Hello!
I've had a long and crazy day with Spawn.
Every Wednesday since fall, Spawn and I have gone for walks after I pick him up from preschool. At first, we just walked the length of the block from the preschool playground to the library. As he got stronger - and more interested in exploring - we started walking from school to the library to the local diner to pick up lunch before getting in our van that I had parked by the diner. This is around 4 city blocks total.
COVID has made this more interesting at times - the school has opened and closed as has the library and the diner - but we just kept trucking along.
Today, we decided to walk from school to the diner and back to the library. Spawn was strong enough to walk that far - around 6 city blocks with a long rest at the diner on a sunny front step - but we ran into a little snag. Spawn gets bored walking with his walker - but he's not quite steady enough on his feet to walk without one of my hands while I carry the walker in my other hand. There were also some uneven icy bits of the sidewalk where I needed to give him a bit of psychological support with my hands on the walker.
That worked fine when I had two free hands. On the way back to the van, though, I only had one free hand because our lunch was in a grocery bag in my other hand.
This lead to a memorable moment that reminded me of that logic problem where you have a coyote, a chicken and a bag of seeds that you have to take across a river in a rowboat with only room for one thing at a time.
I thought I had it worked out - walk Spawn to a clear part of the sidewalk, settle him in place, get walker and food, walk those to the next clear place, and repeat.
The only problem was that Spawn objected loudly and emotionally to my letting go of his hand. He was howling "NEED IT!" (e.g., he needed one of my hands for balance) while I chanted "Spawn, nothing bad is going to happen" a bit more firmly than I wanted to while carrying a walker and a grocery bag of lunch foods over uneven ice while he screamed bloody murder nearby on a clean, dry area of sidewalk.
I kept my sense of humor by thinking how grateful I was that he chose to scream "NEED IT!" unlike the time he screamed "HELP! HELP ME!" when I put him down once while loading the car for school. "NEED IT!" reads like the partial-nervous temper tantrum it was; "HELP ME!" might get some people to stop.
On the far side, Spawn perked up and said "Nothing bad happened! Mama, no bad!" I agreed and told him I was glad he had been brave. But we were still stuck with Mama having two hands and three items that needed to go in those hands.
Spawn's first solution was to have me walk on the farther left side of the side walk, dangling the grocery bag of food over the snow in my left hand while holding Spawn's right hand. Spawn walked close to me using his left hand in mine to brace while dragging his walker next to him using his right hand. This meant the walker took up most of the sidewalk, kept getting wheels hung up in the snow on the right side of the sidewalk, and took a crazy amount of effort for Spawn to move.
Then Spawn figured something out. He was completely over walking IN his walker - you know, the way PTs expect you to use it, silly PTs...... - but the walker has a nice bar across the back that he could use to push the walker in front of him for stability! He strutted the last block or so pushing his walker in front of him to the visible amusement of various people driving down the road.
I wish I had gotten a picture - it looked a bit like the walker was possessed and scooting in front of Spawn - but I really did not have a free hand to pull out a camera, lol.
We're working our way steadily through the fourteenth chapter of Jasmine Baucham's "Joyfully At Home". The first two posts have been about why women don't need to go to college - while mentioning that Jasmine is, in fact, going to college. This next quote made a ton of sense to Miss Baucham at age 19 - but hasn't aged well:
Here we go!
I have no problems with young adults wanting to maintain the discipleship of both of their parents - but "the protection of their father?"
There's two ways that can go.
The first toxic way that this can go is a generalized obsession with keeping women under a male family member as spiritual head at all times. This is a way of infantilizing women to keep them submissive to their fathers and eventually to their husbands. The problem with this is that this supremely patriarchal-family structure does not have much support in the Bible. There are plenty of women in the Bible who exist outside of the correct family structure like Deborah, Esther, Ruth, and Mary. More broadly, even in patriarchal societies, there are wide swaths of female decision making within a home and family. A young women needs to figure out how to structure her time somehow and avoid sin; that's not magically going to get easier with a husband and children.
The second, more fantastical way that "the protection of the father" can go toxic, is when the family is living in a group delusion about the relative danger of outsiders. Geoffrey Botkin taught his teenage daughters that rapists lurk around every corner so the girls had to be armed and accompanied by a brother at all times. This comes up in several of their free podcasts, blog articles and their book "So Much More". The Botkin expect a level of physical and sexual aggression seen in active war-zones and occupied countries, not in stable communities. Voddie Baucham seems to agree with that on some level since he declares that husbands should be "priests, prophets, protectors and providers" - which seems to be a lot to drop on the shoulders of one guy, IMHO. As a form of family structure, it's fairly anti-Biblical. Precious few families had enough income to keep the women members of their family safely ensconced at home all of the time. Most women had to venture out into public places to fetch water, provision their family or work for more wealthy families.
I appreciate all my parents have taught me - but my parents had me solidly versed in the basics of running a household by the time I was 18. Simply, we have so many labor saving devices - washing machine, dryer, refrigerator, microwave - and so many consumer goods - clothing, household goods, packaged foods - that running a household is far more manageable now than it has ever been.
In terms of learning about child-rearing and homeschooling, both of those have a large element of learning on the job with your children. I helped care for my nephew for a few weeks after he was born right around the time I got pregnant with Spawn. Being around a baby a lot helped me feel more confident about my own caretaking skills - but this took around two weeks of a few hours a day help, not multiple years.
How should moms learn how to home-school? Honestly, they should to college and get at least an elementary school teacher's degree. That will at least expose them to the basics of lesson planning, child development, and some methodology for teaching math, reading and writing.
Jasmine Baucham keeps bringing up the false dichotomy of "traveling really far away to go to college" vs. "doing all your classes online at home". Many, many college students live at home while commuting to college. Relatively few students travel outside of the state that their parents live in for college. In 2014, 58% of college students attend college within 100 miles of their hometown and 72% live within the same state.
If living at home is so common, why is Jasmine spouting this myth? Primarily because she has no way of knowing any different than what her dad told her.
Why did her dad teach her a false idea about college attendance while living at home? Well, the real danger of attending college in person is spending time around other peers. Ironically, the biggest danger isn't from the students who are partying hard in college. No, the danger is the nice, clean-cut members of various campus Christian groups who will tell the super-sheltered homeschoolers that their parents views are completely insane.
I've always wanted to be a wife and mother. I didn't date much from high school through my second or third year of teaching because I was getting my career in order. When I was 26 or so, I realized that I wasn't putting any effort into finding someone to start a family with. After a few false starts and a lot of first dates that went nowhere, I found my husband and eventually we had Spawn.
When I was in high school, I thought a lot about what I wanted out of life - and I decided that I couldn't be certain that I'd get married. I wanted to get married. I knew that I had an excellent chance of getting married and having children based on statistics alone - but I also knew that not everyone marries. Not everyone who wants to marry does. Not everyone who wants children has them.
The question that was starting me in the face was "What do I want my life to look like if, for reasons beyond my control, I am single my whole life?" (I had already hashed out that I wanted kids in my life if I had a husband. If not biological, then adopted or foster. That was a non-negotiable for me)
The simple answer is that I wanted a career that mattered. I wanted to help people learn about science because I found science absolutely fascinating. I didn't think I was up for raising a child by myself - but as a teacher I could raise a lot of students a little bit.
Being a stay-at-home daughter was not an option - thank God! Honestly, though, the thought of the lives of most of the adult women who are stay-at-home daughters after 25 years old in households wealthy enough that they aren't needed to work scares me. Running my own home is satisfying if exasperating at times; being the parlor maid-nursery maid-go-fer in my parents' home until someone marries me sounds like hell.
Monday, February 8, 2021
Wednesday, February 3, 2021
Maxwell Mania: Oh, the Idolatry!
Hello!
Occasionally, I dig through the archives of Titus 2 to see if I've missed any interesting posts. This post caught my attention because the title "Guarding Hearts - A Real-Life Situation" made me think it was about how to court while focusing on emotional purity - that weird tenet of Christian Patriarchy/Quiverfull (CP/QF) that says that falling in love to someone you don't marry is equally horrible as having sex outside of marriage.
(For clarity, I don't view either as a bad thing - but CP/QF treats premarital sex with a level of horror that most people save for pre-meditated murder.)
Oddly enough, the blurb was far stranger than anything I expected.
While at the zoo with his family, Steven Maxwell noticed some videos for sale:
Steven Maxwell has launched an entire ministry based on restricting his family's access to anything that Maxwell feels is not religious enough. Practically, that means that anything that limits Maxwell's ability to micromanage the lives of his kids is out. Most memorably, Maxwell turned into a crying mess while taking Nathan and Christopher out for ice-cream as preteens as he declared that no one in the family could take part in organized sports anymore. Maxwell was mostly worked up about the fact that his children were getting to know peers who had not been vetted by Maxwell himself and there also seemed to be some jealousy that the boys enjoyed being around the coach.
On the flip side, activities that Steven likes are allowed. The family runs because Maxwell runs. Maxwell approves of at-home weightlifting and body weight exercises so those are ok. Every year, the Maxwells decamp to Colorado and walk up some 8,000 foot mountains because Steve likes mountain climbing.
So, if Steven is allowed to buy two videos about a non-religious activity that is not related to his career for "educational purposes" - is that allowed for the rest of the family? Could Terri buy a set of videos about household organization which seems to be a hobby of hers? Could Sarah buy videos about world renowned botanical gardens? Even as I write these, though, the hypocrisy is obvious. The rest of the family is not allowed to have interests that Steven doesn't personally approve of - but his whims are educational.
The Maxwells take sheltering to extremes.
In homeschooling history, the Maxwells remove or black-out any section mentioning non-Christian religions. Their theory, such as it is, is that learning about other religions is the exact same thing as idolatry - or maybe it's the first step to becoming an idolater.
That rationale would not hold up against any scrutiny. The Bible is filled with allusions to other co -existing religions in the same area. When old Testament prophets rail against Baal, that implies that Jewish people in that area knew who Baal was. In Jesus' time, Greek and Roman culture was so prominent in the area that observant Jews knew that Greeks and Romans were polytheists.
No, the standard for idolatry is actively worshipping another God - and watching a documentary where a few minutes of time includes Sherpas praying is well-below that standard.
Steven mentions that the youngest kids are in bed - but the older kids are watching with him. How old do you think those kids are based on this next section?
I mean, he could have fallen to his knees and screamed "Oh, the idolatry! Why, God? WHY?" before ripping the power cord from the wall, too - but why sound overwrought when prim will do?
Let me suggest why he didn't turn the TV off.
Jumping off the couch and turning off a video while saying, " Children, cover your ears! We must not pollute our hearts with such heathen things!" followed by a 30 minute Bible lecture flies reasonably well when the audience is elementary school aged and the content being avoided is overt sexuality, drugs, or violence - like a Tarantino film or porn.
Doing the same thing while watching the 1998 released film "Everest" in April of 1999 with Nathan, age 22, Christopher, age 20 and 17-year old Sarah makes him look crazy - even to his less-sheltered older crew.
