Slashdot Mirror

in a polygamous society there are much, much fewer women to go around

In a polygamous society, because women would be able to have more than one husband, there would be plenty of women to go around. It is in a polygynist society, like the FDLS practices, where there are not enough women to go around.

Falcon

Imagine if every family held to about the same ratio of 1 husband to 4 wives. You now have 3 men who will never be able to find a wife, never be able to start a family

What you describe above is not polygamy. Under polygamy those 4 women could have 4 husbands each. It's only under polygyny that one man can have 4 wives but those wives can only have the one husband.

Falcon

Malak Hifni Nassef, as quoted in A Very Short Introduction to Islam, in the chapter on women, pp96.

This is by way of agreement, I thought it was one of the most harrowing descriptions of polygamy I've read, though I haven't read many.

I seriously doubt that that book describes polygamy. I bet what it describes is polygyny.

Falcon

There are people living polygamously

I seriously doubt these are people living polygamously, more likely they are living polygynyously. There's a quick way to tell, can a woman have more than one husband? If not then they aren't living polygamously.

Falcon

In Islamic countries, polygamy is allowed but usually on several conditions and is highly regulated.

No, polygamy is not allowed in Islamic countries, polygyny is allowed there. A man, even if highly regulated, is allowed more than one wife but a woman is not allowed more than one husband.

Falcon

Polygamy is often associated with religions

The problem is polygamy is confused with polygyny.

Falcon

Anyway you look at it, a society where men do not have access to women (or vice versa), for whatever reason, is fsked up. Polygamy is one reason.

You're wrong. Polygamy would allow every man to have a wife, under polygamy a woman would be able to have more than one husband.

But then consider other reasons like female infanticide in India and China and you have a serious problem going forward that is as bad as polygamy.

Infanticide in China and India is as bad as polygyny not polygamy.

Falcon

I think that this study needs a lot more work. As others have observed, they're only sampling men who have already lived past 60, and of those who are polygamous

I think what's wrong with the study was that it looked at polygyny not polygamy.

Falcon

because polygamy "contributes" to violence - and I think it does

How so? Maybe you, like most people, make the mistake of thinking polygyny is polygamy. However unlike polygyny, where a man has more than one wife, in polygamy both men and women can have more than one spouse.

My claim is not really all that strong - I'm mostly just answering the fellow who asserted that polygamy is "beneficial for all those involved". I'm pretty convinced that it isn't.

Polygyny may not be beneficial to all but polygamy certainly can be.

Falcon

Actually, it's not beneficial for large numbers of single men, who necessarily have no wife at all (for each man with two wives, there is one with none, since the sex ratio in humans is very close to 1:1). There is also some evidence that having large numbers of single men contributes to violence (this should come as no surprise). Hence, polygamy probably contributes to violence.

The problem you are describing in caused not by polygamy but by polygyny. Polygamy would actually help here. Please notice the differences in definition, in polygyny a man can have more than one wive whereas in polygamy a man and a woman can have more than one spouse. And to make it more confusing, in polyandry a woman has more than one husband.

Furthermore, while from a strictly materialistic point of view, polygamy is beneficial to women (since richer men tend to have more wives and can support them better on average), I don't think there's a lot of evidence that these women are "better off" from a liberal Western point of view. They are probably not going to be well educated or in the work force, for example.

Perhaps a look at Love unlimited: The polyamorists will disavow that.

Falcon

the statement is likely true. Most polygamous houses have the concept of a head wife, to whom the other wives must address first.

The simple fact is is a polygamous household can have more than one husband. Those households where the man has more than one wife but each wife only has one husband is a polygynyist household not a polygamous household.

The recent events in Texas highlight this.

Despite what the mass media says that Mormon sect practices polygyny not polygamy.

