... is the price that we Marylanders have to pay for returning one-party rule to the state.
While I'm not happy with one party rule, Erlich did nothing during his term to address the structural deficit (though he rode high on tax revenues from the real estate bubble).
increased the sales tax by 20 percent, an increase that disproportionately impacts poorer folks
They did increase the sales tax, but they also lowered income taxes on low earners. How it balances out is a matter of debate.
Because twenty years ago - before the First Tech Bubble - that was farmland.
D.C. is a natural hub for business, but the area north of D.C. was already developed, occupied by defense and aerospace contractors and old guard tech companies.
buying into this idea that the money corporations pay in taxes is magically not going to come out of their hide in the form of higher prices.
The money corporations pay in taxes comes out of profits. Of course, a corporation may raise prices to attempt to keep profits high; the market may or may not support that.
warfare on corporations seems to have no bounds.
Stuff and nonsense. If there was any serious "warfare on corporations", we'd see some of the miscreants getting their charters yanked.
I do custom programming work in Missouri. All you Maryland folks can call me for tax-free work.
I'm sure we'll still be responsbile for paying the use tax, just as if we ordered goods from you. As our Comptroller's website explains:
Every state that has a sales tax also has a use tax. Maryland's use tax protects Maryland businesses from unfair competition. Local businesses would be at a competitive disadvantage if consumers were entitled to a 5 percent discount on items purchased from out of state businesses.
Of course, no one actually pays the use tax they owe on stuff they buy for personal use from out of state companies. (Most people probably don't even know they owe it.) But if I think I might lose a programming gig because someone thinks they have to pay tax if they hire me and not if they hire you, I'll be sure to set them straight.
What part do you "hate"? The "pretense" of wearing something nice? Why? Do you feel that, deep down, you don't merit it, or that you can't "pull it off"?
No, I "merit" it just fine. And I can "pull off" anything from skyclad to a tux to a sarong with aplomb. Having style is a very different thing than merely dressing in style.
But I disagee with your concept of what constitutes "nice" clothes. The "business suit" is an abomination, dervied from the clothing of fops who wanted to demostrate that they didn't have to work; the necktie is hazardous to your health.
More importantly, I disagree with judging people on superficialities. I don't want to "play office politics", as you put it. I want to treat people with respect and be treated the same way in return. Anyone who will treat me differently based on whether I wear a shirt off the rack or one that's custom tailored, is not someone I care to work with.
What do those "pissing contests" accomplish?
Yes, that's a valid point, but it matters not whether the pissers are in black tie or buck naked.
My shiatsu teacher once noted that it's easier to get people to change their religion than it is to get them to change their diet. Probably true - if early Christians had made Gentile converts keep kosher, Jesus of Nazareth would likely be historical footnote today. The way that high-protein diet advocates cling to their beliefs is just another example.
As for the broader question of the scientific basis of medicine, most medicine is based on observation and experience, not controlled studies. It's hard to experiment on human beings in a controlled fashion, after all. That doesn't necessarily mean it's not scientific - astronomers don't get to do controlled experiments on stars, either.
But it is true that a lot of accepted medical "knowledge" has little evidence to back it up. It's interesting that many "skeptics" who demand double-blind studies of, say, acupuncture, are likely to have no qualms about undergoing a surgical procedure which has undergone no such testing. Medicine has the look of "Science" even when it doesn't have the substance. (More about science and Chinese medicine here, if anyone's interested.)
The signal to noise ratio for IM is no better/worse than email - after all, they both come from the same source.
When using e-mail, or any non-realtime mode, people are more likely to wait until they have something to say. It's why letters that survive to us from past eras, even letters from people whose education in written English was less than masterful, often seem so eloquent: one might spend a week thinking of things to say.
When you're in an IM conversation - or a phone conservation, or a face-to-face conversation (though there other factors also come into play) - there's less buffering and filtering. Silence seems awkward, so we fill it with low-quality data.
