Some people are inner directed and some are other directed. Some people are very dependent on approval from others people, and some are much less so. Some people are very hard on themselves because (among other things) they can not meet some very high standard they have themselves set.

People have been complaining for a long time about work being perverted, and of course, it has been perverted for the many.

The meaning in my life has been to help my mother with finances and happily live with her. But, I don't feel the desire or passion or zest for life as many other people feel. Does meaning have to be an active goal or can it be a passive goal? Is there a difference, and finally, what gives your life meaning? — Posty McPostface

Maybe "meaning" and "passion or zest" are not necessarily linked. Passion and zest are attributes belonging to an object. Feeling passion and zest by themselves might not be a good thing. What gives your life meaning need not be active, passive, passionate, or zestful.

What it is that gives my life meaning has changed over time, several times. At one time being a college student (back in the carboniferous period) gave my life meaning. Then having a job I liked was a contributor, as was being out on my own, establishing new relationships, making a life, such as it was. Strong beliefs have given my life meaning (sometimes positively, sometimes not). There were stretches of time when life seemed meaningless to me. Refining the meanings of my life so far (70 years) is a source of meaning.

Perhaps Bitter Crank has a few words on this. — schopenhauer1

We live in a mature capitalist economy which has probably reached the end of its phase of dynamic growth. (That doesn't mean that the economy will now collapse.) Institutions which effectively serve expanding economies don't work as well in less dynamic, slow growth ones.

It's relatively easy to construct a sound narrative about why poor whites, poor blacks, immigrants, et al do poorly in school, don't advance to high paying jobs, and end up occupying the lower quintile of the economic distribution. It's much harder (like, not possible) to prescribe a plan which would lift everyone up and out of poverty.

It's also difficult to determine what white, advantaged, and intelligent children should do to secure a good future. It just isn't clear anymore to me how to advise people on these matters.

I think a lot of people simply don't perceive a way forward that offers a lot of promise. College degrees are less help than they once were to land a good job; skilled trade work (brick layer, carpenter, HVAC, plumber, printer, medical tech, etc.) lack status among some groups, even though the rates of pay are quite good. (Status is not a trivial concern.)

Clarity can't magically dispel a fog of confusion in a confusing world.

You can experience your existence because you exist. If you cease to exist you will no longer be a subject, and will experience nothing. Nothings experience nothings.

If the constituent parts of the brain that produce minds hadn't evolved in predecessor animals, we wouldn't have any brains at all.

Animals - among them humans - have varying degrees of 'mindedness'.

Afaik the american education puts a heavy emphasis on memorization and learning the subject being taught instead of understanding and applying that information. For example, homework is awfully easy and there is a high amount of it. — BlueBanana

Your criticism that students in the US are not being taught understanding and application could well be true. But it's been a long time since I was in high school.

My impression is that most American students are not learning many subjects in depth. There is a lot of talk about STEM (science, technology, engineering, math), but whether many students are learning STEM or not, don't know.

Are students learning how "history works"? I don't think so. I would guess that quite a few college students, even, finish their education without having much understanding of the role of class--how the personal and collective interests of the wealthiest classes tended to drive policy. I don't think students learn all that much about historical economic policy, either. For instance, did railroads lead the settling of the western parts of the US (and "the west" kept moving westward from Ohio to California), or did they follow? (They frequently led.)

I don't think psychology is much--or well--taught either. But then, it has been a long time since I was there. But what I read, see, and hear indicates that students are not leaving school with much understanding of human psychology. (maybe people never have had much of that.)

Memorization isn't all bad. While one can summon information these days with a few flicks of five fingers, it helps to have some things installed on board--like grammar, spelling, and punctuation rules. It's one thing to find a quote from Shakespeare--it can make one look more learnéd than one is--it's something else to have read a few plays, poems, books... thoroughly.

In practice, only one political party, the CPC, holds effective power at the national level. Its dominance is such that China is effectively a one-party state.

per your link at Wikipedia.

China isn't a one party state? What are the various parties?

The Germans didn't vote away their power, it was stolen by the Nazi Party.

