Blog RollKnight N Daze Labeled vs Unlabeled Test comment Overcoming A Single Parent Love Languages for Caterpillars Alan Jones and the Christmas Peace Post 001 |
Sunday, 28 October 2012
Labeled vs Unlabeled
“The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names”- Chinese Proverb
In Stop Calling Me Names! Mrs has drawn several fallacious points about criticism and labeling.
"I must explain why labelling and criticizing weren't the best thing for human growth and mental health since sliced bread, I left the room. "
For millions of years mankind lived just like the animals then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk.
If that's not the best thing that ever happened to we humans then, OK, I'll entertain that possibility. But you've got some explaining to do!
Language is a system of labels for ideas. Words are tokens within langage. Mrs loves her words and her grammar, I don't see her giving those up. What she seems to have trouble with are the labels which describe people. Such as, for example, "bad" or "mean."
So then, that would leave an individual disabled either in language from expressing their ideas about other people. I suppose it would be permitted to know intellectually that a person were kind or honest or afraid or useful or generous or tricky or funny or bad or mean. But it would not be OK to have the means (the use of labels) to communicate this to others. Nor even write it in your private diary or talk to yourself about it or think it in words inside your head!
No longer shall we be able to hold and share estimates of our fellow man. No more shall we express displeasure about our political leaders except in cartoon thought bubbles. We can't say "No, that guy's bad" or "He's a good, keen, man." Price mechanisms, reputation itself, the social network itself will all be without medium and we will now live alone unable to attribute meaning to the existence and actions of others. Nor they to us.
"Stop calling me names." But then what do I call you? How do I distinguish you from a king or a cabbage?
The great dictator of words makes allowance only for self-applied labels. Only oneself is able, you see, to have the full contextual picture. Only that person knows their own motives, thoughts, emotions, and history well enough to be allowed to confer meaning. Everyone else has to forego their natural born ability to draw conclusions. And so we must rely on the likes of Benito Mussolini, Joe Stalin, or Nicki Minaj to front up and give voice to what we all know but could not say. "I'm a scum bag two dimensional cartoon wackjob so don't listen to me." Never again will anybody say "Oh thank god! You just said what we were all thinking!"
But I don't think we're playing it safe leaving it up to them, the worst of mankind.
Likewise I'm not willing to censor my ideas about the best people in the world, nor anybody in between. I need all the words I can get my hands on, I have too few. I want more vocabulary, not none. I want to understand myself and others. I want to be able to explain it to myself and to them. I want the language of Shakespeare on my side, in all detail and delicacy. I want to be able to tell about it.
This may be the best reason. If I think you're being bad and don't say so then answer me this, how will I ever find out I am wrong?
In Stop Calling Me Names! Mrs has drawn several fallacious points about criticism and labeling.
"I must explain why labelling and criticizing weren't the best thing for human growth and mental health since sliced bread, I left the room. "
For millions of years mankind lived just like the animals then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk.
If that's not the best thing that ever happened to we humans then, OK, I'll entertain that possibility. But you've got some explaining to do!
Language is a system of labels for ideas. Words are tokens within langage. Mrs loves her words and her grammar, I don't see her giving those up. What she seems to have trouble with are the labels which describe people. Such as, for example, "bad" or "mean."
So then, that would leave an individual disabled either in language from expressing their ideas about other people. I suppose it would be permitted to know intellectually that a person were kind or honest or afraid or useful or generous or tricky or funny or bad or mean. But it would not be OK to have the means (the use of labels) to communicate this to others. Nor even write it in your private diary or talk to yourself about it or think it in words inside your head!
No longer shall we be able to hold and share estimates of our fellow man. No more shall we express displeasure about our political leaders except in cartoon thought bubbles. We can't say "No, that guy's bad" or "He's a good, keen, man." Price mechanisms, reputation itself, the social network itself will all be without medium and we will now live alone unable to attribute meaning to the existence and actions of others. Nor they to us.