I'd be more inclined to use one of the most chilling verbs around...change.
There's nothing chilling about change. There is, though, something annoying about hoopla about minor changes being some sort of Great Social Upheaval.
Now instead of spending hours on the phone saying nothing, kids spend hours on FaceSpace or SMSing or IMing saying nothing. Instead of getting their morals "corrupted" by hanging out at the pool hall and listening to ragtime music, or by comic books and rock and roll, they get "corrupted" by (insert outrageous video game of the month) and (insert outrageous hip-hop album of the month). The gadgets change, the scenery changes, but human nature remains the same.
Multiple-mind dumps that dart and flash like hungry steelhead in clear, fast moving coldddddduh water.
Please. Incessant IMing and SMSing by younger folks is just the contemporary equivalent of teens trying up the phone line with content-free communication. As Leary and Wilson put it, "Most human communication is embarrassingly primitive, consisting of endless variations on `I'm still here. Are you still there?' (hive solidarity) and `Nothing has really changed' (hive business as usual)." The young need more of this reassurance as they try to figure out their status in the pack; us older folks have settled in.
(Though thanks to hands-free headsets unlimited talk time, I note plenty of older people who can't STFU and pay attention to the world around them. I swear one day I'm going to smack someone who keeps jabbering on the phone as they go through the supermarket checkout line and never acknowledges the cashier with so much as a hello.)
IM is slightly more useful than e-mail in a handful of cases, but most of what passes over it is just hive buzz. As for SMS, it's great that it's displacing annoying cell-phone use -at least it's quieter - but let's not romanticize it.
The older you get, the more you understand the value of your own labour and the more benefits you have to show from it. Hence, when older, you're far more likely to care about the government taking it from you and people like you.
The older I get, the more I see how people who benefit from the system are not the ones doing the labor; the more I see that capitalism rewards parasitic investors, gamblers, the children of the wealthy, and the rapers of the land.
To take music as an example, the older I get, the more talented people I see playing for tips in bars and the more manufactured crap I see hitting the charts. The more I look into the history of music, the more I see the most creative people getting screwed by the corporate swine.
If there's anything anti-capitalist and anti-free-market then it is government-granted monopolies.
All capitalism relies on government grants. You don't have capitalism without private control of capital, and you don't get private control of capital without government guns backing up the capitalist class.
Free markets and capitalism are different things. You can have free market socialism (various libertarian socialist theories), or command economy capitalism (such as the U.S. during WWII).
There is not a valid business model when you say, "Pay whatever you want".
Actually a lot of people make their living, in whole or in part, in just that way.
Priests live off the money in the collection plate. Bartenders and servers live off tips. So do many musicians. Public TV and radio continue to exist. Museums with "suggested donations" stay open.
If you disagree with this conclusion than consider how you will respond when your employer or customers decide they will start paying you whatever they want to and if that's not enough for rent, too bad for you
Um, my employer does pay me whatever he wants. He could tell me tomorrow, "from now on, we're only paying you $10 a day." Then I stop working. Too bad for him.
For instance, you would never go into a store and just take your favorite bands memorabilia without paying for it and not expect to be jumped by the security guard standing at the door - juiced up on steroids.
You know I have to laugh to myself when I hear comparisons like that. Information is not objects. Copying is not theft.
You would never tell a joke you heard on The Daily Show at a party and expect to be jumped by the copyright cops, juiced up on steroids and monitoring all that you say to enforce the "rights" of comedy writers. And yet new jokes continue to be made.
In fact, you would never sing a KISS song at a party and expect to be jumped by the copyright cops. (Well, I'd never sing a KISS song at a party, but you get the idea.)
I've long argued that we should treat copying the same way we treat performance - do it for free and you're fine, do it for profit and you owe a royalty.
If you want to manually create filters for every possibility instead of having the system figure it out for you then you must not get very much email.
I get lots of e-mail, but there's only about two score ways to group it: friends, work, mail from political groups, various mailing lists, and so on.