Falcon

I met a gentleman who claimed to have 13 wife back home in Africa, in his version of polygamy, Number One Wife basically ruled the family with an iron fist. She decided which wife did which tasks and who got to visit the husbands quarters and when. Any wife that offended Number One was in for a world of misery. Overall Polygamy didn't sound like fun for anyone except Number One Wife; like in many cultures, what is displayed in public is different from what happens behind closed doors.

Sorry but that's not polygamy, what that is is polygyny. Polygamy is when a person, male or female, can have more than one spouse. When a man has more than one wife that's polygyny. And when a woman has more than one spouse that's polyandry.

I was concerned TFA would make the same mistake but it doesn't go that far, unlike the mass media coverage of that Mormon sect. And it links to another "New Scientist" article "Love unlimited: The polyamorists" where both men and women have more than one partner.

Falcon

Normally I'm as curmudgeonly as the next grammar-and-usage-Nazi. However, you're wrong.

"It's unclear why this usage provokes such a strong response, but it can't be because of novelty. Impact has been used as a verb since 1601, and its figurative use dates from 1935, allowing people plenty of time to get accustomed to it." http://www.bartleby.com/64/C003/0165.html

Furthermore, using impact in this way promotes metaphor. Why do you hate metaphor? Go back to Metaphor-less Land!

There are also hidden costs in not producing enough/capable enough weapons: being ruled by those who did.

And who's got the weapons to rule? Militarily the USA only has China as a potential threat how China has about as much to loose as the US in any serious confrontation. The US could have cut defense spending without causing harm to the country. Heck, if the defense budget had been cut to 10% of it was at the end of the Cold War then a citizen's army was formed much of the cut in spending could have been used to help the poor in the Third World. Terrorism may be the grated threat the US will face, and a lot of the foot soldiers come from the poor, some feel their life as so little meaning a suicide bomber's death will give them that. By improving everyone's lives it takes away how terrorists, some at least, breed.

As long as fear and want are so strong it will be very difficult to achieve that balance.

One of my favorite quotes about this was said by Benjamin Franklin, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Like the USA's Founding Fathers my greatest fear isn't terrorists but government.

Falcon

That is a backronym. The word Geek predates the "computer/technology" thing by quite a bit.

See:
http://www.bartleby.com/61/0/G0070000.html
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=geek

OK, here you are. Can you explain us how this is supposed to have originated from a language about two thousand years younger?

It could be both. Here it's not particularly "jerry-rigged", as the focus with that phrase is on the quality of the construction, instead of the make-shift nature of it.

It could be both. Here it's not particularly "jerry-rigged", as the focus with that phrase is on the quality of the construction, instead of the make-shift nature of it.

why can't I just provide a forum for others

http://www.bartleby.com/66/40/63040.html

We learn something every day. I learned that Jung had a term called synchronicity.

You get to learn that synchronicity also means "the quality or fact of being synchronous".
Merriam-Webster: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Synchronicity
Bartleby: http://www.bartleby.com/61/42/S0964250.html

From American Heritage: evidence or argument helping to establish a fact or truth of a statement.

He was spoiled rich brat who never worked a day in his life. Marx also didn't claim that he was the Son of God, nor was his death and resurrection prophesied like Christ's was: http://www.bartleby.com/108/19/22.html Christ himself spoked the first verse of this chapter on the cross, it details what happened to him(verse 16) and was written hundreds of years earlier. Of course I am sure you will chalk it up to 'chance'.

Oh, how I hate to take your hilarious post and make it political, but...

Were you a state or region of another nation, or even a city like Kosovo, then you could declare your independent Alaskanistan through the proper legal channels and popularity. I, for one, welcome our new Alaskanistanian oil overlords.

However, in America we have Texas vs. White, a legally established precedent that basically says states can't secede from the United States. Bummer.

Also, there's that whole Civil War thing. Ask Lincoln. As he said in his inaugural address, "...no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence within any State or States against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances."

So, no Alaskanistanimania, sorry. That oil and tax money belongs to Uncle Sam forever!

