May 19, 2024
American > Prussian
Tangentially related to the 'kulturkamph' post from this morning is this fascinating piece by Joseph Moore over at Yard Sale of the Mind.
He points out something that is often noted among critics of the American Education System in current year:
We used to have a MUCH more literate populace.
In fact, we have seen a fairly consistent drop in overall literacy as the concern about education has resulted in greater and greater government (and especially federal) involvement in education.
Libertarians and conservatives often bring up the period from the '50s to now with a strong scrutiny of the stark fall in education metrics that seems to have followed the creation of the Department of Education in the 1970s.
Moore however, takes a LONG view of the matter, noting that when one room schoolhouses were the norm, the U.S. literacy of its rank and file citizenry was remarkably high.
One remarkable example he uses is the immense popularity of James Fenimore Cooper's classic The Last of the Mohicans (1827) which was a runaway hit. He then quotes a paragraph from it....and notes....
I bet your average American college student would think it a slog, or even nigh unreadable. Cooper’s long sentences, nested clauses, adventurous vocabulary are likely to prove difficult. But they were not too difficult for Americans 200 years ago.
30 years earlier, the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist Papers, full of historical and classical references, were published in popular newspapers – and hundreds of thousands of people read them and talked about them. Papers in those days were not written to a 6th grade reading level, yet many, many people read them.
I've noted this myself on far more contemporary matters. Martin Luther King's Letter From a Birmingham Jail was required reading when I was in high school. Around 2018 however, I was told in college that it is not considered wise to assign that to a university student prior to their junior year. Letter From a Birmingham Jail was written in the 1950's on a 6th grade level by a preacher who intended it to be read by African American children. Amongst other things, it contains references to the Bhagavad Gita and yet it was widely comprehended in its day.
On a more banal level, I've shown people copies of Mad Magazine from the 1980s. Young people often don't get half the jokes, which were quite replete with classical references, in a low brow magazine aimed mostly at kids. These are frightening trend lines in just MY lifetime.
According to Moore, the huge dropoff in literacy seems to have begun at the end of WW1. This allows us to blame Woodrow Wilson (which is always satisfying) but Moore gets granular with his analysis and notes the overall push for the adoption of the Prussian model of education about that time. The Prussian model is basically what we have today in our K-12 system.
Interestingly the Prussian model was adopted in Germany at least in part to neuter federalism. Germany was unified by combining a large number of independent principalities in to what ostensibly was a federation. The Prussian educational model itself was intended to produce a population of competent but unthinkingly loyal soldiers (Prussian culture was a trauma response to the 30 years war). This did in fact, successfully homogenize German culture, culling what were seen as eccentricities and organized society along technocratic lines....which led ultimately to.....um.....results.
In the U.S. Prussian education was touted by industrialists, particularly J.D. Rockefeller as a way to educate an intelligent but pliable workforce that would not be concerned with troublesome things, like...I don't know....individual rights.
President Wilson embraced this enthusiastically (the concept absolutely sings to the fascistic nature of a technocrat) and noted....
"We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”
...because yeah.....Wilson appears to have been a villain that escaped from a young adult novel.
In Moore's article, he notes that the decline in literacy was documented by U.S. Military literacy tests starting in the early 1900s, and that it coincided with the professionalization of schools along Prussian (and to a much lesser extent Catholic) lines.
Note that Prussian models CAN produce some useful results, Japan enthusiastically embraced it and by many metrics Japan's educational system is among the best in the world, however, the Prussian, regimented education system tends to produce conformity rather that freedom mindedness and I probably don't need to remind my readers that in Japan, like in then-contemporary Germany there were.....um....results.
I urge you to read the article in its entirety. It is a fascinating read that reinforces the call by many to engage in home schooling.
However, home schooling is very much out of the reach of many people as it requires time, (in short supply today) considerable money, AND a pretty comprehensive education by the parents.
There might be a middle ground....AND WE'VE SEEN IT.
Small 1-4 room schoolhouses SEEMED to get the best results on a macro level. So given the suburban nature of much of the U.S. I could easily see Co-ops growing up in residential subdivisions to set up schools like this similarly to the way the old schoolhouses were established in farming communities. The old system with people learning different levels simultaneously and older students mentoring younger students under the direction of a teacher worked very well. There ARE hurdles to this, not only from the education establishment but zoning boards and homeowners associations. However if we don't deal with those malign organizations eventually, we probably aren't going to save the country anyway.
A more structured Prussian type model almost certainly works better for technical education, so there would still be a need for something like high school in the later teen years, but this model, that was so successful for over a century might be able to spread most of the benefits of home schooling to far more folks than have any hope of attaining it now.
