Whether you watch 500GB of iTunes movies or 500GB of torrents, it's going to cost the uni about the same (yes, yes, small overhead). If they want to throttle Internet leisure activity by limiting consumption in a period of time, that's quite understandable. The problem appears when the school starts expressing a preference for your Internet leisure activity.
In what way does this counter my argument that the dust bowl was a Government created problem?
You haven't argued that. You've argued that the Government contributed toward the problem and ignored everything else. Why did you do that? The Dust Bowl was caused by a combination of factors:
(1) Great Depression causing desperate farmers to seek to regain losses sometimes at the expense of land management, often requiring extensive loans;
(2) Competition from larger farming enterprises which also did not care for land management (being especially badly understood on a large scale), in turn resulting in overproduction driving down prices;
(3) An unusual spate of bad weather, i.e. three waves of drought through the '30s;
(4) Inability to subsist and keep up with loan payments due to (1), (2) and (3). A temporary move to the city usually meant repossession, with Federal emergency aid being limited.
Franklin D. Ulyanov rudely stepped on the toes of the cutting edge soil researchers working for (2), commencing soil conservation programmes which started to make a difference by the late '30s.
Small farms are forced to sell farms because of the death tax. Do you have something to debate these points with?
Well, I don't disagree that the US tax system is far harsher on the small landowner than the big landowner. But they'd lost their land/house/equipment to the bank long before that would have become a worry in this case.
So you were left out of a class. Instead of finding out what the class was up to, you waited until someone else sorted it out for you. This is the Government's fault.
You then did badly in a test. This is the Government's fault.
Then you found drugs. This is the Government's fault.
Then you decided that you weren't going to do any study after school. This is the Government's fault. And your parents' fault, even though they didn't stop you.
Then you looked up your classmates on Facebook and it depressed you, though didn't really get any information because this is Facebook. This is the Government's fault.
Then some Thatcherite "buy a house! it'll make you happy again!" was sprinkled over your town, but it didn't work because you can't just give people a handout to tell them to become good capitalists and expect everything to work out great. This is the Government's fault.
Your forgot that your missing Enter/Return key is the Government's fault. Also my missing gallbladder (even though it was quite painful before the crypto-Stalinist health service removed it).
In what way does that make anything "the Government"'s fault? If I had the resources and the lack of regulation to farm a state to destruction over 10 years, why would a top-up from Sam be anything but a welcome bonus to something I was going to do anyway? In what way would a lack of subsidy stop me doing it, assuming I had the resources to start the operation?
The principle is that outside investors have no reason to care about the long term welfare of the land. It's not worth the risk: better to squeeze while it's easiest, then move on, then die rich and relaxed.
To support parent's point, here are some oyster shuckers voluntarily earning more money than on a farm they'd never have seen. Unfortunately the Great Depression put so many adults out of work that children were pushed out of these jobs, which is sort of like "lead[ing] to growth in industries that lead to the cushy office jobs we all enjoy today" except to the extent that it's nothing like it.
Before the great capitalist machine was able to put them back in their place, the communist Roosevelt forced FLSA on hard-working American children, preventing them from living out the capitalist dream. Eventually children all had the space to receive an education and the time to explore knowledge further, and that's why China's taken our jobs away.
I received an expensive education through parental support and private scholarships, so don't worry about me. But what I'm asking of you, dear common reader, is that you go back to shucking rather than living beyond your means. It's for the good of Economy, and if some of your offspring survive then their children's children might even benefit in some way. And please, don't look East - everything's so much worse in Marxist Europe, and you'll only be distracted by sympathy for men who have dug their own unionised, healthy, comfortable graves.
Or just remove worker benefits entirely. And freedom of asembly. And speech. And make it easier to bribe government officials. Also workhouses. Rows and rows of beds. That's the way to increase employment! Make workers so cheap and desperate that their only alternative is slow death. We did eliminate healthcare, yes? Good.
Not according to the Supreme Court, which has said that the right to marriage isn't just the right to sign a piece of paper, but the right to marry whom you choose. Gay people can't do that.
Your summary of the Supreme Court's opinion is so vague as to be meaningless. With it, I choose to marry you.
What you mean is that the Supreme Court, which has no business defining marriage in the first place, recently decided to define marriage. Before that, the states defined marriage. And they defined it as I describe, no matter how annoyed that makes you.
And if you were the second female member, you'd be outta luck. See? No difference. There are no institutions which polygamous people are denied entry to but others are not.
What? What has gender got to do with it? As a polygamist I want to enjoy my time with Heidi. Are you about to make an argument based on only taking account of the rights of the person with multiple partners, rather than the multiple partners themselves?
The state is not "recognizing a tweaked version of Christian marriage" unless your definition of "tweaking" means "stripping away everything that makes it Christian or religious".
What about the union of precisely two consenting adults isn't extremely Christian about marriage? Are you so parochial as to not recognise that marriage is often arranged, often polygamous, and often comes with more or fewer prerequisites, privileges and restrictions?
