Rightwing personality traits

[voluptuary_manque]

Rum on ice cream?

 

[The_Fool]

You're too good to me.

No such thing.

 

[The_Fool]

Rum on ice cream?

Melt the butter.
Saute the apples, sliced and chunked.
Brown sugar, honey, maple syrup. You make up the concoction.
Ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon. See above.
Rum.
Flame it off.
Serve over vanilla ice cream.

 

[Guest]

Or, eat ice cream.

Then do Bacardi shots.

 

[Dragonlipz]

... but don't forget ... it's a temperory job, although he seems to appropaching it from another aspect

And that aspect is??? Some arcane fabrication on your part or the just what the voices tell you? L2, you seem to be be long on accusations and short on proof....Again, that's one manifestation of the RWA that rings true for you and the 'conspiracies' you constantly allude to.....
BTW - Obama's thoughtful and reasoned approach to the job is a rather refreshing change to the Keystone Kops situation imposed by the prior administration...He's doing the job not just showing up for work....Bush wasn't and isn't stupid, just intellectually lazy.....The American people deserve a leader who will WORK for them and not the moneyed interests....

 

[LaRocha]

And this, I think, begins to crack the theory that was put forth at the beginning of this thread. There is nothing right wing about a desperate need for certainty. Ask any Marxist. They will tell you that the beauty of Marxist theory is that it explains everything. What twaddle! And one of the major casualties of Godel's work was Bertrand Russell. The man burned out his brain attempting to write Principia Mathematica which was supposed to develop a perfect logical basis for all mathematics. Then, in a handful of pages, Godel demolishes the idea. Even mathematics is based on Faith. You just have to choose your God, that's all.[/QUOTE

Manque or should I call you Vol, be careful, not of me but LaRocha who tore my back to shreds in another string once. It was all about one Bertrand Russell whom I referred to a someone who spouted drivel or whatever word I may have used. I thought you were quoting me for just a few words. In other words we agree.

Not just about Russell either but about the "desparate need for certaintly" that people have. The 'need' is great Vol but the major problem is defining the word 'certainty'. Oh not so much for ourselves, it's when we try to define 'certainty' for other people where the trouble begins.

See, Manque is right, he's just not giving enough of the story. Godel didn't just sit down in 1931 and write a handful of pages and undermine Russell's lifetime achievement. There were twenty years in there of serious labor on the part of David Hilbert, Wittgenstein, Keynes, Godel and an assortment of others trying to either move Russell's idea ahead or show its fundamental flaws. Russell's legacy is all of the work in formal logic that occurs from his first publication of Principia until the Vienna Circle implodes with the coming of the Second World War.

So, Boring, you're still way off base here. Is Manque coming out and saying Russell was a fount of drivel? Math is a tool, it's not something magically fundamental that lies outside of the human mind. That's why those golden records on the Voyager are a joke. Why would an alien civilization have any clue what our geometry means?

Comparing the belief in someone's ability to predict the path of a comet through our solar system to a belief that you'll go to Heaven or Hell based on the data set of how you've acted on Earth is absolutely ludicrous. Anyway, a belief does not equal 'faith', as 'faith' actually means something pretty specific. If you tell someone their faith is just a belief, similar to my belief that the Sun won't explode tonight, they'll get pretty angry for good reason. That's it, reason. When reason/belief and faith/belief are paired you get theistic and then atheistic arguments. Faith has nothing to do with Reason, Reason demolishes God. The problem with most people is they think they have to move their Faith into the realm of the provable, they don't have to. But if they do, I'm willing to do my part to show them their belief has no basis in the world that predicts eclipses and puts communications satellites into orbit. Faith is a leftover from the world of magic as described by Fraser in the Golden Bough and Joe Campbell in everything he published.

 

[LaRocha]

Since Marxism was mentioned. Again, Manque isn't giving us a good picture of the importance of Marx to every 20th Century theory of capital. Marxism has nothing to do with Marx and a theory of economics. That's a whole other uninteresting project, so let's stick to Das Kapital and its legacy.

