West Memphis Three Freed

I don’t usually waste my time following high profile court cases. For one thing, they smack a bit too much of gossip. For another, the high profile cases are usually pretty stupid. Oh, and they’re always tied in some way to a pretty white girl.

But every now and then I do pay attention, and today is one of those days. Word came out today that the West Memphis Three are finally going to be freed.

Who are the West Memphis Three? They are Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley Jr. and Jason Baldwin from the small town of West Memphis, Arkansas. In 1994 they were convicted of the murder of three eight year old boys - Stevie Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers. Anybody who is interested in the details can find them pretty easily. I’m not going to recap the details here. There is no question that the murders of these three boys were brutal and barbaric.

However, there was one small problem. The case against the West Memphis Three – whom were all teenagers at the time – was pretty shoddy. Again, the details aren’t hard to find, but some of the problems in the case are:

• The initial investigation’s characterization of the murders as part of some “Satanic ritual” is highly questionable.
• A key statement by one of the witnesses was later recanted and she claimed that the police had coerced her into making that statement.
• In an unrecorded police interview, one of the teenagers (Damien Echols) was asked to speculate about how the boys died. His description supposedly gave details that hadn’t been made public yet – but it was later revealed that it had indeed been public information since very shortly after the bodies were found.
• The “confession” of one of the teenagers, Jessie Misskelley Jr. (borderline mentally retarded) was given after a grueling session of police interrogation and was very quickly thereafter recanted. It was later ruled an invalid confession by the Arkansas Supreme Court.
• Forensic analysis later proved that the three victims had not actually been raped as initially assumed.

The case against the boys essentially rested on the pillar that because they were Wiccans and Heavy Metal fans, they must have been guilty of these Satanic ritual killings that very likely weren’t actually Satanic rituals at all.

Are Echols, Misskelley, and Baldwin guilty? I don’t know. But I do know that their trial was a travesty of “justice” and that nobody should be convicted on such flimsy “evidence.” Echols was sentenced to death. Baldwin was sentenced to life in prison. Misskelley was sentenced to life plus forty years.

Today, 18 years after their conviction, they will finally be set free.

Why is this important in a Traditionalist/Manosphere blog? Because this case wasn’t an isolated incident. Those of us old enough to remember the 1980s and early 1990s remember that there were two big “fad scares” going around: Satanic cults and pedophilic child kidnapper-murders were everywhere, or so the nightly news would have us believe. The net result of both fads were a number of people, mostly men, being sentenced to long prison terms for crimes that they very possibly didn’t commit.

We can’t solve every case of injustice, and in many ways the injustices around us are continuing to get worse. But today we can celebrate that these three men who probably (but not definitively) aren’t guilty are being set free.

“Romantic” Movies

One of the things that Hermione and I love to do together is watch movies. We’re both pretty fair movie buffs. Not necessarily the biggest movie buffs out there, but we’ve seen a bunch and we watch a bunch. For example, I’ve rated almost 1200 movies on NetFlix, and those are just the ones that I a) bothered to rate and b) remembered well enough to give an honest rating. Hey, we like movies.

Being movie buffs has been hard lately, though. Some years are good years for movies. Other years not so good. The last two or three years? Outside of superhero movies, frankly, not so good. And inside the genre of superhero movies, it’s still only been hit and miss. Not that there haven’t been some occasional good movies – and a handful of really good ones. But overall, there’s been a bunch of crap.

On top of that, renting decent movies has gotten a lot tougher. As far as we can tell, there’s exactly one video rental store left in town – and it’s roughly a 30 minute drive from our apartment.

Oh, sure – we watch plenty of stuff on NetFlix streaming. We also use the Zune store on our X-Box to rent movies. We’ve also tried other internet movie services. Hulu Plus was kind of a bust for us – nothing worth watching (by our tastes) that we didn’t already have access to. We haven’t done much with Amazon streaming yet because we don’t have a good way to hook it up to our TV, but I plan to fix that this fall. Yes, it seems that there are plenty of automated DVD rental machines at every grocery store these days. And yes, we have access to Pay-Per-View through our cable provider.

But both of these solutions have the same problem: the selection is mostly limited to newer films. Cable PPV and Zune on the X-Box get us most of the new blockbuster films. NetFlix and Zune get most of the newer non-blockbuster films fairly quickly. But the back-catalogs of both NetFlix and Zune are very spotty – lots of stuff (good, bad and mediocre), but also lots of holes in the selection.

Point… point… there was a point here somewhere. Oh yes.

Lately we’ve been in a bit of a movie slump. Not much has been coming out for the last 2-3 years that we’re super interested in seeing. And since our easy “rental” options are mostly newer films, that means that there’s not much in the rental bins that’s worth watching, either. And we’re not terribly keen on paying $15-30 to buy a movie we’re not likely to watch again anytime soon (much less to clutter up our small apartment with it).

But for our anniversary this week, we tried pretty hard to find something romantic worth watching together. We spent a good bit of time combing through the “Romantic” movies sections of all our available options together.

And the options were bad. Much worse than the general movie options, frankly. Almost every film we looked at could be fit into one of the following categories:

• Woman isn’t happy with her husband/boyfriend and finds a much better relationship with the guy she’s sleeping with on the side.
• Spoiled American Princess is waiting for mister-too-perfect-to-be-real to show up and sweep her off her feet.
• Woman skanks it up on vacation, in college, or for no particular reason at all.
• Woman is pregnant, doesn’t know who the father is.
• The one night stand.

