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[Loud Whispers]

And now, the conclusion

Nah, the wedgeless conclusion is gay skeleton anarchists

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Dunamisdeos]

And now, the conclusion

Nah, the wedgeless conclusion is gay skeleton anarchists

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I wasn't going to, but now

[Reelya]

So when I say that the Deep South is bigoted, I'm not talking about every Southerner or even the average Southerner. I'm talking about the default Southerner, if you will, one that learns just what "everybody knows" but doesn't say even if they don't necessarily believe it. It's that kind of systemically embedded bigotry, the kind behind naming buildings after Confederate heroes and calling black people "well spoken" and advocating for "family values" and "nuclear families" and nostalgia for a 1950s that wasn't ever as good as it seemed but was definitely white, straight, and cis

One of the problems here is when people oppose the concept of nuclear families being healthy, you're ceding that whole issue to them. There is a raft of evidence that many problems are very highly correlated with single parent families. But ... a lot of people on the other side have ideological blinders to this whole thing, and have become knee-jerk "single parent families are great! no men yay!" zealots, which means they've handed those whole platters of "it's better to have two functioning parents" and/or "boys do better when they have a dad" to the right-wing as a gift.

Let me dissect some of the issues. I'm sure we agree it's generally wrong to lump "All X" as being responsible for the actions of "Some X". This goes for groups we both like and dislike, ones we are members of, and ones we are not members of. "All blacks" or "All Muslims" are not accountable for "Some Blacks" or "Some Muslims". But similarly (and seemingly more contentiously) "All Men" are not responsible for "Some Men". The crime statistics for single-parent families show that lacking a dad is in fact one of the best predictors of whether a boy will turn into a violent criminal and/or rapist (I'll present some actual citations below). Maintaining a semblance of a "Nuclear Family" therefore isn't some 1950s joke, it's a life and death thing. The left needs to get on board with the actual data and pull it's head out of the sand or they're just doubling-down on ideology (based on unproven ideas) and alienating most normal people who can read.

the "single parent boys turn out more violent" thing lets "black culture" off the hook for violence, because the correlation between being black and being in a single-parent family is high. but, equally, it ... kinda disproves the idea that fathers indoctrinate boys into those things, too, since the kids lacking a father have vastly more problems. "all men" aren't actually responsible, because it's actually those boys who have the least strong connections with inter-generational men who tend to turn out the worst.

I've left off the evidence to last because I want to dissect this terrible article:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/single-parent-households_n_1616509?ec_carp=1366237014643956986

"Headline: President Obama Disproves the "Broken Home" Theory"

Wow, ok, how did Obama do that? It turns out by existing. The anecdotal point "Obama exists and he's a child of a broken home" "disproves" any amount of evidence to the contrary. The same article lists some actual data:

*63 percent of youth suicides are from fatherless homes (U.S. Dept. Of Health/Census) -- five times the average.
*90 percent of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes -- 32 times the average.
*85 percent of all children who show behavior disorders come from fatherless homes -- 20 times the average. (Center for Disease Control)
*80 percent of rapists with anger problems come from fatherless homes -- 14 times the average. (Justice and Behavior, Vol 14, p. 403-26)
*71 percent of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes -- Nine times the average. (National Principals Association Report)
*75 percent of all adolescent patients in chemical abuse centers come from fatherless homes -- 10 times the average. (Rainbows for All God's Children)
*70 percent of youths in state-operated institutions come from fatherless homes -- 9 times the average. (U.S. Dept. of Justice, Sept. 1988)
*85 percent of all youths in prison come from fatherless homes -- 20 times the average. (Fulton Co. Dept. of Correction)

I'm going to go out on a limb in this next statement however, and say: I'd predict that many "incels" also lack strong connections to other male people (hence why they're all alone bitching about things online), and would be more likely to come from single-parent families where their whole life is in fact dominated by their relationships with women. They are obsessed by their relationship with women precisely because those are the relationships which dominate their lives.

What conclusion does the HuffPost author of the article come to? We should bury the evidence that single-parent families are dysfunctional, because if we say that, it'll make those kids feel bad: "Why shower them with negative statistics and lower their expectations and possibilities in life?"

