A recent essay on Big Think says:

Birth control isn’t about my health unless by health you mean, my capacity to get it on, to have a happy, joyous sex life that involves an actual male partner. The point of birth control is to have sex that’s recreational and non-procreative. It’s to permit women to exercise their desires without the sword of Damocles of unwanted pregnancy hanging gloomily over their heads.

It seems to me that pro-sex rhetoric would have more traction if it gave some weight to the role of sex as an expression of love, which reinforces the bond of couples. Even independent of procreation, that’s a social purpose that the most pleasure-hating communitarian could at least grudgingly endorse.

When did this happen? Mary Ruwart has webbed the first edition of Healing Our World.

How Old Is Your Globe? — Changes of state names, with dates.

Elsewhere someone wrote that libertarians cannot be racist or sexist because our defining tenets include individualism. I responded:

As I understand it, individualism is the moral principle that consent can be given, and obligation incurred, only by the acts of an individual, not by membership in a group (definition made up on the spot, probably flawed). I’m not convinced that it is incompatible with racism or sexism. Enlightened people reject racism/sexism because the weight of evidence says that psychological differences within groups outweigh differences between groups, not because individualism decrees a priori that it must be so.

Have I missed something?

I intentionally glossed over the distinction between personal groupism (treating members of the outgroup differently in one’s private capacity) and institutional groupism (e.g. legal disabilities), partly because the context didn’t specify.

It will be interesting to see whether egalitarian legal principles can survive contact with or creation of

• autonomous artificial intelligences that are more capable than humans in some ways but permanently childlike in other ways;
• uplifted animals;
• aliens in whom the concept of ‘individual’ is fuzzy, such as Didonians (Anderson, The Rebel Worlds), Boaty-Bits (Pohl & Williamson, Farthest Star) and Tines (Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep et seq.).

Whenever I watch a recent French movie, I miss just enough wordplay to wish it had French subtitles.

My newest incoming link is from Wendy Krieger, whose site you should definitely see if you’re interested in polytopes, duodecimalism or the letter Þ.

Many of the anecdotes at Not Always Right concern customers who expect someone to know, without being told anything, what they seek. It crosses my mind that, if you’re stupid enough, you frequently encounter someone who accurately infers things that you have not said, and come to expect it.