If you don't count relationships with spouses and offspring as strong social relationships, married people have fewer strong social relationships than unmarried people.
Similarly, if you don't count bank accounts as money, people who have bank accounts have less money than people who don't.
I ban myself.
So basically married couples without children (i.e. yuppies, dinks, and various strivers) are less likely to be involved in their communities and more likely to the be estranged from their families. No shit.
I'm not sure how this study even makes sense. The factors that might affect marginal social participation for single-income twenty-something working class parents with small children are very different from the factors that might affect marginal social participation for thirty-something dual-income childless professionals. But fitting the community survey data to a linear model implicitly assumes that these factors are the same for everyone.
But there's a real difference between relationships that form part of a network, and relationships that form closed-off little units. It's not that marital relationships or relationships with children in the home aren't relationships, but they don't extend outside the walls of the family domicile.
You can have marital relations outside of the house if your yard is secluded.
3: Sort of. You get connected to your spouse's network of friends. At least sometimes. Also, managing kid activities usually forces you into some sort of relationship with other parents.
Well, right, but the claim in the OP is that even with that sort of thing happening, married couples still end up with less contact/weaker relationships outside the nuclear family (including with their own parents and siblings).
Maybe married parents just don't have any extra time or energy to offer neighbors and friends. But once they examined the data further, they found that those who were married without children were the most isolated. The researchers suggest that one potential explanation for this is that these couples tend to have more time and money--and thus need less help from family and friends, and are then less likely to offer it in return. The autonomy of successful married life can leave spouses cut off from their communities. Having children may slightly soften the isolating effects of marriage, because parents often turn to others for help.
This lens of "help" seems superfluous. Having children means you make new friends and acquaintances who also have children. You meet people through the children, or through going to the same parent events, or simply because it's something you have in common that you can endlessly talk about. That's why people with children are less isolated.
We moved into a street that is almost all people with young children, we don't have young children, and I definitely think we would know the neighbors better if we did.
I think the "help" thing is an attempt to figure out why childless married couples have less contact with their own families than married couples with kids. It's not just having fewer friends, it's having less contact with their parents and siblings.
White people are more likely to be married and to have family members they want to avoid. Probably spurious.
Anyway, in less than three weeks I will be an unmarried person without minor children, so I plan to immediately become the social glue holding together my community. Under the assumption that I can do that without having to talk to people too much.
If your glue starts talking you should probably put it down for a while.
And maybe stop inhaling it so deeply.
So basically married couples without children (i.e. yuppies, dinks, and various strivers) are less likely to be involved in their communities and more likely to the be estranged from their families.
Does this conversation have to be just about the effects of children? Remember, they found the same effect in couples with children, just weaker; but presuming from how it's described, still statistically significant. I'm looking to see if I can find the data / effect size.
Community has survived in one form or another since Ook negotiated with Gloop using something other than a rock to the occipital. I don't understand why everything from marriage to paperback books to Vibram FiveFingers suddenly threatens it.
From another direction, sometimes that disconnection can be a net positive - lots of juicy stories on a certain forum where coupling up eventually gives someone the strength and support to divest from horrible family.
14: But bowling leagues, Flippanter!!!
If you're wearing shoes with toes, I'll step on them.
@13 They did a logistic regression against a bunch of variables. It doesn't look like they included interaction terms. Given that the local dependence of their output variables on their input variables is likely highly dependent on the values of combinations of those input variables (e.g., DINKS versus Quiverfull families), I'm not sure what the regression is supposed to prove...
Is the sample entirely WEIRD?
Yeah, the paper being linked is very light on both model inputs and outputs, and nothing disaggregating kids vs. no-kids.
14, 16: community isn't about bowling leagues so much as half a town truly not giving a shit about the extreme poverty on the other half of the town. If you're in a bowling league, if you volunteer at a hospital, if you get out of your cloister, you're more likely to be exposed to the range of your town.
Maybe I'm kidding myself - maybe wealthy people limit themselves to wealthy activity - but that's not happening out of a sense of obligation to contribute.
