Please point out where I have stated that if one is to choose the Muslim religion, one is rejecting the constitutional provisions for personal freedom.

The “opposite perspective” has long been initially embraced thoughtlessly, then studied, reconsidered, and finally rejected. That’s right. I used to be a moonbat of sorts myself, until the age of 16.

The strife you have to offer is nothing new to me. I enlightened my way out of it. They tried to re-indoctrinate me with it in university. I did my own research and came out with my brain intact. That’s right, economics is taught with a distinctly Marxist or Keynesian flavor anywhere.

You are the one who has not considered the “opposite perspective”.

And I feel about as bad and arrogant for dismissing your tacky MySpace crap as any passerby at a nudist protest would. If you want to be taken seriously, make an effort to present yourself and your case seriously.

You are the one who came here calling an entire nation of over 300 million people “racist, dogmatic, shizophrenic, inward-looking, power-hungry, and dangerous”. And you expect anyone to waste time at your MySpace?

I think we’re done here.

Next!

Tosh, and more tosh!

And yes, I like tacky. Each to his/her own? You see, you are the one consistently hurling vitriol and abuse; something you claim I was guilty of, but, in fact, never was.

I’m gone, since we are wasting time. Feel free to come back to me, you have details if you wish to use them.

Thanks, but no thanks. I will not be enlightened on matters of global relevance by links spinning around in a MySpace profile. I gave you specific authors and books you could pursue if you wanted to dip your mind in the “other side” for a while, you give me links on your MySpace profile?

Plus I did check it, and almost gave me a seizure. That’s a very tacky use of color and graphics.

Sorry, you lost me.

My command of the language may not quite live up to your exacting standards, but I can try to clarify any lack of understanding I may be causing you, for which I most humbly apologise.

Read what? A People’s History of the United States? Is that your source? Or read conspiracy theory troll websites? Word in the streets? Where should I look up this information you allude to?

Please enlighten me. I know how “they” manage the money supply. I’ve written my honors thesis on the very subject.

Just what are you talking about?

My mind has been changed many times over in the past, so it is not impossible for you to write something thoughtful and fact/source-backed, which could prompt me to change my perspective. If you think changing my mind on anything is too arduous a task, then how about at least challenging me properly.

What you have written so far falls very short. Perhaps you should learn the difference between “its” and “it’s” before opining on socio-cultural phenomena of our time.

Find out who is pulling the strings behind the public face of power there, how they have destabilised areas of the world to garner resources and riches and “influence”, how they manage the money supply, how they use tax-dollars to bolster their Imperial ambitions.

Find out how the disaffected minorities and ethnically different have been, and still are regarded there.

Find out how poor the poor actually are.

Look at how the Right wing Christian lobby inhibits choice and movement for those falling outside it’s sphere; how they seek to control immigration with violence, threats, and intimidation.

That ought to be enough for starters.

Let’s face it, I don’t have much chance of changing your minds. And neither do you of mine. However, I can not see America as the ideal- to my mind it is, despite it’s glories, a deeply divided and divisive nation which despite being told it is not welcome continues to pervade much of the world in search of control and influence, choosing to dominate rather than engage.

At least now you are taking somewhat thoughtfully instead of just dropping a little angry ‘bomb’ of no pretense to engage or discuss ideas. In your first comment you wrote “You have no idea what you’re talking about. … This is why you are a racist, dogmatic, shizophrenic, inward-looking, power-hungry, dangerous nation.

Before jumping into an analysis of the content of your remarks, it is clear that you assume that I am American for praising America’s ideological structure and criticizing Europe’s. That is also a very European collectivist ethno-supremacist attitude, according to which one assumes that someone may not reasonably bash his or her own culture or cultural roots in favor of the values of a foreign nation.

You use the vilest and most ferocious personal invective to collectively smear an entire nation, which is telling of your ideological background, deeply rooted in collectivism. The essential differential you perceive between “Europe” (there is no such thing as Europe, other than a geographical designation, but broadly speaking) and America is collectivism (fascism, socialism, communism, redistribution of wealth, populist democracy/mob rule) versus individualism (liberty, free enterprise, individual rights, limited government, constitutional republic). In this you are largely correct: That is the philosophical dilemma. You side with collectivism as an inspiration to politics and philosophy, while my essay repudiates it.

I wrote quite a good deal here to make my case, while you only dropped an angry collective diarrhea of insults, how America is a racist, schizophrenic, dogmatic, in-ward looking (whatever that means), power-hungry, dangerous nation. You say things are more complex than my essay suggest, but you resort to more generalizations than I do, and simply things even further: equality vs liberty.

