Is anyone seriously in favour of keeping bad marriages together? I think the question is surely what turns good marriages into bad marriages and what can cause good marriages to break up. Not that government can do much in either case, but it could at least get out of the way.

“is anyone seriously in favour of keeping bad marriages together?”

When the conservatives say they want to make divorce more difficult, then in practice they are actually in favour of keeping bad marriages together.

On my son’s 3rd birthday, he told me and my (soon-to-be-ex)-wife off for yelling at a train as it went past us at a station.

“Don’t fight,” he said. “You might fight.”

No one 3 years of age should know that.

We should have seperated much sooner than we did. Families forced together when unhappy, stay unhappy. People who are unhappy together should not be together. Together, we were always going to be unhappy. Apart, we may be happy in the future.

The Tories are certainly in favour of keeping bad marriages together, and indeed to make people that aren’t necessarily suited to marriage go through and marry each other to potentially create a bad marriage (that is harder to get out of) all for a bit more cash.

All entirely correct. This is actually a pretty damning condemnation of Conservative Party thinking (if that’s the word for it) on this subject. Not only are they wrong, they’re completely unaware of why they’re wrong in a way that suggests that they haven’t got the slightest idea of what they’re talking about.

I wish it were just the politicians, frankly..

During the course of a messy divorce, my mother and I were disowned by my father’s side of the family, and a large proportion of my mother’s side. This is clearly the Right and Honorable way to treat a woman unwilling to suffer any more abuse, or watch her child take another beating.

I am not an anarchist. I believe strongly in slow, progressive social change, bloodless revolutions and – above all – consensus. Having said that, I have no interest in how much has to be torn down, how many put up against the wall, in order to excise the moral tumour which says it is dishonourable to protect yourself and your children. See articles 3, 5, 26 (3) and (gloriously) 30 of the UDHR.

Well I thought the Tory party’s actual policy was more to try and stop married couples from having their finances damaged by staying together – which I think is reasonable, especially since good marriages can turn to bad ones for reasons of finance. But perhaps they have something else in mind.

As for their ideology, I can’t make much sense of it and so won’t try to defend it.

Is Nick as Stupid As he Claims ?
Nick a good starting point with your inability to understand Conservative thinking is the idea that institutions encode knowledge not available to any one person .Evolved and tested solutions to living are , as a default position , preferable to whatever new idea some student has come up with. This sort of real world thinking is probably something you are used to when it comes to risking , for example , your own money. Anything that matters in fact .I wonder if its really quite so defeating as you claim ?
Emotional Laurie
Laurie it would at times have taken a heart of stone not to laugh . I liked this …My one regret is that my mother didn’t leave my father sooner – something she might well have done had she not been convinced that my sisters and I would never recover….
No missing where your sympathies lie is there ……I take it your father was part of the “Male hegemony “ and you are clearly still in a quite wonderfully adolescent sulk about the divorce . Leaving aside your bonkers excursions into a fictional of history invented by the now abandoned wimmin`s studies what about now …
Marriage Under Attack
Right now only one in twelve married couples par within five years of the child’s birth for unmarried couples that number is ONE IN TWO. In fact all marriages are bad at times and need effort. Most things worth achieving take effort and a social framework that provides help , not hindrance would be a good thing .New Labour have hindered.
The Institute of fiscal studies shows that if a couple are earning £5000 and £15000 a year respectively they will lose £5400 in benefits if they continue to share a home .Care have shown that many couples are £50 per week worse of f they stay together rising to £100. A Couple on £18000 who live in the same house pay a penalty of £8588 per year or 40% of their pre-tax income .A couple on £50,000 per year would be £7000 worse off . Shortfalls then are throughout the population . No wonder 200,000 cohabiting couples are pretending to live apart.
Kiddies Abandoned in the Snow
Children now are three times more likely to live in a one parent household than in 1972 and one in three children will experience divorce or separation before the age of sixteen . UNICEF.., say that Britain’s position as having the least happy children in the developed world is due to the high level of family breakdown.ONS showed that children of single parent families are about twice as likely to have mental health problems .Children from Lone Parent Families are 2,.4 times as likely to smoke ,1.6 times as likely to drink alcohol .70 % of UK young offenders come from fatherless homes and about the same proportion of young drug abusers)
Better Not best
Conservative Policy is to remove some of the fiscal disincentive to form a stable marriage the decline in which has had a disproportionate impact on white working class boys .( Figures excluding immigration would be much much worse). It is in these areas where the decline of sustaining institutions has had its impact not amongst the trendy divorcees routinely wheeled out by the BBC when they wish to sneer at anything “traditional “ . Perhaps it is not perfect and the state can only withdraw but it is certainly an improvement and widely supported by women.
Pah What Does She Know ?
Laurie do you want to have children ? What are your domestic arrangements and on what basis do you feel you are justified in taxing an institution that for all its imperfections clearly works better than the alternatives ? You sneer at thinking of children but your alternative is really only thinking about yourself .Is that it for you ?

