Sigh. I came to Lemmy thinking it was small enough to be populated with real people who would have real policy discussions. But I see now that I’ve just been taken in by a troll. Kudos to you. You seem like a real person and not a bot, so I hope you enjoy the descent into chaos you have spurned.

It is a fucking lie. Women historically worked FOR MONEY, and you still deny them credit for it to fit your agenda.

5+ years of government paid income to every single household with children is not the standard anywhere. Some European governments give ONE year. You are misrepresenting facts again. And yes, I could get behind some kind of additional welfare for children in poverty, but I don’t think it needs to be universal. My children don’t need welfare checks. Nor do any of my neighbors’ children. Nor do I really believe that yours do; your irresponsibility in representing other numbers makes me doubt the veracity of your own income claims.

The $100k family, my family members, who choose to live their ideology about a woman’s role in the family and outsource the consequences of that decision to the rest of their family/ our family without the family’s consent do excite my frustration, yes. Their repeated poor decisions about money and then expectation that they will be relieved of the consequences of those decision is extremely frustrating. But they are inherently not other. They are blood relations and part of me. Your personal judgments about me continue to be wildly off base.

Are you now going to demonize us for paying for childcare? You have no idea what we paid. We organized a harassment campaign at the first corporate daycare we went to, to get the corporation to pay the staff more and fund their certifications so they would quit leaving. Then we took our business to a non profit daycare, that charged nothing to poor families, and we paid full price, but left because they barely had any kids there. Then we went to a local chain that pays their staff some of the best rates in region.

I don’t know if you noticed, but the rest of the world is getting tired of funding the US’s mountain of debt. And you can tax me more, that’s fine. And you can certainly close all the loopholes for the assholes at the top. But when the rest of the world dumps the dollar, we won’t be able to just make up money and inflate our problems away. We’ll only be able to provide services we can actually pay for. And the amount of money you’re asking for is huge. If you say 11 million people stay home and that is a quarter of families, then your asking for income for 44 million more people for at least 5 years each. What kind of income are you looking for? $30k/yr/ person? That’s $1.3 trillion per year. And if you scoff and say that’s not what you said, it’s because you conveniently left out any specifics to your demand, so I tried to sketch out what you might mean.

If you think expecting society to help out with their future citizens as demanding privileges then there is little hope for you.

I literally said there should be more subsidized daycare options. You are asking for tax dollars? Forced corporate fees? to cover the cost of half of every family’s income for 4-5 years? I said THAT is privileged. And if that’s not your ask, then you should be explicit about exactly what it is you’re proposing.

I never asserted that the majority of women used to not work.

Also you:

Going back to when one income could support a family and almost everyone had a parent that was at home that they could rely on is not a stupid lie.

If “almost everyone” isn’t the same as “the majority”, then we’re done here.

You cannot use her words to understand the struggles of the poor because she didn’t experience that

This is a logical fallacy. Do you disbelieve historians because they didn’t live in the time period they speak of?

I don’t know what “othering” people is… I assume it’s similar to dehumanizing them? At no point did I do that. And I’m tired of your word soup of all the progressive buzzwords. Someone who made enough money for his wife to comfortably stop working for 5+ years has no right to lecture anyone about class solidarity. You are better off than most and still feeling sorry for yourself about the struggles of parenting and how difficult the US is. It IS difficult for many many Americans, but that ain’t you. You are closer to me than those struggling. If you were going to suggest some kind of welfare payment to people with children below a certain income, I could get on board with that. The majority of the US’s children live in poverty; we should absolutely be addressing that. But you only care about your own problems. A hand up to the already privileged, just like the push for government to wave ALL student loan repayment.

Again with the laziness. As much as demanding privilege is lazy, I guess it’s applicable? But they’re not really the same vice. Minding young children and the household is very laborious, so I don’t think staying home with young children is lazy. But I do think it’s easier to dedicate the labor of a whole parent to them vs both people bringing in income and minding them.

I am denying your assertion that the majority of women used to not work, that that is the norm for history. And because I am denying that it was ever the case, I am skeptical that it is feasible in the future.

Personally, we are fairly privileged. We are both well-compensated engineers, so we paid for private daycare. And when the daycares closed for Covid, we rotated watching the children with a couple other families from daycare so that all parents could get all their hours in.

Society, particularly in the US, is guilty of not giving enough benefits and pay to take care of a family.

