I'm seeing the NYT headline: "The Hardest Part of Having a Nonbinary Kid Is Other People/A mother recounts the pushback she received from her own family in raising a gender-nonconforming child."
Just remember: You are somebody else's "other people."
I have my problems with other people. Maybe try, if you can, to live in a way where you depend on yourself and draw on energy from within. If you keep demanding that "other people" rearrange their beliefs and behavior to smooth your way in life... 1. They're only going to go so far, 2. You've made yourself dependent on them, and 3. You're the "other people" too.
For the impatient or music-averse, here are the lyrics. (Key phrase:"We are the other people/We are the other people/We are the other people/You're the other people too.")
And what did Jean Paul Sartre mean by "Hell is other people"?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
39 comments:
I have my problems with other people.
Is it Festivus already?
Gender as in physical and mental sex-correlated attributes, or "gender" as in social constructs to normalize a favorable juxtaposition of male and female sexes? Normalization through selective exclusion or tolerance as a general rule? They need to lose their Pro-Choice religion and reconcile.
The hardest part of everything is adverse tweets.
I have my problems with other people.
No, this is just NYT providing a platform to work through and attempt to rationalize the incongruities of the sociopolitical constructs they have normalized to appease special and peculiar interests.
No one has a problem with using OPM though. Other People's Money
Don't want to pay for it yourself? Need to have some new improvement in your community that you don't want to tax locally but will gladly force the rest of the taxpayers to pay. NYC needs a 50 million dollar bail out for their incompetence?? Minneapolis? Los Angeles? Madison? Make the Federal or State Government (funded by everyone else) pony up the money for YOU.
OPM An endless, never empty pit of money. One that can grant every wish and whim.
Or so they think.
That doggone munchausen by proxy thangie, funny the way people do get judgmental about poor mom wanting all that attention.
But haven't I been told the kid does not belong to the parents? Isn't a village required? Shouldn't we poll the village on what to do?
Real comment: Some "other people" may be appalled at your endangering your chiild's physical and mental health through your virtue signaling. Maybe they object at having to buy into your mental illness and lie to everyone else. Maybe they love your child as more than a poster child for how F-ing woke you are.
We demand you tell people what they want to hear.
Other people are just the worst, except for all the alternatives.
So the poor kid has sex chromosome abnormalities. I would think that the unfortunate mother wouldn't want to advertise her child's medical problem in a national fake-news paper, but that's just me.
Neck webbing? Acne? Mental retardation? Behavioral problems? Strangely shaped body? IOW, an FLK?
No wonder other people are pesky.
I didn't read the NYTimes article, but life has taught me that if you define your child as just one thing -- gender non-conforming, say -- and formulate your entire life and conversation around that one thing, that is a disservice to your child.
Social isolation has been a boon for me. Always an introvert, easily distracted, the quarantine has been the most productive period of my life. Yesterday, for the first time in months, I accidentally shook a stranger's hand and it was electric. Hermit fail.
"And what did Jean Paul Sartre mean by "Hell is other people"?"
Pretty close to what Althouse means.
Anyway, I think JP engaged in some nasty cultural appropriation there, using Christian hell for existentialist purposes.
The hardest part of having a non-binary kid is thinking that you have a non-binary kid when you just have a kid.
Those damn "other people" don't always think the right way. You know, the way I think. Damn other people.
Wait until I'm in charge. There will be adjustments a-plenty.
Have you ever read "Uthering Wheights"? I did -- in high school. There's a passage in there that I vaguely recall but I can't seem to find. And no, it has nothing to do with "Othering whites."
The hardest part of having a non-binary kid is thinking that you have a non-binary kid when you just have a kid.
Or worse, othering the kid through a psychological or medical regiment of progressive corruption in a self-realization of woke but sleepy.
I wonder if Sartre was turning around the idea (Pascal?) that the self or ego was hell and didn't realize that his version was shallower, rather than deeper. Or maybe, if the "self" is "constructed" in our interactions with other people and by the "gaze of the other", his idea was actually deeper after all.
Is the shutdown the worst time to philosophize, or is it just about the only time to philosophize?
What exactly is a "social construct"? It is kinda of like an imaginary construct?
I am pleased that the professor has attained a level of consciousness where she is aware of just what a cultural monument the Mothers of Invention album "We're Only In It For The Money" truly was.
Oh my God...a reference to "We're only in it for the Money". My week is complete. One of the all-time great albums that does not translate well to this day. For those of us who listened to it back in the day, however, it does bring back a flood of memories. Today- if one of the tunes from this album comes up on my playlist (yes, it's on my playlist), my wife gives me a look that can only be described as "Who the hell did I marry?".
Ah...good times.
Oh, by the way, any parent using the phrase, 'gender non-conforming child' needs to run, not walk, back to the university from where they received their degree and ask for their money back.
"And what did Jean Paul Sartre mean by (fill in the blank)?"
Nothing.
It's always the people or the things.
Jean Paul Sartre is at an outdoor cafe in Paris and asks the waiter "Could I get a cup of coffee with no cream" The waiter returns an says "I'm sorry but we're all out of cream. May I get you a cup of coffee with no milk?"
What exactly is a "social construct"?
Women in dresses. There may be an innate feminine preference, but it is also normalized to promote a favorable juxtaposition of the sexes. Similarly, men not in shorts. Actually, a quasi-social, natural construct. It is literally for the children!
Context, people.
Sartre knew mostly Frenchpersons. Q.E.D.
Narr
And Nazis. Nobody likes them.
Tom Richey's bookshelves are much more interesting than Obama's.
I would think the hardest part would be living with the guilt of having failed your kid. And if they grow up not being sure whether they are male or female, the parent HAS failed them.
Being in denial about it probably doesn't make it any easier.
John Henry
Festivus in June! It is Festivus Miracle!!!
The hardest part of everything is yourself.
The Mothers of Invention were awesome. "Plastic People" seems pretty apropos right now.
"And what did Jean Paul Sartre mean by "Hell is other people"?"
His play, "No Exit" gives you a clue: people trapped in a room in hell with others they can't stand.
m
The events leading up to “L’enfer, c’est les autres” pale compared to the travails and travels Candide goes through before determining that “on doit garder son jardin”.
Though in this time of protest, it’s probably racist to mind your own business.
Huis Clos was about as far as I could go in French, and I don't think I ever understood the play until I'd read it again later in English. I did go to see a production of the play in college, and ended up together with one of the girls playing a demon. It was nice for a while, and then it was indeed hellish. The thing about performative femininity of the trans kind is that it is all about other people, necessarily. If it were not, there would not be such a mismatch between feeling one sex and being perceived by other people as the other. It would be amusing or at worst annoying if the whole trans performance--and I use that not to diminish transitioning, but literally--were not about turning yourself into an object perceived a certain way in the gaze of others. So it's not only a painful transition, but it's a philosophical dead end if you're an existentialist.
“ I am pleased that the professor has attained a level of consciousness where she is aware of just what a cultural monument the Mothers of Invention album "We're Only In It For The Money" truly was.”
Yeah, I attained that level around 1968.
I have the 50+ year old album right here and ready to play, and I mean to original item I played in my bedroom when I was 17.
I even understand the importance of Ruben and the Jets.
the original item
you're the only blogger i know of who would post Zappa as a response to that NYT quote. Bravo
Post a Comment