It seems a significant element of the shop lifting is due to reselling. How you'd make the online companies facilitating the reselling of these goods liable would be an interesting exercise. But considering they work on a national or trans national scale whereas the thefts are local there'd be a definite venue challenge.
It's conspiratorial to think that chains are hyping shoplifting as a reason to close stores or to lock up merch. The former, they can do for any reason at all without explanation to anyone. The latter is unambiguously more costly, work intensive and trouble for the chains than doing nothing -unless- the shoplifting is a significant concern. They're not doing it as some kind of "own the libz" scheme nor as some kind of "make more moneyz" schemes because the actions involved cost more than doing nothing -unless- the shop lifting problem is real and pervasive.
That kind of conspiracy thinking is right wing quality Philip. If retail chains wanted to lower fixed real estate and personnel costs to boost profits they could simply... close stores. There'd be no need for locking up merch or spinning some story about it. They could simply say it's better for customers to deliver it online and call it a day. There's no authority who's permission they need to close brick and mortal locations. Saying "it's good for the bottom line" is more than good enough.
Yeah, like I said early on- poly relationships sanctioned by law lie behind us, historically, not ahead. Perhaps they will come back around (The wheel of time turns and ages come and go, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the age tha gave it birth returns again.) but I don't see it happening any time in a society we recognize.
When I was debating SSM at Marriagedebate.com (Maggie Gallaghers outfit) waaay back in the early aughts the more strategeric anti-SSM-marriage types were all in on “Reciprocal Beneficiaries” that did generally what you were talking about but were at pains to include all kinds of non-sexual couples like the spinster sisters living together or the elderly friends who cohabited for eligibility too. Of course us pro-SSMers would scoff at it and, on top of that, the rabit anti-SSMers would dogpile it something fierce.
I never doubted SSM was going to win once I saw how conservatives were not going to get on board of civil unions. Every alternative short of it had no constituency.
The problem, Marchmaine, is no one can even define it. You can go with a certain model but every poly couple can have a different one. Which poly model will the slippery slope supposedly force us to endorse? No one knows. And on top of all that you're only discussing property but not decisions. A is in a coma. Which of their poly married partners makes medical decisions? What if they disagree? Binary marriage has a simple answer. Poly? Historically there was entire reams of intricate rules to try and sort it out. Frankly, with SSM now legal I have observed that the talk of legal poly marriage has declined, not increased. The pressures for it have simply imploded.
You said that civil unions led to same sex marriage but civil unions weren't, in fact, widely instituted so they couldn't have led to same sex marriage. The upper end of your slippery slop is moored to... nothing. You're basically saying that a policy that never happened (civil unions) led to what you view as an unfortunate outcome (SSM). Am I misreading you on this?
To your covid point, though, I'd say that the if is, itself, unlikely. I don't think that the arguments that got us to the covid policies of the last several years are, specifically, accepted now that the experts have learned more about Covid and the masses have experienced those policies.
I never alleged that -nothing- has followed from gay marriage, Pinky. I observed that specific, cataclysmic, and terrible outcomes that were specifically and loudly predicted have not occurred and have shown no signs of moving towards occurring. You pointing at other, neutral or benign or minor things occurring as a result of SSM is narrowly correct but is incidental to my point.
Because when you commented on 'transferring" that was right where my mind went. Though I suppose with some form of euthanasia being allowable "transfer" could mean "I copy my brain into the clone and kill myself" which would, from the clones point of view, mean that you transferred yourself but from your own, direct point of view would mean that you created a copy of yourself and then killed yourself.
“There’s no logical reason why gay civil unions had to lead to gay marriages, for example, but it was inevitable.”
Quoth the Pinky in his original comment.
Now, a bajillion comments on I’d like to note, actually, that I hopped on it somewhat incorrectly. You stated that gay civil unions led inevitably to gay marriage and that it was inevitable. I commented on the failure of the specific slippery slope predictions against SSM to materialize in decades since but I didn’t even consider how your original statement was, actually, remarkably a-historic.
To wit: gay civil unions were never instituted generally across the country and were never really supported by conservatives. I recall when Vermont embarked in their civil union scheme in 2000 that Jonah Goldberg, at NRO, commented in an article that agreeing to civil unions might be a very good idea for conservatives because if they didn’t agree to them then same sex couples would be in danger of abandoning them and going for same sex marriage directly. My googling hasn’t yielded the article but I am extremely confident that he wrote it and it proved very prescient.
Conservatives never supported gay civil unions. There were never national civil unions or anything like them. So, the slippery slope example you cite is, itself, a phantom. If anything, Goldbergs slippery slope prediction was the reverse of yours: if we DON’T institute same sex civil unions then one day we’ll have to face same sex marriage. And he was right.
