Anticipating some manner of prose laid out in a thoughtful manner, I was kind of excited to dive in. Instead, I was once again disappointed by what would seem a narrowly educated tech-nerd who probably doesn’t even know the meaning of prose, or possess the ability to recognize irony.
In short, the bullet pointed trash is the very evil he’s attempting to juxtapose against LoR persistent endurance. Irony knows no bounds.
Tolkein would most likely look upon the “vibe-coding” Linked-In, tech climber as Sauron himself.
And, Gil, it’s no $%^#@#$% “secret” why LoR has endured: Capitalism is an evil, unnatural extractive system that benefits the few at the xpense of the many and all of our souls feel this as cognitive dissonance. Tolkein provides our minds with a vision of a better world where the unquantifiable virtues of humanity valiantly defy cost/benefit analysis.
Organized sport is not only not play but it’s also not ritual and rights of passage either or any ritualistic component of it is so muted and overshadowed and obscured it can be said to be non-existent.
Like & Subscribe:
So, the entire world wide web at your disposal and you bring a crunchy poet as authority?
Ever get selected for a team of your ”peers” because all the kids that didn’t make the team weren’t talented enough? Ever win State championships, L&S?
These are profound rites of passage.
And, there is a grain of truth that organized athletics are “structured” play, rather than the “unstructured” variety that kids thrive upon (and Laura is nattering on about). But, what the structured play provides is opportunities to form strong trusting peer groups where the unstructured play happens off the field/court/pitch, what have you.
My kid is at a sleepover as I type with 5 of those peers and they’ve been doing nothing but “unstructured” playing for most of yesterday, and will continue into today. This happens all the time.
I’m more likely to believe your kid just wasn’t cut out for athletics, and now, your grapes are soured on it. Or, maybe, it’s just a post hoc rationalization for lazy parenting. I dunno. But, it makes me kinda sad you’ve denied your kiddo these opportunities.
Macron is deeply sick, has a 16% approval rating, rules only by decree and has a decades-older “wife” who may have a penis and started having sex with him when he was 14 or 15. When I saw that shot of him “waving” at a Military parade my first thought was, why is no French man or woman taking a head shot at him? So they have lost the attempt to use the Nazi Wanna-Be Ukrainian maniacs to “destroy” Russia and this clown can only double down on the failure and playing “Little Napoleon” imagine starting a future war in 2029 or 2030 that NATO will then lose more decisively. The “West” is built on nothing but Endless Wars, Death and Carnage, and creates societies that destroy their own people (trying to exterminate the hated, feared Other.) They interview some dumb racist woman who wants to “serve” unending war. Just beautiful.
That loosely connects to the article which L&S shared, which I thank him for, though it’s sad that he confuses what a Rite of Passage is. There is no Right of Passage, there is droit de seigneur (which I bet Trump and Curtis Yarvin and some of those other Epstein Adjacent PDF Files are trying to bring back, recruiting in Middle Schools). I had a really dumb Principal once at a school I worked at, eventually fired after 2 newspaper stories about his abuse of students and staff, who once emailed about the school “sight”, another Union Rep beat me to correcting him on the difference between sight and site. I really identified with the line about the school psychologist, “She sees six-year-olds who are anxious and withdrawn. Eight-year-olds who are angry and cynical.” I was the latter at age 8 after playing Peewee baseball, I quit and never looked back.
We had an angry, yelling coach, screeching at 7-8 year olds about the need to “win”, red-faced. I’m thankful for this experience coz it turned me off of organized spectator sports forever. I suppose that the kernel of some sports may have some human agency but yes, organizing and manipulating children into this kind of Rites is mostly child abuse, manipulative, and denies their imaginations and better instincts.