Also, what is a "full Muslim marriage experience"?
To give one of a hundred examples, one in which I can state "I divorce you" thrice and become divorced from you, girl, but not from my two other wives.
Your tenuous argument for correlation is not the law, as held by the Supreme Court of California.
Rather than paraphrasing badly what you'd have liked the Court to imply, why don't you quote precisely the decisions you find pertinent? The Supreme Bankruptcy of California has made some funny decisions, but "there is no relationship whatever between marriage and children" would just be a blind denial of reality.
Think carefully to see if you can find a requirement that a stable, loving couple be married. Think carefully to see if you can find a requirement that a stable, loving married couple have children. Neither exist.
A correlation does not imply a requirement. The existence of a host of benefits often taken up does not imply a requirement. Go back to your classics; bone up on logic.
The reason virgins aren't parents is because they're virgins, NOT because they're not married.
Ad - op - tion.
I just realized that you may not know where babies come from.
Angry. Lame.
Maternity and Paternity law allow a parent of either gender to have that legally protected break from his or her career.
And that's great (i) where it exists; and (ii) in equal measures, IOW when the law has already been specifically changed. When I last looked into it a couple of years ago, the FMLA only covered unpaid leave, with only California in the US having specific laws providing for paid paternity leave ("family leave"). It looks like WA and NJ have also made some developments, but that's it. To reiterate why I brought this up too many posts ago:
current Western laws [are] often not suitable for monogamous gay relationships
Of course, since we're redefining what a parent is - from biological to adopting male/female in marriage to one of two adopting adults in a particular partnership - it's worth noting that it's still gotta be one of two people.
Look, gramps, there hasn't been a draft in decades. And, you may not realize this, but there are many, many married couples in the military.
Yes, because gay people are unable to enter into the same institution which straight people can,
Gay people have always been able to get married. It's just that marriage has been defined as a union between one man and one woman, and gays didn't get to redefine it.
Currently, there is no institution which polygamous people are denied entry to, but others are not.
Let's take the "institution" that is a Californian state jail offering conjugal visits. As the 13th male member of Hacksaw Heidi's harem, I'm outta luck. But as of June 2007, were I the first female, erm, member, 't'd be cool.
Google is highlighting a particular sort of relationship as equally worthy of privilege as the one the state currently grants the privileges to.
No, Google is discriminating in response to particular market pressures. If it had genuinely started pontificating on matters of personal relationships, I'd be more worried.
I didn't know jews, muslims, hindus, and atheists couldn't get married in California.
They can all experience the state's recognising a tweaked version of Christian marriage (and divorce). But a Muslim, for example, will not have the full Muslim marriage (and divorce) experience recognised by the State, only those parts which coincide with the state's view of what marriage is.
You may be confused... we're talking about marriage law, not family law.
Sir, you're worse than a politician. Stop telling people what the issues are and what it is they should be talking about - it's too hot today to gather straw anyway.
See, it's possible in this country for people to be married, but have no children. It's also possible for people to have children, but never be married. The two are unrelated.
Just because A doesn't necessarily imply B, and B doesn't necessarily imply A, it does not mean that the two are unrelated. This is an almost painful fallacy.
Think carefully to see if you can find a relationship between the existence of a stable, loving couple and the bringing up of children. Start with biological advantages if you want, but then think in more sophisticated logistical terms. Incorporate emotion if you are able.
IOW, loving couples often want and have kids. By contrast, Theaetetus, single virgins tend not to suddenly find themselves bringing up a child on their own. What biological, sociological and legal reasons could there be for this?
Your examples of maternity law and selective service do not require participants to be married. In fact, marriage has no bearing on them whatsoever.
Maternity law: It's traditionally considered a lot easier to properly look after a very young child when at least one parent is given a legally protected break from her career. This law needs modification for a two-male partnership.
Draft: in the case that neither partner has children: a home can be kept in good order when not every resident is away at war. This might not be relevant to/you/, but IME it's very relevant to the morale of many servicemen. It's also quite relevant to the ability of the couple to settle back into civilian life after everyone's finished playing with his gun.
Traditionally it was assumed that the young man went out to fight while the woman stayed at home, fitting in neatly with the notion of marriage as a union between one man and one woman. You may say "that's nothing to do with marriage law!" but it doesn't matter one bit what category your copy of Fighting Legal Arguments on the Internet in 24 Hours files it under. What matters is how the law affects the married in a way related to their gender.
(Otherwise I shall argue that what happens to your stuff when you die is not marriage law but inheritance law, and what happens when you're ill is just medical law.)
the abolishment of any and all intestate legal relationships? Yeah... I don't think you'll find much support for that anywhere.
Between competent adults? Who is going to object? "No, he didn't give me explicit permission, but I think I should have it anyway." To take the classical, "Should we switch off life support?" question, here's a reasonable list of people who get to choose this, in advance if necessary:
(1) The guy on life support.
