Odds and ends from Baitcon

[rmd]

I mentioned some stuff to people at Baitcon and I forget what I mentioned to whom. So, here's a list of links!

• Rebecca's War Dog of the Week and The Dogblog.
• Susie Bright's take on the Atantic Article about women being unable to have it all.
• An inexpesive bidet that bolts on to your toilet seat and doesn't require major plumbing changes. Bidets are awesome.

And finally, Timothy Anderson imagines the cover of the pulp novel version of Blade Runner:
He's got a bunch of other imaginary book covers for SF movies, too.

ETA: I totally forgot to link to the Best Error Message Evar.

Comments

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Susie Bright's article made me cheer, not least as someone who works in a high school. Those of my coworkers whom I agree with work hard to keep our school from being that kind of stultifying cage, and these days I'm happy to agree with many of them.

Also, that Blade Runner cover is amazing. Wow.

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

Hmm... I seriously hope there's some context I'm not aware of, such as Ms. Bright is (or was) a long-time family friend of Ms. Slaughter. Because without any information stating so, Bright's article read to me as a long "I don't know you or your family, nor have I ever been to your son's school, but I'm going to tell you how you're raising and educating him wrong and are wrong about your own life-choices.

No matter how much I generally agree with Bright's conclusions in the aggregate, it was still exceedingly offensive to read her taking that apparent position.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

*sigh*

I was cheering for the idea that schools don't have to be/shouldn't be stultifying cages for teenagers, that educating teenagers should be about "putting tools in their hands," etc.

Also, just as I saw Ms. Slaughter as depicting her life as an example, so I saw Susie Bright as responding to The Example of Ms. Slaughter, rather than the actual lady and her actual life (kind of like the difference between John Malkovich and 'John Horatio Malkovich' from Being John Malkovich, only not fictional).

I keep talking about how one of these days I'm going to write a post about a pattern I've noticed, where Person A likes X thing which Person B has serious sociopolitical difficulties with, and Person B often concludes, implicitly or explicitly, that Person A likes X thing because of those issues (such as a former friend of mine who thought I liked Star Trek *for* its sexism rather than *despite* it). Thank you for reminding me to work on that essay.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

Well, my first impression (which I'm actually prepared to change if someone shows me wrong), is that Ms. Bright and Ms. Slaughter are playing out their proper sociological roles as (perhaps symbolic) parents, that is, given that each has succeeded exceedingly in her own life, she wants children (either her personal children or children generically) educated to succeed in the same way. Since it's the only path along which she knows how to succeed, she directs everyone along it.

The odds are about 99% that if you are now "director of policy planning at the State Department", you studied diligently and got A's -- in middle school, in high school (probably in an affluent suburb "with good schools", if not a private high school), in a "good college", and likely in a graduate program. And you probably worked long hours for a dozen years or more in increasingly prestigious (but still poorly-paid) political roles.

Her son isn't going to get a job like that if he stumbles out of the staring blocks, if he spends precious hours "to build things, compete in anything he pleased, be at ease with his sexuality ... take higher-consciousness risks, express himself artistically, research anything he wants". The competition isn't going to stumble, or at least, the ones that eventually get the directorship will be the ones who haven't stumbled. ("to be at ease with his sexuality" -- good God, what if he gets a girl pregnant? It's gonna be a solid 10 years before the kid gets a paying job, maybe 15, and the parents don't likely have the loose cash to pay child support for him for that long.)

As Bright says, "Your family has a million bucks, literally, and could make that happen: get the barriers out of the way." But if you "get the barriers out of his way", he will never earn a million bucks.

Now, looking at Ms. Bright, Wikipedia says, "Susie Bright was active in the 1970s in various left-wing progressive causes ... an American writer, speaker, teacher, audio-show host, and performer, all on the subject of sexuality ... She has a weekly program entitled In Bed with Susie Bright distributed through audible.com, where she discusses a variety of social, freedom of speech and sex-related topics."

