gay marriage ,,, What value is "Marriage" or Principles?

The Deconstruction of Marriage

Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 44 Comments

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com.au/2015/04/the-deconstruction-of-marriage.html

The only question worth asking about gay marriage is whether anyone on the left would care about this crusade if it didn't come with the privilege of bulldozing another civilizational institution.

Gay marriage is not about men marrying men or women marrying women, it is about the
deconstruction of marriage between men and women. That is a thing that many men and women of one generation understand but have trouble conveying to another generation for whom marriage has already largely been deconstructed.

The statistics about the falling marriage rate tell the tale well enough. Marriage is a fading institution. Family is a flickering light in the evening of the West.

The deconstruction is destruction. Entire countries are fading away, their populations being replaced by emigrants from more traditional lands whose understanding of the male-female relationship is positively reactionary. These emigrants may lack technology or the virtues of civilization, and their idea of marriage resembles slavery more than any modern ideal, but it fulfills the minimum purpose of any group, tribe or country-- it produces its next generation.

The deconstruction of marriage is not a mere matter of front page photos of men kissing. It began with the deconstruction of the family. Gay marriage is only one small stop on a tour that includes rising divorce rates, falling childbirth rates and the abandonment of responsibility by twenty and even thirty-somethings.

Each step on the tour takes apart the definition and structure of marriage until there is nothing left. Gay marriage is not inclusive, it is yet another attempt at eliminating marriage as a social institution by deconstructing it until it no longer exists.

There are two ways to destroy a thing. You can either run it at while swinging a hammer with both hands or you can attack its structure until it no longer means anything.

The left hasn't gone all out by outlawing marriage, instead it has deconstructed it, taking apart each of its assumptions, from the economic to the cooperative to the emotional to the social, until it no longer means anything at all. Until there is no way to distinguish marriage from a temporary liaison between members of uncertain sexes for reasons that due to their vagueness cannot be held to have any solemn and meaningful purpose.

You can abolish democracy by banning the vote or you can do it by letting people vote as many times as they want, by letting small children and foreigners vote, until no one sees the point in counting the votes or taking the process seriously. The same goes for marriage or any other institution. You can destroy it by outlawing it or by eliminating its meaningfulness until it becomes so open that it is absurd.

Every aspect of marriage is deconstructed and then eliminated until it no longer means anything. And once marriage is no longer a lifetime commitment between a man and a woman, but a ceremony with no deeper meaning than most modern ceremonies, then the deconstruction and destruction will be complete.

The deconstruction of marriage eroded it as an enduring institution and then as an exclusive institution and finally as a meaningful institution. The trendy folk who claim to be holding off on getting married until gay marriage is enacted are not eager for marriage equality, they are using it as an excuse for an ongoing rejection of marriage.

Gay marriage was never the issue. It was always marriage.

In the world that the deconstructionists are striving to build, there will be marriage, but it will mean nothing. Like a greeting card holiday, it will be an event, but not an institution. An old ritual with no further meaning. An egotistical exercise in attention-seeking and self-celebration with no deeper purpose. It will be a display every bit as hollow as the churches and synagogues it takes place in.

The deconstruction of marriage is only a subset of the deconstruction of gender from a state of being to a state of mind. The decline of marriage was preceded by the deconstruction of gender roles and gay marriage is being succeeded by the destruction of gender as anything other than a voluntary identity, a costume that one puts on and takes off.

Destroying gender roles was a prerequisite to destroying gender. Each deconstruction leads naturally to the next deconstruction with no final destination except total deconstruction.

Gay marriage is not a stopping point, just as men in women's clothing using the ladies room is not a stopping point. There is no stopping point at all.

The left's deconstruction of social institutions is not a quest for equality, but for destruction. As long as the institutions that preceded it exist, it will go on deconstructing them until there is nothing left but a blank canvas, an unthinking anarchy, on which it can impose its perfect and ideal conception of how everyone should live.

Equality is merely a pretext for deconstruction. Change the parameters of a thing and it ceases to function. Redefine it and expand it and it no longer means anything at all. A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but if you change 'rose' to mean anything that sticks out of the ground, then the entire notion of what is being discussed has gone and cannot be reclaimed without also reclaiming language.

