HereAndGone
1mo ago
a very young child would benefit from being around its family, versus being one of 10 or 20 kids overseen by essentially a cut-rate nurse, I’d think.
Over here, there are government regulations about staff-to-children ratios, and you would need more than one staff member to supervise 10-20 kids, depending on age (unless this was a really cut-rate, under the counter, unlicensed operation):
Sessional pre-school service A pre-school service offering a planned programme to pre-school (Montessori) children for a total of not more than 3.5 hours per session. This services category covers may include pre-schools, playgroups, crèches, Montesorri pre-schools, naíonraí or similar services which generally cater for pre-school children.
Adult to Child ratio
0-1 year 1:3
1 — 2.5 years 1:5
2.5— 6 years 1:11
Part-Time Day Care service A pre-school service offering a care service for children for a total of not more than 3.5 hours and less than 5 hours per day. This may include a sessional pre-school service for a child not attending the full day care service but instead a half day service. The service must provide the same physical environment, including rest, play and facilities, as for full day care. This service category may include pre-schools, playgroups, crèches, Montesorri pre-schools, naíonraí or similar services which cater for pre-school children.
Adult to Child ratio
0-1 year 1:3
1-2 years 1:5
2-3 years 1:6
3-6 years 1:8
(While within a sessional class - 2.5— 6 years 1:11)
Full Day Care service A pre-school service offers a structured day care service for pre-school children for more than 5 hours per day. This may include a sessional pre-school service for children as part of that day. This category includes day nurseries and crèches.
Adult to Child ratio
0-1 year 1:3
1-2 years 1:5
2-3 years 1:6
3-6 years 1:8
(While within a sessional class - 2.5— 6 years 1:11)
HereAndGone
1mo ago
You get families like that, and they're not confined to Russia. They're trash, dysfunctional, and the kids have little chance to grow up not to be dysfunctional trash themselves given how they're raised, unless someone intervenes at a very young age and takes them out of that environment.
They'll probably still have a ton of problems, but at least they're not being raised like feral dogs.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
There is a difference between "crying because hungry/wet/scared" and "crying because I started and don't know how to stop" and if you're around kids for any length of time you'll pick up on the difference. That being said, I'd hate to be a kid raised under the "at six months ignore the crying" regime because yikes. A small baby is not trying to manipulate its parents, it has few other ways to communicate except through crying.
Kids today, or at least middle class kids upwards, are a lot more isolated. "The newborn is in a crib in the nursery and we monitor via babycam"? The hell? Babies were sharing the bed or at the foot of the bed in a cradle in lower class families, so they were never far away from human contact (see The Reeve's Tale, where a plot point is the deception wrought by moving the baby's cradle from the foot of one bed to another). Now it's a lot more "put the kid in a separate room nowhere near the parents until it cries to be fed" which has got to have an affect.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
I'm not kidding here, we genuinely are rather unsure about the mechanism of action. Most of the commonly advanced suggestions were found to be wrong or inadequate at best.
I know, which is why I've resisted the blandishments of doctors trying to sell this to me. I know I'd be one of the patients who didn't stick to the stringent lifestyle changes you have to make along with the surgery, and I'd be one of the ones who over-eat to the extent of bursting the sleeve.
Trying to fill yourself with low calorie food is an approach known as "volumetrics", and it works okay.
I don't think just drinking water would work as well, because you'd need an uncomfortable amount to fill your stomach, and the body would quickly realize that it's just water, without calories.
Oh, I've tried the fibre tablets thing - eat this tablet before a meal, drink water, it'll swell up inside your stomach and make you feel full and you'll eat less. Never worked for me because I never got the "feeling full" bit even after taking more than the recommended dose (luckily, I think/hope eating too much fibre is not a bad thing as such).
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Changing your lifestyle does actually work; it's just that many people don't do it.
Ah, the good old "all that's needed is just some willpower" argument.
If anything would drive me to be a biological determinist, it's this. Oh, you find it easy to cut down eating, take more exercise, make necessary changes and stick to them?
Do you want a medal for that? Because it's not on you, it's not you making up your mind and applying willpower that does it. It's the genetic luck of the draw of having the fortunate combination of heredity and environment that gave you the physiological and psychological phenotype that means you can eat less, exercise more, and stick to changes.
