gog
1yr ago
I haven't seen it, but my objection to it even existing is that, if you're going to make up a bunch of stuff -which they had to do, because of licensing issues, why call it LOTR? I know it's for marketing, but it surprises (or maybe just depresses) me that people are going for it. It's like starting a taco restaurant, and calling it McDonaldo's because people like McDonald's. Savvy business, I guess, but also a sign that you don't care one bit about McDonalds, or tacos, or making sense. For this reason I see this as one of the worst signs of our cultural decline. The naked commercialism is one thing, but the corruption of beauty (in the grand sense) is another. The LOTR showed modernity the harmony between the pagan and Christian virtues that made the West great. Rings of Power has no such claim even to ambition, let alone greatness.
gog
1yr ago
Maybe it's more useful for adults who thought they were smarter than everyone else, but it offers what was, to me, an unsettling look at the sort of self-destructive martyr-in-the-name-of-authenticity complex that a lot of intelligent young men fall into. The main character delights in dropping truth-bombs on other people's willfully ignorant illusions, and revels in the hostility this provokes in the sheeple, but is blind to the fact that this is all just a means of shoring up his own identity as the only person who REALLY gets it. He has glimpses of his many defects, but in the face of these he doubles down on the identity he has created for himself, which is pretty much divorced from any action he has taken. If TLP was a novel, it'd be NFTU.
gog
1yr ago
One more!
-Flatland: It's not a mathematical novel, it's a philosophy book. Nothing groundbreaking, but it's fun, and written in the most splendidly ornate style. And it's short!
UPDATE:
- Lots of ideas worth considering here. In the end, I just didn't wear the shirt. It turned it to be hugely overthought on my part because
a) 4 other people had no orange shirt, and 5 more had shirts of strategically (cowardly!) ambiguous orangeneity.
b) A kid GRIEVOUSLY injured himself in the shop class, which made everyone forget about Orange Shirt Day entirely. Apparently he's fine.
As an aside, I have come to doubt the sincerity of the people who are the public face of this stuff in schools. Twice now I have seen people go all in on this stuff, then 2 years later apply to become principals, fail to become principals, and then set it all aside. I believe I am seeing a third case now. For a day of grim solemnity, the video they used to Educate students was some instragram girl's "Top 5 questions about truth and reconciliation" [it's really called that here] but it was an actually an ad for her online feather-and-bead store. The bathos boggles the mind.
I need advice on what amounts to conduct in the Canadian culture war.
-
For a little over a hundred years, indigenous (native/Indian/aboriginal) children in Canada attended boarding schools designed to drag them into the modern age. For about 40 of those years (a bit longer, depending on the area), attendance was compulsory, and at all times physical and sexual abuse were at least common, though not universal. A little less than half of all indigenous children who lived during that period attended these schools. 4100 deaths are known to have occurred at these schools, most of them from tuberculosis. While the death rate of the schools was not way higher than the death rate generally, it was higher and most of the children who died in the schools would not have died if they had not attended the schools.
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Indigenous people in Canada today are not well integrated into society. Many live on reserves (reservations, if you're American) and these reserves are isolated, sometimes accessible only by air. Almost no economic activity occurs on these reserves, so unemployment is widespread. The reserves are plagued by extreme substance abuse problems, sexual violence, parental neglect, lack of education/credentials and the shame that results from knowing that these problems are much less severe everywhere else. Even people who move away from the reserves are affected by these problems, or from having grown up surrounded by them.
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For the past 20 years or so, but especially following the George Floyd affair, there has been a major push by the people who set the cultural tone in Canada to establish that (2) is a direct result of (1), just as in the US there is a great yearning to prove that the problems faced by black Americans are the direct result of slavery. In Canada, this has led to strident narrative-crafting. It is commonly (but mistakenly) accepted that residential schools were a big secret, that children were murdered routinely in them, that attendance was always compulsory and, most recently, that there are hundreds of tiny graves hidden all around Canada concealing the remains of the victims of what all bien-pensants agree was a cultural genocide (Side note: While the culture is definitely damaged, there is much evidence to suggest that it was damaged before the imposition of the residential school policy, but this is a matter of historical debate, and no such debate is currently permitted in Canadian society). These graves are in some cases the confirmed rediscovery of previously marked graves in community cemeteries, but the most cited example is of 215 ground-penetrating radar hits near a former residential school in Kamloops, BC. 2 minutes on Google will explain that GPR cannot find human remains, it can only find disturbances, and that those disturbances must be investigated by excavation. No excavation is happening in Canada because it would be disrespectful to the spirits of the children.
