Gaashk
1yr ago
Whenever the topic of tradwives and fertility comes up, my first thought is, what do the women on this board think?
Grew up in a very trad wife centric Christian homeschool subculture. It mostly didn't work out. Mostly, we had to get jobs. It isn't trivially easy to find a man who's prepared to be a husband, father, and primary earner fairly young, willing to ask girls out, often at venues like church functions, and interested in those girls. There are some, sure, and some families were formed that way. But now in our late 30s, I'm hearing about even some of the women who did marry a traditional head of household man divorcing, because he's pushy, unpleasant, domineering, and re-training as a nurse or something, now with several children.
Marriages don't have to rise to the level of beating to be worse than working a lower middle class female job. If my now husband hadn't kept inviting me on romantic dates at ancient castles, I would still be basically content with being single, because being a single woman in the modern world is really just fine, with a long educated Anglophone tradition full of slightly lonely but basically fine governesses and nuns. Even at the standards of a century ago, I would certainly rather be a nun than marry a man I didn't like, of whom people said "well at least he doesn't beat you, just have more grit."
I am not a feminist by current standards. My grandmothers and great grandmothers went to teaching colleges, and followed their husbands around the world while they translated Mayan carvings or something, and returned to teaching when their children where older. They kept copies of Virginia Woolf in their houses. There are great grandmothers I don't know much about, because their children ran away from home (and first marriages, I think?) and met up on a Pacific island, and then went on to have those 3-4 kids together, and raise them while teaching. I don't know how to evaluate the alternate universe where everyone had more grit, sticking out their first marriage on some frozen windswept cattle ranch.
Much is made of the state of family formation in Asia lately. Chinese great grandmothers probably had too much grit, breaking their daughters' feet to help their marriage prospects. I don't know how things were for the great grandmothers of the current generation of South Korean women -- the educational issues there sound like an excess of grit -- everyone could just not cram that extra hour, and things would likely be just the same, but slightly more pleasant. It sounds very zero sum after a pretty baseline educational level and some research skills.
Anyway, I'm pregnant with a third baby because I don't think being not particularly successful in America is that bad, actually. Probably none of my kids will go to an unusually excellent college or have an unusually excellent job or win at a high level competition, and that's alright. Someone came in to my classroom today to say that she's pleased that her daughter is shift manager at a Starbucks and leading literacy tutoring over the summer. This is good! People should be able to be pleased with their children living normal, functional lives!
Gaashk
5mo ago
I grew up reading the kinds of novels that are popular with homeschool girls. Ann of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, George Macdonald, the Bronte Sisters, the kind of novel where the girl's only friend is a horse, and it's not even her own horse. Solitude seems intrinsic to whatever culture it is my family belongs to. It's the class of pastors, teachers, and the kind of farmers who moved to the Western US. When I read novels and hear accounts from older relatives, it sounds like people were mostly reading books in their leisure time. My father recounts playing wall ball with himself in the sweltering summer heat, but mostly reading Tarzan novels that summer. My mother recalls trying to learn to write in Elvish. She didn't have school friends, due to bussing, despite the city not having black kids or ghettos. My grandmother recalls reading Les Miserables in elementary school. Maybe according to the article they weren't alone, because it would be two or three teens and their mother silently reading in the same room.
According to data gathered by the online reservations platform OpenTable, solo dining has increased by 29 percent in just the past two years. The No. 1 reason is the need for more “me time.”
This is interesting. Why do these alienated, lonely people want more "me time?"
Was going to a theater ever actually social? I used to go to movies, and the norm was to sit there quietly, and not engage with anyone, even the people you came with, in a dark room. It's more social to watch TV in my house with my family. We talk to each other and interact.
My grandparents didn't go to restaurants alone because they couldn't go to restaurants more than once a month, and it was an occasion. Take out was an occasion, even when I was a kid. I can't think of anyone I knew in real life who met up in bars.
Because I'm from a long line of bookish but high openness introverts, it's unsurprising that I'm posting on my online culture war club instead of arranging play dates and attending potlucks.
My parents still keep in touch with their five college friends, even though they've all moved to different cities. I just met up with a friend from youth group I haven't seen in four years, and it was nice.
As I write this, my husband has been talking to me about joining a lapidary club, and taking our kids to look for local rocks at a nearby wash. It has taken me most of an hour to write this post, as I made cookies, put the kids to bed, and discussed going to the mineral show.
I'm not saying that there isn't a problem, but perhaps it's a recurrent problem. Or a problem that's always with us.
There was a recent change to the "Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act" which has led to several of the best natural history museum museums simply shutting down their Native American exhibits last week, rather than (what I would naively expect, based on the title) removing human remains from display or something. For instance, The Field Museum papered and curtained over their displays. The American Museum of Natural History is closing two exhibit halls.
This seems like the sort of rule that looks like it might make sense initially, of not grave digging and talking to descendants, until everyone is suddenly reminded that archeology largely is grave digging, and finding descendants is often fraught, with plenty of Tribal Council politics even if a museum can figure out the right authorities to talk to.
I can't tell if this was the intention of the President's Office when they passed the rule, and how much will be left after everything settles (or if it won't settle, and everything will just sit in storage awaiting a change of zeitgeist).