Motivation is a drive that results in behavior. You are sitting in a car. The car gets uncomfortably hot or cold (depending on where the car is). eventually it becomes so uncomfortable that you are driven to do something about the temperature (get out of the car to escape the heat, turn on the heater to escape the cold.

If you were in a building which seemed to be about to experience a Gotterdammerung you would be motivated to get the hell out before the building collapsed on top of you.

Assumption: democracy is inherently good, not just a decision-making procedure. — Pneumenon

Democracy is inherent good (per the OP) but while good, it isn't the only good system. China, for instance, is not and has not been a democracy. It is a one party state which has evolved widely varying economic policies and has struck upon one that has produced widespread prosperity for many of it's people (perhaps 700,000,000 out of 1,000,000,000 are better housed, fed, and employed than were in the previous two generations.

Representative Democracy in the United States has seen both enhanced prosperity (post WWII boom) and a shrinking economy which has reduced the prosperity available to many of its citizens. If many citizens do not have access to the machinery of democracy (fair voting, fair access to the political operations, etc.) then democracy is irrelevant, at best.

Bad parenting and anti-intellectual sub-cultures. — Thorongil

Children coming out of the minority cultures of poverty fit into the category of "bad parenting" -- except that the parents can't help it. The parents are reproducing their own experience of growing up with a rather limited or blunt approach to linguistic interaction. Then there is bad parenting which parents could help, but don't.

Explicitly anti-intellectual sub-cultures are another problem. Some, like the Amish, are anti-intellectual, but they have the virtue of being more or less self-sustaining self-containing communities. There are also religious anti-intellectual sub-cultures that are more conventional, and if their children are ignoramuses, the religious sub-culture won't be taking responsibility for them.

The worst anti-intellectual groups are the anti-evolution, anti-vax, anti-secular, anti-all-learning know nothings.

I would not be surprised to find that the objective quantitative and qualitative measurements of the performance of U.S. schools do not show alarming failure and may even show reason to be pleased. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

This is certainly true for the schools that do a good job of educating about a quarter of the school population -- the schools in affluent, education-minded suburbs, for instance.

Many schools are failing to do a good job, partly through their own deficiencies, partly through the deficiencies of the students, their families, and their neighborhoods.

The alarmism about failing schools may just be ideologues trying to justify their pet interventions such as privatization, charter schools, school choice / vouchers, destroying teachers' unions, etc. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

This is a highly pertinent observation. Various groups want to somehow gain public financial support for schools which are tailored to meet their expectations -- something which public schools will tend to not do. So various schemes are devised to divert funds from public school budgets into institutions which are less than public schools.

School may have been the most interesting part of one's day one hundred years ago, but school now competes with social media, media in general, technology and the internet.

In this environment school is incredibly boring by comparison. — prothero

This is an insightful observation. Prior to the deluge of television in the mid to late 1950s, (which by its nature is more immersive than any earlier amusement) there were film, radio and print, and recorded music. People were more likely to engage in face-to-face interaction during their leisure time.

When I started first grade in 1952, yes, school was the most interesting part of the day. That stayed true for the next 12 years (more or less, but then I grew up in a cultural backwater).

I also think, there's too much emphasis on college level education and not enough on technical schools that you see in Europe. Nowadays because of that overemphasis on getting a BA, everyone has one... — Posty McPostface

Actually, a third of adults 25 or older have a bachelors degree or higher.

The heart of the "education vision" problem is what are young people going to do for a living? Many parents look to higher education for a road to security for their children. Unfortunately, a BA is not a guarantor of much. Not that a BA is bad, it just isn't work-ready preparation, in many cases. Many parents and students look down their nose at trade schools, but getting trained in 'heating, ventilation, and air conditioning' (HVAC) is a better guarantor of security than a BA in history.

Europeans seem to have a clearer view of the how to educate people with respect to employment. (However, there are lots of unemployed young people in Europe).

I could have picked "the system" if "the system" meant American society. We can't restrict blame to "the education system" because other big systems are deeply involved in the design and outcome of schooling. Immigrants? No.

