We’ve killed buttloads of ISIS leaders, fighters, etc. The problem is, every time, we also manage to kill a whole bunch of innocents, too, which tends to make their family members ... want to join ISIS.

The part of the story that resonated most with me was the statistics, more than his personal story. In fact, the more I think about his story the less I sympathize with him.

Completely agree. What I would like to see happen is that a realistic amount is levied so that he can rebuild his life and work toward paying what he owes. Not for his sake, but for hers and the kids. We need to let the guilty have a way to make amends when they truly want to do so.

I regret that I wrote that.

Good points across the board. The more I think about this story, the more I wonder how carefully he’s crafted the tale to paint himself in a positive light.

I’m not well-versed enough in California’s system to say if you’re right of wrong. I gathered from the article that it didn’t keep up with his income levels, but if you’re correct, you’ve poked a major hole in his story.

That is a good point. I guess I assumed that he’d been trying and failing to do so, but that probably was a bad assumption on my part.

The systems in place are precisely the point of the article. He’s having a hard time navigating them. Maybe he’s an idiot and they’re not as hard as he makes them out to be, I wouldn’t know. But what he describes sounds fairly Kafkaesque to me.

It sounds like his hardship is a state expecting him to make very large payments while simultaneously taking away his ability to make those payments. And it is for sure, to a great degree, a self-imposed hardship. He bears a lot of blame for the situation he’s in. But it’s still a hardship.

The author himself doesn’t engender a ton of sympathy from me, either, but I do like that he’s bringing attention to a problematic system. If a deadbeat decides he wants to get his shit together and do right, there should be mechanisms in place for him to do that – not for his sake, but for his ex and his children.

I really like the idea of a counterpoint article from the ex. That would be a valuable perspective.

The point of the article was that his child support payments were based on when he was making 6 figures, so no amount of shoveling shit was ever going to get him caught up. He could shovel shit 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and still not meet the payments. That was the point.

The point of ... ?

Nope. I do blame the author for making a series of mistakes that put him in this position. But I can sympathize that his efforts to repair the damage he’s done are stymied by a messed up system.

I fear that the author’s acknowledged mistakes will make most people unsympathetic to his tale. For some reason, we expect that anyone who dares to speak out against an unfair system be beyond reproach.

“I knew a person who had it hard and persevered, so your hardship means nothing!”

It’s kinda like when you have to put a jigsaw puzzle together without the box to guide you. It’s pretty obvious when you complete the puzzle that you’ve figured out the picture, and you don’t really need to the box at that point to confirm that you did it right, but if it happens to turn up, it doesn’t hurt, either.

I mean, we had plenty of reasons already to see him as evil, but this is blatant, overt, generational evil for short-term gain. This policy grew to imprison millions, entrench long-term poverty for multiple generations, justify all manner of state-sponsored evil committed against ordinary citizens ...

Funny how misogyny and racism so often go hand-in-hand. Almost like there’s a root psychology that the two attitudes share ...

I want him to be transformed into a bridge. A specific bridge that I drive over every day when I commute to work. I want him to be that bridge.