Gaashk
10mo ago
As others have said, the underlying connection is a literal reading of the Constitution. If Congress wants to amend the amendment to say that organizations can discriminate based on race as long as it benefits blacks, they're welcome to try. If Congress wants to forgive student loan debts enough to actually include it in the budget, they're welcome to do that as well. If Congress wants to write actual legislation protecting abortion, they can do that. If they can't, then they shouldn't.
This is not a legal reason, but as far as student loans go, $10-20k is exactly the range lower middle class people should be able to pay off! They pay off cars in that range just fine, all the time. There are also various programs aimed at that demographic, like debt forgiveness for teachers and government workers. People around the poverty level don't need to make payments on federal loans anyway, on account of income based repayment plans. It doesn't prevent lenders from issuing auto loans or mortgages, and family size is taken into account.
The problem area seems to be those with high debt (which this wouldn't have made much of a dent in anyway), making nominally good money in extremely high cost of living areas, so that they really are struggling to pay rent on their small shared apartment, but looking at their income the financial institution expects them to pay down their loan, and this is too much of.a stretch. I don't feel too sorry for anyone struggling to make it in one of the most expensive cities in the world, though.
Gaashk
3mo ago
I think there's something to this.
There's some enthusiasm from my parents' generation for Tony Hillerman's novels, set in the Navajo Nation, especially because he was a careful observer and puts in a lot of interesting local details. There's a TV adaptation from a couple of years ago that, in general, looks rather good (I haven't watched it because cop shows aren't my thing), so the top hits on Google are things like this:
WINDOW ROCK-Despite fine acting, suspense and entertainment featured in the first episodes of the AMC mystery series “Dark Winds,” overall the show misses the mark when it comes to accurately portraying Navajo language and culture, say some Diné experts.
Navajo is one of the most difficult languages in the world for outsiders to learn. That's why it was used instead of code during WWII. Also, speakers like to teach it wrong so they can laugh about it (source: my mom was living on the Reservation for a while. She is not bitter about it, and figured they're entitled to their fun) The Navajo youth most interested in careers like acting are least likely to learn it, because that would require growing up with their grandparents, herding sheep or something. There is not a large pool of Navajo speakers who are also attractive actors. And yet:
One thing learned in the first episode is that if a non-Diné actor wants to depict a Navajo character, they need to have Navajo language lines down and support to do that. “C’mon Hollywood, do better,” said Clarissa Yazzie, who is also a popular social media influencer. In a TikTok critique, Yazzie spelled out how some of the actors’ mispronunciation of words changed their meaning to the point of distraction and shock.
Lol, "social media influencer" as representative of traditional culture. The lesson is mostly just not to try.
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.
Have you ever read Madeline L'Engle (author of A Wrinkle in Time)?
There's a woman I know who went to MIT, worked on Science for a national laboratory, raised five children, sings in a delightful acapella choir, is choir director at a Byzantine style church, and runs things like pierogi baking events and Ukranian egg decorating. Her children are all interesting people I also enjoy. She's smart, sure enough, but what really stands out about her is that she's warm, kind, and generally a delight to be around. She wouldn't be better or smarter if she had done slightly more math or science at the expense of everything else.
I'm not sure what to call this archetype. (edit: I think the old term was "pillar of the community") That's the kind of person Mrs. Murry in L'Engle's novels is. It's one of the archetypal roles upholding our current civilization.
The future will run out of niches for all but a very small handful of math wizzes and wordcels long before it runs out of room for the smart, warm, sciency mother.
Gaashk
10mo ago
I think it is more about the dissolution of regional distinctiveness, and lack of tolerance that follows from that, because every place and people is assumed to be the same, or should be.
My (boomer) mother grew up in a Southwestern American city with a lot of hispanics and very few blacks. She speaks Spanish badly, but my grandparents spoke it fluently (none of us are hispanic). When Bussing went into effect, she had to sit for an hour on a bus every day to move from one majority hispanic school to another, and the main change was not being able to invite her classmates over, because they lived too far away. Her opinion on bussing is that it may or may not have made sense in Alabama, but it was stupid and wasteful in her city. I took busses all the time as a teen, though they're hot and not very efficient. "Brown people" is a stupid category, but New Mexico and Arizona hispanics love their automobiles -- low riders, trucks, mechanic jobs, custom details, the whole package.
