Gaashk
14hr ago
I do think the fertility crisis is still percolating towards the mainstream, and there are potential grandparents who still interpret potential overpopulation in Africa as the same thing as potential overpopulation for them. Also, there are still a bunch of millennials who think they have to be basically perfect, watch their kids constantly, play constantly, never lose their tempers, and so on in order to parent well. Propaganda against these viewpoints have barely been tried so far. It's mostly just a bunch of online rightists talking about it. The culture at large hasn't even stuck its toe in he discourse with fake babies and home ec at high schools, they're currently still below even the 90s in terms of acknowledging teenage girls might eventually become mothers.
Gaashk
1d ago
But then again, people who are succeeding don't have reason to spend time thinking inventing novel sociopolitical philosophies (or spend time implementing, say, a series of technologies that could push society in that direction), especially ones that will only help the poor at the expense of the rich, and doubly so if it would require more effort.
This reminds me of how Tolstoy, at his best, was writing absurdly complex, nuanced novels with portraits of dozens of interesting, flawed, human characters. And then he got everything he wanted, began to doubt himself, and started writing odd little folk tales and morality plays instead.
The original essay might have been improved by including some Tolstoy romantic pairings as archetypes, the way WASP writers always include archetypal Jane Austen pairings.
Gaashk
1d ago
Orthodox women are usually relatively good at cooking, compared the the average Westerner. If they're serious, they're eating a fasting diet almost a third of the time, so they're always making lentil stew and plant based regional food and whatnot. There are a lot of potlucks, including a lot of fasting potlucks, and also a surprising amount of mandatory homemade bread, for remembering, for celebrating, for certain feast days, for Communion loaves, and so on.
Orthodox families have basically average household expectations. Lower than WASP households on average, and also lower than Orthodox Jewish ones where they have to do na extremely thorough cleaning at least once a year, and keep their foods separate.
They also have basically average expectations of the woman working. The woman should probably work at some point, but preferably not while her babies are still babies. This is true of the wives of priests as well, it's kind of weird for a presbytera without young children about to simply keep house. There's a bit of drama about homeschooling being preferred, but not all the families are actually suited to it in practice, and public schooling is perhaps looked down on a bit. Most of the women work, as women have always worked, and people know that it's a fantasy that they should only work on aesthetic homesteading tasks in an era when that isn't economically valuable, and there are women and mothers who are scientists, teachers, nurses, cashiers, counselors, bankers, and so on. Most Orthodox are a bit less gender essentialist than traditional Protestants.
One of the oddities of Orthodoxy, specifically, is that while they are very serious about their liturgical tradition, they're kind of ambivalent about the kind of American traditionalism that resulted in the trad wife meme.
Gaashk
1d ago
It's a solution to some modern problems. People have been talking about aesthetics a lot lately, and if someone's problem is that they live in a grey box, and work on a smaller grey box inside of a larger grey box, where everything is lit with fluorescent tubes, then Orthodoxy can, indeed, solve their Beauty problem. It can solve the lack of a village problem, if they commit. It might solve their theological or hierarchical problems, depending on what they are.
But, yes, it won't solve their relational problems, especially if, as in the article, they're a woman holding out for a Good, strong, provider, leader sort of man around their own age. Or a man in want of a younger woman who's easy to please, cheerful, pretty, a good homemaker, but can also bring in an income before and after having young children. Those expectations are not solvable. A woman looking for a nerd to visit historical sites with might do fine, and then they might develop feelings for each other, if they're both the kind of person where reading Byzantine poetry is romantic, but the women in the article don't seem to be. It's utterly predictable that male Orthodox converts would always be going on about: Rome! Second Rome! Even Third Rome! Restore Constantinople! Of course they are, even normal men are apparently always thinking about Rome, and Orthodox men have even more Romes!
On the other hand, I've met a couple of these men. My husband, who's a big fan of Rome and aqueducts and whatnot, has been a bit weirded out by some Orthodox men who meet us and immediately start talking about some council or other, and their extremely strong opinions about the outcome thereof, for the entirety of lunch. I suppose they're autistic? But, still, autistic men who want to find friends and eventually wives do need to tune in a little bit to how deep into the old books they should get upon first meeting someone.
Gaashk
1d ago
Not sure about movie series, but I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel during formative years, and still enjoy them quite a lot.
The Twilight book was very absorbing in a slightly uncomfortable way, but I don't think I enjoyed the movies very much. Maybe I didn't even watch the last one. The first person perspective really sells the books, and all the drama around the Edward POV book getting leaked, and its wonderful over the top broodiness was great.
