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.
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.
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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
3mo ago
I'm not trying to morally compare the current Canadian government to the Nazis, but I was thinking the other day about how they are comparable in terms of "commitment to the bit". The war was well-lost and everyone knew it, but they were still rounding up Jews until the very end. We see that now and think "Guys, take the hint, throw in the towel," but Jew-gassing was just THAT important to the Nazis.
It looks like the current government is finished. Pretty much everyone hates them, Canada is (relatively) crumbling around us, and the government is trying to do things like find a path to citizenship for illegal migrants. I used to console myself with the knowledge that they were a bunch of bad-faith virtue signalers, but their laser focus on moremoremore immigration- to the exclusion of many, if not most, other issues- makes me think they really do believe in this stuff. Talk about commitment to the bit.
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
1mo ago
Yesterday, I heard a woman casually, as though it were self-evident, explain an undesirable outcome in her life with "because I'm a woman." I have heard this used by many women to explain: -Why they are not managers -Why their students cannot read -Why they follow pointless workplace rules that no one ever enforces and most employees don't follow -Why they live in fear of the disapproval of superiors -Why a waiter was rude to them -Why a waitress was rude to them -Why they must conform to community norms
Though the explanation sounds like a confession ( "I can't be a manager, I'm just a girl!"), in all cases it is an accusation, intended to imply that the patriarchy is manipulating things behind the scenes, or that "everyone knows" men never get punished/demoted/frowned upon, so only women have to actually worry about their behavior/reputations/whatever. I have been shocked both by how readily this explanation is confirmed/affirmed by other women present when it is offered, and also the wild confirmation bias on display. The women are not managers, but they never applied for the job, and their bosses are women. They have never been reprimanded at work, but neither has anyone else. The male students can't read, but neither can the female ones. None of this is considered. It boggles the mind.
Nevertheless, it is a fact about how a certain class of Western woman explains the world to herself. If people so privileged are so certain of how the deck is stacked against them, what hope is there for people with stronger evidence for that belief about themselves? How does a standard right-thinking (from "to right-think") respectable Westerner expect anyone else to transcend their culture or overcome oppression or break the cycle when their default, axiomatic explanation for why they only make 100k and three trips to Mexico per year is "society cheated me." What is a black kid supposed to think? Or a kid on a reservation? "I'll give it my best shot"? I have heard black dissidents make this argument against the idea of systemic racism- that even if it is real, thinking about it stops black people from trying things. But how can self-exculpatory models of the world be eradicated in people with somewhat credible claims to oppression when they are so popular even among the most privileged members of society? How do the "it's the culture" people expect the culture to change if the winning culture tells itself the same story as the losing one?
My kid is 9 and has been homeschooled the whole time. She is far ahead of grade 4 (she just finished gr 8 math, but math is pretty a priori, so it's easier to push than history or something) and she isn't that much weirder than the other kids. I'm not even sure her weirdness is from homeschooling- it might just be hereditary. I am a public highschool teacher, and quite apart from the low-balled curriculm and culture war stuff, just talking to other teachers is enough to make me prefer death in the street to sending my kid to school, at least until 10th grade (I'll consider it then).
Social interaction is absolutely the biggest problem. We live in Canada, in the reddest part of the country (although blue is the colour of the red tribe here, and red is the colour of the blue tribe), so there is no shortage of homeschooling families but they are a)weird as hell and b)hyper individualists who prefer to opt out rather than to work within a system. I don't blame them, that's why we homeschool too, but the result is that the slightest disagreement over vaccines, or theology, or which video games kids are allowed to play, leads to ghosting. These are people who REALLY fear that their kids will develop the wrong values, so they try to find people with perfectly matched values. This works great for Mormons, but not for anyone else.
The next part of the problem is that virtually all social interaction is mediated by mothers and determined by their relationships to each other. Just dropping your kid off at their friend's house is pretty rare. If the kids are hanging out, the moms are hanging out too, so the moms have to be friends. Sometimes they form Mom Groups. Often these groups become Machiavellian dens of intrigue and betrayal, and now your kid's friend just doesn't exist anymore. If you try to organize stuff yourself, it freaks out the moms.
