balioc - Tumblr blog

[balioc]

Y'know what? I'm bored, and there's some substrate here. Let's be very tedious for a moment, and talk seriously about that last profile excerpt, instead of just pointing and laughing.

Speaking as someone who has never -- thank God! -- had any interaction with any kind of online matchmaking site / app / widget:

For discursive analysis purposes, that six-word profile should be divided into two parts.

"I'm a magical...sun siren." and "queer"

I don't have anything interesting to say about the inclusion of the word "queer" in a profile like this. It's not an unfraught inclusion, given that this is [I presume] a woman's profile that's being marketed to men, but the fraughtness is pretty straightforward. I assume that it mostly exists to signal affiliation with a particular cultural/political/aesthetic tribe, for whom Queer Stuff is Always Better. I don't particularly like that tribe's culture, but OK, that sure is how tribal signaling works, I assume that it's a useful thing in a Tinder profile.

(Unless the secret sotto voce signal here, in this context, is -- tee hee, with me there might be bonus sexy girl-on-girl stuff? I assume that kind of thing is too retrograde to be compatible with the culture in question, but Lord knows that humans are inventive in finding non-taboo workarounds to say what they want to say.)

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"I'm a magical sun siren." On a dating profile.

It's cringey, and more than cringey. There's a frightening vibe there. I, too, would not try to get together with this person, were I on Tinder for some reason.

But here's the thing:

Almost every smart, thoughtful, sensitive person I know harbors some luridly-metaphorical sentiment of a similar kind. Deep down, not the sort of thing to throw on a dating profile, the sort of thing that comes out in intimate conversations or maybe in art -- but it's there. Some kind of empowering poetic vision of the idealized self. A divine persona, or fursona, or whatever. It may be inchoate, it may be hard-to-articulate, it may even be unconscious, depending on the person's introspective and narrative leanings...but there's certainly nothing wrong with having the wherewithal to understand your own psychic power images.

It actually provides a ton of insight, to know that someone likes to imagine herself as a magical sun siren. And, no, I don't mean the "insight" that the person is cringey and has Bad Vibes. Imagine hearing that metaphor, not on a dating profile, but from someone for whom you already have some real trust and respect. It's a revelation, right? A vulnerable one, and a valuable one. "This is one of the iconic images that resonates with me, these are the symbols that feel like they're Mine."

(I could write an essay on the implications of solar identification, and the connotations of 'siren,' and the much thornier and more complicated connotations of 'magic' as a tag applied to the self. But you don't need it, you can jump to most of the relevant conclusions yourself, because those are some evocative words right there.)

And because it's a revelation, knowing it provides power. I'd bet that a lot of the ways to make this woman happy involve making her feel like she is, in fact, the magical sun siren that she's trying to be. It is admirable, for her to put that up front for people who are trying to get together with her.

And taken on its own terms, taken seriously, it's [slightly] cool. I would like to meet a magical sun siren. I would probably like to meet the woman for whom "magical sun siren" is a vibrant ideal. There's some originality-of-vision there -- it's not a stock ideal -- and a certain sense of poetry.

So we're left with a profile that is is (1) true, (2) important, and (3) virtuous.

So why are we so instinctively convinced that it's a bad thing? Why, in fact, are we cringing, and shuddering at the vibes?

...because it's too blatant, right? Because it's in a dating profile, being read by strangers, without the ritual protections of artistry. Because this woman hasn't yet earned the social affordances to use a poetic, over-powerful, yeah-OK-it's-pretentious metaphor and be taken seriously.

And she should have known that, and she didn't, which is the real problem. She should have had the judgment to avoid saying the true and important and virtuous thing, because it would obviously be considered cringey -- and bad judgment of that particular kind is unattractive, and indeed scary. Either she's not aware of the effect that her words will have, or she doesn't care; either way, how could she be trusted not to hurt the people around her, when words can have such power?

The cringe-judgment self-justifies and self-perpetuates. The truth and importance and virtue of her little poetic metaphor are as nothing compared to her lack of mastery with regard to the social context of language.

