Orders of Magnitude Podcast

As always, our copious, kick-ass show notes (which include the quotes we read aloud) are on the OomPod Substack. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit oompod.substack.com

As always, our copious, kick-ass show notes (which include the quotes we read aloud) are on the OomPod Substack. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit oompod.substack.com

As always, our copious, kick-ass show notes (which include the quotes we read aloud) are on Substack This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readfems.substack.com

As always, find our show notes on our Substack This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readfems.substack.com

Show notes are, per usual, all on our Substack — where you can subscribe and join the conversation! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readfems.substack.com

As always, see our show notes on Substack! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readfems.substack.com

Thanks for listening — wherever you listen. As always, you can find the show notes on our Substack. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readfems.substack.com

Find the show notes, as always, on the ReadFems Substack This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readfems.substack.com

Missed the homework? Start here. Show notes can be found on our Substack. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readfems.substack.com

Please see the show notes on our Substack. (Especially important for this episode, since the conversation was already in progress when we hit record. Oops.) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readfems.substack.com

Missed the homework assignment? Start here. As always, find the show notes on our Substack! Thanks for listening! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readfems.substack.com

As always, find the show notes on the Read Fems substack! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readfems.substack.com

Show notes As always, they can be found on the Read Fems Substack This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readfems.substack.com

Read Fems is available on Apple Podcasts and YouTube. Google podcasts is being discontinued, but the Google podcast app does allow you to export your current shows to YouTube Music. References and quotations are on our Substack. (George doesn't like how they get formatted via RSS, so that's why we don't include them here.) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readfems.substack.com

First Things First (and other mentions) * C.S. Lewis on reading: It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between... Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books… Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes… Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. (Introduction to Athanasius’ On the Incarnation). * Overton Window * “Nearly 60% of respondents in Generation Z — who were born between 1997 and 2012 — said they would take the job of social media influencer over their current gig.” (source) * Children now ‘biggest perpetrators of sexual abuse against children’ (The Guardian) * Reading on a device you retain less * Steve Jobs thinking the iPhone would be primarily a phone * Take it from a high schooler: porn is a substance * Psychotechnology per John Vervaeke * “[The Director] explains to the boys that human beings no longer produce living offspring. Instead, surgically removed ovaries produce ova that are fertilized in artificial receptacles and incubated in specially designed bottles.” (summary of Brave New World) Might Huxley have gotten this specific idea from Lawrence? * Looking into the Test Tube: The Birth of IVF on British Television * Pregnancy as a disease * “Zero-sum competition” created by the “two-income trap” * Cohousing * Paying people to have children * No-children spaces * The Red Wheelbarrow, by William Carlos Williamsso much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens * Acton’s version:so much depends upon the virtue of the man whom you adore and whether you can trust him * Teen Vogue features young woman with double mastectomy (do not click if you do not want to see the photo of this woman) * “I must, I must, I must increase my bust!” from Judy Blume, Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. (Published 1970) Quotes Women, sex, freedom… For, of course, being a girl, one’s whole dignity and meaning in life consisted in the achievement of an absolute, a perfect, a pure and noble freedom. What else did a girl’s life mean? To shake off the old and sordid connections and subjections. And however one might sentimentalize it, this sex business was one of the most ancient, sordid connections and subjections. Poets who glorified it were mostly men. Women had always known there was something better, something higher. And now they knew it more definitively than ever. The beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful than any sexual love. The only unfortunate thing was that men lagged so far behind women in the matter. They insisted on the sex thing like dogs. Both sisters had had their love experience by the time the war came, and they were hurried home. Neither was ever in love with a young man unless he and she were verbally very near: that is unless they were profoundly interested, TALKING to one another…. The paradisal promise: Thou shalt have men to talk to! — had never been uttered. It was fulfilled before they knew what a promise it was. (12-13) Big Fertility is not as new as you think [Conversation amongst various intellectuals at the Chatterley’s mansion] Olive was reading a book about the future, when babies would be bred in bottles, and women would be “immunized”. “Jolly good thing too!” she said. “Then a woman can live her own life.” Strangeways wanted children, and she didn’t. “How’d you like to be immunized?” Winterslow asked her, with an ugly smile. “I hope I am; naturally,” she said. “Anyhow the future’s going to have more...

