711–720 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does a “flat lining” of wages of cause family stability to go down ? And how do you explain high levels of family stability in countries that are much poorer?
Community.
I can appreciate this perspective because I used to have it. I even wrote a similar blog post 10 years ago - it was on the top of HN and the comment section was a beautiful shitshow. For me, this perspective was a good story to tell myself - it justified why I was only investing my time in “work”, and validated me for having “come so far”. Over time, I have reflected and shifted this perspective. That reflection cent…
Perhaps 10 years of existing within the system led you away from the more revolutionary perspective and towards the status quo. I would be curious to see the blog post you wrote, I can't find it in your submissions.
I can appreciate this perspective because I used to have it. I even wrote a similar blog post 10 years ago - it was on the top of HN and the comment section was a beautiful shitshow. For me, this perspective was a good story to tell myself - it justified why I was only investing my time in “work”, and validated me for having “come so far”. Over time, I have reflected and shifted this perspective. That reflection cent…
One thing that really stuck out to me was the implicit assumption that "stable home environment" requires or is equal to "married couple of biological parents living together until child becomes adult". Especially the quote where an agreement that stability is important was interpreted as agreement that marriage is important.
> In 1960, across social classes, the vast majority of children were raised by both of their birth parents. By 2005, there was a massive divergence. What happened?
The 60's happened.
Social norms broke down all over the world.
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Yes, the rich by and large want the poor to be tractable docile workers. Look at history, the relatively recent mass colonization of half the world by a tiny island nation. Slavery. The wealthy and powerful always try to subjugate whoever they can. It's their golf.
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Yes, society keeps young men in line with the "carrot" of (culturally sanctioned) sex and the stick of ostracism/shunning/shame. This is one of the fundamental pillars of what we call culture.
(The other being death, but that's less popular than sex. With the recent and relative rarity of hairy jerks with swords showing up out of the blue one day to burn down the village and kill, maim, or kidnap everybody in the place, we now use hallucinatory bogeymen for the most part.)
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Technology has obsolesced a great deal of the work these young folk used to do. (Mostly farming and war.) They are "surplus to requirement" from the POV of the system. All that oxycontin abuse? The rash of suicides? Symptoms of the malaise.
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So yeah, it sucks to be a drone.
(Heck, if I wasn't good with computers I'd probably be homeless right now. And even that is getting squiffy these days.)
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On the flip side, there has never been a better time to do things. We have radio-networked pocket supercomputers that can access pretty much the entirety of human knowledge from all of history and all of the world, there are robots, and it's never been easier to get laid.
I threw that last one in as a joke, but it cuts back to the core of the article: once we relax that social control of access to sex, does society fall apart?
(And also the loss of the "common enemy". It's a truism in political science that a common enemy is very very helpful for establishing and maintaining social cohesion. But again we talking mostly about sex here.)
I think the answer to that is, "It depends."
It seems to me that with easy access to birth control we should be seeing the responsible parents having more kids and the promiscuous folks having fewer, eh? So over time society would get stronger, no?
Maybe most people fall into non-reproductive hedonism and the Amish inherit the Earth?
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I think the bottom line is that if you find yourself a poor male with few prospects you have to figure out a lifestyle that you can live with and get on with it. Society mostly doesn't give a shit about you and is unlikely to start. You can blame the elites, but I've met some and they are just as clueless as everybody else, they just have more money, so it's pretty pointless to blame them. And anyway if you try to do anything to them they can and will shoot you. The entire US Army is essentially there to protect the elites, so good luck with that, if you want to be a rebel.
So where does that leave you?
Make some money. Find some good, solid folks and family up with them. Start a commune in the woods. Live happily ever after. I'm not joking: I've met people that have done this. They are very happy. And there is no (NO!) information about their "thing" on the Internet whatsoever. Think about that: these smurfy people totally exist but you cannot learn of them via the Internet. Most of the really happy settled folks out there DO NOT advertise. They keep quiet. They do not do SEO. You won't see them on television or youtube.
No one is making money from telling you about them so you won't hear about them unless you go looking.
There's a whole world of happy "alternate" lifestyles but "the system" won't tell you about them because it's against the system's interests! That's why hippies are always portrayed as dipshits on TV: if you saw for yourselves the lives of the non-dipshit hippies you would "quit your job, repent, and slack off."
Really it goes back to European vs. Native lifestyles and colonization. The Europeans were psychotic bastards who murdered and tortured and enslaved people, and who had absolute masters and abject servants, and all kinds of psychotic baggage. The native cultures were (and still are in many many places) not quite so messed up.
People who could get away from the towns and join Native American societies didn't want to go back. Whereas Natives had to be forced (typically with savage brutality) to adopt European culture.