Gaashk
1d ago
That one showed up on my Substack feed the other day, and I read it there. I thought it was fine, but there's nothing much to say to it. It's unfortunate, but unsurprising. I wasn't trying very hard to get married when I was attending Orthodox Church every day, and eventually married when I was farther away from that culture, and a man who wasn't Orthodox, but respected my beliefs and habits, asked me out on interesting, romantic, fun dates.
Traditional Christianity recognizes there are a lot of potential matches that are worse than remaining single, and respects monasticism, and even spinsterhood. Many saints actually preferred and recommended it. It's very trad to tell stories about a woman so upset at the prospect of marriage to a man she doesn't respect, she chooses execution instead, or God closes a mountain pass on her pursuers.
Gaashk
1d ago
The Orthodox Church, while extremely into Holy Tradition, and even cultural traditions, is basically neutral on that kind of tradism, perhaps mildly negative.
Gaashk
1d ago
The women she's talking about, who go to church multiple times a week, would've likely been happy enough joining a monastery in the Traditional Society, rather than marrying a man they didn't respect. Maybe they still will, but that works better when the women make their decision at 25 vs 45, since worker to diselderly ratios are important in small communes.
Gaashk
1d ago
I agree with this take, and predict that AI will disrupt marketing and stock imagery a lot, but fine art relatively little.
Gaashk
3d ago
Technical high schools and community colleges are relatively popular, but they're for the average student, or above average working class, not the trouble makers.
Gaashk
3d ago
There's a sense in which we don't educate them, certainly. In my preferred world, the ones who aren't expected to live independently would have a pleasant sensory environment prioritized over being in a school setting, freaking out at "transitions" every hour or so. We could build some gardens with greenhouses for what we currently spend on specialists, and have them hang out enjoying the pleasant sensory experience.
My main impression of why we don't is that if they're in a normal school, with normal administrators stopping in and checking on them now and then, and normal specials teachers trying to engage with them, it will be obvious if their minders become weird and abusive towards them. Whereas if they're in a completely different environment, everyone might just spiral into even more misery and degradation, even if there are gardens.
Gaashk
3d ago
Someone who can follow Khan Academy is probably at least 10th percentile in public education, and would be fine in a regular remedial class. They might have an IEP, but it'll just say things like they should sit near the teacher and have extra time on tests. Perhaps an extra study hall and interventionist time.
Gaashk
3d ago
Self contained social education classes are often like that in some respects, though they need. lot of help still with things like bothering each other and toileting.
I don't necessarily have a problem with the argument that this is tax money, redistribution is the best form of distribution, and the Public doesn't care how aggravating your childhood is. Well, I'd rather have even more niche schools than charter friendly states currently have, but it's a valid preference. My main problem with the current article is:
Parents, credulous towards this propaganda and often already looking for excuses to separate their children from poor kids and students of color, pull their kids out of public schools.
Which is entirely unproven, and more snide than he usually is. What if it's not that the kids are poor, but that they're flailing around in the school entrance, screaming their heads off? (I've seen this) What if it's not that they're of color, but that they're pacing around relentlessly, stealing everyone's school supplies, tearing up their papers, for hours at a time? (I've seen this) What if your child has a disability, and their also disabled classmate keeps pulling her by the hair, and the staff are all wearing helmets and shin guards, because the classmate kicks them and throws things at their heads, but your child doesn't have those protections, and isn't able to protect herself because she's a six year child with Down's syndrome? (I've seen this)
I don't mind Freddie having his Marxist policy preferences, as long as he shows that he knows how disruptive the most disruptive 5% of children are.
In general, I like Freddie DeBoer's takes on education. There's a lot of poor thinking about how if only... teachers were better paid, or worse paid; students were tested more, or tested less; unions were weaker, or stronger -- then things would be better. Freddie's there to point out that American public education is exactly what one would expect, given that it is full of Americans.
Enter his newest essay. American schools are exactly what you would expect, given their demographics, there isn't much to be done about that, the teachers and systems are exactly what they need to be, given the constraints they're under, and so... well off parents are racist for preferring schools that are allowed to expel the very lowest performing children.
Wait, what?
My main impression is that when he hears "bad kids," he's somehow thinking of a well meaning black kid who uses AAVE and wants to play sports ball more than learn math, but is in general pretty normal. And in a lot of classrooms it does. But sometimes, in some classrooms, it means a kid freaks out, smashes the other kids' stuff, sometimes hits the other kids, screeches, thrashes around on the floor, and then when they eventually leave, they come back five minutes later with candy in their mouth. None of the other kids are allowed to eat candy in that classroom even if they have it. It doesn't matter, the teacher just mutters to finish the candy quickly and get on with it.