"Stop calling me names." But then what do I call you? How do I distinguish you from a king or a cabbage?
The great dictator of words makes allowance only for self-applied labels. Only oneself is able, you see, to have the full contextual picture. Only that person knows their own motives, thoughts, emotions, and history well enough to be allowed to confer meaning. Everyone else has to forego their natural born ability to draw conclusions. And so we must rely on the likes of Benito Mussolini, Joe Stalin, or Nicki Minaj to front up and give voice to what we all know but could not say. "I'm a scum bag two dimensional cartoon wackjob so don't listen to me." Never again will anybody say "Oh thank god! You just said what we were all thinking!"
But I don't think we're playing it safe leaving it up to them, the worst of mankind.
Likewise I'm not willing to censor my ideas about the best people in the world, nor anybody in between. I need all the words I can get my hands on, I have too few. I want more vocabulary, not none. I want to understand myself and others. I want to be able to explain it to myself and to them. I want the language of Shakespeare on my side, in all detail and delicacy. I want to be able to tell about it.
This may be the best reason. If I think you're being bad and don't say so then answer me this, how will I ever find out I am wrong?
Wednesday, 17 October 2012
Overcoming A Single Parent
I don't read Dan Pearce but like my good Mrs in her post I'm drawn to respond to his The Five Big Advantages of Being a Single Parent. I never had to transition to separation. Nor did I transition out of separation. These perspectives, offered up by the preceding blogs are very common.
Common? More like the rule as that trend shows marriage rates being cancelled out by divorces. So, you don't have to go very far in New Zealand to find a solo parent. A bit further, I think, to find a single guy like me who has had a merger with an existing solo parent family.
I don't think either of my predecessors emphasised enough on how 'all the decisions' are made by all the people. In my family the template is that everybody gets a say, a vote, a seat at the table to decide what we will do with our time and resources. This isn't how I grew up but comes out of my libertarian free market ideals and it's what our Family 2.0 (est 2008) operating system is build upon.
The biggest challenge with this comes with Mrs and the elder two children slipping back to Family 1.0 pre-me thinking. The kids forget they have the franchise. Mrs tries to pull some unilateral decision-making. For example, we may head out on a shopping trip and I'm shocked to find one or both of the kids don't know why or where we're even going! Just following orders! And then I'm alarmed again to find out Mrs didn't brief them ahead of time so they had no chance to be involved at all. It happens less and less. Having Mrs and I model for the kids negotiation and bilateral decision-making rather than single dictator parent is the sort of advantage single parents cannot have.
The Five Big Advantages of Being a Single Parent
1) Guess who makes all the decisions
I don't think either of my predecessors emphasised enough on how 'all the decisions' are made by all the people. In my family the template is that everybody gets a say, a vote, a seat at the table to decide what we will do with our time and resources. This isn't how I grew up but comes out of my libertarian free market ideals and it's what our Family 2.0 (est 2008) operating system is build upon.
The biggest challenge with this comes with Mrs and the elder two children slipping back to Family 1.0 pre-me thinking. The kids forget they have the franchise. Mrs tries to pull some unilateral decision-making. For example, we may head out on a shopping trip and I'm shocked to find one or both of the kids don't know why or where we're even going! Just following orders! And then I'm alarmed again to find out Mrs didn't brief them ahead of time so they had no chance to be involved at all. It happens less and less. Having Mrs and I model for the kids negotiation and bilateral decision-making rather than single dictator parent is the sort of advantage single parents cannot have.
2) Guess how often I argue about money
Well, that's a subset of the above of course. While unilateral Generalissimo Fascism does away with this one we are once again forgetting that children can have a say about money. In Family 2.0 the needs of our children are broken up into budgets for the children to spend as they wish. Simultaneously they are encouraged by reality (rather than Mrs or I) to spend wisely and to look after what they have.