So maybe you sign your kid up for soccer or swimming or something so they can make friends there with some normal kids. The problem is that no other parents thinks of these places as incubators of friendship- that's what school is for. So if you suggest that your kids hang out together sometime, people act like you just invited them to a threesome.
Now, my kid has like 4 friends, and I went to school and had like 4 friends too, so maybe she's not missing out, but maybe she is. I tell myself that it's a tradeoff- you can't count on getting a liberal arts education at university anymore, and you shouldn't try anyway because of the costs, so this way I can give her something like that between ages 12-17, and then she can go get technical training and in any case, who still talks to their elementary school friends?
So if you're opening yourself up to "You kept me isolated throughout my entire childhood," you want to be able to say "No I didn't but also, look at the education you received."
Math is easy. Push Khan Academy. My kid starts Algebra 1 next month, and she's 9. That's not prodigious, but it's pretty good. She'll understand it at least as well as the average kid in Algebra 1. I pushed her pretty hard, pretty young, which led to a lot of rage from me and I don't recommend it and I wont do it with my other kid. Eventually I figured out that as long as her age matches the grade level (9 years old = grade 9 math) everything works okay. If we creep beyond that (because you can advance through this stuff really fast when you aren't doing a crossword about fractions every Friday) she muddles through but it's just not worth it. This takes about 45 minutes per day.
Reading is easy. Teach your kid to read early. My one kid could read by 3, the other one is taking a little longer, but will be semi-fluent by 4. This literally adds years to the kid's info-absorbing life and boosts vocab hugely. This isn't just a party trick, since vocab limits comprehension of text. Push reading fiction to learn words and culture, and non-fiction to build a model of the world. Building an accurate model of the world is the most important way schools fail children. This takes about an hour per day.
Writing is less easy: Get the kid to write poetry and descriptive stuff, emulating the style of distinctive things they have read. There is a book called "Writing Power" by Adrienne Gear which has a lot of good tips for making a kid's writing suck less. This varies hugely. Writing about a trip to Disneyland takes 15 minutes, writing a 12-line poem can take an hour.
Science is easy: Science up to like grade 7 is just general knowledge. If the kid reads a lot, you're good. We follow our province's curriculum as a minimum standard, but it's stuff like "opposite poles attract, similar poles repel." Pretty simple stuff. We do this as the opportunity arises. Maybe an half an hour per day when we're doing it.
History is easy: History up to grade 12 is just bien-pensant propaganda. If your kid reads a lot, you're good. My kid is now at the age where we watch a lot of pop history videos, and we also read The Story of The World, which is a homeschooling classic and is a good starting point for building the model. We cover our province's curriculum in about 10 minutes every year just to be safe: "What happened to the Indians?" "Everyone was mean to them." "Was residential school a good thing?" "I'd say no." Done. This mostly is covered by reading time and conversations in the car.
Gym: BJJ and lots of swimming and biking. She has no idea what to do with a basketball or a baseball. I'd sign her up if she asked, though.
If your wife has a PhD, the above is probably all you need to do. We tried The Good and The Beautiful, which might be good for older kids, for for a small kid it was a lot of "Write 4 facts about Switzerland" and "Memorize this poem of dubious artistic merit that was clearly chosen for no other reason than its memorizability." It's made for stay-at-home essential-oil-selling moms with no real education of their own, and is pretty good for those situations. My wife sorta falls into that category so she gets my kid to do a lot of Duolingo and stuff like that, but I supervise most of the real work.
It's a ton of work. I help my kid with her math in the morning before I go to work and check her writing when I get home and ask her about the books she's reading and read classic stuff to her at night and show her the movies of cultural importance that she can understand. But when it goes well, the pride is indescribable, and we share enough of a common language that when she asks something like "What came before God" I can explain most of the debate pretty quickly in terms she can understand and she wails in frustration as she realizes that some things are not just unknown but unknowable because she really does understand the problem. This might happen if she went to a regular school, but the . . . intellectual(?-she's 9?) . . . relationship wouldn't be there, it would be- if it existed at all- between her and a childless 30-year-old wine-aunt teacher who obsessively watches The Bachelor. There's a fine line between "Why have kids if you're going to have someone else raise them?" and "I'll keep your body in the freezer so we'll never be apart," but I think all this effort and interaction and conflict leads to a better parent-child relationship, and I wouldn't want to cede that to an appointee of the state. Many parents have ceded that relationship with their kids to me without even knowing it ("I asked my mom about this stuff, but she doesn't know anything"), and I don't feel good about it.
