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Home » Teen pregnancy and education: slip-sliding away

Teen pregnancy and education: slip-sliding away

The New Neo Posted on by

This article by Gerry Garibaldi in City Journal—about the enormous number of teen pregnancies, our attitude towards them, and the state of education in our country today—is a must-read.

Garibaldi is a teacher in an urban school in Connecticut. The tale he tells is a heartbreaking one, of teenagers who have given up all hope of marriage as unworthy of contemplation or expectation, and who are having children in a system that, in its attempt to be humane, rewards them and supports them for doing so.

They are mostly the product of unwed teen mothers themselves. Although not unintelligent, they are uninvested in school and much of anything else except the frantic search for love, be it from a missing father, a swaggering teenage boy, or the babies they have with alarming frequency.

As Garibaldi points out, tons of taxpayer money is being flung at the problem. But the end result, unfortunately, is only to encourage the behavior.

I have no solution; these things begin in the home, and this system is broken down. It’s not just urban schools, either—the problem is worse there, but it is everywhere.

The contrast between the world I remember from my high school days could not be greater, in which the few girls who got pregnant usually became more quiet and withdrawn, and then were sent away for months to continue their pregnancies in homes for unwed mothers. Later they would return, empty-handed, a sad and newly-adult look in their eyes.

Not so today. The pregnancies of these girls are often the happiest events in their lives, and the babies are almost always kept to be raised by the teens and their thirty-something moms. The single female parent is the norm:

My students often become curious about my personal life. The question most frequently asked is, “Do you have kids?”

“Two,” I say.

The next question is always heartbreaking.

“Do they live with you?”

Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? It hardly matters at this late point, unless the answer would lead to solutions. Do we withdraw the supports from pregnant teenagers and possibly doom them (and their babies) to a worse situation? But if we don’t, aren’t we just perpetuating the problem? Does the phenomenon lie more in the realm of the emotional? But can’t the emotional be influenced by practicalities? If the consequences of teen pregnancy are made more dire, will it matter at all to these children and their children, who know so little of marriage that it is a foreign territory, almost never visited by anyone in their acquaintance?

Comments

Teen pregnancy and education: slip-sliding away — 82 Comments

  1. The answer to your question, “Do we withdraw the supports from pregnant teenagers and possibly doom them (and their babies) to a worse situation?” must be in the affirmative.

    “Possibly” is the essence of the Leftist slippery slope. Possibility is clearly not Certainty, but is so to liberals. That is why they’re falling out of their chairs all the time, at the slightest hint of an adverse possibility. “It is possible this obscure minnow species will become extinct unless….”

    To fail to right a wrong because of the possibility some may be harmed in the righting? Can’t go there.

  2. These female headed familes are crying out for male support and attention. But we’ve done everything in our power as a society to disempower, disincentivize and discourage young fathers from trying to take care of their own. For the young man who wants to do the “right thing” there’s no rewards in it, mama holds the upper hand, and if he is working poor or lower middle class the government can replace him in many ways as a surrogate income provider.

    This is compounded by our stupid economic corporatist system which seems to forget that economies exist for the use of the people, not the other way around and is perfectly content with making housing unaffordable, transferring jobs overseas and busting unions all the time to drive down wages.

    We could start by reforming family and TANF laws, but we won’t. Too many divorce lawyers and other vested interests who don’t think fathers are important to their families.

  3. Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?

    there IS a correct answer to this.
    the egg comes first.
    the egg is potential the chicken is realized
    so the egg is the only thing that can be different from a realized being already established.

    The Underground history of American Education
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm

    the book online is free.. you can buy it also

    i would read:
    Intellectual Espionage
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3b.htm

    At the start of WWII millions of men showed up at registration offices to take low-level academic tests before being inducted.1 The years of maximum mobilization were 1942 to1944; the fighting force had been mostly schooled in the 1930s, both those inducted and those turned away. Of the 18 million men were tested, 17,280,000 of them were judged to have the minimum competence in reading required to be a soldier, a 96 percent literacy rate. Although this was a 2 percent fall-off from the 98 percent rate among voluntary military applicants ten years earlier, the dip was so small it didn’t worry anybody.

    Six years later another war began in Korea. Several million men were tested for military service but this time 600,000 were rejected. Literacy in the draft pool had dropped to 81 percent, even though all that was needed to classify a soldier as literate was fourth- grade reading proficiency.

    ietnam-era young men had been schooled in the 1950s and the 1960s–much better schooled than either of the two earlier groups–but the 4 percent illiteracy of 1941 which had transmuted into the 19 percent illiteracy of 1952 had now had grown into the 27 percent illiteracy of 1970. Not only had the fraction of competent readers dropped to 73 percent but a substantial chunk of even those were only barely adequate; they could not keep abreast of developments by reading a newspaper, they could not read for pleasure, they could not sustain a thought or an argument, they could not write well enough to manage their own affairs without assistance.

    By 1940, the literacy figure for all states stood at 96 percent for whites, 80 percent for blacks. Notice that for all the disadvantages blacks labored under, four of five were nevertheless literate. Six decades later, at the end of the twentieth century, the National Adult Literacy Survey and the National Assessment of Educational Progress say 40 percent of blacks and 17 percent of whites can’t read at all. Put another way, black illiteracy doubled, white illiteracy quadrupled.

    In 1882, fifth graders read these authors in their Appleton School Reader: William Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Bunyan, Daniel Webster, Samuel Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others like them. In 1995, a student teacher of fifth graders in Minneapolis wrote to the local newspaper, “I was told children are not to be expected to spell the following words correctly: back, big, call, came, can, day, did, dog, down, get, good, have, he, home, if, in, is, it, like, little, man, morning, mother, my, night, off, out, over, people, play, ran, said, saw, she, some, soon, their, them, there, time, two, too, up, us, very, water, we, went, where, when, will, would, etc. Is this nuts?”

    through feminism, and progressive education, and what they did to the teachers union, and all that is what your referring to now.

    if you decide to dip in depth into this, you will again come across the same people the same stage setting. you will run into franz boas, naomi goldstein, kinsey, meade, Dewey, Venona transcripts, bella Dodd, and tons of other names i have brought up and said to read.

    of course we will not think unless some cognicenti will cause us too by writing an article. the idea of actually knowing whats going on, what happened and all that on your own, with someone pointing the way, is way way way too hard…

    By 1812, Pierre DuPont was claiming that barely four in a thousand Americans were unable to read well and that the young had skill in argumentation thanks to daily debates at the common breakfast table.

    back when dad was dad, mom was not a mini man that did it all, and the home was an economic unit the state could not pierce to tax.

    but feminists and communists and all those changed that!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    [edited for length by n-n]

  4. Maria Assunta Isabella / Bella Visono Dodd / Bella Dodd

    Dodd was a graduate of New York University School of Law.

    She also served as head of the New York State Teachers Union.

    Dodd was an organizer for the CPUSA from 1932—1948, and from 1944 to ’48 sat on the CPUSA’s National Council.

    is it any wonder our schools are modeled after the prussian and soviet models?

    In 1953, she testified before the US Senate about widespread Party infiltration of labor unions and other institutions. On March 11, 1953, The New York Times ran a front page article entitled “Bella Dodd Asserts Reds Got Presidential Advisory Posts.” The article reported that Dodd “swore before the Senate Internal Security subcommittee today that Communists had got into many legislative offices of Congress and into a number of groups advising the President of the United States.”[6]

    The New York Times reported on March 8, 1954 that Bella Dodd “…warned yesterday that the ‘materialistic philosophy,’ [i.e., dialectical materialism ] which she said was now guiding public education, would eventually demoralize the nation.”[7]

    so where did our materialism come from?

    In 1954, her book School of Darkness was published, wherein she opined that the Communist Party’s structure “was in reality a device to control the ‘common man'” [a hoax designed by financiers pitting groups against each other]

    but why trust people who changed sides? why trust Dodd? Bently? wittiker chambers? and many many more.

    The Communist Party operates by infiltrating and subverting social institutions like the churches, schools, mass media and government. Its aim was “to create new types of human beings who would conform to the blueprint of the world they confidently expected to control.” (162) Dodd

    “The party did all it could to induce women to go into industry. Its fashion designers created special styles for them and its songwriters wrote special songs to spur them…. War-period conditions, they planned, were to become a permanent part of the future educational program. The bourgeois family as a social unit was to be made obsolete.” (153) Dodd

    There was to be no family but the party and the state. Dodd helped organize the Congress of American Women, a forerunner of the feminist movement.

    “Since it was supposedly a movement for peace, it attracted many women. But it was really only a renewed offensive to control American women… Like youth and minority groups, they are regarded as a reserve force of the revolution because they are more easily moved by emotional appeals.” (194-195)

    so throuhg the people who were doing it and who changed sides we know what it really is.

    but we love our cancer, we love it…

    NEO:The tale he tells is a heartbreaking one, of teenagers who have given up all hope of marriage as unworthy of contemplation or expectation, and who are having children in a system that, in its attempt to be humane, rewards them and supports them for doing so.

    all by plan…

    “No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.” — Interview with Simone de Beauvoir, “Sex, Society, and the Female Dilemma,” Saturday Review, June 14, 1975, p.18

    “Since marriage constitutes slavery for women, it is clear that the Women’s Movement must concentrate on attacking this institution. Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage.” — Sheila Cronan, “Marriage,” in Koedt, Levine, and Rapone, eds., Radical Feminism, p. 219.

