What’chu talkin’ 'bout, Willis? It proved the definition of “lie”, a defintion YogSosoth seemed to be woefully ignorant of. And if we aren’t here to fight ignorance wha…
Oh, wait, to promote the liberal line right or wrong…
:smack: What WAS I thinking?
Nevermind.
The words of the sentence trudge wearily along, they pray for the release of the period, or even a semi-colon! but find only commas, only commas…
Yeah, I know. I debated the use of semi-colons but felt they would make that admittedly word-heavy paragraph unduly confusing.
I might have been wrong about that.
Tell that to the arugula eating, Prius driving, gay couple across the street.
what
Well, now you’re talking about a different thing entirely. Why do arugula eating, Prius driving homosexual couples come in for grief? Perhaps it’s because they’ve looking down their noses at everyone else and haughtily telling them that they ought to be eating arugula instead of the societally costly and unhealthy high-fat diet that they’ve been eating? Or because they’ve been telling everyone else that they ought to be driving Priuses (Prius’s? Priusi?) instead of their gas-guzzling asshole SUVs for the sake of the environment? Or perhaps because they’ve been treated to the spectacle of grown men with spiked hair and dog collars, wearing diapers and humping each other in the streets during gay rights parades, parades that were specifically designed to get in the face of the disapproving element of the straight community and piss them off.
IMO, those parades did more harm to the homosexual rights movement than would a thousand Rush Limbaughs, and echos and images from those parades resonate in people’s minds even to this day and color their perception of gays as people. It may be unpopular to say so, but the in-your-face gay rights activists of those days are to a large degree responsible for the difficulties gays are having in gaining acceptance even to this day. Straight people are swayed much more in favor of gay relationships the more they have the opportunity to see gays the way most of them really are, which is as normal, loving, everyday people and couples, rather than in the extraordinarily offensive and deliberately off-putting way gay activists went about it back then.
No, I’m not. You’re moving the goalposts.
Perhaps? Perhaps, not.
Eh. Those parades are such a tiny part of what’s going on that they’re pretty much dismissible. Sure, they tweak a bunch of up-tight people every year, but you’re the one who said conservatives don’t criticize people for how they live their lives. I’m just proving that you’re wrong about that. You may feel that the criticism is justified, but so what? Liberals feel justified when they criticize people, too.
They come in for grief because conservatives see the kinds of cars they drive, the foods they eat, the kind of life they live, and make judgement calls and criticize them.
OK, getting a bit confused here. Eating arugula makes you gay? Or do you only eat arugula if you’re already gay? Its some kind of vegetable, right? And liberals are to blame for arugula?
:rolleyes: No, they’re not. Such difficulties are, still, rooted in the exact same cultural and religious biases as prevailed by largely unchallenged consensus before the gay-rights revolution, exacerbated, today, by the association of such biases with all the other elements of cultural movement conservatism and its conscious opposition to everything that is not it.
Obama was ridiculed for asking some mid-west farmer if he grew arugula. I just put together a pastiche of conservative criticism to make a point.
Bottom line, you can eat arugula and not be gay. Snorkeling, though, is another matter.
And just so’s we’re all on the same page here - and in spite of luci’s rather, uh, shall we say “charming” attempt to insinuate otherwise - nobody here has actually tried to claim that eating arugula makes anyone gay, right?
Huh? He was just making a silly joke; nobody implied that you insinuated a homosexuality/arugula relationship.
Which is it: conservatives don’t judge anyone based on the way they dress, etc? Or conservatives only judge people based on the way they dress, etc, when such persons deserve it?
Why did you keep spelling “conservative” l-i-b-e-r-a-l?
Damn, that’s some pretty fucked up redunduncy in several places there. I got some bad news about an old friend tonight and it appears I was more distracted than I realized at the time. I apologize.
Starving, wow. Just… so much anger, and fear. Take a deep breath, man. Consider for just one moment that you don’t know as much about liberals as we know about ourselves. I certainly don’t fit in your narrow box and take considerable umbridge at being painted with such a broad brush. You have no idea how vastly different one liberal can be from the next, no clue where I came from and what ‘‘common sense’’ experiences have shaped my political disposition.