References * The Gift of Fear: And Other Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence * Let Grow, an organization leading the movement for childhood independence * The Last Who Remember, excerpt from an unpublished manuscript about growing up Irish in ‘the old times’ * Jennifer Sey on School Closures * Jazz Jennings, “You could be a porn star” * Jordan Peterson (drawing on Carl Jung), ideological flip * Street Epistimology with Peter Boghossian * Supersize Me * Komisar Interview on the Spillover podcast: “Daycare Impacts on a Child’s Brain & Socialization Myths” * The Two-Parent Privilege: HowAmericans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind by Melissa Kearney * Mary Eberstadt on the Modern Wisdom podcast: “Did the Sexual Revolution Actually Benefit Women?” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readfems.substack.com

You are going to feel a bit lost unless you listen to Part 1 first… Notes * Re the homicide spike post-George Floyd, George can’t find the article she read (of course), but she did find this. * Sam Harris’s Waking Up * Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind * “The pose begins when you want to leave it.” — B.K.S. Iyengar This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readfems.substack.com

This was a spontaneous episode, so there was no homework. You're welcome. Find the show notes on our Substack. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readfems.substack.com

Missed the homework? See the original reading list post. References * Nietzsche and the murder of God. “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?” (God is Dead: Nietzsche’s Most Famous Statement Explained) * Illich on the “rupture” caused by the loss of gender (source, emphasis ours): Historians, even those who focus on the history of economic ideas, have not yet noted that the loss of gender creates the subject of formal economics. Marcel Mauss was the first to recognize that “only recently have our Western societies made man into an economic animal” (1909). Westernized man is Homo oeconomicus. We call a society “Western” when its institutions are reshaped for the disembedded production of commodities that meet this being’s basic needs… The novel definition of man as the subject and client of a “disembedded” economy has a history… The perception of ego as a human, and the demand that social institutions fit the ego’s egalitarian human needs, represent a break with all pre-modern forms of consciousness. But to define the precise character of this radical discontinuity in consciousness remains very much a controversial issue… [T]here is a profound discontinuity between all past forms of existence and Western individualism; and this change constitutes a fundamental rupture. It consists primarily in the loss of gender. And this loss of social gender has not yet been treated adequately in the history of individualism. * Matt Osborne on the situation in Tasmania * Billboard Chris’s tweet * The family and the week (as in, the 7-day week, defined by the Sabbath, during which work is forbidden) * Professor John Vervaeke’s mind-blowing series, “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” * George’s latest wormhole, Abarim Publications; she quotes from “How Circumcision Created the Modern World” Complete show notes, as always, available on the Read Fems Substack This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readfems.substack.com

Missed the homework? See the original reading list post. Complete show notes are on Substack (there's just too much to put here!) References * G.K. Chesterton on the democracy of the dead: Tradition is only democracy extended through time; it may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who are merely walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father. (Orthodoxy, ch 4) * “Democrat Party” as an epithet. Though George learned this from life, not Wikipedia… * Curtis Yavin on salus populi, suprema lex * Over 75% of young people do not qualify to serve in the Armed Forces * “Abortion” is a terribly vague term, because it doesn’t distinguish between an elective procedure on a (to date) viable pregnancy and a no-longer viable pregnancy. * “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.” Not Arlo Guthrie, George! That was Will Rogers! * Thomas Frank’s What’s The Matter With Kansas * Phyllis Schlafly was born in August 1924 and got her law degree from Washington University School of Law in 1978, so around age 54. * On Andrew Long Chu, who has won a Pulitzer for Criticism… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readfems.substack.com