February 2019

funereal-disease:

bambamramfan:

oligopsalter:

what’s your strangest belief that doesn’t intersect (except in the most generous hot take way that anything can) with politics/culture war type stuff?

Polyamory is a middle class word for what the upper and lower classes do as a matter of course.

Hmm, I think I disagree, at least on a terminological level. The broader category of “non-monogamy” – which includes swinging, key parties, side chicks, etc. – more or less fits what you’re describing, but “polyamory” often refers to more stable/consistent arrangements like group houses and closed triads. That does seem like something distinct enough to be worth naming.

I can’t speak for @bambamramfan – and I’m not commenting on the object-level truth of anything here – but I think that this claim should be translated as saying:

The differences that you’re talking about are not just random paths of cultural development, they are precisely the things that make multiple-sex-partner-having viable as a middle-class lifestyle.

The argument goes something like this: Upper-class folks, who build their lives around connections and status and patronage relationships, can be comfortable with tacit arrangements and kept mistresses and the like.  Lower-class folks, who often live rougher-edged lives dominated by short-term concerns, are capable of living with “well, something happened and now we have to live with it” as a major social fact.  It’s the middle class that demands legibility and systematic definition; it’s the middle class that needs rules, for the sake of being able to show that you followed all the rules; it’s the middle class that needs its arrangements to be seen and accepted.

bambamramfan:

balioc:

Here we have the meritocratic delusion most in need of smashing: the notion that the people who make up our elite are especially smart. They are not—and I do not mean that in the feel-good democratic sense that we are all smart in our own ways, the homely-wise farmer no less than the scholar. I mean that the majority of meritocrats are, on their own chosen scale of intelligence, pretty dumb. Grade inflation first hit the Ivies in the late 1960s for a reason. Yale professor David Gelernter has noticed it in his students: “They are so ignorant that it’s hard to accept how ignorant they are. It’s very hard to grasp that the person you’re talking to, who is bright, articulate, conversable, interested, doesn’t know who Beethoven is. Looking back at the history of the twentieth century, just sees a fog.” Camille Paglia once assigned the spiritual “Go Down, Moses” to an English seminar, only to discover to her horror that “of a class of twenty-five students, only two seemed to recognize the name ‘Moses’.… They did not know who he was.”

– Helen Andrews, from “The New Ruling Class”

---

This is a pretty good exemplar of a particular claim that you hear a lot.  “People these days don’t know anything about anything!”  “No high school senior in the country today could hope to pass the 1800 Harvard admissions exam!”  etc.

Unlike some, I’m not inclined to dismiss this lament as stupid on its face.  I do think that having a well-stocked mental encyclopedia is important even in the age of Google. I often find myself with the sense that the (elite, intelligent) people around me are just hopelessly ignorant about crucially important things, and I know that they often think the same thing about me.

Whenever I try to think it through, though, I find my mind spiraling around one question:

How many Pokemon can you name?

Which is, of course, a silly shorthand way to say: We have crammed the world way more full of information than it ever was before, there are so many things that a person can dedicate himself to knowing, and while our brains aren’t any smaller than they used to be they aren’t any larger either.  And we don’t have a canon, an agreed-upon prioritization mechanism for that information.  It’s reasonable to expect any member of the intelligentsia to be able to cite the core texts chapter-and-verse if we all understand that we’re talking about the Bible, Shakespeare, Homer, and Virgil.  It’s less reasonable if you multiply that number of texts by ten, or a hundred, or a thousand.  Less reasonable still if you also expect your intelligentsia to be keeping up with a dizzying whirl of pop culture texts, which, let’s face it, is totally a key expectation under which all our reasoning classes labor. 

[shrug] I don’t really know where I’m going with this.  Just…we all know lots of stuff, and it’s mostly not the same stuff, and it’s mostly not stuff that we can easily and comfortably label as “important to know.” 

Yeah, I shared the article for the parts I quoted, and other parts I definitely disagreed with, worst of all this quote here. Like most of it is a thoughtful treatise on the nature of structure and how “people selected for their smartness” still eventually resembles a stagnant closed network and what even is smartness anyway - but this was one digression into taking easy pot shots and felt very off.

I’m sorry Camille Paglia provided easy quips, but no, do not delude yourself that the students at Harvard don’t know who Moses is. If half the kids say they aren’t smart it’s because they don’t feel smart relative to their classmates who themselves are scarily well-read.

