(¹ Not that fancy French vanilla, nor that in-your-face New York vanilla, and certainly not that speckled dirty-looking vanilla bean, just normal generic cheap vanilla.)
There is nothing in this “success” that suggests music, art, philosophy, science, questioning all aspects of life, improving the world, empathy or compassion.
Limiting art to a single set of state-approved forms and styles is a classic move for authoritarian regimes. Creativity is antithetical to tyranny, so creativity has to go.
I couldn't get past the Tennessee lege mandating the speech of health teachers to conform with the narrow worldview of far-right religious nut jobs.
And, FTR, they'd have to explain why two of our recent presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and our immediate former VP, Kamala Harris, were raised by single moms and apparently succeeded without following some legislated 'success sequence.' The truth is, all the things they list might HELP set people up for success, but they're not required.
Well, Kamala only got success because she worked her way up by doing what all women do, pleasuring men. She didn’t earn it, she screwed her way to the top. Fucked her way through college. You know the deal. Tennessee is just trying to stop that sort of climbing.
And popping out a new one every 12 months or so is just a SWELL way to establish a lot of experience and a long-term reputation for stability and reliability in your chosen profession, nu? Or, oh dear me, did I make the mistake of thinking that WOMEN should actually follow that advice in Item B about getting a job or pursuing higher education? Ha ha ha, silly me! That would imply that they're actually, I dunno, people or something.
As someone already said, kids can grow up in financially stable, two-parent families where the emotional environment is so unstable &/or abusive that the children can never develop into emotionally healthy individuals or hope to achieve successful personal lives, even if they manage to get an education & hold a good job.
Unhealthy marriages are likely to produce emotionally unhealthy people. Sometimes deciding to raise children in a single parent family or not to have children at all is the right choice. And anyone who recognizes that they do not desire to be a parent is taking the high ground in rejecting that option.
I think it is the legal underpinnings of Gilead being put into place. The MAGAts/Authoritarians/Dominionists just know there is only one way to conduct your life and it is Their Way. They are willing to take away women's rights to self determination to live in this fantasy world of theirs. Their fever dream - Project 2025 is being implemented. Their Mad King is in the White House. And their Heritage Foundation super-majority is on the SCOTUS. The MAGAt majorities in Congress are content to let all of this happen. Of course, none of their machinations will create a stable, let alone an ethical and beneficial society.
Their idea of stability is to have everyone blindly obeying them. Our idea of stability is a society where no one is starving, unhoused, or without medical care and all are treated with fairness and dignity. We have seen what horrors their idea of stability leads to.
My kids had stability because I divorced my husband. According to this list and subsequent (bullshit) narrative, they should be in jail. One has a PhD and the other is pursuing a Master’s. Both are happy, healthy and in loving relationships.
I suspect the only things that really count on that list are the last two. The first two are just filler. 🙄
I overcame alcoholism and major depression over guilt about being Gay. It took a long time, a divorce, friends and therapy, but I am now comfortable with myself. I am capable of defending myself. One of my greatest accomplishments is a phone call from a detective in the area. He called about calls to the local diocese that spoke of hatred of Gays, burning at the stake, burning witches and other church proclivities. The detective said I was frightening them. I replied the church has spent centuries threatening people like me. I then hung up. Frightening a bishop and his staff FUN. KNOWING I frightened a bishop enough to call the police. PRICELESS. I never threatened, I just asked how they would feel if church hatreds were directed against them. Asking bishop's female secretary if she was aware of 300 years of church treatment of witches was wonderful. I worked through a lot of hostility that way.
Lol, appreciate it. I think they thought I was more like Attila the Hun, but years later they thanked me because mom = rules, real meals and safety; dad = chaos.
Who says these are even everyone’s ideas of a successful human? Our society has some fucked up ideas about success, make tons of money for the sake of having money not for the sake of the stability and access to what it is that makes the individual happy or content. Romance for the sake of the marriage certificate rather than the family and companionship of a relationship. Children for the sake of legacy, but absolutely not for the sake of the child itself. Hi Elon, I’m looking at you.
These are indicators of success for some people, but no everyone finds contentment in them.
Then let’s talk about how these are all supposed to be, or often are, achieved in early adulthood. What do you strive for once you have children or your children are grown and independent? Or when you can’t work the grind anymore? I know the intent is to work you so hard and keep you constantly struggling so you don’t have leisure to see their corruption, but I also want to ask what are you supposed to do in your free time, what kind of success can you reach at leisure? I know they want us to pump out so many children we do t stop raising them until five years after we’ve died, but folks really aren’t doing that. So our retirement is a failure to these scum. We’re supposed to grind and die. That’s why they’ve attacked SS and tanked our 401ks.
