Perhaps one wants a better diversity of rock/pop styles.
Yes. Once upon a time, there were more than one style of music that used electric guitars and synthesizers.
Around here the majority of stations are ClearChannel. There is one rather popular one that is locally owned and operated (and makes a point of saying so in their ads), but their style is a bit too soft for me.
Again, that is not a cause. It is an effect. If CD sales were as profitable as before, retailers would dedicate the necessary space to them. It's not as if retailers are operating in a fixed real-estate situation. They build new stores all the time. When Wal-mart or Best Buy is talking to a building contractor to plan out the dimensions of a new store, they will build as much space as they think they need for what they want to sell. If a product's profit-to-space ratio is high, they'll make room for it. If not, they won't.
That's possibly true, but I'd like to know how a reliable study could report on it objectively.
The reason for the percieved drop in quality is because there aren't different genre's anymore. Everything got consolodated into one generic mixture genre. It used to be that if you preferred one style of music over another, you could turn to the radio station that did that style, and then not have to listen to all the stuff in the other styles you don't prefer. That seems to be less true today - to get different styles on the radio you need to look to the 'oldie' stations because everything new is coming out in the smae one generic pop genre. There isn't a good stratification anymore between styles and that is actually necessary to make music seem good - you need more than one style or it gets monotonous.
I think that while you might not be able to measure quality objectively, you might be able to measure variety of styles of new music that gets radio airplay - and therevy discover the problem.
But *YOU* aren't the person the article is about - it's about the public at large. In the past, when the old people stopped listening to the new music, there were younger people taking up the 'slack' and still keeping sales rising higher and higher despite the industry losing the older generation. THAT is what is different now. Not only are us old-timers buying less music, as has always happened generation after generation, but the teenyboppers that drive the industry are ALSO buying less music, and THAT is new. And that can be explained by a number of reasons, and bad music quality could very well be such a reason.
I have noticed a distinct change in the kind of music that gets radio airplay. I still listened to pop radio despite being "too old" for it, up until about the year 2000 - that's when it really got intolerably bad, and that's also about the time Clearchannel had taken over all the local stations. I don't think this is a coincidence.
When I was growing up, there were multiple genres of NEW music on the radio. Not everybody liked pop, but you could find another station playing rap, or another station playing heavy metal, or another station playing oddball new wave stuff. And these were all targetted at the SAME age group. Now it seems like there is only one new genre and it's pop. For any deviation from that genre, you have to listen to older stuff.
And since when is declining shelf space a *CAUSE* of low sales??? It's an EFFECT of it. IF sales were still high, stores would still be willing to devote the space.
The whole concept of copyrighting a recording is very recent (1910's or so.)
You're implying that this is due to some kind of difference in mentality, but it's not. It's because it was still a very uncommon technology. Sheet music was where the copyright was because that's still where the money was, and that's still where the popularity was.
Your problem is that you want to elevate gay marriage to an equal status as traditional marriage without first insuring that gay marriage is as beneficial to society.
Your problem is that you are implying it is actually possible to gather such data first before doing that. It isn't - because if the control group and the experiment group aren't able to be treated by the same rules, then it is impossible to trim down the differences between the control group and the experiment group to just the one single variable being tested for (sexual orientation).
I admit that there are cases where it is appropriate to treat one group with a different set of rights than another (an example I can think of off the top of my head is convicted criminals as compared to the general public.) But the disagreement, and I think this is where we differ VERY strongly, is as to what proof would be adequete for it to be okay to treat different people with different rights. You seem to be saying that adequete reason would be:
X is known to be beneficial in comparasin to Z, while
Y is unknown to be beneficial in comparasin to Z.
(X = heterosexual marriage, Y = homosexual "marriage", and Z = not being married)
Whereas I would say that's not nearly enough. I would say that you need at least this:
X is KNOWN to be MORE beneficial in comparasin to Z than Y is.
And that is not data that we have yet.
You are correct that it is unproven whether gay "familes" can work as well. But it is unproven only because it has been suppressed as a practice and could not be attempted publicly. The data isn't there because it hasn't been attempted. The data isn't there because it *can't be* until after people have had the chance to try it openly for a long while.
And a policy of assuming guilt by default is not a way to build a civil society. And assuming gays would make bad parents by default is, in essence, a case of assuming guilty until proven innocent. The assumption, to be fair, MUST go the other way around - assume equal rights under the law are appropriate until proven otherwise.
You can pretend that this doesn't effect the divorce rate in the Netherlands,
I'm not doing that. Re-read my previous post. I'm not denying more divorces are happening in the Netherlands, or that marriage rates are down. I'm saying they don't have to mean the same thing as they used to since there is no longer a one-to-one correspondance between people pledging to be together and government recognition of such. Being divorced doesn't always have to mean leaving each other. It could be done purely for paperwork reasons in a culture where marriage isn't really the government's business anymore.
