Responding to one of your old posts, Tush, was on my list of things to do, but it seems that perhaps I should bump up its priority.
But just because you consider a thought does not necessarily make them your thoughts, or views you conform with.
First, yeah, this Thought belong to someone else, so nyah
Second, joking aside, if you can think a thought, then can adopt the behaviors that the thought promotes. Thinking about it, then, opens up a potential decision point. Even if you think about an important a hundred times and each time continue to come down on the proper side, others would be remiss if they did not offer arguments and exhortations to encourage that again the right path is chosen. Even if nothing else, it provides information for a potential third party who is not engaged in the processes but who is viewing.
However, to be clear, being able to understand a different thought pattern and world view than your own is a critical ability to have. Being unable to do so dooms a person to ultimate irrelevance: if one can't understand the actual reasons that others have for their differing world views, if you can't understand how these might be persuasive, then you can't convince them otherwise. On one hand, it is dangerous to be able to understand the allure of an idea because, when walking among so many thoughts, there are more opportunities to fall into one. However, the individual who can move around thoughts with ease is also at an advantage because they are less likely to be consumed by whichever one they happen to stumble upon.
Now let me simplify this philosophy. Males and Females, like Yin and Yang, were two sides of the same coin; two equal parts of a complete being, that one without the other simply cannot be. Each gender is like a leg attached to a body, and both equally important. Undermine any one of those legs, whether left or right, and you're crippled. But respect both and you will go far.
While I find such a perspective appealing, it is inherently dangerous. It separates males and females into different conceptual categories, although it offers the panacea that they are still related. On a rational level, this makes a degree of sense since there are physiological differences between them. However, the first step towards oppression is alienation. You might be able to legitimately hold this perspective without it degenerating into oppression, but humanity at large has shown that it cannot: separate but equal is not a stable state.
You had me there... *twitch* by about a hundred percent that it's ironic I didn't figure this about myself. When did you exactly predict / deduce this about me?
And don't tell me being romantic is sexist?!
Sorry, I should have been more careful: I meant to say that you are a Romantic (you might be a romantic too, but these are different concepts). That is, you ascribe to Romanticism: despite Z's focus on the Springtime of Youth, you hold to passion and emotion more than he does, at least in your postings here. Similarly, just judging from our postings, you the same would be true if I compared you to Josh, RD, RW, Saj, myself, or anyone else that I can think of off the top of my head. It would be too far to say that you wish mystery to remain in the world, but I think it would be fair to say that you like the mystique in the world.
Now Romanticism isn't itself necessarily sexist, but many dangerous concepts have an air of Romanticism about them. It is both Romantic and romantic to say that males and female complement each other and that together they are more than the sum of the individual parts. Sounds very lovely, doesn't it? Ah, but the logical extension of that, then, is that males and males and female and female wont complement each other the same way: eggs and cheese complement each other nicely when put together into an omelet, but eggs and eggs don't make the same thing, nor does cheese and cheese. Heterosexual couples are thus held as the superior combination, which in turn makes homosexual couples the inferior one. And hey, returning to the omelet analogy, you still have a meal if all you have is an egg, so does that mean eggs are superior to cheeses? Each ingredient has its own properties and it is so easy to start evaluating those properties.
I do not in the least think that you were trying to make a disparaging analogy about homosexuals, but these are the shadows that flutter around such thoughts, just outside the field of vision. Certainly you can understand that, when you approach the edge of this cliff to look down into the abyss, others will cry out "don't fall off!" Or, in some cases case, "only mooks approach the cliff!"
