Impossible Thing To Believe Before Breakfast #13:
A man's opinions on how to rear and/or raise a child are invalid
because he is not the child's mother. However, his financial obligation
is greater because no woman gets pregnant by herself.
DAVE SIM:
It's hard to explain these things concisely because so many things are upside down in our society.
The problem is divorce has gone from a religious thing to a societal thing, so The State is now in control. Where The State intervenes in human affairs, it needs (presumably) to do so on the basis of Equality. Everyone has to be Equal before The Law. Which is not what we're doing. A baseball player's ex-wife is worth $3 million dollars, the clerk's ex-wife is worth $40K (or whatever).
What we are doing is incentivizing whoredom and whore-mongering: gold-digging by women and women-as-chattal by men. If, instead, we had a fixed settlement rate for EVERYONE based on jurisdiction (as a 24/7 wife and mother this is what it costs to keep you alive in this jurisdiction, so this is what you get in the event of divorce) we'd be removing those corruptions as a core reality in our society and getting back to something sensible: marrying for love, security, compatability.
If you only got the same "going-away presents" whether you were a baseball player's ex-wife or a clerk's wife, there would be no reason to have "going-away presents" as even an unconscious motivation in marrying and women would, I think, make better choices. It would also mean marriages would endure longer because being a GOOD wife would be more -- literally! -- rewarding than being an EX-wife.
Likewise if you only got "going-away presents" if you were a 24/7 wife and mother. Our concern as a society is -- or should be -- "providing for the provider" with 24/7 wives and mothers as the top priority. As distinct from "nanny enablers", part-time mother-hobbyists, the wives of househusbands, and "opposite sex roommates". Equal Before The Law suggests that everyone is expected to fend for him and/or her self. The State intervening in that should ALWAYS be exceptional and should ALWAYS be "blind justice". Anything else is institutionalized Inequality.
9 comments:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0gaYyNk7QA
Here is your original #12 and my response to it
12. "An airline stewardess who earned $20,000 a year at the time that she married a baseball player earning $6 million a year is entitled, in the event of a divorce, to $3 million for each year of the marriage and probably more."
Me
That depends on the state they reside in. And a simple pre-nup - that any wealthy individual male or female should obtain before marriage can insure that they retain their wealth as affirmed time and time again in divorce court cases.
Furthermore
Divorce rates started to rise in the late sixties as a direct result of the divorce laws being brought into the 20th century. Prior to the no fault divorces, women who wanted out of a bad marriage for whatever reason could not escape unless they proved adultery or battery. Being forced to stay married to someone you do not love who may be abusing you -perhaps not physically, is soul crushing. Women who devoted their lives to the marriage and or who stopped their own careers had little recourse but to endure life as slightly more than indentured servitude before divorce laws were liberalized.
Dave, at one point a few months ago i posited - with tongue firmly planted in cheek, that maybe you were just putting us all on. That your apparent dislike and lack of respect towards women was just an act. A longer form Andy Kaufmanesque con. That you were playing the very long game for purposes only you understood.
Yeah, right.
And they call YOU the crazy one.
You dislike and have little to no respect for women Dave. Whether you feel the term misogynist is appropriate or not it does fit.
The simple truth that nether you or any of your defenders can dispute is that your views towards women make you a bigot. If you drew an equivalency of your intolerant views towards women and applied them towards a different race or ethnic group, say Blacks or Indians or Jews what do you think people would call you?
I find these exchanges between us fascinating because it forces me to confront a person i believe to be a bigot, who at the same time is someone I had admired for his talent and creativity and who is undeniably gracious - except in your views towards women. There is the rub.
Erick, just wondering what you think of the Bill Burr video I posted above. (Personally, I think it falls into the category of "If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.")
Also, I don't think you have any idea whatsoever what modern divorce laws are doing to society in general. Do you think the collapsing marriage rate and the skyrocketing divorce rate are a good thing? Or is it a bad thing that is the fault of men? That is, do you think the liberalization of divorce laws are simply freeing millions of poor, oppressed women who were forced to endure loveless marriages to uncaring brutes? Any chance you see divorce laws as having been largely promoted and passed by feminists and that those laws are now slowly destroying the institution of marriage in general and, through the courts, enforcing the transfer of wealth from men to women? Any chance you see the incredible advantages of divorce to women? I strongly urge you to consider both sides of this argument. You can simply label Dave a misogyinist (yawn), but that's not really an argument.