Harper’s in late 2019 did a piece about an all-boys Orthodox Jewish school in NYC where 2 Rabbis, one an Assistant Principal, engaged in decades-long rape and abuse of teen boys. Belatedly exposed, they were never punished, quietly went to Israel and were promoted up the chain. At the time, Cuomo had just been forced to okay a law removing restrictions on victims filing lawsuits for the abuse due to the statute of limitations. There were nearly 100 victims from this school who were filing a case. It’d be interesting to know if it ever succeeded. I don’t want to broad-brush who abuses children either, the story in passing noted the Orthodox techniques of burying the abuse, attacking anyone who revealed it, etc. was identical to what the Boy Scouts of America, Catholic cleric pedophiles, etc. do. In fact, one good man in the Orthodox community who revealed the abuse was attacked in an area store by a local fishmonger, who threw bleach in his face. He was very lucky not to have gone blind, was severely burned. The attacker was protected by the local D.A. who needed the “Jewish vote,” was convicted of assault and served 6 months of probation, no jail time. This of course is something similar to what Kop Kamala did for Catholic Church child-rapists in San Francisco, as I have previously shared. (And there is one wanna-be DC insider on this site who greatly praises the Social (In)Justice Warrior Kamala regularly, but “pragmatic” decisions like protecting child rapists or continuing a Genocide don’t bother him, of course. She needed the “Catholic vote,” la-dee-dah, nothing to see here, just move along . . .)
I’m not sure if children are truly innocent, at some point clearly they are, but then bullies whether adults (feigning being well-meaning) or other children initiate them into the brutal pecking-order, and turn them into abusers as well. “Man is a bad animal.”
Train them in brutality and abuse early, make monsters of them, they will grow into that woman who fantasizes in a few years she’ll be killing Russkies for the glory of France. Those dirty reds believed in Egalite with their Communist experiment, such ideas of Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite have no place in modern France. Obey, serve the state, kill and be killed, ain’t it glorious.
It’s not Orwell’s boot kicking a face eternally, instead it’s an Eternal Charge of the Light Brigade. I’m thankful never to have conformed or got suckered into this, there are others on the margins like mago who do the same. But our Leaders show what this society is and it is ugly beyond belief.
Are there bad coaches? Yes.
Bad parents? Yes.
Do children suffer because of them? Yes.
Are there good coaches? Yes.
Good parents? Yes.
Do children benefit because of them? Yes.
The broad brush condemnation of something that brings so much good to so many children, just because everyone has a story, tastes to me like virtue signaling. Which, is the most distasteful aspect of Ian’s commentariat. And which, is the very thing that drives me away.
Hmm. Virtue signaling. . . Never thought about it here. Maybe. . .
Anyway, everybody’s talking about the Epstein files so I don’t have to, thank god. I will mention that Taibbi and Tracey have lost their shit with their dismissive and disdainful responses to the whole affair. Anybody who believes the truth is an ignorant fool. Gee I wonder who’s buttering their bread?Those two went off the rails a some time ago. Sad.
It’s funny where one’s mind might stray. I was thinking about those toxic floating prisons sloshing about in the Caribbean with what is it, 4,000 inmates on the USS Ford?
Four thousand people eating shit food with all their waste hitting the water. Sweet. Hormones raging, boredom mounting. I can’t imagine the emotional and mental climate and I don’t want to.
Don’t know if it’s accurate, but I read there’s a billion dollar a day price tag for the “biggest armada ever”according to Caligula in DC. Big is good, biggerly good.
I’m wondering what else that kind of money could buy. Ah, well, priorities, dontcha know. Gotta wash the dishes and make a meeting, so that’s all I got for now.
I’m not virtue signaling, I just recounted an experience that happened when I was 8 years old, truthfully.
Do you think I’m walking around butt-hurt about something that happened to me nearly 6 decades ago? Not hardly. I subscribed to Nietzsche’s “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” since I was 19 years old and I had to support myself because my father made threats against my life and safety.
My best friend supports his daughter’s dancing practices and his son’s football successes.
“Are there good coaches? Yes.
Good parents? Yes.
Do children benefit because of them? Yes.”
I don’t disagree with any of those assertions, but I generally see in much of American society overbearing parents who don’t respect their children’s autonomy. I used to have to supervise 3 High School events annually, and when I did athletic events I would see parents screaming at refs and threatening them. One of my friends was supervising Cheerleaders at the school at one time, and when a girl didn’t make the cut, she was demonized by parents, her assistant coach got a death threat over the phone from family members and quit immediately.
