Good Lord.

29 thoughts on Good Lord.

1. The part I find most messed up about this is the part of the emails that could have been written by any random right winger/freeper about about dissent against the war in Iraq = being unpatriotic, and the egotistical notion that there is anything in common between his parents loosing their home to a communist regieme and him loosing his home because the wife he oppressed finally stood up for herself.

2. The division of assets should be made, based on the contribution each person. There is no rational explanation for the present method. An automatic division is only giving more incentives to divorce. Cordula did not work for 15 years and still she is supposed to get more than 50%.

   Ooooooh. I have heard this logic before. When my ex-husband and I divorced he claimed he should get more of the assets than me because I had not brought in as much money as him during our marriage. I left a good job I had been at for 4 years to marry him and move to his new duty station and then worked full-time for most of our marriage.

   I had a few short periods of unemployment due to silly little things like childbirth/maternity leave and transfers for his job (career military). I also stayed home with the baby so he could get his graduate degree at night school while I put off getting mine. And, its not easy getting work when you are a military wife and they know you will leave the area within 3 years, you tend to end up with entry-level positions. In short, my earning power went down by marrying him and starting a family while his maintained and even went up. My monetary contribution to the marriage was foregoing the same financial stability that he was enjoying.

   But to him and other like him, these activities did not generate revenue so therefore I was an income slacker and deserved less. Luckily, the Hawaii courts (no-fault state) disagreed with him and saw that a 50/50 split was fair (I also got 50% of the debt as well, it wasn’t all a big windfall). Really, it came down to his pride. How dare I leave him and not be financially devastated in the process??

   For the record, I waived any right to alimony or his military retirement (my attorney told me I was entitled to both), just to help move things along and still I am thought of as a golddigger.

   Just the other day my ex-father-in-law made a comment about how his son had “given” me the house (we had two, I got one along with accompanying mortgage as did he). All these years later and the idea still persists that our marital assets were “his” and I “took” them from him when I left by somehow unfairly working the legal system.

3. How… weird. This guy needs a shrink. Not Ahhnold.

4. Wait… what? He’s dead? WHAT?

   Oops. Too late for the shrink.

5. Oh… He’s not dead! (Can you tell I’m blabbering as I go along reading the rest of the stuff on this wacko?)

   Bring back the shrink. That’s right.

6. Make it two shrinks… My amazing reading skills have vanished along with what was left of my sanity.

7. When slowly she started to work I never saw her money it went to her personal account in a bank in Netherlands

   Shouldn’t that have been the guy’s clue that she was getting a little tired of him?

8. My favorite part is actually that the house would have never been an issue if he hadn’t been so stubborn – in the original court decision, it was decided that the house wasn’t marital property, but becuase he was so selfish, he appealed the decision, and the appellate court not only found against him, but threw in the house as well!

9. So he’s not dead yet, though he meant to die in “his” house? So he’s not only a vicious pig, he’s an incompetent vicious pig. What a gem.

   Anyone who thinks she has a quarrel with Linda Hirschman ought to be reading this — the news story and these two posts and the reply strings.

10. Any guy who’s too dumb to get a prenup forfeits any right to whine when his wife leaves him.

11. Let’s hope the kids take after their mother, both in brains and personality. Because if they take after this incompetent wacko, they’re screwed!

12. Fuck you, New York, and your fucking lack of no-fault divorce.

    Uh. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

    *incoherent mumbling* easy to get a divorce in NY… whyioughta…

    In other news, is it wrong that I find this all a leetle bit amusing? Just a tad. Since no one (but him) was seriously injured (or so a friend told me)… I mean it’s unfortunate and sad too. But he’s so freaking delusional.

13. The greedy pig got lost what he deserved.

14. The “got” in that last comment was supposed to have a strike-out line. It obviously didn’t work.

15. He’s parroting the lines FR assholes and misogynists recite in cases like Darren Mack–the bitch made him do it! The courts made him do it! He was driven to it because he didn’t get what he wanted!

    No, Sparky, you cannot have a pony.

16. Not that I am defending him or his actions, but those letter exceprts make him sound mentally ill. I would guess clinical depression, but I am not an MD and the letter excerpts are insufficient even for an MD to make a diagnosis. I don’t think he is dumb or a wacko; I think he is ill.

17. Well then, most of the MRA/FR assholes out there are just as mentally ill, since they insist that men who kill their estranged wives and children are driven to do it.

18. Being a misogynist abusive dumbass whiny asshole and being mentally ill are not mutually exclusive.

19. My brother died because his wife was able to divorce him

    Sorry, just had to frame that one little snippet, marvel at it, gaze into its depths and ponder its place in the universe.

    As to the rest, well, he didn’t kill her and he got himself out of the world’s hair. I hope his plan to make her feel sorry was an utter failure and she’s relieved that the intensely unstable man who so hated her is gone. What a deeply miserable life he must have had.

20. Ooops, missed the part where he got dragged out of the building. I don’t like to say this sort of thing often, but I think I have to call that a crying shame.

