Author Archives: Editors

Below the Surface: How Our Unconscious Rules Our Lives

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An article from Scientific American

Note: To read the full article, please click the hyper-link!!

Below the Surface: How Our Unconscious Rules Our Lives

Driving home after a visit with a relative, you suddenly realize you have no specific memory of how you got there. Well, you’ve taken that trip so many times, you tell yourself, that you could just about do in your sleep. Tying a shoe later, you reflect again on how often you accomplish things while your conscious mind is barely paying attention. Of course, you’re not wrong. We all have those moments.

At around three pounds, the gelatinlike tissue in your skull accounts for only a couple of percent of your total body mass, but it consumes a lot of energy—some 20 percent of the calories you eat every day. Conscious thought is “expensive” in energy terms. Is it any wonder the brain tends to shift its more costly processing tasks toward becoming more automated, “cheaper” routines?

That thought struck me during one of our weekly editorial meetings some months ago while we were discussing story ideas. How much of our lives is actually decided for us by our brain without our active awareness, I wondered? Naturally, when I asked that question out loud, longtime Scientific American senior editor Gary Stix was only too happy to explore the answer. The outcome is the cover story by Yale University psychologist John A. Bargh, “How Unconscious Thought and Perception Affect Our Every Waking Moment.”

Bargh explains how decision making about such tasks as voting, making purchases or even planning vacations often occurs without our giving things much conscious thought. In matters small and large, we routinely arrive at automatic judgments, our behaviors shaped by embedded attitudes. Put another way, awareness about our relative lack of awareness gives us a new appreciation for how profoundly our unconscious mind steers our lives.

 

 

 

 

Should Polygmay be allowed in USA ?

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In a recent court ruling in Utah, a Federal judge ruled that the ban on marriage co-habitation is un-constitutional. The plaintiff in this case was a Mormon and asked the court to rule the ban on co-habitation un-constitutional because the existing law uses the language of co-habitation and not polygamy, but the law was applied to polygamy also. The Judge ruled that marriage license, for legal purposes, can be with only one wife but others can be only co-habitants. Following are some thoughts by experts in NYT. Dr, Aziz Amin gave a wonderful talk on this subject at Thinkers Forum some time ago.  Although it has religious dimension also, but If you like to comment, please comment only from social and legal point of view and not religious aspect. Thanks. ( F. Sheikh)   

Legally, No Different From Same-Sex Unions

Ron Den Otter

Ron Den Otter is an associate professor of political science at Cal Poly San Luis Opisbo.

DECEMBER 17, 2013

Americans are becoming more accustomed to the idea that it may not be wrong for people to have unconventional intimate relationships, provided that all of those involved are consenting adults. Television programs, like HBO’s “Big Love,” TLC’s “Sister Wives” and the National Geographic Channel’s “Polygamy USA” have illuminated the unique challenges of multipartner relationships. The more charitable media portrayal of polygamy, coupled with the debate over same-sex marriage, has encouraged a few academics to think more deeply about the meaning of marriage in a morally pluralistic society like our own. Limiting the size of a marriage may soon be seen as no more justified (or constitutional) than restricting marriage to same-race or opposite-sex couples.

Enough With the Scare Tactics

John Corvino

John Corvino, chairman of the philosophy department at Wayne State University, is the author of “What’s Wrong With Homosexuality?”

UPDATED DECEMBER 17, 2013, 6:30 PM

 

Conservative fearmongers have long warned that same-sex marriage will send the nation down a slippery slope to polygamy, and they’re pointing to the recent Utah decision as evidence. The marriage-equality movement does indeed have a connection with recent challenges to polygamy bans — just not the connection that fearmongers contend.

 

 

There are two versions of the slippery-slope argument from gay marriage to polygamy, and as I’ve argued at length elsewhere, they’re both bad. One version claims that because procreation requires one man and one woman, that’s the only logical arrangement for marriage, and once you reject that standard, anything goes. But whatever its merits as an argument against same-sex marriage, the physical complementarity of the sexes makes a terrible argument against polygamy: Human biology makes it quite possible — which is not to say desirable — for a man to impregnate multiple women or for a woman to bear the children of multiple men.

We Are a Nation of Boundary Breakers

Melynda Price

Melynda Price is an associate professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law and blogs at Thoughts of an Ivory Tower Interloper.