They are never about people being happy and content. They are all about power and control over anyone that might disagree with them. We have seen this under Putin, Hitler, Pol Pot and other autocratic authoritarian 'leaders.'
Btw my husband spent app 6 months home for each of our kids after they were borned. Poor kids, they'll probably end up dead sometime in the next 70 years or so.
People are not some chain of identical paper dolls, and success looks different for different people. That is not some character flaw, sin, or great evil, that's normal and part of living for humanity; humans are not tin soldiers from the same mold and should never be treated as though they are. Attempting to force people into a mold to make them some arbitrary definition of 'acceptable' is wrong, and I'm really sick of seeing people in power try to force that issue.
So, i finished HS, got a STEM job, got married, had only one kid and divorced. That makes me a failure? Living alone makes me a failure? Being Gay makes me a failure? Please be aware I have no intention of entering your fucked up state. IF I do it will be to murder bosses telling me how I must live my life to suit them I follow no gods. WHAT IN HELL makes you think I will listen to you?
I live 50 miles from Beale Street. The little piece of Tennesse I know, and the people I deal with tend to be progressive. I lock my doors and do not stop for anything if I have to drive to the next oasis, Nashville. Surprisingly, the author of this preamble is from Knoxville -college town , but still East Tennessee.
They're putting all the responsibility on individuals to build successful lives while they structure the conditions that make success more and more difficult -- lower wages, longer hours, higher grocery prices, higher rates of consumer fraud with less law enforcement against it, higher cost of continuing education, higher housing prices, higher costs of cars and insurance, poorer public transportation, and so on.
Republican lawmakers and executives never take responsibility for their own actions. We need to elect Democrats for a livable future.
This whole business goes to something I've thought for a long-ass time: that NORMAL is a PERSONAL concept, and the more anyone tries to apply THEIR version of normal to someone else or to a larger population, the less it applies. Certainly, there may be line-items which most if not all of us would agree to as norms, but as to how one conducts their life, the whole graduate-get-a-job-marry-have-kids business comes straight out of Ozzie and Harriet, and the blunt fact is that there are other options out there. Different people are going to approach their lives and how they live them DIFFERENTLY.
If I were to suggest an alternative sequence, I'd say: first, discover who you are. This is NOT an easy process, but in the long haul, it pays off huge dividends. Second, find something you LOVE to do, then see if you can make a living at it. I'd be tempted to say in addition: find someone you want to share your life with, but I'm sure there are those who are entirely comfortable living on their own. Like the saying goes, Your Mileage May Vary.
Hearing Bowling and Bulso trying to shove square, oblong, hexagonal, and other shaped pegs into their round hole of success is plainly LUDICROUS. The real shame is that they can't see that.
The square (and other shapes) peg into round hole metaphor is particularly apt. Notice how much female empowerment is baked into the preamble they rejected. They want those round holes stuck in the kitchen making sammiches for their pegs, with a dozen whiny brats underfoot.
Exactly, which is why I cited Ozzie & Harriet, never mind stuff like Father Knows Best and too much of the other drivel which came out of the 1950s and 60s.
I want to say again, too, how important it is to KNOW YOURSELF. Introspection and self-knowledge is not well encouraged in American society, at least not that I've seen, and I think it can make an enormous difference in the arc one's life takes. It took me a long while to learn that lesson, but I did, finally, with grateful thanks to the friend who taught it to me.
In my former life, I preached often on the fact that normal is subjective. Even the word "community". I lived near a separatist Lesbian commune for a few years. Even though I am GLBT, I was never part of their community. So much for the "Gay Community"!
We make our own normal, as we make our own communities.
I'd regard my life as a complete failure if I ever made it to D, considering the amount of effort I've put into avoiding procreation. As far as I'm concerned, my generation has filled its child-bearing quota already, and does not need my contribution to the continuance of the species, nor would I want to raise a child even if that weren't the case. I value sleep, privacy, peace, and quiet far too much to fill my home with needy screaming bald apes. I admire those who choose to be parents, and even moreso those who raise good kids in spite of having that condition forced upon them... but I have no desire whatsoever to join their ranks, if I can possibly avoid it.
