Memage

I think every somewhat-literate person on the planet—certainly those in the Americas and Europe, and much of Asia—know the Nike slogan, “Just Do It”. I’ll admit to liking it at first. It was inspiring, motivating ... instead of sinking in the quagmire of doubts and fears, just do it! To me there was an implicit promise of seeing things all the way through, and if the result wasn’t exactly as you envisioned, well, you just did it, and that should count for something, right?

Well, leave it to me to find a way to create obstacles out of that inspirational phrase ... but I’ve hit on an alternative that works much better for me.

Over the weekend, I moseyed over to The Economist—I honestly don’t know why—and got no further than the first article to catch my eye: An expensive dinner. My fascination focused not on the tale of rising food prices, but some of the strange memes contained therein. Picking through the entire article, since it may disappear behind a subscriber-only button at some point ...

Several days ago, Wendy McElroy mused about a Libertarian Fixation on Guy Fawkes?, with which I empathized to some degree.

I think most individuals understand at some level that it’s taxes and fees that fund government at all levels. But Jay Jardine recently tossed out a phrase that bluntly, graphically, and very effectively captures it in a way that will probably cause a lot of people to wake up just a little bit more to the true cost of the state in individuals’ lives.

The usual suspects, naturally. But it turns out that isn’t all.

In case it needs expanding, that would be “Who Would Jesus Vote For?”. I’m not the one asking the question, but I expect it’ll come up eventually. The answer comes from How stupid do Christians believe God really is? at Scholars and Rogues. As the title implies, the post is focusing on a different subject, which led to this bit [emphasis and link in original]:

On this point, he [Jesus] was unambiguous: Jesus Christ, like the framers of the US Constitution, was a believer in the separation of church and state. Jesus and Jefferson held this view for different reasons, of course. Jesus saw mucking around in politics as the sort of activity that was properly beneath the dignity of the truly righteous man. Every moment spent tending to the petty affairs of this world was a moment lost to the only meaningful pursuit available: preparing the soul for the next life. Jefferson, on the other hand, saw religion as inherently corrosive to the conduct of government. His only flaw was that he made too many assumptions about the capacity of the average citizen to grasp the obvious. He could have used a measure more of Jesus’ painful literal-mindedness at times.

I don’t hold to the “preparing for the next life” business much, but I certainly agree that there are myriad better things to invest one’s moments in than inflicting a ruler upon oneself and others.

(I spotted a link to this post at a forum that wishes to distance itself from search engines, so no credit link ...)

Deviation is necessary for progress to happen.

Or something like that. I spotted the thought scribbled on a motorcycle cowling, and didn’t have anything at hand to get it verbatim. It reminded me of a couple of lines from an old Rush song that I’ve always liked (even if I can never remember the title):
Everybody got to deviate from the norm
and then, near the end of the song, Geddy sang:
Everybody got to elevate from the norm.

The Seven C’s

By Shaun Saunders

(For Sunni and her Conspirators, with special thanks to Cat Farmer for her brilliant, inspirational essay The Seven C’s: An Ideological or Social Spectrum)



When the spunky young guy dropped me the corny line, “So what’s a nice girl like you doing here?” instead of the usual retorts someone my age might use in my position, I thought I’d answer with the truth.

“I’m here because my father loves me.” There! That should wipe the smug authoritative look from his face.

And it did, for a moment. He opened his mouth, found nothing quick to say, and closed it again.

“There’s more to it than that, of course,” I added, taking the advantage.

“There usually is,” he answered drolly, with a half-raised eyebrow. He hooked a nearby stool with the toe of his boot and plonked himself down, all ears.

“If you don’t mind, I’ll stand,” I said.

He smiled. “But of course, whatever makes you most comfortable.”

I cleared my throat. “It all begins with the ‘Seven Cs of Freedom’.”

His smile became a grin. “Oh, this is going to be good. I must hear it all!”

