gog
1d ago
Sure, but just as you wouldn’t start quoting cholesterol studies to a woman claiming that skinny girls are akshually unattractive, because you’d grok what she was actually talking about, all this drone-Rome-Ireadhistory debating is missing the point entirely. That’s not what any of this is about. It’s nerds-vs-jocks all the way down.
gog
1d ago
“Warrior” in western countries connotes bearded SOF soldier with plate carrier and suppressed M4 - manly men. I think that’s actually what all this is about. The Fremen debate is not about history, it is a valorization of traditional masculinity in a society where tradmasc is fading, and Devereaux (posts cat pics, plays vidya, skinny nerd, spent his life reading and it didn’t pan out) wants it to be true that masculinity is not advantageous to society (and by extension, to individual men). People here are taking the bait like they would if someone wrote a big article about how akshually curves are hot and therefore fat women shouldn’t lose weight. The argument is really over competing visions of masculinity- it has nothing to do with Rome or Somalia.
gog
8d ago
In a different era I might agree with you, but I’m a teacher and have never seen an unsuccessful bid to get an ADHD diagnosis, which suggests to me that doctors now consider “child is difficult” to be sufficient evidence of ADHD. We tell gymbros to stay away from roids until their training, sleep, and diet are dialed-in. We should tell parents the same thing.
gog
8d ago
There's no trick. You just punish your child when he does things you don't want him to do. My buddy has a terror of a kid, and they struggled for years until they finally got an ADHD diagnosis and put him on brain-zapping drugs. Right before they put him on the pills, I said "Have you tried swatting him?" and my buddy reacted with utter horror- that would be abuse! Better to pharmaceutically alter his mind, probably for the rest of his life, than to cuff him a couple of times. This attitude is extremely widespread- "I tried to take away the iPad, but he got mad," etc. This parenting hack is available to everyone except those who will cross into actual beatings, and even they can get the wife to do it.
gog
9d ago
The lie isn't breaking down. A new lie is growing up, which is that the purpose of life is constant amusement. If human life has a purpose in any grand sense, that purpose must have applied to humans in all periods of history, and constant amusement at scale only became possible 40 or 50 years ago, and only for a narrow segment of the Earth's population. So people should really reconsider whether they are intended or evolved or whatever for nothing but tourism and concerts. So "it's not fun" is a pretty weak argument for tossing out the biggest of Chesterton's fences. I agree, though, that that's what people are doing.
But love is not "fun" either. I mean romantic love- the fretting and ups and downs and fights and giving control of your happiness to another person. But it's still worthwhile, and possibly more worthwhile than most amusements. In that sense, having kids is kinda like romantic love- worthwhile in a bigger way than fun.
I had a marriage proposal rejected once, and though we don't talk anymore, I'm pretty sure the main reason was my stated goal of never having children. Later I married someone else, and we fought for years about having kids, because I was adamant that having children was contrary to the will of God (the goal of life is either to serve God or be happy, the vast majority of people do neither, therefore you are probably condemning your kids to earthly unhappiness or eternal damnation. Probably both). I still don't have a convincing reply to this dilemma, but I also note that my chief goal in life at that time was clearing all the vaults in Fallout 3, so my true motives may not have been entirely theological, but the point is that my "I don't want kids" cred is legit.
I eventually caved because my wife was so annoying about it, and we had a kid.
I hated my own kid so much that I spent a while desperately trying to unearth evidence of infidelity on my wife's part so that I could abandon my wife and kid with a clear conscience (remember, my cred is legit). I might have changed 2 diapers (ever- my cred is legit), so I don't even have that to complain about, but my kid screamed all the time, and my wife basically opted out of marriage for like a year and half because she was a mother now. Being home with my kid and de facto ex wife made me bitterly regret every choice that had led me to that path. My kid also hated me. It was breast-fed for years, so I could not provide anything it wanted. It would only sleep with my wife. I just went around raging all the time. All in all, it was absolutely the worst years of my life. And worst of all, there was no evidence of infidelity.
Then it turned two. It could eat crackers, which I could provide. It could go on little walks to look for ladybugs. You could do the Louis CK thing at the grocery store (not that thing) and say "Look! A watermelon!" and know you had just expanded the kid's mind. You could push it down the slide and be a big hero. Even weirder was the first time the kid knew something I didn't, which was only "where the hammer is," but was a qualitative shift in the relation. It was becoming a full human. It could read. It could be taught math. It made jokes. Just to be present while this kid did anything at all was a gift from God or the universe or luck or whatever. I built my life around reading stories to it every night.
