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No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

robkhenderson.com

301–310 of 600 posts

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#301

What I took away from this article is that many low-income men have no real interest in being fathers or raising children. Yet, they tend to produce children anyway. We should focus on making birth control more accessible, instead of trying to make people take responsibility for raising children they obviously don't want. That guy who spends all his money on weed and booze while his kids go hungry? He should have got…

perhaps some guys have kids because their wives/girlfriends required them to do so.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#302

What I took away from this article is that many low-income men have no real interest in being fathers or raising children. Yet, they tend to produce children anyway. We should focus on making birth control more accessible, instead of trying to make people take responsibility for raising children they obviously don't want. That guy who spends all his money on weed and booze while his kids go hungry? He should have got…

Mine cost me $1k up front, health insurance didn’t cover a penny. It’s really silly.

When you think about it, it is kind of crazy. If a person can't afford that, then they definitely can't afford kids.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NIMBY seems to be one of the intrinsic faults of democracy. Some people really don't like any change happening around them, and, once empowered, will go to great lengths to stop anything from happening. This is probably something that democratic states need to address by reducing such empowerment. Much like your neighbor cannot tell you what to cook for dinner - even if he is a vegetarian and hates the smell of meat…

Yep. My county deregulated housing. Literally no code checks. A permit was me drawing a square on a map, paying a few hundred bucks and it was rubber stamped in a few days. It was an absolute godsend. I built the house myself for 1/3 the price of even a clapped out trailer. Sure I could have built a firetrap but I have to live in the fucking house, so I did the best with what I can afford. We all have to live somehow…

Does this mean any random communist party elite from across the pond can do the same? They have enough bucks to draw squares all over your county

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#304
> > 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.

Yes, because evolution, no?

Any other situation is really weird (contra-entropic) which is why things that channel sex/violence (testosterone) into constructive ends are so important. We call them "civilization" (verb and noun.)

- - - -

Anyway, the article seems to overlook the Sixties:

> The counterculture of the 1960s was an anti-establishment cultural phenomenon and political movement that developed in the Western world during the mid-20th century. It began in the early 1960s, and continued through the early 1970s. It is often synonymous with cultural liberalism and with the various social changes of the decade. The effects of the movement have been ongoing to the present day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterculture_of_the_1960s

It's hard to describe how crazy things got and how we live in a different world now, even the people who were there can barely articulate what happened.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#305

simply, when a boy is dependent on his mother's approval for a sense of self it's all the justification he needs, and there is almost no increasingly-terrible situation in which a mother will not love her son. the worse his life, the more he depends on her, the less abandoned she is. it's the definition of a co-dependent cycle. Maybe he replaces her or shares that role with other women, but he ends up in the same cyc…

This comes off as incredibly preachy about gender roles.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This decision really needs to be removed from the hands of doctors, as long as there is no physical risk to the patient.

You think doctors should be forced to perform procedures they don’t want to perform?

At the very least the doctor should be required to refer the patient to a different doctor who is capable of performing it. This question is kind of similar to "Should pharmacists be able to deny birth control (or other medicine like vaccines) to people because of the pharmacist's personal religious belief?"

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#307
post #8

We didn't want young men to do anything. We wanted ever-increasing returns for shareholders, and that meant moving factories (where these young men's grandfathers were working 60 years ago) overseas while doing nothing on the whole to retrain the workforce. We got the shareholder returns. Too bad that can't buy a functional society for people born after 1980.

Also: Nobody in a village should take up 2 houses for themself. But some can, and can even take up 100 houses... so long as the other villagers are fighting amongst themselves, over whether their house should be larger than that of their neighbor. Turns out most of their problems are arguably traceable back to those people with 100+ houses each. Which would be glaringly suspicious to an outside observer. But the vill…

My extreme political opinion is that no one should be allowed to own more than one property in which they do not reside.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#308
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wtf? If all of your neighbors don't like the smell of meat they absolutely can tell you not to cook it. That's what democracy is. Don't like it? Be a king.

And if all of your neighbors don't like your skin color or religion, can they drive you out of town? That is why no country in the world actually employs limitless democracy. There are usually guaranteed and protected civil rights that you can enjoy regardless of current majoritarian (and fickle) opinion in your town. There are more systems in the world than absolute monarchy X absolute democracy that votes on everyt…

> And if all of your neighbors don't like your skin color or religion, can they drive you out of town?

Democracy is not required/irrelevant for that...

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#309

> Those who sit at or near the apex of the social ladder (who decide what behaviors are prestigious) have decided that family stability is unimportant. The author unironically writes this after pointing out that research shows that affluent families the share of families with biological parents has only dropped to 85% from 95% while the share for poor families has dropped to 30% from 95%. The idea that the social ape…

I don't think that disproves it at all? Affluent families have decided that family stability isn't too important, but their affluence makes it easy to obtain, in the same way they obtain other unimportant things like fancy dinners or overseas vacations. If Amy's boyfriend from the article were rich enough that he could satisfy all his selfish pursuits while still spending on the family, it sounds like they'd still be together.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#310
post #108

We expect young men to grow up and become "husband material". Due to various changes (standards for husbands rising, economic opportunity diminishing), this goal has become clearly unreachable for many. I would opt out if I was a poor young man today, and focus on enjoying the small pleasures (drinking with my buddies, playing PS5). The hill they are expected to climb is ludicrous, and I am not surprised they respond…

I'm gay and probably slightly autustic so for me the very natural goal of having a partner is indeed unreachable. The society doesn't give me any other goal to pursue, so I'm stuck just smoking weed and watching YouTube, which is depressing.
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