Post 4300 - Joyous Advent

Family Tradition

The first lines of the chorus have always been this family's phrase for the evening hour when small children are no longer intelligent, but still talking...

Luciafest

Ben posted a video "Swedish Lucia For Dummies" that is unafraid to mention that this is a deeply pagan festival.  Distilled cuteness covers a multitude of sins, I guess, as even the Covenanters celebrate it, as we will this year.  (I'm betting the Swedish Baptist churches dropped it, though.  Are there even any of those left?)


Cute.  Cute costumes. Our two oldest had their shot at being tomten and star boys, and Emily will be a tomter for the first time this year. Kyle and the two Romanians came too late for that.

Interesting that it is still celebrated in Sweden. Though they are at times a hypertraditional people who like to make sure that everyone is on the same page and doing the same thing. An online American commenter mentioned how much he loved living in Sweden until he got to Christmas and noticed that every house in town was decorated in exactly the same fashion.  then he couldn't get out fast enough. I mentioned in reply that there were suburbs here (I was thinking Bedford) with remarkably similar decorations for blocks on end but he dismissed that.  I know what you mean, but this was much more intense. ABBA has been around for 40 years now but they haven't worked that in.* You laugh. American Christmas adds new traditions every year, many of them deplorable. Stupid songs not allowed to die a natural death, reanimated each December like some undead simulacrum of humor or worse, oversentimentalised stories about poor children getting various versions of the-greatest-gift-of-all: shoes, a friend, a sense of wonder, Daddy finally returning after years of profligate wandering, a wink from Santa, a puppy. Plus John Lennon being self-righteous. That's always fun.

My town is much more mixed, with some front-lit greenery and single-candle-per-window neighborhoods, some splashy, tacky, riotous displays, a fair mix of the idiosyncratic, and a whole lot of houses with no decoration. One of our neighbors has an overfull, random display of illuminated (some even flash!) objects - though there is a creche and many santas - such as a 6-foot giraffe with stocking cap next to a large frog.

*Yes, ABBA had that Lennon-lite "Happy New Year," but that was pretty endurable. And they did a very nice job with actual carols.


You can skip the longish introduction here.

Baby I Need Your Lovin'

I almost went with "Tracks of My Tears" instead, until I saw those dresses. That has got to be 1965 or 66. His hair tells me the earlier year is more likely.

It's 7th grade all over for me again. It's an interesting phenomenon of memory. I can tell you within a year or maybe two when something was in fashion from about 1965-72, even with the confounding factors that no girl at my school could have afforded a dress like that or dared to be that splashy; and that Manchester, NH was about a year behind the eastern cities in styles. (Which means a year ahead of Goffstown, where I live now.) But I couldn't come close to telling you what year in the 1980's and 90's something happened by looking at the clothes and the hair. Nor could I for anything prior to '65 - though of course some other clue might give me a guess.

In 1965 I started to care what was up-to-the-minute, and researched it wherever I went, though I didn't call it that. Somewhere in college that just faded. It perked up again for a year or two when my older sons hit 14 or 15, so that I can remember that Hootie and the Blowfish owned 1994.

Correction

On the basis of what I read, what I hear from mental health clinicians, and more extended conversations with members of my family, I have long thought that the obsession of those on the left with finding racism in their political/cultural rivals - in fact, in just about everyone - is a form of escape, of distancing.  They want everyone to know they aren't one of those rubes.

But reading some of the offerings from hbd chick's recent linkfest, especially this little number about 3 Reasons Why Diversity Doesn't Work, it occurred to me that the pull might be in the other direction.  It may be that being an anti-racist is one of the markers of the cultural elite in that crowd.  It's not something where you can just act decently to all sorts of people and say no more about it.  Displaying antiracism is a signifier that one deeply belongs. Making statements about how racist other people are, and displaying a greater sensitivity than normal for detecting it, may be an aspirational strategy - a way of getting ahead.

Rather like the princess and the pea.

