> Watching and hearing about the family instability in these communities is heartbreaking. Half or more of everyone’s parents are divorced. The kids float around seeking stability and the adults can’t provide it.
You seem to be attributing the cause of this to 'Telling men and boys it's cool and fine to divorce'
and not attributing to say... declining material and social capitol in the lower four quintiles of wealth that have created pressure that exacerbates marriage instability and numerous other social ills.
Also, divorce sucks when kids are involved, I don't think anyone on earth, left or right, would dispute that.
> Creating a culture where men can attain dignity and social respect **
We do in fact need a culture where it is possible for people to attain human dignity.
I don't think that the path to gaining this needs to be a rigid and proscriptive 'return to tradition'.
For example, with the advent of no-fault divorce, divorces went up, but female suicide rates dropped by 20%.
It wasn't all streamers and light when the 'guard rails' were on.
And speaking of America specifically, dignity and respect were not equi-distributed if you were a simply a 'married man' in decades past. It was quite a bit stricter: white, middle class or higher, married men were the ones afforded government support and social protection.
> My family’s rigid expectations have been such a blessing.
I won't dwell on this, but not every (or even most) children benefit from this approach to parenting.
Extreme rigidity, in fact, is more associated with negative long-term outcomes.
Finally, historically speaking, decrying the next generation as depraved, lost, and needing traditional discipline has been something the older generations have done since at least the invention of writing (across all cultures too!).
Yet I'm still continually shocked that this argument continues to be unironically employed century after century.
So much of the elite wealthy class and their media sock puppets on both sides of the traditional left/right political divide are dedicated to pushing the identitarian culture war theme - because what they don't want to deal with is something like this:
"Creating an economy where men can attain dignity and social respect."
> "Creating an economy where men can attain dignity and social respect."
Whether hard-working folks can attain dignity and social respect is a factor of society itself, not merely a side-effect of material circumstances. The poorest countries in the underdeveloped Third World have far more recognition and respect for those who work hard and provide for their households (and the happiness/life satisfaction indicators to go along with it) than much of the rich West.
As notacoward observes… literally 'men'? To my ear, 'people' would've worked too.
I feel it's always worth asking whether there are unstated axioms here being snuck into the discourse. Especially in a big conversation about how 'everything is being ruined because people won't stick to the old good ways'.
Though it may be an uncomfortable question to some, to what extent does this rest upon female humans serving as livestock and spawning/rearing children, being relatively disposable themselves?
If you REALLY want to maximize 'men attaining dignity and social respect', to what extent does this rest upon the existence of a subhuman underclass which doesn't count as 'men' and can be enslaved for their labor? Dignity and social respect are RELATIVE. The easiest way to make them seem enhanced for some is to strip 'em from others. People vary far too much to make 'free market' human interaction easy and seamless, and every time we run up against a conflict our dignity and social respect takes a hit.
How badly do you want your dignity? And how much is your end goal just you and not anybody else? (this would be an abstract 'you', not intending it as an argument that the original commenter is this 'you')
All humans, indeed every life-form, are for "serving as livestock and spawning/rearing children", period. Until somebody invents Dune-style axolotl tanks to clone people and robot nannies, that's not going to change. If a society and its culture can't perpetuate itself, it will be replaced by one that does so we all need to come up with a balance that works to perpetuate the type of society that we want.
In the meantime, maybe ease up on flamebait language like "subhuman underclass" and trying to insinuate the person you're replying to is some kind of scoundrel and try suggesting solutions to the fraying social balance instead? Because it's increasingly obvious that there's a problem here.
No, I don't think so. I specifically exempted the person I was replying to in my 'you' unless he wants to lay claim to being the sort of person I meant, and I'm happy with my language in the context I expressed it: 'if you really want to maximize your dignity and social value of men'
From my perspective we are looking at social balance that incorporates more variation, and that there were obvious problems with the previous balance that's now said to be 'fraying'. I think 'dignity and social respect' is a zero sum game, and largely dependent on power balances: you can never truly feel 'I am treated with dignity and social respect!' unless you're being kowtowed to by at least some. Otherwise, your perspective will inevitably be challenged, perhaps a lot if you mingle with a lot of varied people.
The state of actual freedom, is a state of social instability. Nobody defaults to the dominant, nobody's guaranteed to win, and the larger the pool you're in, the more likely someone is going to turn up, compete hard, and make you VERY challenged indeed. And they're in the same pool so there's doubtless something making them very insecure in turn, even if they're stomping all over you.
You can make this seem like a solid, reliable, secure social balance as long as you're able to crush opposing forces and have whatever your class/gender/race is, totally dominate everyone else. Then it won't seem 'fraying' or 'a problem' at all, because you'll not be in serious danger: others will.
The nice thing about humans is that, as thinking life-forms, we get to self-govern the appetites we share with dogs. As such we cease being livestock. This counts for women, too, exactly as much as it counts for men: it's more aspirational than practical. But we do get to question these things, both personally and societally.
Now I really have to wonder, do you get social recognition from your livestock? Of course you don't. So why even make that argument? Dignity and social respect can be a positive sum game; in fact, this is effectively the key insight behind the notion of social capital. In a well-functioning society, more social respect for women can fully coexist with dignity for men and vice versa.