Admittedly, I already mostly go to the local natural history museum for the animatronic dinosaur, and my state has lots of Pueblo Ruins museums, but they're not very good, and run in partnership with the Native American communities. It isn't clear how this will affect locally interesting museums about communities not continuously inhabited since the most archeologically interesting period, such as the Dickson Mounds museum (I recommend stopping by if you're in the area!). Their most interesting parts for non-archeologists are landscape, reproductions and dioramas anyway, so perhaps not much. The Milwaukee Natural History Museum has an unusually enjoyable Native American section (very good in general, go if you're in the area!), but iirc it was also mostly reproductions and dioramas as well.
Ultimately, I suppose it will probably not deteriorate the experience all that much for non-archeologists once the dust settles, but will be one more step of history museums in general toward irrelevance.
Gaashk
2yr ago
As others have said, the underlying connection is a literal reading of the Constitution. If Congress wants to amend the amendment to say that organizations can discriminate based on race as long as it benefits blacks, they're welcome to try. If Congress wants to forgive student loan debts enough to actually include it in the budget, they're welcome to do that as well. If Congress wants to write actual legislation protecting abortion, they can do that. If they can't, then they shouldn't.
This is not a legal reason, but as far as student loans go, $10-20k is exactly the range lower middle class people should be able to pay off! They pay off cars in that range just fine, all the time. There are also various programs aimed at that demographic, like debt forgiveness for teachers and government workers. People around the poverty level don't need to make payments on federal loans anyway, on account of income based repayment plans. It doesn't prevent lenders from issuing auto loans or mortgages, and family size is taken into account.
The problem area seems to be those with high debt (which this wouldn't have made much of a dent in anyway), making nominally good money in extremely high cost of living areas, so that they really are struggling to pay rent on their small shared apartment, but looking at their income the financial institution expects them to pay down their loan, and this is too much of.a stretch. I don't feel too sorry for anyone struggling to make it in one of the most expensive cities in the world, though.
Gaashk
3mo ago
There's a fair bit of talk both in person and in the news about downsizing the Department of Education, possibly moving student loan servicing to another department, and federal requirements around students with special accommodations.
I'm interested if anything will happen with the (massive! extremely expensive!) special education edifice.
Some articles from the past couple days:
- "Trump's Education Secretary Doesn't Know What IDEA Is and Special Needs Parents Are Outraged"
- "As Education Department Slashes Nearly Half Its Staff, Special Ed Worries Mount"
- The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)
I've been personally hearing a lot more (hushed, furtive) negative talk among teachers about IEPs and small groups (children who aren't able to be in a regular classroom due to their conditions) lately, though that could just be my own work environment. Like many controversial things, there are usually a few children who are essentially black holes in the context of large systems, such that while most children will need and be given, say, 1/10 of an adult's attention (and learn the material), two or three will end up with five full adult's attention (and it's entirely unclear whether or if they're learning anything). There are some children in the middle, who may need the attention of one adult, but will then clearly learn things and become productive members of society, and they are generally not talked about negatively, even though it's rather expensive. It might still be less expensive in the long run, anyway.
I have mixed feelings about it. Kids with various conditions should have as good a life as reasonably possible. Their parents and siblings shouldn't necessarily be expected to stop everything to support them full time for the rest of their lives. But at what cost? It's not reasonable to deprive their classmates, who might have a condition but be able to learn curricular things of an education. It's not reasonable to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on interventions to obtain a tiny improvement in the utility of one person.
Apropos Zvi's recent post on education, it's probably not even reasonable to keep dragging a child who's clearly miserable with an enormous school and is trying to run away most days through a daily cycle of "transitions" the they hate every 40 minutes or so (sometimes every five or ten, in the classrooms that use "rotations" with bells and special behaviorist noises).
Perhaps nothing will come of it. Should the edifice change? in what way?
Gaashk
10mo ago
I gave birth to a new baby. I have to, sigh, teach baby to nurse this week.
Gaashk
1yr ago
I think there's something to this.
There's some enthusiasm from my parents' generation for Tony Hillerman's novels, set in the Navajo Nation, especially because he was a careful observer and puts in a lot of interesting local details. There's a TV adaptation from a couple of years ago that, in general, looks rather good (I haven't watched it because cop shows aren't my thing), so the top hits on Google are things like this:
WINDOW ROCK-Despite fine acting, suspense and entertainment featured in the first episodes of the AMC mystery series “Dark Winds,” overall the show misses the mark when it comes to accurately portraying Navajo language and culture, say some Diné experts.
Navajo is one of the most difficult languages in the world for outsiders to learn. That's why it was used instead of code during WWII. Also, speakers like to teach it wrong so they can laugh about it (source: my mom was living on the Reservation for a while. She is not bitter about it, and figured they're entitled to their fun) The Navajo youth most interested in careers like acting are least likely to learn it, because that would require growing up with their grandparents, herding sheep or something. There is not a large pool of Navajo speakers who are also attractive actors. And yet:
One thing learned in the first episode is that if a non-Diné actor wants to depict a Navajo character, they need to have Navajo language lines down and support to do that. “C’mon Hollywood, do better,” said Clarissa Yazzie, who is also a popular social media influencer. In a TikTok critique, Yazzie spelled out how some of the actors’ mispronunciation of words changed their meaning to the point of distraction and shock.
