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 | Wednesday, May 27, 2009 at 11:07:09 mst
Comment ID: #1
Name: Rachel
E-mail: rach48b(at)yahoo.com
I was recently confronted with an argument against homosexual marriage that claims to be scientific in that it looks at empirical studies. The argument goes that allowing homosexual marriage and homosexual adoption will result in more homosexuality. This supposedly will threaten the stability of families. This is obviously a conservative argument but it purports to have science on its side.
Here are two links to the Dr. making these arguments:
http://www.drtraycehansen.com/Pages/writings_samesex.html
http://www.drtraycehansen.com/Pages/writings_legalizing.html
Here are some excerpts:
"An accumulation of research from around the world finds that societies which endorse homosexual behavior increase the prevalence of homosexuality in those societies."
"Social and cultural norms, as well as legal regulations, influence human behavior including sexual behavior. So not surprisingly, as the United States and other Western Countries have become increasingly pro-homosexualâ€"socially, politically, and legallyâ€"they have experienced an upward trend in the number of individuals engaging in homosexual behavior. That trend will continue if we move beyond mere tolerance of homosexual behavior (which is appropriate) to formally honoring it by legalizing same-sex marriage."
I am personally offended by these arguments as the implication is that homosexuals should be denied certain rights and that discrimination against them is warranted. I'm also disturbed by another implication of this and that is that by allowing freedom a society can destroy itself and therefore freedoms must be limited for the good of society; i.e. "pure" individualism is harmful. Leftists make this argument all time with regard to economics. Conservatives make it in the context of personal freedoms with their usual argument being that our society is destroying the institutions of marriage and family by allowing all these unprecedented sexual freedoms to women and to homosexuals and as a result children are not being raised properly.
But my question is for any NoodleFooders with an interest in this subject is whether there is any genuine evidence to suggest that same sex homes with children lead to higher rates of homosexuality of those children or if it leads to higher rates of adult pathology or is all of this just conservatives playing with numbers? |
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| Wednesday, May 27, 2009 at 11:14:03 mst
Comment ID: #2
Name: GregM
E-mail: gregsmullen(at)hotmail.com
Can anyone recommend some must-read classic literature? I want to read up on some classics this summer and am looking for the best ones. Thanks in advance. |
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| Wednesday, May 27, 2009 at 11:44:10 mst
Comment ID: #3
Name: Jeff
To GregM,
I do not know what you have already read; but, I have some ideas.
Romantic Literature:
1) The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky
2) The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne (His short stories are good too, like "The Birthmark" and "Young Goodman Brown.")
3) Moby Dick by Mellville (I find his prose are infinitely superior to Hawthorne's; Hawthorne uses archaic terms, like "physiognomy" for "face" or "preternatural" for "supernatural", and has what I call "dashitis", an affliction of many American writers whereby dashes are used to set off long appositives.)
4) The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo (or anything else by the same).
5) The Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas (a bit long, but the best revenge story ever made)
Classical/Neoclassical Literature:
1) Paradise Lost by John Milton (A favorite of pretty much everyone during the founding era.)
2) Cato by Joseph Addison (George Washington kept a copy next to his bed.)
3) Oedipus Cycle by Sophocles
4) The Aeneid, The Illiad, and the Odyssey |
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| Wednesday, May 27, 2009 at 11:54:01 mst
Comment ID: #4
Name: BrianS
Well this quote certainly tells you all you need to know about the mentality of artists in regard to virtue these days. The producer of the now-canceled tv show 'Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" had this to say about what he wants from art:
"I don't want someone showing me what it's like to be awesome in the face of hard times. I'm probably not gonna be awesome in the face of hard times. I'm gonna be scared and mediocre and I don't need to feel worse that I'm not awesome. I want to know that scared and mediocre is a reasonable response to hard times and not something to be ashamed of." |
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| Wednesday, May 27, 2009 at 14:56:42 mst
Comment ID: #5
Name: madmax
BrianS,
Somehow I have a feeling that that producer is not a fan of The Fountainhead. |
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| Wednesday, May 27, 2009 at 15:05:11 mst
Comment ID: #6
Name: Andrew Dalton
E-mail: andrew.s.dalton(at)gmail.com
URL: http://witchdoctorrepellent.blogspot.com
At least that producer has the honesty (as far as it goes) to cast his timid artistic motivation in terms of *his own* character, rather than deflecting the blame onto human nature in general, which is usually what you get in such cases. |
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| Wednesday, May 27, 2009 at 15:14:00 mst
Comment ID: #7
Name: madmax
Religious conservatives often attack libertarianism and Objectivism (which they almost always lump together) on the grounds that it is precisely libertarianism that has unleashed social forces which are undermining the American Republic.
