In which I offend my friends…
You’ve heard the parable of the brass serpent. Now hear the parable of Disney+.
I have just crossed a kind of threshold into middle age.
We were water fighting in the front yard on Saturday. And I saw a weed and I stopped to pull it out. And I saw a dry spot and I stopped to water it.
Lord, preserve me from myself.
The mind sin-stocked on every shelf.
The smug and imbecilic grin
Within.
The teleology of cancel culture is recreational lynching:
Thought:
Men read news because it combines two of the things they love: feeling they are part of a mob, while comfortably remaining in their armchair.
-plucked from the ether
If you have a business or a side business you can employ your children and they can put money into you a 401k. Which can in turn be converted into a self-directed IRA.
There are limits and wrinkles at all of these steps, due diligence required.
The President has suspended the au pair visa. Consequently the market for domestic au pairs has boomed. This is an opportunity for LDS girls.
An 18-year old I heard of just accepted an au pair position with a quality (non-LDS) family down in DC that she heard about from friends of friends. She wasn’t even looking. It will be wonderful experience for her being paid to practice motherhood and being able to see a second exemplary family (besides her own) from the inside. All her needs are met so if she is thrifty she will come out in one year with somewhere around $15k or even more in savings. (more…)
Ideologies are rickety. Belief systems are rickety. It is impossible to do without one. You cannot understand the world without trying to make sense of the world, and you cannot make sense of the world without using a framework. The ideology is the framework. But it is rickety. It is not the world you are perceiving. The map is not the territory. This is true of our map also. “For now you see as through a glass darkly . . .”
Some ideologies are more rickety than others. But I don’t think there is any sincerely held belief system where a person cannot use it to perceive some angle on real truth and real beauty.
Imagine a bare, plain room. A kind of shed or warehouse. There is light streaming in from a high window and over there someone has built themselves a rickety little platform of stools and scraps. They are looking out the window and describing the wonders they see. You must imagine that they are choked in the throat and crying because outside is so beautiful. The people in that room are gathered around and what the man up there describes is so transporting that they are crying also. In their enthusiasm they devote more attention to building up the platform.
They first forget, and then cover, the window.
In the real parable of Plato’s cave, those who see the shadows do not reject the message of the one who went outside. They only confuse the message and the outside.
It is an aggravation that SJWs have no sense of humor but it is a disaster that they have no sense of tragedy.
A troop of monkeys occupied a copse of trees one day where a path led down to a river.
A pride of lions used to take the path every day and were shocked when suddenly they found themselves under a rain of flung sticks, monkey poop, and rotten fruit. Ducking, dodging, and growling, they hustled off.
The monkeys loudly congratulated each other on their victory. They then started to discuss the lions’ countermeasures. Some said the lions would lie in wait at night and slowly try to pick off the monkeys. Some said the lions would sprint through in terror. Others said they would just suffer the monkeys’ abuse. The trees soon rang with the angry chatter of a hundred different arguments.
The next day, the lions came casually along the path as normal. When they came close to the copse they cut away from the path and made a beeline for another point on the river, equally convenient. Their new route kept them out of range of the trees.
Moral: ???
Comment: This fable is meant as a companion to the fable of the Harassed Aurochs. The lions were too strong and too indifferent for what they did to be considered a surrender. It was masterful indifference. (more…)