In the study!!! With the Candlestick!!!
Stop, focusonz! Don’t huff the bag of Marxist intoxicant. It will make you rant and rave and capitalize words randomly. Oh my God!!! I’M TOO LATE!!!
It’s like a debate with the subject lines in my spam folder.
OK, OK, I’ll go to bed.
:rolleyes: The problem with Obama is rather the reverse of that.
:dubious: We are welcome to have freedom of thought. There is no need for a qualifier.
Not on any available evidence, we couldn’t.
:dubious: Are you suggesing the Second Amendment exists to facilitate resistance to the state?
Heinlein was flat wrong on that point. No democracy in history has ever self-destructed in that way. You must be swallowing the Tytler bullshit.
Moto: Your link to the Slate is to a section called “Media Criticism.” It is a movie review for Good Night and Good Luck – not an historical account anymore than the movie. Certainly there were comments made in the press, but they are not quoted here. We don’t get any idea of how strongly they were worded. The review does mention that Nixon also was critical of McCarthy – gingerly so. Meekness in the face of Joe McCarthy wasn’t what was needed.
In the spring of 1954 I would have been ten years old. What did children that age in the Fifties do for entertainment? We watched television no matter what was on. I also watched Murrow’s statement on McCarthy although I had no idea of the importance of it. I knew that a lot of people talked about it the next day. I didn’t really understand the McCarthy hearings either. I just knew that I was scared of Communists and almost everyone seemed to be.
The link that you provided does offer this quote which makes my point:
“The film covers the five-month period from late 1953 to early 1954 during which Murrow combated the McCarthy-inspired hysteria over communist subversives.” (bolding added)
“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or recklessness … Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”-- Joseph Nye Welch, Chief Counsel for the Army
Certainly you’re entitled to your opinion. But again, I don’t think your memory on some things is as clear as you think - for instance, those “dog tags” you mention made their appearance during World War II.
Wal-mart is biggest scourge on America I know. Wal-mart suckered in everybody to buy American in 2000 and caused the failure of so many mom and pop stores and then went Chinese. So Obama gets his bait and switch tactics from Jason Furman and from Wal-Mart. It is no wonder that Obama changes his platform everyday and then doesn’t change it!
But I am not talking about Obama’s economic rape team.
I am talking about his advocates in the biased media (ie. The Washington Post) and on the message boards and in the blog sphere. It is not debate and dissemination of information, it is pure and ugly thought control and propaganda and it is everywhere you look on the Internet.
OK, lets get drunk and spaced out on drugs and go get a van load of alzheimer’s patients and go vote. Yeh thats the ticket! We can have fun and write in Scuby Doo for president with his Wiley Coyote team and party afterward thinking about the utopia to come. One must purge the intoxicant from ones thoughts or one will see votes which reflect the effects of the intoxicant.
What they say and what they did, was said and done! “Do it to me once shame on them, do it to me twice shame on me!”
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No, your wrong. Heinlein can be neither right or wrong. Heinlein was a science fiction writer of future history stories and the future is not here yet. But be patient It is coming soon to a movie near you.
I’ve never understood why the House of Representatives felt the need to have a committee that engaged in unamerican activities.
Well, they had to give Nixon a job somewhere.
Thank you for demonstrating conclusively – with cites! – just how how ill-conceived and anachronistic the Second Amendment is. For the rest:
So are you suggesting American democracy may, in the future, self-destruct by the plebs voting themselves bread & circuses, etc.? Even though all the other industrialized democracies have been doing just that, in your terms, for decades and remain democracies, and mostly better off than we are?
Hijack to share a couple of favorite YouTube clips: there’s a one man show called ZERO HOUR that’s about Zero Mostel. In this scene Zero goes before HUAC, and in this one he discusses those who sang to HUAC.