The amount of Tibetan Buddhism that "the kids" saw in the movie was small. The film looks respectfully at the practices of the Sherpas who are on the mountain - but the movie doesn't go into any real depth about the tenets or beliefs of the religion. From what I remember, viewers get the idea that the Sherpa are devout, have a variety of prayer methods built into Tibetan life, and maybe understand that the Sherpa build areas for prayer at base-camp.
And honestly, I'm probably overestimating the amount of understanding the Maxwell "children" walked away with because I am interested in high altitude climbing as something I read about - and I've read as much as I can get my hands on about the cultures in the areas that climbing occurs. Because of that, I recognize prayer wheels, wind horses, and prayer symbols. In "Everest", we see the climbers get covered in flour by the Sherpas by one of their prayer altars. What I didn't know when I watched it - but learned later - is being covered in flour is part of a blessing asking that you survive to old age. Since flour makes hair look white-gray and fades skin color like aging, it's a very literal demonstration of what the Sherpas are praying for. It is deeply moving and caring.
And if the representation of Tibetan Buddhism is anything like the occasional forms of Catholicism that you see tangentially in documentary moves, we've probably focused too much on non-essentials and missed entire important areas of Tibetan Buddhism.
It's certainly not enough information for any of the 'kids' to launch into being a practicing Buddhist which is the minimum requirement to reach the "Thou shall not have any other gods but Me" level of idolary.
Fun fact: It's nearly 22 years later - and none of those three kids has jumped the fence and broken with the Maxwell's belief system - although Nathan's kids are being raised in a slightly more stylish fashion than he was.
Amusingly, two of the sleeping kids - Joseph and Jesse - have broken important Maxwell doctrines of "Thou shall live in our neighborhood" and "Thou shall never live in an apartment".
So maybe watching this video had no strong negative effect on the "kiddos".
The one thing I'm sure of: Sarah's life would be a bit easier if Maxwell watched the rest of that second movie. Sarah suffers from acute mountain sickness (AMS) in the form of nasty headaches with nausea at a fairly low altitude and has been stuck at their vacation rental for several years while the rest of the clan hikes a 8,000 footer.
Maybe watching a video about the serious biological basis of AMS - and the ability of AMS to worsen rapidly - would have convinced Maxwell to find a different vacation destination that all of his family could enjoy.
Or not. Maxwell is the only one who really matters, right?
Monday, February 1, 2021
Maxwell Mania: Ragging on Baggers
Hello!
While I greatly enjoy teaching, I have spent an equal amount of my working life in retail. When I was 16, I got my first job as a bagger at a large regional grocery chain. Bagging is a horrible job. The main problem with bagging is the stultifying boredom of putting groceries in a bag for hours at a time. There's relatively little mental or physical challenge to the job after the first month of learning how to bag.
About the only thing that breaks up the monotony is the sporadic angry customer. Occasionally, the customer has a genuine gripe - like when the bagger crushes their bread. Equally frequently, though, the customer either created the problem themselves by crushing the bread themselves - tossing a heavy purse randomly in the cart will do that - or by having major control issues. Yes, I'm thinking of the woman who chewed me out because the items were not bagged in the exact order that she placed them on the belt. That interaction holds a special place in my heart because after she went on for a bit I looked at her innocently and said "So - you wanted the eggs and bread under the canned goods. Got it. Will do." That seemed to shake something free in her brain that caused her to realize how bat-shit crazy her plan was...
Honestly, though, I have fond memories of "bag in the correct order, peon!" lady because I doubt she's slandering me on the interwebs to drum up sales for her vanity press ministry. That slimy job was left to Steven Maxwell who is back to maligning essential workers behind their backs. These quotes are from the article titled "Addictive" published on December 16, 2020.
First, there's no way that Steve Maxwell has sat down and worked out what a representative sampling of baggers from Dillion's Food Store, Price Chopper, and Eddie's Grocery Store should look like - let alone the Sam's Club or whatever wholesale club shopping experience they belong to is. Saying that he's found that all baggers are gamers is pretty unbelievable -and should be backed up with something more solid than "well, that's what I've noticed."
Second, even if the Maxwells are doing once-a-month style shopping, the total amount of time that Steve has to talk to the bagger is 5-10 minutes max. If he is running out more often, the cart size gets smaller and the amount of time to talk to a bagger drops to 3 minutes or less. When you have 3 minutes to greet a customer, ask if they want plastic or paper, bag the groceries and load them in the cart, you don't have time for very in-depth topics of conversation. Discussions about gaming work well for that time-frame because it's reasonably high interest and low controversy. Other similar topics include "your child is so cute!" and "I wanted to try (hold up item of interest) - want to tell me about it?"
Third - and this one should be obvious to Maxwell because he worked at a corporate company for decades - grocery store workers are at work. When at work, employees are not supposed to use company time to convert people over to their form of Christianity. If you started using "The Good Person Test" so beloved by the Maxwells, you'd rapidly be put on a performance improvement plan - e.g., stop it or you'd be fired. This is completely legal because the First Amendment prevents the government from interfering with religion; employers are legally allowed to prevent employees from converting people on the clock. As far as I know, each of those baggers might spend all of their free time hitting up random strangers to do "The Good Person Test" - but Maxwell should never be able to tell that from their discussions at the store.
Fourth, Maxwell has three adult daughters who are unable to support themselves independently - so I'm not sure where he gets off ragging on baggers who use their wages to buy video games instead of using their wages to buy fancy coffees, long running skirts, paying for illustrations for vanity press novels or drawing materials. The Maxwell daughters were raised to be wives and mothers, but Maxwell has failed miserably at getting any of his daughters married. Maxwell sees the baggers as unambitious and drifting - but the same words describe his three adult daughters who hold down two part-time jobs in their brother's companies between the three of them. Most adult women would need to do some serious rearranging of job and household duties to support a sister-in-law's five young children while she underwent chemo in a different state - but the Maxwell sisters were ready because they have no particularly important roles in any place.
This next section makes Maxwell look like a dick:
How long do you, dear reader, think I was a bagger?
If you guessed two years, you are right!
I started bagging at 16 because it was one of the only jobs available to a minor. I could not be a cashier before age 18 because my store sold alcohol and tobacco products. Legally, only adults can handle alcohol and tobacco sales so no minor aged cashiers.
Cashiering and working a department - which often has the same age-restriction due to using cardboard bailers and trash compactors - are far more mentally challenging and sometimes physically challenging compared to bagging. Most baggers who don't quit to get a better job at a different employer at age 18 transfer into either cashiering for a higher wage or a department for less customer service and more freedom.
Why, then, would a man in his twenties be bagging at a grocery store?
I can think of two reasons.
The more palatable reason - e.g., the one that makes Maxwell look like less of an ass - is that the bagger's main job is somewhere else in the store and he's filling in as a bagger because of high customer volume or unusually high absenteeism. At the store where I work right now, we have various people whose main job is to help with loading customers' cars and bringing in carts who are called "Lot associates" or "lot guys". When it's busy, though, nearly anyone in the store who doesn't have a lifting restriction can be helping load large orders or wrangling carts back into the store.
So the bagger Maxwell is ragging on may well be relatively high up in the store leadership and Maxwell just hasn't seen him as the receiving supervisor or grocery area manager since most of that work happens out of view of the customers. A frequent customer asked me one time who the new employee who helped me load her car was. I replied "My boss' boss. He's nice."
The less palatable reason - and the more frequent occurrence - is that the bagger has a cognitive functioning limitation from a disability that makes cashiering or working a department impossible. Every large retail store I've worked at has one or more associates who are excellent employees when doing repetitive jobs with low autonomy - bagging, lot associate, janitorial work - but is unable to do the faster paced and more abstract thinking required to cashier or function within the relatively high autonomy areas of a department.
When I read that section, I feel like Maxwell is taking cheap shots at a guy with a disability. Part of the reason I think that is that the adult-aged bagger told Maxwell the name AND the price of the game. In US middle class culture, people avoid talking directly about money like the plague - so telling a customer the price of something the bagger bought feels like the bagger might not be functioning the same way as the 'average' person. I can think of three former coworkers who did slightly off things like that; one survived a severe head injury in a car accident, one had high-functioning autism, and one had a mild cognitive impairment.
I wonder if Maxwell would be so blasé about that bagger if he realized that his daughters will likely be coworkers of that man when Maxwell dies or the family's money starts running out. Asking Nathan and Joseph to make up jobs for Sarah, Anna and Mary is a hard ask - especially since the girls have spent the last decade waiting to get married instead of doing any kind of employment training. On the flip side, I can't imagine trying to fill out an application for a retail or fast food job for any of the girls let alone making up a resume; they don't have any non-family work experience!
I wonder if Maxwell has ever heard of the saying that "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones......:
If you guessed two years, you are right!
I started bagging at 16 because it was one of the only jobs available to a minor. I could not be a cashier before age 18 because my store sold alcohol and tobacco products. Legally, only adults can handle alcohol and tobacco sales so no minor aged cashiers.
Cashiering and working a department - which often has the same age-restriction due to using cardboard bailers and trash compactors - are far more mentally challenging and sometimes physically challenging compared to bagging. Most baggers who don't quit to get a better job at a different employer at age 18 transfer into either cashiering for a higher wage or a department for less customer service and more freedom.
Why, then, would a man in his twenties be bagging at a grocery store?
I can think of two reasons.
The more palatable reason - e.g., the one that makes Maxwell look like less of an ass - is that the bagger's main job is somewhere else in the store and he's filling in as a bagger because of high customer volume or unusually high absenteeism. At the store where I work right now, we have various people whose main job is to help with loading customers' cars and bringing in carts who are called "Lot associates" or "lot guys". When it's busy, though, nearly anyone in the store who doesn't have a lifting restriction can be helping load large orders or wrangling carts back into the store.
So the bagger Maxwell is ragging on may well be relatively high up in the store leadership and Maxwell just hasn't seen him as the receiving supervisor or grocery area manager since most of that work happens out of view of the customers. A frequent customer asked me one time who the new employee who helped me load her car was. I replied "My boss' boss. He's nice."
The less palatable reason - and the more frequent occurrence - is that the bagger has a cognitive functioning limitation from a disability that makes cashiering or working a department impossible. Every large retail store I've worked at has one or more associates who are excellent employees when doing repetitive jobs with low autonomy - bagging, lot associate, janitorial work - but is unable to do the faster paced and more abstract thinking required to cashier or function within the relatively high autonomy areas of a department.
When I read that section, I feel like Maxwell is taking cheap shots at a guy with a disability. Part of the reason I think that is that the adult-aged bagger told Maxwell the name AND the price of the game. In US middle class culture, people avoid talking directly about money like the plague - so telling a customer the price of something the bagger bought feels like the bagger might not be functioning the same way as the 'average' person. I can think of three former coworkers who did slightly off things like that; one survived a severe head injury in a car accident, one had high-functioning autism, and one had a mild cognitive impairment.
