@TwoInchesOfShaft You are the one who missed the point. Your premise that marriage causes men to do more work and earn more is wrong. Any discussion about your premise is therefore pointless. Marriage doesn't cause men to do more work and earn more. Men who earn more are more desirable marriage prospects and thus more likely to be married.

Tradcons/Christians teach their adherents that men generally are aimless lazy buffoons who need to be guided and directed by wiser, more capable women. (Indeed, that's the plot of pretty much every Christian movie). They push marriage as a way to make that happen. For guys looking for a mommy, the tradcon prospect of some woman bossing them around and forcing them to work more may be appealing. Normal men find the thought of such a thing to be repugnant. Regardless, the studies don't support your premise. It's not possible to discuss whether it is good or bad that marriage causes men to work and earn more, because marriage doesn't cause these things. If you wanted to discuss generally whether working more is good or bad, you shouldn't have tied it to marriage being a causal factor.

@TwoInchesOfShaft Women consider men who earn more to be more desirable prospects for marriage. It's thus unsurprising that married men on average earn more than single men-successful men are more likely to be married. Nothing about marriage causes men to earn more. The oft proffered notion that married men earn more because they have to or their wives provide a positive influence is speculation and unsupported. Further, the ecological fallacy is common when people read studies like this. Such studies also play games with how they count divorced men to reach the outcomes they have predetermined. I've even seen claims that being married makes men healthier. Right. Women regularly seek out sickly, unhealthy, low earning men for marriage then magically transform them into economic powerhouses who are paragons of health. Sarcasm aside, for those who lack the sense to learn from others' mistakes, go ahead and heed the tradcons and man up and get married and see what happens.

@TiberiusBravo87 McConnell and McCarthy threw the election. If the numbers in AZ are like those in PA and other races, it's no surprise Lake lost despite the late surge in the polls. In PA, 900,000 more republican voters voted for Trump in 2020 than for Oz in 2022. If Oz had gotten 25% of them to the polls, he would have won. Overall, GOP turnout was lower than the 2018 midterms but turnout surged among people under 30, and the latter vote dem. Turnout is a function of several things and money is one of them. If candidates don't have adequate funds, they can't do voter outreach and get people to the polls or round up ballots (depending on what's allowed). Kelly spent 8 times more than Masters, and all of the other key races show the same pattern-massive spending by dems, and paltry funds available to the GOP candidates. McConnell saw to it that funds were directed away from close races.

@SeasonedRP Keep in mind the post 9/11 zeitgeist of the second Iraq war. Pretty much the whole spectrum of liberals I heard directly from were extremely skeptical of the claims especially "The next sign might be a mushroom cloud. " However, they largely held their noses and took the President tentatively at his word, and agreed to go along with the war agenda on that basis, and in the name of allegedly urgent National Security needs. Whatever the justifying speeches made at the time by politicians, the above was the overwhelming sentiment among rank and file liberal people at the time.

I've never been a big consumer of mainstream news sources like NYT, nor put much faith in their integrity the more I saw reporting that didn't track my own firsthand observations. I DO check the likes of them with big breaking stories, along with conservative and other known standard candles of bias, in a process of roughly triangulating on the truth where all sources have ulterior motives and none can be trusted at face value; not even the ones that come flavored and biased in ways that appeal to my personal inclinations.

@MentORPHEUS I don't remember much in the way of overt support from democrats for the first gulf war. In fact, Dick Gephardt floated pulling funding for it but it didn't go anywhere, and the war didn't last long enough for that to be an issue. The first nationally known politician (not on the left) that I heard question it was Ross Perot. Ron Paul probably did too but overall there wasn't significant dissent. Bush's popularity during it was very high so they mostly stayed away from that issue as I recall. Also, because it didn't last long, there wasn't time for the public to turn against it.

The second Iraq war was different. Gephardt rounded up dem support, which angered me, though a fair number of democrats were against it. The ones who mattered went along with it. The propaganda organs (e.g., NYT, WSJ, WaPost) pushed pro war messages. I was extremely frustrated at the time because I thought the Iraq war was idiotic and wanted the NYT in particular to have more critical coverage than it did. But no, the press and the politicians got on board. I didn't vote for Bush because of it and soured on the GOP generally, though my leanings are are a combination of libertarian/populist/nationalist rather than traditional republican. Invading Iraq is probably the worst decision made by a U.S. president, perhaps tied with Trump's overall covid blundering-shutting down the economy, creating financial incentives to inflate cases and deaths, and pushing ineffective vaccines with bad side effect profiles compared to other vaccines.