I suggest you take it as a reminder to check in on yourself, because no one is immune to mental health challenges.
I suggest you take it as a reminder to check in on those around you, because it's not always clear when people are suffering and even if they aren't, expressing concern and empathy is a good thing.
I suggest you take it as a reminder to dissociate mental health challenges from stigma, because it's easy to dismiss those struggling with mental health issues as weak, incapable, or unreliable, but none of that is necessarily true.
I saw Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds this summer and enjoyed them very much. Noel only played one Oasis song, "Don't Look Back In Anger," and it was fun, but his other material was much better. And he has clearly learned to give a shit about the audience's experience. I recall a lot of people compared Oasis to the Beatles, which I never understood; this felt closer to a Beatles show (without all the screaming teenagers) than the original Fighting Gallagher Brothers Roadshow. I'd went to see Metric and Garbage, but was quite pleased with the High Flying Birds on the triple bill at the end of the show.
It was understood as early as 2015 that Trump wasn't a conservative. He's a nationalist in the classic European style. What he's revealed himself to be is authoritarian in his nationalism.
Policies don't matter to such a person. Nor does ideology. It is the cult of personality, the elevation of the leader above the law until he becomes the law, that is whole point. And he's been quite frank about it all along. He could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his polling numbers wouldn't change. When you're famous you can just grab a woman's pussy and they let you ("they" being the media and the voters, not the victim of the sexual assault).
So it's no wonder that his supporters like Ms. Boebert see themselves as thus elevated and privileged. And it's no wonder that literally today we see pearl-clutching over loss of "decorum and standards" as the dress code in the Senate relaxes to accommodate John Fetterman's rather casual sartorial style -- from the same people who defended President Pussyhandler and tried to wave away that same President instigating violence against Congress in an effort to illegally remain in power on January 6, 2021.
These are not people engaged in the pursuit of power to advance some sort of an agenda based on ideology or some vision of how the world might be made better. They pursue power so they can do the things they want to do for their own benefit.
The "ideology" of MAGA was articulated in 1933 by the similarly authoritarian President of Peru, Oscar Benavides: "To my friends, everything, for my enemies, the law."
Huh. Remember when we met up in D.C. and we were all sort of disappointed we couldn't get into the Museum of African-American history? That line was wrapped, like, all the way around the building.
Also, this article is dated December of 2011. So it's been known for a dozen years now. But I was only Today Years Old when I learned that the orange juice is a lie.
Well, I was ready to make a nerdy joke over on Bluesky and then did a quick google to make sure I was getting the joke right and came across this, which apparently soft-opened three days ago:
Very sorry to learn of your divorce, Dark Matter. Mine hurt bad and it sounds like there's a very unpleasant situation going on motivating it. Not trying to inquire about the particulars of that, just noticing that it sounds very unhappy and offering up some empathy, the consolation of knowing your path has been trodden before, and the hopes that this journey eventually takes you and your family to a place of happiness.
This flyer might be a good way to start a food fight too. I find myself picking and choosing from its myriad bullet points about what's "white" and what's more culturally transcendent and what's just plain incorrect.
But of course just because one DEI trainer came up with this doesn't mean all DEI training teaches this content in this way.
How is this different from men? If you asked me what sex partner I had who was the very best, I'd pick someone who I had a fling but not a LTR with; she also had some unorthodox personal traits. (I'd guess she still does.)
See also: https://nypost.com/2012/11/25/nobody-marries-their-best-sex-ever/
I'm struck by the resonance between America Ferrera's role as Gloria in Barbie -- a middle-aged mother who struggles within the patriarchy and mourns the bitterness of her formerly-sweet daughter -- and her film debut in the wonderful Real Women Have Curves, where she played a young woman having to choose between a patriarchal life path and a more independent feminist path. It's ironic and a very deliberate choice of the writers of the earlier movie that the patriarchal path is urged by the young woman's mother, as a way of supporting the family and avoiding risk, where the feminist path is presented as something of an unknown but full of opportunity, and urged by the men in the protagonist's life. Barbie gives us an argument that even if a young woman chooses the feminist path, the patriarchy's ubiquity is still going to thwart all the promise and sap all the happiness that a path of greater independence offers.
