Best Of

I do wish people would lay off @HYUFD and the abuse. Yes, he likes to post slightly dogmatic highly traditionalist High Tory views, and then stubbornly digs in when challenged, but that's no reason to be nasty.

I'd say the best way to lower divorce rates would be more marriage courses and marriage counselling.

Marriage is hard and we've had some tough moments. We still hark back to the all weekend marriage course the CofE ran for us before we got hitched in our local church, which we still find useful.

Apprently the way to reduce divorce is to have less lavish and expensive weddings based on a US study.
'According to the data, women who spent more than $20,000 on their wedding were 1.6 times more likely to eventually divorce than women who spent between $5,000 and $10,000'

The logic is apprently twofold, 1 Finances are prominent reason for divorce so starting off with a financial millstone of paying for the wedding and everything around it is not a good start and 2. its been theorised if you are that concerned about impressing everyone else with a lavish do maybe you havent quite got the focus on the relationship itself.

I do wish people would lay off @HYUFD and the abuse. Yes, he likes to post slightly dogmatic highly traditionalist High Tory views, and then stubbornly digs in when challenged, but that's no reason to be nasty.

I'd say the best way to lower divorce rates would be more marriage courses and marriage counselling.

Marriage is hard and we've had some tough moments. We still hark back to the all weekend marriage course the CofE ran for us before we got hitched in our local church, which we still find useful.

Apprently the way to reduce divorce is to have less lavish and expensive weddings based on a US study.
'According to the data, women who spent more than $20,000 on their wedding were 1.6 times more likely to eventually divorce than women who spent between $5,000 and $10,000'

The logic is apprently twofold, 1 Finances are prominent reason for divorce so starting off with a financial millstone of paying for the wedding and everything around it is not a good start and 2. its been theorised if you are that concerned about impressing everyone else with a lavish do maybe you havent quite got the focus on the relationship itself.

This is absolutely true in my personal experience

I've been to loads of insanely lavish weddings, and at least half (rough guess) have ended in divorce, often quite quickly

Of all the lovely little weddings I've been to (small groups of family and friends) 90% of the marriages are still going strong

My grandfather was a very angry disappointed man, who was prone to physical violence against his sons and wife. My grandmother stayed with him for the two boys. By the time I was born he was a doting grandfather, he then died when I was still very small, and I only found out about the full story much later. My father and his brother grew up to be wonderful men and good fathers. My grandmother would have been well within her rights to leave him, but possibly my Dad and his brother would not have turned out the way they did. They are both immensely thankful for the upbringing they had. I am not sure how much we can extrapolate from our own experiences. However, I think we should try to set aside the mores of our own time in forming conclusions. Society in 1950 placed a high value on duty and sticking it out, and a low value on an individual's wellbeing and mental health. Society today places zero value on duty and sticking things out, and values individual wellbeing above everything, especially for women or members of minority groups. Neither attitude necessarily has all the answers.

Are international institutions breaking down?

COP29, which started badly with plenty of no shows, is now on the verge of a complete breakdown, and that's on top of the Commonwealth hustle and FUBAR last month:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c8jykpdgr08t

If they are, and I fear they may well be, then our descendants are basically fucked. The high point of international cooperation has been and gone, and the future is one of nationalist insanity and environmental destruction.

Darwin got it all wrong. We're regressing.

Evolution is not teleological. Darwin never said it always means "progress or improvement"

Yes, things can zig zag. I know that.

Anyway, as I now keep saying to all and sundry, Left Populism is coming. A radical economic offer for the struggling classes without the tacky xenophobic nostalgia that defines the right wing version.

It won't get funded by billionaires (for obvious reasons) but that won't matter once it gets rolling. I'm in. ✊️🕺

(please refrain from the very tedious "lol" if you choose to reply, which you shouldn't feel you have to)

I have seen you suggest this a couple of times and I don't really get it. Left populism would be an utter disaster for all of us (see Venezuela for an obvious example).

Populism is the enemy of progress, both of the left and right variety, and I think of you as a progressive. What's going on?

I mean a politics that shifts wealth and opportunity in favour of those who are in most need without corruption or financial recklessness or xenophobic obsession with borders and immigration. Nothing like Venezuela.

What do you honestly think will happen if Britain becomes, say, 30% Muslim? Or 40%? Think about it, and be honest

At 50-60% we could even get Sharia law

Um… who was saying they haven’t seen much evidence of Great Replacement Theory cropping up on PB?

.

I lean in favour of assisted dying, but don't have a strong view.

Of course, one can take one's stance from our moral leaders - any proposed reform that churches oppose, from ending the burning of witches and heretics to legalising divorce to more or less anything Mrs Thatcher did, is usually an excellent idea.

Divorce laws in the UK are too liberal now with no fault divorce. Having a negative effect on the family and fertility rates

What conceivable benefit would you expect to acru from restricting divorce? Couples stuck in loveless marriages are not likely to bring children into them and if they did it would be for entirely the wrong reasons to the detriment of everyone.

Unless it was an arranged marriage no marriage would be loveless otherwise they would never have got married in the first place.

No marriage is perfect, you work through the downs and arguments as well as the ups

What a naive view.

Love sometimes lasts, but love sometimes dies. At which point it becomes loveless.

Go through ups and downs, yes, my wife and I have had ups and downs and we still love each other. That is a healthy marriage.

If you only have downs and the love is gone, then it's not a healthy marriage and it should be terminated.

