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

robkhenderson.substack.com

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

#541

Post by sandworm101 »

notacoward wrote: post #239
sandworm101 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Also... It is Sunday morning. That means a lot of people are at church (and who is might be related to the demographic observation you've made). Is the message they're hearing one of hope or despair? Or are they not even listening? I'm not going to blame everything on religion, as tempting as that is, but for a non-trivial minority that might be part of who feels included or excluded and why they react as they do.

>> Is the message they're hearing one of hope or despair?

Despair. The average age at most churches now seems to be 80+, and those who are younger are there to support their older relatives. There is no chatting or mingling. Once the service is over it is time to begin the process of loading grandma back into the car. What I see of single people at church is the exhaustion common to all caregivers.

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

#542

Post by Epiphany21 »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #336
fnqra wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> it reverts to the centrist opinion of the 1990s/2000s I don’t know, sort of feels like we’ve largely moved on from the centrist opinions of the turn of the millennium. You’d get the half-shame branding of “metrosexual” for dressing better than average or liking things marginally off the mainline of masculinity, wasn’t exactly a particularly supportive attitude back then. > Brigaded in less than a minute. Well done,…

>You’d get the half-shame branding of “metrosexual” for dressing better than average

"Better than average" is highly subjective. There have always been expectations in every society about how you're supposed to dress and comport yourself in public. The styles and forms these expectations take are largely arbitrary and in constant flux, but the uniformity they provide is anything but. The reason why that kind of uniformity is naturally desirable is because being the odd one out is more often dangerous than it is advantageous. The world is an incredibly dangerous place, so if you exhibit aberrant and/or disruptive behaviors from the majority population, their default response is going to be to shame you, or shut you up, or make you go away. It doesn't matter what the behavior is, only that it deviates from the norm.

There have always been hippies, flamboyant gays, and other eccentric types who have found themselves the odd one out (hello there). But I would argue that their status in society is really determined by the relationships they have with others. If you build up a decent rapport with someone, they'll usually tolerate more of your aberrant behaviors, and might not mind them at all since said behaviors are coming from you specifically.

To tie this back into some of the previous posts, being gay is a quality but it's not a redeeming one, and it doesn't make up for a person's negative traits. There seems to be this expectation from very sheltered people that being the odd one out should afford them certain privileges, often related to some kind of victim status. In reality, people will just see you as weak and bully you for those perceived weaknesses.

Just my two cents as someone who eschews the LGBTBLAHBLAH+++ label for myself, since I don't want to be associated with a cult of corporate and pseudo-academic pandering that deprives me of my agency makes certain assumptions about my morals and politics.

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

#543

Post by XorNot »

onionisafruit wrote: post #484
lkey wrote: 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…

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 si…

No post body was provided.

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

#544

Post by defterGoose »

josephg wrote: post #175
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it is true that there are people who actually do propose completely defunding police activity or abolishing the police, they are a tiny minority of those who took part in protests about police behavior towards non-white communities. It's so easy to make cheap digs about that handful of people instead of actually tackle the issues that this misnamed movement was/is really about. If it had actually been called "R…

I hear what you're saying, but words matter. I can never support a slogan I explicitly disagree with. There's plenty of better slogans out there. I'd support "end police violence" or "stop killer cops" or something. Thats certainly much more catchy than the full slogan right now, which seems to be "Defund the police, but we don't really want to do that, even though some people in our movement actually do want that, b…

Intent and good-faith argument also matter. If you're not willing to look past another person's inexpert use of grammar and/or syntax in order to understand their meaning, then you're doing it wrong. No trophies for elevating language to be a rigid and immutable thing.

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

#545

Post by zozbot234 »

bandyaboot wrote: post #530
zozbot234 wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

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

#546

Post by raydev »

DeathArrow wrote: post #329
giantg2 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The article is right on the mark talking about the importance of social expectations for men." Those only really work if the opportunities are there for the person to succeed. If you have no hope of success, then people just give up.

>If you have no hope of success, then people just give up. Success doesn't come from hope. It comes from hard work and fighting every day for something better. Luck might help, but is neither required nor enough for success. I was from a poor background and fighting for a better future was the only thing that brought me some kind of success.

That's great for you, but go tell that to someone who's lost all hope. If there's no hope then there's little incentive to work hard.

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

#547

Post by ensan »

ss108 wrote: post #122
d23 wrote: post #44

Do people find this stuff compelling? Rank speculation and confident assertion with minimal substantive backing? I’d find this statement equally compelling (which is to say, not at all): > Since we stopped using horses as a primary means of transportation, men’s sense of self worth has diminished. Riding a horse carried a lot of high status connotations: drive, masculinity, towering above the land, and man’s dominati…

It's a shit article where the author lightly blames what one would generally call "elites" for the stupidity and moral ineptitude of lower-class people who avowedly hate elites and who make it a point of hating everything the "elites" like anyways.

"the stupidity and moral ineptitude of lower-class people who avowedly hate elites"

I have never encountered an individual who claims to hate the "elite". And I for one will not complain if someone hates a person who holds your classist views.

And what do you mean by "elite" anyways? If people dislike those in the position of authority, especially politicians, they generally have very good reasons for that. To quote from the article,

"Today, one in six American men between the ages of 25 and 54 are unemployed or out of the workforce altogether: about 10 million men. This number has more than doubled since the 1970s."

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

#549

Post by VLM »

dumpsterlid wrote: post #503
VLM wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

The epitome of privilege is assuming everyone has house servants to empty their trash cans. My trash cans at home do not empty themselves, nor do I have my hired man do it for me.

Yes, I admit elderly living in nursing homes do have hired help empty their trash cans.

Is it a sign of society collapse that one-armed individuals and those lacking any upper body strength cannot live in the lap of luxury? Nah, they go be cashiers at the same store. Well, whatabout those too dumb to make change but too smart to get SSDI disability? Whataboutism has become tiresome and as such is no longer effective propaganda.

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

#550

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

temp3444 wrote: post #525
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Simple, don't have 4 children. Okay, but some people do, so what then? Fuck them and their 4 kids who did nothing wrong but be born?

We need to seriously stop treating having kids as some kind of accident that just happens. It's extremely simple to not have children. American society is free, which means you are free to fail and fuck things up. If someone has 4 children the only person to blame is the parents. If you can't control yourself, get yourself sterilized. We don't need more of your insane lineage that can't prevent themselves from having…

Okay, but again, so we have 4 kids and people with 4 kids. We can wave all the blame we want but all that ends up logically concluding is “fuck children in bad economic situations who did nothing to deserve their situation”. We cannot unbirth children, so now they’re here, how can we incentivize society so that when they grow up they don’t end up putting future children in their current position?
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