How to be hideous: the right wing tries to discredit the Parkland school shooting survivors

The BBQ Pit
261

I agree the notion doesn’t make much sense, but it makes just as much sense as your constantly reiterated unsupported assertion that it was something that liberals were doing that caused the post-60’s spike in crime in the first place. (And as much sense as your equally unsupported speculations about the causes of the subsequent decrease in crime over the past quarter-century.)

It’s worse than that: Starving Artist doesn’t even look at facts and evidence on the topics he’s ranting about when they’re presented right in the thread itself, as I did about the gun ownership stats back in post #208.

Per capita rates of gun ownership are going up because a number of existing gun owners are stocking up their arsenals. Household and individual gun ownership rates are going down, because the percentage of households and individuals with guns is dropping. In other words, many people who already own some guns are avidly buying more, but there’s a smaller percentage of people interested in owning any guns in the first place.

So “more gun ownership” is basically useless as an explanation of the drop in crime rates. Unless you want to try to argue that a given individual with ten guns, say, somehow deters or prevents substantially more crime than the same individual with three guns.

:dubious: Dude, over the course of fifty years it’s inevitable that some criminals will get out of jail. Even some violent ones. This has remained true under both Democratic and Republican governance during the last half-century.

I mean, unless you’re advocating an across-the-board policy of life imprisonment without parole for anybody convicted of any violent crime, it’s hard to see how society can possibly avoid letting some of them out someday.

Apparently not, judging by the behavior of the elderly wealthy white elite businessman that your party selected for their Presidential candidate and subsequently voted into office. In fact, that particular vulgar and trashy guy is even a year older than you are, IIRC.

Not a bad idea! Allow me to kick off the project by contributing a draft opening verse:

America the Shi-ithole,
where Negroes can’t be lynched,
and someone might not think it’s droll
when women’s butts get pinched!
America! America!
How could you sink so low,
To burden whites with equal rights
and cures for po-li-o?

262

Oh look, the ass is braying again.

263

If you can’t be bothered to pay any attention to actual facts, even when people go to the trouble of summarizing and citing them for you as I did in my post #208 in this thread, why should anybody take your word for it that your lazy misunderstanding of them was derived from other people’s misrepresentation of them?

No fair continuing to wallow indifferently in your own ignorance and then whining that other people haven’t fixed your ignorance for you.

Wow, if that actually worked, it would be brilliant: just spread the word that gun ownership rates are much higher than they really are, which scares off the baddies, and we can have lower crime rates and fewer guns! Win-win! :cool:

In fact, since apparently by your reasoning it’s possible to scare off the baddies just with rumors of guns rather than actual guns, we could even eliminate a significant number of the guns and just keep telling the baddies that guns are everywhere.

Heh. It sure is a wild ride in the Starving Artist cogniverse.

264

It’s actually kind of sad that when you get what you consider an opportunity to “just say what you want”, what you want to say is mostly factually unsupported bloviating that makes you look ill-informed and irrational. Don’t you have any interest at all in pursuing accuracy and depth for their own sake and your own edification, irrespective of whether or not you think we deserve it?

There, there. If it’s any consolation, at least this confirms that you’re nowhere near as clueless about being vulgar and trashy as you were worrying that you might be.

265

It certainly doesn’t.

You’ve got to be kidding. Liberals ushered in the drug culture, the single biggest driver of crime probably in the history of the country. They agitated and lobbied and did everything they could to get as many people out of jail as often and as early as possible. They ushered in practices that resulted in huge numbers of people being born into fatherless families and raised without proper guidance, education or discipline, practically guaranteeing these people will turn to lives of crime. They fostered scorn for the police and authority and rebellious attitudes that caused more people than ever before to feel entitled to break the law.

Okay, so you guys are getting all het up that America’s gun owners are going to kill people with ten guns instead of one?

As I said, the impression that most of the country is armed is one that your side has fostered. To the degree it may be incorrect, the blame lies with you, not me.

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me with this ‘50 years’, and ‘even some violent ones’ bullshit. It happens all the fucking time that these assholes with multiple violent convictions are out roaming the streets while still in their twenties and thirties. Often committing rape and murder while they are. Ask any cop. This kind of shit has become so common that it’s become normalized and mostly nobody even questions it anymore.

