This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Every time you DreadJimmers bring this up, I wonder what your model of a marital relationship is like. It's obviously not one where you and your wife actually love one another. So if your wife is not in the mood, or she's injured or sick, or you've just had a raging fight, or you're drunk and stinking and gross her out, you believe in the Good Old Days she'd just have to spread 'em anyway, no recourse, and if she resists, you could beat her until she stops resisting, and that is the past you want to return to?
It does seem to me like there is a whole lot of room between "not when she is injured, or right after a fight, or when you need a bath" and /r/deadbeadrooms. Your examples all seem to assume a pretty high, or at least medium, baseline of sex and then declare that there should be a non-zero number of limits on when a man can assume his marital rights, but what is being discussed is a level which is low to non-existent so your comment seems non-responsive tbh. Real "all debates are bravery debates" energy IMO, where you are saying there must be SOME limits on how often the husband can expect a yes and erwgv3g34 saying there must be SOME limits on how often she can refuse.
There may be room between those positions but there's no stable position between them. The center cannot hold, and has not, and we have reached the stable equilibrium of "she may withhold sex for any reason at any time and his only permissible recourse is a divorce in which he loses most of his assets and future income".
Do you actually know anything about the circumstances under which a man can "lose most of his assets and future income" in a divorce? It is not common. In fact alimony is pretty rare nowadays (and almost never close to "most" of his assets and future income), child support is to support the children, and the number of men paying "unreasonable" child support (however you define that) is exceeded by the number of men not actually paying their child support. The worse case scenario you will usually see is an equal distribution state where a spouse can claim 50% of marital assets, even those he or she didn't bring into the marriage. (This can and sometimes is the man who benefits, though usually it's the woman.) And not all states do a 50/50 split like that.
You guys seriously need to update your notions of how divorce works from the 1960s, or the 19th century.
I've had this argument about a hundred times, so I'm going to experiment with a new track:
What about "child support", as currently practiced in the liberal west and particularly the United States, evidences that it is about supporting children—without referencing its name in any way, shape, or form? If I gave you a sheet describing the terms, functions, and conditions of C.S. with the name at the top blacked out, what elements would lead you to suspect ah ha, the primary function of this policy is to support children! What elements would you point to in order to refute the competing hypothesis that the primary function of the policy is actually mother support?
This is an open challenge. Anyone reading should feel free to answer.
A child support order is going to say, throughout, "for the support of the child" and among other things will typically specify that support will end when the child turns 18, etc. If we have to black out every mention of "child" then I suppose it might be hard to figure out what the purpose of the order is.
The fact that the support ends when the child reaches age of majority, and that the calculation of support is based on the child's needs, not the mother's. ("Mother support" is called alimony, and as I mentioned already, it's awarded rarely nowadays, usually only in a marriage of long standing where one spouse has substantially depended on the other and has no ready means of earning income once separated.)
I am guessing your grievance is that the mother (or, more rarely, father) is given $X per month in child support and nothing really prevents her or him from spending it on heroin or lotto tickets. True except inasmuch as failure to care for the child would be subject to court oversight and in extreme cases loss of custody, but if Mom puts all the child support in the same pot of money as her other sources of income (let's assume she has a job, which most often she does) - how would you prefer to make sure she does not personally benefit from the child support? Suppose you think she's spending too much money on clothes for herself. But she can always say "The child support money is what paid for the food Child ate and the Child's clothes, I bought my clothes with the other money." You could argue that without the child support she wouldn't have been able to afford to buy clothes for herself. While true, the point of child support is that children add expenses. If she weren't taking care of the child she could afford to buy clothes for herself.
I have also had this argument about a hundred times. It always boils down to a desire to be punitive and/or bail on financial obligations, almost always rooted in a sense of bitterness and injustice, not actual concern for the welfare of any children in question.
I said that referring to it by name is against the rules.
I didn't say that, I just said you can't say "the purpose of the law is support the child because the law says so, it's in the name, stupid". You do this multiple times so I'm only addressing it once.
This is also compatible with the mother support theory.
Do the needs of children scale with the father's income? They eat more food? Wear more clothes?
I'm less concerned about this part than other elements, but to the extent that it matters, it is a solved problem. You make it an EBT card with similar controls. Courts can pull the records on a moment's notice. There's way less deniability because the funds aren't co-mingled. This isn't rocket science. Wouldn't be surprised if some places already do this.
If this were the modal impact of the policy, that would be a great point in favor of calling it mother support.
I will cop to feeling that there's a great amount of injustice across nearly all policy that touches men and women as such, and that I harbor a considerable measure of bitterness about it. No point in denying it. I guess that means my beliefs about the world are wrong because they come from a bad place, huh. Where do your beliefs about child support come from? Only love and honey, I'll bet. That means they're better than mine.
How do we know that child support policy as it exists today isn't "punitive"? Sounds like a motivation that could be attached to the fact it scales with income.
I have financial obligations to women all across the country and their children. No bailing on that one, unfortunately. I'd probably feel less bad about child support if it meant I never had to pay strange woman to raise another man's kid. Hell, raise it 10x if that's what it takes. Throw men who can't pay into lithium mines.
Who cares? Nobody has any concern for the welfare of children when it collides with the needs/wants/whims of women. If a woman's right to drink smoke and snort as much as she wants while pregnant is inviolable, I don't see how a man's right to stay home and play video games shouldn't also be etched in sapphire. There's a thousand different policies we could pursue that would have manifest benefits to children to the inconvenience of women, and we implement exactly zero of them.
Your rules are absurd and demonstration nothing because they could apply to a lot of laws. "You can't refer to the purpose of the law in describing what it does" would make many laws illegible.