The left's social deconstruction program is a war of ideas and concepts. Claims of equality are used to expand institutions and ways of living until they are so broad as to encompass everything and nothing. And once a thing encompasses everything, once a rose represents everything rising out of the ground, then it also represents nothing at all.

Deconstruction is a war against definitions, borders and parameters. It is a war against defining things by criminalizing the limitation of definitions. With inclusivity as the mandate, exclusivity, in marriage, or any other realm, quickly meets with social disapproval and then becomes a hate crime. If the social good is achieved only through maximum inclusivity and infinite tolerance, then any form of exclusivity, from property to person to ideas, is a selfish act that refuses the collective impulse to make all things into a common property with no lasting meaning or value.

As Orwell understood in 1984, tyranny is essentially about definitions. It is hard to fight for freedom if you lack the word. It is hard to maintain a marriage if the idea no longer exists. Orwell's Oceania made basic human ideas into contradictory things. The left's deconstruction of social values does the same thing to such essential institutions as marriage; which becomes an important impermanent thing of no fixed nature or value.

The left's greatest trick is making things mean the opposite of what they do. Stealing is sharing. Crime is justice. Property is theft. Each deconstruction is accompanied by an inversion so that a thing, once examined, comes to seem the opposite of what it is, and once that is done, it no longer has the old innate value, but a new enlightened one.

To deconstruct man, you deconstruct his beliefs and then his way of living. You deconstruct freedom until it means slavery. You deconstruct peace until it means war. You deconstruct property until it means theft. And you deconstruct marriage until it means a physical relationship between any group of people for any duration. And that is the opposite of what marriage is.

The deconstruction of marriage is part of the deconstruction of gender and family and those are part

of the long program of deconstructing man. Once each basic value has been rendered null and void, inverted and revealed to be random and meaningless, then man is likewise revealed to be a random and meaningless creature whose existence requires shaping by those who know better.

The final deconstruction eliminates nation, religion, family and even gender to reduce the soul of man to a blank slate waiting to be written on.

That is what is at stake here. This is not a struggle about the right of equality, but the right of definition. It is not about whether men can get married, but whether marriage will mean anything at all. It is about preserving the shapes and structures of basic social concepts that define our identities in order to preserve those very concepts, rather than accepting their deconstruction into nullification.

The question on the table is whether the institutions that give us meaning will be allowed to retain that meaning. And that question is a matter of survival. Societies cannot survive without definitions. Peoples do not go on existing through the act of occupying space. The deconstruction of identity is also the destruction of people.

And that is what we are truly fighting against.

- See more at: http://sultanknish.blogspot.com.au/#sthash.duO1BXBS.dpuf
CS Lewis wrote of "The Abolition Of Man"

Institutionalizing the truth and debate away

The Necessary Rise of the Black Baroness

April 17, 2014 — 1 Comment

Colin Liddell

White woman, presumably filled with guilt, observing Chris Ofili’s “No Woman No Cry,” said to portray Baroness Doreen Lawrence

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2014/04/the-necessary-rise-of-the-black-baroness/

Given that Baroness Doreen Lawrence, the mother of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, is now being touted as Labour’s candidate to fight the London mayoral elections in 2016, it is time to reconsider the complexities of British multiculturalism and how the Black population and Britain relate to each other.

The central problem is that because of real average differences in traits like IQ, Blacks simply don’t fit into White societies, like Britain, that prize “equality.” Most people, of course, know this at a gut level, but on the conscious level there is still a lot of brainwashing, denial, and disinformation, backed up by extremely fuzzy thinking.

People in these societies have been taught that “equality” is a sacred and moral value, so they are naturally reluctant to face up to the awkward fact of continuing Black inequality. It simply does not square with their declared values and actual equality of opportunity that other non-White groups like Asians have no trouble taking advantage of.

The only way out of this paradox is for the society to generate the idea of “racism” and create the myth that Blacks are held back by “evil, racist” White people.

The problem with this, however, is that because these societies are dominated by egalitarian values and the idea that anything “bad” from the past should and can be reformed, they constantly undermine any objective basis for actual racial discrimination with the result that ever more abstruse and chimerical forms of it have to be found or conceptualized.

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Unlike parts of America, which once had a system of apartheid, with some laws that could be described as “race laws,” the UK has never had any racial element in its laws, so, when Blacks from the Caribbean started to colonize the British Isles from the 1940s onwards, there was no legal basis for explaining Black inequality as the result of “racism.”

