Tove K on politics of psychiatry; Randolph Nesse on psychology of politics; Rob Kurzban on mass moral outrage; Lorenzo Warby on status-quo conservatism; Pamela Paretsky on violence and ideology
From a libertarian perspective, why is the state is involved in marriage in the first place? If to protect children, surely DNA testing or other evidence of parenthood serves better. Otherwise, it seems to be an enabler (qualifier) for the welfare-warfare state or the crowding out of religion. If people want a contract, let them write one.
As Cinna notes, the State has plenty of reasons to be involved in marriage. The problem you are talking about is the entanglement of the state in the purely religious execution of marriage.
The most obvious and salient example where it matters is immigration. I think we do generally want citizens' foreign-born spouses to be able to immigrate. I guess if one is libertarian enough to be a true open borders person then it still shouldn't matter, though.
I thought passingly of this sort of thing, the other day, when you commended as you often do, having children so that later on, you’ll have some grandchildren about.
You can’t know the future. You can’t know what you’re going to get. You can expect a measure of pain; and the one thing that being childless has going for it, is that you may live with melancholy down the line, or some loneliness, but you will be spared that acute pain that is made possible by bravely (or foolishly, I suppose, in the modern mind) having people you are related to in your life (both living with them, and losing them).
Tove K. is also a brave writer, because she agrees with a commenter who dares allude to a fact I have often noticed: there is in some ways more risk in having one or two children, than having five or eight or ten as in the past (and the present, in some places). Traditional values, which supposedly only keep women down, may have kept others “up”. Sacrifice exists no matter what path you choose.
There was more latitude for failure. There was less of an obsession, if no less sorrow, with the fortunes of each. The whole was greater than the parts - and sustained them to a greater degree.
I think this is why I’m uncomfortable with pronatalist talk. It has an airy-fairy quality. Perhaps it is too brutal, to speak the truth: we need smart and productive people to reproduce, because we need your DNA. In the current human ecosystem, this will be a total crapshoot for you personally. If all goes as well as possible, you will enjoy spending time with grandchildren in 40 years.
It may seem tangential, but it’s only been one, two, maybe three generations of adults who cannot explain to their young children what they do for work.
Particularly, the well-heeled who send their kids off to elite institutions to presumably, achieve more for society - have greater impact - than they did. Kids from rural cultures often don’t have this condition and more so, neither do their parents. There are some pretty sophisticated ideas - not just jobs - coming out of the cities.
Famously, Rush Limbaugh antagonized the Left (and the musical group The Pretenders) by choosing their song “Ohio” (a screed against globalized “progress”) as his productions’ theme song and, as a mark of his conservative economic sensibilities.
I thought it was more cavalier than curious. He was fully invested, but like a money manager, the resources belong to his clients. Like the forever wars of Iraq, it really doesn’t matter how foolish these cultural investments are - the costs and burden of Teflon is never born by them but rather, by the audience. He was there to process the transactions only, earning the standard 2 and 20, both coming and going.
The name of the song is “My City Was Gone“ by the Pretenders, not the CSN&Y song about Kent State.
For Limbaugh, the appeal of using it as his intro song was primarily and simply due to its upbeat and energetic tempo and driving beat which worked well on tinny AM radio. Limbaugh only played the instrumental intro of the song and did not include any of the actual lyrics.
I distinctly remember at one point he played more of the song, back to Ohio, *paved down the middle*, by a government that had no pride.
Like many people who used to listen to AM radio for news, I got used to hearing the intro before changing the station.
Later on, it was just the little drum figure and the bass riff it seems to me.
A great song.
My opposite number here in the house claims he chose it because he hated it, which a Rolling Stone interview confirms although that was probably Limbaugh retconning.
He said he hated Chrissy Hynde for reasons including her being an “animal rights wacko”.
Later on he apparently took the side of PETA on some or other thing they were against because it was the government that was going to do it.
Sorry to write so many words about Limbaugh whom I believe never uttered a sincere word in his life.
I expect you are right and as an old deejay (?) he chose it because it was catchy.
I made a little post about a week ago pointing out that the worst ideas are often just the antithesis of another bad idea. Like Trump, Limbaugh was a master of such ideas and the only way to promote those is to remain extremely confident until you can only blame others for your own bad behavior.
That’s got to be the worst made up excuse ever. It just happened to be good for a.m. radio? And .. he didn’t play the lyrics anyway? Dog ate my homework.
In my view, it was the first documented troll.