    “How will the family unit be destroyed? … the demand alone will throw the whole ideology of the family into question, so that women can begin establishing a community of work with each other and we can fight collectively. Women will feel freer to leave their husbands and become economically independent, either through a job or welfare.” — From Female Liberation by Roxanne Dunbar

    “The nuclear family must be destroyed, and people must find better ways of living together. … Whatever its ultimate meaning, the break-up of families now is an objectively revolutionary process. … “Families have supported oppression by separating people into small, isolated units, unable to join together to fight for common interests.” — Functions of the Family, Linda Gordon, WOMEN: A Journal of Liberation, Fall 1969

    “[W]omen, like men, should not have to bear children…. The destruction of the biological family, never envisioned by Freud, will allow the emergence of new women and men, different from any people who have previously existed.” — Alison Jaggar, Political Philosophies of Women’s Liberation: Feminism and Philosophy, (Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams & Co. 1977)


    “Destroy the family, you destroy the country.” — V.I. Lenin

    “The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.” — V.I. Lenin

    “We must declare openly what is concealed, namely, the political function of the school…It is to construct communist society.” — V.I. Lenin

    “Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism.” — Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, (First Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 10

    “America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within.” — Josef Stalin

    “[I]f even 10 percent of American women remain full-time homemakers, this will reinforce traditional views of what women ought to do and encourage other women to become full-time homemakers at least while their children are young…. This means that no matter how any individual feminist might feel about child care and housework, the movement as a whole [has] reasons to discourage full-time homemaking.” — Jane J. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA, p.100

    so so so much more…

  5. Brad, I agree with your first paragraph, but after that, you stopped making any sense at all. Economies don’t exist “for the use of the people.” Economies are MADE by the people — an economy is nothing more or less than the people in a particular system, producing, buying, selling, taxing and whatnot among themselves. The economy IS the people. The same thing goes for a corporation. It’s not some kind of scary alien force, it’s just a bunch of people who got together to do business.

    If you think union-busting to drive down wages is a big reason for our current family woes, I invite you to visit Michigan, where unions drove up wages so successfully for so many years that they drove thousands of jobs overseas, destroyed many of the employers who tried to stay put here, and left countless families with no income at all.

    And as for divorce lawyers who ‘don’t think fathers are important to families,” half of them represent the fathers, for crying out loud!

  6. These female headed familes are crying out for male support and attention. But we’ve done everything in our power as a society to disempower, disincentivize and discourage young fathers from trying to take care of their own. For the young man who wants to do the “right thing” there’s no rewards in it, mama holds the upper hand, and if he is working poor or lower middle class the government can replace him in many ways as a surrogate income provider.

    Agreed.

    This is compounded by our stupid economic corporatist system which seems to forget that economies exist for the use of the people, not the other way around and is perfectly content with making housing unaffordable, transferring jobs overseas and busting unions all the time to drive down wages.

    Totally disagree. This comment reflects a profound failure to grasp economics.

    What is “affordable?” For whom? For which housing? Housing the person wants? Well, I want to live in Malibu. If you can get me, say, Barbra Streisand’s mansion, for oh say … $200 K (nah, make $100 K, that’s even more affordable), I’m with you. Otherwise, the price is determined by what a buyer and seller agree it should be.

    Unions should be busted; they desperately need their wings clipped. Besides being fundamentally un-American (because of , inter alia, the closed shop) and quasi-criminal organizations into the bargain (because they threaten violence if they don’t get their way), they’re now essentially rackets designed to extort more money from others than their labor is worth, i.e., what people would pay voluntarily. (Not to mention extorting money from their members, and from non-members in the same industry who have to pay typically of 85% union dues regardless.) Unions should be prime targets of RICO investigations, starting with SEIU and AFSCME.

    Public sector unions should be outlawed, as they used to be, and God willing, will be again. Private sector unions should not be allowed to organize across state lines. Health insurers can’t operate across state lines; why should unions be allowed to?

  7. The war years saw amazing coordination between the Communist Party and America’s financial elite. The elite financed a sophisticated propaganda agency called the Russian Institute located on Park Ave. across 68th Street from Rockefeller’s Council on Foreign Relations. Here “famous names like Vanderbilt, Lamont, Whitney and Morgan mingled with those of Communist leaders. “(153) Dodd

    “I now saw that with the best motives and a desire to serve the working people… I and thousands like me, had been led to a betrayal of these very people…. I had been on the side of those who sought the destruction of my own country.” (229) Dodd

    Communism is essentially a deceitful system of international elite control. It was not suppressed during the McCarthy era. Rather it morphed into the New Left, Counter Culture, Civil Rights, Anti War and Woman’s Liberation Movements, and later into a plethora of elite-sponsored NGO’s, and media, Democratic and Republican party factions, Liberal, Zionist, Labor, and Gay Rights groups. Like the CPUSA itself, these groups are controlled from the top so their memberships are unaware of being used. Makow

    “ideas, activists and traditions that emanated from the Communist movement of the forties and fifties continued to shape the direction of the new women’s movement of the 1960s and later.”
    &
    second-wave feminism stands as an excellent example of a 1960’s movement that blossomed from the seeds that Communist women germinated thirty years earlier.     Kate Weigand – Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation

    Here is Makow Commenting on Weigands writing:

    Women Communists, who made up 40% of the party membership, had long complained that their domestic responsibilities prevented them from attending meetings. After the publication of “Women Against Myth” in 1948, the CPUSA began to address the problems of “male chauvinism” in the Communist Party. They initiated a process of “reeducating” men, that 50 years later, we recognize only too well.

    Professor Weigand follows this process in the pages of the party newspaper The Daily Worker. Feminists began a campaign against “male chauvinism” and “sexism.” For example, a Mrs. Kutzik from the Bronx complained that showing women in bathing suits was demeaning and racist. “What would we think if 90% of the pictures of Negroes in our newspaper showed them in zoot suits?”

    A writer was roundly criticized by woman readers for a story that suggested that his wife and four daughters spent much of their time worrying about their clothes: “The editors and the author owe the readers an apology and themselves a critical evaluation of their understanding of the woman question.” (92) The caption of a photo of a man with a young child read, “Families are stronger and happier if the father knows how to fix the cereal, tie the bibs and take care of the youngsters.” (127)

    The Party disciplined men who didn’t take the woman question seriously enough by ordering them to complete “control tasks involving study on the woman question.”

    In 1954 the Los Angeles branch disciplined men for “hogging discussion at club meetings, bypassing women comrades in leadership and making sex jokes degrading to women.” (94)

    The CPUSA tried to promote these values in the decadent capitalist culture.

    A film Salt of the Earth, which Pauline Kael called “Communist propaganda”, portrayed women taking a decisive role in their husbands’ labor strike. “Against her husband’s wishes, Esperanza became a leader in the strike and for the first time forged a role for herself outside of her household… [her] political successes persuaded Ramon to accept a new model of family life.” (132) Portrayals of strong assertive successful women became as common in the Communist press and schools, as they are in the mass media today.

    Communist women intellectuals formalized a sophisticated Marxist analysis of the “woman question.”

    The books In Women’s Defense (1940) by Mary Inman, Century of Struggle (1954) by Eleanor Flexner and The Unfinished Revolution (1962) by Eve Merriam recorded the history of women’s oppression and decried the prevalence of sexism in traditional customs, mass culture and language.

    The founder of modern feminism, Betty Frieden relied on these texts when she advocated in The Feminine Mystique (1963) that women downgrade their role as wife and mother and instead make career their first priority.

    With the exception of Inman (who left the Party over a doctrinal dispute) these women (including Frieden) all hid the fact that they were longtime Communist activists.

    When their daughters (“red diaper babies”) encountered “male chauvinism” in the 1960s New Left, they had everything they needed, including the example of subterfuge, to start the Women’s Liberation Movement.

    and

    Weigand has shown that modern feminism is a direct outgrowth of American Communism.

    There is nothing that feminists were saying and doing in the 1960’s-1980’s that wasn’t prefigured in the CPUSA in the 1940’s and 1950’s.

    Communists pioneered the political, economic and cultural analysis of woman’s oppression.

    For example, in 1940, Mary Inman argued that child-rearing methods “manufacture femininity” and the “overemphasis on beauty” is used to keep women in subjection (33).

    Communists pioneered women’s studies, and advocated public daycare, birth control, abortion and even children’s rights.

    They originated key feminist concepts such as “the personal is the political” and techniques such as “consciousness raising.”

    The main contribution modern feminism made was to try to eliminate heterosexuality and the nuclear family altogether.

    and Lastly

    It is hard to escape the conclusion that feminism is Communism by another name. Having failed to peddle class war, Communism morphed into a movement dedicated to gaining power by promoting gender conflict.

    The “diversity” and “multicultural” movements represent feminism’s attempt to forge “allegiances” by empowering gays and “people of color.”

    Thus, the original CPUSA trio of “race, gender and class” is very much intact but class conflict has never been a big seller.

    Feminists wish to destroy a Western Civilization that is dominated by white men who believe in genuine diversity (pluralism), individual liberty and equal opportunity (but not equal outcomes).

    We have seen this destruction begin with the dismantling of the liberal arts curriculum and tradition of free speech and inquiry at our universities.

    Many feminists are embarrassed to discover they are Communist dupes.

    They try to point out the differences between themselves and Marxists but these differences are matters of emphasis.

    Their embarrassment, however, is nothing compared to ours when we acknowledge that we have been subverted.

    They have taken over our minds.

    Feminists dominate the mass media and the education systems (both primary and secondary) and use these for indoctrination.

    They have great power in the legal system, many parts of government, and are currently subverting the military. [DADT]

    The evidence is everywhere.

    The term “politically correct” originated in the Communist Party in Russia in the 1920’s.

    We use it everyday to refer to adherence to feminist dogma.

    Recently here in Winnipeg, Betty Granger, a conservative school trustee running for national office, made a slip of the tongue. She talked about an increase in house prices in Vancouver due to “the Asian invasion.”

    Granger was pilloried mercilessly in the press. People sent hate letters and dumped garbage on her lawn. At a meeting of the School Board, it was acknowledged that she is not a racist. It was acknowledged that Asians have married into her family. Nonetheless, she was censured because, and I quote the Chairperson, “appearances are more important than reality.”

    I was at the meeting and couldn’t believe what I was witnessing. Betty Granger repented and voted in favor of her own censure.

    The atmosphere was charged. The people there were like a pack of wild dogs ready to set upon an injured rabbit. These were the champions of “tolerance.”

