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

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

#361

Post by neilv »

philwelch wrote: post #327
neilv wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of "house", you could also imagine a similar analogy around "amount of apples one person needs to eat to live". The sociopathic villager who went to the village's communal trees, and took way more apples than they can ever eat, while others don't have enough apples to eat, should be tossed into the lake. But the sociopathic villager tells stories in the village square, of how those villagers who are starving…

I have a better analogy. It’s the analogy of a guy who got up every morning to plant apple trees in his orchard. When the time came for harvest, he picked all of the apples and sold them to market. With his proceeds, he bought some more land from his neighbor and planted even more apple trees. The next year there were too many apples for him to pick by himself so he hired a few people to help out, and used the procee…

As you adapt my quote, for contrast, you substitute "envy" for "greed", which seems meaningful.

So is the gist of your analogy that, in reality, the problem of what might appear to be greed, is actually strictly envy, by the people who don't merit the wealth?

And when you made the envious people outright psychotically homicidal, was that for a bit of levity? Or do you feel that strongly that irrational envy underlies real world complaints that people might have about inequity?

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

#362

Post by eadmund »

ryandrake wrote: post #181
eadmund wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We wanted ever-increasing returns for shareholders And ever-decreasing prices for consumers. Don’t forget that! Free trade results in more goods for everyone, by enabling different places to focus on what they do best. > while doing nothing on the whole to retrain the workforce. I completely agree that some more attention needs to be paid to retraining. The answer to disappearing jobs is to prepare folks for new on…

> And ever-decreasing prices for consumers. Don’t forget that! Except that's not happening for major purchases. Housing is more expensive than ever. Education is more expensive than ever. Healthcare is more expensive than ever. Cars and Trucks are more expensive than ever. Besides taxes, the above are the biggest slice of the consumer's wallet, and those prices have almost never decreased. Shareholder returns keep go…

> Housing is more expensive than ever. Education is more expensive than ever. Healthcare is more expensive than ever.

Housing, education and healthcare are to a very great extent to amenable to globalisation, since houses have to be built on a local plot of land, education is for most folks done in-country and healthcare too is delivered locally. Not that all three, too, are subject to massive amounts of subsidies.

> Cars and Trucks are more expensive than ever.

A Henry J in 1950 was $1,299 (according to https://www.gobankingrates.com/saving-money/car/heres-much-c...), or $16,934 in 2024 dollars; a Nissan Versa is $17,820 today. While more expensive, that doesn’t seem crazy, just 5.23% more — and of course that Versa is a much better car.

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

#363

Post by datavirtue »

surgical_fire wrote: post #323
im3w1l wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Same as it always was. I feel like it's an industrialization thing. Before industrialization people would farm their own land, set up their own shops etc. Sure there would be people above you, but they wouldn't and couldn't micromanage you. The peasant surely didn't have morning standups with their lord.

> farm their own land Peasants didn't have "their own land". All land belonged to the aristocracy, and you would farm the their land.

Look no further than the native land of JD Vance and you can find sharecroppers. However, these days no self-respecting man would sharecrop. "I'll just sit at the house."

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

#364

Post by dambi0 »

surgical_fire wrote: post #323
im3w1l wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Same as it always was. I feel like it's an industrialization thing. Before industrialization people would farm their own land, set up their own shops etc. Sure there would be people above you, but they wouldn't and couldn't micromanage you. The peasant surely didn't have morning standups with their lord.

> farm their own land Peasants didn't have "their own land". All land belonged to the aristocracy, and you would farm the their land.

Even the official end of feudalism, at least in the UK, was at least a century before the Industrial Revolution.

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

#365

Post by datavirtue »

squigz wrote: post #321
bufferoverflow wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can poll young women for what they require of young men to date them. Plenty of content of that on YouTube. It's not nebulous.

Maybe YT compilations of what "young women want" is not a good source of cultural information.

Right. I rarely trust what people state publicly. It's all idealized and confirmed to the expectations of the audience.

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

#366

Post by portpecos »

> Amy, a white thirty-year-old mother of three, ages six, five, and three, had a boyfriend who worked steadily but insisted on spending on selfish pursuits. This is what eventually broke the young couple up. ‘He wouldn’t spend money for the kids’ food. I had to send my kids across the street to my mom’s to feed them and stuff. That’s what I got fed up with. I shouldn’t have to live like that…I said it’s time for him to support these kids instead of [me] being on [assistance], and he didn’t like it.’”

Translation: “I was impregnated by 3 other guys, and they all left me, and now I finally found a boyfriend but it turns out he doesn’t want to spend his money to feed my kids.”

Sweetie, we’re not married, so there’s no reason for you to expect I feed your children. My earnings are my earnings just like your earnings are your earnings in this feminist culture of independence.

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

#367

Post by thrwwyfrobvrsns »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #32
vegetablepotpie wrote: post #26

This article spells out the incentive structure that leads to low-status men underperforming. > Some of the jobs he can get don’t pay enough to give him the self-respect he feels he needs, and others require him to get along with unpleasant customers and coworkers, and to maintain a submissive attitude toward the boss. > The educated class decides cohabiting partnerships are just as valid and important as marriage. A…

> Some of the jobs he can get don’t pay enough to give him the self-respect he feels he needs, and others require him to get along with unpleasant customers and coworkers, and to maintain a submissive attitude toward the boss. Same as it always was. Or perhaps moving a factory workforce into the service industry has been degrading? (Since of course we shipped the factories overseas.)