For instance, if I receive ten messages a day from a certain email address why not have the email program identify a need to offer a virtual folder of mail from this email address?
Because that may not be appropriate. It may be more appropriate to put it in the same folder with another recipient or group of recipients. I don't want mail from my boss to go into its own folder, I want it in the "work" folder along with other cow-orkers. I'd get really annoyed if my mail software wouldn't let me do this.
Why not let our software work for us so that we can work on stuff that is actually useful?
I do want my software to work for me. That means doing what I tell it to do, not trying to be overly clever and thinking it can come up with better rules than I can. I have a more information about the people I communicate with than is possiblely available to software. You can't determine human relationships merely by e-mail traffic analysis.
This is not to say I would mind an optional tool that made suggestions about filtering rules. That might save me some time - but I could also see it being another Clippy: "I see AnnoyingPerson@aol.com has sent you a lot of mail! Want to add them to your friends list? No? I'll ask again later!"
I've used a lot of email programs over the years and so far all of them have been inferior to the one I wrote for myself.
I can see an option to sort incoming email by how frequently you've sent messages to that person as being very useful...the messages from my friends and family would pop to the top of the list where I'll see them right away.
How about a system that can sort incoming e-mail into different folders by sender, or by subject, or by any header. You know, like any decent mail client has been able to do for over a decade. I get mail from friends, Sylpheed sorts in into my "friends" folder. I can even say "if it's from Julie and it has `poetry' in the subject, file it under `arts'".
Is Gmail so lacking in functionality that it can't do this?
Really simply, an economy is a geometric area - of productivity * population.
Both of which are a function of natural resources. Which are depleted by overpopulation and overproduction.
Populations cannot grow without limit. We are alredy past the sustainable carrying capacity of the planet.
Economists need to join the reality-based community.
Because, I've convinced myself that losing always 'sucks'.
Winning is a peaceful, prosperous, and free nation. If you want a simple economic measure, GNP per capita is a much better indicator of who's living well. Would you rather live in a nation of one thousand people with a $100 million GDP, or a nation of one billion with a $1 billion GDP?
If that's the case, the U.S. is doomed; China and India win.
If winning means overpopulation, I'll lose and take second prize - a peaceful, prosperous nation that minds its own business rather than trying to run an empire.
Hey, if we're going to do e-voting, and you can't deny it forever
Of course we can, and should, deny e-voting for general elections forever. It's a bad idea.
why not just have everyone vote one a week from their PCs on the actual issues and skip the (politicians) middle man?
Because in theory, they aren't just "middle men". We select our best and brightest, and send them to study and debate the relevant issues, and so make better decisions than the mob mind would.
It's a nice theory. Of course, in reality we tend to get bozos who are bought and paid for.
I'm open to discussion whether mob rule by the uninformed masses, or rule by a bought-and-paid-for set of politicians, is worse. Perhaps there might be a sweet spot in between.
(Such as, make Congress ten - hell, a hundred - times bigger. That makes it harder to buy enough legislators to make a big difference. There's a more direct relationship between people and their representatives- currently, each representative represents about 650,000 people - and campaigns are therefore less expensive. The enlarged Congress is manageable due to the use of on-line forums for a lot of the discussion. Maybe Congressional service even becomes a part-time job again, and Congresscritters actually spend part of their time at honest work.)
So you're saying it's Britan's fault that the Burmese government is killing its own people?
I'm saying that Britain bears some responsibility for that fact that that nation fell under military dictatorship, that these wackos got the be the government of the land. (And some British pundits agree.)
Well, yes, I am. I have friends - liberal friends - who are married with kids. And I know that they are people who believe they have their own value outside of being parents. They are people of learning and intelligence who contribute to the world in many ways. And they are better parents - and better spouses - for being whole people with an identity beyond just "Mommy" or "Daddy".
Should women be free to pursue whatever they want, or should they be forced into traditional gender roles which stipulates that a woman's job is merely to bear children for her husband?
