I’m watching the Talks Machina panel [link] from Gencon and someone asked if they could scale back their VM character to level 5, who would in a fight their VM character or their M9 character.
And right now I just really desperately want to see Marisha play against herself in a death match showdown between Beau and Keyleth.
Unless it just totally dissolved into hilarity when Beau inevitably hit on Keyleth and Keyleth got all confused and flustered.
Meanwhile, Percy v. Molly would basically be that scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indy exasperatedly shot the guy with his flashy swords. That one’s no contest.
Them: Ah, but the quasi-canonical comic book adaptation that was published via digital subscription eight years later contains additional background information that explains why it’s actually not problematic at all!
Me: You are an insufferable nerdling who is incapable of understanding media criticism as anything other than the curation of facts, and you should feel bad.
The nuclear family is probably the greatest enabler of child abuse, ever.
Putting two people in complete control of another person (who is particularly vulnerable and has few legal rights) and then having no oversight for the whole arrangement is the absolute worst idea.
Families are garbage.
Hahaha wtf
I wouldn’t even know where to start with this. omg.
OP, what would you propose as an alternative to families?
communal child raising
less isolated familial structures in general
children being made aware of how they should and shouldn’t be treated
Some form of child protection services that don’t just believe the parents and assume a child is lying when they report abuse
more legal and counselling services made available to children
I don’t get people that are like “lol, what? that’s so weird, lets laugh at the very notion that traditional families are abusive”.
communal child raising is the traditional family. 70-100 years ago 4 generations lived together in the same house, having 4 grandparents, 6 aunts and 15 cousins around every day was normal.
Things that should be mentioned:
– These communities are not necessarily connected by an biological ties. In a lot of these multigenerational ‘families’, including people in the family who are not relatives or married into the family is totally normal. This has always created a lot more space to support people without families, support people who do now want to partner up and to create communities in which couples who can not have children (like some queer couples but not all & other couples too) can be a part of child raising.
– Having a lot more young people around often means young people learn from each other. In many cultures young people form a non-hierarchial group that learns together and can do a great deal without adult supervision.
The nuclear family doesn’t just facilitate abuse, it facilitates hierarchy. It’s a training school for obedience to authority.
Now, which system would push such a training school strongly so it could get docile obedient citizens? Which system whould push the nuclear family.
I’m not saying it’s capitalism but it’s capitalism.
And then there’s the fact that the 2 parent, nuclear family can be most easily pushed into the pattern where one adult works an extremely exhausting job many hours a day that leaves that adult hardly capable of doing anything else, while the other adult takes on all the other things that adult would otherwise have done: care for children, clean the living space, prepare food, prepare clean clothing, etc. for free. What we know as traditional gender roles.
This way capitalism gets one intensely loyal worker who feels ‘responsible’ for ‘supporting a family’ while all the work to keep that worker going is done for free by an unpaid worker in the home.
And, you know, communities need a lot less stuff. A community of 50 can do just fine with one or two hammers. 25 nuclear families need 25 hammers. The nuclear family demands a huge amount of commodity purchasing.
(hooboy that last point)
Damn. What a breakdown…
Communal living is fantastic for the disabled and elderly folks, as well.
Suicide rates are absolutely going to continue to climb in the USA as long as our concept of “Mental Health” remains separated from material conditions.
Antidepressants can’t cure poverty and alienation. They can’t cure the crushing pressure that comes with watching climate changing in real time, but feeling powerless because the government is too corrupt to care. They can’t cure the many chronic physical health conditions people go without treatment for because the US physical health system is bullshit.
Always turning toward psychiatry for an answer is a perfect example of American style individualism killing people, because the problem is always said to exist in the individual’s brain chemicals, and society is always innocent.
As the famous quote goes “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.“
This post has gained a lot of traction outside of tumblr due to being reposted by several facebook groups. A large number of people subsequently read this as a criticism of all therapy or medicine within the mental health field.
I want to just state very clearly – that my criticism here is very explicitly about using psychiatry as a bandage for physical health, socio-economic stress, environmental alienation, and other fundamentally non-psychiatric problems.
I’m not saying “Joe who suffers from chronic depression, actually just needs to get some fresh air.”
What I am saying is “Felix the pain management doctor who refuses to give medicine to patients with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, but will instead send them to psychiatry with the accusation that their pain is imaginary or caused by depression or trauma (Despite literally dislocating their bones on a daily basis) is a complete asshole.”
Or even… “Julia the trans woman who ended up on the street after being disowned by family and friends, should not have her oppressors actions ignored in favour of a narrative in which her suffering is exclusively the result of abnormal brain chemicals or genetics. That we should recognize that suffering is a normal and healthy response to social isolation, and that holding bigotry accountable and building real support networks needs to fucking happen for society to grow.”
Organized Chaos 