Any culture that equates women having and raising kids with “being livestock” will be replaced by a society that doesn’t see motherhood that way. By definition.
It's the exact same culture that sees "happiness" for women in pursuing "a younger, richer, more x partner", as noted by a sibling commenter. The idea that many women as well as men might find genuine happiness and fulfillment within stable, well-functioning household relationships is entirely foreign to some "modern" ways of thinking.
Not sure of you realize it, but by focusing a common social-justice phrase on men alone you promote exactly the same kind of "identitarian culture war" that you decry. Might not be that effective.
> “Creating an economy where men can attain dignity and social respect."
What does that mean? Is everyone going to attend college and become coders? Who is going to collect the trash. In my home country the dominant job opportunity is subsistence farming, people still manage.
The lack of dignity and social respect conferred upon those who perform jobs like trash collection is precisely the cultural ill OP is describing.
One of my favorite parts of living in Germany has been the relative lack of social hierarchy associated with one's job. I'm in a martial arts class with a mix of doctors, lawyers, musicians, carpenters, students, and (actual) garbage collectors, and not once have I noticed a stratification or class connotation in discussion during or after class. They have very different economic means of course, but "dignity and social respect" is exactly the right description for the quality they all grant each other as contributing members of society.
It's a cultural quality I've come to accept as a marker of a functional social democracy.
> What does that mean? Is everyone going to attend college and become coders? Who is going to collect the trash.
The obvious solution is to discard classism and extend dignity and respect to the garbage-collectors. Why shouldn't they be respected? They perform an essential service for their community.
This! Most of the flaming identity cultural wars are basically a distraction. The problem as always is class, and elites vieing for control.
Yes progressive values are a thing, but its media representation is nuts, on purpose.
The it's us vs them narrative leads to subjucating all values to pure "survival". This promotes long term irrationality. The powers at be know this and capitalize it.
On both "sides".
In my biased opinion this sort of Machiavellism is more common with conservatives, but its definitely common enough in non conservatives.
Why do you think it's more common with conservatives?
You said it yourself, cultural wars are just distraction to keep the elite in power and talk about everything except classes. People in power don't care about conservatives or liberals, they just pick a team and play the game.
Which party is dedicated to importing massive numbers of cheap workers from other countries to allow business owners to undercut working class wages and pocket more profits?
I suspect that you're implying that the answer is the US Democratic party, but it's really not.
By making immigration-without-visas a criminal offense, rather than an administrative one, the anti-immigration movement serves to drive immigrants (but not immigration) underground and makes their labor cheaper.
It's a lot like prostitution: since prostitution is a criminal offense, all prostitutes are criminals. They can be abused freely because they cannot go to the authorities without certainty being punished themselves.
By the same token, an undocumented immigrant cannot contact authorities to report they're underpaid, stolen from, beaten, imprisoned, or enslaved. (These are all things that happen regularly.) Their "criminal" status is used as a cudgel to abuse them.
Keep in mind, these are all people that just want to work in exchange for money, and they're responding to people and companies that want to hire their services. The "illegal immigration" posturing is just the buyers' way of artificially depressing prices.
- are severely uneducated. Consider distribution of political alignments in Academia. Consider the fact that antivaxxers and conspiracy theorists are in their overwhelming majority politically conservative and authoritarian. Belief in conspiracy theories is highly correlated with an impoverished interpersonal functioning, such as interpersonal paranoia, narcissism, disagreeableness, insecure attachment and Machiavellianism [1]. Impoverished interpersonal skills signify lack of empathy, which fuels dehumanization, and enables exploitation of others.
- grew up hammered by propaganda and the red scare, where anything that resembles social welfare is considered communism even if they themselves are dependent on such systems. Accepting that one needs help is exceptionally difficult for a person high on narcissism and paranoia.
Furthermore, when threatened, the brain takes "conservative" stances, i.e. stances that preserve the status quo. When faced with an ever changing world that does not resemble anything that they were accustomed to, they cling on to the closest sense of status quo even if the person or structure that supports it only does so for optics.
The lack of education makes it difficult for them to see that they are played like pawns by the bourgeoisie, that they receive preferential treatment through systemic issues [2], and finally they misattribute the reasons for their successes due to their obliviousness [3].
People tend to be absolutist about whether it’s better for kids if unhappy parents get divorced, but as the saying goes every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Some marriages are hell for everybody involved and need to end. I put abuse situations in that category of course and also marriages that have so much animosity that they can’t stop fighting. On the other end of marriages that may end in divorce are situations where one partner gets wanderlust and doesn’t want to be tied down by a family or are disappointed that their lifestyle isn’t what they expected. In those cases it is probably best for the kids if the parents learn to be happy within the bounds of their family.
