can tell, the previously normal things (having to sit alone for a while, suspensions, ISS, noticing that other people are angry about the destruction of their concentration and personal property...) haven't ever been tried, in favor of treating the children as not entirely human (doling out pieces of candy one by one, each time they do a tiny positive thing, pretending like them terrorizing their peers can't be helped, organizing a bunch of meetings between six or so adults to consider ways to use behaviorist psychology on them). To the extent that the kid is basically a human being, this is counterproductive -- it's not actually helpful to become a raving lunatic that everyone else averts their gaze from. But there doesn't seem to currently be a path available for school personnel other than deeper and deeper into more and more therapeutic techniques, or for the parents of the other kids other than transferring schools entirely (something mentioned by some kids in relation to potentially complaining about an extremely bad classmate). There was a "mindset training" about how maybe when a kid who's known to be unreasonable throws a tantrum, maybe we should just instantly cave and find them what they want. "Bad therapy" is not very helpful there, since there's a legal apparatus built up around the problem. In my experience school staff understands that the procedures are stupid, but aren't really in a position to change anything, even up to state legislators.
I found the section on gentle, therapeutic parenting especially interesting. When I had my first baby, and had to sit around nursing the baby for an absurd amount of time day and night, said baby was very bad at sleep -- I hadn't previously realized that humans have to learn how to fall asleep -- so I would read parenting advice from generic online sources about my problems. There's a lot about "attachment parenting," gentle, gradual sleep training, and then as they get a bit older, a lot about gentle parenting. In my household, most of this was not so much tried and found wanting, but rather found difficult and left untried -- we both like our parents and come from stable households, so kind of just act similar to our respective parents. Shrier found people who had given gentle, therapeutic parenting a really hard try, but not been blessed with gentle toddlers. The most optimistic account was of an Israeli psychiatrist with a young ADHD son who didn't want to use drugs (at least so young), and spent a lot of time gardening with him as an outlet, and seemed to be enjoying the bonding and enjoying the son. "Raising Raffi" by Keith Gessen chronicles attempts at fatherhood by a highly educated man fully bought in to never yelling or punishing, and Shrier's read on the situation is that maybe some small amount of punishment was in order. An observation from both Shrier and Jordan Peterson is that parents who keep losing power struggles with their young children can, and sometimes do, go on to resent the children, and people more broadly don't like them either, since they're out of control much of the time. That seems plausible, though I can't think of any specific examples. She also thinks that the children in question tend to be the ones who go on to cut their parents off anyway, after all that effort, and not want children themselves, since it looks like such a terrible slog. She doesn't present a lot of evidence for that, just her gestalt impression from interviews. Shrier advocates for parents who themselves like their parents and come from functional households to follow their intuitions and ask their families for advice, rather than reading contemporary parenting books. She, again, doesn't have much advice for parents who come from dysfunctional households with traumatic practices.
In general I liked the book as a bit of casual sociology, it has some interesting anecdotes in it, and would tepidly recommend it to anyone interested.
Gaashk
10d 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
10d ago
That's interesting, though not directly related to the community I was thinking of.
One of the things I like least about the current BLM iteration of ethnic strife is the way it read ADOS Black/white dynamics into completely different ethnic histories and interactions in regions very far from the areas affected by slavery. Even entirely different countries are adopting it! European countries, with utterly different ethnic histories! But the American West Coast wasn't centrally racist against blacks more than, say, Chinese for much of its history.
Anyway, I guess I was thinking of crafts and community gardening as a stand in for the kind of traditionally human things that most people who are average for their own group really can do, the community is happy to have, and the government likes to encourage, but for Seeing like a State reasons once they are Jobs, or even just Volunteer Positions, they become administratively complex, such that the people who are perfectly able to do the thing itself cannot administer the permits and grants, where most of the money ends up going.
Gaashk
14d ago
I feel doubtful about this strategy, though of course it depends on specifics.
My husband is both taller and more hyper than me. Sometimes, he would cook a pound of bacon, and suggest that he should eat it all himself, since it doesn't really affect his weight. I was not happy about that, and did in fact eat the bacon. If he were to suddenly start doing a bunch of pull ups, then making extra food for himself, I don't think the aesthetics of a better looking chest would make up for the annoyance of eating meals together with him consuming twice as much food as me.
You might get farther by taking over dinner more and cooking things that are hard to overeat. I lost a decent amount of weight before by just living with people who would eat beans or lentils for dinner instead or burgers or piles of pasta. Inconveniently, my husband lost too much weight doing that, and making two different meals is annoying enough that I've mostly given up on it. Or taking up an outdoor hobby together that involves fairly basic packed foods.