Education is a collective enterprise to which most people grant ready assent, BUT the details of who, what, how, and when present very large problems, because elites--and not the masses--are in a position to define and shape what will happen in the classroom.

If you ask a reasonably educated reasonably well-employed "middle class" adult what a really good education should consist of, they will probably say something along the lines of a good high school education should produce graduates who:

can read very well (meaning 'with very good comprehension')
can express themselves fluently (can skillfully speak and write standard English)
can understand, perform, and apply general mathematics
can understand, perform, and apply general scientific principles
possess a good grasp of world, American, and local history
possess a general familiarity with English literature (British and American)

IF a student is educated in an affluent school district, they will probably receive this kind of education with "frills" like music and art. BUT most students (maybe 75%) are not educated in affluent school districts whose adults share a consensus of what a good school should produce and a determination to obtain it.

Most students (75%) live in school districts which are not affluent. They are characterized by either "adequate income" or they are in varying degrees of economic decline or poverty. The adults in these districts share less confidence in the best methods to promote their children's welfare. Train them in vocational skills? Prepare them for college? It isn't clear to the adults because the economic futures of their children is, in fact, not clear. It is also unclear what their future is as citizens. This isn't a question of taking civics classes; it's a question of what kind of role they are going to fulfill in society, above and beyond being workers.

If ruling class elites have a clear vision of the future, it probably doesn't bode well for 75% of American children. A well educated, civically and politically active, and informed citizenry really isn't in their best interest. Well educated, civically and politically active, and well-informed citizens are more likely to resist the implementation of projects serving elite interests.

so, before and after. — Bitter Crank

Now after.

Quite interesting, but qualms...

Little pre-school or kindergartener Camille (birth name Sebastian) is totally convinced she is a girl. She wears little girls clothing. Camille didn't drive to Target by herself and pick up her outfits. Someone aided and abetted the child's wardrobe selection. There was a lot of talk between interviewer and parent, therapists and parents, with Sebastian present. Was the child's self-narrative her own, or was she constructing her self-narrative from fragments of conversation with her parents?

No one asked her this, but I wonder what Sebastian's/Camille's parents wanted before they knew the sex of their child.

Sebastian's/Camille's future seems on track to be treated as soon as possible.

It's worth noting that puberty blockers, estrogen, and testosterone have some known side effects in adults (not all of them desirable) and there has been very little research into the effect of administering hormones to adolescents that affect bone density, brain development for the last 10 years of neural completion age 15 to 25), or health in general. These drugs haven't previously been prescribed to adolescents (say 10 years ago) so the prescribers don't know what effect they might have.

The therapists think that they can identify children as early as 18 to 24 months age who think they are "the wrong sex in the body". Do they need their heads examined?

Dr. Rosenthal is an endocrinologist (appropriately in many ways) but not a psychotherapist. His psychotherapeutic side-kick, (name?) was asked about risks of encouraging, or assisting these young people to make the transition. Her response: “the one risk we have is holding them back.” I'm not so sure about that.

Here is a PBS FRONTLINE take on young transsexuality.

↪Bitter Crank A physician or psychologist does not actually get paid for a diagnosis (DSM5 or ICD10 code).

ICD is the International Classification of Diseases, the current version is 10. — prothero

Ah ha! So, I was wrong about that. ¥@#&!¢Ω Thank you for popping my error bubble. So, if it isn't used for payment, then what good is the DSM?

The notion that gravity was different 250 million years ago is at least consistent with that, granted that there is no way to account for such a difference, and it is never really considered as an hypothesis. — Wayfarer

And by what theory could gravity be different 250,000,000 years ago? Had Newton overlooked something?

so, before and after.

I am going to watch it. Before I do, I'll express the opinion that young children should not be encouraged to pursue ideas whether they are actually boys or girls. And certainly not punished, either, for talking about it. Child guidance or child welfare workers should not, and parents should not do this either. As for adolescents taking steps to effect a transition from one gender identity to the other, no on that too, without overwhelming evidence that it will help. Rather than getting on the band wagon, parents and therapists would be better employed helping the child understand that maybe these feelings don't have to be acted upon (while they are in first grade, fCs.).

