Tretiak
3hr ago
People forget a lot of Italians also returned to Italy after deciding America wasn’t for them.
Tretiak
4hr ago
Well English itself is German if you go far back enough in history. Many of the English kings and nobility were Germanics. Ironically that was one of the things Hitler also pointed out and why he considered the British to be people of “high class” and cultural achievement. It was probably just self-serving on his end. He didn’t consider everything about English culture to be held in high regard:
“It’s a great pity none of our great authors ever took his subjects from German imperial history. Our Schiller never thought of anything but to glorify a Swiss crossbowman. The English for their part had a Shakespeare. But the history of his country had supplied Shakespeare as far as heroes are concerned, only with imbeciles and madmen.”
Tretiak
4hr ago
I think it’s a biased analysis to reverse engineer areas where innovations have came out of. It’s probably more relevant to analyze what the cultural trends and forces and composition if you like, were at the time these major ideas were taking root. Innovation is too multidimensional to be reduced to a single factor explanation.
Military R&D and espionage alone contribute an enormous amount to innovation. Commercial air flight came out of the military sector with the recognition that an airliner is just a modified bomber. GPS was developed by the US navy under the NAVSTAR program. There actually is institutional money and pressure to innovate that doesn’t solely reduce to the kind of innovation one would see on Shark Tank for instance.
Tretiak
4hr ago
Friends of mine tried pushing me into studying law when I was in junior high and high school specifically because I loved to argue and debate. For a time I actually became very interested in patent law and specifically intellectual property law. How relevant is patent law today in a globalized and international economy? I’d imagine patent law is one of things whose landscape has changed tremendously within the last 50 years or so.
Incidentally to your first point, I think it was Switzerland if I’m not mistaken that developed fairly advanced industries without a patent system in place, per Ha Joon Chang, shooting a pretty big hole in the idea that innovation doesn’t happen without patents to economically preserve someone’s investment and ingenuity. I think in the US at one point as well there used to only be process patents on end products, and not the final output itself.
Tretiak
9hr ago
Not sure what you mean by “raises your standards,” maybe you can elaborate. It’s widely known that homogeneity enables large scale cooperation and fosters a high trust society between individuals.
But there are multiple ways in which the US has benefitted in certain areas through diversity. One obvious example was the massive brain drain that took place due to the Nazis persecution of Jews in Europe. It was one thing that actually weakened Germany during the war and later played into the US hands in the development of the atomic bomb. Or take another example. One major reason the computer hacker culture took root in the US and not Scandinavia for instance wasn’t just because the digital revolution happened here. It specifically happened because the US was a low trust society coupled with an increasingly individualist culture. If I think you’re not going to pay your fair share of taxes for instance, I’m more inclined to go and look for loopholes for myself.
The important thing to keep in mind with all these arguments is that the cases go in both direction. You can find relevant empirical examples on both sides. The local culture I grew up in was socially and racially exogamous. We were a very colorblind community and really didn’t care about each others race. We could say “the black dude that lives over there,” or, “the white kid across the street” casually without it even dawning on any of us that we had to worry about offending someone. We never even thought twice about it. We were ‘very’ culturally homogenous though. Strict and rigid though as far as norms and standards of behavior went. This cut all across ethnic lines. I grew up in an ethnic composition largely of whites and Hispanics with a minority of Cambodians, Assyrians and blacks. We had a common culture. Played outside with each other. Went to the same schools. Engaged in church functions. You name it. Many of them are still good friends to this day. So it’s ‘possible’ for people to do more than just tolerate each other and live in largely parallel societies like they do in the UK and Sweden, although both of them shouldn’t have adopted the immigration policies they have in the first place.
You can get innovation out of both collaboration and competition. Sometimes you get it through a mix and balance of both. But it’s not an either/or with one winning out to the exclusion of the other.
Tretiak
14hr ago
The fact that the U.S was able to suppress those intercommunal rivalries and, yes, assimilate and to a certain extent dissolve those communities into a broader "Americanness" (or, to put the racial spin on it that both the far left and far right like these days - "whiteness"), is a wonderful thing that I think does deserve celebration despite all the buzzwords and cant that surround it these days.
The reason for this is quite obvious. Some cultures share more in common with each other than others do. The early French and English inhabitants of the US were very culturally digestible into each other, with one another and when coupled with the geographic distance and detachment with their country of origin, there’s great opportunity for your differences to erode and dissolve over time.
