klw

"I found your remark that children are " ... only for economic health""

Nothing I said could possibly be construed as having that meaning. I certainly did not use that phrase.

Sylvia.

Sylvia - this is what you said: The essential premise of my article is that society needs more children for its future economic health. If you disagree with that, then the rest of the article is irrelevant.

I did not mean to misquote you. I was relying on memory until I thought of cutting and pasting the above. Even so, I am allowed to have a different point of view. Your response to me sounded quite aggressive.

I have written you a lengthy and very positive response to your article. The editor sent me a message that it was too long. Whilst I was editing it I must have pressed something incorrectly. I am still looking for it.

Thank you
Kay.

klw,

I am unconcerned about the misquotation per se. What I was unhappy about was that you, whether intentionally or not, seriously misrepresented my opinion about children. As a debating tactic it is recognisable as both an ad hominem attack on me, and a strawman argument. Neither has any place in civilised debate, and if my response seemed aggressive, then it just reflected my annoyance.

If I had said "people need to eat more fruit for the sake of their physical health," that could hardly be construed as meaning that I thought that eating fruit was otherwise a valueless activity.

There are all sorts of reasons people might feel that it is desirable for more babies to be born. Of those reasons, one clearly identifiable one is that society needs them for its future financial health.

That says nothing about my attitude towards children in a wider context.

Sylvia.

Sylvia,
I would think that many of these debates on the modern family become very ad hominem and anecdotal at times, because there is often very little data to go by.

Issues such as marriage, divorce, birth rates etc, are now some of the most important issues facing society, but it is only in recent years that social science has really came out with much reliable data regards it all. However that data does not look good, as our present system is non-sustainable, and it will have to change or society collapses.

However the Feminist / Marxist system of children being raised by the state appears to be abhorrent, (in principle anyway), to most people in this forum, although it is a system that is gradually occurring in time, with the devaluing of marriage, the incessant negative portrayal of men, the wide scale removal of fathers from their children, the emphasis on “parental responsibility” rather than “parental rights”, the opening up of more child care centres etc.

Much money has been spent in the past by government, but this system has still occurred, so the idea that even more government expenditure, (and not things such as changes to legislation), will fix the problems is questionable.

However assuming your belief that even more government spending will fix the problems is correct, it would depend on how that money is spent, as there is no guarantee that government will ever spend any money wisely.

So together with a belief that more government expenditure will be beneficial, there eventually has to be details outlined of how that money should be spent, otherwise it becomes highly likely that the money will be just wasted.

When fatherhood truly becomes a mug’s game, incentives will be raised. Until then, we’ll make do with women’s fashion and men’s cerebral vortex.

By the looks of this thread, and many others, my thought that many men are in social crisis is strongly confirmed. This is just one of the many symptoms of our brilliant effort of the 60s to re-define our society more in terms of 'me' and less in terms of 'us'. We didn't just let go of the values underpinning the stability of the 40s and 50s, we threw them out with a hateful vengence.

Feminism re-defined women, and in the process re-defined men, and now men are in crisis.

We may soon see more evidence of the destructive intrusion of atheist values in more and more males losing their sense of identity, sense of direction, and sense of hope. As the Yir Yuront discovered, small changes can destroy a whole community. You know something is WRONG, but you can't quite put your finger on it, and before you manage to find the source, you are in a downward and irreversible spiral to social oblivion.

Some would 'poo poo' this view, because they only see the small increments, but if they saw how FAR we have strayed, they would think twice about whether to buy a ticket on that train in the first place.

Fatherhood "is it worth it" is just one question that should never even be raised, it is so fundamental to our survival ! The only question should be 'how can I be a good dad, and how can we be a better community in which to be a dad'.