Aren't the collapsing marriage rate, the skyrocketing divorce rate, women working outside the home, the acceptance of homosexuality, and basically all of the other societal changes that Dave dislikes the inevitable results of industrialization? He acts like the 1950s American model of husbands working in factories and offices while wives clean their suburban homes and dote on their children is some kind of ancient societal standard, but I think most people pretty much devoted their lives to doing farm chores (which admittedly were divided by gender) until a couple of hundred years ago. Even that model was relatively new, as agriculture only goes back about 10,000 years and humans were hunter-gatherers for about 90% of our history. My understanding is that marrying for love, not marrying at all, divorcing, not having kids, and finding satisfying careers weren't really options for most people until recently.
Sandeep, if Gail Simone wrote an essay arguing that men have "no ethics, no scruples, no sense of right and wrong," would you be willing to sign a petition that said, "I don't believe Gail Simone is a misandrist"? I'm not coming down on Dave for having issues with women or implying that I'm any more enlightened than he is; I just don't buy the whole "I've been unfairly smeared by vicious feminist theocrats" thing.
Sandeep, no I did not watch the video. As far as the liberalizing of the divorce laws benefiting women, yup, all for that.
Any time there is systemic, historical and institutional inequity, I am for leveling that playing field. Will some institutions suffer? Yup. Will some folks who hold on to out dated, and bigoted views be discomfited? Probably. That's life. You can never please everyone no matter what you do. If you had 50 employees and gave them a surprise gift of $500 each, guess how many would grouse that you did not give them enough to net the $500 because of taxes? People will always complain about something. Hell, Dave is not married and does not even want a woman in his life and yet he is still grousing about women. Dave is a bigot. I get that he is a friend of yours and I am not accusing you as some have of drinking the kool aid. But he holds views that I find abhorrent. The fact that he is not foaming at the mouth makes no difference. A genteel bigot is still a bigot. I can engage in conversation with him, and genuinely wish him well, but that does not change my abhorrence for his views towards women.
Marriage can be a great thing as long as there is mutual respect. It does not matter who the breadwinner or breadwinners are, as long as both respect one another.
Dave has actually advocated hitting a woman. I have daughters. No man would ever lay a hand on my child. Married or not. Women were not put on earth to serve men.
On an unrelated note, Sandeep's link got me to watch a bunch of Bill Burr videos (mostly clips from Conan O'Brien), which I liked. Normally, a loud Irish guy bitching about political correctness wouldn't be my thing, but he's actually pretty funny.
Well again, I think the salient point is that The State is the entity which is now determining the nature of the dissolution of a marriage. MY point is that The State has to err on the side making sure that everyone has the same standing Before The Law and the only way to do that is to say "This is what a 24/7 wife-mother needs to keep her alive in this jurisdiction." "This is what it costs to rear a child in this jurisdiction." Ergo, this is what you get. Anything beyond that should be outside of The State's control or you are asking The State to determine the $ value of each individual wife-mother and each child and are -- in fact -- DEMANDING that The State determine that there are $30K a month children and $1K a month children and which ones are which.
Which The State is cheerfully doing. I'm just saying that I think that's capital w Wrong.
It would be comparable to The State determining what your property taxes are based on how much money you have in the bank and how many houses you own. We SPECIFICALLY DON'T do that, because that SPECIFICALLY violates the whole idea behind the democratic state: that Justice is Blind. Each individual is treated like each other individual. Period.
We have to treat divorce the way that we treat property taxes, is all that I'm saying.
Ok, lets address the State. The State in its infinite wisdom has at times passed laws that allowed human bondage, that treated human beings as less than equal to others simply because of race, that treated human beings of the female gender less than equal to the male, and that to this very day has not provided equal protections. Some laws have indeed attempted to shift the balance of historically unequal distribution of marital property and some have cried foul. There are legal protections for all not just those of means - such as a prenuptial agreement that can insure that marital property is fairly divided. You would not buy a house or car without insurance why would you enter into marriage with someone you may have only known for a few months or a few years without such protections? If you don't have that, well shame on you but don't blame the state for over zealous lawyers. And as far as the State, well in the United States there is a man who has a strong shot at winning the Presidency who has a history of treating women like second class ornaments and who has advocated for keeping entire ethnic groups from entering the country.
Actually, how many houses you own DOES affect your property taxes. The more you own, the more property tax you pay. And how much you earn DOES affect your overall taxes; there is not a single, flat-rate tax. Of course, if you are wealthy enough, you can subvert all that and manage to pay little to no tax at all. Amazing, really, in the feminist socialist dystopia in whiich we supposedly live.
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