His girlfriend's mom seems really practical about things.
who said that by reading obituaries he'd come to understand what a lefty our uncle was, and he sure would have liked to have the chance to take him on and challenge some of these points in conversation.
You're already piling on your brother here, but the fact that your brother managed to have a relationship with your uncle for his whole life without noticing the profound disagreements they had makes your uncle sound kind of great. (As does everything else everyone's said about him all over the internet.)
Although you could argue that "Don't be any nicer to my child than you need to be" is kind of not-motherly.
"Nothing's too good for my daughter, except paying attention to her interests and spending small amounts of money on them."
Very sensible. I had a chat with a private detective once who said that the commonest sign that a husband was cheating on his wife was that he suddenly started to bring her flowers. (Can't remember what the tell was for cheating wives.) So if you establish a pattern of bringing her flowers early in the relationship, you're insulated.
So if you establish a pattern of bringing her flowers early in the relationship, you're insulated.
Bringing her flowers early in the relationship is common. Generally this ends at some point.
What the mother is saying is -- "shouldn't you be saving that money so you can afford a house, and she can move out?"
Streisand was really off-base with "You don't buy me flowers."
the fact that your brother managed to have a relationship with your uncle for his whole life without noticing the profound disagreements they had makes your uncle sound kind of great.
It's insanely perplexing. These are the gatherings where I developed my entire foundation of my understanding of the world, inequality, etc. Nobody shied away from discussing anything. This was all the stuff that we found most interesting to discuss. My brother must have just tuned out whenever he found it no longer interesting and really absorbed zilch.
he'd come to understand what a lefty our uncle was, and he sure would have liked to have the chance to take him on and challenge some of these points in conversation
Does your brother have any idea about your political convictions?
9.2: Maybe this answers my question. Your brother just doesn't listen.
9: Maybe your brother has also been radicalized more recently?
I listen to my sisters better than I listen to my uncles.
They're just much more likely to say something useful or entertaining.
Does your brother have any idea about your political convictions?
We talk a lot about whether the national debt is the biggest problem that has ever threatened our health, safety, and sanity. A lot.
Does he mention what Trump/Ryan did to the deficit?
Does he mention what Reagan or Clinton or GWB did to the deficit?
See, both sides do it. This is usually how the conversation goes.
You do know what Clinton did to the deficit, right?
Actually, there's an interesting question buried here: how did you all come to be such a lefty?
Because the right wing did literally everything the very conservative people I grew up around says not to do, but they decided to ignore it. And the 2008 recession, plus the response after the fact as to who guy bailed out and who didn't, convinced me that wealthy people are a threat to society.
I think a combination of Iain Banks and Twitter. (In college I associated myself with Joseph Stiglitz's outlook and thought it was lefty.)
I would have said it was my family, but now it seems like the main reason is that I never met your brother.
I've been leftish in my views for as long as I can remember.
Since I grew up in orange county, I suppose it might have been an obvious way to rebel (even though neither of my parents was conservative).
20: I get no credit, I was brought up that way. Not that my parents aren't loopy about lots of things, but I haven't moved far from them on politics. (Well, they're sort of ordinary old-person kind of terrible on identity-politics type issues, but there's nothing where they're ever bad enough to consider voting Republican.)
And then when I started thinking independently about politics, there never seemed to be much of an evidence-based reason to change my mind about the fundamentals.
15: I seem to recall that back in the 90s panicking over the national debt was a fairly mainstream thing for younger people to do. "Generation X is going to inherent a bankrupt country because of the national debt" was big talking point for a while.
26: Remember Paul Tsongas? I do! But, just barely.
I mean, I could be talked into worrying about the debt under some circumstances. Just not into believing that worrying about the debt is a reason not to provide social services.
Panicking about future generations inheriting the national debt and panicking about future generations being all dead because of nuclear war have subsided now that future generations are inheriting a planet of climate catastrophe. In the words of Jello Biafra in 1981, We've Got A Bigger Problem Now.
29: Is the "nuclear winter" idea still considered plausible? If so, we could wipe out future generations and solve global warming all in one go.
I'm not sure whether I've become substantively worse on culture war issues. On the one hand there's the usual "kids these days" crankiness that comes with getting older. On the other hand I tended to think that self-styled student "activists" were mostly preening wankers even back when I was a college student myself, so in that sense I haven't really changed.
They call it "geoengineering" now.
I haven't really improved by opinions on young people much, but I sure have lowered my opinion of older people.
I was almost overcome by this kid and his warm-spirited love and caring for no other reason than itself. Some people like flowers, so he incorporates it into his routine to get them flowers, because it's a little thing with a big pay-off.
It makes me think about the cliches around "what is your love language." For me, I know, my love language is small, everyday acts of caring and generosity. I'm not good at the big romantic gesture, but I think there's value in consistent caring.
The best romantic gesture is to let her use the floating door to stay out of the freezing water.