Yes I can. The policy at fault is "warranty doesn't apply if you open the case." Without that in place, I'd have been able to fix the problem on my own without having to wait. (And yes, sending it in also qualifies as waiting, since package delivery is involved and two weeks of downtime was unacceptable.) Keep in mind that I had no idea it was the heat sink that was unscrewed at first. It seemed like a minor enough problem since the system was still working. I figured the case wasn't on fully tightly or something relatively minor like that was wrong. The notion that a computer shop would have the gall to NOT screw down the heatsink well was just unthinkable. Of all the screws, those are THE most important, and yes, I have every right to warn people away from a shop that does such shoddy assembly work that they'd actually leave a heatsink loose on a laptop.)
As it currently stands in America it is the Gay and Lesbian groups that need to convince people that they are likely to make good parents,
And by wanting the adoption rules skewed against them, you aren't in favor of letting them try to do just that. "Before you can do X, you have to demonstrate that you can do X" is a guaranteed impossibility for any X you choose to pick.
The Dutch statistics only show that people are no more or less likely to separate with or without government influence. Regardless of what the piece of paper says, they are no more or less likely to stay a couple. It neither helps nor hinders.
What your statements left out is that it is just as easy to get divorced as it is to get married - so the marriage certificate doesn't present a signifigant hurdle that gets in the way if a couple wants to break up.
A problem I have with your stance is that you keep talking about the benefits of marriage without separating out which of those benefits come from simply staying together versus which ones come from the legal piece of paper. For example, you mention the increase in divorce when marriage laws are relaxed, and make the unstated assumption that this also means their couple-ness is ended, and thus they are breaking up, and all the social ills that result from that kind of break-up are to be expected. This is not necessarily the case when the government is making marriage less of an institution. A couple that still loves each other very much could still get divorced and not have it mean they are breaking up, under the Dutch system. It's just a change in their legal arrangements, like getting seperate back accounts.
A promise to love someone for the rest of your life, and stay with them, is really none of the government's business.
I had one of these. At first I couldn't be happier - it was awesome that all the components worked with linux, and when ordering it you can ask them to partition the hard drive however you like (so you don't need partition magic to put something else on it - you can tell them to leave an unused partition for you to put something else on later), but then I discovered one really dissapointing problem with it: On the physical quality side of things, it is extremely fragile. For one thing, some screws came loose inside that part of the case that you aren't allowed to open without voiding the warranty - I could hear the screws rolling around in there, but to fix it I'd have to mail the thing back in since I'd void the warranty, and that would be a huge delay and I *needed* this thing daily. So I decided to wait until it was out of warranty anyway, and then open it up to fix it myself. If anything broke while it was under warranty, then I'd ship it in.
Well, the fateful day came, the warrany passed, and I opened it up. Inside I discovered, much to my dismay, that not just one or two, but an entire 9 different screw holes were missing their screws. I only ever found 6 of them in the case. Some were for the heat sink. The heat sink was held on by only the gooey thermal gell and pressure from the back of the case. None of the screw holes for the heat sink were still fastened. No wonder I occasionally got shutdowns with "hot cpu" messages in the logs (I had thought it was because I might have been covering the vent with my leg when I had it on my lap).
Also, Xfree86 had started behaving badly (dying at random times) and I found out why when I opened the case - the ATI video card (which was also supposed to be protected by that unscrewed heat sink - it covered video card and CPU) had a few spots where the soldering had apparently melted and I could see brown burn marks near it.
So here I was stuck with a computer that was broke, a day out of warranty, because it hadn't been screwed together very well, and since it's a laptop, trying to go to a third-party for a replacement video card is totally impossible - they're all unique.
Sigh. They're software setup was good, but my experience with their physical durability was piss-poor - and that's an important factor for a laptop.
This has had a profound effect on the number of children born out of wedlock, the number of divorces, and the percentage of children in single parent homes, all of which are indicators of further social problems down the road.
That's a tautological circular argument. What you are trying to prove is that traditional marriages work better than non-traditional ones. But as part of your argument you cite things like children being born out of wedlock being an indicator of social problems down the road - which is identical to your conclusion.
What you would need is a study that compares out-of-wedlock-but-still-together parents to in-wedlock-but-still-together parents. The problem is that "out of wedlock" in most cases in our culture also includes "not living together anymore". It is only in places like Belguim that this isn't being the case anymore.
Basically, what I'm saying is that I would strongly suspect that the better environment for children has everything to do with the fact that the parents choose to stay together, and nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that their marriage is mentioned in a little slip of paperwork issued by the government. And since you can't really enact a law that forces people who are married on paper to *act* like they are married and stay together, that little slip of paper has nothing whatsoever to do with the lasting endurance of their lifetime partnership. If they love each other enough to merge their lives, the paper from the government didn't help cause this. If they grow apart and fall out of love, that little slip of paper from the government won't help prevent this. They'll get divorced or at the very least end up living apart and being married on paper only, which as far as raising the kid goes, has exactly the same effect as being divorced.