How are these romance? Sexy? Perhaps for some people. They may not be my thing, but I can at least get that. But romantic? You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

So here we are on our anniversary, and all we really want is a halfway decent movie that involves a couple that actually stays faithful to each other and ends happily ever after. Maybe a little humor would be good, too, with a little bit of sexiness thrown in. You know, something worthy of an anniversary. So sue us – we’re not looking for anything deep this time. And the few that we can find, we’ve already seen a dozen times.

Seriously, what the hell?

A Marriage By Any Other Name

In a recent post I mentioned that perhaps the best feature of getting married is having somebody who is fully and completely committed to being on your team. The following question was posed by Acksiom in the comments:

And the marriage-neutral response (i.e., MGTOW indifference to it, not MRA opposition) remains, as always, that they can do it right and manage it with the right person without getting married at all, so why should they bother?

The answer is pretty simple, but I thought it worthy of its own post.

To put it bluntly, if you “..can do it and manage it with the right person” then you are in a de facto marriage, whether you call it that or not.

I’m sure by now that all of my readers are well aware of the great debate about gay “marriage” in the United States. My position for some time has been that I no longer care. I do believe that it weakens the institution of marriage – I just also believe that the legal institution of marriage is so far gone that it just doesn’t matter anymore. I also agree with the traditionalist position on this one: this is another attempt by leftists to redefine words so that they no longer have any real meaning.

Words have power when they mean something. Extremists of all sorts know this – it’s why they go to such great lengths to control how words are used and what they mean. When words stop meaning things, they lose their power. As the word marriage has come to convey less and less of its original meaning it has lost more and more of its power. Easy and common divorce was the biggest blow to the word. If marriage no longer means “’til death do us part” then it’s lost a big chunk of its power as a word.

But by the same token, The Bard had it right all the way back in 1582:

What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;

If you enter into a relationship where you’re living with a woman, she’s “on your team” no matter what, you love each other, you’ve got a sexual relationship, and your financial lives are intertwined, that relationship is a marriage whether you call it that or not.

A little known fact: out of the seven sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church, marriage is the only one that is not administered by a priest. When two baptized Christians are married, they are administering the sacrament on each other.

The husband and wife must validly execute the marriage contract. In the Roman Catholic tradition, it is the spouses who are understood to confer marriage on each other. The spouses, as ministers of grace, naturally confer upon each other the sacrament of matrimony, expressing their consent before the church. This does not eliminate the need for church involvement in the marriage; under normal circumstances, canon law requires the attendance of a priest or deacon and at least two witnesses for validity (see canons 1108–1116).

Neither is this kind of tradition only Catholic. For centuries English Common Law (which forms the basis for much law in all of the English speaking world, not just in England) recognized common law marriage for centuries. Many jurisdictions in the Anglosphere (including Washington, DC and ten states) still do recognize it. In short, if you act like you’re married, the law considers you married (in these jurisdictions).

Call it whatever you want. Hell, the term “marriage” is pretty battered and bruised as it is. It’ll probably appreciate getting ignored for a bit instead. But a rose by any other name is still a rose.

Off Sides

As a counterpoint to yesterday’s post, if you and your spouse are not on the same side then your marriage is doomed to failure. It’s a question of when, not if. If you’re not absolutely sure that your partner is truly willing to commit to being on your side, don’t get married. That is all.

Anniversary

My fourth wedding anniversary is this week. It approaches shortly in the wake of a… well, let’s just say a rather large and unexpected slap in the face from my parents, of all people. It’s a bit of a story, and the details would just be a bit too identifying if certain people stumbled across it. Besides that, there’s not much of a way to talk about it without just sounding whiny. Last but not least, it’s more than a little embarrassing that my parents would behave that way. But it’s big enough that Hermione, Primus and I will be pulling out of an upcoming family event in response.

What does this have to do with my anniversary? Well, it puts me in mind of another fictional quote:

I am not altogether on anybody’s side, because nobody is altogether on my side.

–Treebeard, from The Two Towers by J. R. R. Tolkien.

A simple quote, but anybody who has swallowed the Red Pill is well familiar with it. It’s applied to me my whole life. Politics? Democrat or Republican, none of them is on my side. Cliques in school? None of them is on my side. Employers? None of them has been on my side (except perhaps my current job – I’m extremely lucky in that). Even “best friends” and surrogate father figures (another story for another day), not altogether on my side. And right now, as so many other times in my life, even family – not altogether on my side.

When I was dating Hermione, long before we got married, my uncle asked me a deceptively simple question: “Why her?” What is it about her that makes her so special? At the time I didn’t have a good answer for him. The best I could vocalize was something along the lines of, “Just because.” But over the years I’ve come to understand exactly what it is. Once upon a time I was lucky enough to find one person who is altogether on my side, or at least who was willing to be. All she asked in return was that I be willing to be altogether on her side. So I did the only sensible thing: I married her.

There’s a strong anti-marriage sentiment in the manosphere. I get it, I really do. The rules of the institution have been twisted, and they’re pretty stacked against us men right now. It should make men think pretty hard before they go through with it. But for those who question so much why they should risk it, there’s one simple answer – the same answer for both men and women. If you do it right, and you manage it with the right person, you really can find somebody who is altogether on your side.

My marriage, like all marriages, isn’t perfect. If it were, this blog wouldn’t exist. But there’s one thing, the most important thing, that we managed to get right from the beginning: we’re on the same side. And that alone is worth everything else, even if I need to be reminded of it sometimes.

Thanks, dear, and happy anniversary.