Instead two other ideas were invoked, namely the ideas of (1) assimilative lag and (2) unofficial racism said to stem from the attitudes of certain members of the majority population.

The idea of assimilative lag was compatible with the dominant egalitarian ethos because it hypothesized that any immigrant group would simply be unequal until it assimilated. In Britain in the 1950s and 1960s it was still possible to view Blacks in this way, especially as the first generation of Black immigrants were ostensibly keen to fit in and “become British.” Even today, ludicrously British-sounding names such as “Winston” (from British PM Churchill’s first name) are common among Afro-Caribbeans in the UK.

However, because it is a false hypothesis and because it has a built-in time-obsolesence, the idea of assimilative lag soon had to be abandoned on both sides. The second generation of Blacks, instead of redoubling their efforts to be accepted by the general population, went in what can be called a more alienated and identitarian direction, typified by the unemployable weed-smoking Rastafarian or the gangster Yardie.

Because of this, British society with its stubbornly egalitarian ethos had to fall back on the idea of “unofficial racism,” that Blacks were being held back — literally forced into crime, poverty, and familial dysfunction — by unofficial racism, despite the much greater opportunities offered to them by British society as opposed to their countries of origin.

Unfortunately, even the basis for believing in unofficial racism had been severely undermined by the Race Relations Acts of 1965 and 1968, which greatly constrained the ways in which individuals who wished to dissociate with Blacks could express their preference, by making it illegal to not serve a person at a restaurant or to refuse housing, employment, or public services “on the grounds of colour, race, ethnic or national origins.”

Rather than reforming a racist system, these laws merely served to shrilly emphasize the non-racial character of pre-existing British society. But they also emphasized the growing mismatch between natural Black inequality and Britain’s egalitarian ethos. This paradox presented fertile political ground for any party that chose to exploit it, so that even the National Front with its crude sloganeering (“If they’re Black send them back,” etc.), thuggish image, and rambunctious street politics was able to make considerable progress.

To avoid exploitation of the paradox in this way, the British establishment responded with a variety of tactical measures, including media propaganda, demonization, infiltration of nationalist groups, etc., but its deeper strategic response can be divided into two main strands: (1) “prejudice mining” and (2) “bundling” — two terms which I have had to coin because they don’t already exist in a political context.

• Prejudice Mining

In the same way that data mining extracts new information from pre-existing data, “prejudice mining” enables states to “extract” new forms of prejudice from behaviour that in previous years would not be considered prejudice by anybody. But whereas data mining uses a variety of techniques such “cluster analysis,” “anomaly detection,” and “association rule mining” to get objectively verifiable results, prejudice mining is much more subjective and politically driven.

The typical modus operandi involves “political spotlighting,” namely the selection of a specific area for analysis, based purely on political considerations and amenability to media exploitation, and then measuring any inequality of outcome against an assumption of absolute natural equality.

Where no unfair discrimination exists by a standard of common sense, “prejudice mining” can then postulate such explanations as “institutional racism,” “a hostile environment or culture,” “micro-aggressions,” or “a legacy of racism,” which can then be backdated as much is required. On the basis of this, it can then prescribe various forms of “reverse” prejudice, such as “diversity training” and job quotas.

An obvious analogy exists with the methods of the Witchfinders in the late medieval and early modern periods, with the earlier assumption that the Devil must exist being analogous to the assumption that natural equality must exist and must be uncovered at all costs.

The initiation of this system can be dated to the 1976 Race Relations Act, which established the Commission for Racial Equality and thus the racial grievance industry.

• Bundling

The weaknesses of the Race Relations Acts were twofold:

Firstly, they were founded on a pretence of hostile discrimination based on mistaken notions of group equality, when the objective evidence correlated with a wide range of other examples of immigration suggests that Britain was unnaturally welcoming and indulgent to the incomers, and certainly more so than they deserved on their merits.

Secondly, the Race Relations Acts brought the Black-White divide into sharp focus, leading to clear race consciousness on both sides and a tendency towards objectivism about the underlying natural group inequalities.

The Race Relations Acts of 1965, 1968, and 1976 had two unforeseen outcomes. They bolstered Black paranoia and feelings of being persecuted, but also created antipathy among Whites, especially working-class Whites, who instinctively realized that far from Blacks being protected against an unfair system they were simply being singled out for preferential treatment.