(And “grade inflation” is equally stupid. Most competitive employers or programs demand something like a 3.5 GPA. So Harvard decided it is poorly serving its students if what would get an A at OSU gets a C at Harvard - because the CIA or whoever won’t take that C.)

I’m sorry Camille Paglia provided easy quips, but no, do not delude yourself that the students at Harvard don’t know who Moses is. If half the kids say they aren’t smart it’s because they don’t feel smart relative to their classmates who themselves are scarily well-read.

No, I’m actually not bagging on Paglia types here and I’m not sure they’re wrong.

This is a generation or so down the line, but…my wife teaches at a school that caters heavily to the children of NY’s Best and Brightest.  I’ve met with some of her students, worked with them in after-school programs, etc.; we’re talking about some seriously intelligent, accomplished, and well-prepared kids here.  And it turned out a couple of years ago that, yeah, most of them had never heard of Adam and Eve.  Surprising?  Maybe.  I dunno.  But there are a lot of things that a bright child can be learning these days, and there’s no especial reason to expect that everyone in that demographic is going to be fed Bible stories, or even bits of the Western canon that make reference to the Bible stories. 

And, as I said, I often find myself responding to my friends with “you don’t know / haven’t read what???”  And I know they think the same thing with regard to me.

Here we have the meritocratic delusion most in need of smashing: the notion that the people who make up our elite are especially smart. They are not—and I do not mean that in the feel-good democratic sense that we are all smart in our own ways, the homely-wise farmer no less than the scholar. I mean that the majority of meritocrats are, on their own chosen scale of intelligence, pretty dumb. Grade inflation first hit the Ivies in the late 1960s for a reason. Yale professor David Gelernter has noticed it in his students: “They are so ignorant that it’s hard to accept how ignorant they are. It’s very hard to grasp that the person you’re talking to, who is bright, articulate, conversable, interested, doesn’t know who Beethoven is. Looking back at the history of the twentieth century, just sees a fog.” Camille Paglia once assigned the spiritual “Go Down, Moses” to an English seminar, only to discover to her horror that “of a class of twenty-five students, only two seemed to recognize the name ‘Moses’.… They did not know who he was.”

– Helen Andrews, from “The New Ruling Class”

This is a pretty good exemplar of a particular claim that you hear a lot.  “People these days don’t know anything about anything!”  “No high school senior in the country today could hope to pass the 1800 Harvard admissions exam!”  etc.

Unlike some, I’m not inclined to dismiss this lament as stupid on its face.  I do think that having a well-stocked mental encyclopedia is important even in the age of Google. I often find myself with the sense that the (elite, intelligent) people around me are just hopelessly ignorant about crucially important things, and I know that they often think the same thing about me.

Whenever I try to think it through, though, I find my mind spiraling around one question:

How many Pokemon can you name?

Which is, of course, a silly shorthand way to say: We have crammed the world way more full of information than it ever was before, there are so many things that a person can dedicate himself to knowing, and while our brains aren’t any smaller than they used to be they aren’t any larger either.  And we don’t have a canon, an agreed-upon prioritization mechanism for that information.  It’s reasonable to expect any member of the intelligentsia to be able to cite the core texts chapter-and-verse if we all understand that we’re talking about the Bible, Shakespeare, Homer, and Virgil.  It’s less reasonable if you multiply that number of texts by ten, or a hundred, or a thousand.  Less reasonable still if you also expect your intelligentsia to be keeping up with a dizzying whirl of pop culture texts, which, let’s face it, is totally a key expectation under which all our reasoning classes labor. 

[shrug] I don’t really know where I’m going with this.  Just…we all know lots of stuff, and it’s mostly not the same stuff, and it’s mostly not stuff that we can easily and comfortably label as “important to know.” 

odo-of-chatillon:

Claiming that Islam can be rational or have a blossoming intellectual culture because of its so-called Golden Age is like claiming that Christians believe in the literal cosmology of Plato’s Timaeus because the Arian Logos strongly resembles the Demiurge.

Most the philosophers of their so-called Golden Age belonged to the Mu’tazila sect which is universally condemned as heretical by all Islamic sects. As such, modern Muslims have no claim to them, so much so that one could even argue that “the Golden Age” itself would be considered un-Islamic by today’s standards.

This is impressively and comprehensively wrong.

Claiming that Islam can be rational or have a blossoming intellectual culture because of its so-called Golden Age is like claiming that Christians believe in the literal cosmology of Plato’s Timaeus because the Arian Logos strongly resembles the Demiurge.

