Warning Sign 1: Unironically linking to Bari Weiss singing your praises Warning Sign 2: Couching your straw men in unsourced anecdotes: This is a supposed recollection of an off-the-record conversation in which there's a lot of published material; the "night whispers to discount the public" thing is pure disinformation. Warning Sign 3: Assigning roles to sources without documentation: There were four American women at that conference. Three of them were associate professors; at the University of Kentucky that averages $100k a year; at McNeese that could be as little as $46k. I could go on but these sort of chin-stroking thought-pieces are fairly universal: (1) start with something everyone will agree with (2) bait'n'switch to hide where you're coming from (3) blacks are inferior, QED. It's Bell Curve all the way down, always is. Like, how he lists white incarceration with a graph: I'm... rather well-read-up on this? And I have yet to see anyone - ANYONE - make the argument that family doesn't matter. On the left the argument usually goes (1) families matter (2) black families are dissolving (3) what are the possible reasons for black families dissolving faster than white families, hmmm, there's an elephant in the room. On the right the argument usually goes (1) families matter (2) families are dissolving (3) It's probably because those horrible leftists keep insisting men should sit down to pee. That's the "luxury belief" of the "defund the police" argument, not that rich white people wanna defund the police because they can afford to live without cops, but that the modern carceral state is, by design, an instrument to suppress reconstruction: It's cherry-picking all the way down, so that the eugenicists can say "it's either the fault of black people or the fault of liberals, and since liberals won't let us blame black people out loud anymore it's definitely the fault of liberals" when they pick two quotes out of a seventeen year old book: 2.7/10 rating, by the way. Because of three reviews on Barnes & Noble. All three anonymous, two with no review. That proud conservative heritage coming to the fore again. It's like, I'm not. I'm aware of countless studies that say the opposite. The conclusive answer to "nature vs. nurture" is "both." Going back to like the Scopes Monkey Trial and shit. But again, that's not the point - the point is to bait'n'switch from "everyone knows that our society has a problem" to "...aaaaand obviously it's liberalism." So you follow that with a bunch of cherry-picked, pointless statistics (chicks dig statistics). Finally you bring it back to personal responsibility: HOW. HOW can you expect anything of him? That's the question, that has always been the question, that is the core issue that has driven conservatism vs liberalism since the French Fucking Revolution. When things were more leftist, you gave him social programs. When things were more rightist, you take them away in the name of "personal responsibility." And then if you're a conservative asshole, you go when we took away all the social support, things got worse. Obviously we need to take them away faster.“I was surprised then, when one of the members of the Expert Group who was most insistent that two-parent families were just an ideal, said to me quietly, as we were packing up, that she agreed that family stability mattered.
This highly educated and affluent person prioritized stability for her own children.
Over a span of five years, sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas talked in-depth with 162 low-income single moms like Millie to learn how they think about marriage and family. Promises I Can Keep offers an intimate look at what marriage and motherhood mean to these women and provides the most extensive on-the-ground study to date of why they put children before marriage despite the daunting challenges they know lie ahead.
I am well aware of the behavior genetics research, twin studies, and so on indicating little effect of home environment on personality, propensity for crime, addiction, and so on.
You put a guy in chaotic and impoverished circumstances. And then you decide not to expect anything out of him. How can anyone possibly believe this will lead to anything other than disaster?