Anyway...I'm grasping at any lifeline that will stop us from falling into the abyss....What do you think?
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A Note on Streaming:
My leg has largely healed and I've been out of the hospital for 10 days. I should be at my IRL job by Wednesday, so the 2 weeks of intermittant and Guerilla-scheduled streaming will be at an end by the middle of the week
Tonight at 7pm EST/11pm UTC we'll be streaming Genshin Impact again, mostly because we're in the middle of a particularly interesting quest chain.
The tentative schedule going forward after today is:
Sunday: TBA
Monday: Final Fantasy 14 Online
Wednesday: TBA
Thursday: DOUBLE FEATURE
Disgaea Hour of Darkness
Project Zomboid (Collab) (10pm EST/ 2am UTC)
Friday: Genshin Impact
Saturdays Won't generally see any programming, but occasionally will be special / experimental streams and occasionally movie nights.
Start times will be 7pm most nights (aside from Zomboid as noted above)
Technically, I've been dorking around with V-Roid all year but I need to get a good enough webcam to make use of my rig. Being an actual V-Tuber rather than a bouncing .png will be a step up.
I have a Kick channel already but have broadcast there intermittently. I may be doing something there consistently on Wednesday nights starting in a week or so.
I also am looking at simulcasting on different channels Like Kick and Bitchute, but managing two or three chats is going to be a challenge. I'll definitely need to get at least one, possibly two more monitors to do that. I have difficulty with chat engagement now because I'm juggling multiple windows on a small screen at the moment.
I actually am making some revenue from the stream (about enough for dinner out every few months) which is hilarious since I started doing it mainly for post-stroke therapy. That has largely done its job, as I can speak with relative fluency again and have seen improvements in eye-hand-coordination since I started streaming in earnest back in May of 2022.
Now that I'm mostly recovered, we'll see if I can make something more out of this strange hobby.
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On the Deconstruction of Fallen Stars
Issac Young over at Trantor Publishing has been publishing essays on the erosion and corruption of our culture as well as the formidable (and often overlooked or mocked) issues that young people are facing.
In this thoughtful essay he gets down to brass tacks on WHY so many of the "wokefied" changes to beloved I.P.s are so egregiously, bewilderingly bad...to the point of being jarring and hurtful to the bottom line. This seems particularly confusing in cases where adding representation would not normally be controversial in the least (such as Star Trek, where one of the THEMES of T.O.S is Infinite Diversity Through Infinite Combinations) and in franchises like Warhammer 40,000 where there WAS representation but the new examples shatter canon.
Put simply, diversity and inclusion are humiliation rituals. If they happen to fit in the established canon, then so much better. It’s plausible deniability to gaslight those who don’t know any better. But as the internet autists rush to say whether the representation does or does not fit in the lore, the rest of us know the real reason behind these changes.
It’s to flex.
It’s to say this thing that you love is no longer yours. It’s ours, and there is nothing you can do about it. And it isn’t a mistake or a well-meaning push for a broader audience. It’s to cause outrage. It’s to scorn the people the Left despise. It’s civilizational trolling, and it’s done because not only won’t they face consequences, they know they’ll be rewarded for it.
I confess I've come to much the same conclusion. I suspect that a good deal of this dynamic is related to Yuri Bezmenov's thesis on demoralization.
The way forward is often proposed to be to get new, more traditionally themed franchises off the ground, but this runs into a few issues. First, "message fiction" is tendentious and generally unenjoyable, whether it is woke gay space commie propaganda, or a preachy After School Special. Attempts to do counter-programming are frequently just as big a turn off to audiences as Mary Sue Triumphalism, but, without the huge advantage in infrastructure/marketing/financing that the big media companies enjoy, more individualistic entertainment endeavors just flop. Another issue is Conquest's Law "Any organization not explicitly right wing soon becomes leftist" This is likely due to the inherent tendency towards social parasitism that is manifest in those with a mindset that thrives in a bureaucracy.
Young notes another hurdle in a very long, but literate essay.
Video Games are actually the medium of all literature and culture nowadays. Forget getting the younger generations to read, their minds can't process a film let alone a multi-episode series. This is due to the neurology that these people have developed s a result of social media, smart phones, and the risk averse, mental-illness-inducing education these people have had inflicted on them.
The myriad problems that young people face are different from the very real issues that many of us and our parent's generation had to overcome. but because of the structural nature of some of these challenges and the important cultural and family based tools that the younger generations are missing, these issues are not fully appreciated. These issues feed into the larger cultural problem exacerbating those dynamics, reinforcing them.
