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No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

robkhenderson.substack.com

501–510 of 1001 posts

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#501
post #437
post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that can be obtained even with low paying jobs Minimum wage workers can't afford rent anywhere in America. There's no stability to be found for low-paid workers. https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/15/homes/rent-affordability-mini...

Its innumeracy propaganda. There are no minimum wage jobs where I live anymore, and I live in a lower cost of living area (not Manhattan or silicon valley, LOL). I'm not surprised no one can afford rent at $7/hr when no one can find a job paying $7/hr. Costco has a sign up paying $19/hr to empty trash cans and they can't hire people at that low of pay and the article claims its a tragedy that a middle tier single bed…

So basically what you're saying is that there should in theory be no floor to QOL, but then tacitly agreeing with the hand-wringing about how society (a construct based almost entirely around QOL) is faltering?

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not merely expectations but intergenerational poverty. I get that you think that you came from a less privileged background than your in-laws and in some respects that's true, but even being able to immigrate to the US indicates a degree of social mobility that simply isn't available to the intergenerationally poor in rural America. These are people who grew up in places without anything to do, no training for h…

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Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#503
post #437
post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that can be obtained even with low paying jobs Minimum wage workers can't afford rent anywhere in America. There's no stability to be found for low-paid workers. https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/15/homes/rent-affordability-mini...

Its innumeracy propaganda. There are no minimum wage jobs where I live anymore, and I live in a lower cost of living area (not Manhattan or silicon valley, LOL). I'm not surprised no one can afford rent at $7/hr when no one can find a job paying $7/hr. Costco has a sign up paying $19/hr to empty trash cans and they can't hire people at that low of pay and the article claims its a tragedy that a middle tier single bed…

> Costco has a sign up paying $19/hr to empty trash cans

I am getting really tired of people casually talking about jobs like this as if they are easy. Do they require a ton of professional knowledge or skills? Nope. Are they way harder than your job? In all likelihood.

I mean, all the proof you need is literally in the fact that Costco can't find workers willing to do the job for that wage. The conditions suck for how hard the job is.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#504
Good parents don't just create good children, they also create good parents.

Government programs (as presently conceived) will never catch up in terms of effectiveness because they don't have this self-replicating behavior. They can provide relief but not much in the way of lasting improvement.

We should focus a lot more efforts socially and politically to create self-sustaining families and avoid culture and policies that disrupt them.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#505
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 a…

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.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t the burn you intend. Henderson is talking about wealth/status privilege while the left uses “privilege” as a shorthand for racial or gender privilege. Henderson is clearly not ceding that point here (implicitly or otherwise).

I don't think the left thinks of privilege solely as racial or gender privilege. Here's an article on "everydayfeminism.com" about the broad view progressives take on it: https://everydayfeminism.com/2014/05/income-vs-wealth/

I disagree from extensive experience. Unadorned, “privilege” refers to some identity privilege 99% of the time. For example, “check your privilege” virtually always refers to some identity privilege.

Moreover, the salient point wasn’t “the left doesn’t believe in wealth privilege” as much as “no one disputes wealth privilege and thus Henderson isn’t being hypocritical here as you imply”.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#507

"Garbage in garbage out" Seriously? This whole article has a pretty offensive view of people. It reads like "nobody dares to say these things because they are unpleasant, but I'm brave enough to say them and therefore they must be true".

I think that's what the author sells in general. Luxury beliefs sold to conservative men, but the analysis lacks depth

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#508
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a matter of luck—men in my dad’s village in Bangladesh start families, have kids, and live relatively happy lives in poverty even most poor Americans could not comprehend. I don’t think it’s fair to call all these guys incels. As the article observes, most just have no expectations placed on them, and also have no way of attaining dignity and social worth through the avenues in life reasonably available to t…

It is sunday morning. I'm at work (military). Part of that job is checking in with people at a half-dozen other locations who are also at work on a sunday morning. they just happen to all be hetero guys, which is not unusual in the military no matter the day. So I asked in our chat whether they had wives/girlfriends at home today. "No." "Nope." "My car is my GF" and "Rocking a peppi shirt under my uniform". These are…

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Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#509

This article is failing to see a fundamental distinction in spousal relations between "now" (present era) and "then" (pre-1970s): economic dependency between women and men. On the whole, if you mothered children in the pre-feminist era, and you didn't have a spouse... you and your children could starve. Because there was very little space carved out in our society for women to work. And under the cover of that asymme…

Yes. The past half century has been devoted to exploiting the working class breadwinner and family the benefit of the idle class. Now that the working class breadwinner and family has been improvished and ground down, what is the solution? For the upper classes to hold working class breadwinner and family to account, to become more judgemental of them etc.
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