Moreover, I was also becoming a full human. A life spent playing Fallout and eating pizza is, if not a waste, merely the life of an animal. Cattle look for food and scratch itches and avoid pain, which is all I had been doing up to that point. I justified my life by telling myself I was working out and learning music and studying philosophy, and I really was doing all those things a little, but mainly I was playing Fallout. Or KOTOR. Or Arkham Asylum. All the other perfunctory efforts were somewhere on the line between cope and delusion. With the kid I had to reduce that and think about someone else basically all the time, but also admit that I had basically been thinking only about myself all the time. Just as it's hard to explain the value of education to an uneducated person without sounding like a smug tool, it's hard to explain the value of abandoning selfishness to someone who hasn't had it forced upon them. But I would say that I wasn't really an adult until 4 or 5 years into parenthood. (That may be normal, but it's abnormal for that to come at 35 instead of 23)
It wasn't an instant switch being flipped- it was gradual, but love for this kid grew to the point that I only agreed to have a second kid because I knew it would occupy all my wife's time and I would be able to spend even more time with my first kid. Not a great reason, but better than what had convinced me the first time. With the second kid, I knew what to expect and my wife had also grown a lot, and so it was much better, and rather than split the family into factions like I had hoped, everyone drew together, because the first kid also got to watch this baby develop into a full human and the new baby became part of all of our development.
Nowadays, if my kids died in an accident or something, it's a coin toss on whether I'd literally kill myself, because it's not at all clear what the point of living would be without them. I guess I could start over. But once you have kids that you like (not love- everyone "loves" their kids), nothing else is comparable. There is no Fallout or restaurant or vacation that could ever do anything other than remind you that this would be better if your kids were here. So in this sense, saying "kids are gross" is like saying "girls are gross" -only someone who has never experienced a good one would say that. The difference is that "girls are gross" expires on a timer (age), but "kids are gross" only expires on a trigger (getting to know your kids). Pull the trigger.
Finally, my kids are statistical outliers. They are intelligent, but also agreeable and social. Through my extreme weirdness, they have been educated and disciplined far above the standards of the age. I'm not a huge Jordan Peterson fan, but his advice to not allow your kids to do things that make you dislike them seems to have really paid off for my family. This skews my perception of the entire issue. Maybe your kids will be terrors. Certainly, most kids I meet are disliked by their parents and other adults, but in most cases it's the parents' fault for letting the kid get like that- with enough attention and self-discipline (of your self), you can usually discipline your kids into people that you, and everyone else, want to be around.
So you're right but everyone else, but wrong about yourself. Have some kids.
If you had to devise a test to decide who counts as a conservative in the classical sense, what would you check? Politics must count, and religion, and respect for tradition, but almost no one has all three of those in a way that makes the label "conservative" apply.
Politically, most people who apply the term "conservative" to themselves or others actually mean "classical liberal": someone who prefers less economic control/intervention by government and all the market solutions that such a position implies, and also favors no government position on The Good Life, leaving people free to choose whichever life they choose, from pious monasticism to squalid meth addiction. This often means "Red Tribe,' but also covers weirdo libertarians. It rules out nearly all Christians, because they would never say "the true Good Life is not sufficiently knowable for the state to take a position on it," which is why there is so much rhetoric about Christians coming for abortion rights or whatever.
But many religious people don't count either. True Conservatives, in the Burkean sense (not in the literal sense of "this is what Edmund Burke wrote," but in the sense that people mean when they say "I'm a classical conservative") are not supposed to want to change anything in society or culture that was working serviceably. On this definition, though, no American counts, because the Revolution upended a system that was working ok. No protestant counts, because Luther upended a system that was working okay (of course Americans and protestants disagree about that serviceability, but does everyone get a C-pass for their particular complaint? Was Lenin a conservative too?). So this rules out most anglosphere "conservatives." But this leads to the absurdity of going back further and further and finding that no user of bronze tools counts because stone tools were working okay, etc.
In terms of respect for Tradition, there is no definitional problem, but there is the empirical problem of people having no sense of history or culture. Maybe in Europe things are different, but in North America very few people think about tradition at all, and many of those that do overestimate the age of most traditions. So there might be a respect for tradition, but it is uncoupled from ancestral traditions to a point where "I respect tradition" does not mean what anyone wants it to mean.
So my question is, does the term "conservative" mean anything at all anymore other than "red tribe" or "anti-woke"? If so, how would an alien zoologist classify someone as "conservative"? I suggest checking people's children (to check transmission of values) to see how many nursery rhymes they know or how many second-verses of Christmas carols they can sing, but I grant that this prioritizes traditional culture over religion and politics, and a relatively recent tradition at that. Nevertheless, I think that if you sorted people by how many of those things their kids could recite, you would be able to predict more about them than asking "should abortion be legal" or "what is the optimal income tax rate."
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