I believe 'whose' is also the possessive pronoun of 'which' - unless you're aware of a 'whiches' or something similar? One is not compelled to use the circumlocution "of which". See, for example, http://www.bartleby.com/64/C001/049.html

--
.sig

Nader has done more good for this country than Gore (or most others in politics.)

But in securing Dubya's win he did enough harm to over shadow all the good he has done. It's a safe assumption that if Nader had not run, that the vast majority of those who voted for Nader would have voted for Gore, and Gore would have won Florida and the election. Sure 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan may well still have happened, but the Iraq war and the abuse of signing statements and Gitmo and the DHS and the Patriot Act 1&2 and wiretapping would not have happened under Gore. Nader has done a lot of good, but also a lot of damage, he should get back to doing good instead of following his ego and "paving the road with good intentions."

Yup.

I'd also add that "different from" vs. "different than" is not clear-cut. Even in British English, "different than" is sometimes used. Bartleby says that "different than" is considered always acceptable when followed by a clause, e.g. "The book is different than I'd remembered," while "different from" should generally be used when comparing two things, e.g. "My book is different from yours."

And then, there's the British variant "different to," which IMHO makes no sense at all.

[RAMMS+EIN wrote] As jonadab once put it:

> Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it

Yes, and those who do study history are doomed to watch in frustration
as it is unwittingly repeated by those who do not :-)

Source: The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. 2002.
URL: http://www.bartleby.com/59/3/thosewhocann.html

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"

Studying history is necessary to avoid repeating past mistakes. This saying comes from the writings of George Santayana, a Spanish-born American author of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

It's always funny when people tie themselves in knots trying to explain this one. The sister posts demonstrate this nicely.

In fact, the phrase makes perfect sense, but only if you know that one of the older meanings of "prove" is "to test". See, for example, here, but a quick Google will turn up plenty more results.

So it has nothing to do with "prov[ing] the existence of a rule to be excepted" (see sister post) or "mak[ing] ... a rule more obvious". Rather, it means exactly what it says.

:)

Form the possessive singular of nouns with 's. Follow this rule whatever the final consonant.

See this. I'll repost it here, too:
"To cry Wolf! To give a false alarm. The allusion is to the well-known fable of the shepherd lad who used to cry Wolf! merely to make fun of the neighbours, but when at last the wolf came no one would believe him.
So, in essence, it means "to be alarmist", as "later warnings may fall on deaf ears".

M-W defines it as "to give alarm unnecessarily".

:P

Actually, we aren't supposed to be a democracy (and our Presidential Election process is as far from democratic as you can get). In words attributed to Benjamin Franklin, we have "a Republic, if you can keep it" (http://www.bartleby.com/73/1593.html). By definition, a democracy is "a government by the people" (The New American Webster Handy College Dictionary Third Edition 1995 p186). A republic is "a nation whose government is wholly elected, having no king" (The New American Webster Handy College Dictionary Third Edition 1995 p570). A democratic government requires that officials be elected only by popular vote; our constitution explicitly forbids us from electing the president in that manner. The present system we use is a farce of what we are supposed to have; the winner takes all method we use is not proscribed by the constitution. A better implementation, more in keeping with the requirements of the constitution, would be to have the one vote for each house district, which is given to the candidate that wins that district, and two votes that are given to the candidate that clearly wins the states votes, or is split between the candidates if there is no clear winner. Aside from my one disagreement with the assertion that we live in a democracy, I agree with the rest of what you had to say. Admittedly, I'm not the best at remembering to vote, but I do my very best to be involved in the process.

Given the choice of living in slavery or death, which do you think most people would choose? Do you really expect people to say "yes, kill me please"?

There's another choice, you can fight for freedom. You may die but you can take some oppressors out with you. As Thomas Jefferson said, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure." However as with past civilizations, people have become lazy and fearful.

Whose Rights is not the proper question on this topic, as the right to expatriation, (old definition) is a natural Right Preexistent to the State, and therefore is possessed by all humans, as it was endowed to them at birth, by that which they perceive as the creative.