Of course women (and men) should be free to pursue whatever they want - including parenthood, even stay-at-home parenthood, if that's what they want.
it doesn't speak to the fact that most women tend to get married. And, when they do, they tend to vote Republican after they get married
The question isn't "do people who have ever been married tend to vote Republican", it's "do people who are married tend to vote Republican". You seem to want to imply that getting married makes women turn Republican. But that's not necessarily the case. (I'm sure it happens with some folks - just as some people have kids, wonder about the world they'll inhabit, and suddenly start caring about the environment and get progressive.) People who have "Republican values", tend to get married earlier and stay married; that biases the sample of married people toward conservatism.
Let's look at a hypothetical sample of two women, Ms. Red and Ms Blue, the same age. Ms. Red, lifelong conservative, gets married at age 20, stays married until she dies at 71. Ms. Blue, lifelong liberal, first marries at 30, divorces at 39, remarries at 46, stays married until she dies at 71. Let's poll the married population's political views at five year intervals:
Age Married People 20 1 conservative 25 1 conservative 30 1 conservative, 1 liberal 35 1 conservative, 1 liberal 40 1 conservative 45 1 conservative 50 1 conservative, 1 liberal 55 1 conservative, 1 liberal 60 1 conservative, 1 liberal 65 1 conservative, 1 liberal 70 1 conservative, 1 liberal
In this sample 61% of marrieds are conservative - even though only 50% of those who eventually get married are.
Here's your argument: "Evil conservatives merely want women to breed much like heifers than be fulfilled and educated women! Marriage sucks because it's only about mating!"
Please do me the kindness of not putting words in my mouth.
I will say that social conservatives, almost by defintion, believe in traditional gender roles. Do you dispute this? To say "conservatives merely want women to breed much like heifers than be fulfilled and educated women" is an caricaturist exageration of this.
Is marriage just about mating and having kids? Marriage has three two aspects: religious, social, and legal.
Religious marriage is only important to people who think they need the sanction of organized religion to sleep with someone. Definitely a more conservative notion, and one I don't subscribe to. Religious marriage usually includes some sort of encouragement to go be fruitful and multiply and go raise the next generation of believers.
Social marriage breaks down to intra-relationship and extra-relationship issues. Is it important to the people involved to have the ceremony and get the paper? And do the opinions of friends, family, and other community members affect them towards marriage? Conservative folks are more likely to feel that they need to get married to get social approval; and once they do, the next question their friends and family ask is "so when are you two going to have a baby?"
Legal marriage has advantages that apply equally to liberal
you completely missed my example proving my point that no one gives a crap about the people's suffering of today.
If you care about relieving the suffering of today, weeping and rending your garments is of little help. You must understand its origin.
There's been no shortage of coverage of the monks in Myanmar. (Well, at least in the news sources I check, mostly wire reports, public radio, and newspapers. I try to avoid those sources that focus more on celebrity scandals that actual news.)
But I hear little discussion of how that region got fucked by British colonialism, and how the destruction of native institutions set the stage for the nation to fall into dictatorship just fourteen years after Independence.
Slashdot Mirror
And then the buyer pays the use tax. So where's the difference (other than that use taxes are easier to cheat on)?
While I'm not happy with one party rule, Erlich did nothing during his term to address the structural deficit (though he rode high on tax revenues from the real estate bubble).
They did increase the sales tax, but they also lowered income taxes on low earners. How it balances out is a matter of debate.
Because twenty years ago - before the First Tech Bubble - that was farmland.
D.C. is a natural hub for business, but the area north of D.C. was already developed, occupied by defense and aerospace contractors and old guard tech companies.
The money corporations pay in taxes comes out of profits. Of course, a corporation may raise prices to attempt to keep profits high; the market may or may not support that.
Stuff and nonsense. If there was any serious "warfare on corporations", we'd see some of the miscreants getting their charters yanked.