I have read them using this reasoning: during the 20th century there was a rise in social liberalism; ie there was a rise in abortion, contraception, female emancipation, breakdown of traditional family, growth in out-of-wedlock babies, homosexual liberation, same-sex marriage (which they consider an atrocity), etc. Then they say the 20th century has has also seen a growth of socialism and oppressive government. The conclusion they reach is that the social liberalism *caused* the socialism and big government.
This seems to be the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc but I am interested in opinions of what actually was going on during the 20th century that this seeming contradiction occurred; ie a growth of personal liberties but a decrease in economic liberties and the growth of the Leviathon state. My guess is that there was a growing secularism during the 20th century which was a positive thing and this lead to the increase in personal/sexual freedoms. But unfortunately with this growth of secularism came post-Kantian and Post-Modern philosophy with its skepticism, materialism, relativism, and collectivism all of which is resulting in our current drive towards fascism.
But the Religious Conservatives are blaming atheism, secularism and individualism. They seemingly have their scripts already written and it was secular "liberalism" that is to blame. To these conservatives, Objectivism is the epitome of this kind of "atomistic individualism" and godless libertarianism.
Does my general analysis of the 20th century seem right? Are there any other opinions as to why there was a development of freedom in one realm but a move away from freedom in the others? |
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| Wednesday, May 27, 2009 at 20:17:33 mst
Comment ID: #8
Name: Mike
E-mail: mikedialj(at)netscape.net
The shortest sentence that can be made using all 26 letters of the alphabet is "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs." This bit of trivia is about the only thing I remember from reading James Michener's "South Pacific" years ago. |
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| Wednesday, May 27, 2009 at 22:10:01 mst
Comment ID: #9
Name: Jim May
E-mail: Seerak(at)gmail.com
"Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz."
That's 31 letters to your 32 ;) |
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| Wednesday, May 27, 2009 at 22:28:49 mst
Comment ID: #10
Name: Wayne
Classic literature.
Henryk Sienkienwicz's Trilogy or Fire on the Steppe or In Desert and Wilderness. Grand adventure. Heroic characters. |
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| Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 6:03:11 mst
Comment ID: #11
Name: Daniel
URL: http://thenearbypen.blogspot.com
I did a long review of the book Women of the French Salons, filled with tons of good quotes on friendship, on life, and on what the salons were like. Readers here might like it, especially those thinking of starting a salon of their own. Link:
http://thenearbypen.blogspot.com/2009/05/women-of-french-salons-rev ...
Nothing new by me, but here's a video of (a digital copy of) Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, a building that always inspires me. Because it inspires--thus lifting one's spirits--I call videos like this "red bull for the soul". You can take a sip here:
http://thenearbypen.blogspot.com/2009/05/casa-de-la-cascada.html |
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| Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 13:16:29 mst
Comment ID: #12
Name: Frank
E-mail: FNLoreti(at)aol.com
The following is a sentence, isn't it?
It is the answer to, "what string of letters contains all those not found in the first word of the sentence?'
It's 'abcdefghjklmnopqruvwxyz'. Exactly 26. Can't get any shorter than that! |
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| Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 13:27:24 mst
Comment ID: #13
Name: William H Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/profile
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!
I'm not inclined to give full credit to abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz as a sentence. Yes, you can invent an artificial context where it's a proper (if elliptical) response to a question and thus counts as a sentence. But you need the setup! All of the others, as well as the classic "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," are actual grammatical sentences that can be parsed on their own and that are made up of standard English words.
