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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

#811

Post by fwip »

paradox242 wrote: post #701
fwip wrote: post #683

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.

Yeah, I did.

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

#812

Post by whatshisface »

>"Although this may be considered an unflattering characterization…we have found no evidence to contradict the basic general principle that men will do whatever is required in order to obtain sex, and perhaps not a great deal more. (One of us characterized this in a previous work as, ‘If women would stop sleeping with jerks, men would stop being jerks.’) If in order to obtain sex men must become pillars of the community, or lie, or amass riches by fair means or foul, or be romantic or funny, then many men will do precisely that."

I hate to be the person to point this out, but this ideal has all of the same problems as the incel plan. Women are going to find whoever they think is attractive attractive and there's nothing you can do about it no matter how high or low your social aims.

Yes, a lot of people would love to rewrite human nature to make pudgy men with stable jobs the peak of male form but that is as ridiculous as it sounds. :-)

If you want to do anything about this it's going to have to involve changing men.

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

#813

Post by qeternity »

danaris wrote: post #800
rayiner wrote: post #788

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But a lot of those requirements are manufactured. Germany has an advanced industrial economy with half the percentage of college graduates we do (just 1/4). So why do we need to act like “cost of living” for everyone has to include saving hundreds of thousands of dollars for college? I agree the top 10% have poor insight into what life is like for everyone else, but that cuts both ways. I think there’s a real misperc…

Whether it's manufactured or organic, it's still real . That's the economic reality we all have to live with in America, so it doesn't matter whether Germany can operate just fine without the crushing college debt we have: the fact is, middle-class households in America have lost real wealth and purchasing power over the past 50 years because of this and a number of other factors.

Just because it's real, that doesn't make it right. You're missing the entire point: maybe the issue isn't the gutting of the middle class, but the expectation or encouragement of higher "education" even if it is unnecessary for a huge chunk of people.

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

#814

Post by dijit »

zmgsabst wrote: post #690
dijit wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you don't have a good understanding of those times if you think women could be beaten around without repercussions Or, you don’t. It is definitely true that domestic violence was in the realm of “basically normal”, I’d guesstimate 20% of households had an abusive person in them: and if you were married and your partner was not physically violent it was considered that they were a “good person”. This swings…

> domestic violence was in the realm of “basically normal”, I’d guesstimate 20% of households had an abusive person Can you cite this — or is it a made up fact to support your pre-existing beliefs?

It’s a guesstimate. As stated.

The normalisation of domestic violence 30-50 years ago is going to be hard to find statistically, as things like that are not going to be in crime statistics, obviously.

Everything I said was anecdotal, from the midlands in England- but it matches other experiences from southern Scotland and East Coast US.

I guesstimate 20% because it “felt” like 1 in 5 families had someone abusive in them, at least of my social class.

It was normal to hear that so-and-so hits his wife or that so-and-so has an unruly wife at home and that’s why he doesn’t come out or whatever.

Admittedly, the social class I was in (extensive use of social clubs and pubs for drinking) likely had a larger proportion of this kind of people.

But, it’s a guesstimate. As clearly stated.

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

#815

Post by zozbot234 »

danans wrote: post #803
jacobolus wrote: post #764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some places people have centuries of social-structure adaptation to deal with the stress of being systematically oppressed (by local elites, colonial overlords, ...). E.g. money gets shielded by community institutions (such as local religious organizations) that are harder for elites to steal from than individual peasants, and then those act as a kind of social safety net in hard times. Extended families/clans bui…

I think we agree that many pro-social structures exist in poor and socially rigid societies. However these come at the expense of many liberties (i.e. religious) that are held as important in the more developed world. It's not clear that loss of such personal liberties would be an improvement in developed societies, even if it reduced the nominal divorce rate.

Liberties have always come paired with obligations to one's surrounding community, so there would be nothing new in this. We have a name for pure liberty or "liberation" shorn of any checks or obligations towards others: we call it licence, and every increase in licence is ultimately a step towards bondage and tyranny.

