I've heard an accent that has trouble pronouncing the English "th" sound, instead approximating it with more of a "t" sound that misses the tongue thrust. Maybe that is what's happening here?
Masochists are the outlier that pretty much always exists and are a rather bad example because humans are the only species with the luxury of possibly having such a, rather destructive, trait among their population.
Afaik there are no wild animals exhibiting behavior that's comparable to human masochism if animals with comparable traits existed they most likely went extinct because going out of your way to actively look for "pain and suffering" is a rather big disadvantage in the grand game of survival.
> Afaik there are no wild animals exhibiting behavior that's comparable to human masochism
The context of this whole discussion is hedonism, utilitarianism, ethical theory, and philosophy in general. These ideas don't exist (to our knowledge) amongst animals, so I don't find it convincing to use animals to support your argument.
>These ideas don't exist (to our knowledge) amongst animals, so I don't find it convincing to use animals to support your argument.
But aren't we humans just that, animals?
While the concept of ethical hedonism is of a rather philosophical nature, I still think the basic definition of hedonism translates very well into actual nature.
At least when hedonism is defined as "strive for pleasure and happiness" while evading "pain and suffering" there should be no issue applying this to other animals because we know for a fact that animals, besides humans, are able of these emotions and feelings.
What we don't know is if other animals actively reflect about these things. But that's a matter of motivation and not actual observed behavior, if we go by observed behavior than pretty much all living things are living a "hedonistic lifestyle".
You make a very good point. I think my observations are pretty similar to yours. My solution is to expand from the hedonistic goal of maximizing one's own pleasure, to the larger goal of maximizing the total amount of happiness in the world.
I really like your story breakdown here. Those are three pretty clear contributors to the overall forced sex trade story. But I feel like there is one more story that is much less obvious. The three stories you identify reside on the supply side of the issue. On the demand side I feel there is a story about how our social expectations of monogamy contribute to the demand for prostitution. How men in sexless monogamous relationships are forced to go underground to get a basic human need met. How even when a marriage isn't sexless men still may feel the need to fulfill unsatisfied desires. They can't do this openly and honestly because monogamy won't let them. I can't help but feel that if monogamy was not the expectation, and violations of it were not perceived as a deplorable offense, sex would be rendered a much less scarce resource and the demand for sex slavery would be significantly reduced.
Or perhaps if they are in a marriage that restricts a resource that isn't supplying enough of that resource, then the marriage should be reexamined. Marriage is a contract, if you don't like the terms you agreed to, attempt to change the contract, not to cheat it.
> Or perhaps if they are in a marriage that restricts a resource that isn't supplying enough of that resource, then the marriage should be reexamined.
There's a lot of social pressure against this because of the stigma associated with divorce.
> Marriage is a contract, if you don't like the terms you agreed to, attempt to change the contract, not to cheat it.
This is pretty much what I'm saying. The problem is that people are usually woefully naive and uninformed when they enter a marriage contract. Maybe we need to re-examine the societal default for marriage contracts...specifically the portion about monogamy / sexual exclusivity.
> specifically the portion about monogamy / sexual exclusivity
It feel like you are pushing a specific aspect to the detriment of the whole. I agree that if someone doesn't desire, or can't maintain monogamy in a marriage, that they should be upfront about this and make sure their partner is aware and accepting. While that this may require a bit of social change to make it more acceptable, I don't think that's a specific case that needs to be revisited for marriage in general (many people are happily monogamous). I think it's better overall for people to be upfront and and truthful overall. There are many things that can break up a marriage besides infidelity. I'm not even convinced infidelity is the main reason, it may more often be a symptom of some other underlying problem.
> There's a lot of social pressure against this because of the stigma associated with divorce.
Which ties into above, if people can't (or feel they can't) divorce, then they may act out in other ways. I also think this is highly location dependent. In the western US, I'm not sure I've observed much social stigma for divorce.
> It feel like you are pushing a specific aspect to the detriment of the whole.
Maybe. What detriment are you thinking of?
I'm just observing that since monogamy restricts us to this 1:1 gender ratio, and since in some cases one of those 1s is taken off the table (either literally or if not literally, maybe effectively due to low quality) this drastically restricts society's ability to meet a basic human need one a wide scale. To make matters worse, situations like China's gender imbalance add to the challenges that already exist when the gender split is close to 50-50. Wouldn't you agree that these kinds of challenges might be reduced if a many-to-one structure was just as socially acceptable as a one-to-one structure? Could the pigeonhole principle have something to do with the demand for sex trafficking? If this is an unreasonable line of thought, I'd love to understand why.
