HereAndGone2
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User ID: 4074
HereAndGone2
18d ago
What's that quote from Flannery O'Connor? “She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.” That's me! 😁 Up against the wall, just make it fast!
HereAndGone2
18d ago
You can. Just that it's a surprise that you weren't expecting. Or maybe you already have one kid. Needn't even be your wife, as I said.
I'm very curious about the reactions when it comes to "oh, you expect me to put my money where my mouth is when it comes to having kids to save our crumbling TFR rate?" There's a heck of a lot of guys posting on here about "the solution is to force women to have babies", with one person exampling Afghanistan under the Taliban as the "you may not like it, but this is how you do it" as to getting women pregnant whether they agree or not.
I want to see if they're as eager about having three/four/six kids if the chickens come home to roost in their coop.
HereAndGone2
18d ago
There are no principles involved, on any side, it's all "can we use this to smear Their Guy?". That's the problem. "Their Guy was hanging around with noted bad apple thirty years back, that proves he's a bad apple as well! Our Guy was also hanging around with said bad apple? Who cares, that was ages ago".
HereAndGone2
18d ago
Oh, I expect plenty of hypocrisy on this about Bill from the Democrats. I don't think he was fucking 17 year olds, but given that he had no problem fucking Monica Lewinsky when she was young enough to be his daughter, that's a very damn low bar.
The hypocrisy was the feminists going on about "so long as he keeps abortion legal, I'd strap on the kneepads and give him a blowjob myself". Sexual harassment and power differentials and age gaps are bad - except when it's Our Guy.
Sort of the reverse that happens with Republicans as seen by the Democrats: X was Literal Hitler when in power or running for office, give it a few years and now X is the only good responsible statesmanlike Republican, Y is Literal Hitler.
Clinton was the greatest guy, this is why we should elect Hillary because she was as good as co-president during his terms, give it a few years and it's Bill who? Oh that guy, nobody cares about him anymore.
HereAndGone2
18d ago
If they tried getting him on real estate corruption, then they'd have to prosecute everyone in New York from the mayor's office on down. Yes, it's sleazy, but c'mon: you've been telling us for years that he's sleazy and corrupt.
The Letitia James effort rebounded on her (if the bank involved didn't prosecute, how bad a crime was it really?) and it's amusing that she got dinged for fibbing on a mortgage application after making such hay out of Trump doing likewise. But again, everyone expects that doing business in New York involves a lot of, um, differently ethical practices.
As to Mar-a-Lago and the golf courses, those are probably okay from a legal standpoint (that's not to say there isn't or wasn't any corruption involved, but the golf courses do seem to be straightforward 'buy 'em and develop 'em' deals). As to failed projects like the Atlantic City casino, yeah possibly dodgy there, but again - par for the course for such deals. It seems to have been involved in a lot of financial troubles, but if it was possible to get him on such properties, that would have happened already from disgruntled creditors.
HereAndGone2
19d ago
What will happen to marriage and family formation if your typical woman no longer needs help or financial support from any man?
On a tangent, and relevant (I hope) to the vexed TFR question which gets debated on here: I don't know how many on here are married/partnered with children, but let me pose a question to the guys.
If you came home from work this evening and your wife/girlfriend says "Honey, great news, I'm expecting a baby!" what would be your reaction:
(1) Wonderful, now we can start having the big family I always wanted! This is the best surprise I ever got!
(2) Wait, you're what? We didn't plan for this. Isn't it too soon? There's so much we haven't done yet, are we even ready to start having kids?
HereAndGone2
19d ago
I have a sneaking suspicion some of the reasoning behind the Chinese anthropologists was (1) fitting in with the local political theories of 'China has always been at its best when pure and free of meddling foreign influence which brought us to misery' and (2) good old racism: 'no we are not descendants of those monkey-people in that continent!' and (3) 'see, China has always been to the forefront of civilisational advance, we have our own local evolutionary pathways to modern humans!'
I could well be mistaken here, though.
HereAndGone2
19d ago
Even the most "liberal" members of the Motte (myself included) are at best the sort of heterodox classical liberal that leftists today call fascists and rightists still promise to put up against the wall with all the progressives.
I thought it was the tankies who were "liberals get the bullet too"? Though to be fair, I'm a rightist and I do sometimes feel the urge for À la lanterne! reading some of the news (applicable to both right and left, very online SJW/woke/progressive or regressive/far-rightist, civilian or politician).
HereAndGone2
19d ago
That will be "it's different because he's Our Guy" and "The GOP/Trump is hiding all the really incriminating stuff".
HereAndGone2
19d ago
As others have pointed out, "tell them to wear everyday clothes" rather than getting dressed up in Full Escort Kit would be a way of maintaining the illusion that 'these are just ordinary girls hanging out and if one finds you interesting, that's because of your sparkling repartee, not because these are professional hookers'.