The surrealistic mirror image of the patriarchy in Barbieland, in my opinion, was actually no better than the patriarchy itself and I found myself faulting the Barbies at the end for not crafting a better and more equitable solution for the Kens. But then again, Barbieland is animated by the power of the people in the Real World who play with the Barbie dolls, and as the OP points out, they tend to be basically uninterested in the affairs of the various Kens, which is perhaps not equitable from an adult perspective but we are talking about mostly little kids, after all.
I recall Gloria (America Ferrera's character in Barbie) making that exact complaint. Something to the effect of "A woman has to be everything to everyone all the time. She has to be a mother, and she's never a good enough mother. She has to be a career woman, and she is never good enough at her job. And if she does do what it takes to be good at her job, she isn't putting enough effort in to being a good mother. And if she somehow does both, she's letting her looks go, so she isn't pretty enough. And if she somehow does all of that she's so completely stressed out that she gets told she needs to smile more. It's literally impossible for her to win." I'm sure the phrasing of her speech was different than this, but I feel like I have the gist more or less right.
I mean, I agree that women having the option to pursue meaningful, well-paid careers is better than women not having that option. For sure. But the commentary encapsulated in Gloria's rant isn't so much about legal rights as it is about cultural expectations. And that's something that both men and women can work on shifting, but of course shifting cultural expectations is precisely what conservatism is fundamentally about about opposing (standing athwart history and shouting stop! and all that), and thus the alignment of our current discourse about sex, sexism, and gender roles.
Conspiring with who? The subordinates she's giving orders to? That isn't a conspiracy. It might be something else, but a conspiracy requires the conspirators to share a common intent to do a particular criminal thing.
No. I think the AG has done what is appropriate for a public official acting in that capacity to decline to defend the Constitutionality of something that the AG believes in good faith is not constitutional.
In my mind, for an Attorney General to decline to defend a procedurally valid act of the State, the action has to be unambiguously constitutional, and the AG has to be able to back up that opinion with substantial legal research. This looks a little thin on the research side but I can't say on the face of it that it's so thin that he reached this conclusion in bad faith.
I think the future will look a little bit different than the present from the perspective of electric vehicles. We can reasonably expect a larger fleet and the cars in that fleet to have longer range. Not so sure about some of the other bells and whistles and I am not versed enough in the technology to quantify what "longer range" means, although it seems to be the holy grail the engineers are working towards. Also don't know about recharge times.
But there will surely be a demand for that lithium. Balancing the interests of the tribes to control their lands and a reasonable level of environmental hygiene with the mining and use of the lithium strikes me as a big challenge. It could be done in good faith. Whether that will happen or not? I'm not sure history is on that side of things.
Well, you have me on that one. It always has, much of it chronicled here. But if there was ever a guy who had the talent and mojo to break the curse, it’s Aaron Rodgers.
They called Namath a hippie. He did commercials, dated starlets and enjoyed Johnny Walker Red. They call Rodgers a hippie. He does commercials, dates starlets and enjoys California Redbud.
I can feel the stars aligning.
That doesn’t mean the Jets will win the Super Bowl, of course. The AFC is absolutely loaded. Winning a championship is never easy. Injuries have derailed previous Jets’ seasons. The ball bounces funny. Only one team wins in the end and everyone else goes into the offseason unhappy. It is football after all.
But if Rodgers stays healthy and the defense plays like it did last year, the Jets will have a shot. It’s the first time in a very long time we can say that with any conviction.
Since the only thing ever guaranteed in life was the Jets winning the Super Bowl in January of 1969, it’s probably too much to ask for such assertions from my new QB. So, win or lose, the only thing I can be sure of: the Jets will not be boring. The beleaguered fans of this tormented franchise are going to enjoy the ride, wherever it may lead.
