HereAndGone2
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User ID: 4074
About to read, when I get the chance, "Lying in Early Modern English Culture: From the Oath of Supremacy to the Oath of Allegiance" by Andrew Hadfield thanks to a link from another book I just finished, "Thomas More: A Life and Death in Tudor England" by Joanne Paul.
Lest this give the impression that I'm very scholarly in my reading, the book I finished reading last night was an anthology of horror stories dating from the 1920s to 2000 from British Library collections, "The Wayfarer’s Weird: Wild Tales of Uncanny Rambles". Christmas and ghost stories go hand-in-hand!
EDIT: Part of the fun of the More book, for a certain definition of "fun", is reading about his trial for refusing to swear the oath about the Act of Succession (passed to make any children by Anne Boleyn the legitimate heirs to the throne and bypass his daughter by Katherine of Aragon), which involved the vexed question of the king's marriage and Act of Supremacy. More was condemned to death as a traitor for refusing to swear.
A year later, that same queen and marriage and child was all up in the air as Anne Boleyn was tried and executed, her marriage annulled, her child declared a bastard, by the king who had caused More's death.
HereAndGone2
3d ago
Dude, while you may be somewhat tongue-in-cheek with your response, things can go south fast where relationships are concerned.
From a job years back working in social housing, did we get to hear some stories about the clients!
For example, here's Ms A and Ms B (not gay married yet, as gay marriage wasn't legal in my country just then). Ms A had been married to a guy, then came out as lesbian down the track and split up. Took up with Ms B and they lived happily as a happy gay couple.
Mr and Mrs C moved in next door and they became friends and all was hunky-dory for a while. Until Mr C ran off with Ms B to Australia, leaving behind Ms A and Mrs C, the aggrieved spouses who had not seen this coming.
Just imagine the mess if a kid had been involved.
Do not encourage this guy to start spreading his seed around because the women of the world deserve to have his babies. It will blow up in his face.
HereAndGone2
4d ago
Yeah, I don't have a ton of leftovers this year, but enough to do all the week and between all the sweets, crisps, cakes, etc. we got from work and gifts, no need to buy any goodies for a month!
HereAndGone2
4d ago
surely there's a rank order you can produce.
Surely you'll walk into my parlour, said the spider to the fly.
HereAndGone2
4d ago
Pretty much any version of the Tantum Ergo, so long as it doesn't get too baroque. The O Antiphons of Arvo Part, even though we're into Christmastide now and well out of Advent. Of course the Miserere by Allegri (even if revisions over 'is this the original original version or not?')
Video game music - from Path of Exile, Church Dungeon. Got killed a few times here because so distracted by listening to the music 😁 Reworked version of this.
HereAndGone2
4d ago
"The hot lesbian couple who my wife knows asked the most amazing thing... clearly it's true that the right man can turn 'em straight!"
HereAndGone2
4d ago
Does OP or his family have any pet rabbits?
Oh you sweet summer child. Okay, this is from the UK, but "good lawyers were involved"? 🤣 Yeah, and if mom decides she wants/needs you to contribute, good lawyers will also be involved there, too.
The Child Support Agency (CSA) has demanded child support payments from a man who donated his sperm to a lesbian couple to conceive two children. The couple have since split up and the biological mother, Terri Arnold, claims she is unable to work because her second child suffers from a disability that requires regular hospital visits.
Andy Bathie, 37, from North London, claims he was assured by the couple that he would have no personal or financial involvement in the children's lives. The firefighter is now having his pay docked by the CSA despite the fact that he has no legal rights over the children. Rejecting claims that Mr Bathie is being unfairly treated, Ms Arnold told GMTV on Tuesday that although the couple did initially make such an assurance, he had changed his mind and had seen her daughter one weekend every month for two years.
Mr Bathie agreed to donate his sperm to the couple as a friend rather than go through a fertility clinic after they approached him five years ago following their marriage in a civil ceremony. However, only men who donate sperm through a licensed fertility clinic are not the legal father of any child born. A spokeswoman for the CSA said: "Unless a child is legally adopted, both biological parents are financially responsible for their child - the Child Support Agency legislation is not gender or partnership based.
Only anonymous sperm donors at licensed centres are exempt from being treated as the legal father. This does not apply to men who donate sperm as part of a personal arrangement."
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, currently before the House of Lords, proposes to recognise same-sex couples who marry in civil partnerships as equal parents of children conceived through sperm donation.
This is from Sweden:
A court in Sweden has ruled that a man who donated sperm for artificial insemination, enabling a lesbian couple to have three children, must pay child support after the two women separated.
The regional daily Nerikes Allehanda newspaper reported on its website that a county court ruled that the man was undoubtedly the children's biological father and hence obliged to pay child support of nearly €300 per month after the women's 10-year relationship broke up.