Wealth of Nations -> Das Kapital -> General Theory of Unemployment, Interest and Money -> Chicago School of Economics

These are all critiques and descriptions of capitalism, none would exist without the one before. In Das Kapital Volume 1, Part One: Commodities and Money, we have some of the most studied passages in the history of economic theory. If you go to college and study economics you consume Part One of Das Kapital. Why? Because it's the next rung on the ladder after Adam Smith, Keynes and Friedman are supported by the rungs Marx and Engels built.

Exploitation does and doesn't mean right wing authoritarianism. The individuals with capital are the authority in the traditional idea of capital formation. Exploitation isn't a synonym for 'abuse'. Exploitation is just a description of how capital organizes workers to perform tasks to increase that capital. But capital is always the authority, whether it's an individual and their oil company or the Russian Federation and their oil and gas company.

Lenin and Stalin and all them geezers are more or less the founders of state capitalism, something the Depression Era Americans latched onto with arms and legs. Keynes saw the weakness in individual capital formation surrounding the collapse of the Weimar, the risk and fear under certain macro pressures and that's why he places capital in the hands of the government to mitigate the risk to individuals within the capital structure.

During recession there are real risks associated with individual capital formation and exploitation because of a lack of liquidity, which feeds on itself so the pool keeps getting shallower and riskier for the individual who wants to make money. It's easier closing up shop during a recession. That's why the government has to step in to fill the pool back up, float unemployment, be an unlimited supply of spending for the recessed period. This Keynesian theory is a direct adaption and improvement on Part One of Das Kapital.

Authoritarianism is always a problem when the state is the main source of exploitation. You can't just quit Gazprom and Lukoil and go work for Exxon if you're a Russian oil executive. You definitely can't do anything of the sort 30 years ago. There are merely different authoritarian pressures depending on who the government favors at what time and in what economic conditions. As a rule, most likely everyone I've ever met, everyone on this board is completely lockstep with these authoritarian pressures. If they weren't, they certainly wouldn't be reading this message on an Internet message board, they'd be in hiding, an actual Underground Man/Woman.

 

[xssve]

It's sort of a stretch saying that because there is cheating, swinging etc. our culture isn't or hasn't been one based on pure monogamy, whether serial or lifelong. The East has been as consistently monogamous, I don't think it has much to do with religion. The majority, the working class and poor class don't have the luxury to break monogamy. There exists polygamist cultures, there probably always has in certain places, but up until about 50-100 years ago resources were never actually plentiful anywhere at any time. The resource angle just doesn't explain very much, there has been limited resources for generations under H/G and agricultural societies, and monogamy has been a standard practice throughout.

It might be that monogamy wasn't selected for or against, that there is no real answer why females prefer one mate to many. And if you look at who has had many wives in almost every society, including the few h/g societies that still dot our planet, it's the ruling class that has more than one wife. It could be a universal behavior, since as far as recorded history is concerned most reproduction occurs within the confines of a monogamous relationship. And you can take the next step and say most reproduction has occurred within the confines of a ritualized monogamous relationship. We wouldn't say Egyptian society was incestuously endogamous because it was common for the most elite to marry their sisters and daughters, right?

Political, whether authoritarian or libertarian personalities are often mismatched in marriage. As far as I can tell political affiliation is one of the least important traits taken into consideration when choosing a mate. Communal and individualist groups have both existed and accomplished the same tasks. Food, shelter, protection, get that next generation of age to reproduce.

Our joint capitalist, half-communist, socialized everywhere world culture has the ability to form any type of organization we want because of the vast resources we're able to pull together. Authoritarianism won't go away no matter what type of new amalgamation we fight or negotiate for, because any system that organizes more than a couple dozen people needs the fist over the necks of the citizenry, the Panoptic Eye and its swift penalties.

When you say "based on pure monogamy" are you talking about what people say or what they do?

