gog
3d ago
It's a weird vision of dignity that considers MAID death dignified. If you went to garage and shot yourself, whatever your thoughts about the morality of suicide, at least you went out on your own terms. But with MAID (at least in Canada) you have to ask a grown-up for permission, and then they come and kill you and collect their fee. It's not messy, it's not as hard to watch as slow death from dementia, but it's not dignified in Nietzschean heroic Master morality sense. It might be dignified in some conceptions of slave-morality ("I asked permission and the authorities granted my request, but I didn't do it myself. I was a Good Boy") but all that slave morality is the stuff telling you not to do it in the first place.
gog
3d ago
It's not medically assisted suicide. It's not like Kevorkian sets up the machine and then you push the button. The doctor just comes in a 10:45 as per your appointment, kills you, and then bills the taxpayer for 70$ per 15-minute unit.
gog
4d ago
(Since Trump vs Trudeau/Carney is pure culture war, this counts) Every now and again there are throwaway lines in comments here about how Canada is a bad ally, or incompetent, or just generally bad-and-should-feel-bad. And believe me, lots of us do. But those Canadians who disapprove of the direction the country has taken usually do so for internal political reasons (Justin Trudeau, immigration, house prices, indigenous rights-gone-wild, virtue-signalling gun laws, etc). The comments I'm talking about are usually hinting at foreign affairs, but even the most self-hating Canadian usually believes Canada is internationally respected. Please offer below your critiques/complaints about Canada from a foreign affairs/relations standpoint.
gog
1mo ago
If you oppose two gay guys renting a woman for her body and then getting a lab to artificially inseminate her so they can live out their dreams of owning a baby but then it's not the baby they hoped for so they ask her to kill it and when she doesn't they try to sue her- if you oppose that, and your only argument against it is "it might get weirder in the future," you've already surrendered.
If you opposed any of the precursor policies 20 years ago, and the argument you settled on was "it might get weird in the future," then you surrendered back then. Saying "This is a slippery slope" at the start of the argument is a good opener, but saying it at the end of the argument (which trads ended up doing on all these issues) is a form of sulking surrender, like "Oh you'll be sorry one day." Well it's one day now and none of the winners are sorry. They just keep winning bigger and bigger, which makes invoking the slippery slope even funnier to them.
If you care about this stuff, you need to go to war or give up on the West, and especially the East, where they love abortion and suicide even more than we do. Accept that you live in a society where the average person has been totally given over to evil and futile hedonism, and react accordingly.
I don't know what "accordingly" means, but most people have settled on "I will live exactly like everyone else does except I will not kill my baby or my old aunt" which seems like cope. If the sort of situation described in the article is possible, there's something a lot deeper going on in society.
gog
1mo ago
I speak 2 languages. My wife speaks three. We only have English in common. We tried OPOL, but as my kid learned to speak my wife's main language, she didn't know English, and so I couldn't speak to her at all. Since I was at work all day, my kid never learned English, so I insisted that OPOL stop and my kid just be taught English.
Because of my wife, my social exposure to immigrants and their children is extremely high. Furthermore, I have learned 3 living and 2 dead languages, am employed as a French immersion teacher. For all these reasons, I question the value of kids learning domestic Mandarin or Japanese or whatever. OPOL usually doesn't lead to kids speaking the language the way I speak English. It leads to them knowing all the language you need for home life ("bedtime," "toothbrush," "clean your damn room!"), in a slang frozen in whatever era the mom left the old country. So if the kid ever wants to do business in China, or watch Chinese movies, etc, he's going to need focused study, or he'll speak Mandarin the way Tony Soprano speaks Italian. The choice ends up being between "limited communication with one parent and you never really reach fluency in Mom's language unless you buckle down and study" or "as much communication as possible with both parents and you never reach fluency at all in Mom's language to fluency unless you buckle down and study."
Option 2 has a much better cost/benefit ratio.
gog
4mo ago
I was just at dinner at the home of a guy who refuses to recycle aluminum cans. He asked me if I was a "good recycler" so you know he sees the entire thing as moral signalling. He foregoes the refund and just puts them in the trash on principle. I tried to explain that aluminum is the type of recycling that makes the most sense, but he's up to his eyeballs in the culture and he won't do it.
gog
5mo ago
The immersion schools/classes force everything to happen in French. Students resist it, so it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty much what you’re picturing, minus English class and a day off now and then for the science fair or pride parade. End result: 60 hours of study in 6 years.
