I also agree with your economic points. I’m in the top 1-2% by income and don’t feel particularly rich. I feel like my standard of living peaked in 2019 despite substantial raises since then. Of course there’s no reason to think that crippling society and the economy for 2-3 years wouldn’t have an effect.
You certainly fit a lot of great material in these articles- too much to respond to or digest quickly! Maybe shorter would be better…
A few random thoughts:
1. I agree that leadership should ideally come from virtue and persuasion rather than rank. I once attended a talk by an impressive Swiss lawyer named Alexandre Havard who wrote a book titled Virtuous Leadership. It strikes me that we have a desperate absence of such leadership in the world today - how many leaders today are actually admirable?
2. Agree very much so with your comments on marriage. Marriage is the one contract that the law won’t punish you for breaking. In fact, the bad spouse gets the most rewards, such as a loafing spouse who gets long term spousal support as a reward. I saw a situation in my family where a dutiful husband had his life wrecked by a cheating wife who oddly felt perfectly entitled and guilt-free to take him to the wringer, slander him in court filings, etc.
3. Warning signs are often there. In two disastrous marriages in my family, intelligent men had ample warning that the women were unstable and went ahead anyway. Very unfashionable but I would recommend Dr Laura’s books on 10 Stupid Things Men/Women do to Mess Up Their Lives.
4. I personally would not consider marrying a secular or left wing woman in my single days. Other red flags include antidepressants and crazy or abusive parents. But religion is no guarantee. Both of the two disastrous cases I mentioned involved women who were church going. In fact one cheater turned into an ultra-trad homeschooling type while wrecking her family, although she eventually dropped it. (Apparently women on the homeschooling Facebook groups encouraged her to wreck her marriage and destroy her ex-husband and he gives her a minor share of the blame, saying these women seemed to get a kick out of it.)
Yes, Tom generates a level of engagement that is at least an order of magnitude below what I would expect, given the quality of his writing. Breaking an essay like this into around 3 and releasing them weekly or something would probably generate more engagement. Though I read everything he writes so it doesn't affect me.
As for your comments on warning signs: I still don't know what to think about these. I'm in my 40s, and in every case with which I'm personally familiar in which a woman destroyed her marriage, I could see it coming. As a young man, I was terrified of the prospect of marrying a virtuous-seeming woman only for her to go psycho, like the story you tell of the homeschooling woman. This is partly why I didn't get married until my mid-30s. But in practice, while I can find stories like yours on the Internet, I'm still not personally aware of any. It still seems to be pretty rare.
I live pretty naturally and effortlessly by the Billy Graham Rule, as does my wife, and most of our social circles. But it seems there are plenty of churchgoing people who do not, and I still suspect the vast majority of cheating occurs among people who don't live this way.
>Other red flags include antidepressants and crazy or abusive parents.
Yes -- I encountered these aplenty in my dating days, prior to meeting my wife. My wife still laughs that one of the questions I asked her, after maybe our second or third date, was "What prescription medications are you on?" I still think this is an excellent question that everyone should ask as soon as they can get away with it with a prospective spouse.
And the thing about good in-laws is those will be your kids' grandparents, and it makes your whole life better if they're good people that can provide other positive role models for them, and not lunatics that are adding to your life's stresses.
I've seen outlier cases IRL, but they are rare. Whether researching drug side effects or modern marriage, online is not a representative sample of real life. As for the length of these posts, it's a hobby, not a business, and it's a helpful filter to attract thoughtful readers. Substack already filters audiences nicely, which is why I don't post on Twitter.
Great piece. Also thought Churches should promote better marriage contracts. Once you mention prenubs and contracts, people will push bad against yucky sounding terms. Not realizing that they are just accepting the government's default prenub and marriage contract.
Churches should be helping men setup Nevada Asset Protection Trusts (NAPT), only two states offer zero exception creditors, including divorcing spouses, and Nevada is one of them.