DECEMBER 17, 2013

We tend to forget this nation began with the pushing, then breaking, of boundaries. We have moved in slow, plodding steps from a nation that practiced widespread exclusion to a more expansive democracy. It may be hard for some to swallow polygamy as a democratic practice, but perhaps it is.

Polygamy Is Bad for Women

Shoshana Grossbard

Shoshana Grossbard is a professor of economics emerita at San Diego State University and a visiting professor of economics at the University of Zaragoza. In 2010, she testified as an expert witness at a constitutional reference case in British Columbia aimed at determining the validity of Canada’s polygamy law.

UPDATED DECEMBER 17, 2013, 6:39 PM

According to Pierre Trudeau, late prime minister of Canada, “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” In that spirit Adam Winkler favors lifting the ban on plural marriage.

I used to agree with him, but now I think differently. Under polygyny, markets for wives are sellers’ markets, where men can participate multiple times but women can only do so once at a time. Assuming a free market, women will pick their marriage partners and capture the entire value added of marriage.

A Step in the Wrong Direction

W. Bradford Wilcox

W. Bradford Wilcox, the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, is the author of “Gender and Parenthood: Biological and Social Scientific Perspectives.” He is onTwitter.

DECEMBER 17, 2013

 

In their embrace of a laissez faire approach to family life, some liberals andlibertarians seem blind to a basic truth: namely, the success of liberalism depends in part on thriving two-parent families. Not so for William Galston, who recognized in his book “Liberal Purposes” that American liberalism depends upon virtues most likely to be cultivated in a particular family type. He wrote: “From the standpoint of economic well-being and sound psychological development, the evidence indicates that the intact, two-parent family is generally preferable to the available alternatives.”

Understanding Who ‘They’ Are

Ralph Richard Banks

Ralph Richard Banks, the Jackson Eli Reynolds professor of law at Stanford Law School, is the author of “Is Marriage for White People? How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone.”

DECEMBER 17, 2013

Will the advent of same-sex marriage portend the demise of laws that prohibit polygamous marriage? Maybe. The legal arguments for the continued prohibition of polygamous marriage are not nearly as weighty as commonly thought. Rather, what undergirds the continued rejection of polygamy are social understandings that inform moral and legal reasoning about marriage laws.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/12/17/should-plural-marriage-be-legal/understanding-those-who-practice-polygamy

 

“A Literary Look Back at 2013” New York Times

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“The first ever Lahore Literary Festival — not because it was the largest such festival in the world, or the most star-studded, and not because festivals are in and of themselves always good things, but rather because, at the sight of its 800-seat main auditorium filled repeatedly beyond capacity, every stair and aisle occupied in the giddiest breach of fire safety, and with so many hundreds more keen but unable to squeeze into this or that talk, most of them half my age or younger, I began to think that, laments to the contrary notwithstanding, the ranks of readers are in fact growing, in Pakistan and I suspect across Asia and Africa, and that this is a wonderful development, worth our taking a minute to cheer.”
— Mohsin Hamid

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, all 10 columnists look back at 2013 and answer: What was the most interesting literary development — welcome or lamentable — of the year?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/books/review/a-literary-look-back-at-2013.html?ref=books&_r=0

Surviving on Delusions

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Shared by Tahir Mahmood

Despite the change of guards in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, Pakistan is continuing to experience the consequences of its chronic misdiagnosis of terrorism.

Take Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province. Its government, led by Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, has blocked the NATO supply route through the province in a bid to force Washington into calling off its drone attacks—on Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists—which it says result in the loss of innocent lives as collateral damage.

Few can protest against PTI because the rationale of its disruption of the supply route is based on an all-parties consensus in Pakistan against drone attacks. This consensus is based on yet another all-parties consensus tasking the Pakistani government with holding “peace” talks with the Taliban. Given the fact that 80 percent of Pakistanis, according to a recent survey, hate the United States, it appears as if Pakistan is set to pursue a Taliban-dictated change in its foreign policy. Another unavoidable perception is that, given Pakistan’s international isolation, the state is in the process of shifting its allegiance to the Taliban as legitimate rulers. The state survives on its robust delusion-dependency.

http://newsweekpakistan.com/surviving-on-delusions/