“The pilot of this airplane looks extremely young,” I told Klara. “This is disturbing.”
“He probably has really good moisturizer, that’s all,” Klara reassured me.
Author: Clarissa
British National Identity
This isn’t as stupid as it sounds. Anything can become an element of national identity. It can be ancient or invented 5 minutes ago. It doesn’t even have to be connected to people who were aware of your nation-state because it was created long after they died.
The problem isn’t that the BBC and the NHS are recent or that they are institutions instead of, say, natural phenomena. The American nation-state by necessity relies on achievements that are enormously more recent than those of European countries, yet it’s the first, and still the strongest, nation-state in existence. Newness is not in conflict with national identity.
The problem is that the narrative of the British national identity that ties it to the NHS and the BBC was embraced along class lines by people who despise their class inferiors. You can’t have a separate national identity for the fancy people. Trying to position your class identity (which is what “Britain is the NHS is”) as national identity only annoys the people to whom you are signaling that you are their class superior.
State Impotence
An hour away from Brown. The Brown shooter is still at large.
The only thing we have gotten so far from the utterly incompetent FBI is an arrest of an innocent man who is clearly the exact opposite body type of the shooter. An innocent American soldier rubbished for no reason while the actual murderer is running free.
Online sleuths are doing better work on this than law enforcement. Again.
The state has so utterly abdicated its role of serving the citizens that it’s forgotten even how to pretend to do it.
When Does It Begin?
I have no idea what this means. In the diversity paperwork I file for every new hire, there are racial categories of white and non-white but at no point was there a question about origin. There’s definitely no mention of Europe. I hired an Italian instructor from Italy, and there was no opportunity to mention Italy or Europe in that discussion.
Federal education statistics are different from Title IX reporting that accompanies each hire. They are not previous to hiring but are compiled afterwards. In order to know what these stats mean, we need to find out not only how many white Americans were hired but how many applied. Does the exclusion happen at the level of graduate school, for example? We need to know when that journey begins to understand why it ends where it does.
Sins of Grandparents
Granddaughter? Seriously? We are now going to visit the sins of grandparents on their grandchildren?
I have no idea whether Metreweli is good or bad but whatever she is has zero relationship with what her grandfather did in WWII. My grandfather was in the Communist Party, so what? What is it supposed to mean about me?
What does Blumenthal even mean by “complete coincidence”? What is supposed to be coinciding here? It’s “people in maroon T-shirts” crap on steroids. What Metreweli is saying isn’t in any way “pro-Nazi” it even remotely related to Nazism, Hitler or “pro-Soviet partisans.” She’s not talking about WW2.
We should all just stop re-fighting WW2 already and concentrate on what is happening now.
Oral Culture
Reader Demotrash, who by all appearances must be visiting us anonymously from Harvard, says this:
These are important observations that explain why I don’t like the growing popularity of the term oral culture to describe what we are experiencing.
Oral culture exists in a deeply religious society. There is a core of shared belief that brings people into the same symbolic universe. Without this shared worldview nourished by a lifelong participation in the common rituals and traditions, there is no culture. If you don’t have a shared symbolic language that everybody understands irrespective of their degree of literacy, there’s no culture.
There is another aspect to this issue. Culture is the capacity to understand that something can mean something else. It’s a non-literal understanding of the world of which only humans are capable. Portable screens are creating a cognitive gap of extraordinary dimensions. All of the natural cognitive distinctions remain in place. On top of it, we are adding a large number of people with a flat, one-dimensional inner world who can’t comprehend the reality around them and will exist in a state of a permanent freakout over it. They are imitating culture’s “something can mean something else” but in a flailing, dumb way. Like parrots who imitate the sound of a human voice, they chant “people in maroon shirts must mean something”.
The Actor Curse
Did you hear, folks? Rob Reiner and his wife were stabbed to death by their 32-year-old drug addict son. A terrible tragedy.
One thing that is invariable from one culture to another is that actors and actresses are exceptionally crappy parents. They raise more junkies and completely off-the-handle crazy types than truck stop prostitutes and their pimps.
What I find annoying is that people are already making this somehow about Trump even though the utter incapacity of actors to raise semi-normal children was proverbial before Trump was even born.
Passivity and Grief
This is simply bizarre:
What is the theory of the mind here? That people who had a bad shock need to be excised from regular life and sit staring at a wall all day? This is stupid.
Even when somebody is experiencing a terrible personal loss, they don’t need complete passivity. To the contrary, they need a huge to-do list. When somebody dies, in the Orthodox tradition we have a funeral, then pominki, then a gathering at 9 days, and another gathering at 40 days. You cook, organize, talk to people, that helps.
Oh, students will want to go home. OK, and so what? You can’t accept their papers by email? Because normally they hand them in personally? Email has been abolished? You managed to teach remotely for two years and now all of a sudden you are “significantly hindered”?
What is the lesson here? That when you experience something unpleasant, life stops? This isn’t real. Nothing stops. You are preparing students for something that’s not a thing.
And by the way, why is the shooter still not apprehended? What is going on?
Parenting Hack
My 5-year-old used to fight me EVERY NIGHT about brushing teeth.
“No! I don’t want to!”
“You have to!”
Meltdown. Tears. Exhausting.
Then I changed one thing:
Instead of “Go brush your teeth,” I said:
“Do you want to brush teeth before or after pajamas?”
He thought about it. “After.”
Done. No fight. Teeth got brushed.
This is an excellent parenting hack. I’ve been using it since Klara was first learning to walk, and it works great. Kids want to make their own decisions. They want to show initiative and be responsible for themselves. This is a great thing and must be encouraged.
Klara has been choosing what to wear since she was in onesies. Of course, she was choosing between the two onesies that I curated based on weather conditions. These days she dresses herself, and we have zero struggles over “don’t forget the scarf and the gloves” because she’s long been responsible for her own attire.
Give them a choice and respect it, even if it’s weird. Klara brushes her teeth after breakfast. I don’t get it because I brush mine immediately after getting up and love it. But I’ve accepted that everybody is different and instilling initiative is much more important than insisting that my way of doing things is optimal.
True North
Global warming hits hard as we experience the coldest winter I’ve ever had in this region. Canadian levels of cold. I almost closed the window all the way at night. Which means it’s Arctic weather for real. The window is still open a crack but if things continue this way, I might really close it.
Yes, I’m loving every second of it. That moment when you feel like your eyeballs have frozen solid and might actually crack? Paradise.
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