Opinions, art, debate
And for some light, humorous relief:
I don’t know what’s funnier, that this guidance exists or that there are people who are sincerely upset the guidance will go away.
My alcohol drinking days are long behind me but neither back then nor now do I seek the government’s guidance when deciding whether to drink. I assume there’s not a single person who would seek such a guidance.
There are good prequels and there are crappy ones. I’m not opposed to the idea of a prequel but it has to add something to the entire series. I liked The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Collins’s first prequel to the Hunger Games series. It explained why Coriolanus Snow was such a mean bastard and really contributed to the overall story.
Sunrise on the Reaping is also a prequel but it adds nothing, brings no new information and gives no fresh insight into characters. It’s a sort of a clumsy imitation of the first book in the series but with a young Haymitch Abernathy as the main character. The novel is clearly written so that there can be a movie with cool special effects. The story is predictable and quite soporific. To spice up the bleak, tedious brew of the plot, Collins fills it with inventive atrocities but piling horrors on top of each other makes them repetitive and uninteresting.
The movie will undoubtedly be visually stunning but the premise has gotten old.
The disciplinarian society is dead. Nobody cares what you do and how you live. People are trying to convince themselves that this is not the case. They keep repeating “society tells us to” even though society has gone away. They do it because they intuit that the end of the disciplinarian society is a disaster for most.
There are people, a minority, who don’t need an externally imposed structure because they created an internal one. They moved the disciplinarian inside. They live within a severe moral code that is internally sustained. They have their schedules, routines, and a rigid carcass of self-imposed limitations.
Most, however, are incapable of placing the raging desires that are the lot of every human into a cage and policing it daily. Without external sources of discipline, they get addicted to screens, become decision-averse, and perceive any limitation on satisfying each passing whim as crushing. They look unwell, both physically and psychically. The name of their illness is freedom with which they only know how to harm themselves.
Schooling hasn’t caught up with these changes and is still preparing people for a disciplinarian society that is no longer there.
This was written by an NPR journalist and, OK, we can dismiss it because nobody takes NPR seriously. But we have an immigration policy, an education system, and everything in between built precisely on this idea.
It’s very important that there are more men in teaching. Klara’s two main teachers in camp are young men, and it’s a completely different energy than that of women teachers. Different games, different ways of relating to each other. A lot of ribbing, a lot of daring. It’s great even for girls to have this kind of teaching. For boys, it is indispensable.
The naked, shameless neoliberalism of this:
Neoliberals like Obama have the same definition for many things, including citizenship and sex. They define a concept as absolutely anything except the actual thing. This “every way of being American” that Obama references excludes the only actual way of being American.
Reality is diluted into volitional content. Once there are no shared definitions of even the most basic things, our common public space becomes a war zone where people with the most power get to impose their definitions on everybody else.
People support this setup because, against all evidence, they believe that their faction will be able to bully everybody into adopting their definitions.
Forget farms. This is all a distraction, a red herring. We all saw many reports of large groups of migrants, brought into small towns in Ohio, Alabama, Pennsylvania, etc in 2023-24. They were not working on farms. These were people receiving government assistance and living in government-provided housing. Have they been returned home?
The conversation keeps slipping towards migrants who have been in the US for quadrizillion years and have jobs. This is a manipulative trick. We need to talk about the people brought in last Fall. They are not picking any crops. Where are they and what is the impediment to asking them to leave?
I have received an invitation to the following conference:
Announcing the 2nd Annual Illinois Online Higher Education Symposium, “Doing Less with Less, Effectively”
I am not going to participate, obviously, but the cult of austerity has become comical.
Well, at least the organizers have recognized that “online teaching” tends towards doing less and less.
JD Vance is clearly panicking as his chances for a presidency are being erased:
I don’t like him so I don’t care but it’s funny how the poor dude is jumping up and down like a trained seal in this long and confused tweet.
OK, I’m willing to accept the working hypothesis advanced by Omar that things went downhill in this country after she showed up. I definitely feel the decline every time I hear her screeching voice.
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