6 ms·

> Telling people that it doesn't matter if they divorce and that they should put their own short-term happiness first and foremost That's a straw man, though.

> Telling people that it doesn't matter if they divorce and that they should put their own short-term happiness first and foremost That's a straw man, though. Nobody relevant is telling people that. You're either not listening to the primary sources and are getting a distorted representation by politically motivated secondary sources, or your own biases are clouding your understanding when you're reading the primary sources.

zozbot234 5y ago
The BLM movement explicitly supports "dismantling of the nuclear family structure" as one of their goals. How many progressives have voiced support for BLM? How many have bothered to denounce and disclaim support for these peculiar aims, that seem to have remarkably little to do with benefiting Black lives, and that quite a few Blacks would themselves oppose?
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  Explicitly? Where?
  - FFRefresh 5y ago
    They removed references to it from their website (I believe after backlash), but here's an archived link to it: https://web.archive.org/web/20200715132542/https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200715132542/https://blacklive... The relevant bit: > We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.
    - hairofadog 5y ago
      The key word you’re missing in your interpretation of that quote is “requirement”. I may love hiking, but I am not in favor of requiring hiking for everyone. I imagine this is in response to various conservative proposals over the years to put forth (straight) marriage as a solution to various unrelated societal ills.
      - FFRefresh 5y ago
        My comment didn't feature an interpretation, it was directly quoting the BLM site... but now I will offer an interpretation based on your comment: I'm not in favor of requiring hiking or certain family structures either. Serious question, is there a requirement for the nuclear family? Let us not conflate norms and legal requirements. Where I live, there is most certainly a norm around hiking being a really positive thing that you should do, and it's associated with being higher status (local fashion trends even favor looking like you are a hiker). Not everyone is a hiker, and some people don't like hiking. But I'm okay with the norm existing, but would never support a requirement for it.
        atq2119 5y ago
        > Serious question, is there a requirement for the nuclear family? The answer depends on where you are. It's nowhere as strict as "if you have a child outside a nuclear family, you go to jail". But there may be all sorts of softer pressures in place. Now, I don't think having such pressures is necessarily bad in all places. It becomes bad when it's a "one solution fits all" approach, and the pressure is applied even in situations where dissolving a traditional nuclear family would be in the participants' (especially the children's) best interests. Putting myself in the shoes of black folks, I can certainly see how certain conservative initiatives cross that line.
    - skinnymuch 5y ago
      This isn’t “the” BLM site. This is a site that is purportedly onboard the BLM movement. That’s an important distinction.
      - FFRefresh 5y ago
        Why did you ask for evidence in the first place of the claim that BLM held a position against the nuclear family if you wouldn't accept any evidence? If your position is just a flavor of the 'No true scotsman' fallacy, why even bother? Why not just come out and say "There can never be a true BLM source! You can never cite an authoritative position from BLM! You cannot cite anything because there are many local chapters, and the movement can exist even independently of that! BLM can never be criticized thusly for any positions! Ha!" That is your position here, no? It ignores that THERE IS a central hub for the BLM network. And the website for this is blacklivesmatter.com, which is what I cited. This is the primary website for the BLM org and movement. It is by far, the most heavily trafficked website in the BLM movement. BLM started with the group of people who created the org for which the website serves as the face for. Calling it 'purportedly onboard' the BLM movement is incredibly ignorant of its history. Yes, there is a broader network. But this is the center of that network. This central hub (which runs blacklivesmatter.com) took in $90 million in donations in 2020. And it then distributed $21.7 million of that to local chapters.
        skinnymuch 5y ago