Largely agree with your assessment of the problem, it’s just your assessment of the solution I disagree with… Which I thought I implied earlier. Societally there should be more options for subsidized child care, there should be modifications to the tax code and corporate regulations to achieve a more equitable distribution of wealth, and also we should give children more freedom. As a society we expect parents to keep a close eye on children at all times, and it is oppressive to both parents and children and stifles their development: both their confidence and their decision making abilities.

I never said women should have to stay at home, please GTFO with that nonsense.

Indeed you never said that. And you seemed to think, however misguidedly, that the confinment of one parent to the home would be born just as equally by men. But history, and the current political climate, clearly show that one end of the political spectrum seeks to disempower women, and here you are making half of their argument for them.

Beauvoir was a misogynistic classist at heart.

What I’ve read so far is exactly the opposite of that, but I’m no expert on her.

No, my point is that your demand that everyone be able to do it is entitled and unrealistic. And I think your insistence that almost everyone has always done it does a huge disservice to the majority of women who always had to bring in income.

‘Parasitic women’ is a term de Beauvoir made up to refer to the elite women who did not advocate for their own sex and instead adhered to classist, sexist ideals that maintained their husband’s - and by extension their own - privilege. I just referenced it so you could go look it up.

I’m not interested in your defensiveness. I never used the word lazy. Do I think it’s more important to give your children the stability of a home and consistent heating than to be able to keep them isolated in religious indoctrination (the family existing on $100k)? Yes, yes I do. As a working woman, do I resent the implication that I ought to personally be more devoted to my children while also being tapped for money to support someone else’s ideology? Yes, yes I do. As a working woman, do I want to be shoved back into economic obscurity so that it is easier for my human rights to be trampled upon? What the fuck do you think?

I am a married working mother of two. Don’t tell me what I don’t understand. I am not trying to uphold my family as some paragon of virtue. They were the most accessible anecdotes I have on hand. My point is women always worked, and the view that they didn’t is just a rewrite of history to erase them and their contributions by conservatives, and now this fake history is being repurposed by liberals as some achievable ideal. Why do you think all the early women’s rights advocates were demanding equal pay for equal work? Because they were working!

I was going to throw out anecdotes about the folks I know now where one parent has stayed home, but it didn’t help to paint the picture of how things “used to be”. But as far as what people I know do, the picture remains that it is largely a luxury of the well-off: in households where I am fairly sure the husband makes >$250k/yr, I think they do/did fine (past tense for the mother’s that still chose to go back once the children were school-aged). They don’t live extravagantly, but there is no hardship. I know a couple where the Dad stays home, unemployed not by choice. The mom makes (I think) between $200k-$250k/yr, and their finances are tight. They are managing, but it’s not great. She actually took an assignment overseas where their money would go further and more expenses would be paid by her company, but this administration ended that opportunity and they are back. The last couple I know, the husband makes maybe $100k, and it is a hardship that she thinks her role is at home and will not work. They are constantly struggling to pay rent, to pay their bills, and to buy vehicles. They frequently seek financial help from everyone they know.

Anyway, go read some Simone de Beauvoir. Historically most people were poor and most women worked. She called the women in the upper class who didn’t work “parasite women”.

I am not talking about unpaid housework, nor did I ever mention parental leave from work/ a pause in a career. I am talking about paid work. Running a general store and baling hay is not housework. Most poor women have always worked. I read the autobiography of Grandma Moses a while back. You’d probably label her a housewife, but she worked a dairy farm like a dog for years with her husband to sell milk and butter. If she’s working to make money and provide, she’s not a housewife who is free to spend her energies only tending to the family’s needs. That is a luxury.

Further, when you mention the European stat… Which I’ll take in good faith since there’s no citation… You are confusing the first five years of life (preschool) with the original comment which seemed to be about grade school kids as well as your other comments about helping with homework, etc, that also imply grade school age kids. Maybe I could buy your argument about small children, but not school age children.

My point is not to penalize people who choose/have the financial ability to stay home. My point is that it was only really ever economy viable for the wealthier people. For the left to sit around and demand it makes them seem as coddled and out of touch as when they demanded student loan repayment. You are asking for subsidized luxury goods on the backs of people who can barely provide food and shelter for themselves. And maybe you think the whole system should be restructured for the wealthy to pay for it and/ or for us to cut back on military spending to pay for it, etc. but that’s not what people lead the argument with. They lead with this expensive, privileged demand.

