Posts by James Butler
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to Moz,
So when people ask, I just say “it’s complicated” and leave it at that.
Ah, I always wondered what that meant. Some of my Facebook friends just became much more interesting.
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Buteven though some of the APN…
Just getting into the spirit of things…
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The sad thing is that Stephen's graphs really are an interesting thought experiment; the kind of thing that I imagine would make an amusing diversionary presentation at a behavioural economics conference. But behavioural economists would know that the next step would be to find or conduct some research to see how well the models correlate with observed fact, then to have a little chuckle at the folly of humanity and file the paper away under "Misc."; not to go around telling people that Maths Says they can't be happy.
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I would like to pursue a VLR with Tom's newly-coined term "VLR".
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I know our marriage license would have been denied if I'd had to sit a test for it. 18? Pregnant? Together less than a year? Sorry sir, ma'am, come back when you've grown up.
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Totes.
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Missed the edit window to fix a small thinko in that last post: of course an informal relationship can't end in divorce. But you knew what I meant.
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to Stephen Glaister,
Here's a google drive link to a pdf
Thanks Stephen.
In your paper you go to some lengths to show that the probability of any given polyamorous relationship being personally fulfilling to all the involved parties is less than that for a two-person marriage. This may be true; I don't know, but I think it's irrelevant (I'm not even going to go into the fact that we don't assess hetero couples on their probability of happiness before allowing them to marry). You then claim that it follows that polyamorous relationships should not be formalized as marriages. I'm not sure I understand how you get to that claim. Would the availability of PA marriage change the probability of PARs forming, or of existing PARs ending in unfavourable (ie. societally costly) circumstances? Do formalized vs. informal PARs have different probabilities of being fulfilling? Are the costs to society of a formalized PAR ending in divorce any greater than those for an informal PAR, and even if so, is the difference in cost greater on average than the benefits of allowing PA marriage?
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to Stephen Glaister,
I've got what I take to be a sound argument against extending marriage to poly-arrangements, one that applies gender-neutrally and even when all background liberal democratic norms of consensualness and non-coerciveness are satisfied. It's complicated tho'. If that sounds interesting to you, and you're up for long reads go here.
I would read your paper, but "Issuu" wants to take up my whole screen, which is unhelpful when I'm at work. Is there another format available?
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to Bart Janssen,
So if I understand you correctly you'd like a legal structure where any number of people of any sex can form a contractual relationship. The purpose of the contract might include guardianship of children, ownership of property, next of kin rights (eg turning off the respirator).
Well put. Civil relationship law should be a generic framework for recognising relationships, including whatever safeguards need to be in place for child safety etc. Couples, n-tuples, churches and whoever else should then be able to use this framework however suits.