[puroresu]

Rather than wasting a couple of hours “debating” you, when you obviously are psychologically incapable of letting anyone else ever have the last word, not to mention have failed for many years now to provide a real world example of your teen angst libertarian fantasyland, I'll leave you with this. It's a repost of something Lawrence Auster wrote after the Massachusetts same-sex “marriage” ruling. It doesn't contain any of the, “eh, you're a nanny state totalitarian sucking at the gubmint’s teat” rhetorical style you prefer, but maybe you can learn something from it. If not, I'm sure there are people here who will understand it, and won't see it as "just 'nother totalitarian nanny state do-gooder fundie tryin' to stop us from havin' fun".:

---

Fr. Seraphim Rose delineated four stages of Nihilism, defined by their ever-increasing indifference or hostility to truth. The first and mildest stage of Nihilism is Liberalism. The Liberal does not believe in truth, higher truth, absolute truth, or Christian truth. Yet he retains “the name of truth, and the names of those truths men once regarded as absolute.” The next stage of Nihilism is Realism. The Realist aggressively denies all higher truth, he says that only the material, the physical, the lower, the purely deterministic, is true. The Vitalist in turn reacts against the unbearably sterile world that has been created by the Liberal and the Realist. He seeks a revived meaning and vitality in life, but without challenging the Liberal’s and Realist’s assumptions about truth or seeking a restoration of the truths they have destroyed. On the contrary, since the truth offered by Liberalism is so weak and vague, and the truth offered by Realism is so deadening and depressing, the Vitalist rejects the very idea of truth:

“The falseness of an opinion,” said Nietzsche, “is not for us any objection to it.... The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving ...” When such pragmatism begins, Nihilism passes into the Vitalist stage, which may be defined as the elimination of truth as the criterion of human action, and the substitution of a new standard: the “life-giving,” the “vital”; it is the final divorce of life from truth. [Nihilism, p. 50].

In the Vitalist stage of society, people deliver themselves over to an unending search for sensation and excitement, for the exotic and the experimental, for ever-greater freedom and satisfaction of desires, for the “riches of diversity,” for the transforming “energy” that is produced by a society in constant change and motion—and with all these things being seen as, even explicitly promoted as, a substitute for any inherent truth and goodness in existence.
As Vitalism reaches its peak, the final stage of Nihilism starts to appear. This is the Nihilism of Destruction, “a rage against creation and against civilization that will not be appeased until it has reduced them to absolute nothingness.”

It strikes me that with the Massachusetts decision legalizing homosexual marriage, our society may be passing from the Vitalist stage of Nihilism to the full-blown Nihilism of Destruction.

[steve-b]

Rather than wasting a couple of hours "debating" you

In your dreams. That's like imagining that you would spend a couple hours in the ring with Muhammad Ali in his prime.

I'll leave you with this. It's a repost of something Lawrence Auster wrote

It reads like the sort of twaddle cranked out by totalitarians' kept scribes in order to justify the liquidation of the latest Enemies Of The State.

In any case, you are quite correct in saying that there's no point in your continuing to argue, and not merely because you have the far weaker case. You have already retired from the field, by ceding to the State the power to shape culture. I have not made any such concession, and the result is that I find myself engaged with a self-disarmed opponent. Hardly challenging, or even entertaining.