Was it Handwaving Freakoutery? (https://hwfo.substack.com/s/egregores/archive?sort=new)
Gaashk
19hr ago
I don't know, and am starting to understand how my older working class relatives ended up giving each other lame things like jeans, socks, and toothpaste. Anything desirable enough to be excited about must be discussed at length (we're currently considering a three day trip to a nearby city). We're low enough SES that this includes things like an $80 espresso machine. We're both picky about personal items, and it's very obvious when someone isn't using the thing you got them. I will be missed if I leave or get home early/late by even 10 minutes.
At least 5 year olds are fun to buy gifts for. They are the best gift recipients. We got ours pajamas, after previously not having any, and she was so happy about it, and wondered out loud if Santa had placed the pajamas on the store rack for us to see, since it's so great having princess pajamas.
Gaashk
21hr ago
I think this happens anyway. If you need a complex surgery in New Mexico, they will send you to Phoenix or Texas, even if it’s fairly urgent.
Gaashk
2d ago
I don't necessarily feel disgusted. If I were forced by Society or the State to interact with a (certain kind of) trans woman in a female only space, I would probably feel threatened. The new trans woman in Congress who was making video threats about bashing their female colleagues head in the bathroom seemed very threatening. Trans women in contact sports or women's shelters seems potential threatening, on a case by case basis. I am basically fine with people using their intuition/gut/systems that are below the threshold of rationality to make decisions about things like "does this person feel threatening?" I think that we are wrong to try to squash that in the name of disparate impact.
Sex segregated spaces are usually a good thing. To the extent that we, as a society, have gotten rid of male spaces, that was mostly a bad idea and we should bring most of them back. To the extent that we are now in the process of getting rid of certain female only spaces by admitting trans women who the other women don't necessarily accept without coercion, that is also a bad thing. I think it is very reasonable to admit some trans women to some female spaces on the basis of vibes with the women, and not other trans women to other spaces, on the basis of things like large, strong, and has a penis. We've gone crazy and extra on marginal equity lately, which is a bad thing.
Gaashk
7d ago
Scott also has a good essay about BPD https://lorienpsych.com/2021/01/16/borderline/
Gaashk
7d ago
I don’t think hate is necessarily the word, either. Maybe contempt or disregard. But probably not better than nothing in terms of romantic interest, even if he’s rich and hot.
Gaashk
7d ago
Maybe there is something to that.
I liked my grandmother better, because she stayed and raised my mom and siblings while my grandfather moved to another state and didn't communicate with or visit them. My grandmother had everyone over for all the holidays, and it was nice. But she never babysat us, even for an hour, and that was probably stressful for my parents. I think she inherited money and didn't work, other than raising children. My other grandfather died when I was a baby, and we visited my other grandmother and stayed at her house, which was at least nice. I don't think she ever worked while I knew her, and she was fine, but I got the impression she mostly watched game shows and walked around the neighborhood once a day. The TV was never off at her house. I suppose my family made me feel neutral toward having children.
A couple of people in the thread brought up Korean mothers in law specifically, as being demanding and expecting their daughters in law to serve them, which seems interesting in a context where marriage and childbirth are very low. I would guess that they had to work for their husband's family when they were younger, and expect it to be paid back, but were less likely to work an 8 - 5 kind of job outside the home? I don't know what the actual facts are, not being very familiar with Korean culture.
Gaashk
7d ago
That does seem like an issue. In my own family, it seems like grandparents are getting too old to safely lift babies and toddlers right when I have them. We've had kids in late 20s/early 30s.
Gaashk
7d ago
How are proficiency standards determined for K-12 education?
I've tried looking it up a couple of times, after seeing a lot of angst about how less than half of students are proficient in reading or math, and have only found super vague verbiage like "The achievement levels are based on collective judgments about what students should know and be able to do relative to the body of content reflected in each subject-area assessment." That is not helpful at all. I can look at grade level standards to see what they are, and practice tests to see what the state expects that to look like, but it kind of just sounds like some board of people (Department of Ed? State Level? NCLB Commission?) got together and thought about what they wanted, and now every child is measured about that, and every state is panicking all the time about how the actual children aren't living up to it.
But maybe the kids are actually doing very badly? My neighborhood school has less than 50% proficiency, and they're above median for the state. Should I be worried? Did kids do better at some point in the past? When? Are there non BS sources of information about it?
Gaashk
7d ago
They exhumed her body this weekend, that’s why I was reading about her, but I’m not quite sure how it works.
Gaashk
8d ago
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.
Gaashk
8d ago
Mostly, modern formula is basically fine, the effects are there, but small, and almost no fathers are willing to go to the lengths necessary to try producing milk rather than relying on donor milk and formula.
