I had another dream, I had another life
Megan McArdle has a piece for Bloomberg that really resonates with me. She starts out with something that I’ve always felt as well: I care a lot about the absolute condition of the poor…but I don’t care whether Bill Gates is living in a house that cost 19 squintillion dollars. I care whether everyone else … Read more
In a long-running discussion about same-sex marriage, one of the participants asked a simple question. It was (paraphrasing): What’s so great about monogamy, anyway? The answer, in part, is that: …imposing monogamous marriage reduces male reproductive competition and suppresses intra-sexual competition, which shrinks the size of the pool of low-status, risk-oriented, unmarried men. These effects … Read more
Right now everyone’s talking about the SCOTUS decisiosn overturning DOMA and (effectively) Prop 8, which is understandable, but I don’t like talking about what everyone else is talking about so I’m going to talk about the decision that was making headlines before the gay-marriage decisions: the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. For those not … Read more
In the first of three articles for the Huffington Post, Jane Ellen Stevens talks about one of the biggest public health studies you’ve never heard of. Dr. Felitti ran an incredibly successful preventative health program, but one of the initiatives had a puzzling problem. Aimed at helping people who were significantly overweight, he found that … Read more
Although I am a social conservative, I believe that social liberals have played and continue to play a vital and important role in challenging the reasons for socially conservative positions. Quite frequently the position you take is less important than the reason you have for holding that position, but this fact has often been lost to … Read more
I’m not with this article from The Economist 100%, but I feel like they are identifying the issues precisely: Modern politics needs to undergo a similar reinvention—to come up with ways of mitigating inequality without hurting economic growth. That dilemma is already at the centre of political debate, but it mostly produces heat, not light. … Read more
It seems I’m back on my Monday morning posting schedule at Times And Seasons. Today I posted about potential problems with Mormon expectations for missions and marriage conflicting with society’s emerging idea of prolonged adolescence. Mostly a Mormon-centric piece again (it is on T&S, after all) but I think margon (Mormon jargon) is relatively light. … Read more
[This post has no real spoilers for the most recent Star Trek movie, but it does have spoilers for a lot of older Star Trek material as well as World War Z and especially the book version of Ender’s Game.] Gary Westfahl has an interesting review of the most recent Star Trek movie (which I … Read more
Last night my wife sent me this excellent Mormon Women Project interview with Tina Richerson, and I read it this morning and had to link to it. Richerson has had an amazing life-journey. I empathize with her engagement with Buddhism, although she clearly got deeper into that tradition than I have so far. I am … Read more
As a general rule when I’m talking about the abortion issue I’m talking about it primarily in America. And, within that context, I usually refer to those who want abortion to be kept legal as “pro-choice”. I use that term for three reasons. The first is that, in my experience, it is generally accurate. Most … Read more