Gaashk
24d ago
That isn't very surprising, it's basically the impression I got from the Chicago news, though I wouldn't usually use the phrase "mass shootings" for "got in a feud and shot up the place" or "gang based violence killing several people." The people of the Northern Migration cities basically know it's black-on-black crime, in neighborhoods that have been hard to police forever, back to mafia violence and unsuccessful prohibition, and likely before.
I'm willing to believe the Minnesotans were genuinely shocked, they actually believe in restorative justice and sending troubled teens to spend more time in lakeside centers to smell the pines, and urban decay seems pretty new to them.
But, yeah, it's a trope that it's uncouth to mention when shooters are black.
Gaashk
28d ago
I went in for an ultrasound, and baby #3 is looking good as far as they can tell, and is a boy.
People keep asking if I'm excited, and I just look awkward, because I don't feel excited, but think it's probably the right thing to do, and that I will probably be glad to have a son later on, I hope. Nurses keep having me take depression questionnaires as a matter of course (I am not and have never been clinically depressed, but half the symptoms overlap with pregnancy, they also strongly overlap with sleep deprivation such as just after giving birth, and they like to give it to pregnant and postpartum women multiple times. I give some credence to Abigail Shrier's observation that the medical establishment likes to give depression screenings out too much, and get people who are just feeling neutral but going through physical changes to second guess that). There are no parenting questionnaires, but I can sign up to enroll in a baby brain study if I want. I feel like some of this is related to the current fertility problem.
Gaashk
23d 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
22d ago
Plausibly, if my personality is that unstable, my tastes in archiving old things will also change. I'll go through a minimalist phase, throw everything out, then go through a nostalgic phase and regret it.
During the times when I did have a good social life, I participated in a lot of church activities.
Right now, I'm a bit overwhelmed with young children, a gestating baby, a full time job, on Saturdays we go on a family outing and possibly shopping, maybe see another family we're friends with; on Sundays we're mostly tired. Now it's spring, and the weather is finally warm, so we've started getting the yard in order a bit, and should work on some brush cutting and assembling a swing set someone gave us. Sometime we'll probably have enough energy to go back to church; I like the people well enough, there are soup suppers, ladies teas and what not going on that I could participate in.
Edit: Something else that occurs to me is that many of the good social situations I've found myself in have behind them a full time pastor, his wife, perhaps a deacon or other designated minister, and several organizationally capable women who do not have young children or a full time job (perhaps retired or a former housewife without much of a job). The ladies tea I could attend is run by an older but not yet elderly woman with grown children, who makes a dozen beautiful tea foods every month for fellowship purposes. Or educational settings with actual staff getting food for ongoing get-togethers that keep going as the student population changes.
People have noted before that these roles are undervalued in most modern communities. People mostly won't tith to support full time ministers, the "two income trap" will force women to work full time outside the home, and everyone will come home to reheat a frozen meal together, so there's less social infrastructure in place for anyone else to participate in.
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.
Gaashk
15d ago
I always ask why don't they just clean up the place and rent it out and it's always a "eh, I guess I could do that, but eh, Im fine".
Being a landlord in the US generally seems somewhat high risk and high responsibility. Better not to if you don't need the money.
Gaashk
9d ago
This is not a small scale question...
The small answer is to apply state force to the defectors regardless of any sympathy inducing specifics. Crush them into dust under the massive boot of Leviathan instead of shaming others for complaining about them. Let some people starve to death. Reinstate an earnest belief in hell. The question of why that's not possible is large.
Caleb Hammer interviews people (in a fairly obnoxious and click-baity style) in significant loan and credit card debt, breaks down their finances, and tries to get them on a budget with a varying amount of success. The most common factor of the guests he has on his show is eating out- for most of his guests, almost 33% of most of their monthly income is eating out at various establishments and other spending that does not significantly increase their quality of life.
Well at least this involves individual choice, not massive government bureaucracy. There are probably people who do in fact spend a lot of money eating out. There seem to be a surprising number of rather pricy restaurants, even in not terribly well off towns, so I suppose people are going there. It's doubtless more entertaining to find and talk to those people than the ones who are in debt because of health problems, or because they want to live in a big city, and are paying 60% of their income in rent. It would be quite the downer to have to tell someone to move to a much cheaper, duller city far away, choose a small apartment near public transportation, sell their car, and get rid of their pet.
Gaashk
16d 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.
That's only managerial class and above Americans. Plenty of Americans have kids while renting, even in smallish apartments.
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