People need to have a sense of perspective. A game is a game. It’s not real life, it doesn’t change much of anything. I will give credit to great athletes who put themselves out for the greater good of humanity generally. Muhammed Ali comes to mind, as John Carlos and Tommie Smith at the ’68 Olympics, or Colin Kapernick whose career was destroyed just because he had integrity; Billie Jean King’s activism and beating a mediocre male were good for first wave feminism. (Oh but Martina Navratilova was a monster. A friend of mine worked in the hotel industry at one time had a run-in with her, a totally entitled major asshole.)
Defensiveness is a sign that one expects others to revere your own shibboleths. I can’t be bothered. I don’t expect people to revere mine, I respect others’ autonomy and aesthetics (for them.) The little dog barks, the Caravan rolls on.
‘Rite of passage,’ bond-forming, socialization, induction, indoctrination. Non-conformist types will naturally be skeptical of institutions which clearly and deliberately reproduce the hierarchies which they have been obliged to skirt rather than climb. Did they reject the herd as stifling? Did the herd first appraise them as misfit, and thus legal targets? No love lost on either side.
Normies, for their part, will tend to downplay the dark side of their group-cohesion rites. After all: they and their friends came out on the right side of it. How bad could things be, really? This largely unconscious smoothing of the rough edges can be surprisingly powerful, because it pertains to belonging and for humans belonging is survival.
Arguably it is also to an extent an individual duty to seek acceptance. If you can’t be counted on to pull an oar the same as the rest, why should the rest want you? Although, if being on the team meant you had to eat all the shit that ran downhill, you would probably come to hate even the idea of teams.
Anyway, silly rabbits, sports are for gambling now.
Header: Pre-Industrial Culture and Civilization methods of Water Resource management and maintainance methods.
Here is a pdf available for computer screen viewing of a hydrologist’s decades-long survey of pre-industrial/ non-industrial water resource management and use methods from around the world, written up into a magisterial book on the subject. Ideally, as many people as possible would get and own a real copy of the real book. Meanwhile, here is the computer-available pdf version which people can read till it is taken offline or until the internet is kill-switched, paywalled against the non-elite or otherwise go-darked for good.
( supplemental note to Eric Anderson . . . some people bring comments like this one right here with its link right above while other people bring the sort of comments which lead you to want to stop coming here. The name of each commenter appears above the comment itself, so based on the name you can guess as to what the value of the forthcoming comment might be. ” By their fruits shall ye know them” and remember . . . God made a scroll button.)
As to those arguing I’m some kind of conformist because I’m a damn good Dad who coaches his son in organized athletics?
Go back and read my contributions to the site. Just web search either Eric Anderson or Webstir together with Ian Welsh. Ian’s dedicated search also turns most of them up.
Yeah, I’m a real product of the mass hypnosis machine alright 🤣
For those born in the ’50s, just over 50% of those who started playing organized sports as children dropped out before they turned 18. But for those born in the ’90s, over 70% of those who started playing organized sports dropped out before they reached adulthood. It is now much more common for children to play sports and drop out than to play continually or to never play while growing up.
A previous study by Knoester and colleagues showed that many kids who drop out do it because they were not having fun, or felt they were not a good enough player. This study suggests that the problem has been getting worse for recent generations of kids, Knoester said.
The issue of more youth dropping out of sports may be connected to the growth of club sports and the pressures kids feel to excel, the researchers said.
“Underlying all of this is the dramatic shift from sports being seen as a way to have fun and make friends and learn life lessons to sports being a way to get ahead in life,” Bjork said.
Gil here (aka Sauron), author of the article on Lord of the Rings. Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts.
I’ll confess the bullet points were a tactical error: nothing says “I deeply understand Tolkien’s soul” quite like formatting that belongs in a quarterly OKR review. You’ve caught me red-handed.
That said, I think we actually agree more than you might expect. The enduring magic of Middle earth is about those unquantifiable virtues: friendship, mercy, the small heroism of ordinary hobbits. I just used fewer words and more formatting crimes to say it.
Enjoy the read-aloud sessions with your son, there’s nothing quite like experiencing that world fresh through a child’s eyes. That’s the real magic right there.