That doesn’t seem like a very close parallel at all.

A more reasonable analogy would be something like “Greece can be rational, or have a blossoming intellectual culture, because of the Golden Age of classical philosophy [despite the many differences between classical Athens and modern Greek society].”  Or – if you want to paint with an even finer brush – “Christianity can be rational, or have a blossoming intellectual culture, because of the Italian Renaissance [despite all the differences between Renaissance-era Italian Catholicism and any form of modern Christianity].”

These are much more reasonable claims!  So reasonable, even, that people actually make them all the time!

(In the cases of the religions, you can have meaningful and productive debates about the extent to which the intellectual-flowering stuff existed in tension with the cultural religiosity versus being an outgrowth of it.  The Cliffs’ Notes answer in both cases, unsurprisingly, is “a little from Column A and a little from Column B.”  But it’s not like the two cases are particularly different.)

Most the philosophers of their so-called Golden Age

This is already a dodge.  Why are we suddenly talking only about philosophers all of a sudden?  There were certainly notable philosophers who came out of the Islamic Golden Age…but there were also a ton of, e.g., mathematicians and medical pioneers and explorers and poets etc. etc., for whom all this stuff was a lot less relevant to their work.

belonged to the Mu’tazila sect

The Mu’tazila are not, and never were, a “sect.”  The Mu’tazila were a school of theology.  This is like saying “the Thomist sect.”

Which is important, because it’s not actually meaningful to say that your average Muslim philosopher of the era “belonged” (or for that matter “didn’t belong”) to the Mu’tazila.  Guys like Avicenna and Averroes engaged with Mu’tazilite ideas to varying extents and with varying levels of acceptance / skepticism / hostility – Avicenna, the Grand Old Man of Golden Age Muslim philosophy, certainly argued plenty against mainline Mu’tazilite doctrine – but taken at face value this claim falls into the “not even coherent enough to be false” bucket.

It is also worth noting that, for a while, Mu’tazilism was a caliph-enforced orthodoxy, which means that everyone writing in those periods was in some very notional sense a “Mu’tazilite” (and was likely to be friendly to Mu’tazilite doctrine unless he had particularly reason to be otherwise).

which is universally condemned as heretical by all Islamic sects

As has been pointed out earlier, this is untrue of the Shi’ites.  Who do make up a sect, and a very important and powerful one at that.

As such, modern Muslims have no claim to them, so much so that one could even argue that “the Golden Age” itself would be considered un-Islamic by today’s standards.

To pretty much the same extent that crazy heretics like Newton and even CS Lewis are “un-Christian.”

brazenautomaton:

marcusseldon:

I’ve started to feel a bit depressed about AI advancement. We’re headed to a world where intelligence matters less, and where we need fewer intelligent people. Especially outside of programming.

That world is one where social skills and status will become more important, relatively. In short, it’s a world where people like me will be less important and less valued.

It’s not AI that is doing that, it’s Twitter.

This is a misparse.  Leaving aside any question of whether the things you guys are pointing at are real, or whether you’re analyzing them correctly – you are pointing at completely different things.

OP isn’t talking about “social rat races drown out intelligent/productive behavior,” in the sense that you often talk about it.  He’s talking about intelligent/productive work in most materially profitable fields being taken over by bots who can work cheaper (and maybe better?) than “smart” human employees.  The idea, I think, is that something like “making money off your writing skills” or “making money off your holistic analysis skills” will be obsolete in the way that being a clerk or a scribe is obsolete now.

thathopeyetlives:

balioc:

So the assertion seems to be: the “consent of the governed” justification for democratic power is called into question if you allow the voting power of existing voters to be diluted by the introduction of new voters. 

OK, fair enough, there’s a certain theoretical cleanness there.

Shall we trade tight governmental restriction of immigration for tight governmental restriction of procreation?

I think the answer is, “this is what Westphalianism is for”. 

This works only if the Westphalian state is a natural unit in terms of the consent of its constituent voters.  I think history has made it abundantly clear that this is completely untrue.

mitigatedchaos:

balioc:

So the assertion seems to be: the “consent of the governed” justification for democratic power is called into question if you allow the voting power of existing voters to be diluted by the introduction of new voters. 

OK, fair enough, there’s a certain theoretical cleanness there.

Shall we trade tight governmental restriction of immigration for tight governmental restriction of procreation?

