You can't make an omlette without cracking a few duckstacks
A late Duckstack for which I apologize.
Have you heard of “stamp collectors”? Its a new trend where people keep a list of everything they’ve stamped on, and its sweeping the nation. So its more like “stamping collectors” I guess but you can’t really control how these names end up playing out. Well I’ve been trying and these are some stamps I’ve collected recently: A soda can. A spider. A stick1. Sidewalk2. A candy wrapper.
All in all it has been somewhat of a disappointing journey. When I first stamped on a soda can I thought “oh, I can see why people do this, that was pretty satisfying.” But it doesn’t seem to work the same with other objects. Maybe sticks, if you set them up on a fulcrum, but that’s a lot of work.
All in all, I expect this trend of “stamp collecting” to die out for the next Big Thing kids are hearing about on tik tok. Hopefully “duck stacking”.
The Great Divide
Not to be confused with the ok divide
Psychohistory
individuality is the opiate of the masses
People think psychology be like it do, but it don't.
To be accurate in any analysis, its important to factor in drag. While it is certainly possible to map how a physics equation would run in a frictionless vacuum, if you tried to apply that analysis to a real rocket, gravity, wind friction, fuel density, aerodynamics, and a hundred other minor things would throw your calculation off by so much as to render it useless. And psychology is exactly like this.
Psychology is not intuitive. Even to ourselves, we rationalize, hide our fears, posture, all to reach the conclusion we want. Its possible to rationalize pretty much everything if you wanted to, so when you have an opinion the question to ask isn't whether your opinion is logical, its whether you're being honest3. That'll give you a better metric of whether your opinion is “real”. You must understand, nearly everyone on the planet is allergic to rigor.
A simple example of psychology being counterintuitive is a recent argument for mass immigration: The idea that immigrants who come to America will get so much opportunity that they become grateful and eager to pay the United States back. Its certainly an easy scenario to imagine. But it is not True. Especially of second generation immigrants, who nearly universally are more loyal to their ethnic home than America, and we’ve got a bunch of rioters waving foreign flags here in America as we speak.
There is this idea that if we can make them indebted to us, then they’ll love us. First of all, this is evil. You can’t just go around trying to put people in your debt. That’s insane. Second, it doesn’t work. Just as a general principle, what actually happens when you make yourself a blind charity is a bunch of losers come to take advantage of it. This is one of the first things you learn working in charity- the vast majority of recipients are not grateful, at all, for the help. I used to try to have conversations with the street corner beggars, I would ask them about their circumstance and motivations, And most would just tell me directly “yeah, its easier than working.” They basically view begging as a job, grinding customers. And that’s not even the more cynical interpretation.
Everyone has a need to believe themselves to be righteous, at least “broadly”. I have talked to drug traffickers and gangsters in the ghetto and they would talk endlessly about their principles- “I don’t deal to anyone who isn’t already in the game.” (meaning they only deal drugs to gang members). “I only shoot people that have wronged me” Everyone wants to think they’re being good, which means the majority of morality comes from excuse.
If I had to say some words that I think might be true, its this: religion is applied psychology. It seems obvious that what most people seek from therapy is a priest, and it seems like it is the job of religion to predict how people should live, and what actions lead to eternal outcomes. I personally do not believe men will be reprogrammed by God to change their natures- I believe that who you are and what you do in this life is what you’re going to be in the next.
So what do we learn from the psychological principle of benefactor resentment4? To rescue your self esteem from one who made you feel small by offering you their charity, you spite and attack them to feel better about yourself along different axis.
I am a Christian, I believe in grace. But you can learn a lot about someone from what they think heaven is like. Latter-Day Saints along with Catholics and Orthodox often get accused of “working our way into heaven”. Some feel it denies grace, because if God isn’t doing everything, then his role is less “active”, philosophically. They would prefer to believe they will be eternally worthless! There is much I could say about this belief, but the reasons behind it are in my opinion fairly similar to the insistence that Christ’s Father is not human. Its all blasphemy logic5. Whether you think glory is a zero sum game, the kinds of things you associate with glory (in the western mind, mostly power, see luke 22:25-276) A proper understanding of grace, I believe, is perfectly compatible with “work”. God does have ideals, but he also has pragmatic expectations for our falling short. I have lots of expectations for my kids, but to the extent I can't handle them breaking rules sometimes, that’s basically me being a bad parent, usually. Kids are going to be kids.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to teach my kids responsibility with fake or small chores, and then its like “ok you picked up your toys, I'll pay you $500 for those two minutes of work, now we're square on the TV you broke. Kids have no sense of context or value, it really doesn't matter what you pay them as long as you don't overwork them into hopelessness or never play with them so they feel like you don't love them. This is not financial advice I'm not a parenting expert but I think its like that anyway.