To put it in math-ese, they're nontrivial solutions to the problem. . . . |
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| Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 23:01:37 mst
Comment ID: #14
Name: Jim May
E-mail: seerak(at)gmail.com
I remember from a copy of the Guiness Book of world records that there was a headline in Welsh from a newspaper in the UK:
"Quartz glyph job vex'd cwm finks." 26 letters. No idea how to pronounce "cwm".
These are called "pangrams" and a bunch of them are here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pangrams |
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| Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 23:38:54 mst
Comment ID: #15
Name: Jim May
E-mail: seerak(at)gmail.com
madmax: Conservatism has always opposed liberalism; it finds its roots in reaction against the Enlightenment. It's philosophic core has not changed since then.
Liberalism, on the other hand, has been co-opted and inverted by the Left in America. Conservatism does not acknowledge this fact, and there is a good reason for that: they know that so long as the Left continues passing off counterfeit ideological goods under the banner of "Enlightenment" -- democracy as "freedom", socialism as "liberalism", racism as "equality", envirocultism as "science" -- the genuine articles will be the ones to take the blame for the resulting disasters.
Because the Left effected its takeover in stages, fracturing liberty into pieces in order to destroy the less well defended parts first (i.e. "economic" versus "political" freedom), the 20th century is rife with the contradictions and confusions you note. |
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| Friday, May 29, 2009 at 8:34:48 mst
Comment ID: #16
Name: Not Joe Biden
E-mail: notjoebiden(at)aol.com
> No idea how to pronounce "cwm".
It's "koom". The W is literally a double u. |
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| Friday, May 29, 2009 at 10:30:38 mst
Comment ID: #17
Name: William H Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/profile
I believe the English word "coomb" or "coombe" is a cognate of cwm, and it's pronounced much the same. But using the Welsh spelling looks a bit odd in an English sentence. |
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| Friday, May 29, 2009 at 12:13:10 mst
Comment ID: #18
Name: Rob McVey
E-mail: jrmcvey(at)ican.net
Jim May (#15): Thanks for the reduction of Enlightenment to freedom, liberalism, equality and science. It helped me concretize even more in grasping the conservatives' opposition to Enlightenment and O'ism; and that the con's are partners of the left in those respects. |
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| Friday, May 29, 2009 at 12:14:59 mst
Comment ID: #19
Name: Rob McVey
E-mail: jrmcvey(at)rogers.com
Reposted to update email; sorry for any inconvenience. |
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| Friday, May 29, 2009 at 14:43:59 mst
Comment ID: #20
Name: GregM
Thanks Jeff I will definitely check out some of those. |
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| Friday, May 29, 2009 at 14:53:02 mst
Comment ID: #21
Name: madmax
Jim May writes:
"Because the Left effected its takeover in stages, fracturing liberty into pieces in order to destroy the less well defended parts first (i.e. "economic" versus "political" freedom), the 20th century is rife with the contradictions and confusions you note."
This is helpful. But the implication of this is that when (and of) fascism gets here in full force, the personal liberties that liberals supposedly defend will be taken away from them. Leviathon government will control us economically and sexually and I guess modern liberals will then scream "but this is not what we meant!".