And it’s not just one bad school or province. It is a national issue in Canada. Every year there is a teapot tempest about how ineffective this is, but we keep doing it (the political reasons are long-dead by now).
gog
5mo ago
The top 10 or 20 percent get very good, but the average student never gets to the point where all that reading pays off because they resist the earlier drudgery and therefore can’t understand the readings.
Math and science are the first subjects to be dropped from the French program because students tell their parents that their crappy marks are because it’s all in French (untrue since most words are the same: triangle, fraction, oxygen, mitochondria, energy, every word that ends in -ation, etc).
It’s so bad that, at a meeting of the hardest-core French teachers in my province, I learned that I was the only making grade 12 students read; everyone else had them “read along” with the teacher, which means “zone out with the book open.” This was because, after 12 years, even the teachers didn’t expect the kids to understand literary French. Note that we’re talking stuff like Camus, which is stylistically similar to Hemingway- not linguistically taxing. You might chalk this up to the education system’s usual ineptitude, but if immersion works then the French-rich environment should be inculcating French despite whatever the teacher is doing. It works like that until about grade 6, at which point students are celebrated if the hit A2 proficiency. You would expect an adult to hit A2 after 300 hours of study, which is 60 five-hour days. There are nearly 1200 days total in grades 1 to 6. The children do not even learn the language like children. Immersion doesn’t work.
gog
5mo ago
Ah. That’s not what immersion means. “Immersion” means there’s no way out, you are totally submerged; the metaphor connotes sink-or-swim. All language coming at you is the target language, and the only outgoing language that will work is the target language. For Japanese immersion, you have to move to Japan so that you can never English your way out of a situation. If that’s not practical, you need to go great lengths to create those conditions elsewhere. And these conditions need to be in long chunks- all day, preferably all your waking life for whatever period. Therefore you can’t get “immersion” from reading if you’re reading at home, because you can just close the book and read something else, and you have dictionaries and translators available. YouTube immersion makes even less sense, because you can just watch another video. It’s studying, it’s learning, but it’s not immersion. It’s bathing or showering or something.
What do you guys mean by immersion?
In Canada, we have French Immersion schooling, where students are to speak, and be spoken to, only in French from kindergarten to gr 9, and from grades 10-12 are to take some high school courses in French (French, and usual history, and gym in slacker schools). I was involved in this system for years, as a student and then as a teacher. It doesn't work. It's effective at the early stages because the bar for "early stage speaker" is so low, in the same way that you can do almost anything at the gym if you are a total beginner and still see results.
"Immersion" means "oral language only," but the only people who learn languages that way are toddlers. After age 3 the paths of those who can read, those who are read-to, and those who get only oral language are set, and the latter group are never going to be good at language (among English-speaker, these are the people who seen a movie last night where a guy drownded). The midwit meme would show the midwit saying "actually, having the sort of parents who read to you is what makes you good at reading, not the reading itself," but it's definitely the reading. Spoken language flies by too quickly for you to grasp the nuances of the grammar, and your conversational environment is extremely limited in the sorts of topics it covers- home, maybe work; in school, French immersion students know all the different words for binders, folders, duotangs, etc, but that isn't very useful on les rues. The only way to broaden your vocabulary and build even a descriptive theory of grammar is to read widely and see the different constructions so you can look back at them and puzzle over them a little bit every time, which compounds into understanding. In English, when this doesn't happen, you get "what I wish I knew before I started med school," "I swum in the pool," "irregardless," "the ancestral tenants," etc. And that's after 25 or 30 years of immersion- with little kids, after a couple of years of immersion, you get "Last day we goed at school," which is how most immersion students sound when they speak foreign languages.
My theory of language learning is that you can't learn the way a small child does if you are not a small child. Adults improve their native language skills by reading and writing, and so foreign language learning needs to yank you up to read/write level as fast as possible, and that requires boring grammar drills and vocab practice (with translation exercises being the funnest possible combination of these) until you become literate in the language, at which point you get better very quickly. But since boring grammar drills are boring, few people make it out of this stage.