“Right now only one in twelve married couples par within five years of the child’s birth for unmarried couples that number is ONE IN TWO.”

This statistic is irrelevant. It’s like saying married people are 10 times less likely to currently be wearing nappies. Without the quantification of the state of the relationship people are in, marriage or otherwise, the statistic above does nothing to prove or disprove that marriage is a more stable environment for children.

“The Institute of fiscal studies shows that if a couple are earning £5000 and £15000 a year respectively they will lose £5400 in benefits if they continue to share a home”

I always love these little specialised analogies, they’re generally the exception that proves the rule but yet are used as if they’re proof of the whole system being topsy turvy. The couple benefits by £5400 in benefits do they? Shame really that such an amount is generally *less* than they will need to pay an average rent on a place. I don’t even want to get in to the extra cost of gas, electricity, council tax and water, and of mortgages if it’s gone that far. I’d love to look at the realism of it more but finding this IFS report is next to impossible.

All of this ignores other facts. How many couples are on this magical income distribution? Most, or just some? Is it not the case that most couples will actually generally be better off living together due to other associated costs?

There is obviously a loop here, one that can benefit a severe minority of people, and it needs addressing…but using it to claim that all couples are better off not marrying each other is ridiculous.

“ONS showed that children of single parent families are about twice as likely to have mental health problems ”

Another worthless statistic (set of them in fact) unless you can also prove that by placing specifically these single parent families in to marriage would change the situation.

[3] My kids’ mother and I separated and divorced when my daughter was three and my son two. I explained to her at the time that we didn’t want her to see us fighting and she thought this a perfectly sensible explanation. Neither of them have ever criticised us for it. It probably helped that their mother brought them up in a part of north London where only one of their friends was living in a “traditional” nuclear family – kids want their home life to be happy and to look the same as their mates’ – beyond that they don’t care tuppence.

To be fair, though, Newmania’s statistics may be rubbish, but at least he has some.

“To be fair, though, Newmania’s statistics may be rubbish, but at least he has some.”

Bad statistics are worse than no statistics, especially on an issue like this where we are talking about relationships between individuals that will differ wildly.

To take only one example his use of “ONS showed that children of single parent families are about twice as likely to have mental health problems” is a classic example of assuming cause and effect with no evidence to support it other than correlation.

I would rather the state stayed out of people’s relationships as much as is humanly possible. Whilst I agree entirely with Laurie’s piece based on her own experiences, there are almost certainly cases where ‘staying together for the kids’ has proved to be a beneficial choice. In either case, who are we, the state or the Daily Mail to decide?

Newmania, your use of statistics is hugely flawed. The financial data is extremely selective, and the statistics on divorce and mental health show no evidence of corroboration – again, post hoc ergo propter hoc. Do we have any evidence on how many kids with a history of abuse, in single or dual parent families, smoke and drink? Do we have evidence on whether these kids would have started smoking and drinking if their parents had stayed together? If not, these statistics are defunct.

