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Men Without Work (2016)

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241–250 of 471 posts

Re: Men Without Work (2016)

#241
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the minority that historically was doing the oppressing? Is it so difficult to realize those oppressors are dead and these men weren’t alive in 1920?

Who killed all the gamergaters?

These are like a few thousands people, maybe in the tens of thousands at the most. There are about 1 billion men on the internet, give or take.

The internet is very good at amplifying a bunch of very motivated nutjobs. I can, if I wanted to, send death threats and all sorts of horrible things to hundreds of people before breakfast. And tomorrow again. And the day after that. And I'm just one guy with a crummy laptop.

Go out on the street and I'll bet you that most men haven't even heard of gamergate, or have only vaguely heard of it and don't really know much details. And those that do at least roughly know what it was all about will think they're a bunch of idiots.

Re: Men Without Work (2016)

#242

> Statistically, the labor force involvement for men twenty and older fell from 86% to 68% between 1948 and 2015 So what are they doing instead? How are they surviving?

They’re NEETs. Likely live with their parents. May sell odd things here and there to make a buck. Likely invested in cryptos which until recently was enough to get by. Often getting some government gibs like unemployment or disability benefits. American society doesn’t know how to use low skilled men so we keep ‘em fed and put them to the side.

"Low skill" is often also something of a misnomer. Many are highly-skilled, but have difficulties navigating the social environment of both employment and self-employment. Neurodivergent people often fall into this category.

Others are moderately-skilled, but not to the magnitude of their competition (common in art/design); or, they have technical skills that are only useful in jobs that also require conceptual/design skills (or vice versa); or, they're skilled in a niche set of tasks which hiring managers see as nice "add-ons" to another prerequisite (if outmoded) set of skills. As an anecdote: until the Meta crisis the past fall, there were a lot of openings for jobs that amounted to, "Builds XR prototypes/vertical slices so that when VR/AR goggles take off we have some sort of killer app concept ready for production." This requires someone with 3D art and software engineering and interactive design chops, for an interaction paradigm that's maybe 30% finalized. My vantage point was as an intermediate-level amateur 3D artist trying to stumble my way around Unity/UE, watching devs stumble their way around Blender/C4D/etc., all of us watching UX designers used to Figma et al. stumbling their way around both. With no room for people to bring what they CAN do to the table, and learn the rest as they go, many don't find anywhere to land.

Re: Men Without Work (2016)

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that you need to apologize and explain why you care about issues that might affect men is telling in and of itself. The American Zeitgeist around gender issues is distorted to dehumanize men and alienate anyone who even dares to recognize this fact. I'm a pretty hardcore liberal and I I'm totally astonished on a daily basis at the hate in vitriol directed at men that go without comment, let alone castigation…

> The American Zeitgeist around gender issues is distorted to dehumanize men and alienate anyone who even dares to recognize this fact. I must be living under a rock then — this Zeitgeist you talk of is alien to me. I am a male who does not feel in any way dehumanized, nor have any of my male friends expressed as much.

Good for you! I've never noticed this thing so it doesn't exist. Pure and simple internalized misandry.

Re: Men Without Work (2016)

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unspecified in all of this is: Society at large needs less labor to function. What happens when all of the production is automated to the point we don't NEED 'Men to work'? What do we do with them? What mischief do they get into when they have idle hands?

Even if something like food service at McDonald's is automated, it's tough to argue that we should be getting humans to work on things that can be automated. Imagine working 40 hours a week then seeing that the machine both prepared more product and made fewer mistakes than you, or feeling like you're doing work just because someone (the government) pities you enough to force some jobs to remain non-automated. Workin…

> Imagine working 40 hours a week then seeing that the machine both prepared more product and made fewer mistakes than you

The Ballad of John Henry is Civil War era, but even he was a century or two after the Luddites started wrecking automated weaving machines. It's actually been a feature of the Industrial Revolution for awhile, but I think the effects are more pronounced now than ever.