The entire point was to put a finger into the eye of the left who were anti-globalization at the expense of small Midwestern towns, jobs, families, particularly the rust belt in Ohio.
This sentimentality crescendo-ed on the heels of the Iraq War, during the WTO protests, when all the media could do was play endless images of teenagers wearing bandanas, breaking windows of Nike and Starbucks. Fox viewers, who thrive on odious caricatures, could not get enough of it.
Such a short memory we have.
A better troll would be to go back and replay his episodes around that time where he railed against people who are “anti-progress”.
I recall hearing that the Pretender's even complained and tried to stop his use of the song, which only sealed its fate.
The full story from Limbaugh himself is here. He was a DJ long before he ever got into talk radio in 1984 in Sacramento. His show did not become nationally syndicated until 1988.
Tove says interesting things, but she gives me chills, and if I follow correctly, her child has elected not to live with her any more. I would agree with her that it can be unhealthy how a patient and therapist will make an alliance with each other and promulgate the situation; however, Tove herself is vulnerable to the same problem but does not reflect on the problem that I have seen.
I have some experience with people who talk like this, so I am sure I am filling in gaps with Tove's story with my own experience. For what it's worth, though, I've encountered people who say their daughter is hopeless and who rally the village to defend the mom and hold the kid down. In both cases, I have mixed feelings. It is good to see such energy to care for the child, but scary to see the child's resources and autonomy being cut off except when they funnel through the mom.
Here is an example where Tove takes things too far:
"She is oblivious to social facts. For example, she holds a persistent idea that she is going to save her younger siblings, especially a toddler brother she adores, from their substandard parents."
This is presented as an example of the daughter being mad, but that just sounds to me like consistency. Tove cannot seem to imagine this, but the daughter has decided that mom is not looking out for her best interest, and it looks like she is worried about the other kids, too.
As aside, being oblivious to social facts is a core part of an autism diagnosis. Tove has previously posted that she thinks it is inaccurate to call her daughter autistic.
Another part that really feels wrong to me is this:
"And, most crucially, psychiatry helps Alma to become a totally lonely person. First it helped her to verbally attack her parents. A year later it helped her to do the same with her foster parents."
The daughter is 16, so first of all is at the age to argue with caretakers. Aside from that, it's healty and not a sign of madness to talk back to people! It is not something health providers will passively be okay with but will actually train a patient to do, e.g. via a boundaries framework or via "my garden, your garden".
Separately, it is very creepy to suggest that without the mom there, that the daughter will be lonely. What that makes it sound like is that Tove has been forcing mother-daughter bonding activities on her that the daughter nowadays does not enjoy as much.
A part that really makes me just be done with all of this is this:
"For example, both Alma's parents and foster parents have noticed that Alma's alleged fear of germs is very uneven: Sometimes (most of the time) she can’t use utensils that someone else has picked out of the dishwasher, but then suddenly she can eat a hamburger from McDonald's if she is in the mood. "
This is a stretch. Many people would gladly eat a McDonald's hamburger before they eat off a random fork from the dishwasher. McDonalds being a cess pool is one of those things that everyone knows but that is not so true in practice if you follow the evidence. This isn't an example of the daughter being mad. It is an example, though, of how Tove just knows that her daughter is crazy, and then bends any observation she can find into that narrative.
By the way, food pickiness is common among autistic people.
Stepping back, I find myself wondering what Tove's source of expertise is other than how she can just tell things and how seemingly everyone she runs into is misguided. I have a number of therapists in my social circle, and much of what Tove says seems oblivious to their point of view. Tove does not seem aware of how they think and therefore does not provide any counter-arguments.
I'll concede that one thing Tove agrees with them on is that care providers will attempt to dodge cases that feel hopeless, and that a lot of cases are essentially hopeless given the current state of psychology and of the treatment options. Her daughter may be near the borderline of that kind of situation and may have providers trying to make her not be their problem.
To try and make this rigorous, I did a little web searching, and I found the following from the NIH:
The whole thing is good, but I recommend focusing on sections 4 and 5, which are for the last hundred years or so. In the earlier eras, it is plain that the reason for public health treatment in the US was just to separate anti-social people from the general public so that society could carry on. In the mid 1900s, these institutions started affecting people that were socially desirable, however, because they technically had the same mental conditions as the locked-up people; particular examples include returning WW2 vets and also conscientious objectors.
A confounding aspect is that the mid 1900s is also when drug therapies took off. If someone is acting wild and destructive, instead of locking them up, one of the options is to get them on a drug that zones them out and makes them harmless. It's a factor.