"This involves the great question as to the right of expatriation, upon which so much has been said in this cause. Perhaps it is not necessary it should be explicitly decided on this occasion; but I shall freely express my sentiments on the subject. That a man ought not to be a slave; that he should not be confined against his will to a particular spot, because he happened to draw his first breath upon it; that he should not be compelled to continue in a society to which he is accidentally attached, when he can better his situation elsewhere, much less when he must starve in one country, and may live comfortably in another: are positions which I hold as strongly as any man, and they are such as most nations in the world appear clearly to recognize."

Supreme Court Justice James Iredell, "Talbot v. Janson", 1795

Still I will answer whose rights I am defending:

"I do esteem individual liberty above everything. What is a nation for, but to secure the maximum of liberty to every individual? What do you think a nation is?--a big business concern?"

D.H. Lawrence

Ron Paul says he desires to end all taxation: politicians lied, politicians lie, politicians will lie. Why should others be forced to bear a higher burden in the interim policies, even if Paul's rectitude of intent is pure? How does Paul propose to pay down this massive debt without income tax? Does he intend to simply default on The Nation's promissory notes? Be honest now; this cannot be done in our lifetimes, so any tax breaks that Paul gives now to his special groups is a privileged class. I did not elaborate, but his schooling tax breaks are odious for another primary reason: many will be eligible for these tax breaks because they send their offspring off to parochial schools which many others, who are forced to shoulder the breeders' true societal costs, would consider to be personally heretical. Congress shall make no law... this is how quickly privileged classes become perceived in society. No matter how you slice it; it is also a payoff for Paul's most avid supporters. Think I am wrong? Listen to Mr. Paul himself from a file hosted by his own YouTube Account. Now tell me again about Paul's intents?

It is hard to believe that so many understand so little about cause and effects that they would believe that giving a fetus American Citizenship would be a positive action. Please resolve these troubling implications for me then:

• If a 12 year old girl conceived from being raped by her double-digit IQ Uncle, should she be forcedto carry the fetus to term? the answer would be yes the government coerces her, or they will charge her with murder.
• Ectopic Pregnancy (from WebMD):In about 2% of pregnancies, however, the fertilized egg attaches to an area outside of the uterus, which results in an ectopic pregnancy (also known as a tubal pregnancy or an extrauterine pregnancy).
  
  Nearly all ectopic pregnancies develop in a fallopian tube; the rest occur in an ovary, the cervix, or the abdomen. An ectopic pregnancy cannot support the life of a fetus for very long. If left untreated, a tubal ectopic pregnancy can cause fallopian tube damage and life-threatening blood loss. Therefore, unless the pregnancy is miscarrying on its own, medicine is used to stop the pregnancy from growing, or surgery is used to remove it.
  
  It is certainly not the fault of the fetus, where implantation occurred. if a fetus is an American citizen, it is mur

So, you are just using words like "crime" that you really don't understand the definition of. That's cool, you don't have to try to fake it. It is just an opportunity for you to widen your vocabulary.

Here you go: Crime

Possibly karma whoring, but I haven't heard the phrase deep six in a while and wondered where it came from.

That bastion of knowledge, The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, says this:

This phrase is derived from the noun "deep six," meaning burial at sea and referring to the depth of water necessary for such a burial. The term was later used as slang for a grave (customarily six feet underground) and, by extension, as a verb meaning "to kill."

... there was a movie about this, called the island of Dr Moreau. Well not exactly about this, but about a Dr who took animals and tried to make them human, through altering them genetically.

Oh, someone forgot to cite their paraphrasing source...

http://www.bartleby.com/123/13.html

Interestingly enough, Housman was wise enough to learn what he needed only after 1 year. Or maybe he visited San Francisco.

--------------
X's and O's for all my foes.

As an English teacher, you should be doing your best to teaching the English language, and an appreciation of the English canon.