So I think grace is the same way- it isn't that you don't need to keep commandments anymore (technically you don't to be resurrected, which I suppose counts as one definition of “saved”, but mere resurrection is not what most people think of in Christian contexts), grace is more that God is rewarding you wildly disproportionate to your effort, because you are a kid and you have no idea what is going on. But because God is still asking things of you, it makes it so you don't feel like a charity case, you feel like you're building something. This is vital if, as I believe, God’s goal is to develop peers. Again it isn't like I'm just giving my kid busywork when I pay him an allowance for sweeping the floor even though I would never in real life hire someone to do something so trivial.
What would be good is for us to emulate this in our foreign policy. Immigration truly can work, but only when coupled with a goal of assimilation- and this needs to be explicit to work. You can't just hope for immigrants to want to “contribute to America” any more than I can hope for my kids to spontaneously decide to start sweeping the floor7. You also end up with orders of magnitude less resentment this way. In both directions. When you're a charity case (with the caveat that its for no good reason) then you aren't going to act like someone with self respect.
So you need to give people something they can respect themselves over— a role in society. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does this with new members. Since everyone in the church has a job and there’s no clergy, it fits in very well with our normal practice to do this. And when we give people welfare (for general things, not natural disasters), we ask for them to do volunteer work for us in exchange, its not just handouts. This cuts off the “bantu maximizer” failure mode of charity where you merely give license to problems, and end up with simply more people perpetuating the same problem rather than solving things. Because while any religion should view its job as helping the widows and the sick, charity is not the primary purpose of religion. The primary purpose of religion is teaching people how to live.
Dino-Sore-Us
Dino-sores-r-us
The most ouchie animal of all time turned out to be a lizard. Who would have thought. I know I would have thought scorpions, spiders, or maybe wasps. But apparently house sized lizards were best at bruising folks. There’s a moral here, probably don’t underestimate the underdog. These guys even got names like “terrifying lizard”. Does your name mean “terrifying human”? Why or why not?
History
Toddler, unprompted: “I have a daughter.”
The toddler came in to ask: “Does food make me grow big?” And we were like “yeah sure” and then noticed he had a popsicle and were like “not popsicles though!” and he shook it and was like “popsicles make me grow small?”
The toddler got stung by a wasp this week and we were like “yeah wasps are mean.” and he was like “Yeah, thats why I was hitting it with a stick!” think we figured out why it stung you buddy
The toddler requested lots of kisses, and was given lots of kisses. Then he told us “We cannot take our eyeballs out.”
Toddler at the aquarium saw a whale eating a squid. I asked him if he wanted to eat a squid and he told me “Uhh, squids are gross.” Like it was the most obvious thing in the world. In fairness he is right about that being obvious
Took the toddler to the gym. “The gym is fun fun fun”
“I want to see my cousin Mira.” “Who’s Mira?” “Mira is a chicken.”
Ducksnax
sprout
~~~~ Previous Duckstack ~~~~
actually multiple sticks, dont tell anyone
it didn’t particularly seem to flatten in my observation but more experimenting couldn’t hurt
or for a liberal, if you're being ‘kind’, since they value that more. Which is why they often end up being more honest about problems than conservatives (but substantially less honest about conclusions, in my opinion.)
still working on a good term for this
Still working on a good term for this
Luke 22:25-27:And he said unto them, The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and they that exercise authority upon them are called benefactors.
26But ye shall not be so: but he that is greatest among you, let him be as the younger; and he that is chief, as he that doth serve.
27For whether is greater, he that sitteth at meat, or he that serveth? is not he that sitteth at meat? but I am among you as he that serveth.
I heard that. Yes, kids enjoy immitating their parents. But not indefinitely.