dasfoo
3yr ago
It's not social status which made him vulnerable, but his lack of political protection.
This is a self-created problem, and downstream of his social status. Trump doesn't have useful allies and the political protection they afford because he doesn't know he needs them, he doesn't know how they work, he doesn't know how politics works -- he just knows that as someone of low social status, he's suspicious of how the high-status system work -- and he's disloyal to the allies he has, losing them quickly.
I was watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest last night and it dawned on me how much of a McMurphy Trump is. He's a wildly charismatic rule-breaker, but he mistakes his charisma for substance and doesn't really understand why he breaks the rules. He has a child's idea of how things should work. He just has a resistance to the authorities, he gets off on poking them, and he mistakenly thinks he's smarter than them. He makes an instant connection with the discarded people that he thinks have been unfairly beaten down by the authorities, and he lifts their spirits by thumbing his nose at their oppressors... but he never really understands the true dysfunctions of his followers, and as an egotist, he's unconscientious about how he uses them in his own self-service. He also never really understands the system he's bucking, and by the end, he has made vulnerable and destroyed the weakest of his comrades and the system crushes him. He thought he was a righteous agitator, but he made everything much much worse in the short term, and didn't really matter in the long-term.
Of course, OFOTCN was a product of 1960s anti-authoritarianism (young people may not know that Boomers were fleetingly anti-authoritarian before they become the authorities), so we are supposed to view McMurphy as a tragic hero and Nurse Ratched as a fascist monster. We are also supposed to buy in to the popular counter-culture idea that "mental illness" was a social imposition on unfortunate people who are really no less crazy than you or I. But now the OFOTCN dynamics look very different to me: McMurphy is a fool; Ratched has control issues, yes, but she also has the near-impossible job of connecting with severely troubled people who are easily led to extremes by disruptive behavior. Compared to the Titicut Follies, this mental hospital is an ideal of order and serenity before McMurphy shows up. But because of Titicut Follies and OFOTCN, most of the people seen in this movie would soon be living in tents in downtown Portland, shitting on the sidewalk, and randomly attacking passersby. (Fittingly, Oregon, where the movie was set and filmed, recently declared OFOTCN its official state movie.)
dasfoo
3yr ago
I would disagree. The essence of many culture war issues is that our ability to stand up and say "this is fucking stupid" for most of these topics is broken.
YOU think they're stupid, but other people clearly don't. What happens to your community when you're done yelling "You're stupid!" at everyone you don't like? Do they agree and change into smart people? Do they grow to hate you? What has it accomplished? You have broken more than you were trying to fix.
EDIT: Also, I don't know what world you're living in, but the number of people saying "this is fucking stupid" seems to be at an all-time high. Have you seen Twitter? This the Daily Show-ification of public discourse. It makes the person saying "that's stupid" feel smug and makes everyone else hate them. Is it working?
dasfoo
3yr ago
They think they can DIY better than any clinics can help them, that they're fully informed and aware, and that they have a right to pass that knowledge on and push it onto minors with basically no oversight. I have never seen this kind of behaviour in any other kind of group;
You don't spend much time in vaccine-skeptic circles, do you?
dasfoo
3yr ago
how is hush money pursuant to an NDA not a legal expense though
And how is violating an NDA to blackmail a politician not in itself some kind of crime?
EDIT: Also: If hush money doesn't hush someone, is it really hush money? Daniels is not doing wonders for the perception of the ethics of sex workers.
dasfoo
3yr ago
How do you do toilet training with your kids if genitals mean sex and a taboo with regards to children?
Presumably one would not employ a real or photographed demo penis during toilet training. I think keeping the kid's focus on their own penis is good enough. Thankfully, in the Elmo book/video that was popular when my kids were learning how to become civilized, Elmo was not hanging dong.
Besides, how does the statue with a penis become okay at 10 but not at 6 years old? They are still very much kids right?
If we can agree that older kids are better at contextualization than younger kids, I think that answers your question. Anyway, these questions are irrelevant.
dasfoo
3yr ago
Could you elaborate on what specific harm showing an anatomically correct sculpture to sixth graders does to them?
This is a wholly irrelevant question. I know it's what the pro-David side likes to focus on, because it makes their opponents look like aliens to the ingroup, but it fundamentally doesn't matter.
