Wednesday, September 25, 2013

The "Dads" Show, like most Big Network Sit-com's is FOR WOMEN!

I know plenty of men and I'll tell you right now: they don't watch sitcoms, for the most part. Not anymore. They used to. They'd watch Seinfeld, The Cosby Show, any of the detective-crime-dashing-male-lead shows, Law and Order, McGyver, etc. You get the picture.

But we don't bother anymore. First off, those shows are mostly dead and gone - even wildly successful Seinfeld. And secondly, the shows made today, Everybody Loves Raymond, Two and a Half Men, and the latest, "Dads" depict men as immature, incompetent, stumbling, bumbling children. Its pathetic. Even when the shows are quite funny - Two and a Half Men used some decent scripts - ultimately they're awful. And controlling much of this, is the female audience.

Men have tuned out. Men are watching movies. James Bond style stuff. Jack Reacher, Skyfall, War of the Worlds, Rambo, Die Hard, etc.. Many of those movies portray men, even if they are first seen as bums, as ultimately very capable bad-asses who get things done and are righteous in doing so. THE VERY OPPOSITE OF THE CRAP-SITCOMS ON T.V..

So who is watching t.v.? Women. That's who. And watching many of these stupid programs - from a woman's perspective - is very, very different. They basically excuse women for being around and marrying these bozo-men in the shows. After all, if the men are so pathetic, why are the women in the shows with them? Why don't they just walk away? Or never get with them in the first place?  That's never addressed, of course. NEVER. Instead the show is like a recipe for women; it says to them, See? There are plenty of women out there stuck with chauvinist losers, JUST LIKE YOU! This is why half-way intelligent people don't watch t.v. at all anymore and the internet-based programs through Netflix and others are radically increasing viewership, especially among the young. Youthful (late 30s and under) people are watching HBO, A&E, or other unique, crafty network programs. Breaking Bad has exploded in popularity and that show is about a bumbling Chemistry teacher turning into a murderous, drug-dealing, money-making bad-ass. This man is involved in a criminal enterprise and he is the hero - out-thinking and out-witting his naive wife; making millions to give to his family as he is planning on dying from cancer.

He is doing bad things for a good cause and the cause isn't even himself. It brings out his inner demons and ultimately twists him into something terrible, but his reasons at the outset were not himself, they were his family. THIS is a popular show. Everybody loves Raymond was cancelled. Take a hint, dear reader.

The women who watch the shows below are RELIEVED; they are so because they are stuck with either low-class, low-level boys from fatherless homes who are immature, INSECURE, macho lunatics, who, thanks to their fatherless home (I'm sure in each and every case the father was a monster, anyway, right?) learned their life lessons from rap videos (hence the racist and sexist angle). Or else the women who watch are stuck with a well-earning yet twisted, insensitive, and out-of-touch-with-anything-female type man. This show is to point out how foolish these men are and how much they need the women that they are with. Because the inverse of that MUST NEVER BE TRUE! RIGHT!?!?!?

The show is meant to alleviate and calm all the anxieties these female viewers have. Men don't watch these shows. They have enough outlets telling them they need to be more of a "real man" earning more, and "taking care of" their wife or girlfriend who is wildly depressed at out-earning the husband she wants to be more dominant. Men don't need injury added to the insults they receive; they watch the shows that embody who they want to be - the man who can think on his feet and outwit the world to protect his family and earn for them. Its a fantasy inside of a life lesson.

The Fox "Dads" show will be cancelled within a few months, if it takes that long. These one-sided shows on men are gaining absolutely no traction. Shows like Two and a Half men showed the man's viewpoint and his vulnerability quite often; both men and women enjoyed that; ultimately that show was doomed by its singular dimension, but it clearly had a broader audience. "Dads" does not portray "flawed" men, or even take a quick insightful look at women's flaws; it merely piles on the garbage and ills of men and then asks you to stomach it. Its a show for the white trash - I don't know how else to put it. Here's to a quick death of it.

Another look at this show appears below, but I think Robert misses on the women's angle to this.