I wonder if Maxwell would be so blasé about that bagger if he realized that his daughters will likely be coworkers of that man when Maxwell dies or the family's money starts running out. Asking Nathan and Joseph to make up jobs for Sarah, Anna and Mary is a hard ask - especially since the girls have spent the last decade waiting to get married instead of doing any kind of employment training. On the flip side, I can't imagine trying to fill out an application for a retail or fast food job for any of the girls let alone making up a resume; they don't have any non-family work experience!
I wonder if Maxwell has ever heard of the saying that "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones......:
Saturday, January 30, 2021
Joyfully At Home: Chapter Fourteen - Part Two
Hello!
I spent the morning digging out our driveway from the blown snow left by the last snowstorm. The storm was during low temperatures - under 20 degrees F - so the snow is very powdery. Combined with continual winds, I think most of the snow from our front yard and back yard was blown into the driveway where it was trapped in the depressions of the two-tracks. I giggled a bit to see lightly snow-covered grass in the front yard and 6" of snow in the driveway.
It helped that there was a pretty sunrise and a group of foraging juncos chirping happily in long-grass area behind our backyard.
We are working our way through the questions posed by Jasmine Baucham in the fourteenth chapter of "Joyfully At Home". The first section we looked at had Jasmine explaining her dad's beliefs about college degrees and me discussing how erroneous those beliefs were.
In the next section, Jasmine explains what greatly important things she was doing while being a stay-at-home daughter:
I have a question.
How could Jasmine work full-time for her father as a research assistant for two years to produce a book that has seven footnotes and one paragraph length quote from an outside work in the first two chapters?
"What He Must Be....If He Wants to Marry My Daughter" by Voddie Baucham shows more signs of scholarship than most CP/QF works, but that's a far cry from the length and depth of academic works cited in a book that had a full-time research assistant working on it for two years.
Assuming a 40 hour work week with two weeks of vacation a year, Jasmine would have spent 4,000 hours compiling and extracting research notes from books and articles. That's what the job of a real research assistant would look like. Instead, I suspect Jasmine read books and discussed a lot of ideas with her dad - which is legitimately helpful - but not at the amount of time or intensity required by an outside employer.
I suspect that in part because her description of her own role has three references to being household help - household assistant, brother-wrangler, sous chef - and one reference to being an office assistant which is a different job title than research assistant.
I feel like a lot of SAHDs are a bit hazy on what full time employment means in the larger world. It's at least 32 hours of work a week, but 40 hours of work per week. The details vary quite a bit - but real jobs make multi-tasking between child-care, household chores and the minutia of the job damn near impossible. That's not because child-care and household work isn't work - but rather because it is!
I just have a hard time imagining that Jasmine at 18 was able to block out eight hours a day where she was working solely on collecting materials for her father's book without being available for taking care of her 6 younger siblings or doing one of the many chores required in a family with a lot of small children under foot.
This next section shows how Jasmine can miss the point of a complement:
A person compliments Jasmine on doing an online degree - and Jasmine immediately claps back with the fact that most college kids are immature so more of them should study at home with their parents.
That feels like a major over-reach based on CP/QF myths about college students rather than an experience-based discussion of the merits of different methods of learning.
Doing entirely online classes are hard for many different reasons.
First, entirely online learners miss many of the unspoken benefits of in-person classes. Humans learn better when they feel like part of a community and showing up in person to a classroom with other students builds community. Being physically present among other students makes planning for study groups much more simple. Students remind each other directly and indirectly of assignments that are due soon and tests that are coming up. Instructors and students also tend to interact more when placed in a room together.
Second, entirely online learners miss benefits accrued from being on a college campus. CP/QF fearmongers make college campuses sound like a giant drug-fueled orgy - but that's not the main drift of campus life let alone the academic center of colleges. Physically being present on a college campus allows spontaneous synchronous communication on top of planned online interactions. I cannot count the number of thought-provoking conversations I've had with professors while helping take-down a lab, walking to or from a presentation, or by just stopping in during office hours. Similarly, getting academic help can be easier because students have online options for contacting professors or tutors - but they also have access to office hours and drop-in tutoring labs. In the same theme, there's an added convenience of having rapid access in person to the library, academic counseling and financial counseling that is simply not as rapidly available online.
Much of this was doubly true when older members of the CP/QF generation - like Sarah (Mally) Hancock and Sarah Maxwell - were college-aged. When we were college-aged, we could use the internet to search for references but still needed to write out interlibrary loan slips by hand. I would then receive a photocopy of the article in a week or so. Honestly, I was just grateful that I didn't have to do research using a card catalog!
College is challenging; online college is more challenging. The fact that young Jasmine couldn't clearly describe why people kept complimenting her on choosing a more challenging road shows how sheltered she was from the reality of why people do college classes on campus.
Tuesday, January 26, 2021
The Battle Of Peer Dependency: Chapter Four - Part Twelve
Hello!
I'm sitting on the couch with my favorite tiny person who has a snow day from school today. We're in the middle of an expected snowfall of 3-5" which isn't terribly unusual, but there is a high wind that makes the 26 degree F temperature feel much, much colder.
Spawn's ok with having a day off of school while we watch "train crossing" videos on YouTube. He was decidedly more sad when school closed unexpectedly - from a preschooler's point of view - due to COVID for three weeks. Spawn turned four during the COVID closure and he missed his friends from school. Every day, Spawn would ask about various classmates. "Is Travis at home?" "Is Cici with her grandmother? "Is Izzie playing with her siblings?" Thanks to a weekly class meeting through Google Classrooms, Spawn got to see most of his classmates on the computer - although that was a bit of a mixed blessing. One day, Izzie got a hold of a cookie and half the class declared that they wanted a cookie as well. Suddenly, four moms were trying to explain that just because Izzie has a particularly desirable type of cookie in her hand doesn't mean that we have that kind of cookie at home, too.
Reviewing Marina Sears' "The Battle of Peer Dependency" has made me more aware of my son's budding interest in his peers.
And, in a very strange alignment of events, I am currently reading a book on the short lives of the Romanov sisters Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia.
My son is having a pretty standard American childhood - or as standard as possible during a pandemic - where I expect that he'll have some number of friends who are not members of the immediate family.
The Romanov sisters, on the other hand, had very limited interaction with people their own age. Some of the restriction was for safety reasons; assassination was a serious threat to any member of the government and Imperial Family - and a frequent use of bombing created a high risk of injury or death to the daughters despite their very distant chance of ever ascending the Imperial throne. Some of the restriction was due to be members of a royal family; princesses couldn't associate with just any local kid. Some of the restrictions were due to the personalities of the Tsar and Tsarina; Tsarina Alexandra shared a common personality trait with her grandmother Queen Victoria that made Tsarina Alexandra extremely attached to her husband and often refused to let people outside the immediate family spend much time with him or her children. Finally - and in hindsight, most damaging to the family - was Tsarina Alexandra's sheltering of her children from the worldliness of Russian nobility.
When the daughters were children, having the four of them born in six years meant that they were not unduly lonely. The daughters, though, became more and more fascinated by any young person they met as they matured into school girls and young teens. Their lives were so circumscribed that several young women of minor nobility or acceptably wealthy families wrote about how grateful that they were that they had far more freedom than the Imperial daughters.
I was strongly reminded of the Romanov daughters asking detailed questions about what going to school was like or what it was like playing with neighbors when I re-read this section from the fourth chapter of the book:
Back in 2003, I was a camp counselor at a camp for at-risk kids in poverty located on Lake Michigan. At the time, I spent most of the summer completely exhausted and overwhelmed by caring for a cabin of girls for 5 or 9 days at a time while planning workshops.
I don't know that I'd ever do it again - it was physically and emotionally exhausting when I was in my early 20's - but I also met a group of awesome counselors and very cool campers as well.
When I read this, I honestly wonder how much of the Sears' children's excitement was from being around workers their own age for a full week. Pre-teens, teenagers and young adults are primed to spend far more time around peers than they are around young kids or older adults. This is a positive, universal development milestone rather than a sign of moral weakness as the CP/QF crowd declares. Teenagers are going to be finding spouses among peers. They are going to be making future business connections among peers. The people with who they will be raising their children will be their peers - not people of their parents' generation.
The funny bit about this section is that Sears undermines her own premise about peer-to-peer relationships. Remember, Christian Patriarchy/Quiverfull often teaches that families with lots of kids don't need outside friendships - and that outside friendships without excessive family oversight will lead immediately to sinful behavior. Presumably, many of the 25 workers were teens or young single adults - but the world didn't end. In fact, it sounds like those teenagers got a whole lot of work done as a group - and I've seen that happen in a wide variety of setting with teens as well.
Throughout this book, I've noticed that Marina Sears would be a nightmare to have in a playgroup since she's got a very rigid, very uncompromising set of views about how everyone else should raise their children - and she doesn't want your failure of children around her children who she is frog-marching to be soldiers for Christ, thank you very much.
I picked this next quote to show why she has no adult friends either:
Having close friends outside of your marriage is not a threat to your marriage - but expecting your spouse to fill every personal need is.
There are entire topics of importance to me as a woman that my husband has no practical life experience in. For example, I keep my hair in a variety of lengths and styles depending on ever-changing seasonal needs and personal whims. My husband will tell me that he really likes how my hair looks - but he's of no help for situations like "I have a wedding this weekend and my hair is at a weird length. I need up-do ideas right now."
Two years ago, I traveled with my husband to a family wedding. The wedding was in mid-spring - but the weather was unseasonably hot and humid. This meant I needed an up-do to stay sane - but I was struggling to get a reasonably finished look. I kept having strands of hair drop out of the hairstyle....and with my arrow-straight hair, that looks sloppy rather than artistic or cute. With the help of $10 of emergency hair accessories and a ton of hair spray, I managed to wrestle my hair into a French twist and trap it against my head using two combs attached to either ends of an elastic beaded web.
The top of the twist did have the ends of my hair sticking out and looked odd to me. I turned to my husband who was putting his shoes on and asked "Does this hairstyle look ok for an adult woman at a wedding rather than like a college kid?"
My husband turned about five shades paler as he blurted out "I don't know!"
At the exact same moment, I replied, "Sorry. Wrong person to ask."
We both laughed pretty hard - and a female family friend I ran into before the wedding told me my hair looked fine.
And even that points out the difference.
My husband appreciates my hair and makes me want to feel good - so he compliments my hair as pretty. My female friend understands that there are entire societal situational rules about appropriate hairstyles for women - and so she let me know that my hair was fine (e.g., appropriate for the situation).
It's sad that Marina Sears doesn't recognize the difference herself.
I'm sitting on the couch with my favorite tiny person who has a snow day from school today. We're in the middle of an expected snowfall of 3-5" which isn't terribly unusual, but there is a high wind that makes the 26 degree F temperature feel much, much colder.
Spawn's ok with having a day off of school while we watch "train crossing" videos on YouTube. He was decidedly more sad when school closed unexpectedly - from a preschooler's point of view - due to COVID for three weeks. Spawn turned four during the COVID closure and he missed his friends from school. Every day, Spawn would ask about various classmates. "Is Travis at home?" "Is Cici with her grandmother? "Is Izzie playing with her siblings?" Thanks to a weekly class meeting through Google Classrooms, Spawn got to see most of his classmates on the computer - although that was a bit of a mixed blessing. One day, Izzie got a hold of a cookie and half the class declared that they wanted a cookie as well. Suddenly, four moms were trying to explain that just because Izzie has a particularly desirable type of cookie in her hand doesn't mean that we have that kind of cookie at home, too.
