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My Family’s Slave

theatlantic.com

401–410 of 645 posts

Re: My Family’s Slave

#401

Every day you let her live in these disgusting situation makes you complicit in this crime. Your aunt is stealing the life away from your sister. Free her.

Attacking someone who has just shared a difficult situation is cheap. It's not ok to treat others that way here, so please don't do it again.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14354665 and marked it off-topic.

Re: My Family’s Slave

#405
post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more than symbolic that the left has dropped the 'liberal' appelation for the more militant 'progressive.' It's no longer about respecting individuals, now it's about enforcing a particular strict ideology (as you've found).

The left is not a hivemind. There are people who self-identify as liberals but not progressives, and there are people who self-identify as progressives but not liberals, and there's those who mix and match.

Ive actually noticed that really there appears to be a pretty interesting split between progressives and conservatives. Leaving the middle "liberals" (really from both sides) caught in an awkward situation.

For example, being liberal usually implies greater freedoms, such as being pro-choice. However, it can also be pro-gun ownership, or anti-war, pro-research, etc. To me that's the dichotomy the U.S. is facing is really about the progressives and religeous conservatives duking it out, but (I'd argue) most people are much more moderate.

It's interesting to me that a third party (libertarians, or someone else) can't capture that group. As many liberals differ pretty substantially from the progressives, and concervative minded people just lump liberals and them together because they all identify as Democrats

Re: My Family’s Slave

#406
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It often feels like two income households are counter productive. Sure, we make more money, but it feels like 2x the dollars chasing 1.5x the pie out in the world. And then you have to pay for childcare. As for the household work, I was just telling someone today how much I miss being able to work all the time. I love my kids and they come first, but it's a sacrifice to for me not to work 12+ hour days.

As with almost all optimization problems, applying twice the resources (in this case, work hours) won't bring you back twice the (net) bacon, due to diminishing returns. However, I think on net it is still more economically productive, at least in a large portion of cases. It's unlikely that housework and childcare would optimally take up a full 50% of our entire reservoir of workable-hours, especially in the age of…

However, I think on net it is still more economically productive, at least in a large portion of cases.

"Economically productive" in what way? If you want to adopt a short term perspective of a particular nuclear family making X dollars over Y years, maybe.

But that's a rather shallow and irresponsible way of looking at things without accounting for what's better for the future society of our descendants, economically and otherwise.

What in most cases will produce a better quality of individual, a child raised at home by a loving mother, or a child shuffled off to some "childcare" to be looked after by a minimum wage worker absorbed in a smartphone half the time? (Not that all non-motherly childcare is like that, but you get the point)

Re: My Family’s Slave

#407
post #141

Truly remarkable story. One thing that struck me is that Lola did so much of the work of a traditional mother's role: raising the kids, cooking, cleaning, laundry, and even providing emotional support. The mother had to take on a traditional father's role in bringing home an income. And the actual father - well, he did neither role and seemed to just freeload, gamble, abuse, and finally disappear. All of the work in…

An argument could be made that the entire capitalist system is built upon uncompensated labor.

This is kind of an odd damning of capitalism, because no matter how we organize society, there is going to continue to be mothering so long as our species is to survive. And whatever societal system we may have, that society is going to be built in large part by mothering.

Re: My Family’s Slave

#408
What an incredibly deep and well written story. I did not know or appreciate that the author Alex Tizon died a few hours before publication - and this piece was his Faustus, the one personal story he struggled for years to write.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/a-repor...

I rarely use the word masterpiece, but it feels appropriate here.

Re: My Family’s Slave

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there argument here that literally nothing whatsoever could be better than the system we currently live under? The one where we're hurtling toward ecological catastrophe and essentially no mitigation is being done?

Is there argument here that literally nothing whatsoever could be better than the system we currently live under? Potentially, I suppose. The only alternatives I hear being peddled are socialist though. So I associate any petty wry remark about "in capitalism, so and so" as a socialist agenda pushing. In 2017, I don't think it should be considered at all acceptable to advocate socialism in polite company. We've faile…

The main problem here is acting like there are two simple categories that we can easily sum up, "capitalism" and "socialism", with no gray area or alternative conceptions available for consideration.

Re: My Family’s Slave

#410
post #76

When I was in elementary school in the 80s one of my friends has a "nanny" who slept on a cot in the laundry room in the basement. I didn't think much of it, a few of us had housekeepers and I just imagined a few other people had live-in help too, like on TV shows... A year or two into our friendship, I was over at their house after school and around dinner time I asked if I could stay. The parents said, "Sure, no pr…

> we probably all know a Lola Not sure what your value of "we" is. I've never met anyone like Lola, and I've never heard a story like this from anyone I know. Then again, I didn't have a housekeeper or know anyone who did. People in my social class were glad to keep the electric bill paid and have a working car to drive.

A few people I socialised with at university had live-in housekeepers, and I wouldn't be surprised if one or two of them had a rough time.

Most of the students from Asia or the Middle East, whose parents were paying tens of thousands of pounds for their child to attend a British university, had staff at their parents' home.

One close friend was a British girl who'd grown up in Hong Kong, with a full-time au pair. She complained that the other HK and Chinese girls she shared a kitchen with didn't know anything about cooking or cleaning, since their au pairs had always done everything for them. In her case, her parents told her to "help" the au pair with chores, in the same way I helped my mum, so she'd learn. Presumably, her parents knew the arrangement in Hong Kong wouldn't last forever.

I've also met a couple of people working as au pair's here, both ~20 year old women mixing the work with studying, which is the usual sytem in Europe. It looks like a very poor deal, for example [1] £320/mth for what's not far off full time hours (37.5hr/wk would be full time in a government job).

[1] https://www.aupair.com/en/job/lisburn-united-kingdom-765795....

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