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A post is blowing up on my part of twitter where a guy is saying he only wants to spend 10 minutes a day with his kids.. This has a surprising amount of scissor power, with people coming down on all sides.
Relevant quote:
The one straightforward argument is that, well, he's a shitty dad. Especially since he says he wants to be working, accomplishing something, and what is his work? Well, he's a creative director at some random tiny crypto business working on "building digital gold." So... easily mockable.
The other side says that modern parenting norms are fucked, as he aludes to, and that kids used to be a lot more free range. Normally I'm sympathetic to this, but the guy's kids are below five, so idk. I think infants and toddlers definitely need a lot of attention.
Either way I'm curious how parenting norms might break down along culture war lines, and what people here think?
ETA: Also, a great and extremely sassy quote tweet:
What's stopping him from letting his kids be free range ? The restrictions feel self-imposed.
I don't have kids, but I was the elder cousin that was responsible for keeping the kids alive through the holidays. Kids are so much fun. They allow men to experience power and wish fulfillment like nothing else. It's the only time you get to legally play God.
Maybe it is just me, but very few emotions match the unbridled joy of watching kids frolicking. Little puppies, Sunrise hikes, a cold summer breeze. It is a feeling of wholeness, harmony, of being at peace that nothing else matches.
Some classics:
I went off on a tangent, but sounds like someone with a lot of anxiety. I have had periods of my life when I've been unable to exist in a moment, and the urge to escape was usually rooted in an external source of instability that was causing me anxiety.
Percentiles are a better way to look at it. Divorce is the most destabilizing thing a child can go through. Only about 50-55% American kids grow up with their biological parents, who stay married to each other through their entire childhood. If the dude stays happily married, financially stable and doesn't abuse his kids, he is already above average.
So no, not a shitty dad. Above-average is all. Not good. Not bad.
It's a different world man. I checked the FBI crime statistics, and in my home town, when I was allowed to bike 30 minutes as google map says, probably 60 minutes as a kid bikes, down the bike path on the parkway to the nearest shopping center for a slushy, the murder rate in my county was 0-1 per year. Entirely domestics. In the year 2025 it's closer to 50, and lots of gang deaths. To say nothing of other random tragedies caused by associated rises in drunk driving, drug availability, and the general third worldification of my homeland. In 30 years we went from random murder literally not being a thing that ever happened where I lived, to constant low level gang violence.
I get the arguments about per capita. But I think when it comes to the loss of quality of life due to violent crime, the incidents per 100,000 residents matters a lot less than the proximity to incidents. If I'm in a crowd of 100 that gets randomly fired into, versus being in a crowd of 100,000 that random gets fired into, I sincerely doubt my perception and attendant stress levels will be much different between the two. I'm thinking "I could have been killed!" either way.
And so it goes with our kids. When I was a child, it was major news when a neighbor's child wondered off and drowned in a lake. A tragedy the likes of which hadn't been seen in decades in our town. Now teenagers show up dismembered in public parks and it's a Tuesday.
I'm really baffled as to where you grew up, Petersburg? As far as my experiences in Virginia, it's overwhelmingly been one of gentrification - admittedly limited to NoVA and Richmond. I can't speak to Norfolk or Charlottesville. In DC, the majority of the city is unaffordable to anyone but wealthy professionals and the politicos, with the poors being pushed across the Anacostia. H street is a filthy den of hipsters (or may have progressed to a fully upscale neighborhood since I left, I don't know) and you have to go pretty far to the northeast to get anywhere grungy. NoVA is a gleaming mass of towers full of consultants milking the feds (where you possibly work making useless software?) and I'm not even sure how far you have to drive outside the city before you stop seeing Mcmansions and nice suburbs.
I don't know Richmond as well but The Fan and Jackson Ward both gentrified pretty heavily. Nice downtown core, UVA seems to be metastasizing, lots of mcmansions and farmers markets.