As for conservatism, I think the ultimate battle between conservatism and rational liberalism is supernaturalism vs naturalism; a battle that has been going on for centuries. The conservatives are at root Platonists as I see it and they will fight to the death to preserve that epistemology. |
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| Friday, May 29, 2009 at 18:57:18 mst
Comment ID: #22
Name: William H Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/profile
On the subject of conservatism and "family values," my experience has been that conservatives claim that the family is a traditional institution and should be preserved as such, or that it's essential to the survival of civilization, or . . . the saner ones . . . that it's the basis for leading a good, happy life. But at the same time, they don't seem to trust that people would voluntarily choose to live in families. Rather, on one hand, they want to get people into families by denying their access to other things if they're not a family (no sex unless you're married being the most notable example . . . and if you're homosexual, no sex unless you accept heterosexual sex in an opposite-sex marriage; no right to be involved in the medical care of a sick partner unless you're married, and so on); and on the other hand, once they're in, they want to keep them from getting out again, no matter how badly they're treated (in extreme cases, even if they're physically abused; in lesser cases, even if a spouse has lost all interest in them sexually and is pursuing other partners, and even if they've decided they made a really bad choice). All this says to me that they think of the "value" of the family as utterly divorced for any sense that people actually gain anything from having families, and in fact they don't think family life makes people better off and is something a self-interested person would pursue. They think it's a duty that people have to be bribed or compelled to accept, and forbidden to lay down. Which, you know, is rather like saying that work is the basis of human survival (true) and gives people who pursue it a better life (true) but that people won't choose to work and therefore need to be enslaved and driven to their labors, instead of trusting that self-interested people will want to work and earn money.
All of which gave me a grim impression of "family values." I remember a few years ago, seeing television footage of same-sex couples lined up at the city hall in San Francisco, and thinking that that was the most compelling image I'd ever seen of how much Americans really do value the family. And those are the people a lot of conservatives are trying to keep out! |
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| Friday, May 29, 2009 at 22:25:33 mst
Comment ID: #23
Name: madmax
"They think it's a duty that people have to be bribed or compelled to accept, and forbidden to lay down."
There is alot of truth to this. The more philosophical conservatives that I have read describe family as the foundational unit of society; its families that count not individuals. Since most conservatives are Burkean skeptics - i.e. reason is limited and we are socialized by our traditions and institutions - they believe that the family is where children are socialized and made into productive members of society. So if anything undermines the family, then all of society will collapse.
So, they argue, sexual liberation and female emancipation along with contraception, easy divorce and abortion on demand have all contributed to an environment where there are escalating out-of-wedlock pregnancies. These children born to broken homes result in more people on welfare and greater crime, therefore it is personal freedoms and sexual liberation - "libertarianism" - that is leading America to tyranny. When families break down, governments expand thus what undermines families undermines society. Further, conservatives will argue, this is all because society has rejected original sin which restrains man's passions and keeps him under control. By creating a climate of strict monogamy and rigid families, Christianity created a stable social order which is being destroyed by secularism. It is this loss of traditional family values which is modern societies greatest sin. (This is what they actually believe.)
So you are right William. Many conservatives view family as a Platonic archetype whose sole purpose is the generating and raising of children. Family becomes a duty and sex is only proper for the purposes of growing a family. The idea of marriage as a vehicle for two individuals to share their lives and increase their own personal happiness regardless of whether they want children or not is adamantly rejected by serious religious conservatives.
The conservative view of sex, marriage and family is pure Medievalism. Religious conservatism really is a Medieval movement. |
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| Saturday, May 30, 2009 at 11:50:05 mst
Comment ID: #24
Name: William H Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/profile
madmax,
In relation to this, I want to mention Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan novels, a science fiction series that has been coming out for a couple of decades. I find them quite well written, with unexpected plot twists, impressive characters, and an emphasis on moral choice; but in this context I want to talk about their settings.
I think of social philosophies as having two major themes: man as a link in a genetic chain, and man as a being that makes choices. Bujold gives us portraits of societies with both basic outlooks; in fact, she gives us a sympathetic and an unsympathetic version of each: the quasi-feudal Barrayarans, a technologically regressed colony struggling back to advanced technology, where family and kinship were all-important; the totalitarian Cetagandans, a society where genetic planning and control are the basis of all politics, which is taken so far that even the ability to reproduce is state-controlled; the technologically and sexually sophisticated Betans, who have an odd mix of freedom of personal choice with welfare-state liberalism (the Komarrans, a planet conquered by the Barrayarans, are somewhat similar in their internal customs); and the anarchic Jacksonians, whose whole planet is run by what amount to gangsters in a sort of hybrid of anarchocapitalism and the Italian Renaissance. None of these is an ideal society by Objectivist standards, of course, but the philosophical differences among them seem well thought out.