Nope. Completely different tax, completely different forms.
I'm sure we'll still be responsbile for paying the use tax, just as if we ordered goods from you. As our Comptroller's website explains:
Of course, no one actually pays the use tax they owe on stuff they buy for personal use from out of state companies. (Most people probably don't even know they owe it.) But if I think I might lose a programming gig because someone thinks they have to pay tax if they hire me and not if they hire you, I'll be sure to set them straight.
No, I "merit" it just fine. And I can "pull off" anything from skyclad to a tux to a sarong with aplomb. Having style is a very different thing than merely dressing in style.
But I disagee with your concept of what constitutes "nice" clothes. The "business suit" is an abomination, dervied from the clothing of fops who wanted to demostrate that they didn't have to work; the necktie is hazardous to your health.
More importantly, I disagree with judging people on superficialities. I don't want to "play office politics", as you put it. I want to treat people with respect and be treated the same way in return. Anyone who will treat me differently based on whether I wear a shirt off the rack or one that's custom tailored, is not someone I care to work with.
Yes, that's a valid point, but it matters not whether the pissers are in black tie or buck naked.
Nah. Becoming what I hate would be much more wear on my health and piece of mind.
(I work for a tiny company where everyone telecommutes, rather than rent office space.)
Americans' caloric consumption increased 12 percent, about 300 calories, between 1985 and 2000. The idea that this is unrelated to the fact that Americans are getting more and more obese is an extraordinary claim; advocates of high-protein diets have produced no extraordinary evidence to back it up.
My shiatsu teacher once noted that it's easier to get people to change their religion than it is to get them to change their diet. Probably true - if early Christians had made Gentile converts keep kosher, Jesus of Nazareth would likely be historical footnote today. The way that high-protein diet advocates cling to their beliefs is just another example.
As for the broader question of the scientific basis of medicine, most medicine is based on observation and experience, not controlled studies. It's hard to experiment on human beings in a controlled fashion, after all. That doesn't necessarily mean it's not scientific - astronomers don't get to do controlled experiments on stars, either.
But it is true that a lot of accepted medical "knowledge" has little evidence to back it up. It's interesting that many "skeptics" who demand double-blind studies of, say, acupuncture, are likely to have no qualms about undergoing a surgical procedure which has undergone no such testing. Medicine has the look of "Science" even when it doesn't have the substance. (More about science and Chinese medicine here, if anyone's interested.)
When using e-mail, or any non-realtime mode, people are more likely to wait until they have something to say. It's why letters that survive to us from past eras, even letters from people whose education in written English was less than masterful, often seem so eloquent: one might spend a week thinking of things to say.
When you're in an IM conversation - or a phone conservation, or a face-to-face conversation (though there other factors also come into play) - there's less buffering and filtering. Silence seems awkward, so we fill it with low-quality data.
There's nothing chilling about change. There is, though, something annoying about hoopla about minor changes being some sort of Great Social Upheaval.
Now instead of spending hours on the phone saying nothing, kids spend hours on FaceSpace or SMSing or IMing saying nothing. Instead of getting their morals "corrupted" by hanging out at the pool hall and listening to ragtime music, or by comic books and rock and roll, they get "corrupted" by (insert outrageous video game of the month) and (insert outrageous hip-hop album of the month). The gadgets change, the scenery changes, but human nature remains the same.
Please. Incessant IMing and SMSing by younger folks is just the contemporary equivalent of teens trying up the phone line with content-free communication. As Leary and Wilson put it, "Most human communication is embarrassingly primitive, consisting of endless variations on `I'm still here. Are you still there?' (hive solidarity) and `Nothing has really changed' (hive business as usual)." The young need more of this reassurance as they try to figure out their status in the pack; us older folks have settled in.
(Though thanks to hands-free headsets unlimited talk time, I note plenty of older people who can't STFU and pay attention to the world around them. I swear one day I'm going to smack someone who keeps jabbering on the phone as they go through the supermarket checkout line and never acknowledges the cashier with so much as a hello.)
