andrewducker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
andrewducker) wrote2011-12-19 11:00 am
andrewducker) wrote2011-12-19 11:00 am
Interesting Links for 19-12-2011
- Lib Dems come out against tax breaks for married couples
- Why I object to the worship of moral systems.
It's what makes me very wary of things like constitutions that are very hard to change and seen as more than "Some rules that makes it easier to live together."
- A very Lovecraft Christmas
- My Favorite Strange Number: Ω
- Merry Christmas, War Is Over (In Iraq)
- Official Lord of The Rings LEGO - coming in the summer!
- 5 Ridiculous Sex Myths From History
- Harmless Weapons
- British Telecom sues Google over Android (and almost everything else)
- Major poll finds Britons conflicted on immigration
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I love finding things that are outside of my understanding though, but seem to make a certain amount of sense.
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Speaking from personal experience, I have one child born to a relationship that was not a marriage and one born to a relationship that is a marriage. The idea that one of my children is less worthy of a bit of temporary community support because of choices I made about my relationships just makes me cross.
Particularly, when part of the underlying message of tax breaks for marriage is bound up in a view taht “your conformist relationship is approved of in a way that makes society approve of *my* conformist relationship.”
That's before I get to it being used as a tool to activelly disapprove of other people's non-conformist relationships.
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(and I'm avoiding thinking about the child benefit reforms that are in the pipeline for fear that I may throw one of my colleagues out of the window in a fit of Hulkesque rage).
It does highlight one of the difficulties of a collective response to social problems (not that I think people having lots of children when they are not well off is a problem per se, the problem is how collectively we ensure that said children don't starve and get a decent run up at their life).
However...
Where there are opportunities to game the system or perceptions that the system can be gamed I think people become wary of a collective response.
Where the connection between those whose surplus is contributing and those whose deficit is being met collectively I think people become wary of a collective response.
And tax breaks for marriage are IMHO as open to gaming the system as child benefit is. How do I know that the marriage isn't a sham? That the couple are really planning to have children in a safe, secure, loving environment and not to squander my hard earned tax pounds on a second home in the Lakes or a ski-ing holiday in the Alps?
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I agree with you about the wrongness of tax breaks for marriage though.
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You are not usually terse so it was noticible but apology accepted.
It is funny how often a tension with some other situation leaks out elsewhere.
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I’m neutral on the whole marriage and children thing. Or perhaps ambivalent.
I see no reason why a marriage should contain children or the intention to have children. It’s a convenient way for people to share a host of legal rights and obligations.
It also seems to matter to people. I mean, to really matter to people as a life defining event. With or without children, entering into the institution seems to be an important thing for many people. I’m all for the broadest possible access to an institution that is at least partly founded on love and which seems to correlate with happiness.
On the other hand I think that children in stable parental relationships* tend to be happier and materially better off than children in unstable families. I note the correlation between stability and marriage. I don’t think there is a causal relationship that flows from marriage to stability. I think the causal relationship probably flows from stable relationships leading to marriage. I would like to encourage people who are thinking of having children to do so in a stable family** environment. I find parenting hard work and the times when I’ve been a single parent have been amongst the most difficult in my life. I don’t imagine many single parents find parenting physically, emotionally or financially easy. I think we’d all be a little better off if people were a little more circumspect about having children***
But encouraging people to life their lives in a particular way is a difficult place for the state to play.
Marriage, as far as the state and its legal apparatus is a useful shorthand but I don’t think we should lose track of the fact that marriage isn’t just about making the administration of state business easier and that it has individual meaning for people.
*and I really mean parental relationships in the broadest terms possible
**again, family in its broadest sense.
*** and I absolutely include myself in this.
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What really matters to me is my relationship. Getting married is important to me because I love my partner and am committed to him, and it is the recognised way we celebrate that in our society. But aside from the legal protections, I don't intend for my marriage to be any different than our current relationship, although I recognise that other people may see it differently. But maybe the fact that I'm not a Christian has a strong bearing on that.
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I don't *think* my relationship with my lovely wife is any different now that we are married (and have been for five years) that it would be if we weren't married but I am aware of being inside a more secure wrapper. Getting unmarried is much harder than getting married.
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I get the security wrapper thing. For me, I think that added feeling will come more from other people recognising the importance of our relationship, but I think my partner is a bit less secure and will feel more as you do. But then he's co-habited and been engaged before whereas I haven't so this is already a unique relationship for me.
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I'd kinda thought we'd moved a bit beyond the point where one person's doing something in private somehow affected the moral quality of other people doing the same or a similar thing.
My view on marriage is very coloured by my own parents who were married in a registry office and them my studies of Roman law and history with its grades of marriage from a simple contract to a deeply sacred and unbreakable bond. When I came across the Roman treatment of marriage it chimed with my parents experience of a non-religious marriage. I've always taken the view that the religious aspects of marriage can be important they are not a sine qua non of marriage.
I guess other people feel differently.
A lot of the security wrapper thing for me is to do with the external recongnition. I think there is something important about making a public declaration and being recognised by friends and strangers has having made that committment that creates a powerful message. (and why on earth we would want to deny other people the ability to engage in that I don't know, although if you asked me about polyamorous marriages I'd instinctively be really uncertain about them).
And the message is sends out is power too. "If you break this deal you are a bad person."
Thinking about my own marriage and the difference between it and my previous significant relationship I wonder if part of the strength of the message is me being able to say "This relationship, this is the special one."
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Should have used a paragraph break instead of a fullstop, I think.
Although, in the context of tax breaks for married people given on the grounds that marriage is an institution for supporting the family and, therefore I presume, supporting child raising I might ask the proposers of the married persons' tax allowance if they consider marriages where there is no intention to have children to be a sham.
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Damn me, I've been duped. I've been tricked into overly liberal views on important social issues by the damn feminazi/gay militia. Again.
*sobbing*
You blew up marriage. You maniacs. Damn you non-standard relationship rights campaigners, damn you all to hell.
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Aaaaaaaaaaaargh!
I'll bet a pint that's not what the data they're referring to actually say. (Giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming they are referring to actual data, rather than making it up out of whole cloth.)
And even if it is, there is a huge, huge inferential leap from that statement to it being a remotely good idea to provide a small financial incentive for people to get married.
(To be fair: Kudos for not saying 33% and 11%, and for not compounding their error by saying that couples living together are three times more likely to split up before their child is five than married couples. And the statement as written might well be true - marriage is clearly important and has that important association.)
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For more on the subject of nonsense related to sex, I recommend Virgin: The Untouched History by Hanne Blank. It's one of the great "everything you thought you knew is wrong" books.
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I'll get to it at some point. The reading list is a little long right now :->
Chaitin's Omega
I have daydreamed about this being an important hole in the theory, but I think it's more likely to be a tricky technical detail that Chaitin skips over in his popular book.
But what do I know? I don't even know how to get a greek letter or superscript into an LJ comment.