Reviewing Marina Sears' "The Battle of Peer Dependency" has made me more aware of my son's budding interest in his peers.
And, in a very strange alignment of events, I am currently reading a book on the short lives of the Romanov sisters Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia.
My son is having a pretty standard American childhood - or as standard as possible during a pandemic - where I expect that he'll have some number of friends who are not members of the immediate family.
The Romanov sisters, on the other hand, had very limited interaction with people their own age. Some of the restriction was for safety reasons; assassination was a serious threat to any member of the government and Imperial Family - and a frequent use of bombing created a high risk of injury or death to the daughters despite their very distant chance of ever ascending the Imperial throne. Some of the restriction was due to be members of a royal family; princesses couldn't associate with just any local kid. Some of the restrictions were due to the personalities of the Tsar and Tsarina; Tsarina Alexandra shared a common personality trait with her grandmother Queen Victoria that made Tsarina Alexandra extremely attached to her husband and often refused to let people outside the immediate family spend much time with him or her children. Finally - and in hindsight, most damaging to the family - was Tsarina Alexandra's sheltering of her children from the worldliness of Russian nobility.
When the daughters were children, having the four of them born in six years meant that they were not unduly lonely. The daughters, though, became more and more fascinated by any young person they met as they matured into school girls and young teens. Their lives were so circumscribed that several young women of minor nobility or acceptably wealthy families wrote about how grateful that they were that they had far more freedom than the Imperial daughters.
I was strongly reminded of the Romanov daughters asking detailed questions about what going to school was like or what it was like playing with neighbors when I re-read this section from the fourth chapter of the book:
Back in 2003, I was a camp counselor at a camp for at-risk kids in poverty located on Lake Michigan. At the time, I spent most of the summer completely exhausted and overwhelmed by caring for a cabin of girls for 5 or 9 days at a time while planning workshops.
I don't know that I'd ever do it again - it was physically and emotionally exhausting when I was in my early 20's - but I also met a group of awesome counselors and very cool campers as well.
When I read this, I honestly wonder how much of the Sears' children's excitement was from being around workers their own age for a full week. Pre-teens, teenagers and young adults are primed to spend far more time around peers than they are around young kids or older adults. This is a positive, universal development milestone rather than a sign of moral weakness as the CP/QF crowd declares. Teenagers are going to be finding spouses among peers. They are going to be making future business connections among peers. The people with who they will be raising their children will be their peers - not people of their parents' generation.
The funny bit about this section is that Sears undermines her own premise about peer-to-peer relationships. Remember, Christian Patriarchy/Quiverfull often teaches that families with lots of kids don't need outside friendships - and that outside friendships without excessive family oversight will lead immediately to sinful behavior. Presumably, many of the 25 workers were teens or young single adults - but the world didn't end. In fact, it sounds like those teenagers got a whole lot of work done as a group - and I've seen that happen in a wide variety of setting with teens as well.
Throughout this book, I've noticed that Marina Sears would be a nightmare to have in a playgroup since she's got a very rigid, very uncompromising set of views about how everyone else should raise their children - and she doesn't want your failure of children around her children who she is frog-marching to be soldiers for Christ, thank you very much.
I picked this next quote to show why she has no adult friends either:
Having close friends outside of your marriage is not a threat to your marriage - but expecting your spouse to fill every personal need is.
There are entire topics of importance to me as a woman that my husband has no practical life experience in. For example, I keep my hair in a variety of lengths and styles depending on ever-changing seasonal needs and personal whims. My husband will tell me that he really likes how my hair looks - but he's of no help for situations like "I have a wedding this weekend and my hair is at a weird length. I need up-do ideas right now."
Two years ago, I traveled with my husband to a family wedding. The wedding was in mid-spring - but the weather was unseasonably hot and humid. This meant I needed an up-do to stay sane - but I was struggling to get a reasonably finished look. I kept having strands of hair drop out of the hairstyle....and with my arrow-straight hair, that looks sloppy rather than artistic or cute. With the help of $10 of emergency hair accessories and a ton of hair spray, I managed to wrestle my hair into a French twist and trap it against my head using two combs attached to either ends of an elastic beaded web.
The top of the twist did have the ends of my hair sticking out and looked odd to me. I turned to my husband who was putting his shoes on and asked "Does this hairstyle look ok for an adult woman at a wedding rather than like a college kid?"
My husband turned about five shades paler as he blurted out "I don't know!"
At the exact same moment, I replied, "Sorry. Wrong person to ask."
We both laughed pretty hard - and a female family friend I ran into before the wedding told me my hair looked fine.
And even that points out the difference.
My husband appreciates my hair and makes me want to feel good - so he compliments my hair as pretty. My female friend understands that there are entire societal situational rules about appropriate hairstyles for women - and so she let me know that my hair was fine (e.g., appropriate for the situation).
It's sad that Marina Sears doesn't recognize the difference herself.
Tuesday, January 19, 2021
Babbling Botkin: Last Leadership Memo to the President - Part Three
I am wiped out today!
My husband and I own an old farmhouse that a previous owner decorated with lashings of 1960's-style wood paneling.
I don't like wood paneling - but taking it out seemed like a massive undertaking so I learned to tolerate it.
Not long before my son was born, my sister-in-law pointed out that painting the wood paneling would change the look a lot. In fact, her really cute house had previously had similar dark wood paneling - and adding some soft pastel colors made it look much lighter and brighter.
I've been a bit busy in the intervening four years, but I always planned to take on that paneling - and today was the day! The center hallway of house had poor lighting, no windows and the dark paneling absorbed whatever light made it into the area.
Now, I painted the central hallway and the staircase in off-white semi-gloss. As a paint associate, I know that flat paint is in - but I like the shine of glossy paint, plus I like the increased durability of the higher gloss paints. There is so much more light in that area - and I haven't seen it in daylight when the light enters through the window at the top of the stair!
Let's see if I can write this before I fall asleep :-).
We are at the final installation reviewing Geoffrey Botkin's video, "My Last Leadership Memo to the President. Maybe." I must admit the title is catchy in its brazen refusal to admit the obvious that Trump is leaving office on January 20th and will not be coming back.
The first part of the review featured Botkin attempting to convince the President that he and his family would be assassinated if they left office. Personally, I think running his own personal family cult for the last 10 years or so has made Botkin sloppy. He's kept his daughters under his thumb by teaching them that the world is filled with rapists who will attack them if they go to the grocery store alone and unarmed in the middle of the morning - but that kind of insane hype is hard to pull off with people who interact with other adult humans. I find Trump to be quite credulous if information is combined with praise - but he's nearly impervious to things he does not want to hear. I doubt he wants to hear that unnamed people are out to get him from a random nobody.
The second part of the review is a historically inaccurate review of Nicholas II's reign and abdication. It's fascinating that the historical person Botkin thinks Trump has most to learn from is Nicholas II - the last ruler of an authoritarian hereditary monarchy. Botkin has always espoused strange views on governance that combine a very strong, heavy-handed government based on Leviticus for people who disagree with him - while still wanting the small, weak, local governance of Botkin's personal life espoused by Libertarians. Those two governance types seem like a paradox - but that section made it clear for the rest of us: Botkin wants to be a authoritarian monarch. In that system, he can punish anyone he wants while being above punishment - let alone criticized.
Most of the previous section of quotes from Botkin had a running fogginess about which revolution - and therefore what time period we were in. Here we reach a section with a set time point:
A critical skill in teaching is figuring out where a student's mental concept map has an error.
Here's a quick timeline of the rise of Communism in Russia:
After 15 months of imprisonment, the chances of the Romanov House being restored by anti-communist forces grew too high. In June of 1918, Grand Duke Michael, the next in line to succession after the abdication was murdered. The Imperial Family was murdered on the 18th of July 1918. The next day, six additional members of the House of Romanov were thrown into a mine shaft and killed - including an elderly nun who had been serving the poor for decades. Finally, in January of 1919, four more male members in the line succession were murdered. Correctly recognizing that Russia was unsafe for Romanov survivors, 47 additional members of the family entered exile.
Lenin was a terrible, ruthless, cruel leader.
In the previous post, Botkin rambled about how the communist started committing crimes while there was a revolution going on. That made no sense in relation to the February and October Revolutions of 1917 - but is completely true of Lenin's followers after the 1905 Revolution.
Lenin had been agitating for the rise of the proletariat for a decade prior to the Russian Civil War. When he was unable to be organizing in Russia, he'd escape to a safer country like Switzerland and argue finer points of Communist theory with other organizers - critically important points like "Can communism rise up from industrial workers alone or are experiences of the agrarian class the only way for communism to rise?" Seriously, this was a major fracture point among Communist philosophers.
Eventually, Lenin got tired of waiting and decided to help things along. Since the proletariat was always short on cash, Lenin advocated robbing banks, train stations and other cash-heavy locations to fund the revolution. Several groups took him up on this endorsement of crime including one led by future crimes- against- humanity leader Joseph Stalin.
Lenin did write a telegram in August of 1918 ordering the leaders of the Penza Gubernia to publicly hang 100 dissidents to pre-emptively avoid the riots preventing food from reaching the major cities of Russia from reoccurring. No one knows if the orders were followed out - but even if they were not - Lenin is a horrible, horrible person.
Weirdly enough, Botkin seems more upset in the video about the idea that these people were randomly picked up off the streets than the fact they were possibly murdered extrajudicially....
Nope again. The "Hanging Order" preserved at the Library of Congress happened a year after the Civil War started. In the timeline at the beginning of the post, it would fit in two months after the Imperial Family were massacred.
Seriously, Botkin needs to take better notes or make a timeline or learn how to read for comprehension.
I will agree that the Russian Civil War lasted 5 years. *rolls eyes*
Who the fuck is Parvus?
*goes to the interwebs*
Ah, Parvus is Alexander Parvus who got the entire idea of "permanent revolution" revived in the early 1900's. He was also worked with German Intelligence to try and foment a communist uprising in Russia to undermine Russia during WWII.
As a counter-point, there were roughly 30 countries that actively described themselves as Communist or Socialist in 1985 containing roughly 1/3 of the world's population.
Today, there are four countries in that same category- China, Vietnam, Cuba and Laos - or five if you count North Korea* who swears they are not Communists. The total world population in Communist countries has dropped to 20%
And North Korea's set of problems is pretty deep regardless of if Kim Jong-Un calls himself a communist leader, or an absolute monarch, or a completely democratically elected *wink-wink* president so I'll keep them off the list.
I feel like Botkin is stuck in, oh, 1983 and somehow missed the fact that 26 countries have left Communism. It's really not an ongoing worry for anyone besides Botkin.
That place across the Rubicon is known as an authoritarian dictatorship.
It's what Nicholas II had going for him - he just dressed it up by saying that God dictated that his family be allowed to rule forever.