Uh, I can't even get my head around this. If negative statistics aren't PC they need to be completely buried to make the affected people feel better! Thanks HuffPost!

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The nuclear family is absolutely an unhealthy family structure. Like singe-parent families, they are not inherently damaging but have the high potential to be, and for the same reasons. They encourage isolation and maladaptive coping strategies which gradually or not-so-gradually blossom into all the other bad things about our society.

Families don't necessarily "need a dad" or not, they need other people to mutually keep a lid on each other's worst tendencies. Single parent families have the worst numbers because they usually have the fewest points of failure, but they're targeted for purely ideological reasons since anybody who really cared about the numbers would admit how shitty they are for the vaunted proper nuclear family too.

[McTraveller]

The nuclear family is absolutely an unhealthy family structure.

I mean this in the technical sense, not just trying to sound confrontational:  Do you have some data to back up that hypothesis? I mean - something like Reelya posted.

I'm curious as to what is, then, a "healthy" family structure?  Or is there a difference in definition of what you mean by "nuclear family" here that's missed by overuse of the term?

[Trekkin]

I'm curious as to what is, then, a "healthy" family structure?  Or is there a difference in definition of what you mean by "nuclear family" here that's missed by overuse of the term?

I, at least, used it in the sense in which it is used as a dog whistle: that not only are there two parents in a nuclear family, but that those two parents are very specifically one cis hetero man and one cis hetero woman married to each other and raising their biological children -- and, it is implied, that no other possible family structure could ever work.

As for other structures, there's some evidence that kibbutzim have advantages, as do other communal child-rearing structures. Hardly perfect, though.

[Reelya]

kibbutzim are definitely an interesting era: there are a bunch of idealistic outcomes and some not-so-idealistic outcomes. Some outcomes go against the "PC message" of the kibbutzim, and I've seen incidents where, for the outcomes that the person promoting the kibbutzim didn't like the outcomes they go "that outcome happened despite the kibbutzim, not because of it" which seems like putting the cart before the horse: whoever that was has a pre-conceived notion about what the kibbutzim's choice "should" cause, and any evidence that flies in the face of that must be despite it, not because of it.

What I'm mainly talking about here is that the kibbutz children ended up with more-pronounced gender role identification than non-kibbutz children. This is then brushed off with "but those were residual gender roles that weren't fully eliminated by the kibbutzim system" except that doesn't really explain anything since the point is that they are said to be more pronounced than non-kibbutz children. However ... this outcome also fits in with the statistical evidence that in nations lauded for gender equality, women are less likely to pick college majors in STEM rather than more likely. Again, this result is brushed off with "but more gender-equal nations haven't 'fully' eliminated gender roles". Which again is missing the entire point: nobody is making the point that men in gender-equal nations pick STEM more often than women, they're making the point that women in highly gender-equal nations pick "male" professions less often than women in less-equal societies. Turkey, Algeria and Tunisia lead the pack for female STEM graduates, at 35-40%. Meanwhile, Finland and Norway lag at only 20% "despite" topping the metrics for gender equality. Like the evidence from "gender equal" kibbutzim apparently leading to less-equal outcomes, it's an important paradox to unravel, not a pesky fly in the ointment to be denied with one-liners.

I guess the message I'd say is important here is that getting some things we want might be actively contradictory to other things we want, so people need to be more flexible about these rigid ideologies of all stripes. There are a number of these ones that affect liberal ideas (EDIT: and let me point out if someone says "but why don't you apply the same level of analysis to conservative ideas?" - the answer is "sure, except I know very little about conservative ideas since I don't read any of their literature"). for example, nations which offer more parental leave tend to have higher gender wage gaps*. while nations with more gender-equal opportunity (and people who grew up in kibbutzim) tend to have a bigger split in male/female occupational segregation. And, as additional support for the positive effect of male role-models, counties with a higher percentage of men tend to have less male violence and sexual violence, instead of the more violence one might assume. Things be complex yo, and some things we do might have the opposite effect as intended: removing men from a community would presumably reduce "toxic masculinity" / and "the patriarchy", but the actual evidence seems to suggest the opposite is true. <= maybe we can debate the reasons this is true, but any comprehensive world-view on gender relations must in fact accommodate all the data, not deny it.

