HereAndGone2
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User ID: 4074
HereAndGone2
21d 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
21d 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
21d 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.
And what of those who aren't able to have kids, would be terrible parents if they did have kids, or aren't earning enough for the levy to be worthwhile? Here's a charming story of a married couple with six children who were abusive scum to those kids. Yes, how lovely to contemplate a future filled with such happy thriving families!
If you make it a condition that "everyone has to be the parent of one child", then you will get "hello, me and Joe agreed to have a baby, here's the baby, we're giving it up to social services because neither of us wants to raise a kid, can we have our certificates of child-production stamped for the tax office, please?"
HereAndGone2
21d ago
Then we get the resentful younger men saying women are all gold-diggers and the State should force Stacy-Anne to be my girlfriend.
HereAndGone2
21d ago
One big thing I see missing from all these "the solution is simple: force women to have children by coercion!" answers is - are men ready to be fathers?
Parenting is not just "I knocked the bitch up, that's my job done, now I should be able to live as I please without being asked to do anything with the squalling brats except pay the minimum out of my wages to feed and clothe them".
Are men today able, and ready, to be a father to a family of three, four, or more children? Are they ready to make sacrifices? Because even with all the laments over how women divorce and bleed men dry, men very easily drop their existing family to go off and start with a new partner (and maybe a new baby). They don't have relationships with their children, see the arguments over "what if you found out the kid wasn't yours?" and several men have no problem that after being the father for ten or more years, now the child means nothing to them and they don't love it and don't care if it dies and don't care if they're the only father it has ever known, that tie is severed.
You can't have big families where it's all on the woman. That's how we got 'married to the State' in the first place; men were willing to fuck around, not so willing to be parents. Or even would be disasters if permitted to be in the life of the family.
Being a husband and father involves a lot more than just "I married her and got her pregnant, job done".
HereAndGone2
21d ago
AI in ecommerce is making the field even more cut throat driving prices down.
Great! Now you can buy a shit-ton of cheap Chinese crap off Shein and Temu, but you still need to get ten other people as flatmates to rent someplace to live.
HereAndGone2
21d ago
While I can accept universal Maslow-style enlightenment as an ideal post-scarcity society, I'm not convinced that it's possible to push people into that.
Yep. If you just look at the court cases in your local news, you will see how many people decide to spend their free time: drink, drugs, and criminality.
HereAndGone2
21d ago
I'm a skeptic because I don't believe in the implied abundance; someones going to have to produce all those nachos for the average Joe, and the videogames, and the electricity.
I too am a sceptic because of this. If we replace all the labour (or as much as we can squeeze out) with the magic robots, we are not likely to see "and MacroFruitCountenaceBigBigBank happily handed over 80% of their yuuuuuge profits to pay UBI for the 90% of displaced labour force".
Jeff Bezos was able to afford to rent out Venice for his second wedding. That money did not go into UBI. Same with the future: governments will tax what they can, corporations will avail of what loopholes they can, them that has, gits.
And governments may not even tax what they can, see the comedic saga of the government in my country being forced to accept €13 billion in back taxes from Apple, while it did its very best to refuse it (due to fears of "if the EU makes the American multinationals which prop up our economy pay up, they are likely to leave Ireland and then we're effed"). Same with UBI taxes: if it is too onerous a burden, the corporations will move overseas and good luck prying a cent out of the robotic hands.
HereAndGone2
21d ago
thanks to LLMs I can generate thousands of listings' worth of relevant keywords in plain English with great SEO in seconds.
You are a slop generator, one of those making the online experience worse for us all.
I work, actively, at a computer for about an hour a week, on average, and earn all of my money passively through that.
And hot singles in my area want to date me, and you earn $5,000 a month with this one simple trick?
HereAndGone2
21d ago
Yeah, the idea that productivity will zoom up only applies to certain work. How fast can you now build a house if it's all AI? Can AI make it possible for houses to be completed from greenfield site to turn-key in a week? I think there will be gains, but the idea that AI is a magic wand is dreaming.
HereAndGone2
21d ago
I agree with the general thrust of this that we won't get post-scarcity paradise or dystopian hellscape, AI will be a technology eventually folded in (what works of it) into the economy and maybe government policies in some areas, and most of us will go on as we have been doing.
Jobs that can be automated will be (the robot factories run by AI rather than human overseers) and some white-collar work will get disrupted along with that, which will be interesting to watch, but we'll end up pretty much as we are now.
HereAndGone2
21d ago
He uses this term to basically refer to the Zionist project, directed by Zionist Jews inside and outside of Israel, along with Zionist Christians, and secret societies, which are all advocating for war to bring about the Judeo-Christian end times (or something like that.)
Why do you give this guy any more credence than you would QAnon or other wackjobs? "Tinfoil hat guy gives lecture about religion responsible for all bad things" is hardly news, and that the Chinese authorities apparently allowed him to lecture about it (a class he taught (I believe to students in Beijing)") is nothing strange, new or startling. Wow, you mean the government which very much objects to anything that challenges its authority as sole arbiter of what its citizens should think and believe, and which has multiple examples of tyring to coerce, control and destroy religious bodies in China, is happy for some propaganda about "Da KKKristians and Da Joos are behind it all and if only there was no religion we'd have peace, love and a currant bun"? You astound me, Holmes!
