I don't just arbitrarily blame the problems on growing up without a father, it's the data that says it's people growing up without a father who have these problems. While it does not necessarily follow that fatherlessness is the cause of these things (few owners of new luxury cars live under the poverty line, but giving poor people luxury cars will not raise them from the poverty line and is likely to make things worse), it nonetheless is strongly suggestive that intact families are an important factor. Logically speaking, if two people differentiated only by having an intact family exist and one is much more likely to do a bad thing than the other, then it doesn't prove there's a connection, but it strongly suggests there is a connection, which acts as strong evidence that the thing. Paramagnetic oxygen sensors are a crazy device. They operate by running two gasses in between a magnet mounted on a swing-arm attached to a magnet. In one side they run nitrogen, in the other side they run oxygen. Nitrogen is not paramagnetic and oxygen is, so there will be an unbalanced force created proportionally to they oxygen content of the gas sample. This force acts against the spring to turn a needle. Does that mean that the oxygen is the thing turning the needle? Not necessarily, maybe there's a strong magnet nearby, or some other paramagnetic material, or the spring could be damaged. But it's a strong suggestion that there's oxygen in that particular gas.
A lot of your criticisms end up coming off as a fish complaining that water is wet -- that's just the nature of the thing, and it isn't good or bad, it just is the way that that thing is.
Family structure relates to many things, and has subtle but important impacts on many parts of society.
The true nuclear family structure comes mostly from England. It exists in America because the culture in America (and many other countries) is largely derived from English culture, as you can see by the fact that we are all speaking English.
In the true nuclear family structure, a man and woman have a child, and they raise that child, and that child is expected to go out into the world become something worthwhile and find a mate of their own. When a child's parents die, there's no real expectation of what happens to their financial assets afterwards. They could end up choosing to leave those assets to their eldest son, but they could just as easily leave it to the 2nd or 3rd or 4th son, or divided equally amongst all the children, or donate it all to church or an orphanage, or their cat, it's all considered socially acceptable. You claim there is no tradition, but this family structure alone is a long-standing tradition in some cultures. You don't have to like the tradition's implications for that to be the case.
Many of the things that you criticize in your post are simply attributes of the true nuclear family structure. Children are expected to go off on their own and start building their lives once they come of age because that is the nature of the true nuclear family system. And at the end of their lives, it is not expected that children take care of their parents because they've already gone off and built their own lives, and the parents may or may not leave any inheritance.
There are many benefits to the true nuclear family structure.
Women tend to have the best treatment under a true nuclear family structure because unlike a clan family structure where the person you are going to marry is often selected before your birth, women will choose who they are going to marry from the eligible suitors, meaning that those men need to fight for the affections of those women.
You mentioned the cost of education for kids, and the cost of raising kids, but those elements are ways of looking at the world that you have inherited from the nuclear family structure. Children under the true nuclear family structure tend to be the best taken care of because the men spend so much of their early adult lives making something of themselves in order to become worthy of wife that they tend to have fewer kids, and because of that paired with the fact that the parents know full well that the kids are going to have to go out into the world and make something of themselves in turn, parents in the true nuclear family system will tend to make some of the highest investments in individual children of any family structure.
I actually write about something similar to this several times in my book The Graysonian Ethic. In the preface I talked about how one of the reasons for writing a novel length book filled with advice is my expectation that he goes off into the world at 18, and he'll need to be making a name for himself because I'll be busy making sure I'm taking care of myself and I'm not a burden to him. In the chapter entitled "our family", I explicitly talk about the walz, the tradition that tradesmen in Germany who finished their apprentices used to take where they would leave to go work under many Masters in different cities, and how I expected him to go off on his walz when he gets to the right age because that's how he will find success in life.
And because unlike other family structures you aren't constantly surrounded by your kin, the true nuclear family structures tend to have the highest levels of social trust when societies are made up of them because they have to rely on others to survive and thrive, they can't just rely on their families.
Now contrast this with endogenous and exogenous clan structure, which is much more insulated (the difference between the two is whether cousin marriage is taboo or not). In such systems, you are indeed expected to take care of your family from cradle to grave, including housing your children, arranging their marriages from very early on, and sharing assets during everyone's lives such as the family home. Such family structures tend to be significantly more controlled, usually with the family patriarch making major life decisions for individuals within the family, since the family is expected to take care of wayward sons, daughters, and cousins, you never said there's much less Liberty in selecting one's path. The family chooses your path because you are an extended unit.
Now all of this actually just goes to show how powerful family is. You might not necessarily agree with the methods of a certain family structure, but it is undeniable that family itself has a lot of power to have such massive effects on the very structure of the society that those families live within. The nuclear family structure built some of the largest and most powerful countries on earth or in world history, and contributed to both pax Brittania and pax Americana, eras of hegemonic world peace.
Whether you're a Russian novelist or a stripper named Desiree, you should stop trying to mindread others through projection because you keep getting things wrong. Being a parent, for the act of parenthood, they are both things that one does because they are your duty not because you love those things. And you do your duty because you love your child.
