It’s not rocket science. Oh, wait. I almost forgot that rocket science is just another tool of the patriarchy. 
https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/elon-musk-spacex-tesla-patriarchy-marcie-bianco-12650189.php
Ironically his go to guy for space x is a woman.
She runs the whole thing for him!
I know that. You know that. But we were talking about law, and the law is a blunt instrument. People love to declare “this should be illegal!” without thinking it through. My argument is that even though the ‘mail order brides’ concept treads the grey edges of the law and is distasteful, attempting to make it illegal would merely make life just that little bit more miserable for the rest of the planet, by catching a whole lot of other stuff in the dragnet. It would not do what you think it would do.
Aiyo. I never said Tinder was doing it. The girls are doing it. I thought I was fairly clear. My point was that when people meet up, there is always space for them to exploit each other. Exploitation is part of the human condition. I was trying to point out that your position lacks internal consistency.
You don’t seem to grasp the difference between “this is not fine” and “this is something I can fix”. There have been a whole bunch of people throughout history who thought they knew what’s best for people and that There Should Be A Law About That. Then when bad stuff happened, they were a bit surprised and thought, oooh, that wasn’t supposed to happen! I never intended that! And yet the stuff they didn’t intend was eminently predictable.
I was being facetious. It was a reference to someone in another thread talking about a girl’s market value.
So you’re suggesting the participants get kidnapped and transported against their will? There are laws about that.
Look, everyone involved knows how it works, and the only person who’s being exploited is the TaiKe who coughs up 200K - because generally speaking, all the girl wants is a residence permit, not a husband, and she’s made a calculated decision as to how to get it. If she actually wanted a husband, she wouldn’t be using those shady “agents”. Hence the 1-year guarantee.
On what basis? How could they cover their costs, which must be substantial?
Anyway, I never said these services are necessary. I said that some people clearly want them. Your view is that the law should decide what they’re allowed to want. Thought crimes are very hard to describe in legal language, which is the main reason there aren’t many of them.
I was challenging you to attempt a watertight description of the thing you disapprove of, without catching the things you don’t disapprove of. If you can do that I’ll happily accept your position.
3 Likes
I’m just amused that someone called ‘Shotwell’ works for a rocket company.
Does this mean Bob Goodlatte should be working at a Starbucks? 
Never met the guy, but I would guess he’s eminently qualified.
yes…yes, of course…
Kinda like Trump v. Harley Davidson right meow?
Ha ha. You a bit off the rocker there if you think “hump-and-dump” is locker room talk.
Relax and watch the Humpty Dance.
If I recall well, lawmakers did intervene to try to ban agencies/brokers. At least we do not have the real estate billboard ads and the buying tours…I think.
I’d be a lot happier if they banned/encarcerated the laborers’ agencies and brokers, but that is just me.
I share Gain’s dislike towards the mail order bride system. But as Finley, I understand the danger of labeling everything dubious and suspicious.
However, if we recall, the problem with the Vietnamese mail order bride business was for example teh virginity guarantee, no escape possible clauses, problems with losing nationality and naturalization, etc. not to mention people buying the woman to bear children and discarding them away. Making them into objects ends up in the ever favorite killing her -while derailing a train- for the insurance money.
The underlying bigger problem is attitude towrads marriage. How can anyone get matrried when they cannot communicate is beyond me. And most of these brides were brought after meeting teh guy once or twice, arranged marriages, to a strange land wher ethey cannot communicate. They are left at the mercy of teh relatives.
My pal was not a mail order bride. She married hubby after meeting him abroad and everything was fine…until he brought her here. She cannot enroll in Chinese lessons without his consent/assiatnce, and without Chinese, she is not independent. So basically now he can do whatever he pleases, threatens to kick her out every day. She cannot go to classes as they have her working in teh family business. She has to work extra hours to pay for her meals.
I have a couple of acuqintance sthat also married Taiwanese abroad. Guy was 40, they were 15. They told the families they would take care of them and flashed a lot of gifts. Let’s just say that teh pretty wives have had very harsh lives here. Eventually, they have come up on their own but it has been too painful.
Remember my Vietnamese neighbor I told you about? She gave teh man 3 sons, and her business is blooming so he does not work anymore. It seemed idyllical. well, seems the guy now is so bored he beats her. Even teh mother in law has threatened to call the cops on him. Sigh.
I didn’t hear about that, but I’m guessing they were able to do so with existing laws, eg., “don’t stick bills here”, or (as I suggested earlier) ad-hoc judgements about what’s socially acceptable on advertisements. And that’s fine. Gain was talking about enacting new legislation that would make these adverts de jure illegal, not just unacceptable on a case-by-case basis. I was merely saying (a.) that would be hard to frame correctly (b.) it’s not necessary and (c.) it wouldn’t make the problem go away.
Ah, now those are far more interesting than mail-order bride agencies, because they’re not simply flying under the radar, making a semi-legal buck from desperate people. That’s government-sponsored people trafficking. I described the Filipino side of the bargain in the post above, and no doubt the Vietnamese have something similar going on.