Women control the social capital and function as norm setters in our society. Fixing men won’t help if women and the prevailing culture remain broken. All the divorces I’ve witnessed, nearly every married childhood friend of mine has been the victim of unwanted divorce - in every instance initiated by women who simply wanted a younger, richer, more x partner. All were heavily endorsed by the surrounding social groups. It’s framed by their culture as an issue of women having equal rights to live life the way that makes them happy. Well who could argue with that. It sounds great that people should just be free to be happy, and to restrict women’s freedom in this domain harkens back to the past which we as a society have decided was a bad time, when women couldn’t vote and were the property of men. I can’t argue with that! But the children are robbed of a chance at something better, something their parents had, a stable family. Sometimes the little boys will then decide to become females. Who could blame them! I have learned that it’s better to accept these changes than to swim upstream like an old salmon or something. As long as boys can become girls, hypergamy seems fair, more symmetrical. That said, this current state of affairs amongs the coastal working class doesn’t seem like the optimal arrangement with respect to mental health outcomes.
I don’t understand how you get from family instability to sexual identity confusion. Can you explain the connection and preferably substantiate it with data.
The gist of what you’re saying is true: family instability causes one to question their identity. You fixated on sexual identity so explain why.
Since it seems like you have a pretty good sample size, I am curious whether you have noticed a difference or pattern in upbringing among the current and/or former wives of your childhood friends.
Sure. Children of divorced parents are more likely to opt for divorce themselves, based on my sample. That is consistent with everything we know and expect about humans. Whether and how these apparently heritable differences are due to nature vs nurture is to me the more interesting question. Many in the lower class have imperfections that seem plausibly linked to biology rather than culture, like fundamental biological differences in capacity for impulse control, cognitive deficits whether congenital or epigenetic in origin, etc If someone is abusive due to lead exposure for instance, maybe them divorcing their partner capriciously, as a result of poor impulse control, may in fact be the best outcome for everyone. But what if these biological factors can be ameliorated through culture, say through meditation or more traditional means, then problems of nature can be addressed through culture, and perhaps there alone. That’s a line of thought that might fructify other progressive efforts to improve our culture, should the progressivists pursue it.
I tend to think any imperfections are a result of negative socio-cultural (parenting) impacts, although that can of course be driven by one whack-a-doodle relative (biology as the pebble and socio-cultural as the ripples.)
In my experience families that are dirt-poor but land-rich tend to have successful offspring. Maybe that sense of place contributes to the needed stability for children to do well as adults.
“Moving forward, McFarland is analyzing the racial disparities of childhood lead exposure, hoping to highlight the health inequities suffered by Black children, who were exposed more often to lead and in greater quantities than white children.”
Divorce is a legal proceeding. The Government is ipso facto involved, and even more so when kids enter the picture since otherwise there would be no one to stand for their interest.
> and even more so when kids enter the picture since otherwise there would be no one to stand for their interest.
The situation in my case was so extreme that my father ended up with custody, but from what I’ve heard from others it doesn’t sound like the government is standing for the interests of the children. The courts for example, in my fathers parents’ divorce, gave custody go him and his siblings to his broke, alcoholic mother instead of his mentally and financially stable father.
And what do you think the government is going to do when you eliminate no-fault divorce as this whole thread of cowards are happy to imply but not state? What do you think happens then?
> You seem to be attributing the cause of this to 'Telling men and boys it's cool and fine to divorce' and not attributing to say... declining material and social capitol in the lower four quintiles of wealth
It's six of one, half a dozen of another. As the Chinese philosopher Confucious was already well aware of, a tight-knit family is the foundation of all other social structures.
> Finally, historically speaking, decrying the next generation as depraved, lost, and needing traditional discipline
Except that it's not merely "the next generation", i.e. youth that's being so described. The ongoing fraying of the social fabric in late-stage modern societies, especially among those most vulnerable to marginalization due to a broad variety of added factors, has been ascertained quite objectively.
> a tight-knit family is the foundation of all other social structures.
But you're missing an important part there: the "tight-knit" part doesn't just mean "stays together no matter what". It means "genuinely care about each other and work well together."
Yes, a close, loving, supportive family is hugely important, for everyone in it. But a) the nuclear family you're almost certainly thinking about (a married couple and their children) has not been the norm for the vast majority of human history (and certainly wasn't when Confucius was writing), and b) whether you have a nuclear family or not, when one or more of the relationships at the core of your family is dysfunctional and causing significant stress, breaking that relationship apart can be a big improvement for the family as a whole. (In fact, when you don't have a nuclear family, it's much easier and safer to do that, because you're much less likely to be losing half the income in the household, or the only stable adult-to-adult relationship in the household.)
> Yes, a close, loving, supportive family is hugely important, for everyone in it.
Telling people that it doesn't matter if they divorce and that they should put their own short-term happiness first and foremost is tantamount to denying this. And when it's the liberal upper class doing this, they're pretty much pulling up the ladder to effective social cohesion behind themselves, even as they hypocritically enjoy its benefits while denouncing the horrific plight of those most socially marginalized. The fact that some people in terrible relationships are genuinely better off if they split apart doesn't mean that celebrating divorce as anything other than potentially a lesser evil is a sensible idea.
> Telling people that it doesn't matter if they divorce and that they should put their own short-term happiness first and foremost
That's a straw man, though. Nobody relevant is telling people that. You're either not listening to the primary sources and are getting a distorted representation by politically motivated secondary sources, or your own biases are clouding your understanding when you're reading the primary sources.
