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Clementine
44m ago
I had a vague post in mind that sort of overlapped with this one, which was just... The general lack of a sense of "duty". There's just a lot of talk about rights, or privileges, it feels like. Or of being taken advantage of (eg paying for children). Not "obviously if it's my child I have the responsibility to pay for them, what possible use for my money is more important than giving them as much support as I can".
I think the most basic component of a (successful) traditional marriage would be shared duty, both to the marriage itself, AND to something higher than the marriage itself. It's very different from marriage as a romantic fulfilment. Which you can still have, which is still even treated as something you can want, but when the marriage isn't romantically fulfilling but everyone is still doing their duties that's still considered a successful marriage, whereas in more modern culture I think it's considered a failure. (Fwiw I think the modern view has seeped into more traditional circles as well, but there's a clear generational shift I can see, because older couples are much more likely to think as I described)
I usually wonder about this kind of thing in a different sense, because men in spheres bemoaning lack of trad values often mention virginity but I'm never clear on if they're offering the same virginity themselves. And also if they're offering to respect their (prospective) girlfriend's desire for virginity until marriage and would indeed marry her without having sex.
Hieronymus
34m ago
A big change happens in the social environment when you achieve a critical mass of family, friends, and neighbors who will hold you to what you and they believe to be right.
If you are a social conservative in a progressive setting, you can expect that a majority of your friends are more liberal than you, even if they are very conservative by local standards; a majority of their friends are more liberal than they, and so on along the gradient until you hit the local norm. Difficult sacrifices are always difficult; but they get a lot harder when your friends don’t respect them, instead encouraging you to do the easier thing that they sincerely believe would be good for you.
An example:
A couple of my college friends got married. They weren’t a great match in terms of temperament, but they genuinely loved each other and could have made it work. They were on the socially conservative end of their church. They were gender egalitarian, but that’s true of almost their whole denomination, and it’s one of the rare churches where for historical reasons this is not a predictor of broader liberalism. The wedding was consciously traditional in a way that expressed the joy and solemnity of the occasion and acknowledged the givenness of the institution.
They had a kid. ADHD, and later a stroke, made it difficult for him to hold down a job. Eventually he found a crummy job that he kept for a long time. If you knew him, you would know that this reflected heroic effort on his part out of deep love for his wife and child, but most people just saw him being less flaky. It wasn’t enough to provide a middle class lifestyle on a single income as your family and I might prefer, but she didn’t expect it to be. She is very type A, and she made more money than he did in a customer service job, later landing a manager role until stress caused her to step down.
They fought. She obviously felt for years that he wasn’t doing enough for the family, but it’s not clear to me how much of that was fair and how much was his failing to carry out her orders; I suspect some of both. Eventually she left him and got a tattoo symbolizing it as a rebirth. She told him (as I found out later) that the divorce would be good for the kid. To her credit, she tried to follow through with good-faith co-parenting. Without his family, he lost his job and his living situation made joint custody impractical; child support has not made things easier. Now she is planning to remarry.
Now, I don’t know what concrete advice she got from her friends. Knowing some of them and knowing her actions, I suspect it was often, “You don’t have to suffer like this.” But I have to wonder: what if they’d had friends and a church that were more conservative than they were?
Maybe someone could have explained that the relationship dynamics that were cute when they were dating would keep them from communicating love and respect once they were married. (I wanted to beat this into them so badly for years, but I wasn’t close enough to either one that a bachelor’s unsolicited marriage advice would be listened to.) Maybe somebody could have convinced them of the goodness in headship and submission and shown how to apply it in a way that recognized her gifts while encouraging him to take a more active role in leading the family. Maybe a friend good with family finances could have run the numbers to see if she could work part time and invest the rest in ways they could live more frugally. Maybe a sympathetic business owner could have found work that suited his abilities and let him provide better. Maybe she’d have heard, “Divorce is not good for your child!” until she either listened or went deaf.
So, a couple of thoughts:
I don’t know how things are in your community. It sounds like they are by and large better off, and I am grateful for that. In mine, the friend gradient toward the norm makes this kind of thing sadly familiar. I hope to figure out what I can do to make the situation better.
Social conservative “converts” are usually in an even more difficult place than my friends when it comes to support. They don’t have the social encouragement to do the hard, countercultural thing; they don’t have someone to help them fit the pieces together in practice; and there is no one to explain the next step in muddling through. I suppose the exceptions are those literal converts lucky enough to find themselves in churches that can provide these things to get them reoriented while it is all fresh and new.