Personally, I’m interested in what evidence you have for your claims. In other threads I’ve cited the fact that the U.S. has one of the highest poverty rates in the developed world, and that’s a very generous definition of ‘‘poverty’’ that was last defined in 1964. Curtis LeMay appears to not be concerned about our poverty rates because they include black people and Mexicans, but I’m willing to assume you find it problematic that half of the people living in poverty in the U.S. are children. I think there is plenty of solid evidence that racism is still a serious problem in the United States, and I would argue that it’s particularly insidious now because we can mask it with claims of ‘‘poverty culture’’ and so forth, or ‘‘gangsta culture’’ as you put it. Since we know that poverty is correlated with high crime rates, I’m not sure where you’re going with this.
If you really believe that conservative policies are the key to life being better for everyone, as you so consistently argue, I need a convincing explanation for why significant conservative social policy initiatives such as the transformation of AFDC to TANF in 1996 had no appreciable impact on the poverty rates, and why over the last 30 years wages have stagnated while productivity has increased. Unlike apparently all of the liberals that you know, I’m actually a critical thinker and really want answers to these questions. Is there a conservative answer to these questions?
On a more personal note, your notion that most people are poor because they don’t work hard enough/want it bad enough is nonsense. I’ve been poor. I’ve lived with poor people. I’ve seen them break their backs to put food on the table and get nowhere. And I’ve seen all the opportunities I’ve had as a result of certain accidents of fortune (such as my skin color, the fact that I used to be a devout Christian, and my academic talent.) A few of us are lucky that way, but the experience of having been poor will always stay with me and I’ll be damned if I minimize all the shit I went through to get where I am today.
I think too many conservatives think purely in terms of financial well-being when it comes to equality. But what you negate is the emotional reality that some of us have to face. I recently had the privilege of having a classroom conversation with the first black woman in history to earn a Ph.D. in both Philosophy and Law. She explained how many point to her as proof that anybody can be anything in America, and how when she was first invited to be visiting professor at Harvard she wanted so badly to believe it herself. But she couldn’t, because they gave her absolute hell. This was in the 1990s by the way. She was hounded by the media, marginalized by the faculty, and there were op-ed pieces in the Washington Post about how women were not qualified to be professors of law. The whole thing was a giant clusterfuck (one professor sacrificed his tenure out of protest) and this woman, now a tenured professor at Penn, nearing 60 years of age, beautiful, brilliant, strong and confident, this woman was struggling not to cry as she described her life dealing with racism. I suppose you could call her a classic victim, but if she was that, she would be poor wouldn’t she? Do you think she’d be a fucking tenured professor at Penn if she had a habit of not taking responsibility for her life?
So what you don’t see when you look at all of us lucky folks who made it are the scars of inequality. I drive a fuel-efficient foreign car, enjoy the occasional arugula and love me some homosexuals, let me tell you. But I’m never going to be that stereotype you see. Ever. And the more you generalize about people like me, the more you lose out on the beauty and nuance inherent in life, and the poorer of an intellectual you become.
(Since you rely so heavily on ‘‘common sense’’ over actual data, I thought maybe you’d appreciate a little anecdotal information.)
ETA: Sorry to hear about your friend. Feel better soon.
:rolleyes: Yes, you do, Starving, or you are paying no attention at all.
Its not the redundancy. You are redundant, to be sure, but that isn’t why you are held up to such scorn and mockery. Any of dozens of excerpts from the Gospel According to St. Arving could have been placed here, they are all largely the same. And since this forum is specifically reserved for witnessing, you are wholly within your rights to spout faith-based and fact-free screeds and screeches.
But its not the redundancy. It is the wrong.
I’ve heard that before, but still find it to be a much under-reported trend. I would be interested to hear Starving’s acknowledgment or explanation of it.
It’s probably because the workers don’t argue with their bosses for a pay raise hard enough, and therefore their own fault.