In the earlier novels of the series, the central character, Miles Vorkosigan, son of a Barrayaran father and a Betan mother, embodies the tensions personally by having a dual identity: as the son of one of Barrayar's most powerful noblemen, he serves in the military, but in the intelligence service, where his cover identity is as Miles Naismith, owner and commander of a private mercenary force. In that role he even speaks with a distinctive Betan accent learned from his mother. One of the best novels in the series, Memory, shows a head-on conflict between the two identities.
Family's a running theme of the whole series . . . but Bujold shows the Barrayaran concept of family being changed in interesting ways. For example, at one point Miles meets a clone of himself . . . made by a Jacksonian biolab hired by a Komarran secessionist who saw the clone as a tool for political assassination; but to Miles, and to his Betan mother, "clone" is one category of child, and Miles treats the clone as his brother. We also get to see the change from the Barrayaran ethic of chastity to a more galactic ethic of personal choice. There's a really good scene when the clone confronts the parents of his Barrayaran girlfriend, and she ends up telling the parents, "What I want is an option on Mark!" Bujold's idea seems to be that chosen family is better than unchosen family, and that's a theme I find sympathetic.
If you decide to take a look, a good arc is Brothers in Arms (which introduces Miles's clone), Mirror Dance, Memory, Komarr, and A Civil Campaign (a comedy of manners set on Barrayar). On the other hand, the single most intense dramatic story is probably in Barrayar, where Miles's Betan mother confronts the full conservatism of traditional Barrayar head-on . . . and it turns out to be a fairly even fight. (Now available as part of Cordelia's Honor, which also includes an earlier novel that's a bit more comedic in flavor.) |
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| Saturday, May 30, 2009 at 16:32:45 mst
Comment ID: #25
Name: madmax
Thanks for the recommendations William. Bujold's books sound fascinating. |
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| Monday, June 1, 2009 at 9:09:31 mst
Comment ID: #26
Name: Tom Rowland
E-mail: atlasfan(at)earthlink.net
Comment on the difference between liberals' view of freedom and conservatives'. Any one interested in understanding the political scene in its most fundamental terms is well advised to read Ayn Rand's opening essay in For the New Intellectual. BUT. . . one has to keep in mind that Rand is using Attila, the Witch Doctor and the Trader as archetypes based on the way in which they view the world at the subconscious, implicit level. Hume, for instance is not Attila in the sense of attempting to conquer the world or killing people directly. He is Attila in that he thinks in terms of percepts, like an animal, rather than concepts. So liberals are 'earthbound' and 'concrete bound' and 'pragmatic'. Similarly for the Witch Doctor, conservatives are not literally casting spells but have the mentality of an otherworldly mystic caught up in 'floating abstractions.' BTW these archetypes have, I think, a relationship to the three legs of LP's DIM hypothesis. I've forgotten if he mentions this in the series, which I heard once through and haven't returned to. Does anyone recall him saying anything about this? |
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| Monday, June 1, 2009 at 9:49:30 mst
Comment ID: #27
Name: Tom Rowland
E-mail: atlasfan(at)earthlink.net
Added thought. The archetypes are true believers in their positions. So.. they believe that anyone who disagrees with them needs to be regulated and/or brought to the truth. Thus Attilas are blatant materialists who believe that religion and faith and indeed, abstractions and principles of every variety should be squashed and government (meaning they) should control the rest (the material world)since the majority of people are unscientific boobs. That world of belief in God, freedom and immortality can safely be left to the them, since the sciences will be in the left's hands. Thus the Liberals are Kantians in the phenomenalist, empiricist sense. The right on the other hand takes the position on the other side of the Kantian universe. They believe that people are capable of dealing with the world of material goods and services, but need guidance and law to guide them in their dealings with God, freedom and immortality. Thus the material world can be left alone. After all,"doesn't the lord thy God watch over the tiniest sparrow?" In very broad terms you can see the sides as taking positions on either side of the Caesar - God divide. The left renders to Caesar, the right renders to God. Miss Rand renders to man the rational animal. |
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