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
3mo ago
I worked at pretty mid-tier daycare in Canada. It was bad.
The studies that show daycare is good for child development use highly curated daycares, with like 1:4 adult-to-child ratios. These studies actually simulate a mom staying home with her kids. MY daycare was a charity daycare run by a church, so to help single mothers, they took everyone. I worked with the 3-year-olds, and the worst ratio was 1:21 (illegal). A normal day was 1:12. In either case, the kids were supervised, I guess, but the priorities were no fingers in power outlets, no vomit, no urine, etc. Learning to count or something was a complete impossibility.
-The kids could talk, but it was garbled and they couldn't tell you what they had done the night before. Conversation was difficult, so their language development was definitely stunted. A child psychologist once told me that language abilities develop most in early childhood- if that's true, daycare damaged these kids' brains. I would meet kids who stayed home with their moms and those kids would tell me what WOULD HAVE happened if something the night before had turned out differently.
-One kid in the one-year-old room cried LITERALLY all day, 8-5, for about her first month. The metabolic stress alone must have affected her, and the noise and tension affected the other kids.
-One kid didn't talk for the 5 months I worked with her. Not word to me or anyone else.
-The one-year-old room was a pen. The kids sat on the ground with toys pretty much all day. The ratio was better, but the workers were occupied with diapers and feeding most of the time, so interaction was limited.
-About 8 kids (out of around 50) were at the daycare from 7 am to 5 pm. A little kid sleeps about 12 hours, so that leaves either 2 hours with their parents or sleep deprivation. Both of those are bad for kids.
-Since the kid spends the majority of his waking life at the daycare, the workers are raising him. I thought I needed resume padding for teachers' college (incorrect), but the other workers were low-IQ, 5th-generation underclass hillbillies under the stress of just being in a room with so many feral kids, let alone trying to manage them. Since middle-aged women generally don't like the cold, and Canada is cold, the kids spent very little time outside.
I am now a highschool teacher, and while I am certain that intelligence is fixed and genetic, I am confident that IQ depends on nurture. Exposure to puzzles and vocabulary and general knowledge and grammar are extremely important. It takes years and years to acquire that stuff and you can't speedrun it when you realize that it's missing. My kid is 9 and just finished Algebra 1 on Khan Academy. I don't know how that compares to actual school algebra in the US, but in Canada that's pretty good (she can't rotate shapes to save her life though, so that's 1 point for the nature crowd). At this rate she's going to have math powers. She has extreme reading powers. It is possible, and some even say probable, that she will not be able/interested enough to spin that into some high-paying job, and she might turn out a bored housewife or HR-lady-that-none-of-the-other-HR-ladies-like-because-they-think-that-she-thinks-she's-better-than-they-are, and the Nurture Assumption crowd will say "See, Gog? Similar outcomes to other women with parents like you."
But quite apart from money, or propensity to addiction and crime, how do you think her model/experience of the world differs from that of one of the kids who went to that daycare, and which model/experience would you prefer your child to have? What sorts of questions will she wonder about, compared to the daycare kids? How will she experience movies and music and advertising? How many more topics of conversation will she be able to discuss? How much more will she bring to the romance table? None of that just develops because of genetics. Daycare is bad.
gog
3mo ago
Minor quibble: Kids have no real frame of reference, so they are easy to satisfy. Every kid at my daycare except the screaming one-year-old would have said they liked me and the daycare ladies and the food and most of the other kids. One kid (the one who never spoke) tried to refuse to return to the daycare when I quit, though- because she now had a point of comparison.
Main point: Does it matter? Think of watching a movie with a kid and all the jokes and references that the kid doesn't even realize are jokes and references. He doesn't know what he's missing. He might enjoy the movie more than you did, but your experience of the movie was richer/denser. The entire world is like that, all the time, and as you become more culturally educated you realize how many well-credentialed adults are in the same position as the kid watching the movie. Doctors and physicists and professors all the way down to gas-station clerks are missing a huge part of human experience and there is no way to even explain that to them since they don't even realize it's there. So all that wordcel cultural stuff is of limited economic benefit, but it is of extreme personal benefit. And it is a benefit that I want to pass to my kids. But there's too much to absorb to start late, so having a dad like me isn't enough. There needs to be teaching and exposure.
