Now bugger off!

Gosh, you people don’t really know what you’re against.

I think you’re right that any further discussion will be useless.

You’ve contradicted yourself – If providing autonomy for single unmarried mothers requires the state to actively choose a policy of rigorous social engineering in order to provide them with employment oppurtunities, then not choosing to adopt such a policy would not be to deny them anything.

You have clearly failed to understand much of my post, and also the concept of ’starting conditions’ for a system.

You seem to have begun with the automatically left-wing axiom that inequality between sexes or classes in society must be the result of unjust or irrational “discrimination rather than by biology, intelligence, personal choice or economic rationality.

Er, no, I haven’t. I’m not a lefty; ask me about my attitude to weapon prohibition some time.

I fully understand that, for example, the reason Ghana is staggeringly impoverished compared to Britain is a combination of amoral factors, including climate, population density, ease of mining, culture, linguistics and geographical location relative to the Roman Empire. That doesn’t mean that permitting Western megacorps to leach all the ROI out of a nascent quasi-industrial economy is legitimate; such actions merely reflect the truism that money is power. We have all the money (by which I mean the industrial west); we have therefore had much of the power, and we’ve abused it like bastards.

All the same things can be said of the kyriarchy. The rich win; among the rich, the men win: among the men, the whites win: and among them, the Puritans win. That’s because early industrialisation, which Britain achieved through no fault of its own, confers immense power advantages which then become embedded socially and legally, and which then have a vested interest in maintaining status quo ante. Since Britain between 1650 and 1850 was white, partiarchal, Puritanical and already quite rich, and since the hegemony of industrial Europe became very seriously embedded in geopolitical thinking, correcting those arbitrary idiocies can only be good for the species taken as a whole.

Your theory seems to suggest that the poor all deserve it; that they are lacking something the rich have. You’re right; it’s money; and if you think the rich earned their money, you’re wrong unless you believe inheritance law to have been rescinded at some point.

Returning to the more immediate topic: if you are implying that the embedded power imbalance in JCI society between women and men is an accurate reflection of “biological factors”, then I do not believe any further conversation with you is going to be of use. And I believe I may need to go and drink unwise amounts of ale in order to get the taste of this discussion out of my mouth.

You’ve contradicted yourself – If providing autonomy for single unmarried mothers requires the state to actively choose a policy of rigorous social engineering in order to provide them with employment oppurtunities, then not choosing to adopt such a policy would not be to deny them anything. If a state refused to offer subsidised sex change operations, that wouldn’t be to deny the choice of a woman to become a man if she wanted one but couldnt afford it.

“It’s history that made those choices. In that situation, society has therefore artificially created a choice which men can make but women can’t.

You seem to have begun with the automatically left-wing axiom that inequality between sexes or classes in society must be the result of unjust or irrational “discrimination rather than by biology, intelligence, personal choice or economic rationality. I have niether the time nor the inclination to argue about this with you at length. However, I think the ultimate test of whether “society” has artificially created such a ‘choice’ through cultural brainwashing is to consider what would happen under natural law in the state of nature where there was no society, no culture, no economy no state and no marriage. Humans lived in a consequently promiscuous world where they only consumed the fruits of their own labour. What would happen to the children? The answer is that the only visible and demonstrable parent would be the mother. Only the mother would have the child, and therefore only the mother would be left with the child and therefore her opportunity to develop all her faculties, in the direction of labour would be limited. So ’society’ does not artificially create these ‘choices’ of lack thereof. Biology does.

“It’s not the council-estate kid’s fault that hierarchical capitalist economics requires work to happen outside the home, where the worker is constantly surveilled by a member of the owning classes.”

??? It’s neither the fault of ‘hierarchical’ capitalist economics since the market has no “will”. If businesses requires work to take place outside the home, “where the worker is constantly surveilled by a member of the owning classes” (we call it business management these days) it is becuase it makes rational economic sense to do this. To argue against it would therefore be irrational

“That’s not good. It’s also economically counter-productive; we could have a much broader and more productive work-force if we included young women in it without precluding their ability to provide for our next generation.”

How very muddled you are. First you are against economic rationality now you favour it. And again you’re mixing up young women with young mothers again. I do not believe that young single mothers (of any class) should go out to work or should be forced to go out to work by the state. As I explained in my previous posting (which you seem to have ignored completely), the state has created the problem of voluntary unmarried motherhood which doesnt exist in countries in which it is not subsidised. Having made sure their children have only one parent, it seems pretty stupid for the state to conscript a single mother into wage-slavery. Motherhood is the most valuable task in society. If our civilization endures, I expect our grandchildren will be horrified by the wicked, self-indulgent lies we tell ourselves in order to justify the dumping and neglect of an entire generation, for the sake of slogging off to an office.