I do not know much about it other than reading this bare set of facts, but the UK has apparently explored fobbing off divorces to religious (mostly Islamic) arbitration. The author I read this from saw it as a bad development.
Something else to consider is how modern family court puts the personal lives under careful judicial supervision moderated by court-ordered experts. If your parenting does not conform to secular expectations, the opposing parent can apply expert (read priestly) authority to gain more rights to authority over children and perhaps to property.
So in truth to develop on one of the themes in your essay here, the original authority of the father from Roman law (modified by the Normans, then the English, then the Americans, and then by the followers of Anna Freud and others) has instead shifted to the authority of the judge who may preside if either party to the marriage files the packet of paperwork and pays the filing fee.
Either party to the marriage may request judicial supervision of the dissolution. The judge then has authority over most things, but must go through a lot of procedure to completely extinguish the parental rights of a parent such that even child molesters and murderers are very unlikely to lose all parental rights. The judge does not have the right to kill any family member outright (the ultimate Roman paternal right), but the judge may in the absence of a settlement by the parties micro manage just about every aspect of the former family's life including filling out a scheduling chart for each member of the family until all children are emancipated.
But you may extinguish without much trouble perhaps 97% or 99% of a parent's rights to their children without offending the Constitution.
However, the judge-sitting-as-father can still kill family members for disobedience if the judge issues a court order (such as an ordinary restraining order), a family member disobeys the law enforcement officer in a manner that appears threatening to that arm of the judge, and then the officer may kill the disobedient stripling. So the patria potestas still survives in the hands of another, entangled somewhat by procedure.
I think you're misstating what libertarians mean when they say that the "government should get out of marriage".
Marriage, after all, is a contract--typically an oral contract with witnesses. As with any other contract, the government is not (or should not be) required to enter into it. However, as with any other contract, if there is a breach or a desire to dissolve the contract absent a mutually acceptable agreement, the court system typically gets involved--again, as with any other contract.
To put it another way, the government is not required to create a marriage. It may be required if there is a violation of it, or a desire to end it without coming to terms otherwise.
I also agree with your economic points. I’m in the top 1-2% by income and don’t feel particularly rich. I feel like my standard of living peaked in 2019 despite substantial raises since then. Of course there’s no reason to think that crippling society and the economy for 2-3 years wouldn’t have an effect.
You certainly fit a lot of great material in these articles- too much to respond to or digest quickly! Maybe shorter would be better…
A few random thoughts:
1. I agree that leadership should ideally come from virtue and persuasion rather than rank. I once attended a talk by an impressive Swiss lawyer named Alexandre Havard who wrote a book titled Virtuous Leadership. It strikes me that we have a desperate absence of such leadership in the world today - how many leaders today are actually admirable?
2. Agree very much so with your comments on marriage. Marriage is the one contract that the law won’t punish you for breaking. In fact, the bad spouse gets the most rewards, such as a loafing spouse who gets long term spousal support as a reward. I saw a situation in my family where a dutiful husband had his life wrecked by a cheating wife who oddly felt perfectly entitled and guilt-free to take him to the wringer, slander him in court filings, etc.
3. Warning signs are often there. In two disastrous marriages in my family, intelligent men had ample warning that the women were unstable and went ahead anyway. Very unfashionable but I would recommend Dr Laura’s books on 10 Stupid Things Men/Women do to Mess Up Their Lives.
4. I personally would not consider marrying a secular or left wing woman in my single days. Other red flags include antidepressants and crazy or abusive parents. But religion is no guarantee. Both of the two disastrous cases I mentioned involved women who were church going. In fact one cheater turned into an ultra-trad homeschooling type while wrecking her family, although she eventually dropped it. (Apparently women on the homeschooling Facebook groups encouraged her to wreck her marriage and destroy her ex-husband and he gives her a minor share of the blame, saying these women seemed to get a kick out of it.)
>Maybe shorter would be better…
Yes, Tom generates a level of engagement that is at least an order of magnitude below what I would expect, given the quality of his writing. Breaking an essay like this into around 3 and releasing them weekly or something would probably generate more engagement. Though I read everything he writes so it doesn't affect me.