Like and dislike. Interesting. I read the comments here, some of which I don’t quite understand or necessarily agree with, but I consider that each one has something to say. I pretty much know the sensibilities of the regulars. On occasion I send thanks and appreciation, but often I say nothing. A couple of times I’ve called someone out.
I’ve been dissed on here and there and I shrug. It’s the internet. We’re all strangers here in the end. I give the benefit of doubt to all. I trust Ian who has a greater sense of who the commentariat is than you and I and that’s good enough for me.
Sending seasons greetings to all who may bother to get past their pre concepts of what this mago dude might be about. Peace on earth, goodwill to (wo)man.
People say and do what they say and do and everyone dies carrying with them the consequences of their actions and nothing else. All your money fame friends and family are left behind so maybe just maybe we can practice kindness, tolerance and patience and help each other along the way.
I started out to say something else, but that’s what came out. So be it. There’s no need to read it.
Hey d c, some 35 years ago I wrote a research paper on desertification for an environmental studies class. It was scary then, and I never thought I’d see the day, but they’re still raping the Sonora desert, although the cucumbers are “organic “ now.
Thanks for the link.
Last summer I took a train ride across the southern Sonora Desert from New Mexico through Arizona to California. I saw lots of ocotillos and unknown-to-me shrubs and palo verdes and some kind of smallish tree with purple flowers. But I saw almost zero cactuses anywhere. Did I just miss them? Or have they almost all been dug up and removed by cactus rustlers to sell to desert-country homeowners to xeriscape their yards with?
At some point I went through a gradient from Sonora to Mojave desert plantscape. At least I think it was Mojave desert plantscape because of the appearance of lots of little “Joshua bushes” and “Joshua shrubs” though no actual Joshua trees visible from where the train tracks took me.
It is about 5 minutes. Very little fluff and filler, very much show-and-tell how to prepare potatoes for long-term storage . . . ” up to” a year. Really? Worth a try!
Of course, Silicon Valley comprises mostly those who dropped out and/or never participated to begin with, so there is that implication of organized sports. Who could argue Silicon Valley isn’t Revenge of the Nerds? Gil, did you participate in organized sports growing up? Did Musk? Did Gates? Did Zuckerberg? Did Altman? Did Thiel? Karp?
Knowing what I know now from many years of observation and critical review of those observations, I never would have had children. I was unwittingly complicit in the pain and suffering to come just as you are now.
If any of you have not seen Severance, do so now. It is excellent. Riveting. Fantastic metaphor and it’s only just barely metaphor and if the Revenge of the Silicon Valley Nerds have their druthers, that metaphor will quickly become a reality or something even worse than that terrible fate. Ben Stiller, who would have thought? Respect, Ben!
I am just now watching another George Conway political videocast on You Tube and I am beginning to feel like it is a bunch of Political Science Fiction Fantasy. Are these bad things he says are happening to Trump really happening? Or is this AlternaWorld Fantasy Wish-Projection? I don’t have the time and energy to cross-check internet sites to see how many of these things are really happening or not. I am wondering how many of the previous Conway videos I linked to ( regarding Trump) are pure fantasy which George hopes to make into reality through the Magic of Manifestation.
I hope some of it is true but I just don’t know . . .
Eric Anderson
I’ve been reading the Lord of the Rings series to my son of late.
So, I was curious when I came across this link over at Hacker News :https://medium.com/@gp2030/tolkiens-secret-why-lord-of-the-rings-outlasted-every-imitator-c82e4ad179ad
Anticipating some manner of prose laid out in a thoughtful manner, I was kind of excited to dive in. Instead, I was once again disappointed by what would seem a narrowly educated tech-nerd who probably doesn’t even know the meaning of prose, or possess the ability to recognize irony.
In short, the bullet pointed trash is the very evil he’s attempting to juxtapose against LoR persistent endurance. Irony knows no bounds.
Tolkein would most likely look upon the “vibe-coding” Linked-In, tech climber as Sauron himself.
And, Gil, it’s no $%^#@#$% “secret” why LoR has endured: Capitalism is an evil, unnatural extractive system that benefits the few at the xpense of the many and all of our souls feel this as cognitive dissonance. Tolkein provides our minds with a vision of a better world where the unquantifiable virtues of humanity valiantly defy cost/benefit analysis.