So you learn algebra when you're nine, because algebra is easy- it requires no real experience of the world. And then, when all the other 16-year-olds are learning algebra and how to write a sentence (really), you can start philosophy and literature because now you understand death and fear and maybe love. And you don't have to start by learning to read archaic English because you've been reading archaic stuff since you were 7 even though it didn't matter and you can engage the material because you aren't just stepping into the cultural conversation cold- you've been sitting at the grown-ups' table, silent and listening, since you were 10. And when everyone else is taking out student loans to go get an ersatz "The Marvel Cinematic Universe and Feminism" liberal arts education, you already have one at least as good as what they will get, probably better, and you can now study something that pays because you need money but you also need a lot more than that.
So I'd say it matters very much.
gog
1yr ago
My kid was doing gr 7 math questions on khan academy the other day, and one of the questions was “The word ‘latinx’ first appeared in [dictionaries or Google or something] in 2007. How many years has it been in use?” It was the most hamfisted attempt. I would have expected something like “the Latinx population of the US is…”
It seems like a weaponized use/mention distinction, which is weird, because normally use/mention gets pulled out to defend apparent wrongthink.
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.
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.
This is not a small-scale question.
But anyway,
(1) An external motivation to act rightly. In the old internet-atheist days, there was lots of indignation at the perceived attitude of the religious that atheists can’t be good people. That was always a strawman, though. There are lots of good atheists. The question is why there should be. Penn Jilette famously protested that he doesn’t need religious belief to keep him in line, since he already rapes and murders everyone he wants to, it’s just that he never wants to. I admire his purity, and grant that in a society as decadent as ours rape and murder are less tempting than they might once have been. And maybe Penn Jilette has never reflexively blurted out a self-exculpatory fib, or fumed internally about some kid getting the last burger at a barbecue, but it would appear that a lot of people have, and it would be surprising if the rest of humanity had jumped straight to Einsatzgruppen and Congolese rape-battalions without passing through lower levels of immorality.
We can Euthyphro this all day but even setting aside questions of the One True Good, the loss of that external nudge has been disastrous. Law cannot fill the gap- there can be no law against selfishness or contempt, for example.
(2) A prescribed human identity. Religions tell people who they are. Muslim women know exactly what they are supposed to do. Orthodox Jewish men know exactly who they are supposed to be. Suicide bombers know. The vast majority of people are incapable of forming an identity from scratch. Religion offers/offered identities that had many drawbacks and did not adequately serve a lot of people, but they did the job for the vast majority. Among the truly religious, there is no self-expression-by-buying-tattoos, no retail therapy, no do-it-for-the-gram; indeed such narcissistic paroxysm is a sign that someone is on their way out of the religion. Religious people have/create lots of problems for themselves and others, but the defining problem of our age, lack of identity, is the result of the loss of religion. No such broadly effective alternative source of identity has yet appeared.
Americans had slavery, and institutionally confessed to it during the civil rights era, which gave bien-pensants a huge opportunity for performative guilt, righteous feeling, and financial grift. Canadian bien-pensants never had a similar stick to wield. Even residential school, which absolutely sucked, could not compare with the horrors of slavery. How are you supposed to condemn your political enemies in the 2020s if you can’t prove their historical analogues were racist? Then George Floyd happened, and turbocharged every aspect of the situation, including Canadian atrocity-envy. So when they found these “graves,” people jumped on it hard and in about 3 days the narrative was permanently burned into the minds of everyone in the respectable classes. After about a week, news websites started quietly walking back the story -no retractions, mind you, just stealth edits, but the damage was done.
I don’t think indigenous communities themselves set out to scam anyone, but, speaking generally, they are plagued with widespread dysfunction and are grievously (and even understandably) addicted to copium, and so are prone to scamming themselves. There is always a hunger strike, or 500km awareness walk, or traditional hunting camp for kids going on. While these absorb enormous effort, they never change anything, which eventually leads to the conclusion that all the effort is in fact a defence against change, a way of telling yourself change is impossible because you’ve tried lots of solutions. The grave story is the best copium of all: “They were literally murdering our children to exterminate us; who could recover from that?”