    These rituals of denunciation and recantation, typical of Stalinist Russia or the Maoist Cultural Revolution, have become commonplace in America.

    They are “showpieces” designed to frighten everyone into conforming to political correctness.

    We have “diversity officers” and “human rights commissions” and “sensitivity training” all designed to uphold feminist shibboleths.

    They talk about “discrimination” but they freely discriminate against whomever they like.

    “Sexual harassment” is something they use to fetter male-female relations and to purge their enemies.

    In 1980, three women in Leningrad produced ten typewritten copies of a feminist magazine called Almanach. The KGB shut down the magazine and the women were deported to West Germany.

    In the USSR, feminism had always been an export product. According to Professor Weigand, her “book provides evidence to support the belief that at least some Communists regarded the subversion of the gender system [in America] as an integral part of the larger fight to overturn capitalism.”

    The term “politically correct” originated in the Communist Party in Russia in the 1920’s.

    imagine comeing to the US and knowing this as yuo came from there, and the good americans you tell, tell you its not true. that pc is a joke. that its not got that history.

    and that we have people confessing publicly…
    and reeducation… lack of free speech

    yet… shhhhhhh… it cant happen here
    (because it has already happened)

  8. They are mostly the product of unwed teen mothers themselves. Although not unintelligent…

    Evidence? Somebody’s gotta be below average, right? This sorry crew looks like pretty good candidates to me:

    As do most of my 11th-graders, Nicole reads at a fifth-grade level, which means I must peruse the articles and statistics along with her, side by side. She groans each time I pick out a long article and counts the number of pages before she reads.

    This is a serious point. I know it’s de rigeur to assert reflexively that the subjects of articles such as this are “not unintelligent,” but whether they are or not affects the choice of public policy. If they really are “not unintelligent,” then they have no excuse and just need their butts kicked. If aid/subsidies/incentives to unwed mothers were ended, as “not unintelligent” actors they’d presumably adjust their decisions accordingly. Problem solved.

    If, on the other hand, they’re just too stupid to make sensible decisions, regardless of externalities — as I suspect they are — that’s another story. No idea what to do then!

  9. The term “politically correct” originated in the Communist Party in Russia in the 1920’s.

    The very first person I ever heard use this phrase: Angela Davis, in a tete-a-tete when I was in college. It struck me as creepy at the time, and I was a lefty then.

  10. and if you go back to moses harmon, you will realize that this is basically a sex cult expanding to encompass society. a sex cult which wants sex with none of the problems, limitations or hang ups that make it less fun.

    under this
    Children are a hassle -but if you can turn them over to the state, you can go on with your orgies. but the guilt of that can be avoided by murder of the fetus, or birth control pills, etc.

    marraige is a hassle to those who want sex on tap with anyone they want. a society who wants santity of such, would oppose those who by their actions, undermine that sanctity.

    religion says no, it has to go. its oppressing the sex deviates from doing what they like…

    and independent individuals dont want to be victims, so a victim society is necessary for those who want to have all the nasty most forbidden forms of such sex. but with a slave race of people too dumb, and with no help from above, this once again becomes a past time reserved for those better than others.

    men? why oppose men? because most men tend to get a raw deal in mating. and western society was most equitable for them and women. in that each man had a mate, and each mate had a man. serial monogamy was a way to bring back a harem in western terms… classes allow the elite to have lots of fun because of their status, etc.

    of course since most people arent like this, everything had to be couched in terms that were ASSUMED to be about the whole.

    and since these people tend to think they are superior for being able to have sex with anything including objects and animals, they think they are elite for not having such limits. Rome and Caligula was the classic example, but Tiberius would do, or the royal lady of England dying of horse sex, etc.

    now we are seeing it move into the categories it couldnt move into until it had already moved into other areas. so now that gay sex is normalized, and so forth, children and animals is whats coming next (and the reasoning behind it has to do with lukaks, not harmon).

    in fact a woman was recently arrested for having sex with an animal and two children and sharing her hobby online.

    so from a sex commune that celebrated the freedom of satan…. to alinsky, who celebrated lucifers success… to the whole thing being about sex and freud involved and on and on.

    one only has to read it.
    and what doesnt make sense becomes clear.

    in the absence of that, we make up things to fill in the gaps, rather than accept these gaps and wait for answers.

  13. Occam’s Beard: I am referring to Garibaldi’s statement in his article, not voicing my own opinion. He is describing students, he is their teacher, he describes them as having a fair amount of intelligence.

  14. Mrs Whatsit:

    For one you forget that our economy is not some pure capitalistic system. It exists in a framework of laws and treaties and my contention would be that these mostly serve the interests of those with a lot of capital and no one else, not the country, not the workers. A corporation is merely a name we give to an artificial business and tax entity that the US.government per-se does not even have to allow to exist. Capitalism and free markets do not imply the formation of corporations as opposed to other business structures, and there is no Iron Law dictating what type of tax strategy we have follow concerning the various business structures.

    In any case, US corporations owe the US government some loyalty and have some responsibilities when it comes to US workers, or they can’t properly be called “US” corporations and have the concept of nationalism mean anything. You might want to consider there is an inherent tension between “free trade” and nationalism. My solution to that is simple: a univeral labor treaty which sets verifiable standards and compensations levels based on the conditions in each country. Only then could workers worldwide breath a temporary sigh of relief as they would no longer be forced to wage an ever perpetual race to the bottom in terms of wages. Lastly, the US has (or had, it’s rapidly shrinking as our middle class dies) one of the largest and richest internal markets in world history and we used to produce just about everything we needed here. We had no need of trade, free or otherwise, and while I actually do think DONE RIGHT (which we haven’t) trade can be a useful and good thing, I think its obvious we messed up big time in terms of how we’ve conducted our trade policies over the past 30 years. Bubble after bubble worldwide, rising commodity prices, riots, anti-US sentiments…

    As for unions, I’m much more nuanced then you. I consider some unions evil and unnecessary, other unions evil but necessary (i.e. teachers unions since we want to make teachers responsible but not give them power over how to teach or backup discipline in their classrooms), and other unions good and beneficial: I bet the meatpackers who tend to mostly be illegal these days miss their unions which, for awhile at least, gave US workers a decent wage and some health benefits. As for the auto unions it takes a certain sort of historical blindedness to forget where they came from. Just like the most evil union of all – the baseball Major League Players Union, the auto unions became the way they became in part due to the radicalization brought on by struggles with corporatist goons. Of course in the latter years, Detroits unions got fat and happy and complacent and even a bit spoiled and so as the economy turned global and sour, they got what they deserved. But just because labor can be corrupt doesn’t mean capital can’t be.

    Now as for your argument about divorce lawyers: I don’t really know if “half” of them represent fathers as a common refrain you will hear from men online is that their lawyer told them to NOT fight for custody, and without those kind of battles, lawyers become much less necessary. More to the point, if the guy is the sole breadwinner, even if wifey initiated the divorce and kicked him out of his home via a CIVIL (yep, it’s that freaking easy to get someone kicked out of a property they own)complaint, chances are he’ll be ordered to pay for her lawyer as well. Gotta love a system like that.

  15. Occam’s Beard-
    There are idiots among them, but there are women who are above average, too. Just ignorant. If you have had it beaten through your head that reading is a horrible task, you’ll respond the way that girl did– even if it’s not hard for you. (IIRC, “reading level” becomes a matter of vocab pretty quick, as well as more complicated punctuation. Plus, it’s not cool to be smart.)

    It’s easy for me to take out the garbage, doesn’t mean I do a happy dance.

    This may be more the catch:
    She trusted me and would never think that falling behind in my classes would result in a failing grade. Life had allowed her to slide before, through every year of her education, as others in her life had slid–starting with her father, whom she barely recalled.

    Fail because you can fail– there’s no cost, and it’s easy.
    Actually applying the rules is seen as a betrayal of trust. (A personal pet peeve of mine, but very common, especially in city kids, for some reason. No idea why.)

  16. by the way, the men have been making the stats as to single female parentage and the harm it causes…

    but there is a wealth of feminist crap studies used to make the opposing arguments.

    so in this article you find out that these kids have lower scores in reading, and literacy. high pregnancy, followed by high infertility for abortions. high disease rate which also makes infertility. mentally crippled and state dependent.

    anyone want to remember what the women did? they basically shamed and pushed men into the basements and out of work… belittled them, changed film and tv, and on and on.

    and NOW exactly what the men said would happen and was happening is so bad that their BS cant cover it much anymore.

    in fact you still cant bring it up as we now equate feminism with women, and so to say something against it, is to be attacked for having the wrong party mentality PC

    us MEN have known all this for a long long time, and the men who talked before the 60s feminist putsch, said this all would be the result.

    but feminists declared a new age of women, new physics ad math, and so on and so forth.

    remember?

    but once women stopped oppressing sex (and blamed that on men), it became a race to the bottom. where the woman with the least propriety woudl win the male, who wasnt tainted for being a rogue, or with lots of women.

    rather than women become literary giants, inventors and discovered and doctors, they became freebie hookers, or unwilling and depressed and hateful the men pick those others.

    for years us men have learned that if you had a good job, were sane, etc… you were BORING, and the mate potential would fade to zero.

    but if you were a loser, had no job, crazy and unpredictable, and so on… well feminism said you were the man for her! you were no longer a boring man who would run a “happy gulag”, but an exciting person who she could now try to tame.

    we now have record numbers of women who have no mate prospects. they are infertile and many drink too much… even worse, they are now poaching the young men and trashing them before the young women get to them!!! and the young women are fighting to be the sex slave of one of the VERY VERY VERY Few men with any potential any more… (as women dominate in schools).

    demographically we are already dead…

  17. OB:

    Why did you bother replying to me? Is there a logical reason I should address your post since all you’ve done in the past few weeks is insult me. For instance, there’s your post a few threads down where you accuse me of lying about my citizenship for a stupid grammatical error.