Link here: https://medium.com/@gp2030/tolkiens-secret-why-lord-of-the-rings-outlasted-every-imitator-c82e4ad179ad
mago
Testing. Testing. Hello?
Is anybody home?
The world’s on fire and the fire extinguisher’s reached its expiration date.
Like & Subscribe
https://lauragraceweldon.com/2018/10/29/organized-sports-arent-play/
Organized sport is not only not play but it’s also not ritual and rights of passage either or any ritualistic component of it is so muted and overshadowed and obscured it can be said to be non-existent.
Eric Anderson
Like & Subscribe:
So, the entire world wide web at your disposal and you bring a crunchy poet as authority?
Ever get selected for a team of your ”peers” because all the kids that didn’t make the team weren’t talented enough? Ever win State championships, L&S?
These are profound rites of passage.
And, there is a grain of truth that organized athletics are “structured” play, rather than the “unstructured” variety that kids thrive upon (and Laura is nattering on about). But, what the structured play provides is opportunities to form strong trusting peer groups where the unstructured play happens off the field/court/pitch, what have you.
My kid is at a sleepover as I type with 5 of those peers and they’ve been doing nothing but “unstructured” playing for most of yesterday, and will continue into today. This happens all the time.
I’m more likely to believe your kid just wasn’t cut out for athletics, and now, your grapes are soured on it. Or, maybe, it’s just a post hoc rationalization for lazy parenting. I dunno. But, it makes me kinda sad you’ve denied your kiddo these opportunities.
Mark Level
I thank mago for the trenchant observation and am getting the same vibe. I wanted to look at what the normies are thinking this morning and went to the Establishment center Politico to find this– https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/12/21/france-europe-security-trump-00700889
Macron is deeply sick, has a 16% approval rating, rules only by decree and has a decades-older “wife” who may have a penis and started having sex with him when he was 14 or 15. When I saw that shot of him “waving” at a Military parade my first thought was, why is no French man or woman taking a head shot at him? So they have lost the attempt to use the Nazi Wanna-Be Ukrainian maniacs to “destroy” Russia and this clown can only double down on the failure and playing “Little Napoleon” imagine starting a future war in 2029 or 2030 that NATO will then lose more decisively. The “West” is built on nothing but Endless Wars, Death and Carnage, and creates societies that destroy their own people (trying to exterminate the hated, feared Other.) They interview some dumb racist woman who wants to “serve” unending war. Just beautiful.
That loosely connects to the article which L&S shared, which I thank him for, though it’s sad that he confuses what a Rite of Passage is. There is no Right of Passage, there is droit de seigneur (which I bet Trump and Curtis Yarvin and some of those other Epstein Adjacent PDF Files are trying to bring back, recruiting in Middle Schools). I had a really dumb Principal once at a school I worked at, eventually fired after 2 newspaper stories about his abuse of students and staff, who once emailed about the school “sight”, another Union Rep beat me to correcting him on the difference between sight and site. I really identified with the line about the school psychologist, “She sees six-year-olds who are anxious and withdrawn. Eight-year-olds who are angry and cynical.” I was the latter at age 8 after playing Peewee baseball, I quit and never looked back.
We had an angry, yelling coach, screeching at 7-8 year olds about the need to “win”, red-faced. I’m thankful for this experience coz it turned me off of organized spectator sports forever. I suppose that the kernel of some sports may have some human agency but yes, organizing and manipulating children into this kind of Rites is mostly child abuse, manipulative, and denies their imaginations and better instincts.
