Society

My Thoughts on Slate’s Article About Mormon Weddings

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2013-09-17 Wedding

Slate has an interesting article about the exclusivity of Mormon weddings. I thought I’d weigh in and share some experiences about the decisions my wife and I made.

The background is just a little complex, but here goes. First: Mormons believe that marriages can be “for time and all eternity” instead of “till death do you part.” This is based on a ritual Mormons call “a sealing” by which the husband and wife are “sealed” together for eternity. 

Second, this sealing can only be performed in Mormon temples, which means that only adult Mormons in good standing can attend. If you are not a Mormon, not in good standing, or too young then you can’t come.

In theory, this is not a problem, because in theory a “sealing” and a “wedding” are not the same thing. In many countries that don’t recognize Mormon sealings as legally binding, Mormons have to get a civil marriage first and then they go to the temple to get sealed. But in the United States, a temple sealing is legally recognized as a marriage so you can just have the temple ceremony and that’s it.

If you make that choice, then friends and family who can’t enter the temple feel excluded. The logical choice, then, is to go ahead and continue to separate the sealing from the wedding, but the Church has discouraged this for the past few decades with a policy that says that if you get married civilly first (in the US, where that’s optional as opposed to a necessity) you must subsequently wait a full year to be sealed in the temple.

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What To Do About the Science of Political Bias

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2013-09-13 Irrational Politics

It’s not new news, but here’s another article about another study that confirms that people loose their ability to think rationally (including doing fairly basic math) when politics are at stake.

Everyone likes to share these stories, but most folks don’t really think about them very much. Here are two thoughts I’ve had. 

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India’s Powerful “Abused Goddesses” Anti-Domestic Violence Campaign

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2013-09-15 Abused Goddesses

As Buzzfeed reports:

The campaign simply and effectively captures India’s most dangerous contradiction: that of revering women in religion and mythology, while the nation remains incredibly unsafe for its women citizens.

Haunting, but worth viewing. Also: another uncomfortable reminder of the extent to which feminism in the West has been co-opted as a battleground exclusively for the concerns of politically powerful upper-middle class married women.

The Most Quoted Man In News

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2013-09-14 Greg Packer

The New Yorker has an incredible little video about Greg Packer, an otherwise completely ordinary American who has managed to become the most quoted individual with almost 1,000 individual media quotations:

Since his name first appeared on newsprint, in 1995, he’s spoken to reporters on subjects ranging from the war in Iraq to the release of the first iPhone. Greg’s campaign to be the most quoted man in news has been so successful that the Associated Press sent its staff a memo that essentially banned interviews with him. That hasn’t stopped Greg’s “career.” Individually, his quotes are utterly unremarkable, but, considered as a whole, they add up to a rather stunning body of work.

Follow the link to watch the 5-minute video.

Ronald Coase, 1910-2013

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Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase died recently at the age of 102. Many fine tributes have been written over the past week, but a common theme in many of them is that Coase was an economist interested in what actually happens in the economy. Or, as he explains below, “the approach [to economics] should be empirical.”

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Dog Saves Baby from Abusive Babysitter

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2013-09-13 Good Dog

From ABC News in Kentucky:

The parents of 7-month-old Finn Jordan suspected something was wrong last year when their dog began to growl and snarl at the babysitter, Alexis Khan, 22.

“We noticed the dog was getting very defensive when Alexis was around. He would growl and stand between her and our son. His hair would stand up on the back of his neck and we knew something was up,” Benjamin Jordan said.

The parents stashed an iPhone under a cushion to get a recording, expecting to hear the babysitter mistreating their dog. Instead they heard her swearing at the baby, along with the sounds of slapping and shaking. Police weren’t sure it would be enough for a conviction, but the babysitter confessed when interrogated and was sentenced to 3 years, the maximum, and had her name put on a list of child abusers to prevent her from ever working with children again.

Thankfully the little boy, who the parents rushed to a hospital right away, checked out just fine.

Good dog.

The Modesty Wars

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I initially wrote this post as an irate response to this post from By Common Consent, but I decided to let it simmer for a few days. I knew that Angela C, who wrote that BCC post, didn’t really deserve to be singled out as the target for my ire when she was really just the straw that broke the camel’s back.

So, instead of tackling her post point-by-point, I want to get to what really fundamentally bothers me about the modesty wars. I guess I should start by defining the modest wars.

If you’ve never heard of the phrase that’s OK because, as far as I know, I just made it up. It refers to the odd feminist-vs-feminist battle between social conservatives and social liberals that centers primarily on modest dress. The conservative view is that immodest clothing is intrinsically sexually objectifying and therefore disempowers women. Probably the best proponent of this view comes from Caroline Heldman’s TEDxYouth talk.

The liberal response is basically that an emphasis on modest dress is the problem, not the solution, because it teaches both boys and girls to objectify their female bodies in the first place. Apparently liberals believe that, without specific training, no man would ever objectify women by ogling their bodies and that no woman would ever notice this and respond to it by intentionally inviting such objectification in exchange for leverage. Nope: that dysfunctional co-dependency is all thanks to capped-sleeves.

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Reconciling Murray

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GMU’s Bryan Caplan has an interesting 2012 post on reconciling the work of controversial political scientist Charles Murray. Caplan views Murray’s three main books on poverty–Losing Ground, The Bell Curve, Coming Apart–as complementary. To review:

Charles Murray

– Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 criticizes the welfare state for giving the poor perverse incentives.

– The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (written with the late psychologist Richard Herrnstein) argues that the poor tend to have lower IQs.

– Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 claims that the poor are generally lacking in particular virtues and social norms, namely marriage, industriousness, religiosity, and honesty (in relation to rising crime rates).

Caplan sets it up as follows:

  • “The Bell Curve emphasizes the most stable difference between the rich and the poor: The poor tend to be less intelligent. Cognitive ability is an important determinant of success in almost any society. Smarter workers are simply more productive, and competing employers reward them accordingly. In the long-run, therefore, people with low intelligence tend to have correspondingly low incomes.”
  • “People with low IQs aren’t just less productive; they’re also more impulsive…Implicit: One of the best ways to help impulsive people reach decent long-run outcomes is to give them a lot of strong short-run feedback.”
  • “In Losing Ground, Murray shows what happens when the welfare state shelters people from this short-run feedback.”
  • “The impulsive are swayed more by guilt and shame than careful calculations about the distant future. In Coming Apart, Murray shows that over the last few decades, this tradition/social pressure mechanism has gradually broken down for the working class – and transformed the working class into a dysfunctional leisure class…Removing short-run feedback led to worse behavior, which undermined traditional norms about work and family, which reduced social pressure, which led to worse behavior.”
  • “Elites live in a high-IQ, low-impulsiveness Bubble. When they introspect, they correctly conclude that the welfare state has little effect on their behavior. They then incorrectly infer that the welfare state has little effect on anyone‘s behavior.”

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