The rise of so-called “Far Right” parties in the UK can partially be interpreted as a response to these Race Relations Acts. The history of the National Front seems to fit this trajectory rather neatly, with the party being founded in 1967 and enjoying its greatest popularity in the late 1970s.

To offset the polarizing effects of focusing on Black inequality, the British establishment developed a strategy of obfuscation with the issues surrounding Black inequality increasingly being bundled together with other “equality” issues, involving such things as gender, religion, sexual orientation, and disabilities.

It is telling that the 1976 Act was the last Race Relations Act, or, more accurately, the last piece of racial legislation to openly declare itself as racial in its title. Increasingly race issues were linked to other issues in such a way as to disingenuously broaden the base of support.

In a similar way the Commission for Racial Equality, which was actually serving to remind Working Class Whites of how they were discriminated against, also underwent a crafty name change. In 2004 it was decided to “merge” it into a new single equalities body, the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Is this what education means ? ?

The Present—And Future—State of Higher Education in America

Robert S. Griffin on April 17, 2014 — 1 Comment

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2014/04/the-present-and-future-state-of-higher-education-in-america/

The public presentations as part of their candidacies by two finalists for a professorship at the University of Vermont:

Keon McGuire, Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate School of Education and African Studies at the University of Pennsylvania:  ”Problematizing the Presistent Problematizing of Black Students in Postsecondary Education.”   ”In this talk, I discuss methodological tools and theoretical frameworks that educational researchers could employ in order to move beyond studying Black students as problems and investigate new phenomena; namely the intersectionality of students’ racial, gendered and spiritual identities.”

Dr. Kelly Clark/Keefe, Associate Professor, Appalachian State University:  “Becoming Outsider, Becoming Educated, Becoming Undone: Towards an Interdisciplinary Justice-Oriented Perspective on College Student Identity Development.”  “Throughout the presentation, audience members will encounter my process of utilizing arts-based inquiry, inviting considerations that creative methods may help educational researchers to activate their commitment to social justice by carving out epistemic spaces for different ways of expressing unheard of or only partially effable truths.”

A third finalist for the professorship, Dr. Vijay Kanagala, Post-Doctoral Candidate, University of Texas, argues for the contribution he can make to a university setting in the Commission for Social Justice Educators Blog: “If not me, then who will counsel a recent immigrant about race and racism that was experienced at the supermarket or for that matter with an advisor or faculty member on campus?  If not me, then who will work with a White student to encourage the process of self-exploration of her/his identity, privilege, oppression and racism and the ensuing guilt that employs a non-judgmental model for that White student’s ignorance and lack of exposure to diverse issues?”

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People and Ideas

Do not know its source, if able to expand size worth reading the bottom of the image

 Bradamante replied to...........

I don't take this image as an attack on Christianity, even though I have seen what you mean about atheists going after Christianity much more vigorously than they go after Islam. The poster is still right. If we Christians want to draw on Christianity to guide our politics or legislation, then we have to be willing to engage in debate with people. The only way to escape the responsibility to engage in free and open debate is to insist "We're just doing something private that has no impact on anyone else." No one can force me to debate my personal experience of my relationship with Jesus Christ, for example. But if I were to run for Congress and say that on the basis of that experience, I'm opposed to euthanasia (as I am), people have a right to expect me to engage in some robust discussion and defense of my views.

Islamists want it both ways: they want the "it's your private business" exemption for religion, but then they want to use their "religion" as a basis for legislation that would affect all of us. They want to advance arguments for why they should be able to radically transform our society, but then they want to hide from the rebuttals. They want to take a public stand for a certain kind of society -- one in which women are covered up, gay people are dead or in jail, Christians know their place, etc. -- but if you repeatedly point out that that's what they're working towards, as Robert Spencer does, you get attacked as a "bigot" merely for noting the agenda they're pushing and responding to it. If we Christians were engaging in that kind of duck-and-weave maneuvering, I think we'd deserve to get called out on it. And we certainly shouldn't be able to hide from debate by insisting that people should respect our religion. So I'm not offended by the placement of the Cross. It would have looked unfair if the Cross had been omitted.

