Bob, I dunno if you’re gonna stick around here or not, but if you do, you should work on curtailing outrageous statements like these, they do nothing for your credibility except destroy it. Civil rights and the moon landing are the only advancements our country made in the 20th century outside of war? For God’s sake man, don’t be a bigger fool than you have to be.
E-Sabbath, since the OP didn’t do it I figured I’d let you know that you’ve been Pitted. As a racist.
An interesting claim…
How about:
-Women’s suffrage
-The Marshall Plan (true, this might count as war-related)
-The internet
-Rural electrification
-Child labor laws
-Near-universal literacy
-The rise of the middle class
(I’m sure there are some others)
Although it’s hard to argue that the civil rights movement isn’t one of, say, the top 3 triumphs of the USA as a whole in the 20th century, and that Rosa Parks isn’t one of the top 3 symbols of that movement.
Like Jackie Robinson, there’s a small extent to which she was just in the right place at the right time, but that’s dwarfed by (a) the importance of what they did, symbolic and non-symbolic, and (b) each of them was very very much the RIGHT PERSON in the right place at the right time, and their courage and strength of character turned what could either have been disasters or cheap forgettable stunts into triumphs.
It would be silly to say that without Rosa Parks, we’d still be in Jim Crow, or without Jackie Robinson, there would still be segregation in baseball; but that doesn’t mean what they did was easy, trivial, or undeserving of honor.
**Left Hand of Dorkness ** You’re gonna have to pull a cite on that. As far as I know, this was not a planned event.
Wasn’t the internet originally developed by and for the military?
Thanks, FinnAgain. Doesn’t change my point any, were it true. Which it isn’t.
The link to the transcript of Jesse Jackson’s recitation of Green Eggs and Ham doesn’t do it justice. What was great about it was the way he read it, and that doesn’t come through in a transcript. It was a cool way to honor Dr. Suess.
Thanks, Scott 
I know but I figured that post a link to the Audio was probably not allowed by the SDMB. (I think I have it at home though.)
No one said it was rigged. What was said is that Rosa Parks KNEW a test case was needed, so she volunteered herself to be the test case. She pretty much knew what was going to happen, but that doesn’t mean it was rigged. Instead, she basically set up the segregationists, and defeated them. If it were rigged, she would have bribed the white man to ask for her seat.
And I believe it was Cedric the Entertainer who said that, not Ice Cube.
Rosa Parks knew going in what was going to happen, and I think that makes her even braver.
Okay, a bit of Googling later, it appears I was wrong, but not completely wrong. It appears it wasn’t “planned,”, at least not according to the most official site I can find, althoug I’m not able to find it in her words. However, it’s something she had done before (the driver that had her arrested had ejected her from the bus on previous occasions for refusing to give up her seat), and she had attended workshops at the Highlander Research and Education Center the summer before her famous act; at these workshops, the NAACP strategized how best to organize boycotts of discriminatory mass transit systems.
Daniel
The previous time she was ejected was not related to the challenge, it was 12 years earlier and before any planning was done.
Right, I didn’t mean to suggest it was part of this particular challenge (the article I read mentioned it had happened years earlier, but not that much detail–thanks!) I was mentioning her earlier defiance to show that she had a pattern of resistance to discrimination. I think the training at the Highlander Center is the most significant part of the story that gets underreported, though: although I was wrong that she deliberately set out to challenge the bus system on this particular date, it does seem that she was deliberately setting out to organize for social justice in general.
Daniel
What an absolute load of cock.
She also worked as a legal fundraiser and moral support for Claudette Colvin, a fifteen year old girl who was arrested in an indentical protest earlier the same year. If Colvin hadn’t become pregnant out of wedlock between her arrest and her trial, we might be refering to her as the grandmother of the civil rights movement instead of Parks. It’s unlikely that Rosa planned to be arrested on that bus on that day, but she was a seasoned political activist who had frequently bucked segregation on Alabama buses. She was a hell of a lot more than a tired woman who “sat her black ass down.” She was a savvy, incredibly brave political activist who knew exactly what she was opening herself up to when she refused to give up her seat, and who allowed the NAACP to use her as their test case in the Supreme Court. The NAACP had been looking for such a test case for a while, and there is no way Parks would not have been aware of this fact. She almost certainly did not expect her actions to become the center of a national controversy, but at the same time, I have no doubt that she hoped to create such a controversy when she refused to move, if for no other reason than to spare some other woman of having to go through the same ordeal. She was an absolutely remarkable woman, and I think the latter-day mythologizing that ignores her political astutness does her a great disservice.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=starving+artist+fraud&btnG=Google+Search
starving, artist, fraud, over 310,000 hits. So what’s your point, is Google now the bible code?
Yeah, I suppose that’s over the top. Only is a bit hyperbolic, perhaps I should have said the two top. But obviously, I don’t want people to believe me, I want people to be so outraged at all the lies they are being fed that they think critically for themselves and stop letting lesser beings do their thinking for them.
Bob, I am not insulting you… that’s for the pit thread. But… uh. Can you parse your own sentence, and… did you just call yourself a lesser being? I’m not joking. Maybe you should rephrase that a bit?
Yes, I intended to include myself as a lesser being, people who others substitute their opinions for their own. A bit tongue and cheek. I don’t intend it as license for people to think they are superior to others, but I don’t want people thinking that Bill O’Rielly has a special gift for forming opinions, or me either. I’d truly like people to see things from different perspectives and think critically about things. That’s why I’ve spent way too much time here in the past month, because so many people here are onthe verge of being able to think well. I’ve been in other forums, and take for example, Polycarp, or Tomndebb: geez, not just nice to people, but first rate thinkers. (Oh, in real life, I am as nice to people as Polycarp or Tomndebb are on the boards. I would never dream of verbally getting in someone’s face, even when discussing politics. But the freedom of anonymity, let’s me let a few fucks fly.)