So, back to Tove, what was happening is that the public was calling people crazy, and it originally applied to the most unpopular people that everyone wanted an excuse to put out of sight, out of mind. The clinical definition of crazy, however, started including more popular groups of people. Either the definition of crazy had to change--which was hard to do, because everyone who enjoys a Marvel movie is able to hold delusional values--or the whole notion of calling people crazy had to be dialed back.
As a parting thought, there is a race in Galaxy Quest that considered play acting in a TV show to be "lying". To most viewers, the aliens come off as the crazy ones, and it's worth reflecting on why one group seems crazy and one group seems sane. My best answer is that the sane ones are the ones that are socially successful and who have enjoyable days. If you think that's true, and I gather it has been influential in public health care, then you take the approach of helping people succeed and then calling it a day.
“I think that the issue that divides conservatives the most is how much cultural change to accept (conserve) and how much to try to roll back.”
I don’t necessarily disagree with this.
But a very simple heuristic exists.
Today’s left is wrong on just about everything.
And I don’t say this as a tribalist. There are multiple overlapping “tribes” on the non-left.
I don’t think any of them are correct on close to anything [though of course I believe the classical liberals are the most correct on the most things].
Pretty much everything that leftists have pushed in the last 10 years - bascially, post gay marriage - is bad and should be stopped and rolled back. If the left is pushing it, odds are very high it is bad.
Then we can argue about the rest. Legit arguments where “conservatives” and classical liberals and moderates can disagree and where there are few correct answers.
Warby writes: “ Economist Arnold Kling’s famous schema of the three languages of politics talks of conservatism as operating on an civilisation versus barbarism moral axis. That may have been the language, but it has not been the politics, otherwise the march through the institutions of a socially and institutionally corrosive progressivism would never have got anywhere near as far as it has.“ Actually, it has been the politics (i.e. political intentions). Progressives and conservatives and just about everyone else have supported public education, and this is precisely where progressives have made their inroads.
Conservatives are not reading, discussing, and amending their state constitutions to separate school and state. As a result conservatives subsidize progressive barbarism, when their intentions are to nurture civilization though public education.
From a libertarian perspective, why is the state is involved in marriage in the first place? If to protect children, surely DNA testing or other evidence of parenthood serves better. Otherwise, it seems to be an enabler (qualifier) for the welfare-warfare state or the crowding out of religion. If people want a contract, let them write one.
As Cinna notes, the State has plenty of reasons to be involved in marriage. The problem you are talking about is the entanglement of the state in the purely religious execution of marriage.
The most obvious and salient example where it matters is immigration. I think we do generally want citizens' foreign-born spouses to be able to immigrate. I guess if one is libertarian enough to be a true open borders person then it still shouldn't matter, though.
Poor Tove K. Poor all of us.
I thought passingly of this sort of thing, the other day, when you commended as you often do, having children so that later on, you’ll have some grandchildren about.
You can’t know the future. You can’t know what you’re going to get. You can expect a measure of pain; and the one thing that being childless has going for it, is that you may live with melancholy down the line, or some loneliness, but you will be spared that acute pain that is made possible by bravely (or foolishly, I suppose, in the modern mind) having people you are related to in your life (both living with them, and losing them).
Tove K. is also a brave writer, because she agrees with a commenter who dares allude to a fact I have often noticed: there is in some ways more risk in having one or two children, than having five or eight or ten as in the past (and the present, in some places). Traditional values, which supposedly only keep women down, may have kept others “up”. Sacrifice exists no matter what path you choose.
There was more latitude for failure. There was less of an obsession, if no less sorrow, with the fortunes of each. The whole was greater than the parts - and sustained them to a greater degree.
I think this is why I’m uncomfortable with pronatalist talk. It has an airy-fairy quality. Perhaps it is too brutal, to speak the truth: we need smart and productive people to reproduce, because we need your DNA. In the current human ecosystem, this will be a total crapshoot for you personally. If all goes as well as possible, you will enjoy spending time with grandchildren in 40 years.
Regarding conserving conservatism:
It may seem tangential, but it’s only been one, two, maybe three generations of adults who cannot explain to their young children what they do for work.
Particularly, the well-heeled who send their kids off to elite institutions to presumably, achieve more for society - have greater impact - than they did. Kids from rural cultures often don’t have this condition and more so, neither do their parents. There are some pretty sophisticated ideas - not just jobs - coming out of the cities.
