News

Grindr for heterosexuals: new Pure mobile app facilitates hooking up

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Dina sent me this disturbing article from the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

Young people looking for no-strings-attached sex who don’t want to go through the rigmarole of chit-chat online are looking forward to the launch of a new app next week.

Pure, which has been described as ‘bringing Seamless to the bedroom’, offers sex on-demand by simply asking users their gender and the gender of their preference, whether they can host and then shows them potential partners who answer ‘Okay’ or ‘No Way’.

Pending approval by Apple’s App Store, Pure’s intentionally soul-less and potentially dangerous approach to hook-ups has no profiles, no chat sessions before-hand and deletes unfulfilled requests after an hour.

Markedly different from more traditional internet dating sites such as Match.Com and OkCupid, Pure is also a departure from newer apps for anonymous sex hook-ups such as Tinder and Bang With Friends.

All these apps and sites require some kind of profile and online conversation to get to know the potential date better.

However, Pure, created by Roman Sidorenko and Alexander Kukhtenko removes all of that and simply provides two people who want to have sex based on their image online the ability to arrange a meet-up.

I see this story as the final conclusion of a trend I say when I was in my 20s where men and women were unable to evaluate the opposite sex for the responsibilities of marriage. Although young people said they wanted to get married, the way they did it was by choosing the best looking person available. There was no concept of courting, which is putting a person through their paces to see if they can actually do the job that marriage requires of them. I have literally been told by women that they can tell if a man is a good provider based on his appearance. If he is good looking then there is no need to investigate his academic credentials, his resume, his savings and so on. The tingles and peer approval, according to the criteria seen in the culture, are everything she needs to know his balance sheet. This app is the next phase of that, with pleasurable sex taking the place of slow, steady evaluation.

Now it is so bad that people actually want to have sex with people based on a photo. Honestly, this is so far from where I am and what my plans are that I think that it is pointless to even consider marriage at this point. The rules of this society are going to be made by people like the Bro-Choice man and the Duke University athlete hook-up woman. As women keep choosing men based on appearance, government is going to grow and grow to subsidize their behavior with free condoms, free breast enlargements, free abortions, free single mother welfare, and (for the feminists), free IVF. Why would I get involved with an enterprise like marriage where half the women are Sandra Fluke and the other half disagrees with Sandra Fluke, but is too cowardly to say anything about it for fear of “judging” and being seen as “divisive”. If no one is standing up for courtship and marriage, then why should I feel obligated to risk what I have? It seems like people are just not serious about real marriage. Bills, duties, obligations, intimacy, faithfulness.

There is never going to be evidence that shows that anonymous recreational sex is good for marriage or parenting. People can do it if they want to, but it doesn’t help anyone like me who really wants marriage and parenting done right. The truth is that premarital sex is bad for marriage and parenting. It reduces marital stability and quality. It puts children at risk for many dangerous thing, for example child neglect, child abuse and poverty.  If I lowered my standards and married someone in her 30s after she had lived a life of binge-drinking and hooking-up, it would put the quality of my marriage and children in jeopardy. I would not be able to trust such a woman like that with the responsibilities of wife and mother. I would be paying for a marriage and children, but not getting the kind of marriage and parenting that counts for God.

I don’t mind if a woman wants to go on the “photo-only hook-ups” path through her 20s and early 30s, but I’m not obligated to make those choices (WRONG choices) work out for her. Chivalry means picking a good woman who is struggling while doing good things, and helping her to do good things. Chivalry does not mean picking an immoral woman and trying to make her happy. That’s not chivalry, it’s stupidity. Marriage is not something you do with someone who chooses recreational premarital sex partners based on photographs. Period. Marriage is not compatible with that level of stupidity.

News

Unionized UPS to drop health insurance for 15,000 spouses because of Obamacare

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The Washington Times reports. (H/T Letitia)

Excerpt:

Citing Obamacare, the United Parcel Service plans to remove 15,000 spouses from its health care plan because they are eligible for coverage elsewhere.

Rising medical costs, “combined with the costs associated with the Affordable Care Act, have made it increasingly difficult to continue providing the same level of health care benefits to our employees at an affordable cost,” UPS said in a memo to employees, Kaiser Health News reported.