The BLM movement explicitly supports "dismantling of the nuclear family structure" as one of their goals. How many progressives have voiced support for BLM? How many have bothered to denounce and disclaim support for these peculiar aims, that seem to have remarkably little to do with benefiting Black lives, and that quite a few Blacks would themselves oppose?
Disclaimer: while I support the BLM movement, I've never personally interacted with it in any meaningful way, so I don't know exactly what they mean by this, to the extent that they have, in fact, said it.
"Dismantling the nuclear family structure" doesn't mean "throw organized families to the wind, let children fend for themselves, force everyone into single-parent households" or anything like that.
Like I said in my previous comment, the "nuclear family" is not the norm, it is not a particularly stable or sustainable model for family units, and what we had before, while it certainly also has its flaws, tends to be much better for any family that doesn't completely fit within the happy fairy-tale ideal of two parents who love each other completely, 2.4 kids, and a dog.
Through most of human history, "family" has meant either "three generations of blood relations living under one roof, out to aunts/uncles/cousins or even farther, all sharing responsibility for things like child-rearing" or, even more broadly, just "the entire community, made up of a big extended family (with or without blood relations)/tribe/clan." When two parents didn't get along, even if they didn't "divorce" in the way we understand it today, they could still stop being pair-bonded without it significantly affecting the children, because those children were being raised more or less in common with a half-dozen (dozen? score?) others in the much large "family unit", by all the parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents, etc.
"Dismantling the nuclear family" doesn't mean breaking it down and sending the component parts off to do their own thing individually. It means removing that very specific and very inflexible structure as our society's only acceptable model of what it means to be a "family," because like many other things that emerged in the shadow of the Industrial Revolution, it may be helpful for some people, but it's deeply harmful for many, many others.
Unfortunately, the radical left's contempt for the bourgeois nuclear family is only exceeded by their far greater contempt for the traditionalism of extended family structures, which often entails "staying put" for multiple generations in comparatively rural towns and villages - far different from the inner-city concerns of the rest of the BLM movement, and the leftist progressive movement more generally. So, while there's much to say for what you're advocating here, it's not the kind of change that BLM is going to meaningfully pursue.
The question has to be, why is there open hostility to the nuclear family by this and other movements? Why is there a negative statement about it needing to be disrupted/dismantled? Why can't there just be a positive statement about supporting different arrangements where it makes sense?
Yes, there are some social norms around the nuclear family in the West, but it isn't a requirement in society. Nobody is stopping anybody from living how they want as far as who you can have in your life or whether extended family/community can support each other. Nobody is not hiring people because their parents are divorced.
There IS evidence that growing up with both parents greatly increases the likelihood of success. Does that mean having 2 parents is the only way to live? No, it doesn't. But why be hostile/negative towards something that evidence shows is positive? Why not just be positive towards something else?
> why is there open hostility to the nuclear family by this and other movements?
The term, as used in there criticism, refers to the social norm and institutional structures centered on it, not the existence of families that happen to fit the norm..
> But why be hostile/negative towards something that evidence shows is positive?
The nuclear family norm is not positive for the community BLM is concerned with, it both stigmatizes what is common in that community (a harm in itself) and idealizes something which evidence shows is harmful for that community (almost certainly more due to present material conditions than inherently, but the reason isn't that important for this purpose.)
However, I don't think they support the idea that the nuclear family is harmful to african-americans.
A few points:
1. Logically, if certain behaviors/social arrangements are common within a community, then they inherently become 'norms' themselves.
2. The study you linked, associates cognitive scores at 2 years old to household structure. I personally don't think using data for 2 year olds is the best measure for determining the impact of household structures on life outcomes/the community. There's also a lot of massaging of the data to produce its final results, which raises a flag for me without further investigation (this does NOT mean anything untoward has happened, just flagging that).
3. All that being said, the study linked shows that the nuclear household is the second best household structure for african-americans (as measured by 2 year old cognitive scores), bested only by also having a grandparent around. Interestingly, grandparents weren't net good in every case. Here's a further quote directly from the study:
> Supplemental split models showed that for African American children, living with both grandparents and other adults was associated with a significantly lower cognitive score than living with grandparents or in a nuclear family
4. If that study is the backbone of the idea that the nuclear family is harmful for african-americans, then more attention should be paid to keeping other adults out of the house, and keeping biological parents in the household.
5. Just a word of advisement, as far as American social norms go for sharing data on cognitive scores across different racial groups, there's a strong norm to NOT share the data if it doesn't suggest perfect equality. The study you linked doesn't show perfect equality, so I would just be careful sharing in other environments.
We can't easily do empirical studies on the effects of family structures besides the nuclear family, because the nuclear family is the norm in Western society right now (and especially America).
That means that a) there will be very few such families to study (and where you do find larger populations that have non-nuclear family structures, there are likely to be other confounding factors, as they are likely to belong to some particular subculture). This reduces your sample sizes and makes it hard to draw rigorous conclusions based on the data you are able to collect.