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There is, of course, an obvious and inevitable response to all this: Own the cringe. Love the cringe. Maybe just accept the true and important and virtuous thing for what it is, and stop worrying about other people's Keynesian-beauty-contest judgments. That will make your life cooler and lovelier. If everyone did likewise, it would make the whole world cooler and lovelier.

...which is a very nice thought and also total horseshit, because mastery over the socially-constructed power of language is important, you can't fiat that away. If you somehow convince people to Own the Cringe en masse, you will not actually end up with a less-judgey world, you'll just end up with a world where the standards of judgment are more opaque -- a world where you have to figure out which forms of cringe are really cringe as opposed to being delightfully quirky, with even less guidance than you'd have today.

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The only real takeaway here, I think, is that dating profiles as a technology are inherently flawed past repair. Which everyone knew already. But there's no way to avoid making them into stages-for-performance, and then judging people on their performance quality according to deeply-suspect social metrics, because you've taken intimate self-revelation and thrown it into the public sphere as a thing to be judged by the criteria of public conduct.

There's really no substitute for getting to know people.

Excerpts from dating profiles I swiped left on:

"If you're a white man who's lucky enough to match with me, make sure to bring offerings".

"I heal my ancestral trauma by dominating white men and making them do things that improve the environment."

(These were two different profiles, seen within the space of a day or two.)

[balioc]

...you do realize that high culture is a form of culture, right?

[balioc]

Thinking about your hero/maiden/monster trinary again; it really spoke to something lodged very deeply in my soul. I'm pretty sure I'll do something centered on it at some point.

Specifically I'm thinking about how really laying the trinary bare and analyzing it seriously - fully acknowledging its basic arch-regressiveness but also studying it on its own terms and exploring the possibility space of building interesting variance or subversion on that foundation - really puts to shame the pop feminist media criticism that's seemed to me for much of my life to be increasingly hegemonic. This movement, I think, is rooted in possibly-deliberate failure to understand the hero/maiden/monster trinary, and specifically the maiden role.

Funnily enough, I remember experiencing a similar distaste for/discomfort with/"interrogation" of the maiden role when I was a small child, but this was very clearly my own culturally enforced gender-insecure girls-are-icky-ness talking. I think pop feminism does something very similar but for different reasons, exaggerating the passivity of the maiden role (and throwing in a whole lot of empty mockery, highlighting bad or just tired writing) to build a case that it's a degrading, inferior role that adds nothing to the narrative. Although this memeplex is commonly accepted at basically face value even by people who don't generally consider themselves aligned with pop feminism, it does strike me as a very bad thing for someone's ability to comprehend and create narrative.

Once you've actually comprehended the hero/maiden/monster trinary, the popular refrain that the maiden can be replaced with an inanimate object rings entirely hollow; it's no truer of the maiden than it is of either of the other two roles. The inanimate maiden is the MacGuffin, sure, the golden idol that the hero and the monster are both trying to get. But the inanimate hero is just the deus ex machina, the chandelier that falls on the monster and lets the maiden escape, and the inanimate monster is just the crisis, the well that the maiden's fallen down and the hero needs to get her out of. This monomyth still "works" in maidenless form just like it still "works" in heroless or monsterless form. Perhaps it reflects on the shallowness with which popular media has approached the maiden that popular media critics don't see what value she adds to the story - but I think it notably also reflects on the immaturity of the popular media critics, that they're only able to perceive the bluntest and most kinetic interactions in the story (those between hero and monster), not the exquisitely artfully subtler touches the maiden brings.

...I encountered this very old ask while looking through my archives. Right at this moment I don't have a particular response to offer, but...unsurprisingly I like it, and it seemed substantive enough to be worth sharing with the class.

[balioc]

Hey, long-time follower and enjoyer of your ~blog. You clearly have a fairly structured model of human nature, social life, and communication, one which emerges across your writing. I was wondering if you had systematised it anywhere - e.g., in a book or series of long-form non-fiction writings?

Not really. Which is a problem.