I know a couple I work with that are from the Netherlands, who were a part of that trend you speak of - people living together without the official stamp of marriage. (no, they're not gay, it's just that like a lot of other heterosexual Dutch, they decided to forego the official paperwork) Then when they came to the US, they discovered that with the various Visa rules, it was just easier if they got married so that one spouse could continue to reside in the country if the other lost his or her job. So eventually they went to a court clerk, got a witness, and signed the papers. Their relationship hadn't changed signifigantly with this act at all.
Actually, as a somewhat side-note, when this whole gay-marriage idea started surfacing a few years back, I sort of took a step back and asked myself, "why is this an issue?" And what it boiled down to was:
1 - Gay people offended that the government is enforcing someone else's religious moral stance on the matter.
versus
2 - Mainstream people offended that the government is forcing the majority to not excercise their religious moral stance on the matter.
And it occurred to me that maybe the problem is that the government shouldn't even be involved in the first place. After all, nobody complains too loudly about the law when churches perform baptisms, ordain preists, hold bake sales, define rules for who can be ministers, take a stance on abortion, and so on. Why? Because it's not the government's business. The government doesn't care whether you are baptized, or ordained, or any of that - because as far as the government is concerned, it confers no difference whatsoever in your legal status as a person, nor in what rights you have or don't have.
Once upon a time the government was involved in marriages because of the record-keeping. Being able to refer to the married couple as a single unit made things easier. But today the government has to keep track of people changing their names, or people getting married and NOT changing their names, or getting hyphenated names, or being cohabitants without being married, etc and so forth. So basically, the "easy to keep records" motivation for government involvement in marriage is mostly gone now in this information age. (In fact, I know someone who's Master's degree was all about midievil history, and he studied the topic of official civil marriages as an institution. It turns out that in the days of the roman empire, it just wasn't done. Then in the middle-ages it started to become common, and then eventually the civil governments convinced the church to get involved. It turns out it wasn't even a church institution until after it was a civil one.)
Anyway, I think a solution might be to just say, "hey, if you want to go get married in a church, with religious backing, that's great. Go ahead. But Uncle Sam just doesn't care one way or the other about it. If you want to get a marriage with recognized civil ties between you and your partner, then go hire a lawyer and sign some boilerplate contracts that could achieve the same results as currently are done by the government."
In other words, instead of trying to make things equal by giving gays the same civil governmental marriage rights as heterosexuals, why not make things equal by making the government just not care - and give nobody any special rights for being married - take marriage out of the government's jurisdiction entirely.
Well, I don't expect to get you to change your mind on this, obviously. But I am glad that you realize you *do* in fact want different rights for hetersexual versus gay couples. It's not so much the fact that you hold this position that annoyed me. What had annoyed me was that it looked like you were advocating this position while simultaneously pretending that you weren't. While I won't agree with you, I do respect a self-consistent position more than a self-contradictory one. When I pointed out the inconsistency, instead of denying it, you sought to admit to it and correct it. That takes a certain style of humble honesty I can deeply respect.
With that aside, I would like to point out one thing. You mention that if homosexuals invent their own new term for their kind of couples, that would be fine by you, but that they should have the burden of proof of showing that their type of family would not be inferior before getting the same adoption rights as heterosexual couples.
I would ask this: Why is the burden of proof on them? In ethical questions of what rights people have, I would say it is the one who wants different groups to have different rights that should be the one with the burden of proof to explain why. All groups having the same rights should be the beginning default until evidence swings you away from that position.
You mention studies that allegedly provide this proof, but such studies could only be relevant if they were comparing heterosexual-parent familes to homosexual-parent familes. But I strongly suspect that what they were actually doing was comparing families to non-families, or two-parent familes to one-parent families. That doesn't make a good experiment because the control group differs from the experiment group in more than one way, so you don't know which variable is responsible for the results.
In fact, ironically, the experimental survey that could prove heterosexual parents do a better job on average than homosexual parents would be impossible to carry out until AFTER homosexual parents get all the same rights as heterosexual ones - because until they do, you can't eliminate the difference in legal rights from the experiment. (i.e. any perceived inferiority of the homosexual parents could actually be due to social differences that result from not being a legally recognized family.)
Again, I disagree with you, but at the same time I do respect your tendancy during this to keep the disagreement one of logic and facts, not one of emotional rhetoric. You are an honest debater.
This may or may not be because of better technology. If it's a matter of china using some better technology that gets better coverage per dollar spent, then it would be. But if it's just because they spent more on building more transmitters in more locations, then it's, again, a social difference, not a technological one.
