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Hi Santosh: I know I should not have gotten into a philosophic dialogue with a philosopher. Being the realist that I am, I suggest to prove your point. Start on Monday for a month, go to work in a dhoti or kurtha-pajama. Send / post on the Goan cyberspace your pictures in that attire making your hospital rounds and holding your patients, who just adore you. I'd love to see you 'walk the talk' in Houston Texas. Dubiya will likely award you the "Medal of Freedom". This ends the discussion for me until I see your picture. Santosh: I know nothing about this conformist philosophy. This certainly is a new interpretation of the freedoms of belief and thought. You are free to believe in anything as long as you believe in something that the majority believes. If you don't do exactly that then you are socially irresponsible, and you lack common sense. I had always thought that the concept of belief dictated by peer pressure and threat of persecution had fallen into disrepute in modern society. Most people regarded it as an unsavory after-taste of our authoritarian and colonial past. I have never seen it being portrayed as a virtue, as Gilbert has done so unabashedly in his last two posts. I get the unconfortable feeling that something more than history is being revised here. Perhaps, our progressive values are also due for a revision. Those old values are now unAmerican. New Americanism requires one to revise freedom of belief to bring it in conformity with neoconversative ideals of mass conformity, servility, sycophancy, fear of persecution and fear of war of "liberation".
