On Mon, Jan 16, 2017 at 07:33:58AM +1000, James A. Donald wrote:
In truth, demanding that women be free to make contracts and also be held to contracts is as harsh, ridiculous, and unreasonable as demanding that children be free to make contracts and also be held to contracts, and everyone intuitively realizes this when it comes to actual practical cases, even though they claim to disagree with it in theory and in the abstract.
Without some serious scientific study, and even then, I think this might be hard to 'get across the line' so to speak. Having grown up in a broken family, with a younger brother to myself and our mother, I can speak to various anecdotes and observations and consequent challenges I have experienced due to what I say is patently unbalanced for a child (a greater expectation of responsibility and authority on the older child, a lack of discipline in the well meaning guise of "allow self expression" and also just coping with the events of surviving in life - growing or travelling to buy food for example. So I have a personally very strong view that broken homes (single mum or dad) is definitely a sub optimal environment for raising children. The causes which lead to broken homes should definitely be routed out to the extent possible. When looking at for example single parent pensions, it might be challenging to contemplate any easy solution to balancing society's expectation of the value of providing a safety net for single parents, vs the motive towards separation of families inherent in that safety net. Having personally been the beneficiary of said safety net within the "new age" of hippies and "free love", I have very serious concerns that our 'modern' society is indeed promoting superficiality of decision making around having children, and that this is fundamentally terrible. A "purely objective viewpoint" might say "well, those challenges that children face in single parent families are themselves an opportunity for growth of the individual", but such a position is fundamentally callous, and quite ironic in the face of the purported intention of single parent benefits to "minimize the suffering of children".
Fertile age women therefore should always be under the tutelage of fathers or husbands. Fertile age women who find themselves without a father or a husband should be detained in government homes for wayward girls under government supervision until they can find a husband willing to take care of them,
There are many problems, and perhaps some possible approaches to improving the situation - for example teaching at school how to communicate in a relationship, perhaps documentaries on the problems of single parents, and certainly changes in the law - financial incentives to have a family, rather than to be a single parent, would be a good start. We live in an age with a lot of problems, and a lot of degeneracy, and a political system which is apparently hopelessly compromised by pizzagate.