Pick and drag your mouse over the text you want to quote. — Galuchat

With respect to language... Your instructions would have made no sense whatsoever to anyone prior to the 1980s. Will it make sense 30 years from now?

Margaret Atwood concludes her Madd Addam trilogy with Fuck. Not to give too much away, but the lab-bred new humans--the one where the guys have very large blue penises and the gals' abdomens turn blue when they desire sex--have come in contact with the tiny remnant of our species that had been killed off by the mad scientists' pretty much uniformly fatal virus.

The new humans, pretty much like us except for the blue business, learned English--quickly; they are quite smart. They wanted to know what "fuck" was. They heard the last of the humans saying it all the time. The humans decided to tell them that fuck was the name of the god Fuck, who oversaw the old world and will oversee the new one as well. So, Fuck took on yet another meaning and is yet another place in speech -- proper noun -- (in addition to being a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb... and of course the universal interjection).

All interesting observations.

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)

Rant follows.

Ought we take the DSM-5 as gospel truth?

Since 1952, DSM-1 has been revised several times (a committee is probably working on DSM-6). Each time it gets bigger. Occasionally a malady is dropped, but mostly maladies are added and elaborated upon. Question: Is the DSM a work of science entirely, or is there an element of fiction in the book, fanciful embroidery around a small hard nub (or nut) of craziness? Certainly, therapists need to get paid and the DSM provides handy codes for insurance companies. The more codes, the more opportunities to get paid. (Oh, surely a profession as rock solid as mental health wouldn't make things up for mere pecuniary reasons, would they? Maybe there is a code in the DSM for highly educated and self-interested persons who imagine disorders in their customers that aren't really there?)

Not very long ago, (1970) homosexuality was a listed disorder. The psychoanalytic thinking at the time was that homosexuality was caused by overly close mothers and overly distant fathers, or some such thing. The diagnosis had a warm, moist, Freudian feel to it. My first attempts to understand myself involved Kinsey, on the one hand, and some psychoanalytic texts on the other. The psychoanalytic take on my disorder was not very flattering.

Well, then in 1972 or 1973 the APA up and changed it's mind. (There were lobbyists; they didn't do this in their sleep.) A spate of books was on offer at bookstores, like "The Healthy Homosexual" by George Weinberg. He coined the term "homophobia" in 1965. So, queers are fine now. One joke about gay marriage is: "Of course gays should marry. They have a right to be as unhappy as everybody else."

Once upon a time, transsexuals were extremely rare. A 1950s Danish comedian/pianist, Victor Borge, said in one skit that "In Denmark we have three sexes: male, female, and convertible". This was in response to Christine Jorgensen, a soldier from the Bronx, becoming the first publicly known transsexual in the US in 1952.

Then Miss Jorgensen, now Ms. Jorgensen.



The varieties of transsexualism have multiplied among the dividers (the "each of us is different" crowd). I'm more in the combiner crowd ("we're all much more alike than different"). I'm sure that there will be more categories of gender dysphoria in the future, because the APA committee is stacked with dividers. They especially like unique identifiers.

It could change at some point in the future. Just as homosexuality has had its reputational ups and downs, gender dysphoria might also. Oh no! Help! It might be scaled back!

Look at depression: the numbers of people diagnosed with depression is absurd (or tragic, I can't decide which). My sense of the world is that a lot of people are very unhappy because of their life circumstances, and if they could change their circumstances, they'd be a lot happier.

Antidepressants (prescribed by the train load) help people drag themselves through their drab, wretched lives, but they tend not to make people happy. That's because most of these people don't have a mental health condition which can be treated. It's because they have drab wretched lives which could be made better, but that means change, and change is difficult. Really difficult, sometimes. So, doctor, please write another Rx so I don't kill myself or somebody else.

Temporary end of rant. Exit here.

Locke's phrase was "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property". If my memory serves me (it probably doesn't) it was Franklin who suggested that "happiness" should replace "property".

It probably wouldn't have made all that much difference because for many happiness means the successful pursuit of property. Rather ghastly.

I suppose if everybody thought that happiness was a purely interior state that could exist without respect to material factors, then everybody could be happy.