A perfect leftie, probably an IQ of 200 and utterly intolerant of any Will to Conformity, and -- astonishingly -- commercially successful. Again, a tremendously successful person who has achieved a role that few will succeed at, and most likely, she's been diligently practicing for about 40 years now. I mean, how many people are going to get paid for a radio show about "a variety of social, freedom of speech and sex-related topics"? (About as many as get to be director of policy planning...)

The kid isn't going to make it in that milieu if he gets pushed into conformity as a teenager. I mean, if repressive parenting makes him uptight about sex as a teenager, he's never gonna recover fast enough to have the nerves to publish a ground-breaking sex magazine.

[chhotii.livejournal.com]

This Susie Bright person, and her comment-making chorus, are terribly judgmental.

So, should Mrs. Slaughter take her son out of high school, home-school/un-school him? Would he flourish and blossom? Maybe. I don't know. Or, without just the right direction-setting, would he spend a couple of years in stasis, playing video games in his bedroom, and spend the rest of his life feeling like he is playing catch-up? Maybe. Plausible possibility, isn't it? Is there any way to predict? F'd if I know. So, does Mrs. Slaughter have grounds for obsessing over how to answer this question? Ruminating, to the point that it distracts her from drinking wine with the Obamas? Duh, yeah. I presume she loves her child, more even than she loves the Obama family, none of whose skulls she had to extrude through her own pelvic bones. She wants the best for her own son, more than she wants anything good for anyone else in the world. So, should she delegate the whole thing to her husband, who is probably equally qualified as a parent? Well, she may trust her husband, and yet, at the same time, feel that a) she knows her son the best, and b) the most important problem in her world calls for more than one's heads' worth of rumination.

Is parenting difficult? It's impossible. Does it drive us to distraction? Of course it does. So, do we appreciate pat easy answers from the spectators? Claims that the problems would just go away if we took xyz advice? No, not really!!!!

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

I read the Atlantic article, and my first assessment is that Ms. Slaughter is incorrect in an odd way -- she doesn't realize that her arguments carry much more weight than she realizes. From what I can see of the world, the average father and the average mother differ greatly in their visceral need to be involved with their children. (This isn't universal, but the difference in population averages seems to be large.) The reason that "leaving to spend time with your family" is a euphemism in the high-powered male world is that, while we all agree that such an act is laudable, it's inconceivable that someone would actually make such a choice. The (average) upper-tier man doesn't feel anywhere near the family burden that an (average) upper-tier woman feels. He certainly isn't going to mess up his face time with The Most Powerful Person On The Planet fretting about his screw-up son. The fretting can be done later...

Looking at her article from another angle (and comparing with some other things I've seen), it seems that brutal kids-vs.-job competition doesn't set in these days until one is in the upper ranges of the middle class, where people have unique and non-standardized jobs that are only a couple of rungs down from serious power. As far as I can tell, there are now a lot of women professionals whose pay is near, if not over, the 90th percentile, who haven't had the sort of conflicts that Ms. Savage has. It wasn't that way When I Was A Boy...

[chhotii.livejournal.com]

...it seems that brutal kids-vs.-job competition doesn't set in these days until one is in the upper ranges of the middle class, where people have unique and non-standardized jobs that are only a couple of rungs down from serious power.

Is that your assessment of the situation, or hers? I haven't read the original article.

In any case, that's complete bullshit. I have quite a lowly job (although it is rather non-standardized I admit). At my lowly pay-grade, I quite feel the kid-vs.-job competition. It's a product of having a "problem" child who doesn't just go to school and activities and do what s/he is supposed to, which results in maternal fretting, which cuts into attention to job at any level.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

bunch of other imaginary book covers

Certainly the Alien cover is correct -- Alien is so implausible in such a soul-satisfying way that it really is a pulp novel.

[i-leonardo.livejournal.com]

bright/slaughter ? hohumborednow

pulp novel blade runner ? full undivided attention !

[rmd.livejournal.com]

fuck yeah.