For these two reasons, the grave thing is likely to stick around for a long time.
gog
11mo ago
It's not a story. I just have something that half-approaches the old liberal/renaissance-man education (literature, philosophy, general science, music, am swole, etc) and I see how it enriches my life and how the lack of it impoverishes the lives of pretty much everyone I meet. It took me YEARS of autodidacticism to get here, and other than teaching me some math, school did not help one bit. I got all this education at the expense of productive technical training, but I think I can arrange things so that my kid gets most of what I have before she starts technical training so she doesn't end up a wordcel like me. There's no way she'll get it a school though.
School is a colossal waste of a kid's time. I taught elementary school for years, and anyone of average intelligence or higher spends most of the day colouring while the teacher tries to coax a 0.1% improvement out of the sub-average kids. No one wants to do "more challenging work", so they just draw or read the crappy school-provided books. High school is the only place where you will be told that you MUST either learn calculus and quantum physics OR learn how to make jam. This reveals that the primary goal of the institution is not to transmit a considered body of knowledge to a student, but to occupy his time.
Socially, school teaches the wrong lessons. Kids spend most of the day being told not to socialize, and when they are allowed to socialize it's with a bunch of people exactly the same age, which is great for commiseration but bad for education. The main lessons in elementary school are that everyone has to obey the prettiest girl and that you must use authority figures as weapons against your enemies (relentless tattling). The main lesson in high school is that anarcho-tyranny is here and you'd better just accept it (this may not be such a bad lesson . . .)
Ex: Because we can't tell who is ripping the toilets off the walls, no one is allowed to leave class to go to the bathroom, but the toilet-rippers were never in class in the first place. Etc.
Teachers are generally not people you want your kid hanging around if you care about intellectual development. The education system is very much a welfare system for people with bachelor's degrees (I fully admit my participation in this) and is completely ideologically captured, so teachers are almost never the best and the brightest. This wouldn't be so bad if they confined themselves to showing the kid how to do math or explaining how chemical reactions work, but the daily grind is not enough for around half of all teachers. They are there to teach students "how to think, not what to think." THAT wouldn't be so bad if they showed literally any sign at all of possessing such knowledge themselves. It has been my UNIVERSAL experience, however, in numerous schools, at numerous conferences, in various parts of the country, that teachers do not have original thoughts and are incapable of judging a thought beyond the most rudimentary "That's just like, your opinion, man". The most philosophically inclined might sometimes drop a "correlation is not causation," but only with regard to the opinions of others, never their own. Their opinions are totally off-the-shelf, NPC platitudes. They are usually PMC/progressive platitudes, but the dissenting ones only ever rise to FoxNews-style "If a MAN acted like that he'd be in jail, but a woman got away with it" type of stuff. Luckily, such people will never teach your kid how to think, but they'll do their damndest to teach your kid what to think (whether they are successful is an open question- kids openly talk about how you just have to say the white guy in the story was bad and Mr #%^ will give you an A, so they see what's going on, but that just turns the school into the Junior Greengrocers) The rest of the teachers are grill-pilled, which doesn't set a great example for a developing intellect.
Teachers hate learning. Hatehatehate it. Teachers love credentials, and believe that since they got a credential twenty years ago, the matter is settled. English classes study the 4 books the teacher studied in university. History classes repeat historiography from the nineties. Gym teachers are 10 years behind the times with regard to exercise science. I asked a biology teacher where the chromosome pairs actually ARE in the cell because I had been wondering, and she literally did not understand the question- she just drew the same diagram of the 23 pairs that every textbook contains. A week later she came back with an answer after a bunch of research. Good for her, I guess, but had the question never occurred to her? I spent a year learning Latin. It's a niche interest, sure, but my coworkers absolutely could not understand why anyone would learn something just for the fun of it. "So teachers are normies and you're a half-aspie weirdo?" I guess. But in a billion-dollar system that claims to foster intellectual development, I think it's reasonable to expect a little more intellectualism.
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
Just checked my kid's copy of The Giant Peach. The centipede sings about the fat aunt. We got it at Costco, in a boxed set. They still seem to be selling it sometimes. Act now!
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).