UPS expects the move will save about $60 million a year, company spokesman Andy McGowan said.

The health law requires large employers to cover employees and dependent children, but not spouses or domestic partners, Kaiserreported.

On Tuesday, Forever 21 Inc. became the latest national company to cut employee hours to counter the impact of Obamacare, the Atlanta Business Chronicle reported.

The Heritage Foundation has more on that Forever 21 story.

Excerpt:

A leaked memo shared last week on social media with the hashtag #Never21 proves the company capped some full-time workers at 29.5 hours a week as of August 18, resulting in a loss of the health coverage and other benefits offered to full-time workers.

Conservatives have warned that the provision under Obamacare defining a full-time worker as one who works 30 hours a week or more incentivizes businesses to drastically cut workers’ hours to avoid the heavy financial burden of mandatory insurance requirements under the bill.

Forever 21 joins several fast food chains that have cut workers’ hours to less than 30 in the past few months, ahead of the provision taking effect.

I’ve blogged about several of these companies who are having to adjust to Obamacare, but actually, this is not happening to a company here and a company there.

Reuters explains:

U.S. businesses are hiring at a robust rate. The only problem is that three out of four of the nearly 1 million hires this year are part-time and many of the jobs are low-paid.

Faltering economic growth at home and abroad and concern that President Barack Obama’s signature health care law will drive up business costs are behind the wariness about taking on full-time staff, executives at staffing and payroll firms say.

Employers say part-timers offer them flexibility. If the economy picks up, they can quickly offer full-time work. If orders dry up, they know costs are under control. It also helps them to curb costs they might face under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

Now on first glance, it would seem that conservatives should be happy because the leftists who voted for Obama are finally getting what they deserve.

However, my conservative deist friend ECM says “not so fast”:

This would be entertaining, but this is a feature, not a bug.

Remember: they passed the present Ocare on the premise that 44-million were uninsured (never mind how bogus that stat was/is)–now that the ranks are being swelled by the self-same act, there will be tens of millions more which, as the left is wont to do, will be used as ‘proof’ that we need single-payer, not that Ocare wrecked a working market for healthcare.

(No, it doesn’t matter that everyone against this law said *exactly* this would happen, because, to the left, cause and effect and accurate predictions–despite their pretensions at being scientifically-minded–are never valid unless it confirms their biases, so they’ll just blame ‘big business’ and the bogeyman for why it’s going in exactly the direction the sane said it would. The media will reinforce this and, pow, single-payer.)

So laugh while you can–it won’t be funny for long.

I think that this could go either way. If the media covers up for Obama because they want single payer, and the conservatives pick someone like Mitt Romney instead of Bobby Jindal or Paul Ryan or Ted Cruz, then we are going to lose. We are going to lose because people will blame the decisions of private businesses instead of the Obamacare that forced them to make those decisions.

We still have the 2014 elections coming up. The public needs to have a good taste of what Obamacare does in order to understand what they’re getting. If they still choose to elect Democrats after seeing the effects of socialism, then they’ll have to live with socialism. I’m fine with it. I don’t plan to be working when the bill comes due, and I’m not going to be paying for big houses and college tuition, either.

Polemics

Alexander Pruss answers an objection to mind-body dualism

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I found this post on the Biola University Christian Thought blog. It’s by famous philosopher Alexander Pruss. In it, he considers 3 arguments against non-physical souls.

Here is the third objection:

The third objection is based on the Closure Principle: The physical world is explanatorily closed—the explanations of physical states of affairs are always physical in nature. The closure principle would let one be confident that scientists don’t need to look for miracles—that explanations of physical events will never go beyond science. If the Closure Principle is true, then no physical event in the brain has an explanation by means of a soul.

And here is his reponse:

I’m going to argue that the Closure Principle is more likely to be false than true.

My argument has two parts. The first part will be to establish the No Physical Explanation Thesis:

No Physical Explanation Thesis: Whether or not the Closure Principle is true, some physical states of affairs have no physical explanations.

The second part will argue that if the above thesis is true, then the Closure Principle is more likely to be false than true.

Sounds to me like he is just talking about the assumption of metaphysical naturalism, which some people accept because of the success of explaining nature using natural explanations. But can you really explain everything with only natural explanations?