As we see here, most people don’t understand how the anti-communist witchhunts worked. They’ve seen the Hollywood version which mostly goes something like this: Joe is an average liberal pro-union free-speech type guy who works in Hollywood. Then someone accuses him of being a communist. It’s not true, but that doesn’t matter to the anticommunist demogogues. But then they offer him an out. If he accuses OTHER innocent people of communism, he’ll be left alone. And so Joe faces a quandry. He either ruins the lives of innocent people, or he’ll go to jail. What does Joe do? What DOES Joe do?
But it didn’t work that way. The people hauled before HUAC and accused of being communists, turns out, actually HAD been communists. Of course these people were innocent, in the sense that they mostly hadn’t committed crimes (such as, say, spying for the USSR), but they really were communists, or at least had attended communist meetings back in the 30s. And they weren’t asked to accuse other innocent people, they were asked to name other actual communists. And the silly part of all this is that this wasn’t done by the committee to find out who was a communist or commie-symp, because the committee already knew all the names. The point wasn’t to find communists, the point was to publicly embarass these former communists. Either the victim would name the names that the committee already knew, in which case they were betraying their former comrades, or they would refuse to answer, in which case they’d get denounced.
It was a bit of political theater not unlike Maoist self-criticism.
And of course, the punishment in the Hollywood version was that you’d go to jail. But Hollywood sort of forgets that the real punishment the victims faced was being blackballed by the studios. In other words, it wasn’t the big bad government that ruined people’s lives, it was the Studio executives who blacklisted the uncooperative. And they didn’t do so out of fear of the committee, they did so out of fear of the anti-communist mood of the movie-going public.
And as has been pointed out, McCarthy had nothing to do with any of this!
The problem with McCarthy is that he was purely opportunistic, and his famous list of communists in the state department was pure fiction. He made it up. Yes, there were communists in the state department, but they had almost all been purged long ago, and the ones that were left weren’t on McCarthy’s list, because the list didn’t exist. There were communist moles and spies, but McCarthy didn’t oust a single one. He was a complete fraud, and he did more to discredit anti-communism than any single individual in history, including Adolf Hitler.
Of course, being a communist or a former communist isn’t a crime, and should not be a crime, but it certainly should be something to be ashamed of…like being a member or former member of the KKK. Rooting out former Klansmen and forcing them to grovel and beg the publics forgiveness would be a noble mission, the same with members of the CPUSA. The reason McCarthy is such an asshole is that he never did any such thing, he just pretended to.
Those democracies have one thing that we don’t have: a memory of just how bad it can be under fascism and Nazism and totalitarianism and social democrats.
They are restrained in their zealotry because they have been there and done that. We would be very wise to watch where we tread.
Eh? They’re ruled by social democrats, even during periods when conservatives like Thatcher or Sarkozy are in power – and, despite their braindead “There Is No Alternative!” rhetoric, are restrained by the social-democratic consensus from dismantling the social democracy. Which America needs so very badly.
(And yes, I know perfectly well the Bolsheviks, like the Mensheviks, were a faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, and that is merely semantic and utterly beside the point. Compare the Social Democrats USA. Nevertheless, in Europe, political parties in the social-democratic tradition remain better than all others including the “Christian” democrats.)
It needs to be pointed out that a LOT of people back in the 1920s and 1930s either briefly joined the communist party or associated groups, or knew people who had. The ideals of communism appealed to lots of young idealists, and no one had any idea how bad things were, or could get. This was pre-Stalin and pre-revelations about him. In the thirties, the US, like the rest of the world, was in a depressioon, and an alternate economic theory appealed to a lot of people. Just because you flirted with Communism or knew people who did – and those two groups included and awful large number of folks who were young in the 20s and 30s – didn’t mean you advocated the violent overthrow of the existing US government or had any animosity towards it, any more than Truman joining the KKK in the 20s meant anything about the president who desegregated the armed forces years later.
But it was an effective net to use against your political enemies years later. It wasn’t just skittish Hollywood studios. J. Robert oppenheimer famously lost his security clearance because he knew people who had been in the communist party, and he headed the effort to build the fission bomb. The revocation was devastating, and kept him out of the fusion bomb effort. And he wasn’t the only one.