Marianne has a naked breast because it’s an allegory, you cretin

[Elok]

How would you create an equivalent for extramarital parenting? SoCons have already tried any number of incentives to encourage marriage; AFAIK, they don't work. The problem is simply too deeply rooted; a lot of it comes from the lack of good jobs for poorly educated men, and our massive incarceration rate which renders thousands of men unemployable, and therefore unattractive as husbands, every year. It's all interconnected (with the economic factors traceable to the Enlightenment in different ways from the social ones), and only the relatively well-to-do are insulated from the general social rot. For now.

Society is either going to correct the perverse tendencies through massive reform at all levels, or the problem will be solved in a more Darwinian fashion. I suspect the real answer will be a mixture of both.

[Aeson]

... a lot of it comes from the lack of good jobs for poorly educated men, and our massive incarceration rate which renders thousands of men unemployable, and therefore unattractive as husbands, every year.

Job/education programs and ending the drug war would be a good start to addressing those specific issues.

[Giancarlo]

How would you create an equivalent for extramarital parenting? SoCons have already tried any number of incentives to encourage marriage; AFAIK, they don't work. The problem is simply too deeply rooted; a lot of it comes from the lack of good jobs for poorly educated men, and our massive incarceration rate which renders thousands of men unemployable, and therefore unattractive as husbands, every year. It's all interconnected (with the economic factors traceable to the Enlightenment in different ways from the social ones), and only the relatively well-to-do are insulated from the general social rot. For now.

Society is either going to correct the perverse tendencies through massive reform at all levels, or the problem will be solved in a more Darwinian fashion. I suspect the real answer will be a mixture of both.

Education. Improve education. There are many openings (at least here in California) for higher skilled jobs and a lack of qualified workers for them. It would be a combination of education and retraining. And for many incarcerated for lesser offenses, a second chance and greater ability to seek government funding to improve should be on the table.

Your second paragraph describes a dystopia that simply won't happen.

Blaming greater social freedom and equality for all the social problems is not only inaccurate, it is completely preposterous.

Your argument is based on a misfounded hysteria and fear. A complete misconception that seeks to promote a previous social construct and enforce it on us of those who don't conform. It simply won't go your way, and society is changing for the better. Not for the worst.

Restricting social freedom will restrict and strangle society. Restricting social freedom in the name of freedom and security is cancerous, insidious and cruel. It is a type of philosophy authoritarian dictators use. It is an excuse so they can restrict ideas and impose a certain social construct onto society.

[pchang]

Elok starts with the assumption that marriage is good. Might be mixing up cause an effect. Higher education and income leads to stability which leads to less divorce. Instead of worrying about extramarital parenting, perhaps the real problem is poor education and societal role models for the poor.

[BeBMan]

I don't believe we need to go back to pre-Enlightenment models of government or anything like that. I do believe that it wasn't perfect, that it did leave us with problems, and we are going to have to face up to them. Enlightenment concepts of human freedom have been taken to the extreme (exemplified, for example, by certain aspects of modern libertarianism) of promoting radically selfish behavior and ignoring the way the penalties of those behaviors get offloaded onto others. To put it another way, we have promoted rights while ignoring responsibilities. And there's a thin line between individualism and atomization. See post 120.

Yeah, just to avoid misunderstandings - didn't want to pretend that "get rid of all enlightenment stuff" is your POV. Just wanted to make the point that I still regard it as generally positive, even when there are lot of points one could legitimately say against certain aspects of the age enlightenment or the practical implementation of enl. principles or the consequences.

As for #120, I totally overlooked it earlier. I have no doubt that something like a loss of social relations or a loss of "binding power" of certain kinds of groups/institutions is happening. Or that there are negative aspects like overly selfish behaviour. I can't say how serious that is in the bigger picture. Indeed it means more freedom on one side, but also a lot of difficulties stemming from that on the other (for example - like you wrote - we're under no other obligation to do more than paying taxes, but otoh the kind of ideal image of society we usually have - open, democratic, "common good" orientated etc. demands active participation of at least a critical mass of the pop doing a tad more than caring only about themselves).