For example, they get a regular quota of Milo (drinking chocolate) per period of time which they can gobble up quickly or prudently consume. Likewise, a clothing allowance. So, the children get the chance to find out before they face adulthood the costs of using their shoes as skateboard breaks. And unlike Family 1.0, if Mrs or I do notice one of the kids molesting their shoes or spooning raw milo into their mouth we suffer no injury. In Family 1.0 you have to intervene because the communal household supply and budget is under attack. Arguments: neutralised.
The other reason being a single parent is a disadvantage when it comes to money is that couples have shared values. Mrs and I agree, to my renewing delight, on so many things. This includes spending and the conversations that lead to the discovery of this agreement are a pleasure.
3) Guess whose kid gets to learn more responsibility
So the original premise seems to be that more responsibility is taught by the solo parent out of necessity. Can't do it all for your kids, that's a good thing, so you value teamwork more.
Knight N Daze counters that teaching responsibility to children when you're a parenting staff down to half is much harder not easier. Turning things like tidying up and doing the dishes and laundry into education modules takes a great deal more time and patience. And after that the job's unlikely to have been done up to standard anyway.
I can vouch for that. We have learned to consider it victory if the children can self-start and complete a job using too much, say, dishwashing liquid, in twice the time and mess where half their work has to be repeated by a parent. Because, that's not bad for a learner and they can improve on those things next time. But being able to oversee that is costly stuff. Especially for the solo parent's limited resources of time and money and patience. Believe me, we value child responsibility and don't need less parents in our house to underline the benefit!
4) Guess who gets all of dad’s (or mom’s) bonding time
So...run that past me again? There's more bonding time to be had with parents if you get rid of one? Isn't that a bit like using only one chopstick in order speed up dinner? It's crazy.
It's not about who gets all of a finite share of the parent's bonding time. It's about the quality of that bond, how often you get to connect, and it's about growing the share. This isn't a zero sum game. Having the second parent means more and better intimacy on offer to children. More love to give because the parent's needs are being met too so the overall capacity rises. It also means that, at any given moment, there is more chance that a parent will be there for bonding time at the same time a child does.
5) Guess who doesn’t have to deal with the drama
Dead people? They don't have to deal with drama or eating or taxes or dishes or lawnmowers or people.
People who don't have relationships don't have to deal with drama. It's true. And unemployed people don't have to deal with rush hour traffic or pay negotiations of upskilling. And illiteracy solve the problem of profane graffiti; Blindness solves all graffiti. And repressing your empathy down to 0 does away with all sarcasm and intimidation.
Not quite the solution I would have gone for since all of those undesirable things can be eliminated or managed without death or dismemberment while also enjoying the benefits.
I'm tempted to say that a single parent and their children very disadvantaged. But it's far safer to say that families running Family 1.0 software are the ones in big trouble. That's the kind of single parent that I had to overcome and upgrade and this has been a great success. The above "advantages" I think only count in Family 1.0 not Family 2.0 which makes disadvantages of them all. Unless, that is, you count the grateful dead. Because couples that are ended don't have to suffer growing and feeling.
Saturday, 13 October 2012
Love Languages for Caterpillars
So there's a New York Times Bestseller from 1992 and I've read from it but not read it. It is this.
This morning is a typical case of that challenge not being met. I feel hurt and rejected. I feel that my plans and values are being devoured from within like one of those unlucky caterpillars with parasitical wasp larvae on the inside. And there's no caterpillar Sigourney Weaver to save me.
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The Five Love Languages
The premise is well understood by me. Different people express and accept love and value using different languages from one another. To paraphrase, these five are: words, time, gifts, acts, touch. Me? I'm big on 1 and 4; Words and acts. Challengingly, my hierarchy of love languages corresponds exactly to the inverse of my partners!
This morning is a typical case of that challenge not being met. I feel hurt and rejected. I feel that my plans and values are being devoured from within like one of those unlucky caterpillars with parasitical wasp larvae on the inside. And there's no caterpillar Sigourney Weaver to save me.