However, most people (I am guessing -- no evidence, sorry) connect happiness to both material and purely interior states. That's a problem, because unless everybody is satisfied with respect to their material wants and needs, some people will be unhappy.

Worse, there can't be very much change in peoples' material wants and needs because there is only so much material to go around, and if one group develops greater wants and needs and can not meet them, they will be unhappy. If they take material away from somebody else, that group will be unhappy.

Universal happiness requires that the world be a rather static place, and that just seems extraordinarily unlikely.

Not so much for his philosophical expertise... — unenlightened

Damnation by faint praise.

Inasmuch as philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom, he's far wiser than most of us. — Thorongil

That's more like it.
>:)

how about we contemplate what they might be - in blessed silence — Sapientia

As Ludwig Wittgenstein the Wise said, that which ought not be discussed out loud must be stewed over in silence.

this is the kind of person who literarily thinks - listen to this please - that everyone else thinks I'm a sexist. — Agustino

You a sexist? NO! Who would have thought such a thing? You might, on one or two occasions, been just a teensy bit sexist. I don't know, maybe you once rendered a woman invisible or something. She was probably quite annoyed by suddenly not being something to see, I suppose.

Any way, who am I to talk?

BTW, Small high minded groups that are mostly male generally worry a lot about there being no, or so few, women in their group. "Oh, we're driving women away." "Marx was a sexist, you know." "Males always dominate the conversation, which oppresses women." and so on. Once I brought a woman-friend of mine (co-worker, so don't start any rumors) to a meeting to get her judgement about the socialist group I had been telling her about. Her summary about the socialist group probably applies here too: "It's just a bunch of heady males." She could be a bit heady herself, so she was pointing more toward "Males just don't communicate the same way women do." This is true -- we don't. And equally true and not better, "women just don't communicate the same way men do."

So here we are with one, two, or three women, which embarrasses some here because we should, they think. be 50/50. The fact of the matter is, the heady males mentioned earlier weren't attracting a whole lot of other heady men to the group either. We're doing well to have as many heady males here as we do, so we should not wait for hundreds of eager philosophers (50% penises, 50% vaginas) to beat the door down next week.

By comparison, there are some gay posters on Tumblr that have 40,000 followers from the Tumblr platform. I don't know how they do it; I've been working on my blog for 7 years and haven't quite cleared 5,000 followers. (In fairness, most of anybody's followers are dead accounts which have long since been abandoned since they "followed" somebody.)

Well yeah, clearly from that member that told you to fuck off. — Agustino

Actually it wasn't the fuck off bandit. It was a humorless he whom I had hassled by suggesting that he should meet my equally humorless sister. I had also suggested that humorlessness was an early sign of alzheimers. He was aghast.

I like orange, myself. And with the somewhat faint image of Phoebus Apollo (sun god) being pulled across the sky on his daily journey, yellow/orange/red/brown makes sense.

It's a bit too bright for computer wallpaper--too distracting. As an over-the-sofa painting against a grayish green wall, about the size of a dishwasher front turned sideways, I think it would look fine. Great art? No, definitely not. Phoebus Apollo is too close to being a cartoon. Something a little more compelling, something less literal...

Sometimes, I think I've made a pretty decent post, and no one really responds to it saying 'Hurrah' or 'Woohoo' - it just kind of sits there, and I'm left to feel like no one even bothered to consider it. — CasKev

Unfortunately, good posts get ignored. Fortunately, bad posts also get ignored.

There is a thing you can do that might help: Quote somebody in your post (using the quote tool) or reply to somebody using the reply tool. Obviously the quote or the reply should be relevant to your excellent post. Learned philosophers tend to more frequently read and respond to other learned philosopher's posts when they themselves are mentioned in the post.

If that doesn't work, remember that life is just a living nightmare most of the time, so it is quite consistent with reality that one's pearls should be trampled by swine.

One of the moderators told me he was getting complaints about me from member X. I concluded that I should, could, and would leave member X alone. Ignore, not comment on, not annoy further.

The solution to that problem, anyway, turned out to be quite inexpensive.