Both my parents smoked. My father was able to give up smoking and never go back. My mother tried and failed, many times, to give it up and eventually she died of the lung cancer it gave her.
That was not a question of willpower, because my mother was not less strong-willed than my father, or more resistant to change. I don't know why she couldn't stop. She didn't know why she couldn't stop. She wanted to stop, she tried, she failed over and over.
Tell me "all that's needed is just some willpower" about that, and I will spit in your smug face.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Driving her to tears failed.
that's what people don't understand about "well let's just shame fat people into not over-eating".
If you really make me feel bad, what happens? I feel bad, I cry, I hate myself. There's no quick fix, because even immediately going on a starvation diet will not shift significant amounts of weight in time for all the "good job, you are now not a disgusting lard bucket" to make up for the shaming.
You know what does make me feel better in the short term? Eating.
Congratulations, now you've driven me to eat even more.
(Yes, I'm on Ozempic now. I haven't lost weight, but it'd doing good for my blood sugar. Weirdly, I'm eating both less and more, since I don't eat as much at one sitting, but now I'm constantly eating small snacks and meals. No idea what the hell is going on there).
HereAndGone
1mo ago
I think what we are not getting here is that Aristotle means slaves. Not "people who need to be looked after" or "people who are incapable of not fucking up their lives" - we do accept that there is a social duty to look after the mentally ill or the intellectually disordered who can't live without support.
He means "people who are born to be property". And that, dear Mottizens, is the nettle you need to grasp: do you really advocate that some people are property?
HereAndGone
1mo ago
The more you protest, the more I suspect, because this has happened before. "Me, a sockpuppet of Someone? Not at all!" (yes it was a sockpuppet).
HereAndGone
1mo ago
I thought it was good, but weak. The story wasn't well-developed. And there seems to have been no follow-up or sequel as you'd expect.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
I think the "getting girls when they're young" was less about actual paedophilia and more about "get them while they're impressionable, groom them to accept that you're helping them build careers as models or whatever, then have a stable of pretty young things to be arm candy at the parties you're throwing".
It's an old racket, people have been picking off girls since the days of stage coaches. They arrive in London looking for work, or are recruited by those who go into the country looking for girls, and are tricked into joining brothels by a procuress.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Oh yeah - make this a pirate movie, it'll work. Even a space pirate movie. But that doesn't seem to be what it is. People judge by the marketing, so seeing something with a kid with an eyepatch, that looks to be "moral lecture about disability". I was going "why the hell is he wearing an eyepatch?" when looking at the posters etc. instead of going "oh this looks like fun kid's SF cartoon and maybe smart as well!"
HereAndGone
1mo ago
spend half the movie looking at her phone
That's absolutely a problem with audiences today, and part of the reason our attention spans and focus are so frayed. And yeah, the writers have to compensate for "if we don't keep the action moving, we won't keep eyeballs on the screen".
HereAndGone
1mo ago
I certainly get that impression from him, and I also (where I may well be doing him a disservice since I know Sweet Fanny Adams about his background) get the impression that he's on a lower rung of the ladder, aspiring to a higher rung, and resenting the hell out of the fact that he may be confused with the low-lifes one rung below him.
That's the reason I made the Hyacinth Bucket comparison: Hyacinth plainly comes from a background that is working class/teetering on the edge of lower middle class. She made it firmly into lower middle class territory, then clawed her way by sheer force of will into middle middle class land (and is dragging Richard along with her) and aspires, rather pathetically, to the upper middle class reaches that will always be barred to her. She's terrified of her lower middle class roots being discovered and held against her, in the company she now aspires to, or even worse - to be identified by them as such after all her work to climb out of that level.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
The Sting
Redford and Newman, couldn't go wrong with that combo at that time. That's characters + plot meshing well.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
The only thing better than Darwin and Jussie Smollett was Impassionata betting the house on Trump going to jail, for sure, this time, definitely, just we all wait and see, by this time next week he'd be locked up for real.
How many years ago was that, does anyone remember? Ah, good times, good times!
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Problem is, if you were one of the people who engaged regularly with Darwin, you soon got to know his tricks (and yes, he did engage in tricks). As Amadan said, he was very, very good at riding the line between what would be just that step over it to get a ban, and provoking his interlocutor into taking that one step.
