I'm trying to sort through some of the problems with gay marriage in both political and practical terms.

One of the main problems I'm finding with this latest trendy social issue is the requirement for people of Abrahamic faiths to variously support sin indirectly through the system of taxation. This is similar to how a nation-state might view its indirect financing of terrorism: absolutely off limits.

A proponent might dismiss Abrahamic beliefs as generally irrational, seeing certain sin behaviours as merely a matter of taste rather than consequential, but then they are engaging in bigotry themselves.

Another proponent might suggest a tax break compromise, equivalent to that of a gay marriage household, for every person of an Abrahamic faith. Yet, this means people who do not wish to validate the homosexual family unit and who are not of such faith are excluded from the compromise.

So, the gay marriage proponents value the financial benefits of same sex households along with a new form of normative social validity that was once shunned. This is essentially an issue of equal fairness and protection regardless of the specified "harmless" behaviour or lifestyle.

In other words, proponents assert that a homosexual household is no more harmful to self or society (except for mere matters of taste - a freedom of expression right) than a heterosexual household. Thus, equal right for each is justly deserved.

Given our allegiance to liberal democratic foundational principles, gay marriage proponents cannot ultimately fail this battle. I believe opponents will need to put all of their efforts into reprogramming our founding principles themselves in order to win any prolonged battle of ideas in contemporary times.

The conservative problem is their engaging in traditionalist fighting on a battlefield designed for an exclusively liberal democratic war. This is part of what lends us the popular belief that today's liberal and conservative political parties are basically the same, having only some decorative differences for distinction.

Such an observation is not necessarily true. In reality, the outcome of any battle between parties is going to deliver a liberal democratic compatible result in every single case. Probing the gay marriage issue helps reveal this obscured problem.

A quirky kind of store has opened up at 298 Mulberry Street in downtown Manhattan. It’s the first retail location for MakerBot, one of the leading consumer 3D printer companies. People can come in, look at a variety of printed objects, and buy 3D printed knickknacks like watch bands and little plastic squirrels for their friends.

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To have a look at how good the consumer models have gotten, check out Bre Pettis, the MakerBot chief executive officer, in this demo of the new Replicator. Or have a peek at the Cube from 3D Systems, which costs $1,299. With these two systems, the hardware has started to move well beyond the crude, hobbyist stage. Just as important, the software is catching up, so that true amateurs—and not just engineers—can design their own models and print them with relative ease.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-21/the-era-of-retail-3d-printing-begins/

According to figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), only 58.3 percent of Americans over the age of 16 are currently employed. That’s the lowest percentage in the past year—so things are getting worse, not better. But things haven’t just gotten worse over the past 12 months; they’ve also gotten worse since the recession ostensibly ended and the recovery ostensibly began.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/employment-worse-during-recession_652105.html

[Updated at 12:16 a.m. ET] New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg praised police and civilians for their quick response to a shooting outside the Empire State Building on Friday morning, which left two dead and nine injured.

"There is no doubt that the situation would've been even more tragic except for the extraordinary acts of heroism," Bloomberg said in a media conference. "New York City is the safest big city in this country but we are not immune to the national problem of symptom is the cause when only votes and money count."

Gunman Jeffrey Johnson, 53, killed one person before he was shot to death outside the busy tourist destination on 34th Street and Fifth Avenue in a chaotic scene just after 9 a.m., Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said. In addition to being home to a popular tourist destination in Midtown Manhattan, the area is also a busy commercial district.

"I saw people running and I didn't know what happened. I thought it was a celebrity spotting," said witness Rebecca Fox, who was on her way to work when the shootings broke out. "It was a very surreal scene."

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/24/shooting-reported-outside-empire-state-building/

If we look past the world of strictly what is tangible and start thinking of life as an experience, we can see how modern society has made itself hell:

• No values. There is no overall sense of quality or moral good, other than ideological objectives, which distill down to different forms of radical altruistic egalitarianism.
• Quantity over quality. So that all must participate, we reduce the rare and exceptional, and replace it with learning by rote, success by participation, value by conformity and other non-quality assessments.
• Ugly. We call our design utilitarian, but what makes more sense is to call it administrative. It is not there to make life better. It is there to minimize complaints by being so average that none can complain without appearing to be putting on airs.
• Individualistic. Each person by the nature of being equal now needs to prove themselves. They compete on needless tasks, become egomaniacs for no purpose, and attire and adorn themselves with “unique” combinations of hobbies, clothing and personal drama in order to make themselves seem important.
• Conformist. The price of individualism is conformity; if anyone in a crowd is not an individualist, all individualists are threatened, because that non-individualist might invoke some principle of reality larger than the individual. All chase the same trends, memes, crazes, manias, and images. What they see in movies, they buy.
• Anti-exceptionalism. Utilitarian society is designed to accommodate the broadest swath of average, not the exceptional. As a result, it takes from the exceptional and redistributes to the average as a means of hobbling the exceptional so that everyone else feels satisfied at their own level of performance. It’s a peanut gallery, lynch mob, hive-mind and circular reasoning apparatus that exists only to justify itself.
• Idiots rule. To support egalitarianism and also a hierarchy of popularity and income, societies generate tests to find the “best.” Since these are egalitarian, they are not based on actual ability. The result is lots of zampolit style people who master details and know the right political dogma, but cannot adapt to new stimulus and thus are terrible leaders.

http://www.amerika.org/social-reality/welcome-to-hell/

Across all 13 news organizations included in the survey, the average positive believability rating (3 or 4 on a 4-point scale) is 56%. In 2010, the average positive rating was 62%. A decade ago, the average rating for the news organizations tested was 71%. Since 2002, every news outlet’s believability rating has suffered a double-digit drop, except for local daily newspapers and local TV news. The New York Times was not included in this survey until 2004, but its believability rating has fallen by 13 points since then.

These are among the major findings of a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted July 19-22 among 1,001 adults. The survey asks people to rate individual news organizations on believability using a 4-point scale. A rating of 4 means someone believes “all or most” of what the news organization says; a rating of 1 means someone believes “almost nothing” of what they say.

http://www.people-press.org/2012/08/16/further-decline-in-credibility-ratings-for-most-news-organizations/1/

As I witnessed at a marketplace kiosk: "Subscribe to our newspaper because you can get all sorts of coupon offers inside."

People, this is what is known as a severe crisis.

Now in fact history does have quite a bit to say about the matter.  When the United States won its independence from Britain, the constitution that was signed in Philadelphia in 1787 established a form of government that was not, and did not pretend to be, democratic.  It was an aristocratic republic, of a type familiar in European political history: the government was elected by ballot, but the right to vote was restricted to those white male citizens who owned a significant amount of property—the amount varied from state to state, like almost everything else in the constitution, but it was high enough that only 10-15% of the population had the right to participate in elections.

What broke the grip of the old colonial aristocracy on the American political system, and launched the nation on a trajectory toward universal adult suffrage, was the emergence of the modern political party. In America, at least—the same process took place in Britain and several other countries around the same time—the major figure in that emergence was Andrew Jackson, who seized control of one large fragment of the disintegrating Democratic-Republican party in 1828, transformed it into the first successful political mass movement in American history, and rode it into the White House.  Central to Jackson’s strategy was support for state legislation extending the right to vote to all white male citizens; in order to make that support effective, the newly minted Democratic Party had to organize right down to the neighborhood level; in order to make the neighborhood organizations attract potential members, the party had to give them an active role in choosing candidates and policies.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.jp/2012/08/the-degeneration-of-politics.html