    I thought we had a good exchange when we first met when we debated PCR’s idea about how “comparative advantage” no longer applied to free trade. I thought we both more or less held our own. Since that time however, all I’ve gotten from you is snark. Until that changes, I intend to ignore you, so if you intend to continue insulting me, I’d advise you not to expect a reply to your posts no matter how intelligent or stupid they may be.

  18. I am referring to Garibaldi’s statement in his article, not voicing my own opinion. He is describing students, he is their teacher, he describes them as having a fair amount of intelligence.

    Neo, I didn’t think it was your characterization, actually. It’s just that whenever I encounter that verbal/linguistic tic in this sort of context I always think, “Half of the population is of below average intelligence. Where the hell are they, if not here?”

  19. In any case, US corporations owe the US government some loyalty and have some responsibilities when it comes to US workers

    What about responsibilities to US consumers?

    I don’t think sentiment has a place here. Corporations should produce the most they can at the cheapest price they can, i.e., strive to achieve the greatest economic efficiency. If they’re making huge profits, the signal that sends will induce competitors to enter the fray, erode their margins, and ameliorate the perceived shortage that made those profits possible. Win-win. (Think of, e.g., someone transporting portable generators to a disaster area.) So I wouldn’t interfere when a corporation makes big bucks. Conversely, I also wouldn’t interfere when one comes a-cropper. My responses: “congratulations” and “hard cheese,” respectively.

  20. As for unions, I’m much more nuanced then you.

    Actually, I’m more nuanced than me too. I want to push back on the union issue to put debate regarding the proper role and scope of unions back on the agenda, instead of the sacred cows that they’ve been. At one point unions served a beneficial purpose. I think that that point is long past.

    Teachers’ unions are a sore point here in CA, where 40% of the budget of this broke state goes to K-12 education — by state constitutional amendment pushed by the teachers’ unions — and yet we score 49th nationally in educational results. Thanks, teachers’ union!

    I bet the meatpackers who tend to mostly be illegal these days miss their unions

    I’m sure. I’d miss the gravy train too. The question isn’t whether union members want a union, but whether we want to let them have a union. Air traffic controllers probably miss PATCO, but we’re doing just fine without it.

    But just because labor can be corrupt doesn’t mean capital can’t be.

    I couldn’t agree more.

  21. Artfldgr, I’m not sure if it’s been noted before, and I mean no offense, but if you’re worried about taking up too much space here, you could start your own blog and link to it. It might even be easier to format your articles and points with a bit more variety, making it easier to formulate your points. Bold and italics only go so far. (Speaking from experience here; one of the reasons I started a blog is because I felt I was writing too much in comments and not formulating my points well enough.)

    On topic, my cousin who works in D.C. (under Senator Hatch) recently met my wife and two children. She congratulated us and said something to the effect that getting married is something of an achievement these days. I can see where she’s coming from, but that comment came out of left field for me, and I’m saddened to think she’s probably right. She and her sister are still looking, but are frustrated. They won’t have sex or children out of marriage either (gasp! The old fashioned craziness!); that’s just not the way our family works. I applaud that, mind you, but we are in an apparently dwindling population that is of that mind.

  22. In 1950 about 95% of babies were born to a married woman, sometimes recently married. There were no food stamps, no Medicaid, no section 8 housing subsidies, no WIC nutrition program. Teenage pregnancy was more common than now, but it was married pregnancy. If you subsidize something, you get more of it. When babies born to unmarried women were not subsidized, pregnant women married or gave the baby up for adoption. There were also orphanages.

    Working class men can not compete with the government when it comes to money and services.

  23. Neo,

    Someone, I forget who, once said something like this: To reward fools for the folly of their actions fills the world with fools. And we all know that when you subsidize something you get more of it.

    The break down of the family and the generation to generation to generation ingrained welfare class that has grown like a cancer since the 1960s is indeed a sad commentary on our social-political system. But I don’t think rewarding poor choices is the way to get to a society where fewer and fewer people make poor choices.

    Of course I don’t want to see a 13 year old mother with a 5 day old baby dressed in rags starving in the streets. However, IMO that is a problem best left to either the extended family or private and/or religious charities.

    In my version of an imperfect world a young mother who does not have a family structure that can support her and her baby has to rely on private charity or if the taxpayers are going to provide sustenance for them they should be placed in a locked down drab, dreary city or state run dormitory for unwed mothers. No cell phones, no video games, no rap music; and as long as they are dependent upon the taxpayer they have to go to school, become literate, and learn a job skill.

    Right now millions on welfare receive a check from the taxpayers and receive food stamps and housing assistance provided by the tax payers; yet somehow they manage to own the latest dvd player, video game system, cell phone, iPod, etc. Something is wrong with that picture.

  24. Brad, I AM a lawyer, and I can tell you that you should be more careful about basing your views of domestic relations law — or anything else — on a distorted picture gained from anonymous online comments. Yes, indeed, roughly half of the divorce lawyers are representing men, and many of the ones who whine online that their lawyers are telling them not to fight for custody are leaving out the part when their lawyers told them that they wouldn’t get custody because they had been much worse parents than their wives had been and wouldn’t win in a contest based on the best interests of the children; or, in other case, telling them not to fight about custody because, if they let their wives have the kids without a fight, the wives would be more likely to let them have a bigger share of the money pie without a fight. No lawyer is going to tell a man who stands a real chance of gaining custody not to fight for it, and the days when men automatically stood a lesser chance than women of gaining custody are long, long gone — much like the days when unions actually stood for something good. Now for god’s sake don’t tell me about your more “nuanced” view of divorce law because I’m not going to try to get into subtleties in a blog comment.

    And as for corporations, you may wish to consider the fact that even though our law chooses to assign a legal category named “corporation” to a certain type of organization of human beings, and then chooses to assign certain rights and obligations to that organization that are different in some ways from those assigned to other kinds of business organizations, it’s still nothing but a bunch of people. Furthermore, the reason that the law assigned those rights and obligations to corporations in the first place was because it would help those groups of people prosper — thereby creating jobs, productivity, wealth, and possibly some increase in the stocks in your retirement fund — not to take money AWAY from people, in other words, but to put it into your hands. My objection to your discourse on unions and corporations was the way you made it sound as if unions and corporations and government exist separately from the people who make them up — as if corporations move jobs overseas just because they are big meanies who want to make Americans suffer, and not because of economic forces put into motion in large part by choices made by those same Americans — you and me, in other words.

  25. Ref literacy and the military. Before my father’s division shipped out for the ETO in 44, a substantial number of the junior enlisted men had to go to “Three R” school to learn things like traffic sign language. I think the literacy rate quoted is higher than it’s ever been, before or since, for the population.
    Something missing.

  26. Mrs Whatsit:

    Even if you didn’t have a direct self interest in the divorce industry it would be pretty easy to dismiss what you say out of hand. After all, anyone can claim anything on the internet , we can debate studies if you’d like, at least there are links to such things. I also note that you missed something: It is impossible for 50 percent of lawyers in divorces to represent men. Want to know why? Because men who are the primary breadwinners are often made to pay for the wife’s lawyers as well, and whether most couples split the workload or not, of the ones that do have a primary breadwinner the male is overwhelmingly the one in that position. So, just like that, I’ve shown that half of the lawyers retained in divorces cannot be for men, as men are in some cases forced to subsidize lawyers who work against them in court. Do you deny this? I’m waiting.

    “Best interests of the child” is inherently a SUBJECTIVE standard, which can mean anything one wants it to mean. One of the things considered is time spent with the children which of course benefits a stay at home mom versus a working dad. It’s also a STUPID standard because in almost all cases children will be better off if there parents stay together as most of the more recent work on divorces would show you. If not, I wonder why you bothered to bring that up, as every study I have ever seen on this subject shows fathers are discriminated against in custody decisions , even “Mr Moms” tend to get custody at a lower percentage rate than women who are similarly situated.
    In any case this is all very political and I find the whole thing disgusting:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fathers%27_rights_movement#Shared_parenting

    Oh, and just like the ridiculous policies you support in terms of family law have destroyed your country’s families, the laws you presumably support in terms of corporations have impoverished your country.
    I know the given rationales for many of these laws, I know how they are applied in the real world, and I’m not a fool who thinks laws made in the past 20 years have had much of anything to do with making America prosperous, your 401k account to the contrary. Here, read it and weep and consider more is coming:
    http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/housing-hiding-inflation-sectors-economy-cpi-housing-growth-in-medical-care-college-fuel/#more-4185

  27. The absence of a male authority figure in the lives of many children is a major factor in your local school system no matter where you live. When I retired 6 years ago I volunteered (6.5 hours a day) as a mentor in one of the elementary schools in the district that has a large percentage of students with learning ‘issues’. These are young kids with a diagnosed disorder, kids with behavior problems (bad boys and spoiled girls), and kids who are on the left side of the bell curve.

    This year I am mentoring 11 kids K through 6. I mentor/tutor 1 on 1 and in small groups. Over the last 6 years I’ve worked with around 50 kids. Regardless of their diagnosis/problem fully 80% of these kids have a less than ideal domestic situation, namely poor parenting skills at home. Within this 80% fully 75% have no father involved in their daily life.

    Once these kids get to know me and trust that I have their best interests at heart they cling to me and want my approval for “doing a good job”. They hunger for a firm, caring male figure in their life.

    I suspect there are some older, retired males who post here or at least older males who can occasionally mentor at one of their local schools. If you have any experience interacting with young children I urge you to consider volunteering as a mentor. If we can ‘catch’ these kids at an early age we can help them overcome many of their problems and develop self-confidence which is the key to a successful life.

  28. Even if you didn’t have a direct self interest in the divorce industry it would be pretty easy to dismiss what you say out of hand.

    …and doing so means we get to dismiss you. Good to know I don’t need to dig through that mass when there wasn’t much value to what was said before!

    Parker –
    I think you’re very much correct, although the one interaction I had with “mentoring” was just annoying. (I wasn’t very social in high school, and they assigned a woman to mentor me who… well, she meant well, but she didn’t think much, just lots of emotion. Having a great family and outstanding homelife, I didn’t need emoting-support.)
    Mentoring is a very demanding thing if it’s done correctly.