The fuck do you think public schooling and the culture in which kids are raised is?

Okay, that was a bit mean, but it’s late and this vaguepost is about me, so…

Look. It’s an ecology of organisms and not an economy of interchangeable cogs. All species must act in a process of continuous renewal to overcome entropy or vanish from the Earth. But you better believe that how people feel about handing over assets to their kids is different from how they feel about handing them over to outsiders.

And cultural transmission has got to have a different rate of power if it begins in childhood.

So this does actually count as a difference in kind.

Were humans immortal, then you might see tight restrictions on procreation for the reason you just said.

But you better believe that how people feel about handing over assets to their kids is different from how they feel about handing them over to outsiders.

“Their” kids?  Sure.  But your kid is my outsider. 

And cultural transmission has got to have a different rate of power if it begins in childhood.

No particular reason this should matter, if the actual theoretical foundation here is “I’m a voter and thus I have the right to keep my political power from being diluted.”

Seems fairer (by the democratic logic being used) just to say “every voter currently in the system gets a lifetime supply of X Add a Voter To the Polity tokens [probably X = 1], you can spend that on a child or a foreigner client as you see fit.”

@kontextmaschine:

Seriously, though –

In any given overarching cultural context, either

(1) disaffected youngsters are going to feel that the world is basically a safe and happy place in terms of its fundamental structure, where they’d be totally fine and happy if nagging authority figures and crusading zealots would just leave them alone, man; or

(2) disaffected youngsters are going to feel that the world is a screwed-up and scary place in terms of its fundamental structure, that the path of least resistance is for them to live miserably and die fast, and thus that people had better do something about the all the problems.

Even midcentury American youth culture, which is often treated as a monolithic archetype for purposes of this kind of discussion, got a lot more aggressive and moralistic as circumstances on the ground got worse. 

You can calm the self-righteous kids down the same way you can calm everyone else down: stability (especially micro-level stability), prosperity, and peace.

A parable of recent cultural politics:

The mainline Jewish establishment in the US has been in a panicked frenzy for at least a decade now.  “The kids don’t care!,” cry the greying elders.  “They abandon the interests of their own people, they align themselves with foreign and hostile ideologies!  We will die, we will die, we will die!  What have we done to deserve this?”

And, yes, of course, to some extent this is a thing that greying elders are always crying, in every generation and every culture.

In this case, though, there’s something more to it.

I am one of those kids who doesn’t care.  In part, this is something that happened for idiosyncratic reasons, because I care way more about theology than most people (and especially most Jews) do, and I could be driven to cultural apostasy directly through doctrinal apostasy; I am like Tzelafchad, my sin is my own.  But it’s also true that, before I dropped out, I received the same cultural indoctrination as all my peers, and I saw what happened to them as a result.

We were taught, in briefest terms, that it Wasn’t About Us and never would be.  In our day and age, the project of the Jewish people was the State of Israel; that was the shining beacon of goodness, the collective value to which we were all to be devoted.  If you don’t live in Israel, well, you really should move there, y’know, if you’re really a good and devoted Jew.  And if you’re not going to do that – well, your job is to support Israel and to ensure that the Israelis get whatever they need in order to thrive.  This is a political endeavor, an economic endeavor, a spiritual endeavor.  Your job as an agent in the world is to put muscle behind Israel-supporting movements.  Your job as a worshiper in your synagogue is to preach the glories of Israel, or to attend such preaching.  Your job as a parent is to ensure that your children receive sufficient exposure to Israel.  It goes without saying that you’re not supposed to question this state of affairs, and you’re not supposed to question the Israelis’ determination of what they need.  Yours not to reason why, yours but to do and die. 

Amazingly, it turned out that in the long term – once the cultural conditions that had generated this ideology went away – it was totally unsustainable.  American Jews didn’t want to make Israel the center of their lives and their devotions.  They didn’t want to practice a religion that definitely Wasn’t About Them.  And no one could make them.  So…they didn’t.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

Many of the things that people think of as fundamental differences in mindset, methodology, or values are in fact differences in etiquette.  Different groups of people use different catchphrases, procedures, and social displays in order to achieve precisely the same results.

…which is not to say that etiquette “doesn’t count” as important, somehow, or that people won’t fight and die to defend their preferred norms of etiquette.  Culture is real.

So the assertion seems to be: the “consent of the governed” justification for democratic power is called into question if you allow the voting power of existing voters to be diluted by the introduction of new voters. 