Woobegone – this is why this article is light on stats. A lot of the information out there misuses select statistics, and that’s precisely what I wanted to address here. Yes, statistics seem to show that children from ‘fatherless’ homes are more likely to get into trouble – but is this because of the impact of divorce, as is normally assumed, or is it because their fathers were and are bloody awful and irresponsible, and because the state is not set up to adequately support single mothers in work? Hmm….

My point is that the most readily available statistics don’t tell the whole story here. Divorce is an effect, not a cause of family breakdown, and it’s the way that men and women relate within families that needs to be fixed in this country, rather than simply blaming women (it’s usually women – 69% of divorces are granted to women, and half of these cite the husband’s behaviour as the direct cause) for not staying in unhappy marriages. And this is where feminist thought can help, analysing the effects of social change on the way that families relate to one another and working out new ways of supporting men and women in raising their kids, whether together or apart.

NM, what’s wrong with ‘emotional’? Your assumptions about my family situation are laughable, but since the personal is political, and since you ask -

1. My father is not the patriarchy, he is a small and unassuming man who is in the process of recovering from major heart surgery. I get on with him fine – in fact, I get on with him much better now that my parents are apart. I still keep some of my stuff at his place. I regret that some of his assumptions about gender roles affected my family the way they did, but he is the product of a particular post-war generation.

2. I co-habit with my partner, who is a student, my partner’s brother who is a pub manager, one lesbian couple and two heterosexual couples. I’ve not decided whether or not I want to have kids, because I’m only 22, and my uterus is no concern of yours. Had you decided, at 22, whether you wanted to have kids? Would you even have asked me that question if I were a young man?

Laurie, the trouble with saying extremely strong and consistent associations between two factors do not prove causation beyond doubt is not that it’s untrue. It’s that it applies to every claim ever made about causation. It applies to the claim that smoking causes lung cancer or that HIV causes AIDS. In the end, there are no ‘causation’ atoms ready to be discovered under a microscope: only extremely strong associations that show up time and again. If this standard isn’t high enough for you, fair enough, but if this standard is fine until it supports a claim you find politically threatening – that kids do better in life if their mum and dad marry and stay together – it suggests someone unwilling to face the idea that there are trade-offs between some of the things you want for society.

I’ve no doubt you passionately want a society where (a) all children get a fair and roughly equsl chance in life and (b) all adults can follow their hearts (and/or their gonads) in whatever weird and wonderful ways that may lead. But the evidence is now overwhelming that the latter jeopardises the former. It’s difficult to see why anyone would deny it – other than to avoid the discomfort of accepting that 1960s liberalism harms the best interests of millions of children.

To put the above another way – imagine if the exact same evidence suggesting illegitimacy and divorce are bad for kids instead implied that, say, chlorine in swimming pools was bad for kids in the same way. That children exposed to swimming pool chlorine are much more likely fail in school, in work, to end up in prison and so on. I don’t think anyone except spokesmen for chlorine producers would bother to argue against the evidence – you wouldn’t see posts on Liberal Conspiracy musing that perhaps it’s simply that disfunctional kids are more likely to be taken swimming so that their hapless parents can relax by the pool while the kids expend their energy.

The reason the evidence that the fatherless family is bad for kids is controversial is not because it’s anything other than overwhelming. It’s because, if true, it means that adults cause genuine harm if they put their obligations to the children they bring into the world second to their own desires and interests. This is a threatening proposition to some socialists, some conservatives and most liberals and libertarians. How much nicer to believe that adults can simply enter and leave relationships as they wish without anyone getting hurt!

By the way, Laurie, the reason mentioning your anger is jarring is that when someone talks about being angered or upset by someone else’s worldview, the likely reaction will depend very much on whether the offended person is a man or a woman. If two men are arguing about politics and one of them complained that he was hurt and angered by what the other believed and argued, the most likely response would vary from “Um … so what? Doesn’t change the facts, does it?” to outright contemptuous laughter. But if a woman made the same complaint, there is a good chance the same man would say something like “Oh, I don’t mean to upset you, my dear; please don’t listen to me” – especially if he is, as you put it, a product of a particular post-war generation. Now you seem exactly the kind of person who would be most opposed to any such double standard, which makes it seem weird when you basically invoke it. If this is the last thing you want anyone to think you are doing – as it probably is – why even mention your emotional state? It’s not as if it adds anything to your argument in terms of evidence, does it? Whether you realise it or not, a woman who talks about how her emotions are being adversely affected by a debate comes across as if she is making a thinly veiled plea that the man not be so beastly or she might burst into tears.