I recall hearing 'If we let gay couples marry, we'll have to let people marry their box turtles' about as often as I heard 'If we let gay couples marry, we'll have to let threesomes marry.'
I don't really see or hear the pressure to allow threesomes to marry. So I'm content, as before, to say that if society changes in such a way that a significant number of people who are in threesomes demand the right to marry then our cultural and political institutions can deal with that then.
But neither the threesome nor the box turtle arguments were actually arguments against same sex marriage itself. Now that we've experienced it for several years, I don't see that there are any objections against same-sex marriage at all. I see there are people who say "I personally don't want to officiate or sanction them, but I guess they can exist," and that seems just fine to me as a general matter (the actual public officials charged with the ministerial duty of issuing marriage licenses being a narrow exception to that).
Are malls, grocery stores, etc. -- private businesses open to the general public -- considered "public property" for purposes of the Governor's order? If yes, that's getting out of the "ownership control" that Philip refers to, and falls back on the state's police power.
I don't think the issue with cost applies to prosecutors, judges, courtrooms, staff -- as noted by Dark Matter, that's a pretty trifling expense. The issue with the cost of justice mainly comes on the delivery end of it: policing and incarceration are what's expensive. (But also when considering the cost of administration of justice, please don't forget the necessity of paying for counsel for the indigent defendants. Can't constitutionally incarcerate a defendant unless they've had a fair legal defense.)
Let's bear in mind the difference between polyamory and polygamy. Having multiple sex partners is not the same thing as having multiple spouses.
The poly people I actually know who participate in polyamorous dating and sex, and if they are married are socially married to a single partner. Apparently some polyamorous people are married sexlessly on the theory that sex and marriage aren't the same thing so they don't marry for sex and don't have sex for marriage. Others seem to enjoy sex with their spouses as well as other boyfriends/girlfriends. They sometimes use the phrase "primary partner" whether married or not to indicate that some individual (a spouse when they are married) has a special sort of role.
This lifestyle isn't for me so I don't live or participate in it personally; I'm reporting what others tell me. What I don't hear any hunger for, from any of these people, is a desire to have multiple marital partners. There seems to be an understanding that a plural marriage is neither legally sanctioned nor practically feasible the way plural relationships are.
Which doesn't mean that such a desire isn't possible or real; it means that among the people I know who actually live this lifestyle, it isn't a thing. The folks I know are, other than the polyamorous structure to their social and sex lives, reasonably similar to myself and probably a decent number of people here: urban or suburban dwellers, educated, employed in a white collar capacity of some sort, generally law-abiding, and not particularly religious.
So when we talk about polygamy, multiple simultaneous marriages, I think we're talking about things like FLDS or other religions that sanction or in some cases encourage multiple marriages. Those almost all seem to be hugely patriarchial, fertile ground for sanctioning abuse of the women involved in capacities subordinate to their husbands and invariably male church elders. I don't know of any non-religious situation where there are multiple polyandrous marriages (one woman married to multiple husbands, who are in some fashion subordinate to her).
My Secular Argument Against Polygamy, then, is two-part. First, it appears to coincide with abusive situations. Second, in the event of divorce or death, it's too complicated to lend itself to the standardized set of rules for dissolution of property that are associated with the end of two-partner marriages and baked into the law. If people want to privately work out in advance what happens in a plural marriage situation that's great but to make something legal and available to everyone, we need to have a fair and generally-applicable "default model" for what happens when people haven't thus prepared.
I have no Secular Argument against Polyamory, so long as it practiced ethically (meaning peole involved all know what's going on and are treated respectfully by one another).
Yeah, I'm with you on Vikram's friend. I certainly don't have any LESS faith in the EMA than I do the FDA to screen out something unsafe and I'd need to see more than one failure story to be convinced to change my mind.
So if you're trying to persuade me that the FDA is in need of reform, you succeeded.