FOX’S DADS, CRITICS OK WITH HATEFUL PORTRAYAL OF FATHERS

September 19, 2013 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
With a new sitcom on Fox named Dads, it’s hard not to tune in and, having done so, register an opinion. It turns out a lot of TV critics did the same thing, and, at this point, it’s hard to know which is worse, the show or the critics’ responses. But, if I were asked to make a call, I’d have to say that, horrible as Dads is, the critics’ takes are worse. The two taken together tell us a lot about the anti-dad fever that’s gripped the nation for so long. Dads isn’t the only TV offering about fathers, and many of them don’t promote the type of frank misandry the Fox show does, but by itself, Dads hustles every anti-father stereotype that’s zipping around the ether. That just happens to be the good news.
Dads premiered this past Tuesday. The set-up is that two 30-something men, Warner (Giovanni Ribisi) and Eli (Seth Green) run a small but reasonably successful business making videogames. Warner’s father Crawford (Martin Mull) lives with him, his wife (Vanessa Lachey) and their two kids. In the first episode, Eli’s father David (Peter Riegert) comes to live with him.
What are these fathers like? Do you really have to ask? They’re the very incarnation of every bad stereotype of fathers trafficked in by everyone from NOW to the judges who daily decide child custody cases, almost invariably choosing Mom custody over equal custody. If dads are really like they are in Dads, who could argue?
There’s not much to choose between Crawford and David. After all, when you have one stereotype of a father and two fathers to apply it to, they inevitably come out looking a lot alike. And sure enough, both dads are childish, clueless, selfish and self-absorbed and uncaring. They’re also abject failures at everything. They’re failures in business and penniless, which is why they’re living with their sons. They’re failures at love, having left (or perhaps having been left by) their wives. And of course they’re failures at fatherhood. David left his whole family years before and Crawford is just a jerk.
All of this is hammered home in the classic sitcom tradition that nothing can be too obvious. So, within the first minute of the premiere we see Warner’s kitchen in a shambles because his father had made himself a sandwich. His wife provides the obligatory lesson that she’s already got two children and doesn’t need a third.
From there we’re treated to a show-long litany of crudities courtesy of the dads. Needless to say they’re racist (slurs against Asians), sexist (Crawford refers to Warner’s wife as “the maid) and homophobic (he asks if there aren’t “some gays” at Warner and Eli’s office).
In short, the fathers are pretty much what you’d expect – the worst of people with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. As Gomer Pyle would say, “surprise, surprise, surprise.”
By about the first commercial break, we also get the message that the apple hasn’t fallen far from either tree. The sons are just younger versions of their dads. Oh, their business is successful enough for now, but look at how they treat their female employee, a young Asian-American woman (Brenda Song). For potential Chinese investors, they have her dress up in a sexy “little Chinese schoolgirl” outfit, assuming this will impress the money men.  Meanwhile, their other scams include Eli’s dressing in jeans and wearing a motorcycle helmet to convince the investors that their company is cool and, presumably cutting edge.
The none-too-subtle message is that dads are creeps and, however much their grown sons try to convince themselves they hate them, the younger generation hasn’t changed much, if at all.
With that take on fathers, I was heartened to learn that the critical response to the show has been uniformly negative. Article after article, I read, found the show to be awful, a loser. So I figured people are starting to catch on. In a culture that seems to seek ever more hateful ways to depict fathers (remember Kevin Spacey’s Pay it Forward character whose father had poured gasoline on him as a child and set him alight?), surely people were catching on. Or so I thought.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. The show premiered on Tuesday; by the end of Wednesday, I’d read about a dozen critiques of it, and, as I’d been led to believe, they were without exception derogatory. The problem, though is that each reviewer, again without exception, completely missed the obvious. Reading them, I sometimes thought “they didn’t watch the show,” but that’s not right. They accurately described the action, the characters and quoted them in detail. The reviewers had clearly watched the show.
But astonishingly, not a single one of them noticed the screamingly obvious fact that Dads disdains dads. Despite the fact that it’s made painfully clear from literally the first seconds of the show, not a single reviewer mentioned the fact. Nor did they notice the - admittedly more subtle but still clear – point that the younger men are just somewhat hipper versions of their old men. The frontal attack on fathers as stupid, incompetent children sailed right past every reviewer I read. I suppose if they witnessed a gasoline truck collide with a school bus and explode in a ball of flame, they’d talk about the new store at the mall in the background.
What reason did they give for disliking Dads? To a person it was the same; it’s “racist and sexist.” It’s racist because Asian people are depicted in a stereotypical light. It’s sexist, not because of its treatment of fathers, but because Warner and Eli’s Chinese-American employee is forced to dress up in a schoolgirl’s uniform and Warner’s wife is never seen outside the kitchen.
Well, those things may be worth mentioning, but to notice what are essentially sidelights and ignore the anti-father narrative that appears literally in every scene, is bizarre at best.
What’s worse, though is that the reviewers do what’s unfortunately become de rigueur over the years – they don’t notice who’s wearing the white hat and who the black. I know it’s a fiendishly difficult concept, but, in no-nuance shows like this, when the bad guy (he’s the one in the black hat) says or does something, we know it’s bad. See? He’s the bad guy. When Snidely Whiplash ties Little Nell to the railroad tracks, we’re supposed to know that his doing so is a bad act, not a good one.
Sadly, the college graduates who reviewed the first Dads show haven’t mastered that most basic and simple of concepts. They think that putting the Asian employee in a girl’s school uniform with sexy red bra peeking through, is a slap at women – sexually objectifying them, don’t you know. What they miss is that it’s done by the idiot sons of idiot fathers. Because it’s forced on the young Asian woman by them, we’re meant to understand that sexual objectification of women is bad and therefore so are they. It’s so painfully obvious, but somehow everyone missed it.
Ditto the fact that the three of the four women in the piece – Warner’s wife, the Asian employee and a Hispanic housekeeper for Eli – are the only sane, competent and remotely normal people in the bunch. That may be sexist, because of course women aren’t always that way. On the other hand, it may be sexist because there’s a clear divide here between the sexes that’s far easier to see: the men are destructive idiots and the women are competent and together.
Strange how every single reviewer missed all of that. Is the show sexist? You bet it is; it’s a non-stop tirade against fathers. Somehow the critics managed to not notice.
Generally speaking, I think pop culture should be free to say pretty much anything. I think humor particularly should have a free rein in expressing ideas. But where I draw the line is where it too often promotes discrimination against a certain group of people. Pop culture’s role in creating and maintaining certain concepts is in making them part of the mainstream. It does that by depicting them as normal, everyday.
So, if we’re routinely treated to, say, African-Americans in roles as thugs and dope addicts, pop culture makes it easier for us to subconsciously assume those qualities about blacks. That in turn makes it easier to imprison them, fear them, treat them with suspicion, etc. Black people in the U.S. have a hard time getting an even break in many walks of life, and that sort of portrayal by popular culture makes matters worse. Many blacks have pointed this out many times.
Well, fathers too get the short end of essentially every stick, at least when it comes to their children. From custody to child support to adoption to paternity fraud and more, the legal system kicks dads to the curb, the unsurprising result being damage to them and their kids. It’s a situation that screams for change. Dads urges us to maintain the misandric and destructive status quo.
And not a single critic noticed.

