Last Thursday, Tasmania’s Lower House of parliament passed a bill which, if ratified by the Upper House next month, will make the Apple Isle the first state of Australia to legalize gay marriage.
It’s not going to happen: for one thing, the states have no jurisdiction over the Marriage Act, a Commonwealth law. That the bill even got as far as it has, is an artefact of Tasmania’s unique electoral arrangements. The Lower House (Legislative Assembly) uses the Hare-Clark electoral system, in which the state is divided into five electorates, each sending five members to the parliament. While affording an accurate reflection of the will of the electorate, Hare-Clark effectively guarantees that neither Labor nor the Liberals will be able to govern in their own right, and that that the Greens will hold the balance of power indefinitely. It also means that if ever I have cause to contact my state government regarding matters of legislation, I need to write five letters, to politicians of wildly differing persuasions. No easy task.
The Upper House (Legislative Council), by contrast, is composed of representatives of fifteen single-member electorates and, with one Labor and one Liberal member alongside thirteen independents (most of whom have party affiliations but regularly cross the floor), remains firmly conservative, as my own member’s inaugural speech amply demonstrates.
In the unlikely event that the bill passes the Upper House and is gazetted into Tasmanian law, preparations are already being made for a High Court challenge, from a number of sources, including the Australian Christian Lobby, and (possibly) the Federal Government itself. Gillard has painted herself into a corner on this issue, declaring that “marriage is between a man and a woman”, and angering many gay marriage activists; this despite her undergraduate dalliances with groups holding diametrically opposite views on the subject, and despite, as National President of the Australian Union of Students, supporting an AUS motion declaring 1983 to be “The International Year of the Lesbian”.
In one way, it is quite symbolic. Tasmania, politically separated from New South Wales in 1856 as the colony formerly known as Van Diemen’s Land, inherited its statute on the matter from English Common Law, which in turn dates back to 1533, when Thomas Cromwell (great-great-great uncle of Old Ironsides and Chief Minister of Henry VIII) pushed through the English Parliament An Acte for the Punysshement of the Vice of Buggerie. The original punishment for offences against this law,
…the offenders being hereof convicted by verdict confession or outlawry shall suffer such pains of death and losses and penalties of their good chattels debts lands tenements and hereditaments as felons do according to the Common Laws of this Realm. And that no person offending in any such offence shall be admitted to his Clergy…
was not softened (to life imprisonment) until 1861, that is, five years too late to make any difference to homosexual Vandemonians. Indeed, as late as 1997, sodomy in Tasmania remained a criminal offence, punishable by up to twenty-five years in prison. Pressure for change did not arise until the mid-1970s, when the Tasmanian Homosexual Law Reform Group was founded by a then-unknown Launceston doctor named Bob Brown. Being disappointed by the indifference to change by successive state governments, it finally took an appeal to the United Nations Human Rights Committee by Tasmanian citizen Nicholas Toonen, who argued that the state law proscribing homosexual acts violated his right to privacy under Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which Australia was signatory. He also argued that, since the law covered male homosexual acts but not lesbian acts, it also violated Article 26 of the same Covenant.
In 1994, after three years of bureacracy and delays (during which time the state government pressured the Tasmanian AIDS Council into sacking Toonan from his position as General Manager), the UNHRC upheld the complaint; the subsequent refusal of the Tasmanian government to change its law led to the Keating Federal government passing the Human Rights (Sexual Conduct) Act 1994, which invalidated the Tasmanian statute. After a failed High Court challenge to the constitutionality of the Federal Act, the state law was formally repealed. Tasmania thus became the last state in Australia to legalize homosexual acts between consenting adults.
Got to admire his guts: gay rights campaigner Nick Toonan was married overseas in 2007. A decade earlier, kissing the one he loved, even in private, could have landed him in the slammer.
From a Libertarian perspective, it boils down to this: sexuality is at the core of human existence, one of the most basic attributes by which we define ourselves. This makes it a natural target for totalitarians, be they Church or State. By controlling human sexuality, the Leviathan controls us. This makes any State regulation of sexual behaviour between consenting adults anathema to anyone upholding the liberty of the individual. It is to me, however, ironic beyond words that it took an appeal to as one-world, undemocratic and totalitarian a body as the United Nations to guarantee one of the most fundamental liberties a human being can have.
So much for the legality of homosexual acts. Marriage, however, is another issue entirely, and I am convinced much of the brouhaha surrounding the current debate centres around the conflation, deliberate or otherwise, of these two very separate subjects. You aren’t born married. You can make a conscious and voluntary decision to marry. Or to stop being married. This is very different from sexual orientation, which you do not choose, but which chooses you. One concerns what you do; the other, what you are.
I can’t speak completely objectively about marriage, of course. Nor can any of us. Whether or not you’re married, or whether your parents were happily married, unmarried, badly married, separated, divorced, or even unknown to one another, your own unique life experiences will colour your views on the topic. As with so many issues that touch on the personal, there is a tendency for any debate to be shaped by defensiveness, as if somehow any views contrary to our own represent a potential threat, or an invalidation or belittling of our own life story. And while I’m not a psychiatrist, I strongly suspect that this subjective and emotional need for validation and inclusion, rather than an argument from higher principles, is behind a large part of the push for legalization of gay marriage. A false dichotomy is created, wherein anyone who even questions the advisability of changes to the Marriage Act is deemed ipso facto a homophobic, bigoted, ignorant, fascist, bible bashing, knuckle-dragging…
Libertarian? I’ve been on the receiving end of more than one spray of this kind. And strangely enough, never from gays. In fact, most of the gays and lesbians I know are remarkably benign on the whole issue; those in relationships have no interest in marrying, are completely comfortable in their own skin and neither need nor want any official state sanction of their private affairs; indeed, as one gay remarked to me, why would he want to buy into an institution which for thousands of years has been the domain of the Church, for whom poof-persecution has been a perennial recreational activity, or even spectator sport. Many of their loudest and most virulent anti-gay moralists have turned out to be closet queers themselves. Just goes to show.
Which brings me to my next point: the slippery slope. I’m taking the liberty of cutting and pasting from something I wrote last month over at Knotted Prop:
One of the issues being put up against gay marriage is the “slippery slope” argument, which has some merit. Already on the fringe of the LGBTXYZ (placeholders added for future additions) movement down here is something calling itself the “poly community”, meaning polyamorous. Essentially, they are saying that if a man and two women, or for that matter, six men and six women, want to set up house and share love equally then they should not be unfairly discriminated against by being excluded from the institution of marriage. Although seen by some as a stalking horse for the Muslims, the “poly” community actually goes much further in its demand for what it regards as equality under the law.
Then there’s paedophilia. Now, no paedo activist is ever going to come straight out and demand the right to have sex with children and even marry them. What they will do instead is gradually push for a lowering of the age of consent. “If sixteen is OK, then why not fifteen? If fifteen, then why not fourteen?” And so on. If they play their cards right (and they have), they can make it appear as though this push is actually coming from children themselves! Seeing as the prophet Mohammed married a nine-year old, the paedos would seem to have long-range and far-reaching plans in this area. One former politician in this country is widely rumoured to have told friends he wants the age of male homosexual consent lowered to ten. Which sums it up.
After that, the floodgates open. Already respected academic Peter Singer, to whom I have referred at my place several times, has written approvingly about what he calls “zoophilia”, which you and I know as bestiality. How unjust is it to forbid a pop star and a chimpanzee who truly love one another from becoming married? Incestuous marriages are the next step after that; once you start breaking taboos so old that we have almost forgotten why we have them in the first place, it’s impossible to know when to stop breaking.
In all of this, those agitating for liberalization of the law are counting on the unwillingness of lawmakers and the public to draw a definite line, and ridicule anyone who suggests they should, or that a “slippery slope” even exists at all. As a Libertarian, I’m all for less laws that are not specifically connected to property rights and the protection of life and limb. But there’s an issue of responsibility here as well. The institution of marriage is a societal bargain; rights are conferred on those who enter into it, in exchange for responsibilities; primarily, fidelity and the good upbringing of children. Marriage in its traditional definition gives a woman a secure material environment, beyond her years of reproductivity and physical attractiveness; a man gains exclusive sexual access to his wife, and a guarantee of paternity of the children he works to raise. Rights and responsibilities, the same mantra I’ve been repeating for years.
What we are witnessing today, however, is a push for rights, without a corresponding guarantee of increased responsibilities: irresponsible rights. As much as we regard “love” as fundamental to marriage, the institution and societal bargain of marriage isn’t predicated on love at all. Nor is it designed for the purpose of “inclusiveness”, or to otherwise make people feel better (or at least, less worse) about themselves. Marriage is designed for the purpose of rearing children, and socializing them so they will enter adulthood as functioning, positive members of society and not asocial menaces. Which is exactly what we are seeing in society today, not uncoincidentally a generation after the institution of marriage first began to weaken in the West.
As to individual choices, who are we to judge if two sentient adults (or three, or six) who love each other want to set up house together? Good luck to them. And God knows, there are enough terrible conventional marriages around, and enough healthy gay relationships, to take seriously those who want to at least look at the marriage law as it stands. If it leads to a reduction of some of the more silly traditional bigotries, so much the better. But when you start tinkering with ancient institutions, it’s worth remembering exactly why they are ancient, and why they have stood the test of time.
The slippery slope argument has already been made far more eloquently by others; the most cogent observation about the guarantees earnestly made by gay marriage advocates, that any changes to the Marriage Act will definitely end with their type of relationships, is that those guarantees are simply not theirs to make, as they are made on behalf of other groups whom they do not control, and whose interests lie precisely in not imposing any such limitations. You cannot set a precedent on your own behalf, and not expect anyone else who sees potential advantage in invoking it, to portray that precedent as a general principle and not a special case.
After all, if you wish to have tomorrow’s society accept and permit something which it condemns and abhors today, how would you go about it? You wouldn’t just march on down to your parliament and demand that politicians change the law. No, it would take a decades-long process, involving working through the arts and the media, gradually “normalizing” whatever it is you are trying to persuade society to accept. Homosexuality was barely mentioned in western literature before the 1960s; E.M. Forster’s Maurice, written in 1914, was not published until the author’s death in 1970 at the age of 91; Victim (1961), starring Dirk Bogarde as a lawyer facing blackmail, was the first feature film which openly canvassed the topic, and in fact the first English-language film which even scripted the word homosexual. The arts are always in advance of general public opinion in matters of progressive social change; six years after the cinematic release of Victim, the UK parliament passed the Sexual Offences Act (1967), decriminalizing private homosexual acts between consenting adults.
Does this history provide a roadmap for others wishing to legitimize, or “normalize”, their private behaviour, as a precursor to changing the law? Or are our laws underwritten by a core, absolute moral code which precludes this? If the latter, and yet we go ahead anyway and alter the definition of marriage, then we have no choice but to recognize that the definition of marriage that has persisted for thousands of years was always wrong, and that untold suffering has been wrought upon innocent victims as a result. If the former, then it is highly likely that, one hundred years from now, anyone opposing paedophilia will be treated with the same contempt and derision as those who today continue to oppose the legalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults. I simply can’t see any middle way between the two.
I’m personally fortunate in that my own parents were happily married for forty-three years, and indeed four of my five siblings are so today. None of them are gay, though if they were, it may possibly have had some impact upon my views. But today (it being Fathers’ Day here in Australia), I am compelled to reflect upon the fact that the institution of marriage, founded as it is upon a balance of rights and responsibilities, in the final analysis doesn’t exist for the benefit of adults at all.
Be Responsible - Be Free! 
When the employees (elected and appointed) of civil government confer recognition upon the establishment of a contractual relationship, there are material benefits accruing thereunto. This is particularly noteworthy with regard to the clear articulation of property rights.
It can be argued that the practice of marriage has never been more than secondarily concerned with organized religion. The gods (or a God) are invoked by the prevailing shamans in order to confer some kind of sanctity smell, and chiefly that seems always to have been to the primary benefit of the witch doctors. It’s really not necessary for the establishment of domesticity or even the propagation of the next generation.
Note the concept of “common law marriage” in Western jurisprudence.
So what we’re arguing about here – matrimony among the dykes and the Feygelen according to their peculiar appetites – might have something to do with these sexual heretics’ desire ” to legitimize, or ‘normalize’, their private behaviour,” but that’s not really relevant.
What can’t be evaded is the fact that government thugs’ formal recognition of a marital relationship confers real advantages on the participants therein, no matter what their gender, race, religion, age, or reproductive capacities might be.
To argue that tochus-schtupping fairies and snatch-snuffling lesbians are less entitled to those same government services than are their cement-headed straight clown (CHSC) brethren is altogether too much like refusing recognition of the marital contract among the Darkies and the Yids and the Chinks and the other Untermenschen.
It really is a civil rights issue, in precisely the sense that the concept of civil rights defines the relationship between each private citizen and the corrupt gun-wielding extortionate donut-eating grafting overpaid responsibility-shirking government thug.
You’re right Tucci: I should have put in there somewhere that civil unions now exist on most statute books, convey pretty much all the material advantages such as inheritance and superannuation as does marriage, and are so unremarkable that no-one in fact bothers remarking on them. Including me. Civil unions are essentially, as you describe, marriage without the hoodoo. Several of the gay relationships I mentioned above use them – Oz
Tucci wrote:-
“It really is a civil rights issue, in precisely the sense that the concept of civil rights defines the relationship between each private citizen and the corrupt gun-wielding extortionate donut-eating grafting overpaid responsibility-shirking government thug. ”
FB muses: that being the case, what are the arguments against abolishing the Marriage Acts, Civil Union legislation etc, and leaving all such matters under the Law of Contracts, which law seems perfectly capable of providing exactly the same protections to the individual?