“Bad statistics are worse than no statistics”

I strongly disagree. Because if someone offers bad statistics then you can prove them wrong based on good ones, and the debate has moved on. Whereas if someone just makes bold assertions or says “From my personal experience I believe X” , you can’t argue with them. it adds little to the general debate (unless the personal experience is *very* relevant , and representative, but that’s rare – you’re not an expert on knife crime just because someone stabbed you or your relative, sad as that is.)

So I’d say that any statistics – or in general any hard evidence – is better than none. I mean if I say something ridiculous like “99% of rapes are committed by black people”, to prove me wrong, you’d have to look up the real numbers. Which is much more useful than just saying “That’s racist!”

“Evolved and tested solutions to living are , as a default position , preferable to whatever new idea some student has come up with. This sort of real world thinking is probably something you are used to when it comes to risking , for example, your own money.”

Newmania, I see what you are saying but I don’t think it is the state’s role to support institutions just because they have worked well (by some perspectives) in the past. If they are good institutions, they will thrive with or without government support. It also means that I can afford to be much more experimental. If Laurie, for example, can make a polyamorous syndicate work well as a family, then that is fine from a libertarian standpoint. I probably wouldn’t recommend it to most people who might be better off sticking with more tried and tested ways of living, but I can’t want to force or cajole people to conform. In so far as conservatives want to do that, I imagine they will cause more harm than good. If all they want to do is level the playing field so that married couples can gain the benefits of their chosen lifestyle, I will support them.

“The nuclear family, sustained by the middle-class myth of everlasting love and marriage, is an incredibly efficient way of dividing labour in the context of industrial capitalism, as observed by nearly every brave leftist writer from Engels to Betty Friedan.”

Strange that you say everlasting marriage is a myth when almost all my friends and I have parents who have always been married. Rather than some sort of capitalist conspiracy, the nuclear family is based on the idea that those who create children (the parents) stay together and raise those children, putting the interests of the children above their own.

The other great thing about the nuclear family is that it is less likely to be dependent on the state.

Richard wrote:

The other great thing about the nuclear family is that it is less likely to be dependent on the state.

Compared to what?

Consider the alternative to be an extended family with strong communal support from local friends and maybe a religious community. Would the nuclear family really need less support from the state than that? In fact, the rise of the nuclear family is also coupled with the rise of the welfare state. The nuclear family also represents independence from family and community, a relatively modern idea that owes a lot to a) the welfare state and b) 20th century housing policy.

The important point is that we shouldn’t be talking about a binary choice between a two-parent, n-child family and a one-parent, n-child family, but also other arrangements which include extended families, much more support from friends, and so forth. The nuclear family, far from representing the pinnacle of self-sufficiency, is actually quite dependent on state support – housing policy in the 20th century was a key driver of this mode of living, both by providing people with new options to own houses cheaply and in breaking up extended family units through various planned bits of social engineering. The Tory notion that the nuclear family represents some golden age of independent responsible parenthood is plain wrong.

“Laurie, the trouble with saying extremely strong and consistent associations between two factors do not prove causation beyond doubt is not that it’s untrue.”

No-one is saying they are untrue, just that there is nothing to prove that they mean anything.

“So I’d say that any statistics – or in general any hard evidence – is better than none.”

In your example of trying to “get to the bottom” of the debate I’d agree completely. However these bad stats are used over and over, without much referencing of a source so that the FULL picture of the statistics can be analysed I might add, and it is dangerous to simply let them be said because they are there. Unforunately we’re not in a situation where we can simply see a bad statistic, drop everything, and do more studies to find out if the baseless correlations and assumptions made from that are true. Funding, resourcing, etc, all means this isn’t going to happen. As such people shouldn’t be using bad statistics, ideally people would have the capacity to understand when statitistics are completely one sided without any of the quantification needed to make them more empirical, but we know they’ll use them for their own biased ends.