I stand corrected. However, on same days in winter I have seen the engine cool off surprisingly quickly after it is stopped, although it has to be windy out for this to happen (The wind probably has more to do with it).
In response to my question of whether you would support giving non-marriage civil unions (which we know we both mean includes gay couples) the same legal rights as full marriages, you said: Yes, as I stated before, I am not trying to force people to live the way I do.
But then further down, you say: I am not quite convinced that it is wise to conclude that gay civil unions should have the same opportunities to adopt children that married couples have.
These are incompatable statements.
I strongly suspect that there is more to this than the definition of a word. Otherwise it just wouldn't matter to you at all. Arguments over definitions often are actually arguments over the real issues the definitions map to. That you wish it to be that the legal definition of "heterosexual couple living together pledging to stay with each other" be defined by a different term than "homosexual couple living together pledging to stay with each other" suggests strongly to me that you do in fact want to have the ability for the law to treat the two situations differently.
The former Soviet Union seems to hold a lot of weapons-grade plutonium in a usable form.
Mostly from running power plants on the same dangerous design as Chernobyl. (The reason for that design, which just seems idiotic by most standards, was that the side-effect of producing weapons-grade plutonium happens quicker than with other designs.)
and more importantly: 4 - 100 years is a LONG time as far as technology goes. Who knows what we'll be using to provide electricity by then. To put it in perspective, 100 years ago most households in the US didn't even have any electrical service of any kind yet. The "grid" was still being built and service only existed in big cities, and nobody had even contemplated nuclear power of any kind.
By the time that 100 years would run out, we'd be doing something different.
"Decade's old" infrastructure is no longer in use.
False. My parent's house (the house I grew up in) was built in 1975. Today it still uses the same buried copper telephone cable out to the street that was laid when it was first made.
Replacing the major trunk lines is easy and has been done. It's that last little bit that goes to people's houses that's still unchanged.
When you first start your engine you produce more pollution per second than you normally would after it's been running for ten seconds or so. Therefore shutting off your engine at a red light and then restarting it might not actually pollute less than just leaving it on the whole time. It might actually be worse. You would need several minutes of downtime with the engine off before it actually becomes less pollutive that way.
People try to do that anyway. The difference is that now they are more dangerous since they are guessing how long the light has to go, instead of seeing it displayed with certainty.
Yes, but it should be some kind of and invention of SOME sort. Banking hours, as already mentioned, are a social aspect not a techological one. Also, I wouldn't count ubiquitous adoption of a technology as an additional technology itself. (for example ubiquitous use of cellphones, and less annoying purchasing methods for those cellphones (no stupid monthly plans) is not the same thing as better cellphone technology. Again, that is a social thing, not a technological one.
good stead for thousands of years they are made fun of.
The tradition of "commoner" marriage was very uncommon until the end of the middle ages. People who needed their union to be public for the sake of legitimacy (i.e. a king needing an heir) did a grand ceremony. But everyone else just shacked up and started living together, without any official recognition or paperwork. That is why there is such a thing as "common law marriages" on the books - during the age when marriage laws were first being developed, it was a way to grandfather-in all those people who were already living as couples unofficially before the marriage laws were around. This notion that civil marriage is a tradition was in good stead for "thousands of years" just isn't true. Even if you don't think that these traditions are worth upholding
Something being a tradition neither adds nor subtracts from whether it is worth doing. If it is relevant TODAY it is worth upholding. Whether or not it was relevant yesterday is, well, irrelevant - unless you have the ability to go back in time and experience it yourself. and you likewise are callous enough to think that the beliefs held sacred by millions of your fellow citizens should be open to your mockery
All beliefs should be open to mockery. The only alternative to that stance is to favor censorship.
You also kept switching back and forth between issues of marriage and issues of family. Yes, gay sex does not result in children, but being gay is not the only possible reason for a couple to fail to have their own biological children. Even the most staunchly fundamentalist Christians would still agree that it is perfectly acceptable, and in fact quite morally upstanding, for a barren wife and her husband to adopt children and start a family that way. So clearly, no, being biologically related is not a requirement for a good family life. So stop trying to conflate these two seperate issues. How does allowing gay marriages (and gay parents of families) degrade the cultural power of the family unit?
Nor am I even slightly interested in regulating how other people live their lives.
Hypothetically, would you agree with passing the following proposed law: "Civil unions that are not marriages shall henceforth still recieve all the same legal benefits as actual marriages, and as far as the law is concerned, be different from actual marriages in name ONLY."
If you would not support such a law, then your above statement is a lie. If all you want is to not change the definition of a word, then all these other unlreated things you brought up wouldn't have mattered one bit.
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Perhaps one wants a better diversity of rock/pop styles.