[balioc]

All 3 together!

[balioc]

...the book in question was published in the 1320s.

@prudencepaccard

Possibly the only time the hot media/cold media distinction ever had a useful application is the discourse around trauma from children reading books beyond their "reading level". Books are too cold to traumatise you. Maybe only "hot media" like TV can traumatise children.

[balioc]

The Virgin Mary.

Partly because there's no good Muppet for the role, partly just because of the image of the Pieta.

Who would be the one human character in the Muppet Easter Story? Don't say Christ, He's clearly Kermit the frog.

[balioc]

Walking down the street this morning, I passed close by the side of a garbage truck; spilling out of the trash chute was a hardcover copy of The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning

[balioc]

I mean, I sure have been made unhappy (and in other cases happy) by changes that have been to the akashic commons while I was watching.

I think this is true of most people. Or of most nerds, at least.

If you really want to demythologize it and talk about material realities, you can talk about ebb and flow in the fame and prestige of various stories/tropes/etc. I don't think that gains you very much.

(Unless your point is a variant of "you shouldn't care what other people think or do." Which, OK, valid, hermetic monadism is in fact the way to go for anyone who can swing it. But few of us are perfectly enlightened in that way, even amongst those of us who are seeking it, and...having a Fully General Answer of "it shouldn't matter" to any question of culture or interpersonal behavior is discursively unhelpful.)

I have a beard, of a particular slightly-distinctive style. I've had that same beard for the entirety of my adult life.

This is, obviously, the most contingent kind of fact about me. If I wanted to shave it off, or to style it differently, I could do so right now with zero difficulty. It's not a cultural signifier, or a marker of group belonging, or anything; even to me, it doesn't really mean anything other than "this is a symbol of me-the-person because it is associated with me because I have it." I started cultivating it in mid-adolescence for ephemeral irrelevant reasons, and kept it going basically out of inertia.

Nonetheless: it is really important to me. Like, really really important.

I basically cannot use character-creators or avatar-generators of any sort unless they have appropriate-enough beard options. When I contemplate getting rid of the beard...well, based on the way other people use the term, I think that the appropriate word for the feeling I get from that is dysphoria. During a brief period when I thought that I might have to get rid of the beard for medical reasons, I seriously considered wearing some kind of full-face leper mask whenever I left the house, because the thought of hiding my face from the world forever made me less unhappy than the thought of having people see me clean-shaven.

And, crucially, this affects my ability to Identify With People in literature and media. I am about 900% more likely to have an "it me" mental reflex if the character in question has a Beard Like Mine, regardless of whether there's any actual substantive commonality or grounds-for-sympathy there. I can control this with deliberate effort, but -- it takes deliberate effort. This phenomenon has probably had some measurable effect on my personality and philosophy, simply by causing me to identify or not-identify with potentially-high-impact characters in a subconscious (or conscious) way.

For example: I basically always see elves as Other and Not-Me, because elves are usually portrayed as the Beardless People, even if there are all sorts of obvious reasons to map myself onto a particular elvish character or elvish culture. Which there often are!

You might be inclined to say that this is, uh, stupid. I wouldn't blame you. It is, at the least, definitely very irrational; it's an aggressively hypertrophied bit of mental DNA, the sort of thing that you might fairly-if-uncharitably call a "psychic cancer." But of course it's never going to change, because the phenomenon operates deep down on the level of appreciative impulses and happy-buttons, which are mostly impervious to reason. (Assuming that you're inclined to try and alter them through reason, which is usually not worth the effort even when it can work.)

----------

It's not actually a problem for me that beard-related neurosis prevents me from identifying with elves. Not much of a problem, anyway. I guess I lose out on some cool Line of Feanor feels.

But I can imagine it being a problem. I can imagine the world in which the cool resonant myth that everyone cares about, the thing around which you want to build big chunks of your identity, has only elves with whom to identify. I can imagine the world in which all the cool smart people I want to be my friends are endlessly talking about their elfsonas.