As for your comments on warning signs: I still don't know what to think about these. I'm in my 40s, and in every case with which I'm personally familiar in which a woman destroyed her marriage, I could see it coming. As a young man, I was terrified of the prospect of marrying a virtuous-seeming woman only for her to go psycho, like the story you tell of the homeschooling woman. This is partly why I didn't get married until my mid-30s. But in practice, while I can find stories like yours on the Internet, I'm still not personally aware of any. It still seems to be pretty rare.
I live pretty naturally and effortlessly by the Billy Graham Rule, as does my wife, and most of our social circles. But it seems there are plenty of churchgoing people who do not, and I still suspect the vast majority of cheating occurs among people who don't live this way.
>Other red flags include antidepressants and crazy or abusive parents.
Yes -- I encountered these aplenty in my dating days, prior to meeting my wife. My wife still laughs that one of the questions I asked her, after maybe our second or third date, was "What prescription medications are you on?" I still think this is an excellent question that everyone should ask as soon as they can get away with it with a prospective spouse.
And the thing about good in-laws is those will be your kids' grandparents, and it makes your whole life better if they're good people that can provide other positive role models for them, and not lunatics that are adding to your life's stresses.
I've seen outlier cases IRL, but they are rare. Whether researching drug side effects or modern marriage, online is not a representative sample of real life. As for the length of these posts, it's a hobby, not a business, and it's a helpful filter to attract thoughtful readers. Substack already filters audiences nicely, which is why I don't post on Twitter.
Great piece. Also thought Churches should promote better marriage contracts. Once you mention prenubs and contracts, people will push bad against yucky sounding terms. Not realizing that they are just accepting the government's default prenub and marriage contract.
Churches should be helping men setup Nevada Asset Protection Trusts (NAPT), only two states offer zero exception creditors, including divorcing spouses, and Nevada is one of them.
I do not know much about it other than reading this bare set of facts, but the UK has apparently explored fobbing off divorces to religious (mostly Islamic) arbitration. The author I read this from saw it as a bad development.
Something else to consider is how modern family court puts the personal lives under careful judicial supervision moderated by court-ordered experts. If your parenting does not conform to secular expectations, the opposing parent can apply expert (read priestly) authority to gain more rights to authority over children and perhaps to property.
So in truth to develop on one of the themes in your essay here, the original authority of the father from Roman law (modified by the Normans, then the English, then the Americans, and then by the followers of Anna Freud and others) has instead shifted to the authority of the judge who may preside if either party to the marriage files the packet of paperwork and pays the filing fee.
Either party to the marriage may request judicial supervision of the dissolution. The judge then has authority over most things, but must go through a lot of procedure to completely extinguish the parental rights of a parent such that even child molesters and murderers are very unlikely to lose all parental rights. The judge does not have the right to kill any family member outright (the ultimate Roman paternal right), but the judge may in the absence of a settlement by the parties micro manage just about every aspect of the former family's life including filling out a scheduling chart for each member of the family until all children are emancipated.
But you may extinguish without much trouble perhaps 97% or 99% of a parent's rights to their children without offending the Constitution.
However, the judge-sitting-as-father can still kill family members for disobedience if the judge issues a court order (such as an ordinary restraining order), a family member disobeys the law enforcement officer in a manner that appears threatening to that arm of the judge, and then the officer may kill the disobedient stripling. So the patria potestas still survives in the hands of another, entangled somewhat by procedure.
I think you're misstating what libertarians mean when they say that the "government should get out of marriage".
Marriage, after all, is a contract--typically an oral contract with witnesses. As with any other contract, the government is not (or should not be) required to enter into it. However, as with any other contract, if there is a breach or a desire to dissolve the contract absent a mutually acceptable agreement, the court system typically gets involved--again, as with any other contract.
To put it another way, the government is not required to create a marriage. It may be required if there is a violation of it, or a desire to end it without coming to terms otherwise.