I don’t think it’s anywhere as lopsided as you might think. I don’t have access to my copy of the book at the moment, but the last I read indicated a much more complex picture than that. A ‘lot’ of innovation actually comes out of big business. The pharmaceutical industry alone is proof enough of that.
When I say “planned innovation” I don’t mean innovation by committee. What I’m saying is the idea may not have originated with them, but they were the ones who did something with it. Steve Jobs didn’t invent the transistor. He had a vision for the early uses of new technology. He had his plans for the tech that made him who he was.
If you want to remain focused on DARPA or Bell Labs for example, that used to be one of the favorite examples anarchists brought up in support of their philosophical aims. The boundary and restrictions were somewhat wide, but while it’s true that many of the pioneers and innovators within those organizations didn’t invent things through top down directive, they still had to meet certain qualifications that their free exchange of ideas had to be valuable serve the mission statement of the institution. Meaning your work still had to be found useful to the bureaucrats. Otherwise you were out.
Even very politically top heavy countries like China are producing an enormous amount of innovation.
Tretiak
14hr ago
I forget exactly where I read it, but I believe it was in Ed Dutton’s book on the conservative demographic revolution where he pointed out in Islamic medieval society (this was back when the Mongols were rampaging throughout the continent), women had an increasingly considerable influence in political society. You had female imam’s, elites and you even had them influencing military affairs; but his point was that on some level, all of these ended up getting turned in pet projects of sorts and ceased to serve the original function for which they were intended. That was one of the reasons they became so internally weak and were later pushed over by Genghis Khan so easily. There definitely are consequences to an overly feminized or masculinized society.
I tire of these posts often and the kind of comments they enjoin from others. The key word and phrase they’re often looking for is “individualism” and the importance of initial conditions.
I’d be curious to know how much innovation is spontaneous in comparison with how much was planned. When William Shockley invented the first transistor, he probably didn’t have the modern computer in mind. Or the digitalization of the world for that matter. A lot of these ideas are germs and some get built on and others don’t. Of those that receive work on them some fail and some succeed due to timing effects, wrong approaches, lack of funding, all manner of different things. New developments to some extent always require the free play of ideas, but there’s no reason why it specifically ‘has’ to appear in one place or the other. China first cast iron a thousand years before the Europeans did and for centuries Europe was the technological underdeveloped backwater of the rest of the world. There’s no reason why it ‘had’ to be that way. The Soviets originally had their own competition to the ARPANET that ultimately went sideways to due to their own ideological commitments. You could argue there wasn’t enough independence of thought. Or perhaps they had the wrong ideological perspective.
Diversity isn’t a good for its own sake. It has both its upsides and downsides and whatever else your opinion of it, you still have to figure out a way to live with it.
Also as a side note to your side note(!) there was a book recently recommended to me by a friend who is eager to get me a copy and read it so I can give him my thoughts on it. In it, he said the author specifically mentions the patent system as one of the markers of a society’s relative decline in cultural and technological achievement. It’s an interesting barometer and one I hadn’t thought of originally. It probably does yield useful insights.
Tretiak
1d ago
Nobody knows for sure what’s actually going on in the interior of these institutions. I sometimes wonder how disconnected reports are from the actual facts on the ground of this supposed ‘lead’ they have on the workings of the FBI.
Tretiak
3d ago
Well yeah, I’m sure there’s certainly that too. But at the same time at what point can you honestly declare an event to have never likely happened without some effort made to thwart it? At the very least you’re involved in the surveillance of the activity. The other way is to withdraw from the affair entirely and just hope nothing ever comes of it. Not a way I’d want to govern society however.
Tretiak
3d ago
Hindsight is always 20/20. But even still, a conflux of suspicious behavior isn’t grounds for arresting someone.
A young, bullied and disenfranchised boy who acquires a gun and writes hateful things online often commonly precedes an actual shooting that takes place. But a young man who gets a gun and writes hateful things online but has no desire to shoot a school up can only be watched and monitored. You can’t convict someone on odd or abnormal behavior.
Calculating how resources are wasted is difficult when the efficacy of how their work is measured is defined by how many terrorist attacks ‘don’t’ happen. It’s a lot like working in the SOC in infosec. There’s no scoreboard for security and so it’s something you don’t see. People think you just sit around all day and do nothing and ironically on the rare occasion where that happens, those get counted among the most productive days you’ll experience. When you’re hard at work that’s often a bad sign.