And, y'know, in that hypothetical world, there's a few different ways I could react. I could say "fuck you, fantasy myth is for losers." I could be a mythic entrepreneur, and aggressively push my own homegrown stories featuring dwarves and ogres and other beardy folk. I could try to [shudder] map myself onto a beardless elf in my mind, and let that image occupy space in my fantasies, and hope that the revulsion and dissonance don't tear me apart. I could just be kinda sad about it all.

Or I could say: Hey, guys, could we maybe just agree that elves can have beards? Since they're made up and all, and their beardlessness doesn't even really matter to the myth anyway?

If I were so inclined, I could even follow that up with: Look, this is a really big deal for me. I'm pretty sure it's a much bigger deal for me than it is for any of you. That would be 100% honest.

And I imagine that many people would respond: What? No. Ew. The elf stories have clear lore and a well-defined aesthetic, and you're proposing to shit all over them with your weird beard nonsense. You don't get to do that; you don't get to make the akashic commons worse for your own private benefit; it doesn't matter what your reasons are. Play by the rules, or go play another game.

I would have a lot of sympathy for those people.

----------

(Yes, yes, I know, Cirdan the Shipwright, don't @ me.)

----------

There are, of course, lessons in this. Perhaps I will spell them out in another post, soon, if I find myself feeling less tired and cranky. But for now: he who has ears to hear, let him hear.

[balioc]

I have a beard, of a particular slightly-distinctive style. I've had that same beard for the entirety of my adult life.

This is, obviously, the most contingent kind of fact about me. If I wanted to shave it off, or to style it differently, I could do so right now with zero difficulty. It's not a cultural signifier, or a marker of group belonging, or anything; even to me, it doesn't really mean anything other than "this is a symbol of me-the-person because it is associated with me because I have it." I started cultivating it in mid-adolescence for ephemeral irrelevant reasons, and kept it going basically out of inertia.

Nonetheless: it is really important to me. Like, really really important.

I basically cannot use character-creators or avatar-generators of any sort unless they have appropriate-enough beard options. When I contemplate getting rid of the beard...well, based on the way other people use the term, I think that the appropriate word for the feeling I get from that is dysphoria. During a brief period when I thought that I might have to get rid of the beard for medical reasons, I seriously considered wearing some kind of full-face leper mask whenever I left the house, because the thought of hiding my face from the world forever made me less unhappy than the thought of having people see me clean-shaven.

And, crucially, this affects my ability to Identify With People in literature and media. I am about 900% more likely to have an "it me" mental reflex if the character in question has a Beard Like Mine, regardless of whether there's any actual substantive commonality or grounds-for-sympathy there. I can control this with deliberate effort, but -- it takes deliberate effort. This phenomenon has probably had some measurable effect on my personality and philosophy, simply by causing me to identify or not-identify with potentially-high-impact characters in a subconscious (or conscious) way.

For example: I basically always see elves as Other and Not-Me, because elves are usually portrayed as the Beardless People, even if there are all sorts of obvious reasons to map myself onto a particular elvish character or elvish culture. Which there often are!

You might be inclined to say that this is, uh, stupid. I wouldn't blame you. It is, at the least, definitely very irrational; it's an aggressively hypertrophied bit of mental DNA, the sort of thing that you might fairly-if-uncharitably call a "psychic cancer." But of course it's never going to change, because the phenomenon operates deep down on the level of appreciative impulses and happy-buttons, which are mostly impervious to reason. (Assuming that you're inclined to try and alter them through reason, which is usually not worth the effort even when it can work.)

----------

It's not actually a problem for me that beard-related neurosis prevents me from identifying with elves. Not much of a problem, anyway. I guess I lose out on some cool Line of Feanor feels.

But I can imagine it being a problem. I can imagine the world in which the cool resonant myth that everyone cares about, the thing around which you want to build big chunks of your identity, has only elves with whom to identify. I can imagine the world in which all the cool smart people I want to be my friends are endlessly talking about their elfsonas.

