Category Archives: society

A side effect of moral waiver

As early as 2006, the US military started falling short on it’s recruitment numbers, but they made the target recruitment numbers and more. Obviously, with two wars to participate in, meeting this goal was imperative. But in doing so, they had to cut corners. The military started recruiting people with criminal backgrounds including murderers by

A case against ground zero mosque

The ground zero mosque (Park51) controversy has cleaved the media and the public along predictable partisan lines in the US. The Left is screaming “First Amendment” and “Islam does not equal terrorism”, and the Right screams “sure they have the right to build the mosque, but it is insensitive.” Cracked.com pretty much dismisses the whole

Dance Monkey Dance

I assume that you are all familiar with Ernest Cline’s famous spoken word piece “Dance Monkey Dance.” If you are not, just click on this link and you will be. :) In this piece Cline asserts that we are nothing more than monkeys in denial who figured out language and other neat stuff. Before you

On the Institution of Marriage

Given that marriage is an institution of great importance across many (if not all) cultures, it is not unreasonable to expect some sort of a definition of marriage. Ironically, anthropologists are yet to agree on such a definition! Of course, it does not help that the institution itself has been constantly changing over time. So my query is the following: What exactly is the institution of marriage? The institution of marriage, in my opinion, has conflated three different, but related, institutions: (1) a personal institution, denoted pMarriage, (2) a social institution, denoted sMarriage, and (3) a legal institution, denoted lMarriage.