Yes. Once upon a time, there were more than one style of music that used electric guitars and synthesizers.
Around here the majority of stations are ClearChannel. There is one rather popular one that is locally owned and operated (and makes a point of saying so in their ads), but their style is a bit too soft for me.
Again, that is not a cause. It is an effect. If CD sales were as profitable as before, retailers would dedicate the necessary space to them. It's not as if retailers are operating in a fixed real-estate situation. They build new stores all the time. When Wal-mart or Best Buy is talking to a building contractor to plan out the dimensions of a new store, they will build as much space as they think they need for what they want to sell. If a product's profit-to-space ratio is high, they'll make room for it. If not, they won't.
That's possibly true, but I'd like to know how a reliable study could report on it objectively.
The reason for the percieved drop in quality is because there aren't different genre's anymore. Everything got consolodated into one generic mixture genre. It used to be that if you preferred one style of music over another, you could turn to the radio station that did that style, and then not have to listen to all the stuff in the other styles you don't prefer. That seems to be less true today - to get different styles on the radio you need to look to the 'oldie' stations because everything new is coming out in the smae one generic pop genre. There isn't a good stratification anymore between styles and that is actually necessary to make music seem good - you need more than one style or it gets monotonous.
I think that while you might not be able to measure quality objectively, you might be able to measure variety of styles of new music that gets radio airplay - and therevy discover the problem.
But *YOU* aren't the person the article is about - it's about the public at large. In the past, when the old people stopped listening to the new music, there were younger people taking up the 'slack' and still keeping sales rising higher and higher despite the industry losing the older generation. THAT is what is different now. Not only are us old-timers buying less music, as has always happened generation after generation, but the teenyboppers that drive the industry are ALSO buying less music, and THAT is new. And that can be explained by a number of reasons, and bad music quality could very well be such a reason.
I have noticed a distinct change in the kind of music that gets radio airplay. I still listened to pop radio despite being "too old" for it, up until about the year 2000 - that's when it really got intolerably bad, and that's also about the time Clearchannel had taken over all the local stations. I don't think this is a coincidence.
When I was growing up, there were multiple genres of NEW music on the radio. Not everybody liked pop, but you could find another station playing rap, or another station playing heavy metal, or another station playing oddball new wave stuff. And these were all targetted at the SAME age group. Now it seems like there is only one new genre and it's pop. For any deviation from that genre, you have to listen to older stuff.
And since when is declining shelf space a *CAUSE* of low sales??? It's an EFFECT of it. IF sales were still high, stores would still be willing to devote the space.
One hit wonders is not new. Having nothing BUT one hit wonders is new.
The whole concept of copyrighting a recording is very recent (1910's or so.)
You're implying that this is due to some kind of difference in mentality, but it's not. It's because it was still a very uncommon technology. Sheet music was where the copyright was because that's still where the money was, and that's still where the popularity was.
Your problem is that you want to elevate gay marriage to an equal status as traditional marriage without first insuring that gay marriage is as beneficial to society.
Your problem is that you are implying it is actually possible to gather such data first before doing that. It isn't - because if the control group and the experiment group aren't able to be treated by the same rules, then it is impossible to trim down the differences between the control group and the experiment group to just the one single variable being tested for (sexual orientation).
I admit that there are cases where it is appropriate to treat one group with a different set of rights than another (an example I can think of off the top of my head is convicted criminals as compared to the general public.) But the disagreement, and I think this is where we differ VERY strongly, is as to what proof would be adequete for it to be okay to treat different people with different rights. You seem to be saying that adequete reason would be:
X is known to be beneficial in comparasin to Z, while
Y is unknown to be beneficial in comparasin to Z.
(X = heterosexual marriage, Y = homosexual "marriage", and Z = not being married)
Whereas I would say that's not nearly enough. I would say that you need at least this:
X is KNOWN to be MORE beneficial in comparasin to Z than Y is.
And that is not data that we have yet.
You are correct that it is unproven whether gay "familes" can work as well. But it is unproven only because it has been suppressed as a practice and could not be attempted publicly. The data isn't there because it hasn't been attempted. The data isn't there because it *can't be* until after people have had the chance to try it openly for a long while.
And a policy of assuming guilt by default is not a way to build a civil society. And assuming gays would make bad parents by default is, in essence, a case of assuming guilty until proven innocent. The assumption, to be fair, MUST go the other way around - assume equal rights under the law are appropriate until proven otherwise.
You can pretend that this doesn't effect the divorce rate in the Netherlands,
I'm not doing that. Re-read my previous post. I'm not denying more divorces are happening in the Netherlands, or that marriage rates are down. I'm saying they don't have to mean the same thing as they used to since there is no longer a one-to-one correspondance between people pledging to be together and government recognition of such. Being divorced doesn't always have to mean leaving each other. It could be done purely for paperwork reasons in a culture where marriage isn't really the government's business anymore.