It would explain why conversations about immigration so quickly move to accusations of prejudice. It is not enough to merely make no statements which can be interpreted as bigoted; one has to display positive behaviors of being better than average.  Heck, it might be a mating or status-enhancing strategy within that tribe.  I have been thinking of the value of the display as a way of weakening other tribes, but it may instead be a method of acquiring resources within the tribe.

One of the Higher Spiritual Gifts

There are lists of spiritual gifts - in Romans 12, in 1 Corinthians 12, in Ephesians 4, plus a few other isolated references in 1Cor 7 and 1Pet 4.

There is also a common distinction made between teaching, as in presenting new insights, and preaching, as in exhortation. Perhaps the gift I have in mind is just a subset of that latter.

I find as I am older that neither reading the scriptures, nor prayer, nor listening to others brings me anything new.  But I think that's a feature, not a bug. If I haven't got the basics down at this point, I'm never going to.  But what I need over and over, my daily bread in the spiritual realm, are reminders.  I very quickly lose what I know in the heat of the battle - there are many holes in the bottom of my bucket and all the good stuff runs out pretty quickly.

The Gift of Reminding is one of the higher gifts we should aspire to.

Meeting Rituals

The more important people think the meeting is, the longer the rituals before any actual work gets done or information given.  The audience may not agree, but it's a pretty good measure of what the presenters think.

Little League games open with very little ritual.  The amount increases as the level of play improves.  When it comes to the World Series, the build starts days before.  When the high school has Parents' Night, they are careful to have the National Anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance, because they want to reassure the parents - We Get It. We share your culture - even when they don't.  In districts where everyone is very liberal, event the parents of teenagers, maybe they communicate that they get it by not having the pledge, devoting more time to exhortation and bringing up PC groups of students to sing or show their art or get the Right Kind of Awards.  I wouldn't know.

At work, those meetings where the CEO speaks, and lots of people get introduced, and they share inside jokes about how hard they've been working on this - so that you ungrateful bastards attending this workshop/training/presentation know that - are the meetings you need to not say anything bad about, even if it all takes two hours out of your morning that you can't spare to introduce you to a topic you can't do anything about anyway.  (This week: electronic medical record. overview. training starts in Feb. unless there's a delay. timelines. sample screen shots from the software.  except these are from another version, and ours will be different. let's clap for Richard, and Tom, and Diana, who have worked hard. they will be available when we go live in May, right here on site.)

I only asked one question, which is remarkably restrained for me.  It was a good question, but there are no good questions.  I should have asked none.

Pascal's Wager

I have a lengthy, meandering post on the subject - I think I will trash it.

Central point:  If you think there's a 1% chance Christianity is true, then Pascal's Wager makes sense. Technically, because Pascal was a mathematician and liked to think in terms of infinities, it makes sense anyway.  But our brains really don't work that way.  "Big number" is a big number, no more, and infinity is just a big number.  So infinite bliss and infinite torment, to our reptilian brains that we really decide with, boil down to "a whole lot. At least 87."

But I don't see how the wager gets us from 0% to 1%.  If you really think there is zero chance it's true, Pascal can't help you. But it's a slam dunk as a tie-breaker, if you are actually 50-50 whether to believe.

I think there is 0% chance that reincarnation in the Hindu sense, of coming back as animals and other people over and over until we get it right, is true.  But we are to be given new bodies on a remade earth in the Christian new creation, and at least one 1st C group of believers believed in reincarnation, so the idea that we might come back as a something, some unimaginable helper in some other universe, I think rates a 1% chance.  If there were some precautionary action I should take for that, some other version of Pascal's Wager, I'd consider it.

Epicurians and Confucians, in different ways, believed that getting along in a peaceful society was a great good and pleasure, and so recommended worshiping the local gods, with neither seeming to ask whether you believed in them. That is Pascal writ small, a minor inconvenience for a great gain.  The Victorians in the C of E, and the Scandinavian Lutherans until about 50 years ago, seemed to echo this.  Believing was less important than the positive benefits of all journeying together and being a community.