And, y'know, in that hypothetical world, there's a few different ways I could react. I could say "fuck you, fantasy myth is for losers." I could be a mythic entrepreneur, and aggressively push my own homegrown stories featuring dwarves and ogres and other beardy folk. I could try to [shudder] map myself onto a beardless elf in my mind, and let that image occupy space in my fantasies, and hope that the revulsion and dissonance don't tear me apart. I could just be kinda sad about it all.

Or I could say: Hey, guys, could we maybe just agree that elves can have beards? Since they're made up and all, and their beardlessness doesn't even really matter to the myth anyway?

If I were so inclined, I could even follow that up with: Look, this is a really big deal for me. I'm pretty sure it's a much bigger deal for me than it is for any of you. That would be 100% honest.

And I imagine that many people would respond: What? No. Ew. The elf stories have clear lore and a well-defined aesthetic, and you're proposing to shit all over them with your weird beard nonsense. You don't get to do that; you don't get to make the akashic commons worse for your own private benefit; it doesn't matter what your reasons are. Play by the rules, or go play another game.

I would have a lot of sympathy for those people.

----------

(Yes, yes, I know, Cirdan the Shipwright, don't @ me.)

----------

There are, of course, lessons in this. Perhaps I will spell them out in another post, soon, if I find myself feeling less tired and cranky. But for now: he who has ears to hear, let him hear.

[balioc]

This is less a policy position than it is a discursive position, right? Most of the time?

...I mean, I'm sure there are some people out there who are eager to create the Division of Race-Driven Precrime Enforcement, as soon as they can get the political/social cover to do so. But that seems like it's going to be quite rare. Even the most-explicitly-race-conscious conservatives tend not to be advocating for anything like that, outside the fringiest of fringe corners.

Rather, the stance is something like: Science tells us that Minority Groups X and Y and Z are genetically crime-prone. So -- if our prisons are full of people from those groups, if kids from those groups receive disciplinary measures in school at disproportionate-seeming rates, if our culture has a general vague vibe that people from those groups are kinda shady, that is not evidence of an Evil Racist System in need of reform. That is society working as intended, and processing the true underlying facts of the world. The chattering class should stop using those outcomes as a cudgel in order to force through ever more anti-institutional and pro-minority-group reform; and, more important still, the chattering class should stop yelling at me about them.

And, of course, you can respond to that stance in all sorts of ways. You can certainly, with some justice, maintain that the government might easily come to use "genetic criminality information" in evil/oppressive ways.

But I think it's hard to justify the stance that the people talking about this issue are all secretly gunning for that. Their actual affect, and demonstrated priorities, suggest something different.

Casual reminder that genetics exists and is sociologically relevant.

(Denialism about this is one of the major points driving me away from today's leftist coalitions. Truth must come before justice, all else ends up in insanity.)

[balioc]

[Hillel the Elder] saw a skull floating upon the water. He said to it, Because you drowned others, you yourself were drowned; and those who drowned you will themselves be drowned in turn.

-- Pirkei Avot 2:7 (or 2:6, depending on how you count)

This is the way of discourse.

[balioc]

Have there been any studies on how literally teachable/trainable IQ is? Because I would naively expect every single skill tested by IQ tests - including weird ones like eye saccading - to be things that can be trained if you drill down far enough.

I am not an expert in this field.

I know enough to know that there have been studies, some of which claim that small IQ gains can be achieved with the right kind of intensive special training, a few of which claim that (relatively) large IQ gains can be achieved with the right kind of intensive special training. See, e.g., this. I am skeptical in the way that I am skeptical of pretty much all social science results at this point. (Sample sizes are small when they're not tiny, etc.)

I think it's pretty clear that IQ is -- at the very least -- not trainable by teachers using ordinary teaching methods, in ordinary classroom environments, while they are doing the things that teachers are ordinarily expected to be doing.

We could have a discussion about whether it would make sense to replace (e.g.) the thing we currently recognize as "English class" with some kind of verbal-IQ-boosting regimen, but at the very least we haven't done that, and if a given teacher tried to do it on his own recognizance we would regard him as extremely derelict.

