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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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While I disagree with Freddie deBoer on a lot of things, especially his ongoing war with his commentariat about gender, his thoughts on education seem pretty solid. His new post https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-commentary-is-dominated is no exception, though he puts in a bit of boilerplate declaring on faith that of course groups can be equalized somehow, even if individuals can't, despite giving no reason to believe that of any particular group or groups. This seems a pretty paltry fig leaf, but oh well.

I suppose if I want to get more of his view on a way forward, I should read his book, The Cult of Smart, but I don't want to just now. Based on his blogging, he seems to think that moving money from smart, productive people to stupid, unproductive people is the best solution, but this doesn't solve the fundamental question of allowing people who can't contribute much economically to live in a worthwhile fashion that allows self respect.

My state legislature has been debating plans to fiddle about with small levers at the margins to make up for Covid losses and "improve education." The levers are very small indeed. An extra half hour in the day? More private bathroom stalls? The only topic that made some sort of sense was career and technical education. I've been thinking about one side of this, trying to help my husband fix a leak this morning, and reading some thoughts from Internaught at DSL lately about crumbling infrastructure. Every time I interact with a Trades produced physical object, I realize that they are made for the large, strong hands of a young man who has been working on manipulating physical objects with weight and mass for years and decades. This probably makes sense from a materials engineering perspective -- assume that a mechanic or tradesman will be interacting with the object, and it can be heavier, with a tighter seal, probably more durable. But it seems like something of a hard sell, getting people to work with these heavy, sturdy objects for decades at a time when they don't have to, and don't get much status out of it, and most people can't afford . Giving out money doesn't seem all that helpful when we're all living in a crumbling, unfixable physical environment, and the computers can do 80% of the writing, calculating, and art, but can't keep the utilities repaired.

I would like to see more emphasis on humans as embodied, physical, tool using beings, but am not sure what steps might lead in that direction. I was listening to a podcast the other day by a Waldorf kindergarten teacher who had started taking his classes on walks to the park all morning, every morning, and that it worked out very well for them, but this was a nice, safe forest park in a place with decent weather much of the year. I don't really know where to go with these thoughts, though. It seems like kids need more physical, sensory experiences, but it seems like a hard pitch, perhaps something to do with laptopping being high status and easy on the body, as is mentioned in the thread on class.

Fair enough (aside from the piles of skulls). I don't know all that much about what lower productivity people do in moderately functional communist societies, but ideally it would be something other than overdosing on fentanyl. My understanding is that communist states are supposed to tell their people what to do with themselves, even if it's sometimes "you're bad at everything, accept this pension, move to the countryside, and keep a small orchard" or something.

I don't have a good sense of what Freddie would do if he were in charge of the communist city state of New York, but get the impression he's thinking of more than half the population when he refers to people who aren't academically inclined, so it can't just be "give everyone money, hope the trash doesn't pile up too high." Or is it?

My impression is that he genuinely thinks (or claims to think) that the moral thing to do is for all the other people to work extra hard to make sure that the uninclined get to enjoy happy, reasonably prosperous lives, with some magic pixie dust sprinkled on top to make it all work out. (and certainly no ordering anyone - except the people working to pay for everything - how to conduct their lives)

Bolsheviks learned quickly that ordering everyone was often the only solution. The Red Army was originally meant to be a democratic institution where the moral thing to do was to fight as hard as you can. What most people did instead was fight only when they felt safe. Trotsky had to use the power of friendship commissars and literal decimations to turn the Red Army into a literal army from a loose confederation of opportunistic partisans.