Modern Christians, especially evangelicals, don't think much of that sort of belief.  They want to see BELIEF, not some Potemkin village of belief. I sympathise, but they are simply wrong.  On a purely worldly level, no one who relies on the Four Spiritual Laws and coming forward on the sawdust trail in a moment of excitement is in much of a position to criticise others about getting in on a technicality.  But even on a deeper level, none of us comes into belief for a good reason of our own. We are called, not because of our merit but because of His love.  So a Pascal's Wager convert should be welcomed.  Heck, she should even be given a whack at teaching adult Sunday School. Once, anyway.

Update:  See James's comment.

Because

There's a clever little internet usage that I noticed popping up over a year ago.  Perhaps it is older and I didn't notice.  It is a shorthand explanation that intentionally does not explain: because. As in I never considered going into nursing.  Because excretions. Or We're not vacationing there this year.  Because money. I like it, generally. Cute. Efficient.  No more explanation needed.  You should just see.

The problem with it is that the kite string can get quite long, until the kite is invisible. A long string can contribute to the humor, as the subtext "this is just obvious" gets funnier if you have to actually work it out a bit. Wear clean underwear.  Because hospital.

Or the text exchange

Come home by 10
??
Because mother.

But the longer the kite string the more territory is being skipped over, regarded as not even worthy of mentioning. Things can get ambiguous.

We should be affirming homosexuals who visit, because Bible.
We should not be affirming homosexuals who visit, because Bible.

In that instance, the declaration that no further explanation is necessary is an avoidance. Consider the statement: "He stopped going to high school to go skiing all the time. Because Switzerland." Consider the gradual changes through Because Colorado. Because Vermont. Because Maine. Because West Virginia.

I had only partly thought this through.  I had seen some FB and internet comments using this humorous shorthand that I thought were not quite fair, a vague sensing that they were leaping to conclusions or leaving out counterarguments that made the leap not so obvious as they thought.  This crystalised for me when I read the article over at the Atlantic, the stupidly-named (because tangent) America has a New Preposition, Because Internet. The central examples were all snarky comments by liberals.  Why would this be more attractive to liberals? Is this a selection bias because of who the author reads? Is it because it's a younger demographic? Or is there something about this usage that appeals to a certain personality type?  (I have trouble imagining how it could be connected to some theory of government or proposition about social justice.)

I skimmed the rest of the article.  When some interesting question comes before me, some puzzle that I can work on in my own head, I tend to fade out from the sermon, lecture, conversation, or reading I am supposed to be attending to.  Because ADHD.  Because entertainment.  Because arrogant.

I had some tentatively-worded conclusions rolling around in my brain as I sat down to write this post.  Something about getting to be hip and condescending, pretending an argument has already been made, when in fact it hasn't (as in Screwtape). I should have read to the end more attentively.The professional writer said it better.

It conveys brevity. [Stan] Carey: "It has a snappy, jocular feel, with a syntactic jolt that allows long explanations to be forgone".

But it also conveys a certain universality. When I say, for example, "The talks broke down because politics," I'm not just describing a circumstance. I'm also describing a category. I'm making grand and yet ironized claims, announcing a situation and commenting on that situation at the same time. I'm offering an explanation and rolling my eyes—and I'm able to do it with one little word.

Eye roll pre-installed. There's your answer right there.

National Lampoon Vs Others

Steve Sailer reprised the 1977 issue of National Lampoon's JFK Fifth Inaugural Issue and has come back to that general theme at least two more times in the last few days.

Humor doesn't always wear well - it is rather by definition a product of its time for full effect - and you might not have found that style funny even then.  My wife thought it coarse when we were in college.  Which is true.  It still has the power to offend, as last year there was a push to boycott the magazine because of the offensive cover cover of the 1973 Death Issue:


People didn't read the cover too closely, apparently. The campaign died a quick death as folks figured out there was nothing to boycott.

Sailer has been contrasting NL with the current edgy online humor mag The Onion.  I like the latter, but I take his point.  They would never dare to do a JFK issue that outrageous even now, fifty years later.  PJ O'Rourke, the managing editor, did it less than 15 years after.

So too with The Simpsons and South Park, which have been regarded as rather brave in their outrageousness.  Not even close.