Yes I can. The policy at fault is "warranty doesn't apply if you open the case." Without that in place, I'd have been able to fix the problem on my own without having to wait. (And yes, sending it in also qualifies as waiting, since package delivery is involved and two weeks of downtime was unacceptable.) Keep in mind that I had no idea it was the heat sink that was unscrewed at first. It seemed like a minor enough problem since the system was still working. I figured the case wasn't on fully tightly or something relatively minor like that was wrong. The notion that a computer shop would have the gall to NOT screw down the heatsink well was just unthinkable. Of all the screws, those are THE most important, and yes, I have every right to warn people away from a shop that does such shoddy assembly work that they'd actually leave a heatsink loose on a laptop.)
As it currently stands in America it is the Gay and Lesbian groups that need to convince people that they are likely to make good parents,
And by wanting the adoption rules skewed against them, you aren't in favor of letting them try to do just that. "Before you can do X, you have to demonstrate that you can do X" is a guaranteed impossibility for any X you choose to pick.
The Dutch statistics only show that people are no more or less likely to separate with or without government influence. Regardless of what the piece of paper says, they are no more or less likely to stay a couple. It neither helps nor hinders.
What your statements left out is that it is just as easy to get divorced as it is to get married - so the marriage certificate doesn't present a signifigant hurdle that gets in the way if a couple wants to break up.
A problem I have with your stance is that you keep talking about the benefits of marriage without separating out which of those benefits come from simply staying together versus which ones come from the legal piece of paper. For example, you mention the increase in divorce when marriage laws are relaxed, and make the unstated assumption that this also means their couple-ness is ended, and thus they are breaking up, and all the social ills that result from that kind of break-up are to be expected. This is not necessarily the case when the government is making marriage less of an institution. A couple that still loves each other very much could still get divorced and not have it mean they are breaking up, under the Dutch system. It's just a change in their legal arrangements, like getting seperate back accounts.
A promise to love someone for the rest of your life, and stay with them, is really none of the government's business.
I had one of these. At first I couldn't be happier - it was awesome that all the components worked with linux, and when ordering it you can ask them to partition the hard drive however you like (so you don't need partition magic to put something else on it - you can tell them to leave an unused partition for you to put something else on later), but then I discovered one really dissapointing problem with it: On the physical quality side of things, it is extremely fragile. For one thing, some screws came loose inside that part of the case that you aren't allowed to open without voiding the warranty - I could hear the screws rolling around in there, but to fix it I'd have to mail the thing back in since I'd void the warranty, and that would be a huge delay and I *needed* this thing daily. So I decided to wait until it was out of warranty anyway, and then open it up to fix it myself. If anything broke while it was under warranty, then I'd ship it in.
Well, the fateful day came, the warrany passed, and I opened it up. Inside I discovered, much to my dismay, that not just one or two, but an entire 9 different screw holes were missing their screws. I only ever found 6 of them in the case. Some were for the heat sink. The heat sink was held on by only the gooey thermal gell and pressure from the back of the case. None of the screw holes for the heat sink were still fastened. No wonder I occasionally got shutdowns with "hot cpu" messages in the logs (I had thought it was because I might have been covering the vent with my leg when I had it on my lap).
Also, Xfree86 had started behaving badly (dying at random times) and I found out why when I opened the case - the ATI video card (which was also supposed to be protected by that unscrewed heat sink - it covered video card and CPU) had a few spots where the soldering had apparently melted and I could see brown burn marks near it.
So here I was stuck with a computer that was broke, a day out of warranty, because it hadn't been screwed together very well, and since it's a laptop, trying to go to a third-party for a replacement video card is totally impossible - they're all unique.
Sigh. They're software setup was good, but my experience with their physical durability was piss-poor - and that's an important factor for a laptop.
This has had a profound effect on the number of children born out of wedlock, the number of divorces, and the percentage of children in single parent homes, all of which are indicators of further social problems down the road.
That's a tautological circular argument. What you are trying to prove is that traditional marriages work better than non-traditional ones. But as part of your argument you cite things like children being born out of wedlock being an indicator of social problems down the road - which is identical to your conclusion.
What you would need is a study that compares out-of-wedlock-but-still-together parents to in-wedlock-but-still-together parents. The problem is that "out of wedlock" in most cases in our culture also includes "not living together anymore". It is only in places like Belguim that this isn't being the case anymore.
Basically, what I'm saying is that I would strongly suspect that the better environment for children has everything to do with the fact that the parents choose to stay together, and nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that their marriage is mentioned in a little slip of paperwork issued by the government. And since you can't really enact a law that forces people who are married on paper to *act* like they are married and stay together, that little slip of paper has nothing whatsoever to do with the lasting endurance of their lifetime partnership. If they love each other enough to merge their lives, the paper from the government didn't help cause this. If they grow apart and fall out of love, that little slip of paper from the government won't help prevent this. They'll get divorced or at the very least end up living apart and being married on paper only, which as far as raising the kid goes, has exactly the same effect as being divorced.