Tucci,
Absolute brilliance.
So long as it isn’t under age, and so long as it consents, and we’re not keeping the neighbours awake, then the fat blue line have no business in my bedroom.
Regarding the various tax allowences, and inheritance laws – if the state wasn’t stealing and messing with property rights, then there is no reason for the state to be involved in “marriage”
It’s a case of one unreasonable intervention spawning more unreasonable interventions.
Izen’s keeping very quiet on this.
Has he taken to swallowing his opinion rather than spitting it all out?
I’d written: “It really is a civil rights issue, in precisely the sense that the concept of civil rights defines the relationship between each private citizen and the corrupt gun-wielding extortionate donut-eating grafting overpaid responsibility-shirking government thug. “
…and farmerbraun had responded: “that being the case, what are the arguments against abolishing the Marriage Acts, Civil Union legislation etc, and leaving all such matters under the Law of Contracts, which law seems perfectly capable of providing exactly the same protections to the individual?”
No problem whatsoever. Wasn’t I just arguing for nothing more than a leveling of government services in this issue?
Tucci:”No problem whatsoever. Wasn’t I just arguing for nothing more than a leveling of government services in this issue?”
FB: Yes you were. But what are the arguments against such a move?
Regarding the abolition of statutes such as “the Marriage Acts, Civil union legislation etc, and leaving all such matters under the Law of Contracts,” I had responded:
“No problem whatsoever. Wasn’t I just arguing for nothing more than a leveling of government services in this issue?” to which farmerbraun had extended:
“Yes you were. But what are the arguments against such a move?”
None whatsoever, insofar as reasoned and reasonable opposition can be concerned. A government goon’s recognition of your neighbor’s leasehold on his place of business (for example) cannot theoretically or practically degrade your own lease on the entirely separate office or shop across town in which you serve your customers, and in actually would tend reliably secondarily to stabilize and sustain the value of that rental contract in which you are engaged.
It’s difficult to imagine that anyone would be asking me in this forum to voice “arguments against such a move” when I’ve explicitly expressed my opinion that such a move would be a perfectly acceptable course of action.
I can speculate on what the average religious/traditionalist/”social” conservative would scream when confronted by such a straightforward appreciation of marriage as a civil rights issue, but because these flaming idiots are invariably reduced to invocation of the Great Sky Pixie or some other fantabulous ineffibility, what role have they in reasoned discourse of any kind?
FB:” But what are the arguments against such a move?”
Tucci : “None whatsoever, insofar as reasoned and reasonable opposition can be concerned.”
FB : “Where is ‘the average religious/traditionalist/ ”social” conservative ‘ when we need him/her to further the discussion? 🙂 Farmerbraun, similarly, is unable to imagine any coherent argument which might be made against “leaving all such matters under the Law of Contracts, which law seems perfectly capable of providing exactly the same protections to the individual?”
Good idea FB; we should try to round up a traditionalist or two. As a tentative answer to your question, perhaps it is because at law, contracting parties must all be adults – Oz
Well the slippery slope has started in formerly catholic christian Brazil which legalized gay marriage. a man was allowed to marry his two brides on the grounds that Brazilian law no longer forbade it on human rights grounds.
Luton Ian define underage in Denmark the age of consent is 14, it;s 16 in the UK and 15 in Scotland.
It can vary the world over…..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent
In the USA age of consent can vary here in Tennessee it’s 18 yet if I go a mere four miles South of me to Mississippi it’s 16. So whose civil rights are being violated?
Memories of the 80s and a Bronski Beat album called “age of consent” at that time it was 21 for gay, 16 for straight and no limits for dykes. The gay one was simply ignored.
Was it arkansas or Missouri which had 12 as an age of consent?
Consenting to sexual congress is not quite the same thing as contracting to live together and raise children, or whatever it is that the parties agree to enter into.
It would make sense to restrict entry into legally binding contracts to only those who have attained their majorities.
What I meant was, children born out of a marriage are not signatories to a contract. They had no say in their arrival, nor chose their parents. If children were not involved, then I would definitely agree marriage should be a straight contractual affair, outside the state. But that’s not the world we live in – Oz
The age of consent has varied over time and has generally increased as better health and longer lifespans have become more common.
Hells bells! FB might be with the traditionalists in arguing that a child has a right to establish their natural gender identity, free of confusing role models. Is this possible where both parents have the same gender? I’m excluding the sperm donor and /or the embryo carrier from the parent description, and referring to the couple who do the child -rearing.
age of consent for sex versus age of consent for marriage, hmmm.
one of the comments to this song said, “if she’s old enough to drop an egg, she’s old enough”
Perhaps not! I don’t think an abortion does anyone’s emotional wellbeing much good, at any age, though taking precautions doesn’t seem to correlate with age in the same way that fertility does.
Writes farmerbraun: “Consenting to sexual congress is not quite the same thing as contracting to live together and raise children, or whatever it is that the parties agree to enter into.
It would make sense to restrict entry into legally binding contracts to only those who have attained their majorities.”
In matters of sexuality, I’ve long considered “age of consent” statutes to be rather more “age of debilitation“ measures, stating categorically the criteria for preventing a certain category of human beings from exercising their rights to a property in their persons, said standards being predicated entirely upon an arbitrarily-chosen age rather than an assessment of individual capacity as a competent moral agent.
In Western polities over the past four decades in particular, we have witnessed an increasing sentiment for considering “minor children” – those by virtue of age held in law as incompetent to participate consensually in sexual intercourse – to be capable of mens rea in felony cases, emphasis on murder and other levels of willful homicide, not to mention violent rape, assault with battery, aggravated mayhem, et cetera.
Every time I’ve heard the yelping about how an adolescent or child below the prevailing age of consent ought to be “prosecuted as an adult,” I wonder about the sincerity (much less the sanity) of these jerks when it comes to the determination of who should be considered “jailbait” in sexual shenanigans.
There are any number of ways in which forensic psychiatry admits objective criteria for determining whether or not a suspect is capable of criminal mens rea, and therefore to stand trial in a court of law on matters pertaining to his alleged offenses. Recent examples are found in the persons and cases of Jared Lee Loughner (the attacker in the Giffords shooting), Anders Breivik (who had massacred so many Norwegian Eloi on 22 July 2011 in glorious Scandanavian berserkergang), and Nidal Malik Hasan (whose murderous rampage – shouting “Allahu Akbar!” – at Ft. Hood on 5 November 2009 was officially classified by the Obama Administration as “workplace violence”).
Not that I’m either fond of the pshrinks or wish to concede to them any role in the determination of a human being’s right to dispose of his or her affections as desires might dispose, but why the hell aren’t criminal proceedings in “statutory rape” accusations properly required to admit as pertinent similar exacting establishment of the alleged victims’ real ability to judge “…who has the right / To do what, with which, and to whom”?
You’re getting one step ahead of me here, Tucci. I realized (and presumed no-one would put their finger on it) that LibertyGibbert should have first addressed the issue of Liberty as it relates to children. Seeing as the topic at hand was gay marriage, I thought I would get away with it. So consider it in the pipeline – Oz
Tucci you can not be arguing a 13 year old girl can possibly be competent to consent to anything, the teenage brain is not an adult brain and I’m guessing here that a girl matures into an adult between 18-21 and boys between 21-25. So can consent be said to be given before those ages? Of course it brings up the question of voting ages and military service as well.
Although teenagers always seem to find a way to get round the consent laws anyhow with each other and no matter how hard you watch them always will.
Who/Whom
Vlad Lenin, indeed.
How to gain experience in living, without making the mistakes to learn from. Some learn by watching, some by reading, others just have to piss on the electric fence for themselves.
I almost expected to see the back of my own head in that youtube, but she did perform to two houses that night, I was in the front row of the other one. I almost had Juliet land on top of me – much to my estranged’s amusement – she fancies her too.
This is why it needs to be stopped and now….
Ozboy: You are a gem.
K: What about trademarks etc.? Nowadays the group would be in court before the record was really out….
New York looks so grotty when you view it up close….
Note the name on the shop signs behind the group in the video still….
At 8:54 AM on 3 September, Kitler had written:
Tsk. What I took pains to state, Kitler, was that the tendency in criminal law over the past several decades in these United States has been to treat the prosecution of people below the prevailing statutory age of consent as if they were adults fully capable of criminal mens rea when they had been accused of violent crimes.
If your hypothetical “13 year old girl” can be prosecuted as an adult for the death by violence of an infant she’d been babysitting (or, better yet, the death of a police officer she’d blown away with two charges of double-ought buckshot), how does the same criminal code judge her to be incapable of consenting to uncoerced sexual intercourse?
It’s not a matter of whether “…teenagers always seem to find a way to get round the consent laws anyhow with each other…” (which only draws attention to the fact that such laws are intrinsically unenforceable), but whether someone older than the statutory age of consent has committed a felony crime by coupling with such a teenager to somehow violate the younger partner’s rights as a human being.
Oz replies to FB: ‘If children were not involved….’ And that, of course, is the nub of the matter. Marriage, as the world has understood it for thousands of years, is all about children. In some times and places it was about the man’s staking a claim to his wife’s genes, goods, and fidelity, and the founding of his own miniature dynasty (or not so miniature, in the case of Genghis Khan and the like). In more recent times, it is about the couple together marking themselves off from other potential lovers, and it is about family cohesion and recognition. In short, less a property contract than a social pact. But either way, continuation of a name and a line is at its core.
So what happens when we arrive at a juncture in history when we view just about everything differently — what is man? who are the sexes? how are they like and unlike? what are their needs? what are children? and what are children for? What are the obligations of the citizen to the state? And vice versa?
I always wanted to be married: never doubted or questioned it. Which is to say, I always wanted The Man For Me. I never wanted children, and saw no contradiction. Marriage to me was about the husband and the wife. If anything, a child would only ruin it.
Essentially I still hold, for myself, the same view. The only difference is that I am less sanguine now about the idea that the state should have any say in my most private and intimate relationship. (Assuming that the marriage represents it, which it may not necessarily.) I would rather take the risk of not being protected by marriage law than be interfered with by marriage law. The thought that, in the event that I sadly had to call things off, I’d have to give an account of myself to a court is frankly obnoxious. The state should mind its own business, precisely because there are no children involved.
I don’t think I would ever marry again, without having excellent circumstantial reasons. I’d rather be married in the heart and tell the law to buzz off.
Circa 7:59 AM on 3 September, Oz had interpolated:
Children born in wedlock don’t have any “say in their arrival, nor [do they choose] their parents,” either, but they get on with their lives as they have to.
The involvement of children as dependents of a marital union does not confer grounds sufficient for government (“the state”) to be involved in the character of the relationship between those adults taking parental responsibility for those minor children.
Yeah, there might be some reasonable grounds for government thugs scrutinizing the relationship of the parents to the children when there are indications of abuse or neglect, but the parents’ “arrangement for living” can’t be conjured intrinsically to pertain.
I would suspect that readers here are familiar with Robert A. Heinlein’s speculative fiction novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966), one of those in which he fictionally explored forms of matrimony including both real and hypothetical polyamories, such as line marriage.
Whether or not there are children involved, there’s no reason for marriage to be given any sort of government thug’s “seal of approval.” As a practicing physician over the decades, I’ve gotten used to having mothers bring in two or three children each with a different last name, all of whom she herself had borne, each to a different consort, and whether or not any or none of her pregnancies had been brought to delivery while she was in a state of matrimony (of any kind) was a matter of indifference to all concerned.
So many families are “blended” by way of divorce and remarriage that it’s been something to joke about for decades (“Harry, your kids and our kids are beating up on my kids!”), and both fostering and adoption are a commonplace.
Hell, I’d like to see adoptions become even more common. Bad as the so-called taint of bastardy might be (it’s sure as hell not the kids’ fault), the Child Protection Services meatgrinder of the foster care system is far more invidious, being hideously destructive of a child’s ability to find the commitment of family which so many adults are quite capable of providing.
Sorry Tucci, we have a slight misunderstanding of grammar, for which I’m happy to take the blame. By “out of a marriage”, I meant “from a marriage”, not “from outside a marriage” – Oz
At 12:54 PM on 3 September, Amanda had commented:
Yeah? Well, I never wanted to be married. Never could see any advantage in it, and I still don’t.
Nonetheless, I got involved with a widow and her three children, and got seduced – by the kids.
Not sexually, but rather by their desire for a father. I found myself responding more and more to their need for that element in their lives, working in concert with their mother, coming thereby to respect her for her strength and to care for her in her vulnerabilities. A few years of this and we got to that “Why the hell not?” stage. By that time, I’d already been a father in all but name, even going hammer-and-tongs with the educrats in the local school system and sending the youngest one to parochial school (among the Irish, which says everything about how desperate I was, and may St. Agatha save Sicily).
Believe me, if I’d known this was going to happen, I would’ve run for my beloved bachelor life No good deed goes unpunished, and now I’m in similar relationships with a flock of grandchildren.
In my admittedly limited experience, marriage might be sparked by sex, but it takes hold and settles in on the basis of ability to work in partnership. Children test that ability (to destruction, quit commonly), but if you find yourself with responsibility for the little monsters, what the hell else are you supposed to do?
Ozboy-
“But today (it being Fathers’ Day here in Australia), I am compelled to reflect upon the fact that the institution of marriage, founded as it is upon a balance of rights and responsibilities, in the final analysis doesn’t exist for the benefit of adults at all.”
Yes. Marriage is for the socialisation and legitimisation of children…
Historically, and for a proportion of present societies marriage is as much a joint resources management contract between two families as it is anything to do with emotional pair-bonding. Especially in societies where only the man can own or earn significant resources. Thats why wives came with a dowry, to offset the cost of the long-term raising of children, literally a generational investment.