Lol, "social media influencer" as representative of traditional culture. The lesson is mostly just not to try.
As far as the homeschool prom goes, before making any galaxy brained pronouncements about the sexes, one might want to enquire: have they taught the kids to dance? Did they teach them dances that are compatible with the songs they are playing? Do the boys know how to play the role of lead in a partner dance?
One prom I witnessed as chaperone, many of the kids had learned folklorico as kids, and maybe line dancing or something, but the DJ was mostly playing R&B. So they mostly didn't dance, or very badly, or by themselves, until some Mexican folk came on every great once in a while, and then they danced.
Once, I went to a Baptist ball for college students. They had three practice sessions before hand, where they taught the dances and organized the pairings if necessary, since everyone was expected to learn and dance every dance. It was polkas and waltzes and such. They were very explicit that the men were expected to dance at least half the time. Most people danced.
Another dance I went to was Greek Orthodox, with an emphasis on the Greek. They were circle dances, and the priest's wife taught them for a couple of weeks before hand at coffee hour. Everyone danced.
There was a quirky Alaskan group I knew that all sang and played music, and liked to dance things like the Virginia Reel. It was very clear that no one was making any kind of long lasting commitment by asking for a dance, and that the lame thing was to stand around while a girl looked around hopefully. Another Alaskan group I knew decided to play rap music at their school dances, but actually taught the kids fan dances to accompany a drum circle. They did not dance at the school dances -- it's really very difficult to dance to rap without looking a fool, and requires a high skill level.
In general, most people will dance the two or three folk dances they know and are comfortable with, and will not dance the ones they don't know, or especially lead when they don't know what they're doing.
The DJ is largely to blame in playing music intended for couples dancing when the kids were clearly not comfortable with that.
It probably is related to the larger social scene, where it's unclear how someone should go about asking for a date -- that the social script has become largely illegible.
Gaashk
1yr ago
There's been some buzz lately around Bad Therapy, by Abigail Shrier (also known "Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze").
The central thesis is that therapy, to the extent that it's effective even a little, comes with risks as well as benefits, and it's a bad idea to engage in recreational or mental hygiene therapy, in the same way that it's a bad idea to get unnecessary physical operations done. She argues that it's an especially bad idea to do this to children, who don't come into it with a fully formed self understanding, and that parents and schools have been engaging in way too much therapeutic activity without monitoring for harmful results. For most children, it's a better idea to try giving them as much freedom as is culturally reasonable and try telling them firmly to stop behaving badly and do better (and this is what better looks like), rather than trying to figure out if something's wrong with them psychologically. It probably isn't, unless adults introduce that. To back those assertions up, she conducted interviews with some psychiatrists, psychologists, other mental health professionals, as well as teens and their parents.
Caveat: the book is primarily about and intended for middle class, essentially functional families that are assumed not to engage in abusive behavior, and therefore doesn't spend a lot of time worrying that the reader, released from the constraints of the therapeutic model, will start escalating from naming feelings to hitting or starving kids or anything like that. I don't know if this is warranted, but do suspect that families who are practicing overly authoritarian child rearing (e.g. "To Train Up a Child" by Michael and Debi Pearl) are in an entirely different informational ecosystem. That seems likely.
There are three main threads: therapists, schools, and parenting practices. There's a lot of culture war fodder in each of these, especially an argument to massively downgrade the SEL components of schools -- that to the extent people actually go along with them, they aren't just a waste of time and money, but actively harmful. But more than that, to lay off the SEL inspired ways of talking about problems. Working in a public school, I find this somewhat convincing. There are kids who may or may not have psychiatric problems, I can't really tell, but as far as I can tell, the previously normal things (having to sit alone for a while, suspensions, ISS, noticing that other people are angry about the destruction of their concentration and personal property...) haven't ever been tried, in favor of treating the children as not entirely human (doling out pieces of candy one by one, each time they do a tiny positive thing, pretending like them terrorizing their peers can't be helped, organizing a bunch of meetings between six or so adults to consider ways to use behaviorist psychology on them). To the extent that the kid is basically a human being, this is counterproductive -- it's not actually helpful to become a raving lunatic that everyone else averts their gaze from. But there doesn't seem to currently be a path available for school personnel other than deeper and deeper into more and more therapeutic techniques, or for the parents of the other kids other than transferring schools entirely (something mentioned by some kids in relation to potentially complaining about an extremely bad classmate). There was a "mindset training" about how maybe when a kid who's known to be unreasonable throws a tantrum, maybe we should just instantly cave and find them what they want. "Bad therapy" is not very helpful there, since there's a legal apparatus built up around the problem. In my experience school staff understands that the procedures are stupid, but aren't really in a position to change anything, even up to state legislators.