I also think it's pretty clear that, however trainable IQ may be, it is much less trainable than something like "knowledge of a particular corpus of facts and references."

[balioc]

I've said it before, I'm just repeating myself at this point, but my cries have been swallowed by the winds of discourse and so I feel compelled to try once more --

The tests that get used in the US to measure "student achievement," and thereby "school effectiveness," are close to 100% worthless for the purpose.

I say this as someone who is

(a) very much in favor of using other tests to measure student achievement and thereby school effectiveness, and also

(b) very much in favor of using those tests for other purposes.

Close to 100% of the big-stakes tests, across the country, from kindergarten up through the end of high school, are either timed reading-comprehension exercises or timed basic math exercises. Which is to say: they are barely-disguised IQ tests. They do not demand any particular corpus of knowledge, or for that matter any kind of cultivated skill, beyond the absolute baseline universal standards of "can read and understand written English" and "can execute the most fundamental algebraic and geometric operations." They give points for being quick and accurate, and sometimes for being able to see through simple tricks. You do well on those tests by having a fast, agile, precise, unclouded mind and a capacious working memory.

That is not a thing that any teacher can teach.

It's an important thing. There are all sorts of circumstances where it really matters whether you have a fast, agile, precise, unclouded mind and a capacious working memory. But measuring that, and then using the results to determine whether or not a school has done its job, is pants-on-head insane.

...the trick, of course, is that -- for all the bellyaching and caterwauling about intelligence measurement -- we can all pretty much agree that, wherever they come from, reading comprehension and basic math skills are things that matter. In order to have a sane measurement system for schools, we'd have to come to a similar agreement about anything that a school could reasonably be expected to teach.

This is one reason, of many, that it is good to have an acknowledged cultural canon. But we could at least start with dropping the reading and math, and testing basic scientific and historical knowledge instead.

[balioc]

I am a newer LARPer and I have attended a couple of blockbuster games, but I'd love to get more into the theatrical LARPing community. Do you have any recommendations for theatrical games planned in the coming year that might be looking for a motivated and interested player? I live in Oregon, but would happily travel for the right game. My ideal would be a weekend or multi-day event with lots of narrative intrigue, but I'm flexible on setting and playercount. Thank you for any help!

Mrgle.

So -- real weekendlong litform theater-style LARPs are pretty thin on the ground, these days. Standards for writing and design have gotten high enough that a weekendlong is just immensely hard to write. My own extended LARPing circle has generated three such games within the last few years, and that was after a very long period when there just weren't any coming out; the one I wrote took the better part of a year to create, for three serious and experienced authors. Organizing and running them, once they're written, is also very difficult and expensive.

(The blockbuster games of which I'm aware tend to be a somewhat different kind of thing -- to my mind, a worse kind of thing -- in that they are generally much less prewritten and much less narratively-integrated.)

Point being, if I become aware of an upcoming weekendlong run, I'll point you in its direction. But (a) right now I'm not aware of any, and (b) anything of which I am aware will probably be in the Northeast.

-------------

If "multi-day event" includes "opportunity to play a bunch of smaller games in a row," that's much easier. You should go to a theater LARP con; that's precisely what they are. And the Northeast has a bunch of those.

Unfortunately, your timing here is poor. The big-ticket event, the five-hundred-pound gorilla of theater LARP cons, is Intercon; the 2024 Intercon is this coming weekend, so, uh, not a lot of time to jump on that one (plus most of the games are full). The other LARP con I frequently attend is Dice Bubble at RPI, which is also coming up very soon (end of March). If the travel difficulties aren't too burdensome for you, you might consider checking out Summer LARPin' (July in Boxborough, MA).

-------------

I do know some Bay Area LARPers, and if they have any big events that are looking for people, I'll get you in touch with them.

[balioc]

...sigh. Sam Kriss is an excellent wordsmith and metaphorical-reference-wrangler -- like, one of the best -- but that's not the same as having good ideas or even cogent ideas. Which is especially visible here.