This wasn't really what I was thinking of when I first engaged on the subject though. The Finland-or-Florida question is, because the rub of it is we don't know when or how we're going to need medical care. You don't get to pick something exotic or obscure like Incredible Rare Blood Condition Only Dr. House Can Identify and you don't get to pick "Leech up your nose how did THAT get there?" or any of those things. What you get to pick is "I'll live HERE," knowing that eventually your number is going to be up somehow. (A fact that, as we age, becomes all to ominously real.)
I didn't choose to dislocate my finger out on the river, but that's what happened to me a few weeks ago. I got to deal with a U.S. healthcare system for the entirely unanticipated and unchosen orthopedic injury. I might have preferred the NHS or the Canadian system as it turned out; the speed with which I actually got service from the appropriate physician after first doing the telemedicine visit then doing the primary care physician screen then getting referred to the orthopedic specialist when I knew good and damn well all along what I needed was an X-ray and an orthopedist to verify that my field repair had put the knuckle back where it belonged and get me into the right kind of splint. That was a lot of co-payments and time consumed. What would my experience have been in Canada? Probably a faster route to the orthopedist, but not MUCH faster -- so if it isn't going to be much faster, then it might as well be CHEAPER. Because I pay for the equivalent of a silver-level plan for myself, and at my age and with my health profile, it's the second-largest check I write every month after my mortgage payment.
(By the way, my finger hurts like a big dog. Still. If you get the chance to dislocate a finger or a toe, I suggest you pass on the opportunity.)
So there's inefficiency and bureaucracy (as Kristen complained of) anywhere I go. I don't know if I had to jump through all those hoops because the government made my health insurer put them in place for some reason that may or may not have a rational basis intelligible to a user of the system, or if the insurer did that on its own because the trolls in underwriting insist that there be screening mechanisms to protect their expensive orthopedist from people who don't really need them.
I'm not sure if the reason my health insurance is the second biggest bill I pay every month is because of the government. I know that there are other ways of doing healthcare that would result in me paying zero for health insurance every month, getting what amounts to the same speed and quality of care I just experienced, at the trade-off of me and you and everyone else paying higher taxes. And that there are steps intermediate between what we experience now in the U.S. and those other systems. But I'm not aware of any country that has a care-gatekeeping system and payment-for-services system that is LESS governmentally involved than ours, except if you're super rich and can pay for concierge medical services, which you can do anywhere in the western world if you have enough money. Most of us don't have that kind of money.
Which is part of the source of my skepticism that government involvement in healthcare is going to be any worse than privatized healthcare. And that's the case if "worse" or "better" are measured in 1) economic efficiency, 2) temporal efficiency, 3) quality of medical outcomes, 4) user friendliness, 5) long-term sustainability of systemic viability, or any other index one might care to propose.
Ironic indeed to look to the European Union for a "less governmental, less bureaucratic" system of medicine! But the EMA is only one part of the system of medical care that a citizen of, say, Czechia would navigate.
As far as I can tell, the EMA has a 210-day limit on the amount of time it can evaluate a drug before it either blesses it for release to the public or sends it back to the lab. The FDA's calendar is longer and more malleable (which, if you're right about the relatively higher corruption level, is ripe for abuse). An FDA defender would say the EMA may not be giving itself enough time to really understand a drug's risks before releasing it, but I think you're on to something. Let's award this point to our European friends.
So this part of the system one encounters in an EMA nation is better than the U.S. Does that mean you'd rather get sick in Florida, or would you rather get sick in Finland?
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/9/2023”
Today (11 October 2023) is World Mental Health Day.
I suggest you take it as a reminder to check in on yourself, because no one is immune to mental health challenges.
I suggest you take it as a reminder to check in on those around you, because it's not always clear when people are suffering and even if they aren't, expressing concern and empathy is a good thing.