You seem to be making gross assumptions about the rest of the material I will cover in my classes, even though I gave absolutely no information about it in the first place. My original post implied that I was curious to find out which resources fostered interests among science and math. Neither did I say I wanted to try and teach those subjects, nor did I indicate that I would be offering up different genres and subjects of literature in lieu of excellent Western literature.

It's amusing to me that someone would make this accusation in particular since, of all the teachers in my department, I'm the only one that offers more "standard" literature instead of just "teen" literature. As a matter of fact, as an end of year project last year I gave out classic poems (ranging from the 1600s to 1950s) and asked the students to interpret meanings and even memorize and give off a performance. I consider this to be a high school task, but they did very well with it!

It's almost like you're sabotaging your own field, and hope to stress other subjects!

It is not my purpose, as an English teacher, to raise students to become English teachers. Nor should it be. My goal is to help them achieve an understanding of literature, figurative language, the complexity of the written word, and to use these concepts to understand the world they live in. Ultimately, that goal is not very different from the sciences and maths. We learn those concepts to understand our world better.

Furthermore, unless I declared war upon grammar, I cannot sabotage my own field. Yes, there is good literature, great literature, poor literature, and absolutely horrible literature. Whatever made you think I would just choose "some random book" from the suggestions here, is beyond me. Most good literature teachers have the foresight to actually READ the books they teach, before the students do.

Furthermore, the sort of people who would get anything out of science-fiction are the sort of people who would read it anyway.

This argument is meaningless. You suggest that people should have a greater appreciation for their culture, so they should study what came from their culture, but then you seem to imply that literature about science is only enjoyed by people with an inborn desire for it. Science IS very much a part of our culture, especially Western nations.

In fact, one of the primary reasons the Western nations have dominated over the global economy for so long is because of the contributions of technology, the advancements of medicine, and the pioneering spirit of our scientists. This should absolutely be celebrated in our classrooms and we should absolutely continue the tradition of fostering a love and wonder of these disciplines.

Honestly I think it's terrible that an English teacher has so little regard for their own subject. If you were the teacher of my child I would demand them being transferred out, and I strongly believe you're in the wrong field.

This is what is posted on my classroom door. You may notice, if you read through the poem, that it has a formal style, a rhyme scheme, it is dense with imagery, alliteration, and metaphor, it includes a clear voice, excellent diction, and the intent of the writer is clear. The tone is powerful and the mood is restless, unrelenting, and uplifting. It also brings up the supernatural and references geological formations, naval concepts, and even the immense scale of planets and beyond. The sentence structures are both simple and complex. Even the punctuation is challenging. The theme encompasses an enormous portion of Western philosophy and even religion, that has been a driving part of our cultur

What about when he responded to the pharisees about taxes and tithing "give unto Caesar what is Caesar and unto God what is God's". Or the Sermon on the Mount, specifically enumerating murder, divorce, false testimony. How about when he acted as judge in the case of a prostitute? Just a few cases.

Guess I have to say I disagree with you, Jesus belongs up there. And if you believe the Bible, Moses does not because he was just a transcriptionist for God.

Someday, I want to draw a cartoon with nine Roman soldiers standing and lying one on the ground. One of the survivors can say "This decimation isn't as bad as I thought it would be."

Maybe you could work in something about this occuring in October. You know, the eighth month. And mention how it's a real tragedy, so someone should win a goat for their song.

Etymology is interesting, but a poor guide to proper meaning and usage. "Decimate" as destroying or removing a large part of a group is quite acceptable usage.

Anyone else curious about the "sowsear" tag? A google turned up this tidbit of cultural literacy:

You can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear
meaning:
It is impossible to make something excellent from poor material.

A bit obscure, but quite apropos. Kudos to the tagger for piquing my curiosity...

definitively/definitely

So he's a real geek :)

Last year, for instance, engineering majors at the University of Nebraska starting paying an extra $40 per credit hour. One argument in support of differential pricing is that professors in engineering and business are more expensive than in other fields.