I found the section on gentle, therapeutic parenting especially interesting. When I had my first baby, and had to sit around nursing the baby for an absurd amount of time day and night, said baby was very bad at sleep -- I hadn't previously realized that humans have to learn how to fall asleep -- so I would read parenting advice from generic online sources about my problems. There's a lot about "attachment parenting," gentle, gradual sleep training, and then as they get a bit older, a lot about gentle parenting. In my household, most of this was not so much tried and found wanting, but rather found difficult and left untried -- we both like our parents and come from stable households, so kind of just act similar to our respective parents. Shrier found people who had given gentle, therapeutic parenting a really hard try, but not been blessed with gentle toddlers. The most optimistic account was of an Israeli psychiatrist with a young ADHD son who didn't want to use drugs (at least so young), and spent a lot of time gardening with him as an outlet, and seemed to be enjoying the bonding and enjoying the son. "Raising Raffi" by Keith Gessen chronicles attempts at fatherhood by a highly educated man fully bought in to never yelling or punishing, and Shrier's read on the situation is that maybe some small amount of punishment was in order. An observation from both Shrier and Jordan Peterson is that parents who keep losing power struggles with their young children can, and sometimes do, go on to resent the children, and people more broadly don't like them either, since they're out of control much of the time. That seems plausible, though I can't think of any specific examples. She also thinks that the children in question tend to be the ones who go on to cut their parents off anyway, after all that effort, and not want children themselves, since it looks like such a terrible slog. She doesn't present a lot of evidence for that, just her gestalt impression from interviews. Shrier advocates for parents who themselves like their parents and come from functional households to follow their intuitions and ask their families for advice, rather than reading contemporary parenting books. She, again, doesn't have much advice for parents who come from dysfunctional households with traumatic practices.
In general I liked the book as a bit of casual sociology, it has some interesting anecdotes in it, and would tepidly recommend it to anyone interested.
Gaashk
10d ago
I read the new ACX Review post about Alpha School (by an anonymous writer, not Scott). It was well written, but a bit of a slog, because it's quite long for an essay, but not as polished as a book. Some thoughts:
- The school in question costs $40,000/year, and the writer sent three children there last year. There were apparently only 10 children in their cohort.
- The big headline for the Alpha School model is that it has only two hours of core academics. I looked at the schedule for my local elementary school, and they have 2.75 hours of core academics. I don't think most people know this. I get the impression the writer, who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars sending three children to this elite private school and wrote a very long essay about it also doesn't know this. Forty-five minutes a day is not nothing, but is not a huge deal or the main thing the school has going for it.
- The other headline is that they progress 2.6 times faster on the state mandated curriculum, so they'll probably finish it all by junior high or so. Sure. Great. It's nice for kids to learn more things sooner.
- They have an incentive structure that appears to cost about $400 per child per year, which they earn mostly for completing their lessons well and on time, and can buy real things that they like, not extremely cheap things that individual teachers can afford to buy themselves, like at many schools. It's not impossible that public schools can adopt this, if they're convinced enough. Medicaid gives mothers points for taking their babies to checkups, which they can use in an online shop to buy books, toys, kitchen items, etc.
- The teachers are well paid ($60,000 - $150,000), not called teachers ("guides"), and have a slightly different schedule structure from public school teachers. In public schools, the art, music, PE, library, and sometimes other teachers are the only specialists, and their schedule is determined entirely by the need to provide a break to the main teachers. There's some office politics around when this "prep" happens, and how the schedules are set up. Apparently at Alpha, all the students work on the digital platform for the first half of the day, and it's not entirely clear what the "guides" are doing during that time -- students ask for individualized help from call center teachers in Brazil -- but given the pay rates, presumably they're doing something. Then they lead clubs and whatnot in the afternoon. That sounds nice, but they're paying them more than the public schools, so I wonder if there's a catch. That's a big part of the question of whether it could scale or not. Could educational assistants do what the Brazilian on call tutors are doing? Could public school teachers do whatever the guides are doing? It's unclear.
- Every public school teacher I've talked to likes the idea of morning academics, afternoon specials. This doesn't work due to the schedules of the specials teachers, and also staggered lunches. Large elementary schools have six lunches a row, and are very inflexible about that. Apparently it works at Alpha both because all the teachers are, to some extent, specials teachers, and they have less than 100 kids, so lunches are not a huge concern.
- I can see why the SSC-sphere is apparently full of well off people with gifted children, but do not personally relate all that strongly. If I were going to send my kids to a school like that, it would be for the better/longer electives and more interesting peer group, more than for the accelerated learning.
Have you ever read Madeline L'Engle (author of A Wrinkle in Time)?
There's a woman I know who went to MIT, worked on Science for a national laboratory, raised five children, sings in a delightful acapella choir, is choir director at a Byzantine style church, and runs things like pierogi baking events and Ukranian egg decorating. Her children are all interesting people I also enjoy. She's smart, sure enough, but what really stands out about her is that she's warm, kind, and generally a delight to be around. She wouldn't be better or smarter if she had done slightly more math or science at the expense of everything else.
I'm not sure what to call this archetype. (edit: I think the old term was "pillar of the community") That's the kind of person Mrs. Murry in L'Engle's novels is. It's one of the archetypal roles upholding our current civilization.
The future will run out of niches for all but a very small handful of math wizzes and wordcels long before it runs out of room for the smart, warm, sciency mother.