My son is just a little bit needy like I am, and I love that about him. Any time I'm sitting down he'll come ask me to play with him. He's also a trickster like his mom, he jokes around all the time. He loves nature, and unlike most children I've ever seen in my life he is so gentle towards it. He will touch a leaf or a flower, and most kids would just tear the leaf right off the tree or destroy the flower, but he just very gently touches it leaving it exactly the way that he found it. Today we were at the park, and several times he took a piece of litter off the ground and walked all the way over to the trash can and dropped it in a bunch of times, without any prompting from me. So don't tell me I don't love my child, because you're wrong and it makes you look stupid.
Your statement that "passing politics and religion without giving a choice is indoctrination" is not in line with the facts presented. Everyone has a choice as to whether to follow their parents. According to the numbers, between 10 and 20% of people choose not to follow their parents. One of the powers of family is that people willingly choose to do the same thing as their parents, not that they are forced to follow their parents.
Your final paragraph is a non-sequitur and appears to assume I'm from the US? Congratulations on your moral outrage that society isn't replacing fathers, but that moral outrage seems to prove my point rather than disproving it. Family is a powerful thing. It isn't always right, that's not where power comes from. There are criticisms of may thing with power such as the state, the church, family, but they are still things with power. Unlike most of those things, family is something inherited and inherent, and this whole discussion has proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that it is powerful.
I don't need to prove that family is good, or that a given family tradition is good, I only need to prove that family is something with power and the data that I've presented, and the arguments that I presented I think overwhelmingly support that idea. You don't need to prove that family is bad, or a certain family tradition is bad, was that a certain society is bad, you need to prove that family doesn't have power, and instead, your arguments inherently support the idea that they do have power because you wish that power was used differently.
A lot of your criticisms end up coming off as a fish complaining that water is wet -- that's just the nature of the thing, and it isn't good or bad, it just is the way that that thing is.
Family structure relates to many things, and has subtle but important impacts on many parts of society.
The true nuclear family structure comes mostly from England. It exists in America because the culture in America (and many other countries) is largely derived from English culture, as you can see by the fact that we are all speaking English.
In the true nuclear family structure, a man and woman have a child, and they raise that child, and that child is expected to go out into the world become something worthwhile and find a mate of their own. When a child's parents die, there's no real expectation of what happens to their financial assets afterwards. They could end up choosing to leave those assets to their eldest son, but they could just as easily leave it to the 2nd or 3rd or 4th son, or divided equally amongst all the children, or donate it all to church or an orphanage, or their cat, it's all considered socially acceptable. You claim there is no tradition, but this family structure alone is a long-standing tradition in some cultures. You don't have to like the tradition's implications for that to be the case.
Many of the things that you criticize in your post are simply attributes of the true nuclear family structure. Children are expected to go off on their own and start building their lives once they come of age because that is the nature of the true nuclear family system. And at the end of their lives, it is not expected that children take care of their parents because they've already gone off and built their own lives, and the parents may or may not leave any inheritance.
There are many benefits to the true nuclear family structure.
Women tend to have the best treatment under a true nuclear family structure because unlike a clan family structure where the person you are going to marry is often selected before your birth, women will choose who they are going to marry from the eligible suitors, meaning that those men need to fight for the affections of those women.
You mentioned the cost of education for kids, and the cost of raising kids, but those elements are ways of looking at the world that you have inherited from the nuclear family structure. Children under the true nuclear family structure tend to be the best taken care of because the men spend so much of their early adult lives making something of themselves in order to become worthy of wife that they tend to have fewer kids, and because of that paired with the fact that the parents know full well that the kids are going to have to go out into the world and make something of themselves in turn, parents in the true nuclear family system will tend to make some of the highest investments in individual children of any family structure.
I actually write about something similar to this several times in my book The Graysonian Ethic. In the preface I talked about how one of the reasons for writing a novel length book filled with advice is my expectation that he goes off into the world at 18, and he'll need to be making a name for himself because I'll be busy making sure I'm taking care of myself and I'm not a burden to him. In the chapter entitled "our family", I explicitly talk about the walz, the tradition that tradesmen in Germany who finished their apprentices used to take where they would leave to go work under many Masters in different cities, and how I expected him to go off on his walz when he gets to the right age because that's how he will find success in life.
And because unlike other family structures you aren't constantly surrounded by your kin, the true nuclear family structures tend to have the highest levels of social trust when societies are made up of them because they have to rely on others to survive and thrive, they can't just rely on their families.
Now contrast this with endogenous and exogenous clan structure, which is much more insulated (the difference between the two is whether cousin marriage is taboo or not). In such systems, you are indeed expected to take care of your family from cradle to grave, including housing your children, arranging their marriages from very early on, and sharing assets during everyone's lives such as the family home. Such family structures tend to be significantly more controlled, usually with the family patriarch making major life decisions for individuals within the family, since the family is expected to take care of wayward sons, daughters, and cousins, you never said there's much less Liberty in selecting one's path. The family chooses your path because you are an extended unit.
Now all of this actually just goes to show how powerful family is. You might not necessarily agree with the methods of a certain family structure, but it is undeniable that family itself has a lot of power to have such massive effects on the very structure of the society that those families live within. The nuclear family structure built some of the largest and most powerful countries on earth or in world history, and contributed to both pax Brittania and pax Americana, eras of hegemonic world peace.
Whether you're a Russian novelist or a stripper named Desiree, you should stop trying to mindread others through projection because you keep getting things wrong. Being a parent, for the act of parenthood, they are both things that one does because they are your duty not because you love those things. And you do your duty because you love your child.