        Anecdotes mean just what they mean. However as some one most closely aligned to leftys vs other political identity or group, I’ve not been around too many leftists so focused on BLM specifically in a central/organized way or treat it as such. > That is your position here, no? Not at all. Your core point revolves around me thinking about and using local chapters as a core defense. I didn’t even know that was a thing for all of this. The comment revolves around various assumption. Pointing to a caricature of an immature left wing person who craves getting one under everyone to the right of them. Like “if you wouldn’t accept any evidence”. I asked because I don’t particularly care much about BLM a specifically because caring about oppressed minorities has always been a core tenant. i knew little about this most famous blm group**. Similarly, I can’t remember the last video feed in the past year I’ve gotten from YouTube that was about BLM from a lefty source. Except for two specifically focused on black issues in America. ** I searched “blm vs black lives matter group”. I see a majority of front page news and other stuff being conservatives foaming out about stuff. As if a lot of the issues and “facts” of BLM centralization are something greatly discussed by all sides. Not just the people upset over it. Now I more likely believe how big this org is. If they get this much attention from center and right leaning media. Not dissimilar to the over exaggeration done by the mostly centrist and neoliberal media of focusing on Trump so much (though definitely including more left wing media a lot too). Still. Not every one on the left or sympathetic to certain issues thinks this way. Nor is every one on the left a smarmy smart ass. People aren’t a monolith.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- danaris 5y ago
  Disclaimer: while I support the BLM movement, I've never personally interacted with it in any meaningful way, so I don't know exactly what they mean by this, to the extent that they have, in fact, said it. "Dismantling the nuclear family structure" doesn't mean "throw organized families to the wind, let children fend for themselves, force everyone into single-parent households" or anything like that. Like I said in my previous comment, the "nuclear family" is not the norm, it is not a particularly stable or sustainable model for family units, and what we had before, while it certainly also has its flaws, tends to be much better for any family that doesn't completely fit within the happy fairy-tale ideal of two parents who love each other completely, 2.4 kids, and a dog. Through most of human history, "family" has meant either "three generations of blood relations living under one roof, out to aunts/uncles/cousins or even farther, all sharing responsibility for things like child-rearing" or, even more broadly, just "the entire community, made up of a big extended family (with or without blood relations)/tribe/clan." When two parents didn't get along, even if they didn't "divorce" in the way we understand it today, they could still stop being pair-bonded without it significantly affecting the children, because those children were being raised more or less in common with a half-dozen (dozen? score?) others in the much large "family unit", by all the parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents, etc. "Dismantling the nuclear family" doesn't mean breaking it down and sending the component parts off to do their own thing individually. It means removing that very specific and very inflexible structure as our society's only acceptable model of what it means to be a "family," because like many other things that emerged in the shadow of the Industrial Revolution, it may be helpful for some people, but it's deeply harmful for many, many others.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    Unfortunately, the radical left's contempt for the bourgeois nuclear family is only exceeded by their far greater contempt for the traditionalism of extended family structures, which often entails "staying put" for multiple generations in comparatively rural towns and villages - far different from the inner-city concerns of the rest of the BLM movement, and the leftist progressive movement more generally. So, while there's much to say for what you're advocating here, it's not the kind of change that BLM is going to meaningfully pursue.
  - 5y ago
- hotpotamus 5y ago
  Funny to see where arch-elite conservative David Brooks and BLM are in such complete agreement. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuclear-family-was-a-mistake/605536/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuc...
- rcacho 5y ago
  I think the BLM group and the BLM movement should be differentiated. While many progressives may have supported the BLM movement I don't believe the openly Marxist organization is as popular. Also, just cutting the quote at the dismantling part without including the rest of that statement seems disingenuous.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  It does not. The stated goal was “disrupt the nuclear family requirement.” Very different than “dismantle the nuclear family structure.”