Never said otherwise. Covid was new, no one knew definitively what it could do and everyone was nuts over it. Now? There's no plausible expectation you'll even see new mask mandates, let alone anything more.
Such points would have, maybe, a point if they weren't discussing things that occurred twenty to thirty years prior to SSM. But, as they are, they're as toothless as a rotten stump.
And you'd be right. I don't nutpick myself but I suspect you'd have to sojourn long and hard in the most neurotic corners of the interwebs to find someone seriously carrying a torch for the "masks outside are necessary" or "sequester inside or we'll all die" line.
Exactly, a court can't insert poly marriage into a binary marriage by fiat even if some deranged judge managed to find some principle to try and point at to do so. And of the even less savory slippery slope downsides, well frankly, I can't be bothers to dispense with them because they're so odious and so effortlessly dealt with.
Except that "the pet' cannot give consent and, thus, is being raped is the iron clad retort that the tiny fringe of human/animal love advocates can never surmount as a principle. And, I would note, that just like you just did, the anti-SSM advocates said that allowing SSM would bring about man-animal marriage "next year". Well it's been way more than a couple "next year"s and not only has man-animal marriage (or it's myriad other scary co-travelers) not materialized; no material sign of them ever materializing has presented. They were wrong.
That the health extremists were nuts and had serious overlap with the more nutty identarian leftists doesn't surprise me in the least. But that the Floyd protests didn't cause a huge surge in Covid is, in my mind, mostly dispositive on the subject.
Then the first thing the fool needs to do, when making the policy ask, is describe what it is. And if you put three poly advocates in three rooms you'll get three different descriptions of what poly marriage is as a practical and policy matter.
Forget about advocating for the legal institution of poly marriage- poly marriage advocates haven't even gotten to defining what a legal poly marriage actually even is.
Eh, the Floyd protests were assuredly a thing but, being as they were outside, they weren't really linked to much Covid increase as far as I can recall. They're also rather non-sequitur regarding SSM.
But every example you raise is not really a slippery slope so much as a… I don’t know… duh? Like if we let gay people get married they’ll call each other their spouses. The horror! Likewise, as Pillsy noted, none of your examples are anything anyone who isn’t frenetically opposed to SSM would consider bad. The original anti-SSM arguments raised things everyone could agree would be undesirable and couched them as consequences of SSM and they simply haven’t shown any material signs of coming about.
Not only has none of the exaggerated nonsense about what would follow same sex marriage not come true but pretty much none of it has any form of organized advocacy in existence.
The number of people you can find advocating for animal marriage is infinitesimally small even in the nutfarming twittspace.
The number of idiots you can find advocating for allowing under age children to have sex (a necessary precursor to under age same sex marriage) is less small but remains an incredibly fringe view that would be shouted out of all but the most deranged left-wing spaces. You can find an occasional tenured idiot pushing the view but otherwise, nothing and as political advocacy it’s as dead as NAMBLA. The only place you can find large scale child marriage is *cough* on some fringes of the religious right but those’re men and underage girls so I guess it’s fine?
I’m unaware of any concrete movement within the Dems to try and go after governments forcing churches to perform same sex marriage. IIRC some religious groups and some Catholics have voluntarily mused on some kind of blessing but that’s intra-religious. As InMD observed, in the US there’s a rock solid constitutional block for trying to do it and, to be blunt, most LGBT+ people couldn’t be less interested about getting churches to endorse their marriages- you’ll struggle to find a less religious group.
Polygamous marriage is a funny one because it’s technically in our past and, in theory, you can find a lot of poly couples but they have little policy oomph to try and institute poly marriage. This is likely because not even poly couples can easily outline how, exactly, a legal regime of poly marriage would work in any literal manner. The legal marriage binary just can’t easily paste onto a larger number of people than two.
When one read same sex marriage opponents, they didn’t say that these outlandish outcomes from same sex marriage would happen in fifty to a hundred years. They claimed that said outcomes would naturally follow and would do so in short order. The only sane response to those claims, looking at the current political landscape is a simple three words: They were wrong.
I'm still waiting for the inevitable polygamous underage dog/child/man/refrigerator marriages that SSM opponents predicted would inevitably follow gay marriage.
On “A Real Problem For Retail? A Shoplifting Q and A”
It seems a significant element of the shop lifting is due to reselling. How you'd make the online companies facilitating the reselling of these goods liable would be an interesting exercise. But considering they work on a national or trans national scale whereas the thefts are local there'd be a definite venue challenge.