I think you're going to be hard pressed to back that up statistically - just because people give lip service to a thing doesn't mean they don't get away with whatever they can, every chance they get.

In fact, aren't we talking about the conservative mindset here? There is nobody more conservative than the aristocracy, conservatism is aristocratic by definition, I have no idea how they managed to get it associated with liberalism, other than the fact that a lot of family patriarchs, once they grabbed as much as they could, realized that they needed other people to maintain their empires, people to do the work and consume the products - even philanthropy has essentially selfish motives, and a lot of that "liberal" old money is in fact behind the whole conservative movement.

Again, conservatism is basically an internal war between your better and baser instincts - the constitution is a liberal document: it essentially outlaws a whole range of traditional conservative strategies for maintaining power: coercion (troop quartering), controlling the media, religious establishment, etc., and as a conservative you have to come to terms with the fact that to call yourself and American in anything other than a geographical sense, you have to support that which tells you you can't just "manfully" take whatever you want.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Let us not ignore Das Kapital's further parts where Marx's reasoning falls completely apart. That's the trouble with most people who start quoting him. They try to stick with vol. 1 because it's damned near incomprehensible all by itself, let alone the next two volumes. That being the case, folk figure that Vol. 1 is all that counts. Uh-uh! Karl tries to continue his reasoning beyond Vol 1. and can't. "Theory of Capitol" sounds good but ask the old joke goes, as 20 economists a question and expect at least 21 answers. Again, this is a desperate need for certitude.

All we can say that is true is what we experience. Everything else may be calculable until a flaw appears. Then the flaw screams at us and we think we have been lied to. Wrong. "The Universe isn't just stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine." Whatever you find most important in your life is your religion and if you cling to Newtonian physics, that's Faith whether you choose to acknowledge it or not. You don't get to define Faith vs. Reason solely on your own terms. Bronze Age people could explain the universe perfectly in terms they understood. Today we try to use String Theory. At the heart of the matter, what is the true difference?

 

[xssve]

Forget the fact that "pure monogamy" is in large part, a social construct designed to keep women out of the loop - a "lady" is somebody who doesn't ask embarrassing questions.

"Pure" monogamy means a dyad composed of Two people who have never had, and never will have, another sexual partner - this has never even been the official line, at least not for men.

If you have slept with more than one person, you are not technically "purely" monogamous, being as every act of sexual intercourse theoretically contains the inherent possibility of reproduction.

You could make an argument there for same sex, but again, seldom monogamous, at least without a Draconian superstructure to enforce it: i.e., it's very likely that most gay couples were monogamous when they had to keep it on the downlow.

Pure monogamy happens only incidentally without that enforcement - what you have instead are typically various forms of social monogamy that maintain appearances - like the Emir of Kuwait, who marries a different virgin every night and divorces her the next morning.

 

[LaRocha]

...

Again, conservatism is basically an internal war between your better and baser instincts - the constitution is a liberal document: it essentially outlaws a whole range of traditional conservative strategies for maintaining power: coercion (troop quartering), controlling the media, religious establishment, etc., and as a conservative you have to come to terms with the fact that to call yourself and American in anything other than a geographical sense, you have to support that which tells you you can't just "manfully" take whatever you want.

Yep, the new conservatives, the Neo-Cons are just taking up what 'liberal' used to cover. America as world police force was a liberal idea for a while, now it's seen as a conservative, protectionist policy. Neo-liberal, neo-con can really get things jumbled here, so let's not going into the specifics of these four fairly different labels.

The conservative/liberal policy is no longer about flat out stealing from you, it's more about getting you to give up what you earned, willingly. There are no liberals or conservatives in office that are more 'for the people'. There is the authoritarian class and the different forces within that class who want to try and get you to give them certain authorities over you and the distribution of wealth and resources. The only friction between liberal and conservative is over how and who gets to redistribute public resources into the hands of a selected few.

