Kind of slow, you didn't make a point. Posting something absurd doesn't make a point. I meant it as a compliment not an insult. Like Dirty Harry said "A man has got to know his limitations."

To compare apples to apples:

You can't walk down the streets of New York with a marijuana joint and get less than 20 years in prison for daring to presume that you can make better decisions about what you put in your body than the government. You're also not allowed to have more than one wife or husband and have this union recognized legally because the government knows better than you know you can or can't love, and you can't own a fully automatic rifle to defend your family because the US government knows better than you do what you need to protect yourself. Finally, If you're an American male you have to fill out a draft card and can be drafted into an army and be forced to kill others or risk being killed yourself. Saudi Arabia has none of these repressive restrictions so in this purely cultural sense it's freer.

Now obviously Saudi Arabia is a tin-pot third world pseudo-islamist dictatorship but these flaws are primarily political and indeed enabled by the United States which has defended the Saudi Monarchy for over 60 years. Strange that Iraq needed to be invaded for the human rights abuses, but the much more culturally and legally repressive Saudi government is a key ally and has kept it from being overthrown from within. So the question: is there something wrong with Saudi culture and society in general or is there something wrong with the parts of saudi society the "Free West" chooses to support?

I look forward to your response.

TB falls into the same mental straightjacket by likening the everyday act of a women wearing a bikini on the street to "a poor person who has contracted an illness requiring expensive medical treatment?"

It just makes you wonder how poorly thought these individuals world views really are.

The failure to grasp the basic hypocrisy of the scenario is startling enough, but to watch this kind of mental flailing about in hysteric posts is even more surprising.

Take a deep breath TB and simply realize that not letting a women walk down the street in a bikini is an autocratic social abuse by government/religion/or whatever social institution is responsible for hit.

It's really a simply point that you are failing to grasp.

Posting something absurd??

I repeat:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/08/31/122789/wikileaks-iraqi-children-in-us.html

...but you are worried about bikinis...

TC, I agree with you! It's not fair that people can't dress how they want to everywhere. We need to send troops into every country that won't let a woman walk down the street in a bikini, to make sure that Socratic ideals are enforced across the entire Earth.

In other words, what do you suggest we do?

20 years in prison for smoking a joint on a street in New York City.

LOL! Thanks for the laugh.

Nothing quite like theater of the absurd.

TB,

You still miss the key part of the bikini statement Mecca.

I do appreciate your inability to abandon the absurd though...."send troops into every country."

We don't need troops to point out they hypocrisy, inconsistency, and misogyny in other ideologies or cultures.

I do feel your frustration wanting to find a gap in my reasoning and being unable to.

Kind of slow, the fact that you don't even realize how absurd your post is in response to a question about the innocuous act of wearing a bikini on a street makes me feel sad for you.

I'm over it now.

@TC

That's not theater of the absurd, read some Beckett before you throw around terms that you don't know the meaning of

No it really is Hugo, but this is what usually happens when dealing with young people who have accepted ideological positions without them being based on any type of reflection or contemplation.

It's simply a common error of youth. You guys will grow out of it.

Could a man walk down the National Mall naked?

No, but he could in the English Garden in Munich. Is German society freeer than that of the United States?

I was being sarcastic. Again, TC, what are you going to do about it? I think we agree that ridiculing them will do nothing.

And again, I agree with you. I think you're absolutely right that Saudi society is injust and misogynistic.

"20 years in prison for smoking a joint on a street in New York City.

LOL! Thanks for the laugh."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Drug_Laws

Ah, you're right--it was four ounces and it's was only a minimum of 15 years, what freedom! But while 20 years is unreasonable, maybe 2-5 years for questioning your government is clearly fair.

I also like how you ignored everything else I wrote--you're an obvious troll since you refuse to address any of my other points. Why solicit discussion if you're only willing to address the easy arguments and aren't smart enough to consider the problems/hypocrisy of western support for repressive regimes? I will debate you on any issue you care to talk about over a skype phone call, we'll record it, and then we can put in on mega upload for the fine people of this forum to listen to and decide who won the debate. Calling you out right now--I'm guessing you're going to ignore this or make up some lame excuse because you know how weak arguments are.

@TC

We've been over this before
A) I'm probably the same age as you, so don't try talking down to me. And even if i'm not, i've seen a lot of life

B) You being a cranky old man doen't give you some position of intelectual authority over this board

Lmao god damn smerdyakov you win +1

I was about to say, TC, why don't you respond to the leaf-on-groin question?

The fact is every society decides subjectively on certain questions such as what is considered immodest.

Why can't you walk around naked? Same ostensible reason the Saudis won't let you have a bikini. It doesn't have to make sense it just has to be something everyone thinks.

Also, TC, what are you trying to prove exactly? The West is the Best? Or something?

youradhere:

I'm going to say yes, actually.

I drank beer on the U-bahn with cops at ten in the morning, nearly had sex in public during the love parade and the whole time I had health insurance, unemployment insurance and a choice of more than two political parties along with a higher minimum wage and much cleaner air and water. Sure there are no guns, strict zoning restrictions, and you can't get asprin over the counter, but you have to pick what types of freedom are important.

"misogyny in other ideologies or cultures. "

Yeah they're misogynistic, but we aren't? Are we not allowed to point out flaws in our OWN ideology or culture?

Or I suppose you think American culture is the logical conclusion of the human experience, flawless.

Thucydides, Who do you mean by "we."

Please don't try to answer the question directly. What is wrong with a woman walking down the street in a bikini in Mecca, but it is perfectly alright for a woman to walk down the street in New York City in a Burka?

