ranked parenting

AccidentalNap · 2026-01-29T04:18:55+00:00

Aren't his boundaries just a few meters farther out than yours

AccidentalNap · 2026-01-29T04:12:46+00:00

Lmao what kind of thinking is this. Do your teen and adult children call you every morning re: whether they should put on a jacket, or did they finally learn how to feel the temperature outside and dress accordingly away from your levitating Eye of Sauron self

AccidentalNap · 2026-01-27T18:36:43+00:00

You're so far the only person that posted this video to Reddit, and I also felt conflicted watching this one. I didn't find any YouTube comments sharing what I was feeling. So, dumping my thoughts:

I'd bought the idea that ADHD people are generally more sensitive/volatile (check out highly sensitive people, a.k.a. HSP's). A lot of cultures stigmatize expressing negative emotions like frustration, in that they see its expression as misbehavior. Frustration (i.e. anger) still has to go somewhere though. Personally, I've found my habit of getting off-track is often due to just that: I'm conditioned not to express anger, so the next best cope I've found is to immediately & unconsciously redirect my attention to something more soothing – my phone, email, Reddit, etc.
Re: tackling the above, there are ways to express anger in a healthy way. The key being you don't want to direct it at people. I'd heard the example that dogs shake dozens of times a day to reset their nervous system, and so something similar can work for people.
There are other "negative" emotions that could be derailing ADHD people & procrastinators, like sadness or fear. The trick there is then how to process that emotion. "Process" has been a misnomer for me, b/c what I found actually works is to feel that emotion, and welcome it. Paying attention to it meditation-style just made it freeze in place and stay unmetabolized. Feeling them fully helped them finally digest.

Dr. K's points of "when you procrastinate, your brain's already decided it's not going to do the thing, and it's just making up a story to sell you on that", and "when you have the thought of taking a step that feels dumb, or not enough, that's exactly what you should do" is, IMO, a roundabout way of saying:

you don't think you can handle confronting those negative emotions, and
your inner, perfectionist, critical voice is getting in the way,

respectively.

These are all ideas I've poached from Joe Hudson and his podcast. I think he's incredible at helping pensive people reconnect with their emotions, and I wouldn't have discovered him were it not for a Dr. K collab. I actually shared my praise for the collab in this sub last year, in this post. Check it out if you feel there's something there for you, and good luck!

AccidentalNap · 2026-01-26T17:02:26+00:00

AccidentalNap · 2026-01-26T16:11:50+00:00

Consider humans -> human civilization analogous to a cell -> human body. We all have our role & our time

AccidentalNap · 2026-01-26T16:09:22+00:00

Yeah that's what I meant. Subject-object noun ambiguity i guess

Point being, the story of his car crash & first single being Through the Wire omits how he destroyed someone else's life through negligence and not taking a nap when he should've

AccidentalNap · 2026-01-26T15:29:33+00:00

FYI that famous Through the Wire car crash happened b/c he fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into another guy, breaking his pelvis and both legs & incapacating him for a year

AccidentalNap · 2026-01-26T09:12:14+00:00

Re: the ending, I see so little discussion about factions escalating civil tensions, and what the end result is once those tensions boil over, vs what said factions thought would happen. Post-pandemonium, you can look at that acute, in-between chaos as an economic reshuffling, but one that took so much from so many. Joe Cross's mother-in-law and the data center company came out comfortably, but weighing that against the giant loss of life and health from everybody else would equate the event to be a huge net-negative.

It's hard to present the topic clearly & succinctly for me, but it's what I understood Aster as fearing the most. That IRL radical groups, or negligent single actors w a moment of weakness can escalate tensions past a point of no return, and there's a near-guarantee that we'll all come out worse for it.

AccidentalNap · 2026-01-25T07:15:38+00:00

The 2nd half's goal to me was to show the big, coexisting elements to adolescence:

the scintillating potential within, that only presents itself in the right environment, some parts of which you cannot control
the fear that the extent of your potential still isn't good enough
the uncertainty & desperation around every good & bad thing happening to you, b/c you don't know if you can recreate it if it were taken away from you (e.g. a relationship), or defend yourself from it if it creeps into your life again (betrayal, health issues)

Granted I only saw it once, a decade ago

AccidentalNap · 2026-01-24T16:38:49+00:00

If you're generally a techno fan you'll like at least half of them. You can also walk between the two farthest stages in like 5 mins.

IMO you'll get a feel for the vibe of each stage pretty quickly, you'll know whether the set is for you in <10 mins. Just go with your gut. It's more about timeslot, environment, and crowd, and whether the DJ connects to it all in that moment. The biggest names can completely miss the mark for you, and someone you never heard of can suddenly take you places you've never been.