33: Yeah, I know that I go for the accumulation of small practical (and hopefully thoughtful) acts, rather than grand gestures. I suspect that's unfortunately because it's what I want, as much as what I think she'd like. (I know that she loves big gestures and frequent verbal compliments.)
Have you considered a frequent user punch card to your favorite flower shop?
"Generation X is going to inherent a bankrupt country because of the national debt"
Ha! Turns out we didn't inherit shit and the Millennials got the bankrupt country.
Lots of florists don't have punch cards, but most sandwich stands do.
5: Going outside to talk on your cell phone would be one.
Poetry books are supposed to be a good gift, I am reminded.
36: Hmmm.... ;) Her current setup isn't good for flowers, but after construction she'll have an office where her flowers can be undisturbed. (At home, our cats enjoy eating them or toppling the containers.)
Thank you for this post. It brought joy.
With Joy, paper towels, and a swifter, you can clean anything.
45: SWIFFER!
my love language is small
It's not the size of the love language that counts, but the friction of the diction.
I am boggled by your brother's ignorance. Is he as similarly ignorant about views of other close relatives? Does he just tune out?
I'm 99.9% sure I took a class with your uncle, heebie. If I'm right, he was a genuinely great teacher. (He didn't change my life, because it had already been changed, but he was that kind of professor.)
52: that's really lovely to hear. Thank you.
51: I am coming to believe he just projects his own beliefs onto me? More or less? Plus a dash of "kid sister Heebie doesn't know any better yet"? Philandering aside, this brother is fairly well approximated by Bill Clinton in his foggier years.
In the genial charm but outdated sense.
Actually, there's an interesting question buried here: how did you all come to be such a lefty?
My own path--or at least the narrative I currently tell myself--is a little dispiriting for a would-be civics education teacher, because it accords very little causal weight to the force of reason (of course I know that's very typical, but still):
1- My initial political awakening, in high school, was purely about rebelling against my bourgie-lefty parents and the dominant culture of my rich-but-democratic suburb. Becoming a libertarian not only served that purpose well, it also fits right in with teenage "Who made you the boss of me? I didn't ask to be born! Just leave me alone and let me do what I want!" solipsism. This was reinforced in college, at least at first, by majoring in economics and hanging out with a lot of really smart right-wing folks.
2- The Bush administration made me realise the absurdity of conservative-libertarian fusionism. That this realisation wasn't universal planted the seed of disillusionment about organised libertarianism, though I continued to cash their scholarship checks and so on into grad school, and I stayed engaged in, e.g., The Antient (not a typo) and Honourable Edmund Burke Society throughout undergrad.
3- By my junior or senior year I was increasingly disenchanted with economics as a subject and rational choice theory more generally; as I'd never been particularly persuaded by rights-based libertarianism, this undermined the support base for my beliefs without giving me any replacement master narrative. This was largely where I was at for the first few years of grad school: calling myself a "left-libertarian" while feeling increasingly alienated from "official" libertarianism, and increasingly hostile towards Republicans and the right.
4- I went through two big shifts during grad school. Largely thanks to girlfriends, I slowly woke up to the reality of structural sexism and patriarchy; in my early college years, I'd be precisely the sort of person who these days would be loving "PETER|SEN *DESTROYS* FEMINIST ARGUMENTS WITH LOGIC!!" youtube, god help me. Feminist sci-fi, the feminist blogosphere, and women friends helped a lot here, around 2005-2007 or so.
5- The second shift came from my long-running and losing battle against depression, procrastination, and general self-sabotaging behavior. While this was surely driven by terror about failing to live up to (megalomaniac ideas of) potential, it perhaps ironically led to a rethinking of my underlying assumptions about agency, responsibility, and desert. I'd long since stopped thinking that the economy gave "to each, according to his marginal product"; I now started to realise how inhuman and dystopian such a system *would* be, even if possible. Now that I no longer expected to be a winner at the game of life, I started to think that maybe one should be able to live decently even as a loser. Based on my new self-identity as a failure, I started to appreciate the safety net.
6- Living in Germany for a bit, then continuing to flail about in California, while uninsurable due to asthma & depression and still parent-supported, only reinforced this ideological shift. I was simultaneously seeing how unfair it was that others lacked the advantages I squandered, while also seeing my own psychological brokenness as one symptom of, yep, neoliberalism. So much of what kept me locked in not merely personally but also socially wasteful behavior patterns was driven by straight-up *fear*: why did we think a society based on extracting performance through terror of being out-performed was a good idea?
7- The Great Financial Crisis and its aftermath cemented these convictions; living in San Francisco, literally walking by homeless people in front of my door as I went to my 80k entry-level job, drove home the point. And now that I'm in Austria, where even the extreme-right takes for granted a level of social provision unimaginable in much-richer America (admittedly, only for "real Austrians"), it's hard to imagine going back. Especially now that we're expecting a child: admittedly, hard to find daycare before 6 months, but after that, only €150/month for full-time, right across the street, and since I'm currently making almost no money while studying for the teaching degree, the ~€850/month one-year income-independent variant of parental-leave works great for me (though the overall structure of the system tends to seriously reinforce gender divisions).