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One former residential school student once received a special orange shirt for her first day of school, but this shirt was confiscated by the nuns when she arrived at the school and was made to wear a uniform. Therefore, orange shirts have become/been made a symbol of public regret (in a bizarre inversion of the American culture war they bear the slogan "every child matters"). Regret over what? Formerly, it was regret over the abduction of children by the state, though this was always the policy, but more and more they have become a symbol of regret that the Canadian government literally murdered children and hid their bodies and used residential schools as a way of making this possible.
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Ironically, schools are the main institutions pushing the new narrative, in many cases explicitly as a means of correcting the backward thoughts of the students, since they cannot correct the backward thoughts of their parents. This was precisely the rationale for residential schools.
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Advice time: I am a teacher. Tomorrow is my school's Orange Shirt Day. I have lived in the fly-in communities I described above. I have seen the mind-boggling material and moral squalor of reserves. I have lived in it. I do not see how anyone wearing an orange shirt will bring about one iota of improvement in the lives of the people I knew Thus, if I were to wear an orange shirt, it would only be to avoid the consequences of being literally the only member of a 60-person staff without one, but these consequences would be entirely social. Canadian teachers are virtually impossible to either reward or punish. I would be something like Havel's Schoolteacher, only worse, because of the much smaller threat.
-I could wear the shirt but inwardly resist acquiescence to the narrative. This is what Havel argues quite convincingly against.
-I could wear the shirt so my friends on the staff are not marred by their association with me, although the consequences would be entirely social.
-I could wear the shirt because, having argued against pretty much every hyper-compassionate wine-mom idea my fellow teachers have, I am now regarded as a mere contrarian, so if I don't have a shirt they'll just roll their eyes and whatever statement I think I'm making will fail.
However, if I were to wear an orange shirt, in addition to just feeling like I took an L, it would also greatly undermine every argument I have made to my students regarding the value and possibility of resisting conformism. I am not so naive as to think that any of this will be remembered a year after they graduate, but day-to-day we all have to look each other in the eye.
Not wearing the shirt incurs only social consequences, but I have been incurring them for years now, and it's getting tiring.
I don't want to wear the shirt, but I also don't want to make a scene, but I also want to be credible to the people I ask to believe me.
Someone talk me into the right course of action here.
gog
1yr ago
Students mostly don't participate. Dorks care, and the kids who are like 1/8 indigenous make a big deal about it. The teachers, secretaries, and ed assistants are in lock-step on it, though. It is very much a top-down movement.
gog
1yr ago
Orange Shirt Day update:
(edited original comment, but no one saw it, so posting the edit here.)
Lots of ideas worth considering from everybody. Thank you all. In the end, I just didn't wear the shirt. It turned it to have been hugely overthought on my part because:
a) 4 other people had no orange shirt, and 5 more had shirts of strategically (cowardly!) ambiguous orangeneity.
b) A kid GRIEVOUSLY injured himself in the shop class, which made everyone forget about Orange Shirt Day entirely. Apparently he's fine.
As an aside, I am increasingly doubtful of the sincerity of the people who are the public face of this stuff in schools. Twice now I have seen people go all in on this stuff, then 2 years later apply to become principals, fail to become principals, and then set it all aside, thereby revealing that the entire thing was resume padding. I believe I am seeing a third case now. For a day of grim solemnity, the video they used to Educate students was some instragram girl's "Top 5 questions about truth and reconciliation" (it's really called that here) but it was an actually an ad for her online feather-and-bead store. The bathos boggles the mind.
gog
1yr ago
Two things:
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People vastly overestimate the amount of information on the internet. Nowadays I get most of my reading from the internet, but when I open a real book, written to be inform attentive readers, the amount of detail there is usually literally amazing. Quite apart from the density mentioned by the others, the quality of the information is just so much higher than you can get anywhere else.