"
It's conspiratorial to think that chains are hyping shoplifting as a reason to close stores or to lock up merch. The former, they can do for any reason at all without explanation to anyone. The latter is unambiguously more costly, work intensive and trouble for the chains than doing nothing -unless- the shoplifting is a significant concern. They're not doing it as some kind of "own the libz" scheme nor as some kind of "make more moneyz" schemes because the actions involved cost more than doing nothing -unless- the shop lifting problem is real and pervasive.
"
That kind of conspiracy thinking is right wing quality Philip. If retail chains wanted to lower fixed real estate and personnel costs to boost profits they could simply... close stores. There'd be no need for locking up merch or spinning some story about it. They could simply say it's better for customers to deliver it online and call it a day. There's no authority who's permission they need to close brick and mortal locations. Saying "it's good for the bottom line" is more than good enough.
On “Can She Do That? New Mexico Governor Suspends Gun Carry Laws”
Yeah, like I said early on- poly relationships sanctioned by law lie behind us, historically, not ahead. Perhaps they will come back around (The wheel of time turns and ages come and go, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the age tha gave it birth returns again.) but I don't see it happening any time in a society we recognize.
"
When I was debating SSM at Marriagedebate.com (Maggie Gallaghers outfit) waaay back in the early aughts the more strategeric anti-SSM-marriage types were all in on “Reciprocal Beneficiaries” that did generally what you were talking about but were at pains to include all kinds of non-sexual couples like the spinster sisters living together or the elderly friends who cohabited for eligibility too. Of course us pro-SSMers would scoff at it and, on top of that, the rabit anti-SSMers would dogpile it something fierce.
I never doubted SSM was going to win once I saw how conservatives were not going to get on board of civil unions. Every alternative short of it had no constituency.
"
The problem, Marchmaine, is no one can even define it. You can go with a certain model but every poly couple can have a different one. Which poly model will the slippery slope supposedly force us to endorse? No one knows. And on top of all that you're only discussing property but not decisions. A is in a coma. Which of their poly married partners makes medical decisions? What if they disagree? Binary marriage has a simple answer. Poly? Historically there was entire reams of intricate rules to try and sort it out. Frankly, with SSM now legal I have observed that the talk of legal poly marriage has declined, not increased. The pressures for it have simply imploded.
"
You said that civil unions led to same sex marriage but civil unions weren't, in fact, widely instituted so they couldn't have led to same sex marriage. The upper end of your slippery slop is moored to... nothing. You're basically saying that a policy that never happened (civil unions) led to what you view as an unfortunate outcome (SSM). Am I misreading you on this?
To your covid point, though, I'd say that the if is, itself, unlikely. I don't think that the arguments that got us to the covid policies of the last several years are, specifically, accepted now that the experts have learned more about Covid and the masses have experienced those policies.
"
I never alleged that -nothing- has followed from gay marriage, Pinky. I observed that specific, cataclysmic, and terrible outcomes that were specifically and loudly predicted have not occurred and have shown no signs of moving towards occurring. You pointing at other, neutral or benign or minor things occurring as a result of SSM is narrowly correct but is incidental to my point.
"
Have you ever played Soma Dark?
Because when you commented on 'transferring" that was right where my mind went. Though I suppose with some form of euthanasia being allowable "transfer" could mean "I copy my brain into the clone and kill myself" which would, from the clones point of view, mean that you transferred yourself but from your own, direct point of view would mean that you created a copy of yourself and then killed yourself.
"
“There’s no logical reason why gay civil unions had to lead to gay marriages, for example, but it was inevitable.”
Quoth the Pinky in his original comment.
Now, a bajillion comments on I’d like to note, actually, that I hopped on it somewhat incorrectly. You stated that gay civil unions led inevitably to gay marriage and that it was inevitable. I commented on the failure of the specific slippery slope predictions against SSM to materialize in decades since but I didn’t even consider how your original statement was, actually, remarkably a-historic.
To wit: gay civil unions were never instituted generally across the country and were never really supported by conservatives. I recall when Vermont embarked in their civil union scheme in 2000 that Jonah Goldberg, at NRO, commented in an article that agreeing to civil unions might be a very good idea for conservatives because if they didn’t agree to them then same sex couples would be in danger of abandoning them and going for same sex marriage directly. My googling hasn’t yielded the article but I am extremely confident that he wrote it and it proved very prescient.
Conservatives never supported gay civil unions. There were never national civil unions or anything like them. So, the slippery slope example you cite is, itself, a phantom. If anything, Goldbergs slippery slope prediction was the reverse of yours: if we DON’T institute same sex civil unions then one day we’ll have to face same sex marriage. And he was right.
"
I think Duck is more right than not on this.
