Like your bride? Consider your best man.
In the first installment of my series “Republicans are not only stupid, they’re incredibly evil” I explain how the United States is paying a substantial amount of money to prevent gay marriages (instead of like funding No Child Left Behind or something).
Traditionally, a married couple consisted of a wage earner, the man, and an object sent by the lord jesus christ for his amusement, the woman. If the man earned $200k/year, he would pay a higher tax rate on the second $100k than he did on the first. To lower his tax liability, he could pretend that his wife earned half of his income and they would each be taxed on their own $100k/year at the lower bracket. The Court in Lucas v. Earl held that income should be taxed to the person who earned it and this practice was therefore prohibited.
Certain states however, established community property laws. If the income of a marriage (by either partner) is community property, it is owned in equal shares by each, and the couple’s tax liability would be lowered without implicating Lucas. In response to what amounted to geographic discrimination against taxpayers, Congress began to allow joint returns. In a joint return, the couple where spouse 1 earns $200k/year and spouse 2 earns $0 and does “pilates” all day can file jointly as though each earns $100k (thus lowering their tax liability). A more modern household where each spouse earns $100k/year may file separately or jointly with the same outcome.
Screwed up thing #1…
The True Global Threat
Be warned:
It’s a fucked-up world out there. Let’s face it. Used to be all one had to worry about was the omnipresent threat of nuclear war with the Soviets and, if you’re older, polio and the Prussians. Nowadays we have even crazier diseases we can’t seem to cure (and it seems like they all started by some yahoo having sex with animals), nightly updates on the “war on terror,” and sensationalist news reporting on everything else from sex offenders to storm watches to celebrity “justice.” This permeates every fold of the fabric of our society, from innocuous water-cooler small talk to inundation by the mainstream media.
Yet I feel calm. At peace. I might even say Zen-like, if I were more educated and knew what that was. Actually, it still sounds pretty sweet. I’m going with it. My tranquility is Zen-like. In fact, there’s only one thing that really scares me at all – and it really freaks the hell out of me. It’s not AIDS. It’s not global warming. It’s not even marriage.
Hippopotamuses.
If I have a boogeyman in my closet that keeps me awake at night, or roams freely in my nightmares, it’s not wearing a knifed glove or wielding a chainsaw. No, it’s a goddamn hippopotamus.
“The Turn”: Analogies and Clarifications
So, some have asked me to clarify 1) what exactly the turn argues, and 2) what exactly are the uses or ramifications of the turn?
1…
Before answering what the turn argues, we should look at what epistemologists (those concerned with the philosophy of knowledge and truth) believed before the turn. To borrow from Derrida, before the turn philosophy was dominated by one of two variations on Platonism. The first can be traced back to Plato’s idealism, the other to Aristotle’s materialism. In short, Plato believed there was a literal “world of forms” where “perfect beings” (all that we can imagine or speak about) existed, and to which we could only aspire. Materialism seemed to break with this. Aristotle argued that there was only a material world of cause and effect, and this material world is all that could be studied or known….