There was a woman in one of my social groups, born in Africa, went to a college in the Great Plains, living in a former Spanish colonial part of the American Southwest, going on about her experience as a Black American and her Blackness, and her sensitivity toward people curious about her background, and it was so very tiresome. None of her ancestors were American slaves, or suffered from redlining, or were discriminated against in any way. None of our ancestors owned a plantation. Nobody in our state was involved. And yet here we all were, unable to talk about any of our actual histories or the places we were actual from, because of her feelings of Blackness.
For a while, I lived with an Albanian family in rural Kosovo. Everyone was very nice to me, and I especially liked that I didn't have to drive or own a car at the time, and I could drink a 50c macchiato at a cafe over the course of an hour without anyone judging me for it. That was mostly because everyone was poor, though. They were upset over having their village shelled, and that for a while they had to teach their language in basements with only a single book for a room full of children. This may be peripherally related to pensioners, but it seems more related to feeling responsible for people who are deemed backwards. Which is, yes, also a problem in many American cities.
The American West has in some sense always wanted cars, even before they were invented. Horses were adopted with great enthusiasm the instant they arrived on the continent. And so were cars. Phoenix isn't full of cars and expansive, flat suburbs because of "boomers." It's full of cars and boomers and suburbs because it's in the middle of an enormous desert. Arizona spent 20 years building the CAP canal system, not for boomers to spread out (although they do), but because they're in the middle of an enormous desert. Boomers from Arizona and Texas drive RVs around for the same reason. i don't think this is necessarily grounded in unusual narcissism, but simply in unusually high wealth.
Gaashk
5mo ago
Could you please not quote the whole thing, but instead excerpt the most important sections?
Gaashk
11mo ago
This seems likely to be more the norm than the exception, historically. Spin offs and retellings of King Arthur, Robin Hood, St George, Coyote, Tarzan, or whomever is probably normal, with an actually new story every decade or so.
At the same time, I agree that whatever's going on now feels like something of a wasteland.
Maybe this has to do with the tendency to mine the same stories too quickly. But I used to binge read King Arthur anthologies, and the entire Wizard of Oz collection, so I'm not sure that's it, either. Maybe something more basic, like that the stories are just not good stories, for various reasons. I'm on board for an Ant Man story, but not the one they have, by report, actually produced. I'm on board for a How Raven Stole the Sun retelling, but not as a three hour CGI fest. If someone with the aesthetics of Miyazaki decided to retell it (that would be odd, but supposing an equivalent folktale), I would absolutely be on board. I don't so much feel inundated with retellings, as that there's a specific "memberberry" version of those retellings that's insufficiently universal, pandering too much to specific target demographics. A war movie about Judith and Holofernes could be fine and interesting, but not the way it would probably be produced in actuality. Companies are recycling too narrowly, from their own slate, rather than from the broader catalogue of world civilizations.
Gaashk
9mo ago
I don't necessarily disagree with your thesis, but you're also throwing together a bunch of things that aren't really symmetrical.
The "minimum deal" for women seems to be "get married." The minimum deal for men seems to be: become homeless and kill yourself, if you aren't murdered first.
This is not symmetrical at all. If we're comparing a dysfunctional woman with a homeless suicidal man, it's more like a series of abusive boyfriends who beat her and molest her children, but with an option of low class prostitution and to spend the night at a women's shelter. In some states it includes an option to abort the pregnancy with fetal alcohol syndrome or the coke baby, or in some states it doesn't, but both things are kind of traumatic.
On the other side, marriages are usually one to one, so symmetrical to the unhappy housewife who doesn't get to self actualize, is an unhappy husband, working long hours at a boring or difficult job. It's reasonable enough to argue that the husband who has to, for instance, go on assignment in an active war zone has it worse than the woman who has to stay at home alone all year with young children, that's probably true. But it doesn't make sense to use marriage in itself as an example of a-symmetrical success/failure.
Gaashk
10mo ago
I finished reading Peter Turchin's new book, End Times this past week, which visits many elements of the culture war, including Trump, immigration, 99%ers, even Ukraine. I hadn't read his previous books, but apparently they included more of the data and graphs that he works with for his research. This one is branded more populist, from the name, bright red cover, and relegation of models and graphs to the final third of the book, which is all appendix. He comes across as a moderate Marxist, who's trying not to alienate American conservatives.
