Archive for the ‘PST Miscellaneous’ Category
Let’s Hear It For Balthasar Castilio
One of the great demographic trends of our epoch is delayed marriage, with couples embarking on parenthood in what would previously have been considered middle age. Because of the immense self-love of the parents involved, it has proven very hard to criticise this development. The 40-somethings immediately scream that we are “stigmatising” them as well […]
In: PARENTAL STATUS TECHNOLOGY, PST Miscellaneous
Self-Esteem And Inflation
“The Value, or WORTH of a man, is as of all other things, his Price,” says Thomas Hobbes, “that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his Power: and therefore is not absolute; but a thing dependant on the need and judgement of another…. And as in other things, […]
In: PARENTAL STATUS TECHNOLOGY, PST Miscellaneous
Recovering Lost Ground
The basic move made by the Dr. Spock school of childrearing was to replace corporal punishment by “withdrawal of love”. It is hard for us now to remember why that seemed like a good idea at the time. This may be because one of the sole epistemological advances of the later twentieth century was a […]
In: PARENTAL STATUS TECHNOLOGY, PST Miscellaneous
The Junk-Food Bribers
Jamie Oliver talked the British government into spending four billion pounds on a healthy school meals programme. It was reported that many mothers were responding to this by smuggling junk food to their children through the windows. Doubtless these mothers justify their behaviour in terms of their “love and concern” for their children, because that […]
In: PARENTAL STATUS TECHNOLOGY, PST Miscellaneous
The City Race
Once upon a time there was a second city that suddenly found itself overtaken in population by the hitherto third city, its historical enemy. The Mayor told the citizens to “Go home and get doing it”, with gratifying demographic results. I wonder whether the children born of the Mayor’s campaign were told that they had […]
In: PARENTAL STATUS TECHNOLOGY, PST Miscellaneous
Some Aunties Do Have ‘Em
The school of thought that attributes altruism to kin selection should be asked to explain the way the aunts of my generation liked to buy their nephews things like argyle diamond-pattern cardigans. Come to think of it, some mothers did too. And yet any sitcom should have made it abundantly clear, even to them, that […]
In: PARENTAL STATUS TECHNOLOGY, PST Miscellaneous
Pimping Your Daughters In The Liber Augustalis
In the law-code of that Enlightenment figure 500 years before his time, Frederick II, pimping your daughters was made illegal – unless for poverty. The implication is that some parental units were pimping their daughters even when they were not poor. Why might that be? To get rich, one supposes. Perhaps for other reasons too, […]
In: PARENTAL STATUS TECHNOLOGY, PST Miscellaneous
The Idiot Back From Copenhagen
Just as all Britons can quote Shakespeare, even unintentionally, all Danes and Norwegians know clips from Erasmus Montanus, a play by the 18th-century dramatist Ludvig Holberg, who is by no means part of the heritage of English-speakers. If nothing else, Danes and Norwegians know the bit about his mother being a stone. For the play […]
In: PARENTAL STATUS TECHNOLOGY, PST Miscellaneous
The Locomotive Modellers And The Weed
In my youth it was a social law that no adult ever criticised another adult in front of a child. (This rule was one of the things that facilitated sexual abuse by Catholic priests and others, but that is another story.) My parents must have really strained themselves in not saying that a given family […]
In: PARENTAL STATUS TECHNOLOGY, PST Miscellaneous
Old Families
Margaret Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature describes Edward Gibbon as coming from “a good family”. The English do not need to have it explained to them what that means; other cultures might need it translated into their terms, so that the Pole could be told that he was a Pan and the Spaniard that […]
In: PARENTAL STATUS TECHNOLOGY, PST Miscellaneous