Friday, September 06, 2013

What?!?! COMMON SENSE ALERT!

Let me be clear - I am pro-marriage. Ban divorce for all I care. But when a couple splits, they each take what they have, what they came to the marriage with and walk away, with no distribution of income from one party to the other, period. If you are not married to or seriously dating a woman you do not get to sleep with her. If you are not married to a man, or stay with him, YOU DO NOT GET HIS MONEY. Anyone who thinks that is crazy is a fucking moron. Its fair. Period.

One judge in Israel has woken up:



Child Support Ruling is ‘Very Good News for Divorced Fathers’

Judge makes unprecedented ruling freeing father from all child support obligations due to joint custody, salary gap.
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By Maayana Miskin
First Publish: 8/25/2013, 12:55 PM

Court (illustrative)
Court (illustrative)
Israel news photo: Flash 90
A Tel Aviv judge has ruled that a father from Rehovot does not need to pay child support – setting a precedent that could change child support arrangements for many divorced parents.
Judge Yoram Shaked ruled that the father in question does not need to pay support because he shares custody of his children with his ex-wife, and because she has a higher income and more disposable income than he does. Were the father to pay support, he would need to pay only 300 shekels a month, Shaked found – a finding that led him to decide to waive the obligation to pay altogether.
Attorney Aviv Harel explained the significant of the verdict. “Until today, most judges set minimum child support payments for Jewish fathers that stood at 1,350 shekels per month per child or more,” he said.
“This revolutionary verdict is very good news for divorced fathers, but much less good for divorced mothers in Israel,” he noted.
Courts normally look at two aspects of child support, Harel explained. The first is “essential support,” which includes the cost of food, clothing, housing and healthcare. Fathers are automatically viewed as responsible for paying for “essential support,” regardless of their income, he said.
The second aspect includes “extras” such as vacations, entertainment, and extra-curricular activities. These costs are normally split by divorced parents based on their respective incomes.
Judges usually rule that fathers who share equal custody of their children with the children’s mother must pay 75% of the cost of raising the children, Harel said, while fathers who do not have custody at all must pay 100% support.
In the case in question, the divorced parents share custody of the children. The mother earns more than 18,000 shekels a month and owns a home, while the father earns over 13,000 shekels a month and rents his home. The mother had sued for over 13,000 shekels a month in child support, arguing that she bears primary responsibility for the children and so deserves financial support.
The court found that because the children are with their father half of the time, he is essentially already paying half the cost of “essential support.” The mother, who has significantly more disposable income than her ex-spouse, should legally pay proportionally more for “extras,” Shaked ruled.
Therefore, the father’s obligation to pay 100% of “essential support” is balanced out by the mother’s responsibility to pay proportionally more for “extras,” he said, and the arrangement the two currently have in which neither party pays support to the other is just.
“In light of the tiny sum that the father would be giving the mother, and in light of the fact that in effect the children spend more than half of their time with the father, I saw fit not to obligate the father to give the mother any payment. So the two parents will continue to equally share the costs,” he wrote.
Attorney Harel said the verdict joins several others that indicate a trend toward splitting custody and child support equally in divorce cases.
The case could lead to a reduction in the amount some divorced fathers must pay in child support, he said. However, he noted, the situation in question, in which the mother both earns more than the father and owns a home while he does not, is relatively uncommon.  