My son is just a little bit needy like I am, and I love that about him. Any time I'm sitting down he'll come ask me to play with him. He's also a trickster like his mom, he jokes around all the time. He loves nature, and unlike most children I've ever seen in my life he is so gentle towards it. He will touch a leaf or a flower, and most kids would just tear the leaf right off the tree or destroy the flower, but he just very gently touches it leaving it exactly the way that he found it. Today we were at the park, and several times he took a piece of litter off the ground and walked all the way over to the trash can and dropped it in a bunch of times, without any prompting from me. So don't tell me I don't love my child, because you're wrong and it makes you look stupid.
Your statement that "passing politics and religion without giving a choice is indoctrination" is not in line with the facts presented. Everyone has a choice as to whether to follow their parents. According to the numbers, between 10 and 20% of people choose not to follow their parents. One of the powers of family is that people willingly choose to do the same thing as their parents, not that they are forced to follow their parents.
Your final paragraph is a non-sequitur and appears to assume I'm from the US? Congratulations on your moral outrage that society isn't replacing fathers, but that moral outrage seems to prove my point rather than disproving it. Family is a powerful thing. It isn't always right, that's not where power comes from. There are criticisms of may thing with power such as the state, the church, family, but they are still things with power. Unlike most of those things, family is something inherited and inherent, and this whole discussion has proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that it is powerful.
I don't need to prove that family is good, or that a given family tradition is good, I only need to prove that family is something with power and the data that I've presented, and the arguments that I presented I think overwhelmingly support that idea. You don't need to prove that family is bad, or a certain family tradition is bad, was that a certain society is bad, you need to prove that family doesn't have power, and instead, your arguments inherently support the idea that they do have power because you wish that power was used differently.
Finally starting to get into starting up the Amiga 500 I found at a yard sale.
Well, I failed pretty catastrophically at upgrading my gotek (maybe), I'm going to have to see but at this point it looks like the oled screen is working but the rotary encoder isn't working at all. I'm just a hop skip and a jump away from being able to open up a boot disk though!
I've also got the RGB2HDMI installed, though without a firmware. I have a usb set up for the gotek with a boot disk image and a micro sd card with the rgb2hdmi, so next step is going to be trying both out.
One issue I found was unrelated to the computer: Left it in the garage and found out that local wildlife really likes munching on brand new power supply cables. Which is annoying...
Well, I failed pretty catastrophically at upgrading my gotek (maybe), I'm going to have to see but at this point it looks like the oled screen is working but the rotary encoder isn't working at all. I'm just a hop skip and a jump away from being able to open up a boot disk though!
I've also got the RGB2HDMI installed, though without a firmware. I have a usb set up for the gotek with a boot disk image and a micro sd card with the rgb2hdmi, so next step is going to be trying both out.
One issue I found was unrelated to the computer: Left it in the garage and found out that local wildlife really likes munching on brand new power supply cables. Which is annoying...
One of the thought-terminating cliches is with respect to marginal tax rates. "People don't understand economics you can't make more money and take home less money". I think that often takes legitimately bad arguments and groups them in with legitimately good arguments.
First let's be clear: the amount of money you take home after taxes isn't economics, it's finance. The distinction is that economics is the study of incentives, finance is the study of accounting. The two are closely related, but not the same thing. As an example, finance is saying "if we increase taxes by 10% it'll bring in another 15 billion dollars based on our current tax receipts of 150 billion" but economics is "the laffer curve suggests that as you raise taxes economic output drops and so eventually additional taxation doesn't result in additional tax revenue"
If you work lots of overtime in some places, it wipes out the time and a half wage advantage altogether and can hit your additional pay at the maximum marginal rate federally and for your region. My first dollar is tax free, but overtime pay gets hammered for nearly 50% and so you see this massive top line number and an insignificant bottom line number. You're not making less money, but for the burden of spending 10, 12, 16 hours of your day and the accompanying strain it's not worth the pain of working extra. Besides direct taxes, overtime and bonuses in Canada at least also end up getting hit with cpp and ei, so while your marginal tax rate is one thing, the total tax burden on the individual for that dollar is quite another.
Same with bonuses. Company pays out a bunch of money, but unless you lock it up in a 401k a significant portion heads to the government at various levels.
The legitimate argument saying you won't work additional overtime due to taxes isn't about not making any more money, it's about the marginal value of your time vs. the marginal payment for that time. Your last hour is more valuable to you than your first hour, but you may earn less for that last hour than you did for the first hour and so people won't work overtime because the marginal payment on offer doesn't match the marginal value and people would rather do something else with that time.
First let's be clear: the amount of money you take home after taxes isn't economics, it's finance. The distinction is that economics is the study of incentives, finance is the study of accounting. The two are closely related, but not the same thing. As an example, finance is saying "if we increase taxes by 10% it'll bring in another 15 billion dollars based on our current tax receipts of 150 billion" but economics is "the laffer curve suggests that as you raise taxes economic output drops and so eventually additional taxation doesn't result in additional tax revenue"
If you work lots of overtime in some places, it wipes out the time and a half wage advantage altogether and can hit your additional pay at the maximum marginal rate federally and for your region. My first dollar is tax free, but overtime pay gets hammered for nearly 50% and so you see this massive top line number and an insignificant bottom line number. You're not making less money, but for the burden of spending 10, 12, 16 hours of your day and the accompanying strain it's not worth the pain of working extra. Besides direct taxes, overtime and bonuses in Canada at least also end up getting hit with cpp and ei, so while your marginal tax rate is one thing, the total tax burden on the individual for that dollar is quite another.