"Going native" was perceived as a serious problem, because it was: if you didn't like society, or your actual literal "master" (a person under the psychotic delusion that he or she actually literally owned you) you could try to escape to, say, the Sioux nation.
We mostly exterminated or marginalized these societies, and filled and/or enclosed most of the open land, so it seems like options are fewer.
And today we have "the homeless" to act as a goad: if you don't work you will starve in the street. There's not supposed to be a way out.
This in a land (I'm continuing being provincial here and talking about North America) where the herds of buffalo were so large they could take more than a day to pass by, where the rivers were so thick with salmon during spawning season that it's said you could walk across them, where flocks of passenger pigeons were so thick and numerous that they could eclipse the sun and turn day into night.
We destroyed it, farmed ourselves into the "Dust Bowl", etc...
It doesn't have to be this way, there's a better life out there, but the system won't help you reach it.
So fuck the system. Go make your won system.
I can appreciate this perspective because I used to have it. I even wrote a similar blog post 10 years ago - it was on the top of HN and the comment section was a beautiful shitshow. For me, this perspective was a good story to tell myself - it justified why I was only investing my time in “work”, and validated me for having “come so far”. Over time, I have reflected and shifted this perspective. That reflection cent…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The tentatives to artificially engineer the society to be more just, fair and inclusive only resulted in a less just, less fair and less inclusive society. The society should be left to evolve on its own, in a natural way. If we don't want to replace small disasters with big disasters.
Civil rights for gay people and black people were criticized "artificially engineering society". As were voting rights for women or access to birth control. Subservient roles for women and labor roles for black people were seen as "natural." I think you'd be absolutely crazy to consider rights for these populations to have led to a "less just and less fair society." There is no such thing as natural society. Society…
The philosophy of the cultural liberals is to remove restrictions that inhibit people from living the social lives they want.
The cultural socialists want to use the power of institutions to distribute a culture across the population. They believe their culture is societally optimal so reducing liberties to propagate it is morally justified.
I’m sure most peoples beliefs lie somewhere in between the two. But the cultural socialism maximalists in the west have been getting louder and louder and it’s beginning to terrify me.
I predict in the next 5 years, womens’ voting rights will be an actual political topic. It will start with “ironic” jokes and “rational” thinking but will get increasingly normalized in discourse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's absolutely wild to me that Rob quotes: > 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. Without seeming to make any s…
Did you grow poor or have friends from poor backgrounds? I saw lots of drug use, stealing, petty vandalism and violence, and little if any of it had to do with their trying to survive in a material sense. There are different norms around which behaviors grant status, and this is the primary driver behind this kind of behavior in my experience.
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…
Speaking of innumeracy, how would a person afford to save for a homeloan deposit, while also paying for health insurance, rent, food, and vehicle maintenance. With kids? Might as well hang yourself, before the kids hang themselves. I'm in Australia, so the numbers are approximately similar, our minimum wage is $20.33 an hour, our public health care system had been eroded by successive governments, and never included…
Home ownership was never universal in the US. It has been within a few percent of 65% since the 1960s[1]. It was always out of reach for the lowest earners, like those that make minimum wage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home-ownership_in_the_United_S...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is a reasonable course of action, of course, but also respect the DINKs who look at having kids and go “no thanks” and continue jetting off to the Alps, Turks and Caicos, or whatever. Having kids is an opportunity cost, and there’s a lot of life enjoyment to be had if you don’t have them. Kids were previously an asset a century ago, now they’re a luxury good.
Sure r/childfree has lots of this sort. They often seem a bit too into being childfree to me, I probably wouldn't like their shitty kids anyway. There's an opportunity cost for most life decisions. Sometimes they're obscured. It's often not presented this way but for a cohort of women university and work, displaces marriage and children.
It feels like a lot of users there, instead of replacing all that time/effort/money spending (that comes with having kids) with a bunch of fun/useful/exciting things to do in life, they end up replacing it with "not having kids is my personality and the ultimate activity".
I agree with the core premise of both (not religious, don't want to ever have kids), but i ended up completely filtering out both subreddits. Even opening a random post from those subs on r/all is like stepping into some children- and parent-hating alternate reality cesspool, where their choice is the only "obvious" choice, and everyone else is "brainwashed" or an idiot.
I don't understand why it is stressed that all of this is connected to marriage (or absense of). Parents walking away from responsibility is a cause for problems in children, no matter whether you are married or not. Also, I doubt that the degree of married parents is connected to class. We have both a PhD, a child, and live together for 15 years, failing both to see a reason for marriage.
Maybe there are some saintly principled people who will never walk away from responsibility no matter what, for whom marriage adds no value, and maybe there are some feckless unprincipled people who will walk away from responsibility at the slightest provocation, for whom marriage also adds no value, but maybe there is a large intermediate population who may occasionally feel a moderate urge to walk but are dissuaded…
