Re the comic I have story with my kid about girls intruding in boys universe. For my son’s 4th we hosted the party at a park, had 12 or so kids. My daughter is 2.5 years older, of course was there, and true to personality, needed to make the party about her. She wore butterfly wings and ran around calling for all the boys to follow the faerie. My son looked puzzled and luckily most of the boys ignored her.
After the party my son and I were putting together his figure 8 car track - right of passage for all mailed. My daughter waltzes in.
Daughter: Oh, I have an idea. We can get the dinosaurs and put them around the track.
Son: No I wanna play with this.
Daughter: Wait, I have another idea, we’re going to put the dinosaurs inside and on the track.
Son: No this is for the cars
Daughter: No, the cars won’t go on the track, because the dinosaurs are there.
Son: [Frustrated and quiet for a moment] No I just want …
Daughter: Wait I have a BETTER idea …
Son: [Pissed]. I have an idea - HOW ‘BOUT NOTHING?!?
Witnessing that was funny as hell. Sometimes people have to be told to stay in their lanes.
Girls just want to be included, because they want the attention. Boys just want to play with their toys. The eternal struggle.
It's like when you find your sister marrying GI Joe to Barbie. That's not what he's for! But it would never occur to you to draft Barbie to go to war against COBRA.
I really enjoyed your chat on Fencing Bear With Prayer. It really did sort of blow my mind to find yourself and a couple of old lady medievalists getting along famously.
Re: Marching Through the Shadowlands interview. One minor point of accuracy: Mennonites do not have a uniform, they just wear regular clothes. Amish AND Hutterites do wear homemade clothes that are all the same design and colour. And yes, Hutterites live communally with low access to Personal technology but all their farms Corporately are very high tech. When a colony reaches 120 people then they start to look for another location to hive-off and start a new colony. They don't like the colony to exceed 200 people.
McLuhan has given me my favorite quote: “Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept quiet by the public’s incredulity.” Maybe some paraphrasing but you get the drift. Boy have “they” ever used that against us lol.
Busy weekend, I skimmed through this pretty quick. I believe you also on the podcast with Ahnaf too.
Time appears to be just another prop for our soul's journey through many lives, both real to the senses, and unreal....As a regression hypnotist, I've had a subject go from a life long ago to a life far in the future, then back to our present...
Thank you for the article. Time has always been considered linear and yet the paradoxical nature of our existence suggests that theory and thought may be incorrect. Please expand on your patient’s experience without violating any privacy issues.
She has given me permission to discuss it...It's quite unusual...The first life she went to was as the wife of a nomadic group on the steppes, and their family was starving...She kept saying that it was too hard, and she wouldn't do that kind of life ever again...Ultimately, she and her daughter starved to death, while her husband and son survived, which made sense because he was the only food provider..In what I call the Spirit World, she observed that there was a being or possibly machine spitting out green symbols which your brain receives, which she couldn't immediately decipher...She said "this is where all the ideas come from." Her next life was on either an orbiting space ship or possibly a space station off a planet on which they were apparently mining valuable minerals, but she wasn't interested in that...Her ship produced its own oxygen and food and she described some of the other machines, but couldn't describe their purposes...I am assuming this was a life in the future, but it could also have been an alternate time line....At that point our time ran out...
Interesting, reading this, listening to the Mosaic Ark conversation, re-reading the reenchantment of... along with a bit of a steampunk scifi as the snow falls lightly all day up here atop the world while meanwhile daily tasking & out and abouting.
You (and professor Brown) may also be interested in Orthodox writer, Rod Dreher's new book "Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age”. It is about re-enchantment of Christians and Christianity. It isn't just you thinking about it, it's a whole lot of people. Rod Dreher is well known for bringing the unspoken thoughts of many Christians into writing and making them part of common culture. Even non-Christians will find it thought-provoking.
One of the saddest aspects of modern academia is that the surfeit of administrative staff often seek to defend/rationalize their utterly expendable services by loading down departments with endless paperwork in the name of “evaluations,” “restructuring,” “creating new mission statements etc etc etc., all of which burns up time and energy that could have been better devoted to improving teaching and pursuing research. Being able to read new books and periodicals to stay atop one’s discipline takes time and energy wasted by having to jump through all the make-work hoops of administrators.