I have no doubt that Trump would enjoy immensely being an authoritarian dictator - but the US is a democracy.
We've been a democracy for 245 years - and we will continue to be one when Joe Biden is sworn in on January 20th at noon.
Good night - and God bless America!
My husband and I own an old farmhouse that a previous owner decorated with lashings of 1960's-style wood paneling.
I don't like wood paneling - but taking it out seemed like a massive undertaking so I learned to tolerate it.
Not long before my son was born, my sister-in-law pointed out that painting the wood paneling would change the look a lot. In fact, her really cute house had previously had similar dark wood paneling - and adding some soft pastel colors made it look much lighter and brighter.
I've been a bit busy in the intervening four years, but I always planned to take on that paneling - and today was the day! The center hallway of house had poor lighting, no windows and the dark paneling absorbed whatever light made it into the area.
Now, I painted the central hallway and the staircase in off-white semi-gloss. As a paint associate, I know that flat paint is in - but I like the shine of glossy paint, plus I like the increased durability of the higher gloss paints. There is so much more light in that area - and I haven't seen it in daylight when the light enters through the window at the top of the stair!
Let's see if I can write this before I fall asleep :-).
We are at the final installation reviewing Geoffrey Botkin's video, "My Last Leadership Memo to the President. Maybe." I must admit the title is catchy in its brazen refusal to admit the obvious that Trump is leaving office on January 20th and will not be coming back.
The first part of the review featured Botkin attempting to convince the President that he and his family would be assassinated if they left office. Personally, I think running his own personal family cult for the last 10 years or so has made Botkin sloppy. He's kept his daughters under his thumb by teaching them that the world is filled with rapists who will attack them if they go to the grocery store alone and unarmed in the middle of the morning - but that kind of insane hype is hard to pull off with people who interact with other adult humans. I find Trump to be quite credulous if information is combined with praise - but he's nearly impervious to things he does not want to hear. I doubt he wants to hear that unnamed people are out to get him from a random nobody.
The second part of the review is a historically inaccurate review of Nicholas II's reign and abdication. It's fascinating that the historical person Botkin thinks Trump has most to learn from is Nicholas II - the last ruler of an authoritarian hereditary monarchy. Botkin has always espoused strange views on governance that combine a very strong, heavy-handed government based on Leviticus for people who disagree with him - while still wanting the small, weak, local governance of Botkin's personal life espoused by Libertarians. Those two governance types seem like a paradox - but that section made it clear for the rest of us: Botkin wants to be a authoritarian monarch. In that system, he can punish anyone he wants while being above punishment - let alone criticized.
Most of the previous section of quotes from Botkin had a running fogginess about which revolution - and therefore what time period we were in. Here we reach a section with a set time point:
A critical skill in teaching is figuring out where a student's mental concept map has an error.
Here's a quick timeline of the rise of Communism in Russia:
- February 1917 - Nicholas II abdicates; a provisional government with lots of local control forms.
- March 1917 - The Imperial Family is arrested by the provisional government.
- October 1917 - Provisional government falls; Civil War begins.
- July 1918 - The Imperial Family is murdered in Yekaterinburg.
- June 1923 - End of Russian Civil War - between 7-12 million deaths occurring over five years.
Near as I can tell, Botkin believes that February 1917 marks the beginning of a combined Communist government and everything that happened after February 1917 can be blamed on the Communists alone.
Unfortunately, it's not that simple.
The House of Romanov had stayed in power by using intimidation and punishment to keep the population from rebelling.
The supporters of the monarchy and allied supporters who didn't want to restore the monarchy but also didn't want to have a communist government used intimidation and execution to fight back against communist governments.
Hell, even the communist-socialist groups were not aligned. The October Revolution occurred when a left-wing socialist controlled provisional government fell to the left-wing communist city-groups known as soviets. Now, to Botkin, that might sound like two identical groups - but just because a government is based on government-control of the economy doesn't mean that government is happily aligned with all other Marxist government.
Don't believe me? Look up China and Russia's relations after 1940.
From 1917-1923, Russia was a war zone. Political violence is never right - and in this case - all sides were using it. That means Botkin's breathless assertion that non-Communists were being killed was true - but so were Communists.
Let's discuss the arrests and murders of the Imperial Family.
If I've not made it clear so far, there were a lot of very angry armed people in Russia in 1917. The Provisional Government had control of the government - but their control was tenuous at best. The arrest of the Tsar fulfilled two issues. The arrest showed people that the government had control over the former leader while providing some security to Nicholas II and his family against assassination.
Why was Nicholas II and his family murdered?
Let's think about what a heredity monarchy is. In that form of government, the office of the head of the government is passed down through a single family line. The House of Romanov had strictly punished members of the House who married non-royals with expulsion from the line of succession and exile until 1911. In that year, the House adapted their rules so that members outside of the direct line of succession could marry non-royals if they renounced their place in the line of succession. This matters because there were a total of 65 members of the House who were in the line of succession at the time of the abdication.
As heredity monarchies go, that's not very many.
Unfortunately, it's not that simple.
The House of Romanov had stayed in power by using intimidation and punishment to keep the population from rebelling.
The supporters of the monarchy and allied supporters who didn't want to restore the monarchy but also didn't want to have a communist government used intimidation and execution to fight back against communist governments.
Hell, even the communist-socialist groups were not aligned. The October Revolution occurred when a left-wing socialist controlled provisional government fell to the left-wing communist city-groups known as soviets. Now, to Botkin, that might sound like two identical groups - but just because a government is based on government-control of the economy doesn't mean that government is happily aligned with all other Marxist government.
Don't believe me? Look up China and Russia's relations after 1940.
From 1917-1923, Russia was a war zone. Political violence is never right - and in this case - all sides were using it. That means Botkin's breathless assertion that non-Communists were being killed was true - but so were Communists.
Let's discuss the arrests and murders of the Imperial Family.
If I've not made it clear so far, there were a lot of very angry armed people in Russia in 1917. The Provisional Government had control of the government - but their control was tenuous at best. The arrest of the Tsar fulfilled two issues. The arrest showed people that the government had control over the former leader while providing some security to Nicholas II and his family against assassination.
Why was Nicholas II and his family murdered?
Let's think about what a heredity monarchy is. In that form of government, the office of the head of the government is passed down through a single family line. The House of Romanov had strictly punished members of the House who married non-royals with expulsion from the line of succession and exile until 1911. In that year, the House adapted their rules so that members outside of the direct line of succession could marry non-royals if they renounced their place in the line of succession. This matters because there were a total of 65 members of the House who were in the line of succession at the time of the abdication.
As heredity monarchies go, that's not very many.
World War I made exiling the Tsar's family nearly impossible. France and Belgium were active war zones. Germany and Austria-Hungary, two empires that the Imperial Family had close family ties to, were enemy states. The Tsar also had family ties in Great Britain which was allied to Russia in World War I - but popular opinion was strongly against absolute monarchists in Britain an offer of exile was revoked.
Even if a country had been found, the Imperial Family would have to be transported somehow through areas of Russia held by military groups who wanted the Tsar dead.
In a country where over 1 million men have been killed in a foreign war and the government is struggling to maintain power, any members of the House eligible for succession were a threat. Nicholas abdicated for his son Alexei - but Alexei was a minor whose life-threatening hemophilia was not widely known. Would he abide by an abdication made by his father when he was 21 or 25?
The Tsar also had four handsome eligible daughters between the ages of 22 and 17. While Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia were officially only able to succeed if all male members of the House of Romanov died, Russia does have a long history of female rulers. In a country in a state of near chaos, what would happen if one of the daughters married a fairly powerful member of the military allied with the anti-Communists? Would a new imperial house be founded linking the House of Romanov with a new military leader?
Even if a country had been found, the Imperial Family would have to be transported somehow through areas of Russia held by military groups who wanted the Tsar dead.
In a country where over 1 million men have been killed in a foreign war and the government is struggling to maintain power, any members of the House eligible for succession were a threat. Nicholas abdicated for his son Alexei - but Alexei was a minor whose life-threatening hemophilia was not widely known. Would he abide by an abdication made by his father when he was 21 or 25?
The Tsar also had four handsome eligible daughters between the ages of 22 and 17. While Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia were officially only able to succeed if all male members of the House of Romanov died, Russia does have a long history of female rulers. In a country in a state of near chaos, what would happen if one of the daughters married a fairly powerful member of the military allied with the anti-Communists? Would a new imperial house be founded linking the House of Romanov with a new military leader?
After 15 months of imprisonment, the chances of the Romanov House being restored by anti-communist forces grew too high. In June of 1918, Grand Duke Michael, the next in line to succession after the abdication was murdered. The Imperial Family was murdered on the 18th of July 1918. The next day, six additional members of the House of Romanov were thrown into a mine shaft and killed - including an elderly nun who had been serving the poor for decades. Finally, in January of 1919, four more male members in the line succession were murdered. Correctly recognizing that Russia was unsafe for Romanov survivors, 47 additional members of the family entered exile.
Lenin was a terrible, ruthless, cruel leader.
In the previous post, Botkin rambled about how the communist started committing crimes while there was a revolution going on. That made no sense in relation to the February and October Revolutions of 1917 - but is completely true of Lenin's followers after the 1905 Revolution.
Lenin had been agitating for the rise of the proletariat for a decade prior to the Russian Civil War. When he was unable to be organizing in Russia, he'd escape to a safer country like Switzerland and argue finer points of Communist theory with other organizers - critically important points like "Can communism rise up from industrial workers alone or are experiences of the agrarian class the only way for communism to rise?" Seriously, this was a major fracture point among Communist philosophers.
Eventually, Lenin got tired of waiting and decided to help things along. Since the proletariat was always short on cash, Lenin advocated robbing banks, train stations and other cash-heavy locations to fund the revolution. Several groups took him up on this endorsement of crime including one led by future crimes- against- humanity leader Joseph Stalin.
Lenin did write a telegram in August of 1918 ordering the leaders of the Penza Gubernia to publicly hang 100 dissidents to pre-emptively avoid the riots preventing food from reaching the major cities of Russia from reoccurring. No one knows if the orders were followed out - but even if they were not - Lenin is a horrible, horrible person.
Weirdly enough, Botkin seems more upset in the video about the idea that these people were randomly picked up off the streets than the fact they were possibly murdered extrajudicially....
Nope again. The "Hanging Order" preserved at the Library of Congress happened a year after the Civil War started. In the timeline at the beginning of the post, it would fit in two months after the Imperial Family were massacred.
Seriously, Botkin needs to take better notes or make a timeline or learn how to read for comprehension.
I will agree that the Russian Civil War lasted 5 years. *rolls eyes*
Who the fuck is Parvus?
*goes to the interwebs*
Ah, Parvus is Alexander Parvus who got the entire idea of "permanent revolution" revived in the early 1900's. He was also worked with German Intelligence to try and foment a communist uprising in Russia to undermine Russia during WWII.
As a counter-point, there were roughly 30 countries that actively described themselves as Communist or Socialist in 1985 containing roughly 1/3 of the world's population.
