a spectre is the 2024 internet man. and that spectre is:
the difference between modernism and post-modernism.
this has been a huge part of my "navigating people trying to force you to do stuff" studies. it is useful.
know the difference. it could save your life.
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my education is native to postmodern world. this isnt really a flex at all, because its a terrible place to start. you essentially start off with everything disassembled, and then you have to work backwards and figure out why people disassembled it. really, its a horrible set up
that being said, it's almost a joke now that people use post-modernism as a blanket term online without really referring to anything specific. we can imagine the ancient "everything i dont like is hitler" meme reset with "postmodernism" at the end. at least, thats the perception
one of my favorite weird internet things. was in a program like this around 3rd grade. in retrospect, makes no sense. was taken out of school half a day once a week and taken to a non-school building to do weird puzzles and take strange tests. generic name, 0 record of it online
i remember being in the basement of our school, a huge grey room, with all the kids there sitting very far from each other. they gave us a test with lots of images. me and three other kids got in, and they’d take just the three of us on this bus to the program with the other kids
the building they took us to was not a school building, the only adult there was whoever the “teacher” was. we took bizarre tests that usually involved working around a problem, a logical trick, or inventing something to solve an elaborate complex problem. zero normal “learning”
today is st.martin's day, also known as martinmas. the story of st. martin is that he had a coat, and cut part of it off to help another man keep warm
a lot of waldorf (anthroposophy) stuff is about catholic saints. on martinmas, they do a lantern walk. aesthetically, its cool:
the kids line up with lanterns they made and walk out into the darkness in a line. it has an obvious symbolic component: being the light in the darkness, going into the dark part of the year - st. martin's act, and others like it, that we can do, as illuminating a dark world:
its hard to find good pictures of it, probably because it has a reverent vibe, and its not really a "take out your phone" environment... plus its dark. but seeing the kids walk out all together with these paper lights is very cool. its become a "start of winter" thing for us.
after elections, much is made about how the educated vote vs the uneducated. ive benefited from education and am generally a book nerd, but there are dimensions to the educated vs uneducated dichotomy that dont fit into intelligent vs unintelligent. one is: cause and effect
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when you receive education, you are not “a cause”: you are “an effect”. you are receiving. you are there to be the effect of the educational institution. some people that are well educated have been in this state for years - this receptive state has been the focus of their life.
because education “is good”, some people never snap out of this, and never become “a cause”. they just stay receptive - they stay “the effect” forever, even after leaving. contrast this with someone uneducated - its possible they’ve been “pure cause” for almost their entire life
appalachia is a crazy place. “first and last frontier”. millions of people, but only one state is fully in it (west virginia) so it flys under the radar as a region - unlike the pacific northwest, the midwest, the south, which you can associate with many full states.
appalachia took the brunt of having no environmental regulations at the time. they basically blew off the tops of mountains to strip them and things like that. in my opinion you can kind of code the increasing environmentalist vibe as you scan america east to west, starting here.
the mountains themselves also retained a lot of “original” culture, as an isolating or shielding force. horace kephart was something like a mega-librarian who went to live up in the mountains around 1900 and happened to notice how much language they retained even back to chaucer: