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Impossible Thing 13

Impossible Thing To Believe Before Breakfast #13:
A mans opinions on how to rear and/or raise a child are invalid because he is not the childs mother. However, his financial obligation is greater because no woman gets pregnant by herself. 

DAVE SIM:
Its hard to explain these things concisely because so many things are upside down in our society.

The problem is divorce has gone from a religious thing to a societal thing, so The State is now in control.  Where The State intervenes in human affairs, it needs (presumably) to do so on the basis of Equality.  Everyone has to be Equal before The Law.  Which is not what were doing.  A baseball players ex-wife is worth $3 million dollars, the clerks ex-wife is worth $40K (or whatever).

What we are doing is incentivizing whoredom and whore-mongering: gold-digging by women and women-as-chattal by men.  If, instead, we had a fixed settlement rate for EVERYONE based on jurisdiction (as a 24/7 wife and mother this is what it costs to keep you alive in this jurisdiction, so this is what you get in the event of divorce)  wed be removing those corruptions as a core reality in our society and getting back to something sensible: marrying for love, security, compatability.

If you only got the same "going-away presents" whether you were a baseball players ex-wife or a clerks wife, there would be no reason to have "going-away presents" as even an unconscious motivation in marrying and women would, I think, make better choices.  It would also mean marriages would endure longer because being a GOOD wife would be more -- literally! -- rewarding than being an EX-wife.

Likewise if you only got "going-away presents" if you were a 24/7 wife and mother.  Our concern as a society is -- or should be -- "providing for the provider" with 24/7 wives and mothers as the top priority.  As distinct from "nanny enablers", part-time mother-hobbyists, the wives of househusbands, and "opposite sex roommates".  Equal Before The Law suggests that everyone is expected to fend for him and/or her self.  The State intervening in that should ALWAYS be exceptional and should ALWAYS be "blind justice".  Anything else is institutionalized Inequality.

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Impossible Thing 11

DAVE SIM:
Hi Erick!  The 2+2=4 on this one, for me, is that if we lived in a society with actual Gender Equality, no one would pay alimony to anyone.  In the same sense that if you have a roommate and they decide to move out, you dont go to court to figure out who should pay what to whom.  You go your way, I go my way, goodbye. Period.

You cant make the genders equal in these areas.  Men pay alimony to women disproportionately because most women are less well equipped to provide for themselves than are men.  The easiest way to disprove that thesis is by eliminating alimony.  If the Genders were Equal, alimony would be an insult. "How dare you imply that I cant provide for myself!" The genders arent equal which is why alimony exists and involves such astronomical sums of money going from "male" to "female".

Child support is a different thing: each jurisdiction needs, I think, to have a legal fixed cost established of what is needed to rear a child and that needs to be paid.  But, it needs to be a FIXED cost, otherwise youre enabling a class system that establishes that Child A gets $30,000 a month and Child B gets $4,000 a month.  "This is how much it costs to rear a child". Thats how much gets paid.

The exception, to me, would be alimony paid to wives and mothers.  If she was your wife and the mother of your children and that was WHO she was and WHAT she did, 24/7, then, yes, alimony needs to be paid and in a sufficient amount to maintain the life that she had, even if it impoverishes the divorcing husband and father.  Whatever flexibility you attached to that would, I think, have to be considerably (considerably!) less flexible based on the wife and mothers age.  The older she is, the less likely she is going to be able to provide for herself and the less likely she is to remarry.  So, yes, in that case alimony should, in my opinion, be "for life".

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Impossible Thing 12

Impossible Thing To Believe Before Breakfast #12:
An airline stewardess who earned $20,000 a year at the time that she married a baseball player earning $6 million a year is entitled, in the event of a divorce, to $3 million for each year of the marriage and probably more. 

DAVE SIM:
I tend to separate these situations into "wife and mother" and "feminist" categories.

In the event that the former stewardess became a 24/7 wife to the ballplayer and mother to his children, then I think she needs to be provided for in the event of a divorce in a manner comparable to child support as I envision it: that is, child support should be a fixed amount of money that it costs to rear a child in a specific geographic jurisdiction and alimony for 24/7 wives and mothers should be a fixed amount in a specific geographic jurisdiction (i.e. more in New York City than in Smalltown, Iowa). Otherwise you put The State in the untenable situation of establishing the $ value of children.  The baseball players children are worth $30,000 a month and the garbagemans children are worth $1,000 a month.  We DO that, as a society, but I think its wrong.

If the stewardess kept working -- that is, she was a feminist -- then I think the roommate rule makes sense.  She can enjoy being in a more affluent context as long as it lasts and then go back to the life she had when it comes to an end. You dont pay alimony to a roommate when they move out.

I also think you need to have a "nanny rule":  if you hired people to take care of your children then you werent a 24/7 wife and mother. You were a roommate.

To reiterate the underpinnings of all this:  I think women, generally, by nature and inclination are predisposed to be wives and mothers and I think society benefits from "the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world"and should encourage that by creating a safety net for them not enjoyed by non-wives and non-mothers and "nanny enablers".  The further we get from that, the worse society gets, I think. And were hurtling away from that in the opposite direction.    

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Impossible Thing 14

Impossible Thing To Believe Before Breakfast #14:
"Disagreeing with any of these statements makes you anti-woman and/or a misogynist."

DAVE SIM:
What Im alluding to here is the Feminist Theocracys impulse towards "the one right way to think."  The Impossible Things are far too intricate for that:  there are just too many ways of thinking about the various subjects to rule anything "out of order" (I think) -- let alone ruling EVERYTHING out of order that doesnt conform to Feminist Theocracy thinking.

And, yes, in our society, thinking that way makes me a misogynist.  Which is why I dont go out in public.

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Impossible Thing 15

Hi Erick!  Legislative seat quotas are, by definition, totalitarian and anti-democratic since they involve "predetermination of outcome".  A democracy determines by the election process who will represent what jurisdiction for a fixed period of time.  Period.  I pretty much covered that in CEREBUS with the assessment of Astoria:  "A thirst for governing but no stomach for election."

To cite what I consider the most notorious example of Feminist Theocracy quotas -- the attempt to "force-feed" Afghanis a constitution mandating that 25% of their legislature seats needed to be allocated to women -- I consider that a political obscenity and a sadly missed opportunity to bring democracy to a Muslim country.

ANY quota imposed in a democracy is sown with the seeds of its own destruction which, I think, is what happened/is happening in Afghanistan.  ANY quota raises the question of "Why YOUR quotas? Why not OUR quotas?"

In a nation composed of a (relatively) straightforward mix of Sunni Islam and tribalism more sensible quotas than gender quotas -- to THEM because its THEIR country -- would be Tribal Chieftains (based on influence and prominence), age (the longest-lived being the most reliable), Sunni Islamic scholarly credentials (endorsement by Saudi clerics), etc.

Which is why quotas can never be a foundational element in a democracy.  Whatever youre purporting to do, what youre actually doing is "stacking the deck" or "attempting to stack the deck".  All that leads to is contradictory deck-stacking (i.e. what if we allocate x number of seats to the Taliban to neutralize them?).  Whatever that is (and it can be called many things, none of them flattering) it isnt democracy.

And now, CHARLES BROWNSTEIN (doesnt he look as if he was BORN to the red carpet at Comicon?):    

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