Today, there are four countries in that same category- China, Vietnam, Cuba and Laos - or five if you count North Korea* who swears they are not Communists. The total world population in Communist countries has dropped to 20%
And North Korea's set of problems is pretty deep regardless of if Kim Jong-Un calls himself a communist leader, or an absolute monarch, or a completely democratically elected *wink-wink* president so I'll keep them off the list.
I feel like Botkin is stuck in, oh, 1983 and somehow missed the fact that 26 countries have left Communism. It's really not an ongoing worry for anyone besides Botkin.
That place across the Rubicon is known as an authoritarian dictatorship.
It's what Nicholas II had going for him - he just dressed it up by saying that God dictated that his family be allowed to rule forever.
I have no doubt that Trump would enjoy immensely being an authoritarian dictator - but the US is a democracy.
We've been a democracy for 245 years - and we will continue to be one when Joe Biden is sworn in on January 20th at noon.
Good night - and God bless America!
Saturday, January 16, 2021
Babbling Botkin: Last Leadership Memo to the President - Part Two
Good morning!
For people who have forgotten, Geoffrey Botkin was a member of a conservative think tank and lobbying group in Washington, DC. in the 1990's. I'm assuming that this conspiracy filled memo that he sent to President Trump is a holdover from that period of time. Otherwise, maybe he's been writing these memos for decades and sending them to the President weekly.Honestly, I don't know which would be weirder - but I can't rule either out.
The first section of the memo demonstrated Geoffrey Botkin's lack of understanding about the Constitutional transition of power for the President, an inability to keep up with national news about the state of the election, and a disturbing level of credulousness towards conspiracy theories.
As my husband succinctly noted, "He reads government documents the same way he reads the Bible. He combines reading to support a predetermined opinion with shoddy comprehension."
Scathing - yes. Accurate - yes.
Next in his video memo titled "My Last Leadership Memo to the President. Maybe." Botkin makes a transition from political mentor to history teacher. He has a succinct style of communicating information that is both relaxing and easy to follow.
Unfortunately, nearly every word out of his mouth is wrong.
I don't mean that Botkin advances an unusual interpretation of events in Russian history. No, he creates lists of facts are easily shown to be wrong - and tops it off with a weird interpretation.
Here - even the first 30 seconds about Nicholas II is a mishmash of wrong facts and bizarre interpretation:
No, Nicholas II was not a reform minded leader. Nicholas II was the son of an absolute monarch who focused on remaining an absolute monarch. He bristled at any hint of reforms to improve the lives of the poor in Russia and tolerated the Duma as long as the Duma did not impinge on his authority.
Yes, Nicholas II was a conservative - but only in the broad term meaning "he wanted the status quo to remain unchanged". Geoffrey Botkin's et al., views on very limited local government, a Bible-based theocracy and everyone being able to carry as many weapons as they wanted would be as foreign and unpalatable to Nicholas II as the doctrine of absolute monarchy is to Botkin.
Yes, Nicholas II was a nationalist - but that stopped being a revolutionary viewpoint 200 years previously.
The last rambling sentence of that quote makes me laugh. Botkin makes it sound like Nicholas II was having a great day on Wednesday and wham! Thursday brought a world war, famine, national blockades, insurrection and even world revolution all at once! Oh, the horrors!
More realistically, Nicholas II inherited a nation in 1894 that was in the process of modernizing many areas while being saddled with an absolute monarch. European monarchies had survived (so far) by allowing governmental reforms that granted powers to elected officials while reserving certain powers to the monarchy. Nicholas's grandfather, Alexander II, was genuinely interested in certain reforms in Russia prior to his assassination. His son, Alexander III, who succeeded him, on the other hand, was not interested in reformation and his views on continuing the absolute powers of the monarch were shared by his son.
Domestically, Nicholas II was presented with requests for reforms as soon as he was crowned - and he reacted to most of them with irritation and refusal. While ignoring these requests was personally satisfying to Nicholas II, it did nothing to improve the living and working conditions of rural or industrial workers. Workers had been striking throughout the 1890's and the lack of substantial reform increased anger at the Tsar.
In terms of foreign affairs, Russia chose to negotiate aggressively with Japan about division of powers in the East in 1903. When talks broke down, Japan declared war in 1904 and immediately attacked the Russian navy in Port Arthur. Within two months, the Russian Pacific fleet had been decimated and Russia was struggling to move army and navy reinforcements the massive distance required to reach the battlefield. The war, which Russia was losing badly, became extremely unpopular domestically. The war ended a bit over a year later with the Treaty of Portsmouth.
The combination of miserable domestic conditions and fighting a losing war increased domestic tensions in 1905. The Tsar's popularity plunged after his forces shot and killed members of a planned, peaceful march who were going to present the Tsar with a list of requested reforms. Soon, much larger strikes and work-stoppages appeared in cities and spread to the countryside.
Faced with the options of political reform or being overthrown, Nicholas II signed the October Manifesto which gave basic human rights to all Russians, allowed all groups to be represented in the Duma, introduced voting rights for all men, and required that all new laws be approved by the Duma.
Initially, the October Manifesto was accepted as a sign of good faith by Russians and the riots and work stoppages ended. Quickly, however, the fact that the Tsar retained the right to veto any laws passed by the Duma combined with the Tsar's imposition of martial law quickly showed that Nicholas II was not planning to change much in Russia.
The process of figuring out how universal male suffrage and the new powers of the Duma would work bought Nicholas II a decade of relative internal peace. After a few rough starts, the Duma figured out how to use their control of the finances of the state of get reforms passed and Nicholas II accepted the input of the Duma in limited amounts.
The final straw that broke the frail truce between the Russian people and the Tsar was World War I. The same issues that had plagued Russia during the Russo-Japanese War of difficult transportation of troops and equipment existed during this war. Additionally, Germany had greatly increased their military technology while Russia's had stagnated. This meant that hungry, threadbare, undertrained Russian conscripts were marching thousands of miles before facing the most modern war technologies. The casualties on the Russian side were horrific and the only reason that Germany was able to fight the Eastern Front to a stand-still was the willingness of the Russian military to throw thousands of troops at the front despite terrible losses.
The ongoing deaths combined with the shortages inherent from mobilizing a military by depleting the available workforce caused Russia to be near complete collapse by 1917.
Nicholas II had many points where greater reforms may well have forestalled the fall of the House of Romanov - but he chose to maintain as much personal power as he could for as long as he could - and paid the ultimate price.
TL;DR - Nicholas II had faced two decades of internal calls for reform prior to the collapse of his empire. There were many moments where he could have made different choices; this was not a sudden or catastrophic change.
Yeah, things got worse in 1916 - but WWI sent Russia into a precipitous decline in prosperity for the average person starting in 1914. By 1917, over 1 million Russian soldiers had been killed on the Eastern Front. Over 15 million were actively in the military which meant that there were 15 million fewer agricultural and industrial workers available to produce goods.
It was a slow burn that finally exploded - regardless of how poorly that supports Botkin's attempt to mangle history.
The leftist might have had a good propaganda machine - but Nicholas II gave them plenty to work with. The loss of the Russo-Japanese War embarrassed the Russians. Despite the promises of the October Manifesto in 1905, reform had stalled out. Citizens had tried various other forms of rebellion to get increased living conditions - and the Tsar simply wasn't interested in change. Finally, a massive war of limited interest to the average citizen was crippling the economy and killing men.
It was a slow burn that finally exploded - regardless of how poorly that supports Botkin's attempt to mangle history.
The leftist might have had a good propaganda machine - but Nicholas II gave them plenty to work with. The loss of the Russo-Japanese War embarrassed the Russians. Despite the promises of the October Manifesto in 1905, reform had stalled out. Citizens had tried various other forms of rebellion to get increased living conditions - and the Tsar simply wasn't interested in change. Finally, a massive war of limited interest to the average citizen was crippling the economy and killing men.
That's not a situation where it is hard to turn people against leader with a history of incompetence.
Importantly, Nicholas had managed to undermine the support of Monarchists at the same time. The Monarchists felt his reforms had gone too far - but the promotion of Rasputin into power especially soured the monarchists against Nicholas II.
Honestly, Nicholas II had never been an effective leader; WWI just made everyone miserable enough to finally force him out of power.
Psst! Botkin! This is Russia in 1916. Protesting was a criminal act - you didn't even need to add violence, looting or property damage.
This bit is a great demonstration of how little research Botkin did for this memo. Which revolution is he talking about? Because there are actually three revolutions that Botkin may be talking about - but I have no idea if Botkin knows that.
The 1905 Revolution was 11 years in the past. Russia had been doing well enough for the nine years prior to WWI - so I don't think that the nation could be said to be reeling from that revolution.
The next option would be the February Revolution in 1917. This revolution makes sense based on it being the revolution that brought down Nicholas II - but the February Revolution was a spontaneous series of protests by locals that grew until the regime fell. The problem is that the partial coalescence of various communist and socialist groups happened during the Provisional Government period between the February Revolution of 1917 and the October Revolution of the same year.
The last option would be the October Revolution - but in that case - Nicholas II was already deposed and under house arrest at that time.
Nicholas II never volunteered to reduce his personal power ever. .This bit is a great demonstration of how little research Botkin did for this memo. Which revolution is he talking about? Because there are actually three revolutions that Botkin may be talking about - but I have no idea if Botkin knows that.
The 1905 Revolution was 11 years in the past. Russia had been doing well enough for the nine years prior to WWI - so I don't think that the nation could be said to be reeling from that revolution.
The next option would be the February Revolution in 1917. This revolution makes sense based on it being the revolution that brought down Nicholas II - but the February Revolution was a spontaneous series of protests by locals that grew until the regime fell. The problem is that the partial coalescence of various communist and socialist groups happened during the Provisional Government period between the February Revolution of 1917 and the October Revolution of the same year.
The last option would be the October Revolution - but in that case - Nicholas II was already deposed and under house arrest at that time.
He agreed to abdicate only when the army had turned against him.
His initial abdication would have left his son twelve-year old son Alexei as Tsar. Alexei, however, was often severely ill from hemophilia and his doctors did not believe he'd survive if separated from his parents and siblings when they were forced into exile. His second abdication document had both Tsar Nicholas II's abdication and the removal of Alexei from the line of succession.
This meant the next Tsar would be the Grand Duke Michael Alexanderovich - who was Nicholas II's younger brother.
The bit that Botkin missed somehow is that the Grand Duke had been trying to get kicked out of the line of succession for years. In 1909, he was having an affair openly with a married woman of common birth. The Grand Duke fathered a son with Natalia in 1910 before she was legally divorced. He had the divorce backdated to be certain that his morganatically born son would be claimed as his rather than Natalia's first husband. Finally, he married her without his brother's knowledge in 1912.
The Grand Duke claimed two reasons for marrying Natalia. One was that he loved her. The second was that he wanted to be removed from the line of succession and creating a morganatic line with a commoner would do that.
Nicholas II was extremely upset. He banished the Grand Duke and his family and froze his assets soon after the wedding.
