If Sally swore to take both Jake and Steve as her lawfully wedded spouses, forsaking all others, then yes, marrying Brian later on would be a violation. But if there was no clause prohibiting additional spouses, she's legally free to play the field and still be considered faithful.
We are talking more about categories than we are about law. If Jane takes advantage of the lack of an explicit clause to cheat on Steve, that does not exactly count as being monogamous, even if it is legal.
Leaving out the "chastity clause" is shorthand for the civilization allowing polygamous partners (of at least a specified gender) to continue courting additional partners, perhaps even adding them to the harem. Depending on how
common this marriage structure is within the civ, it's generally safe to assume that all partners are aware of this possibility, and therefore consented to it when they consented to the marriage itself. This style is neither monogamous nor cheating: it is
faithful polygamy.
But suppose there's another civ, where the rules are slightly different: A polygamous wife may take another lover
only with the specific consent of her existing spouses, or perhaps cannot take new lovers at all. In this case, Sally fooling around with Brian would be an instance of
unfaithful polygamy, especially if Jake and/or Steve did not approve of Brian.
I am nearly always right and the 'handful of other posters' are nearly always wrong. That leaves me with only two options, either I am better than them or worse than them, naturally I prefer the former concept over the latter. . . .
The problem is that I know very, very well exactly why I am right. I have checked and double-checked everything I believe many, many times already in my head . . .
So, in other words, "GoblinCookie knows all. Just ask him, and he will tell you." --
GoblinCookieBut it also the case that unpopularity is a necessary consequence of actually being a genius, at least unpopularity in some circles.
Buckminster Fuller? Issac Asimov? Carl Sagan? Jim Henson? Richard Feynman? All pretty universally liked, at least as far as I know.
(And yes, I
can see that I need to bolster my list of likable geniuses with something more diverse than Dead White Guys.)
It is the main reason I generally hold the crop of official intellectuals of this civilization in such low regard, if they are held in such high esteem by this society then they are obviously mediocre at best;
I'll pass that on to them, though I'm sure they'll be devastated.
Being actually wrong and incapable of ever arriving at the truth they [the geniuses] can bask in popularity and advance their careers, but if they actually arrived at the truth they would bask in mass hatred and lose their careers.
I'm just going to admire the staggering enormity of your arrogance for a moment.
Okay, that's long enough.
I see how we are moving from actual history to fantasy literature. That is a problem because we are now hostage to the ignorance of the fantasy author rather than that of the historian.
Oh--are you referring now to the
actual history of dwarves, crundles, foul blendecs, and bronze colossi?
Your friend seems like almost a test-case for the one-eyed man in the world of the blind claim. Your friend knows that predators control their own population because otherwise they would all starve to death. Yet there are good number of non-predators, elephants or rhinos for instance that are in the same boat at the predators are, not much eats a rhino or an elephant. Yet despite the fact that same principle logically extends then at least to the nigh-indestructable non-predators, but still your friend can still claim that only predator animals do that?
As neither elephants nor rhinos tend to frequent the freshwater wetlands of the northwest United States, I can see how they might have slipped my Riparian Analyst friend's mind during her reply to me. But on her behalf, I might point out that both of these animals (as well as their American counterpart, the bison) "control" their own offspring primarily just by being more K-selected, as previously mentioned in the thread. They do NOT voluntarily practice chastity: Even the youngest and weakest bull elephants will
try to mate, failing only when they are driven off by larger, stronger bulls. As I've said right from the beginning, by far the most common strategy in the animal kingdom is for all animals to
try to produce as many offspring as they (safely) can. Of course there are exceptions, but they're just that: exceptions.
But I'll advise my friend as to your analysis of her ability to do her job. I'm sure
your superior skills, experience, and of course sheer intellectual rigor would be of great benefit to her in the performance of her duties, and she should rightfully be grateful for any pearls of wisdom or advice you might deign to offer her.
But no, a household is not a house. A household lives in a house and the house defines the household as a unit. . . .
Tell you what, I'll be frank. We all know that you're never going to admit to being wrong, certainly not to
me, so I'm sure you can understand when I say that keeping this played-out thread alive solely to listen to you retcon your past misstatements into some tortured form of technical correctness is an idea that has remarkably little appeal for me. For all I care, you can continue to sit in your nowhere land, making all your nowhere plans for nobody.