In retrospect, this was entirely foreseeable. While admin was handled by professors thrust against their will into senior departmental roles, they wanted to get the hateful chore of paperwork wrapped up as soon as possible so they could get back to their research. Professional administrators, on the other hand, prosper precisely by creating more paperwork, which then justifies hiring more administrative staff, which then creates more paperwork, and thus it snowballs.
Add to that the sense that all academics feel obliged to comply out of fear that questioning the bureaucratic bullying will end their employment. During a mandatory self-evaluation for our departments and programs we were ordered only to use the financial data being provided by the administration. Among the cash-flow “costs” counted by the administration were included disbursements of funds for scholarships and fellowships. I protested that these funds were autonomous trusts funded by outside donors that each academic unit was obligated to disperse to worthy candidates and that they should not be treated as if they were fungible cash flows. Once those supposed costs were subtracted from unit cash flows many units that had appeared to be in the red were actually shown to be in the black. I was actually the only faculty member in my college (Arts and Letters) who noticed this. This was my attempt to push back on the budgetary blackmail of our administration.
Admin at one school I worked at tried blackmailing the faculty union during salary negotiations over budget issues. Faculty asked to see the budget. Admin refused to show them the budget, but abruptly stopped complaining about cash flow.
"You want Information Dispersal for that question. This is Information Retrieval".
On the other hand, with the ever-greater specialisation (speciation might be more apt?) in all sciences and the proliferation of "fackidioter"* plus the relusting siloing of knowledge, and lack of perspective on consequences of experiments, research and findings once they are put to use in the real world (Gain of function f.e.) - administration and bureaucracy has grown as a direct product of the development sketched out above.
And via that, grown has the fungoid creatures known as DEI-ESG experts of all clades infested the system, and it has grown mighty indeed, leeching resources from actual science while rather than providing a conscience asking "Ought we do this?" it instead incessantly hollers "Do it as long as it's done Politically Correct Progressively!". (PCP seems to me a fitting acronym for woke HR-departments.)
*Fackidiot = Fack, here means slot or compartment, idiot is self-explanatory. It means someone who's an expert when allowed to stay in his "slot" of expertise, but a total idiot outside of it. In Swedish, it is not a pejorative as such but a warning to remember that just because you are in the top ten in your field, doesn't mean you know squat diddley-doo about other fields.
Best line in "Brazil":
"Confess lad, before you ruin your credit-rating!"
I stopped listening to interview podcasts because they tend to be low effort with the host clearly not bothering to read up on the guest's work enough to have a deep conversation. It's good some people know how to do an interview right.
What a brilliant essay, John! Thuvia of Ptarth would love it.
While we are currently living in a mindless and disenchanted, completely materialistic society, there are still some outriders who believe in God and who live godly lives. Just as Scientology has been debunked and only those currently being blackmailed by Hubbard's cult, the WOKE dreamworld is already in the process of crumbling and being discarded. Life is Change and it always will be.
I happily accept the Creation Story of the Taoists. First, there was the Tao and it created Yin and Yang. Yin and Yang went on to create the thousands of things.
Unless the Biden administration accidentally destroys civilization in the next three months, the world will continue to stumble along, clinging to whatever nonsense is in vogue.
Re the comic I have story with my kid about girls intruding in boys universe. For my son’s 4th we hosted the party at a park, had 12 or so kids. My daughter is 2.5 years older, of course was there, and true to personality, needed to make the party about her. She wore butterfly wings and ran around calling for all the boys to follow the faerie. My son looked puzzled and luckily most of the boys ignored her.
After the party my son and I were putting together his figure 8 car track - right of passage for all mailed. My daughter waltzes in.
Daughter: Oh, I have an idea. We can get the dinosaurs and put them around the track.
Son: No I wanna play with this.
Daughter: Wait, I have another idea, we’re going to put the dinosaurs inside and on the track.
Son: No this is for the cars
Daughter: No, the cars won’t go on the track, because the dinosaurs are there.
Son: [Frustrated and quiet for a moment] No I just want …
Daughter: Wait I have a BETTER idea …
Son: [Pissed]. I have an idea - HOW ‘BOUT NOTHING?!?
Witnessing that was funny as hell. Sometimes people have to be told to stay in their lanes.
😂
That's adorable, and so very, very typical.
Girls just want to be included, because they want the attention. Boys just want to play with their toys. The eternal struggle.
It's like when you find your sister marrying GI Joe to Barbie. That's not what he's for! But it would never occur to you to draft Barbie to go to war against COBRA.