No, because it expires when the child no longer needs support.
How would you propose disentangling "mother support" from "child support." Any money given to a mother to support her child necessarily benefits her.
I am fine with a rich man having to pay more than a poor man to support his children. If you're rich you shouldn't get to leave your children in poverty because you don't think you owe them anything. If you want to propose a cap, I'd be amenable, but not if it's the bare minimum because fuck those kids (and their mother).
Wouldn't you still protest that she might be eating some of the food bought with the EBT card (which she almost certainly is)? Or, again, that being given money to buy food for her child means she can use some of her other money for not-child things? It does not solve the problem from your perspective (which is that we should somehow prevent the mother from benefiting in any way).
Do you actually know what typical child support is? Because you seem to think the median child support payer is being drained of half his income or more and it equals or exceeds the amount actually needed for basic living expenses for a child. This is not the median situation.
That's a slightly different issue, because enforcement is hard and society picks up the tab on deadbeats. But I'd be on board with much harsher measures for men who can't/won't pay- "lithium mines," sure. I don't think you actually would be, though.
I am pretty sure there are laws under which women who abuse drugs and cause their children to be born addicted, or with birth defects, can be charged, though that's another hard to enforce law. If you want to make it illegal for a woman to drink, smoke or do any drugs at all while pregnant, I think it's impractical, but let's say I agree in theory. The point of child support laws is not to make sure men and women are being "punished" equally, it's to provide for children. "Well, if we cared about children, we should do this also!" Okay, if I agree in theory but also acknowledge we can't/won't do that, what now? Fuck them kids because it's unfair to men? Some things are unfair for biological reasons (where a lot of these conversations wind up, usually about the time the proposal that a man should be able to disavow any responsibility or obligation for children he fathers emerges).
I would agree that there are many laws whose motivation for being bear very little to relation to their stated purpose.
Sure, but she has less going on in her life now that needs any support. Hard to say from this one alone. Which brings me to:
Well, I would say we take a look at whose benefit the terms of the policy correlates the most with, which leads me to Exhibit A, the smoking gun:
I am once again left to wonder if children of rich fathers need more food and clothes than the children of poor ones. What's the thing that children need more of when their father is richer? I really can't overstate how damning it is that the amount of funds demanded for child support bears almost no correlation whatsoever with the needs of any actual or theoretical children being supported.
You used the word "punitive" to describe my likely motivation for having skepticism toward modern child support policy, but to me it seems like a great descriptor for how child support policy itself actually works. Its terms make very little sense if you want to believe that it's actually about supporting children, and much more sense if you impute that its actual motivation has much more to do with look dude, ya had sex, now pay up.
I'd feel a lot better if the number were derived from what children actually need, rather than how much we think we could and should extract from a given man.
I know how it works. It's absurd. In most places, if you go and fuck some loser who works at the grocery store deli, you get like eighty bucks a month which isn't nearly enough—and then me and other taxpayers have to pitch in to make the difference. But if you manage to sack a Guy In Finance, you get a gorillion dollars.
It gets really bad if you think of all the myriad, trivial ways that the funds could be made to better seek the actual needs of actual children that could be implemented but aren't. I'd be way less offended about how the numbers are calculated if the funds that were clearly in excess of what the child's needs went into some general pool that was drawn off to support tougher cases. But that's not how it works, all of that excess needs to go to the mother who bagged a high value guy. I suppose that's the bounty she earns for a sexual conquest that puts a high earner to work for society's reproductive needs. Sorry, little Timmy: apex maneater Stacy needs her meal ticket.
There's a practical, happy medium of oversight that exists between none at all and hellhole 1984 panopticon. I find it suspect that we choose one of these extremes. I've given you an example of a trivial to implement solution that would substantially increase the auditability of funds ostensibly earmarked for the support of children for very little added friction and inconvenience to the people involved. I could probably think of a dozen more, but I'm not going to waste too much effort on this one as I doubt that anything I could offer would change your opinion about me. I mean, you've already read my mind over TCP/IP and know my true sentiments:
My most preferred model is that accountability for reproductive outcomes be assigned based on possession of the power to shape those outcomes. Things have gotten more complicated since Dobbs, but before that, here in the States, the entire process of human reproduction from start to finish was considered a woman's private affair by the most supreme court in the land. Responsibility should have been assigned accordingly.
I understand that this isn't how it works, and probably not how it will ever work for reasons that may never cease to frustrate me. My second-preferred solution is that we keep the spillover as contained to the most nearby man as possible, and in a way that empowers individual men to avoid this situation as far as practical.
I understand that this probably won't happen either, and that I'll probably just be made to pay women to fuck other men and bear their children for the rest of my natural life.
But I am allowed to complain about it.
There aren't. Not here in the States. I've looked. I did, however, find cases of children afflicted by these diseases suing their mothers for what she did to them and losing due to being considered as having no standing. Can you at least understand why I might be quite unimpressed with what our civilization demands from women when it comes to reproduction, and why I might not see where exactly it gets off demanding anything from men?
Why? Would it be too inconvenient to her to not have to fucking poison her own child?
"Fuck the children" is indeed the position of our civilization whenever the interests of women and children collide—and yes, if we are going to continue to do that, I would like the trifling, self-centered interests of grown-ass men to prevail over the welfare of children, too. Fuck 'em.
Biology doesn't write our laws or determine how they're adjudicated. Simple as. Men are biologically stronger than women but that doesn't stop rape from being illegal.
This would, in fact, be what peak justice in reproductive affairs looks like. Although as a matter of implementation detail, I'd much prefer an opt-in model. What women do with their bodies is nobody else's business, or it is. Pick one.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link