Another School Shooting [Stoneman Douglas] (2/14/2018)

The BBQ Pit
481

Of course not. They want conservatives to vote for liberal candidates, but failing that, they’d obviously prefer conservatives to vote for any of the other candidates than Trump. Surely you aren’t so disingenuous as to claim otherwise (I say this not because I believe it outside your character to do so, but because your chicanery would be obvious if you did)?

Given what’s happened to this country in the last fifty years, it’s hard to find fault with that position.

Since when have the country’s liberals found any Republican candidate they would characterize as having honest principles and aims? I certainly don’t recall any great love for any of the Republican candidates since at least the time of Nixon.

See? This right here is the more typical liberal view of Republican candidates. To the liberal mind, any idea, philosophy or goal of any Republican is unethical, counterproductive and stupid. Or at least this has been the case since…wait for it…the sixties. You people have only found or claimed to find merit in any of the Republican candidates since the time Trump got elected. Prior to that, you were so convinced that Trump would never get elected that you continued to spew your venom at all the other candidates. Then Trump got elected and all of a sudden you’re all about intelligent and principled Republican candidates. As with most of the things you attempt to regale me with, it is to laugh.

Pretty poor example on two levels. One, I didn’t give him to you as I didn’t vote for Trump. In fact I came this close (fingers 1/8" apart) to voting for Clinton but in the end just couldn’t make myself pull the trigger. And two, Trump was elected for many reasons. Some of them he’s already either accomplished or is in the process of accomplishing. And I’ll say this much for him, he’s living up to his campaign promises more than any president I can recall in my lifetime. Pissing you guys off is just a side benefit. It’s not just ridiculous but also stupid to actually believe that pissing liberals off is the sole or even primary reason Trump was elected. You people have shown time and time again that you don’t have the foggiest notion of what really goes on in the conservative mind. You just know that it appears to think differently than yours and therefore it has to be evil, stupid, unethical, racist, yada, yada, yada, ad virtually infinitum.

You know perfectly well what I mean, dear. I mean “all the world’s civilized countries who’ve managed to get rid of all their guns”. You know, the ones you guys are always on about. Curiously, you’re silent when those claims are made, aren’t you?

Nope, sorry. The fact that the country’s liberals aren’t pressing for ridiculous practices that there’s currently no support for or is ludicrous on the face of it in no way means that liberals have become satisfied with the status quo on any of their pet or hot-button issues. You’re still trying to make the country as secular as possible and I see absolutely no reason this will ever end, short of having accomplished it. Despite the fact that black people and other minorities are now free to live, work, shop, attend school, just like everyone else, you’re still shouting ‘racist!’ right and left, and most often in regard to things that aren’t remotely racist. And don’t get me started on identity politics and the idiocy attendant to them, where people are attacked for daring to wear some other culture’s clothes or hairstyles or perform ‘someone else’s’ music. Education is getting fucked up more and more as time goes by, etc., etc., etc. There’s really no end. If it’s a hot-button liberal issue, there’s never enough ‘progress’ and never an end. Everyone not a liberal knows this, and like I said upthread, it’s why they fight so hard to keep you from gaining even sensible ground on gun control because they know ‘sensible gun control’ is just the first step on the road to banning them altogether.

482

Too bad that the increasing and liberal-driven acceptance of social and legal equality for, e.g., blacks, women, homosexuals and atheists in this country in the last fifty years bothers you so much, but that’s your problem.

Honestly, SA, you keep throwing unqualified condemnation at a period of history in which our society has made huge strides against, e.g., racism, and then you whine about being called racist. It’s nobody’s fault but your own if you constantly come across as regarding, say, civil rights for black people as a trivial issue compared to the unimaginable horrors of women no longer wearing hats and gloves in public and the more widespread acceptance of the use of words like “fuck”.

Uh, no, I said that intelligent and principled Republican voters could have nominated a better candidate than Trump. Being better than Trump is an extremely low bar in terms of candidate quality.