How is this any better, in practice, than “I believe X”?

What I find hilarious about newmania is his political confusion and hypocrisy.

When it comes to economic matters he wants the state to stay away as much as possible. When it comes to social issues he would like the state to interfere so everyone can be pushed in the direction he would like.

Sunny, it’s a perfectly reasonable position to hold that pursuing ones self-interest in economic matters within the law is to the general good (not from the butcher or the baker) etc.) whereas pursuing one’s self-interest when it comes to ones obligations to ones partner and children can be anything but.

I’d argue that in the real world the greater contradiction is supporting minimal government in theory while in practice supporting the social liberalism and family breakdown that inevitably create the demand for ever more government and welfare to pick up the pieces.

Rather irritatingly my own patriarchal household is , in practice , a matriarchy . Mrs N has expressed the keen desire to throw my computer out of the window if she sees me on it at this time of year when my children see so little of me . I have a lot of sympathy for much of what has been said here especially on stats . I still think marriage needs some defence against those who hate it and an over mighty state for whom it is an enemy as are all self sustaining sub state groups .
…..eeeek gotta go ( and rule …)

When it comes to economic matters he wants the state to stay away as much as possible. When it comes to social issues he would like the state to interfere so everyone can be pushed in the direction he would like.

That ios precisely not wqhat i have said isn1

Oops

When it comes to economic matters he wants the state to stay away as much as possible. When it comes to social issues he would like the state to interfere so everyone can be pushed in the direction he would like.

Sunny
That is not what I said is it ? I said would like the state to get out of marriage by removing the fiscal impediments it has erected . I am , also far less of an economic liberal than many “Liberals “ that comment here anyway. By your standards I may have a traditional fondness for free enterprise but its not an ideological necessity . Goodness that was hard. (yawn)
On the stats Polly Toynbee mounted a contextualising counter argument to this and much more of the same that would provide some balance it could be easily googled if you want some ammo .Both time scale and class differentials are good points of attack . I feel the Conservative case is overall a good one (if less eye catching than the one I have presented ) but it is only asking for less interference and so quite modest. No Conservatives would countenance more than encouragement by the state which being the ritual expression of an organic society is not conceived as the main player except by unfortunate necessity . If people had to be forced to get married there would truly be no point .I , like most Conservatives , usually ignore statistics , and I approve of the scepticism shown here in general .My god I put up with plenty of lies in empirical clothing from New Labour .These were taken from right wing commentators in the national Press. They are what they are

Laurie I approve of emotion and distrust reason . I like the way you wear your heart on your sleeve which makes for invigorating reading .I am far from sure that as a woman you can go on pretending to be a subordinated group though. Did you know that if a man’s IQ rises by 16% he improves his chance of mating by 35%. If a woman’s IQ rises by 16% her chances reduce by the same amount ( The amount of childless graduate women is staggering ). Why because women refuse to marry “beneath them”.
Women are surging through our elite institutions and the scale of change before us is as yet unnoticed . Men however refuse to become house husbands , women refuse to support men and so we have a large loose end to the feminist revolution. Are you sure you are not fighting a battle that has already been won and “losing the peace “. Just as devolution eventually lead us to the unnoticed English problem Feminism has reached a point where we have a “Male “, problem. My feeling is there is altogether to little discussion of men in the context of feminism and what women really want from them .I would be fascinated to know what someone like you admires in a man ..( his feminine side ?)

Conservatives as ever take a pragmatic view and watch a new ‘team’ marriage evolve with approval even if it includes numerous elements that would make the old style man hater pull her underarm hair out . Just let us get on with it .

Thank you for this extraordinary blog post, which I read with interest. Your righteous indignation (nicely accentuated by the use of obscene language) is a thing to behold.