  29. FoxFier:

    I guess then I’ll just assume that when you go to purchase a car, you believe everything the salesman tells you. That’s not very smart.

  30. Parker:

    I’ve done supervised reading with children.

    However, in my opinion, the real problem is cultural. Males are considered dangerous to children and treated with suspicion as opposed to reasonable caution. Until recently (after a few years of protests) British Airlines had a policy preventing children from sitting unaccompanied with lone male passengers as if there was some sort of epidemic of child sexual abuse taking place on airlines. Men would lose seats for the simple fact of being men. A friend of mine used to be an elementary school science teacher. Males, esp in elementary schools are rather rare. He kept his door open at all times to help ward off any chance of something happening, and was constantly forced to take various “diversity” courses which all of course seem to assume that the white male is the problem. There were many stranger /danger drills, and he didn’t have much control over how he ran his classroom or taught the material. He’s now teaching in South Korea to kids in high school and is raving about how great the culture is in terms of respect for teachers.

    As much as I agree with you that kids need male mentors, I can tell anyone who is thinking of doing so that you will get little support and you take a quite great risk, even if you stick to only single sex children. This applies to males and females, but as a male you will also instantly get the benefit of suspicion being thrown at your motives, qualifications, and character.

  33. And those who said the “Great Society” programs would destroy morality, the family, and any sense of personal responsibility were called selfish, greedy, heartless, cruel, uncaring bastards.

  34. And those who said the “Great Society” programs would destroy morality, the family, and any sense of personal responsibility were called selfish, greedy, heartless, cruel, uncaring bastards.

    Ah, but they weren’t called “mistaken.”

  35. Nope.

    And those who publicly deplore this situation will be told This deplorable situation exists because we haven’t spent enough money yet!

  36. Hmmmm, I have had tremendous support from teachers, administrators, and for the most part from parents. That may partly be due of where I live. I’m in a moderately sized city in Iowa. (We Iowans are convinced that we are the most friendly, generous, and even keeled people in the country.)

    But I do take your comments seriously Brad, I’m sure that in the large metro areas it is unpleasant to be a teacher or a mentor. Come to think of it, I’ve lived in Denver and Chicago (way back when) and its generally unpleasant to live in a large metro area even if you never set foot in a school.

  37. Occam: Agreed, the so-called Great Society has left an ugly, not easily erased footprint on society.

    ELC: Agreed, money isn’t the problem, the problem is the break down of the family, negligent/overwhelmed single female parents, and the lack of committed fathers

  38. were called selfish, greedy, heartless, cruel, uncaring bastards.

    I think we need to embrace all of their epithets, because they are designed to forestall debate.

    Are we selfish? Yes.
    Are we greedy? Yes.
    Are we heartless? Yes.
    Are we cruel? Yes.
    Are we uncaring? Yes.

    We will, for this purpose, stipulate to everything you accuse of being, everything except bastards, which is what we’re trying to prevent.

    Now that we have the name-calling out of the way, let’s debate the issues.

  39. Occam’s Beard-
    Heh. Too right.

    Although pointing out that it doesn’t matter what I am, here’s the facts, tends to just make the name calling go up a notch. (Don’t forget: if the study’s results aren’t what you want, it’s racist, sexist, biased[in the pc sense] and unscientific.)

  40. Do you deny this? I’m waiting.

    Of course I deny it — what you said reflects complete ignorance about how the practice of law works and is silly besides. Number one, even when one spouse has to pay the fees for the other spouse’s lawyer, that doesn’t mean the paying spouse gets either two lawyers or none! The lawyer for the wife represents the wife, the lawyer for the husband represents the husband, and whichever spouse pays the bills pays both of them. Number two, while it may still be more common that husbands have more money than wives and that wives are more likely to stay home with kids than husbands, neither is anywhere near universal any more. There are plenty of cases in which the wife is the one with the money, whether earned or inherited, and plenty of cases where the man stayed home with the kids or — much more commonly — both spouses worked, both spouses had equal opportunities and responsibilities as parents, and the man contributed as much or more to the parenting as the wife. Insisting that this is rare — when looking around your neighborhood will show you how common it is — doesn’t do a lot to bolster the underlying proposition you seem to be offering that men are just as capable and willing to be active parents as are women.

    As for my supposed self-interest, you are assuming quite a lot based on no information. I’m not a practicing lawyer any more but when I was, my representation was almost exclusively limited to the children caught up in custody and visitation battles. Kids don’t benefit in any way from the kind of gender wars you’d like to provoke and prolong, and neither do their lawyers. You might want to remember that no matter how mathematically equal the legal representation of men and women may or may not be, it isn’t divorce lawyers who award custody — far and away most often, it is decided by the spouses themselves. In the enormous majority of cases, they decide on their own who gets the kids, who’s paying what, and all the rest, and hire lawyers only to draw up the agreement and get it signed by a judge. This means that the primary reason statistics may show that wives more often end up with custody than husbands is that this is what the spouses themselves most often want to do. As for the much smaller percentage of cases in which spouses can’t agree and must get somebody else to decide who will get the kids, the person who decides is a judge, not a lawyer (surprise!) A goodly percentage of these judges are divorced spouses themselves or children of divorced spouses or loving parents or otherwise experienced in the vagaries of human existence, not to mention the law, and nondisposed to be as evil or sexist as you seem to enjoy imagining. As for the subjectivity of the best interest standard, certainly it’s subjective, and that’s a damned good thing. Can you imagine any objective rule that could possibly be fairly applied to a situation with so many variables, so much room for error and imperfection, and such a crying need for a little humane flexibility and wisdom? A nice clear bright-line objective standard is what we used to have when the courts said, “The female person gets the kids and the male person has to pay for it” – and you didn’t seem to like that approach very much. This whole argument boils down to this: life is unfair and divorce is really unfair, no matter what happens. If you couldn’t make your marriage work, and you didn’t realize it before you had kids, there is NOT going to be a way out that will be completely fair to everyone and that will leave everyone unscathed. There simply isn’t — no matter what choices are made, someone will be hurt and somebody will suffer — most often the kids, at least when the spouses are so self-invested that the only injuries they understand are their own.

  41. True, but the trick is accept every epithet, every insult, with equanimity. It totally deflates those hurling them; for them, it’s like punching a mattress. Nothing defangs an epithet quite like its failure to elicit a reaction.

  42. Informal rules: Growing up in rural Washington state in the late 1950s, I knew that — if I got a girl pregnant — I would have to marry her. To this day, I don’t know how I knew that, since it wasn’t something either of my parents said anything about. But somehow I knew that. (And I have no recollection of knowing about any punishment that would hit me if I didn’t follow that informal rule.)

    John J. Dilulio tells a similar, but much more powerful, story. In his Italian neighborhood, a young man got a a girl pregnant. Everyone waited for the young man to do the right thing and come up with a ring. When he didn’t, the neighbors approached a local organization man.

    He called the young man in and explained the facts of life — and perhaps, death — to him. The young man showed up at the girls’s home very shortly afterward with a ring and a very sincere proposal.

    Dilulio says that the marriage was reasonably happy, and concludes the story with this moral: Sometimes it takes a man to make a man out of a boy.

  43. Oops, my comment was intended in response to Foxfier’s, but Mrs. Whatsit pipped me at the post, as some might say, eh Brad?

  44. Dilulio says that the marriage was reasonably happy, and concludes the story with this moral: Sometimes it takes a man to make a man out of a boy.

    Sometimes I reflect that we are but transport and (for men) delivery systems for oligonucleotides.

  46. OB-
    I’ve never had luck with that, possibly because I flush too easily– relentlessly pointing out that they’re changing the subject seems to work fairly well.
    The usual response is to take offense, and when that fails, to throw a hissy fit and do the petulant “you won, you won” thing– really pisses them of when you point out that it’s not a matter of winning, it’s (original question/topic restated again).

    Exhausting, but effective.

  47. The Great Society was modeled after the sacrificial goldfish every 8 year old kills by feeding it too much.

  48. SteveH,

    I’m drinking a glass of wine as I read comments just before I go to bed and your sacrificial goldfish comment made me choke on a sip of Shiraz. Thanks a lot. 😉

  49. Foxfier, I derive perverse entertainment (hard to believe, I know) from the psychological ju-jitsu of agreeing with those hurling epithets meant to stymie debate. In some frames of mind I’ll helpfully suggest follow-on or more apposite insults for those with circumscribed vocabularies.

    Occasionally, if time permits, I’ll titrate them, gradually imputing to myself progressively more and more reprehensible qualities to see how far I can go before they realize I’m making fun of them (adipose tissue as an energy source? hmmm) by parodying their argumentation style.

    The key is not to become personally invested, to maintain that critical distance. It’s tough to do, but well worthwhile if you can do it. Sometimes I can, sometimes not.

  50. OB: the tactic Cyrano de Bergerac famously used in the Insult Scene. 😉

    Theodore Dalrymple has noticed the same phenom among whites on the dole in London. No religion, no morals, no marriage; just endless dependence on the Government, and a total lack of strong fathers or even father figures.

    Whatever happened to character-building? I suggest that shame, it now seems, was a necessary element after all: and NOT just for young girls.

  52. Parker and Jim Miller have pointed to the only approach that can be taken to this problem: it must be bottom up and it must be tied to the most basic emotional bonds. Lectures from the president about staying in school won’t do it. Even Cosby-type criticsms of gang and ghetto culture won’t do it. Everyone knows what is wrong but gives too little attention to the tiny efforts that are right. We have degraded family rituals like dinner at 6 by pushing for flexibility and extracurricular school activities and sports. We have eliminated rites of passage: Where are the assumptions that you have to be in high school before you can do such and such?