zozbot234 5y ago

The BLM movement explicitly supports "dismantling of the nuclear family structure" as one of their goals. How many progressives have voiced support for BLM? How many have bothered to denounce and disclaim support for these peculiar aims, that seem to have remarkably little to do with benefiting Black lives, and that quite a few Blacks would themselves oppose?

skinnymuch 5y ago
Explicitly? Where?
- FFRefresh 5y ago
  They removed references to it from their website (I believe after backlash), but here's an archived link to it: https://web.archive.org/web/20200715132542/https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200715132542/https://blacklive... The relevant bit: > We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.
  - hairofadog 5y ago
    The key word you’re missing in your interpretation of that quote is “requirement”. I may love hiking, but I am not in favor of requiring hiking for everyone. I imagine this is in response to various conservative proposals over the years to put forth (straight) marriage as a solution to various unrelated societal ills.
    - FFRefresh 5y ago
      My comment didn't feature an interpretation, it was directly quoting the BLM site... but now I will offer an interpretation based on your comment: I'm not in favor of requiring hiking or certain family structures either. Serious question, is there a requirement for the nuclear family? Let us not conflate norms and legal requirements. Where I live, there is most certainly a norm around hiking being a really positive thing that you should do, and it's associated with being higher status (local fashion trends even favor looking like you are a hiker). Not everyone is a hiker, and some people don't like hiking. But I'm okay with the norm existing, but would never support a requirement for it.
      - atq2119 5y ago
        > Serious question, is there a requirement for the nuclear family? The answer depends on where you are. It's nowhere as strict as "if you have a child outside a nuclear family, you go to jail". But there may be all sorts of softer pressures in place. Now, I don't think having such pressures is necessarily bad in all places. It becomes bad when it's a "one solution fits all" approach, and the pressure is applied even in situations where dissolving a traditional nuclear family would be in the participants' (especially the children's) best interests. Putting myself in the shoes of black folks, I can certainly see how certain conservative initiatives cross that line.
  - skinnymuch 5y ago
    This isn’t “the” BLM site. This is a site that is purportedly onboard the BLM movement. That’s an important distinction.
    - FFRefresh 5y ago
      Why did you ask for evidence in the first place of the claim that BLM held a position against the nuclear family if you wouldn't accept any evidence? If your position is just a flavor of the 'No true scotsman' fallacy, why even bother? Why not just come out and say "There can never be a true BLM source! You can never cite an authoritative position from BLM! You cannot cite anything because there are many local chapters, and the movement can exist even independently of that! BLM can never be criticized thusly for any positions! Ha!" That is your position here, no? It ignores that THERE IS a central hub for the BLM network. And the website for this is blacklivesmatter.com, which is what I cited. This is the primary website for the BLM org and movement. It is by far, the most heavily trafficked website in the BLM movement. BLM started with the group of people who created the org for which the website serves as the face for. Calling it 'purportedly onboard' the BLM movement is incredibly ignorant of its history. Yes, there is a broader network. But this is the center of that network. This central hub (which runs blacklivesmatter.com) took in $90 million in donations in 2020. And it then distributed $21.7 million of that to local chapters.
      - skinnymuch 5y ago
        Anecdotes mean just what they mean. However as some one most closely aligned to leftys vs other political identity or group, I’ve not been around too many leftists so focused on BLM specifically in a central/organized way or treat it as such. > That is your position here, no? Not at all. Your core point revolves around me thinking about and using local chapters as a core defense. I didn’t even know that was a thing for all of this. The comment revolves around various assumption. Pointing to a caricature of an immature left wing person who craves getting one under everyone to the right of them. Like “if you wouldn’t accept any evidence”. I asked because I don’t particularly care much about BLM a specifically because caring about oppressed minorities has always been a core tenant. i knew little about this most famous blm group**. Similarly, I can’t remember the last video feed in the past year I’ve gotten from YouTube that was about BLM from a lefty source. Except for two specifically focused on black issues in America. ** I searched “blm vs black lives matter group”. I see a majority of front page news and other stuff being conservatives foaming out about stuff. As if a lot of the issues and “facts” of BLM centralization are something greatly discussed by all sides. Not just the people upset over it. Now I more likely believe how big this org is. If they get this much attention from center and right leaning media. Not dissimilar to the over exaggeration done by the mostly centrist and neoliberal media of focusing on Trump so much (though definitely including more left wing media a lot too). Still. Not every one on the left or sympathetic to certain issues thinks this way. Nor is every one on the left a smarmy smart ass. People aren’t a monolith.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
danaris 5y ago
Disclaimer: while I support the BLM movement, I've never personally interacted with it in any meaningful way, so I don't know exactly what they mean by this, to the extent that they have, in fact, said it. "Dismantling the nuclear family structure" doesn't mean "throw organized families to the wind, let children fend for themselves, force everyone into single-parent households" or anything like that. Like I said in my previous comment, the "nuclear family" is not the norm, it is not a particularly stable or sustainable model for family units, and what we had before, while it certainly also has its flaws, tends to be much better for any family that doesn't completely fit within the happy fairy-tale ideal of two parents who love each other completely, 2.4 kids, and a dog. Through most of human history, "family" has meant either "three generations of blood relations living under one roof, out to aunts/uncles/cousins or even farther, all sharing responsibility for things like child-rearing" or, even more broadly, just "the entire community, made up of a big extended family (with or without blood relations)/tribe/clan." When two parents didn't get along, even if they didn't "divorce" in the way we understand it today, they could still stop being pair-bonded without it significantly affecting the children, because those children were being raised more or less in common with a half-dozen (dozen? score?) others in the much large "family unit", by all the parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents, etc. "Dismantling the nuclear family" doesn't mean breaking it down and sending the component parts off to do their own thing individually. It means removing that very specific and very inflexible structure as our society's only acceptable model of what it means to be a "family," because like many other things that emerged in the shadow of the Industrial Revolution, it may be helpful for some people, but it's deeply harmful for many, many others.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Unfortunately, the radical left's contempt for the bourgeois nuclear family is only exceeded by their far greater contempt for the traditionalism of extended family structures, which often entails "staying put" for multiple generations in comparatively rural towns and villages - far different from the inner-city concerns of the rest of the BLM movement, and the leftist progressive movement more generally. So, while there's much to say for what you're advocating here, it's not the kind of change that BLM is going to meaningfully pursue.
- 5y ago
hotpotamus 5y ago
Funny to see where arch-elite conservative David Brooks and BLM are in such complete agreement. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuclear-family-was-a-mistake/605536/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuc...
rcacho 5y ago
I think the BLM group and the BLM movement should be differentiated. While many progressives may have supported the BLM movement I don't believe the openly Marxist organization is as popular. Also, just cutting the quote at the dismantling part without including the rest of that statement seems disingenuous.
UncleMeat 5y ago
It does not. The stated goal was “disrupt the nuclear family requirement.” Very different than “dismantle the nuclear family structure.”