Adding to AOC's analysis

here's one
Her: (bringing her phone to me) Luckbox, what does gender mean?
Me: hmm...what?
Her: Because I downloaded this new app and it wants to know my gender.
Me: It's asking if you're a boy or a girl (but actually it was asking male/female)
Her: So what do I say?
Me: Female.
Her: Female is girl?
Me: yes

No time for teaching momemts as I'm trying to get her sister to sleep.

The Great Robert Conrad - AKA Jim T West passed away today at 84.

I will be asking Well Named to allow a moment of silence in this thread for the rest of the night PST in honor of his life.

I'm not generally prone to enjoying David Brooks pieces, but I think this one is worth a read: The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake

Destroying family life, by emphasizing the nuclear family over the extended family, is an essential part of US neoliberalism/capitalism. Broken/dysfunctional nuclear families are even better. The neoliberal capitalist machine wants you completely dependent on it, so that you do its bidding.

The Dismal Kingdom: Do Economists Have Too Much Power?

Paul Romer on economics in government decision making.

Excellent quotes, though your selected quotes are all I read.

The title "The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake," highlights a (conservative) pet peeve of mine. All of the arguments in the quotes are argue why extended families are great - not in any way why nuclear families are bad. That is, we should, as a society, promote nuclear families and extended families. Nowhere in those quotes are nuclear families shown to be bad. But the title implies there is something wrong with nuclear families... when in reality, they should be supplemented with extended families, not dismantled- annoying title rant over.

The original tweet got deleted because the entire conservative twitterverse lost its collective magat mind over this lmfao

it's always the "it was just a joke/locker room talk" "**** your feelings" conservatives that are OUTRAGED and TOTALLY OFFENDED at anything they disagree with.

i would bet my net worth that multiple people in the comments that are TOTALLY OFFENDED in those posts have made a "it's just a joke snowflake" comment to a comedian telling a rape/race/anti-lgbtq/down syndrome joke..

That video is amazing

LOL. ****ing twitter.

This seems.... not good for sustainability vs a traditional vehicle

https://www.vice.com/en_in/article/y...es-they-expect

Not sure how much difference it makes in the end

LMAO

The quotes are intended as a teaser, not a summary. I definitely recommend reading the whole thing.

In any case, I don't think he's arguing that nuclear families are bad. He's arguing that our idealization of the nuclear family as the primary social unit is fragile, as evidenced by a bunch of different trends over a long period of time: declining marriage rates, increased divorce rates, single-parent households, smaller family sizes, greater social isolation, etc. The point is mostly that extended (or forged) families are less likely to suffer from shocks (deaths, unemployment, divorces, etc.) and are thus more resilient. So we should stop idealizing the nuclear family so much.

How about this thread? alt-right bullshit eh? You mean like white-supremacy? What are some examples of alt-right bullshit that I "dissemble and parrot out"?
Can you provide some? I really want to know so i can be as morally superior as you are.

I am pretty sure Marx and Engels argued that the nuclear family was a construction of capitalism, whose main function was to facilitate the ability of the bourgeoisie to exploit labor, and just as importantly pass down inherited wealth directly through a nuclear family structure. I have to say kinda makes sense.

That being said, it seems extremely possible to me that the breakdown of the nuclear family coincides with the increase in 2 earner households. One of those unintended (if you are prone to cynicism, you might actually argue very intentional) consequences of women entering the workforce en masse.

This is actually something that lines up with Elizabeth Warren's arguments in her book "Two Income Trap" (full disclosure, I never read the actual book but rather a Vox article outlining the arguments of the book). Basically, she argued that due to women entering the workforce, and resultant wage stagnation and increase in housing and education prices, starting in the 70s-80s, suddenly it was necessary to have both parents working full-time for most families to sustain a middle class lifestyle, and families became much more fragile as a result.

So, it all kind of lines up, where it seems neoliberalism is constantly evolving society to streamline the process of wealth transfer from the working class to the bourgeoisie, where women entering the workforce en mass was one of the main cataclysmic events facilitating this.

Of course, every women should have the choice to work (even when it really isn't even a choice anymore). This is a pretty obvious moral principle, which is exactly why neoliberalism works so damn well; because it utilizes straightforward moral arguments that are more or less undeniable to manipulate society to do its bidding.

Edit: In Warren's defense, her solution to the 2 income trap was not to argue women should go back to domestic life, but to modify existing laws, especially bankruptcy laws, so life wasn't so perilous for 2 income nuclear families.