Only if you count grifting himself more money and getting himself more talked about. Oh, and pumping up bigotry and delusional rejection of facts is definitely something he’s managed to accomplish, so there’s that too.

There’s nothing else he’s really any good at, except the abovementioned shameless bragging and grifting. Many conservatives are just plain mad that they now have to live in a world with, for example, greater equality for blacks and women and homosexuals and atheists, and Trump is their giant flabby middle finger waved at the liberals who made that happen.

Cite? I don’t find any instance in this thread, or anywhere on these boards, or for that matter elsewhere on the internet, of anybody but you referring to countries “who’ve managed to get rid of all their guns”.

So no, I don’t know what you mean when you claim that liberals are “always on about” countries that are literally “gun-free”. At present, the status of that claim remains Inaccurate Misleading Hyperbole Pulled Out of Starving Artist’s Ass.

Gee, that’s convenient. You simply declare as an axiom that liberals are intrinsically never “satisfied with the status quo” and then you can just ignore all actual evidence about issues on which liberals are satisfied with the status quo. :rolleyes:

Well, thanks at least for finally admitting that conservative paranoia and anti-liberal trollishness is leading conservatives to deliberately oppose even measures that you yourself admit are sensible.

Sure, just like conservatives used to “know” that racial integration of schools would be “just the first step” towards millions of white girls being indiscriminately and helplessly “polluted” by the “savage lusts” of their black boy classmates. That didn’t end up happening either.

483

Have you ever once heard me complain about advances for black people and women? Nope, but that’s all you got. Everything else has been a race to the bottom, but since that’s all you’ve got it’s what you keep coming back to. Most of the conservatives in this country are and always have been fine with the elimination of racism and of women’s rights, me most certainly included. People like you love to broad bush all conservatives with statements like the idiocy you ended your post with, but people like that make up and made up a very small percentage of the country’s conservatives.

So racism has gotten better and women’s rights have gotten better and everything else has gone to shit. There’s a reason why the 50s and 60s are regarded as America’s halcyon days, and contrary to the inevitable and tiresome liberal line that it’s because "uppity blacks and women knew their place, it’s because kids graduated high school knowing how to speak correctly, use proper grammar, and actually do math. It’s because millions of people hadn’t died or had their lives and those of their families and loved ones ruined because of drugs. It’s because criminality hadn’t forced the police to become paramilitary units and the citizenry didn’t feel the need to arm themselves to be safe both out in public and in their own homes. It’s because public life wasn’t rife with crassness and vulgarity and it was possible to raise kids to be wholesome rather than foul-mouthed lowlife street rat wannabes. It’s because people aspired to better themselves and their lives and weren’t castigated for waste and ‘privilege’ when they did.

Tell ya what, let’s keep race and women’s rights where they are now and getting even better and let’s change everything else back. Whaddya say? Surely you’re not in favor of drug addiction and its concomitant ruination of lives. And surely you’re not in favor of kids graduating college with worse English and math skills than that of an 8th grader in 1960. And surely you’re not in favor of the widespread criminality that took off beginning in the late sixties. And I’m willing to listen to whatever you feel it benefits society to have crass and vulgar and often vile language and music permeating every segment of society, but as for now I can’t see that it accomplishes a single thing that’s positive.

I’m aware there’s not a snowball’s chance your side will go for this because it would involve things like discipline and delayed gratification and individual responsibility and, well, work. But that doesn’t change the fact that these are the reasons those decades are looked upon fondly by those fortunate enough to have lived through them. (Insert boilerplate about blacks, women, yada, yada, yada. I’ll bet dollars to donuts you can’t not do it.)

484

What’s the point of talking to you, Starving Artist, when you so clearly hate liberals, liberalism, and inevitably describe our positions so wrongly? And when you’re uninterested in even considering the possibility that maybe you don’t fully understand a position that you hate so much?