Anyone else? No. If he hasn't said anything, assume exactly what you'd assume if there was no family around to decide. Which, hopefully, should be, "Keep me alive as long as you can!"
No, monogamy in marriage has also existed a lot longer than the Christian church.
And polygamy came before monogamy, and asexual reproduction came before polygamy. But it doesn't matter what came first. What matters is why we have today's rules now - if we don't identify what's propping up current legislation, we can't hope to change it.
Your Trent hobby-horse fails to recall that laws had been written and upheld for centuries before based on Christian principles, and punishments for fornication and sodomy were based on Christian principles. Why did Islamic states admit multiple wives for their men, even states which were Christian before? Because their state was no longer based on Christianity.
Do our criminal laws "stick to the Christian principle of 'thou shalt not kill'"?
There are philosophical foundations for no-murder which have been fairly lengthily sounded out and applied in forming younger nations, e.g. Republican France and US, and these foundations shape much law in those nations. If we wanted to change murder law, we'd have to look at those foundations, not at Christianity.
Thing is, it's a bad red herring, because most people in favor of gay marriage have no problem with polygamy
We're discussing Google, not "most people". Google haven't provided a framework of benefits for polygamous relationships, but for gay monogamous couples. Google are highlighting a particular sort of relationship as somehow worthy for special privilege out of a huge list of possibilities. The relationship is: Christian marriage + modification to admit same-sex partners brought about by successful lobbying for gay rights.
But no-one here is denying that current Western laws may not be suitable for polygamous relationships, just as they're often not suitable for monogamous gay relationships. There are still gender-specific privileges which affect a family unit from obvious discrepancies such as "maternity" rights all the way to the possibility in most countries of only men being enslaved in a Draft.
The state is also bound to certain obligations by the marriage certificate, and thus can be obligated to enforce the marriage against the wishes of next of kin or other blood relatives.
But that's only an exception to another exception. If the state didn't already give special powers to blood relatives, it wouldn't have to give an exception to marriage in this case.
Marriage for inheritance purposes predates the Christian church
Of course it does: it predates Christianity. But today it sticks to Christian principles on sexuality and monogamy, among other things.
Accordingly, when a spouse dies, the remaining spouse inherits tax-free because they already own everything.
Assuming a jurisdiction where this is true, this principle cannot be extended to polygamous marriages. I'd just marry everyone on this planet preemptively (you know you want to!) so none would have to pay inheritance tax on my estate. Hence my alternative suggestion.
Under current marriage laws, the hospital must obey the wishes of both B and C, which is clearly impossible.
This could be handled in the same way as multiple Power of Attorney, again without the next-of-kin override clauses which may exist in your jurisdiction. For example, if there is no consensus, do the same thing you'd do if the spouse wasn't available for comment.
You're not seeking simply cohabitation or shared ownership, you're seeking a legal agency relationship that trumps the rights of blood relatives,
Why can't this be arranged in a similar way to Power of Attorney?
allows for probate-free inheritance, etc.
You're already introducing a Christian moral principle in considering that a person should be able to give their stuff tax-free to a single qualified other. Then it can be abused anyway by marrying to pass on an inheritance. Then exceptions can be created to minimise abuse. Etc.
Why can't I marry two people and let them each get half tax-free? Ten for a tenth each? Why can't I marry my son just so he can safely inherit my farm? What is the non-religious principle here?
This. All I see is an article about how the government intrudes into family lives, giving particular benefits to two heterosexuals living together in a particular sort of arrangement but not to singles, homosexuals or people living together under other arranegments. And Google has decided to follow the government's lead by discriminating against everyone whose lifestyle is not that of a particular steady homosexual partnership, e.g. people who remain single / practice polyamory / shack up in a massive commune / sleep around / anything else.
All this crap about the moving helping in "competing for the same talent" implies that everyone is either in a gay marriage[tm] or straight marriage[tm].
They are rewarded by the general public by being lied to,
Examples? Don't say, "sometimes criminals lie!" Uh-huh. Sometimes criminals also break the law. If only we had some sort of force of public servants trained, employed and paid to impersonally deal with that.
belittled, mistrusted, and portrayed as criminals.
Which country do you live in where this is the predominant attitude toward the police? It must be some sort of quasi-anarchy, because I'm fairly sure there are a lot more civilians than police in every single country. The reason Rome's not always burning is because most people have respect for Rome.
Then policeman's not the job for you. Just as you'd not be a paramedic if you broke down crying at every bloody body.
So people are rude and they lie. Imagine you're a computer, processing streams of sound and observed movement. The computer doesn't care if you speak angrily or wave your hands at it all day, and it doesn't react any better if you shower it with rosepetals - it's just processing. Now add human intelligence to enable your processing to excel, but avoid adding human emotion. Don't take it personally.
If you don't find yourself able to do this, there are plenty of jobs where your inability to rein in basic instincts won't affect other people's lives so much.