 

[LaRocha]

Let us not ignore Das Kapital's further parts where Marx's reasoning falls completely apart. That's the trouble with most people who start quoting him. They try to stick with vol. 1 because it's damned near incomprehensible all by itself, let alone the next two volumes. That being the case, folk figure that Vol. 1 is all that counts. Uh-uh! Karl tries to continue his reasoning beyond Vol 1. and can't. "Theory of Capitol" sounds good but ask the old joke goes, as 20 economists a question and expect at least 21 answers. Again, this is a desperate need for certitude.

All we can say that is true is what we experience. Everything else may be calculable until a flaw appears. Then the flaw screams at us and we think we have been lied to. Wrong. "The Universe isn't just stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine." Whatever you find most important in your life is your religion and if you cling to Newtonian physics, that's Faith whether you choose to acknowledge it or not. You don't get to define Faith vs. Reason solely on your own terms. Bronze Age people could explain the universe perfectly in terms they understood. Today we try to use String Theory. At the heart of the matter, what is the true difference?

That sounds like a Loring argument. "If an argument isn't complete and sound from top to bottom all aspects of the argument are worthless/rubbish." It turns out Keynes and Friedman read Marx as close as Marx read Smith and Hegel. None of these jokers had a flawlessly reasoned argument from beginning to end. To expect that is to expect the believability of only accepting what we experience.

Religion and religious feeling are totally at odds. Human beings developed systems such as religion, science, math to explain the feeling of awe we come about once in a while as we experience the natural world. The systems of religion are unsuitable for explaining the awe we feel once Newton puts pure logic together with the observation of celestial bodies. Awe and the religious feeling aren't left behind, the inadequate aggregate system of beliefs based on superstition and magic is left behind.

There are systems of beliefs that argue for the existence of God. The logic of religion is the same as the logic of physics: "We're going to put together a set of practices and beliefs to explain the rationality of our experience of this world." So then when the logic of the system is put to the test, any semblance of order or explanation falls apart. Religion explains nothing. It merely points to what is currently unexplained and shouts, "Look here, these new orders can't explain this! Isn't it a nice feeling, you may experience it through us, we're telling you it is God, the Heavenly Father, director of all that is good in your life!"

The Sun's warmth is magic, until someone comes along and explains the process of nuclear fusion. Faith means a belief that is not based on proof. I'm saying, I don't have to define faith, when reason means a belief that is based on some sort of proof. That's where Saint Anselm and Aquinas jump in and try to give proofs for belief in God, as if they're giving a Pythagorean proof in geometry. Again, bring your pseudo-Pythagorean theistic argument for the existence of God so I can disassemble it. If you're smart, you won't say the words "God exists" out loud. Keep it to yourself and you can protect your personal feeling.

 

[xssve]

Yep, the new conservatives, the Neo-Cons are just taking up what 'liberal' used to cover. America as world police force was a liberal idea for a while, now it's seen as a conservative, protectionist policy. Neo-liberal, neo-con can really get things jumbled here, so let's not going into the specifics of these four fairly different labels.

The conservative/liberal policy is no longer about flat out stealing from you, it's more about getting you to give up what you earned, willingly. There are no liberals or conservatives in office that are more 'for the people'. There is the authoritarian class and the different forces within that class who want to try and get you to give them certain authorities over you and the distribution of wealth and resources. The only friction between liberal and conservative is over how and who gets to redistribute public resources into the hands of a selected few.

...and that is feudalism, based on patronage rather than equality of opportunity - I'd say that on the political-economy continuum, we're at roughly the same juncture as Great Britain just before enclosure - authority is, as you say, capital, entrenched interests - the aristocracy in Britain, corporations and management networks, often based on familial and collegial ties - in America, adn they're fighting over what primitive capital there remains to exploit.

The economic mode here is primitive capital, land and resources, once those are all spoken for, there is nothing left but labor - enclosure occurs when those who control all the primitive capital realize it is a finite quantity, that it can be depleted, and with it, the entire basis of their economic security, and suddenly they see "the masses" as a swarm of locusts, which in some ways, they are.