If we can agree that there are two groups who differ on the answer to your question: regardless of the substance of their answers, this is an issue of how a community has decided to navigate through this difference in opinions. Now, it may seem to some like the question is so stupid that the community process no longer matters, but this is a great way to destroy a community. This is the essence of a lot of culture war issues at the moment, a focus on terminal values above the process by which we allow competing values to co-exist peacefully.
dasfoo
3yr ago
Yes, and the teacher was totally correct to be defensive given what happened!
Which is why he should've known not to do it. Unless he is a new transplant with no sense of the community, it's either pure stupidity or intentional self-sacrifice.
dasfoo
3yr ago
As an isolated gag, it's funny. Because the teacher I'm sure had 0 actual fear of getting fired for showing his students Michaelengo and was perfectly fine with them showing their parents, and thought that was common knowledge for everyone listening, until he actually was fired.
If the teacher "had 0 actual fear of getting fired" why would the joke ever occur to them? It's the joke of someone who is aware of the hazard, or there is no joke. Now, it may be that a teacher in an urban Portland Oregon school full of good little liberals might make that joke as an outgroup dig, but a teacher at a Florida school where "we don't use pronouns" is surely aware that he is operating in a different environment.
dasfoo
3yr ago
I've also had a tween girl dinner guest who identified as non-binary. She was more physically developed than her peers, cycled through a repertoire of cutesy vocal and motor tics, and low-key complained that ever since her parents' divorce her father has barely been around. It was like she had arrived to act out Lisa Littman's core thesis for us. I felt terrible for her, because she was obviously genuinely suffering, but I just could not buy that the solution to her problems lay anywhere in gender ideology.
I wonder if any medical professional would suggest that the solution to her underlying problem should be as follows: To behave/believe as if her absentee father is actually omnipresent in her life, and have the people around her also engage in affirming that her absentee father is fully present in her life? If this is not a proper course of counseling, why not?
I think there's a growing sense that this approach to therapy is wholly off-target. The job of the therapist is not to reinvent the world as a way of mitigating an individual's negative feelings, but rather is to help the individual process their negative feelings so that they are expressed in the least harmful manner. "Gender-affirming" care is a Utopian fool's errand: "This suicidal person whose sense of self is at odds with reality would be happy if I could wave a magic wand and change reality." Sorry, but everybody experiences varying degrees of unhappiness, misfittedness, insecurity, neurosis, social awkwardness, but most people naturally develop internal tools to cope with those feelings and orient themselves so that the feelings aren't overwhelming in destructive ways. People who lack the natural ability to put negative feelings in perspective, may need therapy to learn that these feelings are normal and that there are methods of coping. It seems like teaching them instead that reality is wrong is more harmful in the long run, even without hormones and surgeries.
dasfoo
3yr ago
Both images depict nudity. Note that it isn't claimed anywhere that this is an exhaustive list. It is quite possible that other artworks that don't feature nudity were discussed in the class, and the news reporting only mentioned these three because they are pertinent.
If it's not the teacher's choice and they are merely following a curriculum set by the board, that's the board's problem. If the board is telling teachers: Pick any lesson that doesn't contain nudity, and the teacher picks one full of nudity, they have only themselves to blame. If a teacher is required to inform parents of something and doesn't and then tells students not to tell their parents, they should be fired. There is no situation in which teachers/school should be hiding things from parents, and that's the key to this entire culture war chapter.
dasfoo
3yr ago
#2 Is straight up witch-hunt logic. Defending yourself by saying the sculpture David is non-pornographic does not suggest you were on other occasions showing kids pornography.
If you are displaying nudism in art because nudism is natural and non-lascivious, there's no need to draw attention to other lascivious forms. By classifying David as "not porn" you are not only virtually inviting the students to be curious about the mentioned alternative but you are implicitly categorizing "porn" as the default and "not porn" as the exception. I understand why someone would psychologically feel the need to defensively declare "not porn!" if one is already anticipating cries of "porn!" but that's not the act of someone who is not already defensive about their course.
dasfoo
3yr ago
I'm on the fence about this. I have no problem with my kids seeing nude figures in classical art. But it seems to me this teacher was either asking for trouble or had some motive that superseded his job survival instincts.
It's clear from the chain of events that this teacher knew this might be an issue for some kids/parents, because:
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The school already considered it controversial enough to (fail to) send out a warning letter.