The marriage as a whole. I see accurate representation of expected monogamy/polygamy or fidelity/infidelity (WRT sex) as just one aspect of many that may cause marital problems. What about a husband that expects the wife to be a homemaker when she is unhappy in that role, or a wife that expects the husband to provide all financial support when the husband is unhappy with that. There are many reasons marriages fail, and I think focusing specifically on one of them may not help as much as making people more aware of marriage expectations altogether.
As for the rest of your comment, I would be happy if marriage as a whole was less strictly regimented by society, but I understand the reasons it is. Marriage is the building block of families, and families are the building blocks of our societies. We optimize for successful families that produce well adjusted offspring. The problem is that I'm not sure exactly how we are defining "well-adjusted". If it's primarily in relation so society and culture (it is, the question is how much), it may just be self selecting. That's not necessarily a way to make things better, just to perpetuate the status quo. I just don't know enough to make a call.
How precisely do you think the things I'm saying harm the marriage as a whole? I'm still not seeing your point. I'm not talking here about causes of marriage failure. I'm talking about the graph structure of society's sexual relationships.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't have monogamous marriages. I'm asking if changing society's expectations to the point where both monogamy and all variations of non-monogamy were perceived to be equally legitimate (with a likely corresponding increase in the number of non-monogamous relationships) could have an impact on the demand for sex trafficking. I don't think making this change would eliminate sex trafficking, but I think it could plausibly help the situation.
> How precisely do you think the things I'm saying harm the marriage as a whole?
I think focusing on one possible problem with marriages which I view to be a subset of a larger issue may take focus from other, equally important aspects. Not so much in that it harms a specific marriage, but that it may be a less useful way to look at marriage in general if our goal is promote happy and long lasting unions.
> I'm not saying that we shouldn't have monogamous marriages.
I didn't think you were saying that. I'm more conversing than arguing a point. We seem to be mostly in agreement, I just think an approach less focused on a single aspect would be more beneficial overall.
> I just think an approach less focused on a single aspect would be more beneficial overall.
Fair enough. I was focusing on the monogamy issue because it seems a lot more directly related to sexual trafficking and this thread than, say, how a couple manages finances or who cleans up the kitchen. :)
Gay Marriage Advocates tend to be skittish of embracing poly marriage because that would make them look more extreme. If they can show that their position is not the most extreme one out there, then they have a better chance of seeing their agenda actually become reality. The funny thing is that while poly marriage advocates might not like that right now, in the long run it might actually help them because it will probably speed up the necessary changes.
The broadest possible reading of the essence of marriage is a single relationship entered into exclusively, voluntarily and with full awareness.
An arranged marriage fails the voluntary test.
A union involving a young child fails the awareness test.
A unions that includes a non-human entity fails the voluntary and awareness tests.
A union of three or more entities fails the exclusivity test. (Between two people there is just one relationship. Between three people there are three relationships.) I have no problem with the idea in theory, but it will require a lot of structural change of law to implement and is therefore sufficiently different to warrant a different technical term in law.
> Between two people there is just one relationship.
no there isn't.
my wife talks to my dad in a way i never have. they get each other. they understand one another, and she respects aspects of him that i didn't know existed until i saw that a lot of what i love about my wife is true of my dad.
my wife talks to my mom in a way i haven't understood until recently. my mom is very loving; i never knew how much more loving she was until recently, when my wife explained just how intense that is.
i have a relationship with mama, my catonese mother-in-law, who understood the importance of computers even when it was the early 90's and she'd never seen one, who grew up during the cultural revolution, who doesn't trust authority figures for the same reason i don't.
my wife is good friends with many of my siblings - that's 8 more relationships there; 13 when you include the in-laws. my brother matt is married to michelle, who's talked to my wife, christine, about a lot of topics, and the two of them have a relationship far more intense than many biological siblings.
no man is an island.
no man is an island.
no man is an island.
no man is an island.
please for the love of all that is good in the world, can we stop pretending otherwise?
How is exclusivity crucial to marriage in the maximal broadness sense? It might be crucial in the current legal landscape, but that's not what we're talking about here. I tend to think that in the broadest possible sense marriage is just a contract and there's nothing preventing it from including more than two parties. Or, even if you do create a compelling argument for it being a contract between only two people, why should that preclude me from making another similar contract with a different party?
We are absolutely talking about the current legal landscape. If you want to discuss polygamy in a spherical cow universe, that's fine, and I've already said I have no in-principle objection to formalizing polygamy.
However, a union between three or more people (or multiple concurrent marriages) is in an engineering sense a very different mechanism. It has more moving parts and more complicated parts. Most critically, its interfaces to the outside world are different.