Polyandry only arises in societies where the woman can own land, or the means of food production I think. The financial independence of women in modern societies undermines the justification for marriage.
It is easy to suspect that some of the motivation for the legitimisation of gay marriage is the obverse of the Groucho principle. The desire to join any club which is opposed to your membership.
I am not convinced that marriage has been unchanged for thousands of years, or that there is a slippy slope towards pedophilia if it is redefined. The ancient Greeks had both. But marriage was not the same then as now and pederastra was considered the superior relationship to marriage. These things are most often socially defined, and dependent on the economics of the marriage contract which historically gave rights to the man, but only responsibilities to the wife.
@- Luton Ian says:
“Izen’s keeping very quiet on this.
Has he taken to swallowing his opinion rather than spitting it all out?”
Ha ha.
Its amazing how that little biological factoid about paternal tolerance in the immune system captures some peoples’ imagination.
Busy weekend in the real world is the reason for my late arrival in this thread though.
Oz’ was looking for a ‘traditionalist’ so I guess that’s me.
As far as any relationship goes I’m with Mrs Patrick Campbell:-
“I don’t care what people do as long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses”
…….but that’s relationships, not Marriage.
I believe the definition of marriage to be the contract between a man and a woman, and the preferred state for the procreation of children. I cannot see why any couple having children together would not want to formalise the union. The responsibility for the children is already there. If a couple aren’t committed to each other they should not be having children in the first place in this day and age. (OK I know, things happen, but that’s not the children’s fault)
For any other sort of partnership surely a ‘Civil Partnership’ would cover all the financial/responsibility issues?
One of my nephews has been in a same-sex relationship for many years and went down the Civil Partnership route when it became possible in order to safeguard his partner financially. They have no wish to be any more “married” than they already are, there is no need.
Why would same-sex couples feel they were in a second class relationship unless they got married as well? It smacks of “entitlement” syndrome to me, give me a cause and I’ll fight for it. “It’s my Right!”
At 8:15 PM on 3 September, meltemian opines:
Oh, goodie. And what happens if and when the marital couple is infertile?
Does marriage end with menopause on the distaff side, or with a low sperm count on the other?
Wow. And divorces aren’t supposed to work their way in there precisely…why?
One of the realities of primary care is that one gets a helluva lot of information about patients’ family lives. Naïf that I had been, I was genuinely perplexed to discover that some women had gotten themselves preggers quite deliberately in the hope that this would somehow “bind” more puissantly their troubled relationships with their hubbies, who typically didn’t notice until the bulges began to appear.
Did I say “some” women? Make that “a bunch” of women. It’s like there’s hundreds of thousands of ’em working out of the same playbook. Maybe they get it on daytime TV, or in those special classes in school when all of the guys have to go off to a separate room with the football coach to learn about wet dreams and venereal diseases.
Those men who dared to suggest voluntary termination of what they looked upon as a wholly unanticipated and unwelcome “accident” got slammed with loud screeches, whines, and other manifestations of female hostility for wanting to massacre the particular little bundle of intrauterine genetic material, and don’t you like the idea of bringing new life into the world?
And then, of course, there are the married guys who actually want kids, thinking of themselves doing the Ward Cleaver bit – or am I too dated, and I should be looking to re-runs of Full House, in which we’ve got Bob Saget’s character handling a crowd of cute little girls and male arrested adolescents with wisdom and humor and no hint of having the kind of revenue stream required to pay so much as the real estate taxes levied against the pictured house on Girard Street in fantabulously overpriced San Francisco?
Of course, fantasy comes athwart reality good and goddam quickly, usually in the third trimester of pregnancy when the navel you used to think looked so cute above her bikini wax starts to protrude like that little plastic pop-out thing which signals that you’ve just overcooked your Thanksgiving turkey.
If that (and her howling imprecations in labor and in the delivery room) don’t disabuse Maritus americanus of the oversold joys of fatherhood, those first few ca-ca diapers are gonna do it fer sure.
I handle it pretty well (I’m a grandfather entirely too many times over), but bear in mind that I’d gotten into this stuff after four years’ worth of undergraduate biology lab courses and a year cuddling up to corpses in first-year gross anatomy, not to mention several years of a 36-and-12 clinical training regime spent dealing with nursing home patients chronically incontinent of urine and feces.
Babies ain’t got nothin’ I ain’t seen and a helluva lot worse. For those without such a background (or experience pumping out septic tanks), however, becoming a “Daddy” is a pretty rude awakening.
And this is before the little larvae are capable of accompanying their defiance and rage with intelligible speech and the demonstration of destructive ingenuity I’d once thought only to encounter in Viet Cong sappers who’d squirmed under the razor wire and into the compound with their loads of plastique and a few SKS carbines.
Egad, but why would heterosexual couples feel the need to procreate? It’s a sentiment alien to my thoughts and nature, ’cause the kids were already there when I walked into my personal parody of Father Knows Best.
If the nonorthosexual types – masculum et feminam creavit eos – can find a shaman to dance the Watusi around them and shake his (or her) rattle over their ceremonial joining, and thereafter call it a “marriage,” it’s no skin off my tochus.
What’s more, to the extent that such status confers improvement in these partnerships’ abilities to deal the government thugs in rearing children (either of their own bodies or adopted), I’m for it.
Anybody experienced enough with Child Protective Services in these United States knows good and goddam well that Agatha and Brunhilda (or Steve and his “good friend” Chuck) are more likely to provide a kid with a decent home than he’ll get if he’s flung into the foster care system.
Ceding them the bells and whistles of “marriage” costs nothing but sputtering indignation among the religious whackjobs, and I count that an unintended benefit, not a liability.
@- Tucci78
“Ceding them the bells and whistles of “marriage” costs nothing but sputtering indignation among the religious whackjobs, and I count that an unintended benefit, not a liability.”
The sputtering indignation is an exercise in proving your tribal affiliation. The recent Chick-a-fil nonsense was a classic example of many people declaring their membership of a tribe that considers that it inhabits the moral high ground because it suffers spluttering indignation at the prospect of gay marriage, or even civil partnerships. Failure to exhibit ethical horror at the possibility of homosexual persons forming civic recognised relationships is taken as evidence of at the very least liberalism, and probably other deeply unAmerican traits.
{grin}
At 11:33 PM on 3 September, izen observes:
Yeah, deeply “unAmerican.” Sensibilities like “Keep your [frackin’] hands off!”
Speaking as a physician, I’ll admit that I’m kinda happy to see the religious whackjobs eating lots and lots more in the way of fried foods. Atheromatous vascular disease isn’t quick, but it’s sure.
Tucci: Yes, agreed: which is why I wanted nothing to do with them (children). As it is, I thought I was just becoming the owner of a dog, since my husband wanted it, and instead I’ve become a devoted dog mummy who won’t go on dogless holidays and can’t change countries for her sake. In the past I would have considered that extreme, bordering on bananas. Now I just accept it.
My marriage wasn’t sparked by sex. My honeymoon was chaste. The immediate occasion for the marriage was that we were different nationalities and could not live in the same country or countries unless we were legally hitched. Anyway, my union — a better word — was sparked and has continued as a meeting of minds and hearts. Again: extreme, bordering on bananas….. Ha ha ha!
Tucci: Meltemian’s comment about marriage as the preferable condition for the procreation of children is completely untouched by your objection that some people don’t have children, or can’t, after a certain age. It’s better for children if their parents are together under the same roof and have promised to stay together, not as co-inmates but as family. The fact that some people don’t want to reproduce doesn’t mean that marriage is not the best environment for reproduction. And as a doctor you will know that many people that do not intend to reproduce — not now, anyway, not at this age or in this house, etc. — do conceive and do in fact have children. And much better, when they are caught out that way, for them all to be caught by the safety net of marriage.
So Tucci you are in favour of Gay marriage then and assume Gay people don’t die of clogged arteries or eat junk food either. Of course the gay lifestyle especially of those that do not pursue monogamous relationships and have hundreds of partners is perfectly healthy with zero consequences.
I assume Tucci you have zero arguments against resurrecting the the Greek practice of pederasty the Greeks were nothing but logical and what was good enough for Socrates is good enough for us I presume. You can sputter on about consent but what has that got to do with anything anymore, in the new brave future anything will be permitted.
Hell, I’d like to see adoptions become even more common. Bad as the so-called taint of bastardy might be (it’s sure as hell not the kids’ fault),
I’ve wondered about why the child should be tarred with the deeds of its parents. The best explaination I could think of was, in the days it was subsidised, a woman who risked destitution, and a male who made off when his wild oats took root, were likely to be pretty high time preference.
Chances were the kid would be too – if it wasn’t born that way, the hardships of growing up in even less desirable conditions than other kids, with a high time preference mum, probably burned it into the sprog – hence bastard being a synonym for unpleasant, hard hearted individual.
I assume that some people have never bothered to ask adoptees what they think of it, I can assure you interracial adoptees share horror stories of their treatment. So in about 14 to 16 years a new group of adoptees will be sharing theirs about being adopted in gay households.
How’s this for statist irony:
“A mother has been jailed for 15 months for leaving her baby daughter at home alone every day for a week while she went out drinking.
The woman, 20, of Brecon, Powys, admitted neglect of the 15-month old while she went out at Christmas.
Neighbours raised the alarm when they heard cries, Merthyr Crown Court heard.
Judge John Curran said: “You may have gone back to the house on occasions but the fact is you neglected her for a very long time.””
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-mid-wales-19318591
And now thanks to her caring neighbours and the ever so caring state, sprog will be without mother for a much longer period of time.
One statist intervention deserves another:
Sprog becomes a ticket to a council house and welfare
Even if mother hates sprog and would like to give it (or sell it) to someone who wants one – she’d be giving up the welfare ticket – That’s really going to help her stop hating and start to love the sprog [not].
Even if she did give it up, the basteaucrats will hold it for years, until all the boxes are ticked – all for for the child’s benefit, of course.
Couples desperate for children, go as tourists to places (usually shit holes) where the basteaucrats will accept payment to look the other way – our basteaucrats claim that this is not in the best interests of the child, especially in terms of it retaining its culture (yep, even when its’ mum lived on a landfill and sorted trash for a living, or sucked off sailors for sixpence.
Sorry about the tangent, the next one is OT
Tucci,
I’ve come accross this before, I’m not Irish in any way shape or form, I lived in Ireland and loved it, and was (technically still am) married to an Italian (The wheels of Italian basteaucracy move slowly).
She loves Ireland too, but speaking to both Jewish and Italian academics in the [formerly sovereign] States, when she tells them that she lives in Ireland, They laugh and ask what the hell got into her.
Jews and Italians seem to get along fine in America, but for some reason, neither appears to mix much with the Irish.
Is there a story to that?
if so, what is it?
From 08:02 AM
“I’ve wondered about why the child should be tarred with the deeds of its parents. The best explanation I could think of was, in the days [before] it was subsidised, “
At 2:16 AM on 4 September, Amanda writes:
What Amanda and meltemian are insisting upon, of course, is regarding the classic Donna Reed Show nuclear family as the only “arrangement for living” in which procreation and child rearing can and does take place.
Speaking “as a doctor,” I have not only observed but in this forum acknowledged quite explicitly the fact that lawfully married heterosexual couples who “do not intend to reproduce […] do conceive [unintentionally, accidentally or by way of purposeful female scheming to evade contraception] and do in fact have children,” the impositions of child-bearing and -rearing falling upon one or both participants in the marriage as an unwanted adversity rather than any sort of “blessed event.”
Might as well contend that because husband-and-wife matrimony is arguably a better condition in which one of these partners might spend the final agonies of his/her terminal illness that this is justification for marriage to be denied Agatha and Brunhilda (vide supra).
Y’see, also “as a doctor,” I’ve gotten to see what happens to men and women in their reproductive years “when they are caught out that way” (curious to contemplate the propagation of the species as a catastrophe people must face, like a tsunami or a high-category cyclonic storm or a plague of boils, ain’t it?), noting that when they’re “caught by the safety net of marriage” how often that “safety net” turns out to be a hangman’s noose in a complex suicide pact.
Grinding out the next generation of producing-and-consuming taxpayers is admittedly of critical importance to the incumbent politicians who have budgeted the anticipated pillage of today’s children (and their children, their grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren) to pay for our governments’ past and present graft and waste and “picking winners” crony favoritism and other Keynesian malfeasance-as-usual in public office.
Kinda reminds me of the way predecessor socialists in the 1920s and ’30s exhorted women to stray from the Küchen only long enough to grind out the Kinder so that the supply of conscriptable cannon-fodder will meet war-waging requirements.
How is it that the traditionalists get to squeal and yelp and point government guns at sexual heretics because they consider the institution only for the purpose of meiosis and its consequences? Have we not taken note of the fact that men and women commonly enter this condition knowing they can’t have kids (all those endocrinologists and OB/GYN guys raking in the cash in lucrative carriage-trade “fertility” practices notwithstanding) or that they can successfully avoid putting up with stretch marks, squalling brats, surly adolescents, and jobless twenty-somethings occupying their basements when the miserable slugs aren’t out there defecating in Zuccotti Park (all those other doctors performing quite satisfactory vasectomies as quick snip jobs in their offices)?
I haven’t voiced an “objection that some people don’t have children, or can’t,” but rather an observation that so very many the participants in heterosexual ball-and-chain matrimony perceive such value in a non-fecundative contractual relationship (recognized by the rotten sonzabitches who suck unto government power) that even if the traditionalists push their load of “It’s for the children!” horsepuckey it can be observed that tochus-bandits and muff-diving “womyn” are capable of getting some perceived benefit for themselves in unions they’re able to persuade complicit Witch Doctors to sanctify.