I suggest you take it as a reminder to dissociate mental health challenges from stigma, because it's easy to dismiss those struggling with mental health issues as weak, incapable, or unreliable, but none of that is necessarily true.
On “Breaking Down the Band: Oasis, Radiohead, and Pearl Jam”
I saw Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds this summer and enjoyed them very much. Noel only played one Oasis song, "Don't Look Back In Anger," and it was fun, but his other material was much better. And he has clearly learned to give a shit about the audience's experience. I recall a lot of people compared Oasis to the Beatles, which I never understood; this felt closer to a Beatles show (without all the screaming teenagers) than the original Fighting Gallagher Brothers Roadshow. I'd went to see Metric and Garbage, but was quite pleased with the High Flying Birds on the triple bill at the end of the show.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/18/2023”
Florida man insists Portland burned to the ground in 2020, not yet rebuilt.
I'd better get that claim on my homeowners' insurance started, then.
On “MAGA Isn’t Serious… or Conservative”
Yeah, clearly my blood pressure was too low. Welp, THAT problem got solved!
"
It was understood as early as 2015 that Trump wasn't a conservative. He's a nationalist in the classic European style. What he's revealed himself to be is authoritarian in his nationalism.
Policies don't matter to such a person. Nor does ideology. It is the cult of personality, the elevation of the leader above the law until he becomes the law, that is whole point. And he's been quite frank about it all along. He could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his polling numbers wouldn't change. When you're famous you can just grab a woman's pussy and they let you ("they" being the media and the voters, not the victim of the sexual assault).
So it's no wonder that his supporters like Ms. Boebert see themselves as thus elevated and privileged. And it's no wonder that literally today we see pearl-clutching over loss of "decorum and standards" as the dress code in the Senate relaxes to accommodate John Fetterman's rather casual sartorial style -- from the same people who defended President Pussyhandler and tried to wave away that same President instigating violence against Congress in an effort to illegally remain in power on January 6, 2021.
These are not people engaged in the pursuit of power to advance some sort of an agenda based on ideology or some vision of how the world might be made better. They pursue power so they can do the things they want to do for their own benefit.
The "ideology" of MAGA was articulated in 1933 by the similarly authoritarian President of Peru, Oscar Benavides: "To my friends, everything, for my enemies, the law."
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/18/2023”
Huh. Remember when we met up in D.C. and we were all sort of disappointed we couldn't get into the Museum of African-American history? That line was wrapped, like, all the way around the building.
I wonder if we'd have been given this flyer.
"
Also, this article is dated December of 2011. So it's been known for a dozen years now. But I was only Today Years Old when I learned that the orange juice is a lie.
"
Well, I was ready to make a nerdy joke over on Bluesky and then did a quick google to make sure I was getting the joke right and came across this, which apparently soft-opened three days ago:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2518960/Wizardry_Proving_Grounds_of_the_Mad_Overlord/
It ain't Starfield or Baldur's Gate but it is remarkable that it exists at all.
On “Barbie, Motherhood, and the Political Climate”
Very sorry to learn of your divorce, Dark Matter. Mine hurt bad and it sounds like there's a very unpleasant situation going on motivating it. Not trying to inquire about the particulars of that, just noticing that it sounds very unhappy and offering up some empathy, the consolation of knowing your path has been trodden before, and the hopes that this journey eventually takes you and your family to a place of happiness.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/18/2023”
This flyer might be a good way to start a food fight too. I find myself picking and choosing from its myriad bullet points about what's "white" and what's more culturally transcendent and what's just plain incorrect.
But of course just because one DEI trainer came up with this doesn't mean all DEI training teaches this content in this way.
On “Barbie, Motherhood, and the Political Climate”
How is this different from men? If you asked me what sex partner I had who was the very best, I'd pick someone who I had a fling but not a LTR with; she also had some unorthodox personal traits. (I'd guess she still does.)