At that point, there are only Two options: either seek new sources of primitive capital (colonialism), or manage whatever resources remain, and managers have first access.

Once all the primitive Capital is accounted for and apportioned, there is nothing left to fight over except labor capital, that's all that's left, and a lot of cultures past that stage have become slave economies.

It's panic mode - however, we have that Great Britain didn't, what the Middle Ages didn't, is the technology to build a whole new economy beside the primitive capital economy, a value added economy - Europe has been evolving towards this for some time, given that all the primitive capital was spoken for a long time ago - there is nothing left but improvement, and that's an extensible cycle - Cradle to Cradle technology for example resolves many of the issues inherent in the industrial/lean production model, namely product cycles and obsolescence, which drive the primitive capital/depletion model to it's current extremes, visible in the Congo, and other locales.

Conservatives basically lack a basic grasp of modern economics, IMO, they put their faith in the visible, the tangible - in spite of all the high blown rhetoric it's pretty much all "I got mine, Jack" - you start talking about synchronicity and symbiosis, co-operation, and being all linked by the human condition, their eyes glaze over, it all sounds so very hippy-dippy to them.

 

[xssve]

All we can say that is true is what we experience. Everything else may be calculable until a flaw appears. Then the flaw screams at us and we think we have been lied to. Wrong. "The Universe isn't just stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine." Whatever you find most important in your life is your religion and if you cling to Newtonian physics, that's Faith whether you choose to acknowledge it or not. You don't get to define Faith vs. Reason solely on your own terms. Bronze Age people could explain the universe perfectly in terms they understood. Today we try to use String Theory. At the heart of the matter, what is the true difference?

The true difference is that the latter is attempt to produce a predictive model, the former is just something to say in the absence of more information.

 

[LaRocha]

Forget the fact that "pure monogamy" is in large part, a social construct designed to keep women out of the loop - a "lady" is somebody who doesn't ask embarrassing questions.

"Pure" monogamy means a dyad composed of Two people who have never had, and never will have, another sexual partner - this has never even been the official line, at least not for men.

If you have slept with more than one person, you are not technically "purely" monogamous, being as every act of sexual intercourse theoretically contains the inherent possibility of reproduction.

You could make an argument there for same sex, but again, seldom monogamous, at least without a Draconian superstructure to enforce it: i.e., it's very likely that most gay couples were monogamous when they had to keep it on the downlow.

Pure monogamy happens only incidentally without that enforcement - what you have instead are typically various forms of social monogamy that maintain appearances - like the Emir of Kuwait, who marries a different virgin every night and divorces her the next morning.

I can't really give too many examples of who slept with who 8, 10, and 12 thousand years ago either. Pure monogamy would actually just mean 'serial monogamy' in our world, that during periods of sexual activity where women are fertile, say from 15-50 they are consistently sleeping with one partner for each cycle. If a woman is sleeping with one man for all of a twenty-eight day cycle and then sleeping with another man for all of the next twenty-eight day cycle we could say she's monogamous.

I'm not really interested in the monogamy of virginity to death, I'm talking about the monogamy that so far has been the standard in recorded history. It's irrelevant what the Emir of Kuwait does, what is the sexual program of the majority of his subjects? We have always defined monogamy as one partner for a given period of time, we'd have to get more specific and say actual monogamy would occur at the very least during a twenty-eight day fertility cycle.

If your chick is sleeping with you and another dude this month we can assume that's not monogamy. We can really only go by what people say. As far as I know there may exist a cheater among the monogamous relationships I see between my friends and family, but I haven't spotted them yet. If one is a cheater, the rest are still monogamous, and that's pretty much how its worked for most societies larger than a few thousand people. If ten percent of all Americans cheat during their marriage, and monogamous marriage is the standard for the majority, that ten percent isn't really throwing the question of monogamy up in the air. Divorce is part of serial monogamy, so it doesn't throw what we mean by monogamy up in the air, it just throws the question of what we mean by marriage.