You accuse liberals of this all the time – you say we get wrong conservative motives and ideas. Isn’t it possible that maybe you do the same sometimes?

If you’re ever open to this possibility, please let us know. Maybe you could learn something – I still tend to think that under all this rage and weirdness, you might be a decent guy.

485

I need to call it a night, but before I go I’ll just say I’m not really consumed with hate the way you guys seem to think. In this thread or another one Chefguy called me a misanthrope, and he couldn’t be more wrong. I like people just fine and have lots of friends. Away from here I’m a friendly good-natured guy who enjoys people quite a lot and they like me. I honestly can’t think of a single person in real life who dislikes me. I even got a handwritten note from McDonald’s one day entitling me to a free meal after the employees all got together and decided to reward me because I was their nicest customer. Several times in my life people have told me they wished they could be happy all the time like I am.

I do dislike much of what liberals do and how they think, and yes, I hate much of what they’ve done. But the truth is most of my friends and family are liberals and we all get along fine, because I was raised in an era where people were considered entitled to their own opinions and we give each other space to believe as we want. Even here I could probably count on one hand the posters I really and truly dislike and wouldn’t agree to have a beer or a drink with away from the board.

As for my behavior here, it’s 50% because of the way the board’s [political] posters have treated me from my very first day here (when I was much less, shall we say, forthcoming, about my thoughts and foolishly tried to be polite and discussional), and 50% because of the ire it raises when I see the nonsense people here post about conservatives so I point out the harm they’ve done just so they know there’s a counterpoint and they’re not so wonderful after all. And also because it’s a lively way to pass the time when I don’t have anything else going on. :smiley:

486

I listen to POTUS on Siruis all the time (Julie Mason, Michael Smerconish, Steele & Unger) all the time, it’s one of my regular stations on rotation while driving (which I do a lot of) along with the Grateful Dead channel, Yacht Rock, and 90s on 9. Sometimes I even switch to Patriot to hear the crazier side, like the sometimes-hilarious/sometimes terrifying Mark Levin, just to keep abreast on the Republican “pulse”, which you gotta do if you follow politics.

I never hear anyone talk about Michael Moore. Ever.

On FB when people share political humor, it’s Oliver, Colbert, Samantha Bee, on the less-humorous and more serious side I see a lot of Shaun King, Ta-Nehisi Coats, various stuff from Vice, The Atlantic…never see Moore’s name come up.

487

And so, with just two words, you expose the secret liberal agenda of banning the practice of putting sugar in porridge!

It was bound to come to that when folks stopped wearing respectable hats.

488

Obviously not*, or they would have done it when they ran the country.

*presuming that the statement that conservatives have always been fine with the elimination of women’s rights was a malapropism rather than an intended assertion

489

No, and I didn’t say I had. My point is that you constantly disregard the valuable recent advances for black people and women (and homosexuals and atheists and many other groups, by the way) in order to keep shit-talking the period that produced them.

When you are always sweepingly condemning the post-1950s era on account of its alleged effects on “decorum” and “civility”, while at the same time stubbornly overlooking the importance of its achievements in civil rights and social justice, that makes your priorities look very skewed.

“Everything else” except rights and equality for gay/trans people and religious minorities as well as for women and racial minorities. And increased effectiveness in the defense of civil liberties and church/state separation. And recognition and defense of women’s reproductive rights. And continued increases in measured IQ along with falling smoking rates and rising life expectancy. And an eventual reduction in violent crime rates (after a spike in the first few decades) to below their pre-1960s level. And criminalization of marital rape, and increased efforts to place the stigma of rape and child sexual abuse on the perpetrators rather than the victims. And the exposure and punishment of perpetrators who had been committing abuse for decades. And the abolition of military conscription and unmasking of public-health dangers like the tobacco-company coverups. And the emergence and growth of an active environmental movement whose innumerable achievements include saving many endangered species and repairing the ozone layer. And significant increases in high-school graduation rates and college attendance. And the diversification of higher education to offer more opportunities to people who weren’t upper-middle-class white men. And mainstreaming of people with various disabilities in schools and other public places so they can be included rather than isolated in our society.