The most recent extremes of the Sexual Revolution are an example of both tendencies; the majority of new mothers in the US are now unmarried. We've gone beyond breaking up existing families, and are now failing to form new ones. The consequences of such a change should be readily foreseeable--indeed, they're well-established by research. Really, they're quite horrifying. No, we do not need to go back to barefoot-and-preggers-in-the-kitchen, but more freedom is not the answer to everything. You need water to live, but that doesn't mean it can't kill you.

The tricky part is then who gets to define what level of freedom is good for someone (as noted by I think Aeson earlier), and what this would mean in result.

I also think the scientific discoveries of the Enlightenment era can and should be considered distinct from the social changes. To some extent, the two were intertwined, but science has advanced plenty under less-than-free regimes. The Abbasid caliphate comes to mind. Even ancient Greece and Rome were far from Enlightenment-type civs.

That just as an aside: sure they're pre-enlightenment, but interestingly these also belong to the relatively more "open" examples of their time. Like early Islamic countries being more open to innovation than both early medieval Euro realms as well as later Islamic countries.

I wouldn't say science/tech progress is impossible in less/non free societies, but it seems to hit limits there regularly when it collides with the ruling ideology.

[Elok]

Job/education programs and ending the drug war would be a good start to addressing those specific issues.

Ending the drug war would do something, yes. However, a large amount of our drug problem today is not trade in illicit drugs, but prescription drug abuse. People are getting wasted on perfectly legal opiates, often ones they obtained through legal channels. The sickness is not all caused by Mexican dope cartels and the like.

There's a feedback loop at work here; single parenting leads to lower income and kids who make poor choices, which leads to kids growing up into adults with poor prospects (possibly in jail), which leads to said adults not getting married, which means more single parenting. It's all tied together. The problem is only going to get worse with time if not corrected. I'm not sure what the solution is, but it will likely involve a mixture of political, cultural, and economic reform.

Jobs programs ain't gonna cut it by themselves. We can't bear the load of the entitlements we already have, and education is quite bloated in this country. You could take a hacksaw to the system--I certainly wouldn't object--but even so, government programs have extreme difficulty in adjusting to real-world demands. Moreover, I've tried retraining myself a bunch of times, and I have fallback resources most poor people can only dream of. Once you've dug a hole, it's extremely hard to dig your way out while continuing to work, especially if you have a family. Even if you managed to pay for the costs, some guy who just got out of lockup is going to have one hell of a time shedding a lifetime of bad habits and acquiring a boatload of new skills while continuing to work to support himself.

To put it another way: I once took a pre-employment survey for a temp agency that primarily staffed a manufacturing plant. I got forty questions about my drug use, my feelings concerning violence towards people who offend me, and under what circumstances I feel workman's comp fraud is justified. You are not going to take such people, shove them through a couple of years of community college, and turn them into white-collar professionals. Not without fixing the ****ty broken society which created them. Jobs are a start, but they're only a start.

Elok starts with the assumption that marriage is good. Might be mixing up cause an effect. Higher education and income leads to stability which leads to less divorce. Instead of worrying about extramarital parenting, perhaps the real problem is poor education and societal role models for the poor.

Marriage has existed for thousands of years because it creates a stable environment for raising children (along with pooling resources). There are different forms of marriage than the kind we practice now, but none that I know of are really viable. Polygyny, for example, worked great in societies where women were property. It would not work today, polyamorist advocates aside, because of the difficulties in achieving a stable consensus with each new spouse. I could envision a society adapting to the modern situation in a manner akin to, say, certain herd animals, where women band together to pool resources and raise children, only hooking up with random passing men for pleasure. I would not call such a situation healthy or happy. There's good reason to believe the men would be prone to criminality, for one thing, while young boys would have no role models of their own sex.