When the Law is So Far Adverse to Reason

THEN ITS IN PLACE SIMPLY TO ENRICH A FEW SLEAZY LAWYERS AND THE STATE ITSELF.

PERIOD. THE END.

THIS IS WHY THE UNITED STATES HAS ZERO CREDIBILITY WITH FAMILY/PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP LAWS THE WORLD OVER.

Women's rise in earnings, careers, and education is without question in the past 20 years+, SO AGAIN TELL ME WHY THE BLOODY HELL WE HAVE ALIMONY LAWS!?!?!?!??!



CHANGE COMES SLOWLY TO ALIMONY LAWS, BUT IT COMES

September 4, 2013 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
The fight against the truly absurd and archaic laws on spousal support continues. And, if this article is any indication, reforms may be getting some traction (Bloomberg, 8/26/13).
Appropriately, the piece begins with a real horror story about a man named Ari Schochet who once had a good job as an investment analyst, but who lost it in the economic downturn. But the judge in his divorce case doesn’t much care that he no longer has the same job and can’t find one as good. Alimony was set at the rate required by his former earnings and, since he’s supposedly able to find a similar one, he can’t get a modification. So his life has become a hell of jail cells and desperate searches for jobs that never pan out.
Ari Schochet has grown so accustomed to being sent to jail for missing alimony payments that he goes into a routine.
Before his family-court hearing, Schochet, 41, sticks on a nicotine patch to cope with jailhouse smoking bans, sends an “Ari Off the Grid” e-mail to friends and family, and scrawls key phone numbers in permanent ink on his forearm.
Schochet, who said he worked as a portfolio manager at Citadel Investment Group Inc. and Fortress Investment Group LLC (FIG) and once earned $1 million a year, has been jailed for missing court-ordered payments at least eight times in the past two years as he coped with the end of his 17-year marriage.
The reason he ran afoul of the law was simple. He was out of work for most of that time, a victim of a weak economy, and he ran through his savings trying to pay his wife alimony and child support that totaled almost $100,000 a year.
“It’s a circle of hell there’s just no way out of,” Schochet said. “I paid it as long as I could.”
That’s too bad for Schochet because it’s going to continue - in his case, for the rest of his life. He and his ex-wife were married for 17 years and, in the eyes of New Jersey law, that means he has to support her until one of them dies. It doesn’t matter what he’s capable of earning; it doesn’t matter what she’s capable of earning; it doesn’t matter if she’s found a job or even tried to. The law is based on the long-antiquated notion that women not only don’t but can’t work for a living.
That of course has never been the case. Women in this culture have never not worked. Oh, some of them have been privileged enough to not have to work and earn, but they’ve always been the small minority. Others have worked. Until the 1930s, most women didn’t work for wages because they worked on farms with their husbands and families. But women who’d moved off of farms worked in a wide variety of jobs, mostly retail sales, nursing, secretarial jobs, restaurant jobs, etc.
Alimony laws were for the women whose husbands earned enough that their wives didn’t have to work. Unsurprisingly, there’s a long history of women who made a living off those laws by serially marrying and divorcing.
But this is 2013. Women make up over 47% of the work force, so, for all practical purposes, there are no women who can’t support themselves. As I’ve said before, there are people of both sexes who can’t do that. They’re disabled or too advanced in age to train for and find work. For those people we can make an exception and say alimony may be necessary. Likewise, I can see one person paying alimony to the other for a short time, say, two years, to allow that person to get up to speed in the job market.
But, as far as I can see, in every other instance, no one should receive alimony. A divorce is a divorce. It means the two no longer want to live together, plan together, keep up the house together, travel together, etc. There is no reason why, in this day and age, either person should be able to continue to rely on the other for support. We champion women’s abilities and drive, but then turn around and treat them like “delicate survivors” from a Tennessee Williams play.
Gradually, some states are starting to haul themselves out of the 19th century.
In states such as New JerseyConnecticut and Florida where divorce laws are based on century-old notions of what an ex-spouse deserves, laws are being proposed to limit alimony in recognition of wives’ earning power and the changed economic circumstances husbands can face.