And thousands of other developments which have made millions and millions of people’s lives better. Which you personally don’t seem to care a rat’s ass about in comparison with, say, proliferation of vulgar rap lyrics and young adults enjoying slang and music and fashions that you don’t consider “wholesome”.

I’m assuming you meant to say something like “fine with the elimination of racism and the assertion of women’s rights”, instead of lumping women’s rights in with racism as something to be eliminated?

If so, then you need to thank a liberal, because the conservatives sure as hell weren’t getting that job done.

Only by people who didn’t have to live through them as somebody other than a comfortable white male, and don’t have enough empathy or respect for democracy to care about what those other people had to go through.

Uh-huh. What actually happened in the 1950s was that adult society was panicked as hell about “juvenile delinquency” and the pernicious influence of rock ‘n’ roll and other aspects of youth culture. There was a whole United States Senate Subcommittee on juvenile delinquency, for Pete’s sake; they held hearings on, e.g., comic books aimed at children with covers showing a woman’s decapitated head. The only people you can sell that bullshit about the 1950s being so uniformly “halcyon” and “wholesome” are people who don’t know or refuse to remember anything beyond their own rose-colored-glasses sanitized impressions.

Yes, plenty of kids graduated high school in the 1950s knowing how to speak standard English and do some amount of math (although at a lower level than the math many of today’s graduates have learned). Plenty of other kids didn’t, often because they were tucked away in substandard segregated schools where comfortable white kids like you didn’t see them.

Sure they had, with the primary drugs being alcohol and tobacco, but also prescription narcotics and other medications. There was a White House Conference on Narcotic and Drug Abuse already in 1962.

As with so many social phenomena in your alleged “halcyon days”, the chief reason you imagine bad stuff wasn’t happening then is because there was such a strong social emphasis on keeping bad stuff hidden, not because bad stuff wasn’t actually happening.

So, no more gay/trans rights? No more strong civil-liberties defense of church/state separation? No more special needs education for disabled kids in public schools? No more environmental and sustainability movement? Back to covering up all the rapes and drug/alcohol abuse and child molestation and contraceptive use because the important thing is that the neighbors not find out?

Hell no, I don’t want to go back to that whitewashed world of sanitized TV shows and insanitary secrets. Just because you’ve somehow managed to get the real 1950s confused with a Leave It to Beaver episode doesn’t mean that anybody else should fall for it.

The fact that you keep dismissing condemnation of segregation-era racial policies with disparaging sneers like “boilerplate” and “yada yada yada” is one of the many reasons you keep coming across as racist.

And I can’t quite figure out why you are so resolutely ignoring, for instance, the topic of gay rights. Just one more issue that you’ve failed to notice in your romanticization of the midcentury American mythos, or are you actually opposed to equal rights for gay people?

490

You’ve offered no facts, only opinions. Opinions are not facts.

Your opinions are also ill-informed. For example, what is the effect of sawing off a shotgun barrel? Or conversely, why would they bother putting those pesky barrels on them in the first place?

Also, suddenly the weapon that would do exactly the same job in the hands of a mass shooter becomes clumsy and insufficient in the hands of Joe Selfdefender?

491

Whatever the reason, your posts come across as hateful, and your beliefs about liberals largely inaccurate. If you have any interest in changing this, let us know.

492

It’s worth noting that this bit of overbearing Big Government (huh… I thought conservatives were against that sort of thing…) led the industry to censor stories that encouraged those nasty unsettling 1960s cultural upheavals.

493

Man, when you put it like that, it’s almost like he doesn’t know what he is talking about.

494

Shrug. You said you’d never heard of it happening; now you know better.