The basic argument is that a core part of nation ending turmoil is a cycle of what he calls the wealth pump and overproduction of elites. A society will start out an epoch with a more or less equitable share of power and money between the workers and the elites, but at some point, this is disrupted by the elites ovedrawing resources from the economy, often because they have too many children, or allow more upward mobility than downward. Then popular immiseration sets in, where the workers have decreased access to the kind of resources they need to thrive -- land, capital, opportunities -- and the elites have a "wealth pump," which seems to be his way of talking returns on capital outpacing returns on labor. Also, increased immigration to keep labor costs low, and benefit employers. The wealthy grow, the poor grow, and the middle class shrinks. Elite competition becomes more and more intense, both because there are more people competing for roughly the same number of positions, often simply because population growth outstrips the growth of important positions, and because the alternative of downward mobility looks worse and worse in comparison. So everyone with any money or influence tries extra hard to get their kids a good position at whatever their era's version of the ivy leagues are, so they can benefit from the growth of the top 10%, while desperately fearing falling into the precariat. There are a bunch of young intelligentsia without money or positions, but a lot of education and family investment, ready to become counter elites or revolutionaries. Often they wage wars until enough of them die to relieve the social pressure, and the cycle starts over.
Turchin's main prescription follows the outlines of the New Deal -- high tax rates for the rich, a growing minimum wage, labor unions, low immigration, perhaps public works projects, that kind of thing.
I found the prescription, especially, underwhelming. Turchin doesn't really go into the kinds of jobs workers do, or how that might influence things, and there's no real commentary about going from an agricultural labor base, to industrial manufacturing, to service, and the growth of a suspicion that it isn't just the aspiring elite jobs that are basically useless, but many of the "workers" are as well. A large component of the current malaise seems to be the impression not only that there are too many leaders, not enough followers, but that, increasingly, the followers are all simulated, automated, or passive consumers, not workers at all. It seems like any plan that could hope to stabilize society over the next hundred years would need to incorporate the possibility that most middle class jobs, especially, as well as a decent number of working class ones, will be automated, while higher level positions and things like garbage collection and construction continue to be necessary much longer. Sure, we could probably move to an economy where each person's job is to care for some other person's parent, child, or pet, but that doesn't seem like a great outcome. He does not mention this at all.
Gaashk
3mo ago
I think there's something to this, and that it's unfortunate. American Indian culture is often quite interesting.
I do like what the Ojibwe adjacent areas have been doing in Minnesota, with "Indian Education" teachers in the schools, both academically supporting native youth, but also making popped wild rice and leading field trips to the art and culture exhibits, leading plant walks, and inviting drum circles to assemblies. It adds regional flavor, which seems good. Not that (clearly!) Minnesota doesn't have their own problems, but Ojibwe teachers and artists are, on he whole, doing good work.
Gaashk
3mo ago
Do specific parenting choices really make a difference for how people eventually turn out?
@gog posted a comment fairly deep in the thread about courtesy, which seemed worth discussing further. (https://www.themotte.org/post/812/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/176067?context=8#context)
The obvious: misery is bad all on its own, regardless of whether it affects future earnings. So, for instance, Aaron Stark’s childhood was bad (https://youtube.com/watch?v=su4Is-kBGRw) and his parents should feel bad, even though he eventually turned out alright. It sounds like Aella’s childhood was bad and her parents should feel bad (https://aella.substack.com/p/a-disobedience-guide-for-children is not about her childhood specifically, but is the kind of discourse she and others with similar childhoods end up in. FWIW, “my parents are too violent, maybe I should escalate to breaking windows” sounds like an absolutely terrible plan), and it’s debatable whether she turned out alright or not.
Also obvious: It’s possible to prevent children from learning basic things like reading by never reading to them, teaching them, or exposing them to reading culture, not having books at home, not reading or writing oneself, etc, as has been common historically among impoverished households. There seem to be a fair number of children on the margin, who can learn to read just fine with proper instruction and interesting materials, but fall off with poor instruction and boring materials (c.f. Los Angelas whole language program). There also seem to be a fair number of people who will learn to read with just the Bible and an adult who will eventually, somewhat irritably answer their questions.
Contentious: given a certain genetic makeup, family environment, and baseline level of things like nutrition, how much difference do things like daycare, schooling methods, or specific actions make?
Does teaching a child to read at 3 vs 6 matter? Does teaching them algebra at 9 vs 16 matter? Does it only matter under certain circumstances (such as a future mathematician needing to learn math early, or a future world class musician needing to learn to play an instrument early)? Do the children of the sorts of people who like cramming them full of Math and Culture and Literature end up with a richer inner life than if their parents hadn’t had time and energy for that?
