hey RebeccaBV, glad to hear about your positive experience with TCS!
there is an active online community which discusses TCS and other related ideas at the Fallible Ideas discussion group. you can learn more about important philosophical ideas like TCS and get help applying them to your life! http://fallibleideas.com/discussion-info
>But the "rules are bad" trope is, unfortunately, a trend in The Netherlands. Parents that live by this rule are sacrificing themselves. It's bad parenting.
TCS explicitly says don't sacrifice yourself, even in the specific essay linked. The people in the Netherlands are not doing TCS.
It's a common trap people fall into though, even with conventional parents. I agree that self-sacrifice is bad. There's a lot to TCS other than not having rules though.
You can't just drop rules and expect everything to work out great. That would be naive. You have to actively seek out solutions that work for you and your kid. And really work, not "work" in a compromising, sharing-of-misery kind of way.
>I see a lot of parents (mothers mostly) in public places desperately trying to explain their dissatisfaction to their misbehaving children.
What you aren't seeing is the thousands of times the child has been thwarted, denied, forced, coerced, dragged around, insufficiently helped, etc.
>The children meanwhile are completely disregarding them and will continue doing whatever they were doing untill the parents give up.
Does that strike you as the approach a child would take if their parent were typically super helpful, responsive, and had a really strong strong track record of taking the child seriously?
>The parents will end up awkwardly trying to ignore their children,
this is not TCS!
>visibly ashamed
ashamed of their helpless, dependent children who are actively upset about something!
>but still unable to use their authority for fear of breaking their chosen path to happy parenting.
You describe a sad situation but something that is not at all a criticism of TCS. It's rather compatible with the TCS worldview (the bare facts of the situations described, not your interpretation)
>They won't even raise their voice.
Having a big person yell at you isn't helpful or nice.
I've given people basically the above points and managed to persuade them. But like I said, only if they ask. Some people don't wanna hear it cuz they think law school is their only possible life plan, so if you tell them it's a bad plan they get mad.
Also you can find out what schools they are targeting and link them to http://lawschooltransparency.com. Amazing to see the jobless rates of students at even pretty good schools.
Can you link some of these govt jobs that don't have serious competition? I know people that might be interested in them.
And what sort of issues do you think are preventing people from getting government jobs "a lot of the time" that aren't caught by the C&F committee when you are trying to join the bar in the first place?
Law school grad here (top 10 school). Anyone asks my opinion (which seems to happen an awful lot -- I guess lots of people consider law school at some point or another), I tell them I think it's a pretty bad idea.
1) The cost (direct and opportunity) is ENORMOUS. And even with special federal govt repayment plans, if you don't get that big firm job, the debt will potentially weigh you down well into middle age (with the possibility of a nasty tax bite at the end if you have any assets and the law isn't changed).
2) The likelihood of getting a high paying job is slim. It's even pretty risky from top 10 schools.
3) Even during the boom times, when people from top schools were getting jobs at top BIGLAW firms left and right, people were HATING LIFE at the firm because they didn't realize what it was going to be like. And more broadly, lots of people get all the way through law school and realize they don't wanna be lawyers. This is super common.
4) Non-big-firm opportunities are either super competitive (like govt or public interest), super low paying (also includes lots of govt and public interest), or not a great value proposition (how'd you like 200k in debt to try scratching out 50k a year as a solo?)
Lots of the reasons people want to attend law school are pretty dumb/false (stuff like: like to argue, wanna be prestigious, think its a safe/good-paying career track). The people that should attend law school are those who:
a) won't be financially ruined by the decision,
b) actually want to be a lawyer, and
c) have some real sense of what being a lawyer actually means (e.g. they spent at least a couple years working at a firm in some non-lawyer capacity, or they have a parent who was a lawyer and told them lots about their job, or they spent tons of their time researching law and legal practice. In other words their knowledge of legal practice is not based entirely on fictional TV and movie lawyers).
I'd say that describes under 1% of the people enrolled in law schools nationwide.
Answering my own question a bit, it appears to be "no" (at least short term) -- there's a new Kindle Books with Narration in Kindle Unlimited category with only a couple thousand titles http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=9630682011
there is an active online community which discusses TCS and other related ideas at the Fallible Ideas discussion group. you can learn more about important philosophical ideas like TCS and get help applying them to your life! http://fallibleideas.com/discussion-info