    I think the best chances for change will come from small community churches or groups or perhaps charter schools that can help families reestablish rituals and can stimulate discussions among parishioners and parents about parenting and perhaps also about loneliness. Women can’t depend only on their children for love; they are themselves too needy and too fearful of rejection to supply the discipline kids need. How can a woman who has never had a real relationship with a man understand the needs of her son? How does the young father feel about the role he is assigned by his child’s mother? If it assumed from the start that he will disappear, where is the motivation to stay?

    Our whole society has been focussing for so long on sexual repression and academic credentials and victimology that we have neglected people. Out of fear of feeding racism, blacks have been told not to talk about their own failings. But is there a better way to understand ourselves and other than to realize we all share fears and loneliness and character flaws. We have been dishing out BS to the young for so long, and yet, as Parker described, kids do respond to honesty and humilty and caring. The problem is that we can’t be honest with kids if we aren’t honest with ourselves.

  53. A curious thing is found by checking out some good older songs on youtube and you’ll discover lots of teenager’s comments admiring and even longing for the days that celebrated simplicity and goodness of people. It is really at a level quite extraordinary if you pay attention.

    I’m not sure we’d get such insight without the anonimity of the internet. These kids are stigmatised (see rebutal comments) for merely admiring something so old fashioned as wholesomeness, goodness and love. But there is definitely a crack appearing in the matrix that has been shoved down their throats.

    I believe the best music and culture in general comes out of the folk. The crap today is coming at the folk like never before from elitist with an agenda. And on some level these kids are starting to know it.

  54. There are non-intrusive (relatively) and low-cost procedures of temporary sterilisation for women, now used in Africa. They are not more complex than immunization. I think these should be mandatory for groups of risk of teen-age pregnancy, namely 13-year age black girls from fatherless families.

  55. I was raised by my mom in the 50s. I can tell you personally that it was extremely rare and I was constantly asked why I had a different last name. (My folks were divorced before I was born). I am now watching my stepson deal with becoming a father while in high school. He’s having to struggle to stay in his son’s life. The girlfriend can take the boy anywhere she chooses. He’ll have to pay her support but that doesn’t guarantee him any visitation rights. And the grandfather has even less rights.

    The mom works part time as a waitress. She’s now living with another guy and talks about how much she’d like another child. Some way, we need to make these young women aware of the economic realities of trying to raise a child on your own. I know my mom did not have it easy.

  56. I have recently been pondering how we went so wrong. I’m a software architect and make a decent living, but was raised by frugal parents. I recently had my 2nd-ever manicure before a large family wedding. While there I observed a subculture of our small city that left me angry. The place was full of very young, single mothers. They were having “the works” false fignernails and toenails with airbrushed designs, costing over $100. They do this every week while discussing their food stamps, welfare checks and subsidized housing. No shame whatsoever, and I think that’s the key.

  58. Sergey –
    they did forced sterilization already. It didn’t work. It’s not the babies that are the issue, it’s the sub-culture. (Notice how these girls WANT the babies, just to get some human affection in their lives?)

    We’d have more luck with a mandatory affectionate-dog-and-cat assignment. >.

  59. Sergey –
    they did forced sterilization already. It didn’t work. There’s a good chance that it’s a big part of why we have the problem.

    Is it really a good idea to train at-risk boys that they can screw and screw without any “risk” of becoming a father, thinking that this will make them grow up as responsible guys who get married before getting the girl pregnant?

    It’s not the babies that are the issue, it’s the sub-culture. (Notice how these girls WANT the babies, just to get some human affection in their lives?)

    We’d have more luck with a mandatory affectionate-dog-and-cat assignment. >.

  60. Lectures from the president about staying in school won’t do it.

    This is arguably Obama’s biggest single failing. He blew his chance to truly be a historic President, and a great one. And it was easy to do.

    All he needed to do is have a Sister Souljah moment. Not vapid exhortations about staying in school, but some straight from the shoulder talk. Acknowledge what success blacks have made, and then round on the ghetto subculture. Tell them that they’re letting their people down by acting that way, that they’re an embarrassment to blacks generally and to him in particular, and he’s ashamed to share an ethnic allegiance with them. Tell them he wants to see them drop the basketball and pick up the calculus book. Tell them to turn off the rap music, quit the gangs, knock off the drugs, and show everyone just what they can do. Do it for him. Do it for themselves. Do it for their people.

    I think that that would have done it. If he’d done this, and especially if it worked, then in my book he would be a great President.

  61. OB. i’m not convinced Obama has much of a problem with ghetto culture and general under performance by blacks. If the problem got fixed, there’d be nothing to point to for the argument of the man holding them back. Otherwise what would hold him back from such a speech as you suggested?

  62. Mrs Whatsit:

    As for representation via lawyer: men can be court ordered to pay for lawyers for their wives , they can’t be court-ordered to get a lawyer to represent themselves. And certainly some men after having paid for HER lawyer lack the funds to pay for one for themselves. And that’s just one of the flaws of your argument.

    Another flaw is you assume the inevitability of divorce, esp when there is children involved. I’d reform laws to make it harder when children were involved, indeed, I predict far fewer divorces in the coming decade as the economy continues to crash and burn. In any case, beyond mouthing some pieties in all the threads on this subject you’ve participated in since I’ve been here, I haven’t seen you advocate for a single change or policy.

    As for the best interests standard I don’t think any of that stuff is constitutional in the first place, nor should the default be anything but legal joint custody. In short, under my system it would be hard to get sole custody unless the other parent agreed that this was for the best or abuse or some other failing could be shown in a court of law -not a court of “equity”.

    And that’s really all I have to say on this subject. Talking to you is like talking to a wall.

  63. Tesh,
    the core of the problem is not my long writing, its the fact that the people generally are completely ignorant of this history. so rather than make a reference to “innocents clubs”, and all would know what i mean, i am stuck either using a term, and being ignored… or explaining.

    same happens when i talk science of artificial intelligence with people who don’t know, you spend a lot more time actually explaining concepts, facts, principals, history, etc.

    there is no way around this that is acceptable.

    if i stop, then the progressives have succeeded in rewriting history, and any conclusion from this false history is false and contrived to all that know, but not to those who dont.

    if i put it in a blog, then will you go read it all? of course not. its just a polite way for someone to achieve their end by other means. which is why no one trusts anyone that says trust me, or i am looking out for you, etc. in general the person, whether knowing or not, is being manipulative and very insincere with the purpose of tricking another while not actually being seen as the impetus themselves.

    so again, to do that means that the progressives and socialists win… they rewriet history, and again, disconnected people arguing points with no real basis other than the illusion of such given to them by the story…

    so ultimately, there is no other thing to do, but be where the discussion is, and inject history when the rest seem to want to make up somethign from some more immediate state and their anecdotal position.

    thats what the author of the article is doing!!!!

    he takes the situation anedotally, deletes the hsitory, and then goes forward to posit the ’cause’ of the problem, and then a ‘cure’ which tends to match what the ones erasing history want. (funny how that works. but if your going to undo it all, you have to know what it is, or else you cant take the hegelian opposite).

    they will not bring up the sex cult communes of the 1800s that started the progressives, or how they married their ideas with marx as a tool to end oppression and make society one big sex addicts dream (including a victim population for all those really forbidden thins).

    did he mention it? nope…

    but how can you talk of current conditions and fix them if you have no idea how things got this way, and you happen to be on the side that made it that way, but dont want to blame them? beleive they are responsible, etc.

    so all they do is pretend that everything is spontaneous, even if its not (astro turf)

    did he bring up Dewey and his desire to rework schools to the progressive ieal and copied the soviets? (he was a spy)

    did he bring up lukaks? how about the romantic era reformers? the eugenicists who wanted to dumb the population down so that they felt they were not able to keep up and so abort their children?

    how about dodd? how about the inventor of kinder garten (childs garden in german)… or who wanted cradle to grave educatino for his youth… why lgbt is big? why there are 400% more abortion clinics in black neighborhoods? that welfare rules required that the mother eject th father in favor of state matriarchy?

    how they took monogamy and made it mathematically equivalent to a harem… (except in this harem the women are not taken care of, just used)

    its funny that in a post that ultimately has to do with the failure of education as we thoguht it was, and the success of education as theprogressives and socialists designed it…

    and we fight for ignorance, as reading long things is too involved.

    did you note that in the article, these changed people couldnt read long things?

    did you note in my post the historical fact that prior to this modern education, they had reading levels that were much much higher (13th grade vs 4th)…

    i was raised the old way, where james fenimore coopers books of leatherstocking were childrens books for boys (written at 13th grade level)…

    so to me, i am writing and discussing at that level.

    the rest think thats high falluting, but its just a childs level from early last century.

    if i write the difficult stuff most wouldnt understand me at all… (and would attack me even more being angrier, as my experience has taught me).

    people would ahve to use a dictionary. so i tend not to use those terms, and refernces, and literary historical commonalities, and all that.

    the public in general is no longer up to it.

    you can get angry at me about it. or you can realize if they were, i would be a dot in a sea of dots…

  64. No lawyer is going to tell a man who stands a real chance of gaining custody not to fight for it,

    bull…

    period…

    mine abandoned the child. faked her own murder. used the welfare system. faked injuries. and tons of stuff that would curl your toes in the grave. hearsay admissible as witness testimony.

    i was told i have no rights…
    [my lawyer was a supreme court justice]

    and am lucky that she appeared from no where at the point they were going to indict me for her murder. they had already destroyed my career and future, questioned me to exhaustion, contrived and faked the lie detector results, had false witnesses, and more…

    and i was the one that took care of the child, brought him to the doctor, made plans, etc…

    but i have no rights…
    i was told that by a judge…

    if what you said had an iota of truth, NONE of what happened would have happned to me.

  65. OB. i’m not convinced Obama has much of a problem with ghetto culture and general under performance by blacks. If the problem got fixed, there’d be nothing to point to for the argument of the man holding them back. Otherwise what would hold him back from such a speech as you suggested?