I’ve read a lot of fairly surface level articles and reviews about this by people like Scott Alexander, Brand Caplan, and Freddie DeBoer, but mostly forget the details. They tend toward saying that most things work about as well as other things, but some situations are miserable or waste a lot of money and resources, and wasting billions of dollars making people miserable for no reason is probably bad.
I was homeschooled, and am now teaching public school, and sending my daughters to public preschool. Several of my friends are homeschooling or planning to once their kids are old enough, and more are stay at home parents than not, despite being generally lower middle class. I don’t have anything against homeschooling, it just isn’t pragmatic given my personal financial situation and the personalities of my older daughter vs husband and I. This might change as she gets older, she’s still in pre-K, and when I try to teach her something, she tends to argue with me about it.
My general impression on the ground, as it were, with two children and teaching 600 elementary children, is that there is not necessarily any One True Way that will work for every child. And that there are children who are thriving in the large elementary school, and children who are miserable there. Their autism program, especially, seems very stressful for everyone involved, like placing it inside a very large elementary school was probably a bad idea.
Both my daughters seem pretty happy with their publicly funded daycare/pre-K. Two year old is always waving bye to everyone and seems pretty happy to see them. Four year old talks about liking the playground, some friends, and learning to write her name. We bought food from the school cook, and it was quite good. Gog’s preschool did sound pretty unfortunate.
Is there any useful way to systematize any of these observations? Any high leverage changes people are able to make but don’t?
Gaashk
6mo ago
I don't think very many people have a problem with things like West Side Story, with an entire culture swap?
Or things like The Princess and the Frog, where the black heroine has a reasonable place and culture. I don't remember anyone complaining about moving the setting, because it made sense.
The Little Mermaid might have been interesting if they had an entire Black Mermaid culture, complete with a black king, and a sensibly different aesthetic than Ginger Mermaids. The problem isn't that mermaids must be ginger, but that they didn't really do anything interesting with the changes, which seems lazy and boring.
It might be interesting to have an Othello where everyone is black, except Othello, who is asian or something, and the Jew is some other minority people have opinions on. But having his race stand out and get commented on suggests that he should at least look like he comes from a different group than everyone else.
The problem with lazy race or gender swapping is that it's lazy, not that it never makes sense to clothe stories in contemporary culture.
Gaashk
29d 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
5mo ago
I don't think this is actually that different from the situation of normie grill pill Americans trying to enjoy franchises they grew up with, but where the messaging has taken over the characters and story.
The main thing is that, recently, it isn't "otherwise good."
But also, I don't think most people are able to set their BS thresholds consciously.
Personally, I'll put up with a fair bit if the actors, costuming, makeup, and lighting are good. Still, I'm about to give up on Neil Gaiman adaptations, because while I enjoy the aesthetics, the LGB relationships have become just about the whole thing. Also, the Strong Females of Marvel (still enjoying Loki though; hope they don't pull anything extra dumb in the last episode...). The nonsensical ethnicities in Wheel of Time would doubtless be obvious to anyone, anywhere, but I'm basically willing to overlook it, because this season the acting, music, and costuming were basically good (and as a non book reader, the plot was intelligible, all things considered, unlike season 1). Which I think is more the median American position -- it's forgivable to mess with races and sexes a bit in the name of The Culture, as long as you're actually making an effort in general.
Gaashk
8mo ago
I agree that more age mixing would be a healthier norm, but my revealed preferences (child in pre-K, working at a large public school, moved away from parents and in-laws...) suggest that I don't really care all that much. This very mild preference does not seem to affect any of my actual decisions.
Upon finding out I was pregnant I thought something like "I've never known a baby, but chances are I'll love my baby. All my ancestors succeeded at this, I probably will too." That turned out to be correct thus far. This attitude may be more true for women than men, though.
Gaashk
3mo ago
That might have been too salty, it's a mixed bag.
The Santa Fe Museum Hill Indian Arts & Culture museum is quite good, especially when they have a traveling exhibit up. There was an excellent glass art exhibit a couple of years ago, and the current Dine (Navajo) weaving display is also quite good. https://www.indianartsandculture.org/current?&eventID=5406 They are, especially, very good at things like lighting an integrating a bit of technology in a way that improves the experience, rather than having a bunch of broken tablets embedded in signs, as I've sometimes seen. They have a couple of other spaces with also excellent lighting and use of color to improve the experience.