If you have a light out on your car, the officer could give you a ticket, or he could give you a warning. If youre polite, you'll probably get a warning. If you're rude, you'll likely get a ticket. This seems perfectly reasonable.
While it feels seductively comfortable, I'm not sure it's at all reasonable in a nation of laws. It's as objective as letting off the busty blonde or being harsh on the dusky bearded gent.
IOW, what law did only the impolite person break? Why is it OK for people who are good at showing themselves polite to get away with breaking more laws? The police force is a tool for helping to enforce the law, not a tool to change people's behaviour toward the police.
Perhaps one problem is giving officers apparent powers of insta-justice for many traffic and a few pedestrian behaviours.
One of those responsibilities is to treat public servants with respect.
Assuming this, it does not follow that there is a legal requirement to treat public servants with respect. IOW, it may be immoral to mouth off to a police officer, or to mouth off to your neighbour, or to sleep with your neighbour, or to pray/not pray for the soul of your temptress neighbour, but that doesn't mean it should be illegal.
If I annoy the police officer (e.g. with a snarky remark) then the police officer might be reasonable to annoy me back as any citizen legally can (e.g. with another snarky remark). But there is no reason why his wearing the colour of law should give him the right to do more than any other citizen. Ideally he should learn some fucking restraint - I have immense respect for policemen who show decorum when they're being wound up.
It is part of their job to interpret the law since you have to interpret it to apply it, but that interpretation can be challenged and corrected by the courts.
Is this perhaps one of the weak points of the current UK Common Law variant? There is the potential to write broad laws under the assumption that
The Police will initially interpret them reasonably and in a disinterested manner; and
the Courts will refine any problems with interpretation again in a disinterested manner;
the Police will pay attention to Court decisions;
people charged but not convicted will not be damaged by an arrest record.
Consider the police, instead of having become heavily politicsed and targets-based, simply being given the task of enforcing the law. Consider a police force, then, which prefers as much as possible to leave people alone, except when it is quite clear that the law requires them not to. Such a police force would choose always to interpret an ambiguous law in favour of leaving the potential lawbreaker alone, and it would be up to lawmakers try harder to make the law sufficiently specific.
if you can't handle people like that you should not be a police officer.
I would like to understand what causes/some/ police officers to get uppity and apparently very insecure. I'd like them to feel confident and proud of their jobs. What do they fear? Is it not meeting some target? I can understand an officer in obvious physical danger lashing out too hard (what is unreasonable defence when you're having a knife waved in your face?), but why otherwise?
/., why must you engage in so much mutual masturbation? Liberals (in the classical "defender of liberty" sense, not in the US "not conservative" sense) are being downtrodden precisely because they think small.
Yes, it's great that senior officers have issued a memo to junior officers - not even a slap on the wrist - but the problems are:
the intentional vagary of the law, which must be tackled at Parliament level - not that this is very easy while the LDs have sold themselves out and Cameron is waving around the "in Britain's security interests" card;
the general principles ("oh god bombs and pedos everywhere!") by which the Met operates, with significant politicising of the police by senior officers.
Remember: in any reasonable state, it's not the policeman's job to write or interpret the law, and the police should never have the power of a law so vague as the Terrorism Acts. Are you not paying attention? The public aren't even allowed to know where certain Laws apply. This might protect a few people on the ground being harassed, but it's the worst way of sweeping the problem under the carpet.
The Independent may be less, well, un-Independent than most of the mainstream rags, but no-one pays much attention to it. And The Register is read by as many people who count as the scrawlings on the average 6th Form toilet wall.
It's not to say that the laws aren't being abused. It's that pompous claims like
The Independent forced senior officers to admit that the controversial legislation is being widely misused.
are more "haha I stuck it to the Man!" exaggeration than evidence of the Met receiving a genuine reprimand from those who represent us.
As someone who loves cuddly and non-cuddly animals - some of them even human - and who has worked with PETA people and found them to be a bunch of animal-killing lunatics(*), it saddens me that PETA has completely broken the good image of animal welfare. Not that it's always PETA directly - sometimes they are the extreme that the opposition use to belittle the mainstream. A small proportion of what they do may be considered reasonable: e.g. undercover examination of conditions in testing labs; pushing research for meat production which doesn't require farming a whole animal. But general practice and underlying philosophy mostly causes more harm to the animal (and, by extension, human) welfare movement.
Anyway, social bees are cool. If we're the top mammal, they're the top insect. Yet we've done a good job of fucking up native varieties by over-zealous import of bees who turn out diseased./ not to be so great in another environment (shock!). Let's return to finding out how we can help each other:-).
(*) Their belief being that it's better to kill an animal than let it suffer the torment of symbiosis with humans. It's a really, really, contradictory cult. The exceptions to the insanity are the student volunteers who don't really see how the business (I don't expect them to survive on misguided love alone, but Ingrid is rich) works.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether you watch 500GB of iTunes movies or 500GB of torrents, it's going to cost the uni about the same (yes, yes, small overhead). If they want to throttle Internet leisure activity by limiting consumption in a period of time, that's quite understandable. The problem appears when the school starts expressing a preference for your Internet leisure activity.