HereAndGone2
22d ago
Men ran away as fast as they could from marriage and child-rearing during the Sexual Revolution. So this is reaping what was sowed - oh, women are now on the Pill and other contraceptive devices and don't have to get pregnant if they engage in sex outside of marriage, and indeed we WANT women to engage in sex outside of marriage because then they're not baby-trapping men and tying them down?
Well, here come consequences, boys.
HereAndGone2
23d ago
Trying to recreate Trump's train of thought is taking crazy pills, but in the spirit of maximum charity, it could be "actions have consequences, the kind of TDS this person engaged in came back to haunt him as another guy went nuts due to the rubbish being peddled about me and murdered him".
Do not make me go dig out mediaeval illegitimacy and prostitution rates.
Okay, early modern period, which is very roughly 16th-18th century. Someone has done work on that, and probably plenty more as well. But if you are trying to tell me the vast majority of men, historically, have been doomed to die kissless virgins if they could not find a wife... then we must have the heavens full of saints in spite of themselves!
In the Late Middle Ages, a third of the population was probably born extramaritally. From 1400 to 1600, the illegitimacy ratio dropped markedly, but from 1650 to 1850, it seems to have gradually risen from around 5 to 9% in most European states.
"A third of the population" would cover "had the baby first then the wedding" as well as "never got married", but one third? That's a heck of a lot of men not getting regular sex if they didn't have wives yet managing to father children!
HereAndGone2
23d ago
Wildly speculating here, but if he knew/recognised the person (who had waited for him to show up) then he might bring them into the foyer with him.
But this is all armchair detective theorising at present,.
HereAndGone2
23d ago
Information about his personal life is slowly trickling out. One source says "Loureiro was reportedly born in Portugal to a Sephardic Jewish family in 1977" so that covers the Jewish ancestry part. Other reports say he was married with three children.
So probably not an affair gone wrong, but it could still be anything. Police say no suspect yet, which is unusual, but I guess we'll have to wait until they can find some evidence and release it.
HereAndGone2
23d ago
500 years ago they were getting the wenches with child but not marrying said wenches; today they don't have to get them with child because contraception and abortion.
Most young men want to have fun, sow their wild oats, and then settle down. Even in the 19th century, they didn't want to be tied down, and ironically often those who did want to marry had to wait a long time for economic stability to do so, or even that their employers discouraged marriage as taking their attention away from the job.
HereAndGone2
23d ago
The same working class background that a certain commentator likes to sneer about. And that our society has spent a lot of time over the past decades trying to shift the culture to "we're all middle-class now", and which has been successfully gutted so that the vices, but damn few of the virtues, of that background survive.
I'm constantly astounded by how much I find myself agreeing with Shoe0nhead, even when I disagree very strongly with other beliefs of hers; see this recent video, where she talks about how she grew up and now how her kids will grow up, starting at 17.01 here.
HereAndGone2
23d ago
It is more than just a dead tree, but it's not some kind of "and by putting in a tree, it really means that the British Empire will continue to survive into the future" symbolism, either. Tolkien liked trees so he put in trees. What are the seven stars a symbol of, then? What are the seven stones? Remember the rhyme:
Tall ships and tall kings
Three times three.
What brought they from the foundered land
Over the flowing sea?
Seven stars and seven stones
And one white tree.
Tolkien explains in notes what they were, and it's not this kind of facile but dumb explanation here:
The seven stars and seven stones are symbols of the Valar, the gods of Tolkien's universe, who guided the Numenoreans to their new home.
Tolkien doesn't put symbolism of that type in, he puts prophecy in: "the hands of the king are the hands of a healer", and so forth. This is how Aragorn establishes that he is the rightful heir and king (and that is what the split between Gondor and Arnor started with, the denial by Gondor that descendants of the Arnorian line had any inheritance rights on the throne).
There isn't any symbolism of "by X you meant the Tories/the Communists/the Joos, just say it, we all know you really mean it, it's Da Joos isn't it???" kind.
HereAndGone2
23d ago
Chin up, if AI works out as everyone is hoping, we're all unnecessary for securing the future, the transhumanists who are happy to be replaced by our superior silicon descendants will win, and neither men, women, nor others will survive the Great Robot Purge.
HereAndGone2
23d ago
Who knows? He could have been a hound with the co-eds or female faculty/staff members, and this is a jealous boyfriend/husband going after the prof sleeping with his girlfriend/wife. It could be a disgruntled neighbour over putting out the bins on the wrong day. A lot of possibilities, jumping straight to "he was Jewish! (even though on his official bios there's no mention of race or religion) and he was murdered because anti-Semitism!" is definitely leaping to conclusions.
HereAndGone2
23d ago
Trump's post was weird but I think he put it out as "crazy left-wingers driven nuts by TDS running amok and murdering people" and no more than that. He's as subtle as a brick, so it was taken as victim-blaming.
My immediate reaction to the news was "sounds like family member did it" because there have been a few recent cases in Ireland of people murdered by their (drug-addict/mentally ill) adult kids in these same circumstances.
An interesting point is that the synopsis hints the family are not the tolerant, accepting liberals they pretend to be:
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.
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