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I don't know if you've traveled much, but people who have traveled generally agree that traveling is good for you in many ways. The problem is that if someone tries to explain to someone who hasn't traveled how much traveling can change, enrich, and expand your perspective on the world, they just end up sounding like a pompous boob. Reading is the same. At the risk of sounding like a pompous boob, I object to the idea that "all these people are doing just fine." It seems to me that huge numbers of people suffer from narrow global outlooks, shortened historical outlooks, confused scientific outlooks, facile religious outlooks, and self-serving philosophical outlooks. This all combines in a soup of error and small-souledness, and while I don't claim to be feasting on a stew of truth and magnanimity, I notice many differences between my life and the lives of people who don't read, just as a gym-rat notices many differences between himself and people who don't lift. Mottistes will doubtless insist that reading correlates with IQ, and IQ with a lack of error and small-souledness, but my IQ was what it was long before I devoted my life to extreme reading. That time of my life is over now- I have kids, and a job, etc, so I read a lot less and I notice that I used to just be . . . better. If you are the average of the people you hang out with, it pays to hang out with the best thinkers we know of, through the Magic Of Books!
Note: I'm talking here about philosophy and history and economics and science and uppercase-L Literature. Not Game of Thrones or Jack Reacher. I'm not saying it doesn't work, but as a pompous boob, I've just never tried it.
gog
1yr ago
Am teacher in Canada. You are naive. Social transition is instant. You’re a girl. You fail a test, you get scolded for it, you say “I’m trans” and suddenly everyone is terrified you’ll kill yourself and the test is forgotten. All you have to change is your name. Your clothes, behaviour, love of manly stuff like anime and fan fiction all remain unchanged, only now you don’t have to do any work at school because of your “mental health.” The other girls trip over themselves to affirm your new identity, and you all hug and giggle together in the cafeteria. If a social worker or counsellor is in on this, they will insist that your identity must be affirmed and your (in most cases, single) mother, aiming to literally save your life (because, suicide) will take you to the doctor to begin treatment. You dare not refuse, because you told everyone this was Not Just A Phase.
You can overdo it and say you’re a demon or something, but if you stick to the script and go to the right places, you can be well on your way to embodying the masculine ideal (5”2’ , blue hair, with a hint of a moustache) in a few weeks.
gog
1yr ago
I meant that these "trans" kids have zero masculine qualities. Nowadays, there's nothing girlier than saying you're a boy. One of them skipped my class, and when asked where they had been, replied "Home Depot." I felt bad, because I had judged this kid to be most unconvincing. But Home Depot? Perhaps I had been blinded by bias. "What did you buy there?," I asked. The reply? "This potted pansy! It's gardening day!"
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They trenders are 16. If you don’t hang around teenagers you won’t meet them.
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It’s probably a nightmare if you really are trans. What is crystal clear, though, is that almost none of the kids who say they are, actually are. That’s why it’s all girls. If a guy is trans he has to bear a lot of costs: get new clothes, look weird, change his voice, etc. A girl can change nothing, not even her clothes, (changing your name is really something you make everyone else change)and everyone will cheer-lead her bravery, and fall in line to affirm her new name and identity. The costs are borne by everyone else. It’s a cost-free power move, so it’s not surprising that kids are drawn to it.
gog
1yr ago
On mobile, at gym, sorry for gaps in the explanation, but The Last Psychiatrist (Edward Teach) talks about pretty much only this, in a hundred different ways. In the absence of any higher moral principles, you don’t even know how to desire things, and so the consumerist system steps in to teach you what and HOW to desire. All it cares about is keeping the money flowing, so it’s not weird that no one actually becomes happier, and it substitutes the much easier illusion of happiness by making identity (as divorced from actual deeds) the centrepiece of satisfaction. People allow this because the system promises absolution without requiring action, and people hate hate hate actually doing something to change their lives.
Constitution aside (since the inclusion of that clause guaranteed its eventual abuse, and no one should be surprised by the current situation), if asked privately, nearly every parent would be in favour of preventing a strike. So it’s really the parents tyrannizing the workers, using the province as their attack dog. The trouble is, though, that in order to pay the CUPE workers more, the population has to be taxed, and taxation involves the threat, however distant, of death. So CUPE would be tyrannizing the people of Ontario, with the province as their attack dog. And since shutting down schools does not hurt the government they way shutting down the kitchen hurts McDonald’s, CUPE is threatening kids’ and parents’ time (the least renewable non-renewable resource) in order to hurt the government’s money (they make more of it every day), which is a form of hostage-taking, and must also count as tyrannizing the people of Ontario. So in this exact public-sector union dilemma I count CUPE as aspiring to be twice as tyrannical as the government of Ontario, and therefore, bizarrely, prefer that the government win this one.