EDIT * This isn't a reason, obviously, to not introduce paid maternity leave, but it is an indication to have a more open mind about the (basically meaningless) wage-gap statistic. It's self-evidently better to give more options to women by providing them with paid maternity leave as a choice than it is to limit their choices in the goal of "fixing" some arbitrary statistic. This article for example cites all the reasons for the wage-gap other than "women actually want to spend quality time with their children rather than chasing another buck":
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tanyatarr/2018/11/30/how-this-study-misses-the-mark-on-equal-pay-and-the-pay-gap/#49c78a7942c1
While this Danish study shows that the same gender gap as the USA persists for women who have a child in a nation giving 1 years paid leave as it does in the USA:
https://www.vox.com/2018/2/19/17018380/gender-wage-gap-childcare-penalty
While this article cites research showing that nations with generous maternity leave schemes have generally higher wage gaps:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/08/21/paid-maternity-leave-would-increase-the-gender-pay-gap/#7407a58d34af
Paid parental leave will do many good things, however "fixing the wage gap" is a pie-in-the-sky promise that the choice of paid parental leave will not fix - unless you specifically allot leave to father's only.

Another thing: if you care about gender pay gaps, then you should only support paid parental leave if it's in the form of a government-controlled insurance scheme / payroll tax sort of thing. If you force employers to foot the bill for paid leave, you'll effectively punish companies economically for the choice to hire women, which will increase the pay disparities between female-dominated and male-dominated industries. Avoid any sort of logic that forces employers to jump through more hoops if they do in fact employ women: that can only make the pay gap worse. As an analogy, imagine a law that said if you hire a black person, then every three years you have to roll a die and if it rolls a "6", you have to buy them a new car and offer them up to a year off work, and they can do this up to three times. Well, people might say that it's racist to avoid hiring black people because of this law because it's is only possible to have to pay out on the new car and the holiday, not certain. So, companies don't want to be racist, so they pretend it's not a thing while hiring.  ("free cars for the black guy" is only correlated with race, not caused by it - I say that because I've heard the same argument about women and parental leave - hiring managers should pretend it doesn't exist, because taking long leave breaks is only correlated with gender, not caused by it). However ... what happens to a company which hires a lot of black people? In the long-term, it's every other worker who is paying for the new cars, not the "company". This is effectively the economic situation when governments mandate that companies must foot the bill directly to pay for maternity leave: it disproportionately pushes the costs onto female-dominated industries as a whole. The women who get the leave obviously still benefit: the victims here are women in those companies who choose not to have kids: they're indirectly subsidizing other women's leave.

[Dunamisdeos]

The nuclear family is absolutely an unhealthy family structure.

I mean this in the technical sense, not just trying to sound confrontational:  Do you have some data to back up that hypothesis? I mean - something like Reelya posted.

I'm curious as to what is, then, a "healthy" family structure?  Or is there a difference in definition of what you mean by "nuclear family" here that's missed by overuse of the term?

Also interested in data that shows a nuclear family is, as a concept, unhealthy. A nuclear family is literally a couple with dependents. If that's damaging, and single parents are damaging, what are you advocating, exactly?

Another thing: if you care about gender pay gaps, then you should only support paid parental leave if it's in the form of a government-controlled insurance scheme / payroll tax sort of thing. If you force employers to foot the bill for paid leave, you'll effectively punish companies economically for the choice to hire women, which will increase the pay disparities between female-dominated and male-dominated industries. Avoid any sort of logic that forces employers to jump through more hoops if they do in fact employ women: that can only make the pay gap worse. As an analogy, imagine a law that said if you hire a black person, then every three years you have to roll a die and if it rolls a "6", you have to buy them a new car and offer them up to a year off work, and they can do this up to three times. Well, people might say that it's racist to avoid hiring black people because of this law because it's is only possible to have to pay out on the new car and the holiday, not certain. So, companies don't want to be racist, so they pretend it's not a thing while hiring.  ("free cars for the black guy" is only correlated with race, not caused by it - I say that because I've heard the same argument about women and parental leave - hiring managers should pretend it doesn't exist, because taking long leave breaks is only correlated with gender, not caused by it). However ... what happens to a company which hires a lot of black people? In the long-term, it's every other worker who is paying for the new cars, not the "company". This is effectively the economic situation when governments mandate that companies must foot the bill directly to pay for maternity leave: it disproportionately pushes the costs onto female-dominated industries as a whole. The women who get the leave obviously still benefit: the victims here are women in those companies who choose not to have kids: they're indirectly subsidizing other women's leave.