“According to my dad, the seven Cs represent an ideological spectrum between ‘Contemplation’ and ‘Coercion’, or, as dad says, thuggery. He also says that the spectrum is a way of looking at relations between people in any given society, and that its rules and laws, and people’s attitudes and behaviours towards one another, reflect which end of the spectrum most people are at. Are you with me?”

“Oh yes, and most fascinated, too,” he said.

“Good. Would you mind bringing your stool a little closer? Thanks. It makes this a little more comfortable for me.”

“Of course. But what are the other five Cs?”

“Ok. I’ll start at thuggery – Coercion – and work backwards, just like dad did when he explained it to me. Coercion is the antithesis of freedom, because by its very definition it must mean an imposition of some kind by one person on another.”

The young man nodded. “Yes, it can only include freedom for the person doing the coercing, no matter how it is prettied up for general consumption.”

Wow! This guy is smart. “The next C is Control: this is about using rules and regulations, policies and procedures and customs to keep the majority in their place –”

“– But the minority with the ability to coerce determine what and where that place is.”

“Right again. Would you like to take over my monologue?”

“No, not at all – you’re doing a swell job. Please continue –” (with a twinkle in his eye) “– I think your father would prefer it that way.”

“Next up is Cajolery. This is much harder edged than merely getting your point of view across – think of it as persuasion with a sword aimed at your target audience’s throat. Your point of view is the only point of view...and everyone had better take it on board.

“It’s all uphill from here – although cooperation is sometimes a front for control and coercion –”

“– Like when someone puts a gun to your head or hires a thirty-thousand dollar a day barrister and says ‘please cooperate with me’? Sorry, I’m butting in again.”

“No, you’re actually communicating with me, and showing courtesy at the same time by questioning your own actions. But you’ve knocked out another two Cs...”

“Leaving us with?”

I sighed, perhaps a little over-dramatically. “Contemplation. Placing considered thought before action, or, in my case, inaction.”

The object of my attention screwed up his brow. “Okay,” he said slowly. “But where does your dad and his affection for you – his obviously lovely daughter – come into this intriguing ideological parable?” He cast a glance at the storm clouds gathering in the afternoon sky. “We may have exhausted the seven Cs, but I do hope that you can finish this story without working through any more of the alphabet: I have a feeling that might benefit us both.”

That twinkle, again.

I sighed. “As you would know, my father has strong views on what is just and right, and what a citizen’s responsibilities are in maintaining a just and right society. He expects everyone to contribute to that according to his or her individual capacity to do so.”

Big, cold raindrops began to patter around us.

More quickly now, “Last week a petition was circulating through the village... about boat people or something. Illegal immigrants maybe. Whatever. Anyway, this morning, during breakfast, my father asked me for my views on the subject. When he found out that I didn’t have any, and worse, that I hadn’t given thought to the petition, he was not impressed.”

“What exactly did you say to him?” the young man asked, grimacing as he chilled in the rain.

“I said, ‘Well, that has nothing to do with me...I’ll let someone else worry about them.’ My father stopped eating, looked at my mother and said, ‘Is this our fault?’ Mother’s reply was, ‘Yes, ultimately, but someone else can worry about it.’ Dad said, ‘Agreed.’

“Dad excused himself from the table, made a call, and shortly after some men in uniform were knocking on our front door. As they dragged me out of the house, kicking and screaming in a most unladylike fashion, I asked my father how he could do this to me.”

“Don’t tell me – he said, ‘This is the first C – Coercion – and you’ll have to plead to someone else, I’m not interested’?”

“Close. He actually said this was ‘Cajolery’.”

The young man shivered in the rain. “Whew. I’d hate to get him riled up to ‘coercion’, then.“

I put on my most endearing, please-help-me-I’m-defenceless-and-very-very-pretty smile. “Yeah, that’s about it. Put in the public stocks in the centre of town because I couldn’t be bothered helping someone else I’ve never even met.”

“Or even giving them thought,” he corrected. He shook his head. “Ah, the advantages of being the Mayor’s daughter...”