Gaashk
6mo ago
I don't know what pro-life people Pastor Barnhart knows, but the ones I've known are the same people doing a bunch of stuff to help out single mothers ("widows," lol), and adopt or foster abandoned children ("orphans" would be way easier to help, there's a lot of court input around the kids that is a huge drag on these relationships. My impression is that actual orphans are usually immediately adopted, often by relatives).
Balancing the needs of the current community and the needs of lawbreakers is indeed complicated, and I'm not surprised that what is mostly a coalition of mothers or would be mothers doesn't have a good solution for that.
Once I tried going to an Arab church, where the pastor spent the whole homily complaining about men who prefer to smoke hookah with their friends, rather than going to church. He didn't seem to be addressing them directly, so I suppose they were not there that morning, either. Did he think their wives and daughters would go home and shame them, and they would start coming again? Seems unlikely. We didn't go back. This feels like that. Somewhere, there are probably some people who might be like he describes. It's a big country, with a lot of different flavors of hypocrite in it. But aiming sermons at someone, somewhere, hoping it'll be shared on social media until they find it seems... bad. Immoral, maybe. In dereliction of his duty as a pastor. My impression of him as a pastor, based on this, is very, very poor.
Gaashk
6mo ago
I think this is inadequately handled.
https://www.thecut.com/article/gen-z-ipad-kids-generation-screen-time.html I just clicked through to his first link about iPad kids. On the issue of raising children in a big city like New York, my impression is that in the past the norm was to live near relatives and trusted acquaintances (co-religionist or co-ethnic, for instance), and let bands of roving kids wander the neighborhood with little parental involvement, to be called back for dinner. Now, they know people from different parts of town, meet up at a park, then go out to lunch together at a restaurant. That is not inherently lower effort than the previous arrangement. They might not have to keep their apartment clean or cook lunch, but now they have to keep children quiet in a restaurant, which doesn't really allow adult conversations.
The kids don't have permission to do what they would prefer, such as playing a game, so they settle for the permission they can get, to watch a show on a phone, which is still better than fidgeting and getting dirty looks. That is not necessarily permissive, though, since their first choice of running around, playing, and exploring is denied them. I don't get the impression that kids are eager for permission to watch more shows. They're much more eager for permission to take small risks. I offered some kids the opportunity to look at stuff on their chrome books or chip away at little pieces of soapstone. They strongly preferred the stone, but I stopped because it's too loud for the adults. That is not permissive. There is no permission to make noise and accidentally hurt a finger. It would be more permissive in the case of the restaurant to give them a little playground like fast food places used to have.
As a teen and young adult, I read Classics. Lately, I've been reading Brandon Sanderson novels. This is because I had a lot of free time then, and don't have it now. The Motte and Sanderson novels are compatible with brain fog from waking up every few hours to feed an infant, and interacting with other young children every few minutes, while Kant is not. I don't really have a good model of what's going on with Taylor Swift or Marvel fans (are there still Marvel fans left?). As I recall, Don Quixote was basically a spoof about a man who read a lot of Star Wars novels, thought that Jedi were real, and then decided that he was one. I gave up because the second hand cringe was too strong, not something that I can recall happening with any other novels.
I'm not sure that it makes sense to talk about reading Sanderson instead of Dostoyevsky as permissiveness. The latter is, of course, better, but I'm tired and my memory is bad. I'm unable to read it after working and caring for children. My parents are retired, and reading Dostoyevsky again. They have a little book club. They have permission to spend time on good books, permission to spend the best part of the day on that, instead of on working.
Again, a lot of people don't seem to feel permission to be an ordinary person, doing a slightly below average 9 - 5 job, sending their kids to the ordinary public school, to themselves become an average person living an average life. Who can work a stable job at Kodak for 30 years? "Many people have lamented that kids these days say they want to be famous YouTubers instead of astronauts." Sure. The only astronauts I know anything about are the ones that got stranded because Boeing messed up bringing them back. Which was a story entirely about how unreliable Boeing now is, and not at all about the astronauts themselves.
I was chaperoning a kids' dance party this week. The kids don't know how to dance, even things like the Cupid Shuffle, where they literally call out the moves. Some attempts were made to do that dance where they squat, bounce, and throw their legs out, kind of like in Russian dancing. The dance they attempted was harder than normal folk dancing, but at least known. This was because they don't know how to dance, not because we're so permissive we let them dance however they want. They probably want to be taught how to dance. The adults might even prefer to teach them a dance, but didn't necessarily have permission to do so, or knowledge of how to go about it.
On clothing, I likewise don't necessarily find the mess that is our current clothing choices to be permissive, so much as burnt out or depressed. People mostly aren't dressing in clothing that they love and find beautiful for their own idiosyncratic reasons. Straight men don't seem to have a ton of choice for what to wear in public, outside of special interest clubs. They're dressing in jeans and hoodies because that's the cultural norm, to which they are dutifully adhering. I like Uniqlo clothing and follow their collaborations. There was a surprising amount of buzz this fall about slightly less terrible looking sweatpants. They sold out! They come in not only grey and black, but wine! So exciting. Theoretically, people have permission to wear all sorts of things. Actually, they are so confused and guilt ridden, they wear the same dress a hundred days in a row. That is not a sign of permission.