Same with bonuses. Company pays out a bunch of money, but unless you lock it up in a 401k a significant portion heads to the government at various levels.
The legitimate argument saying you won't work additional overtime due to taxes isn't about not making any more money, it's about the marginal value of your time vs. the marginal payment for that time. Your last hour is more valuable to you than your first hour, but you may earn less for that last hour than you did for the first hour and so people won't work overtime because the marginal payment on offer doesn't match the marginal value and people would rather do something else with that time.
In the recent past I spoke about the two different kinds of "idiocracy" out there. Today I was thinking about how it can apply to the phrase "correlation does not imply causation".
One of the subplots in Idiocracy is that the people in the idiot future are dying of starvation because instead of watering plants with water, they're watering plants with an energy drink called "brawndo". In the movie, people outsource their understanding to catchphrases such as "brawndo has electrolytes, it has what plants crave" and they repeat those catchphrases mindlessly, assuming that there's an expert somewhere who knows what they're doing that claimed this. In the end of the movie, disaster is averted for society and also for the main character when it's shown that the farms are growing again now that the farms are being watered with water instead of brawndo.
I recently started to take issue with the phrase "correlation does not imply causation" because of course correlation can imply causation. It might not mathematically prove causation, but all of science is based on people inferring potential causation based on correlation and using that implication as a starting point to see if you can prove it.
I think it matters a lot what people mean by "imply". I'm sure that in correlation and perhaps formal logic "imply" is an ironclad rule whereby A must always imply B or A does not imply B, but in human communications, implication is a fuzzier concept where something can imply something without that thing being true.
One important thing with respect to this discussion about the word imply is that we have 2 forms of "idiocracy" at the moment, one being the anti-intellectual populist version, but the other being the pseudo-intellectual elitist version. The latter may use phrases like "correlation does not imply causation" similarly to the former's "but brawndo has electrolytes" -- so in the movie, after they give the plants water instead of brawndo and plants start to grow, the anti-intellectuals may accept that, but the pseudo-intellectuals would start chanting "correlation does not imply causation" and even in the face of evidence of plants growing in fields that were dead previously choose to ignore it until some outsourced competent person (who doesn't exist in that universe anymore) claims the causation is now implied using a peer reviewed study (a process that pseudo-intellectuals will hold as sacrosanct without understanding what it means or the limitations of it as a medium). Alternatively, I can imagine "Brawndo is killing the plants? It looks like we've got a conspiracy theorist over here! I think that Brawndo would know not to water plants with something that would kill them!"
In some ways, the pseudo-intellectual elitist idiocracy is a cargo cult, where people act like smart people assuming that doing so will make them smart, when in reality they're just taking on the trappings of this group they want to be like without fully understanding what they're doing. In doing so, much like the euphemism treadmill takes gentle euphemism and sees them become the new slur, tools of intellectual rigor are used to attack what could be rigorous thought.
One of the subplots in Idiocracy is that the people in the idiot future are dying of starvation because instead of watering plants with water, they're watering plants with an energy drink called "brawndo". In the movie, people outsource their understanding to catchphrases such as "brawndo has electrolytes, it has what plants crave" and they repeat those catchphrases mindlessly, assuming that there's an expert somewhere who knows what they're doing that claimed this. In the end of the movie, disaster is averted for society and also for the main character when it's shown that the farms are growing again now that the farms are being watered with water instead of brawndo.
I recently started to take issue with the phrase "correlation does not imply causation" because of course correlation can imply causation. It might not mathematically prove causation, but all of science is based on people inferring potential causation based on correlation and using that implication as a starting point to see if you can prove it.
I think it matters a lot what people mean by "imply". I'm sure that in correlation and perhaps formal logic "imply" is an ironclad rule whereby A must always imply B or A does not imply B, but in human communications, implication is a fuzzier concept where something can imply something without that thing being true.
One important thing with respect to this discussion about the word imply is that we have 2 forms of "idiocracy" at the moment, one being the anti-intellectual populist version, but the other being the pseudo-intellectual elitist version. The latter may use phrases like "correlation does not imply causation" similarly to the former's "but brawndo has electrolytes" -- so in the movie, after they give the plants water instead of brawndo and plants start to grow, the anti-intellectuals may accept that, but the pseudo-intellectuals would start chanting "correlation does not imply causation" and even in the face of evidence of plants growing in fields that were dead previously choose to ignore it until some outsourced competent person (who doesn't exist in that universe anymore) claims the causation is now implied using a peer reviewed study (a process that pseudo-intellectuals will hold as sacrosanct without understanding what it means or the limitations of it as a medium). Alternatively, I can imagine "Brawndo is killing the plants? It looks like we've got a conspiracy theorist over here! I think that Brawndo would know not to water plants with something that would kill them!"