Not to mention the fact that these folks also find themselves either fostering/adopting the by-blows of heterosexuals’ misadventures or managing the rearing of their own tentative explorations at the opposite end of the Kinsey Scale.
They’re supposed to be denied the argued advantages of marriage when meeting such challenges?
Tucci are you trying to tell us something are you hiding in the place they store clothes?
At 8:31 AM on 4 September, Luton Ian writes:
I recommend economist Thomas Sowell’s eminently readable Ethnic America; A History (1981). I don’t have my copy to hand as I respond here, but Dr. Sowell recounts the arrival of southern Italians (the grandparents and great-grandparents of those of us with roots in il Mezzogiorno came over toward the end of the 19th Century and early in the 20th, and were designated by the federal government as an immigrant group ethnically distinct from the northern Italians who had fled the old country in the wake of the failed 1848 uprisings against the Austrian Empire) in U.S. cities where there were already well-established urban enclaves of Bog Irish whose own progenitors had bailed out of their Corn Laws-afflicted home island during the Potato Famine (1845-1852).
Sowell noted that the customs of these Sons of the Auld Sod were such that casual brawling was considered something of an amusement. Men from Sicily and the Campania, Abruzzo and Calabria, Lazio and points thitherabouts did not look upon such practices as anything but risky misadventure in which they stood too goddam good a chance of getting crippled or killed – and then what’s gonna happen to la sposa and the bambini?
Paddy would start a “friendly” donnybrook, the taciturn Guido would bring out a blade or a hand-held life preserver to precipitate yet another one of those elaborate Irish wakes, and mannaggia agli Irlandesi!
Took the Irish a while to get the message, and to this day there’s a certain confused rumble among the beer-swilling potato eaters that the Greaser is a shifty little bastid who refuses to fight fair.
The Irish always seem to come off second best in those encounters – Oz:
At 7:37 AM on 4 September, Kitler fribbled:
Oh, sure the salami-hiding pillow-biters do “die of clogged arteries” and are susceptible to all the other ills to which “junk food” eating makes one susceptible. It just tickles me that the Chick-fil-A fixation is likely to increase the epidemiological susceptibility to such pathologies among the religious right-wing sphincters afflicting the American political right.
Having to make common cause in any way with these odious puckers – even against the “Liberal” fascists – is rather entirely too much like helping the guys in the Veterinary School to jerk bulls. The objective is arguably praiseworthy, but the process is both dangerous and disgusting.
But is the sexually promiscuous tochus-schtupper any more likely to come afoul of Cupid’s catarrh and other venereally acquired communicable diseases than is the heterosexual sperm-squirter out and about among the multitudes of leg-spreading yoni-toters?
You, dear Kitler, have obviously never served as the medical director of a county STD clinic, have you?
Most of my HIV-infected patients in the early years of “gay-related immune deficiency syndrome” (GRIDS) were actually predominantly heterosexual intravenous drug users (IVDUs), who to this day show a distressing proclivity for developing IVDU-acquired coinfection with Hepatitis C virus (HCV) and dying in end-stage liver failure with hepatocellular carcinoma.
Goddam HCV just takes of like a fire in the paint locker when there’s a chronic HIV-1 infection present, even if we’ve got the latter suppressed with antiretroviral (ARV) regimens.
At 7:48 AM on 4 September, Kitler had overreached to write:
Now how in the hell did you manage to yank that out’n your butt without benefit of a colonoscope, Kitler?
Before you go off into your blind fantasies, wouldn’t you want to do a little reading-up on “the Greek practice of pederasty”? You’re on the Web, ain’tcha? How about starting with Wiki-bloody-pedia?
The allegation that “the Greeks were nothing but logical” is wonderfully silly. All through their flourishing both before and after the onslaught of Christianity, they were as full of passions, as knotted by traditions, and as prone to irrational action as any of their contemporaries, and rather more than some. Such maunderings are the hallmarks of a romantic entirely out of touch with reality.
Equally unrealistic is the bleat about a “new brave future anything will be permitted” while blanking out thought about who might lawfully be empowered to determine what’s “permitted” as regards the individual human being’s exercise of his utterly unalienable right to a property in his own person, and why such an officious meddling thug shouldn’t get a quick trip out to a shallow grave in the Pine Barrens.
The institution of pederasty in the archaic and “classical” periods of Greek civilization wasn’t so much an excuse for child-schtupping (which has been from time to time about as unremarkable – one way or the other – in human societies as farm boys’ proclivities for doing unsanitary things to barnyard animals) as it was a systematic effort to formalize the erotic aspects of those practices involved in getting the next generation of combatants armed and trained to participate effectively in warfare.
Because the usages of industrialized warfare have been refined to turn a flabby feathermerchant into an adequately conditioned 11-Bravo in a helluva lot less time than was require to prepare a cavalryman, hoplite, or peltast to engage successfuly in battle back during the heyday of the Greek city-states, we simply don’t need pederasty to ensure that we can put a capable military force in the field.
The satisfaction of human sexual appetites is subject to a number of caveats which – if we were truly “nothing but logical” – would depend entirely upon objectively verifiable assessments of risk and benefit, but we cede weight to the cavils and qualms of custom among the blindly illiterate, who have no real idea (or inclination ever to learn) the plain facts of history.
Tucci…”You, dear Kitler, have obviously never served as the medical director of a county STD clinic, have you? “…no but I played one in the movies.
I am a very moral upstanding citizen not prone to put it about a lot and have never been seen inside a titty bar or strip club. My strong protestant religious upbringing forbids me from partaking of the whims of the weaker strains of Christianity. So what an STD clinic looks like I have no idea as I’ve never needed there services.
Tucci however you have not made a good case as to why you prefer societal anarchy over common sense protection of marriage as a protection for society. To claim well we’ll just murder them well who do you think in the modern criminal world is selling young boys and girls to the highest bidder. They will be where the moneys at, drugs, prostitution, gambling, extortion and even children. You assume criminals have some sort of morality.
At 2:38 PM on 4 September, Kitler yanks a really big strawman out of his Sitzplatz and waves it around, spewing that I’ve somehow:
Not that anarchy isn’t preferable to demosclerosis (nice little button commonly seen at SF conventions reading: “Anarchy: It’s not the law. It’s just a good idea”), I’ve not made any case at all in this exchange for debilitating the institution of matrimony among the heterosexual majority. To the extent that it provides measures for defining and protecting the property rights of those participating in the marital union, and facilitates their discharge of parental responsibilities in the nurture of children (whether natural or adoptive), I think it’s a fine devisement, and see no reason to deny its utility to those who are not heterosexuals.
It’s pretty safe to conclude that Kitler is opposed to “gay marriage” for some reason or reasons he’s reluctant to expand upon, almost certainly because he knows he hasn’t got a goddam leg to stand on when it comes to supported argument, particularly when it comes to how a government goon comes in any way to be qualified to tell private citizens – of any age or condition – what they’re not allowed to do consensually with their naughty bits.
I mean, is there alleged to be some kind of “societal” benefit to be gotten by having Officer Friendly busting into bedrooms to arrest people (each of an age suitable for licensure as motor vehicle operators) for doing things other than immissio-penis-in-vagina for the explicit purpose of fecundation?
Or a quorum of Boy Scouts for sharing a jar of Vaseline in a circle jerk?
When it comes to matters sexual, are people like Kitler even remotely capable of appreciating the concept of “No harm, no foul”?
Those of us who approach this subject as adults acknowledge the fact that most human sexual activities are undertaken knowingly under circumstances in which the propagation of species is flatly impossible, and with objectives emphatically divergent from getting spawn. We are, after all, H. sapiens and neither Oncorhynchus nerka, Ursus arctos, or Equus ferus caballus, to be subject to mating seasons and limerant urges associated exclusively with hooking gametes together.
We do most of our schtupping because we enjoy it, the pure limbic pleasure heightened for some of us by the extent to which such indulgence afford a sense of emotional communication with our partners. (Not that there isn’t something to be said for the casually hedonistic “swinging” we used to do back in the ’60s before Nixon and herpes came along and screwed that up, too.)
In his incoherent, unthinking, cement-headed way – yammering for no reason whatsoever about how in his fantasies …the modern criminal world is selling young boys and girls to the highest bidder” – Kitler is indulging in neurotic fibrillations about how the only alternative to unrestrained predation is supposedly abject subordination to the authoritarian normative Nanny State, obliterating as usual any thought of how self-responsible self-governing human beings can and do order their affairs to ensure the protection of the individual human being’s rights to life, to liberty, and to property while at the same time conducting peaceably their sexual affairs pour l’amour o pour le sport.
What must it be like to live in Kitler‘s dark and suffocated little mind, where he assumes surety that the armed thugs on the government payroll “have some sort of morality”?
A 2:26 PM on September, Kitler had admitted his ignorance regarding sexually transmitted diseases and gone on incoherently and with typical lack of support to blurt:
Nor, obviously, sought any information whatsoever before voicing your vacant noise about “the gay lifestyle especially of those that do not pursue monogamous relationships and have hundreds of partners.”
Perish forfend, Kitler, that you should ever speak about any subject on the basis of anything other than your cherished illusions.
So Tucci you admit to banana wrangling, enough said the missus had a neighbour a respected dentist who left his wife and family only to die of a “blood disease” a common problem in the over educated apparently.
Now that I have your blood pressure at record levels if you have ever been paying attention my muse as I have always stated is Loki the god of mischief. I’m also an atheist and understand evolutionary biology and in the geologic record better than you do and it’s something Luton Ian and I have been arguing the whole subject for decades, it’s amazing what you discover from simple observation of the natural and human world. People are really just clever monkeys that just stopped throwing poop at each other and now it’s just verbal poop. As for Gay people I’m very tolerant I really couldn’t care less what they get up to in private but if you get up to stuff in restrooms you should be arrested as that is in public. I’m all for civil unions to give them the same legal rights as other people, inheritance, visitation in hospital rights etc.
I do not and will never support marriage for gay people quite simply because society as a whole needs protecting not from gay people but all the others that will follow them into anarchy.
If you think kiddie fiddling won’t be legalized in the next 30 years think again, it will drip by drip and media gradual promotion of the concept a well known gay rights campaigner in the UK was on record as stating that was his goal, he wasn’t really gay he is a pederast and they are using the cause of equal rights for gay people to promote his own agenda.
This is why gay marriage is unacceptable because once you say yes to one group inevitably the rest will follow sure as flies are attracted to sh**e.
Going completely off the rails, at 4:08 PM on 4 September Kitler succumbs to complete lack of reason or sanity with:
A browser tab opened to a search engine finds no definition for “banana wrangling,” so I’ve kinda gotta consider a nonsense neologism invented by Kitler in response to what’s looking more and more to be a major thought disorder percolating between his parietal knobs. As for the dentist, I’ve known some several of ’em who’ve contracted intractable infectious diseases in their practices over the decades, and both experience and training has taught me to address human bite wounds with scrupulous attention to standard-of-care.
Er, that is what you’re getting at, isn’t it, you poor, pitiful psychotic?
After maundering that “My strong protestant religious upbringing forbids me from partaking of the whims of the weaker strains of Christianity,” we’ve now got Kitler rambling: “I’m also an atheist and understand evolutionary biology and in the geologic record better than you do and it’s something Luton Ian and I have been arguing the whole subject for decades….” and yadda, yadda, yadda, and y’see what happens when your patients run out their haloperidol prescriptions? Kitler is proving to be a poster child for the decanoate ester depot formulation.
Bobbing up almost to a condition resembling coherence, Kitler burbles: “I do not and will never support marriage for gay people quite simply because society as a whole needs protecting not from gay people but all the others that will follow them into anarchy.”
Not that it’s a coherent argument to the effect that gay people (who are tending reliably to support our Illegal-Alien-in-Chief and the rest of our National Socialist Democrat American Party [NSDAP] candidates in this year’s elections) are anarchists, mind you. Instead, they’re stumping for “Liberal” fascism, the very antithesis of benign, peaceable, laudable anarchy. .
How it might be that “marriage for gay people” conduces in any way to “anarchy,” of course, Kitler draws a perfect, bewildered blank. What these sexual heretics are seeking, of course, is nothing more or less than the same government sanction accorded standard heterosexual marriage, conceiving there to be some material benefit accruing thereby.
Their taxes – direct and indirect – pay for the conduct of government, and both as human beings and as citizens they do seem to have the right to equal services under the law. As I’d said, regarding their contracts as of less validity or value than those of heterosexual couples is inescapably of a piece with those long-repealed statutes which treated “miscegenation” (interracial marriages) as unworthy of such recognition.
In his psychosis, Kitler succumbs to paranoid ideation about how “marriage for gay people” will send society – in Kitler‘s diseased fantasies – down some sort of slippery slope to the legitimization of “kiddie fiddling,” obligatory public nudity (which we’ve already kinda got at the airports), and turning the Primate Buildings at the zoological gardens into houses of ill repute.
(Hey, don’t laugh. They’re that hard up for revenue nowadays.)
And he closes with: “…gay marriage is unacceptable because once you say yes to one group inevitably the rest will follow sure as flies are attracted to sh**e.”
Ain’t that cute? It’s folks like Kitler who used to voice the same “argument” as the reason we should hold firm against the invidious notion of allowing the Darkies to apply for marriage licenses, too.
And who said the internet doesn’t influence the national debate?
http://www.news.com.au/world/anti-gay-marriage-group-loses-internet-domain-name-to-pro-gay-marriage-group/story-fndir2ev-1226464921343
Thanks Tucci. Vintage!
I feel somewhat . . . well . . . enlightened . . . perhaps.
How many other blogs get exchanges like that one??? Many thanks to both Tucci and Kitler, who by now are both enjoying some well-earned rest in their neighbouring time zones.