I'm not sure what's going on with the adults eating exclusively chicken nuggets and Mac & cheese, but it sounds like depression again? Or an eating disorder? It certainly doesn't sound enjoyable.
Gaashk
2yr ago
I'm thinking about this from the female side at the moment, as a mom of two young girls. They are, of course, interconnected, but actually physically implementing public works projects is a young man's task.
As I understand things, people got washing machines, vacuums, off the rack clothing, children started going to school younger and staying longer, cheese came pre-shredded, veggies come frozen and chopped in bags, and so on. On the one hand: great! Hand washing and ironing clothing is horribly tedious. On the other hand, by the 60s there wasn't all that much left, and despondent housewives sitting alone at home, vacuuming for the third time that day became a trope. It's as easy for a man as a woman to type, so there were suddenly lots of secretaries and stenographers and whatnot. Lower class women could work at Macy's instead of making custom dresses at a small shop. This is ambiguously good -- there are a lot of tragic stories about impoverished women slowly losing their eyesight in centuries past, unable to replace their handwork with anything less visually exacting as they aged. But it's difficult to enjoy leisure when one is mostly just stuck at home alone all day operating various cleaning devices.
At the same time, female offices are kind of miserable, and most of the tasks can be automated anyway. I worked in an office a few years ago where I spent hours every week physically filing paperwork. This paperwork was, as far as I could tell, not required by law. Something about their business cycle made it easier to hire a relatively low skilled part time position year-round, rather than hiring a mid-skilled technician once for a couple of months. Probably related to the administrative assistant's desire to have assistants herself, ultimately for status reasons. There was all sorts of bad behavior around this, like setting up her chair to stare directly at her assistant's monitor at all times, and going on and on about how she couldn't go eat lunch until she had dispensed enough tasks to her subordinate. Alas.
Anyway, these sorts of positions can and should be automated already, and probably will be in reality soon. Where does that leave us? With a lot of home health aids, teachers, food service workers, and retail workers, apparently. Of those, most can be pithed of the more meaningful portions of the jobs, with only the tedious parts remaining. Medications can be automated; bedside manner cannot. Academic instruction can be automated; classroom management cannot. POS and much of food preparation can be automated; people feeling special because a somewhat attractive woman delivered their food in a polite way cannot. The parts of retail that can't be automated are mostly things like sweatshop labor, stocking, warehouse work, and deliveries. Amazon can pretend as though they've been automated by remaining surprised that someone might go to the bathroom more than average.
Community organizing, meetups, and church ladies have genuine value, but are not exactly scalable. You want probably 5 of them in a group of 100.
I'm not certain where this leaves us in the upcoming era of automated typing work. Faux homesteading and homeschooling families are still pretty fringe. I'm not completely sure even where I want things to go, though my aesthetic sensibilities head in the direction of more handcrafting and church like communities.
Gaashk
2yr ago
I'm American, and she doesn't look black to me either. After hearing about it for the first time when it made the news last year, I now think... she still doesn't look black, actually. Her hair and nose especially. Unless she's displaying stereotypically black speech patterns or something in private, the race angle here is transparently silly.
Gaashk
1mo ago
The whole thing seems very weird, probably fake, and not primarily about "agency." What kind of weather situation were they in where he was actually cold, not just making idle chatter, and a "nice scarf" was going to fix that? And then he just went around wearing some random woman's scarf the rest of the evening? It sounds funny, I guess they could have a good laugh over it? Definitely manic pixie dream girl vibes.
But, also, I've been confused about how "agency" is being used lately. Assertiveness? Willingness to take action? It seems kind of new to hear that discussed in terms of agency, but seems to have become a thing lately.
Gaashk
2yr ago
I think it is more about the dissolution of regional distinctiveness, and lack of tolerance that follows from that, because every place and people is assumed to be the same, or should be.
My (boomer) mother grew up in a Southwestern American city with a lot of hispanics and very few blacks. She speaks Spanish badly, but my grandparents spoke it fluently (none of us are hispanic). When Bussing went into effect, she had to sit for an hour on a bus every day to move from one majority hispanic school to another, and the main change was not being able to invite her classmates over, because they lived too far away. Her opinion on bussing is that it may or may not have made sense in Alabama, but it was stupid and wasteful in her city. I took busses all the time as a teen, though they're hot and not very efficient. "Brown people" is a stupid category, but New Mexico and Arizona hispanics love their automobiles -- low riders, trucks, mechanic jobs, custom details, the whole package.
There was a woman in one of my social groups, born in Africa, went to a college in the Great Plains, living in a former Spanish colonial part of the American Southwest, going on about her experience as a Black American and her Blackness, and her sensitivity toward people curious about her background, and it was so very tiresome. None of her ancestors were American slaves, or suffered from redlining, or were discriminated against in any way. None of our ancestors owned a plantation. Nobody in our state was involved. And yet here we all were, unable to talk about any of our actual histories or the places we were actual from, because of her feelings of Blackness.
