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London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked

theguardian.com

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Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked

#71

Post by clort »

foldr wrote: post #52
DanBC wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same sex marriage is still not legal in NI, so you're not quite right for "UK". And gay people were only allowed to marry in 2014. The UK does better than most countries for supporting LGBT rights, but it took a long time. The UK discriminated against homosexuals for many years, and we still have some way to go to fully recognising rights of LGBT people.

>And gay people were only allowed to marry in 2014. This is true, of course, but potentially a little misleading for people not familiar with the UK, since civil partnerships have been available since 2004.

civil partnerships were also misleading, since myself and my opposite sex partner are not allowed to get one, even though we are both civilians.

Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked

#72

Post by arethuza »

mattgibson wrote: post #7

This article more or less describes what a police state would look like if the Church of England designed it. A controlled, plasticised, corporate Little England, where fun is monitored and must be of an approved nature, freedom of expression is allowed as long as you don't express anything disagreeable, and the public have no democratic rights at all. Yet another small, sad indicator that control over the lives of L…

I think you're being a bit harsh about the C of E - as a Scot they seemed to be a rather friendly organisation untroubled with strong beliefs, particularly about the "God" thing.

However, the Church of Scotland - at least how I remember it from my youth, now there was an organisation dedicated to the eradication of passion and joy from the world.

Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked

#73

Post by alexro »

dragonwriter wrote: post #65
alexro wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why didn't people go out, pick up some orphan kid and give him whatever needed to be 'inherited'?

In its historical roots, though often (but far from always) without the "orphan" part, that's exactly what marriage is: the process by which a family chooses some non-family person to share with some member of the family in the inheritance of the family. (Sometimes in a reciprocal, but even when so often not symmetrical, relationship with another family.)

Usually in such a way that when the parents get older their children would care of them, isn't it?

Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked

#74

Post by function_seven »

alexro wrote: post #66
dghf wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Marriage is a strictly defined cultural phenomenon meaning a relationship between a man and a woman with the original intention to continue the family by having kids. So are you saying that when people marry in old age, it's not really marriage?

It is an exception and was a source for many jokes and lots of drama in literature, wasn't it?

You didn't answer the question.

Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked

#75

Post by alexro »

task_queue wrote: post #59
alexro wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You confusing legal with cultural. If you go around taking about marriage only few will think about gay relationship. And in any case there is simply no real value for gays to become 'married' other than getting a sticker.

If you've acknowledged that marriage culturally is a sticker, why care about something so insignificant? Legally, there is obvious value. Stating such an opinion leads me to believe you are being willfully dishonest in your argument.

It's only a sticker for gays as it doesn't serve any purpose to them. They are pretty good being just in a partnership.

Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked

#76

Post by vidarh »

alexro wrote: post #54
Spare_account wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it isn't. Marriage was adopted by the Church and redefined along the lines you describe - it existed long before that as a legal process to control inheritance. You're welcome to do whatever you think is best within the confines of your own marriage but to say that marriage intrinsically has your preferred attributes is incorrect.

So are you saying that millions (and now billions) of Chinese and Indians who never had Bible and were absolutely poor used marriage to pass inheritance along? Also there were thousands of tribes who never had to worry about inheritance but who have traditions for marriages, no?

Actually, if you bother to look you'll find that tribal societies often have very rich culture and rules around marriage exactly because "worrying about inheritance" is a critical for their very survival. And "worrying about inheritance" is also a substantial part of the reason there is a rich history of marriage that goes beyond one man marrying one woman in these societies.

E.g. many African tribes have traditions for polygamy that are either explicitly intended to deal with men being likely to die earlier (as fighters or hunters) to safeguard the viability of the house-hold and/or to deal with inheritance in societies where women were often not allowed to inherit (a typical case being a social obligation in some tribes for a man to marry his deceased brothers wives in order to ensure she still has somewhere to live).

Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked

#77

Post by vidarh »

alexro wrote: post #62
dragonwriter wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Marriage is a strictly defined cultural phenomenon meaning a relationship between a man and a woman with the original intention to continue the family by having kids. This is wrong in so many ways; "marriage" is a concept that exists in many cultures with many different different understandings, and those understandings have historically been fluid over time even within the same culture. Its most consistently a pro…

So why didn't people go out, pick up some orphan kid and give him whatever needed to be 'inherited'?

Because often the point was to ensure a pooling of the resources of two families.

But adoptions to secure an inheritance chain is historically certainly not that unusual either.

Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked

#78

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

alexro wrote: post #30
TomGullen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say liberal, do you mean liberal but still will not do gay marriages?

It doesn't make sense to call gay partnership a marriage. Marriage is a strictly defined cultural phenomenon meaning a relationship between a man and a woman with the original intention to continue the family by having kids.

The best thing about this comment is: This opinion doesn't matter any more.

Whether officiated by a religious order, the state, or the word of those involved, 'marriage' is just a word, a concept, and has many permutations.

The new Marriage is unbounded by anyone else's beliefs.

The old Marriage is concerned with law, religion, and society. And sometimes we need to drop down a gear and consider these things, but law, religion, and society do not a marriage make.

It is the combination or mixture of elements that gives rise to something new, something neither of the elements alone is capable of, that is a 'marriage'.

Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked

#79

Post by vidarh »

alexro wrote: post #34
mathieuh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strictly defined by whom? It doesn't have that definition for me anyway.

You can call computer a calculator since it does indeed 'calculate' stuff, but you'll be in a minority. Computer's got so much more than a simple calculator, same with marriages - it is much more for a man and woman in every country in the world.

> it is much more for a man and woman in every country in the world.

In every country in the world? There are a large number of countries that allow marriages that does not meet your definition. Both polygamy and gay marriages.

Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked

#80

Post by lucozade »

arethuza wrote: post #72
mattgibson wrote: post #7

This article more or less describes what a police state would look like if the Church of England designed it. A controlled, plasticised, corporate Little England, where fun is monitored and must be of an approved nature, freedom of expression is allowed as long as you don't express anything disagreeable, and the public have no democratic rights at all. Yet another small, sad indicator that control over the lives of L…

I think you're being a bit harsh about the C of E - as a Scot they seemed to be a rather friendly organisation untroubled with strong beliefs, particularly about the "God" thing. However, the Church of Scotland - at least how I remember it from my youth, now there was an organisation dedicated to the eradication of passion and joy from the world.

I see your Church of Scotland and raise you a Free Church of Scotland.

I wasn't a member (my girlfriend was) and I haven't attended a meeting in the last 20 years. But I was still shocked when they (grudgingly) allowed hymn singing in 2010.

Having said that, the garden bridge sounds more like a CofE-esque police state that a Free Church police state. I mean, it'll probably allow flowers and papists and all sorts.

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