In what way does this counter my argument that the dust bowl was a Government created problem?
You haven't argued that. You've argued that the Government contributed toward the problem and ignored everything else. Why did you do that? The Dust Bowl was caused by a combination of factors:
(1) Great Depression causing desperate farmers to seek to regain losses sometimes at the expense of land management, often requiring extensive loans;
(2) Competition from larger farming enterprises which also did not care for land management (being especially badly understood on a large scale), in turn resulting in overproduction driving down prices;
(3) An unusual spate of bad weather, i.e. three waves of drought through the '30s;
(4) Inability to subsist and keep up with loan payments due to (1), (2) and (3). A temporary move to the city usually meant repossession, with Federal emergency aid being limited.
Franklin D. Ulyanov rudely stepped on the toes of the cutting edge soil researchers working for (2), commencing soil conservation programmes which started to make a difference by the late '30s.
Small farms are forced to sell farms because of the death tax. Do you have something to debate these points with?
Well, I don't disagree that the US tax system is far harsher on the small landowner than the big landowner. But they'd lost their land/house/equipment to the bank long before that would have become a worry in this case.
So you were left out of a class. Instead of finding out what the class was up to, you waited until someone else sorted it out for you. This is the Government's fault.
You then did badly in a test. This is the Government's fault.
Then you found drugs. This is the Government's fault.
Then you decided that you weren't going to do any study after school. This is the Government's fault. And your parents' fault, even though they didn't stop you.
Then you looked up your classmates on Facebook and it depressed you, though didn't really get any information because this is Facebook. This is the Government's fault.
Then some Thatcherite "buy a house! it'll make you happy again!" was sprinkled over your town, but it didn't work because you can't just give people a handout to tell them to become good capitalists and expect everything to work out great. This is the Government's fault.
Your forgot that your missing Enter/Return key is the Government's fault. Also my missing gallbladder (even though it was quite painful before the crypto-Stalinist health service removed it).
In what way does that make anything "the Government"'s fault? If I had the resources and the lack of regulation to farm a state to destruction over 10 years, why would a top-up from Sam be anything but a welcome bonus to something I was going to do anyway? In what way would a lack of subsidy stop me doing it, assuming I had the resources to start the operation?
The principle is that outside investors have no reason to care about the long term welfare of the land. It's not worth the risk: better to squeeze while it's easiest, then move on, then die rich and relaxed.
All get together and agree to do nothing. Watch as the government doesn't withdraw federal funding for all schools.
To support parent's point, here are some oyster shuckers voluntarily earning more money than on a farm they'd never have seen. Unfortunately the Great Depression put so many adults out of work that children were pushed out of these jobs, which is sort of like "lead[ing] to growth in industries that lead to the cushy office jobs we all enjoy today" except to the extent that it's nothing like it.
Before the great capitalist machine was able to put them back in their place, the communist Roosevelt forced FLSA on hard-working American children, preventing them from living out the capitalist dream. Eventually children all had the space to receive an education and the time to explore knowledge further, and that's why China's taken our jobs away.
I received an expensive education through parental support and private scholarships, so don't worry about me. But what I'm asking of you, dear common reader, is that you go back to shucking rather than living beyond your means. It's for the good of Economy, and if some of your offspring survive then their children's children might even benefit in some way. And please, don't look East - everything's so much worse in Marxist Europe, and you'll only be distracted by sympathy for men who have dug their own unionised, healthy, comfortable graves.
Or just remove worker benefits entirely. And freedom of asembly. And speech. And make it easier to bribe government officials. Also workhouses. Rows and rows of beds. That's the way to increase employment! Make workers so cheap and desperate that their only alternative is slow death. We did eliminate healthcare, yes? Good.
Bigger nations easily could (and probably should) squash these micronations when they feel like it.
We're right onto that.
--
USA
Short answer: existence.
Long answer: existence for a long period.
Polygamy that is purely one-man/multiple-women suffers from this. Every society with polygamy has also been patriarchal.
Hmm. Tibetan fraternal polyandry was patriarchal, but what about the Nayar Hindu caste?
NN.
Not according to the Supreme Court, which has said that the right to marriage isn't just the right to sign a piece of paper, but the right to marry whom you choose. Gay people can't do that.
Your summary of the Supreme Court's opinion is so vague as to be meaningless. With it, I choose to marry you.
What you mean is that the Supreme Court, which has no business defining marriage in the first place, recently decided to define marriage. Before that, the states defined marriage. And they defined it as I describe, no matter how annoyed that makes you.
And if you were the second female member, you'd be outta luck. See? No difference. There are no institutions which polygamous people are denied entry to but others are not.