Fuck, it was cold, and I was starving, too. Enough banter. Time for some mutual ‘cooperation’. None too innocently, “Perhaps you could help me out of these wet clothes? They didn“t padlock the stock –” (Not that that would stop any healthy guy given the option of having some private time with me.) “– Dad said all I had to do was convince someone to let me out.” With a knowing smile, “How about it? If you’re still not convinced of my innocence, you can tie me up someplace warmer.”

The young man’s face turned to stone. He arose from his stool. “No, I’m sorry, but life is not a fairy tale – wolves do have teeth, and little girls in red capes do get eaten, cold or not. You’ll have to look elsewhere for your Galahad, but I do thank you for the parable. It was most...instructional. Good day.”

“How can you just leave me here?”

“Quite easily, I assure you. Your argument lacks a ‘C’ not on that list: conviction.”

“Prick!”

The duty constable smiled once more as he departed. “Careful, or you’ll have me adding another C to that list, somewhere above coercion and far more personal. Give my regards to your father.”

A comic strip I really like is Mafalda. A few days ago the local newspaper had one that is so good I have to share. I found a copy of it online here.

The first panel shows Mafalda reading the dictionary.

"DEMOCRACIA (del griego, demos, pueblo, y kratos, autoridad) Gobierno en que el pueblo ejerce la soberanía".

DEMOCRACY (from Greek, demos, people, and kratos, authority) Government in which the people exercise sovereignty.

The rest is self explanatory.

A long, long time ago (but not in a galaxy far, far away), NeoWayland honored this place by choosing it for a Thinking Blogger award. Being both an award and a meme, the baton was passed to me to choose five bloggers upon whom to bestow the award.

And so I started thinking about that. And it didn’t take very long for me to conclude that this was much too similar to choosing favorites for me to be able to select five bloggers quickly. I think that became a convenient excuse to avoid choosing. That said, though, the folks listed to the right are largely there because I regularly find thoughtful content at those sites. That’s why I read blogs—to be stimulated, challenged ... to have my ideas critiqued and checked, and improved, I hope.

But I didn’t stop thinking about it as I visited the many sites I try to frequent, and so, at long last, I have compiled my list.

I haven’t meant to be absent here so much of late. I have been busy with various things, and it’s hard to say no to the snolfs when they ask me to come outside to play or explore with them ... but those are only partial explanations.

I don’t know anything about coding, but that in no way keeps me from seeing a good amount of idiocy expressed in The Virtues of Monoculture, found at Slashdot.

I found this late last night, browsing when I should have been sleeping. In the style of Schoolhouse Rock, but with a much more important message, here’s Pirates and Emperors (or, Size Does Matter):


Direct link to vid on YouTube

If you’d like more information about the video, Pirates and Emperors has some (but the site’s driven by javascript – popups for new pages); or, check out Eric Henry’s web site.

It’s good to see content like this getting out there, even when it isn’t coming from a full-fledged family member. I would love to be part of a creative project like this!

Propaganda often figures heavily in state tactics. Peer pressure (cultivated in state-run schools) and exploitation of fear have figured prominently in recent State propaganda. After that preface, now the fun memage part, this video has been wildly popular lately.

LRC points to an interesting Jewish World Review article on unschooling — ‘Unschooling’ lets children pursue their own interests. Unschooling involves allowing the child to pursue whatever interests him or her, at the child's own pace and for as long as the child wants to explore a given topic.

Naturally this practice has the educrats all atwitter. From the article:

Not everyone is convinced that unschooling is a great idea.

I think the downsides would be related to teachers who don't understand putting parameters around children's decision making, said Jill Fox, an associate professor of education at the University of Texas at Arlington.

It's one thing to allow children to choose to study Amelia Earhart before studying Harriet Tubman, with the clear understanding that both will be studied thoroughly during the school year. It is another thing to allow children to study Muhammad Ali and completely skip over what the state standards or district curriculum require, Fox said.

Teachers - and parents - have to keep in mind that children's decision-making skills are not yet fully developed. They don't quite understand cause-and-effect and often don't realize the consequences they may face as a result of their decisions.

And unschooling is not for everyone, experts say.