Especially now that we're expecting a child
Did I miss the announcement? In any case, CONGRATULATIONS!
No, I guess this was the announcement. Thanks!
Putting the announcement in the eighth paragraph of the post is really burying the lede.
Congratulations c.trapnel and Iberian Fury.
Congrats. Thanks peep for pointing it out because I missed it in until comment.
Congratulations!
Regarding the non-child expecting parts of your comment, the current social/political landscape has had me thinking about moral luck lately. I'm old enough that my support for left wing and most "progressive" social justice-ish stuff is not going to be altered simply because so many people prominently associated with these causes seem to be obnoxious trolls. But I wonder how I would fare if I were a 16-18 year old today.
Congratulations, x and partner!
66 is a very good point.
Congrats!
it accords very little causal weight to the force of reason
I dunno, I think force of reason is a reasonable description of your process.
Hooray!
Also between you and Stanster, I'm starting to think that Unfogged exerts some gravitational pull on long lost new parents.
(Until the sleep deprivation sets in.)
Congratulations, XT!
Personally my politics haven't evolved much. I sometimes think that growing up as a nerd made it easier for me to identify with disadvantaged people who had problems that actually matter. My parents were Rockefeller Republicans when I was growing up and they realized some time between 2000 and 2004 that the GOP had gone nuts. They occasionally have old-people-attitudes towards the national debt but on the whole the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree.
66: Hard to say. In college I remember some obnoxious leftists and minorities, but there were also some obnoxious college Republicans, plenty of non-obnoxious minorities, and even then I think I had some ability to draw a line between the argument and the person making it. A few years younger than that, maybe I would have had problems. On the other hand I really doubt the conventional wisdom that social justice warriors are particularly obnoxious compared to their counterparts 20 or 50 years ago or in another country, especially when you consider that there are literally professional trolls trying to make them look worse than they really are.
Congratulations XT! And IF - the child will presumably be pseuded as THEN.
And that was an interesting and honest political autobiography. I think PF is right to point out how much reasoning fram what you observed shaped your progress. Lots of people (heebie's brother) never manage to do so, it seems.
Congratulations XT! And IF - the child will presumably be pseuded as THEN.
And that was an interesting and honest political autobiography. I think PF is right to point out how much reasoning fram what you observed shaped your progress. Lots of people (heebie's brother) never manage to do so, it seems.
"Fram" is my ship. Let it sail from you sentence immediately.
clearly my earlier remarks were so unimpressive I had to repeat them
Not a chance. It's locked in the icy grip of NW's logic until spring.
72.3: Probably true. The difference I was thinking of is the constant exposure the interwebs and social media give you to the most obnoxious characters. In the old days you had to actually physically hang around campus radicals to get exposed the biggest jerks in that set. Now you can just see them in your social media feed.
It's a distorted picture*, true. My wondering was about how I would process that distorted picture as an 18 year old.
*I think the odious types really are as odious as they seem. The distortion is in the impression of how common they are.
The left-right model doesn't map onto SA in any straightforward way and I was raised basically unpolitical anyway. From parents I got racism*, from school anti-racism and nationalism; in HS I had an Economist subscription which I think was the first real policy discourse I read; around the same time I was anti-American, for no particular reason I can remember. I was pushed leftward on economics by history, and Krugman's and Charles Stross' blogs; on race, university and I think just aging (since I was always friendly enough with all the black people I actually knew, maybe the cognitive dissonance had to give). Other influences: experiences similar to trapnel's 56.5-6; violent crime; international travel.
On moral luck, in HS I missed being a gamer by a hair's breadth, essentially just because my parents are late adopters. Had it gone otherwise I can picture myself falling for the alt-right. I would like to think that philosophy would have broken me out of that, but in that scenario I may well have studied CS instead, leaving me much richer and probably a worse person.
*And a little misogyny, homophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-intellectualism. You know, the usual. But mostly racism.
Also between you and Stanster, I'm starting to think that Unfogged exerts some gravitational pull on long lost new parents.
Heh. Yep, pretty much.
79
The left-right model doesn't map onto SA in any straightforward way
South Africa? South America? Saudi Arabia?
Left-right doesn't map onto most cities' politics.
I'm not familiar with American restaurants.
They serve a lot of pork and alcohol.
I was trying to figure out if it really was San Antonio or if I was just being provincial.
I don't mean to be all Standpipe-y, but does San Antonio even have an commissioner?
The left-right model doesn't map onto SA in any straightforward way
Milner
South Africa
OT: Miley Cyrus's new song sounds very good, like Dolly Parton.
I might try to figure out how to buy a piece of music.
Yes. And apparently now voice coach. I always thought he had a good voice, but she's doing the warbly thing like Parton does in Jolene.