I had a debate with my father several years ago around this phenomenon. I tried presenting a plausible account of a conspiracy that police don’t have a real incentive to stop crimes because if they did, wouldn’t that take away their whole reason for existing? It’s been known to have a real effect in some countries. Several years later I realized that there was an informal term to describe exactly what I was I was trying to articulate. I still regard it as a valid concept. I just don’t know on what level it’s true.
Tretiak
3d ago
Being my favorite holiday, Halloween is probably the best night you could ask for getting away with the “it’s just a prank bro” legal defense. One of the last Halloween occasions I had with my family had a relative of mine getting arrested and later released for bringing along a real (and fortunately empty) shotgun with him while trick or treating solely for the purpose of scaring the kids.
I can’t imagine the difficulty in general of picking out an actual terrorist plot on such an occasion, unless the people in question are incredibly stupid.
Tretiak
4d ago
Why? We remember both MLK and Malcolm X, so I guess we simply have to wait until someone takes a shot at Fuentes to see just how much history rhymes.
Well someone already did show up at his house with a gun, wanting to kill him. But I suppose he’s an appropriate target to the relevant interest groups, so he doesn’t matter that much.
Perhaps Fuentes is the seed crystal for what will be, in 50 years, clearly identifiable as post-progressivism. Or post-post-conservatism, but that's silly.
50 years could contain anything. You can’t even predict what will happen tomorrow. But conservatism is still looked at as a tarnish word the left remains hard at work trying to smear and degrade even further as much as it can. It contaminates virtually everything it touches, including the root of its own traditional philosophy. The liberalism that arose out of the European wars of religion came out of necessity to combat constantly warring identitarian groups with competing divisive and exclusionary outlooks, remains a sound and respectable philosophical opponent of my own political beliefs. It’s still one I regard as wrong but useful lessons can still be gleaned from its failings. The left abandoned its own stance on liberalism a long time ago. If we’re not post-everything already, let’s at least return to the historical and normal vocabulary used to describe our respective positions. Common sense would be a great place to start with things.
and while being gay isn't something I find disqualifying it is something a large portion of his potential base finds disqualifying (if you're curious, check out Kiwi farms - they have impeccably documented the multiple instances of him being caught red-handed browsing gay porn or gazing longingly into the eyes of another man).
Uh. What?
And for the right? The majority of conservative youth are either /pol/ adjacent or had their worldview informed almost entirely by second-hand exposure to /pol/ memes and ideas.
In a way they’re just the new low information voters adopting what’s in vogue in meme format. 2016 was the real watershed moment where it became evident that it’s a force multiplier in battling in the media space. And it was weaponized hilariously.
The information environment on the online, anonymous right is so much more effective at selecting for persuasive memes and ideas than the institutional, pro-Zionist right that whenever there's an even playing field /pol/ wins every single time. I've said before on here that people who are healthy and well-adjusted winners generally don't get involved in antisemitism or other kinds of discrimination because they don't have a need to blame anyone for why they failed - but society has failed so many of these young men that the number of losers has reached critical mass. Even the youth who are actually doing well are growing up in a social context where antisemitism is just a constant fact of life. You are never, ever going to turn a young, radicalised right winger who has grown up on an information diet of /pol/ infographics, Pepe the frog memes and USS Liberty references into a zionist... the only exceptions I've seen of people pulling themselves out of that kind of information environment are cases where they end up trans, and the radical left isn't going to be supporting Israel either.
It’s actually pretty funny. Awhile ago I was looking for a new book to read in what little down time I had after finishing an earlier one and came across this that appeared in my Amazon suggestions. When I went through the preview I was laughing my ass off because of how idiotic most of this stuff sounds, and it instantly reminded me of the Far Right Extremist meme. As something of a moderate fascist myself, it was very funny watching some academic jackass come along and supposedly tell me what it is I actually believe. Chapter 5, “Women and Nonbinary Children,” already taking a page out of the shitlib lexicon right out of the gate. How’s the phrase go? “Surely the enemy has conquered you when you adopt and speak their language.” Apparently being illiberal makes you a Nazi it seems. Nothing could be further from the truth. Always love it when people attempt to pathologize my political beliefs.