It is not suited either to all kids or all parents, said Tom Hatch, a professor at Columbia University Teachers College in New York City. It requires students with considerable curiosity and independence, who come up with and get interested in questions and can sustain some interest in them.

All of which is utter rot, intended to mask the truth behind the educrats' methods: they want control of our children, especially what gets put into their heads.

Have you ever seen evidence of a state standard that gives more than lip service to the kind of hands-on learning that's essential for certain kinds of work (such as auto repair, plumbing, or designing manufacturing equipment)? I haven't. They tend to glorify rote memorization of dubious facts, regurgitation of analysis that fits neatly into the predigested product the curriculum tells its teachers to shove down their students' intellectual gullets, and thinking which is really merely shifting around the conceptual blocks given them. In other words, it's a highly intellectualized view of learning which is suitable for some kinds of learning, but certainly not all kinds; and of course it works well only for those individuals whose brains are receptive to it. To simplify the idea further, today's American educational system is largely geared to spit out white-collar cogs for the corporate and bureaucratic machines. How can someone attempt to just estimate how many of those unhappy cogs would have been much better served by going to a trade school, but didn't even consider that possibility because of a lack of knowledge about their existence or because such careers tend to be looked down upon?

I have yet to see a child with anything close to normal intelligence, who hasn't yet had his or her natural inclination to explore beaten to death, who doesn't have considerable curiosity and independence. Yet when a mechanically-inclined school student takes apart a piece of equipment to see how it works instead of completing his math sheet along with the rest of the class, will that initiative be rewarded? Of course not! Most formal schooling pounds out curiosity and independence, which they must if all students are going to fit neatly into their little curricular boxes.

[An aside: yes, I know I'm harping on another specific type of intelligence by focusing on mechanical skills. It's an important issue to me personally for many reasons. More broadly, though, I think that the USSA educational system's emphasis on book learning is beginning to show itself as a disastrous strategy. It's responsible for the increase in pencil-pushers and other administrative deadweight on creators. Worse, it's responsible for the decline in the number of competent individuals with practical experience in designing, machining, assembling, and repairing stuff. Even engineers today tend to come out of the educational extruder with a highly skewed ratio of theoretical information to practical experience.]

Let's cut to the meat of the matter here, as expressed by one of the educrats: Teachers - and parents - have to keep in mind that children's decision-making skills are not yet fully developed. They don't quite understand cause-and-effect and often don't realize the consequences they may face as a result of their decisions. There's little to argue with in those assertions, actually. The divergence between educrats and unschoolers begins when each considers how best to help a child develop those skills.

Notice how all the statements the educrat makes are negative: children don't have, they don't understand, and don't realize. All of that leads to an implicit conclusion: the child can't. If the child cannot perform, the question becomes, Who can? And the educrat's answer is almost always some authority figure. A parent or teacher or supervisor must make decisions. A grownup must have control.

But that begs the question of how, then, a child develops those skills. It's true that a child can do so, if the grownup is willing to cede the control she or he has had over the child as it develops its skills. But not all grownups are willing to do that; and besides, this structure enables a destructive habit to form in the child — the acceptance of someone else's authority over his or her own.

If, instead, a child is allowed to explore — and especially to fail — the child will learn much better, and typically, much faster. Unschooling practically guarantees that such opportunities will arise. It takes those present-tense negatives and instead, views them as potentials — skills that are awaiting development, or are in an active state of refinement. It's more a view of, My child can or My child is, rather than of can'ts and don'ts.

For example, when I finally calmed down about letting my children learn to read at their own paces, I found that they were interested in it, and came to me with questions and requests for help. Specifically, I was quite concerned that my son was choosing to play video games for large portions of his day instead of practicing reading skills. Lobo said that playing the games would encourage him to learn to read. And he was right. I still inwardly fussed about how much time he was devoting to an activity I consider pretty close to useless; but I didn't take control of the situation. (I do, however, express my feelings with respect to video games to my son, and tell him why I think they're largely a waste of time.) After a few unhappy episodes where he's lost out on some activity he prefers because he's allowed himself to get hypnotized by a video game, he's learned more about opportunity cost and self-discipline than he ever would from abstract presentations from Lobo or me. That's not to say he doesn't still make decisions he regrets — but what adult has a perfect record on his or her decision-making? And it should be obvious from my example that parents are (and rightly, should be) involved in their childrens' decision-making processes. Asking questions to stimulate explorations, helping find resources, encouraging thought-experiments, offering advice and/or cautions are all excellent ways to be involved without taking control.

