Don't cook at home without a license
Yes, also a response to still more calls to regulate homeschooling
I saw this comic a few days ago:
One thing going on here, I think, is that the technical mind has been trained to think that the real things are the things that exist in spreadsheets, the real things are the things under our control. The first picture above at least has fences, without those it would be totally wild. But the second is fully under our technical control. We don’t want an environmentalism that is just letting nature do her thing, we want an environmentalism that is tracked and monitored and built.
If you’re reading this post, you’ve been trained into that mindset as well to some extent. I was telling someone yesterday that when I was younger, the cash I had felt like real money, and whatever I had in the bank (and it wasn’t much back then) was sort of fictitious. At some point that reversed. Now my digital assets (which are tracked) are the real thing, and whatever paper fiat I have is “off the grid”, sort of literally, and feels less real. Why I can spend it and my spreadsheets don’t even notice.
From Alexandros Marinos yesterday:
I suspect some of you love and some of you hate Huberman but whatever, this is not really about him. But Marinos senses the problem in his comment there. How can we be alive with non-standardized air invading our lungs? Cooking at home involves the use of untested, unregulated dietary supplements. You probably don’t even have a degree in culinary science! (Some of you even grow the food you eat, the horror magnifies.) OK, we laugh, but we laugh because we are used to it. But the technocratic mind, which thinks everything (EVERYTHING, really) should be under the control of experts would be troubled by the idea of just anybody producing unregulated products for consumption. Say it another way, if we lived in a world where literally all cooks were licensed cooks and somebody proposed, hey how about we just let anybody do it, the proposal would be decried as incredibly dangerous.
So you can see, I think, how this is also about homeschooling. In its latest issue, Scientific American, that formerly great magazine which, as Jarrett Skorup said, now regularly opines about politics while pretending it’s just doing science, called for more regulation of homeschooling. They do mention that some homeschooled children seem to do very well, but also, well:
Yes, I’m sure that “virtues of Nazism” curriculum is very popular. You should be more like the government schools and do harmless stuff like telling girls they were born in the wrong body and needs drugs and surgery to be happy.
But anyway, amidst the crazy talk (including multiple paragraphs about homeschooling as an excuse to secretly abuse children), they request:
federal mandates (federal, because you can’t trust those conservative states) for reporting and assessment
require the yearly submission of documents to show children are learning
require homeschooling parents to pass a background check, same as teachers
Now there’s a lot going on here of course. For one, homeschooling has only been relatively ignored for so long because it was small enough they didn’t see it as a threat. So you can be grateful, sort of, that you’re seen as dangerous now (classical Christian schools will feel, and to some extent now are feeling, the same pressure). And of course I have to laugh at concerns like “we don’t know what kind of education the homeschoolers are receiving”. Well we do know what kind of education the government schoolers are receiving, and it’s sometimes terrifying.
But part of it is again this technical mindset. Unregulated homeschooling that’s… that’s like wild man. We need background checks. We need forms submitted. We need federal mandates. We need every child with an ID number and a spreadsheet. (And once we get the camel’s nose in the tent, we’re going to “need” more and more, I assure you.)
This is still outside the Overton Window for the moment, but this same mindset would be pleased if having children at all required a license. Why exactly should homeschooling require a background check, when this is basically a background check just to be a parent! Well, their minds aren’t quite there yet, but they’d be happy if just being a parent required a background check too.
THE END
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Do you think that 'those people' haven't studied how to improve the Chinese regime of one couple/one child (three children now, I guess)? 'They' may not have done, but I'd be willing to be that some individuals among them have. Am old and childless, so 'their' concern for me is that I 'euthanise' myself sooner rather than later. Tsk; what a world.
"they’d be happy if just being a parent required a background check too."
So can I blame you for giving them the idea?
Not too hard to imagine one way it gets enforced - a marriage license is not issued unless a DEI loyalty oath is signed. Or no tax breaks for marrieds or shack-ups with kids unless they sign a loyalty oath.
I work as a regulatory government person. Over 50% turnover in staff the last 5 years. I've been calling the new technicratic mindset of the new employees a "CSI mentality.," in reference to the TV show where real-time data about everything is always available.
The new employees always say, "this requirement of mine won't cost the regulated entity much, and the increased safety that comes from more data is worth it."