I’m going offline for a few days. The Internet is just too full of stupid right now. I can’t handle it.
It’s also full of cute (H/T MJR), so enjoy yourself. I’ll be back.
I’m going offline for a few days. The Internet is just too full of stupid right now. I can’t handle it.
It’s also full of cute (H/T MJR), so enjoy yourself. I’ll be back.
Just for the record, http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-02-20 came out the same day you made this announcement.
No Such Thing as a Coincidence Dept.
Claire, if you’re looking to avoid stupid the internet is not the place to do it.
It might even require a different planet.
Excellent article about the child outsourcing industry:
http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2015/02/debbie-turrentine-and-child-outsourcing.html
Interesting article & sadly true on “child outsourcing.” But I always laugh at people who think this is the way humans have always lived and raised children:
“ONE parent would work to earn the resources to support the family, while
ONE parent would stay at home and take care of the children.
This system worked for 2 million years, 3 billion if you include preceding evolutionary relatives of humans, and still works for the vast majority of mammals on the planet today.”
LarryA — OMG, that’s so funny. And so very not a coincidence.
I tried to come back online today and even had a blog post about half composed. But I just can’t do it. I will be back soon. But just not yet.
There are an amazing number of people who firmly believe the world was always the idealized way they remember it when they were growing up.
There have always been broken homes and single parents. One reason marriages didn’t used to last as long as many of them do today is because people died earlier. My own genealogy has several examples both of men who outlasted several wives, and wives who outlasted several husbands.
IMHO, the official* divorce rate started trending up when permanent country-wide identification** made simply leaving, and starting over elsewhere much more difficult. That trend made no-fault divorce necessary, not the other way around.
Methinks the good Captain defines “capitalism” differently than I do.
* “Official” as in government paperwork sanctioned.
** Particularly the 1939 “It will never be an ID number” SSAN.
Thanks, Paul, for that link. For I’m now aware that “Boris the Shitting Buffalo” is an actual published book. I wonder how much income it brings in for the author. If there’s actual money to be made in quadripedal coprologic fiction, maybe I should give it a shot. 😉
Yes, Claire, it’s just getting thicker and deeper out there. (Speaking of fecal matters, as we were.)
Throughout history, in every culture and climate, the most successful families were multi-generational, often extended to much of the community as well. Most of those families survived by hard work by every member who as physically able to lift a finger. Subsistance living was the norm, with even the youngest children required to work hard. Starvation and death was also the norm, for many reasons.
The idea of daddy going off to the office, and mom staying home with the kids is a fantasy of television and movies for the most part. Only a small portion of the population was ever actually able to indulge in it. The jobs open to women outside the home and farm have certainly improved, but very few women in the history of the world were ever in a position where they did not need to work, and work hard – quite aside from the raising of children. And raising those children was always done best by the extended family, brought together and motivated by the desire to survive.
The world has always been pretty much screwed up, one way or another as well, at least for as long as most people have believed the insane superstition that any sort of “government” or religion has legitimate authority over their lives.
“ONE parent would work to earn the resources to support the family, while
ONE parent would stay at home and take care of the children.”
Yeah, that bit was not very plausible, at least the millions of years part, or the assumption of only nuclear families. However even in cave man days there was somewhat a division of labor. And his main point is true, that if neither parent is interested in dealing with children now when we DO have nuclear families rather than extended ones, then obviously the parenting must be farmed out. Schools are after all, not only indoctrination centers, but also babysitting services.
True, Mama.
“A man must work from sun to sun, a woman’s work is never done.”
The “homemaker” wasn’t “taking care of” children. She was chopping wood, tending garden, gathering wild berries and such, tending chickens and such, cooking from those live ingredients, preserving whatever surplus showed up, (And not by freezing or refrigeration. Canning, salting, drying, jerking, etc.)making most of what passed for medicine and administering it, making/mending/washing clothes, (By hand, with homemade thread, cloth, soap, etc., in the local stream.) in the home, and participating in all the community events from church socials to barn raisings.
And that wasn’t harvest, when she was in the field gathering with everyone else who could lend a hand.
And much of her life, she accomplished all this while pregnant.
“Taking care of children” meant making sure the older ones watched over the younger ones, they all did their share of the work, and learned how to run their own homes when it was time.