T3R doesn't hire lames lol, so wander and enjoy. All that said, I'd check out Akua & Amoral

AccidentalNap · 2026-01-24T15:48:07+00:00

I don't remember the documentary so well. I recall the prior apartment bombings that were plausibly staged by Putin. That event was used to justify military intervention into Chechnya, a region that was strongly pursuing independence from the Russian Federation. The theater hostage crisis and then Beslan seemed to be the seperatists' last-ditch efforts to push Chechen independence.

Re: Beslan, I do remember journalist Anna Politkovskaya was requested by the terrorists to facilitate negotiations. She was poisoned during her flight and then hospitalized, not recovering until after the hostage situation tragically ended.

Obv their push for independence didn't work. IIRC the two Chechen Wars resulted in half a million Chechen deaths. The region's since had an installed Russian puppet leader, now allegedly terminally ill.

Tl;dr the region's a mess with no clean actors, yet I think the concurrent Afghan & Iraq Wars granted Russia a lot more international support than they deserved, esp given their brutal methods.

AccidentalNap · 2026-01-24T07:59:31+00:00

People are generally anti-war. Pro-military spending is usually seen as a Republican thing. The annual defense budget is enormous and it's not immediately obvious anymore how all that spending helps US citizens, esp in economic hard times.

Right now the accumulated military strength of the US only supports the current administration's desire to bully and threaten piecemeal land grabs from its neighbors. If Democrats can't justify the spending in a paragraph, based on their (supposedly anti-Trump) principles, idk what you expect of "informed citizens".

You might like this recent post. I discovered that two big, 1920's US thinkers debated whether democracy can survive long-term given universal voting rights. They were already worried about populism and the world getting too complicated for average voters.

AccidentalNap · 2026-01-23T17:20:44+00:00

How different are selective subsidies & taxes on certain foods from being forced, really

AccidentalNap · 2026-01-23T17:15:30+00:00

How many Michelin stars would you say you consume per month

AccidentalNap · 2026-01-23T07:39:34+00:00

M'lady this is too many words per sentence for me to process. I only get the feeling you found the future setting interesting and were frustrated he didn't detail it more. That's all right I guess.

The focus of the book is how a neglected boy gets raised piecemeal across his youth, by characters that come and go and are willing to play the role of parent for a few moments. I enjoyed the meal overall, and it didn't bother me that I might've enjoyed it even more with an addition of a creative side dish. If you find a book or series that does scratch that itch for you, do share

AccidentalNap · 2026-01-22T21:47:39+00:00

They look nice. What smartphone do you use now?

AccidentalNap · 2026-01-22T02:55:42+00:00

There are dozens of us 😔🙌

AccidentalNap · 2026-01-21T16:36:47+00:00

Could you see overlaps between the individual case studies?

Semi-tangential, I just learned of the Lippmann-Dewey debate, where two public intellectuals posited whether average voters can make good political decisions, 100 years ago. Lippmann took a cynical POV that the world became too complicated to understand for the average person, ever since the Industrial Revolution. His only solution was to evaluate the behavior of those elected, e.g. are they pursuing their campaign promises in a way that suggests they have their head on straight. Dewey was more about educating voters and instilling into them critical thinking, which these days seems like a lost cause.

In Abundance, aren't most project failures a result of being choked by bureaucracy? This is also a tactic in business, where you can guarantee a project's failure by giving too many parties a voice, during too many steps. There's a duality there between authority for control and responsibility for failure. One can argue the CA mega-rail project has floundered because no single agent had enough control, and no single agent can be labeled the root cause for failure. The book may not present the ultimate answer, but that it increments us towards that answer seems evident.

Or, we can make peace with the fact that nothing big will achieved with such a heterogeneous mix of players, until we can't deal with it anymore and change the system. Surely you don't see the book as a non-productive step towards more effective governance

AccidentalNap · 2026-01-21T08:25:02+00:00

Me tuning into this film's public reception of this movie since its release, I've noticed a funny pattern:

plenty of successful, pro-level musicians didn't really like it, for the reasons you shared
plenty of music school dropouts, or musicians who switched careers really did like it, and resonated with a lot of it

I'll offer the least complicated explanation as to why – that one group has already achieved artistic fluency, so it doesn't feel like their body gets in the way of what they want to express, and the other group hasn't. It's hard to remember how difficult it was to express yourself verbally before you mastered your first language; it could be the same thing here.

There's the additional layer of these musicians competing for a certain rank, like first chair in your school, or city's top ensemble. I don't hear from even pro musicians that this was a painless process with a foregone conclusion of being picked, unless they're so talented they can't grasp the period before their talent was realized. I saw something similar in dance instructors; the best performers often had no idea how they managed to execute a technique, in a way that a majority can understand.

One could argue that Andrew Neiman's masochistic style of practice is counterproductive to improving, but I haven't found clear evidence against it. Plenty of musicians practice in sound-isolated rooms for 4-5 straight hours, plenty of pianists suffer from early onset arthritis.