See also: https://nypost.com/2012/11/25/nobody-marries-their-best-sex-ever/
"
I'm struck by the resonance between America Ferrera's role as Gloria in Barbie -- a middle-aged mother who struggles within the patriarchy and mourns the bitterness of her formerly-sweet daughter -- and her film debut in the wonderful Real Women Have Curves, where she played a young woman having to choose between a patriarchal life path and a more independent feminist path. It's ironic and a very deliberate choice of the writers of the earlier movie that the patriarchal path is urged by the young woman's mother, as a way of supporting the family and avoiding risk, where the feminist path is presented as something of an unknown but full of opportunity, and urged by the men in the protagonist's life. Barbie gives us an argument that even if a young woman chooses the feminist path, the patriarchy's ubiquity is still going to thwart all the promise and sap all the happiness that a path of greater independence offers.
The surrealistic mirror image of the patriarchy in Barbieland, in my opinion, was actually no better than the patriarchy itself and I found myself faulting the Barbies at the end for not crafting a better and more equitable solution for the Kens. But then again, Barbieland is animated by the power of the people in the Real World who play with the Barbie dolls, and as the OP points out, they tend to be basically uninterested in the affairs of the various Kens, which is perhaps not equitable from an adult perspective but we are talking about mostly little kids, after all.
"
I recall Gloria (America Ferrera's character in Barbie) making that exact complaint. Something to the effect of "A woman has to be everything to everyone all the time. She has to be a mother, and she's never a good enough mother. She has to be a career woman, and she is never good enough at her job. And if she does do what it takes to be good at her job, she isn't putting enough effort in to being a good mother. And if she somehow does both, she's letting her looks go, so she isn't pretty enough. And if she somehow does all of that she's so completely stressed out that she gets told she needs to smile more. It's literally impossible for her to win." I'm sure the phrasing of her speech was different than this, but I feel like I have the gist more or less right.
I mean, I agree that women having the option to pursue meaningful, well-paid careers is better than women not having that option. For sure. But the commentary encapsulated in Gloria's rant isn't so much about legal rights as it is about cultural expectations. And that's something that both men and women can work on shifting, but of course shifting cultural expectations is precisely what conservatism is fundamentally about about opposing (standing athwart history and shouting stop! and all that), and thus the alignment of our current discourse about sex, sexism, and gender roles.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/11/2023”
yet.
"
Well, arguably in her power.
Turns out it was a losing argument (as most of us here, you and I both, predicted).
On “Can She Do That? New Mexico Governor Suspends Gun Carry Laws”
Conspiring with who? The subordinates she's giving orders to? That isn't a conspiracy. It might be something else, but a conspiracy requires the conspirators to share a common intent to do a particular criminal thing.
"
No. I think the AG has done what is appropriate for a public official acting in that capacity to decline to defend the Constitutionality of something that the AG believes in good faith is not constitutional.
In my mind, for an Attorney General to decline to defend a procedurally valid act of the State, the action has to be unambiguously constitutional, and the AG has to be able to back up that opinion with substantial legal research. This looks a little thin on the research side but I can't say on the face of it that it's so thin that he reached this conclusion in bad faith.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/11/2023”
I think the future will look a little bit different than the present from the perspective of electric vehicles. We can reasonably expect a larger fleet and the cars in that fleet to have longer range. Not so sure about some of the other bells and whistles and I am not versed enough in the technology to quantify what "longer range" means, although it seems to be the holy grail the engineers are working towards. Also don't know about recharge times.
But there will surely be a demand for that lithium. Balancing the interests of the tribes to control their lands and a reasonable level of environmental hygiene with the mining and use of the lithium strikes me as a big challenge. It could be done in good faith. Whether that will happen or not? I'm not sure history is on that side of things.
"
Oh, man, my heart goes out to John Puccio, who wrote this back in May:
And so after three snaps, 0/1 completions, zero yards passing, zero yards rushing, and a grand total of 75 seconds played, Aaron Rodgers came up lame with what we now know to be a season-ending, if not career-ending, torn Achilles tendon. Now, the Jets wound up winning last night and they deserved to win. Great show by the Jets D, and a stunner at the end of regulation. But, with all the hope and promise and excitement that John described... it's still the Zach Wilson era.