We need to more fully subsidize those degrees in fields where we're starting to lose our edge.

I couldn't agree more. One taxes what one wants to discourage. And the article did say "public universities", which I assume means it's getting government funding, so the government could legitimately interject some rationality here. Why not charge art majors a luxury fee and apply it to the engineering costs? If that drove a few would-be artists to become engineers because they couldn't afford the extra $40, maybe that wouldn't be so bad. (Maybe it would cause them to notice the fact that without a decent education, they can't afford $40 and that could even spur them to want to achieve more?) Just a thought.

The schools are perhaps thinking it costs more to produce engineers, but I doubt it really is. That's like a student saying it costs more to go to college than not to.

Schools exist to crank out what society needs more of. The arts are a by-product of other more applied endeavors generating the necessary affluence to afford the luxury of arts, the arts are not a life style choice that can be substituted for engineering because it's more cost-efficient and because we can outsource engineering. Nudging people by subtle economic means into areas of endeavor that may not be supported in an ever-more-competitive global economy is ill advised in the modern economy.

Plus a lot of schools get donations from alumni. The engineer alums are more likely to have money to donate than the non-engineers.

If the school is really having trouble breaking even on engineering, we should be trying as a society to come up with ways to help them, so that people (and by implication society) doesn't take the wrong path just for the sake of a momentary cash shortfall. The problem is that a person starting out in life may not yet realize the critical nature of the error they are making in choosing on the basis of price, yet some may in fact do so. (They may choose for other reasons, and that's ok. But once there's a price difference, some can't afford not to take this into account.)

When we consider the true cost of the Iraq war, the absence of many, many billions of dollars in our treasury that could have gone to infrastructure issues will one day be clearly seen as the true cost of the war: the opportunities that were no longer available to us because we depleted our nation on a fool's errand when we should have been enforcing our borders, making sure our own cities are safe, getting our national debt in check, reinforcing our internal ability to generate critical tools and technologies without relying on overseas imports that could disappear in time of war, resolving energy issues, ... and education--so that we don't have to outsource the doing of--nor in fact the very understanding of--these critical things.

To paraphrase an old proverb... "For want of $40 ... the kingdom was lost"

Actually, now that I think about it they have had a magnetic stripe (like bank cards) since way back as well. Again, no effect on my privacy and freedom. The only effect I can think of is expediency of roadside stops.

The more poignant question here is if a "Real" ID is a driver's license, then what of those who do not drive? It is a creepy indicator of our car culture that definitive identification is tied to automobiles. So if I do not have a drivers license am I not a "Real" person?

Like I said, owning a motor vehicle is the best way to allow the state to harass you. I do not own a car myself (thank god) but have a drivers license for employment purposes. Want to drop off the radar? (Pun intended.) Lose the car.

It is a amazing the freedom that not owning a car allows. It seems counterintuitive, but since I gave up my last car I have never felt as free as I do now. The automobile is a ball and chain to the individual and an albatross around the neck of humanity.

(oddly enough, when I checked out appropriateness of the albatross idiom in this context I found the following ironic example: http://www.bartleby.com/59/4/albatrossaro.html )

I think you misread my earlier comment. To clarify, I believe the people God chose to write His book never intended the word translated "day" to be read as "24 hour period". That's not to say the word was mistranslated, just that it was misunderstood by some; "a period of time in history; an era" is one of the definitions given the English word "day": http://www.bartleby.com/61/40/D0044000.html

You are correct that I have determined myself able to understand more of the Bible than the human chosen to write Genesis, and some other parts of the Bible. Reason 1: Genesis was written hundreds of years before the Bible's completion. Reason 2: scriptures such as Daniel 12:8,9 in which Daniel is told the things he is writing are not for his understanding, but for some future generation.

Please don't assume--just because I understand it differently from modern tradition and church doctrine--that I'm choosy about which bits of the Bible to believe. All Scripture is God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16).