This week I had two goals. One was a month old and it was to, finally, take the cardboard recycling out to the street for collection. It's a personal failure to me that it didn't happen until now. And the fact that nobody else bothered to or even cared or remembered hurts me caterpillar-style.
Was is Aristotelianism or Epicureanism or something 1000 years on that talked about friendship the way it is for me? I forget the reference but always loved hearing this once. That, one definition of a friend is someone who will take on your works and go on with them after your death. Not just revenge on what snuffed you either but things like your hypotheses and scrolls you may have been writing or taking out your paper recycling to the side of the road. My family doesn't even do that for me.
How I love the idea of ancient Greek and Renaissance philosophers in their togas and their gowns feeding my cat while I'm away or returning my library books if a deadly James Cameron plot befalls me. My friends speak my love language and remember my life plans even if I were away.
This week I had two goals. The second was paying the bill for broadband though we lack the budget. So I got an extra job and worked hard and made extra money. Paid for it. But then Mrs Just As Now shifted the money about. She said we needed this, had to buy that. Speaks of fruit and of new school bags and shoes for the kids. Something was gnawing at my little green caterpillar insides.
My act of working extra to expand our budget was an "act of service" nobody cared for. Another Taja Mahal for the living which my Greek and Renaissance imaginary friends are loving me for but my internet-hungry family takes for snack food. My chrysalis is never going to come.
It's love to me to help someone else's dreams come true. To take their goals seriously and help them where you can. The least best thing you can do, in my love language, is to listen and remember what another person cares about even if you don't. But I told Mrs J.A.N. (Oh hell, Freud alert. That's my Mum's name!) anew of this goal, that I'd gone to extra effort to pay an extra bill, and she didn't remember. Did not listen. That, in Love Language #1 and Love Language #4 is large font Caps Lock-on DON'T LOVE YOU.
This happens far too often to she and I. The Five Love Languages book is more of a blessing than a curse. The curse is that she's read it and knows what message I am interpreting and that doesn't stop her blasting away anyhow. The blessing is that as my fuzzy wuzzy caterpillar organs are shredded, chrysalis future sold up the river, pain and grief receptors salted and UV irradiated I know that she didn't mean it like that. It was a typo, it was a misprint. It was an English as a Second Language student's unproofed first draft.
Friday, 12 October 2012
Alan Jones and the Christmas Peace
As Melbourne's Herald Sun correctly reports there was a great media war this week between old media and new media. Radio and internet. Old right-wing breakfast radio shock-jock Alan Jones had gone a bit far this time in his attack of the Prime Minister. Using social media one of the major replies came from journalist and academic Jenna Price.
Major online petition through Facebook and many interviews and comments into the mainstream media from Price also. This included her comments on Jones' radio station to one of his colleagues...
Let's focus on that. The rest I couldn't care less about these days. Shock jocks offended people in the past and will in the future, Just As Now. Radio station PR spin saved men like Jones in the past, it will again, Just Like Now. Their media spin force up against Jenna Price and pals is like Darth Vader in a lightsaber duel with Donald Duck: Short and conclusive with a fragrant ion wiff of burnt pillows.
Much more interesting is the way Ms Price talks about her kids. It's socially acceptable enough to her and to her interviewer to go by without comment. That her children, teenagers if I recall, will conjure insincere apologies to her in order to get off the hook. To an ear like mine that reveals a great deal about her parenting credibility at home and what her children have been trained to do in case of being confronted with "anything bad."
Time to tie this in with Knight N Daze latest post about domestic wars.
So very true. People cannot be soldiers and war if they have empathy. And that is why the Christmas Truce of 1914 had to be put down harshly. It is not possible to humanise your enemy, to feel for them, and also be able to hurt them. Quite the contrary, which is why Enemies of the State have been vilified in the past as Huns, terrorists, sambo, darky, wog, greaser, chink, gook, slope, camel jockey, nip, kraut, etc. Just as before, Just As Now.
