On honeymoon in Vegas, Republican governors seek couples counseling with America

[Hatake Kakashi]

Seriously, I can't believe you'd stoop so low. You think I made my statements to make the top score on some fucking game you've dreamed up? I made my arguments because someone declared something I believe in to be evil. My arguments centered around the idea that it is motive, not object (or institution, or whatever), that defines the morality of the subject.

I'm going to step away and relax before I'm tempted further to get nasty about it.

[Osterbaum]

People don't argue to lose.

e: I'm just sayin' that it's fairly reasonable to assume you were arguing your point "to win" ie. you considered yourself to be right and were trying to convince the rest of us.

[phil_]

I can't believe inserting Power Thirst exclamations for levity backfired as completely as it did. Still doesn't make "You didn't address these points we're not talking about, so you're wrong" any more rhetorically sound, though.

[Hatake Kakashi]

I needed that bit of fresh air.

No, Oster. Not necessarily arguing to win or lose, but trying to figure out why marriage could be considered evil. I get the points mentioned, and yes, I concede, in those instances it is. I'm just not convinced that marriage, in and of itself, is evil.

And phil_, my apologies. Unfortunately, I am not quite adept at reading into sarcasm or levity in text. I was attempting to state that ideas, concepts, institutions, physical objects... they're just that. It is the people using those ideas, concepts, institutions and objects that either creates the good or evil in them.

Let's take the example you selected. Money. Now I will freely admit, the pursuit and acquisition of money has likely been more responsible for the atrocities that mankind commits than nearly any other cause. However, the concept of money (at least as I was taught to know it) is simply a physical symbolic measurement of one's earnings. It is a way for a society as a whole to attach a value to work or goods that can be conveniently utilized by its constituents. A dollar bill is not evil in and of itself. It cannot make a choice to commit murder, lie, sleep with its neighbor's spouse, etc., nor can it make a decision to feed the hungry, to put clothing on a person who has none, or pay the rent for someone down on their luck. On the other hand, people often use it to pay for murder, to buy lies in an election season, to rent a hotel room to shoot a pornographic snuff film, to buy groceries to feed their families, to buy a homeless person a hot cup of coffee, or to pay for research into curing disease.

Inanimate object/concept is inanimate.

Morally benign person is morally benign.

Morally corrupt person is morally corrupt.

That's all I'm saying.

[phil_]

I mean, I could argue that the very thing which makes money useful — its ability to conveniently attach a value to goods and services — is where the bad stuff happens; in that it shapes our worldview at a very deep level, i.e. unconsciously and constantly ranking and judging things on a continuum from valuable to worthless, which is what makes people unhappy over petty things; and that spending money to an evil end is a different ball of wax.

But really I'm just glad that breather you took worked and you don't hate us forever.

[Hatake Kakashi]

Originally Posted by phil_

But really I'm just glad that breather you took worked and you don't hate us forever.

Shit, naw. There were other things in the forums that couldn't break me, this didn't stand a chance.

[Marelo]

The argument is not that marriage can't possibly be done well, nor even that it is inherently evil in some way in all its forms. The argument is that patriarchy makes marriage a tool of oppression, as it does with many other things, that the current institution of marriage, as a cultural structure affected by patriarchy, is corrupt.

This is separate from saying that any individual, specific marriage is inherently evil or harmful, either now or in the future. Speaking about these trends has nothing to do with your marriage or pocheros' marriage or the rights of same-sex couples to marry. It is just fine, and even intellectually consistent, for you to believe in your marriage and in the marriages of other healthy couples as good things while still acknowledging that the institution as it exists today, in the context of the culture surrounding it, is harmful.

[Professor Smarmiarty]

I didn't read any posts by anybody else because if I read too many of one persons posts we become legally married.


There are two basic arguments
1) The patriarchy argument is the first and is pretty good. This applies in general as well, even if we didn't live in patriacharl society- you are contracting out your relationship, making it difficult legally and socially to end it, partners are being coerced to stay together which is never a good sign. If they love each other they shouldn't need some form of legal coercion to stay together.
but I prefer
2) That marriage is inherentely evil because it encourages the formation of family groups- of competing units, of people who care more for protecting their family than for the good of the people as a whole. The best way to kill off revolutionaries is to get them married off and preferably to have kids- as soon as that happens their number 1 goal from then on is protecting and providing for their family and their spouse, thus preventing them from taking up risky actions, for pushing for change which will carry with it periods of uncertainity, from doing anything other than trying to make the maximum money possible.
The family unit is a deeply deeply conservative idea and it is promoted as such to enforce social control and to slow change. This is why the church are so all over controlling marriage- this began in the 12th century right as the church started instituting its most major structural reforms to get in with the rising economics and powers of Europe, they hadn't given a shit before, and they have kept it up ever since.
TLDR: Marriage is exploitative. Marriage is normative. Marriage is depowering. And it doesn't have any good points- there is no need for it.

[Magus]

Clearly when we operated under a barter system instead of currency life was all love and roses.

It is simply greed/lust, not whatever particular object we are applying it to, that is the problem. Capitalism is just a convenient evolution of age-old rapine behavior that allows for greater accumulation of wealth with less and less bloodshed--well, in-person bloodshed, there is plenty of vicarious bloodshed occurring--as time goes on. Whether you call it money or mammon it is the same thing.

Same thing with "marriage"--as a state institution it had been used as an evil tool but monogamous relationships are not necessarily good or bad, it is in their application.

[phil_]

Originally Posted by Magus

Clearly when we operated under a barter system instead of currency life was all love and roses.

You know, I almost put "Chickens and Rock Concerts" in that last post as a way of saying that I'm not proposing a return to barter (if we want to call a state that never existed a "return"), but I wasn't sure everyone else had been indoctrinated with the same pro-capitalist arguments I had and I couldn't find a straight-forward example of the "Currency is super because you can't pay for a rock concert with chickens; that's ridiculous" story, so I left it out. Wow, that was one sentence.

So, yeah, some people gonna hate that other people are alive; it seems impossible to change that. However, currency's an extant way society as a whole encourages and rewards that behavior, and I'm gonna complain about things that exist with less prompting than I will complain about things which don't exist.