For a while, I lived with an Albanian family in rural Kosovo. Everyone was very nice to me, and I especially liked that I didn't have to drive or own a car at the time, and I could drink a 50c macchiato at a cafe over the course of an hour without anyone judging me for it. That was mostly because everyone was poor, though. They were upset over having their village shelled, and that for a while they had to teach their language in basements with only a single book for a room full of children. This may be peripherally related to pensioners, but it seems more related to feeling responsible for people who are deemed backwards. Which is, yes, also a problem in many American cities.
The American West has in some sense always wanted cars, even before they were invented. Horses were adopted with great enthusiasm the instant they arrived on the continent. And so were cars. Phoenix isn't full of cars and expansive, flat suburbs because of "boomers." It's full of cars and boomers and suburbs because it's in the middle of an enormous desert. Arizona spent 20 years building the CAP canal system, not for boomers to spread out (although they do), but because they're in the middle of an enormous desert. Boomers from Arizona and Texas drive RVs around for the same reason. i don't think this is necessarily grounded in unusual narcissism, but simply in unusually high wealth.
Gaashk
6mo ago
I work for a hedge fund that is buying lots of small engineering companies. Most of these companies have pretty terrible IT people. [...] Half of them within a year have left to take senior admin jobs. One of them even got a job at Google.
I suppose it's piling on at this point, but, yes, it absolutely sounds like you are devaluing them both monetarily, and personally in quite an adversarial way. So while I can see why you might want to get workers with fewer options, I am not convinced that it's at all beneficial for anyone else. If they were making something incredibly useful, you could probably treat them better for it.
Gaashk
10mo ago
This sounds like a just so story. Have you observed it? The 30 year old women of my acquaintance who seem like maybe they should be settling down but are instead running 5ks, climbing mountains, and drinking fancy cocktails do not necessarily have strong Instagram presences. Also, engagements, marriages, babies, and cute little kids get a lot of positive attention on social media. More than anything other than running social media as an actual business. The mom influencers are generally pro-natal -- they make having children look more aesthetic than it really is.
Gaashk
2yr ago
This seems likely to be more the norm than the exception, historically. Spin offs and retellings of King Arthur, Robin Hood, St George, Coyote, Tarzan, or whomever is probably normal, with an actually new story every decade or so.
At the same time, I agree that whatever's going on now feels like something of a wasteland.
Maybe this has to do with the tendency to mine the same stories too quickly. But I used to binge read King Arthur anthologies, and the entire Wizard of Oz collection, so I'm not sure that's it, either. Maybe something more basic, like that the stories are just not good stories, for various reasons. I'm on board for an Ant Man story, but not the one they have, by report, actually produced. I'm on board for a How Raven Stole the Sun retelling, but not as a three hour CGI fest. If someone with the aesthetics of Miyazaki decided to retell it (that would be odd, but supposing an equivalent folktale), I would absolutely be on board. I don't so much feel inundated with retellings, as that there's a specific "memberberry" version of those retellings that's insufficiently universal, pandering too much to specific target demographics. A war movie about Judith and Holofernes could be fine and interesting, but not the way it would probably be produced in actuality. Companies are recycling too narrowly, from their own slate, rather than from the broader catalogue of world civilizations.
Gaashk
13d ago
Even more than in her previous essay, she doesn't seem to actually like any of her "friends." The men are all cads, the women all fools, and she feels like talking to her female friends about their lives is "emotional labor." Is she also suffering from "dark triad" behavior, and honest, emotionally stable people keep their distance?
Gaashk
4mo ago
What would be a good outcome for the automation of knowledge work?
Everyone’s been talking a lot about both the downsizing of the federal government, and the rapid improvement of LLM technology, such that the fake jobs are being cut at the same instant that more jobs are becoming to some degree fake. I don’t necessarily think that the US government should be a bastion of fake jobs, especially Culture War ones, but at the same time I wonder if there’s any end game people like Musk are working toward.
As far as I can tell:
Blue collar jobs are still largely intact. There’s about the same need as there ever was for tradesmen, handymen, construction workers, waste disposal, and so on. Most of the automation in those fields came from vehicles a century ago, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a push to leverage things like prefab construction all that much more. I personally like the new “3-D printed” extrusion style of architecture, but it doesn’t look like it actually saves all that much labor.
Pink collar: Childcare takes about the same amount of labor per child, but there are fewer children. Nursing is in demand, but surely healthcare can only take up so much of the economy. Surely? Retail continues to move online, and we continue to descend into slouchy sweatpants, parachute pants, and the oversized, androgynous look. I would personally like it if some of the excess labor went into actually fitted clothing, but haven’t seen any signs of this. Cleaning services seem to have more demand than supply, with an equilibrium of fewer things getting cleaned regularly than in the past, while continuing to be low in pay and prestige, so I’m anticipating more dirt, but little investment into fixing it.
Demand for performance based work seems to be going down. It’s just as good to listen to or watch a recording of the best person in a field than a live performance by someone less skilled. But were performers ever a large part of the economy?
