Welcome to anyone who browses through!  After years sitting on the sidelines, spending altogether too much time reading blogs and opinion columns, I've decided to suit up and enter the fray myself.  

What could compel a man to do something so monstrously unintelligent?  Why would anyone willfully determine to sacrifice untold hours of time and untold amounts of frustration to producing a blog that will have no discernible difference whatsoever on the trajectory of political events and the world of political discourse? 

Frustration.   Persistent, overpowering frustration.  Frustration with the state of political discourse.  Frustration that screeds and slogans, bumper-sticker clichés and a general morass of confusion and ignorance should masquerade as intelligent political argument.  

The purpose of this blog is to assess and produce arguments.  For the sake of my own professional survival I intend to keep my identity concealed insofar as possible, but suffice it to say that my own professional training is in the arts of argumentation.  I do not intend to overload these 'pages' with jargon, but I do intend to bring some level of conceptual rigor to ongoing arguments in the social and political spheres.  

Let me make a few points clear:

1.  I strive to examine each issue on the weight of its own merits.  Historically this has led me to 'conservative' positions, and I see no reason to expect that this will change.  Intellectual integrity, however, requires that I remain open to wherever the arguments and evidence lead me.  And there are places where I believe conservative orthodoxy must be challenged, and places where I believe it has led in the wrong direction.  That's fine, of course.  A lively dialogue is the heart of a healthy movement. 

2.  My hope is that this will prove collaborative, which is why I've chosen to allow comments.  I don't pretend to be the sharpest and most informed person on every issue, or even any particular one.  So let me know where I'm wrong and I'll admit it.  The atmosphere here will be investigative, enquiring.  It will be no place for ad hominem attacks, for rhetorical excess, and so on.  I reserve the right to delete comments liberally.

3.  Since the purpose is neither to rally the troops for activism nor to sway a particular issue, but rather to deal with arguments themselves, it will deal with the arguments we find in a great variety of places, from international affairs and the war on terrorism, to domestic policy and immigration, to ethical and cultural issues.  Also, as academia and religion are my special spheres, I will comment on them more thoroughly than others. 

4.  Finally, the larger purpose here is to elevate and refine the discourse.  I try to hold myself to the standards that academia (my professional sphere) once advocated but now (at least in certain circles) seems to have abandoned: understanding opposing viewpoints before critiquing them, representing those viewpoints charitably and honestly, and dealing with opposing arguments in their strongest formulations.  I take these things seriously.  Ultimately they lead to more refined and more persuasive arguments.  

All right, I'll leave it there for now.  For the coming days I would expect the blog to be largely 'under construction.'  But drop by again if this sounds like the sort of dialogue that would interest you.  

Drop by again, that is, if you feel the same frustration.  Drop by if you're looking for a new form of discourse, for new ways of thinking, new ways through the dense thicket of conceptual confusion that is contemporary politics.