Polygynous cults / student newspaper articles / Warner Bros

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

Alex Hogan wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/35969>:

<< Warren Jeffs and his cult of perverts. Marry the girls as soon as
they hit puberty, run the young men of the same age out. A geezer
pedophile festival. >>

Most cultures which practise polygyny don't have many (if any) more
women than men. So if their elite men marry (= own) large numbers of
women, there aren't enough women to go around; many (sometimes all)
young and/or poor men have no wife at all. 

In theory, the not-enough-women problem could be solved by a very
aggressive culture which is always raiding its neighbors to steal
women, and steal loot with which to buy women from slave traders,
especially if a lot of their men (but few of their women) were killed
in self-defense or revenge by the raid-victim communities.

However, I have never heard of a culture that managed to have 2 or 3
or 4 times as many [female] wives as [male] husbands community-wide.

I have read that the great Zande empire in Africa, whose elite men
could have several hundred wives and concubines, dealt with the woman
shortage by having the custom that young men, warriors in their
twenties, still saving money for the bride-price for a girl, could
marry a teen-age boy. I guess that is a way that a culture could have
significantly more [female and male] wives than [male] husbands?

That marriage ends when the boy is old enough to be a warrior himself.
The bride-price paid to the boy's parents is much lower (more
affordable) than that paid to a girl's parents, but the other rules,
like what a son-in-law gives his parents-in-law on an on-going basis,
are the same. The anthropologist wrote 'If the young man is a good
son-in-law, he might marry one of their daughters some day.' 

But I don't remember if the boy-wife has to fetch water and do all the
cooking and cleaning and grow the food in her garden like a female
wife. Wouldn't that interfere with the boy's training to become a
warrior and domestic tyrant when he grows up?

So whenever I hear of the various polygynist cultists between the
Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevadas with a predilection for
assigning large numbers of girls and young women to older men, I have
wondered what they do with their young men, their own sons. Do they
come up with excuses to expel them? Do they send them to other states
to get jobs in the outside world? Do they keep a flock of unmarried 
young men to act as their militia/enforcers, who remain obedient in
hope of being given a wife? Jeffs gave a young man a wife at least
once, in the case where he was convicted of forcing an underage girl
to marry her 19-year-old cousin. 

It irritates me that these people call themselves polygamists, thus
givng polygamy a bad name.

Mike Ting wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/35979>:

<< Hello friends. I'd like to invite you to read these short articles:
(snip)
3. Man becomes pregnant
<http://www.studentpa.info/spip.php?article611>.>>

Hi, Mike, did you write these articles?  'Man Becomes Pregnant' is
such a National Enquirer headline that I read the article, which is
disappointingly plausible but still enjoyable. I dutifully clicked on
the Gold and Silver Screen one and found that it was long and
scholarly (like a term paper for school), not something I would want
to read.

Bumblebor wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/36081>:

<< I am not the least worried about W.B. In fact, I curse their very
name. I think they totaly ruined the HP movies. I felt the magic in
the first one, felt ok with the 2nd one. The 3rd movie was the first
time in my life I had to force myself not to walk out and demand my
money back. The 4th one, well, they cut out so much, still it was
viewable and I sat and watched it despite my aprehension. And the 5th
movie? I never went to the theater to see it. >>

My opinion of the movies is almost exactly opposite to yours. Of
course the books are MUCH BETTER than the movies, but to me the first
movie was not good; I was terribly disappointed by it. I thought the
second movie was less disappointing, but I'm not sure if that was
because it was better or because my expectations were lower.

The third movie was a delightful surprise because it wasn't a bad
movie. To me, it proved that the previous two movies had been the
fault of the director rather than of the writer, because this one had
the same writer and a different director.

The fourth movie was better than the third and the fifth movie was the
best so far. To me, the fifth movie was the only one in which the plot
changes they made in order to eliminate excess subplots and characters
didn't leave big gaudy scars. 

<< They are in it for one thing only, and its not the story, the
telling of the story, or the fans. They are in it for greed. >>

Well, of course. Time-Warner is a big publically owned corporation.
The board of directors and the top executives have a fiduciary duty to
make money for the stockholders. They didn't go into business to be
Harry Potter fans; they may not even have gone into business to be
movie fans.

In an enterprise owned by Time-Warner, as such Warner Bros movie
studio, the top executives' job assignment is to make money, not to
make good or faithful movies. 

Of course a lot of the people who work for movie studios, even some
executives, went into the business in the first place because they
loved movies and wanted to make good movies, and they are allowed to
do some of what they want to do, either because 'wiser' heads think it
will make money, or because the wiser heads figure that spending this
money to keep this person happy will lead to making more money in the
future. But only a very young employee would have gone into that
career because of wanting to turn the Harry Potter books into movies.

And, y'know, even the people who want to make good movies don't always
have the same idea of what makes a movie 'good' as I do. For example,
some of them really believe in movies that have lots of fart jokes and
sex jokes.