My girl was a tomboy, is cut from my cloth re aggressive energy. One time she was throwing stuff in the living room, hit my son with something.
Me: Hey, how many times do I have to tell you not stuff inside? You know, you’re older, so you’re supposed to be
Daughter: Dominant!
Me:[trying not to grin] No - a good example.
My son learned to handle her, it’s funny how one word from him now upends her cart. They’re 22 and 20, it’s interesting how things evolved.
I'm guessing she wasn't nearly so dominant once he hit puberty...
He became more resilient. She’s a tornado, but he learned to just dispel the drama. Effortlessly.
He’s a chill dude, doesn’t get rattled. That just took time to emerge. Boys and girls develop differently with the emotional component.
I really enjoyed your chat on Fencing Bear With Prayer. It really did sort of blow my mind to find yourself and a couple of old lady medievalists getting along famously.
They're lovely people. As for me, I get along with anyone who has an open mind and a good sense of humor!
Re: Marching Through the Shadowlands interview. One minor point of accuracy: Mennonites do not have a uniform, they just wear regular clothes. Amish AND Hutterites do wear homemade clothes that are all the same design and colour. And yes, Hutterites live communally with low access to Personal technology but all their farms Corporately are very high tech. When a colony reaches 120 people then they start to look for another location to hive-off and start a new colony. They don't like the colony to exceed 200 people.
There are Mennonites who look normal and modern, but also ones who don't, who are far more visible, albeit rare.
McLuhan has given me my favorite quote: “Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept quiet by the public’s incredulity.” Maybe some paraphrasing but you get the drift. Boy have “they” ever used that against us lol.
Busy weekend, I skimmed through this pretty quick. I believe you also on the podcast with Ahnaf too.
Yep, and doing another podcast today with Isaac Simpson. Busy busy.
That McLuhan quote is very similar to the Goebbels ‘big lie’ quote.
Yep, and doing another podcast today with Isaac Simpson. Busy busy.
That McLuhan quote is very similar to the Goebbels ‘big lie’ quote.
Good stuff! The World is pretty enchanted, it's just that we are programmed not to notice it...Just saw this...https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/scientists-discover-negative-time-in-bizarre-quantum-experiment-where-photons-exit-atoms-before-entering/
Time appears to be just another prop for our soul's journey through many lives, both real to the senses, and unreal....As a regression hypnotist, I've had a subject go from a life long ago to a life far in the future, then back to our present...
We don't understand what time is, at all, but it's certainly intimately bound up with consciousness (which we also don't understand, at all).
Thank you for the article. Time has always been considered linear and yet the paradoxical nature of our existence suggests that theory and thought may be incorrect. Please expand on your patient’s experience without violating any privacy issues.
She has given me permission to discuss it...It's quite unusual...The first life she went to was as the wife of a nomadic group on the steppes, and their family was starving...She kept saying that it was too hard, and she wouldn't do that kind of life ever again...Ultimately, she and her daughter starved to death, while her husband and son survived, which made sense because he was the only food provider..In what I call the Spirit World, she observed that there was a being or possibly machine spitting out green symbols which your brain receives, which she couldn't immediately decipher...She said "this is where all the ideas come from." Her next life was on either an orbiting space ship or possibly a space station off a planet on which they were apparently mining valuable minerals, but she wasn't interested in that...Her ship produced its own oxygen and food and she described some of the other machines, but couldn't describe their purposes...I am assuming this was a life in the future, but it could also have been an alternate time line....At that point our time ran out...
Very interesting stuff.
Those "lobsters" look to be Genestealers from the Space Hulk boardgame. The 1996 edition to be precise (2nd).
Whose turn is it?
That’s probably where they came from!
Nice! I never actually got to hear you speak. Will be a welcome addition to my morning commute
Really? I'm on podcasts pretty regularly.
Since this went up I've done two more … with another one later today.
Wait you're jumping on podcasts?! Dammit Carter, I've GOT to get you on one of my shows soon, as you're one of the top essayists and writers here!
Sure. Get in touch over DMs, we'll discuss.
Yay! That sounds awesome! First I’ll also have to figure out questions (usually takes me a week to meditate and decide upon them).
That's what i sayd.
Interesting, reading this, listening to the Mosaic Ark conversation, re-reading the reenchantment of... along with a bit of a steampunk scifi as the snow falls lightly all day up here atop the world while meanwhile daily tasking & out and abouting.