Understanding the Basis of "Democracy"

If Religious Liberty Helped Create America's Greatness, Can We Really Survive Without it,

Christian Origins of Essential American Doctrines

- Kelly OConnell (Bio and Archives)  Monday, April 8, 2013  (11) Comments | Print friendly | Subscribe | Email Us 74

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In midst of the modern, mindless battle to drive religion completely from American life, a small and inconvenient fact has been ignored: Virtually every important, original American idea is a product of Christianity. Further, had these doctrines never been developed, the US would arguably not been nearly as productive, free or happy. These ideas involve property, liberty, and the rule of law.

Today the government bears down upon the Constitution, menacing the Bill of Rights and our entire way of life, offering to trade our freedoms for the supposed security of state control. Our very life, liberty and pursuit of happiness hang in the balance. We would do well to remember that the source of our original constitutional doctrines come from natural law, common law and our profound biblical heritage. For once we lose our freedoms, liberties and economic vitality, we are unlikely to taste these ever again. And do we not owe our children and the subjugated of other countries a duty to protect this irreplaceable inheritance? This article surveys some of the more important American doctrines which came down from a biblical antecedent.

I. Magna Carta

Magna Carta, or the Great Writ, is considered the centerpiece of Anglo-American liberties. It is fascinating to therefore discover that this great work was negotiated and drafted between King John and the lords by Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury who interpolated biblical ideas into the final draft. (Langton was the same person who introduced chapter and verse into the modern Bible.) Magna Carta offers the biblical idea of putting the law above the king. (see Why Separating Church & State is a Fool’s Errand: Consider Magna Carta’s Origins)

II. Property & Natural Rights

The emergence of modern expressions of Natural Law and Natural Rights is traced by Brian Tierney in The Idea of Natural Rights, to a debate between The Franciscans and Pope John XXII. The argument concerned whether the followers of Saint Francis had a right to declare themselves to be in a property-less state. This debate was famously joined by William of Ockham.

Natural Law itself is defined by Ockham as law “in conformity with a natural reason that never fails.” An example would be the Ten Commandments prohibitions against lying and adultery, being a kind of enlightened understanding of law. Pagans also had a lesser natural law with which to reason, such as that described by Cicero.

Ockham argued that while anyone could give up any rights they had through Christian liberty, an immutable law was the right to self-preservation which could not be taken from anyone, nor could it be relinquished. Further, God had given mankind the right to property after the Fall and this could not be arbitrarily taken away from mankind. Beyond, Ockham claimed the Pope could not take away the Christian liberty of his subjects, whom he also gave the right to choose their own rulers. These conclusions made Ockham a lifelong enemy of the papacy, needless to say.

III. Democracy

A. Foundation of Democracy in Reformation

Modern democracy is not from the ancient Greeks.

Firing Wall

Did Che really say this ?
Did he practice what he preached ?
where does this thinking lead to in the future ? ?
Does one rule by terror ?
Is this what he meant ? ?

"To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary...These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the The [Execution] Wall! (El Paredón)" --Ernesto 'Che' Guevara

punish voters with more immigration Sweden

http://www.friatider.se/reinfeldt-erknner-migrationsuppgrelsen-var-en-bestraffning-av-vljarna
Unbelievable! !  Can this be true of the Swedish Prime Minister or is it an example of how many politicians truly think and  work in their countries.
Excuse the English as this has been translated by google.

Reinfeldt recognize: Migration settlement was a punishment of voters

Published November 6, 2012 at 18:42

In an unusually hard attack on Sweden Democrats today revealed the Prime Minister, including the migration agreement with the Green Party from last year aimed to show the SD voters that there will be even greater immigration with SD in parliament.

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In the morning today, Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, a guest lecture for students of political science at Stockholm University. (See also free Tiders  leaders of the lecture.)

The program would focus on "the role of politics and how Sweden is affected by membership of the European Union", but a large part of the lecture came to be about the government's approach to the rapidly growing opposition party Sweden Democrats.

Hard to reach SD voters
Moderate leader complained among other things that he found it difficult to reach Sweden Democratic voters as they take part in other media channels than those in which the government's message is allowed to stand unchallenged.

- If you take out their description of reality sees a very different Sweden.If you listen to it and nothing else you get a completely different picture of reality and it makes it incredibly difficult for me to reach.

That it would be possible to "reach" through an open debate in the substantive dismissed, however, Fredrik Reinfeldt, simply because there are too many social problems linked to immigration.