Harper’s in late 2019 did a piece about an all-boys Orthodox Jewish school in NYC where 2 Rabbis, one an Assistant Principal, engaged in decades-long rape and abuse of teen boys. Belatedly exposed, they were never punished, quietly went to Israel and were promoted up the chain. At the time, Cuomo had just been forced to okay a law removing restrictions on victims filing lawsuits for the abuse due to the statute of limitations. There were nearly 100 victims from this school who were filing a case. It’d be interesting to know if it ever succeeded. I don’t want to broad-brush who abuses children either, the story in passing noted the Orthodox techniques of burying the abuse, attacking anyone who revealed it, etc. was identical to what the Boy Scouts of America, Catholic cleric pedophiles, etc. do. In fact, one good man in the Orthodox community who revealed the abuse was attacked in an area store by a local fishmonger, who threw bleach in his face. He was very lucky not to have gone blind, was severely burned. The attacker was protected by the local D.A. who needed the “Jewish vote,” was convicted of assault and served 6 months of probation, no jail time. This of course is something similar to what Kop Kamala did for Catholic Church child-rapists in San Francisco, as I have previously shared. (And there is one wanna-be DC insider on this site who greatly praises the Social (In)Justice Warrior Kamala regularly, but “pragmatic” decisions like protecting child rapists or continuing a Genocide don’t bother him, of course. She needed the “Catholic vote,” la-dee-dah, nothing to see here, just move along . . .)
I’m not sure if children are truly innocent, at some point clearly they are, but then bullies whether adults (feigning being well-meaning) or other children initiate them into the brutal pecking-order, and turn them into abusers as well. “Man is a bad animal.”
Train them in brutality and abuse early, make monsters of them, they will grow into that woman who fantasizes in a few years she’ll be killing Russkies for the glory of France. Those dirty reds believed in Egalite with their Communist experiment, such ideas of Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite have no place in modern France. Obey, serve the state, kill and be killed, ain’t it glorious.
It’s not Orwell’s boot kicking a face eternally, instead it’s an Eternal Charge of the Light Brigade. I’m thankful never to have conformed or got suckered into this, there are others on the margins like mago who do the same. But our Leaders show what this society is and it is ugly beyond belief.
Eric Anderson
Are there bad coaches? Yes.
Bad parents? Yes.
Do children suffer because of them? Yes.
Are there good coaches? Yes.
Good parents? Yes.
Do children benefit because of them? Yes.
The broad brush condemnation of something that brings so much good to so many children, just because everyone has a story, tastes to me like virtue signaling. Which, is the most distasteful aspect of Ian’s commentariat. And which, is the very thing that drives me away.
Barf.
mago
Hmm. Virtue signaling. . . Never thought about it here. Maybe. . .
Anyway, everybody’s talking about the Epstein files so I don’t have to, thank god. I will mention that Taibbi and Tracey have lost their shit with their dismissive and disdainful responses to the whole affair. Anybody who believes the truth is an ignorant fool. Gee I wonder who’s buttering their bread?Those two went off the rails a some time ago. Sad.
It’s funny where one’s mind might stray. I was thinking about those toxic floating prisons sloshing about in the Caribbean with what is it, 4,000 inmates on the USS Ford?
Four thousand people eating shit food with all their waste hitting the water. Sweet. Hormones raging, boredom mounting. I can’t imagine the emotional and mental climate and I don’t want to.
Don’t know if it’s accurate, but I read there’s a billion dollar a day price tag for the “biggest armada ever”according to Caligula in DC. Big is good, biggerly good.
I’m wondering what else that kind of money could buy. Ah, well, priorities, dontcha know. Gotta wash the dishes and make a meeting, so that’s all I got for now.
Thanks to Mark Level, btw.
Mark Level
I’m not virtue signaling, I just recounted an experience that happened when I was 8 years old, truthfully.
Do you think I’m walking around butt-hurt about something that happened to me nearly 6 decades ago? Not hardly. I subscribed to Nietzsche’s “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” since I was 19 years old and I had to support myself because my father made threats against my life and safety.
My best friend supports his daughter’s dancing practices and his son’s football successes.
“Are there good coaches? Yes.
Good parents? Yes.
Do children benefit because of them? Yes.”
I don’t disagree with any of those assertions, but I generally see in much of American society overbearing parents who don’t respect their children’s autonomy. I used to have to supervise 3 High School events annually, and when I did athletic events I would see parents screaming at refs and threatening them. One of my friends was supervising Cheerleaders at the school at one time, and when a girl didn’t make the cut, she was demonized by parents, her assistant coach got a death threat over the phone from family members and quit immediately.