Quite enchanting.
First snowfall of the season is always a magical time.
You (and professor Brown) may also be interested in Orthodox writer, Rod Dreher's new book "Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age”. It is about re-enchantment of Christians and Christianity. It isn't just you thinking about it, it's a whole lot of people. Rod Dreher is well known for bringing the unspoken thoughts of many Christians into writing and making them part of common culture. Even non-Christians will find it thought-provoking.
One of the saddest aspects of modern academia is that the surfeit of administrative staff often seek to defend/rationalize their utterly expendable services by loading down departments with endless paperwork in the name of “evaluations,” “restructuring,” “creating new mission statements etc etc etc., all of which burns up time and energy that could have been better devoted to improving teaching and pursuing research. Being able to read new books and periodicals to stay atop one’s discipline takes time and energy wasted by having to jump through all the make-work hoops of administrators.
In retrospect, this was entirely foreseeable. While admin was handled by professors thrust against their will into senior departmental roles, they wanted to get the hateful chore of paperwork wrapped up as soon as possible so they could get back to their research. Professional administrators, on the other hand, prosper precisely by creating more paperwork, which then justifies hiring more administrative staff, which then creates more paperwork, and thus it snowballs.
Add to that the sense that all academics feel obliged to comply out of fear that questioning the bureaucratic bullying will end their employment. During a mandatory self-evaluation for our departments and programs we were ordered only to use the financial data being provided by the administration. Among the cash-flow “costs” counted by the administration were included disbursements of funds for scholarships and fellowships. I protested that these funds were autonomous trusts funded by outside donors that each academic unit was obligated to disperse to worthy candidates and that they should not be treated as if they were fungible cash flows. Once those supposed costs were subtracted from unit cash flows many units that had appeared to be in the red were actually shown to be in the black. I was actually the only faculty member in my college (Arts and Letters) who noticed this. This was my attempt to push back on the budgetary blackmail of our administration.
Admin at one school I worked at tried blackmailing the faculty union during salary negotiations over budget issues. Faculty asked to see the budget. Admin refused to show them the budget, but abruptly stopped complaining about cash flow.
They are all scum.
Didn't they make a movie about this? "Brazil" was the name iirc. 😏
"You want Information Dispersal for that question. This is Information Retrieval".
On the other hand, with the ever-greater specialisation (speciation might be more apt?) in all sciences and the proliferation of "fackidioter"* plus the relusting siloing of knowledge, and lack of perspective on consequences of experiments, research and findings once they are put to use in the real world (Gain of function f.e.) - administration and bureaucracy has grown as a direct product of the development sketched out above.
And via that, grown has the fungoid creatures known as DEI-ESG experts of all clades infested the system, and it has grown mighty indeed, leeching resources from actual science while rather than providing a conscience asking "Ought we do this?" it instead incessantly hollers "Do it as long as it's done Politically Correct Progressively!". (PCP seems to me a fitting acronym for woke HR-departments.)
*Fackidiot = Fack, here means slot or compartment, idiot is self-explanatory. It means someone who's an expert when allowed to stay in his "slot" of expertise, but a total idiot outside of it. In Swedish, it is not a pejorative as such but a warning to remember that just because you are in the top ten in your field, doesn't mean you know squat diddley-doo about other fields.
Best line in "Brazil":
"Confess lad, before you ruin your credit-rating!"
Fackidiot is a great term. Rolls off the tongue much better than Taleb's "clever-silly".
Out university administrators could never match the efficiency of the bureaucrats shown in “Brazil.”
That's a terrifying statement in itself.
I stopped listening to interview podcasts because they tend to be low effort with the host clearly not bothering to read up on the guest's work enough to have a deep conversation. It's good some people know how to do an interview right.
I'll take a listen.
What a brilliant essay, John! Thuvia of Ptarth would love it.
While we are currently living in a mindless and disenchanted, completely materialistic society, there are still some outriders who believe in God and who live godly lives. Just as Scientology has been debunked and only those currently being blackmailed by Hubbard's cult, the WOKE dreamworld is already in the process of crumbling and being discarded. Life is Change and it always will be.
I happily accept the Creation Story of the Taoists. First, there was the Tao and it created Yin and Yang. Yin and Yang went on to create the thousands of things.
Unless the Biden administration accidentally destroys civilization in the next three months, the world will continue to stumble along, clinging to whatever nonsense is in vogue.