Here are 𝘮𝘺 two simple criteria for judging whether or not my life has been successful:
- Am I old and wrinkled and grey?
- Am I grinning?
If and when both apply, success has been achieved.
I'm unique among my siblings because I've never been married and never wanted to be married. Never once had the urge. I will pass from this existence a happy bachelor.
Newspeak: Freedom, individualism, Independence, is achieved through Conformity!?!?!?!?
I don’t think so.
My favorite color is beige, and it is yours too. IT IS.
You screaming liberal, you! Everyone knows the best possible color is taupe! /s
Ecru. Trust me on this. I’m colorblind!
Vanilla¹ is nice.
(¹ Not that fancy French vanilla, nor that in-your-face New York vanilla, and certainly not that speckled dirty-looking vanilla bean, just normal generic cheap vanilla.)
https://youtu.be/_aPoKr9x_yQ?si=HWX0Aa2suitx8-Bi
Agree 💯
"Obtains a high school diploma or high school equivalency credential"
*Try not to get shot and killed at school though, because we're not doing a fucking thing about that problem.
First, correlation doesn't equal causation.
Second, so this bill tells infertile women and men, but mostly women, that they can never be successful and have no worth as human beings.
Only because the party of Forced-birthers believes that.
I totally agree.
Hmmpfh. Every single person who confuses correlation and causation ends up dying.
There is nothing in this “success” that suggests music, art, philosophy, science, questioning all aspects of life, improving the world, empathy or compassion.
Limiting art to a single set of state-approved forms and styles is a classic move for authoritarian regimes. Creativity is antithetical to tyranny, so creativity has to go.
I couldn't get past the Tennessee lege mandating the speech of health teachers to conform with the narrow worldview of far-right religious nut jobs.
And, FTR, they'd have to explain why two of our recent presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and our immediate former VP, Kamala Harris, were raised by single moms and apparently succeeded without following some legislated 'success sequence.' The truth is, all the things they list might HELP set people up for success, but they're not required.
Well, Kamala only got success because she worked her way up by doing what all women do, pleasuring men. She didn’t earn it, she screwed her way to the top. Fucked her way through college. You know the deal. Tennessee is just trying to stop that sort of climbing.
/s if it wasn’t apparent.
Thanks for the laugh! I SO look forward to the day when successful women aren't accused of sleeping their way to the top!
"Tennessee is just trying to stop that sort of climbing."
They're fine with it, as long as it's kept in the family.
So long as they’re the ones benefitting from her aspirations.
And popping out a new one every 12 months or so is just a SWELL way to establish a lot of experience and a long-term reputation for stability and reliability in your chosen profession, nu? Or, oh dear me, did I make the mistake of thinking that WOMEN should actually follow that advice in Item B about getting a job or pursuing higher education? Ha ha ha, silly me! That would imply that they're actually, I dunno, people or something.
As someone already said, kids can grow up in financially stable, two-parent families where the emotional environment is so unstable &/or abusive that the children can never develop into emotionally healthy individuals or hope to achieve successful personal lives, even if they manage to get an education & hold a good job.
Unhealthy marriages are likely to produce emotionally unhealthy people. Sometimes deciding to raise children in a single parent family or not to have children at all is the right choice. And anyone who recognizes that they do not desire to be a parent is taking the high ground in rejecting that option.
👆🎯So many people should never be parents.
Agree! Too many of them don't figure that out until after.
Most never figure it out and blame everything on their children.
Absolutely right!
I think it is the legal underpinnings of Gilead being put into place. The MAGAts/Authoritarians/Dominionists just know there is only one way to conduct your life and it is Their Way. They are willing to take away women's rights to self determination to live in this fantasy world of theirs. Their fever dream - Project 2025 is being implemented. Their Mad King is in the White House. And their Heritage Foundation super-majority is on the SCOTUS. The MAGAt majorities in Congress are content to let all of this happen. Of course, none of their machinations will create a stable, let alone an ethical and beneficial society.
Their idea of stability is to have everyone blindly obeying them. Our idea of stability is a society where no one is starving, unhoused, or without medical care and all are treated with fairness and dignity. We have seen what horrors their idea of stability leads to.
You heathen communist!!!! Lay down and die!
/s
And none of the MAGATs in Congress actually LIVE the reality they want to force on the rest of us.
Laws for thee but not for me!
My kids had stability because I divorced my husband. According to this list and subsequent (bullshit) narrative, they should be in jail. One has a PhD and the other is pursuing a Master’s. Both are happy, healthy and in loving relationships.