HereAndGone2
19d ago
Too young to be emperor, too old to be fodder - probably the sweet spot 😁
HereAndGone2
19d ago
You are correct!
HereAndGone2
20d ago
Don't take this seriously, because I'm operating off "I seem to vaguely remember maybe reading this somewhere back when", but something about "why so many Jews in the diamond trade?" is because it allows the wives to run the business while the men devote themselves to study of the Torah, and is profitable enough to support such a lifestyle.
I don't think the Haredi men want to work in Amazon warehouses, they want to do what their culture tells them is the aim of life, and find a way to make enough money to support that life. Working eight hours a day in a manual labour job is not that way. If they push the wives out the door to do the warehouse shifts, large numbers of children in a family are not going to be possible.
HereAndGone2
20d ago
GenX erasure yet again (sigh).
HereAndGone2
20d ago
And UBI just permits them to devote full-time attention to said career.
HereAndGone2
20d ago
I have found search engines of all descriptions to have drastically gone down in usefulness due to (1) SEO crap and (2) AI crap (about twenty minutes ago a Google search returned me the completely wrong reply to a query because it was all optimised on 'AI' and 'SEO' terms), so that anyone who brags that they are contributing to clogging up the system via "I can now produce oodles of great SEO!" gets the side-eye from me the same as if they had bragged about their successful ransomware or phishing exploits.
HereAndGone2
20d ago
The problem is not alone regulations. It's getting the water and power utility infrastructure up and running. Maybe slapping up two hundred new houses on a former bog is not something that can be handled by the existing, outdated, creaking at the hinges pipes. Digging holes in the ground will still take as long as it takes, even if an AI is handling the permitting.
"AI will speed up everything so much, productivity will zoom upwards and the economy will boom so that everyone gets the UBI abundantly" is a lovely dream, but it's still a dream.
HereAndGone2
20d ago
Is it even possible for you people not to get butthurt over people not immediately accepting Youtube algorithm slop?
HereAndGone2
20d ago
Drops her immediately for her younger, hotter sister. If they made later Family Stone movies we'd see him switching to younger, trashier versions every year. By TFS 6 he's getting handjobbed by a crack whore.
And in TFS 2 it's revealed that after he broke up with Younger Sister, Dad swooped in and now she's his step-mom. Awkward! But that just makes for the comedy, right? She's slept with three out of the four Stone men, and is maybe making googly eyes at the gay son, ha ha only joking! Nah, she's having an affair with Amy's Brad, not with Thad, that's where the misunderstanding came in: someone overheard a phone call but it was muffled and they misheard "Brad" for "Thad".
But the affair is okay, they're all bohemian, it's chill, and anyway Amy is exploring the possibility she might be bi so while Brad is getting it on with step-mom-in-law, she's having late night artistic discussions with Original Character who then ends up being third, slightly trashier, girlfriend for Everett.
The Family Stone: all one big happy quasi-incestuous family!
HereAndGone2
20d ago
Yes, I saw this news story, so it seems like the suspect has likely motivations associated with the university rather than racial/ethnic animus:
A MAN BELIEVED to be behind both a mass shooting at Brown University and the killing of an MIT professor has been found dead after a days-long manhunt, authorities said Thursday.
The suspect, Claudio Neves Valente, was a 48-year-old Portuguese national who had once studied physics at Brown, officials announced at press conferences in Providence and Boston.
There was no immediate indication of a motive in the twin shootings at two of the top universities in the United States, which rattled the elite New England campuses.
The shooter’s body was found at a storage unit in New Hampshire along with two firearms. He died by suicide, Providence police chief Oscar Perez said.
HereAndGone2
20d ago
An interesting point is that the synopsis hints the family are not the tolerant, accepting liberals they pretend to be:
Brian J. White as Patrick Thomas, Thad's partner. Patrick shows some sympathy to Meredith, hinting that the Stones gave him a hard time as well.
Patrick is the black boyfriend of the deaf gay son. So the wonderful, bohemian, free-spirited Stones were a teensy bit racist when their son showed up with a black man? He had to prove he could fit in before they'd accept him?
As you say, the Stones are the most gentry of gentry: father is an academic, mother is the iron fist in the velvet glove, and when a guest who is trying to fit in with them but is clumsy and ignorant of the right way to signal the right attributes turns up, they are cruel to her. She's not even an antagonist, because she wants to be part of the family, she just doesn't know all the right shibboleths (and gosh that does sound right in Culture War terms). Her offence is not being malleable enough, unlike her sister who is already cast in the mould of upper middle-class artistic liberal, until at the end she permits herself to be melted down and re-cast (wear the clothes of the family, take up as the responsible partner who will be mother as much as girlfriend to the skeevy brother) as they want her to be (particularly Mom, who probably is the one not at all happy that outsiders are taking away her darling sons and replacing her as the most important figure in their lives, see black boyfriend and SJP's character).