I would correct the quote as such:

>Don't pay enough to live in a way that his family and community respects his contributions and sacrifices, if such pay even gives him room to contribute at all.

>Require him to get along with customers and coworkers that may be abusive and prejudiced, for no other reason than that the position is "supposed" to be servile and manned by a lesser person.

>[Require him] to maintain a complete physical and psychological affect of arbitrary "professionalism", servility, and agreeability, even while dealing with higher-status individuals who are not only allowed to be emotional, aggressive, and competitive, but who actually benefit from it in their career.

TFA spends a moment on what I think might be the crux: that the elite set rules they don't have to abide by. This is unfair, and poor young men recognize that it's unfair, and they're punished when they point out that things are unfair, because breaking the masquerade makes people uncomfortable, and nothing is more important than the comfort of high-status individuals.

As much stability in the family structure of poor folk may be breathing its last breath, noblesse oblige is long dead.

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

#368

Post by datavirtue »

pwthornton wrote: post #269
welshwelsh wrote: post #148

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…

A lot of men, particularly less educated men, have bizarre beliefs that vasectomies harm sexual performance or make them less of men. I saw the other day a person asking on the biohacking Reddit if a vasectomy would harm testosterone levels. Asking poorly educated, poorly read, and low-skilled men to make highly informed decisions is going to be a losing battle. I'm willing to bet the rates of vasectomy are highly co…

It's a costly inconvenience. Women are responsible for their bodies. Then you have to sell the prospect of someone cutting at their manhood. It just ain't happening.

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

#369

Post by squigz »

anal_reactor wrote: post #359
mrguyorama wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know plenty of gay people and autistic people in relationships. Get off the internet and touch grass.

Ah yes. Whenever someone asks me what can we do about poverty I'll just reply "I know plenty of people with lucrative jobs, get off the internet and touch grass". We've been telling people for years already that them being lonely is their personal failure, not some systematic problem, yet people, on average, keep getting even more lonely. What makes you think that continuing to present loneliness as a personal failur…

> We've been telling people for years already that them being lonely is their personal failure, not some systematic problem, yet people, on average, keep getting even more lonely. What makes you think that continuing to present loneliness as a personal failure will eventually solve the problem?

Your logic here seems to be that, over time, telling people it's a personal failure (which I don't agree has been the rhetoric, but for the sake of conversation...) will lead them to fix that failure - which isn't at all my experience. There's plenty of issues one can point to that, just because we've been informing people of for many years, doesn't mean any progress has been made.

> Ah yes. Whenever someone asks me what can we do about poverty I'll just reply "I know plenty of people with lucrative jobs, get off the internet and touch grass".

If someone said, "I'm in a wheelchair, so having a job is unreachable" then I might respond in a similar way as GP (though perhaps a bit nicer)... because you can have a job while in a wheelchair, and have a relationship while gay and autistic.

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

#370

Post by quacked »

anal_reactor wrote: post #295
quacked wrote: post #99

Many have not yet squared up to the fact that society itself is an unprofitable boondoggle that requires massive moral radicalization and willingness to participate in odd, polarizing institutions and practices. We live inside the semi-decayed skeleton of a society built by deeply religious people who believed that society should be built and maintained because that is the moral thing to do . They weren't only motiva…

> Take away the glory and meaning from the basic acts of living among your peers and you will end up with large swaths of people who do enough to get by, and not much more. This is exactly how I feel. Sure, my life is comfortable, but at the same time it's so small and pointless, which leaves me completely unmotivated. Why do anything if nothing matters.

There is a way out of this slump, but it is difficult. My recommendation is that you spend a period of self-investigation, and then begin to use your moral and aesthetic judgement frequently. This is difficult for many Americans because most of our time up to adulthood is spent in schools, whose major function is to suppress your natural and parent-trained senses of judgement and morality, and instead instill obedience to the directions of various legal and economic authorities:

https://selfdirectededucation.neocities.org/pdf/JTG%20The%20...

What I mean by executing your moral and aesthetic judgement: you need to discover what you think is RIGHT vs. what is WRONG, and what is BEAUTIFUL vs. what is UGLY, and begin to make amends for wrong-ness and ugliness in your community and your social circles by adding right-ness and beauty. It could be as simple as looking at a blank wall in your apartment and thinking "that's UGLY, for the entire course of human history people have decorated their dwellings using their own cultural stylings; what is my culture, and what are its stylings?" and then decorating your apartment, or it could be as complex as (to use another commenter's example) looking at homeless people who don't have anything to eat and thinking "that's WRONG, why are people living on the street with no food, how could this problem be rectified?" and feeding them sandwiches or joining groups attempting to mitigated homelessness. (I personally do not think that individuals bringing meals to homeless and poor people is a good or sustainable practice for society, but it doesn't matter; each person needs to develop their own thoughts and opinions on the matter.)

My overall point is that the chief desire of "capitalists, communists, schools, prisons, politicians, profiteers, thieves, predators, etc." is your apathy, both to the moral practices of your society and to the aesthetic decisions displayed to you. As long as you don't care, they can do whatever they want, because you're not going to get in the way. You need to flex your own opinion and become radicalized in applying your own judgement to the things that you see in society. Never assume that "the experts have it under control" or that nothing matters; in fact, society is made up of individual people, of which you are one, and you need to contribute your judgement and effort to the way that society acts and looks, or else everything will seem "small and pointless", as you say.

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