Opinions expressed as well as that, whether they agree with my own or not, are always welcome at the Bar and Grill – Oz
FB, I’m not sure about being enlightened but I certainly enjoyed it all!
Tucci, I think you’re deranged but I love you…….(and Kitler of course)
Wow – you had me laughing out loud, Mr M thinks I’ve lost the plot, again.
@- Tucci78
” Kitler is indulging in neurotic fibrillations about how the only alternative to unrestrained predation is supposedly abject subordination to the authoritarian normative Nanny State, obliterating as usual any thought of how self-responsible self-governing human beings can and do order their affairs to ensure the protection of the individual human being’s rights to life, to liberty, and to property while at the same time conducting peaceably their sexual affairs pour l’amour o pour le sport.”
As always your florid rhetoric is wonderful and invigorating, although I am not able to find ‘limerant’ in any dictionary….
But in the absence of an imminent revolution that will bring in the utopian era of anarcho-freedom where “self-responsible self-governing human beings can and do order their affairs to ensure the protection of the individual human being’s rights to life, to liberty” we are stuck in the world as it is.
Here, there is the fact, described by Ozboy as ‘ironic’, that the liberty of the gay individual in Tasmania to peacefully conduct their sexual affairs could only be render free of Nanny State interference by the intervention of the ultimate Leviathan, the UN.
Some may see this as paradoxical that in the real world individual freedom is best defended by the most extreme of the collective authorities.
Others view it as the inevitable outcome of individual freedoms legitimised by mutual coercion, mutually agreed.
“Limerant”… I assume derived from limerence (don’t worry Izen, I hadn’t heard of it either).
And your last paragraph encapsulates all I aim to explore on this site – Oz
Did I miss something?
New post…
Amanda Oh I’ve just been goading Tucci and he’s been a worthy adversary as usual. At least it’s moved the debate on in new directions.
Yes, I must say that ‘banana wrangling’ has a certain fruity je-ne-sais-quoi about it.
Amanda well it does sound terribly norty although totally nonsensical. Considering I was making stuff up as I went along one of my better ones it could have been worse I could have accused him of being Anderthen “chathe me chathe me “Coothper of CNN fame.
Limerent reaction
The limerent reaction is a composite reaction; that is, it actually describes a unique series of reactions. These reactions occur only where misperceptions meet adversity in the context of a romance.[citation needed] Perhaps because of this unique specificity, limerent reactions can be uniquely quantified and predicted according to the schema described below.
Damn, that was good.
Fantasies are preferred to virtually any other activity with the exception of activities that are believed to help obtain the limerent object, and activities that involve actually being in the presence of the limerent object. The motivation to attain a “relationship” continues to intensify so long as a proper mix of hope and uncertainty exist.
Izen, put forth:
“Here, there is the fact, described by Ozboy as ‘ironic’, that the liberty of the gay individual in Tasmania to peacefully conduct their sexual affairs could only be render free of Nanny State interference by the intervention of the ultimate Leviathan, the UN.
Some may see this as paradoxical that in the real world individual freedom is best defended by the most extreme of the collective authorities.
Others view it as the inevitable outcome of individual freedoms legitimised by mutual coercion, mutually agreed.”
Does a slave owner, interceding between a petty minded overseer and one of his slaves – validate or in any way offer support to the institution of slave owner?
“She loves me; she loves me not ; she loves me ; she loves me not . . .
Olive Oyl and the”love me not petals ” wasn’t it?
Izen also squirted;
“But in the absence of an imminent revolution that will bring in the utopian era of anarcho-freedom where “self-responsible self-governing human beings can and do order their affairs to ensure the protection of the individual human being’s rights to life, to liberty” we are stuck in the world as it is.”
True, we have the World as it is, and must deal with it.
There is nothing utopian about libertarian anarchy – it accepts human nature as it exists, there is no need to breed a new socialist man, oil the muscles of some master race, or invoke some sort of holy statist grace from the immaculate conception of some institution or other of political thugs.
We’re individuals, and there is no pixie dust which makes those individuals who style themselves as “state”, better at making my decisions for me, than I am at making all of those decisions for myself.
There are precious few “revolutionary” libertarians, most believe in “one mind at a time” deprogramming, unfortunately there is no pill which shows the matrix for what it is.
Even those who are “revolutionary”, such as the agorists, follow the non aggression principle, their revolutionary activity is through revolutionary free (sometimes “black”) market activity, to deprive the state of legitimacy, control and income, rather than acting like a bunch of unwashed 19th century left-anarchists, running around with machinepistols, planting bombs and robbing banks.
@- Luton Ian
“Does a slave owner, interceding between a petty minded overseer and one of his slaves – validate or in any way offer support to the institution of slave owner?”
Category error.
Individuals and governance are different sorts of thing.
But to pursue your confusion of levels…if the slave owner {institution} is interceding to abolish slavery then yes.
http://www.historyplace.com/lincoln/divided.htm
@- farmerbraun says:
” The motivation to attain a “relationship” continues to intensify so long as a proper mix of hope and uncertainty exist. ”
Limerant = cat owner.
Farmerbraun: Loving is the easy bit. It’s what you do about it that’s so thorny.
Luton Ian: Good one. I’ve only ever had a dog and rabbits, so all I’ve known is devotion and ticklish fur in the morning. (The budgies were my mother’s.)
Ah I see tucci is being racist….”Olson Johnson: All right… we’ll give some land to the n*ggers and the chinks. But we don’t want the Irish! ”
Being part O’rish meself I resemble that remark. What tucci does not understand is the Northern English sense of insanity when making arguments, the Fox will lead the houndsmen on a merry chase through thicket and briar. Insanity in arguing serves a purpose to confuse and lead astray the opponent. Loki is my muse.
At 4:26 PM on 5 September, Kitler writes of: “…the Northern English sense of insanity when making arguments, the Fox will lead the houndsmen on a merry chase through thicket and briar. Insanity in arguing serves a purpose to confuse and lead astray the opponent. Loki is my muse.
Uh, huh. I’ll go with Murray Rothbard. When asked once what was the source of his erudite eloquence when confronting the wrong-headedness, errors, and lying crap of Keynesians and monetarists, he replied:
Izen invokes the magic pixie dust of collectivism.
There is no “collective will” or “collective decision” seperate from the wills or decisions made by the individuals forming those groups.
Izen also invokes Lincoln.
Which other collection of states descended into war to achieve the abolition of private ownership of slaves, killing 600,000 citizens in the process?
There is considerable and reasonable doubt that Lincoln’s war aim was to end the private ownership of slaves, as opposed to subjugation of the sovereignty of the states into a program of national socialism. But, for the sake of keeping this brief, I’ll stick with the assumption that his aim was purely to end private ownership of slaves:
What means did he use to achieve that?
The draft.
What is the draft if not the enslavement of individuals by those individuals calling themselves “state”?
Something of a contradiction, enslaving to end slavery.
What is the theft of c40% of your income by the state, if it is not enslavement for 40% of the time you are at work?
Sure, even massa down on the plantation would let his possessions tend their own gardens, for a part of the day, they were, in a limited sense, “free”, but they were still slaves.
I’ve a photo from 20 years back of a pal called John Peel, standing by that huntsman’s tombstone.
I was going out with his daughter at the time, and she thought it was a bit morbid.
Which reminds me, I need to call in and see him, he’s not in the best of health these days.
Tucci….”Uh, huh. I’ll go with Murray Rothbard. When asked once what was the source of his erudite eloquence when confronting the wrong-headedness, errors, and lying crap of Keynesians and monetarists, he replied:
“Hatred is my muse.” ”
Close and something we can agree on but Loki is mine an apt and appropriate God for myself the descendants of Vikings. It’s always interesting to see if anyone takes the bait of total falsehoods and misdirections. If I was a half way decent speaker I could so destroy the current POTUS in a debate because nothing I would argue would make sense and he would be totally unbalanced and not know what to say. It’s all soundbites.
Argumentum ad bullshittium completeii – I’m familiar with it – Oz 😉
@- Luton Ian says:
“There is no “collective will” or “collective decision” seperate from the wills or decisions made by the individuals forming those groups.”
Actually, there is. Complex adaptive systems like collective governance institutions have autonomous intent that emerges from the interaction of the individual input but is qualitatively distinct from those individual choices.
That is why such organisations long outlive the membership.
Individuals are the only source of moral judgement, but they are not the only source of intentionality with moral outcomes.
I’m with Ian on the collective will thing. What Izen is describing is nothing more than previous decision-making by an earlier group that a later group has allowed to stand, unchanged or unchallenged. Where was the ‘collective will’ of the House of Lords when Blair decided to overturn a thousand years of status quo, eh?
@- Amanda
“. Where was the ‘collective will’ of the House of Lords when Blair decided to overturn a thousand years of status quo, eh?”
In the eventual collective compromise that the change instigated. That was not the choice of one individual but the collective, consnsual, conclusion of all involved.
Even in a tyrannical dictatorship the ruler is constrained by the span and extent of his political power, he is not able to realise ANY personal whim.
Izen: Tell that to Lord Monckton.
You’re confusing party agreement with some sort of osmotic mindmeld, a curious conception which many are much wedded to, especially on the Left (Rousseau in some ways has a lot to answer for, as does Nietzsche in the other direction; but neither nearly as much as Marx). Parties are possible because a party’s worldview, and later, its stated agenda, meshes well enough with the pre-existing views of its members. In short, the constituent members come first; the party comes later. No members: no party. And of course, people do change their party allegiances, rather than bow to the ‘collective will’ and consensus that you so believe in.
People of the Left, statists like Blair, wanted the Lords done in because it wasn’t bendable enough to their will. The conservatives, traditionalists, libertarians or Left-skeptics of the Lords, and of the electorate watching all this, were not part of the supposed consensus at all. They were overruled. Rule is necessary, and tyranny is possible, only because there is no such as a general will, but only political stances that achieve popularity.
Hi Amanda,
Many thanks for doing most of the work on that.
Izen asserted,
“Actually, there is [such a thing as collective will]. Complex adaptive systems like collective governance institutions have autonomous intent that emerges from the interaction of the individual input but is qualitatively distinct from those individual choices.
That is why such organisations long outlive the membership.
Individuals are the only source of moral judgement, but they are not the only source of intentionality with moral outcomes.”
You surprise me, I wasn’t thinking of you as a believer in that sort of thing.
How about belief in fairies in gerneral (better not deny them, it might be tinkerbell who has to die this time)?
The tooth fairy in particular?
Unicorns?
Pixie dust?
The divine right of monarchs?
on a serious note, yes, there are emergent orders, where the good ideas of many individuals have been picked up and used by many other people, because they serve a useful purpose, if some individual has a good idea and other individuals see its merits, then they will adopt it. Emergent orders are things like languages, the free market, media of exchange.
Such emergent orders are easy enough to perceive, Individuals can, if they so desire, refuse to go along with them (Esperanto, barter exchanges etc are examples of that),
What of “collective will” as compared to the wills of the individuals?
what might such a thing look like?
how would it be observed?
It could hardly be observed by general elections; what was the percentage of those entitled to vote that got blair his three terms and got us the current Con-Dem bugger up? less than 40%?
Hardly an irrefutable example of “collective will”, eh?
Perhaps it is only visible or knowable to those with a vested interest in lying and deceiving the honest majority of decent individuals, who are too busy earning an honest living by serving others through the market, to give it too much critical thought?
The sort of parasitic, devious individual who wants to steal and coerce, and who is willing to use any tool available to do so, and use any excuse for having used those means.
The sort of individual like, illegitemate son of a Church of Ireland Priest and his maid servant*, Eamon Devalera, who’s famously quoted as saying: “If I wish to know what the Irish want, I look into my own heart.”
___________________________________________________
*the Sunday service at the parish where Dev’s mother had worked for the proddy priest, was interrupted by a masked gang of members of the IRA, who removed the parish records. Strange why they’d do that.
Hi Ian: Thanks. And I included most of the words, though I left out ‘thing’ : )
I should like to point out, while I’m at it, that I’m not anti-Rousseau — or anti-Nietzsche, for that matter. I am only anti-Marx. The trouble with R. and N. is that there teachings are diffuse, dense (in the sense of hard to penetrate), and highly susceptible to over-interpretation or outright misunderstanding. They are ultimately responsible for that state of affairs, to the extent that they knew how their words were likely to be received and perceived by various audiences.
This is why I would never begin a sentence with ‘Plato thought’, ‘Aristotle thought’, ‘Rousseau thought’, etc. One cannot say, certainly not without a lifetime of the most searching study, what they ‘thought’. And even then, one would have to be open to the possibility that one had misread them. One can only say what these thinkers had their characters say, or how they organized an argument. Very often, what they ‘say’ turns out not to be exactly what they ‘think’ at all.
Why do they not just say what they think? Three reasons. What they think is too complex and contingent to be simply and baldy stated, like laying down a law. Philosophy is not the law. Secondly, what they think, even if it could be stated, would be known more by report than by actual encounter, and thus it would be twisted out of shape in the reporting. Lastly, the mob is intolerant of what it rejects, and speaking truth is very risky business.
‘their’ not ‘there’. A touch of Kitler there!
Ozboy, while your category description is elegant, FB feels that it diverges slightly from convention; he suggests that we institute the term :-
ARGUMENTUM AD FAECES TAURI when referring to this modus operandi.
One of our Latin scholars may like to add the superlative in your original viz. the completeii
Oh well: universa – Oz 🙄
Ozboy if you have to argue with leftist idiots who don’t realize they are idiots then logic goes well out the window and you may as well make it up on the spot and use their own tactics against them it confuses them no end and they really don’t know how to deal with it. So I prefer to go the whole Bos primigenius.