I can’t see a way to defend abolishing public sector unions, but they at least have to be honest about the fact that, in the end, they’re not extorting money from greedy capitalists, but time from ordinary citizens (and permanent residents).
gog
1yr ago
Sure, it counts. But we’re not talking about who is evil and who is righteous; we’re talking degrees of bad in badly conceived system.
gog
1yr ago
I'm not @urquan, but my mom died at 58 under similar circumstances, having to choose between starving to death or dying of bowel obstruction. People have come to understand dying with dignity as meaning dying on your own terms, or dying without a lot of suffering or something, but there is something to be said for equating dignity with triumph, in the sense that you can whip slaves all you like, but they can still stand tall and ask for more, thereby denying you the victory of degrading them. As painful as it is to see someone suffer, it also painful to see someone reduced to bemoaning their state and begging to be put out of their misery, not because it fills one with pity, but because it fills one with scorn. By the end of someone's life, it is perhaps too late to inculcate stoicism, but in my mom's case I basically told her to man up and quit being a pussy, that she would soon be dead, but everyone but her would have to live with the memory of her final days, so she should consider pulling whatever victory she could out of the situation. And she did. She did it out of maternal love for me, rather than out of any attachment to airy principles, but even still, in dying she left the gift of an example of courage and forbearance in the face of certain defeat. It doesn't get much more dignified than that.
I'm a teacher in Canada. I'm not sure lack of homework is either a good thing or the result of advances in pedagogy.
I teach high school, and can say with full confidence that it has been decades since kids have been educated as poorly as they are now (and this in in Canada, where I say with much less confidence that average performance is better than the US). Less and less is expected of kids every year, everything operates in what Zvi Mowshowitz calls easy mode (https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/26/play-in-easy-mode/), when most of it should happen in what he calls hard mode (https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/26/play-in-hard-mode/) and grade inflation is rampant. All of this is caused by institutional cowardice, since angry parents call all the time to complain about their kids' grades. Because homework was often a mark-depressor (as you note in your own case, and as it was in mine), it has become unfashionable largely because, if people send their kids to school for any nobler reason than "day care" it's to have the kid's intelligence certified ("He's an A student"), rather than to have the kid actually learn things. So cutting homework raises grades and reduces teacher workload- it certainly isn't cut because people are reading well-designed studies and changing their practice based on the findings. But cutting homework also removes a ton of practice from the kid's life, which means the kid is absolutely worse at the subject than he would have been. Maybe it's a good trade-off, maybe it's not that important to be good at school when you're a kid, maybe school should be nothing more than day care, but the kids definitely know less and have weaker skills than they used to. And your taxes are increasing to pay for it.
Note also that places like Kumon exist to SELL homework to families. Since this homework is not connected to the school, they get all the benefits of the practice without any of the risk of mark depression.
gog
1yr ago
Most of the true believers were poorly-educated themselves, and usually have no extracurricular skills, so they have no frame of reference for what excellence would actually look like (except high marks in school). Therefore, they can believe truly without having any idea of what to actually do to achieve their goals.
gog
1yr ago
I am a high school teacher in Canada, and I see this type of thing all the time. We have a token gay teacher at my school who runs the GSA (formerly the gay-straight alliance, but now the gender and sexuality alliance) but the flag is really waved by straight, childless women who crave the trappings of emotional intimacy that come with long, private discussions about sexuality, gender, coming out and whatever else. So they co-op the GSA (which has itself been co-opted by homely “trans” girls, and contains very few gay kids) and get to emotionally masturbate and play confidante every lunch hour with the neediest kids, and feel just like cool moms! They really are using these kids for their own purposes, those purposes just aren’t sexual, and they cheerlead (“affirm”) the girls who come to them relentlessly, so it’s not weird to see the explosion of trans-identifying girls as a partial result of this. It’s maybe a tortured definition of grooming, but it is damaging kids for personal gain, and it’s definitely a bad thing.