We live in a system today where a large number of men aren’t benefitting from the institutions that take from them. And who can blame them? A few of my closest friends are some of the hardest working people I have ever known from childhood and have been high achieving all their life. For almost the last 15 years when they’re off work they go straight home and withdraw into their hobbies and social ties that have remained with them. They barely participate in society anymore unless there’s an outing that involves family or friends and if you ever ask them why you’ll get the same reason from them every single time. “I have no reason to.” Like myself we very much grew up with the mindset that you marry young, get a career and raise a family. At least that was all we ever asked for growing up. That’s what gives their lives meaning. But absent that they see little reason for getting out of bed in the morning.
American society is losing its most productive people at the most productive ages of their lives and things in a hundred different ways are simply demotivating for a lot of men. Otherwise give me your best vanity pitch for why a lot of young men should care about it. Men aren’t going to work to uphold a system they feel is dedicated to tearing them down at every turn. At some point you have to speak their language. I don’t wake up every day and go to work for the “possibility” of getting paid on the hope my boss decides to pay me. I work for the tangible results that are returned to me to be able to live my life. Most communities are being destroyed. Most churches are dying and most men don’t have a realistic opportunity to pursue relationships with others.
But there's no putting the genie back into the bottle. Israel has completely torched their reputation with the youth of both the left wing and the right wing. Nobody on the left gives a single shit about accusations of anti-semitism anymore, because those accusations have been used on people like Ms Rachel. When you tell people that a woman taking care of a young girl that had her legs blown off and giving her a chance to have a real birthday party is actually an antisemite, you don't actually make people think that caring for amputee children is bad - you make people think that an antisemite is a pretty young woman who cares about wounded and disabled children.
People have had Israel fatigue for a long time. I think only now it’s become more socially acceptable for it to seep out in the broader population. The average person’s beef isn’t with Jews or Judaism at all. It’s with Zionism which is the ideological mantle of Israeli government. That can go straight to hell.
I saw that interview as well and was indeed surprised that Tucker had him on. He didn’t really cover anything that Nick hadn’t already brought up in previous interviews. I did get the impression that Tucker was squirming a bit in some of his responses to Nick, almost as if he’s trying to ride both sides of the aisle because he doesn’t want to get hit hard by the political establishment.
I felt I also got dismissed by people here when I brought up Nick in contrast with Charlie Kirk’s assassination. People essentially said Nick doesn’t have much of a base of support outside the groypers, but there’s a massive undercurrent of people sympathetic for wanting to shift the establishment gatekeeping of conservative assumptions to other issues, that’s probably best seen by the viewership numbers his content generates. I don’t have anything quantifiable outside of that. And why should someone? People don’t want to get destroyed in their personal or professional lives if they express sympathies for his views.
I don’t actually think Nick is a racist or an anti-Semite. He’s not someone like ZoomerHistorian (who probably is a racist and anti-Semite) but the kind of views expressed in a book like the one in the video represent a broad segment of populations across the western world who are afraid of saying the kinds of things that someone like Nick is willing to do. And if you look at the character assassination campaign against him, it’s no wonder why.
In the future I predict no one will remember the significant impact someone like Charlie Kirk had over the long run. He simply repeated the same boring, middle of the road mainstream conservatism these token characters with big money support behind them always do. But people will remember the impact Nick had in the political sphere. Whether that turns out to be for better or worse is still to be determined.
I wonder to what extent this is simply because cultures were more effectively separated at the time.
When I was growing up you couldn’t really help it. Culture moved slower then than it does today and even slower the further in time you go back. I’m younger than the typical cohort here and grew up at the intersection of new changes that were rapidly developing but I was still very beholden to my upbringing of the previous generation fortunately, so trendy new influences never pushed me around in the storm of things very much. I was always a very strong willed kid who was proud to have remained stable in a sea of chaos. People tend to look down on others who haven’t changed throughout in their lives. I haven’t changed one bit since I was 16 years old. Very few people would be able to distinguish the me of then and the me of 2025, but for me, refusing to change has been one of the proudest achievements of my life. A handful of good people I knew growing up and today all the worse because they left their good sense behind them to go down roads they shouldn’t have travelled. My foundational roots had already been solidified for good.
The experience of the world back then was also far more local and felt much smaller than it does today. When I was extremely young, if we went 2-3 hours out of our way for a family event, it felt like I was living at the edge of the known world without much to explore beyond it. Today the whole world can be knocking on your doorstep, demanding and competing for your attention which leaves a lot of people feeling burnt out on life. I can play the whole social media game if I want but it has no appeal to me and I have little desire for it. I have an enormous love for technology, just none of its popular uses. What’s popular is almost guaranteed to be wrong, per Heinlein’s maxim:
“Does history record any case in which the majority was right?”