I suspect the only things that really count on that list are the last two. The first two are just filler. 🙄
DM got a sperm donor, her grandfather and at least two step father. Days in jail = 0.
I overcame alcoholism and major depression over guilt about being Gay. It took a long time, a divorce, friends and therapy, but I am now comfortable with myself. I am capable of defending myself. One of my greatest accomplishments is a phone call from a detective in the area. He called about calls to the local diocese that spoke of hatred of Gays, burning at the stake, burning witches and other church proclivities. The detective said I was frightening them. I replied the church has spent centuries threatening people like me. I then hung up. Frightening a bishop and his staff FUN. KNOWING I frightened a bishop enough to call the police. PRICELESS. I never threatened, I just asked how they would feel if church hatreds were directed against them. Asking bishop's female secretary if she was aware of 300 years of church treatment of witches was wonderful. I worked through a lot of hostility that way.
BTW, it took a couple of months to track me down. A burner phone would have made it far more difficult, even impossible.
Scary that they felt the need to track you down.
Who says you can’t get no satisfaction?
Sounds like they had a great mother.
Lol, appreciate it. I think they thought I was more like Attila the Hun, but years later they thanked me because mom = rules, real meals and safety; dad = chaos.
Who says these are even everyone’s ideas of a successful human? Our society has some fucked up ideas about success, make tons of money for the sake of having money not for the sake of the stability and access to what it is that makes the individual happy or content. Romance for the sake of the marriage certificate rather than the family and companionship of a relationship. Children for the sake of legacy, but absolutely not for the sake of the child itself. Hi Elon, I’m looking at you.
These are indicators of success for some people, but no everyone finds contentment in them.
Then let’s talk about how these are all supposed to be, or often are, achieved in early adulthood. What do you strive for once you have children or your children are grown and independent? Or when you can’t work the grind anymore? I know the intent is to work you so hard and keep you constantly struggling so you don’t have leisure to see their corruption, but I also want to ask what are you supposed to do in your free time, what kind of success can you reach at leisure? I know they want us to pump out so many children we do t stop raising them until five years after we’ve died, but folks really aren’t doing that. So our retirement is a failure to these scum. We’re supposed to grind and die. That’s why they’ve attacked SS and tanked our 401ks.
I hate it here. Stop the world, I wanna get off.
They are never about people being happy and content. They are all about power and control over anyone that might disagree with them. We have seen this under Putin, Hitler, Pol Pot and other autocratic authoritarian 'leaders.'
You're supposed to take care of your grandkids so their parents can work. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥 𝘈𝘤𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘝𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦.
Whose tradition????
Not mine, that's for sure.
Btw my husband spent app 6 months home for each of our kids after they were borned. Poor kids, they'll probably end up dead sometime in the next 70 years or so.
Baby boomer grandma says what now?
People are not some chain of identical paper dolls, and success looks different for different people. That is not some character flaw, sin, or great evil, that's normal and part of living for humanity; humans are not tin soldiers from the same mold and should never be treated as though they are. Attempting to force people into a mold to make them some arbitrary definition of 'acceptable' is wrong, and I'm really sick of seeing people in power try to force that issue.
"People are not some chain of identical paper dolls"
THIS!!!!!
Really good at that persecution complex.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1b648b7f756397309407e7aef64f2fd1ff8f9a39d203832482df849c63ae6731.jpg
Religion came from men in power. From "The Open Question"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_k66FDdnXw
Let her go to a country where Christians really are being persecuted and stand beside them. Martyrdom's a sure way to get to heaven, right?
It'll never happen. Their faith is as shallow as they are.
So, i finished HS, got a STEM job, got married, had only one kid and divorced. That makes me a failure? Living alone makes me a failure? Being Gay makes me a failure? Please be aware I have no intention of entering your fucked up state. IF I do it will be to murder bosses telling me how I must live my life to suit them I follow no gods. WHAT IN HELL makes you think I will listen to you?
I live 50 miles from Beale Street. The little piece of Tennesse I know, and the people I deal with tend to be progressive. I lock my doors and do not stop for anything if I have to drive to the next oasis, Nashville. Surprisingly, the author of this preamble is from Knoxville -college town , but still East Tennessee.
They're putting all the responsibility on individuals to build successful lives while they structure the conditions that make success more and more difficult -- lower wages, longer hours, higher grocery prices, higher rates of consumer fraud with less law enforcement against it, higher cost of continuing education, higher housing prices, higher costs of cars and insurance, poorer public transportation, and so on.