I've mostly just been feeling like the older museums have a lot of interesting reproductions and scenes, and the newer ones tend to have a lot of flat panels with words and images that might as well have been a website (would be better as a website!), but it could just be based on where I personally have visited.
Gaashk
3mo ago
I wish that this were a transcript, not a Youtube clip. Personally, I do not like starting a separate thread as a way to get around writing a submission statement. Why were you interested in this? What do you want to talk about? It looks like pretty standard stuff about people not having as many children as they would have wanted, and this being bad for society, and also for those who never become grandparents. That seems true enough.
Today's AXC book review (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-educated-mind) is about "The Educated Mind" by Kieran Egan. This is my second time reading half of it, skipping to the bottom, and feeling frustrated about it.
The reviewer is clearly invested, excited, and has put a lot of effort into their review. At the same time, I can't think of how the ideas, as presented, could possibly useful as a teacher, parent, or even if I were trying to design a new charter school or something.
A while ago, I went to a two hour lecture (with no breaks! In tight stadium seating, so it was impossible to even go use the restroom!) with someone going on and on about neural imaging and The Science of Reading (tm) and Background Knowledge and whatnot, with five minutes towards the end suggesting that perhaps it would be worthwhile to look into actual books or something sometime, as part of Professional Learning Communities (tm). These are, in general, things I'm interested in, but it was all about the five strands of something, which each split into three strands, which each have seven flavors, or something like that. There was no clever resolution as in the rhyme about the man going to St Ives.
This review felt kind of like that. It either is kind of the same as one would intuitively expect, and so doesn't need explaining (yes, of course we should tell stories. Clearly. Does anyone except Eustace Scrubb's parents disagree?), or it's something very complex that teacher's will struggle to follow and probably fail at (nobody is going to succeed at teaching "ambiguity, meta-skepticism, balance, lightness" in school, to ~30 assorted youth at a time).
A bit ago I was listening to Jordan Peterson interview a man who had opened up a private school in Wichita, Kansas (Zach Lahn, Wonder). The school sounded nice. I would plausibly send my children there, were I in a position to do so. They have a system with older students mentoring younger ones, a binary choice to discuss each morning, and one time they had a disrespectful student, but then they expelled him. It isn't just rich kids, he argued: he has a nurse working two jobs to pay the tuition! I stopped listening at that point, and felt a bit spiteful about it.
Maybe I should stop following this stuff, and just keep my head down. It's not like I'm planning to open up a new Eganian charter school in my city anyway. But educational discussions follow me around, haunting my steps, ever since growing on in a very countercultural, education aware household, reading John Taylor Gatto as a teen. I tried to go to in-person events, and it followed me. The ladies tea was talking about it, with a homeschooling mom of four, a mom with her kid in private school for culture war reasons, and someone getting people to sign a culture war adjacent education petition. I tried going to church, and the pastor's wife was talking in the nursery about Sunday School curriculum, with some sort of Montessori adjacent Catholic derived philosophy or something. I tried going to a friend's house, and they were also talking about Education. All of it sounds kind of exhausted and on edge.
Gaashk
10mo ago
Do women admire one another for their martial achievements?
As others have already mentioned, there are a decent number of examples of female agents from the 90s and early 00s, even up to Rogue One. These tend to be fairly masculine movies, appealing more to men. Women like them about as much as if the protagonist were male. In a certain sense, they might as well be male.
Meanwhile, the prototypical female story by a woman, appealing to women, is Pride and Predjudice. The heroine most uncover the true characters and motivations of the men in the story. It doesn’t matter all that much which men have served in the military and defeated their nations foes. In Persuasion it matters for status, but not who he has killed or under what circumstances. It matters a great deal whether the man will treat his wife well, be faithful, provide a good living, be respectable according to social norms, and so on. She must figure this out, and choose wisely. They are, to some extent, morality plays. Men do read, for instance, Persuasion, and admire it for its subtlety and deep observation.
Female archetypes are different from male, and perhaps should be different, and the current trend of populating action movies with what amount to trans men is silly. The motherly feminine archetypal character is speaking wisdom and weaving cloth, and that is alright. I especially love the great grandmother in The Princess and the Goblins, and would like to see more of that, rather than yet another woman fighter. Civilizations need wisdom and cloth and social norms as much as they need to repel the invaders or solve the mystery or Do Science.