Maybe it's an overrepresented dynamic in schools I've observed, but in addition to outlier events like knife fights, if a kid has the misfortune to be assigned an all day elementary class with a "disregulated" classmate or two, there's literally nothing to do about it, other than changing schools. This is a Problem, actually. It is a Problem with the laws and court decisions, not necessarily individual decisions on a school or even district level, but Freddie is simply wrong in how he talks about the "hardest to educate students." Education Realist was more on track when he wrote about the topic a couple of years ago.
Special ed law originated before medical advances kept children alive in conditions we never anticipated. Imagine just one severely disabled child born at 25 weeks, blind, wheelchair bound, incontinent, and destined to life institutionalization. That child will need an expensive wheelchair, transportation, at least two paras, at a cost of what–$100K or more? Now multiply by what, 100,000 kids? Fewer? more? Now move up the disability chain to kids who can walk, can make it to the bathroom with an escort, but and can’t be put in a classroom without two full-time paras and they’ll disrupt the classroom every day. Or the kids who are locked in an autistic world, screaming if touched. There are still several steps up the chain until you get to the merely low cognitive ability students, the “mildly retarded” as they used to be called, the Downs Syndrome children that IDEA was originally intended to support.
This isn't the same disregulation most parents are pulling their kids out for, since they're in segregated classrooms, but is in fact the "hardest to educate students" that public schools are dealing with. As I recall Freddie did teach actual school at one point, but it looks like he was teaching high school composition, and for all his research, still underplays what the bottom of even normal suburban public schools are like.
Gaashk
4d ago
The one for my area is, to be clear, not Marketplace based, but a group where people ask other people for recommendations. I might use Google if I didn't have any other choice, but knowing it's a bad source for that kind of thing. I'd be more likely to call the number I see on a sign on the side of the road.
Gaashk
4d ago
Do people find plumbers from Google search results? There's a neighborhood Facebook group that's mostly about that, and people will ask in person if they can about that and auto mechanics, unless it's the most trivial possible thing everyone can do. Most of them don't even have listings or websites, that's how they signal they can get enough in person recommendations.
Gaashk
5d ago
There was the time I cleaned out a closet full of dead mouse bodies without a mask, and then people said: you shouldn't do that, mouse droppings carry diseases! I have now mildly updated towards not doing that in the future.
Gaashk
8d ago
I would consider watching an episode or two of a Youtube of this, or Hell's Kitchen tier reality show. But ultimately it would come across as trashy, and get stale fast. I would never use it to actually choose a restaurant to eat at.
Gaashk
9d ago
I enjoyed the essay, as well as "The Colors of Her Coat,"but lacking in his usual clarity -- I don't know what he likes, or whether he's really secure enough in those preferences to defy the snobs. He seems to like Studio Ghibli style custom images, Art Deco doors, and stained glass windows. He sort of wanted a stained glass window with a famous scientist in it a while back, but I think not enough to actually commission one. Of course, custom art windows aren't cheap, but that was also true in the past, people who weren't nobility would have to get by with art they made themselves. Sometimes he seems to hope that AI art will solve his problem, but I don't think it will, because things that can be printed already exist to suite all tastes, and things like doors and windows are not getting there any time soon.
I feel basically neutral about Angelus Novus. I think I like the art better than the flowery description that Scott quoted, despite not liking it all that much. The description of the new mono print process he used to make it was interesting. The mouth is quite interesting. Visiting David did not fill me with awe at the human figure, though I was impressed with the scale.
The Aesthetic Experience aspect of great art may have been overhyped. Sometimes people have great spiritual experiences when praying or meditating or whatever, but traditional Christianity is right to discourage people from chasing after it. It's neat to go to the Chicago Art Institute and look atet impressionist paintings. They're quite large! It's fine to just admire them, they have good colors, the painters used a lot of paint! Someone probably could gain art fans by doing actually Impressionist things, like hauling a giant canvas off to the haystack every week to get the different lights. But hardly anyone wants to, they are not enamored with the idea, it is not the right moment, there have only ever been a few people who were truly passionate about it, and there aren't any I've heard of now.
Writing about art critics seems unlikely to lead much of anywhere.
Sure, I hear they have better maternity leave than the US. I've also heard that Japan has been at least beginning to ask their people to form families.
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