We were outmaneuvered in a two pronged assault. The first is that reality has steadily become less meaningful, while the second is that simulacra has become more addicting. In my lifetime, I know I will see the rise of sexdolls not unlike what is in Blade Runner 2049. And that will probably be the genetic bottleneck which will crush anyone who isn’t some sort of fanatic. I guess the silver lining in all of this is that only true believers will inherit the Earth. They get to live in the ruins because everyone else sterilized themselves.
Later in his essay, he delves into the importance of basket weaving....
I urge you to read the whole thing because I would not have thought that digression could actually make sense...and yet it does.
Not only because we'll still need baskets after a civilizational collapse, (he doesn't mention that, but we will) but because we have to do something to create an IRL space to socialize people.
These issues are going to be very tough nuts to crack. There will be some debate about why we should...
After all, old farts like me have been ranting and raving about "THESE HERE KIDS TODAY" since Aristotle.
However, a failure of cultural continuity IS a thing that sometimes happens historically, and it can lead to societies collapsing, either through decadence or a lack of cultural competency. This is the GOAL for the left, who are quite confident that they will sculpt a Utopia from the rough clay of man....but if one looks at the past societies where these self assured technocrats have succeeded, one will shudder in terror at the suffering, both physical and psychic that always seems to result.
Thus we should take this threat seriously and that means to take the challenges that young people today face with thoughtful consideration, for they did not create the absolutely insane world in which they find themselves, and they did not chose to be trained by their educators to make only the wrong decisions.
President Reagan noted that freedom is a fragile thing that is never more than one generation away from extinction He further noted that it is not inherited, but must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation. That ability to fight and defend something depends on knowing what it is, on one having values that were passed down from one's forbearers.....We have denied our youth the tools and the skillset to do what they must.
Some have, like Cassandra warned us:
"In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” -C.S. Lewis
We have our work cut out for us.
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May 17, 2024
HAH! SILL NOT DEAD!
Come join the channel at 8:30pm EST / 12:30am UTC as I celebrate unlocking the achievement 8 days out of the hospital. We'll be continuing to pursue eldritch horrors and annoying puzzles far beneath the Earth's crust......or whoever's crust Teyvat has...as we explore the enigma that is THE CHASM. Come for the scuff, stay for the cringe at https://www.twitch.tv/brickmuppet .
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May 12, 2024
"TAP...TAP" Is This Thing Even On?
I'm Out of the Hospital! I'm Sitting in Front of a Computer.
OH NO! I JUST UPDATED OBS!
Let's See if I Broke Everything!
Let's See If I Can Still Stream!
Let's See If I Still Know How To Game!
Stop by , say "Hi!" and LEARN VALUBLE LESSONS as I Go Over Why I Was Gone Last Week.
Then Point And Laugh as I Attempt to do EVERYTHING I was Told NOT to Do in This Huge Crater Wasteland I was Sent to West of Liuye. (What is Happening With This Game!?)
See you in 10 minutes over at https://www.twitch.tv/brickmuppet
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RIP-Roger Corman :
He was a huge influence on U.S. cinema and because he was indie in the machine dominated Hollywood of the day he was able to (and did) find, elevate, and give room to fly many iconoclastic talents that would have been ignored or buried by an industry that could not abide their out of the box thinking and styles. Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicolson, James Cameron , and many others got their starts because of him. He had another, albeit indirect effect on American Pop-Culture. As the head filmmaker for the indie studio American International Pictures he was instrumental to introducing the American audience to several Kurosawa films, popularizing & legitimizing Japanese cinema in the eyes of the U.S. general public (as opposed to the hoity-toity art house set). Because of his Corman was (very) tangentially involved in bringing over another movie that had similarities to his own radioactive monster films.
Godzilla opened the door to Japanese sci-fi, and a decade later the first Americanized anime.
This, in turn, set the great historical pachinko machine in motion in that particular set of "clicks" that resulted in...
WEEBERY.....
Thank you Roger Corman.
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May 11, 2024
Wait....What World Did I Wake Up In!?
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May 10, 2024
Where I've Been the Last Week
So my Mom was traumatized at a young age by a relative dying of sepsis. Every time I'd get a cut..."It'll become sepsis!"
Every time I go to the ER...""It's sepsis isn't it!?"
Of course it's never sepsis.
Tuesday however, I had to call Mom, rub my foot on the ground and say Mom....you were right again....
I told myself I would get up, make some anti-doxxing adjustments and photo the nurses info panel, but by the time I was both un-hooked from the IV and had the energy to walk across the room, "explain sepsis" had been removed the nurses to-do list.
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May 01, 2024
A Couple of Videos
Discuss:
This last one's not really political, but it's wild and messed up.
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April 26, 2024
I'm BAAAACK!