21. True, RR. Veeery true.

    I think these people are more likely to have personality disorders (narcissistic, anti-social, etc.) rather than psychosis. They know full well what reality is, and they know right from wrong. They just think they are above all that.

22. The NYT today reports that he considered his daughters failures –one is a chef in NYC and the other is a designer for Nike. He called them a “cook and a seamstress,” and blamed his wife for their “failure.”

23. Kat, my divorce settlement was so bad for me my lawyer wrote me a CYA letter about it before letting me sign, and I’m a lawyer. After getting our house in Florida on the beach plus 100% of the value of the business he started from scratch during our marriage while I worked “for the man” (and therefore was to be sneered at), he tried to get me to pay the taxes on some phantom income from the same partnership where he got 100% of the value, even though I got nothing from it. Unfortunately, our agreement said split the taxes and did not take this into account. I was hanging tough, by lawyer was advising me to cave, and finally, by threatening to file a separate return which would lock in a higher rate on his ENTIRE income, I made him cave, but you should have heard the whining. OOOOh I’m such a victim with my $500,000 from the partnership, house on the beach and $40,000 car. The car I got had a trade in value of $1000, I got nothing from the partnership, and the house I got was no where near water (and worth a lot less). But just like you, I was the greedy one. The good news is we’re both divorced, and the prenup for my current marriage is tighter than a drum.

24. No, Sparky, you cannot have a pony.

    …uh… was there ever any chance he could? (cringe)

25. I don’t support blowing shit up in the middle of New York. But is the whole equal division of assets totally unquestionable from a feminist perspective? I know MRAs support it. But if I got married wouldn’t want the whole concept of marital property applying to me: I’d like what is mine pre-marriage to remain mine, what I earn to be mine, that to remain the case after a divorce, and not to be responsible for my spouses debts. I think being able to maintain financial independence like this would be a good thing. Why the hostility to it? Is it just because MRAs support the idea?

    The idea that spouses pool property is one of the few hold overs from much less enlightened days. The basic idea was that women were incapable of looking after themselves and needed a claim on their husbands money. Most of the other stuff from then is obviously objectionable and has been done away with, why not do away with this?

26. Nik, the idea behind pooling marital money has a lot to do with what the lower-earning spouse gives up. In this case, the wife had a doctorate and quit her career to raise their children — though, apparently not to his liking, considering his dismissive comments about the careers they’ve chosen. The earning power she forewent could be considered value added to the marriage to her later detriment should he no longer support her. And that’s what happened. She’s been out of the workforce for years, raising his children.

    In any event, she didnt’ get an equal share in the house because a good deal of the interest in the house had been owned by his parents, and some of that he distributed to his daughters. He had to sell because the claims she had to the rest of the marital estate were sufficient that he couldn’t satisfy them and keep the house.

27. Nik, what you bring to the marriage in terms of assets is normally not considered part of the marital estate unless you co-mingle it with marital assets. In equitable distribution states, even marital assets are divided up based on length of the marriage and relative contributions, so if you plunked down a million on a house using premarital assets, titled it in both your names, and your wife contributed nothing, then you divorced in a year, in an equitable distrubtion state you’d probably get the house. However, other states are different, especially those with community property like CA. Best bet is to have a pre nup if your assets are substantial. My husband offered to sign one without being asked because I own two office buildings and make a big bundle more than him. I made sure he was protected in the document in terms of getting the house we live in if I die (I’m contractually bound not to will it away even though it is in my name). That was the only thing he wanted, and I thought it was more than fair. The whole thing was a good chance to talk about money and long term expectations. Both of us felt financially burned by our divorces, so covering our downsides in the future appealed to us both, even though I obviously get the greater protection with my greater assets and income. I’ve got to say, that if either one of us quit to be Mr. or Ms. Mom, it would probably be fair to renegotiate more in favor of the stay-at-home person, because like zuzu said, having a dad-nanny would allow me to keep making the big bucks, and it would only be fair to entitle my stay-at-home spouse to a share of my post-divorce income for putting his career on hold. Unfortunately, the law has to feel its way through these concepts with broadly general rules that will not always seem fair in every situation. Just remember we are only a decade or less from the normal divorce allowing major support payments for the wife, who is now more likely to get rehabilitative alimonry so she can learn a skill and work if she has no means of supporting herself. Still a fairly harsh result for someone who has not worked in maybe 20 years, but that’s where things are headed.

28. Surfed on in from Pandagon. This Bartha guy is a piece of work. Apparently, he’d also sent this 7419 word letter/diary/aubiography to Fox “News”, which actually printed it in it entirety on its site. I’m permalinking to this post in my “Twenty Bucks, Same as in Town” blogwhoring feature, but I’ll be going on at greater length about this Bartha clown in this weekend’s Assclowns of the Week.

29. Here from Pandagon. I have to say that this:

    Life passed me by and I could not achieve everything I planed.

    is the funniest part of the rant. Hi, Crazy Guy? Most people don’t get to achieve everything they’ve planned to achieve. It’s called “life”.

    And it’s super funny that he blames his unfulfilling, unsatisfying life on his wife. It’s called ‘a grip’, and he needs to find one, stat.

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