It's more of a "whole body of work" thing rather than "this specific post here, this one, this one" because ain't nobody got the time to make a list and checking it twice over arguments from years back (I know, somebody will pop up with just such a list). It's like somebody new coming in to a pub and hearing about Billy 'BabyEater' McGee getting barred, and asking why, and going on about how "but all you're telling me is that he got into a fight, and the other guy was the one who threw the first punch anyway!"
Yeah, that was the last straw which gave the ostensible reason for barring him, how do you think he got the name "BabyEater" in the first place?
HereAndGone
1mo ago
At this point, I'm starting to lean towards you being either Impassionata (hi, guy!) or even Darwin himself. You're doing the same darn thing of repeating the same point over and over ("Darwin had AAQCs!") and ignoring every other point being presented.
AAQCs mean nothing. I've gotten some myself, and I certainly never put any effort into the ones that got recommended. I've also gotten some bans, and I have to admit I did flounce off once myself, and those are more meaningful.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
he stuck around a long time, obeying rules that became increasingly convoluted and personally-tailored against him, due to the hatred of the people.
Ah, come on. He was able to finesse the rules within an inch of their lives so that the people responding to him ate bans while he just slid on by with clean hands. Eventually it all caught up to him, but he wasn't the one on the receiving end of the rules enforcement.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
I'd forgotten how entertaining the Smollett thread was. Darwin lecturing de haut en bas about empirical reality in regards to one of the stupidest (but admittedly hilarious) fake hate crimes ever was just perfection.
If Smollett had just stuck to "I got jumped and beaten up by two white guys yelling slurs", he probably would have gotten away with it. Even the MAGA thing would have worked if he said one or both was wearing a MAGA hat. But he had to plan it out like a TV episode with the bleach and noose and on-the-nose dialogue, and it all fell apart.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Nah, Darwin drove me nuts because he explicitly stated that sometimes he just posted something that he didn't believe simply in order to start a row (and as Amadan pointed out, that often got people banned for responding). How do you have any kind of productive discussion if the other party is "ha ha, you honestly thought I was serious about that? man, what a maroon!"
HereAndGone
1mo ago
I think his problem is that he doesn't and won't come out and say explicitly what the hell it is that he really believes, his own 95 Theses if you will. This makes it very difficult to argue with him, since anything he may have posted that you want to dig into, he comes back with "that's not what I think so you're wrong".
I don't mind a bit of the ould sneering contempt, I can dish that out myself, but I do want to know what precisely the sneering is about.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Whatever makes The Motte appealing to most of the people here doesn't seem to exist to the left of the motte.
I think it's the arguing! When you have a site that is all "so we do all agree that purple is better than brown" on some topic, then there's not much left to discuss about purple and brown, so there's not much point in hanging around for the fiftieth post on how great purple is. I think TheSchism was a charitable project and even a good idea, but I also think it was mostly Trace's pet project and now that he seems to be busier elsewhere then there's not as much input and not as much drive to get people engaged and recruited.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
That we practice "leftist affirmative action" and the Darwins and the AlexanderTuroks (whether or not he claims/admits to being on the left) go way too long without being banned
To be fair, I don't think Alexander is particularly left or right (I think he's probably somewhere in the spectrum of liberal to centre-right). What he is, is extremely hung up on class and status. He's obsessed with what he deems to be low-class/underclass behaviour (especially around women's sexuality as baby mamas) and hence why he always brings it back to abortion as the social climbing panacea (keep the underclass from breeding more underclass, keep aspirant working class to lower middle class types from falling back down the ladder by not letting them become single teen moms). He wants marriage and family and the rest of it, but on the proper timeline of "get educated, get a job, get married and have the appropriate number of kids, avoid sleeping around as a teen, avoid sleeping around like a ho in general, and if you do get pregnant without planning it, get an abortion so you don't ruin your life and more importantly your social status as nascent middle class". Thus his grudge with the pro-life right, because we want the sluts to keep their bastards who will then leech off the state for life (putting words into his mouth there, but that's the impression I strongly get of how he feels about it). If we were truly responsible right-wingers holding conservative values, we'd be all for discreet abortion to maintain decorum and enforce social conformity around correct behaviour.