Well, that’s where we differ. I don’t think “independent” women i.e. unmarried women who don’t have the financial security should deliberately choose to have children and then leave responsible taxpayers to foot the bill.

…

Okay, no, so it’s not misogyny, it’s class warfare. Let’s try this again.

“unmarried women who don’t have financial security” == “not middle class”. Can you genuinely not see that if your society chooses to offer no opportunities to women for self-supporting work managed in a way compatible with raising children, that means your society is systematically denying autonomy to women? It’s not the council-estate kid’s fault that hierarchical capitalist economics requires work to happen outside the home, where the worker is constantly surveilled by a member of the owning classes. It’s history that made those choices. In that situation, society has therefore artificially created a choice which men can make but women can’t. That’s not good. It’s also economically counter-productive; we could have a much broader and more productive work-force if we included young women in it without precluding their ability to provide for our next generation.

The problem here is that a single mother can work but is not permitted to; at all in the early years, or very much in the later years, because society enshrines archaic religious dogma. There’s all kinds of ways we could modify society so that she could directly contribute and become self-supporting, mostly involving the managing classes learning to trust their employees (which in turn involves appropriate remuneration and dealing in good faith, which the managing classes really don’t like to think about). This restricts female autonomy to the very rich, who already have it because, well, they’re very rich. It’s both class war and gender war; these women don’t get to have any say in their own lives, including the basic fact of reproductive freedom, because … some rich white men two hundred years ago didn’t believe women were people. But my daughter should certainly have reproductive autonomy; she went to Oxford. Of course, in practice, most middle class men of such an age don’t think the latter either.

I take the view that this situation is both socially damaging, and economically unrealistic. To take the matter of practicalities: any job which is based around information flows and makes use of a telephone can be done from home: why can’t call-center work be farmed out to single mothers working from home? An xDSL line and a bit of software is all that takes. Any hand craft job can be done from home. Any research work and most government jobs can be done primarily from home. We;re living in the future, people; we don’t act like it because management don’t trust their employees: so the employees have been given no incentive to deal honestly with management.

Free our work force from the office; let people recapture the concept of personal responsibility rather than top-down authority, and you will see a whole new British economy. For a start, several hundred thousand women will be economically viable who are at the moment able to contribute but denied the chance.

1) Tax credits are a two way stret also aiding the married, so the government is not footing the bill for people’s decisions in the way you think they are.

2) People are not having children ot gain some sort of benefits advantage, their is no cultural left movement trying to bring about some sort of single parent family revolution, neither is the “decision to have a child outside wedlock was once a major one, and is still very significant” you seem to have not moved with the times but it reflects your moral compass.

3) You seem to suffer from a classic problem of many right-wingers that come here, you think you have a get out of jail free card by smearing people that disagree with you as intolerant. No all ideas are of equal value and pushing tired old ideas that have no bearing or basis in modern life is your right but don’t think your ideas have such vigour that they are immune from being refuted.

Just another thing to point out to you, to show how flawed your thinmking is. Statements like this: “This is because leftists actively disdain marriage and are happy to see mothers married to the state or as wage-slaves while their children are dumped in day-’care’.” make you look like a tit and hopefully you can see why. No such people exist and by no means form some sort of liberal cultural elite that make these lofty decisions. It is just not true and a complete effort by you to make stuff up.

Well, that’s where we differ. I don’t think “independent” women i.e. unmarried women who don’t have the financial security should deliberately choose to have children and then leave responsible taxpayers to foot the bill.

“Middle class single mothers can afford to make sure their children get a chance. Poor single mothers can’t.”

Again, you speak as if unmarried mothers have had no choice but to become preganant. Pregnancy let me remind you is freely chosen. This is all part of the deliberate attempt on the part of the cultural left to mix up voluntary and conscript single mothers. I have never assumed that unmarried motherhood has a 1:1 correspondence with accidental pregnancy. The decision to have a child outside wedlock was once a major one, and is still very significant. The widow or the deserted wife or the wife who has been abused may be bringing up a child alone, but they didn’t at any stage choose to do so.

The point I made above is that if the state were to give a nine months’ warning that benefits for new applicants would not be paid, those who would intentionally become pregnant because of the benefits available to single mothers would know in advance that these benefits are not available, and hence would not become pregnant. This is the case in many continental countries which do not supply such benefits. So their lives would not be “sabotaged” as you put it. If they become pregnant, without being married to the father and persuading him to support the child – they will be consciously volunteering for it. If I am right, the main effect will be a sharp and permenant drop in the numbers of such households, just as the introduction of these payments led to a sharp and sustained increase. I would not stop any payments to current single mothers. These women became married to the state and the state has no business deserting them.