In some ways, the pseudo-intellectual elitist idiocracy is a cargo cult, where people act like smart people assuming that doing so will make them smart, when in reality they're just taking on the trappings of this group they want to be like without fully understanding what they're doing. In doing so, much like the euphemism treadmill takes gentle euphemism and sees them become the new slur, tools of intellectual rigor are used to attack what could be rigorous thought.
Perhaps you hate your kids and your kids hate you, but I love my parents, and I love my kids, and at least at this point my kids love me (We'll see if they still do when puberty hits).
But you don't need to love your family for it to be a source of power. A fish who has always lived in a pond is made up of whatever was in that pond, and in the same way parents have an overwhelming effect on their children, even if the children don't like their parents.
The difference in outcomes between intact families and non-intact families is overwhelming. There's sources out there claiming that 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes. 90% of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes. 85% of all children who show behavior disorders come from fatherless homes. 80% of rapists with anger problems come from fatherless homes. 71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes. 75% of all adolescent patients in chemical abuse centers come from fatherless homes. 70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions come from fatherless homes. 85% of all youths sitting in prisons grew up in a fatherless home.
Many of these differences in outcome seem to remain after being corrected for incomes.
According to Pew Research, most U.S. parents pass along their religion and politics to their children. Their data suggests an overwhelming correlation, nearly 80% and in some cases closer to 90% in terms of both religion and politics, in all directions. This finding came about despite most parents on surveys not prioritizing this result.
The state of the art in early childhood development shows that families model human behavior for their children as early as before birth. Before children can speak or play, they see how adults around them behave and how they interact and those become fundamental social lessons that early on. Early on our brains have all kinds of neural connections and those connections die off as they are used less and strengthened as they are used more, so the stimuli provided by families in the earliest years of life have a lasting impact on children's neurological development. A natural experiment in Romania under a communist dictator had many children living in state orphanages where they stared at a white ceiling for 8 hours a day and the impact on doing that was effectively permanent brain damage.
Finally, bonds of family are still some of the strongest in humanity, and that's been the case for most of human history, and it's still the case for most of the world today. A few strange societies such as the English have a true nuclear family system, but most of asia, the middle east, and large chunks of north africa are various clan based social structures even today (often with cousin marriage allowed), and even Europe has many cultures that are based strongly around the clan structure without cousin marriage.
Various forms of nuclear family can be sustainable because they're still based around the family, but what isn't sustainable is the idea of an atomized world that tries to destroy the family as a structure. Our atomized existence today is unusual, and not particularly sustainable. The future is with families, in one form or another.
That's all testament to the undeniable power of family, and that's something an outsider can't just bully their way into -- the moment they interject, they're interjecting as something other than family.
But you don't need to love your family for it to be a source of power. A fish who has always lived in a pond is made up of whatever was in that pond, and in the same way parents have an overwhelming effect on their children, even if the children don't like their parents.
The difference in outcomes between intact families and non-intact families is overwhelming. There's sources out there claiming that 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes. 90% of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes. 85% of all children who show behavior disorders come from fatherless homes. 80% of rapists with anger problems come from fatherless homes. 71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes. 75% of all adolescent patients in chemical abuse centers come from fatherless homes. 70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions come from fatherless homes. 85% of all youths sitting in prisons grew up in a fatherless home.
Many of these differences in outcome seem to remain after being corrected for incomes.
According to Pew Research, most U.S. parents pass along their religion and politics to their children. Their data suggests an overwhelming correlation, nearly 80% and in some cases closer to 90% in terms of both religion and politics, in all directions. This finding came about despite most parents on surveys not prioritizing this result.
The state of the art in early childhood development shows that families model human behavior for their children as early as before birth. Before children can speak or play, they see how adults around them behave and how they interact and those become fundamental social lessons that early on. Early on our brains have all kinds of neural connections and those connections die off as they are used less and strengthened as they are used more, so the stimuli provided by families in the earliest years of life have a lasting impact on children's neurological development. A natural experiment in Romania under a communist dictator had many children living in state orphanages where they stared at a white ceiling for 8 hours a day and the impact on doing that was effectively permanent brain damage.
Finally, bonds of family are still some of the strongest in humanity, and that's been the case for most of human history, and it's still the case for most of the world today. A few strange societies such as the English have a true nuclear family system, but most of asia, the middle east, and large chunks of north africa are various clan based social structures even today (often with cousin marriage allowed), and even Europe has many cultures that are based strongly around the clan structure without cousin marriage.
Various forms of nuclear family can be sustainable because they're still based around the family, but what isn't sustainable is the idea of an atomized world that tries to destroy the family as a structure. Our atomized existence today is unusual, and not particularly sustainable. The future is with families, in one form or another.
That's all testament to the undeniable power of family, and that's something an outsider can't just bully their way into -- the moment they interject, they're interjecting as something other than family.
Leftists want to abolish family because it's a form of power they can't wield universally against their enemies. It's a club they can't bully their way into.
you guys need to try out vcvoid. its really good and its free because they want to achieve a monopoly on voids.
I was just thinking of something...
We live in a highly individualistic society, and a society which seeks to blame others for a lot of what's going on.
We blame our parents for not spending enough time with us, or for mistakes they made raising us, or for being part of a generation that made poor political decisions.
We wonder why we aren't able to reach the heights we think we're deserving of -- why do we have to work so hard for so little, to never get a boat or a big SUV, or a brand new car?