    Nothing whatever, SteveH. And therein lies the shocking immorality. He’s placing his personal aggrandizement ahead of the improvement of the very people he purports to champion. (That’s a well-trodden path, mind you. More than a path, it’s an eight-lane freeway, the Jesse Jackson-Al Sharpton Expressway.) At this juncture, the only thing holding blacks back is…themselves.

    My suspicion: the blacks in question are afraid that they might not make it on a level playing field, working without a net (to mix my metaphors – sorry), and consequently eschew the attempt. It’s much cozier to wallow in self-pity and to blame the other than to try, and thereby to risk failure.

  66. Number one, even when one spouse has to pay the fees for the other spouse’s lawyer, that doesn’t mean the paying spouse gets either two lawyers or none! The lawyer for the wife represents the wife, the lawyer for the husband represents the husband, and whichever spouse pays the bills pays both of them.

    wow…

    well there was no money for me to have my lawyer, which is why i had a pro bono help out when he heard i was nearly railroaded into prison for a murder in which the victim was not dead.

    there was tons of money for her, none for me. she had shelters and aid, i had none.

    you may be a lawyer, but you certainly dont knw wahts been happening for 30 years and more.

    Kids don’t benefit in any way from the kind of gender wars you’d like to provoke and prolong, and neither do their lawyers.

    ah… so now that the courts are so slanted to women.. you cant use disparate impact of men to show the discrimination… 90% awarded to the woman… care to spout how many men are getting child support? how many are getting alimony? shall i quote female millionaires upset that their man is getting a pittance compared to the other way around.

    so now that the dominant way we have our secret court, which you cant talk about, who your not allowed to see all your accusers, where hearsay is evidence for one side, and on and on…

    sorry.
    your WRONG…

    your as clueless as the politicians…

    there was a time when kids had it very good

    that was before lawyers and poltiicans and others that are just like you. and now that their lives and such are full of such misery, to claim that a person who wants it better for them wants to extend the pain… well thats just ingenuous bs..

    You might want to remember that no matter how mathematically equal the legal representation of men and women may or may not be, it isn’t divorce lawyers who award custody – far and away most often, it is decided by the spouses themselves.

    really? so a lawyer who is a feminist would not do anything for the cause? she would forget a point, not fight a hard, etc… and how would a man prove it.

    right now i have a labor dispute, but since i am a male, there is no way to hire a lawyer. flat out they want harassment under the new measure of the unreasonable rather than reasonable person.

    so no longer being allowed to have any friends, or lunch with anyone, or even personal relationships out of work, are forbidden or i will be fired. basically employment blackmail forbidding all personal interaction with people unless my boss gets to review all conversations to insure that they have nothing to do with some work i want to do that they arent paying for.

    cant do anything but be streesed, tell my friends i cant talk to them any more, be completely isolated at work, and know i cant do a thing bout it since they are very left and promoted someone with no experience over me with experience, and then spend time lying on reviews.

    i have already been told that men have no rights by a judge… (a female family court judge who explained that she got into law to give women a boost!)

    he person who decides is a judge, not a lawyer (surprise!)

    so i can become a judge and never been a lawyer?

    or did all judges start as lawyers?

    and what abolut advocate judges?
    you know, the ones that make law from the bench?

    what about the organization of female judges whose purpose is to get women out of prison after convictions of spousal murder, etc?

    last week an african woman assaulted me on the train.. everyone watched… she hurt my leg and had a fun time hittng and baiting me…

    i had to take all the assault, abuse, and all that, and be injured..

    why?

    because we arent even allowed to defend ourselves any more..

    which is what oppressor oppressed dialectics is all about.

    the designated oppressor has to take it and is forbidden defense!

    and the designated oppressed has a right to class hatred against the ones they designate as oppressors.

    “I feel that ‘man-hating’ is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.” — Robin Morgan

    Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated.
    Catharine MacKinnon Constitutional LAWYER

    “Differences [between men and women], including the products of social inequality, make unequal treatment not unequal at all.” — Catharine MacKinnon, “Reflection on Sex Equality Under Law,” Yale Law Journal, 1991

    ah, so here is a lawyer, calling for unequal treatment, a constitutional violation…and she is a constitutional lawyer, like obama.

    “All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman.” — Catharine MacKinnon

    she sounds like she would represent a man honestly, no?

    “You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs.” — Catharine MacKinnon (Prominent legal feminist scholar; University of Michigan, & Yale.)

    complete neutrality… eh

    “Feminism is built on believing women’s accounts of sexual use and abuse by men.” — Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified, 1987

    not that they are valid. care to see how many cases where the law is prosecuting people for rape that never committed it? care to see the LAWYERS statements that men should have no right to defense? that women never lie?

    please…

    your int he same bubble as the politicans
    take some time… dig…

    what your saying and such is NOT valid but is the MSM take on things… parroting.. it dont fit the facts.

    and just so you relaize…

    almost a majority of women under 20 have an STD and a large number of them will be infertile or have cancer because of it.

    so how letting all this continue, is going to help the girls is beyond me.. maybe you can explain it, now that they are basically sex toys and disease vectors under progressivism

  69. I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life. Sotomayer as a lawyer…

    “Differences [between men and women], including the products of social inequality, make unequal treatment not unequal at all.” — Catharine MacKinnon, “Reflection on Sex Equality Under Law,” Yale Law Journal, 1991

    hey! are we allowed to have a mens law forum?
    how about mens health like women?
    how come chearleaders are conveniently not considered a sport under title IX?

    why are there no affurmative action programs to reduce thenumber of women teachers and move the numbers to 50/50?

    why are there now more new programs nwo that women are getting 60% of degrees?

    after all, i couldnt go to college, despite bronx science and all that… i had a penis, and our feminist politicans decided that we can do ok without people like me to screw up the numbers on their reports.

    Christina Hoff Sommers Takes Down Feminist Law Prof. Lemon
    http://www.wemen.us/index.php/articles/views/612-christina-hoff-sommers-takes-down-feminist-law-prof-lemon.html

    now remember, lemon is teaching lots of people to become LAWYERS and judges, and of course her lying as to the facts would then color those lawyers and how they treat their clients.

    and note that it takes a famous feminist to fight the fight as a common nothing man who points this out is taken to pc task for it.

    however, note that this is a professor and this is the law that they are teaching.

    With that in mind, it seems there’s an ongoing dispute between Christina Hoff Sommers and feminist law professor Nancy K.D. Lemon over some patently false claims Lemon’s latest text on domestic violence makes.

    Sommers has pointed out Lemon’s errors before, and now, in this article, Lemon attempts to defend herself (Chronicle of Higher Education, 8/10/09).

    Several of Lemon’s statements are at issue.

    One has to do with the “rule of thumb,” which feminists in the DV industry have long informed us originated with an ancient legal tradition which allowed husbands to beat their wives as long as the rod used was no thicker than his thumb.

    so if you learned lawyer for family law from this wacko, would you be prepared for law in this world, or in some made up world where the law and history was different?

    Lemon claimed in her book that this originated during the reign of first king of Rome, who she claims was Romulus I and who reigned from 753 B.C. to 717 B.C.

    The only problem with that claim is that, (a) Romulus is probably fictional, and (b) essentially all historical records of Rome prior to 390 B.C. were destroyed by the Gauls rendering our knowledge of the origins of Rome “hazardously hypothetical” according to historians more reputable than Lemon.

    like the feminists claiming women could not go to college. i heard one tell me that before feminism a woman couldnt get a harvard degree… i said yes, thats true… she went HA! see… men oppressed women… then i pointed out that the womans harvard was called radcliffe…

    if this trope was true..
    then how did my grandmother beome a research chemist?
    how did emmy noether come up with the roots of supersymetry?
    how come the majority of early progressives were college educated?

    “For one of the implicit, if unadmitted, tenets of feminism has been a fundamental disrespect for men.” — Wendy Dennis

    Never mind, though. Lemon tells us that “Livy and Plutarch” both said that Romulus existed and so, well, it must be true.

    Unfortunately for her, Livy and Plutarch suffered from the same lack of historical material on the origin of Rome and its first kings that present-day historians do. Writing some 700 years after the fact, they were essentially recycling (albeit elegantly) folktales about the early days of Rome.

    Lemon seems to think that the discipline of ancient history was the same as that of modern history. She seems not to grasp the fact that Livy and Plutarch were engaged in an enterprise entirely different from what we understand as history today.

    What ancient historians did was closer to mythmaking than to empiricism. As historians Will and Ariel Durant describe it, “Roman historians looked upon history as a hybrid child of rhetoric and philosophy: if we may believe them, they wrote to illustrate ethical precepts with eloquent narrative – to adorn a moral with a tale.”

    This is lost entirely on Lemon.

    To her, if Livy and Plutarch said it, it must be true, however unlikely it is. Of course Livy also said that Romulus was conceived from the sexual intercourse of the god Mars and the vestal virgin, Rhea Silva. Maybe Lemon believes that too. Why wouldn’t she? After all, Livy said it.

    From citing mythology as historical fact, Lemon plunges on to claim that the “rule of thumb” was a fact of British common law.

    Again, unfortunately for her, British common law contains no such thing, as Sommers points out.

    In neither the authoritative compendia of William Blackstone nor in any other source does it appear.

    A few American cases mention it, but never as authoritative and never do they cite a source. It’s clear that some people may have believed that the ‘rule of thumb’ at one time existed, but there’s no evidence that they were right. Lemon is no more so.

    or of the claim that the law didnt protect women as special… and allowed rape and all that.

    go and read hamurabi’s code…
    from the first written law on, making the assertion a lie

    No feminist text about domestic violence would be complete without some outright falsehoods about the incidence of DV itself, and Lemon’s is no exception. She claims, for example, that “Between 20 and 35 percent of women seeking medical care in emergency rooms in America are there because of domestic violence.”