IM is slightly more useful than e-mail in a handful of cases, but most of what passes over it is just hive buzz. As for SMS, it's great that it's displacing annoying cell-phone use -at least it's quieter - but let's not romanticize it.
The older I get, the more I see how people who benefit from the system are not the ones doing the labor; the more I see that capitalism rewards parasitic investors, gamblers, the children of the wealthy, and the rapers of the land.
To take music as an example, the older I get, the more talented people I see playing for tips in bars and the more manufactured crap I see hitting the charts. The more I look into the history of music, the more I see the most creative people getting screwed by the corporate swine.
All capitalism relies on government grants. You don't have capitalism without private control of capital, and you don't get private control of capital without government guns backing up the capitalist class.
Free markets and capitalism are different things. You can have free market socialism (various libertarian socialist theories), or command economy capitalism (such as the U.S. during WWII).
Actually a lot of people make their living, in whole or in part, in just that way.
Priests live off the money in the collection plate. Bartenders and servers live off tips. So do many musicians. Public TV and radio continue to exist. Museums with "suggested donations" stay open.
Um, my employer does pay me whatever he wants. He could tell me tomorrow, "from now on, we're only paying you $10 a day." Then I stop working. Too bad for him.
You know I have to laugh to myself when I hear comparisons like that. Information is not objects. Copying is not theft.
You would never tell a joke you heard on The Daily Show at a party and expect to be jumped by the copyright cops, juiced up on steroids and monitoring all that you say to enforce the "rights" of comedy writers. And yet new jokes continue to be made.
In fact, you would never sing a KISS song at a party and expect to be jumped by the copyright cops. (Well, I'd never sing a KISS song at a party, but you get the idea.)
I've long argued that we should treat copying the same way we treat performance - do it for free and you're fine, do it for profit and you owe a royalty.
I get lots of e-mail, but there's only about two score ways to group it: friends, work, mail from political groups, various mailing lists, and so on.
Because that may not be appropriate. It may be more appropriate to put it in the same folder with another recipient or group of recipients. I don't want mail from my boss to go into its own folder, I want it in the "work" folder along with other cow-orkers. I'd get really annoyed if my mail software wouldn't let me do this.
I do want my software to work for me. That means doing what I tell it to do, not trying to be overly clever and thinking it can come up with better rules than I can. I have a more information about the people I communicate with than is possiblely available to software. You can't determine human relationships merely by e-mail traffic analysis.
This is not to say I would mind an optional tool that made suggestions about filtering rules. That might save me some time - but I could also see it being another Clippy: "I see AnnoyingPerson@aol.com has sent you a lot of mail! Want to add them to your friends list? No? I'll ask again later!"
Is this available somewhere?
How about a system that can sort incoming e-mail into different folders by sender, or by subject, or by any header. You know, like any decent mail client has been able to do for over a decade. I get mail from friends, Sylpheed sorts in into my "friends" folder. I can even say "if it's from Julie and it has `poetry' in the subject, file it under `arts'".
Is Gmail so lacking in functionality that it can't do this?
I'll be in Nagoya in two weeks. Have to check that out. Thanks!
Both of which are a function of natural resources. Which are depleted by overpopulation and overproduction.
Populations cannot grow without limit. We are alredy past the sustainable carrying capacity of the planet.
Economists need to join the reality-based community.
Winning is a peaceful, prosperous, and free nation. If you want a simple economic measure, GNP per capita is a much better indicator of who's living well. Would you rather live in a nation of one thousand people with a $100 million GDP, or a nation of one billion with a $1 billion GDP?
We ought to try winning by hitting number one on the Human Poverty Index, or the Human Development Index, or World Audit's Democracy Table, rather than the "Makes The Most Stuff" Index, or the "Can Blow Up the Most Stuff" Index.
If that's the case, the U.S. is doomed; China and India win.
