What is so bad about polygamy?
By Brian Earp (Follow Brian on Twitter by clicking here.)
What do gay marriage and polygamy have in common?
To find out, watch this exchange between US Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum, and a New Hampshire college student. Here’s an edit to give the gist:
Student: How about the ideas that all men are created equal, and the rights to happiness and liberty? [Applause.]
Santorum: Ok, so — Are we saying that everyone should have the right to marry?
Audience: Yes! Yes!
Santorum: Everyone? Ok, so, anybody can marry anybody else.
Audience: Yes, yes!
Santorum: So anyone can marry several people? …
Panopticon Problems: Purists rather than Privacy?
Would a transparent society where we could all watch each other be a better society? A recent paper has made me wonder whether the big problem might not be privacy, but purists.
Intolerance we ought to encourage?
by Anders Sandberg
Government Chief Scientific Adviser John Beddington goes to war against bad science: Selective use of science ‘as bad as racism or homophobia’. He argued: ‘We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of racism. We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of people who [are] anti-homosexuality…We are not—and I genuinely think we should think about how we do this—grossly intolerant of pseudo-science, the building up of what purports to be science by the cherry-picking of the facts and the failure to use scientific evidence and the failure to use scientific method’. Is he right that we should be intolerant of bad science?
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