Or if you like, the quote often misattributed to Henry Ford:
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
People carry around a lot of standard knowledge for the time in which they live but very few have any truly useful insight to impart with others. Coupled with Sturgeon’s Law, nobody has me convinced that I’m missing out on anything here. Not being a narcissist driving everywhere with a selfie stick in the back of my car is more than enough of a win for me. I hope future anthropologists one day can cite that item as the defining characteristic that marked the downfall of American civilization. It’s pathological.
The Internet in its infancy was a kind of refuge for misfits who could connect and talk to each other and do funny things over BBS boards, among other stuff. Cyberspace then was a form of digital dumpster diving for the curious. Nowadays it’s just another form of crass commercialism. Another marked out district for the display of wealth without culture. Just mindless consumerism.
Tretiak
4d ago
Trying to find the political common ground that’s appropriate for discussion often leaves people uninterested. Suppose you’re a person that has what would pass for radical opinions in the current climate. Would you really want to risk discussing that with someone you aren’t sure you’re on that level with, at work?
There’s a great level of comfort and ease I still have with my childhood friends that I just don’t have with professional colleagues. Even among those who’d I’d describe as friends. With the former we can discuss very morbid topics or perhaps even share unpleasant opinions without forgetting that we confidently know that’s not who the other person is because we’ve known them all their lives and have seen every dimension of their personality growing up.
There’s more than just the axes of personal/professional and small/serious. There’s also boring and interesting and that varies widely with people. You can often tell by the level of engagement and whether they’re more reactive or proactive in the discussion as to whether they have an active interest in the topic or it’s just because it’s a “you” thing. General topics are more accessible at the water cooler or lunch table at break but they’re far less interesting than the ones that would get you the side eye from the booth or table next to you that causes that group to get up from the table and relocate elsewhere because you brought up the Khmer Rogue and Cambodian genocide and how it compares to what’s happening in Gaza.
Let’s be honest though. Most men don’t faire very well either in their youth when the hormones first kick in and all they can think about is love and sex. It’s all consuming on a level that is maddening to get ahold of and they shouldn’t be entrusted with too much independent decision making either. It’s practically as intoxicating as trying to rear every young man off cocaine because those changes are essentially are a cocktail of drugs. When the testosterone first hit my body and mind were brimming with a level of energy that was uncontrollable and I felt like I could conquer the world. I was a raging hell storm for others to deal with at times. And while I perform quite well in all spheres today, 16-18 year old me could absolutely run circles around me in 2025; I would be no match for myself then.
I once got into a conversation with a guy who essentially now treats women along the pattern you described. His argument came down to not having a great deal of pity for them because following their demand for emancipation and independence, if women get burned as a consequence of refusing to adhere to men’s hesitation to grant them their rights then that’s ultimately women’s fault because “they did this to themselves.” They quite literally asked for it, according to him. It’s not exactly an easy point to challenge and I’ve essentially made the argument in another context that if women think it’s men’s job to police the behavior of other men so it’s safe for them to walk the streets at night, then they’re obligated to follow men’s rules at the end of the day and do what they’re told. Otherwise, you’re independent. Fend for yourself. If you want to live independently of the group then you in turn are entitled to no benefit from the group. Hang on tightly to the political ticket in your purse because it’s going to be all you have after you’ve spurned everyone in your community with your attitude. I’m not a fool. I’ll stick with the group and my family and friends. Most women have sadly been duped into abandoning those who actually care for them to hitch their wagon to temporary government giveaways by politicians who don’t have a care in the world for them beyond using them for a vote at the ballot box during the next election. That’s why all politicians that aren’t ideologues with an actual vision are philosophical prostitutes who view their constituents as tools for furthering their own career goals only to in turn sell them down the river at a later time. And I will never trust the principles or supposed “ethics” of a prostitute’s embrace. And the fact that they wear a suit and give speeches makes no difference to the point. You can keep your blank ballot.