I know a couple I work with that are from the Netherlands, who were a part of that trend you speak of - people living together without the official stamp of marriage. (no, they're not gay, it's just that like a lot of other heterosexual Dutch, they decided to forego the official paperwork) Then when they came to the US, they discovered that with the various Visa rules, it was just easier if they got married so that one spouse could continue to reside in the country if the other lost his or her job. So eventually they went to a court clerk, got a witness, and signed the papers. Their relationship hadn't changed signifigantly with this act at all.
Actually, as a somewhat side-note, when this whole gay-marriage idea started surfacing a few years back, I sort of took a step back and asked myself, "why is this an issue?" And what it boiled down to was:
1 - Gay people offended that the government is enforcing someone else's religious moral stance on the matter.
versus
2 - Mainstream people offended that the government is forcing the majority to not excercise their religious moral stance on the matter.
And it occurred to me that maybe the problem is that the government shouldn't even be involved in the first place. After all, nobody complains too loudly about the law when churches perform baptisms, ordain preists, hold bake sales, define rules for who can be ministers, take a stance on abortion, and so on. Why? Because it's not the government's business. The government doesn't care whether you are baptized, or ordained, or any of that - because as far as the government is concerned, it confers no difference whatsoever in your legal status as a person, nor in what rights you have or don't have.
Once upon a time the government was involved in marriages because of the record-keeping. Being able to refer to the married couple as a single unit made things easier. But today the government has to keep track of people changing their names, or people getting married and NOT changing their names, or getting hyphenated names, or being cohabitants without being married, etc and so forth. So basically, the "easy to keep records" motivation for government involvement in marriage is mostly gone now in this information age. (In fact, I know someone who's Master's degree was all about midievil history, and he studied the topic of official civil marriages as an institution. It turns out that in the days of the roman empire, it just wasn't done. Then in the middle-ages it started to become common, and then eventually the civil governments convinced the church to get involved. It turns out it wasn't even a church institution until after it was a civil one.)
Anyway, I think a solution might be to just say, "hey, if you want to go get married in a church, with religious backing, that's great. Go ahead. But Uncle Sam just doesn't care one way or the other about it. If you want to get a marriage with recognized civil ties between you and your partner, then go hire a lawyer and sign some boilerplate contracts that could achieve the same results as currently are done by the government."
In other words, instead of trying to make things equal by giving gays the same civil governmental marriage rights as heterosexuals, why not make things equal by making the government just not care - and give nobody any special rights for being married - take marriage out of the government's jurisdiction entirely.
Well, I don't expect to get you to change your mind on this, obviously. But I am glad that you realize you *do* in fact want different rights for hetersexual versus gay couples. It's not so much the fact that you hold this position that annoyed me. What had annoyed me was that it looked like you were advocating this position while simultaneously pretending that you weren't. While I won't agree with you, I do respect a self-consistent position more than a self-contradictory one. When I pointed out the inconsistency, instead of denying it, you sought to admit to it and correct it. That takes a certain style of humble honesty I can deeply respect.
With that aside, I would like to point out one thing. You mention that if homosexuals invent their own new term for their kind of couples, that would be fine by you, but that they should have the burden of proof of showing that their type of family would not be inferior before getting the same adoption rights as heterosexual couples.
I would ask this: Why is the burden of proof on them? In ethical questions of what rights people have, I would say it is the one who wants different groups to have different rights that should be the one with the burden of proof to explain why. All groups having the same rights should be the beginning default until evidence swings you away from that position.
You mention studies that allegedly provide this proof, but such studies could only be relevant if they were comparing heterosexual-parent familes to homosexual-parent familes. But I strongly suspect that what they were actually doing was comparing families to non-families, or two-parent familes to one-parent families. That doesn't make a good experiment because the control group differs from the experiment group in more than one way, so you don't know which variable is responsible for the results.
In fact, ironically, the experimental survey that could prove heterosexual parents do a better job on average than homosexual parents would be impossible to carry out until AFTER homosexual parents get all the same rights as heterosexual ones - because until they do, you can't eliminate the difference in legal rights from the experiment. (i.e. any perceived inferiority of the homosexual parents could actually be due to social differences that result from not being a legally recognized family.)
Again, I disagree with you, but at the same time I do respect your tendancy during this to keep the disagreement one of logic and facts, not one of emotional rhetoric. You are an honest debater.
This may or may not be because of better technology. If it's a matter of china using some better technology that gets better coverage per dollar spent, then it would be. But if it's just because they spent more on building more transmitters in more locations, then it's, again, a social difference, not a technological one.