 

[LaRocha]

The true difference is that the latter is attempt to produce a predictive model, the former is just something to say in the absence of more information.

Dark Matter isn't really a theory of something either, it's a placeholder for the moment where we can explain it away in the model. The placeholder theory attempts to bridge information that can be explained or observed, but not sufficiently for the rigor of the model, it's meant to be swept away once a more complete relationship between the information is uncovered. Religion has no placeholder theories, just fact fact fact of God God God.

 

[xssve]

Well, you're defining monogamy as sleeping with one person at a time, but the whole argument is otherwise framed in terms of all the kids having the same set of parents, and unless it's a closed dyad form start to finish, there is no way of guaranteeing this, historically speaking.

Serial monogamy is not "pure" monogamy, it's a form of poly that looks like monogamy. It's easy to pretend to be monogamous while playing fast and loose with the definition - until somebody comes up preggers.

I'm arguing that once you've rationalized that, you're probably causing more harm than good with this delusional insistance on adhering to "pure" monogamy - even Tiger, as an extreme example - can you really say that our official reverence for "pure monogamy" has been good for his family?

For all I know, they might have worked it out and kept the family together - now everybody is in a position where working it out is out of the question, it can't happen, and they'll both end up with other people anyway.

 

[xssve]

Dark Matter isn't really a theory of something either, it's a placeholder for the moment where we can explain it away in the model. The placeholder theory attempts to bridge information that can be explained or observed, but not sufficiently for the rigor of the model, it's meant to be swept away once a more complete relationship between the information is uncovered. Religion has no placeholder theories, just fact fact fact of God God God.

Well, yes, a predictive model is an attempt to generate a testable hypothesis that fit the facts, whereas in a religious myth, the attempt is always to make the facts fit an untestable hypothesis.

 

[LaRocha]

Well, you're defining monogamy as sleeping with one person at a time, but the whole argument is otherwise framed in terms of all the kids having the same set of parents, and unless it's a closed dyad form start to finish, there is no way of guaranteeing this, historically speaking.

Serial monogamy is not "pure" monogamy, it's a form of poly that looks like monogamy.

I'm arguing that once you've rationalized that, you're probably causing more harm than good by delusionally insisting on adhering to "pure" monogamy - even Tiger, as an extreme example - can you really say that our official reverence for "pure monogamy" has been good for his family?

For all I know, they might have worked it out and kept the family together - now everybody is in a position where working it out is out of the question, it can't happen, and they'll both end up with other people anyway.

I don't know that we've gone much into all the kids having the same mother and father. In certain structures of kinship the son of your sister is your heir. This is just a way to ensure your stuff goes to a blood relative, because you can't be sure your own wife isn't sleeping with another guy and pushing out his kid. While you can be sure you share the same uterine mother, unless your mama is lying to you.

Lions want to ensure the lionesses only push out their kids, that's why they don't let other males party with them. Monogamy is just an intelligent way of acting like a lion and trying to make sure you get a kid out of what you offer the female. If a female gets pregnant during your turn with her for that month or two you can be fairly sure she's gonna want some assistance, she wants to prove you're the father long before paternity tests exist. So she's actually not going to enter into the type of serial monogamy where it's one partner after another all bunched together.

I don't know that our society is that delusional. We've come to accept second and third marriage, step children and all that with open arms. Maybe I shouldn't have ever said pure monogamy, because serial monogamy is the case even in mythological times of a few hundred years ago. Your husband dies, someone else marries you and gets his stuff. In the Bible when someone dies their little bro marries you and puts a kid in you as their duty.

 

[xssve]

I don't know that our society is that delusional. We've come to accept second and third marriage, step children and all that with open arms. Maybe I shouldn't have ever said pure monogamy, because serial monogamy is the case even in mythological times of a few hundred years ago. In the Bible when someone dies someone else marries you and puts a kid in your as their duty.

There ya go - "pure" monogamy is inhuman, it's an abstract construct, it's only pure as an abstract concept.