Gee, you’re right! It’s all so clear to me now! Why didn’t I think of it before? Vulgar/trashy/uneducated/lowlife scumbaggery = equality!

How could I ever have been so blind?

:rolleyes:

266

AFAICT, liberal and mainstream media outlets have been accurately reporting that the per capita gun ownership rate in America is very high and increasing, but they haven’t been incorrectly claiming that individual or household gun ownership rates have been going up.

If some people are too dumb and/or lazy to know the difference between those concepts or to try to find out what they don’t know, that’s not the fault of the folks accurately reporting the facts.

You were the one complaining about a fifty-year phenomenon, not me. In fact, you don’t really seem to have grasped exactly what it is you’re complaining about. Crime rates have fallen, and recidivism rates have also fallen, meaning that released criminals are reoffending less than they used to.

You seem to have formulated your gripes about crime somewhere back in the early 1990s, and never updated them since to reflect any more recent developments.

Um, the verse is about modern society rejecting certain traditional but pernicious forms of vulgar/trashy/uneducated/lowlife scumbaggery by giving up (at least some of) the nonconsensual lynching and pinching.

If I had to guess, I’d guess years of practice.

267

Well, you see here’s the thing about that. I discovered years and years ago that honest and reasonable…or hell…even rational discussion about political issues was impossible on this board. (Or at least in the board’s political threads. There are lots of good people here otherwise.) People here in political threads twist what you say if they don’t like it. They lie about what you say if they don’t like it. They are cheap and underhanded and dishonest, and will use any advantage they think they can get, no matter how petty or underhanded, to try to dismiss or undercut or derail or obfuscate arguments they don’t like. They try to bully their opposition into submission, and hopefully away from the board altogether if they can get away with it. After this much time on the board I have pretty much zero respect for 98%…make that maybe 99%…of the posters I interact with, and therefore have pretty much zero concern for what they think of me or what I say. I’m here to state my view on these matters so that people are made aware of what people outside their bubble are thinking. And believe me, there are a lot of people out there who are a hell of a lot worse than me from the board’s perspective. In the conservative world I’m actually pretty much of a moderate. So nitpick away and congratulate yourselves over your perceived micro-victories. They mean nothing. The country is still just as fucked up as I say it is and in the way I say it is. They problems I complain about are still just as real and still the result of your wrongheaded thinking. And your behavior all these years is still the reason Donald Trump is in the White House and why the two parties in this country can no longer do business together. Assholism breeds assholsim and your chickens have come home to roost. It’s true that issues of equality have gotten better but everything else has gotten worse, and that’s a hell of a lot to get worse.

268

Like I said, ask a cop.

Um, my statement had nothing to do with the words of your little snippet, but with the propensity you and others of your ilk have to irrevocably wed the racial ills of the past with its more civilized and positive qualities. Surely one of your presumed intelligence should be able to compartmentalize and separate these things. It can’t be that much of a stretch to imagine that it’s possible not to have “suck my badass dick” blaring from car radios without black people simultaneously having to ride in the back of the bus.

And what the hell is ‘nonconsensual lynching’?

I’m afraid that with that little bit of nonsense I’m gonna have to call it a night.

269

:dubious: When you’re feeling that almost literally everyone else is the problem, then perhaps it’s not everyone else that’s the problem.

Yes, we know. It’s actually kind of cute that you seem to think the other posters here would have no awareness of or exposure to right-wing factually unsupported bloviating if it weren’t for your endeavors, but such is not actually the case.

Well, if you don’t count, say, high school graduation rates and college attendance rates, which are much higher now than they were in the 1950s. And if you don’t count environmental protections and nuclear nonproliferation treaties. Or medical advances, or school anti-bullying campaigns, or Habitat for Humanity, or the movement against South African apartheid, or across-the-board measured IQ increases, or a whole host of other stuff.

Well, except for all the stuff you’re wrong about or don’t know about and can’t be bothered to find out about, sure.