I fully endorse voting with your money with regard to woke art, but if the movie isn’t ideological (which remains to be seen), why do you care about the producer? I don’t know about film crew ranks, but if the best boy (whatever that is) held values antithetical to yours would you be bothered? What about the key grip (again, whatever that is)? Costume designer? Casting director? Keep moving up the chain until it matters. Why is that the point where a worker’s political beliefs ruin the movie for you?
In the old Christian view of the world, everyone was equally evil and equally deserving of damnation, but I think that worldview allowed for greater nuance in weighing people’s moral worth. You either had to bite the bullet and say that no one had any moral worth, or make pretty fine distinctions, along the lines of “OF COURSE we’re all equally bad, but we kill people in battle, and that other guy kills prisoners.” Nowadays, though, without that blanket condemnation of every human, it’s easy to fall into “but that guy is BAD and I don’t want to help him/pay him/give him a platform/etc.”
My brother in Christ, EVERYONE is bad. Your plumber cheats on his wife, your mechanic watches child porn, your hairdresser spreads rumours, your kid tortures frogs. You give them all money without a second thought. It sucks, but it is the fallen nature of humanity. If the movie is a wokefest, skip it no matter what the producer thinks, but if this specific bad executive producer can executively produce a good movie, why the isolated demand for purity?
On another note, yousaid it was an ethical dilemma, but ethical dilemmas involve competing obligations. You have only one obligation- to not support this guy, but mentioned shame and feeing emasculated. That’s not an ethical dilemma, it’s a psychological one. It sounds (sounds, that’s all), like you’re trying to preserve an ideal of who you are as resisting in some measure the decline of western society. A noble goal, but we’re fretting over a spiderman cartoon, so the battle is lost. They’ve gotten into your head, and whether you see the movie or not, you think watching spider man movies is really important, which is a win for Marvel marketing over the long run. Do not resist the decline, propel the recovery. Step one is to stop watching marvel movies and go out and act on the world. . If you already act, act more.
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.
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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
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!"
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.
I’m a teacher in Canada. Points below about teachers finding phonics boring are true, although there is constant pressure from administrators and colleagues to be FUN, and phonics doesn’t make class fun.
It is impossible, however, to overstate the staggering stupidity of the average teacher. Intellectual mediocrity combined with everyone else in the room treating you like an authority (and shamelessly kissing your ass) is a really bad combination for self-awareness.
Examples:
-Test question shows a French peasant and a priest riding on a rich guy. Implication is that he is supporting them. Correct answer is “this image depicts France after the revolution.” I show up and point out that the nobility was destroyed (not esoteric knowledge) and largely the clergy too, and therefore this image cannot depict France after the revolution. Say it is more like some noble’s uncharitable take on the true motivations of the 3rd estate. Unanimous response from the entire department: “we’ve used it for 17 years, we’re not changing it.”
-kid gets shunted out of AP English for arguing that the accepted interpretation of a story is wrong. “It’s not what you’re supposed to think.”
-AP English teacher says a play is racist because it contains a song where a girl mocks the bumpkin townsfolk by listing all the stereotypes they expect her to fulfill, and agreeing to enact them because that’s all their tiny minds can understand. Teacher protests that stereotypes should never even be mentioned unless he (personally)is present to make sure kids think correctly about them.
-I teach French, but can also teach math. Have no degree in either. Fellow teachers universally baffled that, in the 20 years after university, I have learned other things to slightly above high-school level. I say “you can learn new things.” One says “NO, I CAN’T.”
-Gr 3 math teacher comes to me, kid is multiplying stuff like 71x83 incorrectly, but getting correct answer every time. He’s doing tens then ones, instead of ones then tens. She cannot understand how this can work, because she has never actually understood multiplication.
-At provincial gr 12 French immersion meeting, teachers unanimously lament that, after 12 years of relentless French instruction, kids can’t read French novels and they must be read to them. Final essays are 80% about hallmark-grade movie Intouchables, a black-guy cool/white guy uptight shlockfest. Teachers are SO happy. It’s the BEST movie, with SO many themes.
I could go on and on (“I showed my students this really good TED talk”), but if you are wondering “how did they not see that the kids weren’t learning,” the answer usually is “they were, on average, not smart enough to do anything other than follow a recipe.”
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