"
Never said otherwise. Covid was new, no one knew definitively what it could do and everyone was nuts over it. Now? There's no plausible expectation you'll even see new mask mandates, let alone anything more.
"
Such points would have, maybe, a point if they weren't discussing things that occurred twenty to thirty years prior to SSM. But, as they are, they're as toothless as a rotten stump.
"
And you'd be right. I don't nutpick myself but I suspect you'd have to sojourn long and hard in the most neurotic corners of the interwebs to find someone seriously carrying a torch for the "masks outside are necessary" or "sequester inside or we'll all die" line.
On “9/11 at 22: Are We Forgetting?”
W remains, in my books, the most cataclysmically destructive President, policy wise, in modern times. The Orange man doesn't come close (yet).
On “Can She Do That? New Mexico Governor Suspends Gun Carry Laws”
Exactly, a court can't insert poly marriage into a binary marriage by fiat even if some deranged judge managed to find some principle to try and point at to do so. And of the even less savory slippery slope downsides, well frankly, I can't be bothers to dispense with them because they're so odious and so effortlessly dealt with.
"
Except that "the pet' cannot give consent and, thus, is being raped is the iron clad retort that the tiny fringe of human/animal love advocates can never surmount as a principle. And, I would note, that just like you just did, the anti-SSM advocates said that allowing SSM would bring about man-animal marriage "next year". Well it's been way more than a couple "next year"s and not only has man-animal marriage (or it's myriad other scary co-travelers) not materialized; no material sign of them ever materializing has presented. They were wrong.
"
That the health extremists were nuts and had serious overlap with the more nutty identarian leftists doesn't surprise me in the least. But that the Floyd protests didn't cause a huge surge in Covid is, in my mind, mostly dispositive on the subject.
"
Then the first thing the fool needs to do, when making the policy ask, is describe what it is. And if you put three poly advocates in three rooms you'll get three different descriptions of what poly marriage is as a practical and policy matter.
Forget about advocating for the legal institution of poly marriage- poly marriage advocates haven't even gotten to defining what a legal poly marriage actually even is.
"
*cough*
"
Eh, the Floyd protests were assuredly a thing but, being as they were outside, they weren't really linked to much Covid increase as far as I can recall. They're also rather non-sequitur regarding SSM.
But every example you raise is not really a slippery slope so much as a… I don’t know… duh? Like if we let gay people get married they’ll call each other their spouses. The horror! Likewise, as Pillsy noted, none of your examples are anything anyone who isn’t frenetically opposed to SSM would consider bad. The original anti-SSM arguments raised things everyone could agree would be undesirable and couched them as consequences of SSM and they simply haven’t shown any material signs of coming about.
"
Not only has none of the exaggerated nonsense about what would follow same sex marriage not come true but pretty much none of it has any form of organized advocacy in existence.
The number of people you can find advocating for animal marriage is infinitesimally small even in the nutfarming twittspace.
The number of idiots you can find advocating for allowing under age children to have sex (a necessary precursor to under age same sex marriage) is less small but remains an incredibly fringe view that would be shouted out of all but the most deranged left-wing spaces. You can find an occasional tenured idiot pushing the view but otherwise, nothing and as political advocacy it’s as dead as NAMBLA. The only place you can find large scale child marriage is *cough* on some fringes of the religious right but those’re men and underage girls so I guess it’s fine?
I’m unaware of any concrete movement within the Dems to try and go after governments forcing churches to perform same sex marriage. IIRC some religious groups and some Catholics have voluntarily mused on some kind of blessing but that’s intra-religious. As InMD observed, in the US there’s a rock solid constitutional block for trying to do it and, to be blunt, most LGBT+ people couldn’t be less interested about getting churches to endorse their marriages- you’ll struggle to find a less religious group.
Polygamous marriage is a funny one because it’s technically in our past and, in theory, you can find a lot of poly couples but they have little policy oomph to try and institute poly marriage. This is likely because not even poly couples can easily outline how, exactly, a legal regime of poly marriage would work in any literal manner. The legal marriage binary just can’t easily paste onto a larger number of people than two.
When one read same sex marriage opponents, they didn’t say that these outlandish outcomes from same sex marriage would happen in fifty to a hundred years. They claimed that said outcomes would naturally follow and would do so in short order. The only sane response to those claims, looking at the current political landscape is a simple three words: They were wrong.
"
After we get artificial humans none the whole policy question flies out the window.
"
I'm still waiting for the inevitable polygamous underage dog/child/man/refrigerator marriages that SSM opponents predicted would inevitably follow gay marriage.
On “9/11 at 22: Are We Forgetting?”
Are we forgetting? Yes. Humans forget. Be at ease; it is a blessing more than it is a curse.