- We can not believe that we are in open debate takes care of the phenomenon of the Sweden Democrats, we must fundamentally understand that there are social problems related to integration and immigration, crime, globalization and restructuring of Sweden that we have to solve. We need to give people hope that there are problems that can be solved. That's what we try to do.

Immigration deal aimed to punish SD voters
prime minister even came with an interesting revelation in his speech to the students. The agreement with the Green Party, which includes free medical care to persons residing illegally in Sweden, was as Conservative leader a punishment of SD voters that they would understand that refugee policy will become even more liberal if you vote for the Sweden Democrats.

The message to voters is that it should be possible to change immigration policy in a democratic way, without any voice, no matter which party you put it on, becoming a voice for increased immigration.

- We will isolate them from power, he said, among other things, claiming that it was just that he had done when the government shortly after the election concluded an agreement with the Green Party on asylum and migration policy.

- The effect of SD was that we had a policy in the opposite direction, said Prime Minister contentedly.

Jimmie Åkesson respond Prime Minister
, in a press release for a little while then says Sweden Democrats Jimmie Åkesson to the Prime Minister tirade against his party's response to its opinion successes recently.

- This is a way for Reinfeldt to respond to the voter flight as seen in particular from the Conservatives to us right now. He probably noticing how a majority government is becoming increasingly unlikely. However, I think that it is strange and unfortunate that he chooses to use this unusually harsh tone whilst eliminating all forms of discussion. A healthy political climate demands that one can speak respectfully even with political opponents.

UN rights

The UN…….
Democracies have been a minority within the UN since 1958.
The UN is controlled by a bunch of failed, corrupt, racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic, dictatorial states.
The block of 57 OIC countries comes to mind.
These 57 countries, have their own official ‘ declaration of human rights’, are actively involved in suppressing the right of free speech and have only signed several other UN declarations with reservations as they contradict with Islamic Sharia law.
Several of these countries that repress women, homosexuals, ethnic and religious minorities are members of the UN Human Rights Commission. Syria, Sudan, Libya, and especially Saudi Arabia, together with China and Cuba are countries that oppose and reject the concept of universal human rights, have an appalling record of human right abuse and they happily criticise New Zealand.
It is a sad state of affairs.
Last year……
Libya had a chair on the Human Rights Council.
China, Russia, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Cameroon all had seats on the Human Rights Council.
North Korea had the presidency of the UN Conference on Disarmament
Iran had a seat on the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women.
Pakistan served as acting head of a U.N. body called the Counter-Terrorism Implementation Task Force.

Question Insanity: What to ask Progressives

Question Insanity: What to Ask Progressives
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/question-insanity-what-to-ask-progressives/?singlepage=true

An ex-Soviet immigrant goes Socratic on his liberal American critics.

December 27, 2010 - by Oleg Atbashian Share

The two women who showed up early for my book signing at a small bookstore in Houston, TX, never even bothered to open my book. Wearing knowing smiles, they engaged me in a bizarre discussion that wound up leaping all around the known and unknown universe. They hadn’t the slightest curiosity about my ideas as an ex-Soviet immigrant in America, or what I had to say about my experience working inside the two ideologically opposed systems. As it turned out, they had spotted my flyer in the store window the day before, and the book’s title — Shakedown Socialism — had enraged them so much that they decided to return the following day and give me a piece of their collective mind.

Their act almost made me feel as if I were back in the USSR, where the harassment of people with my opinions was the norm. The shorter, pudgier woman was the soloist bully, while her skinnier, older comrade provided backup vocals and noise effects. The duo’s repertoire was an eclectic collection of unoriginal talking points, each branded with an almost legible label: NPR, Air America, MSNBC, and so on. Not only were those mental fragments mismatched in key and rhythm; the very existence of harmony seemed an unfamiliar concept to them. But compared to the hard-core screaming I used to hear from card-carrying Soviet bullies, this was almost elevator music. If I had survived the original cast, I could certainly handle a watered-down remake.

Framed on their terms, the debate zigzagged from the evils of unbridled capitalism to global warming to Bush’s wars for oil to Sarah Palin’s stupidity. Since my opponents wouldn’t give me a chance to respond, I soon became bored and tried to entertain myself by redirecting the flow of mental detritus against itself in a way that would cause its own annihilation. I did that by asking questions.