Here’s the crucial point: because freedom of movement is restricted on the Turd World side, the Old Boy’s Club in Taiwan (or whereever) can kick into action, and you get this unholy mess of bureaucracy bringing out the worst on both sides. If the Philippine government simply allowed their people to seek employment abroad, as Europeans or Americans do, those agencies would disappear overnight because they would serve no purpose. Did you know you can be imprisoned for offering a Filipino a job abroad unless you’re carrying a government license to do so? You can imagine how that one pans out [:hand-under-table-gesture:]
The instances of Vietnamese brides getting treated like skivvies, locked away, and beaten would happen with or without the agencies. The fundamental problem there is unsocialized men finding desperate women to hook up with. But ‘unsocialized men’ and ‘desperate women’ are categories that don’t respect borders. The world is full of them, and they tend to find each other despite nature trying to keep them apart. It’s been an intractable problem since the beginning of time. I’m not saying we shouldn’t attempt to address it - of course we should - but the solution is probably complicated, if one exists at all. “There Should Be A Law Against That” is facile and pointless.
Gain’s approach is a classic:
- Something must be done.
- Here’s something.
- We’re doing something.
Found some stuff on the ban:
https://taiwantoday.tw/news.php?unit=10,23,45,10&post=15587
Implications and lessons from Taiwan: the revised immigration law for marriage migrants
http://onlinepresent.org/proceedings/vol119_2015/9.pdf
Agree with Finley that once you get the law, you get the problem: the open clause on clamping illegitimate mariages is the weapon given to husbands to dump their wives when they do not want them anymore. The wife’s ROC nationality can be removed if the husband accuses her of not being in areal marriage, even if they have had kids/lived together for years. That is a problem.
If we could have mandatory language learning, free from family intervention, that would be one step forward in empowering spouses. Another would be legal counseling, to know your rights before they are taken away. And while we are at it, custody and visitation laws and rights that are enforced and not just a biased on paper, that would be nice. That would be positive aspects of laws. Problem is that now the unsocialized locals have the power from the laws, and desperate women only have ignorance.
Taiwanese like to look down on the brides and their kids, but teh tools for their education are here, available, open. It si not expensive to invest in the future.
2 Likes
The essence of slavery is that someone is held against their will. As a legal bod, you must surely be aware that a contract of outright slavery is technically impossible because it does not involve an offer and acceptance between slave and owner, ie., a mutually-beneficial relationship that the two parties agree upon in good faith.
Obviously slave-like arrangements are possible - bonded servitude or whatever you want to call it - but give me an instance of such a thing occurring without (a) some obvious benefit to both parties and (b) an oppressive State apparatus whose stated goal is to drive the population into destitution, thereby making contracts of bondage attractive.
The essential precondition is (b). In other words, nobody enters into such a contract without deliberate, carefully-constructed moral inversions that permeate an entire society. The lowest of the low in Taiwan is still objectively better, it seems, than what a certain subset of Vietnamese women can expect back home.
Without reference specifically to Vietnam:
If you sell yourself into slavery, obviously there’s some kind of perceived benefit. That’s also how selling an organ works. You may be doing it to feed your family, to buy an ipad (so you can seem rich and therefore get married), to feed your cats, to feed the starving masses, to get into heaven, or for any other reason, whether your plan will actually succeed or not.
If you expect selling the organ to kill you but do it anyway, you’re still doing it for the perceived benefit, and if private law reigns supreme, there’s nothing improper about it.
That’s the thing about absolute freedom of private law. There’s no supervision, so all kinds of absurd situations are allowed to exist in the name of “economic freedom”, yet most people actually don’t want to sell their organs or even to sell their labor under conditions of slavery or utter bleakness (or to live in cages that are more expensive per cubic foot than mansions on the Peak in HK), and even if they want to, they shouldn’t, but they do it anyway out of desperation, and then people say oh look, they agreed to it, and that means they’re “free”, and the economy is “growing”, so everything’s fine!
As I said before:
Which society is stronger, the one where half the population walks around with a missing kidney and the other half is already dead, or the one where the government does its job by regulating things?
If the government were doing its job, nobody would choose to sell their kidneys. The hallmark of a good government is a population with no desire to exchange bits of themselves for green paper rectangles.
It is not the government’s job to regulate things. It’s the government’s job to regulate the right things. Of course, what’s ‘right’ is open to debate, hence the need for politicians, elections, stupid people, talkshows, student marches, and all the other trappings of democracy.
Any government that finds itself in a position where it has to regulate kidney sales screwed up a long, long time ago.
1 Like
This is an excellent idea. The problem I’ve noticed with third-world workers is that they completely fail to understand that they’re no longer in a third-world country where third-world rules apply. On paper at least, Taiwan does have reasonable labour laws and protection for foreign workers. The government can and does support them in cases of abuse. But the workers don’t know that. They think the boss owns them … because that’s how it works back home. And Taiwanese bosses catch onto this, and some of them succumb to the temptation to play along with it.
No doubt a similar situation exists with foreign brides. They’ve tried to leave the third world behind, but they’ve carried it with them in their heads.
it may or may not related to this problem, but last year Taiwan started giving nationality to those who got divorced due to DV, and those who raise minor Taiwanese, or they started counting them separately.
Oh they do not succumb. they also still believe it, dive into it gleefully, the sam eway they evade taxes and cut corners on safety and product quality. These all go hand in hand.
Make syou wonder how poor Taiwan bosses survive if they have to resort to these lenghts to keep the business afloat. Alas, indeed. (please note sarcasm)
It is an education problem for starters. Like, teaching people kidneys do not grow back.
And if you have to teach people what they are worth, as you say, society not just government screwed up long ago.
1 Like