People need to have a sense of perspective. A game is a game. It’s not real life, it doesn’t change much of anything. I will give credit to great athletes who put themselves out for the greater good of humanity generally. Muhammed Ali comes to mind, as John Carlos and Tommie Smith at the ’68 Olympics, or Colin Kapernick whose career was destroyed just because he had integrity; Billie Jean King’s activism and beating a mediocre male were good for first wave feminism. (Oh but Martina Navratilova was a monster. A friend of mine worked in the hotel industry at one time had a run-in with her, a totally entitled major asshole.)
Defensiveness is a sign that one expects others to revere your own shibboleths. I can’t be bothered. I don’t expect people to revere mine, I respect others’ autonomy and aesthetics (for them.) The little dog barks, the Caravan rolls on.
Planter of Trees
‘Rite of passage,’ bond-forming, socialization, induction, indoctrination. Non-conformist types will naturally be skeptical of institutions which clearly and deliberately reproduce the hierarchies which they have been obliged to skirt rather than climb. Did they reject the herd as stifling? Did the herd first appraise them as misfit, and thus legal targets? No love lost on either side.
Normies, for their part, will tend to downplay the dark side of their group-cohesion rites. After all: they and their friends came out on the right side of it. How bad could things be, really? This largely unconscious smoothing of the rough edges can be surprisingly powerful, because it pertains to belonging and for humans belonging is survival.
Arguably it is also to an extent an individual duty to seek acceptance. If you can’t be counted on to pull an oar the same as the rest, why should the rest want you? Although, if being on the team meant you had to eat all the shit that ran downhill, you would probably come to hate even the idea of teams.
Anyway, silly rabbits, sports are for gambling now.
different clue
@ Eric Anderson,
I am about to offer the sort of comment which might give you an incentive to keep staying here.
Stay tuned . . . . .
different clue
Header: Pre-Industrial Culture and Civilization methods of Water Resource management and maintainance methods.
Here is a pdf available for computer screen viewing of a hydrologist’s decades-long survey of pre-industrial/ non-industrial water resource management and use methods from around the world, written up into a magisterial book on the subject. Ideally, as many people as possible would get and own a real copy of the real book. Meanwhile, here is the computer-available pdf version which people can read till it is taken offline or until the internet is kill-switched, paywalled against the non-elite or otherwise go-darked for good.
” The Water Atlas ( traditional knowledge to combat desertification)”
https://catalogue.unccd.int/1148_The-water-atlas.pdf
( supplemental note to Eric Anderson . . . some people bring comments like this one right here with its link right above while other people bring the sort of comments which lead you to want to stop coming here. The name of each commenter appears above the comment itself, so based on the name you can guess as to what the value of the forthcoming comment might be. ” By their fruits shall ye know them” and remember . . . God made a scroll button.)
mago
And oh yeah, happy solstice to those in the Northern hemisphere.
Moving forward to the light.
Eric Anderson
Thanks Different Clue. Indeed true 🙂
As to those arguing I’m some kind of conformist because I’m a damn good Dad who coaches his son in organized athletics?
Go back and read my contributions to the site. Just web search either Eric Anderson or Webstir together with Ian Welsh. Ian’s dedicated search also turns most of them up.
Yeah, I’m a real product of the mass hypnosis machine alright 🤣
Like & Subscribe
https://news.osu.edu/organized-youth-sports-are-increasingly-for-the-privileged
For those born in the ’50s, just over 50% of those who started playing organized sports as children dropped out before they turned 18. But for those born in the ’90s, over 70% of those who started playing organized sports dropped out before they reached adulthood. It is now much more common for children to play sports and drop out than to play continually or to never play while growing up.
A previous study by Knoester and colleagues showed that many kids who drop out do it because they were not having fun, or felt they were not a good enough player. This study suggests that the problem has been getting worse for recent generations of kids, Knoester said.
The issue of more youth dropping out of sports may be connected to the growth of club sports and the pressures kids feel to excel, the researchers said.
“Underlying all of this is the dramatic shift from sports being seen as a way to have fun and make friends and learn life lessons to sports being a way to get ahead in life,” Bjork said.
