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Politics : Actual left/right wing discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (8951)	12/14/2010 8:17:23 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10087

I see no reason to continue the slavery discussion - I think you're simply refusing to accept that people have sold themselves into slavery in history. I only imagined that you said you would allow legal recognition of marriage of fathers and daughters? I would allow it. I have tried to explain the difference between passively leaving the law silent on it and actively advocating legalizing it. I don't know any further way to explain the difference. Yes, its a little confusing ..... you would allow legal recognition of incestuous marriages in an imaginary clean sheet world but you're not for changing the law in the current world in which its illegal. Why bother with the clean sheet approach? Is this a matter of Randian idealism? I actually don't know of any others so far that would allow legal recognition of incestuous marriages, but there probably are such folks. I understand that you would consider that a threat but I think that your concern is producing figments. Yeah, I'm just so insecure here in my binary world. I'll have to ask my strict father what to do. ;>) As for women, I can define essential qualities that define them from men. And the essential quality that distinguishes gays from straights is that gays are attracted to their own rather than the opposite sex. Whatever wiring we have that triggers sexual urges works differently for gay and straights. It's the different wiring, not the behavior. I realize that that's a slimmer difference than, say, the difference between men and women. Yes, it is. Actually it would be amoral, not immoral. Not according to Lakoff as he describes the Strict Father Model, the basic model for social conservatives. In his section entitled moral boundaries, he emphasizes the strict division between good and evil. No middle ground, no standing on the sidelines. If you deviate from the path, that's immoral. If you make deviance seem safe, normal or attractive, that's a threat to the community, which is immoral. If you tolerate deviance from the path, likewise, that's immoral. No place for amoral anywhere. You either support the morality scheme or your don't. I should have read Lakoff to know how to respond there. I haven't read Lakoff but I see he's a Berkeley professor so he must be right about everything. You might try Sowell's A Conflict of Visions. Thats not a liberty I will defend. That's because you expect the legal code to enforce your moral code and I don't. Everyone expects the law to enforce their moral code to some extent. And asking it to enforce the proposition that marriages shouldn't include father-daughter unions isn't very extreme. I want it to be silent on moral codes unless there's a victim to protect. There's always a victim of immorality. Which isn't to say we can protect them all, especially when the victim is the perpetrator. I don't believe a young woman reaches the age of 21 and says hey, I want to bed my Dad suddenly. Maybe, but that's not the question on the table. Its part of the situation being discussed. According to Lakoff, in the Strict Father model, parents raise their kids to be morally upright, which includes self sufficient. And the nurturant family doesn't want their children to be morally upright as they see things? And self sufficient? Once the child is grown, he's supposed to prepared to stand on his own. The parent loses moral authority over a child when he reaches maturity. Trying to exert moral authority after contravenes the moral authority of the child over himself and is consider not only meddling but immoral. Legitimacy of moral authority is a big deal. (Fascinating stuff. I haven't gotten to the part of the book where variations on the central model are discussed.) I don't think you should assume people necessarily fit Lakoff's model. He may be onto some things, he may not. It sounds like you're applying it too much in a cookie cutter manner ..... like I'm threatened by somebody committing incest and my insecurity causes me to want the guilty punished because I had a strict father ..... actually I'm more bothered by the people saying hey, its no big deal. Its the idea that moral relativism or amorality will become standard that bothers me more. Actually, isn't elevation of individual liberty to a point where its the only consideration - morality doesn't count - a binary view too? Actually I think I'm less binary. I can recognize both liberty and morality as good things to advance What I wrote was this: "You are interested only in the morality factor. I am interested as well in the liberty factor. I judge that the affront to liberty is greater than the affront to morality." As you can see, I was recognizing both liberty and morality. I gave the greater weight in this case to liberty. You interpreted that as my making liberty the "only consideration" when I was clearly weighing them both, same as you. Okay, we can both recognize there's a liberty issue and a moral issue. We draw the line in different places. You put liberty over morality even when the subject is incestuous unions .... and I put morality over liberty in that case. In that kind of case, I find the insistence on liberty over morality absurd. I see no need for a clean sheet of paper construct. The clean sheet of paper matters because any proposed action has to consider the default. The default is what we have now. No legal incestuous marriages. Real life doesn't begin from a clean sheet. I see no reason to look at things from a clean sheet construct that pretends there's not existing laws and mores out there. Direction of movement matters. I had a discussion the other day with someone who wanted to raise taxes on the rich. She didn't care what the rates were. What mattered to her was that they went up. Very soon after they'd be raised, that person would want them raised again.