I remembered an old trick invented in the fifth century B.C. by Socrates. Instead of telling people what he thought was true, Socrates asked seemingly simple questions that put his opponents on the path of finding the truth for themselves. Seeking genuine knowledge rather than mere victory in an argument, Socrates used his questions to cross-examine the hypotheses, assumptions, and axioms that subconsciously shaped the opinions of his opponents, drawing out the contradictions and inconsistencies they relied on.

As the two women faced my questions, their knowing smiles turned to scowls. Sometimes they would backtrack and correct their previous statements; sometimes, they would angrily storm out of the room in the manner of Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg on The View with Bill O’Reilly. After a while they would return with more talking points, and then they had to answer another logical question. My friends who witnessed the scene told me later they saw the shorter bully beginning to foam at the mouth.

Some heads contain an enormous number of facts that never bind with one another to form a fertile soil from which original ideas will grow. Each piece of information exists independently from the others, all of them continuously shifting and rolling around like grains of sand, forming ephemeral dunes in the lifeless deserts of their minds. The “open-minded” owners of such heads like to open their minds in the company of peers and admire each other’s fanciful sandy mindscapes. Every new whiff of wind or shaking of the head tosses the sand in more quirky patterns, forming new whimsical outlines. As previously covered facts are exposed and facts once exposed are concealed, a semblance of new ideas will emerge without any true change in content.

A similar effect is achieved when the content of such minds is raked by “intellectual” authors, filmmakers, and politicians — a practice they immensely enjoy, calling it a “spiritual” experience. They think of themselves as “intellectuals” while denying this title to anyone with a consistent, original mind. To have structured values is an unpardonable faux pas in their circles. Those who challenge them get sand thrown in their eyes — the punishment I was being subjected to at the Houston bookstore.

In return, I reminded my opponents about the existence of the scientific method of discovery — a logical device that had made Western civilization so successful in the past, but had now been abandoned by “progressive” thinkers. The resulting cognitive dissonance made them disoriented. In due course, they panicked and walked out, never to come back.

A few weeks later I told this story to Maggie Roddin, a radio talk show host in Philadelphia. (Click through my Website to hear this interview.) Maggie asked me to recall some of the questions, but I could only remember a few. She insisted that I write them down to share with her audience. As I did so, more questions began to pop up. Some were new, while others I had been asking for years while trying to make sense of my American experience. The resulting list may not exactly fit the definition of Socratic questioning. But in my defense, even Socrates couldn’t possibly envision the scale of absurdity a political argument could reach in the 21st century.

Dear Americans, these are some questions I have collected in 16 years of living in your country. Please see if you can answer them for me:
After the jump His questions Plus many other questions and thoughts from the comments sections.

Womens and Mens Taxes and Pensions

Why is it that a single man, particularly thru the last century, that as supposedly on average was paid a higher wage and so paid more in tax than a single working woman. Yet the man on average life expectancy collected far less pension. !

Why is it that when a woman took time out of the work force to have and rear children, (and I surely wished was happily and responsibley provided for by her husband), and again the government did not collect taxes, (ok it was called unpaid work) but now if an employer provides a house or car or meals or any other beneficial perk, the IRD always works out its value and then taxes it and this simply does not happen ! Why not?

Accident Compensation Corporation, ACC Levies, which has been making $billions of losses in the last few years. For sure has issues regarding sports injuries, who pays to cover those? How does it go when it has to cover house help? who are predominately woman?

Also bearing in mind that some fortunate woman never even went back into the work force, and even if they did, not many found high paying jobs so that they could pay the high taxes, and yet again they collect the full pension for quite a few years. I do realize many women are the motivation and stabilizing influence for many men and family. Often she survives the husband by quite a few years and collected the whole pension at the single rate, if she did not remarry.

I have never seen this aspect weighed up. Sure it can easily be dismissed, but first why as this not been worked out?. Instead it seems to moved sideways to that government (all tax payers) should pay for the home/house keeper/wife /partner.
It just seems to me that it is a one way street and every follows the "experts considerations"

Sure often men leave things a bit late for health considerations, but until recent years there has always been a drive for womans health. Would be interesting know what health costs per man and then per woman. Again I am Ok with that but it does seem to me that overall that this push for femism and equality, should have the a base start that could be quite revealing, not just the one way street with all the hyperbole meme pushed onto everyone