You have laid out with clarity and honesty what every conservative suspects lefties of thinking, but doesn’t actually believe they are capable of thinking. From the upfront admission that you prefer personal happiness to family responsibility, to the contempt for ‘middle-class’ values, it is word-perfect left-wing writing.

The bile and hatred that bubbles beneath your piece is breathtaking. Conservatives often wonder if they have invented a false enemy in the angry lefty, but here you show that such anti-conformist fury, such passionate ill-feeling towards those who subscribe to ‘heteronormative’ views, is very real.

Thank you, genuinely, for making crystal clear who the enemy is for conservatives.

Newmania,

Those are some fascinating statistics, if they’re true – although perhaps they also indicate that women are more likely to look for intelligence in a mate?

‘Men however refuse to become house husbands , women refuse to support men and so we have a large loose end to the feminist revolution.’
Well, yep, this is part of the point I’m making here. The revolution has come to a standstill: more cannot be acheived until the system changes such that one partner is not forced to become a ‘house’ anything, and so that domestic labour and the labour of childcare is both valued and shared equally. My idea of heaven is not, believe it or not, a nubile and greased effeminate young man chained to the sink!

I have a lot of thoughts about masculinity and what’s good about it, some of which I’ve shared on here, some of which I haven’t. If anyone else would be interested, I might write a separate post in the near future?

[27] Please do, Laurie.

In that case I shall!

Cicero – I also drink the blood of Christian babies. Om nom nom.

Why should we do as we are told, and why not do as we please? Why should women be reduced to baby machines to please others? Why marry… if they do not want to?

“I , like most Conservatives , usually ignore statistics”

That’s what’s wrong with Conservatives.

“My god I put up with plenty of lies in empirical clothing from New Labour .”

That’s what’s wrong with New Labour.

“In that case I shall!”

Cool. ^.^

“My idea of heaven is not, believe it or not, a nubile and greased effeminate young man chained to the sink!”

Some men would pay good money for that.

In that case, great – but would I lose my benefits?

“Compared to what?”

A single parent having to survive off of handouts. I actually agree with your point re the extended family though.

“You have laid out with clarity and honesty what every conservative suspects lefties of thinking, but doesn’t actually believe they are capable of thinking. From the upfront admission that you prefer personal happiness to family responsibility, to the contempt for ‘middle-class’ values, it is word-perfect left-wing writing.”

To be fair I think this is more redolent of the loonly left than the moderate left, although there may well be traces of the thinking of the former in the latter.

Cicero: “From the upfront admission that you prefer personal happiness to family responsibility”

Category error.

‘Personal happiness’ is an end – it’s a nice thing that everyone, unless they’re really really evil, would like to see happen for everyone in an ideal world. But ‘family responsibility’ is a means – it has no value beyond the extent that it leads to greater personal happiness for everyone. Which it sometimes does, and sometimes doesn’t.

So preferring personal happiness to family responsibility is definitionally the right thing to do, unless you actually believe family responsibility is the /only/ way to achieve personal happiness.

(great original piece BTW)

Laurie that was courtesy of Boris Johnson a poster of whom I have no doubt you kiss nightly before retiring .( I do )

I wonder if our resident Troll kisses the BoJo poster in front of his wife or behind her back…

John B Said -‘Personal happiness’ is an end – it’s a nice thing that everyone, unless they’re really really evil, would like to see happen for everyone in an ideal world. But ‘family responsibility’ is a means – it has no value beyond the extent that it leads to greater personal happiness for everyone. Which it sometimes does, and sometimes doesn’t.

I say -This is as banale a vision of “happiness” as I would expect . Happiness is not an end , a cow is happy and epsilon more so , we crave more than this. One of the reasons for revering monogamy or marriage is that it is an institution that celebrates truly knowing and devoting yourself another person. Naturally this heroic feat is fraught with danger , unhappiness , failure.It is not for everyone . Nonetheless it is a noble endeavour in itself and one far superior than the vain silly quest for happiness.
I would rather suffer the miseries of a poet than endure the happiness of a pet rabbit even if John B does think it is a “Nice thing “

This debate in hopelessly out of date; the same one Americans were having a full 15 years ago. Today in the US, the scholarly debate is not about ‘whether’ the two-parent married family is better for children, but as to ‘how much’ it is better.