What if you volunteer at a cloister?
Mostly I think wealthy people move to towns/neighborhoods where there isn't any extreme poverty, and become very engaged in their community when they're afraid something is going to change that.
Did everyone see the story about the guy who was pulled over for having a broken rear light and was found to have, in his car, a bottle of whiskey, a firearm, a live rattlesnake and some uranium?
A uranium is just a terrarium for uranus.
Very unusual by UK standards. I've never heard of anyone being pulled over for having a broken rear light.
27: the rattlesnake was actually inside a terrarium.
I would love to know what the precise problem was that the guy had a plan to solve using those materials.
Use URANIUM on RATTLESNAKE.
Rattlesnake is now radioactive.
Use RADIOACTIVE RATTLESNAKE on YOURSELF.
You have been bitten by the radioactive rattlesnake. You now have rattlesnake powers.
Use GUN on RADIOACTIVE RATTLESNAKE
Radioactive rattlesnake is now dead.
Use WHISKEY on YOURSELF
Your wound from the snake bite is now cleaned.
WHISKEY FORTRESS - An Infocom production in association with Tom Waits
If this post is an attempt to make me feel bad for not going to any community group meeting, it may work.
Does posting anonymously on a public blog count as community engagement? Asking for a friend.
25 Basically, the plot of "Repoman"
The OP article is much better when you read it in the voice of the priest from the wedding in The Princess Bride.
38: Thank you! What a relief! For my friend, that is.
It probably all relates to towels, which are surprisingly expensive if you want nice ones, and you do. Single people need towels and have no way to get them except either buying them or asking a relative for some. When you get married, you get all the towels you need, so you don't need to keep in touch with your relatives until you have kids. Then you need to keep in touch just enough that they'll give your kids towels when your kids get married.
Getting married is also a good way to get much nicer silverware than you'd get otherwise. But the next wedding in going to, they registered at "please just give us cash." I'm going to get them towels.
Right. They'll probably take a few months to do that.
|| so, the asshole Nazi troll has to pay 14 mil. |>
|| Maybe his community will pass the hat. |>
shattering the myth of the spinster cat lady entirely
Dislike! Spinster cat ladies 4EVA
The semicolon is the punctuation mark for respect.
I would say "Standpipe!" But I'm worried that I would be making something explicit that has already been discussed on another blog.
I have a general principle that the only things are truly zero-sum are time and attention. I have noticed in myself that my level of civic engagement goes down when I am in a relationship, in part because if I went out all of the evenings when I normally would have gone out (nonprofit board meeting, poll watching, public health training, music fest) I would genuinely not get to see my partner for days at a time -- given commute times, work schedules, etc.
Ideally, your partner should share some of these interests with you, but I've had much more success finding a partner who likes the same recreational activities than someone who shares civic commitment. Although my new-ish partner will come to protests, which is awesome. He came with me to one about freeing kids from cages* on Friday.
*I still cannot really believe that this is where we are.
We're apparently still debating whether or not it's racist to tell non-white people who are U.S. citizens to go back where they came from. If you want something different to be disappointed in.
who are U.S. citizens
Who were born in the United States!
One of whom is not even from anything that could be construed as an immigrant family! Just black.
(I mean, it would be just as bad if they were all naturalized as adults. But under the circumstances, it sure is transparent.)
I did like the comment on Twitter that by telling a child of Palestinian immigrants to go back where she came from, Trump has for the first time endorsed the Right of Return.
You don't even need to pass a test to become a citizen that way. Anyone can do it.
56: That's wonderful. Too bad that they don't even have any rhetorical consistency, yet alone intellectual. It's hilarious that this "if you don't like America as it is go back to where you're from" argument is coming from the guy behind Make America Great Again. That's conservatives for you.