I don’t think they thought it was a construction in a literal sense; more that the nuclear family is a byproduct of the emergence of private property and then came the bourgeoisie created by the exploitation (division) of labor and capital accumulation. So once private property was abolished and the state took over raising children, the nuclear family would just dissolve on its own accord since it’s an unnatural artifact to begin with, or so they argued. Yeah, it makes sense but I don’t think it’s a very popular theory with modern socialists/feminists, namely because they seem to think the structure of the family unit drives the economic structure rather than the other way around as with the Marxists. That’s my impression, anyway.
Depending on how we define the term, I’d agree there’s an element of neoliberalism but I’d stop short of defining our broad socio-economic culture as neoliberal. It seems like on one hand we have capitalism doing its thing with economic prosperity through the free market and socialism doing its thing with equality through social programs and redistribution, relatively independent of one another. And while economic prosperity and equality are somewhat opposed to one another, essentially their relationship is symbiotic because they both need something from the other so they end up working together in a sensed but it's more like independently coexisting.

I think you're referring to Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. I think John's note about "construction" is basically right from what I recall, but I've only seen a few excerpts and read one of Engels' essays on the patriarchal family. I think it's clearly true that changes in political economy are tightly bound together with changes in kinship structures, but, where Marxists will highlight the economic causation, others (Weber, some recent work on the development of so-called WEIRD societies) discuss the role of religious development as well. The correlation between the two sets of developments is clear, but I'd guess the causation is a slightly more complicated story than Engels tells. I don't think the Marxist take is entirely without merit, though.

I haven't read the book, but the Vox article does not present the causality this way:

You're presenting women's entrance to the work force as a cause of wage stagnation where Warren is not. Rather the story is that a lot of the wage gains associated with going from one to two earners in a family are offset by other associated changes in spending, and other macro-economic factors.

From a very macro perspective on labor supply and demand I'm sure it's true that there was some impact on wages from the increase in labor supply during this time (though I've read some reasonable amount on the subject, I'm not aware of any estimates). The fact that men and women tended to enter different occupations also probably limits the impact, for the same reason that occupational complementarity is important in estimates of the impact of immigrants on native wages. The economists I've read who discuss this subject (mostly Goldin, I think?) seem to talk a lot more about other factors in wage stagnation since the 70s, primarily related to globalization and the role of technology development.

You're making it sound like there was this enormous economic vs moral trade-off in women entering the workforce and the research I've seen does not paint such a simple picture about the economic side. Other very major macro factors are probably more important. We agree about the moral argument though.

Also note-worthy in the Vox article is that the last point above dovetails with the argument about the problem of resiliency which Brooks raises, e.g. in highlighting "downside risk". He's probably actually read Warren's book :P

And I think that is also a fine approach, particularly given that policies intended to make life less perilous for middle/low income families are not going to only be available to nuclear families. In general, I don't think Brooks is making a policy argument so much as a cultural/conceptual one, because our cultural ideals shape the decisions we collectively make, and those decisions are also consequential apart from policy.

You have a very half glass full approach to how well our social systems are "doing their thing". One could argue our social systems are in fact working to destabilize the proletariat classes, making them more dependent on the state, while simultaneously enriching the bourgeoisie class.

Fair enough. I probably did not do a great job delineating where Warren's ideas stopped and mine started, so do your own research before casting judgment on her based on what I said.

This is segwaying into a discussion in another thread; but I find it interesting how there is so much societal momentum to promote gender equity in the workplace, and so little societal momentum to reform bankruptcy laws.

This is just me soapboxing, but it seems to me the neoliberal system does a very good job of repressing moral ideas that actually endanger the economic system, and promoting the ones that prop it up. Watching the Super Bowl and seeing all the commercials by billion dollar multinational corporations, all trumpeting diversity, inclusion, equity, gender equality, etc. and pretty much nothing about class issues: eg. reforming labor laws, or bankruptcy laws, or medicare, or any number of things that I can't even come up with because I have been conditioned so well not to think about. And as a society it seems we just accept multibillion dollar corporations (the bourgeoisie for all intensive purposes) dictating to us what is a moral concern and what isn't.

Good, good post.

Working-class heroism sells, but who's buying?

With the viability of a candidate like Sanders, maybe the pendulum has reached its rightward apex, but I doubt it. Things aren't nearly dire enough.

Too many powerful forces are arrayed against progressive policy, like you say, unless the idea in question isn't perceived at that time as overtly dangerous.

Perhaps, they manage to promote the more innocuous concepts, while actively suppressing ideas that have proven harmful to their interests.

To follow-up lol

The foundational differences between left and right-wing political philosophy need to be understood and adhered to, if necessary, by muting the extraneous noise.

We'd be immune to all their propaganda.

So... Mistrial coming in the Roger stone trial?

lol.


i do have to say chiddy makes the best dumb comments. out of all the dumb ones, his always make me laugh

Born February 15, 1820