But then I get to thinking about the fact that we're temporary residents of this Earth, and for most of us we've got more time behind us than ahead of us, it feels like we're asking the wrong questions.
There's a particular genre out of China called regression where someone goes back in time to an earlier part of their lives, and another called cultivation where people use special knowledge of the world to become the strongest, and these two combine to create a very specific genre of the regressor-cultivator. These are stories of using your knowledge of the past and your secret knowledge of the world to do better in a new life. Reading these stories I can't help but think of them as representations of people's secret desire to have and raise children and give those children a better life than they had.
In this way, we use our accumulated wisdom for another throw of the dice -- a better throw. Knowing where the pitfalls lay in our "first lives", we can fight to confer wisdom to our children so they can get that better throw.
There are two futures ahead of many of us: In one future, we disappear, we cease to exist entirely because we spent our fleeting time on earth chasing better for ourselves. In another future, we live on through our genetic progeny, but more importantly through the culture we have a chance to create in new family stories that could be passed down for generations.
Many people want "a legacy" that involves changing the entire world, but when you think about it, the miracle of being able to change just one life is something worthwhile in itself (and even better if it's more lives, good people should have lots of kids if they can). You don't need to "save the world or destroy it" as many narcissists in my generation might say, you just need to protect and improve your little corner of the world. And it isn't about money, it's about time and effort and care.
Those who cultivate humanity's next generation don't simply plant a seed and walk away. To do so is not to fulfil the duty written into our existence. Instead, it's to plant that seed, help it sprout, care for it, provide fertilizer and keep weeds and insects away, water it and watch for disease or problems with soil conditions. Our farmer ancestors would spend much of the growing season working from sun-up to sundown, and through the summer months the work would not end, and in the autumn there would be as much work as ever, long days from sun-up to sundown, harvesting the crop and preparing for the winter season by nurturing the soil, planting winter crops, and preparing preserves for long winters ahead. It wasn't easy. A lot of people failed along the way, but this back breaking labour build civilizations, one acre at a time.
Imagine for a second, 4 billion years ago, and a lightning strike hit a puddle of goo, and the first amino acids formed. A while later, those amino acids started to combine, and eventually the building blocks of life happened to over countless natural experiments became structures that built themselves. A goo of life without even things we consider natural such as cell walls, and that life survived and thrived and sometimes faced mass extinctions, and that goo is your ancestor, as are single celled organisms, as are sea creatures so strange you'd be awed by their bizarre looks, as are all the steps to the small warm-blooded creatures who survived the long winter caused by the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs, and those tiny creatures are your ancestors too, and they were given the spark of life, and they carried it for a time, and they passed it on. And over millions of years, aeons so long that even microorganisms could build mountains such as the white cliffs of Dover, which are made out of tiny sea creatures that lived and died and their corpses created mountains, and that spark from the very first puddle of goo continued to be passed on. Through early hominids, to modern humans, and from using rocks as tools to finding metals, to the industrial revolution, to the information revolution, and all the while that spark keeps being passed on, and deep in your blood there's lessons perhaps going back as early as that puddle of goo 4 billion years ago hiding there, driving you to live on and pass on that spark, up until your grandparents, and your parents, and now you. And for many people they will take that miraculous 4 billion year spark passed down from a puddle of goo and extinguish it. How selfish. And just imagine, some of these selfish creatures believe they're saving the world in doing so!
For people who think they're very important, it must be a shock to think about how small they are in the great chain of life. For those who think they're very unimportant, it must be a shock to think about how critical they are in passing it on to the next generation.
With the creation of modern man, a second spark was created. Our brains are layered. The reptilian brain deals with the basest of instincts and fundamental life systems such as the beating of your heart and the breathing in your chest when you don't think about it. The mammalian brain deals with emotions and different kinds of memories. The Human brain is genius, and can predict the future, knows good from evil, and knows that one day we will die, the heavy price we pay for that superpower. The mammals can remember their lives, but humans invented recorded history. The story of 7 Pleiades sisters is interesting because the cluster of stars that make up that constellation appears to only contain 6 stars, but hundreds of thousands of years ago, there would have been 7 stars. The story of 7 sisters, and one of them disappearing was passed down for that long, and how many people don't think it's worth remembering? How many stories from our past will be erased so we can focus on meaningless pop culture created by people who hate us? That second spark is our culture, and it's far deeper and goes back far longer than we can understand.
Although I criticize pop culture, that doesn't mean the second spark is something to be kept locked up in a cage never to be released. Culture in stasis dies. In addition to passing on the intellectual lineage of our ancestors, we also must work to contribute our piece to that story. It means reading the classic stories, and creating new stories. And some of those stories are small stories for your small corner of the world. Pass on the story of your ancestors because that's a tiny spark within a spark that will certainly die if you don't pass it on.
I also speak of family, but that doesn't mean I'm limiting my viewpoint to just a nuclear family. The nuclear family structure itself requires individuals to build social networks with the people around them even if they aren't family, and we need to build those bonds because a single family of a father, a mother, and 2.5 kids cannot truly thrive. We need friends, we need community events, we need to go outside and see people who we perceive as friendly because otherwise your little slice of the world becomes too little.