There’s nothing funnier than watching two totalitarians slug it out. Yesterday at Lawfest at the University of Tasmania’s Hobart campus, Australian Christian Lobby’s Managing Director, Jim Wallace, took on the Australian Greens federal Leader Christine Milne in a debate on same sex marriage. I don’t have any vision, but respective transcripts are at the links. I wish I had known about it yesterday, I would have gone along to watch the fun. Did they use water pistols?
Church and state. Spot the difference. If you can.
And something else I should have included at the top but didn’t, which you might like to discuss, what about freedom of conscience – particularly of the churches? I’m thinking here of a landmark ruling in Denmark this year, in which same-sex couples now have not simply the right to marry, but the power to demand a church wedding. Under this ruling, which applies mainly to predominant Danish Lutheran Church but affects all denominations, individual vicars are free to refuse to marry to a gay couple, but the vicar’s bishop must then nominate a replacement vicar to perform the ceremony. That may work for churches whose clergy were free to choose in the matter; there are, for example, only about 85,000 Catholics in Denmark, but I’m guessing it won’t be long before the clash of rights comes to a head.
Thoughts?
Sorry if the spacing isn’t right, but when I try to manipulate/correct it, I get bumped out of the post and lose all my typing. So annoying.
I have just replied to my good friend Jeff on Delingpole’s blog. He had written:
‘I really, honestly, don’t get why adults care what follow consenting adults wish to do with their own lives.
If two people wish to commit to each other I say, more power and best wishes to them”.
I replied:
Jeff, I think you’re looking at this as an emotional event between two people. That’s understandable and laudable in its way. But the objectors don’t object because they want to deny people happiness. They object because they don’t want to deprive future children of a mother and a father, and mothers and fathers are best made by and in marriage, which is a stable long-term relationship — rather than by the more ephemeral unions that exist outside of the commitment of marriage.
In short, it’s about children and the raising of our future citizens. I would frankly be just as happy unmarried as married, since in my case the relationship would be the same in practice. I HAD to be married because I was a foreign national at the time, and could not have lived in the same country as my beloved without that legal tie. But the state (in this case, the USA) awarded us that legal tie because there was always a chance (well, what did *they* know?) that we might become parents. And therefore we should be kept together as a legal family unit, privileged in the eyes of society above all other legal units and above all other private unions.
No one is saying that homosexual couples shouldn’t have legal unions. What we’re saying is that those unions aren’t marriage, and can’t be marriage, because they can’t naturally give rise to children (whether the parents actually expected those children or not).
Oz: Quick thought: How can you have a church wedding if you don’t accept the precepts of your church? This is a separation of church and state issue, which isn’t always about the freedom of the state from the church, but can also work the other way. This is the fundamental political-philosophic question (formally known as ‘the theological-political question’) of Who Should Rule?
How much sway do we allow the priests? In our time, the claim of religion is a negligible part of the political picture, since the priests — heavy-hitters in all polities the world over — have been whittled to nearly nothing in the West. But human nature will always provide new priests in their place, wearing different vestments and speaking different doctrines.
Correction: I had gone to bed and was lying there thinking: ‘It’s the theological-political problem‘ (so-called, rather than ‘question’). It has even been called the theologico-political etc., but that’s not what we call it at my house. : )
It’s going to depend on the denomination. The Church of Rome (article coming soon as promised BTW) is absolutist in matters of marriage and sexuality, holding Matrimony to be one of the Seven Sacraments, that is, channels of divine grace. Here it is, straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. So priests have no option, are unable to marry gay couples; no bishop can order a priest to do so, and even if one did, under Canon Law the marriage would be invalid, as it did not meet the preconditions for a valid marriage.
So, as far as Catholicism is concerned at least, you are right: you cannot be married in the Church if you don’t accept its teachings, with regards matrimony at a minimum. The trick, then, is in convincing the churches themselves to alter their own teachings; in the case of the Danish Lutheran Church, at least, this would appear to have worked – Oz
Update: here’s an article that canvasses the political and social ramifications for the Church of England.
I see JD’s blog has been firing away with a debate on the same subject. Coincidence, I’m sure 😀
In response to Amanda (1:41 PM on 6 September), Ozboy had observed that:
I’ve long been of the opinion – particularly since my college course on The Church and the Modern World in fulfillment of my Theology requirement back in the days when I was young, happy, and getting laid pretty regularly – that if Roman Catholics in these United States really took their religion seriously, we would long ago have formally rejected the Vatican in favor of a schism.
There’s a damned good Web article on The Counter-Enlightenment: Papal Encyclicals of the Nineteenth Century (27 February 2011), which starts:
Although the focus of Church doctrine voicing the Vatican’s hostility toward the political instantiation of individual human rights – particularly freedom of conscience – were focused most intensely upon developments in western Europe, the rank disgust with what was happening in the English settlements of North America that became these United States (and which very early-on showed aggressive “manifest destiny” threats to Catholic francophone Canada and the Catholic Spanish colonies to the south) was palpable.
It wasn’t until the election of Leo XIII (r. 1878-1903) that opposition in the Vatican to the principles of civil government protective of individual human rights finally began to abate. From that article previously cited, let me pull a more lengthy quotation:
Remember, the list of concepts in Syllabus Errorum were being condemned by Holy Mother Church, and explicitly entrain the anti-establishmentarianism – Jefferson’s “wall of separationbetween church and state” – embodied in our Constitution’s First Amendment.
Small wonder that for most of the 19th Century the federal government in these United States refused to accept a papal nuncio (“apostolic nuncio”) as the official ambassadorial representative of the Papal States because such a person had to be a Roman Catholic priest, and there were periods during which the Congress refused to recognize the Pope’s rule of the Papal States and later Vatican City as a legitimate government.
“Boomer” Americans – including those of us who’d been “raised Catholic,” who send our kids to parochial schools, and who regularly take part in the Mass and other parish activities – seem to have a gauzy mellow view of Roman Catholicism very much at odds with the historical record and the rest of hard reality.
So what’s the solution for Roman Catholic homosexuals?
The way I figure it, they should get the hell out of the Roman Catholic Church and either find a Protestant sect in which religious doctrine is reconciled with the Zero Aggression Principle (i.e., individual human rights) or start their own.
“Holy Mother Church”!
To this day, I can’t utter that phrase in anything but the stage Irish accent in which I always heard it in my childhood 😆
There is much (much) I could say in response, as I expect could others of our group raised in the same faith. But I’ll save it for the dedicated thread – Oz
I have been trying to think of some clever way to connect emergent properties of complex adaptive systems with gay marriage…. But failed. So to keep this OT digression brief;
I am not talking about some romantic Rousseuian abstract mind-meld, or identifying the majority choice with a supra-individual concept of intention.
This is real, observable behaviours of groups. The UK electoral system with commons and lords, constituencies and MPs is a system with a lot of traditional inherited aspects, and gradual evolution over time. It invites the classic metaphor of the ‘body politic’ in its organic parrallels. In multicellular animals the individual cells interact to form an entity with features that transcend the capabilities of the individual elements. It has capacities that are not part of the behaviour of the constituent parts.
http://www.gradesaver.com/leviathan/study-guide/section8/
Hobbes leviathan encapsulates the body politic in image form…
Another recognition of the organising elements that emerge from collective systems is in Adam Smiths metaphor of the ‘invisible hand’. Again the capacities of the system are distinct from the abilities or choices of the individuals that comprise it.
And seeing the church raised as an aspect of the gay marriage debate does make itossible to link back, organised religion is e paradigm of trans-individual systems….
Is the Roman Catholic church legal it is after all the product of admitted self forged legal documents and the product of schism from the Orthodox church. For them to pontificate on the rights and wrongs to others is to my mind a tad hypocritical.
Kitler, pontification is , per se, pure hubris and delusion.
The Roman Catholic church lost the plot at the point where they decided to run with the Resurrection from the Dead story, rather than the truth of the “botched ” crucifiction.
Whatever is fictitious about the story — and as you know, Farmer friend, I think all the significant bits are, nonetheless, how can one ‘botch’ a crucifixion? Wouldn’t that be like ‘botching’ the sinking of the Titanic (or any other boat, for that matter)? How could anyone ‘botch’ the beheading of More, Anne, and Mary Queen of Scots, except in the sense of not doing it quickly?
Certain things are not survivable.
amanda by botching remember they would not allow the body to be disposed of for weeks, not less than 24 hours you want the example to hang around a while to remind people and as criminals the romans would probably not allow the body a decent burial.
I have a feeling you started all this Gay marriage debate.
…Of course there’s a tradition in Britain for pantomime….
Kitler: A gruesome subject — but a body raised up above the ground would at least be safe from the, er, attentions of carnivorous animals.
Doesn’t bear thinking about, really.
Fenbeagle’s latest is, by contrast, a jolly affair. Well, sort of bittersweet jolly.
Re . The Anointed One.
Regardless of whether or not he existed, or whether he was removed from the cross unconscious (having ingested the substance on the sponge) after a short interval and before death had resulted, dead people do not come back to life.
Just as water does not change instantly into wine ; an unfortunate truth.
The Roman Catholic church set itself up for ridicule when it decided to run with the spin version.
FB: But a non-believer might well ask: aside from the salutary aspects of its morality, what about scripture or dogma is not open to ridicule?
Perhaps you mean religious dogma/ scripture of a theistic nature; so of course that is true. But while the Dead Sea Scrolls , for example , may have been regarded in that way by the sect to which they are attributed, viz. the Essenes, we can see them as purely historical documents which provide an interesting perspective on the events that took place 2000 odd years ago.
In the aforementioned scrolls , Jesus the Nazarene is referred to as The Man of a Lie, the schism over the so-called resurrection having already split the church into those who saw the PR value of this myth on one hand , and those who were present and observed that Jesus was removed from the cross before death ; in the story these last mentioned were Mary his mother and Mary Magdalene , his wife. John (the Baptist) was aligned with the latter group. Today we can see the whole story as an account of a radical Judaistic sect , espousing inclusion, non-separatism, charity to all regardless of anything, and the fate of one of their leaders( at the behest of the Judaistic orthodoxy) who failed to fulfill the eschatology which formed the basis of their crusade.
Hi Farmer. Non-separatism in what context, may I ask? You are a writer of admirable economy but it does mean that one runs the risk of assuming too much.
Extremely interesting ideas, by the way, Farmer. I’m not talking in code, either: what you’ve said is very interesting, even though I don’t know the truth of the matter.
Here is a link which , while it is not the last word on the matter, provides some background to what was really going on. The gospel of Peter , fragments of which have recently been uncovered, is providing further evidence that the intelligent reader was not supposed to take the “miracles” at face value, and that the real meaning ( the pesher) was far more mundane; basically just a power struggle amongst factions.
http://www.peshertechnique.infinitesoulutions.com/index_The_Resurrection.html
What an unbelievable level of detail – Oz 😉
Farmer: Bookmarked, and thank you.
————-
Oz: :^o
Oz, more or less believable than “miracles”?
The whole idea of the pesher was to reveal the whole truth while keeping it concealed from those who did not need to know.
IMHO? No more. And no less.
These kinds of cabalistic interpretations of scripture are nothing new. I’m not surprised someone’s done the same now with the Dead Sea Scrolls. But the author’s almost comic vehemence in differentiating herself from the Da Vinci Code aficionados serves only to highlight that she is really just one more of them – Oz
Farmer: That’s what philosophy attempts to do (as I mentioned in my comment about Rousseau et al, above). Though ‘the whole truth’ may be too ambitious for a human being.
By the way, I’m interested in this idea of ‘pesher’ as real meaning. The Greeks have the term ‘aitia’, which seems to be similar (at first glance) in that it refers to the true cause, which is not always or ever the stated cause or even the generally believed cause. So in the Pelopponesian War, there is the cause as given by each of the poleis and recorded by Thucydides, and then there is the aitia, true cause, which Thucydides is concerned to discover.
At 1:34 PM on 9 September, Amanda had posted:
Hrmph. I’d gotten the impression that “pesher” was in some way derivative of the Yiddish term “pisher,” which translates a wee bit scatologically as “a bed-wetter, a young inexperienced person, a person of no consequence,” equivalent to “a young squirt” in colloquial American.
Hadda resort to Wiki-bloody-pedia to find out that “pesher“ is Hebrew, not Yiddish, and carries with it the significance of “interpretation” to a degree of finality implying solution in the examination of scripture. We called it exegesis in my college Theology courses, though I’m not sure that the two terms are precisely equivalent.
It is easy to see why the pesher technique was especially important for the occupants of Jerusalem :-
“During its long history, Jerusalem has been destroyed twice, besieged 23 times, attacked 52 times, and captured and recaptured 44 times.[1] The oldest part of the city was settled in the 4th millennium BCE, making Jerusalem one of the oldest cities in the world.[2]
It should be noted that according to the Bible the Jews are not a native people of what is now Israel but hail from lower Mesopotamia. Then after a quick stint in Egypt in a vain attempt to acquire the dancing genes, mysteriously were promised by an invisible being that the real estate they had wandered into was theirs. Religion always makes perfect sense, they probably did a runner from Egypt because they owed them rent or something.
‘Then after a quick stint in Egypt in a vain attempt to acquire the dancing genes’
God you are hilarious!
Tucci: But exegesis is a process or attempt, isn’t it, and the ‘true meaning’ might be what one finds through successful exegesis.
The idea that religious texts contain hidden cryptic knowledge so that only the cognoscenti can extract it is a form of conspiracy theory.
Of course on occasions religious writers did encode their meaning, and there is a long tradition in Jewish scholarship of textual analysis to find the “true” meaning. Also known as looking for loopholes in the rules….