270

That “propensity” is called “acknowledging historical fact”. The racial ills of the past did irrevocably coexist with its other qualities. Ignoring those ills in favor of creating a hypothetical sanitized version of the past where they didn’t exist is just a game of make-believe.

But “these things” weren’t separate in the past: they were part of the same historical and social reality. We should not use our “presumed intelligence” to pretend that only the good parts of the past were real or important.

I don’t think anybody is denying that such a thing would be hypothetically possible. The point, though, is that it wasn’t actual. Back in the days when nobody would have dreamed of blaring overtly sexual lyrics from car radios, you did accept black people having to ride in the back of the bus.

The “civilized and polite” people back then didn’t bother to fix that glaring injustice, so you don’t get to pretend that it ought to be airbrushed or “compartmentalized” out of the discussion of the realities of those days. If you didn’t want the perception of your social mannerisms to be tainted by the injustice and hypocrisy of your race relations, you should have fixed the injustice and hypocrisy then.

The usual kind.

Well, I’ll look forward to more of your nonsense when you return. Sleep well.

271

Or perhaps I could just go hang out on a conservative board and be thought wise, correct and dead on the money.

Once upon a time I earnestly tried to be polite here and I tried to have honest, sincere and reasoned discussions with people. The responses and the nature of them are the reason I post the way I do now.

Yeah, but they don’t get blowback. I like to give blowback. Makes me feel like I’ve done my good deed for the day.

And what’s all this crap about unsupported this and unsupported that? I can’t count the times I’ve posted cites around here that were totally ignored and accomplished nothing. And I can’t count the times totally unsupported shit has been posted about conservatives on this board and not a peep has been heard from you or anyone else. The only time ‘unsupported’ seems to count with people like you is when you think it provides a chink you can exploit to try to shoot down a bigger argument.

Sorry, but when I hear my friend talk about his next door neighbor whose 18-year-old high school graduate son can’t read or write beyond a second grade level, and when I hear and read college graduates saying things like ‘Me and her went to that concert’ or "Have you ever went to that bar’ and having to pull out their phone to do simple math, I have to question the quality of those graduations. Anti-bullying campaigns? Seems to me like bullying is pretty much at an all time high. Never heard or read of kids committing suicide from bullying in the 50s/60s. Of course in those days kids could be disciplined, so they didn’t act out. Or at least not much. Most of the other things you mention have little to nothing to do with day to day societal life and the way people interact with and influence each other.

272

Nope, sorry. Tying them together as though they can’t be separated is make-believe.

Of course not. But we should use our actual intelligence to realize that positive change in the bad areas could have been made without negative change to the good areas. When you have a bad tire on your car, you don’t spray paint “Shit Piss Fuck Cunt Cocksucker Motherfucker Tits” all over it and then put on a better tire, you simply put on a better tire. You are aware, I presume, that women’s suffrage and much important civil rights legislation had already been passed without turning the country into a lowlife cesspool in the process.

And besides, elimination of inequality isn’t the problem. Unthinking and indiscriminate permissiveness is the problem.

Nope, there’s no rational justification for that stance at all. As I just said, advances had already been made in women’s rights and civil rights without the negative societal consequences that have happened since the sixties. Furthermore, the counterculture revolution which is responsible for all this was never about racial and women’s rights originally to begin with. It was about Vietnam, drugs, promiscuity and permissiveness. Or apart from Vietnam, pretty much the same things that have caused the problems I’m critical of now. Issues of equality got tacked on some years later. So it was never the case that the societal upheaval that has resulted in life the way it is today was part and parcel of a necessary change to address inequality. When you consider that important legislation resulting in women’s suffrage and civil rights occurred prior to the counterculture revolution, and the fact the counterculture revolution was never about those issues at its beginning anyway, it becomes clear that fucking up the country and correcting issues of equality are not opposite sides of the same coin. They could have and did exist separately for a time so clearly the idea that the one couldn’t have been possible without the other is a myth, self-serving and perpetuated by the left as an excuse for the damage its philosophy of permissiveness has created.

Thanks. You too. :wink:

273

Such as?

Seems like you’re trying to have it both ways: you aren’t willing to do the work of actually backing up your claims with factual evidence instead of just saying whatever pops into your head, but you want to be accepted as a truthful and reliable poster anyway.

