A long article, but an utterly thorough take-down of the Tiger Mom Book: [link]

I also think Western ways of parenting are in trouble. The ideas that commonly guide parents today are actually debased and derivative versions of an ethos that has been reduced to clichés (e.g., “Be yourself”; “Do what you love”; “Live your own life”). Rather than simply attacking Chua and reaffirming Western ways of parenting, the task before us is to recover and articulate our own ethos.

At its best, the Western style of parenting aims to help children live authentically, that is, to take on the responsibility to decide for themselves what to do and how to live. My understanding of the world is inauthentic to the extent that I have simply inherited it from my parents or absorbed it from the people around me, without having made any responsible effort to measure it against my own experience. My discourse is inauthentic if I accept and repeat what others say without trying to understand through my own effort what it means or whether it is true.

"Authenticity" is one of the great bullshit standards.

I have a "certificate of live birth" not a birth certificate. I may possibly be a muslim/african born person, I guess.

pssst, Sophia is the president, pass it on!

It’s Official: James Cameron and Google Unveil Plans for Asteroid-Mining

A recently announced space venture backed by James Cameron, Google executives, and others isn't scheduled to formally announce its plans until later today, but as of late last night, the news is official: Planetary Resources, Inc. is fixing to do some asteroid-mining. Here's everything we know about the venture so far.

This is big news on several fronts, not the least of which being the fact that this venture stands to reinvigorate the world's passion for space exploration. Money can be a powerful motivating factor, and all indications suggest that there a LOT of it to be made mining resources like water and precious metals from near-Earth asteroids

At its best, the Western style of parenting aims to help children live authentically, that is, to take on the responsibility to decide for themselves what to do and how to live.

Teaching children how to live capably and independently in the world, anyway. I'm not sure what authenticity has to do with it.

How do you live "inauthentically"- isn't the fact that it is life make it authentic? I am more used to art/theatre described as inauthentic, which makes more sense to me.

How do you live "inauthentically"- isn't the fact that it is life make it authentic?

I surround myself with cardboard cutouts of my robot army and of the groveling masses. My house is actually pretty small, but I've built a gigantic paper-mache volcano completely around it so I can pretend it's a secret lair.

In contrast, what is authentic is what is our own—what we have that we have made our own. My understanding and discourse is more authentic the more it comes out of my own experience, thought and judgments. My life is more authentic the less it is dominated by “the everyone” and the more it is governed by my own understanding, concerns, desires, tastes, goals, etc. One of the clearest articulations of this idea of authenticity comes in Leo Tolstoy’s novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Tolstoy tells the life of a man who becomes successful and respectable by ignoring his own moral intuitions and living according to the bourgeois values of “the everyone”:.

Tolstoy doesn’t tell us what exactly Ivan Ilyich did; he doesn’t denounce this or that immoral act. The point is that Ivan let his own sense of good and bad be overruled by the dictates of common opinion. The tragedy of his life is not that he failed to achieve something, but that the ideals he did succeed in reaching were not truly his own. The novella has often been read as a condemnation of the bourgeois ethos whose highest values are success and respectability. It has also been read as an indictment of conformism. While both these readings are plausible, at the deepest level the novel is about inauthenticity. What is wrong with Ivan Ilyich’s life is not just that it was guided by a narrow and superficial set of values, but that Ivan simply accepted those values without questioning them.

Actually, Gud's one person I think could do that ....