Let’s see:

So, first, I need to argue that some physical states of affairs have no physical explanations. A quick argument for this thesis is to consider all of physical reality as a whole. This constitutes a gigantic physical state of affairs. This gigantic physical state of affairs cannot have a physical explanation. For if it had a physical explanation, that physical explanation would be a part of the gigantic physical state of affairs, since that gigantic state contained all of physical reality. But then the explanation, in explaining that gigantic state, would also explain itself, since it itself is a part of the gigantic state. But no physical state of affairs can explain itself—that would be like the absurdity of being one’s own parent.

A second (related) argument is that if every physical state of affairs has a physical explanation, we end up with a vicious infinite regress of physical states of affairs. Physical state #1 is explained by physical state #2 (maybe, my existence is explained by my parents’ existence), which then must be explained by physical state #3, and so on. So we have an infinite regress of physical states of affairs. But the regress does not stop there. For the whole infinite regress will be a physical state of affairs, and hence will need an explanation. So we will have another regress, and another, and so on. This is really absurd.

A third argument is that current science gives us good reason to think that physical reality is not infinitely old, that it came into existence some finite amount of time ago, maybe in a Big Bang. If so, then the state of affairs of physical reality coming into existence won’t have a physical explanation.

These three arguments for the No Physical Explanation Thesis are basically adaptations of the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God, but I am not concluding from them that there is a God—just that something physical has no physical explanation.

So now we’ve learned that some physical state of affairs has no physical explanation.

Let’s give a name to some such physical state of affairs—call it “Blob.” Blob, then, has no physical explanation. There are now two possibilities. Either (1) Blob has no explanation at all, or (2) Blob has a non-physical explanation.

If Blob has a non-physical explanation, then the Closure Principle is false, since the Closure Principle said that no physical state of affairs has a non-physical explanation, and here is Blob—a physical state of affairs with a non-physical explanation.

Of the two options, which is more likely? Blob having no explanation at all? Or Blob having a non-physical explanation? I will argue that think the likelier option is the latter—that Blob has a non-physical explanation.

For physical states of affairs are contingent—they don’t have to be there. Blob, thus, doesn’t have to be there. The idea of something contingent having no explanation is like the idea of something coming into existence out of nothing. It is intuitively absurd. Much more absurd than the alternative, namely that it has a non-physical explanation. Maybe it’s hard for something physical to happen because of a non-physical cause—but it should be far harder for something physical to happen for no cause at all. If we think that that something contingent could happen for no cause at all, it should be even easier for it to happen due to a non-physical cause. So it is more likely that Blob has a non-physical explanation than that it has no explanation at all. But if it has a non-physical explanation, then the Closure Principle is false. So, most likely, the Closure Principle is false.

Moreover, if we admitted that a physical state of affairs, namely Blob, could take place for no reason at all, with no explanation, then it would be a wonder why all sorts of other physical things don’t happen for no reason at all. Why doesn’t a dog-headed person suddenly pop into existence for no cause at all in front of me? Why doesn’t a golden mountain materialize in the middle of the Pacific Ocean out of nowhere? I can give a very simple explanation of why all these infinitely many strange things don’t happen: all physical states of affairs have to have explanations. But this explanation also implies that the Closure Principle is false. For we know that Blob has no physical explanation, and so Blob’s explanation must be non-physical.

The Closure Principle was introduced in large part to save science from giving up on physical explanations and looking for supernatural ones. But if we accept the Closure Principle, then we have to say that some physical states of affairs have no explanation at all. And it is much worse to be willing to give up completelyon a search for explanation than to be willing to give up on a search for physical explanation.

We should thus think that most likely the Closure Principle is false, and hence this argument against interaction between the soul and the body fails as much as the previous ones did.

This sounds a lot like William Lane Craig’s contingency argument, and I think that it is particularly mean (to the naturalists) to invoke science to smash their naturalism. I certainly accept non-physical causation when it comes to the origin of the universe – nothing too mysterious about that. And I think he’s right to say that this shows that it’s at least possible, then, that a non-physical entity could effect material things like our bodies. In fact, I’ve heard J.P. Moreland argue that this is what God actually is – a non-physical mind.