When WWI started, the Grand Duke asked to come home and help out with the war effort. The Grand Duke was allowed to do so and became an effective and popular military leader. Personally, however, he was more and more angry at the leaders in Russia - including his brother - for incompetence and greatly admired the soldiers he was working with.
Technically, the Grand Duke did not decline the crown. If he had, there would have been an uncle or cousin who would have been offered the crown; that's how succession happens in monarchy.
No, the Grand Duke was smarter than that. He essentially said that he would take the crown when it was offered to him by a Russian government supported by the people.
Oh, Geoffrey, life in Russia would have been easier if anything had been that quick.
The new provisional government formed between the February and October revolutions. Since the February Revolution was caused by a spontaneous uprising, there wasn't a single party or a coalition of parties ready to form a stable government. The fall of a government is stressful for a population who is not facing hunger and want; the Russian people were already exhausted, hungry, and fearful.
To help move the government closer to the people, there was much more local control of government during the provincial government period. The downside was that there was continual jockeying for power between political and geographic groups. This is the period where various communist and socialist groups started to coalesce to attempt to control the government - but the initial outcome was the October Revolution.
The October Revolution was the beginning of Russia becoming a communist government - but that happened after a five-year-long civil war between all of the factions in the government.
Botkin is always one of the people who is worrying about the government controlling the media - but he's managed to start a conservative think tank, spent years running with an obscure religious organization who wanted to take over the government, launched his own family based media company and, most recently, started his own YouTube channel.
His own life, in fact, contradicts his own scare stories.
Botkin's never spoken out against the effects of involuntary slavery in the USA. Vision Forum, the cult he ran with, firmly believed in the "slavery was good for slaves" lies of the Lost Cause Myth.
Until he's worried about the effects of our history in our country, I'm not going to listen to him wring his hands about Russian history.
On the other hand, Botkin is never going to read my blog. I write long posts with obscure topics. Similarly, Trump is never going to read anything written by Botkin. He writes shorter posts that outlast the president's attention span. Finally, Trump is never going to watch a video by Botkin. Trump only watches videos made by people he views to be powerful, successful, and in favor of Trump. Botkin is clearly enamored on Trump - but having a few thousand viewers on YouTube means nothing.
How do I know? I have a few thousand viewers on my defunct YouTube channel that I used for posting lessons when I taught high school. Just saying.
In the last post, we get to see Botkin try to explain the horrors of Lenin - and still fail miserably.
Wednesday, January 13, 2021
Babbling Botkin: Last Leadership Memo to the President - Part One
Hello, buddies!
Does everyone have a crazy uncle?I do -several, really, of varying race and gender - but is that a universal niche in families that needs to be filled? Every family is required to have an older relative who has gotten really, really into conspiracy theories - and has gotten in so deeply that the rest of the family accepts that any conversation that last longer than five minutes will reference some wacky theory involving politics or health?
I bring this to your attention because I realize that Geoffrey Botkin has cannon-balled into this trope - and he's given us a short, but marvelous opus to crazy-unclehood in his most recent video "My Last Leadership Memo to the President. Maybe." Even the title is nuts!
The video opens with an out-of-focus slim young man throwing something into a small stream surrounded by a dormant deciduous forest. Next to the young man, a handsome golden lab wanders around. We get various shots of nature scenery and the dog for the next minute and a half while Botkin does a voice-over.
Pretty sure, Uncle Geoff, that the President can figure out the date you printed on the memo without you reading it aloud. If not, do we really want the leader of the free world who is functionally illiterate?
Fun fact: The Constitution states the office of the President transfers to the winner of the election on the 20th of January. Whether Trump leaves voluntarily is moot; the powers of the Presidency will be transferred to President-Elect Biden who won the Electoral College.
As a point of fact, the election issues have been put to bed. President Trump had one successful lawsuit that affected 200 votes and 60 lawsuits that he lost. The sixty lost cases included plenty that were summarily rejected as without merit by judges that Trump appointed as well as appointees from Presidents Bush and Obama. The Supreme Court rejected unanimously one last-ditch effort by the State of Texas to disenfranchise the entire State of Pennsylvania. There was a minor disagreement on the Supreme Court in that Justices Thomas and Alito thought the suit should have been heard by the Court before being dismissed for lack of standing while the other seven justices felt the suit could be summarily dismissed....but even Thomas and Alito agreed that the suit itself was groundless.
The integrity issues surrounding Trump will never be ended because he has no integrity.
Trump never seemed to be unduly stressed by being the president -he got a whole lot of golfing and glad-handing in - and I really doubt he's looking forward to less stress when he leaves.
Possible criminal indictment - yes. Crumbling financial straits - yes. Restful retirement - no.
Trump will still have Secret Service coverage. No former president or member of a former president's family has been assassinated in the history of the US.
As for the Oath of Office, well, Trump's never been too serious on that one. From what I can remember without using notes, he blabbed military secrets to a friendly nation which strained our relationship with Israel. He handed a national security issue at Mar-Lago surrounded by non-clearanced guests. Historians will be working out what exactly Russia had on Trump that made him fawn all over Putin at Helsinki. He asked Russia and China to investigate his political rivals before his election and asked Ukraine to do the same after the election.
That's just the foreign affairs.
Domestically, he threatened to withhold federal support to states with large Democratic voting blocs during a pandemic. He threatened all sorts of violence against Black Lives Matters (BLM) protests - despite constitutional protections for freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.
Oh, and he long-conned his way into a protest-turned-riot that was a coup attempt.
That's NOT what the Founding Fathers had in mind.
*laughs*
I mean, now that he's banned from Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat, it'd be hard for him to organize a barbeque let alone a separate political party.
Hearing that extreme right wing insurrectionist white supremacists are frightened because the lawful government is using the absurd amount of evidence the rioters created while committing crimes to bring them to justice is the best thing I've heard all day. To quote a friend, "Maybe don't post video of you committing a crime combined with your name, hometown, and detailed description of how much you enjoyed breaking that law unless you want to help the prosecutors in your future case."
Interestingly, Trump is excellent at making adversaries without anyone fanning the flames. I've been opposed to him as a politician and a person since he called all Mexicans rapists - but he's insulted so many people and groups that I'm sure I'm going to forget someone. I remember Mexicans, Muslims, Black Americans, Native Americans, and women as entire groups.
No, Captain Bone-spurs has no stomach to fight himself. He bailed on serving in Vietnam.
On the 6th, he gave a rousing speech encouraging violence towards the Capitol and promised he'd be right alongside the protestors. Then, he departed and watched the chaos on TV.
He is, in fact, the definition of a coward.
Dunno about the state where Botkin lives - but my State Capitol has had armed protestors show up for voting times and there was a plot to kidnap our governor. The people who are actively disrupting democracy right now are violent right wingers - not left wingers.
Hey now.
We pulled off a very legal election in 2020 in spite of attempts at voter suppression by the GOP and a raging pandemic.
If Trump had focused on the Senate Election in Georgia instead of telling people to not vote while whining about the fact he totally did not lose, the GOP would be in control of the Senate from 2020-2022. Just saying.
Uncle Geoffrey is now in the wet-dream of conspiracy theorists. That magical heady land where logic, rules, procedures and reality disappear. A land where fishing stories are real - and the bigger the better!
The problem is that the fantasy land withers in the light of day.
Trump's term is done on January 20th at noon. His acceptance of that fact matters not a whit.
I mean, now that he's banned from Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat, it'd be hard for him to organize a barbeque let alone a separate political party.
Hearing that extreme right wing insurrectionist white supremacists are frightened because the lawful government is using the absurd amount of evidence the rioters created while committing crimes to bring them to justice is the best thing I've heard all day. To quote a friend, "Maybe don't post video of you committing a crime combined with your name, hometown, and detailed description of how much you enjoyed breaking that law unless you want to help the prosecutors in your future case."
Interestingly, Trump is excellent at making adversaries without anyone fanning the flames. I've been opposed to him as a politician and a person since he called all Mexicans rapists - but he's insulted so many people and groups that I'm sure I'm going to forget someone. I remember Mexicans, Muslims, Black Americans, Native Americans, and women as entire groups.
No, Captain Bone-spurs has no stomach to fight himself. He bailed on serving in Vietnam.
On the 6th, he gave a rousing speech encouraging violence towards the Capitol and promised he'd be right alongside the protestors. Then, he departed and watched the chaos on TV.
He is, in fact, the definition of a coward.
Dunno about the state where Botkin lives - but my State Capitol has had armed protestors show up for voting times and there was a plot to kidnap our governor. The people who are actively disrupting democracy right now are violent right wingers - not left wingers.
Hey now.
We pulled off a very legal election in 2020 in spite of attempts at voter suppression by the GOP and a raging pandemic.
If Trump had focused on the Senate Election in Georgia instead of telling people to not vote while whining about the fact he totally did not lose, the GOP would be in control of the Senate from 2020-2022. Just saying.
Uncle Geoffrey is now in the wet-dream of conspiracy theorists. That magical heady land where logic, rules, procedures and reality disappear. A land where fishing stories are real - and the bigger the better!
The problem is that the fantasy land withers in the light of day.
Trump's term is done on January 20th at noon. His acceptance of that fact matters not a whit.
We talked 'bout the lawsuits. Trump lost biggly.
Jesus, we have Trump to thank for the word "biggly" as well. That's really a minor thing - but biggly.
Pretty sure that we can't bring lawsuits against criminal conspirators in the Deep State. Government officials are solidly protected against lawsuits in the course of doing their jobs. This certainly brings problems in some respects - but it's the law and would need government support to change.
Also, if the government officials are committing crimes, that's a criminal investigation - which can lead to jail time - which is a separate legal proceeding from a lawsuit which is a way to get redress from a civil wrong. They are two very different things - and people should be very wary of taking any advice from someone who doesn't know the difference.
For sane people, though, the use of "Deep State" is a cue to disregard all information from the speaker.
For non-US readers, "Deep State" is a conspiracy theory that believes that there is a secret cabal of non-elected government workers who are working to overthrow Trump, the GOP, and America.
It's one of those theories that happens when people fall asleep in their high school government class and so never learn that most of the US federal government is made up of nonpartisan bureaucracy that exists to serve citizens while working with the current administration. These are the departments that cover things like the military, the social safety net, collecting taxes, providing education, space research, and regulating food, drugs, businesses and environment. The current administration can certainly promote pet projects in each of these areas and squash other projects - but there's a certain amount of inertia built into the system due to the simple size and importance of the job of keeping vital infrastructure going.
Most people see the inertia and think "Well, that's government" with a shrug. Conspiracy theorists see the same thing and create a new cabal.
It's one of those theories that happens when people fall asleep in their high school government class and so never learn that most of the US federal government is made up of nonpartisan bureaucracy that exists to serve citizens while working with the current administration. These are the departments that cover things like the military, the social safety net, collecting taxes, providing education, space research, and regulating food, drugs, businesses and environment. The current administration can certainly promote pet projects in each of these areas and squash other projects - but there's a certain amount of inertia built into the system due to the simple size and importance of the job of keeping vital infrastructure going.
Most people see the inertia and think "Well, that's government" with a shrug. Conspiracy theorists see the same thing and create a new cabal.
