There's a particular kind of listening that kids (and adults) sometimes do. Daddy is saying stuff—his mouth is moving and making noise—and he's talking about what I ate for lunch, and something about other times I've eaten ice cream, and something about rules and this and that and what Mommy would think and something about bedtime—but I am not so interested in that. What interests me is the punchline "...and therefore you can't have ice cream.". I'm only incidentally interested in the other stuff, insofar as it might determine whether I get ice cream.
In an obvious way, I'm showing rather poor listening skills. I did not understand most of what Daddy said, and arguably I'm even being rude.
However, in another way, this stance has a virtue. The virtue is that it holds fast to what matters, as best I know how, and does not give in to Daddy's framing. It sticks to what is real and concrete, what matters, despite a cloud of justifications. This is certainly not an unalloyed virtue, just as the POSIWID perspective is both useful and fraught. But it matters that although Daddy is a complex system with [...]
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Outline:
(00:10) Ice cream
(01:54) Wah wah
(02:21) Scammer
(02:51) Throwing stuff on a bonfire to make it burn less
(05:28) A skip connection for sanity
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
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