Victims of socialism
October 7, 2009
Are you a victim of socialism?
As the national political debate rages between people who value freedom (the “conservatives”) and people who value security (the “socialists”), many people ask, “What difference does it make to me?” It’s not always obvious how policies promoted by socialists will steal your freedom and hurt you personally but eventually the hurt reaches out and smacks you in the face.
By then it’s too late: the policy is law, and you’re the victim.
There’s a man here in Reno—call him Greg—who was smacked in the face recently, not just by socialism but also literally. Greg, who is in his fifties and a 30-year employee of a Fortune 500 company, brought a woman he knew from Georgia out west and married her in a Reno wedding chapel. Unfortunately for Greg, marriage late in life can be a hard row to hoe.
Or a hard ho in a row. Or both.
Greg’s new wife invited two grown sons—in their twenties and still dependent on Mom—out from Georgia to live with them in a two-bedroom apartment. He didn’t want that, didn’t like it, marital harmony disappeared, and one day Greg came home late, said something mean to his wife on his way to bed, and the two stepsons jumped on him and beat the crap out of him.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “What in the hell does the Jerry Springer Show have to do with socialism?” Hang on a minute, I’m getting there. (If you’re a man, you probably know where this is headed.)
Starting in the 1960s the socialists, sometimes known as liberals, started stepping off the short yellow buses they rode to school and straight into the hierarchy of the Democrat Party where they quickly dominated the party’s agenda by virtue of shrill voices, aggressive natures, unpleasant attitudes, poor bathing habits, and bad breath. (Okay, some of my history on this subject might be slanted. Mea culpa.)
The agenda they pushed assumes certain structural inequities in our society and enacts government mandates to rectify those inequities. In other words, they love to imagine victims so they can write laws to protect them.
One of those assumed inequities is the oppression of women by men.
“Ah ha!” you say, “Now I see where this is going.”
Personally, I’ve never oppressed a woman with more than my presence but that’s just me. Lots of other guys are acting like thugs, saying mean things, and sticking wet fingers into female ears, apparently.
For the last forty years, leftwing policies which assume that men oppress women have been steadily criminalizing the masculine gender in America, to the point where it is virtually impossible for a woman to get arrested in a domestic dispute and equally impossible for a man not to get arrested.
People who saw Greg after his beating were horrified. It looked like a baseball bat was used on his face. But when somebody called the police that night, they came to the apartment and arrested Greg. Nobody else had a scratch on them—not his wife, not the two stepsons—but they arrested Greg because Mom said her two sons were protecting her.
Greg isn’t that large, his wife isn’t that dainty, and you would never guess she needed that much protection but it’s hard to argue against an entrenched political agenda using simple tools like common sense.
When the socialists are passing their laws, they always make them sound innocuous but eventually the government shows up at your door with guns to enforce them and you realize that no law is innocuous, not really.
Most police departments have rules which require that somebody must be arrested when there is a domestic dispute and since the socialists have convinced us that women are oppressed it’s the man who is arrested no matter how beaten and bloody he looks.
This happens regularly and everywhere in this country, and once the man is arrested the legal system proceeds inexorably, as government bureaucracies tend to do. Greg accepted a plea bargain last week that makes him guilty of a misdemeanor domestic assault with a sentence requiring abuse counseling and a ban on alcohol.
That’ll teach him a lesson, right? For hitting his stepsons in the fist with his face?
The same assumption which caused Greg’s arrest is even more splendidly manifest in our family courts where men are financially abused, separated from their children, and routinely arrested if they fall behind on child support payments.
Funny thing is, since federal law requires that child support be withheld from paychecks automatically, the only way a man can fall behind is to be out of a job so what’s the point in arresting him? If the guy is out of work he’s probably out of money, right? Putting him in jail where he can’t find work and making him hire a lawyer to get out of jail is probably not going to generate more money for child support.
Duh.