The verdict poses a legal dilemma, however, because under Swedish law a sperm donor is not regarded as the legal parent of children conceived with the help of his semen.
Sperm donors are normally strictly anonymous, but in this case the man was a friend of the couple, and his identity as the father is in no doubt. The man has appealed.
And there are American cases as well:
One case out of Pennsylvania concerned a man who donated sperm to a friend. Carl Frampton was close to the woman he donated his sperm to, and, he didn't just donate sperm. He provided limited financial support and developed an interest in the children, reports the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The court eventually ordered child support.
Similarly, in New Mexico, a man was ordered to pay $250 a month in child support. Kevin Zoernig donated his sperm to a lesbian couple. The insemination was conducted informally, and Zoernig acted as the donor.
Zoernig, however, also did not just act as the donor. The children stay with him every other weekend during the school year and half of the time during summers, according to Fox News.
These cases seem to show that courts can order sperm donors to pay child support. On the other hand, it also appears like courts are only doing so when the donor has a higher-level relationship with the family or the children.
So if you have anything to do with the kid, and it would be hard not to given that everyone would be 'good friends' and living nearby, then you are likely to be on the hook for financial contributions.
I'm laughing about the lawyers bit because I remember, years and years back, reading reports of a court case. Lesbian couple went to court with heart-rending story about wanting non-biological mom on the birth certificate. She is my partner and as much a parent to this child as I am, sobbed biological mom, and their lawyers wrung every drop of pathos out of it that they could.
Okay, judge rules that law can be changed and non-bio parents put on birth certificate.
Fast-forward a few years. Couple have split up. Now biological mom goes to court to get ex-partner off the birth certificate because (I'm paraphrasing here) no way that bitch is having anything to do with my kid, she's nothing to us.
Law in these instances means whatever they want it to mean. Don't bet your life on "but we had a contract!"
HereAndGone2
4d ago
where some of that warmth in feeling will translate to the kid
That is the big problem here, though. "Sure I'll knock you up, but that's it, kid is a stranger to me thereafter" is one possibility. "Kid is not a stranger, wife and existing kids resent the hell out of this situation" is another. "Wants to be involved in kid's life, moms don't want that" a third. "Wants to be involved in kid's life, mom of kid okay with that, wife of mom emphatically not okay because oh, so this is why you were so eager to have him knock you up, huh? guess it's true what they say about bisexuals!"
And that's before we get into "and we all live in the same neighbourhood and people are gonna notice kid looks like me and tongues are gonna wag" down the line.
HereAndGone2
4d ago
You can't really sign away parental rights/responsibilities; courts routinely compare a child's interests against contractual statements and throw the paper away. That's unlikely to come up, given the background you've mentioned here, but it's potentially very expensive -- and worse, may be something you'll constantly be weighing when considering things like offering to babysit the kid even if you ultimately decide to help out.
Oh yeah. Eighteen years down the line, Baby is now old enough for college, "well seeing as how you're the dad and we're all such close friends, of course you'll help out, right?" and that's just if nothing else crops up (such as medical expenses) in the interval.
HereAndGone2
4d ago
I mean, yeah, it's adultery but given OP didn't even mention that, I don't think this is the sort of Christian he is. So appeals to traditional morality don't seem relevant here.
Aside from that, this is a very, very, very bad idea and someone in another comment raised questions of inheritance. You have no idea the amount of warfare that happens over wills in families. This would be his kid and thus, depending on the laws of the particular state, entitled to a share of the estate upon OP's death. Is his name going to be on the birth certificate? If there are lawyers involved with contracts pre-conception, no way he can later duck out of "that's not my kid, I have no idea what they're talking about". If he wants bloody war among his kids, his widow, their half-sibling and half-sib's mother, then this is a great way to set it up.
Immediate reaction? HOLY CRAP NO! This is the perfect storm for blowing up your life, you and your wife's marriage, and the lesbian couple relationship. If you and your family remain friends with this couple, how are you going to introduce the kid to your kids? Or do you intend to pretend this child is not related to you? If Mom and Mom break up (and this happens) are you prepared to pay child support? Because forget any "oh but we got lawyers involved and there's a contract", that will be worth spit when she brings you to court to garnish your wages for the child you fathered in full knowledge and "the old-fashioned way" so you can't even argue it was anonymous sperm donation to unknown person(s).
There's a million ways this can go wrong and you making a joke of it to your wife is going to be marked as a red flag (so, what, you don't mind cheating on me? were you thinking of this before? were you thinking of her before?)
Let the friendship crash on the rocks if needs be, you have your marriage, wife and kids to think of.
I'm willing (and kinda want) to do this.