And what’s this?:

“The nuclear family, sustained by the middle-class myth of everlasting love and marriage, is an incredibly efficient way of dividing labour in the context of industrial capitalism, as observed by nearly every brave leftist writer from Engels to Betty Friedan.”

Wow! I haven’t heard this kind of shit for 25 years. I feel quite sorry for British conservatives: its 2009 and they still have to argue against this self refuting rubbish. I’d advise them not to bother. You cannot argue with minds so disabled by ideological fanaticism. You should expend your energies arguing with socially liberal conservatives. You must accept that some people are just imbeciles and will never change their position on certain things because they are impervious to factual argument.

Elite opinion will change eventually simply because 1000s of years of human experience, across civilizations and cultures cannot be denied indefinitely. Unfortunately it will probably only change when the problem of an unsocialized underclass grows so large that it can no longer be ignored.

ADAMITES

“The obscure sect, dating probably from the second century, professed to have regained Adam’s primeval innocence. Various accounts are given of their origin. Some have thought them to have been an offshoot of the Carpocratian Gnostics, who professed a sensual mysticism and a complete emancipation from the moral law. Theodoret (Haer. Fab., I, 6) held this view of them, and identified them with the licentious sects whose practices are described by Clement of Alexandria. Others, on the contrary, consider them to have been misguided ascetics, who strove to extirpate carnal desires by a return to simpler manners, and by the abolition of marriage.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adamites

Right-hand, or Left-hand: either way they are a bloody nuisance!

“You must accept that some people are just imbeciles and will never change their position on certain things because they are impervious to factual argument.”

Wise words. Motes & beams.

Yawns

When it’s time for bed, nobody invites the state to come with them.

Laurie – maybe the news paper articles piss you off because of the simple fact children usually fight tooth and nail to keep their biological parents together ?

Various levels of self deception/rationalisation ensue for both children and parents (after the parting of the ways) including a fair amount of free floating anger – while children may act out or become depressed, etc, etc.

It goes without saying that children from divorced parents are far more likely to repeat this pattern of behaviour (the so called repetition compulsion).

#15

“To put the above another way – imagine if the exact same evidence suggesting illegitimacy and divorce are bad for kids instead implied that, say, chlorine in swimming pools was bad for kids in the same way. That children exposed to swimming pool chlorine are much more likely fail in school, in work, to end up in prison and so on. I don’t think anyone except spokesmen for chlorine producers would bother to argue against the evidence”

What is it with right-wing commentators on this site and terrible, terrible analogies?

Suppose children were routinely exposed to conflict, put in frightening situations and perhaps abused or forced to watch someone they loved being abused? Would Conservatives then argue that it was the chlorine in the pools that was damaging the children? What about if there were children who swam in chlorine pools but weren’t exposed to the above, and they were well-adjusted? Would the Tories still insist it was chlorine in pools that was damaging kids?

I bet they would, you know.

As for:

“Did you know that if a man’s IQ rises by 16% he improves his chance of mating by 35%. If a woman’s IQ rises by 16% her chances reduce by the same amount”

I think newmania means “getting married” here by “mating”. In which case – apart from the likelihood that some men are threatened by women who don’t act dumber than them – might many intelligent women just not feel the need to marry? Might they and their loved ones be perfectly happy living just as married families do but without a piece of paper? Why would that matter? (Of course, if this statistic is accurate – and coming from Newmania the chances are he overheard it in the pub or is reproducing it from guido’s comments section – it is more likely to have something to do with the tendency of highly educated people with lofty career aspirations to wait before settling down.)

I love the implication that someone’s IQ might rise by 16% overnight, btw.

Got it from Boris Johnson`s Book as I said and the point is that women are not marrying socially inferior men . Judging from what they say it makes them very miserable to be childless and lonely but who knows .