Yeah, the 5th century context is a little muddled. It's hard to know exactly how peaceful versus imposed the Christianisation of Ireland was, but it was pretty much peaceful and was heavily "local guys converted then converted their neighbours" and less "outsiders came in and imposed their foreign alien faith on the natives". Take St Patrick - he came to Ireland as a captive taken in a slave raid and eventually comes to identify with the Irish (see the Letter to Coroticus):
Surely it was not without God, or simply out of human motives, that I came to Ireland! Who was it who drove me to it? I am so bound by the Spirit that I no longer see my own kindred. Is it just from myself that comes the holy mercy in how I act towards that people who at one time took me captive and slaughtered the men and women servants in my father's home? In my human nature I was born free, in that I was born of a decurion father. But I sold out my noble state for the sake of others – and I am not ashamed of that, nor do I repent of it. Now, in Christ, I am a slave of a foreign people, for the sake of the indescribable glory of eternal life which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
...That is why I will cry aloud with sadness and grief: O my fairest and most loving brothers and sisters whom I begot without number in Christ, what am I to do for you? I am not worthy to come to the aid either of God or of human beings. The evil of evil people has prevailed over us. We have been made as if we were complete outsiders. Can it be they do not believe that we have received one and the same Baptism, or that we have one and the same God as father. For them, it is a disgrace that we are from Ireland. Remember what Scripture says: ‘Do you not have the one God? Then why have you each abandoned your neighbour?’
Then there is the 11th century anecdote from Gerald of Wales, the Anglo-Norman apologist for the Norman invasion of Ireland:
Chapter XXXII: A sarcastic reply of the Archbishop of Cashel.
I once made objections of this kind to Maurice, archbishop of Cashel, a discreet and learned man, in the presence of Gerald, a clerk of the Roman church, who formerly came as legate into those parts, and throwing the blame of the enormous delinquencies of this country principally on the prelates, I drew a powerful argument from the fact that no one in that kingdom had ever obtained the crown of martyrdom for the church of God. Upon this the archbishop replied sarcastically, avoiding the point of my proposition, and answering it by a home-thrust: “It is true,” he said, “that although our nation may seem barbarous, uncivilized, and cruel, they have always shewn great honour and reverence to their ecclesiastics, and never on any occasion raised their hands against God’s saints. But there is now come into our land a people who know how to make martyrs, and have frequently done it. Henceforth Ireland will have its martyrs, as well as other countries.”
Now, it could be plausible that Remmick is complaining about "in the 5th century the king gave a parcel of land to the local monastery when he converted to Christianity and that was land my father occupied" but that is as far as you could stretch it - the land would have been the king's in the first place. There really weren't Christian conquerors marching around taking land off the locals the way this scene seems to be trying to evoke.
EDIT: Well, not unless you count miraculous cloaks as "marching around taking land off the locals":
[St Bridget] approached the King of Leinster requesting the land on which to build her monastery. The place she selected in Kildare was ideal. It was near a lake where water was available, in a forest where there was firewood and near a fertile plain on which to grow crops. The King refused her request. Brigid was not put off by his refusal. Rather, she and her sisters prayed that the King’s heart would soften. She made her request again but this time she asked, “Give me as much land as my cloak will cover.”
Seeing her small cloak, he laughed and then granted this request. However, Brigid had instructed her four helpers each to take a corner of the cloak and walk in opposite directions – north, south, east and west. As they did this the cloak began to grow and spread across many acres. She now had sufficient land on which to build her monastery. The King and his entire household were dismayed and amazed. They realised that this woman was truly blessed by God. The King became a patron of Brigid’s monastery, assisting her with money, food and gifts. Later he converted to Christianity. It was on this land in Kildare that she built her dual monastery c.470.
Problem is, yes I would lose weight if you locked me in a camp and beat me with sticks. But to keep the weight off, you'd have to keep me locked up for life, or give me my own personal 'beat me with sticks and knock the food out of my hands' 24/7 person.
Changing habits is hard and willpower won't let me power my way to the new regime. I managed to willpower my way to stop biting my nails after years and years of that, but I can't willpower 'just stop fucking eating, you fat bitch'.
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