OK, fair enough, there’s a certain theoretical cleanness there.

Shall we trade tight governmental restriction of immigration for tight governmental restriction of procreation?

thathopeyetlives:

To some degree. the structure of separation of Church and State in the USA is just doomed. 

I don’t think a constitutional amendment is unavoidable, but the overall structure was assumed to work OK when most people in the country were some or other kind of Protestant of varying degrees of intensity. And a lot of old-style religious right-wingers more or less assumed that the First Amendment was more about making sure there would never be something like the Church of England or a Catholic Confessional nation, not true irreligiousness of government. 

It still worked OK when the majority of the country was some kind of Christian, most irreligious people were just nonpracticing Protestants and not outright atheists, and other religions were just minorities who couldn’t hope to have the whole country respect them beyond giving them their personal freedoms. 

Now, it’s just coming apart. And that’s even without mass immigration of people with really heavy disagreements. 

Something is going to have to happen and I hope it isn’t going to be antireligion the way that the Supreme Court has been going so far. 

OK, I’ll bite.  How is it “coming apart?”  Not in the sense of “the polity is moving towards an equilibrium that I personally disfavor,” but in the sense of “the polity is moving towards some kind of crisis outcome that most people would consider unacceptable?”

My sense is that, for all the many things tearing the people of this country apart right now – and there are many – religion isn’t really one of them in any very active sense.  The religion-driven political movements have subsided for the nonce, sectarian faith seems to be going away with a whimper rather than a bang as most people in every tribe lose interest, and basically no group of any real size is particularly bothered by the dominance of the secular viewpoint. 

Individual religious persons may consider this horrible, of course, but it doesn’t seem to be “not working” in any visible sense. 

A thing I feel, in a variety of contexts, and something that I’m kind of surprised isn’t more often voiced by more people:

I am weird, abnormal, taboo, and I’ve found a way to be those things that suits me well and brings me joy.  I have a relationship with the normal/mainstream way-of-being, one defined in part by distance and other-ness and some degree of alienation, and that relationship is comfortable.  Therefore, to some degree, I am invested in the normal/mainstream thing continuing to hold its social place.  Without it, my transgressive identity would be injured, just as the conforming identity of more-normal people would be injured. 

Obviously there is some degree of hostility from the normies that would make peaceful coexistence impossible.  I’m not going to accept to be violently persecuted or anything.  But it does seem as though we should be able to come to some kind of modus vivendi that will leave everyone basically happy.  I am willing to be your freakish outcast as long as you treat freaks and outcasts with some level of decency; after all, I did basically choose that for myself, and playing a legible outsider role is probably better than swimming in a sea of semiotic anarchy.

marcusseldon:

It seems that the primary way people make friends as adults is by befriending people they meet at group social situations: meetups, sporting leagues, parties, bars, etc. 

But I have no idea how this works! Most of the time when I go to group social situations I either stand by myself awkwardly and don’t talk to anyone I don’t already know or I do talk to new people but then we’re barely acquaintances. The next time I go to the same group event, the cast of characters often shifts somewhat, and there’s no guarantee I get alone time with anybody I’ve met before. So I end up with vague acquaintances, and that’s it.

I strongly recommend getting involved in some activity where you will have an individual structurally-acknowledged socially-interactive role to play, so that your engagement with others doesn’t immediately take place on the plain of “hi I am talking because I am trying to make friends.”

Theater LARPing is super great for this.  Normal theater is also pretty good if you can deal with the culture of normal theater.

thathopeyetlives:

soulvomit:

thathopeyetlives:

soulvomit:

In the wake of the Amelie Wen Zhao controversy, I’ve decided I’m probably going to co-write with my partner, publish under a male name, and let him be the “face.”

I don’t want to be female in public. If I’m perceived as a man, my work doesn’t have to meet any particular purity guidelines. The bar for moral acceptability from male content creators is much, much lower.

Yes, I saw “Big Eyes.” We will draw up legal paperwork and shit. 

I’m not familiar with this controversy, but I’m moderately surprised by this - I would have expected the opposite. Maybe that only works on gender?

Well - from where I’m sitting - it seems like men actually have to get brought into a #MeToo scandal or say something *overtly* racist, sexist, or transphobic. They aren’t picked apart by their own constituency the way women are - but not being a man, I could be wrong, I probably have no idea how it looks from the male point of view. 

