The TV show Gossip Girl has a limited number of main plot devices. Relationships between characters, which receive much attention, are usually:

1) dating
2) fighting
3) trying to be friend

(3) never lasts. It always turns into (1) dating, (2), fighting, or (3) avoiding each other.

They don't just reuse plots. They also reuse characters. In other words, the people doing the fighting, and the people doing the dating, are the same small group.

When they branch out it usually has to do with either an affair, hurting someone, or more often both.

It'd be nice if it was just a fantasy, but The Hills is rather similar, except without any script.

Good principles Republicans have (interpreted to make them as good as possible):

1) American/Anglo/Western values are objectively good and it would benefit people in other cultures to learn them.
2) Morality is important.
3) Sometimes you have to stand up for good values, and even fight for them.
4) Good traditions should be respected. That means people who wish to change them should understand them and their value, and suggest only well-thought-out improvements which they can reasonably expect will do no harm.
5) It's good for people to be competent to take care of themselves, and to take responsibility for themselves, and to take pride in running their own life.
6) People should voluntarily be friendly and help each other out.
7) There is evil in the world and closing our eyes will not vanquish it.

Good principles Democrats have (interpreted to make them as good as possible):

1) Society is capable of lots of improvement.
2) All suffering can and should be avoided.
3) Peaceful differences in ideas or culture should be tolerated.
4) All people matter, even if it's an eight year old blind, lesbian, Muslim girl with purple skin, no money, and no education.
5) When people are unhappy there is a way to solve the problem, so everyone would be happy, without hurting anyone.

Basic libertarianism:

1) The market should be free.
2) The government should be smaller and less intrusive.
3) Society should aim to be more voluntary. People shouldn't have to do things they don't want to, when possible.
4) Defensive force is acceptable. Initiating force against peaceful people is not.
4b) Defensive force includes defending A) yourself B) anyone who wants you to defend him and who has the right to defend himself in the situation
4c) Force includes threat of force, and includes fraud.
5) All laws should involve a victim who did not want the crime to happen and is materially harmed by it. The rest should be repealed.
6) People have the right to life, liberty, and property.

A rational boss doesn't do anything just to close off doors; everything else being equal he'll avoid it; he just does what's best for his business.

A rational marriage would have to follow that pattern. Doors would only be closed when there is a compelling reason, such as a way that it helps one's children.

There isn't even a pretense that real life marriages are like this. There isn't explicit analysis of marriages on these lines. It's not how people talk or think about it. They say "don't cheat or you're a lying bastard" rather than using an argument that relates cheating to some material harm. They make each other promise things, and use those promises as bludgeons, without constant references to how this makes for a better family. They even say things like "love isn't rational". And they often use emotional blackmail: "don't do X or I will feel bad."

Not only do people not approach their marriages rationally, they are also generally blind to their own situation. If their boss started arbitrarily restricting them, without giving a compelling business reason, they'd resent it. In marriage they excuse it and do it to their partner. This blindness is best explained as the work of anti-rational memes.

In this clip, one girl shows signs of wanting privacy, but the other uses common techniques for making it difficult to maintain privacy. This is unscripted.

Theism gets a lot of attention as a nasty meme. Among people I know, romance gets attention to. And parenting and education memes. Fad diets. Scientism. Post-modernism and nonsense philosophy. Environmentalism and various political memes.

There are other memes that are less obvious. One of the very worst memes in existence is the idea that some problems are too small to bother solving. It's everywhere. I could give examples, but that never seems to work. People need to figure out how to spot it for themselves. They can't just watch for things on my checklist of examples. Be on the lookout whenever people dismiss something and say it's too much trouble. Sometimes it manifests itself as laziness. Sometimes as scorn. The constant factor is that there is undue resistance to a small potential improvement because it's small rather than because of some actual defect in the proposal. Watch for anytime someone goes to more trouble avoiding trying a possible solution to a problem than it would take to do it.

What I do want to say, rather than examples, is why it's so bad. It sabotages piecemeal change. It completely prevents gradual improvement. And that's the only approach which really works. Where would the Earth be if a single mutation was deemed too small to bother with? It'd be nowhere. Evolution could never have created anything. When you rule out small changes, you prevent all improvement from getting started, which leaves only disastrous revolution available.

Marriage closes doors. It forces one to destroy other relationships that could have become something great. Sometimes it forces people to "make a choice" which means to destroy a relationship that already is great.

Relationships should develop piecemeal. Marriage (and the courtship preceding it) causes a revolutionary change in one's life. "I do" is final. It's not open to correction should it be mistaken.

Everyone knows this. It's not a secret. They know marriage can be hard or painful. They know it can involve sacrifice. They know it's a big commitment that can "happen so fast" and that sometimes one has to make a big decision, with serious consequences, which he doesn't feel quite ready for.

But they do it anyway. They say that's how life is. They are pessimistic that life can be better. They say the pain can't be avoided. And they say it's worth it. They are pessimistic that alternative ways of life can have equivalent or superior upsides.

That's not how life is.

You can have two hobbies. You can do them both. But you can't have two intimate relationships. No one asks you to choose one hobby and stick with it, and to give up the other.

You can have one kind of fun one day, and another the next. No one asks you to choose one and devote yourself to it permanently. Variety is the spice of life.

You can have lots of friends. And that's important. Knowing different types of people help's one see different perspectives on life. Culture clash is educational.

Intimate relationships are important, they say. Intimate relationships teach you a lot, they say. They change you. Who you marry is very important because each person is different, and your life will be different based on who you choose. There's different things to learn available with each spouse. There is goodness to be derived from many different possible intimate relationships. But most of it will never be yours. They say it is there, and they say it cannot be yours. You can only have a little piece of it.

Relationships are joyful, they say. They make people happy. They also make people sad. Too bad. That's just how life is. You can't do anything about it. Don't even try. Just accept it. Problems are not soluble.

Who is so blind as will not see?

People acknowledge that a "sweet nothing" is a "nothing"; it has no content. So how can it be considered sweet?

I finished reading Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee. I have several comments on the last chapter. One is that replacing the phrase "X is a certain truth" with "X is an almost certain truth" does not make one a serious fallibilist. There have been hints that Magee doesn't really understand fallibilism throughout the book, and it's pretty blatant in the final chapter. On the last page of the book Magee talks about what we can and can't prove as if that's important. A fallibilist would know that we can't prove anything, so "can we prove X?" is not a useful thing to wonder about X.

Here is an example of Magee's disrespect for fallibilism on page 454:

We may not know how to answer [the questions above], but their significance--and, what is more, their fundamental importance--can scarcely be open to doubt.

And another on page 452:

I think I know that our situation is at least roughly as I have described it up to this point.

BTW, what is he so sure of? That realism is false! He's so sure that we have "selves" that are not part of the natural world. He's so sure that looking into a person's eyes is not a physical process. He's so sure that his favorite school of philosophy (German Idealism) is correct. How sad and parochial!

I think the worst passage in the book is this one, on the second to last page (462):

Throughout my life I have believed that I knew when I was doing wrong. The problem in those cases has not been knowing what was right but doing it.

Throughout the book Magee makes one thing especially clear: he loves philosophy. He is curious. He has questions and he wants answers. He loves to learn new things. He cares about creating knowledge.

This passage is a striking exception. It is extremely disrespectful to philosophy. It says that with regard to morality, philosophy has nothing to offer us. It says there are no interesting or important problems or questions to explore about how to live. It says that thinking is not needed. All that is needed is to obey the moral rules his parents taught him, and they are good enough for all of time, and the only problem is how to obey them more faithfully.