Are you confident that your quiet suburbia was invaded by illegals rather than most of the successful, law-abiding people being siphoned off by the gentrifying cities? Brain drain to the city cores will hollow out the suburbs and revitalize the downtowns which seems to be what's happening (although I haven't noticed the apocalyptic degradation of the suburbs you write about extensively). It's surprising that I lived in fairly similar areas to you without ever hearing about Teen Dismemberment Tuesdays. Why do you think we had such different experiences?
I've been thinking about this as well and my money is on @WhiningCoil having grown up somewhere around Woodbridge. Maybe just the right part of Fairfax County (Herndon, Springfield).
I also generally agree with his characterization of the changes over the last 20 - 30 years, although with a little less blackpilling.
So, @WhiningCoil is right in that a lack of awareness is not a lack of evidence. My own semi-conspiratorial impression is that both Farifax County and Arlington County police know that most of their calls to the well to do parts of those areas will be for domestic stuff, they over patrol in the immigrant heavy parts of the counties with the clear message of; "you guys can fuck around with each other as much as you want, but if you make trouble for John Q. Taxpayer, we will destroy you."
There's also degeneration at the top. There was a time when Tysons Corner and Northern Arlington had mom and pop shops and restaurants. Local High Schools would host fundraisers and other events at these places. There were weird tarot shops that may have been mild drug fronts and, according to urban legend, classy rub-n-tug joints. You know, the things that make a small town work.
To say that NoVA is now corporatized is an understatement. It's internationally hypercorporatized. If you walk through Tysons II on any given day, perhaps on your way to drinks at the Ritz-Carlton, you will see a Saudi woman in full Burqa (fully face covered except for the ninja-slit) toting bags from luxury stores with doormen in $5000 suits. If you walk through Clarendon on a Friday or Saturday night you will see G-Wagons and Ferraris parked outside of the "clubs" there. How can this be? This isn't Vegas, LA, New York. This is a still heavily milquetoast white people suburbia full of, yes, "consultants" and political operatives who mostly make money siphoning off their portion of The Federal Trillions. Real deal finance isn't there, there is no celebrity entertainment industry, "venture" and "tech" exist but in silly reinvent-the-consulting wheel ways that would make actual Silicon Valley denizens laugh (which is saying something).
Less than two hours away you have multiple counties to the west and south that went for Trump 70/30 or better. You have the border with West Virginia (and not just the eastern pandhandle which is just extended NoVA). You have the area around Thurmont and Frederick Maryland, known as a one of the last super stronghold of the KKK. 90 minutes south on I-95 you have Quantico, VA, Headquarters of the USMC and the major FBI training center.
In 2018, Washington and Lee High School, in Arlington, VA, renamed itself (well, the schoolboard did) to "Washington and Liberty" High School. I guess Lee was removed because he was the loser slave owner instead of the winner one.
While I can't quite bring myself to the level of "intentional race replacement" that @WhinginCoil seems to have signed on to, I do think this is what it looks like when a society lets suicidal empathy and degenerative "inclusivity" run amok. It starts simple enough with an "authentic" arepas restaurant or food truck opening up. What's the harm? It ends, years later, with the high priestesses beginning the government backed erasure of history that displeases them.
Capital One employees catching strays.
It is interesting how despite being the capital city of the US, DC and its surrounding areas are fairly devoid of private sector white-collar jobs, especially in Tech, Finance, generic corporate roles. It's often usurped by cities and their surrounding areas such as NYC, SF, LAX, CHI, sometimes even more minor ones like Boston, Greenwich, Seattle, etc.
Greater DC has an urban area population of 5.2 million vs 9.8 million for London and something similar for Paris (the French don't publish urban area population estimates). Metropolitan area population (defined by commuting patterns) is 6 million for DC, 13 million for Paris, and 15 million for London. And DC hosts a bigger, richer government and so has more government and government-adjacent jobs.
There just aren't the people to staff another industry in DC. The US is a big enough country that (apart from NYC, which does everything except government) its major cities are functionally specialised.
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