In general, I feel you're both responding to the problems of a decadent society with the imperative to have more and more large-scale social engineering fixes. This is kind of like taking a man with heart disease and diabetes, pumping him full of pricey meds, and allowing him to retain the poor diet and lack of exercise which caused him to become diseased in the first place. We don't need an atomized society under Leviathan. We need a community. SoCons have been saying so for years, but the message was somewhat undermined by their being ridiculous and obvious pawns for that same Leviathan. There's no reason we can't try it for real.

[Aeson]

How would you create an equivalent for extramarital parenting? SoCons have already tried any number of incentives to encourage marriage; AFAIK, they don't work.

SoCons have chosen untenable positions.

With teen/unwanted pregnancies, SoCons have chosen to promote "abstinence only" and to oppose other contraceptive options being taught to kids. It's obvious that "abstinence only" is going to fail to address the issue very well. (I say this as someone raised very conservatively, in conservative communities ... where I and most others I knew had premarital sex.) Even if SoCons weren't so horrible at promoting to younger people, sex is far better at marketing.

In regards to marriage, SoCons have opposed extending marriage rights first to interracial couples, then to homosexual couples. If marriage is such a great benefit, why have SoCons been on the side of disallowing marriage rights to more people? Not only was this a losing fight for SoCons, but it meant they lost credibility with the younger generations.

(Note ... I'm not convinced there is much if any difference between person A and person B raising kids while married, vs the same two people raising kids while not married. There could be slight tax differences and social stigma affecting the family, but as parents they would be the same people doing the same things to raise their children.)

[Elok]

I'm referring very specifically to attempts to reach out to poor people and provide financial or other incentives for marriage. Not abstinence only or gay marriage or any of that other crap. Said attempts have achieved only very modest success in increasing marriage rates among their target audience. The disincentives are just too strong to overcome. Can't go into detail now, company coming.

[Aeson]

Ending the drug war would do something, yes. However, a large amount of our drug problem today is not trade in illicit drugs, but prescription drug abuse. People are getting wasted on perfectly legal opiates, often ones they obtained through legal channels. The sickness is not all caused by Mexican dope cartels and the like.

Not many prescription drug abusers end up in prison.

There are many problems in society, but ending the drug war was specifically about addressing the incarceration rate issue you brought up.

There's a feedback loop at work here; single parenting leads to lower income and kids who make poor choices, which leads to kids growing up into adults with poor prospects (possibly in jail), which leads to said adults not getting married, which means more single parenting. It's all tied together. The problem is only going to get worse with time if not corrected. I'm not sure what the solution is, but it will likely involve a mixture of political, cultural, and economic reform.

Jobs programs ain't gonna cut it by themselves. We can't bear the load of the entitlements we already have, and education is quite bloated in this country. You could take a hacksaw to the system--I certainly wouldn't object--but even so, government programs have extreme difficulty in adjusting to real-world demands. Moreover, I've tried retraining myself a bunch of times, and I have fallback resources most poor people can only dream of. Once you've dug a hole, it's extremely hard to dig your way out while continuing to work, especially if you have a family. Even if you managed to pay for the costs, some guy who just got out of lockup is going to have one hell of a time shedding a lifetime of bad habits and acquiring a boatload of new skills while continuing to work to support himself.

To put it another way: I once took a pre-employment survey for a temp agency that primarily staffed a manufacturing plant. I got forty questions about my drug use, my feelings concerning violence towards people who offend me, and under what circumstances I feel workman's comp fraud is justified. You are not going to take such people, shove them through a couple of years of community college, and turn them into white-collar professionals. Not without fixing the ****ty broken society which created them. Jobs are a start, but they're only a start.

I agree, though I think you are missing the most obvious solution to these issues.

I'm not proposing to make them all into white collar workers. What does need to be done is to ensure all necessary jobs, even the ones looked down upon by society, allow those who do them to live a comfortable lifestyle. That we've left much of the workforce to be stuck in debt makes alternatives (welfare or crime) look better, and trying to raise a family look worse. (Both parties have been complicit in creating this situation, though in different ways.)