As a kid in school I learned about British debtors’ prisons, horrible institutions where they kept people until they could pay off their debts. Such imprisonment was effectively a life sentence if nobody on the outside could—or would—pay your debts for you. Debtors’ prisons were eventually outlawed as a barbaric legal custom by every civilized nation.
(They never outlawed it in Saudi Arabia—draw your own conclusions.)
U.S. law holds that civil penalties must not devolve into criminal punishment, which means, in plain English, that a judge can’t throw a person in jail for a debt they don’t have the money to pay.
Except for men who can’t pay their child support.
That’s right, thanks to the socialists and their hard sell of the notion that women are victims who need special government protection, we have effectively reinstituted debtors’ prisons in the United States of America. Men who can’t pay child support (or alimony) can be thrown in prison at the judge’s whim, for as long as the judge wants, even if they don’t have a dime to their name.
(On a positive note, Saudi Arabia doesn’t feel so lonely anymore. “Hey, let’s form our own clique! We don’t need those other stupid heads,” the Saudis said through diplomatic channels.)
How bad is it for men? Well, H. Beatty Chadwick has been in a Pennsylvania jail since 1995 because he owes his ex-wife $2.5 million. He says he doesn’t have it. The judge doesn’t believe him. Mr. Chadwick is old and has cancer so he’ll probably die in his cell.
You probably thought I was exaggerating when I said debtors’ prison used to be a life sentence but now you get to watch it happening in real time. Watching H. Beatty rotting away is like watching the History Channel or taking a trip to the 18th century in a time machine… or reading a Dickens novel.
Family courts are not required to maintain records of how many men they throw in jail for non-payment of child support so we have no idea how many American men are rotting in “debtors’ prison” at any given moment. Estimates range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. With the current recession pushing unemployment toward 20%, it might be in the millions.
Who cares how many there are? It’s just men. The dirty tyrants deserve it.
It sounded so innocuous, didn’t it, when the socialists were telling us horror stories about women trying to raise children without financial support from fathers? And how the government needed to step in and force men to meet their responsibilities? What’s wrong with punishing guys like that?
Nobody resisted this anti-male agenda because what politician would risk being seen as a defender of deadbeat dads?
After forty years of increasingly draconian punishment of men by the legal system, the American family has disintegrated. The family courts are so intent upon demonizing men and rewarding women that marriages and relationships that falter are nearly impossible to rescue. Once couples step through the doorway into family court, incentives to reconcile are destroyed. No woman in her right mind will give up child support payments in exchange for a risky reunion with her children’s father—not when she can find another guy just like him and end up with a man in her bed and the payments.
And just like the rational decision for a woman is to keep the child support and find a different man, the rational decision for a man is to avoid the system which demonizes and threatens him, and find some other woman with her own child support annuity.
Consequently, millions of American children have no contact with their fathers. Between 1960 and 2000, as society came down harder and harder on men, the percentage of children living apart from their biological fathers rose from 17 percent to 50 percent. In the black community, it's 70%.
The people who engineered this Bizarro World system which treats men like oppressors did so to satisfy a leftwing agenda. Most men suffering from the system have no clue that they suffer for a political belief.
If they ever figure it out, the Democrats will never win another election.
If you are a man—or the child of a man, or the parent of a man, or a woman in love with a man—sooner or later you will probably be a victim of socialism just like Greg, and for the very same reason.
From Reno, Nevada, USA
As the national political debate rages between people who value freedom (the “conservatives”) and people who value security (the “socialists”), many people ask, “What difference does it make to me?” It’s not always obvious how policies promoted by socialists will steal your freedom and hurt you personally but eventually the hurt reaches out and smacks you in the face.
By then it’s too late: the policy is law, and you’re the victim.
There’s a man here in Reno—call him Greg—who was smacked in the face recently, not just by socialism but also literally. Greg, who is in his fifties and a 30-year employee of a Fortune 500 company, brought a woman he knew from Georgia out west and married her in a Reno wedding chapel. Unfortunately for Greg, marriage late in life can be a hard row to hoe.