“I don’t hear the Tories or the Fail shouting about how barristers earning £150k a year should be bound by law to expose their children to a violent, alcoholic stock-broker or authoritarian, abusive police officer every day; clearly life is better for them and the children alone than with that kind of man. Why is this not true of the poor woman who wants to get her kids away from a violent, alcoholic brickie, or a sexually predatory streetsweeper?”

I never said that women and their children shouldn’t be free to leave violent and abusive relationships. Again youre conflating voluntary and involuntary single parenthood.

“I was trying to find out which can Adrian crawled out of; it seems to be the misogynist, rather than the puritanical or heteronormalist cans, though I’m still suspicious about the latter.”

This is more the same type of intolerance visited by left-liberals on anyone who tries to speak out against the anti-marriage state. This is because leftists actively disdain marriage and are happy to see mothers married to the state or as wage-slaves while their children are dumped in day-’care’. This makes no moral or economic sense whatever and I am only glad that someone who supports such policies attacks me.

As I keep saying, read the 107 comments before yours.

This would allow the main alternative to the married family to remain marginalised naturally as it is in other countries where there are no provisions for single mothers.

Otherwise known as the systematic rejection of agency for women, or “medievalist patriarchy” in common modern parlance. I know too many single mothers to see your concerns as anything other than bigoted. Okay, yes, you may not be bigoted about gay people or polyamorists but you are, apparently, opposed to the development of civil autonomy for women.

I appreciate that your prejudice has a scarecrow’s hat on; the social safety-net offered by government is there, in some tiny measure, to balance the grinding effect of hierarchical economics. If it was realistic, for most people, to be self-employed and/or work from home (and there is no technological or economic reason that this working pattern should not become normalised) then the problems you are focusing on go away.

It isn’t. The government is merely trying to provide some basic societal recognition of the fact that our economic establishment is hideously prejudiced against independent women who wish to have children but aren’t endowed with financial security through inheritance or alimony. Plutocracy is against individual autonomy among anyone but plutocrats, in other words.

Pagar:

I was trying to find out which can Adrian crawled out of; it seems to be the misogynist, rather than the puritanical or heteronormalist cans, though I’m still suspicious about the latter.

More substantively:

Statistically, children from a traditional heterosexual family do best on average but of course there will be some such children with poorer outcomes than those who had homosexual guardians, foster parents and adoptive parents.

I’m not sure this statement can be safely made, primarily because of embedded realities which are hard to control for.

Let us list a couple, applying to those in my cohort (children between 1975 and 1985, teenagers during the rave era, young adults in the Internet era). Anyone who was known to have (for example) two mothers would have been mistreated in the playground on a level that would be likely to cause physical and psychological scars for life. The children of single mothers (with single incomes) will have been subjected to the removal of any kind of effective state education system, years on the dole because industry had been excised from your entire county and national unemployment was running between five and six per cent. You’d have faced mistreatment and suspicion from every agent of government you ever talked to, assumptions made about you because of your hairstyle by everyone over the age of 30 you ever met, assumptions made about you by employers because someone had invented the term ‘Generation X’, and so on.

Middle class single mothers can afford to make sure their children get a chance. Poor single mothers can’t. Guess who the prejudice is aimed at… I don’t hear the Tories or the Fail shouting about how barristers earning £150k a year should be bound by law to expose their children to a violent, alcoholic stock-broker or authoritarian, abusive police officer every day; clearly life is better for them and the children alone than with that kind of man. Why is this not true of the poor woman who wants to get her kids away from a violent, alcoholic brickie, or a sexually predatory streetsweeper?

The difference is that in our current socio-economic hierarchy, work must be, for most, on someone else’s terms and outside the home. This systemically sabotages working single mothers. The state offering even a slight attempt to level that playing-field makes economic and social sense as well as being the ethical thing to do.

The social assumption that single motherhood has a 1:1 correspondence with accidental pregnancy and/or benefit fraud needs to be challenged more often.

The key point is that, to have the best opportunities in life, every child benefits from a stable environment.

Yes. And following the thread above; what Adrian’s view fails to even ask is whether a single mother who loves her child and is supported in that love by the state is a more, or a less, stable environment than a bitter, violent household in which the two adult role models are constantly fighting; or than a silently abusive, authoritarian childhood devoid of physical or mental security. Stability of horror is not good.

Adrian’s model seems to be that ’stability’ is entirely equivalent to “a man in charge of a house with a woman in it”.

I also see no reason why one woman and one woman are an intrinsically less stable parenting couple than one man and one woman.

Another can of worms, John, but nor do I.

Statistically, children from a traditional heterosexual family do best on average but of course there will be some such children with poorer outcomes than those who had homosexual guardians, foster parents and adoptive parents. No doubt there will also be successful adults who have emerged from seventies style communes and the care system.

Indeed, I have such a friend.