495

Why the liberal fondness for conflating disapproval with hate? I hate some of the things liberalism does, but most of my posts here express disapproval (albeit with a healthy helping of disgust or contempt thrown in at times) or criticism, but not hate.

To hear liberals tell it, no one on the right ever just dislikes or disapproves of something. No, they hate it!

Why is this, I don’t wonder.

496

[My bold]

It’s your words, dude.

ETA: And by the way, criticism and disapproval, with disgust and contempt, pretty much is the definition of hate.

497

Hating some of what someone has done does not equal hatred of them, nor of everything they do.

And no, sorry, but contempt and disgust are not the same as hate. For example, I hate banging my head on the towel rack when I step into the shower, but I’m not contemptuous of it or disgusted by it. It’s just a hasty mistake. And I’m disgusted by dog poop on my shoes but I don’t remotely hate it. It’s just another example that in life, shit happens.

Lots of people disapprove of homosexuality but they don’t hate it, nor do they hate homosexuals. In fact this was me at one time. Further, lots of people disapprove of welfare, feeling that it causes more problems than it solves, but they don’t hate it. Lots of people disapprove of socialism, believing that it causes more and worse problems than it solves, but they don’t hate it. Etc., etc., etc. And yet to hear the left tell it, anyone who disagrees with them at all on anything is motivated by hate (or to be fair, by stupidity, but that’s for another conversation).

I long ago noticed that semantic dishonesty is one of the chief characteristics of liberal activism, and things like attributing hate to mere disapproval are one of the ways that dishonesty manifests itself. The use of it is intended to exaggerate disapproval, which can be rational and logical, into the realm of hate, where it can be portrayed as unreasoned and irrational and dismissed, with the added benefit of portraying the alleged hater in a much more negative light than would be the case with someone who merely expresses disapproval. You guys simply don’t realize how transparent this all is, and how much annoyance and hate (:D) you generate with these kinds of tactics. You might look to the occupant of the White House to see the consequence.

498

Well, tough.

The people of your halcyon era had their chance to fix the problems and injustices of society. They did not bother* to do so. Therefore, their belly-aching about the people who did bother to do so will be summarily ignored.

*Oh, and I expect your gratitude for using this charitable interpretation rather than the “they did not want to do so” conclusion that would inevitably be drawn by your stereotyped image of a “liberal”.

499

:rolleyes: This, from the guy who in just a few recent posts has asserted (with no evidence) that liberals advocate emulating literally “gun-free” societies, that literally “everything else” except racism and women’s rights “has gone to shit” in the last few decades, that there weren’t millions of ruined or destroyed lives due to drug abuse before that period, and many similar semantically dishonest claims.

If you weren’t such a fact-allergic clumsy hyperbolizer, SA, it would conceivably be possible to actually have a constructive discussion with you about specific societal negative consequences of specific liberal ideals (along with other causes) in the past few decades. But you pre-emptively engage in so much rhetorical fist-shaking and stupid overgeneralizations that it takes a rational person all their time just cleaning up a few of the giant turds of factual error that you leave littered about the discussion and consequently ignore.

How about we do a deal? To start with, you either provide some definite evidence that liberal gun-control advocates really “point to gun-free countries as the example we should follow”, or retract your use of the term “gun-free” as careless and inaccurate (because the countries that liberal gun-control advocates actually do suggest emulating have private gun ownership rates well above zero).

In return, I’ll point out some post-1960s societal development that I think was bad for society and the ways in which I think liberal principles were partly or largely responsible for it.

500

This is silly. You know perfectly well what I mean by ‘gun-free’ countries/socieities/whatever. And I don’t for a minute believe you’ve never seen the virtually limitless number of times pro gun-control posters have brought up examples of Australia, England and “the rest of the civilized world” having gotten rid of/done away their guns. I realize that in accordance with your typical M.O. you’ve managed to ferret out a nugget not hair-splittingly correct and seized upon it in the hope of diverting attention from the overriding message, but I’m not gonna play along.