The most disappointing bit in this video section is that the cavorting doggy disappears at 1:22 to be replaced with a picture of Trump on Air Force One. Bye, bye pup! I will miss you!
I laughed so loudly at this next part that my kid wanted to know what was funny. I told him a joke to distract him, then read this to my husband who guffawed:
Come on, Uncle Geoffrey! Don't hold out on us now!
Grace us with the finer details of your inner knowledge of the Deep State!
Wait... he can't. The Deep State KNOWS about his website.
I laughed so loudly at this next part that my kid wanted to know what was funny. I told him a joke to distract him, then read this to my husband who guffawed:
Come on, Uncle Geoffrey! Don't hold out on us now!
Grace us with the finer details of your inner knowledge of the Deep State!
Wait... he can't. The Deep State KNOWS about his website.
The only safe option is to send a paper letter to the President of the United States.
Yup, that's fail-safe.
The President of the United States only gets a letter or two a day and will immediately open up a letter from a random guy in middle America and pour over it. *rolls eyes*
Far more likely, the intern of an aide of an aide of an aide may read this on the 18th or 19th. Finding that the letter contains nothing of interest, a form letter will be returned to Botkin and his deeply fascinating letter will be shredded.
The picture of Trump on Air Force One fades to a picture of Tzar Nicholas II.
Does Trump know who Nicholas II is? I'd bet not; Trump's knowledge of American history has seemed exceptionally weak these last four years so I doubt he's got a good founding in Russian history.
But don't you worry, dear reader! We've got two more posts from this video in which we get to listen to Botkin skewer Russian history!
Yup, that's fail-safe.
The President of the United States only gets a letter or two a day and will immediately open up a letter from a random guy in middle America and pour over it. *rolls eyes*
Far more likely, the intern of an aide of an aide of an aide may read this on the 18th or 19th. Finding that the letter contains nothing of interest, a form letter will be returned to Botkin and his deeply fascinating letter will be shredded.
The picture of Trump on Air Force One fades to a picture of Tzar Nicholas II.
Does Trump know who Nicholas II is? I'd bet not; Trump's knowledge of American history has seemed exceptionally weak these last four years so I doubt he's got a good founding in Russian history.
But don't you worry, dear reader! We've got two more posts from this video in which we get to listen to Botkin skewer Russian history!
Thursday, January 7, 2021
Joyfully At Home: Chapter Fourteen - Part One
I swear this started as a good day.
I dropped Spawn off at school and started driving to a grocery store when the alternator on my car died. I got the car off the road safely and called for a tow truck. Years ago, one of my aunts was critically injured when her disabled car was hit by another car - so I got out of the van and paced up and down the side of the road while waiting for the tow truck.
I lost track of the number of people who stopped to see if I needed anything. One person apologized for not stopping on their way to dropping their kid off at school - and I told them I was fine.
The tow driver took me to my aunt-in-law's house where I got my mother-in-law to drive me to pick up my son at school. We all enjoyed a walk from school to a local restaurant. It's about 4/10ths of a mile and Spawn rocked it in his walker.
I was pretty wiped by the time we brought our food home - so Spawn and I had a good nap.
Then I opened the interwebs to see if the Georgia Special Senate Election had been called.
I found that pro-Trump rioters had invaded the Capitol - and the President is wishy-washy about denouncing them.
Honestly, I feel sick.
I kind of thought Trump was going to go out in a ball of flames - but more like a crazy-uncle type of flames than inciting riots.
My mistake.
I need to distract myself so I'm going to post out-of-order another section from "Joyfully At Home" by Jasmine Baucham. In true form, my copy of "The Battle For Peer Dependence" is missing in action - but my copy of "Joyfully At Home" surfaced.
We are starting Chapter 14. Chapter 13 was an impassioned defense of stay-at-home daughterhood that failed to answer the main objection to stay-at-home daughterhood "How will you support yourself financially if you never marry, get divorced or are widowed early?" Chapter 14, then, attempts to weave some defenses for other oddities of stay-at-home daughterhood.
Here's the first question:
After the question, Jasmine brings up the importance of grounding any answer in the Bible - but somehow manages to miss that no one went to college in the Bible....and that we segregated people with presently treatable skin conditions to a leper colony.
IOW, sometimes the Bible doesn't have particularly pertinent answers to modern questions besides the standard ones about how to treat other people and how to worship God.
Next, Jasmine discusses how she wanted to go to an Ivy League school during most of her childhood, but her aspirations for college shrunk every year during high school. That's a really unusual situation for someone as skilled as Jasmine - until you realize the source:
Voddie Baucham's five point sermon is extremely weird considering the fact that he has three post-secondary degrees! The fact that Rev. Baucham earned multiple degrees from accredited institutions gave him access to jobs that people who followed his advice would be unable to access.
Allow to me rebut his arguments.
1) "Most BA degrees are not worth the paper they are written on".
This is simply wrong. Completing a four year degree has consistently been the most effective way for people to increase their lifetime earnings and compete for the widest pool of jobs available. People with a bachelor's degree have shorter spells of unemployment and are eligible for higher wages than people without.
2) "Four years is too much time to waste."
This might be a valid point for a CP/QF son who could start earning good wages faster through technical or trades training - maybe. The point is moot for a stay-at-home daughter who will be working as an unpaid kitchen/nursery assistant for the same period of time because she's wasting a few years anyways. Looking at a longer time frame, a stay-at-home daughter is ideally supposed to become a homeschooling mother in the fullness of time. Going to college to solidify a young woman's reading, writing, math, science and social studies skills is an investment in her children's high school education - hardly a waste of time.
3)"$80,000 ( Room & Board/ State School) to $250,000( Room & Board/Ivy League) is too much money to spend."
I agree with Rev. Baucham on this one - don't pay full price for your college education.
On the other hand, Rev. Baucham isn't telling his children the entire truth about college prices.
Shopping for colleges is a lot like purchasing a used car. There is always a sticker price for tuition, room and board for each college - but savvy buyers never pay that price. Jasmine - like most high school students- believes the main effort is getting into a college. Her father - like most college graduates - knows that the real competition is finding a college that wants YOU as a student strongly enough that they will give you a discounted rate through scholarships, grants etc., so your degree will cost a fraction of the sticker price.
The college I graduated from had a sticker price of $22,000 per year. I paid $7,500 per year.
Jasmine seems bright and articulate. I'm sure she could have gotten some decent scholarships at a variety of colleges - and possibly full-ride ones.
4) "College is not for everyone."
I agree in generality with Rev. Baucham - not everyone is a good fit for college.
But Rev. Baucham isn't speaking to a crowd of high school students - he's speaking to his two high school aged children.
I have no idea of Trey Baucham's personality or academic skills - but Jasmine seems to be a natural fit for college - and we know she is because she did eventually earn a 4-year degree.
Homeschooling parents are supposed to know more about their children's academic needs and strengths than a teacher - so why is Jasmine's father giving her crap-tastic advice? Because she's a girl? To keep his followers happy?
IOW, sometimes the Bible doesn't have particularly pertinent answers to modern questions besides the standard ones about how to treat other people and how to worship God.
Next, Jasmine discusses how she wanted to go to an Ivy League school during most of her childhood, but her aspirations for college shrunk every year during high school. That's a really unusual situation for someone as skilled as Jasmine - until you realize the source:
Voddie Baucham's five point sermon is extremely weird considering the fact that he has three post-secondary degrees! The fact that Rev. Baucham earned multiple degrees from accredited institutions gave him access to jobs that people who followed his advice would be unable to access.
Allow to me rebut his arguments.
1) "Most BA degrees are not worth the paper they are written on".
This is simply wrong. Completing a four year degree has consistently been the most effective way for people to increase their lifetime earnings and compete for the widest pool of jobs available. People with a bachelor's degree have shorter spells of unemployment and are eligible for higher wages than people without.
2) "Four years is too much time to waste."
This might be a valid point for a CP/QF son who could start earning good wages faster through technical or trades training - maybe. The point is moot for a stay-at-home daughter who will be working as an unpaid kitchen/nursery assistant for the same period of time because she's wasting a few years anyways. Looking at a longer time frame, a stay-at-home daughter is ideally supposed to become a homeschooling mother in the fullness of time. Going to college to solidify a young woman's reading, writing, math, science and social studies skills is an investment in her children's high school education - hardly a waste of time.
3)"$80,000 ( Room & Board/ State School) to $250,000( Room & Board/Ivy League) is too much money to spend."
I agree with Rev. Baucham on this one - don't pay full price for your college education.
On the other hand, Rev. Baucham isn't telling his children the entire truth about college prices.
Shopping for colleges is a lot like purchasing a used car. There is always a sticker price for tuition, room and board for each college - but savvy buyers never pay that price. Jasmine - like most high school students- believes the main effort is getting into a college. Her father - like most college graduates - knows that the real competition is finding a college that wants YOU as a student strongly enough that they will give you a discounted rate through scholarships, grants etc., so your degree will cost a fraction of the sticker price.
The college I graduated from had a sticker price of $22,000 per year. I paid $7,500 per year.
Jasmine seems bright and articulate. I'm sure she could have gotten some decent scholarships at a variety of colleges - and possibly full-ride ones.
4) "College is not for everyone."
I agree in generality with Rev. Baucham - not everyone is a good fit for college.
But Rev. Baucham isn't speaking to a crowd of high school students - he's speaking to his two high school aged children.
I have no idea of Trey Baucham's personality or academic skills - but Jasmine seems to be a natural fit for college - and we know she is because she did eventually earn a 4-year degree.
Homeschooling parents are supposed to know more about their children's academic needs and strengths than a teacher - so why is Jasmine's father giving her crap-tastic advice? Because she's a girl? To keep his followers happy?
5) "Most universities are philosophically antagonistic to Christianity."
First, Jasmine and Trey wouldn't be going to "most" universities; they would be going to a university. I'm certain they could find quite a few Christian universities - and maybe even a Christian university that supported their worldview if that's a major concern.
Second, most universities are also philosophically antagonistic to smoking pot, having Quidditch tournaments, and having adult students treat professors as equals rather than respected elders - but each of those things happen everyday at universities all over the US. If you need to avoid the philosophical antagonism of universities to Christianity, avoid the area where philosophically inclined professors hang out to argue rhetoric and join the local "Students for Christ" club in whatever form it takes.
Personally, I avoided both groups like the plague - but you do you.
Well, things have settled down in DC so far. Have a good night.
First, Jasmine and Trey wouldn't be going to "most" universities; they would be going to a university. I'm certain they could find quite a few Christian universities - and maybe even a Christian university that supported their worldview if that's a major concern.
Second, most universities are also philosophically antagonistic to smoking pot, having Quidditch tournaments, and having adult students treat professors as equals rather than respected elders - but each of those things happen everyday at universities all over the US. If you need to avoid the philosophical antagonism of universities to Christianity, avoid the area where philosophically inclined professors hang out to argue rhetoric and join the local "Students for Christ" club in whatever form it takes.
Personally, I avoided both groups like the plague - but you do you.
Well, things have settled down in DC so far. Have a good night.
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