Re: Men Without Work (2016)

#246
post #226
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone else wondering what the five factors are: > Sax’s research found that the following five factors attribute to our society of underachieving, disengaged boys: (1) changes at school; (2) video games; (3) medications for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD); (4) endocrine disruptors; and (5) the revenge of the forsaken gods. From this Amazon review which also goes into further detail: https://www.a…

Im sorry, but item (5) means less than nothing without context. Can someone who read it please add some? I'll go looking for it & will edit this (if I make it in time, before the editing window closes)

Also from the linked review:

> In Dr. Sax’s final factor “the revenge of the forsaken gods,” he identified in leading to a generation of unmotivated, disengaged boys and men. Boys need strong male remodels to emulate and look-up to. Dr. Sax stressing that gender does matter because “boys and girls differ with respect to risk factors for social pathology” (p. 178).

Re: Men Without Work (2016)

#247
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bull.

Do you have factual information backing your statement? I have, to take the two dominant Christian fundamentalist interpretations: - for Mormonism: "Numerous Prophets have instructed that a Mormon woman’s place is in the home. Only Federal anti-discrimination laws, which the Church vigorously opposed, and the threat of Federal prosecution, forced the Church in 1970s to stop terminating female employment upon the birt…

There's a lot of religious things written down that many people don't really follow in practice. Are there various religious views that don't view women as I would like to? Sure. But it's quite a leap to "literally brainwashed from birth that women's purpose is to be docile broodmares".

And quite a few religious women want to be house-makers. Do I personally think that's a rather outdated view of what it means to be a woman? Sure. But it's not my life to live and the women's choice. Let's assign some agency to these women and allow them to live their lives as they see fit before claiming they're "brainwashed". "Being able to make my own choices just like men" is kind of the point of feminism, no?

Re: Men Without Work (2016)

#248

I think "Men Without Work" is a euphemism. The problem is: - Men without Skills in-demand-- skills which are at least somewhat fulfilling & interesting to those men. Solution: Research labor data for careers in high demand, then cross reference those careers with skills a person is interested in. Then identify resources & a roadmap for learning those skills. And sit down, and put the time in to learn & apply those sk…

There seems to be a duality among people where some people find satisfaction working with their minds, others with their hands. I know it's a controversial view but I truly believe it: some people just want to see something physically accomplished at the end of a day's work. A roof shingled, a road graded, a cabinet hung.... When society pivots and those manual jobs go overseas, just telling everyone they're better o…

I'm entirely like that. If it wouldn't wreck my body and it paid the same—or even close—I'd carry boxes from one side of a room to another all day, over programming or most other office work. Or basically any trade work except electrical. Trying to maneuver those tiny little wires in tiny little spaces makes me irrationally angry.

Re: Men Without Work (2016)

#249
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>, many spaces that are branded as "men's rights" today seem... That's the thing, that's the branding . The left (with Tucker Carlson's help) managed to get everyone to think of a man tanning his balls with any mention of men's rights. This is a major coup for leftist feminists, and a major loss for human rights. Men's rights are human rights. They are father's rights. They are worker rights. It means equal protectio…

> Men's rights are human rights. They are father's rights. They are worker rights. It means equal protection under the law, protection from rape and violence, protection from discrimination and threats. These are basic human rights that should be afforded to everyone. This should not be a zero-sum game: to give one group rights you should not take them away from another group! There are plenty of rights to go around…

> E.g., I haven't yet seen a feminist sub on reddit excuse a female rapist

They don't have to, society already does this for them all the time.

Pay attention to how media frames the crime when a female teacher sleeps with an underage male student versus when a male teacher rapes an underaged female student.

My word choices are deliberate here. In a vast majority of headlines and articles I've seen, if the perpetrator of a sexual crime is female, the language is much softer about the action.

And courts tend to be much softer on them as well than on the men doing the same crime.

Re: Men Without Work (2016)

#250
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm pretty sure society is not obligated to have an interest in you I have grown to believe over time that this is true, and that most people are willing to throw away unsuccessful or unlucky others using this reasoning. It's depressing, but also frees you from feeling any particular obligation to society. If society doesn't either provide you with what you need or a means to achieve it, I recommend that you cheat,…

Be aware, that then opens you up to being directly attacked by, and not just ignored, by society. And society has lots of fangs, in that sense.

That's merely a practical consideration. Besides, the difference between "ignored" and "directly attacked by" is mostly rhetorical when your psychological or physiological needs are unmet.
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