I had a mid-Victorian annotated bible once that explained the book of revelations not as a warning about armeggedon and the second coming, but as an extended rant by St John against certain factions within the new church. The claim was that the characteristics of the beast and whore were topical and would have been easily recognised as referring to specific churches, and bishops of the early movement.
But most exegesis, pesher, hermetic knowledge is, like conspiracy theory, an exercise in thinking that you are superior in having gained the ‘true’ knowledge that is hidden from the mere hoi-poli.
There is a saying that for every question there is a simple and convincing answer. That is also wrong.
With conspiracy theories and religious kabbalistic encoded knowledge there are an infinitude of complex, comprehensive and seductive answers.
Also all wrong.
Given that the are few historical sources from the period, and all are partisan or partial, trying to determine the TRUE events is inherently impossible. I suspect the best depiction of the social context and type of events that were happening in Roman occupied Palestine at the time is in that well researched and sourced historical documentary, The Life of Brian.
{with the possible exception of the alien saucer landing}
Izen: True. Philosophy is a different case, however, being about apprehension of reality rather than the record of history or chronology. For reasons I’ve already given, political philosophers — which is to say, really, THE philosophers, even if they were also ‘natural philosophers’ — have to cloak their teachings and provide artful misdirection. A book, of course, can be read by any literate person but on the other hand, only certain persons, educated to a certain level, can read, puzzle things out, raise their own mental questions in response, join the dots and understand. The gap between reading and reading is what makes esoteric writing possible and worthwhile. Even Shakespeare’s works can be said to be esoteric, in that they do not reveal their meaning to every reader or on a casual uncritical read.
The point Izen , is that there was no Virgin Birth, Resurrection from the Dead, Walking on Water , Changing Water to Wine etc and that’s the truth.
The Book of Revelation is , according to the pesher, no more than an account of a religious ceremony; quite mundane.
But I think that you do the scholars a disservice in calling them conspiracy theorists, although I agree that they were biased in that they dismissed the possibility of the supernatural happenings at the outset.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were being worked on when FB was a student of religion , and the first interpretations were quite fantastic ; witness John Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.
You want conspiracy then check that one out; a cult of phallus worship [apparently a misconstruction of the usage of Amanita phalloides, the deathcap mushroom, as a suicide draught for crucifiction victims. Hee, hee, what a dick :-)]
I never read any of Allegro’s work, but did read plenty of accounts of the character assassination perpetrated on him by the little clique of priests who for decades acted as gate keepers to the scrolls.
It is only in the past decade or so that photographs of the scrolls have become available to a wider scholarly community. The stock refusal was apparently to claim that any scholar outside of the little clique was unqualified to have access to images of the scrolls.
It all sounds very familiar to spectators of climate gate.
Two possible reasons for the pathological reticence;
1) the scrolls were as Allegro claimed, the dynamite which would blow the Christian religion to pieces, and therefore all translations had to be carefully scripted to edit out or disguise the dangerous bits
2) the scrolls were so mundane and boring that the little group of fathers had to blagg about their importance to keep the funds flowing.
Both of which pretty much describe the activities of the hockey team too.
On the question of the language of “water to wine”, “Raising Lazarus from the dead”, “born of a virgin”
If you take the the Essenes as a little, ultra orthodox sect, with their own jargon /cant, using allegory and symbolism (and the scrolls seem to support this)
The Essenes appear to refer to themselves as:
the meek, the poor, the living, fishes. the last one is interesting, as nasari means fish Their women are virgins the essenes are wine, they have been raised
Those outside of the circle of the Essenes, are
the rich, they are dead in the sense of not being members of the cult, they are water, their marriages are not recognised and their women are whores and adulteresses.
Taken in the context of allegory, the loaves and fishes becomes a successful day’s missionary work, as does the water into wine at the wedding in Canaan.
Lazarus, had suffered a crisis of faith and Jesus (a title, not a name) went to see him and talked him round.
The virgin birth and Mary Magdelane’s supposed indiscretions become clear too. The virgin was a cult member, Magdelane was a convert; a whore.
The problem comes with Saul of Tarsus, who as a diasporan Jew, either lacked the cultural knowledge himself, or failed to pass it on to his converts around the empire, and who certainly lacked the cultural background.
The knowledge of those who’d known Jesus (and who was he? John the Baptist looks like a more realistic spiritual leader – his cousin, with his thuggish “disciples” (Simon the rock, Judas the knife…) more like his kingly / military underling) and were almost certainly killed, resulting in their knowledge being lost, or dispersed in the two Jewish campaigns.
The few scrolls which show up are the ones which have evaded the Roman military in the Jewish Campaigns, Constatine’s burning of anything which didn’t fit his chosen narrative, and subsequent wars, attrition and the bonfires of islamist “purification”
Was Yehoshua, son of man (as opposed to Yehoshua, Bar Abbas (son of The Father) who was freed) taken off the cross alive?
The Muzzies say he was, and there may have been more reliable information available in Mecca, than there was in Constantinople.
OZ: ” But the author’s almost comic vehemence in differentiating herself from the Da Vinci Code aficionados serves only to highlight that she is really just one more of them ”
Barbara’s Thiering’s work on translating and making sense of the Scroll’s pre-dates the da Vinci stuff by some years, and is unlikely to be related. I have to say though that I know nothing about the da Vinci Code.
If you say so FB; your link is my only acquaintance with her. I note simply the remarkable coincidence that her scriptural interpretation technique somehow seems to have turned out the exact plot of The Da Vinci Code – Oz
That’s the interpretation which makes sense Ian ;the Loaves and the Fishes were the priests (levites) and monks. Jesus’ heresy was to say that anyone could do it, similarly to his saying that all should be admitted to communion with wine instead of water. The whole thing is just politics. John the Baptist (The Teacher of Righteousness)was a hard-liner and Jesus (The Man of a Lie) was a usurper with democratic tendencies.
The thing that I find unbelievable is the idea that the RC church doesn’t know all this.
Oh, they know all right – in fact, they’ve sent out murderous albino monks to try to cover it all up (sorry, now I’m becoming more sarcastic than funny).
I really should get the next religion thread going soon so you can all have at this topic afresh. For what it’s worth, my own view of the historical events of the time actually isn’t too far from yours – the events depicted in the Gospels certainly can only be understood in the context of local history; in-fighting among Jewish potentates over many decades had weakened and fragmented their ability to rule, and it was inevitable that one of the rival factions would make alliance with the superpower of the day in exchange for at least the veneer of supreme local power. Unrest and resistance groups, such as John the Baptist’s (or, pace Izen, the People’s Front of Judea), inevitably form under such circumstances. It’s a story as old as civilization itself, and we do not even need to look back beyond the twentieth century to see it repeated over and over.
That’s the historical reality. The supernatural (traditional Christian) or Jesus-dynastic (Da Vinci Code) interpretations of these events require leaps of faith; in Old Testament prophecies and second-hand witness accounts on one hand, and tea-leaf reading on the other. I don’t discount either absolutely, and hasten to add that I respect those with faith in either. For myself though, I prefer instead to employ Occam’s Razor – Oz
Oz,
The plagiarism case may have failed, but Brown’s “davinci code” story draws very heavily on Leigh and Baigent’s “holy blood, holy grail”, and fails to reference that source.
Leigh and Baigent draw on the scrolls as one line of evidence.
Oz: Occam’s Razor will do. : )
Actually, FB piqued my interest, so I did a bit of gargling. Barbara Thiering’s book, Jesus The Man, indeed pre-dates the publication of The Da Vinci Code, by thirteen years. I could find no reference that Brown in researching his novel drew upon Thiering’s work, but rather, as Ian points out above, on Leigh and Baigent.
Theiring’s book does not seem to have had a very positive response among professional historians. Géza Vermes, Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies at Oxford, and who as a young man was among the first scholars to examine the Dead Sea Scrolls, wrote a critique of Jesus The Man (mostly behind a paywall) for the New York Review of Books. Thiering wrote an angry letter in response to the NYRB, to which Vermes replied:
Perhaps this is why the Church of Rome does not know the history of Jesus, as deduced by Thiering?
Hi guys. For myself, I confess quite easily that I’m out of my depth here. I don’t even understand the definition of ‘pesher’ as being interpretation of an existing prophecy (is there any other kind?) in terms of its fulfillment in the age of the interpreter. The interpreter, reading old texts, might well live at any time. Those that fulfilled the prophecy (or are believed to have done so) might have lived two millenia ago. Why not? I don’t get it.
Géza Vermes ; Sheesh , nasty little bitch isn’t he? What’s his problem? Barbara Thiering is a woman? She’s an Australian? Who cares?
They both agree that there was no resurrection it seems:-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/mar/18/academicexperts.highereducationprofile
The apostles were having visions , in Vermes view. He also seems happy to run with the idea of prophecy, which is strange for a rationalist. And he’s a Catholic , though that could mean anything , or nothing.
The point about the pesher, according to Thiering, was that there was no interpretation required; it meant exactly what it said , once the terminology was acquired; it was consistent throughout; invariable ; and the meaning was precise.
Well, if that wasn’t so , why did anyone bother to write any of it down? Surely , the intention was to convey something. But surely not to require belief in rational impossibility.
Still , it seems the Dead Sea Scrolls have had the impact that Ian referred to. Vermes and Thiering both discount resurrection, for different reasons , and the central article of faith is revealed for . . . what?
Nere is a bit of commentary on the different forms of pesher:-
http://sxcari.blogspot.co.nz/2009/05/pesher-and-dead-sea-sectarians.html
And here’s one for the conspiracy theorists:-
From Dr Roger James
” Frank Kermode does not include in his discussion of the resurrection the gospel reference that gives the best clue about the death and resurrection of Jesus, namely John 19.34: ‘Forthwith came there out blood and water’ (LRB, 20 March). There can be only one possible explanation for this happening after the spear had been thrust into his side: Jesus had a large pleural effusion, which the spear released. This diagnosis explains a good deal that is otherwise puzzling in the gospel stories. Although he had previously walked everywhere, Jesus needed an ass for his final entry into Jerusalem. Also, he was unable to carry his cross, which other men of his age could carry easily. A pleural effusion this size would have been accumulating for some time. It would have been tuberculous, and so Jesus would have been getting steadily weaker. It isn’t surprising that he felt ‘he was not long for this world.’
The story in John implies that the soldiers were surprised to find Jesus dead so soon. With the effusion pressing on his heart and his body fixed upright he would probably have gone into severe heart failure, and would have appeared dead even though his heart itself was perfectly sound. The spear blow that was expected to finish him off might actually have saved his life by relieving the pressure on his heart. Being laid horizontally would have allowed the blood and fluids pooled in his legs to return into circulation, a process assisted by the coolness of the tomb. He might, in these circumstances, have regained consciousness and thus have seemed to be resurrected.”
Dr Roger James
Portsmouth
And if you’re still interested in any of this , some points in relation to Vermes’ views:-
http://www.tektonics.org/books/vermrezrvw.html
O.K. I promise; no more :-
http://thefactsaboutislam.blogspot.co.nz/2011/05/forgotten-resurrection-story-is-refuted.html
Heh, heh, OK. As I’m new to this myself (as in, today), I’m in no position to referee that particular spat. But one point I would note about Vermes’ comments above is that his conclusions appear to be pretty much unanimous in the academic community. There may well be senior scholars who subscribe to Theiring’s views, but in the brief period I’ve been looking at this today I haven’t found any. That doesn’t speak to the supernatural interpretation of the Resurrection; it seems to me you could still discount both it and Theiring’s techniques together – Oz
completely OT
Now that they’re planting bombs, the Southern Preposterous Lie Centre, has identified “occupy” clowns as “Radical Right”
Firehand has the links, turn your sound off before going there, he has an embedded video in an old post which autoplays http://elmtreeforge.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/the-southern-poverty-lie-center-strikes.html
However Cthulhu “may he feed on you last” is entirely real and anyone arguing is up for some serious cut and thrust debate at the old mysterious watch tower near Miskatonic university.
Luton Ian the Southern lie center gets it’s money from ruining otherwise normal people exercising their right to free speech via suing them in the courts. They never go after lefty extremists like the NBP or the weather under ground folks. They also support the followers of the desert pedo who shall in their time destroy them as well. Try practicing law with no head.
Back to our original topic, apparently I’m a “Bigot”. Presumably lots of other people are as well or he wouldn’t have changed it?
http://news.sky.com/story/983827/clegg-speech-gay-marriage-opponents-bigots
I wonder: does he think that anyone opposed to all those other types of potential future marriages are all bigots too?
All those bigots to rail at… what a broad-minded fellow he must be – Oz
meltemian what original topic?
New post… http://knottedprop.wordpress.com/2012/09/11/how-is-that-arab-spring-working-out-for-you-obama/
Kitler,
re: preposterous lie centre.
It’s all about making language so confused that people are unable to think; remember in the time of gorbachuffchuffchuff, the BBC was talking about “right wing” soviet communists.
I remember my surprise when I saw hammer and sickle emblems framed on the walls of Margheritta Sarfati’s house. (she was benny’s mistress and co founder of Madge & Ben’s ice cream
sorry, that should be “social experiment”
I was surprised, because I’d been raised on the official English speaking world’s vanilla and waste pork fat flavour story that Benny was “far right”
my then wife was amazed that I didn’t know that they were (and sarfatti may have remained) marxists and that fascism was a form of socialism.
I’d also sort of assumed that fascism was racist and anti semitic
Sarfatti was of Jewish birth, and Benny put Italian troops into harms way to protect Jews
I think his daughter and grand daughter are technically “jewish”
Well it’s funny here in Obamastan as every time the liberal media find an incident of right wing violence and or hate crime it invariably turns out to be one of theirs and they shut up very quickly and the incident is spoken of no more. The Zimmerman/Trayvon case is a prime example he went from white racist to technically black and card carrying dem activist you can’t make this stuff up.