Trump wasn't even born on the American mainland. He's from an insignificant offshore island, named for its unusual narrowness, with few cultural similarities with the heartland.
||
That said, composite indices derived from existing household and population sample surveys have proved of immense use to the social compensation funds (SCF) which were set up in many developing countries following the adoption of IMF -approved structural adjustment programmes. Proxies such as; (i) quality of, and accessibility, to water, (ii) nature of the waste disposal system, (iii) access to primary education, (iv) type of housing structures, (v) prevalence of overcrowding, and (vi) subsistence capacity, are used to identify household deprivation (see Box 2)10.|>
Ilhan Omar is a naturalized citizen who came to the US as a child as a refugee from Somalia. Trump is still being racist telling her to go back where she came from, it's just slightly less blindingly incoherent than saying the same thing to women who were born in the US.
60: Hey, don't knock Queens. Trump may be from there, but they had more sense than to vote for him.
Well of course the head has some sense, but what about the flukes?
63: Everything I hear is that it's great if you like that kind of living*, but clearly they aren't corn-fed good ol' boys there. Although there's probably a charming 80s fish-out-of-water comedy about precisely that.
* I know a guy who commutes from there to Brookhaven. He works multiple hours a day on the LIRR. I don't understand how he does this, but whatever works.
The steel rails on the ground lower resistance to rolling, so that large numbers of people can be moved without using very much energy.
In Ohio workplaces, it was illegal to tell white people from Appalachia to go back to where they came from. Or something like that.
One of the enduring mysteries to me about Democratic presidential politics is that nobody is trying to meet Trump on his own ground. By this, I mean that nobody is trying to use high-impact, Trump-style language on behalf of decency.
Let's say you are, I dunno, John Delaney or Kirsten Gillibrand. Your campaign isn't getting any traction. Why not come out today and call Trump a "senile racist son of a bitch" in exactly those words? And tomorrow remind people that during the French revolution, people like Trump had their heads chopped off. And the next day, talk about how funny-looking Mitch McConnell is. You could make wild and extreme accusations against Republicans and get cameras pointed at you without even having to lie. (And if you wanted to lie, well that might work, too!) The media could be a particularly ripe target for this type of Democrat. What is the bought-and-paid-for media doing while the planet bakes?
This might not be a strategy for Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren or Mayor Pete -- too off-brand, and they each have semi-plausible paths to the nomination without getting extreme. But maybe Bernie should be thinking about it. And with 20-plus candidates in the race, why isn't anyone taking obvious steps to get attention, now that Trump has shown how it's done? The Republicans are prepared to throw anything against a wall to see if it will stick. What possible reason could Tom Steyer have to run for president if he isn't willing to raise hell with Trump and the Republicans? I don't get it.
68: I think there are a lot of internal-culture bars all these candidates have cleared, related to managing donors and navigating party politics, that include a preference for seriousness, dignitude, etc.
Alan Grayson sort of tried to take this tack pre-Trump, but it didn't get him that far - he tried to move up to Senate and lost the primary by a 41-point margin. Then he tried to win back a congressional seat in 2018 and lost that primary too.
|
The evaluation of the proportion of adult illiterates as well as that of persons deprived of safe drinking water did not pose major problems.|>
You're right that Grayson is a good example of what I'm talking about. He even had a bigamy scandal, which seems very Trump-like.
But I'll say two things about that: 1.) He was pre-Trump, and Trump didn't merely take advantage of an existing situation. He changed politics. 2.) House politics is more retail-oriented. Presidential politics is about media and spectacle.
Of course, I'm not proposing a strategy that I think would win. I'm suggesting that this is a viable longshot strategy for one of the folks that is certainly going to lose.
||
King Maha Vajiralongkorn presided over the swearing-in of the 36-member Cabinet, during which they pledged their loyalty to the constitutional monarch. "Every task has obstacles. Every mission faces problems," he told them in brief remarks. "It is normal to take on work and solve problems so that the country can be run smoothly according to circumstances."Whatever would they do without him.|>
71: All makes sense. I think if any candidate goes that way it might be de Blasio - he has the least to lose and he has the most unvarnished image at present, aside from maybe Sanders.
Wow, I completely missed that the King's sister tried to run for prime minister with a Thaksinist party and he personally barred her.