Famously, Rush Limbaugh antagonized the Left (and the musical group The Pretenders) by choosing their song “Ohio” (a screed against globalized “progress”) as his productions’ theme song and, as a mark of his conservative economic sensibilities.
It was curious to me that he apparently didn’t listen to his own theme song.
I thought it was more cavalier than curious. He was fully invested, but like a money manager, the resources belong to his clients. Like the forever wars of Iraq, it really doesn’t matter how foolish these cultural investments are - the costs and burden of Teflon is never born by them but rather, by the audience. He was there to process the transactions only, earning the standard 2 and 20, both coming and going.
The name of the song is “My City Was Gone“ by the Pretenders, not the CSN&Y song about Kent State.
For Limbaugh, the appeal of using it as his intro song was primarily and simply due to its upbeat and energetic tempo and driving beat which worked well on tinny AM radio. Limbaugh only played the instrumental intro of the song and did not include any of the actual lyrics.
I distinctly remember at one point he played more of the song, back to Ohio, *paved down the middle*, by a government that had no pride.
Like many people who used to listen to AM radio for news, I got used to hearing the intro before changing the station.
Later on, it was just the little drum figure and the bass riff it seems to me.
A great song.
My opposite number here in the house claims he chose it because he hated it, which a Rolling Stone interview confirms although that was probably Limbaugh retconning.
He said he hated Chrissy Hynde for reasons including her being an “animal rights wacko”.
Later on he apparently took the side of PETA on some or other thing they were against because it was the government that was going to do it.
Sorry to write so many words about Limbaugh whom I believe never uttered a sincere word in his life.
I expect you are right and as an old deejay (?) he chose it because it was catchy.
I made a little post about a week ago pointing out that the worst ideas are often just the antithesis of another bad idea. Like Trump, Limbaugh was a master of such ideas and the only way to promote those is to remain extremely confident until you can only blame others for your own bad behavior.
Who said anything about Kent State or CSNY?
Ah. I said the Pretenders. “I went back to Ohio”. So I got the name wrong.
You stated above that the Limbaugh theme song was “Ohio,” which is CSN&Y and not the Pretenders.
That’s got to be the worst made up excuse ever. It just happened to be good for a.m. radio? And .. he didn’t play the lyrics anyway? Dog ate my homework.
In my view, it was the first documented troll.
The entire point was to put a finger into the eye of the left who were anti-globalization at the expense of small Midwestern towns, jobs, families, particularly the rust belt in Ohio.
This sentimentality crescendo-ed on the heels of the Iraq War, during the WTO protests, when all the media could do was play endless images of teenagers wearing bandanas, breaking windows of Nike and Starbucks. Fox viewers, who thrive on odious caricatures, could not get enough of it.
Such a short memory we have.
A better troll would be to go back and replay his episodes around that time where he railed against people who are “anti-progress”.
I recall hearing that the Pretender's even complained and tried to stop his use of the song, which only sealed its fate.
The full story from Limbaugh himself is here. He was a DJ long before he ever got into talk radio in 1984 in Sacramento. His show did not become nationally syndicated until 1988.
https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2011/05/13/origins_of_the_eib_theme_song/
Tove says interesting things, but she gives me chills, and if I follow correctly, her child has elected not to live with her any more. I would agree with her that it can be unhealthy how a patient and therapist will make an alliance with each other and promulgate the situation; however, Tove herself is vulnerable to the same problem but does not reflect on the problem that I have seen.
I have some experience with people who talk like this, so I am sure I am filling in gaps with Tove's story with my own experience. For what it's worth, though, I've encountered people who say their daughter is hopeless and who rally the village to defend the mom and hold the kid down. In both cases, I have mixed feelings. It is good to see such energy to care for the child, but scary to see the child's resources and autonomy being cut off except when they funnel through the mom.
Here is an example where Tove takes things too far:
"She is oblivious to social facts. For example, she holds a persistent idea that she is going to save her younger siblings, especially a toddler brother she adores, from their substandard parents."
This is presented as an example of the daughter being mad, but that just sounds to me like consistency. Tove cannot seem to imagine this, but the daughter has decided that mom is not looking out for her best interest, and it looks like she is worried about the other kids, too.
As aside, being oblivious to social facts is a core part of an autism diagnosis. Tove has previously posted that she thinks it is inaccurate to call her daughter autistic.
Another part that really feels wrong to me is this:
"And, most crucially, psychiatry helps Alma to become a totally lonely person. First it helped her to verbally attack her parents. A year later it helped her to do the same with her foster parents."