But also b) any such families you find will be necessarily marginalized to some extent, because, again, the nuclear family is the norm, and that fundamentally means that those who eschew it will find themselves underrepresented and frequently discriminated against, both overtly and subtly.
That means that outcomes for such families in the real world, today, will be almost guaranteed to be worse than they could be otherwise, because of the exact thing BLM is trying to change (the nuclear-family norm).
The post I was responding to was attempting to use an empirical study to support a given sociological position for a given group (which from reading the study didn't actually support that position).
Now you are responding to me and saying empiricism cannot be used to support the given sociological position. Did you mean to respond to the poster I was responding to? I did not put forth that study in this thread.
Even given all of that, I strongly disagree with the anti-empiricism notion for this topic and any other related one.
On sample sizes being an issue:
-The US has 330 million people.
-There are 130 million households in the US.
-There are 74 million children in the US.
-35% of children have lived with a relative (i.e. non-nuclear) other than their parent or sibling at some point by age 18 (source: umich link the previous poster posted)
-And when you look beyond the US, the world has a population of 7 billion people
-Needless to say, we don't have a dearth of data to lean on to answer questions such as these
-There's also such a thing called statistical significance, which can be used to display the confidence of a result given the sample size. Studies usually use p=0.05
On the idea that non-majority populations/lifestyles automatically means guaranteed worse outcomes, I do not agree that's a given, and don't accept that it must be the case here. I have seen no causal chain presented yet (that also accounts for the available evidence). A couple counter-examples:
-Non-overweight people are the minority in the US, but their outcomes are much better, even though there are norms around larger/higher caloric meals in the US
-Same-sex couples, a minority, have higher household income than heterosexual couples
Do not misread the above examples as saying there's no discrimination going one way or the other or there being no confounding factors. They are showing that living a minority lifestyle does NOT guarantee worse outcomes. And we shouldn't assume that's the case without evidence for other things.
That just isn't true. Extended families are common and coexist with nuclear ones throughout the Mediterranean-influenced world, including the bulk of Latin America. That's a huge population to study. Not to mention Asia.
> We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.
The key word you’re missing in your interpretation of that quote is “requirement”. I may love hiking, but I am not in favor of requiring hiking for everyone.
I imagine this is in response to various conservative proposals over the years to put forth (straight) marriage as a solution to various unrelated societal ills.
My comment didn't feature an interpretation, it was directly quoting the BLM site... but now I will offer an interpretation based on your comment:
I'm not in favor of requiring hiking or certain family structures either. Serious question, is there a requirement for the nuclear family?
Let us not conflate norms and legal requirements. Where I live, there is most certainly a norm around hiking being a really positive thing that you should do, and it's associated with being higher status (local fashion trends even favor looking like you are a hiker). Not everyone is a hiker, and some people don't like hiking. But I'm okay with the norm existing, but would never support a requirement for it.
> Serious question, is there a requirement for the nuclear family?
The answer depends on where you are. It's nowhere as strict as "if you have a child outside a nuclear family, you go to jail". But there may be all sorts of softer pressures in place.
Now, I don't think having such pressures is necessarily bad in all places. It becomes bad when it's a "one solution fits all" approach, and the pressure is applied even in situations where dissolving a traditional nuclear family would be in the participants' (especially the children's) best interests.
Putting myself in the shoes of black folks, I can certainly see how certain conservative initiatives cross that line.
Why did you ask for evidence in the first place of the claim that BLM held a position against the nuclear family if you wouldn't accept any evidence?
If your position is just a flavor of the 'No true scotsman' fallacy, why even bother?
Why not just come out and say "There can never be a true BLM source! You can never cite an authoritative position from BLM! You cannot cite anything because there are many local chapters, and the movement can exist even independently of that! BLM can never be criticized thusly for any positions! Ha!"
That is your position here, no?
It ignores that THERE IS a central hub for the BLM network. And the website for this is blacklivesmatter.com, which is what I cited. This is the primary website for the BLM org and movement. It is by far, the most heavily trafficked website in the BLM movement. BLM started with the group of people who created the org for which the website serves as the face for. Calling it 'purportedly onboard' the BLM movement is incredibly ignorant of its history. Yes, there is a broader network. But this is the center of that network.
This central hub (which runs blacklivesmatter.com) took in $90 million in donations in 2020. And it then distributed $21.7 million of that to local chapters.
Anecdotes mean just what they mean. However as some one most closely aligned to leftys vs other political identity or group, I’ve not been around too many leftists so focused on BLM specifically in a central/organized way or treat it as such.
> That is your position here, no?
Not at all. Your core point revolves around me thinking about and using local chapters as a core defense. I didn’t even know that was a thing for all of this.
The comment revolves around various assumption. Pointing to a caricature of an immature left wing person who craves getting one under everyone to the right of them. Like “if you wouldn’t accept any evidence”. I asked because I don’t particularly care much about BLM a specifically because caring about oppressed minorities has always been a core tenant. i knew little about this most famous blm group**. Similarly, I can’t remember the last video feed in the past year I’ve gotten from YouTube that was about BLM from a lefty source. Except for two specifically focused on black issues in America.