    That, of course, is completely false. In fact, the closest thing she can get as a source for that claim is the Centers for Disease Control figure that 35% of women in emergency rooms because of injuries caused by violence were victims of DV. To Lemon, it’s all the same, but in fact if her claim were true, between 8,000,000 and 14,000,000 women would be treated for DV-related injuries each year. In fact, the number is about 192,000. Lemon’s figure is off by a factor of 40 – 70, but who’s counting?

    the above is about a doubly wrong stat!

    turns out that the feminists record all injuries where the injured doesnt describe things as domestic violence, inflating the numbers, and of course influencing the court.

    a court who would rather err on the side of prudence

    but if prudence is defined by lies, then what?

    I won’t go on. Sommers is far better than I am at tearing the hide off Lemon’s claims that are already bare of facts and reliability. Read the whole exchange; it’s a nice primer on the intellectual dishonesty with which feminist discourse is rife.

    kinsey who is a crank is the most quoted researcher in law.

    the bigger point is that its gotten so bad, that men dont want to marry!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    they also dont waqnt to earn or want a family because its a completely raw deal now!!!!!

    paul mcartney married again how long and lost how much?

    i lost my career, savings, child, future…

    and people like you assume that i lost all that because of me… no, i lost it because of the prejudgements and such of people like you who say such things.

    how can a lawyer, who is supposed to accept the idea of innocence before guilt, say that these people did this to themselves when the system does not allow them the leeway to act freely!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    a woman who marries has a choice of working or not working… the harm she may do to her family is irrelevent… so, if he has no such choice, how is it his fault she is the majority caretaker?

    in fact, the only way that that situation isnt fixed, is if he orders his wife to work, stays home, and then spends years building up a case against her (As many women do)

    demographics will fix it all as all that is happening is that the smartest women are committing familial genocide and feeling morally superior for doing it!!!!!!!!!

  73. Occam’s Beard: but if he’d done that he would have been Bill Cosby.

    Neo, yep, but with enormously more clout than Cosby. Think how Obama is revered in the black community. It could have worked.

  76. the vids above feature erin pizzey the woman who opened the first abuse center… she was pushed out by leftist women who tried to bomb her. the shelter she started doesn’t bear her name… she has written many books, and had to flee England

    take some time to look at her writing, she lays out the truth from the early days as she was a part of it. from the marxist bull dykes who took over her organization, to others we have forgotten like rote zora from feminisms marxist anarchist terrorist roots.

  77. Left’s Celebration of Planned Parenthood’s Ethics Blows Up in Their Face

    When I saw the left celebrating Planned Parenthood’s supposed thwarting of an O’Keefe style sting operation last Thursday I knew there would absolutely be some videos coming that showed the exact opposite was true. Well, what do you know, I was absolutely right.

    blog.eyeblast.tv/2011/02/lefts-celebration-of-planned-parenthoods-ethics-blows-up-in-their-face/

  78. I gave up trying to read artfldgr’s endless comments long ago, so I did not read much of the one in which he attacked me. However, I read enough to see that whatever experience he had with murder charges and a missing wife and I don’t know what all else is so far outside the norm that nothing I said about ordinary divorce and custody battles — or ordinary legal representation, for that matter — has any application at all. Whatever you went through sounds perfectly awful, Art, and I sympathize, and I wish you’d had better legal help — but I really wish you hadn’t come out of it QUITE so convinced that women are the root of all evil, in all situations, all of the time.

    Brad, just a couple of things. If a man, for some reason, was silly enough or misinformed enough to hire a lawyer who was such a sneaky feminist that s/he’d pretend to represent a man while actually sabotaging his case, why on earth wouldn’t he just fire her (or him) and hire somebody decent? As for whether there are evil feminist lawyers out there who are so dastardly clever that they manage to make their own clients lose while making it look like they’re trying to win and hiding their real goal, not just from the clients but from the opposing counsel, the judge, and the professional misconduct commission — well, it’s way too far down the loony tunes conspiracy path for me to try to follow with any kind of logic or reasonable argument.

    Now, about the difference between lawyers and judges. Yes, of course most judges used to be lawyers — all of them, in most places. They both need legal training, they both work with the law. However, their roles are radically different and if you truly don’t understand this, you certainly should not be lecturing others about how little they know about the courts. The lawyer is an advocate whose ethical obligation is to zealously represent the interest of his or her client. The judge is a decision-maker whose ethical obligation is to be impartial and apply the law as fairly and accurately as possible. Are there some biased judges who fail in this undertaking? Of course. Does that mean most of them fail? Of course not — no more than the fact that some men abuse their wives or rape women means that most of them or all of them are abusers or rapists, or the fact that some women cheat on their husbands, manipulate the system, or abuse their husbands, for that matter, means that they all do — art’s views notwithstanding.

    And as for arguing with me being like talking to a wall — I take pride in that attribute when the person who’s arguing with me makes as little sense as you do!

  79. Mrs Whatsit:

    Are you getting me mixed up with Art? I never said a thing about Judge being lawyers or whatever brought n your paragraph long response there.

    I also don’t understand why you are talking about incompetent lawyers, feminist lawyers, or men “firing” them when all I mentioned was that some men are forced to hire a lawyer for their wives and as a result, some don’t have the money to get representation themselves. Obviously there are poor men who can’t afford but one lawyer and if that lawyer goes to their wife via court order, they are SOL, just as obviously a wealthy man never has to worry about legal representation. I certainly never mentioned a thing about lawyers sabotaging men’s cases being a major problem, or any problem – I didn’t mention it at all.

    No wonder I make “little sense” if you attribute to me things I never typed and arguments I never made. What I’d really like to know is how you’d reform family law, and what you would do to make family formation easier, and get men re involved in kids lives. If you would?

    I think what happened is that Art’s comments are so long they caused your head to spin and you got us confused.

  80. Whatever you went through sounds perfectly awful, Art, and I sympathize, and I wish you’d had better legal help – but I really wish you hadn’t come out of it QUITE so convinced that women are the root of all evil, in all situations, all of the time.

    did i say WOMEN or the poltical ideology feminism

    does feminism = women?

    you proved my point…

    and its NOT so far out of the norm.

    after all, when a woman disappears, who do all the crime shows say is most likely to be the criminal?

    so if she does it on purpose, she knows what? that they are going to go after the male mate.

    duh.

    and for a lawyer making judgments by not reading, and not being able to read long texts, is a farce.

    the point was it was so out of the norm because i was forbidden to bring up anything that disparages the woman in court. so i couldnt bring up her shoplifting (which i didnt know about). her falsyfying records. writing bumb checks.

    how about the fact that her feminist state welfare agent employee freind planned it all!!!

    the MAIN point being that if the court was NOT messed up, NONE of that could have ever happened!!!!

    i was assumed guilty, not innocent
    i was TOLD by a family court judge i had no rights
    my lawyer was a supreme court 9th circuit judge when they held court out of legal venue.

    its convenient that you say that the outocme of the court was caused by the man…

    but he cant quit work and stay with the kids. she would divorce him and the court woudl force him to work or go to jail (how many womn go to jail for non pahyment?)

    if she was abusive, there are zero shelters he can go to, and the court will take the kids sayign he kidnapped them

    AFTER the woman did all this, she popped in and the state handed the kid over to her! why?

    turns out that you have all the nice neat answers to make reality go away.

    funny thing that if a person under an extreme situat6ion has no rights or can do anything.
    what do you think is possible for those not in extreme situations? nothing.

    by the way..

    want to know my crime in all this?

    NOTHING…

    she was never struck
    she was always supported and i paid fort the feminist courses that informed her and introduced her to antoher feminist who taught her she could work the system to slam me and take all i have. but first, they had to force me into bankruptcy, that way i would have no bills and the courts would take more than the 17% minimum!!!!

    it was all planned and the courts helped with hundreds of do gooders, and such.

    [edited for length by n-n. I’ve been a bit remiss in the last couple of days about the length thing, because I’ve been mega-busy.]

  81. thats ok..
    i havent added anything for days till today….

    Eventually, I got joint custody.
    However, a week later, she took the kid and disappeared
    She ended up in another state, made claims, and so on
    We managed to bribe her so my parents could be a part of his life

    A few years later, she decided to take my son, her two new kids by another man who was out working (trucker), and decided to rob a bank. She got caught, my son was in jail almost overnight too embarrassed to call his grandparents. I had joint custody, but had no rights and was half a continent away where he grew up originally.

    She got 2.5 years in club fed. Despite having joint custody, I couldn’t get custody. (seems the local games were trying to use her kids to justify why she should serve time). her mom died while she was in prison, my son moved out to live with his grandparents. I ended up paying child support twice. Once to the prison lady and once to my parents, and any other money I could help with. if I didn’t give the other money, she was going to go to court and destabilize the kids life again for personal gain.

    Just to put icing on it, the 8A program at SBA said that they only help women and minorities., they give extra money, guarantee the loans, free office equipment, payroll tax reductions, discounts on energy, mentorships, free courses, etc.. so no bank would help since I was a white male, the only group who was an oppressor group and not allowed help!!! D

    on’t worry, they got me in school too, they stopped scholarships for the men so that more women could get degrees.

    And now they are ruining my sons life (but he doesn’t know it yet). The NIH is offering extra money to researchers if they drop a white man, and get a woman or minority on their team to do research. So basically, they don’t hire him, they get a 90k bonus for research.

    ALL of this is feminists in cahoots with progressives and statists

    While the common women refuse to believe it, refuse to be compassionate to their mates, and on and on. That is, the ONLY choice the men have is to consider these women unworthy of the pledge of marriage.

    See “marriage strike”

    there are LOTS of wonderful women out there. but your chances of finding one are slim to none in liberated land…

    making women unmarryable is a great way to get everyone to mix up, and end the western society (a stated goal).

    after all, if the men mix, and the women are barren, the demographic end is unavoidable.

    we are almost to that point now (Russia is, and we copied them 40 years after they did it!)

    ultimately the one child smart women will be overtaken by the 5 kids no college women… [and the elite like pelosi who has 5 kids…]

    the smart women lines will be poisoned genetically by their penchant for late birth (high rates of genetic problems and downs syndrome)…

  82. I’ve been wondering why artfldgr isn’t banned. After that last post, I’m beginning to understand.

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