Gaashk
6mo ago
Coming from the Southwest, my mother was complaining about Californians with their pushy driving and their big houses fifteen years ago.
But, still, my home culture is closer to LA than it is to Luisiana, not only geographically, but more deeply. The same Spanish Colonial influences, of course. No influential schools specifically for boys, or Blacks, or Catholics. Sprawling cities that expanded in the era of the automobile, with huge grids and wide lanes.
I'm unsure how to classify the apology and trust issue, but I'm not sure "California" is the right category. We don't like our new neighbor, who has been building a house next to ours, because he does things like helping himself to other people's stuff without asking, and embedding it in his fence. When confronted with this, he always deflects, never apologizes. He seems to have learned everyone's names and has been occasionally using them as a kind of weapon. We always feel extra angry with him after he uses especially our children's names. My husband is considering installing a camera just for him, because he seems untrustworthy. He has painted his new house primer gray over stucco, in a land of clay colored pinks and tans, with matching grey stonework (suggesting this isn't an oversight, it really will stay that color), and bulldozed all the shrubs in his yard. We call this behavior "car salesman," but it's not exactly that, either. I don't know if he's from California, but if so, it was a long time ago. I would like it if there were an accepted term for this, like "premium mediocre" for many things also popular in California.
Back when I was in youth group at a California feeling Evangelical church, some church members once recommended a book called TrueFaced (https://www.amazon.com/TrueFaced-Bill-Thrall/dp/1576836932), and talked about how it had been important and meaningful to them, as they realized that they had been living a lie all this time. They did not seem especially disoriented by that realization. My family was intensely puzzled by this (along with the popularity of things like Wild at Heart and The Purpose Driven Life, also out of California). I think this is related to the "privacy settings" issue, and also to pressure from many social groups to perform things like enthusiasm or conversion in order to experience belonging and acceptance. We once went on a youth group outing to a California theme park, where after riding roller coasters all day, we went to hear a sermon about "recommitting our lives to Christ" or some such thing. At one point, the speaker demanded that we should get up and go over to another area, so I did, and then got me to fill something out saying that I had pledged recommitment or something. Afterwards, I felt confused and ashamed. I got up because a leader told me to, and now it was supposed to be something deeply meaningful and personal? People with a deeper need for belonging and greater focus on adherence to social norms probably do bend their entire personalities around the expectation that they be in some constant state of Revival (or, now, of finding themselves, or therapy, of being Out, whatever their social group calls for)
Some years later, I was volunteering for a month at a youth camp in California. This time it was Eastern Orthodox, which even in California is more stately and solemn than frenetic and enthusiastic. And yet. They wore me out with constant demands to be more extroverted, more enthusiastic, to Experience Revival, to sing louder, with more energy, with frenzy, to compete for attention at each meal, for Fun. Californians, and California adjacent youth cultures, I think, do worship a minor deity of Fun, to which they make sacrifices.
Gaashk
10mo ago
I'm not a fan of rdrama, nor do I want its aesthetics and hyperbole imported here.
I am not a huge fan of lawns, and my own yard is some combination of native grass and spindly flowing things.
Still, I find myself confused by your confusion. The lawn people have two children and a dog. If they're older, maybe they have some grandkids and a cat. They do not want to have to supervise them or have them in the same room with themselves all the time, or even all the time when they're home on evenings and weekends. They cannot send them to the park on their own for 13 years, or depending on the neighborhood, ever. Hence, the yard. Why is that the case? Because it's a big American city, and Americans are kind of paranoid and drive around drunk in trucks where they can't see kids.
Why is the yard full of grass instead of potatoes? Partly because potatoes are kind of a stupid thing to be growing in modern industrial society, where they're incredibly cheap and they'd have to dig up their yard to get them, and there are a bunch of utilities under the soil, so you have to map out where you'd even be able to dig safely.
Some of them do in fact grow kale and such in their backyards, but in suburban Chicago there is a bunch of lead in the soil and the paints and the pipes, and it isn't trivially easy to grow vegetables that are worth eating. It's a lot harder to learn how to grow actually useful plants, neatly, than to keep a lawn, and they subscribe to the broken window theory, where a poorly kept, weedy garden is analogous to a broken window in signaling urban decay. In their defense, a lot of neighborhoods are undergoing a process of decay.
