If you can forgive me quoting myself:

I’m imagining her prep work would consist of skimming the table of comments of a copy of “Judgin’ for Dummies.”

Yeah, the more I let this particular piece percolate in my mind, the less comfortable I felt with my initial defenses of it. There are some red flags that perhaps his version might be substantially different from the way his exes would describe the whole deal.

Producer 1: Stop using legal terms around Sarah, she doesn’t know what they mean and she keeps dropping them in at random!

Yeah, “celebrity doctor” should be an oxymoron. Once they gain a modicum of fame, they’ll say anything to keep it.

bullshit homeopathy study

Criminy, I’m a random internet commenter, not the nominee for the Supreme Court. What have you achieved by fact-checking me? So I exaggerated? Will you have me indicted now?

Gotcha. I figure in Ted’s case he’ll defeat ISIS by personally offering them free hugs. They’ll instantly disband and flee for the hills. Then he’ll be prosecuted by The Hague for war crimes.

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.