Gaashk
5mo ago
This is the rhetoric that younger generations are hearing from their parents and grandparents.
It's more likely that the NYT commentariat is very highly selected, and more so for this piece.
I have sometimes encountered an attitude in single women over 60 that their mothers trained them to look after the house very neatly as a point of pride, and that they clash with younger women who consider it a personal preference that conveys no status. They would probably also clash with older men who were either raised with the expectation that the woman should keep the house, or men who are comfortable with a messier space. There seem to be several comments about cooking and laundry especially, and someone who just visits her romantic interest, but they keep separate homes. As far as I can tell, this represents both a gender difference (men are a bit less likely to be temperamentally orderly, and much less likely to have been trained in homemaking by their parents), and a generational one.
Gaashk
5mo ago
The comment in question:
I'm a woman. Recently joined the chess club at my senior center chess club as the only female. (one guy smugly announced that all the women who join quit because they "can't hang onto their queens"). At first everyone I played was all smiley, sort of flirting and trying to give me "tips" about developing the pieces and so on. But then they found out that I play like a boss and could crush almost all of them quite handily (I'm on a ridiculous win streak). Now none of these men want to play against me, and all their smiles have disappeared. Story of my 145 IQ life. Men need to feel intellectually superior to women and I got sick of playing dumb a long time ago.
Indeed, I would probably not want to play chess with her, it sounds fairly unpleasant, along the lines of #2.
Gaashk
5mo ago
Does anyone like or "get" monotype printing?
I have some equipment for making and teaching mono prints with charming little presses and gel plates, but whenever I look into resources about it, the professional art is not inspiring at all. Lots of kind of boring stencils of elephants or birds, lots of leaves, mandala looking stencils, dots that look kind of like packing materials, all in acrylic, which is a huge pain to clean up. I do like plate and woodblock printing, but am not going to set that up, it's a whole different tool set. The most interesting gel plate pieces I've seen included using the gel print as a background and drawing over it in chalk pastel, but then it has to be framed behind glass because of the pastel.
Gaashk
5mo ago
That's a good point. Upon hearing a prophesy of terrible children, it might make sense to first try to figure out what went wrong, rather than give up entirely.
Among basically average parents I've seen some have one problematic child and a couple of better ones, in which case maybe it's better to have more children (or at least more than one).
Gaashk
5mo ago
I don't think either? Neither scenario is related to why I have kids now, so they might not be in hypothetical true prophesy world.
Maybe I'd have more kids if I had married younger. Maybe I would have fewer if I were more organized about taking birth control pills at the same time every day and renewing on time.
Gaashk
5mo ago
The difficulty is pretty variable.
I'm an introvert who loves alone time, and currently 7 months pregnant with two children under 5. I would go on week long silent retreats if I could. My daughter is extremely hyper, showing signs of ADHD. Trying to rest at home with her is awful. Going on adventures with her is pretty fun. I'm reasonably optimistic that her energy levels will pay off in the end, but times were bad when she was a baby in a little apartment. A teacher friend with similarity energetic children is putting them in a bunch of cheap Parks & Rec day camps, and I think I'm going to have to do something like that in the future.
My brother was very challenging for my mom as well. Some parent/child combinations are just really difficult, for personality and energy level reasons.
Gaashk
5mo ago
It's the meme version of getting smallpox etc, without either vaccines or any childhood immunity. Western Civilization has great books too, bot it takes quite a lot of education to appreciate it.
I suppose the "white person" version of just naturally absorbing weaving and making attractive books is that my parents were always, every day, talking about what they were reading, reading it out loud, and going on about their favorite books and philosophy professors -- a kind of meme childhood immunization.
Gaashk
5mo ago
This reminds me of some articles Scott had shared a while back about "vibes collapse" in remote tribes, when first introduced to larger civilizations. For instance: https://smoothbrains.net/posts/2022-08-24-planetary-scale-vibe-collapse.html
I'm not certain what to think about it. Since the smartphones and modern social media are only ~15 years old, we're still figuring out how to fit them in at a civilizational level.
The classy people like @WhiningCoil are taking up aesthetic crafting hobbies and artisanal homeschooling sans social media.
The uncool moms like me are begging our children to please, please just go watch a couple of episodes Octonauts so that I can get some alone time.
People have been making fun of the overconsumption of written stories since before Cervantes. I suppose it would probably be useful to consider something telos related, but haven't heard anything extremely compelling yet. Perhaps it would be good for some Jesuits to bring the tribe more Aristotle.
Gaashk
6mo ago
In the case of restaurants, I'm not sure having different priorities, other than authenticity, is a mistake. Unless people are getting food poisoning, people are allowed to like what they like, whether or not it's the same as the preferences of the people in the cuisine's country of origin. Restaurant owners should go ahead and optimize for that, offering enchiladas at their Chinese buffet or whatever if that's popular. Unless the reviews literally say "this is extremely authentic!" I wouldn't read any opinion on the authenticity into the review.
