That was what I meant-that he thought that the HUAC was one of the great things about the '50s that doesn’t exist today. Sorry, I probably should have been more precise.
And of course, we could probably use a man like J. Edgar Hoover around. Then again, Starving Artist probably wouldn’t want to use ol’ Hoover as an example…*
*In my defense, Eddie Izzard has referred to Hoover as a “weirdo transvestite”. And considering what a bastard Hoover was, he deserves to be called out on his hypocrisy.
It hardly matters, you’d have been just as wrong either way.
As usual.
I dunno, Starvin’. I like it a lot better now that the " polite, civilized, mature and well-dressed society" includes people other than white males.
The politeness was a facade. Terrible things were going on behind closed doors and people didn’t think there was anything wrong with hitting children in the face or whipping them until they were too bruised to go out.
Civilized? Didn’t you ever see Blackboard Jungle? Rebel Without a Cause?
Why did people have book burnings and vinyl record burnings?
Well-dressed? Some of the girls at school wore dresses made out of flour sacks. Did most men wash, blue, starch and iron their own shirts? Ironing is so fulfilling. Many of the women made their own clothes.
It wasn’t better for MOST of us.
Sorry, Zoe, I have work to do right now and don’t have time for some of the other issues you raise. I’ll try to return later and do so.
OK, but my question is. . . did the change in politeness cause the change in the things that made things better? Or did they just happen simultaneously?
Just as an example, was it necessary to have more swearing generally to change the awareness of domestic violence?
Was it a cause and effect type thing or something else?
If it was a cause and effect, could you give some examples of what caused what?
It just seems to me that some of the things that happened could have happened without the level of crass, rude behavior increasing.
Oh, yeah…cough
Sorry. 
Heffalump and Roo, I’ll try to give you my take on the chronology later. Sorry I haven’t gotten around to doing so yet in the Pit thread where you asked it of me before.
The Gold Standard of Dialects: those with the gold, choose the standard.
The only point I was trying to make is that language continues to change and right and wrong change with it.
Thanks! Looking forward to it. 
True. To the Right wing mind, the idea that the proletariat should not be utterly comfortbale in their subservience is unfathomable.
Communism was a horribly flawed theory that would never work, but its appeal was in its (apparent) correction to unbridled Capitalism. Neither approach works all that well, but the partisans of each like to pretend that their side is inspired by God and intuitively obvious to the casual observer and that anyone who fails to see that is either stupid or malicious.
Utter hogwash that is the result of swallowing the Power-Ade of propaganda from the period.
China was desperately trying to recover from 100 years of foreign abuse (and following the really stupid Marxist plan to do it) while having no designs on conquering the world except to the extent that it wanted to expand its local borders to provide a buffer against further foreign encroachment.
The Soviet Union had abandoned even Marxism except as a symbolic policy and had also abandoned the idea of making the world “Communist” since the exile and later murder of Trotsky, years earlier.
The Soviets, like the Chinese, were looking for buffer states so that the next time someone decided to invade Russia, the invader would have to go through more territory before they actually got to Russian soil. Beyond that, it was simply a matter of the Great Game in which the Soviets and the Yanks and the Brits continued the gamesmanship and power seeking that the Europeans had played through the nineteenth century, (just as the Athenians, Spartans, and Boetians/Thebans, had played the game in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E.).
Don’t forget to save it in a text file, somewhere. I wouldn’t want your efforts to “disappear” the way they did on two separate occasions when you claimed you were going to shred the chronology I provided. 
Well that was my point. But it’s important that English didn’t have an “official” dictionary until long after places like Spain and France.
I’m sorry, I doubt you can provide this, but can you offer a cite that the level of crass, rude behavior has increased? Can such a thing even be proven, since it’s just your opinion, based on your limited, colored perception of the world? People have always been crass and rude, since the dawn of human civilization. How anyone can claim that rudeness and crassness was invented in 1962 or whenever is ludicrous. At least now, racist, sexist, and homophobic comments are no longer acceptable in polite society. That sort of crassness is no longer indulged, a change for the better. For every loss of civlity, there as been a gain IMO. Why see it as some horrendous decline? Why not accept that living societies evolve?
What you, H&R, and Starving Artist, fail to realize, is that your perception of the 1950’s and before as more civil is just that-- your perception. It’s not a truth, nor is it a fact. But stating it as if it were, and as if one political view is responsible for it and the alleged consequent decline of American culture, is absurd, small-minded, and risible.
But I expect this will fall on deaf ears, as usual.
Does “It just seems to me” not sound like IMO to you? Especially in the context of a question to someone else?
I’m sorry, I doubt you can provide this, but can you offer a cite that [del]the level of crass, rude behavior has increased[/del] for every loss of civlity [sic] there as [sic] been a gain?
Can such a thing even be proven, since it’s just your opinion, based on your limited, colored perception of the world?
What you, [del]H&R, and Starving Artist[/del] Rubystreak, fail to realize, is that your perception of the 1950’s and before [del]as more civil[/del] is just that-- your perception. It’s not a truth, nor is it a fact. But stating it as if it were, [del]and as if one political view is responsible for it and the alleged consequent decline of American culture,[/del] is absurd, small-minded, and risible.
But I expect this will fall on deaf ears, as usual.
