Hieronymus
3mo ago
A year and a half ago Scott wrote an ACX post about why his writing had changed from the way it was 2013–2016, and it prompted me to think about the kinds of pieces I would rather read from wizened psychiatrist Scott rather than young buck Scott. One of these is his current thoughts on shared environment and the effects of parenting. Another is the state of social science research on spanking; that would give him a chance to apply his thoughts on shared environment, and it’s culture-war-adjacent enough to examine the effects of bias but outside the current focus of the culture war.
Aella’s descriptions of her own childhood make for somber but thought-provoking reading. As an evangelical Christian, though not a parent, I wonder what went wrong to produce the kind of abuse she went through. One possibility: maybe evangelical parenting advice is particularly difficult for parents on the autism spectrum to apply. Aella has described herself and her father (but not her mother) as on the spectrum. Evangelical advice focuses pretty heavily on responding to the child’s heart and will. Young children especially wear their hearts on their sleeves, but if you struggle to notice emotional cues you may miss the point where you have been severe enough to discipline effectively and you may see obstinance where there is none.
It’s also interesting that, in spite of all that, Aella writes positively about her homeschooling experiences and negatively about her brief time in public school.
Hieronymus
6mo ago
… but he’s no Roy Moore.
This is definitely a tangent, but I haven’t kept up with political scandals. What do you mean? My recollection is that Moore was accused of some things that were really serious and some things that were merely weird; then, when some of the weird accusations were proved, people spoke as if the grave ones were too, mostly without evidence. But I am fully prepared to have missed some developments in the mean time.
Hieronymus
7mo ago
I happened to read it at that age. Although it's not exactly history, it did put our brief coverage of Hawaii in my US history class to shame.
Hieronymus
7mo ago
I want to offer a data point since your example caught my eye. My go-to butter, from a very respectable American dairy brand, is 81% butterfat. Butter isn’t what they’re most known for and I don’t think chefs seek it out, but I prefer it to the well-reviewed European brands I have tried. So it surprises me that the EU forbids it to be called butter.
On the other hand, America’s minimum alcohol content for liquor to be labeled with the obvious categories (whiskey, brandy, gin, etc.) is 80 proof (40% ABV) as opposed to the EU’s 75 proof (37.5% ABV). I don’t know what that says about us, but I am grateful for it.
Hieronymus
7mo ago
I read Hawaii in high school, but Michener’s patronizing treatment of Hale is one of the few things I remember now. Whatever the movie’s take, Michener clearly didn’t think Hale’s faith a virtue; in modern terms, it felt like a lot of 1950s literary sneering at the repressed, nerdy missionary.
Is the movie more nuanced in that regard, or does it just feel that way given the evolution of the culture war? Is my memory unfair to the novel?
Hieronymus
9mo ago
I would love to read it.
I appreciate your and @screye's replies on the culture war aspects. As an American I am used to reading western history with the bias of the author in mind. But that's hard to do for parts of the world where I don't have the context; I can sometimes intuit the author's biases, but their implications are not clear to me.
Hieronymus
9mo ago
Do you know of any resources that make the history of Hinduism legible to a westerner? I got curious reading about Indo-European languages and then Indo-European religion. The parallels between Germanic mythology and early Vedic religion are fascinating. But the early Vedic religion has clearly been transformed and subsumed. (No cattle sacrifices in modern Hinduism!) I am curious what the different proto-Hinduisms were and how they met and fought and syncretized.
Books I've read on the history of Indo-European religion (admittedly years ago) were light on the Indo-Iranian branch.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
“This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.”
Some Python modules implemented in C have pure Python implementations for portability. Depending on your background it may be obvious, but I’d try swapping in pure Python versions wherever possible. If the segfaults stop, you know someone was taking indecent liberties with the object graph.
But mostly I’d be praying that it’s not actually a bug in the runtime.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Some of us are déclassé enough to appreciate it; I thought the reminder that some in the UK already saw the connection was well placed. And if it introduces somebody new to The Gods of the Copybook Headings, that's great too.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Yeah, I can sympathize with that.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
I certainly don’t know the man, and I haven’t read enough of his writing to draw broad conclusions. But I read one or two of his pieces after his conversion, and they sure pattern matched to “New Christian” for me.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
I have no objection to rolling back the Sexual Revolution, but it needs to apply to men as well - it takes two to tango, after all.
I’m not the GP, but yes, of course. As you point out, restraining the sexuality of one sex implies restraining the sexuality of the other. I want a world where both sexes value chastity, understood in the classic sense of sexual virtue.
