A 4.8 earthquake in Sichuan, Luding, as far as I can tell nobody died.
Woman divorces her husband after suffering domestic violence while sitting the month for her daughter. When she is packing up to leave with her daughter, her toddler son grabs her luggage and cries, knowing she is going to leave. She apologises and begs that he won’t grow up to hate her for abandoning him. Internet commenters ask, “What did her son do wrong to have to go through this?”
Another story of a woman getting a divorce. Her dad tells her, “If you don’t take the kids, they’ll be ruined. If you do take the kids, you’ll be ruined. But I’d rather you ruin yourself than ruin your kids.” A blogger comments that he captures the paradox of desiring traditional marriage and all the downsides of traditional marriage perfectly.
“If you don’t take the kids, they’ll be ruined.” implies that children can’t be trusted to their dad or their dads’ families. This contradicts the often said line, “You don’t want your kids to grow up without a dad”, or even the concept of children taking their dad’s surname, or being the continuation of their dad’s bloodline. If they really are that important to their dad’s family, why would they be ruined? So even avid supporters of traditional marriage don’t think that fathers treat their children well. Under patriarchy, children are just a tool to ensure you get offerings in the afterlife. Everyone knows this.
“If you take the kids, you’ll be ruined.” is an even more interesting line. Why would kids ruin you? Because everyone still think this is the dad’s kids. If you have them around you, it’ll affect whether your can find a second marriage. Not just because nobody wants a woman with kids, but because society will judge you for throwing your kid to an unfamiliar stepdad to raise. Secondly, kids will drain your time and energy, affecting how you can live your life. Otherwise why would divorcing kids ruin you, but raising kids inside a marriage with an absent husband not ruin you? What’s the difference?
“I’d rather you ruin yourself than ruin your kids” is even harsher. On the one hand, people deny the natural bond between a mother and her child, making the kid entirely the father’s property. But on the other hand, they use the responsibility of motherhood to take women hostage. Any woman with a child is no longer an independent human being, but instead expected to sacrifice everything for her child. A woman and her child have a inimical relationship—for one of them to live, the other must die, and this happens because people want the product of women’s labour, but they don’t want to take on any of the responsibility of the labour and shove it all off on the mother.
Whatever a woman chooses, she loses. And yet whatever a man chooses, he’s already won. If he wants kids, then, “This is my kid, my bloodline, women can’t pass bloodlines down.” But if they don’t want kids, well, “You’re his mother, you need to take care of him. Men don’t know how to take care of kids.” And men who take children won’t ruin themselves, because they can throw the kid to a stepmother to take care of, or a grandparent to take care of, and society thinks there’s nothing wrong with this.
An askreddit question, “Lots of capitalists like to say, ‘If you don’t want this job, there’s plenty of others who do.’ How do I rebut this?” The top reply is, “The boss of my factory was like this. He loved saying, “If you can’t do your job, then quit.” Then in 2019, during the nightshift, a piece of equipment broke. If we stopped production, told the boss, and performed maintenance, we could’ve averted disaster. But we didn’t say anything. Our shift manager is supposed to be keeping an eye on things, but he usually just takes a nap through his shift. So, the broken equipment carried on, and everyone put on safety gear and backed off far away and watched. Then, with a big explosion, the shift manager woke far too late. Lost 800K in damages that night. When we left work that day, everyone had a smile on their face.
Capitalists, I’m an employee of yours. It’s true that if I don’t want my job, there’s plenty of others who do. Even if I quit in protest, I can be replaced the same day. But if you say that to me, then I will only ever do what is within my job description. Even if your factory catches on fire, so long as I’m not the one explicitly in charge of the extinguisher, I’ll pretend I didn’t se it. As a long-time factory workers, I know how much damage an uncaring crew can cause.
To give some other examples, I have deliberately run brand new equipment in a day to maximise wear and tear. I have taken every opportunity that QA isn’t around to make products that don’t meet standard. Just last month, I saw that the chain of the crane has several fractures along it. I haven’t told anyone or said anything.
If you think of your workers as slaves, then your worker will think of you as a bandit.
Woman born in 1993 is already the mother of 6 children, all girls, named respectively Zhaodi (“welcoming a brother”), Pandi (“awaiting a brother”), Sidi (“thinking of a brother”), Niandi (“wishing for a brother”), Wangdi (“praying for a brother”), and Xiangdi (“wanting a brother”). Internet commenters ask if she has a crown she needs to pass down.
A anime blogger talks about the controversy over whether people should get one day off or two days off per week. He says that he has a friend whose boss shortened each of their workdays by one hour and moved it to Saturday, so that going by total work hours, he’s not over the legal limit, but you still don’t get two days off. He says that HR at work spend all day thinking of how to squeeze more work out of them. Their boss was headhunted from Huawei just to think of more plans to get more work and less pay out of them.
Guy makes a post complaining that he is in the last year of highschool, his sister freshman year in uni, and every time she calls to talk with their mother, she talks about inheritance. Guy says that he doesn’t understand why she’s already calling every day to complain that his mother plays favourites and never gives her money, when she gets 2500 a month to live on, and he only gets 800.
She runs out of money constantly and asks for more from his mom, and when his mom refuses, she complains how they spend all their money on him and she gets nothing. She cries about how she was tossed to be raised by the grandparents while he got to stay with his parents, so she’s been insecure all her life, but he doesn’t get it. He’s spent a year with the grandparents too when he was 3-4 years old. Grandma and grandpa are pretty nice to her, but never to him. When she’d do well on exams, they gave her 1000RMB to congratulate her, but never gave him any money as a reward. And grandma and grandpa often can’t even remember his name and mix him up with a cousin of his.
She says that the house is surely his and has been picking a lot of fights on this topic. Guy says he doesn’t get it because if they gave him their house, he’d totally let them live with him and take care of them. Her sister flips out that if he can promise that he can take care of them 100% and never ask for anything from her, then she can give up all of her inheritance. He feels that she’s maybe too deep into feminism. She often asks why his parents had him when they already had her. If they would’ve kept having babies if he’d turned out to be a girl.
My mom’s already said that she’s going to have a dowry, he don’t understand why she doesn’t let go on the house thing. Once he said if you really want this house that bad, just take it, and she kept repeating that he knows that’s not what she meant, but he have no idea what she means. She can have it if she wants, it’s not like he plans on living in this middle-of-nowhere town the rest of my life.
He says he doesn’t know what to do.
Commenters ask why he needs 800 a month when he’s still in highschool and living at home, when his sister is moved out and needs to pay for everything herself.
CCTV news reports that Yaya is due to come back to China April this year. CCTV reassures readers that they have sent experts to investigate Yaya’s health situation and determined that aside from a skin condition that causes fur loss, Yaya is healthy, stable weight, good appetite, and producing normal poops. Their expert team is working with the Memphis Zoo to figure out a plan to better take care of Yaya in light of her fur loss.
This blog is amazing! Just wanted to mention that most people who come across it may be confused as to what it is. I wonder if the first post called ‘introduction’ should be easier to find. Perhaps incorporated in the ‘about’ section or as a separate page next to it.
Also the description you see when you first come to the site is “My Personal Substack”. Maybe you could have a one line description there. I just found that sending it to some friends they didn’t seem to be interested until I explained what the blog is.