Is this the future of marriage?
There’s a new take on the whole marriage, “Love Wins” debate, and it’s taken quite a technological turn. Who are you to pass judgement on it? Well, if you have stood up for the traditional definition of marriage, you can.
And I have some questions to keep in your hip pocket in case someone suggests that socialism is a better system.
Mentioned links:
Employees again receive wage increase
Episode 82: The Supreme Court “Hobby Lobby” Case
Jon Bon Jovi’s charity restaurant opens in NJ
The Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation [Wikipedia]
Getting some shopping done? If you're going to shop at Amazon, please consider clicking on my affiliate link. Thanks!
You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes. And please leave a comment letting them know how you like it. I really appreciate listener ratings on iTunes, which can also lead to having more listeners, and more ratings!
If you're on Android, you have Google Play Music, and you'll find the podcast there. It's the most recent of all of these, but it is Google, so it'll grow quickly.
The Stitcher Network is another possibility. You can find podcasts, add them to your favorites, and then either listen to them on the web site, stream them to your smart phone, or to some snazzy GM, Ford, and BMW car. If you do download Stitcher to your phone, please use the promo code “ConsiderThis” to let them know where you heard about it.
You can listen on the Blubrry Network if you like. You can find podcasts and save them to your MyCast list, and come back anytime and listen to the latest episodes.
Similarly, Player.fm allows you to subscribe to podcasts and play all the latest episodes from your browser.
And if you have some other podcatcher or RSS reader, click here to get the direct feed and paste it wherever you need it.
I would love it if you would spread the word about the podcast! Click the Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and other icons (or all of them!) at the bottom of this post to recommend "Consider This!" to your social media audience.
Show transcript
You can marry whoever you want, right? Your choice of marriage partner says nothing about you, right? What right does anyone else have to disparage your choices about love, right? Love wins, so they keep telling us.
This would include a woman named Lilly. Hailing from France, she has garnered a news article all to herself regarding her choice of who to love. First, a little background. Lilly is training to be a roboticist. In fact, she’s 3D printed one. In fact, that’s who she wants to marry.
Lilly realized that this is her orientation at the age of 19 when she realized she disliked physical contact with people. She insists the idea is not ‘ridiculous’ or ‘bad’ but simply an alternative lifestyle. And as soon as it’s legal in France to marry robots, she’ll tie the power cord.
Now, when you think about it, this isn’t a bad idea. She can make her robo-spouse exactly what she wants. If she gets tired of his nose, or even his height, she can 3D print new parts. Once she gets the programming aspect figured out, she can change his personality at a whim. He won’t do the laundry? Doesn’t like the motor oil she prepared for him all afternoon? Squeezes the toothpaste tube in the middle? That’s simply a software upgrade!
And please excuse me, since I’ve been referring to Robbie the Robot as a ‘he’, because that assumes gender norms. A few tweaks to the personality unit, or some 3D printed interchangeable parts, and we have Roberta the Robot. Lilly can be heterosexual, homosexual, or any sort of sexuality she wants with the flick of a switch or the push of a button.
Of course, marriage is also a legal contract, so that would make it clear who gets the house, the car, and the spare parts after the other dies. If she goes first, legally the robot would be free to remarry. Can you imagine the dating site ad? “Single, widowed microprocessor seeks technologically inclined carbon-based unit for relationship to last a lifetime (or 100,000 miles).Must be good with a soldering iron. Experience with the C++ programming language a plus. I like long walks (though not on the beach due to potential salt-water corrosion), deep conversations in binary, and double-A batteries. Do you have what it takes to keep me interested for more than a few nanoseconds, or will you grind my gears?”
Alternatively, if the robot contracts a virus and can’t reboot, what would Lilly do? I hope that at least she’d donate his wires and circuits to IBM. He’s not going to need them after he’s gone.
OK, enough of the joking, let’s really think about it. If someone you knew said that they’d struck up a loving relationship with a robot, what would you think? Would discouraging such thoughts be intolerant of you? Would you attend the wedding? If so, what would you buy them off from the registry at Radio Shack? (Sorry, I just had to.)
Here’s the main issue. Marriage, once society has dispensed with the definition that it’s had for centuries, no longer really means anything anymore. We’ve already said “Yes” to arrangements that were most certainly not marriage, so who is anyone to say “No” to Lilly’s definition?
No one can if they’ve allowed the traditional definition to fall by the wayside. If you haven’t, you can.
Here’s something I came up with while shaving the other day. It’s weird where inspiration will hit you sometimes.
There are those that say socialism is a more fair economic system. This, despite that fact that it is more government coercion that it is voluntary buying and selling, but that’s not my point, at least not right now. What I keep mentioning to its proponents is that there is no historic example of socialism actually working. It always descends into corruption and shortages because of all the power that it gives government. Companies vie for dominance in the economy by buying off government officials, and it just gets worse and worse. In pure socialism, where the government owns all the means of production, all that money flowing through the halls of government is too tempting for most bureaucrats to not skim some off. It’s not that socialism removes a rich upper-class from society; it’s just that they now all reside in the government.
Proponents have long claimed that this would be avoided if the “right people” were in charge. If only this group of angels could be found, then everything would work out perfectly. This brings up a couple of questions.
- Do these people even exist? Given the history of flawed human beings, is there any reason to believe that they do? And it can’t be just the one person at the top, but the entire hierarchy has to be filled with them.
- What happens after these people die or are replaced? Are there regular elections? If so, what if the wrong people get voted in? What does it say about an economic system that can’t survive an election?
And the big thing is that they can’t point to any example in history where this has worked on a medium or large scale. Now, as much as they find capitalism evil, I can point to plenty of corporations that have done the right thing by both their employees and their customers. Two that I have covered in this podcast are Gravity Payments and Hobby Lobby. Gravity Payments instituted a minimum wage of $70,000 per year, and the CEO reduced his pay to that same level. There were some issues while they were making the transition, but so far it seems like their service hasn’t faltered. And Hobby Lobby raised their minimum wage for full-time employees to $15.35 per hour last April; the eighth increase in as many years, and higher than any federal or state minimum. Further, their health insurance policy, for which they got sued by the federal government, included 16 of the 20 contraceptives mandated by ObamaCare. So if an employee’s choice wasn’t on that list, they were paid enough that they could buy it themselves.
Oh, and Jon Bon Jovi opened up a restaurant called “The Soul Kitchen” where you would just pay what you can for a meal. Sounds vaguely socialist, but he could afford to do it because of the profits he’d made over the years from … capitalism.
And there are plenty other examples, but the point is this: Capitalism has examples to point to. Socialism doesn’t. If you don’t like what a corporation is doing, you can stop doing business with them. You can’t do that with government. And yet socialism is the supposed “utopia”. It’s like telling someone, “Sure, that Arsenic Diet has killed everyone else that’s tried it, but for you I’ m sure it’ll be different.”