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

#817

Post by AvocadoPanic »

hotpotamus wrote: post #391
AvocadoPanic wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Military or a trade would be a better choice.

https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/DD/issuances/do... There's the 40 page document of all the medical reasons you won't qualify for military service, one of which I have. Everyone says just join the military, but I suppose 7 year old me should have thought of that before I chose to get bone disease.

7 year olds often make poor choices.

Military and trade jobs require an element of physicality, it's the nature of the work. It's not for everyone, but neither is University.

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

#818

Post by stjohnswarts »

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…

I have definitely observed the "we need to put little johnny in safety padding for all things" amongst my friends and their kids. My kids were free to roam (within reason) and try things most people shudder at. They learned to cook relatively young, use power tools (after many safety instructions), stay over at friends houses, be around adults talking about adult stuff, etc. They both survived and became healthy, happy young adults (21 and 19 currently) who weren't afraid to take a chance or risk a little pain; they learned that the journey is as important as the end of the trail (learning is a reward, and you'll hit painful road blocks along the way). I had some parents breathless when I told them I let my two 15/13 year olds camp in the woods by a lake over a weekend for fishing and enjoying nature by themselves, because I trusted them to stay out of trouble and use their common sense. I also know they snuck along their handheld gaming devices along with them too and got a chuckle out of their limited rebelliousness. Learn to give kids some slack and they'll set their own goals and not be afraid to go for them.

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

#819

Post by ksplicer »

rayiner wrote: post #761
hotpotamus wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've seen, there's an entire industry of conservative economists Like Arthur Laffer and Larry Kudlow (to name a mere two, there are entire billionaire funded thinktanks like AEI dedicated to this) to deny the reality of the issues you mention, not unlike scientists paid to deny Climate Change or Tobacco's cancer links. And because of this, conservatives don't even believe that such issues exist.

There’s also a couple of billion people in Asia who think the exact same way as the author about families and culture. I’ve never read Laffer or Kudlow. I’m interpreting society through the values of my Bangladeshi parents. And they lead me to the same conclusion. And given the remarkably higher income mobility of Asian kids raised in the bottom income compared to white kids, I think social liberals are sticking thei…

Be careful when trying to draw conclusions about cultural values of different ethnicities within western countries with high percentages of recent immigrants. Immigrants in general outperform natives in income mobility, and this tapers off in later generations. Additionally it's difficult to ignore the massive selective bias within immigrant populations. Immigrating is very difficult and that's positively reflected in basically every way you could measure the character of those populations.

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

#820

Post by trevorboaconstr »

zmgsabst wrote: post #690
dijit wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you don't have a good understanding of those times if you think women could be beaten around without repercussions Or, you don’t. It is definitely true that domestic violence was in the realm of “basically normal”, I’d guesstimate 20% of households had an abusive person in them: and if you were married and your partner was not physically violent it was considered that they were a “good person”. This swings…

> domestic violence was in the realm of “basically normal”, I’d guesstimate 20% of households had an abusive person Can you cite this — or is it a made up fact to support your pre-existing beliefs?

I was unable to find extended statistics, but DMV rates over the past 3 decades seem to have fallen dramatically. During the 1950s there were no laws to protect battered women and assaults on women were not considered as a crime. Even in 1960 New York domestic violence cases are transferred from criminal court to civil court, where only civil procedures apply. The husband never faces as harsh penalties as he would suffer if he was found guilty in criminal court for assaulting a stranger.

“The rate of domestic violence declined 63%, from 13.5 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older in 1994 to 5.0 per 1,000 in 2012 (appendix table 3).”

- https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/ndv0312.pdf

Also, getting accurate statistic pre 1960s for DMV is likely going to be difficult. Here’s a short TIME piece illustrating how views on DMV can alter studies and how DMV is qualified/quantified given the times.

- https://time.com/3426225/domestic-violence-therapy/

Take a look at some of these poster, DMV was more or less normalized in the cultural ethos at the time: https://ibb.co/279sjZ2

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