That never fucking existed. There was never a large portion of the population that made enough money for the woman to stay at home, and even when there was enough to apparently make memes about it, it was at most 2 decades.

For real people, women have always worked. In the 1950s, my maternal grandmother ran the general store they owned and lived above while he worked in the factory, and she helped him bale hay on the weekends when it was in season. My paternal grandmother didn’t work, and they were dirt poor. She thought it was a woman’s place to stay at home and they barely kept food on the table and a roof over their heads. They got frequent financial help from her parents.

My husband: His maternal grandmother didn’t work, and the husband had a decent job. And my MiL died bitter because her parents would take all the kids’ incomes as teenagers to support the household/themselves. His paternal grandmother worked and retired from a federal job.

It’s a lie. It was a lie then to keep women suppressed, and it’s a lie now that doesn’t serve you like you think it does. The average American has always worked, and women’s work has always been discounted. The only ones who didn’t work were the wealthy parasite class.

I agree with you that the person I responded to was wrong for dumping on the parents, but everything else is just more grievance politics, but this time from the left.

This is a miserable take. Either

1. parents were historically solely responsible for everything a child received, including instruction, and thus you are in fact already contracting to do part of a parent’s job anyway Or
2. raising children was historically a communal responsibility and you are doing what was historically done by the extended community anyway

You have beef with the disparity between the lines for who has responsibility for the child vs who has ultimate authority over the child. And that is fair! But it’s a problem with the current structure of the system, and we don’t need to harken back to some stupid lie about the good old days to justify the current impasse.

I could not agree more. These are people who have taken greed and hoarding of wealth well into the realm of mental illness, and we are supposed to admire them!

Yes. It’s true that people can be inherently different, and it’s true that you can teach/ socialize them to treat others with respect anyway. Like the doctor studying psychopaths that discovered he himself was a psychopath. He had been taught how to treat people, regardless of his innate ability to empathize.

Not sure I follow, this seems to be what I was saying. Read it back. The difference is that now we have technology capable of remotely erasing huge populations, and no means whatsoever of keeping it out of the hands of the freaks that invariably take power.

Were you initially arguing then that today’s weapons are worse because they make murder further removed from oneself or because the scale of death is larger? Or both?

If the first argument, I disagree. Murder is no more moral for being gritty and physical. Tasting the blood of your victim doesn’t redeem the act. Perhaps you would argue that it is worse to allow the murderer to obfuscate the brutality of his actions from himself. But either way, he is a murderer just the same, with the same suffering resulting from his actions. Others should not be held accountable because he found a way to lie to himself. Removing the killing from immediate vicinity of other allows it to be more targeted and involve fewer innocents, and that far outweighs the mental gymnastics it enables for the murderer.

If the second argument, I agree the scale of death, especially the scale of imprecise killing, affects the morality of a weapon, hence why I mentioned nuclear weapons. I kind of thought you did NOT agree with that though, based on this argument:

So the difference between them then is just one of scale.

The amount of innocent deaths enabled by a fusion bomb in a single instance far outstrips that of a conventional bomb. And I would argue it is a weapon that could not be used in any way that would not involve millions of innocent deaths. This inability to be harnessed in any productive way (besides as a threat I suppose) is where it clearly falls into the realm of immoral weapons, and this is fundamentally different than (e.g.) designing sensors that enable us to better monitor the activities of our adversaries. You are making an argument about the cumulative effects of people’s actions, but still the net effects of the people who worked on these two examples are very different.

the next technology turns all of your enemies into steam, but as a side effect, also does the same to their families…I would argue that creating a new weapon, or developing existing ones further is not made more or less moral on the basis that your enemy might be doing it,

I argued that arming yourself was moral based on the fact that psychopaths would likely attack you. I am not trying to justify absolutely every type of weapon in existence, but the post is saying ALL weapons and their production is immoral which I do disagree with. And again, I would largely view a weapon that cannot be effective without harming innocents as immoral (another example: chemical warfare that cannot be removed from the environment). I do not think the morality of any object is based on whether it can be used to harm innocents though, because as previously argued, that is every facet of existence in the hands of a psychopath. One facet of military development is development of CONOPS (Concept of Operations - how the weapon is used), and there are absolutely immoral CONOPS of weapons (like carpet bombing).

But look at what you’re mixing up here: the psychopathic megalomaniacs who are sitting barking orders a world away from the lethality radii, and the grunts and (invariably) innocent collateral who are atomised inside them.