** I searched “blm vs black lives matter group”. I see a majority of front page news and other stuff being conservatives foaming out about stuff. As if a lot of the issues and “facts” of BLM centralization are something greatly discussed by all sides. Not just the people upset over it. Now I more likely believe how big this org is. If they get this much attention from center and right leaning media. Not dissimilar to the over exaggeration done by the mostly centrist and neoliberal media of focusing on Trump so much (though definitely including more left wing media a lot too). Still. Not every one on the left or sympathetic to certain issues thinks this way. Nor is every one on the left a smarmy smart ass. People aren’t a monolith.
I think the BLM group and the BLM movement should be differentiated. While many progressives may have supported the BLM movement I don't believe the openly Marxist organization is as popular. Also, just cutting the quote at the dismantling part without including the rest of that statement seems disingenuous.
A lot of this discussion seems to be wrapped up in the idea that the lower classes look up to the upper classes. Is there any evidence for this point? It seems to imply poor people unable to think critically and independently. Yet, there exists households of modest means where each partner holds their other half accountable-- yet nobody is talking about those people. What's different about them, and what differentiates them from other lower-class households that can't keep it together?
Because when people think critically and independently, they get called "deplorables", "bigoted" or "conspiracy nuts" by the liberal elite who don't like what they have to say.
I’m with you on the wildly wealthy and also elite people like Ted Cruz or that Shapiro fella. Or Josh Hawley. Cant be more of a coastal elite than that! Even I’ve visited the mid west because I wanted to, for non political reasons, more than he has and he’s from Missouri. Which he fled from to go from one coastal elite institutions after another. Or that Tucker fella who a few weeks ago sarcastically brought up Biden paying off his Yale student debt. Even though Biden at most would do $10K debt relief. And Tucker is an heir while going to Yale as a wealthy person is as elite as you can get — no relation to the common person.
Same issues with out of touch elites like Biden and Mrs Harris throwing every other struggling person in prison if it benefits them while pretending it is being tough on crime and prevailing justice. Or Pelosi, or the Clinton’s, and oh so many more. Pelosi with her “let me trade investments with possible insider knowledge as possible” heh.
Conservative echo chambers are just as strong as liberal ones. You best be towing the party line with your thoughts when participating in any political affiliation.
This seems to be rooted in the notion that the liberal upper class benefits by having cohesive families while at the same time saying that divorce doesn’t matter and, in fact, celebrating it. I can’t help but ask you to support that, because it seems like a bizarre claim to me. The only type of person that comes to mind for me when thinking of people that celebrate divorce are people that have been divorced.
> I can’t help but ask you to support that, because it seems like a bizarre claim to me.
There's little about this claim that's "bizarre", and the OP brings relevant evidence. Celebrating widespread, no-fault divorce and dismissing the importance of household-scale social cohesion is indeed a key part of the current Zeitgeist amongst intellectual, often left-leaning elites.
It’s quite possible I missed the relevant evidence as I skimmed through a lot of it. There was certainly a relevant supporting anecdote, but I assume you’re referring to more than that? I won’t bother responding to the part that is essentially “support through repetition”.
> Also, divorce sucks when kids are involved, I don't think anyone on earth, left or right, would dispute that.
Tons of people dispute this. The thinking is that people staying married when they don’t want to stay married is worse for kids than people getting divorced and creating two separate households the kids float between. I don’t agree with this thinking, mostly because I’m the product of divorce that saw the aftermath and have seen the deep regret of what happened on both the parent of the previously married parents and the children. I suppose the good thing that came out of it is that neither I nor any of my siblings have gotten divorced, despite now all having been married longer than our parents ever were. Divorce is rarely the answer and does terrible things to children.
I was a child of divorced parents. It seems logical that which is 'better' depends on just how irreconcilable the differences are, relative to the parents in question. I mean, it seems staying together could only work if the parents had small changes to make, simply because people mostly don't make big changes to themselves, at all.
My mother sat my 2 sibs and I down before and asked for our thoughts/feelings, and we all said "Do it" without hesitation or doubt. In my case, we were all clearly worse off materially after. I think we kids were a little better off mentally and emotionally, but a large component of that is that my mother would have continued attempting suicide otherwise, and it's possible she might have succeeded.
It's useless to speculate about whether they could have stayed together if they'd had the capacity to put others above themselves, because they didn't have it, and no amount of counseling could have endowed them with it.
> Divorce is rarely the answer and does terrible things to children.
My mother was shocked that I supported my parents' divorce. She couldn't imagine how I wasn't devastated. They screamed at each other frequently. They'd stayed together "for the kids," and that was a nightmare.
Right. I don’t think it’s divorce that does terrible things to children but bad relationships. Whether that relationship ends in divorce or not, growing up in a household full of toxicity and people fighting and hating each other and full of animosity is what is terrible. And yes, that often leads to divorce. But it’s the toxicity that is terrible, not the act itself.
(My parents are not divorced and have had a quite good, tho imperfect, marriage so I can’t speak for either scenario. But this is what I gather knowing and observing people who grew up with parents who divorced or remained married while miserable and hating each other.)