Or a hard ho in a row. Or both.
Greg’s new wife invited two grown sons—in their twenties and still dependent on Mom—out from Georgia to live with them in a two-bedroom apartment. He didn’t want that, didn’t like it, marital harmony disappeared, and one day Greg came home late, said something mean to his wife on his way to bed, and the two stepsons jumped on him and beat the crap out of him.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “What in the hell does the Jerry Springer Show have to do with socialism?” Hang on a minute, I’m getting there. (If you’re a man, you probably know where this is headed.)
Starting in the 1960s the socialists, sometimes known as liberals, started stepping off the short yellow buses they rode to school and straight into the hierarchy of the Democrat Party where they quickly dominated the party’s agenda by virtue of shrill voices, aggressive natures, unpleasant attitudes, poor bathing habits, and bad breath. (Okay, some of my history on this subject might be slanted. Mea culpa.)
The agenda they pushed assumes certain structural inequities in our society and enacts government mandates to rectify those inequities. In other words, they love to imagine victims so they can write laws to protect them.
One of those assumed inequities is the oppression of women by men.
“Ah ha!” you say, “Now I see where this is going.”
Personally, I’ve never oppressed a woman with more than my presence but that’s just me. Lots of other guys are acting like thugs, saying mean things, and sticking wet fingers into female ears, apparently.
For the last forty years, leftwing policies which assume that men oppress women have been steadily criminalizing the masculine gender in America, to the point where it is virtually impossible for a woman to get arrested in a domestic dispute and equally impossible for a man not to get arrested.
People who saw Greg after his beating were horrified. It looked like a baseball bat was used on his face. But when somebody called the police that night, they came to the apartment and arrested Greg. Nobody else had a scratch on them—not his wife, not the two stepsons—but they arrested Greg because Mom said her two sons were protecting her.
Greg isn’t that large, his wife isn’t that dainty, and you would never guess she needed that much protection but it’s hard to argue against an entrenched political agenda using simple tools like common sense.
When the socialists are passing their laws, they always make them sound innocuous but eventually the government shows up at your door with guns to enforce them and you realize that no law is innocuous, not really.
Most police departments have rules which require that somebody must be arrested when there is a domestic dispute and since the socialists have convinced us that women are oppressed it’s the man who is arrested no matter how beaten and bloody he looks.
This happens regularly and everywhere in this country, and once the man is arrested the legal system proceeds inexorably, as government bureaucracies tend to do. Greg accepted a plea bargain last week that makes him guilty of a misdemeanor domestic assault with a sentence requiring abuse counseling and a ban on alcohol.
That’ll teach him a lesson, right? For hitting his stepsons in the fist with his face?
The same assumption which caused Greg’s arrest is even more splendidly manifest in our family courts where men are financially abused, separated from their children, and routinely arrested if they fall behind on child support payments.
Funny thing is, since federal law requires that child support be withheld from paychecks automatically, the only way a man can fall behind is to be out of a job so what’s the point in arresting him? If the guy is out of work he’s probably out of money, right? Putting him in jail where he can’t find work and making him hire a lawyer to get out of jail is probably not going to generate more money for child support.
Duh.
As a kid in school I learned about British debtors’ prisons, horrible institutions where they kept people until they could pay off their debts. Such imprisonment was effectively a life sentence if nobody on the outside could—or would—pay your debts for you. Debtors’ prisons were eventually outlawed as a barbaric legal custom by every civilized nation.
(They never outlawed it in Saudi Arabia—draw your own conclusions.)
U.S. law holds that civil penalties must not devolve into criminal punishment, which means, in plain English, that a judge can’t throw a person in jail for a debt they don’t have the money to pay.
Except for men who can’t pay their child support.
That’s right, thanks to the socialists and their hard sell of the notion that women are victims who need special government protection, we have effectively reinstituted debtors’ prisons in the United States of America. Men who can’t pay child support (or alimony) can be thrown in prison at the judge’s whim, for as long as the judge wants, even if they don’t have a dime to their name.
