The State and the Family - Our Political, Economic and Social Decay - video, 1 hr


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This is one hour long but probably well worth your time if you are interested in parenting. It consists mostly of amazing statistics about how important a stable 2 parent family is to children.

1:08:53

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Stefan Molyneux is the world's most popular internet philosopher, is an anarchist, and makes a big deal out of child rearing.

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Jerry: I would suggest you take a look at this thread where Stefan Molyneux is "discussed" in specifically and in general...

Sharon Presley on authority

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Did you look at the thread or not?

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Did you look at the thread or not?

I looked at the thread and I didn't see anything about Stefan's statistics.

Fair enough. Just wanted to appraise you of how he was viewed by a number of folks on OL.

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I agree with the perceived problems, but not at all with their context or the "solution" ... if that is what he is proposing, i.e, a "Leave it to Beaver" utopia where Dad works and Mom stays home to take care of the 2.2 children.

The problem with Stefan Molyneux's statistics is that they are just that: numbers. Individualism is not just an abstract political philosophy. It is a way to see the world. Either you see persons or you see numbers of people.

I agree that the single mother household - over 80% of us these days, he claims - is at a disadvantage but I submit that the solutions are a matter of perception, social capital, and choice.

First of all single mother households require the absence of a father/husband. That is a choice. Accepting responsibility is a choice. But, then, are these women not better off on their own than saddled with a man who abnegates the consequences of his actions?

But, then, what makes this viable is the modern urban industrial informatic society. He speaks of traditional families, but we have a non-traditional - I submit anti-traditional - society. George Jetson was only Ward Cleaver with a aircar. Our world is different than that. Heck, a single mom raised her son to be President of the United States. Would they have been better off living with Barack Senior working as an insurance salesman so that Mom could stay home and care for 2.2 children? In point of fact, I challenge anyone to show a US President who had a "normal" childhood by Molyneux's standards.

But maybe that is the message here. If we had a Leave it to Beaver utopia of stable families, we would have a stable society. Like ants.

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I agree with the perceived problems, but not at all with their context or the "solution" ... if that is what he is proposing, i.e, a "Leave it to Beaver" utopia where Dad works and Mom stays home to take care of the 2.2 children.

The problem with Stefan Molyneux's statistics is that they are just that: numbers. Individualism is not just an abstract political philosophy. It is a way to see the world. Either you see persons or you see numbers of people.

I agree that the single mother household - over 80% of us these days, he claims - is at a disadvantage but I submit that the solutions are a matter of perception, social capital, and choice.

First of all single mother households require the absence of a father/husband. That is a choice. Accepting responsibility is a choice. But, then, are these women not better off on their own than saddled with a man who abnegates the consequences of his actions?

But, then, what makes this viable is the modern urban industrial informatic society. He speaks of traditional families, but we have a non-traditional - I submit anti-traditional - society. George Jetson was only Ward Cleaver with a aircar. Our world is different than that. Heck, a single mom raised her son to be President of the United States. Would they have been better off living with Barack Senior working as an insurance salesman so that Mom could stay home and care for 2.2 children? In point of fact, I challenge anyone to show a US President who had a "normal" childhood by Molyneux's standards.

But maybe that is the message here. If we had a Leave it to Beaver utopia of stable families, we would have a stable society. Like ants.

I salute you. You can think. :)

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My parents were divorced when I was 5 (my broither was 2), but we both stayed married to our spouses and raised our exactly 1.0 children. The problems with this presentation sprout at every display of text. If you stop to read each blurb, the vacuous quality of these assertions and "statistics" becomes painfully obvious.

For instance, at about 30:59, he says that one-fourth to one-third of non-custodial fathers maintain close contact with their children and about an equal number maintain little or no contact. That leave about the same number (one-third to one-half) in the middle. So, apparently, there is no real problem because most fathers maintain a nominal to close involvement while only a minority of them do not.

How is that majority of "broken homes" different from being the happy child whose parents have two homes? I mean, if mom and dad are legally married and mom inherited a million dollars and dad is an investment banker with Morgan Stanley and the kids shuttle between Connecticut with Mom and Long Island (or Hilton Head) with Dad, while being housed in boarding schools, how is that worse than what he implies for the (ahem) "poor." His numbers would miss that.

Also, read carefully that his focus is on youngsters, young people, adolescents, and young adults. He does not look at final outcomes. Again, at 30:59, "interviews with children suggest that separation from their fathers is the most painful consequence of divorce." Well, yeah... Because the child is likely to say,"I miss my Dad" and unlikely to say, "I am concerned for my loss of socio-economic status and diminished potential for future outcomes."

addendum --

I surfed Wikipedia for biographies of US Presidents. There is no pattern. For some. even when the father was nominally present, he was absent. (Nixon's father suffered from tuberculosis; Nixon lived with an aunt for two years in high school.) Theodore Roosevelt benefited from a strong father, but look how he turned out.

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