[Giancarlo]

I'm referring very specifically to attempts to reach out to poor people and provide financial or other incentives for marriage. Not abstinence only or gay marriage or any of that other crap. Said attempts have achieved only very modest success in increasing marriage rates among their target audience. The disincentives are just too strong to overcome. Can't go into detail now, company coming.

Your premise is false.

We shouldn't be providing incentives for marriage. Marriage is not going to solve or even help society.

And it isn't even addressing the real problems in society. You blame the problems on the lack of marriage or falling marriage rates. That is another false premise.

[Aeson]

I'm referring very specifically to attempts to reach out to poor people and provide financial or other incentives for marriage. Not abstinence only or gay marriage or any of that other crap. Said attempts have achieved only very modest success in increasing marriage rates among their target audience. The disincentives are just too strong to overcome. Can't go into detail now, company coming.

It is linked though. When you have someone promoting marriage to you, and then very obviously opposing marriage for others for reasons that don't make sense to you ... and claiming that marriage is going to be destroyed by something that is happening ... it's not a very strong sell.

The financial incentives to marry aren't very persuasive either. In some cases it is actually a decentive ... especially for lower income women. I myself will probably still file separately, as filing jointly would mean Net would have to pay US income taxes on any income she ever makes, even if she never becomes a US citizen and only earns money in the Philippines. Not much incentive there!

[Giancarlo]

You want a better society? How about paying women equally and empowering them to become more active in the workforce? And some think more marriage will somehow solve this. We have seen in other western countries social improvement because women have greater pay and greater opportunity. This is something America just doesn't seem to learn.

[Elok]

Oh, I don't deny that SoCons have shot themselves in the foot gloriously. Gay marriage, for example, has little to do with the decay of traditional society, and if anything would function as a kind of safety valve by providing stable homes for unwanted children to be adopted into. They could have acceded with provisions for their opting out and retained some credibility. Instead they fought like mad and created the present scorched-earth environment where they get bulldozed out of the way no matter what they do. Stupid.

Though that of course is how people behave when they feel the ground falling out from under them--as the ridiculous French mayor in the long-ago OP is doing, trying to pretend a beach without glistening wet boobies will somehow lead to the downfall of France. But the Muslims keep coming, France seems to be getting less and less French, so NO CHANGE CHANGE IS BAD TITS OR GTFO!

[Elok]

And I haven't even responded to BeBro yet. Man, there needs to be more than one of me. This always happens in my threads.

[Ming]

The most recent extremes of the Sexual Revolution are an example of both tendencies; the majority of new mothers in the US are now unmarried. We've gone beyond breaking up existing families, and are now failing to form new ones.

Claire Cain Miller at the New York Times has some bad news for those who enjoy blaming unwed mothers for everything from gun violence to poverty: The birth rate for unmarried women has actually gone down 14 percent since its peak in 2008. “The recent declines were sharpest among teenagers; black and Hispanic women; and those without a college degree — all of whom have typically had the highest rates of single motherhood — according to data from the Census Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics,” Miller writes. The only group whose unwed birthrates are going up? College-educated women over 35, though they are such a small percentage of unwed mothers that their impact on overall numbers is slight.

The rise in women without wedding rings having babies—about 40 percent of babies born in the United States have unmarried mothers—creates alarm in conservative circles, in no small part because a lot of people conflate “unwed” and “single.” “Some researchers and marriage advocates say the prevalence of single-parent families could have long-term negative effects,” Miller writes. “These families are more likely than two-parent ones to live in poverty.”

However, a full 58 percent of unwed mothers of newborns are living with the fathers of their children. Many of them will marry, and many of the married mothers will divorce and become single mothers. What these kinds of statistics show is not the end of fatherhood, but that people's approach to marriage and parenthood is becoming more complex and individualized.

But just because the unwed birth rate is going down doesn't mean that the panic over single motherhood is likely to recede. The majority of Americans believe crime is getting worse, but crime is actually way down since the ’90s. Most Americans also believe teen pregnancy is on the rise, when in fact it's in a sharp decline. So we'll probably continue to hear about how single mothers are responsible for every social ill imaginable.