("What’s happening in Gaza is actually existing neoreaction. The IDF has a rigid top-down command structure." Good God! What an impossibly asinine take! What's happening in Gaza is directly and substantially linked to Israel's democratic-accountability structures, and the world has rarely seen a more dramatic illustration of the ways in which democratic accountability is not a panacea! A democratically-elected leader is deliberately prolonging a brutal war, in large part because he knows that he's in deep political shit the moment that it's over, but the electorate and the power-players will [probably] keep him afloat for the duration of the "crisis." Lord knows that dunking on Moldbug can be a fun game for the whole family, but somehow Moldbug isn't the one who comes off poorly here.)

(And, uh, in a deeper and murkier but more-important vein: "Israel is an expression of all the worst tendencies in my people and my religion." No. Tabling any question of whether the state of Israel is good or bad, whether it's legitimate or illegitimate -- it is a new thing amongst the people of Israel, it represents an almost-total break with the culture and priorities of Talmudic Judaism that had been developing in the diaspora for centuries upon centuries. In the face of devastating loss, the rootless homeless middleman-minority scholar-merchants of Europe decided to give nineteenth-century-style nationalism a go; and whatever you think of that decision and its fruits, it's uncouth to blame the results on the diasporic religion and way-of-life that got mostly abandoned.)

This is the Palestinian resistance. It’s not beautiful. It’s not inspiring. It’s desperate and futile and sad. Generation after generation of children, throwing themselves into the path of one of the most brutal military machines in human history, smashing their skulls against its steel hull, mangling their limbs in its treads, thousands of them, for seventy-five years, destroying themselves as they try to face down an engine that simply rolls on over the dying and the dead. These kids were brave, much braver than I’ll ever be. They rose to defend their honour. It’s noble. But stupid beyond belief. Later, Hedges talks to Lieutenant Ayman Ghanm, a Palestinian police officer who says he’s given up on trying to save these boys’ lives. ‘When we tell the boys not to go to the dunes,’ he says, ‘they taunt us as collaborators.’ I began by saying that this is a war without opposing sides. Israel is not actually trying to defeat the resistance; it has no political objectives, just violence. But the same goes for the resistance: they are not, in fact, doing anything to meaningfully resist. Think about what actually happens in Hedges’ story. The Israeli soldiers call through their loudspeakers for the Palestinians to come, come and be killed—and the Palestinians obediently show up. Their resistance is indistinguishable from following orders. The Israeli state wants a certain level of violence from the Palestinians, it actively courts it, and the resistance factions keep doing exactly as they’re told. They teach Palestinian children that the best thing they could do with their lives is lose them. This is not a very healthy attitude, but when you start up your bullshit about the glorious resistance you are part of that sickness. What would actual resistance look like? Maybe it would start with not handing over your life to the enemy. Not climbing up the dunes. In saying all this, I’m obviously breaking one of the biggest taboos on the left, which is that you must not presume to tell Palestinians how to go about their resistance. I might have spent time in Palestine, but I’m not Palestinian. I’m not subjected to the daily nightmare of occupation. Who am I to start preaching? My only reply is this: if the armed resistance factions were resisting sanely and effectively, this kind of taboo wouldn’t need to exist. If there were a better argument for their actions than don’t criticise the victims, you’d be making that one instead. But there isn’t, so you can’t. It’s not a coincidence that the exact same rhetoric is deployed by Israel and its apologists: yes, we’re committing hideous atrocities, but how dare you notice? Who are you to say anything to us? Whoever’s saying it, the fact remains that there is no military path to a free Palestine. This fact is inconvenient and unfair and doesn’t leave much room for the optimism of the will, but that doesn’t make it any less true, and if you think there’s an exemption from unfair truths that’s awarded to especially just causes then you are wrong. Israel has nuclear weapons: it will not be overthrown with small arms and explosives. I don’t think I have the right to condemn violent resistance altogether—but I can reject violent resistance that’s doomed to fail, that achieves nothing and produces nothing except violence for its own sake. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad claim to be fighting for an Islamic republic, in which Jews will be free to live peacefully as long as they don’t dispute the sovereignty of Islam. The PFLP claims to be fighting a revolutionary people’s war for a liberated workers’ state. Their critics say that both are actually fighting for an unlimited genocide, the death of every single Jew in Israel. But what difference does it make? This is all make-believe! None of it matters, because none of it is ever actually going to happen! They’re not fighting for anything at all. They’re just fighting.