Republican lawmakers and executives never take responsibility for their own actions. We need to elect Democrats for a livable future.
This whole business goes to something I've thought for a long-ass time: that NORMAL is a PERSONAL concept, and the more anyone tries to apply THEIR version of normal to someone else or to a larger population, the less it applies. Certainly, there may be line-items which most if not all of us would agree to as norms, but as to how one conducts their life, the whole graduate-get-a-job-marry-have-kids business comes straight out of Ozzie and Harriet, and the blunt fact is that there are other options out there. Different people are going to approach their lives and how they live them DIFFERENTLY.
If I were to suggest an alternative sequence, I'd say: first, discover who you are. This is NOT an easy process, but in the long haul, it pays off huge dividends. Second, find something you LOVE to do, then see if you can make a living at it. I'd be tempted to say in addition: find someone you want to share your life with, but I'm sure there are those who are entirely comfortable living on their own. Like the saying goes, Your Mileage May Vary.
Hearing Bowling and Bulso trying to shove square, oblong, hexagonal, and other shaped pegs into their round hole of success is plainly LUDICROUS. The real shame is that they can't see that.
The square (and other shapes) peg into round hole metaphor is particularly apt. Notice how much female empowerment is baked into the preamble they rejected. They want those round holes stuck in the kitchen making sammiches for their pegs, with a dozen whiny brats underfoot.
Exactly, which is why I cited Ozzie & Harriet, never mind stuff like Father Knows Best and too much of the other drivel which came out of the 1950s and 60s.
I want to say again, too, how important it is to KNOW YOURSELF. Introspection and self-knowledge is not well encouraged in American society, at least not that I've seen, and I think it can make an enormous difference in the arc one's life takes. It took me a long while to learn that lesson, but I did, finally, with grateful thanks to the friend who taught it to me.
In my former life, I preached often on the fact that normal is subjective. Even the word "community". I lived near a separatist Lesbian commune for a few years. Even though I am GLBT, I was never part of their community. So much for the "Gay Community"!
We make our own normal, as we make our own communities.
Telling others how they must live to satisfy them is alol they know.
https://scontent-ord5-3.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/489996180_602563826144653_7334906196218944827_n.jpg?_nc_cat=100&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=127cfc&_nc_ohc=Gjf8ZUNT0ykQ7kNvwHNW8sl&_nc_oc=AdlCUD2LRHv04NMbcxmjRpOtXlHA1yHRfEkiyP3XiwYMp0YMaR2_esIK4nsHIAHfGxg&_nc_zt=23&_nc_ht=scontent-ord5-3.xx&_nc_gid=YGDDr7dGrdeWLQ-Ojzxgiw&oh=00_AfFku6_MHC4kxTbRtX3Gyp5zfDouuDTVwluHmnuIYFHWKQ&oe=67FF132A
I've read that the "nuclear family*" is a historical anomaly.
* Married couple with children where the man works to support the family and the woman stays at home to care for the children and household.
My Canadian friends* got three of the four steps, I am sure they see their lives as successful.
* Conservatives would wail about them. It's the husband who stays at home, cooks and does chores 🤣
French idiocy of the same kind
"Tout le monde a une Rolex. Si à 50 ans on n'a pas une Rolex, c'est qu'on a quand même raté sa vie",
"Everyone has a Rolex. If you reach 50 years old without having one, it means you wasted your life"
Jacques Séguéla about nicolas sarkonzy.
Watches are unnecessary nowadays.
I'd regard my life as a complete failure if I ever made it to D, considering the amount of effort I've put into avoiding procreation. As far as I'm concerned, my generation has filled its child-bearing quota already, and does not need my contribution to the continuance of the species, nor would I want to raise a child even if that weren't the case. I value sleep, privacy, peace, and quiet far too much to fill my home with needy screaming bald apes. I admire those who choose to be parents, and even moreso those who raise good kids in spite of having that condition forced upon them... but I have no desire whatsoever to join their ranks, if I can possibly avoid it.
Here are 𝘮𝘺 two simple criteria for judging whether or not my life has been successful:
- Am I old and wrinkled and grey?
- Am I grinning?
If and when both apply, success has been achieved.
I'm unique among my siblings because I've never been married and never wanted to be married. Never once had the urge. I will pass from this existence a happy bachelor.
When you will reach my age, you will be able to confirm again you made the right choice for you 😉