Ok, but why aren't they at least growing fruit or nuts? I don't know, it would amuse the children and the cat, and is easy. Maybe they should. The ones who drive around in pickup trucks, drinking beer while they fish in canals do have fruit trees (and also messy vegetable gardens, and are really an entirely different demographic than the suburban middle class lawn owners). It is probably fairly easy to convince a suburban lawn owner to plant a fruit tree, with a neatly mulched barrier between it and the lawn.
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
3mo ago
My grandmother grew up in southern Texas, and also followed these rules. She also hosted holiday get togethers, and always enforced the "no politics or religion" rule, aside from niceties like singing traditional Christmas carols, or presenting a theologically neutral Thanksgiving prayer.
I haven't followed fat acceptance very carefully, and mostly hear about the sillier examples online.
As far as I can tell, the vast majority of people are still reasonably polite, and never ask something weird and rude like "where are you really from?" or complain about strangers weight in front of them, even as they're being crushed on a 6 hour flight between two much heavier people.
I've met some people who seem nice enough in person, but come across as very rude online. The Grandmother's Etiquette Guide seems like it needs to have some things worked out about things like (generally non-conversational) email lists and social media, because of the whole dynamic around some people soapboxing in those spaces, a few people responding positively, and a bunch of other people quietly thinking worse of them, but not really knowing them well enough to say anything. I would like to be able to wield something that's the internet equivalent of a mildly disapproving stare or awkward silence.
Gaashk
8mo ago
In general, I like Peterson, though he's been going a bit too far into right wing punditry for my tastes, and I'm not fond of the Daily Wire, which he has recently allied himself with. He mentioned going to the training and recording all of it, which does sound mildly entertaining.
It makes some sense for the College of Psychologists of Ontario to want to distance themselves from him, and he really does seem to have turned into more of a pundit or preacher lately, which is probably somewhat at odds with being a psychologist. In that vein, maybe public money shouldn't be going to psychology, and the courts should tell them to handle the situation themselves. Go ahead and excommunicate the heretic, that's their own business, but they shouldn't receive public funds from the state run healthcare or university system.
Whether B is a problem or not depends on whether or not the person in question was in fact vindictively spreading a pack of lies. If they are, I would rather they were called on it than that it was politely obfuscated behind a wall of disclaimers. If they aren't or it's uncertain, then yes, that's bad on his part.
On F, Peterson phrased that poorly, he should have been more careful (as he likes to say he usually tries to be) and said that what the doctor did should have been criminal. Maybe he should have said evil instead? But I doubt the exact phrasing is really why the College of Psychologists was upset about it.
Ultimately it's probably fine if Peterson goes all in on his transformation to being a secular pastor. Evidently the demand is there, and he's hardly able to engage in professional psychologist duties already. He was talking with Jonathan Pageau the other day about working on fairy tales. I just hope he doesn't go too all in on constantly complaining about #CurrentThing, which tends to ruin that kind of work, even if from the conservative side.
There was a recent change to the "Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act" which has led to several of the best natural history museum museums simply shutting down their Native American exhibits last week, rather than (what I would naively expect, based on the title) removing human remains from display or something. For instance, The Field Museum papered and curtained over their displays. The American Museum of Natural History is closing two exhibit halls.
This seems like the sort of rule that looks like it might make sense initially, of not grave digging and talking to descendants, until everyone is suddenly reminded that archeology largely is grave digging, and finding descendants is often fraught, with plenty of Tribal Council politics even if a museum can figure out the right authorities to talk to.
I can't tell if this was the intention of the President's Office when they passed the rule, and how much will be left after everything settles (or if it won't settle, and everything will just sit in storage awaiting a change of zeitgeist).
Admittedly, I already mostly go to the local natural history museum for the animatronic dinosaur, and my state has lots of Pueblo Ruins museums, but they're not very good, and run in partnership with the Native American communities. It isn't clear how this will affect locally interesting museums about communities not continuously inhabited since the most archeologically interesting period, such as the Dickson Mounds museum (I recommend stopping by if you're in the area!). Their most interesting parts for non-archeologists are landscape, reproductions and dioramas anyway, so perhaps not much. The Milwaukee Natural History Museum has an unusually enjoyable Native American section (very good in general, go if you're in the area!), but iirc it was also mostly reproductions and dioramas as well.
Ultimately, I suppose it will probably not deteriorate the experience all that much for non-archeologists once the dust settles, but will be one more step of history museums in general toward irrelevance.
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