Hoo-boy. Hoo, hoo, hoo-boy. You just ran your head into the noose there about "well yeah I'm kinda hot for Bi Girl there, wifey, but don't worry, it'll just be meaningless hot fantasy sex with a lesbian, there won't be feelings involved". Better start looking up some expensive presents for your missus and pray to God she doesn't read anything posted here.
HereAndGone2
7d ago
And the same to you. Just finished cooking, serving up, and eating the dinner, so am now in a turkey-and-carbs stupor and noodling around online while I digest the meal and work up an appetite later on for "filling up the corners" 🎅
HereAndGone2
7d ago
It is depressing. The student really does need a rap over the knuckles for "the assignment was read the paper, you never read the paper". But giving zero for a topic that is relevant to the tutor/TA/whatever the position, is also going to look like bias. If, as claimed, other students have turned in equally crappy papers and not gotten zero grades, then it is unjustified. But I do think the student wants to be a martyr and now she has achieved her fifteen minutes of fame for "they persecuted me for being a Christian".
But to quote St. Clement of Alexandria, rashly running out to be persecuted is not true martyrdom, it is vainglory:
Now we, too, say that those who have rushed on death (for there are some, not belonging to us, but sharing the name merely, who are in haste to give themselves up, the poor wretches dying through hatred to the Creator )— these, we say, banish themselves without being martyrs, even though they are punished publicly. For they do not preserve the characteristic mark of believing martyrdom, inasmuch as they have not known the only true God, but give themselves up to a vain death, as the Gymnosophists of the Indians to useless fire.
...When, again, He says, When they persecute you in this city, flee to the other, He does not advise flight, as if persecution were an evil thing; nor does He enjoin them by flight to avoid death, as if in dread of it, but wishes us neither to be the authors nor abettors of any evil to any one, either to ourselves or the persecutor and murderer. For He, in a way, bids us take care of ourselves. But he who disobeys is rash and foolhardy. If he who kills a man of God sins against God, he also who presents himself before the judgment-seat becomes guilty of his death. And such is also the case with him who does not avoid persecution, but out of daring presents himself for capture. Such a one, as far as in him lies, becomes an accomplice in the crime of the persecutor. And if he also uses provocation, he is wholly guilty, challenging the wild beast. And similarly, if he afford any cause for conflict or punishment, or retribution or enmity, he gives occasion for persecution. Wherefore, then, we are enjoined not to cling to anything that belongs to this life; but to him that takes our cloak to give our coat, not only that we may continue destitute of inordinate affection, but that we may not by retaliating make our persecutors savage against ourselves, and stir them up to blaspheme the name.
So, deliberately provoking the university authorities is not standing up for your principles, it is causing them to offend.
HereAndGone2
7d ago
Eh, "slave morality" is just a boolight. I ignore any comment that invokes it, because they are trying too hard to edgelord.
HereAndGone2
8d ago
Have I stopped beating my wife yet, you ask? I reply that I am not married.
HereAndGone2
8d ago
"It’s no wonder that many devs instinctively recoil when a slimy MBA comes in who clearly doesn’t know much about AI or programming, and starts blathering on with “let me tell you about the future of software development!”
Tangential to the main thrust of your article, but there are entire Youtube channels about 'workplace revenge' stories (basically wish-fulfilment fantasies for frustrated mid-level white-collar workers) churned out pretty obviously by Asian content creators using AI to write the scripts (or more commonly take two existing stories and mash them together to create a third).
A ton of the stories are exactly this: "I worked in Company for 16 years as Senior Whatsit, I built the framework from the ground up, then some young nepo baby hire comes in as manager with an MBA and a slate of buzzwords and fires me because I'm a dinosaur and everything is going to happen in the cloud" 😁
HereAndGone2
9d ago
HereAndGone2
9d ago
And that's destroying his own stuff, not going out to someone else's house to destroy their stuff.
HereAndGone2
9d ago
But destroying the painting doesn't achieve anything except destroying the painting. It doesn't prove he committed the murder. It isn't a motive for him to commit the murder. It has nothing to do with the murder. It's just destruction.
HereAndGone2
9d ago
I think the idea there is that it destroys the bad guy's reputation with the public so he can't get away with it or something? But the problem is, as you point out in another comment, the second the real world applies then Burninator Lady gets the blame, not him. She's the one blew up the place, after all. She knew what she was doing. Bad Guy may be a murderer and a vain idiot, but he didn't want the Mona Lisa destroyed. She's just like the paint-throwing activists, except one step worse.
Wikipedia mentions Johnson was raised Evangelical, so he has as much notion of Catholic theology as I do of nuclear engineering. This is the sort of thing that makes me wince when I see it in movies/TV/media; if you take things like the Eucharist seriously, it's very jarring, not to say hurtful if meant to be deliberately mocking.