I know. That 1950s style life of prosperity and Frank Lloyd Wright and new homes and new cars and suits and dresses and martinis and Frank Sinatra was horrible. One really had to live it to experience the utter hopelessness and sense of despair that pervaded the nation at the time.
The airwaves were flooded with tripe such as Queen For A Day and I Love Lucy and December Bride, all deliberately designed to make women think their lot was a happy one, while at the same time Leave It To Beaver and My Three Sons were brainwashing America’s teens into thinking that life was all sunshine and lollipops, and of course there was The Mickey Mouse Club and action/adventures like Sea Hunt, The Adventures of Daniel Boone and The Lone Ranger to keep kids from realizing how horrible and robot-like their world really was. And of course there was Gunsmoke and Perry Mason and What’s My Line to keep the adults anesthetised and unaware of just how awful their mundane lives of conformity and indebtedness to the Establishment really were.
Now, having said that, have you lost your fucking mind?
To wit:
As evidenced by the oppressive and lifeless manner in which its citizens were forced to live, which included tiny cracker box apartments, no automobiles and hours spent waiting in line for such staples as a loaf of bread, all the while wondering if your neighbor was gonna turn you in for making some anti-State comment, whereupon the secret police would appear in the middle of the night and spirit you away, never to be heard from again?
That kind of horribly flawed theory? :rolleyes:
Which provided an absolutely marvelous and plentiful lifestyle for a greater percentage of its citizens than existed virtually anywhere else in the world. Sufficiently so that the U.S. became a virtual Mecca for people the world over, and which is still largely the envy of most of the civilized world. While Communist Germany was machine-gunning children in order to keep them from escaping, we were having to try to keep people the world over from flooding our shores.
It was awful! Awful, I say! Sob
Except that one of them did: Ours…and it has been the envy of the world! (Well, except for the world’s liberals, who are disgusted by all that we have and are upset that they don’t have it as well.)
And now we come to the part where I have to ask, seriously, whether you’ve lost your fucking mind.
Everyone try to follow:
Poor, poor, China and Russia. They only wanted security from outside aggression…so they overran and took control of country after country (often with tanks and with little regard to the fact that, you know, humans beings were an impediment to their progress), all the while massacring hundreds of millions of their own citizens in the U.S.S.R. and China at the same time (not to mention the payoff in resources to be gained by taking over satellite countries).
What the hell would be your response if the United States were to decide to ‘protect’ itself like the “Athenians, Spartans, and Boetians/Thebans” had done and decided to overrun Canada, Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, et. al, with tanks and rockets and soldiers and either install our own puppets to run them or even just absorb them into the country at large? Your howls of outrage could be heard across the ocean!
But then again, that’s only to be expected, eh? After all, when it comes to America, there’s no such thing as being right…and when it comes to the Communist bloc, there’s nothing that isn’t at least understandable even if they might have gone about it the wrong way, right?
I mean, they were only trying to protect themselves when they were slaughtering all those tens and mayber hundreds of millions of their own citizens and those of the satellite countries they overran, right?
Good fucking grief, how can anybody swallow this shit?
I can’t fucking stand it! :smack: Surcease! Somebody please*! Give me surcease*!
Schmuck!
Ahem…and Heffalump and Roo (and Rubystreak, too), I hope you’ll allow me one more day to respond to your posts. I’m too cranked at the moment to do a cogent job of it. Please accept my apologies (and please know, H&R, that your post was the only one in the Pit thread that I’d been planning to return to and answer, even though I knew it would mean three days of squabbling with the usual suspects as a result…and which is why I’ve thus far not returned to answer it.
And now I’m outta here. I need some fucking booze and an episode of Leave It To Beaver to put me right! 
There’s a quite considerable difference between being understandable and being right. I don’t see any point at which tomndebb expresses his views that the actions taken by China and Russia were perfectly fine and acceptable, only his view that they weren’t motivated by a desire to take over the world.
With all due respect, I think you’ve built up your enemy beforehand and are now fitting tomndebb into it, however unconsciously. Look at it this way; you think what he’s saying is the worst kind of utter bullshit. Nonsense. Idiocy. So what’s more likely; he believes what you think he believes, this madness you cannot even begin to comprehend where it has been pulled from, or you are mistaken about what he’s saying?
I can’t speak for you, but my initial reaction to something I find to be immensely stupid and illogical beyond words is generally “Uh, how am I misunderstanding this?”, rather than to assume the creator is just immensely stupid and illogical. If nothing else (and there’s considerable else), it is the very opposite of respect for others to do so.
Nah, you leftists would still look bad even without **Stoid’s **help.
When I think of posters I can’t stand the first to come to mind is Otto. I never ever wanted him banned, though, because no one loves B’way musicals the way I do the way he does. Yeah, that sentence makes no sense.
So, really, I couldn’t stand him if he spoke about anything but musicals. But now I miss him because who can I chit chat with about how wonderful Marisa Jaret Winokur is and why Rent was such a breakthrough production? Damn.
Well, the U.S. did provoke a war with Mexico with the ultimate end of seizing a large part of its territory. But they didn’t have tanks back then.
I see your
and raise you cough
tomndebb, and let’s not forget that Russia had never HAD a democracy-prior to the Soviet Union, you had had an absolute monarchy. (Unless you want to count the Kerensky period)
Starving Artist, have you ever heard of the Somoza dynasty?