What? What has gender got to do with it? As a polygamist I want to enjoy my time with Heidi. Are you about to make an argument based on only taking account of the rights of the person with multiple partners, rather than the multiple partners themselves?
The state is not "recognizing a tweaked version of Christian marriage" unless your definition of "tweaking" means "stripping away everything that makes it Christian or religious".
What about the union of precisely two consenting adults isn't extremely Christian about marriage? Are you so parochial as to not recognise that marriage is often arranged, often polygamous, and often comes with more or fewer prerequisites, privileges and restrictions?
Also, what is a "full Muslim marriage experience"?
To give one of a hundred examples, one in which I can state "I divorce you" thrice and become divorced from you, girl, but not from my two other wives.
Your tenuous argument for correlation is not the law, as held by the Supreme Court of California.
Rather than paraphrasing badly what you'd have liked the Court to imply, why don't you quote precisely the decisions you find pertinent? The Supreme Bankruptcy of California has made some funny decisions, but "there is no relationship whatever between marriage and children" would just be a blind denial of reality.
Think carefully to see if you can find a requirement that a stable, loving couple be married. Think carefully to see if you can find a requirement that a stable, loving married couple have children. Neither exist.
A correlation does not imply a requirement. The existence of a host of benefits often taken up does not imply a requirement. Go back to your classics; bone up on logic.
The reason virgins aren't parents is because they're virgins, NOT because they're not married.
Ad - op - tion.
I just realized that you may not know where babies come from.
Angry. Lame.
Maternity and Paternity law allow a parent of either gender to have that legally protected break from his or her career.
And that's great (i) where it exists; and (ii) in equal measures, IOW when the law has already been specifically changed. When I last looked into it a couple of years ago, the FMLA only covered unpaid leave, with only California in the US having specific laws providing for paid paternity leave ("family leave"). It looks like WA and NJ have also made some developments, but that's it. To reiterate why I brought this up too many posts ago:
current Western laws [are] often not suitable for monogamous gay relationships
Of course, since we're redefining what a parent is - from biological to adopting male/female in marriage to one of two adopting adults in a particular partnership - it's worth noting that it's still gotta be one of two people.
Look, gramps, there hasn't been a draft in decades. And, you may not realize this, but there are many, many married couples in the military.
What
Yes, because gay people are unable to enter into the same institution which straight people can,
Gay people have always been able to get married. It's just that marriage has been defined as a union between one man and one woman, and gays didn't get to redefine it.
Currently, there is no institution which polygamous people are denied entry to, but others are not.
Let's take the "institution" that is a Californian state jail offering conjugal visits. As the 13th male member of Hacksaw Heidi's harem, I'm outta luck. But as of June 2007, were I the first female, erm, member, 't'd be cool.
Google is highlighting a particular sort of relationship as equally worthy of privilege as the one the state currently grants the privileges to.
No, Google is discriminating in response to particular market pressures. If it had genuinely started pontificating on matters of personal relationships, I'd be more worried.
I didn't know jews, muslims, hindus, and atheists couldn't get married in California.
They can all experience the state's recognising a tweaked version of Christian marriage (and divorce). But a Muslim, for example, will not have the full Muslim marriage (and divorce) experience recognised by the State, only those parts which coincide with the state's view of what marriage is.
You may be confused... we're talking about marriage law, not family law.
Sir, you're worse than a politician. Stop telling people what the issues are and what it is they should be talking about - it's too hot today to gather straw anyway.
See, it's possible in this country for people to be married, but have no children. It's also possible for people to have children, but never be married. The two are unrelated.
Just because A doesn't necessarily imply B, and B doesn't necessarily imply A, it does not mean that the two are unrelated. This is an almost painful fallacy.
Think carefully to see if you can find a relationship between the existence of a stable, loving couple and the bringing up of children. Start with biological advantages if you want, but then think in more sophisticated logistical terms. Incorporate emotion if you are able.
IOW, loving couples often want and have kids. By contrast, Theaetetus, single virgins tend not to suddenly find themselves bringing up a child on their own. What biological, sociological and legal reasons could there be for this?
Your examples of maternity law and selective service do not require participants to be married. In fact, marriage has no bearing on them whatsoever.
Maternity law: It's traditionally considered a lot easier to properly look after a very young child when at least one parent is given a legally protected break from her career. This law needs modification for a two-male partnership.
Draft: in the case that neither partner has children: a home can be kept in good order when not every resident is away at war. This might not be relevant to /you/, but IME it's very relevant to the morale of many servicemen. It's also quite relevant to the ability of the couple to settle back into civilian life after everyone's finished playing with his gun.
Traditionally it was assumed that the young man went out to fight while the woman stayed at home, fitting in neatly with the notion of marriage as a union between one man and one woman. You may say "that's nothing to do with marriage law!" but it doesn't matter one bit what category your copy of Fighting Legal Arguments on the Internet in 24 Hours files it under. What matters is how the law affects the married in a way related to their gender.