Moreover, even the most diligent farmer can't monitor his fields 24/7. Eventually everyone needs to sleep, and in those moments perhaps birds come and eat all your seed? Building a community you can trust is to spread out that burden, and passing on that second spark of culture is to build scarecrows and wire fences to protect from animals and birds.
To bring this back to the beginning, does what I'm saying that we should never think as individuals, never act as individuals, and that all personal success is meaningless? Of course not. For many reasons. The world will write the unworthy individuals out of it regardless of grand designs on passing on the spark of life, so individuals must fight for their future. One must fight to be worthy of survival. One must fight to be worthy of reproduction. One must fight to be worthy of staying in their children's lives. One must fight to be worthy to raise their children right, one must fight to be worthy of being remembered. Community can support good people, but the good people must build themselves as well because it is carried on the strong backs of the community members.
We live in a highly individualistic society, and a society which seeks to blame others for a lot of what's going on.
We blame our parents for not spending enough time with us, or for mistakes they made raising us, or for being part of a generation that made poor political decisions.
We wonder why we aren't able to reach the heights we think we're deserving of -- why do we have to work so hard for so little, to never get a boat or a big SUV, or a brand new car?
But then I get to thinking about the fact that we're temporary residents of this Earth, and for most of us we've got more time behind us than ahead of us, it feels like we're asking the wrong questions.
There's a particular genre out of China called regression where someone goes back in time to an earlier part of their lives, and another called cultivation where people use special knowledge of the world to become the strongest, and these two combine to create a very specific genre of the regressor-cultivator. These are stories of using your knowledge of the past and your secret knowledge of the world to do better in a new life. Reading these stories I can't help but think of them as representations of people's secret desire to have and raise children and give those children a better life than they had.
In this way, we use our accumulated wisdom for another throw of the dice -- a better throw. Knowing where the pitfalls lay in our "first lives", we can fight to confer wisdom to our children so they can get that better throw.
There are two futures ahead of many of us: In one future, we disappear, we cease to exist entirely because we spent our fleeting time on earth chasing better for ourselves. In another future, we live on through our genetic progeny, but more importantly through the culture we have a chance to create in new family stories that could be passed down for generations.
Many people want "a legacy" that involves changing the entire world, but when you think about it, the miracle of being able to change just one life is something worthwhile in itself (and even better if it's more lives, good people should have lots of kids if they can). You don't need to "save the world or destroy it" as many narcissists in my generation might say, you just need to protect and improve your little corner of the world. And it isn't about money, it's about time and effort and care.
Those who cultivate humanity's next generation don't simply plant a seed and walk away. To do so is not to fulfil the duty written into our existence. Instead, it's to plant that seed, help it sprout, care for it, provide fertilizer and keep weeds and insects away, water it and watch for disease or problems with soil conditions. Our farmer ancestors would spend much of the growing season working from sun-up to sundown, and through the summer months the work would not end, and in the autumn there would be as much work as ever, long days from sun-up to sundown, harvesting the crop and preparing for the winter season by nurturing the soil, planting winter crops, and preparing preserves for long winters ahead. It wasn't easy. A lot of people failed along the way, but this back breaking labour build civilizations, one acre at a time.
Imagine for a second, 4 billion years ago, and a lightning strike hit a puddle of goo, and the first amino acids formed. A while later, those amino acids started to combine, and eventually the building blocks of life happened to over countless natural experiments became structures that built themselves. A goo of life without even things we consider natural such as cell walls, and that life survived and thrived and sometimes faced mass extinctions, and that goo is your ancestor, as are single celled organisms, as are sea creatures so strange you'd be awed by their bizarre looks, as are all the steps to the small warm-blooded creatures who survived the long winter caused by the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs, and those tiny creatures are your ancestors too, and they were given the spark of life, and they carried it for a time, and they passed it on. And over millions of years, aeons so long that even microorganisms could build mountains such as the white cliffs of Dover, which are made out of tiny sea creatures that lived and died and their corpses created mountains, and that spark from the very first puddle of goo continued to be passed on. Through early hominids, to modern humans, and from using rocks as tools to finding metals, to the industrial revolution, to the information revolution, and all the while that spark keeps being passed on, and deep in your blood there's lessons perhaps going back as early as that puddle of goo 4 billion years ago hiding there, driving you to live on and pass on that spark, up until your grandparents, and your parents, and now you. And for many people they will take that miraculous 4 billion year spark passed down from a puddle of goo and extinguish it. How selfish. And just imagine, some of these selfish creatures believe they're saving the world in doing so!
For people who think they're very important, it must be a shock to think about how small they are in the great chain of life. For those who think they're very unimportant, it must be a shock to think about how critical they are in passing it on to the next generation.
With the creation of modern man, a second spark was created. Our brains are layered. The reptilian brain deals with the basest of instincts and fundamental life systems such as the beating of your heart and the breathing in your chest when you don't think about it. The mammalian brain deals with emotions and different kinds of memories. The Human brain is genius, and can predict the future, knows good from evil, and knows that one day we will die, the heavy price we pay for that superpower. The mammals can remember their lives, but humans invented recorded history. The story of 7 Pleiades sisters is interesting because the cluster of stars that make up that constellation appears to only contain 6 stars, but hundreds of thousands of years ago, there would have been 7 stars. The story of 7 sisters, and one of them disappearing was passed down for that long, and how many people don't think it's worth remembering? How many stories from our past will be erased so we can focus on meaningless pop culture created by people who hate us? That second spark is our culture, and it's far deeper and goes back far longer than we can understand.