I suppose in the movie the idea is meant to be that the bad guy treated his wealth like his god and it was his real religion, not whatever he pretended to believe ("you cannot serve both God and Mammon"). I just wish Johnson hadn't used Eucharistic similes.
That "V for Vendetta" part looks like the Reformed explanation of the Eucharist; it only becomes the body for those who truly believe, while for unbelievers it remains only bread (I'm shaky on Protestant theology so I'm probably not getting that right). Consubstantiation not transubstantiation.
The V panel also gets it wrong: it's not "whatever it is now", it has to be bread and wine, so you can't have a Coke and cookies eucharist.
HereAndGone2
9d ago
Ooh, I'm thinking now of Charlotte Bronte's novel Villette where, among other things the deeply Protestant narrator (mirroring the deeply Protestant author) is contemptuous of the Catholic insistence on having girls chaperoned. An English girl, on the other hand, can be alone in a room with a man because they just would not indulge in any hanky-panky. Why not? They just wouldn't, that's all! These Continental girls are all flirts, because they haven't been brought up in good Gospel religion which would give them sound moral values so they wouldn't even dream of misbehaving.
It is true that Madame had her own system for managing and regulating this mass of machinery; and a very pretty system it was: the reader has seen a specimen of it, in that small affair of turning my pocket inside out, and reading my private memoranda. “Surveillance,” “espionage,”—these were her watchwords.
Still, Madame knew what honesty was, and liked it—that is, when it did not obtrude its clumsy scruples in the way of her will and interest. She had a respect for “Angleterre;” and as to “les Anglaises,” she would have the women of no other country about her own children, if she could help it.
Often in the evening, after she had been plotting and counter-plotting, spying and receiving the reports of spies all day, she would come up to my room—a trace of real weariness on her brow—and she would sit down and listen while the children said their little prayers to me in English: the Lord’s Prayer, and the hymn beginning “Gentle Jesus,” these little Catholics were permitted to repeat at my knee; and, when I had put them to bed, she would talk to me (I soon gained enough French to be able to understand, and even answer her) about England and Englishwomen, and the reasons for what she was pleased to term their superior intelligence, and more real and reliable probity. Very good sense she often showed; very sound opinions she often broached: she seemed to know that keeping girls in distrustful restraint, in blind ignorance, and under a surveillance that left them no moment and no corner for retirement, was not the best way to make them grow up honest and modest women; but she averred that ruinous consequences would ensue if any other method were tried with continental children: they were so accustomed to restraint, that relaxation, however guarded, would be misunderstood and fatally presumed on. She was sick, she would declare, of the means she had to use, but use them she must; and after discoursing, often with dignity and delicacy, to me, she would move away on her “souliers de silence,” and glide ghost-like through the house, watching and spying everywhere, peering through every keyhole, listening behind every door.
... “I’ll go; I will be ready in ten minutes,” I vowed. And away I flew, never once checked, reader, by the thought which perhaps at this moment checks you: namely, that to go anywhere with Graham and without Mrs. Bretton could be objectionable. I could not have conceived, much less have expressed to Graham, such thought—such scruple—without risk of exciting a tyrannous self-contempt: of kindling an inward fire of shame so quenchless, and so devouring, that I think it would soon have licked up the very life in my veins. Besides, my godmother, knowing her son, and knowing me, would as soon have thought of chaperoning a sister with a brother, as of keeping anxious guard over our incomings and outgoings.
HereAndGone2
9d ago
What the FUCK was his problem?
Because guys who break their vows are just as likely to be diddling their employer. If they have no loyalty to their wife, why expect them to be any more loyal to you, and not be embezzling/selling corporate secrets/cheating on expenses, etc.?
It's "dishonest in a small thing is likely to be dishonest in a big thing".
My main question is how the hell did they pull this off? I work in a childcare service that receives government funding (along with charging parents fees) and it is one massive pain in the backside keeping track of all the paperwork (needing to be filed online through the national service provider portal for Early Years Programmes) to receive said funding.
It is not as simple as "hello, yes, we have 200 kids attending 5 days a week for 5 hours each at $30 per hour, this is our bank account number, kthxbai". We get inspected by a couple of different bodies. We get surprise inspected/mini-audited and we damn well better have all our ducks in a row. If it turned out "why no, there aren't 200 kids attending 5 days a week for 5 hours each", we'd be slapped down in a hot minute, the excess funding would be clawed back, and we might get shut down for good measure.
There must be more to the story than this. Otherwise it sounds like a counterpart to Rotherham: people had suspicions stuff was going on, but some people higher up the food chain shut down any awkward questions because that would sound like racism.
Doesn't reflect well on Governor Tim either, the man put forward as part of the Dream Team to save the nation from Orange Man Bad, much lauded for being the progressive governor of a well-run state.
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