You’re kidding yourself if you think that illiterate high school graduates are a new phenomenon. Here’s a 1968 article about the reality of segregated schools:

Again, you just blithely steamroll right over the fact that juvenile delinquency was such a concern in the 1950s that there was a Presidential Commission to address it. Here, for example, is one of the many 1950s educational short films about juvenile delinquency, in which a gang of four teenagers deliberately rear-end a car in front of them because they think the driver’s waiting too long at a stop sign, and then beat up the driver when he gets out of the car to reprimand them. Polite and civilized as all-get-out.

Oh, I see: when you say “everything else has gotten worse”, you don’t actually mean “everything”, you mean “things having to do with day to day societal life and the way people interact with and influence each other”.

274

I gave you actual examples of how outlawing weapons stopped people from killing people. We’re not the ones missing the point.

The percentage of posts in which he blames other people for things he personally and other people he agrees with say and do is staggeringly high. Has Starving Artist ever taken responsibility for anything?

You could, but that would be a reflection of the other board members, not on the accuracy of your statements.

Cite?

Seriously - link to those threads. Because you’ve been a raging dishonest asshole the whole time I’ve been aware of you, and we have a cite above that you were so a short time after you joined.

“It’s not my fault! Honest… I ran out of gas! I–I had a flat tire! I didn’t have enough money for cab fare! My tux didn’t come back from the cleaners! An old friend came in from out of town! Someone stole my car! There was an earthquake! A terrible flood! Locusts! IT WASN’T MY FAULT, I SWEAR TO GOD!!!”

Take some responsibility for your own actions, you whiner.

Your inability to count is not our fault.

Ironic, considering the above.

Again, ironic, considering how pervasive the tactic is among right-wing media and politicians (and most notably by the current President).

Your ignorance is not evidence of absence. And how often were suicides reported at all?

275

Nobody is saying that racial and gender equality couldn’t have been possible without the counterculture. You can imagine scenarios in which the former happened and the latter didn’t, just like you can imagine the 20th century without WWI and so on. But that hypothetical alternative reality isn’t the way things actually panned out.

You are also being pretty disingenuous when you try to dissociate the counterculture movement from civil rights activism and other reformist causes:

The catalyst of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, which I think you’ll agree was a major part of the “counterculture revolution”, was activist Jack Weinberg’s setting up a table for the Congress for Racial Equality in a student organizations space, and getting arrested when he refused to leave.

And the sexual liberation movement, or what you call “permissiveness”, was also closely tied to “women’s lib”. As Gloria Steinem wrote in 1969,

(This was in an article called “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation”, another indication that it’s incorrect to claim that counterculture and civil rights weren’t closely linked.)

The thing is, Starving Artist, that you’re so virulently opposed to 1960s liberalism that you’re trying to “compartmentalize” it right out of historical reality, to reduce it to a bunch of selfish dirty hippies smoking pot while the decent people got on with fixing the world. That’s simply not the way it was.

276

:dubious: Yeah, I think you’re forgetting some significant events that happened decades before the Hippie Revolution.

The Mafia would have been unable to capitalize on the narcotics trade were it not for the fact that they had already developed networks for smuggling and distributing contraband back in the Volstead era.

Of course, taking a longer view of American history, the American “exceptionalism” in regard to homicide rates is not a recent phenomenon. At all. From Pieter Spierenburg’s Violence & Punishment: Civilizing the Body Through Time, 2013, pp.59-60:

277

Yes. Because on any given “conservative” board that I have ever seen, you are a massive cut above the rest.

This isn’t a compliment. I’m saying that you’re at least capable of pretending that you can think rationally, which most people on those kinds of forums can’t or won’t. It’s like how seeing Shodan on Christianforums was a fuckin’ breath of fresh air for me - “OH GOD SOMEONE WHO MIGHT NOT SUCK QUITE SO GODDAMN HARD”. Surround yourself with the dumbest people on the fucking planet and you’re probably going to look smart.

278

ISWYDT, BPC. Heh.

279

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280

Reported.

Bye, Felicia.