Divorced dad, anecdote. My kids, my ex, and I are much better off now. Having the kids around 50% time is a huge sanity boost and allows me to be there for them more than before. I’m lucky to have remarried to a very engaged stepmom, but even without her we’d probably still be better off.
I also saw my parents become much happier after they split up (when I was an adult.)
I'll add a +1 to this as the kid of parents who divorced (when I was about 11). Home went from being an unpleasant place to be to being a nice place again. It is horrible to feel stuck between two people who don't want to be there.
It was one of the best things that happened for me. And my parents.
I meant the fact of a divorce involving children sucks (for the kids especially).
I wasn't arguing that parents with children shouldn't divorce at all.
Each couple will need to consider the pros and cons as best they can.
I myself was a product of a home that tried both 'stay together for the kids' and 'extremely messy 6 years long divorce' in that order.
That relationship was doomed from the start, it would have been better if they'd never met.
My dad is/was a high-functioning drug addict (among other thing), divorce was always the best answer for them.
My parents no longer being married did nothing to me. Zero.
My parents trying to get me to hate the other parent caused severe damage and was entirely ineffective at its goal.
Not being able to spend much time with one of my parents, especially the one with the most life survival skills was bad. I had a relative that could have stood in, but they declined to really be there regularly.
An amicable divorce with some mitigation of the parenting structure would have turned out just fine. And, maybe part of that would have been achieved with an earlier divorce.
>> Also, divorce sucks[1] when kids are involved, I don't think anyone on earth, left or right, would dispute that.
> Tons of people dispute this.
Divorce with children clearly does suck, statistically and practically. Those who dispute it are simply wrong, for whatever reason they wish to assert. That's obvious, with the data we have today.
[1] "sucks" is a fairly broad word, but graciously, it can be considered "not good".
"don't want to stay married" is worth exploring. Why don't they want to?
Maybe a part of that is attitude and culture and values, and not so much unreconcilable problems. If they felt strongly about providing for their children together, and that was highly respected by society, maybe the problems they have would look trivial.
I was the opposite. My parents "stayed together" in that they lived in the same house but had separate bedrooms and lives. Most of the time when they were interacting it was some kind of power struggle. By age 13 my sibling became an addict and is to this day unable to sustain a job. I attribute it to the instability in the household growing up.
We're always going to see this through the lens of the experiences we grew up with.
Whatever works for you, but be aware your experience might not generalise to the whole population. I'm not going to say "everyone's situation is different", there are more than seven billion of us, I suspect our experiences fall in to approximately a few broad categories,
My parents stayed together much longer the should have. One day, much later, my mother cried and apologised that she hadn't left my father 13 years earlier.
My father was a massive piece of shit, the lung cancer couldn't have taken him soon.
We wouldn't have been floating between two houses, rather we would have had one stable home.
I don't believe the people arguing for divorce in some situations are saying "divorce doesn't suck", but there's at least some chance it might be better than the alternative.
I appreciate the candor but at the same time wonder about the lack of counterfactual experience. What if your parents had stayed together and you grew up in a household of constant fighting? Would that have been better?
I don’t know how many people actually dispute that divorce sucks tho, even if they think that it is the preferable or better or even good outcome for a relationship.
Like, I don’t know anyone who argues that divorce is easy and fun and causes absolutely no issues for kids who are involved. What I do see people argue is that divorce can be a better outcome than staying together and being miserable.
> And speaking of America specifically, dignity and respect were not equi-distributed if you were a simply a 'married man' in decades past. It was quite a bit stricter: white, middle class or higher, married men were the ones afforded government support and social protection.
You're conflating dignity and respect with government support. These are not remotely the same things. Some highly respected men were actively opposed by their respective governments because they stood up for what they saw as right despite the corruption of their governments, e.g. MLK Jr, Mahatma Ghandi, even Jesus. All dignified and respected by large numbers of people, all opposed by their governments.
I think you're making an attribution error by suggesting they are able to get others to do anything, that would imply that the person first realized that something needed to get done beyond establishing their brilliance.
At this point I think my sons may accomplish more in life if they remain unemployed as adults.
>> I won't dwell on this, but not every (or even most) children benefit from this approach to parenting. Extreme rigidity, in fact, is more associated with negative long-term outcomes.
Nobody is advocating "extreme rigidity". Consistently enforced boundaries have benefits for people across the board. I would argue that's the most important thing (maybe even the only thing) in raising kids to become responsible adults.
> "Suicides among children and young people aged 10 to 24 rose 57% from 2007 to 2018, according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention... In actual numbers, the suicide rate among 10- to 24-year-olds jumped from about 7 per 100,000 in 2007 to nearly 11 per 100,000 in 2018, according to the National Vital Statistics Report published Sept. 11."
That's called massive societal failure any way you look at it. Oh well, I guess there's the upside that wealthy boomers can ride off into their cruise ship futures on the backs of 401K retirement plans financed by investments in student loan debt, fossil-fueled global warming, price-hiked pharmaceuticals and the war machine. What a wonderful picture, really shows the mentality here.