I would expect Google reviews of various other businesses to mostly be about their customer service, there probably isn't any way around that.
Gaashk
6mo ago
"He cutted!!!" for skipping ahead in a line. I can't remember if they say they cutted the paper or not, I think it might go both ways.
Gaashk
6mo ago
Was it the same Njall's Saga essay as Scott posted during last year's ACX book review contest? If not, you should read that one, it's hilarious, but I don't think the comments were exactly a discussion either, mostly just a lot of people saying that they enjoyed it over and over again. Which is discouraged here.
This is the first I've heard of the homosexuality paper, and won't based off of this.
Everyone has an opinion on sex.
Gaashk
6mo ago
I don't. Suppose I say "I should trim back the plants in my yard," this is silently followed up by "in order to better enjoy spending time in my yard."
Perhaps when my mother was younger there was some hope left for "may" vs "can" when making requests, but that ship has sailed, and I think she may have given up on it.
I'm about to give up on "cut" in the past tense, the kids seem to be losing some irregular past verb forms.
Gaashk
6mo ago
If someone finds them a match and pushes things forward, do you have any sense of whether they do alright at marriage?
Gaashk
6mo ago
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. What trap? What standard for agency? Isn't f3zinker the one asserting without elaboration that women have no agency?
Gaashk
6mo ago
Yours is closer to my experience as well, though I'm willing to believe there's a vast experiential gulf between hot, agreeable woman in CurrenYear who performs for Only Fans and average, prickly woman a decade ago at a provincial state U who hangs out with Baptists and the kind of Greeks who teach folk dancing and won't let a 20 year old drink ouzo with them.
Gaashk
6mo ago
I was admittedly both rather low agreeableness and not particularly hot, and also unlikely to be friends with Ms. Khalidi. But it doesn't take all that much willpower to not invite a man into your dorm room on the first date after getting burned a couple of times?
Gaashk
6mo ago
It’s honestly bad manners not to sleep around if large parts of society.
That seems like a reasonable enough thing to be pushing back against.
Gaashk
6mo ago
She was casting a great deal of shade on magazines for girls, probably produced by women. In general she seems to think that older women are failing to appropriately guide younger women, both going on about the devil and hell, and suggesting that anal sex and being hit with a riding crop are things girls are likely to enjoy.
In no particular order:
- Her college sex and dating environment does sound pretty bleak.
- Islam as represented by the people in her life also sounds pretty bleak in respect to women.
- She does seem to be perpetuating some of the bleakness with camgirl activities and inviting romantic prospects to bed then ejecting them again, rather than just not inviting them.
- As is sometimes said, it probably isn't to women's advantage that colleges are very female now. But it doesn't even seem cearly to men's medium term advantage, if the women come out jaded and thinking of men as basically beasts.
- It seems like eventually the college girls would learn to say things like "I want a romantic relationship, not a one night stand" and hold out against the "why's" with their experiences of disappointment? It doesn't seem like most of them care all that much for the sex in and of itself, or are all that carried away in the moment aside from the effects of intoxicants they're choosing to take.
Gaashk
6mo ago
Fair enough, it just seems somewhat at cross purposes with the dream of convincing all of your relatives to spend time there in comparison with, say, orchards.
Gaashk
6mo ago
I genuinely want more content in an Ethiopian setting. They had a really interesting civilization, with good aesthetics, that's underrepresented in media. On the other hand, I don't play this kind of game, so my opinion doesn't matter much.
Gaashk
6mo ago
(I like scrub desert more than average, so others may feel differently)
For other people, yes, because the glare is significantly increased. I suppose it wouldn't make much of a difference farther from the roads, but it also seems like there would be a significant cost connecting to the grid from farther away. I'm in favor of the solar panels for individual houses, schools, military bases, and so on, and it seems promising for places with long electrical connections that are currently maintained for fairly small neighborhoods. If the plan is for the family settlement to generate solar power and use it for their AC or something, that isn't a problem.
Wind farms are unsightly, visible from extremely far away, and kill a fair number of birds.
It's possible that both ventures are still worth it in some situations, but probably not in the case of an amateur landlord who is wondering about putting a shrimp farm in a desert with uncertain water sources.
Gaashk
6mo ago
Are there large cacti? Mesquite? Creosote? Palm trees? Juniper?
There are people growing North African oasis style gardens in that climate, with citrus, olives, and date palms (best example at https://www.goglobaltoday.com/st-anthonys-greek-orthodox-monastery.html). But that takes a long time, a lot of work, and a good well.
It looks like more of the hopeful comments come more from widowers, and the angry ones from divorced or never married women.
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