 

[LaRocha]

There ya go - "pure" monogamy is inhuman, it's an abstract construct, it's only pure as an abstract concept.

Think about this though. I've only slept with one woman intending to impregnate her. All the ones before I took steps to not impregnate. This one I put a baby in, so say she only makes my babies and we both die, would that be pure monogamy? Is it the act or the intention of the act that makes monogamy?

Which brings up the question of abortion in my mind. Every time you have hetero sex with someone you should understand the possibility of impregnation and babyhood. So no one should really sleep with someone they don't intend on getting pregnant. Which sounds like abstinence, but it really puts a spin on the right to abort. If you have sex you have to make a decision on abortion. "He's about to stick it in, it's time to decide: Will I abort this guy's baby or push it out into the atmosphere?"

 

[xssve]

Think about this though. I've only slept with one woman intending to impregnate her. All the ones before I took steps to not impregnate. This one I put a baby in, so say she only makes my babies and we both die, would that be pure monogamy? Is it the act or the intention of the act that makes monogamy?

Which brings up the question of abortion in my mind. Every time you have hetero sex with someone you should understand the possibility of impregnation and babyhood. So no one should really sleep with someone they don't intend on getting pregnant. Which sounds like abstinence, but it really puts a spin on the right to abort. If you have sex you have to make a decision on abortion. "He's about to stick it in, it's time to decide: Will I abort this guy's baby or push it out into the atmosphere?"

Just one of the many reasons we maintain the facade of monogamy - it is merely a construct that defines the difference between r and K strategies, which again, people fuck with all the time - historically, in terms of the official line, K good, r bad - the woman who has a dozen children with the same father is revered as a sainted mother, the woman who has Six kids with Seven different fathers is a "slut".

It is entirely possible for one partner to be monogamous,and the other poly of course, it's just that when referring to monogamy, typically we mean it refer to the entire dyad.

As for birth control, it doesn't really make a difference, it doesn't even make a difference if it's a gay couple - the values being assigned in a monogamous value system are K strategy values - it's not about whether you even have kids or not, it's whether you are theoretically providing a stable social environment for hypothetical children - otherwise why even worry about gays getting married? It's all about being a "role model" of monogamous behavior, probably based on the underlying suspicion that without that modeling, everybody is going to sleep with everybody, and all hell will break loose.

"Family values" are not just genetic, they're economic - the "family name" must be preserved, even if it means significant deception - it just won't do if you're a "family values" family and one of your sons turns out to be gay - what he or she wants, doesn't matter, they're just a reflection of you, and because of the horror inherent in the possibility, they seek to remove any temptation, especially if that means acting like being gay is even remotely acceptable.

In many instances it's really about what advantages you stand to lose - defy the official party line and you're cast out, no longer entitled to it's protection - you don't even have to believe, you just have to pretend to - and we're back to deception, which is all the things they, society, doesn't say.

It's the same with anything that isn't strict monogamy, premarital and extramarital sex, the whole objection to birth control to begin with because it has the potential to mediate what they see as the natural consequences of sex - reproduction, which is simply a very basic value, fertility, which plays a central role in every culture that's ever existed, including Manichean dualism that Christianity is rooted in, that sought to end the tyranny of the flesh by avoiding reproduction.

And in that sense, no, birth control doesn't alter a thing, it's the abstract model that's important, the facade must be maintained, as it turns out, largely for political reasons.

In fact, primitive societies had to be fairly selective about reproduction, in nature, if you don't live within your means you can't just declare bankruptcy, you die - and the fact is almost all cultures have practiced infanticide, even human sacrifice at some point, usually under some sort of religious auspices.

On a deeper (or shallower) psychological level, every time a republican politician comes up gay, they try to pretend it didn't happen whereas they crack on Barney Frank every chance they get - it's the role that's important - you can't control identity, you can only control roles, and in keeping with the whole conservative obsession with external appearances and tangibility - tangible order - roles are tangible, identity is fluid and confusing - you can't see it, and it often defies external appearances.