As oppressive as feminism is to men in it’s political influence, it’s twice as oppressive to women and unfortunately millions of young women out there have absolutely no idea and won’t even see it coming, despite all the indicators being there. It was a bad idea when it was first conceived and it’s been a bad idea since then. Sure some good came out of it but then again the link between smoking and lung cancer was first discovered in Nazi Germany. Along with world ice theory, racist gravity, racial hygiene and other dogshit, but so what. Many men were already on their side when it came to the right to vote, allowing them to open up bank accounts, full access to educational opportunities and the right to pursue a career. No man who wasn’t a piece of shit then (for which there were many) wanted to stomach the idea of his daughter/sister/wife/mother being oppressed and abused. They were already fully on their side. Thinking women were fully equal in dignity and respect was a no brainer. Thinking men and women were biologically and by norm the same with each other was where they walked right off a cliff. To treat a lady the way we treated men in our community would’ve absolutely made you a misogynist. Men and women are complimentary to each other and should not aggressively compete against one another. This was basic to what we were taught. But the later feminist movement was predicated on a wholly incorrect view women have about what they think being a man is like. Terrible regimes and social movements sometimes produce good things too among a host of bad ideas. Best of luck to them. The Bolshevik’s brought a level of independence to women in the Soviet Union far greater than anything you could’ve imagined that happened in 1st and 2nd wave feminism in the US. And it also brought along Lysenkoism, socialist trees, sexist glaciers and NATO backed mutant space potatoes along with it. They had more than just equality of opportunity but a near complete equity and parity with men when it came to social, political and economic participation. Marriage and divorce was something you could register with the local politburo in a single day and the amount of sexual freedom eclipses what the US had post 1960. After the USSR fell in 91’, millions to women were desperate to rush back to the traditional paradigm prior to the revolution, only now with greater technological assistance in the domestic sphere. They realized it was one of the dumbest things they ever asked for. You’ll see a similar pendulum effect in the US eventually. This stuff has already been tried before.
If you consider your husband icky and feel stuck in a marriage, and would prefer to simply get divorced on "grounds" you just don't want to be married anymore, but you can't legally do so because no-fault divorce isn't on the books and your husband has technically not done anything that is grounds for divorce, than yes, I suppose it does feel like a personal problem. It violates your feelings, just like the lack of rape shield laws do. You feel wronged.
This is exactly what’s wrong with today’s social landscape. People I knew just fundamentally had a much more realistic sense of people than those who pass for “adults” in the year 2025.
If you described yourself as being “stuck” in a marriage 25-30 years ago, we ‘all’ knew what that meant. It meant you were in a physically abusive marriage and you needed a way out. Today being “stuck” in a marriage means your husband wanted to have sex with you last week and you don’t feel as attracted to him as you once were. One of these 2 things doesn’t belong.
Adults have this attitude today that life doesn’t involve hardship and making sacrifices. Anything that represents even the slightest inconvenience to you is at liberty to be disregarded because you should just “do what makes you happy.” Well I’m sorry, but that’s ‘life’. Life is about doing 100 things every single day that you don’t want to do. And while your personal happiness is important, it’s far from the highest value to aspire to and is the least enduring and meaningful when you’re on your deathbed and wondering what you’ve left behind.
Tretiak
4d ago
I don’t actually know how I feel surrounding this. When I was growing up it felt like there was much greater decentralization and separation between culture and politics in the strict sense of the word. Politics and religion were the 2 standard notions that families rarely brought up apart from church attendance, and you certainly didn’t bring them up with your friends and neighbors either. Not because you were afraid to. It just wasn’t important to why we associated with each other. Unless things naturally turned in that direction it was just considered in poor taste to broach the topic. We liked one another on a closer and personal level.
I couldn’t tell you who my parents voted for and they voted at every state, federal and local election. But that’s not because I’m apprehensive about telling others. It’s because nobody in our family knew who voted for who and we didn’t discuss it. Politics never got in the way of our family importance.
Thomas Sowell once said “if you have a lot of social control you don’t need a whole lot of government control.” I see that as the counterpoint to the intermix of the personal and the political. We resolved issues on our own. I don’t remember seeing a single instance of teenage pregnancy until gangs swept through our neighborhood and it didn’t impact us personally. Child support and alimony existed politically but weren’t a thing in our community. Marriages were mostly stable and of those that weren’t the husband and wife generally separated but never divorced.
The simple fact is you can’t substitute politics for community and there is no substitute for good judgment. Politics comes in to address these wherever there’s a disintegration and tear in the cultural fabric.
Yes. Yes, indeed.
I trust you understand my original point though, I hope.
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