@- farmerbraun
“The point Izen , is that there was no Virgin Birth, Resurrection from the Dead, Walking on Water , Changing Water to Wine etc and that’s the truth.
The Book of Revelation is , according to the pesher, no more than an account of a religious ceremony; quite mundane.”
As a Humean hard-line materialist you don’t need to persuade me! {grin}
But that reality would not have initiated the pandemic meme of christianity. Which seems to feed on its combination of open access {even to slaves!} with no circumcision and no special value to social status, so a very wide market. And the synthesis of various deep mythic elements from other magical religious traditions that had the rhetorical appeal to existential questions of mortality, suffering and social ethics.
The subsequent history is not of any attempt to get closer to the truth, but a chaotic evolution, sometimes intentionally selected, of honing the core message, rules and accompanying rituals.
The schisms are part of that. Adherence to tradition, and adaption to changing conditions is an inherent conflict in any social organisation. A complex adaptive system like a religious organisation may split to resolve this internal conflict when even a diet or worms cannot generate a compromise…
My limited impression of the catholic church, the jesuits rather than the laity, is that they are quite aware of the partly human designed nature of their theology and traditions. But regard the ‘magical’ elements a necessary faith. It also bolsters the tendency to reduce change to the minimum. Supernatural absolutism is a powerful legitimiser of tradition.
@- meltemian says:
“Back to our original topic, apparently I’m a “Bigot”. Presumably lots of other people are as well or he wouldn’t have changed it?”
Enough for him to wimp out.
No surprise.
Who is a bigot is defined by social context.
But the problem with the term bigot is that carries the implication of an unchangeable, absolute opposition to the gender, race, behaviour or beliefs of another person. That has not been an accurate description of a very large proportion of the population. As Ozboy details with the history of the issue in Tasmania the transition from outright illegality to acceptance reflects a very big change in social attitudes by a significant percentage. Studies of opinion have shown repeatedly that when a radical idea is first suggested like say ‘Votes for Women’ opposition may be strong and outright rejection socially acceptable. But once the legitimacy of the change is established opinions change very rapidly. It then becomes acceptable to label those who still reject the change as bigots.
This connects back to the religious issue and the catholic church. Gay marriage by the churches is not on the cards {except for a few at the radical fringe.} Gay tolerance appears to be an issue that is splitting the Protestant church. But the real elephant in the room is the role of women. There are many in the traditional wing who would rather thave a gay bishop than a female one.
And then there is the catholic tradition. Only celibate male clergy allowed. Its an utterly unchangeable intolerance of female involvement in the church organisation beyond the level of consumer. {okay nuns are allowed…}
Is this bigotry ?
Traditional bigotry ?
It will only be socially acceptable for Clegg to call those opposing gay marriage bigots AFTER an act of parliament has legitimised the status of such marriages.
Izen: I don’t really like the term ‘bigot’ because, as your comment suggests, ‘bigotry’ is not an actual, definable position but a moving goalpost. Essentially, ‘bigotry’ is a charge rather than a fact. ‘Bigot’ is anyone that disagrees strongly with what someone else believes in. From the point of view of a truth-seeker, that simply is not good enough.
State shown for what it really is:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/liverpool/9538079/Hillsborough-report-reveals-South-Yorkshire-Police-made-strenuous-efforts-to-deflect-blame-on-to-Liverpool-fans.html
Some (not all) of the state paperwork relating to the deaths of over 90
supporters of Liverpool soccer team, has been de-classified.
Police actions resulted in the crushing to death, and later allowing further injured to die un attended.
The extent of the cover-up and the length of time that the cover up has been allowed to remain in place
– protecting an incompetent monopoly provider, and the incompetents within it from criticism (and implicitly from having its monopoly status challenged) says much about the contempt which our coercive monopolists harbour for those of us whom they parasitise.
I’ve been having several long running debates with minarchists (they might be my kind of archist, but they still remain archists, who wish their beloved statist violence to be inflicted on thee and me) who insist that policing, courts and law making can only be done by a coercive monopolist, despite the clear logic that :
ceterus parabus, a monopoly will provide lower quality higher priced goods than competing providers
a monopoly can only be maintained by state violence
a monopoly suffers from the calculation problem, it cannot calculate what services to provide, where, in what quantity and of what quality.
Further, it cannot calculate how to price them, and, as payment is taken by coercion and separated from delivery, and there is a disutility of labour, it follows that ever less service of ever lower quality will be provided by increasing numbers of, in this case The Fat Blue Line*
______________________________________________
*technical term for doughnut munchers, stolen from this gentleman
http://freedominourtime.blogspot.co.uk/
missed a bit
Further, it cannot calculate how to price them, and, as payment is taken by coercion and separated from delivery, and there is a disutility of labour, it follows that ever less service of ever lower quality will be provided at ever increasing cost and by ever increasing numbers of, in this case The Fat Blue Line*
Whatever happened to Dr Dave? Does anyone know? Or care to tell?
Someone could do a TV comedy about blogging types and their blogging friends and how these intersect (or not) with their everyday lives. It’s a whole world, really. The title could be The Blog Com (on the example of ‘sit-com’ or ‘rom com’).
I spoke to Dave recently; he says he’s been busy but does lurk here occasionally.
“The secret life of trolls” might be a goer, if any TV execs are lurking – Oz 🙂
Thanks, Oz. Glad to hear that Dave is still amongst the oddballs in some respect : )
Yes, thanks Amanda, I kept meaning to ask where Dr Dave had got to as well.
I miss his arguments with Tucci!
Incidentally Tucci, it was good to see you talking to Lubos about his suspected health problem. Hope he gets to the bottom of it soon.
At 5:14 PM on 13 September, meltemian writes:
You mean talking at Luboš. Or haven’t you noticed that he’s not responding to what I’ve noted and recommended?
At 11:55 PM on 12 September, Luton Ian had observed (incidental to his condemnation of The Fat Blue Line, but it goes for any kind of government action in society)that:
Thus the economic argument (preponderantly Austrian School, though there’s <a href="Ahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_smith"Adam Smith and Frédéric Bastiat in there as well) for libertarianism.
When I got my one and only chance to sit down and compare notes with Ron Paul (at a convention a bit more than a quarter-century ago), we spent most of the time explaining how we’d respectively discovered the Austrian School theorists. Typical GP/specialist contrast. I came in by way of Henry Hazlett, and he’d hammered through Ludwig von Mises’ massive Human Action.
In the course of my few years of activity in the Libertarian Party (back in the late ’80s), I found that the majority of my contemporaries had been drawn to the freedom movement not so much by pacifism or patriotism or any great appetite for the libertine pleasures – this latter the endless yammer of the sweaty, desperate statists as they’d realize we were attacking their beloved “God of the Machine” religious idiocy – but because of their grim appreciation that the government thugs were f-cking up the economy.
The Austrian scholars had been, for me as for almost all the rest, literally the last resort in each individual’s effort to figure out just how and why the “mainstream” economics to which we’d been exposed in college served in no way to account for the phenomena manifesting in the sociopolitical environment during the 1970s, emphasis on the hideous “Carter Malaise.”
It’s the great vulnerability of statism – and “The Fat Blue Line” – that when you turn a dispassionately objective examining eye upon its premises and effects, it just friggin’ well doesn’t WORK to achieve real human well-being (particularly or generally) as does the unimpaired conduct of voluntary, non-aggressive interaction in a laissez-faire political economy.
Hi Meltemian, of the lovely romantic Meditteranean name : )
Luton Ian only through a mountain of skulls can we restore the economy to it’s true balance, I belong to the Genghis Khan school of economics. Before anyone asks yes you can balance skulls to make a mountain of them.
Hi Amanda.
Not so lovely and romantic here today. We’re just getting our ‘End-of-Summer’ storms. Mr M has just been out paddling on the balcony unblocking the drain fractionally before the water comes over the step and into the house!
We’ve been leaping about the garden celebrating the rain – haven’t seen any since May and we’re fed-up of trying to keep the plants alive A couple of days of rain is just what we need.
Monday it’ll be back to sunshine again.
Sorry Oz’…..very OT, but it’s amazing how happy you can be about of rain. .
As I’ve always said Mel, here at the Bar and Grill, particularly this far down into a thread, there’s no such thing as OT – Oz 😉
“about of rain??? I think I meant about A BIT of rain.
Kitler, You mean like this?
http://www.google.gr/imgres?imgurl=http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oZIQ3fGvDq4/Tcf1_5UMuqI/AAAAAAAAC0Q/92upO0G1TDk/s1600/pyramid-of-skulls.jpg&imgrefurl=http://catholicknight.blogspot.com/2011/05/mountain-of-skulls.html&h=469&w=469&sz=72&tbnid=A5wppKT8i2IEpM:&tbnh=93&tbnw=93&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dmountain%2Bof%2Bskulls%26tbm%3Disch%26tbo%3Du&zoom=1&q=mountain+of+skulls&usg=__AhhM0jTgxx55vNr7QHG4GvF0Pek=&docid=TXjgRXDLh5hbbM&sa=X&ei=ht1SUMuaLZKk0AW-g4Ao&ved=0CCoQ9QEwAg&dur=227
Meltemian we have had some really good storms the last few weeks and flash flooding do you want to swap, the sub tropics is hot humid and thundery this time of year.
Meltemian no the Khan was very much a capitalist mountain of skulls man, always polite willing to do business but if you killed his ambassadors trying to drum up trade he would level your cities and kill everyone, cats and dogs included. I like his approach very direct.
Hi Meltemian. I can certainly understand that: as K. says, we have a rainy season but the complement to that is a fairly dry one. I can’t imagine living in a place like Phoenix, Arizona where it rarely rains at all. There is something about rain — psychologically — that is deeply refreshing, never mind the garden (though of course that’s a benefit, too). Too much of anything can be wearing, and that includes a samey sun.
Oh dear, looks like you’ve got a very unpleasant socialist meme festering away there Kitty.
If they’re left untreated, they keep on getting worse, the intellectual dissonance which they cause is both painful for the sufferer and the smell is unpleasant for anyone down wind (it even over powers the smell of maggoty sheep and foot rot coming off my work clothes).
Would you like it treating?
I’m sure the good doctor would oblige, or I could have a go, but i’ve only been swatting up on Rothbard for just coming up 2 years, Tucci’s been at it for quarter of a century. That’s impressive.
So Luton Ian and Tucci you mean you haven’t learned anything in all that time a total of 27 years between you and still trying to figure it out. Serious face palm.
K: I want to know, are you fonder of Memphis than ever or do you still have your sights on them thar snowy hills?
At 10:56 AM on 15 September, Kitler writes: “So Luton Ian and Tucci you mean you haven’t learned anything in all that time a total of 27 years between you and still trying to figure it out.”
Nah. Can’t speak for Luton Ian, but I’m a science fiction fan, and as we like to say, “Fans are Slans.” I had it figured out completely by 1966, when Heinlein had published The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the notable passage of dialogue running as follows:
Though it’s common enough for American libertarians to say It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand, for science fiction fen it’s more appropriate to attribute our cussed methodological individualism to the early and pervasive influence of Robert A. Heinlein.
Amanda them thar snowy hills.
Tucci I’ve read all of Heinlein probably three times over and if you’ve read “The cat who walks through walls” you find out that Luna becomes like any state corrupt and bureaucratic and basically like modern America; also the computer at the heart of it organized it all because it was emotionally still a child and was bored.
Did I not say so above?
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/donkey-sex-gets-thumbsup-from-censors-20120914-25×24.html
And they mock those who warn of a slippery slope…
on the subject of poor taste films, I found a trailer for the one which is currently claimed to make certain individuals loose all responsibility.
Don’t bother looking for it unless your either really curious, or just like bad films, it is an absolute Z grade movie.
crap sound, actors badly superimposed above wobbly desert images, wooden actors with brown makeup on and crap script writing.
halfway through the youtube crashed. I’m guessing their admin guys have taken it down.
You’ve provided no link, which is probably just as well. Anything that coerces anyone to lose their sense of responsibility is bad news in my book.
I suspect, however, you are talking about this – Oz
Ah the nostalgia! Those heady days of adolescence flailing around for a belief system with certainty after rebbelling against the inherited version. I remember drinking down the Henlein anarcho-syndicalism as the last word in political thought. Of course I was also reading Bakunin, Proudhon and Kropotkin.
I still retain some of the ideas I formed from those youthful days. The unique primacy of individuals as sentient moral agents makes them the only possible subject of moral culpability in my view.
I would want to have a week or two to work up a rational argument for that position, even then I doubt it would have much epistemic solidity so probably best to take it as an a priori assumption, a matter of ‘faith’ if you prefer.
Hard to deny the existence of supra-human systems when faced with the recent violence in response to a film insulting islam. Not really credible, or usefull to ascribe all that violence to individual choice and make each individual culpable when the religious institution to which they belong is the source for their actions.
I would also take issue with the little para-religious catechism that was quoted twice. –
“ceterus parabus, a monopoly will provide lower quality higher priced goods than competing providers
a monopoly can only be maintained by state violence
a monopoly suffers from the calculation problem, it cannot calculate what services to provide, where, in what quantity and of what quality.”
Ceterus parabus in this case would seem to mean a very narrow and specific definition of economic measurement that excluded any externalities or considerations of Pareto efficiency that might refute these assertions. In other words they are only true within a constrained context.
Certainly I am sure that Tucci can think of several examples where in the real world monopoly provision is not just more effective than competition, but there is no functional example of a private competitive system that provides the services or product in anything like as efficient a manner.