Jim Morrison was speaking for that class when he said, "I don't know what's gonna happen, man, but I'm gonna get my kicks in before this whole shithouse goes up in flames."
> You seem to be attributing the cause of this to 'Telling men and boys it's cool and fine to divorce' and not attributing to say... declining material and social capitol in the lower four quintiles of wealth that have created pressure that exacerbates marriage instability and numerous other social ills
Considering that the divorce rate has increased massively while poverty has decreased, it is nearly impossible that the cause of marriage instability is poverty.
> For example, with the advent of no-fault divorce, divorces went up, but female suicide rates dropped by 20%. It wasn't all streamers and light when the 'guard rails' were on.
This statistic "with the advent of no-fault divorce, divorces went up, but female suicide rates dropped by 20%" seems very surprising to me. By googling I haven't been able to find a source for it. If I look at women's suicide rates over time they seem to be trending up. No fault divorce starts in California in 1969 and is legal in the last state, New York, by 2010. If that causes a significant drop in suicide rate I can't see it on this graph.
Additional Googling has turned up for me a paper that gives the 20% reduction claim. Still not clear to me how a 20% reduction in female suicide does not show up in a chart of female suicide rate.
Another interesting thing about this paper is that it references another paper that found the opposite result - i.e. that no fault divorce seems to have increased the suicide rate.
I tried to find suicide rate in California specifically around 1970. Ideally, I'd like to see a graph going from 1950 to 1990 and see that there is a ~20% drop around the legalization of no fault divorce. I found this paper that does mention a big drop in California suicide rate, especially among women and teens, between 1970 and 1990.
This paper does not attribute the drop in suicide rate to no fault divorce though. As I understand it this paper is saying that the suicide rate drop is explained by two main factors.
First, a change in how California coroners coded suicides relative to how other coroners did it. If I'm understanding correctly it seems in 1970 California coroners were inclined to mark deaths resulting from suicide attempt damage as suicide. Because of this, in 1970, California cities had about double the suicide rate of US cities. By 1990 California coroners were doing what other coroners were doing and California cities had effectively the same rate of suicide as US cities.
In my imagination this works as - if a woman attempts to kill herself by overdose, but survives the attempt, though has irreparable organ damage and dies from that a month later - in the 1970's California coroners would call that suicide, but by 1990 they would call it an unintentional death. Since men tend to kill themselves with guns or by hanging men tend to die when they attempt suicide. Women are more likely to try poisoning or drug over dose and thus are more likely to survive the attempt but take an eventually fatal injury. This would explain why women's suicidality is apparently more affected by a change in coroner practice than men's.
Second factor is changing demographics. American Indians are the most suicidal, then white people. Between 1970 and 1990 the proportion of these two groups declined and the number of the relatively not-suicidal Hispanics increased dramatically. Thus, the suicide rate in California will appear to plummet - not because of any change in behavior or policy, but simply because there are more less suicidal people moving in.
After reading about this for the last hour my current impression is that we probably don't know the affect of no fault divorce on female suicide rates. The academic literature is contested (I've seen two papers on the specific point with opposite claims), the statistics are not clear (female suicide rate is trending up), and in the state with the sharpest change in suicide rate following no fault divorce legalization (to my knowledge this is California) there are other explanations for the change.
> declining material and social capitol in the lower four quintiles of wealth that have created pressure that exacerbates marriage instability and numerous other social ills.
The article disputes that:
"Most social scientists who study poor families assume financial troubles are the cause of these breakups. After all, these young people grow up in a context of extreme disadvantage, at least by American standards, and they come of age with little education, few skills, and not many future prospects. Lack of money is certainly a contributing cause, as we will see, but rarely the only factor. It is usually the young father’s criminal behavior, the spells of incarceration that so often follow, a pattern of intimate violence, his chronic infidelity, and an inability to leave drugs and alcohol alone that cause relationships to falter and die."
You seem to be attributing the cause of this to 'Telling men and boys it's cool and fine to divorce' and not attributing to say... declining material and social capitol in the lower four quintiles of wealth that have created pressure that exacerbates marriage instability and numerous other social ills.
Also, divorce sucks when kids are involved, I don't think anyone on earth, left or right, would dispute that.
> Creating a culture where men can attain dignity and social respect **
We do in fact need a culture where it is possible for people to attain human dignity. I don't think that the path to gaining this needs to be a rigid and proscriptive 'return to tradition'.
For example, with the advent of no-fault divorce, divorces went up, but female suicide rates dropped by 20%. It wasn't all streamers and light when the 'guard rails' were on.
And speaking of America specifically, dignity and respect were not equi-distributed if you were a simply a 'married man' in decades past. It was quite a bit stricter: white, middle class or higher, married men were the ones afforded government support and social protection.
> My family’s rigid expectations have been such a blessing.
I won't dwell on this, but not every (or even most) children benefit from this approach to parenting. Extreme rigidity, in fact, is more associated with negative long-term outcomes.
Finally, historically speaking, decrying the next generation as depraved, lost, and needing traditional discipline has been something the older generations have done since at least the invention of writing (across all cultures too!). Yet I'm still continually shocked that this argument continues to be unironically employed century after century.