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Wednesday, March 25. 2020

Virus and the Jacobins

Via Hot Air:



 Nuclear households, it seems, are where we are all intuitively expected to retreat in order to prevent widespread ill-health. ‘Staying home’ is what is somehow self-evidently supposed to keep us well. But there are several problems with this, as anyone inclined to think about it critically (even for a moment) might figure out – problems one might summarize as the mystification of the couple-form; the romanticisation of kinship; and the sanitization of the fundamentally unsafe space that is private property…


Posted by The News Junkie in Hot News & Misc. Short Subjects at 15:41 | Comments (9) | Trackbacks (0)

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This is so absurd it's hard to believe it's real. I can't help but wonder if the Paris Marx author is actually someone trying to write a soliloquy belonging to Darkseid.
#1 DrTorch on 2020-03-25 16:09 (Reply)
In case you haven't noticed--lately the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) NYT, and other "informed" media have begun to focus on other ways to have family. In other words, the destruction is not complete--there is still the problem of the nuclear family as we have lived it for hundreds of years. What the perverts at BBC have said recently is polyamory is better (three partners) last month it was adventure travel to an isolated Chinese village where women take in men to have sex and a baby and then tell the men to leave when the woman is finished with the relationship. Over the past six months there has been another situation of rising crescendo in the media on this subject--One man/One woman doesn't work in the "new feminist world".
Here are the articles available through BBC:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=polyamory
#2 faculty wife on 2020-03-25 18:24 (Reply)
As always, Nature will have the last say on which social conventions are useful in carrying the species forward in time.

My money's on those conventions that have proven useful over the last few tens of thousands of years rather than those cooked up today.

Nature is brutal. It doesn't care how well you crafted those arguments and what grade you got at that postmodern-family seminar at your highly credentialed institution.... If your family arrangement doesn't move your (personal) genes forward in time, you're an evolutionary deadend — a loser in the race to the future because you won't have any descendants.
#3 PubliusII on 2020-03-25 18:50 (Reply)
"As always, Nature will have the last say..."

Gods of the copybook headings and all that.
#4 Zbignu on 2020-03-25 20:06 (Reply)
Now there are calls for banning reusable bags as unhygienic and to bring back single-use plastic bags. Massachusetts has now issued an emergency order doing so and requiring markets etc. to begin providing free single use plastic and paper bags. Where those plastic bags are going to come from is my question, since they've been banned.

And Greta Thunberg supposedly has the virus.
#5 Jim on 2020-03-25 20:42 (Reply)
I'm not expecting the nuclear family to suffer from what we learn from the pandemic. It would be nice, though, if the pandemic taught us to think more carefully about telecommuting and virtual meetings. It is strange how cavalierly bosses and clients order people to fly all over the country to no obvious purpose. Having telecommuted almost exclusively since 1999, I can testify it works surprisingly well and gets easier every year. It places a premium on a reputation for being able to get things done on schedule and under budget without exhaustive personal supervision, and it places a high priority on results over time-serving and clock-watching.
#6 Texan99 on 2020-03-26 07:43 (Reply)
Well darn. Time-serving and clock-watching are my two primary skills.

As to Ms. Marx's comments, I think they boil down to "People I don't like, especially women, would have less status, while people like me would have more under any new such system."
#6.1 Assistant Village Idiot on 2020-03-26 08:19 (Reply)
A lot of the corporate world has already been doing this, now that bandwidth has become a widespread, easily-obtainable commodity. Certainly the oil business has embraced it, many companies have a slew of small conference room set up for precisely these kinds of screen-sharing virtual-meeting workflows. It's a good development, but I find that a lot of the time, with delivery-oriented type project work, you have to see it in person, and you have to work through the problem with all parties present. There is a special human dynamic that can't be substituted by screen imagery - the energy and intensity of working through a challenging problem with the team all present is better by a country mile.
#6.2 Aggie on 2020-03-26 10:21 (Reply)
Greta should be extra careful (and do the world a favor) and self isolate for the next 60 years.
#7 Andrew Stanton on 2020-03-26 08:47 (Reply)

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