Although I criticize pop culture, that doesn't mean the second spark is something to be kept locked up in a cage never to be released. Culture in stasis dies. In addition to passing on the intellectual lineage of our ancestors, we also must work to contribute our piece to that story. It means reading the classic stories, and creating new stories. And some of those stories are small stories for your small corner of the world. Pass on the story of your ancestors because that's a tiny spark within a spark that will certainly die if you don't pass it on.
I also speak of family, but that doesn't mean I'm limiting my viewpoint to just a nuclear family. The nuclear family structure itself requires individuals to build social networks with the people around them even if they aren't family, and we need to build those bonds because a single family of a father, a mother, and 2.5 kids cannot truly thrive. We need friends, we need community events, we need to go outside and see people who we perceive as friendly because otherwise your little slice of the world becomes too little.
Moreover, even the most diligent farmer can't monitor his fields 24/7. Eventually everyone needs to sleep, and in those moments perhaps birds come and eat all your seed? Building a community you can trust is to spread out that burden, and passing on that second spark of culture is to build scarecrows and wire fences to protect from animals and birds.
To bring this back to the beginning, does what I'm saying that we should never think as individuals, never act as individuals, and that all personal success is meaningless? Of course not. For many reasons. The world will write the unworthy individuals out of it regardless of grand designs on passing on the spark of life, so individuals must fight for their future. One must fight to be worthy of survival. One must fight to be worthy of reproduction. One must fight to be worthy of staying in their children's lives. One must fight to be worthy to raise their children right, one must fight to be worthy of being remembered. Community can support good people, but the good people must build themselves as well because it is carried on the strong backs of the community members.
It doesn't matter if she won or lost, Harris is a weak candidate in general so win or lose the more people see her the less they like her and the worse she'll do in the general. Trump wins the more America actually sees her outside of the museum showrooms she's been sticking to.
There's a reason they kept her locked in the basement for the last 3 and a half years, it's because she's unlikable and seems to be condescending to an American audience she almost seems to see as beneath her.
I think the Dems are running a weaker candidate than they could otherwise run on purpose. There's a few reasons they might do so, for example keeping their powder dry for 2028 because win or lose any candidate running against Trump will get dirty, and also most indicators are suggesting a major recession incoming any time now and if that happens there'll likely be a sovereign debt crisis afterwards. Who wants to be holding that bag? Maybe Trump, but even some Republicans are secretly hoping they lose this election.
There's a reason they kept her locked in the basement for the last 3 and a half years, it's because she's unlikable and seems to be condescending to an American audience she almost seems to see as beneath her.
I think the Dems are running a weaker candidate than they could otherwise run on purpose. There's a few reasons they might do so, for example keeping their powder dry for 2028 because win or lose any candidate running against Trump will get dirty, and also most indicators are suggesting a major recession incoming any time now and if that happens there'll likely be a sovereign debt crisis afterwards. Who wants to be holding that bag? Maybe Trump, but even some Republicans are secretly hoping they lose this election.
I saw a bunch of people pretty frustrated that Trump didn't do a better job, but public opinion is like turning a cruise ship, we won't know for sure for a bit what the outcome actually was since there's a delay between the event and the action.
I'll have to wait and see how things pan out, but I still think that any time Kamala gets a chance to talk her approval rating goes down. People like the marketing materials put together by slick advertisers, but the actual product was like a presidential candidate you bought on wish.
I mean, ngl Trump is also kinda a presidential candidate you bought on wish too, but it's already at your house and everyone knows it kind of works ok. This other one keeps saying opposite things in the copy. "Ok, it says it charges with usb c and apple lightning. Which one is it?"
I mean, ngl Trump is also kinda a presidential candidate you bought on wish too, but it's already at your house and everyone knows it kind of works ok. This other one keeps saying opposite things in the copy. "Ok, it says it charges with usb c and apple lightning. Which one is it?"
https://picard.musicbrainz.org/
MusicBrainz Picard ended up being a really useful tool for me today. It's open source but does rely on the proprietary MusicBrainz service, but it let me go through all my music and give it proper tagging from a database, even the stuff I ripped from a tape recorded vinyl record 20 years ago. Then I was able to take the properly tagged music and use the tags to name the files and put them into proper directories.
MusicBrainz Picard ended up being a really useful tool for me today. It's open source but does rely on the proprietary MusicBrainz service, but it let me go through all my music and give it proper tagging from a database, even the stuff I ripped from a tape recorded vinyl record 20 years ago. Then I was able to take the properly tagged music and use the tags to name the files and put them into proper directories.
One of the reasons Kamala Harris is unelectable is "They're not gonna stop... and they should not" and raising funds for rioters. The Republicans are just proving how inept they are to not be hammering on that every hour of every day.
Of course it does. That's the only reason to have immunity. There's no need for legal immunity from something that isn't illegal.
Now, if you're talking about more limited qualified immunity lower officials have, that's a different question.
Now, if you're talking about more limited qualified immunity lower officials have, that's a different question.
And it's also true that the same sovereign immunity that protects Trump protects the head of the DHS. The government won't do anything to the people who did bad in office.