(On a positive note, Saudi Arabia doesn’t feel so lonely anymore. “Hey, let’s form our own clique! We don’t need those other stupid heads,” the Saudis said through diplomatic channels.)
How bad is it for men? Well, H. Beatty Chadwick has been in a Pennsylvania jail since 1995 because he owes his ex-wife $2.5 million. He says he doesn’t have it. The judge doesn’t believe him. Mr. Chadwick is old and has cancer so he’ll probably die in his cell.
You probably thought I was exaggerating when I said debtors’ prison used to be a life sentence but now you get to watch it happening in real time. Watching H. Beatty rotting away is like watching the History Channel or taking a trip to the 18th century in a time machine… or reading a Dickens novel.
Family courts are not required to maintain records of how many men they throw in jail for non-payment of child support so we have no idea how many American men are rotting in “debtors’ prison” at any given moment. Estimates range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. With the current recession pushing unemployment toward 20%, it might be in the millions.
Who cares how many there are? It’s just men. The dirty tyrants deserve it.
It sounded so innocuous, didn’t it, when the socialists were telling us horror stories about women trying to raise children without financial support from fathers? And how the government needed to step in and force men to meet their responsibilities? What’s wrong with punishing guys like that?
Nobody resisted this anti-male agenda because what politician would risk being seen as a defender of deadbeat dads?
After forty years of increasingly draconian punishment of men by the legal system, the American family has disintegrated. The family courts are so intent upon demonizing men and rewarding women that marriages and relationships that falter are nearly impossible to rescue. Once couples step through the doorway into family court, incentives to reconcile are destroyed. No woman in her right mind will give up child support payments in exchange for a risky reunion with her children’s father—not when she can find another guy just like him and end up with a man in her bed and the payments.
And just like the rational decision for a woman is to keep the child support and find a different man, the rational decision for a man is to avoid the system which demonizes and threatens him, and find some other woman with her own child support annuity.
Consequently, millions of American children have no contact with their fathers. Between 1960 and 2000, as society came down harder and harder on men, the percentage of children living apart from their biological fathers rose from 17 percent to 50 percent. In the black community, it's 70%.
The people who engineered this Bizarro World system which treats men like oppressors did so to satisfy a leftwing agenda. Most men suffering from the system have no clue that they suffer for a political belief.
If they ever figure it out, the Democrats will never win another election.
If you are a man—or the child of a man, or the parent of a man, or a woman in love with a man—sooner or later you will probably be a victim of socialism just like Greg, and for the very same reason.
From Reno, Nevada, USA
October 10, 2009 - I am a victim of Socialism myself. I am from Venezuela, a place where i cannot live anymore, where a man took the power more than 10 years ago with the promise of finish the corruption and lead the country to the progress and take the poverty to an end. But what is happening is: 1)This man has built the most corrupted government Venezuela has ever had. 2)The country has received more than ever millions of dollar as a profit of oil prices but the people is poorer than before. 3)He is giving away the money from the country and supporting terrorist of any kind. 4)There is not more freedom to express yourself and the prisons are full of people that oppose his regime. 5)The criminality is one of the highest in Latin America and the inflation is one of the highest in the world. He does it in behalf of THE SOCIALISM, that is not different from the COMMUNISM. The socialists don't believe in the democracy. They will take your freedom out and set their rules that you should follow, all on behalf of a demagogic democracy. This man, whose name is Hugo Chavez is the new Stalin of the Americas, the Socialist that is causing a havoc in the politic of Latino America. - Jackie, United Kingdom
October 7, 2009 - Sounds like you got taken to the cleaners by your ex-wife. - Rudy, Reno
J.P. replies: Wow. I don’t have a smartass answer to follow that. I wish every person in the United States would read your comment and feel the passion behind it and take it as a warning.
October 7, 2009 - Sounds like you got taken to the cleaners by your ex-wife. - Rudy, Reno
J.P. replies: Ex-wives.