If winning means overpopulation, I'll lose and take second prize - a peaceful, prosperous nation that minds its own business rather than trying to run an empire.
Of course we can, and should, deny e-voting for general elections forever. It's a bad idea.
Because in theory, they aren't just "middle men". We select our best and brightest, and send them to study and debate the relevant issues, and so make better decisions than the mob mind would.
It's a nice theory. Of course, in reality we tend to get bozos who are bought and paid for.
I'm open to discussion whether mob rule by the uninformed masses, or rule by a bought-and-paid-for set of politicians, is worse. Perhaps there might be a sweet spot in between.
(Such as, make Congress ten - hell, a hundred - times bigger. That makes it harder to buy enough legislators to make a big difference. There's a more direct relationship between people and their representatives- currently, each representative represents about 650,000 people - and campaigns are therefore less expensive. The enlarged Congress is manageable due to the use of on-line forums for a lot of the discussion. Maybe Congressional service even becomes a part-time job again, and Congresscritters actually spend part of their time at honest work.)
I'm saying that Britain bears some responsibility for that fact that that nation fell under military dictatorship, that these wackos got the be the government of the land. (And some British pundits agree.)
Well, shit. That's new. I'm headed back over there in two weeks and didn't know about this. Thanks for posting.
Well, yes, I am. I have friends - liberal friends - who are married with kids. And I know that they are people who believe they have their own value outside of being parents. They are people of learning and intelligence who contribute to the world in many ways. And they are better parents - and better spouses - for being whole people with an identity beyond just "Mommy" or "Daddy".
Of course women (and men) should be free to pursue whatever they want - including parenthood, even stay-at-home parenthood, if that's what they want.
The question isn't "do people who have ever been married tend to vote Republican", it's "do people who are married tend to vote Republican". You seem to want to imply that getting married makes women turn Republican. But that's not necessarily the case. (I'm sure it happens with some folks - just as some people have kids, wonder about the world they'll inhabit, and suddenly start caring about the environment and get progressive.) People who have "Republican values", tend to get married earlier and stay married; that biases the sample of married people toward conservatism.
Let's look at a hypothetical sample of two women, Ms. Red and Ms Blue, the same age. Ms. Red, lifelong conservative, gets married at age 20, stays married until she dies at 71. Ms. Blue, lifelong liberal, first marries at 30, divorces at 39, remarries at 46, stays married until she dies at 71. Let's poll the married population's political views at five year intervals:
In this sample 61% of marrieds are conservative - even though only 50% of those who eventually get married are.
Please do me the kindness of not putting words in my mouth.
I will say that social conservatives, almost by defintion, believe in traditional gender roles. Do you dispute this? To say "conservatives merely want women to breed much like heifers than be fulfilled and educated women" is an caricaturist exageration of this.
Is marriage just about mating and having kids? Marriage has three two aspects: religious, social, and legal.
Religious marriage is only important to people who think they need the sanction of organized religion to sleep with someone. Definitely a more conservative notion, and one I don't subscribe to. Religious marriage usually includes some sort of encouragement to go be fruitful and multiply and go raise the next generation of believers.
Social marriage breaks down to intra-relationship and extra-relationship issues. Is it important to the people involved to have the ceremony and get the paper? And do the opinions of friends, family, and other community members affect them towards marriage? Conservative folks are more likely to feel that they need to get married to get social approval; and once they do, the next question their friends and family ask is "so when are you two going to have a baby?"
Legal marriage has advantages that apply equally to liberal
If you care about relieving the suffering of today, weeping and rending your garments is of little help. You must understand its origin.
There's been no shortage of coverage of the monks in Myanmar. (Well, at least in the news sources I check, mostly wire reports, public radio, and newspapers. I try to avoid those sources that focus more on celebrity scandals that actual news.)
But I hear little discussion of how that region got fucked by British colonialism, and how the destruction of native institutions set the stage for the nation to fall into dictatorship just fourteen years after Independence.