Middle class office work, knowledge work, words, paperwork, emails: seems about to implode? How much of the economy is this? Google suggests about 12%. That seems like a lot, but nothing close to the 90% of farm work that was automated throughout the 21st Century. This article was interesting, about the role of jobs like secretary, typist, and admin assistant in the 20th Century. I tried working as an assistant to an admin assistant a decade or so ago, and was physically filing paperwork, which even then was pretty outdated.
The larger problem seems to be status. What kinds of work should the middle class do, if not clerk and word adjacent things? There seems to be near infinite demand for service sorts of work – can we have an economy where the machines and a few others do all the civilizationally load bearing work, while everyone else walks each other’s dogs and picks up each other’s food? My father thinks that there’s less slack in many of these jobs than when he was younger. I’m not sure if that’s true in general, or how to test it.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with a future where most people are doing and buying service work. The current trend of women all raising each other’s children and caring for each other’s elderly parents seems to not be working out very well, though.
Gaashk
1yr ago
Could you please not quote the whole thing, but instead excerpt the most important sections?
Gaashk
2yr ago
Like some others here, I have never heard "ethnicity" used to refer to anything other than ancestry in the past several decades I've heard the term. The person of Chinese descent living in Hungary is ethnically (Han or whatever his biological ancestors were), and culturally Hungarian, if it's important to make the distinction. Or if not, he is Hungarian, and racially Asian.
This may be because I'm American, and the usage is different in Europe. But if it's different, it's not recently different. If a person's biological ancestors are from France, but he's raised by Greek Americans, he is ethnically (some kind of French) and culturally American or (regional) American or Greek American, depending on how much he participates in Greek specific cultural customs. Calling him ethnically Greek would not so much confuse people as simply miscommunicate his background. And nobody calls anyone ethnically American unless they're emphasizing that they don't know where their ancestors are from.
There's some battle of the sexes going on, but 44% of women still voted for Trump, and an actual majority of white women. The very active pro-life organizations that are out running crisis pregnancy centers, right to life dinners, and petitions for heartbeat lives are largely supported by women.
(unedited, meandering thoughts)
Something seems to be going on, not just between men and women, but just as importantly, women and their mothers. There seem to be a lot of women, of the making histrionic remarks on Facebook variety, who are into looking at the faults of their mothers, and "re-parenting" themselves at 35. I've heard from acquaintances about their mothers gently nudging them about how if they want a family, now is the time to do it, they're in their 30s, there won't be another chance -- and the women getting frustrated and offended about that. Why are Korean mothers in law so demanding? It sounds like they've had hard lives, but also they're not stupid, and should have noticed their bad reputation, and that they're scaring the younger women. From the thread below, LLL has been important partly because mothers stay out of their daughters' business when it comes to childbirth and feeding of infants, though sometimes they step in to babysit every now and again.
I was listening to a podcast a few weeks ago, where they were talking about the female archetype with Maiden, Mother, and Crone, and how the Mother and Crone archetypes are currently rather broken. There aren't very many older women I respect and want to be like. My own mother is fine, and it's basically fine if I'm like her, but I feel this in general, like older women are kind of just playing around, with very little purpose. Perhaps this is related to the trivializing of women's work and running the household. I was reading the other day about Matushka Olga of Alaska (1916 - 1979), who's community considers her a saint because she was well loved, a good midwife, and was always making warm clothing to give to people. They talk about people in the other villages wearing socks and mittens she made for them, and how happy they were about it. George MacDonald is a lovely writer, who's books are full of very old but still lively grandmothers and great grandmothers at their spinning wheel. Sometimes they spin wool, or magical thread that will let the adventurers always find their way home. He said he remembered going to his grandmother's little cottage, where she was always spinning, back when that was important and necessary work, and loved the sound of the spinning wheel, and the stories of his grandmother. My godmother knitted me a huge wool scarf that I would wrap up to my nose when the cold winter winds blew, for years. I moved a few times with only a suitcase since then, but it was the coziest scarf I've ever warn, with both wool and effort.
It's nice that I can just order a totally adequate coat online for less than four hours of labor and have it delivered to my house, where my dishwasher and laundry machine are running in the background. But despite quite a lot of training in home economics sorts of tasks, I don't make much of anything, because it feels redundant. Many of the women in my community make art, and sometimes I go to the local gallery, or the studio tour. It's nice to paint the hills, or "work with printed textures" or whatever, but it seems disconnected and trivial, like it's a visual expression of a crisis of meaning. The whole lifestyle of sending a six week old baby to daycare so you can go file papers in an office to pay the mortgage in the neighborhood with the adequate schools so that your daughter can get a college degree so that she can send her newborn infant to daycare while she sends emails thing is... not ideal. And then you retire and go to workshops where you paint the hills or make abstract acrylic collages or something, and babysit the grandkids a couple of times a year, if you're fortunate enough to have any grandkids. It sounds a lot worse in S Korea. You work in some dull office all day to send your kid to cram school at night so that she can go to college to get a job that lets her send her kid to cram school. Nobody receives love and recognition for vacuuming her mother in law's house every day.
Maybe I'll take my kids to church tomorrow. Apparently they had a tamale making event today, and a potluck tomorrow. They built a new building, with a metal dome that's still under construction, and it looks rather nice. Someone is hand carving an iconostasis.
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