The key point is that, to have the best opportunities in life, every child benefits from a stable environment.

f u c k o f f.

Stop being a silly boy and pull yourself together, all your old hat you’re trotting about the state to blame, the sanctity of marraige, blah blah blah, has already been dealt with, you’ve come to the party a bit late.

Basically, is your issue with commitment (families should be founded on a committed parenthood relationship: I agree) or with “normal” (families should be one man, one woman, 2.4 children: I absolutely do not agree)?”

No, I am talking about households headed by unmarried mothers which are the main alternative to the married family. The villain in this has always been the State, which has encouraged unmarried motherhood by subsidising it. Hundreds of thousands of women are, in effect, married to the State. If the tories seriously wanted fewer fatherless families, there would be a very simple solution. Stop encouraging this form of household. Existing benefits should remain untouched, but we should give nine months’ warning that they will cease for new applicants. Such a policy could never be construed as authoritarian or paternalist since this would in effect be a huge withdrawal from private family life. This would allow the main alternative to the married family to remain marginalised naturally as it is in other countries where there are no provisions for single mothers.

To the infantile prat calling himself Daniel Hoffman Gill- If you don’t want to have an argument, no-ones asking you to hang around this thread so do yourself a favour and fuck off.

Read on McDuff…

Lovely conservative values.

I had some involvement with a boy whose formative years were spent with his mother in a number of seventies style communes and by the age of twelve, his personality was so severely damaged it was clear, even at that age, that he would never recover to function properly.

The two crucial things in this particular anecdote are, one “a number of” communes, and two, “seventies style”. Both of these things would have exposed the developing child to serious risk. 70s style communes were, a, not well thought-out and b, subject to very severe discrimination and social threat. Nothing like victimhood to give someone a victim complex. And “a number of communes” does suggest that the lack of stability was not caused by the type of community he was living in being unstable, but by the type of person who was dragging him around the country being unstable.

What your anecdote does not do is support the view that a male/female 2-parent family is intrinsically better at offering stability than some of the other models available. For a start, the last 40 years of post-industrial British history have been, in large part, about how unstable the modern nuclear family really is.

I grew up among tribal people who operated an extended-family establishment system; that is, a family establishment included on average five or six direct parents, and probably at least one or two nuclear families embedded within the establishment. The stability level among such families is extraordinary; family establishments 8 generations in with over 100 people living in them. I also see no reason why one woman and one woman are an intrinsically less stable parenting couple than one man and one woman.

Adrian @108:

What Ms Penny dissmissively calls the “heteronormative marriage model.” has been the foundation of civilisation for millennia.

No it hasn’t. Unless your comment is literalist, in the sense that you’re talking only about heterosexual breeding couples being the norm. What worries me more about your thinking is that you can juxtapose this:

It would be permissive;

against this:

alternatives to the married family to be marginalised

So, your ‘permissive’ involves marginalising the alternatives, yes? That’s intrinsically prohibitive, it’s just sneaky.

Also; I cannot help but feel that ‘alternatives to the married family’ here is encoding more nuance than it admits to. Query; would you consider multi-partner heterosexual marriages (a clearly married family, and the norm where I grew up) to be an “alternative”? Would you consider a male couple with children who’re in a civil union to be an “alternative” to the married family?

Basically, is your issue with commitment (families should be founded on a committed parenthood relationship: I agree) or with “normal” (families should be one man, one woman, 2.4 children: I absolutely do not agree)?

Punishing married couples (as does our gargantuan welfare state) is social engineering of those most malignant kind. It a deliberate attempt on the part of the left-wing state to artificially create the maximum moral space for the individual to persue ‘experimental lifestyles’ and absolve him/her of any responsibility for the consequences. It does it by using huge amounts of coercive power against businesses and taxpayers to prevent a dominant culture from emerging. It deliberately removes all pressures on mothers to stay at home or for fathers to stay and provide. It deliberately rewards unmarried mothers with benefits that married couples can only through self-sacrifice.

A conservative solution (not a tory solution) would be to abolish this massive social interference, not replace it with another form of interference. It would be permissive; it would involve permitting normal habits of self-sufficiency to re-emerge. It would involve allowing alternatives to the married family to be marginalised naturally by withdrawing public funds from poisonous feminist university courses. It would be to allow the restoration of circumstances in which responsible ways of living spontaneously emerge.

Even though the facts of life are unnatural and abnormal to marriage-hating leftists like Laurie Penny they’re perfectly normal and natural to human beings.

No Sally.

I believe in personal responsibility. I was partly responsible for bringing the child into the world and it cannot be expected to feed itself so it’s my responsibility and therefore my problem.

Simples.

*shudders*

And Old Greg, manginas are all good, you show me yours and I’ll show you mine.