This is a good essay in general, but this point draws out something I think is important: the need to believe that, if there is a group of Bad Guys in a conflict, doing Bad Things, there must be an opposing group of Good Guys doing Good Things. But there's no law of the universe that says it must be so; mostly there's just the churn of senseless, sickening violence, to no useful or redemptive end.

[balioc]

Oh, boy! It's Education Theory o'Clock again!

...I have a lot of thoughts on this topic. At some point, when I'm less busy and tired, I should probably try to write them up. Natively, I'm one of the school-is-a-nightmare-prison people, like so many others in this little discourse-sphere -- but I'm married to a middle school teacher, so I regularly encounter both the good arguments from the other side and the facts on the ground, and those things have altered my perspective somewhat.

But I am, in fact, busy and tired. So for now I'll just content myself with saying:

School is an institution that serves many, many, many purposes at the same time. A lot of those purposes are load-bearingly important. (A couple of years ago, I wrote this about college, and...it's double-plus true for primary and secondary schools.) If you don't try to account for all of that stuff in your theory of What School Is and How School Works, you will generate incoherent garbage thoughts. If you have a New Concept for school entailing top-down design that is optimized for a single function (like "increasing test scores" or "causing kids to love learning" or whatever), you'd better have a plan for how you're going to do all the other important things that schools do. And even if you think that some of those things aren't actually important or necessary, you'd better have a plan for dealing with all the people who disagree. Because...

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...school, as it exists today, is an inherently political institution. Both in the "soft" sense that everyone has strong opinions about what it's supposed to do and how it's supposed to work, and in the "hard" sense that it is actually controlled by democratically-accountable governments. (This is double-plus true in the US, where it is controlled by local governments, and therefore doesn't even have the protective insulation of a massive bureaucracy.) Everything about the way schools work is a compromise brokered amongst ideologues and self-dealers. Everything about the way schools work involves a lot of decision-makers trying not to get yelled at by the yelliest people around. If you're looking for elegant purpose-driven top-down design, you won't find it. You could probably make a case that any elegant purpose-driven top-down design would be better than the thing we actually have, but getting there would require finding a way to remove the political element.

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Most importantly: public schools are (1) compulsory, (2) universal, and (3) for children. [People who are legally children, anyway, whether or not they are actual children in whatever sense matters to you.]

This means that they cannot let students leave, and they have to keep control of all the students that they aren't allowing to leave.

In the most literal not-a-judgment-but-a-fact sense, they are indeed prisons. They are coercively keeping people inside. They have to do that thing, as per their most fundamental mandate within the current system. The alternatives involve letting kids run around unsupervised, and/or failing to give some kids even the most cursory kind of education, and those things are absolute non-starters under present conditions.

All the normal institutions-for-adults operate on the principle of -- If you really don't want to be here, you can leave, and deal with whatever consequences there may be for leaving. This is not an option for schools, and that fact accounts for...everything.

Classroom structure is built around the necessity of keeping the most-hostile, least-engaged student in the class present and supervised, and then trying to prevent him from disrupting things for everyone else. Because the obvious solution that any other institution would use -- "just cut him loose, he doesn't want to be here and we don't want him here" -- isn't available.

(I once talked to my wife about the rationed bathroom access thing, which is one of the most flagrant nightmare-prison aspects of the school experience. Her response was, "If you let kids use the bathroom whenever they want, as much as they want, then you don't have mandatory universal education anymore. Some of them will never return to the classroom, because they don't want to be there." Which is...obviously true.)

So you have something that replicates many of the features of prison, because it has to accomplish the same basic tasks that prison accomplishes. Yay, Foucault.