Try to avoid being obtuse.

Smerd, I guess you have as much problem as the rest answering a simply question without going off on an obscure, irrelevant tangent.

It is pretty sad that so many of you can't grasp the basic problem in society in Mecca.
All an educated person can do is feel pity for such souls.

Smerd, By the way I want to buy all my pot from you. You don't understand the difference between a joint and four ounces. I'll give you $5 for that quarter-pound, I mean joint. LOL!

Hey uh.... why are you incapable of considering more than one example at once?

Since you are so insistent - this is what is wrong with it - the people there think it is immodest.

The reason we invoked other examples is to demonstrate a cultural equivalent for us Westerners. The closest equivalent is this - you would feel the same way about a naked person in a major city here as they would feel about a woman in a bikini.

This is to say: you would find it immodest, despite lacking a good reason why it should be wrong. That does not mean however that without a good reason we are obliged to allow it. Some societies allow it, but ours does not. By the same token, we allow bikinis, Mecca does not.

The parallel here is that in parts of Europe you can wear a burka, a bikini, or nothing. You can only do two of those in America.

So since your logic is that the less you can do the freer you are, demonstrate why our level of less freedom than some Europeans is better, if indeed you believe it is.

Hi, are you a bot designed to do research on trolling and when you hit a brick wall you loop back to the beginning? Can you read? I take it you won't be accepting my offer but at least now you can stop pretending you have any interest in real debate since you're not intellectually capable enough to understand the basic principles of rhetoric. Skype up or shut up, forever, preferably.

P.S. If you don't believe any of this nonsense but are just a long running troll, my hat is off to you, you are a true master at walking the fine line between plausible dickery and overly-obvious trolling.

Thucy, I wonder why you refuse to define the "we" you mentioned earlier.
Do you not realize what a vague pronoun that is.
Also, changing the subject is rather crude.

"We"? invoked other examples? We=?

I'm glad to finally see you take a stab at a direct answer though.
Woman wearing a bikini is immodest? Really?
Is it immodest for a man to go shirtless in the same way?
What I'm getting at is your inability to recognize the double standard in your own post.

I didn't mention Europe. I mentioned New York City. Again you try to change the subject from the original question. I guess that is because you are having such a tough time producing an argument that justifies telling a woman she can't wear a bikini in Mecca.

You tried to portray it as the woman being immodest and it being perfectly alright for the government/religion/or whatever institution in Mecca to establish an arbitrary definition of immodesty and impose it.

Yet you can't seem to grasp the insulting nature of a woman forced by society into wearing a burka for the same reasons a woman is denied being given the right to wear a bikini.

I just love to get you kids to post in writing the true nature of your ideas and though processes.

My logic is that there is something wrong with a society that has a double-standard for the conduct of men and women.

Using the bikini example was a simple one to illustrate that, but the responses in this thread showed you guys couldn't even grasp that.

I ended up reading about the lack of universal health insurance, the inability to care an AK-47 in public, the lack of knowledge of the difference between a quarter pound of pot and a joint, and how a poor person with an expensive illness was how almost every post by a certain group on this board always ends.

It's really a shame there isn't a higher quality of thought.

Could a women in the United States get sentenced to death by stoning? Of course not, but it happens all over the Muslim world and is sanctioned by Sharia Law.

A Somali woman was stoned to death and her boyfriend given 100 lashes for having an affair, a judge for an Islamic militant group in Somalia told Associated Press reporters Wednesday.
The woman was killed Tuesday in front of a crowd of some 200 people near the town of Wajid, the Star Tribune said.
The Somali woman, 20, was a divorcee - but although she was no longer married, her affair was seen as adultery in the eyes of Somalia's extremist interpretation of Sharia law, according to a Mail Foreign Service article.
The militants that control much of southern Somalia and have links to al-Quida have instituted a conservative reading of Islam's Sharia law, the Star Tribune said.
Sheikh Ibrahim Abdirahman, the judge for the group al-Shabab, says the woman's boyfriend was a 29-year-old unmarried man, was given 100 lashes for the affair, according to the Mail Foreign Service article.
The stoning death was a least the fourth for adultery in Somalia over the last year. It was the second time a female has been killed, the Star Tribune said.

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/falke019/3101newsfall09/2009/11/somali-woman-stoned-to-death-for-adultery.html

Smerd, are you a stoned teenager designed to post meaningless jibberrish?

I am not commenting on the burka thing or the we thing because I am using your own fucking medicine against you. If it wasn't directly mentioned in the OP, we are not allowed to think about it.

Right?

A woman does not have the choice in Saudi Arabia to wear a bikini for the most part, you are right.

However to say that because there are double standards in Saudi society, the United States is better than them, is folly. There are double standards here too. In fact is it you who is using an almost comical double standard in your single-mindedness.

There are other issues besides what you can wear.

In fairness we also learned that you're a troll and afraid to debate someone where you wouldn't be able to ignore difficult questions and say the same thing over and over again without sounding like an obviously evasive idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about. Can you think of another reason?

Let me clarify so you can follow my train of thought, since you so rarely do.

There are lots of double standards everywhere, but the ones I were referring to when I said "There are double standards here too" were double standards in the United States between men and women.

Singling out this ONE double standard that exists only in medieval Saudi Arabia does not prove anything except that we do not have that double standard.

(Except wait... wait.... why can a man walk topless in America, but not a woman without breaking the law? Hmmmmmmmmmm there is a phrase for that situation..... I can't remember it though)