Gaashk
8d ago
They can. But it's kind of against their core mission, which is about less reliance on medicalization and corporations for childbirth and feeding. So they'll advocate for things like placing the baby on the mother's chest immediately after birth, without taking them to weigh or clean first, starting breastfeeding as soon as possible, because it's way harder to breastfeed when starting later, and babies get nipple confusion, slow flow bottles so mixed fed babies don't get impatient with the breast, being patient with growth spurts and cluster feeding, and so on. This is related to breast milk being a better food, immunological interactions, and not being reliant on formula (I was very glad to not be trying to buy it during the shortage a few years ago, for instance).
(I am currently doing mixed feeding, about 1/3 formula, 2/3 breastmilk, both because baby was in the ICU a few days his first week of life on formula, and the hospital was making me do some terribly depressing triple feeding, and because I'm working full time. I am not a breastfeeding purist, and have found some lactation consultants press too hard and have caused problems for my babies when I returned to work.)
On the other hand, modern formula isn't all that bad, actually. Adoption and surrogacy at very young ages are central examples of times when donor milk or formula are good choices. LLL has a video on their homepage showing someone who's face is cut off (unusual in their materials, which usually feature an entire mother and baby), a "baby" with a full head of hair, and something about dripping milk down the breast from a syringe. It is an extremely non-central example of breastfeeding. Then there's an article about non-gestational parents breastfeeding, which admits that it's quite hard, and most parents who do it are not able to do exclusive breastfeeding.
The whole regime of taking hormones, pumping, getting a partial supply, trying to get an adopted baby who's more than a few days old and not previously breastfed to go along with it, but still supplementing a lot, maybe more than half... sounds terrible, exhausting, expensive, and just probably like a bad idea for most people. I do not think it's a good idea to be advocating for breastfeeding among parents who are not the birth mother for "bonding". Babies bond with caregiver fathers just fine. Formula is fine. They look like they've lost the plot with breastfeeding extremism.
To the extent that there are breastfeeding trans women willing to participate in a study, then yes, someone should do the study. Not necessarily LLL.
Gaashk
10d ago
It may not be good for the babies. Hormones around childbirth and breastfeeding are fairly complex, and show up in the milk.
Gaashk
10d ago
If you prefer pumping every two hours day and night to cuddling a baby. But, also, it’s pretty hard to pump enough, since babies are more efficient after the first week or so, and they cluster feed to increase production. Mixed pumping and formula is, of course, an option, but less convenient, at night especially.
Gaashk
19d ago
Yeah, that's the big thing. He feels ambivalent, like the pros would be good, but not if it makes things worse for the baby.
Should I put my 4 month old baby and 3 year old in daycare for working purposes?
Pros: reduce instead of expand debt, father might prefer random resulting job to watching the baby full time. I think the three year old might like it, she did last year.
Cons: I think babies find daycare stressful? It would cost more than we would make, but most of the financial costs are dispersed to the taxpayers. It would complicate our schedule, and make us more likely to get sick.
Gaashk
21d ago
On general dining experiences, I nominate the Supra, from the Republic of Georgia. It’s a feast/symposium, with elaborate toasting rules, homemade wine and cognac, and a nice assortment of dumplings, meat dishes, bread and cheese dishes, etc.
Gaashk
21d ago
Wabi Sabi Painting with Cold Wax. The examples are more abstract than I prefer, but the colors and marks are attractive. Some of the text is interesting and useful, though most is generic.
Gaashk
21d ago
That's been my impression of most people who work full time and above.
30 hours a week is enough to get most of the benefits of having a set schedule, without the downsides of not getting to do much else. Higher than full time seems mostly employer driven, probably with some small business owners who don't want to go out of business and people getting started in competitive professions as well. I'm not sure that the medium difference between the US and Europe calls for more explanation.
Gaashk
1mo ago
In some sense, we do engage in that much specialization, it's just that we're specializing in reading, so it doesn't register. I'm sure I read 10,000 hours in my youth, starting at 4 or so. But, like video games, it isn't completely useful. I was homeschooled, and my mom spent a lot of time reading books, while we kids also read books for 8 hours at a time.
Interesting.
My husband tended to be 99 F when he was younger, and also attracted way more static electricity than I do. He eats things like an entire pound of bacon, then just paces a lot, or walks around barefoot in the snow or something. My daughter seems to have inherited his metabolism, and actually was sent home from pre-K a couple of times for "low grade fever," but then she got home and didn't have a fever.
My body temperature is a bit below average (I don't check it very often, because I almost never run a fever), and I'm lower energy, but also have fewer random health problems -- things like almost never getting headaches or nausea, even when we eat something a bit off, getting over colds and flus faster, stuff like that. This has been good for pregnancy, which went smoothly all three times.
There seem to be trade offs involved.
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