In some cases the possibility of child support can keep men from just cutting and running or give them some skin in the game. But in my friends’ case its function is to make it easier for a woman to leave her husband because she thinks he’s a drag on her, while still demanding some of the (modest but heroic) financial support he provided as her husband. I doubt that the availability of child support caused this divorce, but it has made things worse, and it’s patently unjust. I wonder what socially conservative child support reform would look like.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
31m ago
I think using power word: kill on the jailer and explaining it away as expecting him to dodge it was the stage when it became obvious who the BBEG was, especially given EY's strong views on harm.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
24m ago
You're 100% right. I do this because the regular 5-point scale has been distorted too much by average rankings: 5 is good, everything else is bad and the real ratings are 4.99, 4.95, 4.9 etc.
Hieronymus
20m ago
I usually wonder about this kind of thing in a different sense, because men in spheres bemoaning lack of trad values often mention virginity but I'm never clear on if they're offering the same virginity themselves. And also if they're offering to respect their (prospective) girlfriend's desire for virginity until marriage and would indeed marry her without having sex.
I am reminded of a pastor who praised a groom during his wedding for bringing his bride to the altar a virgin. The pastor’s homily was kind of tacky, and his exegesis wasn’t great, but I think his heart was absolutely in the right place.
Clementine
15m ago
...gotta say my reaction to that is a firm "ew". Delicacy, modesty, discretion, not saying everything out loud in public are all virtues.
Why do slaves pick cotton? It's obvious that they don't want to, and neither do white sharecroppers: but only the latter have the skills to do better jobs.
Answer: because slaves beat out sharecroppers because THEY HAVE A COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE. THEIR LABOR IS CHEAPER. IT IS LITERALLY FREE.
YOU CANNOT COMPETE WITH FREE.
Do you know why American workers are paid more? It's because their aggregate productivity is higher. And because of this, the basket of goods they have to purchase to live makes WORKING AT SLAVE WAGES ECONOMICALLY UNTENABLE.
IF SOMEONE CAN WORK AT A TENTH OF YOUR WAGES, IT IS THE SAME THING AS COMPETING WITH FREE.
You know who picked the fruit before the influx of illegal immigrants? AMERICANS! Very poor Americans, but your countrymen (I'm assuming you are American). That an entire industry is sustained by the systematic violation of immigration law is no mere accident or economic inevitability. The only reason this perverse status quo exists is for the profit margins of corporations and the electoral schemes of bourgoise liberals.
Going back to having one's food picked by one's countrymen isn't the end of the world. The job isn't pleasant. But if it paid a livable wage, then Americans would do it. Americans will do many unpleasant things for the right kind of money. Just not for the pittance given to illegal aliens.
No doubt you have some sort of smart alecky answer to this post already prepared, but I will tell you now that you're not fooling anyone. You're being ratioed (a term that as a twitter addict, you are no doubt familiar with) into the ground because your arguments are bad. Whatever you're thinking you're gaining by pretending to be retarded is diminished by the fool you are making of yourself. Then, of course, is the retreat into sour grapes. You can tell yourself that we're all chuds and we're ganging up on you, that we're all woke rights no better than the ones on the left.
That isn't the case either. But believe what you want. It's a free country. People also believe in lizardmen and astrology. You do you.
Corvos
10m ago
The thing is, you have to offer the rights/privileges if you’re going to ask for the duty. Duty without reciprocation is just exploitation.
What I’ve found is that due to inertia a lot of people expect traditional duties from men: chivalry, serving women first at meals, paying for and organising dates, being the breadwinner when necessary, child support, a certain level of strength and stoicism and respect.
But they aren’t willing to put up the traditional privileges: obedience and respect from the wife and the children.
For marriage, I don’t everyone understands and agrees on what they’re supposed to get out of it. People are constantly negotiating their wants and expectations and they don’t feel comfortable with the idea of just doing their duty because they aren’t sure what they’re going to get back from it all.
Corvos
5m ago
It’s also the case that once the just cause has triumphed for a couple of generations it will look a lot less just.
After a while, the people in charge aren’t just any more, they’re incurious conformists upholding a system whose virtues they no longer understand. Social parasites get in at the cracks. The various downstream issues the just cause creates at scale are papered over to prevent exposure.
She made the account in 2006. It has her last name but connecting that would be tenuous without knowing a lot about her. Her name also isn't the meat of the allegations. It's that a weird, politically active and well-connected account had repeated lapses in activity that could be tagged to events in the life of a similarly weird, well-connected woman, the activity halting completely when that woman was arrested.
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