It’s a meme of my opponents here that I think the fifties were perfect and golden. I’ve said more than once (quite a bit more than once actually) that the fifties were far from perfect and that the only reason they look so good now is because of how badly things have gotten screwed up since.
Now, having said that, I should probably have waited till later to post what I did above as I’ve got work to do now. I’ll answer more later.
I realized something. Trying to argue with Starving Artist is like trying to argue against a political campaign commercial. There’s just a lot – a TON – of stuff simply asserted as fact, and it’s supposed to be compelling simply because of who it comes from. I occasionally yell back at the TV at some of the more egregious examples of ridiculousness (I guess the analagous equivalent would be my posts in this thread), but I don’t write letters to the editors rebutting each and every point.
It’s very unfulfilling.
Agreed, I think most of us posting in this thread have that in common.
True dat. That’s why I like arguing with you! 
You have to start somewhere.
Well, sure, but Starkers offers the efficiency of focus! Instead of wasting effort on people who are only wrong about a couple of things, and each with a different set of ignorances, you get one-stop shopping. You get numerous and sundry opinions, all of them wrong, and all of them delivered with the bland assurance of a man who hasn’t changed his mind in forty years.
I feel the same way, and until this thread had managed, over recent months, to avoid engaging with Starving Artist very much at all. There were even occasions where i desperately wanted to respond to one or another of his ignorant posts, but consciously decided to forbear in the interests of time, energy, and wasted breath. I was quite proud of my self-control.
I think, for me, the temptation to respond comes not so much because i feel “smarter by comparison” (although, in his case, that wouldn’t require one to be very smart at all), but because i sometimes unconsciously underestimate the intelligence of the other people who participate in these threads. I sometimes find myself thinking, “If i don’t respond to that stupid argument, then some people are going to think that Starving Artist is actually making a valid point.” I need to bookmark threads like this to remind me that pretty much everyone with three or more functioning neurons recognizes how wilfully ignorant and dishonest he is, and they don’t need me to point it out to them.
But see, that’s his particular genius. You get specific, he goes general. You go general, he gets specific. You THINK you’re talking about the same thing, but you never are.
*Heineman reference?
I forgot to address this in my answer to you so I will now before I have to leave.
The things you are talking about are reactive, not causative. The problem began when liberals decided that prison was punitive and not rehabilitative. And that it was racially biased because a disproportionate number of minorities were being sent to prison. (Make the case that that was because they were committing disproportionate amounts of crime, and you got of course got called racist.) And that long prison sentences were costly and served mostly to satisfy conservative desires for vengence. Liberals also seem to take crime lightly to begin with anyway, as evinced by their strong inclination to blow off laws they don’t agree with such as those regarding drugs and immigration. So they’re less inclined to be punitive.
This, thanks to liberal judges and corrections systems and political pressure, eventually resulted in 16 years being the average time served for life sentences and a revolving door for lesser crimes. That is when three-strikes laws came into being. They didn’t just spring up for no reason out of conservative politics – they were a deliberate attempt by a frustrated populace to keep repeat offenders in fucking prison where they belong.
Which brings us to drugs. In the fifties there were laws on the books prohibiting drug use. The fifties did not create these laws, they had been on the books a long time. The sixties came along and the left embraced drugs like manna from heaven. Doing drugs was cool, man! So they were breaking the law! And what happens --or at least what used to happen – was that when you broke the law you went to prison.
So, if so many people hadn’t decided to break the law and indulge in drugs, the number of drug users and dealers in prison wouldn’t be a problem, would it? (And I don’t believe that mere drug users are the ones being kept in prison at all costs, but rather dealers.)
I’ve never heard anything regarding a conservative reluctance to finance the building of more prisons. It’s seems to be more of a general taxpayer issue, with people also determined that prisons not be built anywhere near where they live. I have often wondered why judges, instead of turning violent criminals loose on society due to overcrowding, don’t simply order more prisons to be built. It looks to me like if they have the power to mandate and enforce such a comlex and expensive and unpopular undertaking as forced busing, they should also have the power to force the building of prisons when needed.
I don’t think it would come as a surprise that by the time girls are eighteen or so that they are very unlikely to still be virgins. But there was undoubtedly far less in the way of teen pregnancy, abortions and STDs then than there is now, which speaks to a relative lack of promiscuousness during that era than has existed since.
See what **SA **did here, folks? Take note, this is a brilliant example of strawmanning: someone claims **SA **to believe the 50s were goldenhued (no use of the word or the concept of “perfection” anywhere in the post he was responding to.) He vehemently denies that which was NOT claimed (that the 1950s were perfect) amd then procedes to make the point that he is presumably refuting (that, in comparison to now, the fifties “look so good” because we’re in a progressively worse time.) Genius, in its own way, really.