Join us tonight at 7:30pm EST/ 11:30pm UTC for the triumphant return of the Brickmuppet to streaming. I'm OUT of the hospital and raring to go all Mathew Perry on Inazuma! We'll clear a few Spiral Abyss floors as well, so mosey on over to https://www.twitch.tv/brickmuppet , grab a drink and a snack, as you come for the scuff & stay for the cringe!
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April 22, 2024
I Hab a Code
No stream tonight.
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April 20, 2024
Rage Stream!
I have lost two blog posts into the ether. So in a fit of rage and pique, I'm going to do a rare Saturday stream. Join us at 8:00pm EST 00:00 UTC as we have a laid back, chill Genshin Impact stream poking about in Inazuma and try to get the teleporters to work. If we get them working, then after doing daily's who knows? Main storyline? Chat engagement collabs? I don't know either, so let's find out!
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April 11, 2024
Stream Adjustment
The IRL-RNG has necessitated a rescheduling of tonight's Disgaea stream. However, the Zomboid Collaboration stream will go on as scheduled.
Join us tonight at 10pm EST / 2AM UTC for a PROJECT ZOMBOID theme mission. What's a "Theme Mission" , you might ask. Well I have no idea, SO LET'S FIND OUT! Join me and 8 other V-tubers as we explore the remnants of post apocalyptic Tennessee at Brickmuppet: https://www.twitch.tv/brickmuppet
Hyasynth: https://www.twitch.tv/hyasynth_live https://kick.com/hyasynth
Niveksirrah https://www.twitch.tv/niveksirrah
Imitation Orange https://www.twitch.tv/imitationorange
Spicy Spykstr https://www.twitch.tv/spicy_spykstr
Action Points https://www.twitch.tv/actionpts
Cooks117 https://www.twitch.tv/cooks117
The Osakan https://www.twitch.tv/the_osakan
Eccentric BlueByrd https://www.twitch.tv/eccentricbluebyrd
Niveksirrah https://www.twitch.tv/niveksirrah
Imitation Orange https://www.twitch.tv/imitationorange
Spicy Spykstr https://www.twitch.tv/spicy_spykstr
Action Points https://www.twitch.tv/actionpts
Cooks117 https://www.twitch.tv/cooks117
The Osakan https://www.twitch.tv/the_osakan
Eccentric BlueByrd https://www.twitch.tv/eccentricbluebyrd
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April 10, 2024
In Lieu of Any Actual Creative Content in This Space, Here is A Video of 2 Big Brains Kibitzing
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Rumors of My Alive-idness Were Slightly Exaggerated
The house got struck by lightning, frying one of the wiring legs and keeping me off the computer for a week. The past week has seen everything fixed (mostly) streaming resume and 2 attempts at blogging get eaten by the Minx monster. (I THINK Mee'n you still uses Minx)
Now I have a broken tooth, meaning that everything is back to normal and the end times are not upon us.
So rejoice!
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March 21, 2024
I'm ALIIIIIVE!
Join us tonight @https://www.twitch.tv/brickmuppet, as the channel celebrates my return to streaming and associated escape from the hospital for a Thursday night double feature! First at 7:30pm EST/ 11:30pm UTC We are doing an item world run in DISGAEA:HOUR OF DARKNESS Then at 10pm EST/ 2:30am UTC we will be collaborating with numerous other streamers as we face the horrors of an apocalyptic world so broken that even the dead cannot rest, as we fight, survive, and COOK WITH STYLE in a very special episode of PROJECT:ZOMBOID.
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March 18, 2024
Side Effects...
... of Cephalexin include diarrhea, nausea and vomiting, and stomach pain.
I rolled a critical success and got them all.
No strim tonight.
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March 17, 2024
Ack!..."Thud"
I've been spectacularly ill off and on since Thursday afternoon (why I haven't streamed). Early this morning, I ran to the ER. It turns out not to be the flu, COVID or KNOXitis, but a bacterial kidney infection. The local pharmacies are out of the prescribed antibiotics due to the current shortages, but they've ordered some & in any event I've been on IVs for hours, so I feel a lot better.
Still weak though.
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March 14, 2024
Fireworks in 10 Minutes!
T Minus 10 Minutes! STARSHIP LAUNCH!
AD ASTRA LETS GOOOOOOOO!
https://www.twitch.tv/brickmuppet
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March 10, 2024
Adventures in Game Mechanics
OK...This Morning, While Doing our Dailys, we Learned an Important Lesson About Adventure Levels. We're Suddenly Level 31 and Can Proceed With the PLOT! Join Us Tonight at 7:00pm EST /11pm UTC @ https://www.twitch.tv/brickmuppet
(That's in 11 minutes if you forgot to set your clocks)
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