gog
1yr ago
For most modern board games, pursue anything that gets you extra actions. Often it’s not a question of who plays best, but of who plays most IN a game. So get the extra worker in worker placement games, get the free actions in roll-and-writes, etc. If it’s an engine builder, don’t stall your engine (ex: don’t run out of money in Roll for the Galaxy). Seems obvious, but people get trapped by the idea of a big, strategic, knock-out turn and make decisions that are suboptimal for victory, but also for fun, since that knockout turn might only come around once every three games, and the rest of the time you’re just sitting there frustrated.
gog
1yr ago
Maybe he phrased it churlishly, but I see what he means. The trads are less defying authority than they are preferring one authority over another. Among the traditionally-minded there are many highly intelligent people. In my little homeschooling circle there are computer programmers, a guy with a phd in engineering physics, a woman with a masters in musical accompaniment, etc. They are also all evangelical Christians. Normally we don’t think of evangelicals as highly-educated, but these people border on hyper-educated. Except that both their education and religious inclination depend on strict adherence to agreed-upon truths. I, a de facto wordcel, show up and try to make conversation about ideas- their ideas! Physics! Music! Code! and it’s the embodiment of the NPC meme. They absolutely cannot think outside their boxes, and even thinking inside their boxes takes the form of mere recitation of principles. If the regeneration of the West ever comes, it will come after the traditionalists’ descendants recreate something like worst aspects of the middle ages. So expect it in 400 years, not 200.
To distinguish a man from a non-man, check the chromosomes. I don’t know why everyone forgets to do that. But if you want “man” to be a social identity and you aren’t a compensatory narcissist, then counter to trans ideology you need to forget appearances (the mere trappings of maleness) and check behaviours. So examine the human in question and consider:
-Whether or not it is interested in objects with which it can DO something, like guns or computers or model trains or Magic cards.
-Whether or not it prizes mastery of skills, like jiu jitsu or Fortnite or coding or Magic cards.
-Whether or not it habitually considers recourse to violence in times of conflict, like war or crime or school shootings or Magic cards.
-Whether or not anyone would find that violence threatening if it were to be put into action.
-Whether or not it cares deeply about how you are feeling at any given moment.
-Whether or not it is moved by things that are cute.
-Whether or not it would have the capacity to provide for a group of others if the economic system were less bountiful.
-Whether a group of others would consider following it, uncoerced by bureaucratic structures, in the pursuit of any goal.
Non-men may possess some of the characteristics, and are-men may not possess them all, but anything that DOES possess them all is not a non-man. You might, as an objection, demand to know exactly what constitutes a credible threat of violence or what leadership is, but anyone about whom you would answer these questions in the right way would know. “What’s the right way?” They know that too.
gog
1yr ago
I think you misunderstand the objection. It’s not that people “have issues” with changing sex, they way they might disapprove of gay sex or pirating movies or something. The contention is that, since they think sex is innate, and “gender” is such a motte-and-bailey of a concept as to be useless, changing your sex is totally, categorically impossible and any claim/affirmation that it has happened is at best an error and at worst a lie. You might as well ask “If there was an immortality pill, how far back along the line from that point would you accept someone’s claim that they will never die?”
gog
1yr ago
-I’m saying that people believe sex is innate, so they believe that whatever happens to you later is irrelevant. At best you would gain the “power of menstruation” or something, just as if you had functional wings grafted on you would gain the power of flight, but still not be a bird.
-My immortality thing is trying to point out that your question amounts to “does an imaginary world where something impossible is possible cause you to reconsider that possibility of the impossible thing in the actual world?”
gog
1yr ago
C.S. Lewis pointed out that no technology increases human power over nature- it only increases the powers of SOME humans over nature, with the rest of the humans making up part of that nature. Whatever happens with technological progress, the delusion is that we will all share equally in it.
-Pensées, by Blaise Pascal gets poo-pooed because the stock objection to the Wager is easy to understand, but it's a good trip through the mind of someone honestly grappling with religious questions.
-Notes From the Underground should be required reading for every teenaged boy who suspects he is smarter than other people (this means you, probably, if you're here)
-Alexandria, by Paul Kingsnorth is the best post-apocalyptic story I've ever read, and I've read all the canonical ones.
-Religion and the Decline of Magic is an excellent history of ideas about magic. Academic enough to be serious, but popular enough to be readable.
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