Fate came for the Goddamn New York Jets once again. So sorry, John.
On “Can She Do That? New Mexico Governor Suspends Gun Carry Laws”
What's the case for marriage?
1) People want it.
Do we need a 2)?
"
I recall hearing 'If we let gay couples marry, we'll have to let people marry their box turtles' about as often as I heard 'If we let gay couples marry, we'll have to let threesomes marry.'
I don't really see or hear the pressure to allow threesomes to marry. So I'm content, as before, to say that if society changes in such a way that a significant number of people who are in threesomes demand the right to marry then our cultural and political institutions can deal with that then.
But neither the threesome nor the box turtle arguments were actually arguments against same sex marriage itself. Now that we've experienced it for several years, I don't see that there are any objections against same-sex marriage at all. I see there are people who say "I personally don't want to officiate or sanction them, but I guess they can exist," and that seems just fine to me as a general matter (the actual public officials charged with the ministerial duty of issuing marriage licenses being a narrow exception to that).
"
Are malls, grocery stores, etc. -- private businesses open to the general public -- considered "public property" for purposes of the Governor's order? If yes, that's getting out of the "ownership control" that Philip refers to, and falls back on the state's police power.
I don't think the issue with cost applies to prosecutors, judges, courtrooms, staff -- as noted by Dark Matter, that's a pretty trifling expense. The issue with the cost of justice mainly comes on the delivery end of it: policing and incarceration are what's expensive. (But also when considering the cost of administration of justice, please don't forget the necessity of paying for counsel for the indigent defendants. Can't constitutionally incarcerate a defendant unless they've had a fair legal defense.)
"
Let's bear in mind the difference between polyamory and polygamy. Having multiple sex partners is not the same thing as having multiple spouses.
The poly people I actually know who participate in polyamorous dating and sex, and if they are married are socially married to a single partner. Apparently some polyamorous people are married sexlessly on the theory that sex and marriage aren't the same thing so they don't marry for sex and don't have sex for marriage. Others seem to enjoy sex with their spouses as well as other boyfriends/girlfriends. They sometimes use the phrase "primary partner" whether married or not to indicate that some individual (a spouse when they are married) has a special sort of role.
This lifestyle isn't for me so I don't live or participate in it personally; I'm reporting what others tell me. What I don't hear any hunger for, from any of these people, is a desire to have multiple marital partners. There seems to be an understanding that a plural marriage is neither legally sanctioned nor practically feasible the way plural relationships are.
Which doesn't mean that such a desire isn't possible or real; it means that among the people I know who actually live this lifestyle, it isn't a thing. The folks I know are, other than the polyamorous structure to their social and sex lives, reasonably similar to myself and probably a decent number of people here: urban or suburban dwellers, educated, employed in a white collar capacity of some sort, generally law-abiding, and not particularly religious.
So when we talk about polygamy, multiple simultaneous marriages, I think we're talking about things like FLDS or other religions that sanction or in some cases encourage multiple marriages. Those almost all seem to be hugely patriarchial, fertile ground for sanctioning abuse of the women involved in capacities subordinate to their husbands and invariably male church elders. I don't know of any non-religious situation where there are multiple polyandrous marriages (one woman married to multiple husbands, who are in some fashion subordinate to her).
My Secular Argument Against Polygamy, then, is two-part. First, it appears to coincide with abusive situations. Second, in the event of divorce or death, it's too complicated to lend itself to the standardized set of rules for dissolution of property that are associated with the end of two-partner marriages and baked into the law. If people want to privately work out in advance what happens in a plural marriage situation that's great but to make something legal and available to everyone, we need to have a fair and generally-applicable "default model" for what happens when people haven't thus prepared.
I have no Secular Argument against Polyamory, so long as it practiced ethically (meaning peole involved all know what's going on and are treated respectfully by one another).