You don’t understand at all how predictable that anti-American, anti-capitalist bile is. You do not understand how deterministic your thinking is. You are a stereotypical product of Western European public education of recent decades. You have been brainwashed with a neurotic hatred of America and of individualism by the same failing socialist public education which has not managed to teach you the grammatical difference between “it’s” and “its”. This is meant as no personal offense: What you wrote here, I could find thousands of trolls all over the internet to spew perfectly interchangeable comments on the same subject. However powerful and personal your emotions may be, you need to understand that your ideas are not at all original, and millions of youths in your corner of the world have been indoctrinated with these exact same talking points.

To some extent, of course we are a product of our circumstances, our upbringing, and education. But what distinguishes us from animals and rocks, is our will, free within bounds. We can at times begin to question everything around us, and choose to think with our own heads. I hope you would do just that. Stop for a minute, forget what you have been told in the classroom, by your media, by your pundits, and think critically:

The United States of America is by no means a perfect country, but all of its imperfections can be traced back to aspects it shares with Europe: the rise of socialism as the dogma du jour in its intellectual institutions, universities, public schools, media, and the citizenry’s mindset; the growing size of government; the pollution and dilution of the ideals of its 18th-century founders.

Far from being a naive child with a blank slate for an ideological foundation, with a coarse and primitive cultural complexion (unlike Europe’s centuries old refined cultural complexity which you allude to), the USA is a child with the very best and idealistic and humane cream of the crop of Europe’s philosophical tradition, reincarnated in its young political soul.

The US Founding Fathers were of course, learned (often self-taught) idealistic, however also pragmatic, radical Europeans –British nationals, specifically. America was the implementation of the best of Europe’s thought tradition, which Europe’s ignorant masses, corrupt clergy, chauvinistic ethno-supremacists, and power-hungry kings and noblemen, lacked the moral and intellectual audacity to adopt.

Don’t give me your silly talks about how “us Europeans” have been united and divided throughout centuries in uniquely instructive ways. You are talking of your corner of Europe, the British rivalries, wars, and treaties with the French and the Spanish, which were just expansive games of bigoted kings and queens. I could give less of a shit. In my corner of Europe, my country has been torched, invaded, its people ethnically cleansed, its territories used as pawns and spoils by your kin, and finally divided among the British, the Germans, and the Russians, to appease their local vassals in the Balkans.

Don’t tell me about ‘dog-eat-dog’ approach. We know all Europe’s former super powers, including your own country, would keep their colonies if they still could. You have shed the imperialist cloak way too recently to be speaking with such ethos about egalitarian causes. You have merely replaced one kind of aggressive chauvinistic collectivist attitude, with a self-loathing, relativist, masochistic, decaying collectivism.

As for the merits of socialism, please just take an introductory course in Economics. You will be a much more enlightened individual for it. Even better, read Adam Smith, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Ludvig Von Mises, Frederick Von Hayek. If you don’t care enough to delve into these issues you have been so emotional about in these comments, but want to give individualistic ideas a fair try before knocking them, then at least read only the very short book by Frederic Bastiat, “The Law”.

We can talk then.

And just where did I say I was? You aren’t reading what I have written.

I also never said it was “a “centuries old cross cultural complexity””, but that “cross cultural complexity [in Europe] has developed in a way America has not had chance to imagine….” meaning that America is not experienced in the same historic way that Europe is. We’ve been united and divided throughout the centuries in ways America hasn’t, simply because America is still young, with the ideology of the young.

Likewise, I did not infer that the ancient cultural complexity blesses us.

I am not a proponent of Eurocentric snobbery- I am merely pointing out that things are much much more complex than the article suggests regarding the European situation.

Where I think Europe is GENERALLY superior to America is that we have significantly more progressive politics than the US. It’s all about the individual and personal liberty in the US, whereas much of Europe, despite all the faults, is more for the wealth of the society than the individual, hence national and international systems of welfare, health, transport, and so on which are communally funded.

Americans (I know I generalise) are very wary of socialist or communist policy, but it has worthwhile and positive elements which the US does not contemplate.

I am not Anti-American on a personal level; my dislike is for the way in which US society is organised, and the appparent dog-eat-dog approach most there seem to favour. It is beyond my ken that America does not repeal its’ gun laws, for example. And then, when you get shot and can’t afford hospital you’re in big trouble if you don’t have health insurance…

medaura- you label me a “shit-head”. Why? I thought this was a debate, not a slanging match. You don’t do yourself any favours.

The fact that you are what you are is neither here nor there- American, European, Chinese, I don’t care- I was discussing what you’d written, not you. Your bio has nothing to do with it.