The daughter is 16, so first of all is at the age to argue with caretakers. Aside from that, it's healty and not a sign of madness to talk back to people! It is not something health providers will passively be okay with but will actually train a patient to do, e.g. via a boundaries framework or via "my garden, your garden".
Separately, it is very creepy to suggest that without the mom there, that the daughter will be lonely. What that makes it sound like is that Tove has been forcing mother-daughter bonding activities on her that the daughter nowadays does not enjoy as much.
A part that really makes me just be done with all of this is this:
"For example, both Alma's parents and foster parents have noticed that Alma's alleged fear of germs is very uneven: Sometimes (most of the time) she can’t use utensils that someone else has picked out of the dishwasher, but then suddenly she can eat a hamburger from McDonald's if she is in the mood. "
This is a stretch. Many people would gladly eat a McDonald's hamburger before they eat off a random fork from the dishwasher. McDonalds being a cess pool is one of those things that everyone knows but that is not so true in practice if you follow the evidence. This isn't an example of the daughter being mad. It is an example, though, of how Tove just knows that her daughter is crazy, and then bends any observation she can find into that narrative.
By the way, food pickiness is common among autistic people.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3601920/
Stepping back, I find myself wondering what Tove's source of expertise is other than how she can just tell things and how seemingly everyone she runs into is misguided. I have a number of therapists in my social circle, and much of what Tove says seems oblivious to their point of view. Tove does not seem aware of how they think and therefore does not provide any counter-arguments.
I'll concede that one thing Tove agrees with them on is that care providers will attempt to dodge cases that feel hopeless, and that a lot of cases are essentially hopeless given the current state of psychology and of the treatment options. Her daughter may be near the borderline of that kind of situation and may have providers trying to make her not be their problem.
To try and make this rigorous, I did a little web searching, and I found the following from the NIH:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10302760/
The whole thing is good, but I recommend focusing on sections 4 and 5, which are for the last hundred years or so. In the earlier eras, it is plain that the reason for public health treatment in the US was just to separate anti-social people from the general public so that society could carry on. In the mid 1900s, these institutions started affecting people that were socially desirable, however, because they technically had the same mental conditions as the locked-up people; particular examples include returning WW2 vets and also conscientious objectors.
A confounding aspect is that the mid 1900s is also when drug therapies took off. If someone is acting wild and destructive, instead of locking them up, one of the options is to get them on a drug that zones them out and makes them harmless. It's a factor.
So, back to Tove, what was happening is that the public was calling people crazy, and it originally applied to the most unpopular people that everyone wanted an excuse to put out of sight, out of mind. The clinical definition of crazy, however, started including more popular groups of people. Either the definition of crazy had to change--which was hard to do, because everyone who enjoys a Marvel movie is able to hold delusional values--or the whole notion of calling people crazy had to be dialed back.
As a parting thought, there is a race in Galaxy Quest that considered play acting in a TV show to be "lying". To most viewers, the aliens come off as the crazy ones, and it's worth reflecting on why one group seems crazy and one group seems sane. My best answer is that the sane ones are the ones that are socially successful and who have enjoyable days. If you think that's true, and I gather it has been influential in public health care, then you take the approach of helping people succeed and then calling it a day.
“I think that the issue that divides conservatives the most is how much cultural change to accept (conserve) and how much to try to roll back.”
I don’t necessarily disagree with this.
But a very simple heuristic exists.
Today’s left is wrong on just about everything.
And I don’t say this as a tribalist. There are multiple overlapping “tribes” on the non-left.
I don’t think any of them are correct on close to anything [though of course I believe the classical liberals are the most correct on the most things].
Pretty much everything that leftists have pushed in the last 10 years - bascially, post gay marriage - is bad and should be stopped and rolled back. If the left is pushing it, odds are very high it is bad.
Then we can argue about the rest. Legit arguments where “conservatives” and classical liberals and moderates can disagree and where there are few correct answers.
Warby writes: “ Economist Arnold Kling’s famous schema of the three languages of politics talks of conservatism as operating on an civilisation versus barbarism moral axis. That may have been the language, but it has not been the politics, otherwise the march through the institutions of a socially and institutionally corrosive progressivism would never have got anywhere near as far as it has.“ Actually, it has been the politics (i.e. political intentions). Progressives and conservatives and just about everyone else have supported public education, and this is precisely where progressives have made their inroads.
Conservatives are not reading, discussing, and amending their state constitutions to separate school and state. As a result conservatives subsidize progressive barbarism, when their intentions are to nurture civilization though public education.