From my point of view, it looks like men (especially men perceived as white and straight) are just straight up not allowed to have opinions on anything “woke” at all whatsoever… Unless they are Wokeman Beardson (who can get away with murder), but that requires Total Dishonesty.

Of course, you can just ignore it all, but that makes you an outsider and you can still get hit by some stuff.

I don’t dispute the “being picked apart” thing, though.

I’m not an expert in the field by any means, but…I think that the man/woman distinction, with regard to this particular horror, is disguising the actual distinction that is doing work.  Which is literary genre.

Probably, all else being equal, a female author is less likely than a male author to be brigaded on account of Wokeness Failure. 

But this isn’t about a “female author” in the abstract, this is about a female author of a YA fantasy novel.  And, as far as I can tell, the YA world is way more immersed in the horrors of ideological policing than most other parts of the publishing world are.  Like, orders of magnitude more.  The tastemakers and influencers aren’t fashionable high-class chatterati (who in fact tend to be pretty chill unless they’re provoked, or are advancing a private social agenda); they are actual goddamn Tumblr kids, for whom fighting about ideological micro-issues is a way of life, for whom being righteous on these matters is a primary source of validation, and for whom perspective and charity are altogether beside the point.

YA is an overwhelmingly female world.  Probably any men who venture in there are at even higher risk of getting brigaded than are their female counterparts. 

(This is leaving aside the separate issue that is “men are probably more likely to dig in their heels and sneer rather than immediately folding, and many of these storms blow over fast if you’re prepared to weather them.”)

bambamramfan:

balioc:

Trad rightist family fetishism and upscale trendy (mostly-)leftist helicopter parenting are two sides of the same base-metal coin.  A parent’s obligation to his child is pretty much infinite, and one of the most important parts of that obligation entails not demanding that his child’s existence validate his own choices / ego / ideology.  If you are fundamentally dependent on that relationship for your own needs, you will pervert it to suit yourself. 

If you think that the highest purpose of your existence is raising a family…you would be well-advised to find a better highest purpose before you actually go raising a family.  I know what it is like to be raised by parents whose most fundamental selves and aspirations are tied up in being parents.  I do not recommend the experience. 

Yeah, not a fan of this take. Though sympathy of course.

1. There are 7 billion humans. Most of them are not going to find a top priority that is better than “raise your children.” If you find a job where your contribution really matters, great. If you are an artistic innovator, great. How many people is that? If you’re a hair stylist who lives 5 miles from where you grew up and is part of a community theater then a) great and b) your kids are probably the most important thing in your life.

I guess it matters on what you mean by “dependent on that relationship”, but I’m not sure what you think it WOULD be okay to be dependent on if not that.

Make not your garden upon your joy, yeah, but then what will you?

2. There’s been a lot of discourse lately about not doing things for people because they make you feel better, compared to how they really benefit the other person. And there are examples where this is clearly true. But it can’t be a universal maxim that guides all our relationships: we don’t have access to what genuinely benefits other people, we only know our own perception of them. We are ALWAYS going to treat people ultimately on how it feeds our own identity. A firefighter rescues people because that is how they see themselves as a firefighter. What’s useful is some line between “reasonably limited to our own perspective and information” and “ignoring the separate needs of others.”

You don’t have to be a great artist, or to have an awesome career, to have a foundational identity beyond your family relationships.  If you’re sufficiently invested in your community theater troupe or your model train setup or your raiding guild or your Rotary Club or your meditation regime or your mastery of the Talmud or your existence as a Wild and Crazy Guy, if the you that exists inside your head is fundamentally rooted in any of those things rather than in your parenting, then…your relationship with your child doesn’t become an exercise in narcissistic defense. 

(Some of those things are better than others, of course.  There are dangers to external rootedness of all kinds.  But anything is better than being rooted in your kid.)

[EDIT: Being totally indifferent or hostile to your kid is not better.  This happens a lot less than people natively think these days, or so I believe – most forms of horrible parent-child conflict grow out of someone caring too much, in the wrong ways, rather than not caring enough – but it does happen and it would be monstrous to dismiss it.]

Your second point is sophistry in effect (although presumably not in intent).  Yes, on some ultimate level everything we do is filtered through ourselves, good parenting is going to come out of wanting to be a good parent, hi-ho.  For practical purposes, Ginnungagap lies between “this is a thing I do” – or even “this is a mega-important thing to which I have devoted a big chunk of my life’s time and energy” – and “this is who I am.”