When children learn to devalue others, they can devalue anyone, including their parents. For children to be using terms like those it shows that they have been trained. For children to be making false apologies out of fear in order to get away with something, especially if it's to their parent, it shows that they have been trained for war.
Knowing this and hopefully being at least a little convincing, I return to the beginning. Isn't it it an awful smoking gun that Jenna Price has said her children make insincere apologys to their mother?
Worse, she feels safe saying so in public without rebuke. Probably quite correctly, this post excepted. The fact she has this domestic problem is even used as a debating point that depends on others having this problem normalised too. Sad state of Australian values.
Finally, an open question. What might her reception of the wayward Alen Jones' apology really represent now we know this about her family?
Major online petition through Facebook and many interviews and comments into the mainstream media from Price also. This included her comments on Jones' radio station to one of his colleagues...
She said Jones' apology in the wake of his comments was "something like my own kids would make if they were trying to pretend they hadn't done anything bad".
Let's focus on that. The rest I couldn't care less about these days. Shock jocks offended people in the past and will in the future, Just As Now. Radio station PR spin saved men like Jones in the past, it will again, Just Like Now. Their media spin force up against Jenna Price and pals is like Darth Vader in a lightsaber duel with Donald Duck: Short and conclusive with a fragrant ion wiff of burnt pillows.
Much more interesting is the way Ms Price talks about her kids. It's socially acceptable enough to her and to her interviewer to go by without comment. That her children, teenagers if I recall, will conjure insincere apologies to her in order to get off the hook. To an ear like mine that reveals a great deal about her parenting credibility at home and what her children have been trained to do in case of being confronted with "anything bad."
Time to tie this in with Knight N Daze latest post about domestic wars.
I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.
And when you see your home as a war zone, the same things happen.
[...]
Your children, buckled and pleading, follow your instruction out of fear and apologise for being who they were born to be. You call it respect, and so will they and they'll forever confuse the two.
So very true. People cannot be soldiers and war if they have empathy. And that is why the Christmas Truce of 1914 had to be put down harshly. It is not possible to humanise your enemy, to feel for them, and also be able to hurt them. Quite the contrary, which is why Enemies of the State have been vilified in the past as Huns, terrorists, sambo, darky, wog, greaser, chink, gook, slope, camel jockey, nip, kraut, etc. Just as before, Just As Now.
When children learn to devalue others, they can devalue anyone, including their parents. For children to be using terms like those it shows that they have been trained. For children to be making false apologies out of fear in order to get away with something, especially if it's to their parent, it shows that they have been trained for war.
Knowing this and hopefully being at least a little convincing, I return to the beginning. Isn't it it an awful smoking gun that Jenna Price has said her children make insincere apologys to their mother?
Worse, she feels safe saying so in public without rebuke. Probably quite correctly, this post excepted. The fact she has this domestic problem is even used as a debating point that depends on others having this problem normalised too. Sad state of Australian values.
Finally, an open question. What might her reception of the wayward Alen Jones' apology really represent now we know this about her family?
Post 001
My dear partner Knight N Daze has her own blog where she writes about her everyday life in our family from a pleasingly philosophical and insightful vantage.
She also has a particular style where she seems to me to purchase clarity and brevity at the expense of greater depth and volume.
I like volume. There's so much to say and so very many connections to be made!
So here's what I feel this blogosphere needs. We need to augment and retrofit and sometimes counter the odd Knight N Daze blog post. And some other blogs which I'll pick up along the way too of course. And news stories. And my own experiences. And we need to do it with a rich mixture of my many influences. Here are some...
All of that and more. And especially from a Flintstones/Desmond Morris perspective as it turns out. I feel like running with a theme of how humans keep on making the same silly mistakes all the time. That we are, as Moris says, the "naked ape" and do, as the Flintstones show, basically still live as cavemen despite our modern technology [ref image above.] So that's my theme and purpose. Cue next post.