(Otherwise I shall argue that what happens to your stuff when you die is not marriage law but inheritance law, and what happens when you're ill is just medical law.)
Is
the abolishment of any and all intestate legal relationships? Yeah... I don't think you'll find much support for that anywhere.
Between competent adults? Who is going to object? "No, he didn't give me explicit permission, but I think I should have it anyway." To take the classical, "Should we switch off life support?" question, here's a reasonable list of people who get to choose this, in advance if necessary:
(1) The guy on life support.
Anyone else? No. If he hasn't said anything, assume exactly what you'd assume if there was no family around to decide. Which, hopefully, should be, "Keep me alive as long as you can!"
No, monogamy in marriage has also existed a lot longer than the Christian church.
And polygamy came before monogamy, and asexual reproduction came before polygamy. But it doesn't matter what came first. What matters is why we have today's rules now - if we don't identify what's propping up current legislation, we can't hope to change it.
Your Trent hobby-horse fails to recall that laws had been written and upheld for centuries before based on Christian principles, and punishments for fornication and sodomy were based on Christian principles. Why did Islamic states admit multiple wives for their men, even states which were Christian before? Because their state was no longer based on Christianity.
Do our criminal laws "stick to the Christian principle of 'thou shalt not kill'"?
There are philosophical foundations for no-murder which have been fairly lengthily sounded out and applied in forming younger nations, e.g. Republican France and US, and these foundations shape much law in those nations. If we wanted to change murder law, we'd have to look at those foundations, not at Christianity.
Thing is, it's a bad red herring, because most people in favor of gay marriage have no problem with polygamy
We're discussing Google, not "most people". Google haven't provided a framework of benefits for polygamous relationships, but for gay monogamous couples. Google are highlighting a particular sort of relationship as somehow worthy for special privilege out of a huge list of possibilities. The relationship is: Christian marriage + modification to admit same-sex partners brought about by successful lobbying for gay rights.
But no-one here is denying that current Western laws may not be suitable for polygamous relationships, just as they're often not suitable for monogamous gay relationships. There are still gender-specific privileges which affect a family unit from obvious discrepancies such as "maternity" rights all the way to the possibility in most countries of only men being enslaved in a Draft.
The state is also bound to certain obligations by the marriage certificate, and thus can be obligated to enforce the marriage against the wishes of next of kin or other blood relatives.
But that's only an exception to another exception. If the state didn't already give special powers to blood relatives, it wouldn't have to give an exception to marriage in this case.
Marriage for inheritance purposes predates the Christian church
Of course it does: it predates Christianity. But today it sticks to Christian principles on sexuality and monogamy, among other things.
Accordingly, when a spouse dies, the remaining spouse inherits tax-free because they already own everything.
Assuming a jurisdiction where this is true, this principle cannot be extended to polygamous marriages. I'd just marry everyone on this planet preemptively (you know you want to!) so none would have to pay inheritance tax on my estate. Hence my alternative suggestion.
Under current marriage laws, the hospital must obey the wishes of both B and C, which is clearly impossible.
This could be handled in the same way as multiple Power of Attorney, again without the next-of-kin override clauses which may exist in your jurisdiction. For example, if there is no consensus, do the same thing you'd do if the spouse wasn't available for comment.
You're not seeking simply cohabitation or shared ownership, you're seeking a legal agency relationship that trumps the rights of blood relatives,
Why can't this be arranged in a similar way to Power of Attorney?
allows for probate-free inheritance, etc.
You're already introducing a Christian moral principle in considering that a person should be able to give their stuff tax-free to a single qualified other. Then it can be abused anyway by marrying to pass on an inheritance. Then exceptions can be created to minimise abuse. Etc.
Why can't I marry two people and let them each get half tax-free? Ten for a tenth each? Why can't I marry my son just so he can safely inherit my farm? What is the non-religious principle here?
This. All I see is an article about how the government intrudes into family lives, giving particular benefits to two heterosexuals living together in a particular sort of arrangement but not to singles, homosexuals or people living together under other arranegments. And Google has decided to follow the government's lead by discriminating against everyone whose lifestyle is not that of a particular steady homosexual partnership, e.g. people who remain single / practice polyamory / shack up in a massive commune / sleep around / anything else.
All this crap about the moving helping in "competing for the same talent" implies that everyone is either in a gay marriage[tm] or straight marriage[tm].
They are rewarded by the general public by being lied to,
Examples? Don't say, "sometimes criminals lie!" Uh-huh. Sometimes criminals also break the law. If only we had some sort of force of public servants trained, employed and paid to impersonally deal with that.
belittled, mistrusted, and portrayed as criminals.
Which country do you live in where this is the predominant attitude toward the police? It must be some sort of quasi-anarchy, because I'm fairly sure there are a lot more civilians than police in every single country. The reason Rome's not always burning is because most people have respect for Rome.
I'd have a pretty fucking short fuse too.