The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers in 2007 recommended restricting alimony amounts and duration. The proposal became the basis for Massachusetts’s alimony reform laws in 2011. Those statutes eliminated permanent alimony and gave judges guidelines for calculating amounts.
Three states have enacted laws abolishing permanent alimony with caveats allowing discretion in exceptional cases, according to Laura W. Morgan, an attorney and owner of Family Law Consulting in Charlottesville, Virginia. Lawmakers in at least 10 other states, including New Jersey, are being prompted by advocates to consider more restrictive legislation, said Morgan, who is writing an alimony handbook to be published by the American Bar Association.
New York lawmakers are considering a bill that would create an alimony formula that would require that only spouses with much higher incomes than their ex-partners pay support.
Connecticut Governor Dannel P. Malloy in June signed legislation revising the state’s alimony statutes to add education and earning capacity to a list of factors to be considered. The changes, which take effect Oct. 1, direct judges to specify the basis for any award of permanent alimony. The law also calls for lawmakers to study the fairness and adequacy of statutes governing alimony awards and make recommendations by February.
Unsurprisingly, the only ones opposed to sanity in alimony laws have little with which to back up their arguments.
[Family attorney Laura Morgan] called the current push for change “very male-driven.”
“As men retire, they don’t want to keep paying alimony,” she said. “For every horror story that you can come up with about a support obligor, I can come up with 10 for an obligee who can’t make ends meet because her post-divorce standard of living has so drastically dropped.”
Hmm. What she doesn’t add is how many of those women did little or nothing to contribute to the family’s income while they were married. If a woman or a man allows their marketable skills to erode over the years, for any but the most necessary of reasons (like caring for children or a disability), why should the other spouse pay indefinitely? That spouse has likely already been a drag on the family’s finances during marriage. Why should he/she be one after divorce?
To give an idea of Morgan’s level of intellectual honesty, she adds this chestnut:
“But there is still a glass ceiling, and women are still earning just 70 cents on the dollar” earned by men, Morgan said.
Nonsense. That glass ceiling is made up mostly of women’s refusal to work as many hours as men or at jobs likely to get them into the top echelons of management. Far too much data exists showing women opting out of the workforce and, even when they’re in it, working substantially fewer hours than men for us to buy the glass ceiling claim.
Just last year the Times ran a piece on women in the workplace that featured one headhunter (a woman) for McKenzie and Company who said frankly that they can’t recruit women for top management jobs. They don’t want to pull the hours or deal with the stress, and believe me, I can relate. But women can’t refuse to do the work and then complain about not getting the top positions. Of course few of them do. The ones who are actually in the trenches of top corporate management aren’t the one’s kvetching. It’s mostly academics who wouldn’t be caught dead in the rat race who want to tell the rest of us how the system’s stacked against women.
And of course Morgan’s 70 cents on the dollar claim has been demolished so many times, it’s hard to believe even feminists have the gall to keep bringing it up. Women earn, in the aggregate, less than men for two primary reasons. One is that they don’t work as many hours and the other is that they tend to opt for lower-paying jobs like teaching, nursing, retail sales and secretarial jobs. That may or may not be changing, but the workforce as it’s currently configured has an abundance of women in those jobs. Ergo, they make less on average than do men. Their choices, their consequences.
But alimony law is dead set against the notion that women should have to deal with the results of their own choices. If a woman chooses not to work or to work at a low-paying job, alimony’s there to bail her out.
Meanwhile men and a few women pay every month, sometimes bankrupting themselves in the process. It’s all based on a notion that was never very much true and now is almost never so – that women can’t support themselves. Ari Schochet knows exactly what that means.
“What am I supposed to do?” he said in a phone interview yesterday. “This is so against the law, so against my civil rights. Now I’m stuck in the system again for months. It’s just unbelievable. I have no recourse. The legal system has totally stepped away from me.”