So language classes don't work because in North America, school is supposed to be fun or stress-free or whatever, and so language teachers have to play restaurant or grocery store with the kids, and these allow everyone to learn maybe 15 words in 90 minutes, which is six minutes per word, assuming no one forgets anything. So taking a couple of classes in highschool will never get the average person there, just as gym class won't make you fit. As Napoleon himself complained: "Since sixt week i learn the Englich and i do not any progress. Six week do fourty and two day. If might have learn fivity word for day I could know it two thusands and two hundred. It is in the dictionary more of fourty thousand; even he could must twinty bout much of tems for know it our hundred and twenty week, which do more two years. After this you shall agree that to study one tongue is a great labour who it must do into the young aged." If a genius on St Helena (nothing else to do) couldn't do it, why would a vaped-out TikTokker in grade 10 be able to do it?
PS: The immersion-equivalent for teaching native English speakers is called "whole language," and it bears much of the responsibility for the terrible literacy results sweeping the continent. So if we don't trust English-immersion to teach English speakers English, why would we trust immersion to teach foreign languages?
gog
5mo ago
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."
gog
5mo 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
5mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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.
gog
7mo ago
Mindbug! It's a Magic-style game co-created by Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic. He never liked the pay-to-win incentives of Magic, and wanted a game where you had less control over the deck and had to just roll with what luck gave you (you could see him trying to correct this with Keyforge). In Mindbug, you and your opponent draw 10 cards (that's it) each from a big shared deck and play them to attack and block and manipulate powers like in every other game. There are no resources. The twist is that each player has two Mindbugs, which they can spend to take any card you try to play and add it to their board as though they had played it. This adds a mind-game that other card games lack, where you try to bait each other into wasting Mindbugs while not wasting yours, but if you don't use them you'll almost certainly lose. One match takes 10-15 minutes.
You can get the app for phone or computer and play PvP or against a progressively more difficult AI. They have released 4 or 5 sets and each one has some unique mechanics, and they rotate these through the app for competitive play. The base set is free.
It's a really good game if you can deal with the goofy art; it just needs a bigger player base. Check it out! Right now!
gog
8mo ago
Anyone on that track has already had their marks compressed up into the 98-100 range. We're talking 71 going up to 75 here.
gog
8mo ago
They are delusional.
It’s only rational and not inculcating narcissism if you admit to yourself that you are gaming the system. Remember that I’m talking about high school, which affects many more students at more critical ages. These parents and their kids really believe that the kid is really smart even though there is no evidence this. They handwave the lack of evidence, and teach the kid to handwave it, because schools are there to say “don’t worry about actions, we will affirm your kid’s identity (that you, the parent, picked for him, usually as a projection of your own) by giving him extra equal treatment.” So you have all these vectors adding up to “your actions have nothing to do with who you are.” You can dispute whether that is really so bad, but you can’t dispute that it’s the implicit (and often explicit) message of all this.
Universities go along with it because of stuff like human rights law. I didn’t think that was controversial.
gog
8mo ago
Speculation is half the game around here.
-The problem is that the people I’m talking about have confused the metrics for the reward and this has deleterious personal and social consequences. We’re not talking about breeding cobras, here, we’re talking about apparently irrecoverable psychological damage on a wide scale.
-Narcissists really do hate people who tell them the truth, yes. If you object to the n-word, just consider whether you’d want any kind of relationship with someone who hates being told the truth. It doesn’t matter what the clinical name is. Do you want to do business with guy? Do you want to date that woman? Want them as a neighbour?
-The omnipotence in question is granted by the narcissist to everyone else to affirm their identity, and he demands that they use it. They’re not asking you to move a couch, they’re asking you to affirm their self-image, and because that image is baseless (it is not backed by deeds) your affirmation is all they have.
You can advance this discussion by denying either the phenomena I’m describing, the causal links between them, or the significance any of it. I can’t advance it by giving you any sources since the system keeps finding itself to be working just fine.
gog
8mo ago
We can disagree on whether humans are mortal, I guess. The real question is why you would want to take all that time. Any system that leads you to spend hours and hours on schoolwork to game a 4% increase in your mark is not serving you or the people it is training you to serve.
Just kill yourself like a man. Don't get them to send you over the Rainbow Bridge like a pet.
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