While that is a valid perspective, and very well stated, I'm not sure I'm convinced. Having children is as ubiquitous as getting sick. We require employers to allow sick leave because getting sick is practically guaranteed for human beings. Likewise, having children is, in any healthy society, a near-certainty within any potential workplace. I don't see an unequivocal reason why this shouldn't be considered the responsibility of a business to plan for.

Additionally, to me, the point of that leave is for the caretakers of the child to recover/adjust to the point where they can safely work and care for said child. I think that leave should be equal for maternal/paternal leave. That way noone is incentivized away from hiring a specific gender. We've moved pretty firmly away from the female-takes-care-of-the-baby/male-works-a-job system, and it's time to update these things accordingly. (reference: https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2017/mobile/employment-in-families-with-children-in-2016.htm)

[Dorsidwarf]

The nuclear family is absolutely an unhealthy family structure.

I mean this in the technical sense, not just trying to sound confrontational:  Do you have some data to back up that hypothesis? I mean - something like Reelya posted.

I'm curious as to what is, then, a "healthy" family structure?  Or is there a difference in definition of what you mean by "nuclear family" here that's missed by overuse of the term?

Also interested in data that shows a nuclear family is, as a concept, unhealthy. A nuclear family is literally a couple with dependents. If that's damaging, and single parents are damaging, what are you advocating, exactly?

I guess the ol'fashioned "Whole family lives together and when a marriage happens the couple attatches themself to one of the newlyweds existing families rather than make a new one", so you end up with 3 generations living together

[Loud Whispers]

tbh the only valid family unit is 1 necromancer, 1 bonelord, 1 deathknight and 40 gay skeleton anarchists

[Dunamisdeos]

tbh the only valid family unit is 1 necromancer, 1 bonelord, 1 deathknight and 40 gay skeleton anarchists

This is canon now

@Dorisdwarf
I mean yeah I could 100% see that as unhealthy in many respects, but i don't think that's what a nuclear family is. I'd even make a case that it's in opposition to it, since a nuclear family consists of one couple, and their kid(s). That whole generational-exclusive thing would be one couple, the next couple, the couple after that, etc etc. (quick check: Wikipedia separates the concepts as well.)

[MrRoboto75]

>Child leave in the gig economy

[Dorsidwarf]

@Dorsidwarf
I mean yeah I could 100% see that as unhealthy in many respects, but i don't think that's what a nuclear family is. I'd even make a case that it's in opposition to it, since a nuclear family consists of one couple, and their kid(s). That whole generational-exclusive thing would be one couple, the next couple, the couple after that, etc etc. (quick check: Wikipedia separates the concepts as well.)

Uh. I described a classic alternative to a nuclear family, not an actual nuclear family.

[Dunamisdeos]

@Dorsidwarf
I mean yeah I could 100% see that as unhealthy in many respects, but i don't think that's what a nuclear family is. I'd even make a case that it's in opposition to it, since a nuclear family consists of one couple, and their kid(s). That whole generational-exclusive thing would be one couple, the next couple, the couple after that, etc etc. (quick check: Wikipedia separates the concepts as well.)

Uh. I described a classic alternative to a nuclear family, not an actual nuclear family.

...Thought it was an answer to "example/data of an unhealthy nuclear family". I guess you were responding to McTraveller? My bad.

Regardless, your model lacks even the barest hint of necromancy. No stars.

[hector13]

You’re not going to engage in necromancy on a clear night. Folk might see you.