It would require substantial root-and-branch changes to a massive amount of existing legislation in every country and state. Using a different word in law (while accepting colloquial use of the word marriage in everyday parlance) is a practical necessity.
> However, a union between three or more people (or multiple concurrent marriages) is in an engineering sense a very different mechanism.
Forming, adding to, withdrawing from, dissolving, and otherwise handling unions of three or more people, including in dealing with how the members of the union deal with their rights and powers vis-a-vis the property and prerogatives of the union as such between each other and in interfacing with outside entities has been dealt with fairly extensively over the past several centuries in the evolution of partnership law. And most of it can be viewed as a fairly direct multiparty generalization of the two party way similar things are dealt with in existing marriage.
There's no real reason that a generalization of marriage law to handle multiparty relationships that reduced naturally to the same handling for two-party cases as status quo rules would deserve any different name.
Sorry, but polygamy doesn't get to ride the coattails of gay marriage for free. Despite the howls from conservatives, this slope isn't inherently slippery. You have to change minds before you can discuss changing laws. (And besides, I thought we all agreed the anthrozoologists were next in line? Then NAMBLA. Wait your turn.)
I have always wondered why the government is involved with marriage at all. Seems like it would be simpler if we set it up like this:
Everyone pays the same taxes no matter what, and you better write an explicit will and testament to control who gets your stuff when you die/can pull the plug on your vegetative state. Ie. no special benefits/drawbacks for married people.
If you want to get married, great---go find a church or a mosque or a ship's captain; it's none of the state's business. The government doesn't recognize the institution of marriage as anything special. Marriage would be an entirely private association, like joining the Elks lodge or something.
That's "simpler" in the "fewest number of base rules" sense, and more complex in the UX sense.
Given the frequency of the desire to enter into a partnership with something like the kind of mutual exchange of commitments and agency relationships packaged in civil marriage, it makes sense as a UX optimization for government in terms of providing sensible defaults for common needs (with the ability for users interested in different configurations to reconfigure the defaults to a certain degree.)
Funnily enough, I too have often wondered about that.
I've also often wondered why your gender is the state's business at all. One way to make the whole gay marriage thing a non-issue would be to say it's nobody's business what you have between your legs, except your doctor and your partner.
There are a couple of scenarios where it would be an issue, like if you go to jail and there are no mixed gender jails, but it's likely that a little bit of imagination would fix that.
How is that a violation? My understanding is that it's a violation to disclose classified information. It doesn't really make any sense to prevent cleared people from reading these things because then who's going to be able to figure out the extent of the information leaked.
Because it's still technically classified. When you hold a security clearance, you're not only agreeing to keep things classified, but also to not pursue any classified information you don't need to know.
This was a big issue when WikiLeaks started leaking info. There were regular memos circulated in DoD and DoE environments reminding people they weren't to be reading classified documents.
As is so often the case with government bureaucracy, that's pretty ridiculous (although I'm not disputing its truth). I can totally see it being a violation to knowingly look at documents that are clearly marked or otherwise denoted as something for which you don't have the need to know. But with something public that probably doesn't have classification markings, how can you possibly know?
I'm currently thinking about dipping my toes in Haskell web development, but am having a hard time deciding which web framework to use. Could you describe why you chose Snap over the other options?
1) Snap is super simple. It's not overdone with metaprogramming etc so it's easy to understand and debug, but it's not so simple that you have to reinvent the wheel all the time.
2) Heist, the templating engine, is super simple and powerful. It subscribes to the idea that control flow should be in Haskell and HTML/XML in the template. It's proven to scale EXTREMELY well.
3) Performance. Snap server has really performed well in production for me. Low memory and CPU usage, fast, etc. Right now I'm just running on a micro EC2 and it's not breaking a sweat under the HN load.
4) Digestive functors is a GODSEND for handling forms. It really looks like Haskell's the perfect language for form processing when you use it compared to other frameworks. It also has features like dynamic lists w/ automatic JS which many other frameworks don't support.
5) Snap is the perfect blend of simple + featureful (framework + libraries). It easily competes with microframeworks in simplicity and the heavy weight frameworks when you need the functionality.
There's a great SO post with more detail from the authors of both Snap and Yesod:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5645168/comparing-haskell... Jump on IRC Freenode #snapframework for discussion. The community is great and really open to all frameworks and language discussion.
Yesod is more popular, faster, has more users, plugins, etc., but is indeed more like Rails than Snap. If you're looking at the simplistic end of the scale, i.e. similar to Sinatra, take a look at Scotty.