On “The Brand is the Point: Voting Against Your Interests to Stay in Your Tribe”
Yeah, I'm with you on Vikram's friend. I certainly don't have any LESS faith in the EMA than I do the FDA to screen out something unsafe and I'd need to see more than one failure story to be convinced to change my mind.
So if you're trying to persuade me that the FDA is in need of reform, you succeeded.
This wasn't really what I was thinking of when I first engaged on the subject though. The Finland-or-Florida question is, because the rub of it is we don't know when or how we're going to need medical care. You don't get to pick something exotic or obscure like Incredible Rare Blood Condition Only Dr. House Can Identify and you don't get to pick "Leech up your nose how did THAT get there?" or any of those things. What you get to pick is "I'll live HERE," knowing that eventually your number is going to be up somehow. (A fact that, as we age, becomes all to ominously real.)
I didn't choose to dislocate my finger out on the river, but that's what happened to me a few weeks ago. I got to deal with a U.S. healthcare system for the entirely unanticipated and unchosen orthopedic injury. I might have preferred the NHS or the Canadian system as it turned out; the speed with which I actually got service from the appropriate physician after first doing the telemedicine visit then doing the primary care physician screen then getting referred to the orthopedic specialist when I knew good and damn well all along what I needed was an X-ray and an orthopedist to verify that my field repair had put the knuckle back where it belonged and get me into the right kind of splint. That was a lot of co-payments and time consumed. What would my experience have been in Canada? Probably a faster route to the orthopedist, but not MUCH faster -- so if it isn't going to be much faster, then it might as well be CHEAPER. Because I pay for the equivalent of a silver-level plan for myself, and at my age and with my health profile, it's the second-largest check I write every month after my mortgage payment.
(By the way, my finger hurts like a big dog. Still. If you get the chance to dislocate a finger or a toe, I suggest you pass on the opportunity.)
So there's inefficiency and bureaucracy (as Kristen complained of) anywhere I go. I don't know if I had to jump through all those hoops because the government made my health insurer put them in place for some reason that may or may not have a rational basis intelligible to a user of the system, or if the insurer did that on its own because the trolls in underwriting insist that there be screening mechanisms to protect their expensive orthopedist from people who don't really need them.
I'm not sure if the reason my health insurance is the second biggest bill I pay every month is because of the government. I know that there are other ways of doing healthcare that would result in me paying zero for health insurance every month, getting what amounts to the same speed and quality of care I just experienced, at the trade-off of me and you and everyone else paying higher taxes. And that there are steps intermediate between what we experience now in the U.S. and those other systems. But I'm not aware of any country that has a care-gatekeeping system and payment-for-services system that is LESS governmentally involved than ours, except if you're super rich and can pay for concierge medical services, which you can do anywhere in the western world if you have enough money. Most of us don't have that kind of money.
Which is part of the source of my skepticism that government involvement in healthcare is going to be any worse than privatized healthcare. And that's the case if "worse" or "better" are measured in 1) economic efficiency, 2) temporal efficiency, 3) quality of medical outcomes, 4) user friendliness, 5) long-term sustainability of systemic viability, or any other index one might care to propose.
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Ironic indeed to look to the European Union for a "less governmental, less bureaucratic" system of medicine! But the EMA is only one part of the system of medical care that a citizen of, say, Czechia would navigate.
As far as I can tell, the EMA has a 210-day limit on the amount of time it can evaluate a drug before it either blesses it for release to the public or sends it back to the lab. The FDA's calendar is longer and more malleable (which, if you're right about the relatively higher corruption level, is ripe for abuse). An FDA defender would say the EMA may not be giving itself enough time to really understand a drug's risks before releasing it, but I think you're on to something. Let's award this point to our European friends.
So this part of the system one encounters in an EMA nation is better than the U.S. Does that mean you'd rather get sick in Florida, or would you rather get sick in Finland?