If you’ll note, I spoke of my opponents (that would be plural) here portraying me as believing the fifties were perfect, not simply Mapache.
It’s telling that on this board the exercise of mere common sense is regarded as genius. 
ETA: Okay, now I really am out. Later.
Oops. I forgot to mention what is perhaps the key issue in liberal softness on crime, which is that the liberal position on crime during the early days of revolving door corrections was that crime was largely society’s fault, as in a fair and proper society, everyone would be provided for and therefore there would be no impetus for anyone to commit crime.
This is not only naive and ridiculous on the face of it, but what good does it do – assuming the imperfect society they claim – to foist the criminal element back upon it? Are people to be given free rein to engage in crime without recrimination simply because life isn’t fair? Do the people robbed, raped and murdered by these scuzzbugs suffer any less because, hey, if only the government was providing for everyone people wouldn’t be committing crime?
Thought processes like this are precisely why I find liberalism so objectionable.
I think it’s high time you upgraded your processor.
You know, I’m sure you could find me a cite (if you believed in them) somewhere , of someone accusing you of thinking the 1950s “perfect.” But you didn’t quote those posts-- you quoted Mapache’s post, and answered it, precisely in the manner I describe above. Why quote his accusation if you intend to refute the accusations of others?
Why is *sex *society’s fault but *crime *is totally removed from society’s influence? Does society influence human behavior or not? What’s a more elemental human drive: procreation or crime? Which is more likely to be formed by societal influences: procreation or crime? Which is hardwired into our DNA: procreation or crime?
Come again with how sexual innocence and abstinence is somehow a natural state, and it takes the Rap Music it sexualize a puberty-mad teenager, but somehow correlations between poverty and crime are wholly unrelated?
Just trying some, you know, common sense.
Doper: “Starving Artist insists that the 50s were better than the present day.”
SA: “I never said they were perfect.”
Uh, that is not a refutation. It’s a sidestep. It’s a hallmark of how you fail to engage while pretending to engage. It’s why people keep answering you, because you seem SO CLOSE, just one little clarification and we’ll FINALLY be talking about the same thing. But the clarification never lands. You just sidestep again, sometimes even back to the same Twister circle you were standing on in the first place. It’s an utterly nonsensical game that SMELLS like discussion, but it’s not. It’s entirely dishonest.
Pointer gleaned from this thread: Whenever SA says “I never said . . .” this will always be followed by a dishonest sideswipe. It’s a lie–in that it’s likely no one has accused you of saying what you’re denying having said–without seeming like a lie–in that, uh, no, you didn’t say what no one has actually accused you of saying.
You translate what someone says you’ve said, and then deny the retranslation instead of the initial statement. Instead of the common bad-debater’s trope of insisting on a neverending prelude of “defining terms” without ever actually beginning the debate, you redefine the terms in the middle of the discussion, whenever the ground you’re standing on becomes shaky. You lob mistranslations into the center of the fray and then everything has to stop while these mistranslations are sorted out. This is dishonest and cowardly.
But it keeps the discussion well away from any kind of meaningful progress, and so it serves your purpose. Which is not to reach understanding, but to prevent it.
This one is easy. “The rate of teen childbearing in the United States has fallen steeply since the late 1950s, from an all time high of 96 births per 1,000 women aged 15-19 in 1957 to an all time low of 49 in 2000. … Recent declines in teen birthrates, then, are attributable to reductions in pregnancy rates.” http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/tgr/05/1/gr050107.html
“The 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s included the twentieth century’s highest teen birth rates (respectively 79.5, 91.0, and 69.7 per thousand). By 1960, nearly one-third of American females had their first child before reaching age twenty. The 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s reversed this trend.” Teen Pregnancy - Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society
Can you provide one single citation to anything that says different? One? Or can you provide any argument that the Guttmacher Institute cannot be trusted? Or will you simply disregard the cites without looking at them?
I’m taking bets. Anyone?
Well, in part that can be explained by the higher rate of teen marriage in the 1950s. Of course, one has to assume that teenage marriage is a good thing before using that as an excuse.
But that’d be the sort of re-defining of terms midstream that lissener was talking about. “When I said ‘teen pregnancy,’ I meant unwed teen pregnancy. Obviously. Liberals suck, and society today is looser because of that.”
I almost want to put this in a spoiler box to be unveiled later as a prediction. Actually, I think a “prediction” box would be a pretty cool functionality for a board – a spoiler box that can’t be opened for a few hours after it’s posted.