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The teacher felt the need to categorize it as "non-pornographic" (Why, exactly, did he feel this was necessary? ISTM that raising the topic of porn is more likely to get him into trouble, not less likely. Hopefully, it wasn't to differentiate Michael from the art he showed the students on other days....)
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"Don't tell your parents." Come on. Maybe he wanted this. Maybe he wanted to become a cause celebre for the left. This is not the behavior of a teacher without some other motive. He got what he wanted. He poked the bear and the bear gutted him and we all know about it and I'm sure there's a related GoFundMe we can support or a TikTok we can heart.
Given all that, I have another question: Why Michelangelo's David? Yes, it's famous. But it's not like it's the only work of art in existence. I don't know enough about art to tell you why David is more famous or worthy of study than any other partially clothed statue. They all look pretty good to me. He chose it for a reason. Maybe laziness. Maybe a lack of imagination. Maybe he just a little bit likes to make kids look at schlongs. Maybe it's his favorite work of art and he has a unique and scintillating perspective on it. Maybe he holds that fraction of parents in contempt and wanted to fuck with them. All or some of the above, still it was poor judgement on his part, unless it's what he wanted.
dasfoo
3yr ago
That is, mental illness alone of any severity does not meet the requirements for a risk protection order, which instead must depend on clear and convincing evidence of danger to himself or herself or others, according to the statute.
Isn't the basis of the argument for gender-affirmation that the trans person is an imminent risk to themselves? Affirmation is required to subvert suicidal tendencies; to not affirm is to commit "genocide" because this is all that stands between the trans person and self-harm? And since affirmation relies on the participation of uncooperative third-parties, the stability of the trans person is in constant jeopardy?
I don't know how you square this argument, which is the basis for the current mode of treatment for people with gender dysphoria, with "not a danger to themselves."
dasfoo
3yr ago
Calling this a 180 seems akin to saying it's a 180 that a man would want a virgin bride but then after they got married, he'd want her to be sexually available to him whenever he felt the desire. It's just a bizarre framing.
The Madonna/Whore complex is real! This is exactly what men want. But they don't want a 180-degree change, they want a singular sexual devotion to them, which is constant from when the girl is a virgin waiting for the right man to when the girl is willing to become his sexual fantasy and his alone.
dasfoo
3yr ago
Isn’t it strange that when they marry, women do a 180 on what they want in a man?
My general conception of the paradox of male-female compatibility is as follows:
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Young women hope that the man they marry will change. Men rarely change all that much, leading to disappointment.
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Young men hope that the woman they marry will stay the same, but women change a lot (esp. due to childbirth), leading to disappointment.
Yes, I do think that women often want a completely different man than the one they choose, partially because they are so wired to want to settle down that they are motivated to make big compromises to make it happen (like temporarily pretending to like things the man likes, including frequent sex), but also because they believe that men are unfinished projects.
Anecdotally, I am an agnostic white-collar nerd who married a woman from a family of religious blue-collar semi-rednecks. My theory is that she was initially attracted to how different I was from the men she grew up around, and that every day since she has increasingly resented not only how unlike them I am but how uninterested I am in that entire world as she gravitates back in that direction.
dasfoo
3yr ago
This is akin to a trend I've noticed with promiscuous people in general.
Your post very accurately described the movie "Trainwreck." Say what you like about Amy Schumer, that movie really captured a common contemporary female neurosis.
dasfoo
3yr ago
I used to marvel at how well the men were written on SATC, until it dawned on me that the show was run and written mostly by gay men. They understood men from both empathetic and adversarial positions.
dasfoo
3yr ago
Are the situations equivalent?
I suppose in both cases, employees are being required to "participate" in what could be considered a "political" activity (are all civic activities political?), and I am against employees being coerced into political displays of any kind.
I guess the arguments will come down to one's definitions of "participate" and "political," and is kneeling taking a conspicuously political action as opposed to merely not participating, ala Reimer?
Also, complete tangent, what do Canadians like Reimer do during the US National Anthem? Do they stand politely but not sing/participate? Do they kneel or otherwise demonstrate their lack of interest or objection to the anthem? Is this useful in any way as a comparison to Kapernick's method of dissent?
dasfoo
3yr ago
For my part, I try to read or skim several articles from one of a few news aggregator sites every morning
For an unrelated reason last night I went looking for daily podcasts that cover the day's top headlines in several broad categories -- like the sections of a newspaper -- in a few minutes. I found a couple, but there are shockingly few of these.
