Comment by dividefuel
4 hours ago
I had my first kid a couple years ago and found myself spending a ton of time holding my kid while he slept, since it's the only way he'd reliably sleep. I spent a good amount of that time browsing various parenting and new baby subreddits.
One very common pattern I saw is that the conclusion is always that the dad is useless. Any provided facts are downplayed. Any omitted facts are imagined in the most negative light possible. And to be fair, there really are LOTS of cases where the dad is useless. The issue is more that posts needed to contain a mountain of evidence to return a neutral ground where the dad is no longer seen as a piece of garbage, rather than starting from neutral ground.
I feel for moms, who in addition to giving birth and having their lives upended to raise a baby, are now told that not only are most men garbage, but their man is garbage too. I feel for the dads, who even if they work hard are told how useless they are, and have to combat a stream of negativity fed to their spouse. It's a divisive wedge thrown into a new family, one that social media algorithms are only happy to encourage for engagement.
When I see instances like the one in this topic, I can see how the default narrative has been applied here. The radio announcers surely aren't aware of the storm they're creating, but it suddenly thrusts two average people into the social media spotlight, where people are happy to assume any missing details to fit their narrative. Everyone is going to apply the default story without taking any time to consider the possibility of other context.
EDIT TO ADD: I know there are manosphere spaces that are toxic too. As a man I've had no problem avoiding them, so this is one of my first extended exposures to this type of content, which is why it stuck with me. Probably also because I felt personally unwelcome as a dad.
> One very common pattern I saw is that the conclusion is always that the dad is useless. Any provided facts are downplayed. Any omitted facts are imagined in the most negative light possible. And to be fair, there really are LOTS of cases where the dad is useless. The issue is more that posts needed to contain a mountain of evidence to return a neutral ground where the dad is no longer seen as a piece of garbage, rather than starting from neutral ground.
You can find quite a lot of data showing that the burden of managing domestic matters falls primarily on women. I would recommend people check out the book Fair Play which examines the problem and puts forward a system where people are assigned various personal tasks that need to be done (there are 100 in total, not all of which may apply to your life/household):
> The result is Fair Play: a time- and anxiety-saving system that offers couples a completely new way to divvy up domestic responsibilities. Rodsky interviewed more than five hundred men and women from all walks of life to figure out what the invisible work in a family actually entails and how to get it all done efficiently. With four easy-to-follow rules, 100 household tasks, and a figurative card game you play with your partner, Fair Play helps you prioritize what's important to your family and who should take the lead on every chore from laundry to homework to dinner.
* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/44071899-fair-play
* Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6FfxfRMQkw
I really enjoyed Fair Play. While we didn't really prescribe to playing the game rigorously or really start keeping track of cards, it was a great read for our relationship and really made both of us look at how we lived our lives and acted in our relationship. We immediately made some small but lasting pivots that removed unneeded friction and now have new-found respect for each others daily "grind".
I've recommended it to a few friends and they have had similar stories. Nothing life changing, but some small, nice changes to the dynamic and how they think about it.
> I really enjoyed Fair Play. While we didn't really prescribe to playing the game rigorously or really start keeping track of cards, it was a great read for our relationship and really made both of us look at how we lived our lives and acted in our relationship.
This is probably the best (and maybe the only) way that this is a good game. As soon as it turns into score keeping, the relationship will almost certainly go sideways.
Maybe some relationships should go sideways, but that can be addressed in a different way.
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People are animals and animals can be trained. Dogs can be trained, elephants can be trained, tigers can be trained. This fact is hated, but has been known for thousands of years.
Foreign adversaries, political extremist groups and so on are all clawing away at every facet of society that can contribute to training people to be and do what they want. For all of our information, language and intellect, those strengths are just an open vulnerability if they aren't protected.
You have to train yourself sufficiently on the grounded basics of reality, the truth and the nature so that when adversarial training against you and others strikes you can be wise enough to push back like this. You have to be able to surround yourself with people who disagree and stand your ground, because they're all being pumped with garbage from everywhere and don't know any better.
It is one of Russia, China, Cuba's and even Iran's way of attacking the US at a distance by funding these groups and amplifying the dumbest stuff you can imagine until these minority voices reach majority saturation in some of the information spaces where they can fester. Taking over education, journalism, social media and so on.
If the idea of the open society is going to survive into the next century, we're either going to need AI to ground society if we can prevent AI from becoming too centralized, or we're going to need to rapidly change education to teach people to think even if the reason we haven't been doing so up to this point is that it fragments society too much. If the alternative is a fragmentation that our enemies control, then a new enlightenment may be the better way.
> It is one of Russia, China, Cuba's and even Iran's way of attacking the US
It's the USA eating itself and trying to attack Europe, if anything. It's American fascist billionaires who own, buy, and steer these social networks.
Owning the social networks doesn't mean you control all the information inherently, because it can easily get out of control. It wasn't that long ago that hundreds of thousands of bots had to be removed after running rampant for a long time which were manipulating trends that cause peaks on journalist's social media dashboards that influences what stories they cover.
Yes, social media bots impacting statistical trend services which some news organizations use to decide what stories to cover.
Communists caused World War 2 and yet love to play the victim. Not everybody who is against communism is a "fascist" and most people don't even know what that really means.
We're not attacking Europe, we're making Europe stronger so it can stand more independently so it doesn't require as much US intervention in the case World War 3 does start and a new front opens there beyond Ukraine. That way the US can invest more of its resources in the pacific. NATO understands this.
The reason we had to do it rudely, is because we've been trying to get Europe to do this for decades nicely and that hasn't work. So you get the rude approach.
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