P is for Proportion

Heretical Sex (hereinafter HS) draws our attention to a judge who "says mothers should have children taken away if they don't let fathers see them". Ok, this is a Daily Mail article from the UK, but still, the joyful bit of the article is that the justice in question 'Mr Justice Coleridge' advocates something like a '3 violations of visitation and then jail' policy.

Now that's all very nice, and better than the toothlessness that the current law seems to operate on with respect to how they treat women, but come on! Men can get tossed in the slammer after a couple months of not paying their peonage, and women? You've got to take them to court 3 times, and they've got to violate 3 orders. That's probably $100,000 in legal fees and two to three years just to get to see your children that the state kidnapped by gifting them (and your income) to your ex, and making you an unwelcome and infrequent visitor in their lives.

Is this common sense? Or is this taking one cup of milk, and passing it in through the bars of the concentration camp to where we keep our men?

The justice in question is clearly terrified of this being a hard and fast rule, terrified of the backlash against him in case the law might ever apply to women. He's afraid he's gone too far already, you can see, but it isn't enough.

-We're dying in here.

My Best To You In Your Struggles

-M

p.s. - All the old posts should be restored. Sorry if it came in a rush.

T is for Threats to the System

Recently, I was forced by circumstances to seek employment in another field.

The world has changed, and I have not been able to find employ in my prior field for some time. There were jobs in the new field, and few takers. All I had to do was take some training, and jump some educational and testing hurdles.

Being paranoid, I searched the internet for any evidence that my status as a ‘deadbeat dad’ would be held against me. Nothing. All systems go. So, I set to it. I would be able to earn real money again, make a difference in my children’s lives and my life in a financial way, rather than being a load on the system.

This was great.

I won scholarships and grants to help with my retooling, and just as I was about to start the educational part of my program, a letter from the state licensing board arrived – it was a long bureaucratic checklist letter, and way at the bottom was written in an additional item, which had a check next to it: words to the effect that ‘men with arrears are not eligible for licensing in this field’.

So I called and wrote and spoke to these folks. Sure, the law gives them the right to withhold my license, I said; but I am trying to work – this will enable me to pay! Unless someone is complaining, why would they withhold this license?

True, they said, they need a complainant. But how that works (they candidly told me) was if they found that someone was in arrears, they would send a letter to the local employer, and ask that they initiate a complaint.

Got that? They would solicit, would GENERATE the complaint. Think any employer is going to ignore a request like that from the state licensing board that holds all their licenses in their hands?

You would think it sounds insane, but you would be forgetting two things – one, that there are a lot of folks who earn money pursuing deadbeat dads – seizing their accounts, garnishing their wages, serving as their ‘collections/probation officer’, suing them, serving as judges in the slave courts, - and there is a lot of incentive in terms of grants and matching funds from the federal government for doing all this. It’s a whole industry.

And the men involved, well, they are the disposable pawns, the workers, the slaves in the system that make all of this possible.

If one were to find a way out, others would follow.

To quote words that E.W. Jackson Sr. wrote in a recent and unrelated article: “When a slave escaped from the plantation, it wasn't merely a case of one slave being a problem. That slave became a threat to the institution of slavery and to the master's way of life.”

It is necessary to keep us in, to keep the empire running. Not one slave must be allowed to escape.

Let this be a warning to men everywhere. The entrée to this empire of slavery is marriage. The exit is death.

This is why almost 15,000 men kill themselves each year to escape it.

This is why if a man commits suicide, the odds are he is a divorced man. Because for the oppressed slaves in a slave state, the only escape allowed is death.

My Best To You In Your Struggles

-M

R is for Return

...or maybe 'republish'.

I'm going to restore my posts, which were moved back into 'draft' status because I was worried that they would show up in court. I won't do them all at once (there's a bunch), but I have done a bunch today, and will do more on subsequent days.

What's going on with me? Probably I shouldn't say, because folks are already guessing who the author of this website is. Suffice it to say things are worse than they ever were.

I am a non-citizen, really.

Property rights? What's that?

The biggest riot is that back when I was earning, my ex complained that sometimes she 'had' to shop at a department store she felt was below her (and we aren't talking Value Village here), and that got her an increase which I had to pay, along with the legal fees.

Today, I can't afford hot-dogs, let alone health insurance, housing, hair-gel, and other things that start with 'H'.

But adjustments aren't for me, no, no, no.

See, there's something different about me.

I'm not the woman.

My Best To You In Your Struggles

-M

F is for Finger

Another video to amuse.

T is for This requires comment...

One thing that is true about humans is that they do something, and then make up the reasons for it later.

In this case we have what I am sure is a lovely woman (Hannah Seligson), explaining why she isn't getting married.

Apparently there are 'un-travelled continents and four more career paths to explore'.

And there are. Career paths and continents, which can't be explored if:

1) no one has a very high-paying career to pay for them, and
2) no one has been roped into a divorce settlement to pay for them.

Now I do think Hannah is probably a decent partner, as she tracks her purchases with an eye to dividing it up based on who paid for what, and tries to avoid the messy divorces of the previous generation, but I wonder...

I wonder if she really would, after a 12-year non-married relationship, walk away with just the things she personally bought - or if she would walk across the street to the lawyers office, and discover that palimony is just as good as marriage, and take her ex 'partner' for everything she could get. I can hear her muttering about how 'that bastard took the best years of my life', and feeling all justified as she turns him into a slave for the rest of his.

Unfair? Unrealistic? Not if you look at the statistics. No, unfortunately, financially enslaving your ex is big business, and if Hannah resists the temptation, she is the exception, not the rule.

The delay in marriage might have something to do with unexplored contients and careers, but it is, in my opinion, mostly about men avoiding slavery.

Why did this particular essay tweak me enough to post? Because it reeked so strongly of sour grapes. Rare is the man who doesn't want to find a good woman, and raise children with her. Even more rare is the PERSON (no sexism in this post) who can resist enslaving their ex and ensuring their future casual explorations of careers an continents when the state hands it to them on a silver platter, courtesy of the partner whom they now dislike.

-And the tightness of the marriage market is all about this. With a judiciary/legal system that thinks that men were built to support women, no matter WHAT they do (no fault, remember?) marriage is going to become more and more rare.

It's not about 'adulthood', or the length of 'careers' - marriages and kids were more common when we were mostly working on farms and in sweatshops, and when 'success' was something that never happened. And it isn't about exploration, although the exploration is in there, but mostly by the women, and at the man's expense.

My Best To You In Your Struggles

-M