I used to think that too. The statue says "Feel defeated." It just doesn't say that to everybody. — Mongrel

This is true. The Confederate memorials were generally erected well after the civil war during times when the erectors felt like change agents needed to be reminded who was in charge (i.e., white folks in the big house).

The statue may represent Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, John C. Calhoun, or scores of other Confederates. Whatever the virtues of the individuals (and they did have virtues) erecting a statue of Jefferson Davis shortly after the SCOTUS Brown Vs. The Board of Education decision was clearly not about Davis, and was about segregation vs. integration.

OK, just to make it clear, please note that I'm moving leftward not he monuments and statuary problem, at least partly because of opinions expressed here I earlier disagreed with.

My experience is also that good morale isn't something you can engineer. If the stars are right, it's there. On the other hand, good morale is fairly easy to destroy. — Mongrel

This is very true. I've worked in a few places with great morale. Sometimes one can name some factors: new urgent cause to work on, new place to work, all sorts of psychic income, etc. But then, one can also see why morale drops: psychic income falls; the new urgent cause goes stale; the new place to work starts resembling every other work place. The race for a cure is replaced by a treadmill of same old same old.

One sees recurrent good morale in the United States -- not universally, by any stretch. Immigrant morale is up, displaced worker morale is down. Economic expansion beneficiaries are happy, economic expansion (or contraction) victims are not happy. The minority who are financially secure have good morale, a lot of those hanging on to solvency by their fingernails are not doing well in the morale department.

The thing is about the fallen, unfinished world is that there are people who insist on having annoying opinions (way too conservative, way too liberal, way too radical, way too lackadaisical, way too etc.) and they won't just disappear, damn them.

I generally don't like right wing fascist types, judgmental reactionary Roman Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic, or Hindu fanatics, and so on. I've had some very unpleasant run-ins with these people. However, people become reactionaries for a reason. There are factors, causes, predisposing factors, strengths and weaknesses, and so on -- just like there for people who become contemplative monks, social justice warriors, or double plus liberal politically correct nit-pickers extraordinaire.

There's nothing about my life that a right wing racist type would like--or if they were in power would tolerate. Still, I think I have some sense about what makes them tick. Some of it is quite understandable. Most of these right wing types are not members of the 1%, the haute (or even petite) bourgeoisie, the ruling class, or anything like that. They are mostly disappointed white working class men who can not fulfill the role that they expect of themselves and that a good share of society expects of them. Do they have anything to be disappointed about? Sure they do. Does that make it OK to be neo-nazi, reconstructed KKK, or white supremacist? No.

A better response to the "alt-right" or whatever one wants to call it, has to be found by the left. Just tangling in the streets isn't going to result in anything better over the long run. Shutting the opposition off is a short-term feel-good event -- not a good long range policy.

I have no objection. — Baden

Enter the "too much of nothing" problem mentioned by Dylan.

Yes, indeedy. Here are two examples:

Liked a lot


Not liked much

So here's the book for you: PAINTING BY NUMBERS: KOMAR AND MELAMID SCIENTIFIC GUIDE TO ART.

Using consumer polls, sales and marketing information, various studies, and their own made- to-order-paintings", Kormar and Melamid set out to find what it is that various populations around the world really like. Most people like landscapes quite a bit, but whether children or animals -- and how many -- should be in the portrait varies somewhat. The amount of blue, green, red, yellow, etc. that people want varies too. Most people don't especially like a lot of orange in their above-the-couch art, and most people don't like abstract art. So, if you are painting orange abstracts, it is not surprising that people are recoiling in horror.

It's a fun read.

Secondly, not all transgender people are uncomfortable with their body. Plenty of transgender women have no desire to transition via surgery and hormones. They're more concerned with things like perceived gender roles, clothing, labelling, and other social aspects. — Michael

It would seem to me that if a person is comfortable with his or her body, doesn't want to change it, doesn't want to take estrogen or testosterone, doesn't want plastic surgeries performed, etc. then they are not not gender dysphoric, don't have a gender identity disorder, are not transgender, but are instead social justice warriors and politically fussy people specializing in gender terminology.