For about a year I've been listening to the BBC's global new report, but it has too much magazine-like filler, is too keen on pushing narratives, and releases several episodes per day. I was hoping to find 2-3 more compact headlines+lead paragraphs only podcasts from different sources. I have yet to go through the ones I found, but I think there's a market for something like this:
Monday-Friday, a 10-minute podcast that goes through 5-6 top news headlines from one source. The source changes everyday, rotating through 5-10 sources, so you get some different perspectives on the same big stories. Maybe on the weekend, 10-20 minutes going through some niche subject headlines, like sports, entertainment, tech, etc.
dasfoo
3yr ago
From that small excerpt, all I can say is that Pearl is an idiot. How many of these kinds of emails does everyone get everyday? I've had urgent messages about my account with such-and-such being compromised, and they look legit - but since I never went near such-and-such and have no account, I know it's a fake.
Anyone above the age of reason who clicks on a mystery link in an email, in this day, is an idiot. Sorry Pearl but it's your fault, not Musk's fault.
It is shocking to me, as someone whose job is basically helping small business owners deal with technology, how resistant people are to learning basic internet safety habits. There are often two or three clear signs that these emails are fake and a very simple way to verify without clicking any links in the email. Fortunately, I've trained several of my clients to forward suspicious emails to me, so I can confirm their suspicions, but it really isn't very hard and we've had 20+ years of life-training on this by now, haven't we?
dasfoo
3yr ago
A middle class programmer with a PhD who considers himself a worldly cosmopolitan will assure you they are working class. My theory is that the middle class is split down the middle by those who want to appear “posh” and those who want to look hip, which is what voting labour and identifying as working class is.
See Pulp, Common People, 1995:
dasfoo
3yr ago
I was listening to a podcast the other day by a Waldorf kindergarten teacher who had started taking his classes on walks to the park all morning, every morning, and that it worked out very well for them, but this was a nice, safe forest park in a place with decent weather much of the year.
I have a middle-schooler who, last year, was in a homeschool pod with, sort of accidentally, a lot of vaccine-wary Waldorf-defectors. They did the walk/bike to a park almost every day. We pulled her out of that pod this year because the plan was to spend essentially all day every day in the forest. The only math that was on the curriculum was in the spring when it was needed to plot out and build a big garden. All the reading was going to be nature-related non-fiction. No history at all. There's probably a healthy balance between intellectual and practical education, but it's easy to go too far in one direction.
dasfoo
3yr ago
I don't have a fixed POV on this issue, but I think your accurate historical definition of "political machine" is beside the point. My "election truther" buddies, if they were to refer to a "machine" behind ballot fraud, would be using a known old term to refer to something new and different, a difference that is key to their argument. In their worldview, a paradigm shift has taken place that has removed the common man from the political machine (this is the essence of Trumpism). Now that the titans of industry are predominantly Democrats, they have conspired with Democrat politicians to circumvent the inconvenience of getting votes from regular people. The argument is that they have figured out how to rig the game at a higher level, and everything else is kayfabe. They use "current thing" to distract the public from realizing that the public is now irrelevant. Meanwhile, a closed loop of graft and favors is making everyone in the elite richer and richer. (Add to this recipe some degree of Satanic grooming, if you want a full picture of this theory of the world.)
This isn't my worldview -- I expect more uncoordinated chaos in how things fold and unfold -- but I hear it a lot, in different degrees of eloquence. Like most other machines that have been around since the dawn of the industrial revolution, political machines have gone through technological changes that would now confuse the mechanics of that earlier time.
dasfoo
3yr ago
It seems natural to me that customers pay for the product that comes to them. If I get something trucked to me, I assume the cost of road tax (for upkeep of the road that the truck uses) will be included in whatever I pay the trucking company.
I pay both Comcast for the pipes and Netflix for the content that comes over the pipes. If Comcast starts charging Netflix for delivering what I already them pay for, that might be shrewd business on Comcast's part, but I'm not going to like a Netflix fee hike to cover what I'm already paying for.
I've heard that he is extremely unpopular amongst people with whom he has direct contact; so unpleasant that he was kicked out of a kibbutz for being generally annoying and not pulling his weight in community work. He and his wife also have some financial issues that are potentially more than just unbecoming of a self-declared socialist. We've never seen a gloves-off campaign against Sanders, because Clinton had the 2016 primary fixed.
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