It’s great that so many denizens of the manosphere (or whatever it has turned into) have come to see the effects of feminine promiscuity. It means that they have found an important piece of the puzzle. It behooves those of us who see the other pieces to help them fit it together. And some of them do get there! The former pickup artist Roosh is a famous example.
I’m not old enough to remember the years before the pill. But it’s easy to see that the relationship between marriage, sex, and children was obvious then in a way it isn’t now. The relationship was important for more reasons than pregnancy, but pregnancy was a reason that any horny doofus could see.
I keep seeing Christian kids who should know better sacrificing their principles to their libidos and calling it nuance. It’s refreshing to see secular people who notice the burns on others. It raises my hopes that they will come to see how marrying the only woman you will ever sleep with at twenty could be a joy and a blessing.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
I really enjoyed the B5 episode from the perspective of the telepaths, The Corps is Mother, The Corps is Father. But late in the show they promised to explore the Telepath War, which would have been a fantastic opportunity, and then they didn’t deliver. I wonder if it turned out to be harder than they thought.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Were they still punishing people for wrongthink by taking away their checkmarks, or had that also changed?
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Could you elaborate on the Latin America factors? I don't know the social dynamics, and I'm curious how Roman Catholic politicization has gone there.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Those places exist, but not as conservative communities. Cities are consistently the most progressive places in their regions, so it's hard to see them as the way to work out conservative values.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Hey, I like my writing system to include vowels. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
It is strange how the the author glosses over the diversity of opinion among those quoted. Someone who thinks that changing the word “race” to “species” will do the trick has a very different critique from someone who thinks that neither the character’s species nor its culture should impact character creation. When Paizo¹ published Pathfinder 2 it used the term “ancestry” instead of race, but the article is wrong to say that it dropped racial ability modifiers altogether. It did change them to make playing against type less disadvantageous.
Over the years I have come to a particular view on the purpose of RPG rules: their primary function is for the gamemaster to communicate to the players how things work and what is possible within the game world; they establish a shared understanding. The GM is free to violate the rules, but he should do so selectively to preserve that shared understanding.
So if someone separates race from culture, I want to ask, “How does that fit your setting?” If it communicates the world better to the players and lets them situate their characters better within it, that’s great! Maybe your elves have several very different cultures, or your capital city has a cosmopolitan culture shared by the men, elves, and dwarves who live there. But if your elves are a reclusive people clinging tightly to their shared traditions, rules that let the player create an elf character from a dwarven culture are going to lead to confusion and frustration.
I think the article fundamentally objects to the givenness of these game mechanics for the character. That explains why the author is concerned not only with race (in either sense of the word) but also with multicultural characters or a 1976 Dragon magazine piece (!) trying to model sexual dimorphism. The player chooses the character’s race, sex, culture, background, and class, but the character only chooses the last one² or two. If you believe that real-world people are fully self-defined beings, I can see how that would rub you the wrong way.
[1] For non-gamers, Paizo is the company which publishes Pathfinder, another branch of the D&D family and a competitor to Wizards of the Coast’s current, fifth edition of D&D.
[2] I wonder how the author feels about sorcerers who inherit their powers through a bloodline, though D&D 5e leans into this less than D&D 3e did and far less than either edition of Pathfinder does.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
There is truth to this, but I think it is overstated. America radically overhauled our immigration policy in the 1920s. The specifics were often silly, but one of the goals was to give time for immigrant communities to assimilate. And it worked!
That’s not to say that all the costs went away; neither did all the advantages. But even if you can’t regain all of what you lost, you can regain some of it.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
But since the title of "king" generally meant "ruler" and not "husband of queen", there was historically a lot of reluctance to give this title to someone who married the female monarch, particularly in the days when the husband ruled the wife.
Yes, I see avoiding the implication that he ruled jure uxoris. That said, what would have been the implications if he had become co-ruler? It's hard for me to see how Britain would have been worse off for giving Albert or Philip more influence.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
I hadn't realized the impact of Diana's popularity! That makes a lot of sense, silly as it seems to me.
... and the husband of Queen Victoria was Prince Consort (not King Consort, though she wished to create that title for him, but it was strongly resisted by the politicians).
That's adorable! I didn't know she had wanted to call him king consort. Royal marriages do run the gamut from the sordid to the sweet.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
I look forward to reading your post. I hope you are right.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
I like these changes a lot. Things are clearer and subjectively less cluttered.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Thanks!
One of the silly and dangerous things about the exchange in Aella's post is that it doesn't distinguish between parental motivations. I suspect, though I can't know, that the parents of authors one and two are disciplining, whether wisely or unwisely, out of love, so those kids really don't have to worry about their parents trying to hurt them this way out of revenge. But kids from worse families who tried their advice could be burned pretty badly.
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