I stand corrected. However, on same days in winter I have seen the engine cool off surprisingly quickly after it is stopped, although it has to be windy out for this to happen (The wind probably has more to do with it).
In response to my question of whether you would support giving non-marriage civil unions (which we know we both mean includes gay couples) the same legal rights as full marriages, you said:
Yes, as I stated before, I am not trying to force people to live the way I do.
But then further down, you say:
I am not quite convinced that it is wise to conclude that gay civil unions should have the same opportunities to adopt children that married couples have.
These are incompatable statements.
I strongly suspect that there is more to this than the definition of a word. Otherwise it just wouldn't matter to you at all. Arguments over definitions often are actually arguments over the real issues the definitions map to. That you wish it to be that the legal definition of "heterosexual couple living together pledging to stay with each other" be defined by a different term than "homosexual couple living together pledging to stay with each other" suggests strongly to me that you do in fact want to have the ability for the law to treat the two situations differently.
The former Soviet Union seems to hold a lot of weapons-grade plutonium in a usable form.
Mostly from running power plants on the same dangerous design as Chernobyl. (The reason for that design, which just seems idiotic by most standards, was that the side-effect of producing weapons-grade plutonium happens quicker than with other designs.)
and more importantly:
4 - 100 years is a LONG time as far as technology goes. Who knows what we'll be using to provide electricity by then. To put it in perspective, 100 years ago most households in the US didn't even have any electrical service of any kind yet. The "grid" was still being built and service only existed in big cities, and nobody had even contemplated nuclear power of any kind.
By the time that 100 years would run out, we'd be doing something different.
Interstate highways? Does Sweden have states?
"Decade's old" infrastructure is no longer in use.
False. My parent's house (the house I grew up in) was built in 1975. Today it still uses the same buried copper telephone cable out to the street that was laid when it was first made.
Replacing the major trunk lines is easy and has been done. It's that last little bit that goes to people's houses that's still unchanged.
When you first start your engine you produce more pollution per second than you normally would after it's been running for ten seconds or so. Therefore shutting off your engine at a red light and then restarting it might not actually pollute less than just leaving it on the whole time. It might actually be worse. You would need several minutes of downtime with the engine off before it actually becomes less pollutive that way.
People try to do that anyway. The difference is that now they are more dangerous since they are guessing how long the light has to go, instead of seeing it displayed with certainty.
Yes, but it should be some kind of and invention of SOME sort. Banking hours, as already mentioned, are a social aspect not a techological one. Also, I wouldn't count ubiquitous adoption of a technology as an additional technology itself. (for example ubiquitous use of cellphones, and less annoying purchasing methods for those cellphones (no stupid monthly plans) is not the same thing as better cellphone technology. Again, that is a social thing, not a technological one.
good stead for thousands of years they are made fun of.
The tradition of "commoner" marriage was very uncommon until the end of the middle ages. People who needed their union to be public for the sake of legitimacy (i.e. a king needing an heir) did a grand ceremony. But everyone else just shacked up and started living together, without any official recognition or paperwork. That is why there is such a thing as "common law marriages" on the books - during the age when marriage laws were first being developed, it was a way to grandfather-in all those people who were already living as couples unofficially before the marriage laws were around. This notion that civil marriage is a tradition was in good stead for "thousands of years" just isn't true.
Even if you don't think that these traditions are worth upholding
Something being a tradition neither adds nor subtracts from whether it is worth doing. If it is relevant TODAY it is worth upholding. Whether or not it was relevant yesterday is, well, irrelevant - unless you have the ability to go back in time and experience it yourself.
and you likewise are callous enough to think that the beliefs held sacred by millions of your fellow citizens should be open to your mockery
All beliefs should be open to mockery. The only alternative to that stance is to favor censorship.
You also kept switching back and forth between issues of marriage and issues of family. Yes, gay sex does not result in children, but being gay is not the only possible reason for a couple to fail to have their own biological children. Even the most staunchly fundamentalist Christians would still agree that it is perfectly acceptable, and in fact quite morally upstanding, for a barren wife and her husband to adopt children and start a family that way. So clearly, no, being biologically related is not a requirement for a good family life. So stop trying to conflate these two seperate issues. How does allowing gay marriages (and gay parents of families) degrade the cultural power of the family unit?
Nor am I even slightly interested in regulating how other people live their lives.
Hypothetically, would you agree with passing the following proposed law: "Civil unions that are not marriages shall henceforth still recieve all the same legal benefits as actual marriages, and as far as the law is concerned, be different from actual marriages in name ONLY."
If you would not support such a law, then your above statement is a lie. If all you want is to not change the definition of a word, then all these other unlreated things you brought up wouldn't have mattered one bit.