I feel like you are arguing that because grunts are being exploited (I can agree with this) that they are innocent. But if you are hired to kill others on behalf of a psychopath, even if you really need the money, you are still accountable for carrying out the orders to kill on behalf of the psychopath. They are not innocents for having been duped. They are tools of destruction in the hands of the psychopath and must be disabled as much as a bomb or drone.

Find another job, where you can look back at your life’s work and honestly believe you made the world a better place.

I think it is a tall order to demand everyone dedicate all of their energies only to improving the world. Most people do a job they think is fine (especially since ideological work usually doesn’t pay) and contribute to the world and their communities as they can. My husband and I went around and around about this with Trump’s most recent election. We settled on working programs we don’t think to be actively harmful, donating generously with time and money, and political activism as it seems useful. The issues I worry most about require collective action (climate change, the malevolence of the current US administration), and I have never been one skilled are persuading others.

If a pacifist somehow held in their hands a button which would kill every non-pacifist in the world, should they push it?

Did you intend this to be paradoxical? If a pacifist pushed a button to kill non-pacifists, he would obviously die from it too.

Yet psychopathic megalomaniacal leaders are a feature of the human race further back than recorded history, where remote mass destruction of estranged populations is a very recent development

This is likely wrong. In Sapiens, Yuval Harari discusses at length how genocide is as old as humanity. Some of us would brutally murder each other with sticks and stones if they had nothing better.

And, in creating any new technology, we do need to ask, “is introducing this worth the risk of it falling into the wrong hands?”

I guess I can more or less agree with this question. But most defense work is not creating the atomic bomb. Most of it is incremental improvements aimed at more effectively engaging a military target. Which is why the US did so poorly against guerilla warfare in Afghanistan… But that’s beside the point. Excuse my tangent. I am a defense contractor, I have left programs I was uncomfortable with existing.

Anyway, we agree that psychopathic megalomaniacs are a feature of the human creature. And whether or not they are flying drones, driving tanks, or a leading a hoard of mounted Visigoths at your village, I think most of us would rather remove them as a threat from a safe distance… Like with a missile.

Israel’s primary weapon is starvation via blockade. Yea, it’s not very precise.

Was the person you’re responding to sincere? Fuck. I thought it was heavy sarcasm.

Sigh. The Internet has killed satire.

I don’t know man. Even cell phones seem pretty dangerous in Israeli hands.

I think the issue is that there are people for whom it is necessary and proper to use military violence against, and when you don’t continually invest in it, you find yourself subject to those who have (see: Europe vs Russia and/or the US).

Further the decision and event chain that you mention has been used just as frequently by the US military to head-off and prevent escalation of violence.

As I pointed out elsewhere, putting psychopaths in charge can make most things dangerous. The Trump administration is currently weaponizing financial fraud against all of us so the billionaires can feast on the remnants of the middle class. Now obviously, military tools are made to be dangerous, which is not in line with a pacifist morality. But most people aren’t pacifists, and sociopath leaders will always find a cornucopia of tools to murder their opposition.

It was immoral to hand these tools to Trump. It was immoral to hand these tools to Netanyahu. But that’s a problem with these systems of government, not with the creation of militaries and their equipment.

Your phrasing there is intentionally misleading.

The wiki you link discusses 20 people of obviously mixed race, with half? of those likely parentages seeming coercive. ‘Many many’ sounds like dozens.

I guess you mean that the number is rapes likely far exceeds the number of people conceived from rapes? The wiki also mentions guests expecting sexual gratification from slaves, but not whether or not those expectations were met. “Overseeing” any activity, kind of implies you’re managing said activity, seeing it through to it’s completion. Looking the other way would certainly be complicit, but it’s not the same thing as commanding and ensuring those rapes happened.

Also, I set the bar intentionally low for zombie Washington. Child rape was the bar. There’s no amount of revision of American history that has lowered Washington to Trump levels of evil yet. And I further wrote couldn’t rape kids with the expectation that zombie dicks probably fall off.

So anyway, zombie Washington still gets my vote over Trump.

Zombie Washington probably wouldn’t/ couldn’t rape children, so yes. I’ll give it to you.

I guess you’ve never have neighbors with bamboo!

It has long since become a problem for every neighbor that borders their yard. I’ve been digging the runners our of my yard since we moved in 8 years ago, and I’m about ready to spend ~$10k on remediation (burying a wall that the roots can’t penetrate).

It is not native and grows out of control where I live. It takes over acres too densely for anything else to grow.