Sunday School

[UnseenParticipant]

jakelafort wrote:

Rickles was funny. Unseen, isn’t that about political correctness? Are the terms interchangeable or overlapping?

Overlapping, I’d say, at the more extreme end of PC.

[UnseenParticipant]

jakelafort wrote:

But a great many people seem to be all about the people around them even when they are strangers. For instance if i am at a restaurant and i enjoy the food-that is all i care about. On the other hand too often i am with someone for whom the experienced is ruined if the server is cold/aloof. (something less than what i consider rude/nasty) My point is that we are by and large a highly social animal and how others react to us has a lot to do with our well-being.

Jake, the only lack of wokeness in there is to complain about the attention one gets from a service class person without knowing the context. An overworked waitperson may not attend to their customers as assiduously as they wish they could. Maybe the kitchen is shorthanded or burdened with too many trainees, for example.

[—Participant]

We are social animals which is why it’s weird that we’re so repressed. The situation you described is a situation where we very much watch what we do and say. We have normalized etiquette for dining, for server/ customer relationships, for handling (or avoiding) tension and conflict.

It makes sense to a point. Having shared etiquette makes it easier to decide how to behave. It makes it easier to avoid conflict which may seem destabilizing or can expose us to risk. But it’s also taxing.

My mom used to come home from work and she’d grumble about certain people. And that I never minded because we all need to let off a little steam. But the thing she used to say that would irk me is, “But of course you can’t say that.” It was the word “can’t”. Because she could have said most of those things; it just would have created momentary waves on lightly rippling water. The thing is, the stuff she wasn’t saying was eating at her.

What I am getting at is staying the same isn’t a means of getting away from watching what we say. It’s just a paradigm where we’re more familiar with what to watch for. But that also doesn’t necessarily lead to promoting well-being. It can just mean repression that is comfortable for some, but troubling for many. Somewhere between an endless war of words and a repressed existence one would hope there was a state where humans could say what we think without it leading to drama.

I don’t know how to get there. I just know I can choose were to invest my own drama.

[jakelafortParticipant]

Autumn, you have hit on a big topic in day to day life. NORMALIZED ETIQUETTE.

There is so much to it. So much so that i imagine that moderns who used a time machine to live among the Ancient Greeks, 18th century Commanche, medieval British Peasants would at first be lost.

We all know when someone is not towing the line. Some of the stuff is subtle too. For instance what is comfortable air space between two people talking, how long we ought to wait before we begin to speak, whether to sit across or side by side. The content and choice of language is the obvious stuff.

When someone violates those norms it stands out. Your mom is not alone in feeling constrained. I bet her use of the term, can’t, describes exactly how she feels. Being that way or feeling that way is unhealthy. There is a happy middle ground between not giving a fuck for what others think and feeling can’t. The whole topic is such a part of our lives that there are comedies based on nothing more than a protagonist who is a violator of norms.
It can be gut bustingly funny watching a violator shit all over the norms.

Norms and their power of can’t make me think of Islamic/cult constraints. For anyone who has lived in the west and at least felt free, to be there and see it must be the greatest of culture shocks.

[jakelafortParticipant]

Unseen, sometimes the server is simply having a bad day. I mean if your livelihood depends on how the customer perceives you it is in your best interest to put on a show. And if you can’t it may be an aberration. Although i am reminded of a server at a Chinese restaurant who was unbelievably rude. I used to go there hoping to get him just cuz i enjoyed the show.

[UnseenParticipant]

jakelafort wrote:

Unseen, sometimes the server is simply having a bad day. I mean if your livelihood depends on how the customer perceives you it is in your best interest to put on a show. And if you can’t it may be an aberration. Although i am reminded of a server at a Chinese restaurant who was unbelievably rude. I used to go there hoping to get him just cuz i enjoyed the show.

I don’t think we’re contradicting each other at all. Here’s what I wrote:

Jake, the only lack of wokeness in there is to complain about the attention one gets from a service class person without knowing the context. An overworked waitperson may not attend to their customers as assiduously as they wish they could. Maybe the kitchen is shorthanded or burdened with too many trainees, for example.

During my college years I worked some retail jobs and might find myself confronting four or five impatient people while I rang up sales. Customers with questions seldom counted how many people were waiting behind them and those people always thought the worst, that I was lazy or an idiot.

Maybe it was my first week and the person I might have asked to jump in and help was otherwise occupied. Maybe I was facing an issue I had no idea how to deal with or a question that was simply beyond my knowledge and experience.

Now, a waitperson is in the worst position. They are the prisoner of whatever’s going on in the kitchen. Yet, blaming the cooks is not a good strategy. Looking busy just makes the customer feel invisible. About the best you can do is keep the water and bread coming until the meals are ready.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Autumn,

In all the time Wong spent on the term “Gardener” and “Gardening,” he could have written about how to actually grow something that readers have never successfully grown. (For me, goards and melons. Never could get those to take off.)

That would promote Gardening to multiple generations, who then could use the words “Gardening” and “Gardener” with pride.

[—Participant]

Bruh, he’s written three hundred plus articles on gardening advice for the Grauniad alone.

He’s even written about growing gourds, though I hit the free article limit so I don’t know if he has quite the advice you need (which I am sure is really just a google search away).

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/jul/30/megalomaniac-squashes-how-to-keep-them-in-check

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Fellow Unbelievers,

There are many caveats worth adding to all studies and debates about intelligence:

One, I.Q. tests are just one indicator at one instance of what a person’s intelligence could be and it can and does vary, not just between groups qnd within groups, but varies over time with individuals. My own was higher in elementary school and college than in junior high and high school. (Judging from Eighties Teen Sex Comedies, probably a lot of people have this pattern in their own I.Q.s over time. 😁 )

Two, what average is used in tabulating group I.Q.s? Median? Mode? Mean? All three could be very different.

Even if there was a finding that some hereditary groups have lower I.Q.s than others, it could still be environmental. Jim Crow, zoning, and “urban renewal” all forced people out of some areas to others and these locations could have been located near Lead and Mercury sources such as dead battery dumps, chemical waste areas, ammunition dumps, or natural veins and seams of these poisonous, intellect-lowering Elements.

Finally, as Ayn Rand observed in her essay “Racism,” a genius is a genius and a moron is a moron regardless of how many others of his “race” are geniuses or morons. The individual has metaphysical and moral primacy over any group, which is just an aggregate of individuals.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: spacing and spelling

[PopeBeanieModerator]

jakelafort wrote:

I am not particularly well informed in the woke-spoke debate.

I haven’t been, either, and I avoided trying to figure it out until recently, because of the often petty and sometimes hateful spitting of epithets between two groups of people who had no interest in understanding each other, much less caring about each other.

But now I understand wokeness as a way for one group to just be obtuse in their statements aimed at another group, triggering the other group to reply with name calling and other emotionalized degradation. It’s like the side that hates wokeness (sometimes for a good reason) just becomes woke in the opposite direction. One group is woke, and the other group is negative-woke. Like matter and anti-matter.

Whatever valid points one or the other group may have had just become lost in a kind of righteous pissing contest.

[Author]

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