Its why they're so conflicted about identity vs. status, you can only base status on the tangible, identity has no external value unless it conforms to the role, which it seldom does - the obsession with conformity reflects an attempt to subjugate the subversive self that often resents unnatural confinement.

Since the identity, which consciously or subconsciously is usually larger than the role, that suppressive energy is often focused onto external examples of that which is being denied.

The only justification for that denial is "society", it just happens to be a love/hate relationship, since society is all about self-denial in order to play the role that society requires, and all that resentment has come out somewhere.

We always hate others for allowing themselves that which we deny ourselves, and that includes those who get the benefits of sexual activity without paying the price of feeding the machine with more warm bodies.

In tangible terms, as goods and services become commodified, demand has to increase in order to maintain profit margins - since the urge to increase profits is uncontrollable (see the inherent instability of cartel pricing), supply tends inherently to increase to it's natural limits, whatever they happen to be.

There is only one way remaining to increase demand - the greatest disaster for those whose economic security depends on feeding ever increasing appetites, would be a decline in the population (demand) - prices would collapse, profit margins disappear - and these are the people who represent capital, and consequently, authority.

Yeah, in a lot of ways, it's not dissimilar to mold in petrie dish. The question on an individual level, for the self, represented by identity, is really, not whether or not those are "values", but what kind, and whose sort of "values" are they?

It's way beyond simple reproduction, a thing at which we are more than adequate at.

 

[xssve]

It really reflects a pastoral value system as opposed to an agrarian value system in which there is usually room to feed one more - in a pastoral system, the bigger the herd, the bigger the potential profit, so you encourage unrestrained breeding, and cull them out later according to circumstances - it means that some portion of the population is always destined to become Veal - one of those things they don't tell you, they just rationalize it in terms of "winners and losers" - all you can say for certain is which side they intend to be on.

The predictable thing in watching the health care summit is that republicans consistently reject any sort of win-win scenario, such scenarios simply don't exist in current conservative philosophy, it conflicts with their entire hierarchical worldview.

It's going to be an uphill battle all the way, and if the dem's end up creating a win-win scenario by some sort of fiat, it will simply reaffirm conservative suspicions, and they'll cry about "losing" instead of considering what they've gained.

That's politics baby.

 

[xssve]

Anyway, I think I've just confused the monogamy issue, read that article on Slimy Monogamy I linked to if you didn't, monogamy is an adaptation to circumstances where your offspring need a little more help.

Insofar as monogamy is the most commonplace strategy, it basically reflects the fact that children have a more difficult time thriving and maximizing their own breeding potential without significant parental involvement - without it, you're Veal.

 

[LaRocha]

That Austrian geezer might say the subversive self isn't really trying to free you, but actively trying to annihilate you, as that aspect of you has no place in society, as society was formed to protect you from not only outward threats but also from that insistent inward will to destruction. The roles assigned may be harsh, stagnant, unchanging, but they keep the society functionally reproductive. We just assign value judgments such as "It's better to own things and control things" as opposed to "It's better to own nothing and control nothing" and go about trying to alter what the rolls assigned look like.

If an end result of capitalism is the cessation of functioning societies we'll get our Malthusian/Spencerian selection, return to feudal slave societies and just start over. Feudalism wasn't necessarily better or worse for the reproductive success of our species, we only assume capitalism is better because it allows for a significant increase in the population of our species. Who's to say that's even a good thing? What if the slave society would have kept the species alive longer? It's biologically irrelevant how an individual feels in their day to day life, the only thing of relevance is the continuation of specific genetic sequences.

That sucks, because 'I' apperceive conscious thought in myself and in others. I have a vested interest in the immediate well-being of myself and those I've been trained to take into consideration, not my species, I can't calculate the impact my actions have on my species. I make decisions based on immediacy and can't possibly make decisions with my society in mind. Some people are placed in positions to make guesses about policy with the society in mind, I'm not.