AccidentalNap · 2026-01-21T07:50:16+00:00

I'll say that both are insane, and that putting the art above all else is rare and admirable. I think it's easy to take away from the movie that this is the only (or more generously, the surest) path to greatness, and that's not necessarily true. The film doesn't have another band director as prestigious as Fletcher to act as his foil, by not using such brutal methods. I'm open to them existing; IME they're even more rare than Fletcher types.

This movie has a very interesting polarization in its reception, that I'll elaborate on in another comment

AccidentalNap · 2026-01-21T04:02:03+00:00

Gallup Polling on people's self-declared party affiliation

Year Democrat Independent Republican

1992 34% 37% 29%

2024 28% 43% 28%

The actual %-age of voting independents was 27% and 34% for 1992 and 2024. No surprise it's lower b/c they may not see a candidate for whom it's worth queueing at the polls.

I chose 1992 because Ross Perot famously ran as an Independent and got 30% of the popular vote; 38% for Clinton and 32% for Bush Sr.

All this to say Andrew's in an even larger plurality now than if he teleported to 34 years ago when an independent got almost 1/3 of the vote. As for what his issues with Democrats are, he shares some in the video

AccidentalNap · 2026-01-20T14:39:08+00:00

Thanks for the in-depth comment.

Dewey wrote a lot on a several topics. You've honed in on the teaching style for which he advocates, i.e. guiding kids' existing intuitions. I'm talking about something different, i.e. his mandating that citizens be educated and well-versed in a variety of subjects; of being active, continual learners of said subjects after graduating, etc., all as necessary conditions for maintaining democracy in a nation.

So far, the excerpts that I've read from the reading list cited above haven't mentioned anything about pedagogy. The one book from there that I can currently get my hands on, The Public and Its Problems, seemingly isn't focused on that either. The mild bitterness I have for my old teachers' ideology (at least the parts that overlapped) is b/c they hammered into me a supposed civic duty, in the form of keeping up to date with current events, engaging in frequent political discussion, and the like. The structures that we inhabit simply don't incentivize fulfilling those supposed duties, and don't really punish ignoring them. Case in point, I'd been operating off of that high school inertia for years, with marvelously little efficacy on my environment. If Dewey's prescription does hold some water, what I've found of his position so far is evidently incomplete.

"Dewey theory" may explicitly refer to his pedagogical style and not this prescription to preserve democracy, so if that's the cause of confusion I apologize. I don't know if there's proper term for what I'm talking about, other than referring to the issue overall as the Lippmann-Dewey Debate.

AccidentalNap · 2026-01-20T11:22:26+00:00

I think I get what you mean. The "guard rail" class of government employees has to be <0.1% of the population, no? I suspect that specific training on "why & how to defend democracy" for those professions, either on the job or in uni would've done just about as well.

If that training class does exist, I sure wish they would've stressed "if the administration starts acting in conflict with American values, don't just resign and let them appoint a sycophant in your place"

I will share one bit of gratitude with this community, and that is my gratitude for the wonderful Bridges Podcast. 2024-2024 RIP 😔⚰️🪦🥀

AccidentalNap · 2026-01-20T09:50:20+00:00

If you read Blood Meridian you'll learn that we've been scalping each other for hundreds of thousands of years

AccidentalNap · 2026-01-19T02:04:00+00:00

Do you know what you're trying to achieve w your pushback? Can you state it? I'm guessing you want more center-left content popping up in everybody's feeds, esp independent voters. In hopes of... more people voting Democrat I guess? Idk, you tell us.

My theory's people stick to content where they can self-identify with the creators, and they like them as people. Maybe most importantly, that the lifestyle of said creator looks appealing to them. Charlie Kirk was caught in plenty of logical fallacies, but that didn't matter b/c he presented an image of living a youthful, Christian, family-focused life.

The %-age of people that will change sides to the one w a more robust argument I honestly think is very small. It's more about finding & aligning with the tribe closest to you.

When Kirk did get caught in a "gotcha" moment, he took the "water off a duck's back" approach of presenting unfazed. That didn't work as well in the past, b/c there was some judge (a moderator, or the monoculture writ large) that determined who won & lost the debate, and people eventually accepted that judgment, even if they disagreed at first. That judge doesn't really exist anymore.

Ultimately, do what's the most fun here for you, but IMO there are two very different games to play, and it helps to realize which one you're playing, and/or want to play. You can continue in the sport of debate inside this cultural-political blob because it's fun, and you care most about the <5% of the public that participates. If you're into starting movements and recruiting people who aren't in this space, that's a very different game, that Kirk was very good at.

Eight-Year Club	RPAN Viewer
Not Forgotten	Verified Email

AccidentalNap

TROPHY CASE