Gil Pignol
@ Eric Anderson
Hi Eric,
Gil here (aka Sauron), author of the article on Lord of the Rings. Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts.
I’ll confess the bullet points were a tactical error: nothing says “I deeply understand Tolkien’s soul” quite like formatting that belongs in a quarterly OKR review. You’ve caught me red-handed.
That said, I think we actually agree more than you might expect. The enduring magic of Middle earth is about those unquantifiable virtues: friendship, mercy, the small heroism of ordinary hobbits. I just used fewer words and more formatting crimes to say it.
Enjoy the read-aloud sessions with your son, there’s nothing quite like experiencing that world fresh through a child’s eyes. That’s the real magic right there.
Warmly (but in an evil, extractive way),
Gil
P.S. See you on LinkedIn!
mago
Like and dislike. Interesting. I read the comments here, some of which I don’t quite understand or necessarily agree with, but I consider that each one has something to say. I pretty much know the sensibilities of the regulars. On occasion I send thanks and appreciation, but often I say nothing. A couple of times I’ve called someone out.
I’ve been dissed on here and there and I shrug. It’s the internet. We’re all strangers here in the end. I give the benefit of doubt to all. I trust Ian who has a greater sense of who the commentariat is than you and I and that’s good enough for me.
Sending seasons greetings to all who may bother to get past their pre concepts of what this mago dude might be about. Peace on earth, goodwill to (wo)man.
mago
People say and do what they say and do and everyone dies carrying with them the consequences of their actions and nothing else. All your money fame friends and family are left behind so maybe just maybe we can practice kindness, tolerance and patience and help each other along the way.
I started out to say something else, but that’s what came out. So be it. There’s no need to read it.
mago
Hey d c, some 35 years ago I wrote a research paper on desertification for an environmental studies class. It was scary then, and I never thought I’d see the day, but they’re still raping the Sonora desert, although the cucumbers are “organic “ now.
Thanks for the link.
different clue
@mago,
Last summer I took a train ride across the southern Sonora Desert from New Mexico through Arizona to California. I saw lots of ocotillos and unknown-to-me shrubs and palo verdes and some kind of smallish tree with purple flowers. But I saw almost zero cactuses anywhere. Did I just miss them? Or have they almost all been dug up and removed by cactus rustlers to sell to desert-country homeowners to xeriscape their yards with?
At some point I went through a gradient from Sonora to Mojave desert plantscape. At least I think it was Mojave desert plantscape because of the appearance of lots of little “Joshua bushes” and “Joshua shrubs” though no actual Joshua trees visible from where the train tracks took me.
different clue
Header: personal or family multi-month potato storage video.
” How to Keep Potatoes Fresh for a Year! ”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjb_SRYf_3I
It is about 5 minutes. Very little fluff and filler, very much show-and-tell how to prepare potatoes for long-term storage . . . ” up to” a year. Really? Worth a try!
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Of course, Silicon Valley comprises mostly those who dropped out and/or never participated to begin with, so there is that implication of organized sports. Who could argue Silicon Valley isn’t Revenge of the Nerds? Gil, did you participate in organized sports growing up? Did Musk? Did Gates? Did Zuckerberg? Did Altman? Did Thiel? Karp?
Knowing what I know now from many years of observation and critical review of those observations, I never would have had children. I was unwittingly complicit in the pain and suffering to come just as you are now.
If any of you have not seen Severance, do so now. It is excellent. Riveting. Fantastic metaphor and it’s only just barely metaphor and if the Revenge of the Silicon Valley Nerds have their druthers, that metaphor will quickly become a reality or something even worse than that terrible fate. Ben Stiller, who would have thought? Respect, Ben!
different clue
I am just now watching another George Conway political videocast on You Tube and I am beginning to feel like it is a bunch of Political Science Fiction Fantasy. Are these bad things he says are happening to Trump really happening? Or is this AlternaWorld Fantasy Wish-Projection? I don’t have the time and energy to cross-check internet sites to see how many of these things are really happening or not. I am wondering how many of the previous Conway videos I linked to ( regarding Trump) are pure fantasy which George hopes to make into reality through the Magic of Manifestation.
I hope some of it is true but I just don’t know . . .