That's the rad-fem angle there: a woman must be malleable, must fit herself to the expectations of others, must be at the service of men/institutions of society as they wish her to be, must lose her own character, wishes, and wants to become the acceptable object.
HereAndGone2
20d ago
From the synopsis of the movie, I would hate it whether the main family is left- or right-coded. I don't like romcoms, and I don't like ones where the women have to be shoved into the appropriate box of the appropriate relationship (the ending is all that everyone is neatly partnered up with the 'right' partners now).
The family does sound very unpleasant, and I think the best ending would have been that SJP's character dumps her spineless fiancée, has nothing to do with his creepy brother, and finds someone compatible with her in New York. Let her brainless sister stay behind to be passed around like a token between the Stone brothers (and hey, Dad's a widower now, maybe he'd like a hot young live-in lover!)
HereAndGone2
20d ago
We've made parenthood and family size a moral issue, where having more than two children is a sin against blessed Gaia, and moreover a sign that you're a fool to waste your prime years having babies instead of having fun, and this also means that you must be poor, stupid, inferior human capital since everyone knows it's the underclass that is the most fertile.
You're not going to wind back fifty years of "having babies is irresponsible and selfish" by promising "hey, we'll give you twenty dollars coupon every month for each kid up to the age of seven!"
Children's allowance is indeed a thing, and indeed a very necessary thing. But so is abuse of the system, and for all the scorn about the 'welfare queens' political sloganeering, I've seen myself people cheating the system.
Changing social attitudes is like turning an oil tanker. You can do it, but it'll take a lot of time and careful manoeuvring. Plus men being unwilling to marry a woman who already has children - and remember, single mothers also includes widows and divorced women. So there's little incentive to have a lot of kids unless you're sure your spouse will never leave you, and that's not 100% any more since we've reduced marriage to "if at least two people (but maybe we can legislate in the future for more partners) want to live together, but only so long as they want to live together and are 'in love', no more than that".
If your choice is to be single mother with young children, or single woman with no children, after your relationship/marriage breaks down, then option B is better for dating/getting a new partner. I'm making a large assumption on that one, the first study I could find about remarriage after divorce is from 2015 for the period 1979-2010, and that makes the data fifteen years out of date:
Previous studies have identified several consistent predictors of remarriage for divorced women (Bramlett & Mosher, 2002; Folk, Graham, & Beller, 1992; Goldscheider & Sassler, 2006; McNamee & Raley, 2011; Shafer & James, 2013; Stewart, 2010). These predictors include being young at the time of divorce, having a college education, being employed, and living in the southern region of the United States. In addition, remarriage is less common for African Americans, the poor, and mothers who conceived or gave birth prior to marrying. It is not clear whether having children affects the likelihood of remarriage. Some studies show that remarriage is more likely when women have children, some studies show that remarriage is less likely, and yet others suggest that the association is contingent on other factors. These discrepant findings may reflect conflicting effects of children. On the one hand, some custodial mothers may be motivated to remarry because their new husbands can assist with the economic support and supervision of children (Morrison & Ritualo, 2000; Smock, Manning, & Gupta, 1999). On the other hand, some men may be reluctant to take on the economic and social responsibilities of the stepfather role, thus decreasing the attractiveness of mothers in the remarriage market.
...Our results cast some light on the notions that marriage is a “package deal” and that men “exchange children” when they remarry (Furstenberg & Cherlin, 1991; Tach, Mincy, & Edin, 2010). This idea is based on the assumption that men are connected to children primarily through their spouses and partners. Consequently, when men remarry they become less involved with children from their former marriages and more involved with their stepchildren. Because the current study does not have data on stepfathers’ relationships with children from previous unions, our findings do not provide direct evidence either for or against this idea. The current study does show, however, that men are more likely to marry when the fathers of their new partners’ children are highly involved. It appears, therefore, that many stepfathers prefer to “share” rather than “exchange” children.
HereAndGone2
20d ago
So are you the parent of fifteen children? Walk the walk before you demand the right to control others over when and how they have children. That's what annoys me the most about these blithe theoretical solutions: the people putting them forward are also the ones saying they're not married yet, have no kids, etc.
Yeah, I think the French Revolution is the ur-example though. I'm still astounded how it went from, say, Camille Desmoulins being firebrand revolutionary to not being revolutionary enough and eaten by the same monster he had helped create.
It does help explain how they went from Republic to Empire under Napoleon, they had killed everyone who they could kill, so there was nobody left to kill off and that left a gap for the old model to return.
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