Then policeman's not the job for you. Just as you'd not be a paramedic if you broke down crying at every bloody body.
So people are rude and they lie. Imagine you're a computer, processing streams of sound and observed movement. The computer doesn't care if you speak angrily or wave your hands at it all day, and it doesn't react any better if you shower it with rosepetals - it's just processing. Now add human intelligence to enable your processing to excel, but avoid adding human emotion. Don't take it personally.
If you don't find yourself able to do this, there are plenty of jobs where your inability to rein in basic instincts won't affect other people's lives so much.
If you have a light out on your car, the officer could give you a ticket, or he could give you a warning. If youre polite, you'll probably get a warning. If you're rude, you'll likely get a ticket. This seems perfectly reasonable.
While it feels seductively comfortable, I'm not sure it's at all reasonable in a nation of laws. It's as objective as letting off the busty blonde or being harsh on the dusky bearded gent.
IOW, what law did only the impolite person break? Why is it OK for people who are good at showing themselves polite to get away with breaking more laws? The police force is a tool for helping to enforce the law, not a tool to change people's behaviour toward the police.
Perhaps one problem is giving officers apparent powers of insta-justice for many traffic and a few pedestrian behaviours.
One of those responsibilities is to treat public servants with respect.
Assuming this, it does not follow that there is a legal requirement to treat public servants with respect. IOW, it may be immoral to mouth off to a police officer, or to mouth off to your neighbour, or to sleep with your neighbour, or to pray/not pray for the soul of your temptress neighbour, but that doesn't mean it should be illegal.
If I annoy the police officer (e.g. with a snarky remark) then the police officer might be reasonable to annoy me back as any citizen legally can (e.g. with another snarky remark). But there is no reason why his wearing the colour of law should give him the right to do more than any other citizen. Ideally he should learn some fucking restraint - I have immense respect for policemen who show decorum when they're being wound up.
It is part of their job to interpret the law since you have to interpret it to apply it, but that interpretation can be challenged and corrected by the courts.
Is this perhaps one of the weak points of the current UK Common Law variant? There is the potential to write broad laws under the assumption that
Consider the police, instead of having become heavily politicsed and targets-based, simply being given the task of enforcing the law. Consider a police force, then, which prefers as much as possible to leave people alone, except when it is quite clear that the law requires them not to. Such a police force would choose always to interpret an ambiguous law in favour of leaving the potential lawbreaker alone, and it would be up to lawmakers try harder to make the law sufficiently specific.
if you can't handle people like that you should not be a police officer.
I would like to understand what causes /some/ police officers to get uppity and apparently very insecure. I'd like them to feel confident and proud of their jobs. What do they fear? Is it not meeting some target? I can understand an officer in obvious physical danger lashing out too hard (what is unreasonable defence when you're having a knife waved in your face?), but why otherwise?
<ol> (<li> [^<>]*)+ </ol>
/., why must you engage in so much mutual masturbation? Liberals (in the classical "defender of liberty" sense, not in the US "not conservative" sense) are being downtrodden precisely because they think small.
Yes, it's great that senior officers have issued a memo to junior officers - not even a slap on the wrist - but the problems are:
Remember: in any reasonable state, it's not the policeman's job to write or interpret the law, and the police should never have the power of a law so vague as the Terrorism Acts. Are you not paying attention? The public aren't even allowed to know where certain Laws apply. This might protect a few people on the ground being harassed, but it's the worst way of sweeping the problem under the carpet.
The Independent may be less, well, un-Independent than most of the mainstream rags, but no-one pays much attention to it. And The Register is read by as many people who count as the scrawlings on the average 6th Form toilet wall.
It's not to say that the laws aren't being abused. It's that pompous claims like
The Independent forced senior officers to admit that the controversial legislation is being widely misused.
are more "haha I stuck it to the Man!" exaggeration than evidence of the Met receiving a genuine reprimand from those who represent us.
As someone who loves cuddly and non-cuddly animals - some of them even human - and who has worked with PETA people and found them to be a bunch of animal-killing lunatics(*), it saddens me that PETA has completely broken the good image of animal welfare. Not that it's always PETA directly - sometimes they are the extreme that the opposition use to belittle the mainstream. A small proportion of what they do may be considered reasonable: e.g. undercover examination of conditions in testing labs; pushing research for meat production which doesn't require farming a whole animal. But general practice and underlying philosophy mostly causes more harm to the animal (and, by extension, human) welfare movement.
Anyway, social bees are cool. If we're the top mammal, they're the top insect. Yet we've done a good job of fucking up native varieties by over-zealous import of bees who turn out diseased./ not to be so great in another environment (shock!). Let's return to finding out how we can help each other :-).
(*) Their belief being that it's better to kill an animal than let it suffer the torment of symbiosis with humans. It's a really, really, contradictory cult. The exceptions to the insanity are the student volunteers who don't really see how the business (I don't expect them to survive on misguided love alone, but Ingrid is rich) works.