Yeah, but there were several months where I was completely delighted by whatever Grayson had said last. When he turned out to be scummy, I was more disappointed than usual. We had lost a good role player!
Bigamy is probably a good way to fight against the decline in social connectivity that comes with marriage.
I mean, if you want your candidate for the general to spend half her time answering questions like "Do you condemn Tom Steyer's description of the President as a racist loon who has to be reminded of his wife's name?" then go for it. But, you know, hostile media environment. This story would be tailor made for the US media because it would lead to about 25,000 "both sides are awful" stories.
One side is awful, the other unconscionable.
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
77: ajay is right. I'm happy with the Democratic candidates saying Trump is racist, corrupt, incompetent, utterly ignorant and that he should be impeached. There is no need to be uncivil.
77: The media problem doesn't originate with Democratic politics; it is purely internal to the media. That's why the Clinton Foundation was a scandal, and the Trump Foundation was a blip. E-mails, doncha know. And no matter what the Democrats do, there's going to be some hothead out there telling the truth. Remember Rev. Wright?
But you point out another useful aspect of the strategy I'm proposing. It would help the eventual Democratic nominee be a moderate in the media narrative, if that seemed useful in the moment. "Well, no, I don't approve of that kind of language at all. No matter what the president says or does, I think we need to accord some respect to his office. My whole campaign is about returning dignity to the presidency." Or whatever.
Of course, that's assuming that a tough stance against Trump fails in the primaries. If the Democratic nominee has had success by confronting Trump, you just keep doing that. "I'm not going to apologize for using strong language to combat a sexually deviant, open racist. Trump is a stain on America, and it is our responsibility to remove that stain."
Somewhere, there's a right-wing commentariat wondering why liberals never nominate buffoons. Or whatever the right-wing version of commentariat is. Volk something?
81. Arguing against didn't work for Berlusconi's opponents. Saying that Trump's bad policies and incompetence make the US predictably worse might work. However, people living in the places that flipped for DJT see that the places they live are bad and getting worse. Possibly trumpers there do not care that Trump is damaging the remaining viable cities and college towns, because they don't live there.
Also, many trumpers are convinced of things that are not true (for instance, that central americans now in the US are a demographic problem; explaining that they're normal immigrants and no there are not too many immigrants is not likely to be easy)
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/opinion/the-right-way-to-resist-trump.html
Zingales' idea that Hillary didn't talk about the issues is simply incorrect. But he's right about the media, which did ignore the fact that Hillary was talking about issues. And the media pretty clearly isn't going to change. So what do you do?
Berlusconi's party never had to get a majority, and Trump has never been supported by a majority - or even a plurality - of the electorate here, despite what might be the best economy of my lifetime. I don't actually know anything about Italy, but their media ecosystem seems like it might be even more corrupt than ours. It's a problem, but it's not a problem that you can fight with position papers.
Zingales:
Shortly after Mr. Trump gave his acceptance speech, protests sprang up all over America. What are these people protesting against?
Seriously?
He then slips further into incoherence: In an op-ed about political practicality, he argues that the Democrats, when dealing with Trump, should find ways to be accommodating because the only thing that the Republicans got from their relentless opposition to Obama was political victory.
I suppose this seemed plausible at the time, but events have not been kind to Zingales' thesis here:
There are plenty of Trump proposals that Democrats can agree with, like new infrastructure investments. ... Democrats should also offer Mr. Trump help against the Republican establishment, an offer that would reveal whether his populism is empty language or a real position.
Well, congressional Democrats kind of did offer infrastructure packages in good faith. They just never followed through in making hay of the rejection/indifference that came back.
I agree with pf. The media will write "both sides" stories, no matter what. The (probably accidental) genius of Trump is that he has weaponized this. He can get away with 18 things that would have sunk a previous President because he did 18 things, and he knows that the media will spend 1/36 of their time on each thing, and then 1/2 of their time on "Democrats in disarray".
He doesn't know diddly shit from a hole in the ground. He's just lucky that the media is dysfunctional in ways that benefit him.
I have a trowel to dig a hole in the ground to shit in.