At this point some of you who've been following the AAA thread on child-rearing may recall a comment I made on Jorge's Stark Contrasts post, wherein I stated, ... I am not averse to doing some ordering and insisting ... when the issue is respecting property rights. Laura called me on that, asking:

It seems a core part of your parenting, Sunni, as I've understood from these postings, to allow space for children to discover, question, be individuals for lots of reasons, chief among them would be that what you decide to do yourself you truly believe vs what you're forced to do you may not (the difference between compliance and committment.) If that's so, it would be helpful for me to hear how property rights are different? Wouldn't it be more effective to let kids experience the consequences associated with not being respectful of other's property (including making Mom really, really mad, if that's one), and experience their own internal reactions to that choice, rather than "insisting" on a certain behavior? It seems like it's even more important for something so "fundemental" as you state to provide your kids opportunities to develop an intense and personal value around that belief themselves rather than insist that they behave as if they have it.

Property rights aren't really different in my view. They are, however, fundamental, which is why I'm emphatic about them. I see my insistence on respecting property rights as providing space for the snolfs to question and discover how important it is. Children grok the concept of mine at a fairly young age — and can be quite insistent about it ... sometimes to the chagrin of parents whose views include the notion that forced sharing is a good thing. However, at that age most children don't yet understand that every item around them (leaving aside the muddle of public property) has behind it some individual who could be just as insistently shouting, Mine! as the child is.

I think it's a parent's responsibility to help a child understand that as soon as possible, in part because the parent is likely to be a more patient and gentle teacher than, say, the lawn-obsessed man down the street who presses a trespass charge against a five-year-old for cutting across a corner of his yard. That might be an extreme example, but it's one that could really happen — and for which a child should be prepared. One never knows when someone else is going to be absolute about respecting property; so in my view it's better to develop the habit of always doing so than never doing so. [And yes, my policy has led to some amusing situations wherein friends have been taken aback by my asking permission to use their property in situations where others tend to view the permission as implicitly granted. What can I say? Implicit agreements are often anything but; and I like to know I'm standing on solid footing as much as possible.]

How does this policy shake out in our daily life? I don't require my children to ask for permission before every use of my silverware or dishes, for example. But they know what stuff is mine, and that certain items have broad permission granted for customary use (kitchen tools being a good example). They also know that they should ask if they want to use something of mine for a nonstandard use, or that they should ask first if they're uncertain about whether the broad permission covers what they want to do with my property. Other items are on an always ask before touching basis. The snolfs know that not following these rules — in other words, not respecting my property rights — will result in the broad permission being revoked.

Not everyone in the family shares this approach, though. And that has led to problems, such as inconsistent enforcement of property rights; sometimes a certain behavior is okay, but other times, it isn't. I try to deal with this by reminding the snolf that if he or she always asks the owner first (until a general permission rule is given), problems shouldn't arise. It also teaches important lessons about taking care of property; if you value something and you don't want it used/touched/destroyed, either intentionally or accidentally, then you don't leave it where it's available to everyone. Or, if it's something that isn't practical to put in a private place, you develop, communicate, and enforce clear rules about the property's use (no leaving messes in Lobo's or my vehicles, for example).

I hope it's clear from the above that I don't insist that the snolfs perform certain behaviors; rather, I insist that they refrain from specific actions, or that they stop actions that are possible violations of another's property rights. I see this as the best way to help them understand that other people can have the same intense sense of Mine! that they have about their property; and that if they want others to respect their property rights, they must respect others' property rights. Am I missing a better way of achieving this?