All my biological grandparents divorced. Both my dad's parents remarried before I was even born and had a happy, healthy second marriage that took them to the end of their lives. Them divorcing and remarrying was the best thing that ever happened to them, and the family as a whole.

I was also lucky enough then to grow up with 5 grandparents (3 biological, 2 not) and am fortunate still have the two non-biological grandparents whom I love as my grandparents every bit as much as the biological ones.

My father's parents divorced and it had a negative impact on his teenage years and hit his mother hard while his father remarried.

Divorce is simply too easy nowadays, unless there is adultery or domestic violence involved divorce should be an absolute last resort and best avoided

My mother got a divorce in the late 1960's. It was incredibly difficult and took an absolute age, being one of the reasons the Denning Reforms came about. My father was a serial philanderer and he walked out the family home just after my sister was born in 1962. There was no fault on my mother's part. He was finally forced by the courts to pay maintenance in the princely sum of £4 a week. But the marriage still could not be ended for an age longer.

Allowing my mother to escape being trapped in a marriage was no "last resort"; splitting from him was not "best avoided", as for one thing it would have prevented her getting another successful, joyous marriage to my stepfather. The strain of the broken relationship and the attempts to get a divorce caused her to have several nervous breakdowns. No child should have had to endure seeing their parent go through ECT.

Your world view is so constrained. It would result in so much pain for others if rigidly adopted.

I have already said I don't oppose divorce on the grounds of adultery, even Jesus did not oppose divorce when one party had committed sexual immorality and cheated on the other.

That is not the same as supporting no fault divorce though, which I oppose even though it is now legal in the UK

"Sorry, kids, me and yer dad can't split up, even though we hate each other because some bloke called Jesus, who may or may not have existed 2000 years ago, wouldn't like it and the government don't like it very much, either, so we'll just stay together and make your life a misery until you're old enough to leave home"
That's right?

If you clearly hated each other you would never have married in the first place. Most kids want both their parents at home with them

1 - People change
2 - Sometimes, especially when young and full of hormones, we make bad decisions
3 - Information that wasn't known beforehand can come to light

Your stance rejects all of the above.
My mother is twice divorced. Anathema to you.
For her first marriage, she fell deeply in love. A year or two down the line, her husband was diagnosed with schizophrenia. They had one daughter by then, but decided to divorce when, in the middle of an episode, he threatened the baby.

For her second marriage, she married "on the rebound." Partly because she was now used to being away from her over-controlling mother. She and my father had very different personalities - which they found out. Unfortunately, after the marriage. After several years of trying their best to make it work (and two children), they agreed to divorce.

To be honest, their divorce was the best thing they could have done for the children (me included). Rather than grow up in an air of mutual resentment and "making the best of it" through clenched teeth, we grew up in a home of love, learning, and laughter. Mum and Dad got on much better after the divorce and when they could live separately and when they didn't have to be in each other's business all the time. I actually think it was that which may have led to my sister and I both being in stable long-term marriages (her for 30 years+ at this point, me approaching 25 years). We didn't have the experience of the resentment we would doubtless have had in that alternate universe.

I reject entirely your didactic and unempathic stance.

Yes empathy is only uber liberalism, everyone else is evil and beyond the pale. Marriage, commitment of both parents to raising children, the nation's fertility rate, all irrelevant in comparison to the desires of the self first.

Well tough, I represent an argument millions agree with, especially the religious and don't give a shit whether you dislike me making it or not I will continue to do so

You represent an argument that was rejected 70 years ago and continues to be rejected since.

Far from it, Italy has recently elected a government with a more traditional view of women and the family, the US has also just elected a President and Congress with a more traditional view of the family.

The backlash against wokeism and uber liberalism has begun

Wrong.

America has just elected a twice divorced, repeatedly unfaithful adulterer as President.

Not a traditional view of the family.

And Giorgia Meloni has had a kid out of wedlock. Not exactly a bastion of religious morality.

One of the curiosities of right-populism is how many of its leaders don't reflect the values their rhetoric espouses. There's a definite lack of Corbyn/Livingstone like figures- even when their views were odd/wrong, they did sort of try to live by them.

Not that curious. There's a simple explanation.

Neither the leaders nor the voters give the slightest damn about Biblical values. HYUFD shows his contempt for the teaching of Jesus on a daily basis.

All they care about is cherrypicking elements they care about and then telling other people what they can and can't do.

Rubbish, Jesus was not a communist woke social liberal

For his day he bloody well was.

Overturning the money tables and the whole eye of the needle thing. Wanting to feed the hungry, help the poor, heal the sick.

He was incredibly woke for his era.

Wokeism is ultra pro LGBTQ+, pro division on race and sexuality lines with a particular rejection of white heterosexual male 'privilege' and uber feminist (albeit with some clash with them and the equally woke uber trans).

It is perfectly possible for big corporations to be very woke and many now are and for a poor man to be socially conservative and anti woke. Hence Harris won lots of executives from the former and Trump lots of the latter

Have you considered it's perfectly possible to be pro LGBT rights, women's rights, the rights of minorities, and sincerely desiring a society composed of equality of opportunity - particularly among marginalised groups who might not otherwise enjoy the same opportunities as you and I due to age old discrimination - without being "woke" or "dividing [society] on race and sexuality lines"?

What you call being "woke" I call treating people with decency and respect irrespective of their gender, sexuality, or colour of their skin.