P.S. - And if you think about it, Otto, you might find it amusing that posters such as Der Trihs can rant and rave about how EVIL America and conservatives are and how he’d use magical powers to kill every U.S. soldier, and he raises nary a complaint or criticism among the ignorance-fighters of the Dope. Some of them will even comment on occasion that perhaps he goes a little too far but they can see where he’s coming from.
But let me hold liberal feet to the fire and point out the lives that have been lost and the misery that has been created by their attempts to reinvent the societal wheel and a grassroots movement forms to rally posters to ignore me.
I don’t know what you call it when your opponents flee rather than own up to the consequences of their actions, but I call it victory.
Gee, you’re right, Starving Artist, the 1950s were pretty bad. Teen pregnancy rates were way higher than they were today. http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/tgr/05/1/gr050107.html
And you’re sure right that glamorizing street corner thugs is a sick and sad thing.
And drug dealers!
Kids growing up in an environment where learning is scoffed at, crime and drugs are everywhere.
Hey, Starving, would you mind having one more go at explaining your worldview? I don’t think I quite got it the first thousand times. Also, please increase the word count; I’m sure that will make reading the same crap over and over again much more compelling.
I find it utterly wrong-headed that you dismiss civil rights and the anti-war movement, things for which there is a concrete, verifiable voting record, as being irrelevant or only tangentially related to liberalism; and yet you draw an absolute causal link from cultural trends like music to current teen pregnancy rates, and condemn current political ideas because of it.
I almost said that you implied an intent on the part of liberals, but I’m not sure if you’ve ever actually said that. So I’ll ask. Starving Artist, if liberalism begat sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and those things begat a host of social problems, are you saying that liberalism deliberately set out for those ends, that those ends should have been foreseen and avoided, or that it was inadvertant but liberals deserve the blame anyway?
Less than half of all high schoolers are even sexually active, and 1 in 4 sexually active teenagers contracts an STD (cite). Only 7 percent of teenage girls get pregnant (cite). I have no idea where you get the idea that most high school graduates are illiterate, but since an ever-increasing number go on to 4-year colleges, I also assume that is untrue. Are any of the things you say backed up with facts?
Look - I am 30 years younger than you, but I had the idyllic childhood you so love, and believe is gone - Mom stayed home with us while Dad went to work and brought home the bacon. We lived in a quaint little bungalow in a pleasant part of town - crime and drugs were not a problem. If I were to use your anecdote-as-fact model, I would say that the mid-to-late 80s were the golden age. Thing is I grew up and realized that my experience was far from universal and far from perfect, and furthermore that the world is vastly more complex than I thought it was when I was 14. I’m sorry that you haven’t realized this.
What you fail to realize is that I was already an adult by the time all that crap started. I turned 21 in 1969 and could readily see even then where all that shit was gonna go. I don’t have time right now to answer the rest of your post (or yours, RA) but I’ll try to get back to them later. (And btw, you’re wrong about the rate of female teen STDs. It’s one in four female students - or at least it is according to MSNBC, ABC, and Dr. Sami L. Gottlieb, from the division of sexually transmitted disease prevention at the U.S. Centers for Disease and Prevention. Cite)
And yeah, more kids are going to college, where they write papers so full of spelling and word usage errors that only professors who’ve gotten used to it by now can figure out what they’re saying. (Generally speaking, that is. This board is evidence that some people can get through school while actually learing something. The point isn’t that no one learns anything, it’s that the number of those who do is so much smaller than it was prior to the counter-culture revolution and its after effects.)
And just for the record, it isn’t that I so love the good old days; it’s that I’m so disgusted by what has happened since then. Again, that so-called ‘golden era’ only seems golden because things are so incredibly screwed up now. Nobody back then thought that era was golden, including me.
And also for the record I was just as disgusted and contemptuous of what was happening in 1969 as I am now. If you’ve swallowed the Doper kool-aid and think I’m just a cranky old geezer looking back on a gilded age that never existed, you’ll be quite wrong. I was an adult when the counter-culture revolution occurred. I turned 21 in 1969 and know fully well what things were like then from an adult perspective. And for what it’s worth, I was just as appalled and disgusted by what was going on then as I am now.
Man, kids these days! With their spooging in swimming pools! Why, back in my day you spooged in the privacy of your own home, like a good God-fearing American, and you liked it!
I implied no such thing. I asked if OttoDaFe would call a society that boasts a high school in which one of every eight girls is pregnant ‘seemingly disfunctional’?
I said nothing about all high school girls being pregnant, and I said nothing about “this exact moment”.
So in very short order, Meyer6, you’ve been wrong about the number of high school girls with STDs; the number I said were pregnant; and what you thought I was saying exists right now. You imply that I don’t know what I’m talking about by asking if I ever say things that are backed up by fact, and yet you’ve been wrong about virtually everything I said even though the facts of what I said were right there in front of your face in black and white. As Shodan said: "This must be that thing called irony, if I am not mistaken.
Nope, I got lots of ‘hippie chick’ action. They all wanted me to ‘tune in, turn on, and drop out’. The ones who succeeded in turning me on got to stick around for a while.
Okay, so for you to claim this dysfunctional society, only one single high school in America needs to have a high teen pregnancy rate? That’s even dumber than what I thought you were trying to say. And as for the STD rate - it seems to be reported differently depending on what website you look at, which is suspicious, but I will note that your cite lists HPV as far and away the most common STD in teens, and testing for that was not developed until the mid-70s and was not common until well after that, so I have no idea how you propose to compare those rates to the ones in your halcyon youth.
