Strom Thurmond ring any bells? Or did you just conveniently forget him once he died? All those Republicans railing against the NAACP? Or all those right-wing pundits complaining about Equal Opportunity Amendment because of it’s impact on small business?
Oh, and by the way - I grew up and was educated in Montana. Hardly a bastion of Democratic groupthink. I came to these opinions on my very own based on observation, reading, and listening to other people, just like a grown up. Your implication that I think this way because I don’t know any better and was force-fed by Liberal teachers is not only insulting but idiotic as well.
And yet other countries that are far more liberal than the US have lower crime rates, lower rates of STDs, better-educated children, etc. It’s almost enough to make you think that perhaps liberalism isn’t to blame for our nation’s woes.
Other countries have completely different social histories and dynamics. Why would you look to them rather than the perfectly obvious night-and-day difference that has occurred in this country over just the last 40 years?
In the “Halcyon Days of yore” you pathetic Conservatives continue to reminisce about, the problems were there and just as bad, but they just weren’t talked about publicly and the Government’s Father Knows Best attitude kept things that way by lying to the public in both big and small ways. In those days you seem to remember through such wonderfully deceptive rose-coloured glasses, an STD was curable with a simple shot. It didn’t kill you 10 years later after 1-2 years of symptom-free living allowing you to spread it far and wide. Teenage pregnancies were ignored and wayward daughters either forced to marry or sent away to give birth and put the kid up for adoption, or illegal abortions secured and thousands and thousands of women died from them. And drugs were a ‘black problem’ that people didn’t care about because it was confined to the Ghettos where decent folks didn’t live. And the US Government was running around the globe and within the US itself, enthusiastically violating the civil rights of anyone they saw fit and simply saying ‘national security’ to excuse their worst abuses and the blow-back from those well-meaning idiots we’re still feeling today (care to review the modern history of Iran or Iraq for your clear blow-back from a black op gone wrong?)
You can go ahead and take your halcyon days of yore and stuff them where the sun don’t shine. I’d rather have truth and openness in and from my government rather than secrecy and lies.
Why look at the US over the last 40 years? You are assuming that, of all the myriad factors that have been in play over the last 40 years, the one factor that explains the alleged decay in US morals is liberalism. This is merely an example of fallacious post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning. Why not blame, say, conservatism’s failure to take seriously the problems of the inner city and institutionalized racism?
All this assumes, of course, that society has gotten worse over the past 40 years. I look at the advances of women’s rights, gay rights, minority rights, etc., etc., as progress. Why not attribute all of that to liberalism, if we are allowed post hoc reasoning? After all, these things coincide temporally with the supposed rise of liberalism.
I must say, it is quite entertaining watching you tap-dance.
Any chance any facts whatsoever will ever penetrate your [del]thick[/del] Conservative skull? Seriously, tell me now so I can stop wasting my time if you’re going to continue to ignore every single fact thrown at you.
And the night was before the changes; I consider the daylight now, with the constant and incremental changes moving us closer and closer to freedom and equality rather than a white straight man’s club which only rewarded the winners and ignored the losers.
Again, you are talking about a very small but vocal segment of a population numbering in the many tens of millions. Certainly there were racists about, but to paint all of the country’s Republicans/conservatives with that broad brush is grossly innacurate to say the very least.
You just said you came to your opinions based not only on your own observation, but by reading and listening to other people. I’ll wager that much of what you read, and much of what you heard from those other people, was influenced by by the mainstream media in this country, which I mentioned along with the educational system. And I never said you were force-fed by liberal teachers, though I’d be surprised if you hadn’t been strongly influenced by at least some of them at some point.
And as far as you not knowing better (which is your interpretation; I never said it or thought it), what was the point of all this reading and listening and observing if you already knew better?
I don’t know that they apply it equally - they don’t give any examples for McCain, and I can’t find the actual results of the study. IOW, I have simply to take their word for it.
I didn’t conclude this; I said I couldn’t tell.
That is the one I mean.
Because the one claiming bias against Obama finds the opposite of what they found in every other study going back to 1992, and what virtually every other study has found since the sixties - that the MSM in the US covers Democrats running for President more favorably than it does Republicans.
The commonly accepted standard for scientific studies is a 95% confidence rate. That sounds pretty good, and it is. It also means that about one study in twenty, even if properly set up and administered, is wrong.
So here we have this study, which finds that Obama got far more publicity than McCain overall, and overwhelmingly more positive publicity than Hilary or McCain up to the point where the primaries were over. At that point, for a period of a couple of months or so, he still got far more publicity than McCain, most of which was neutral. However, by the Center’s standards, it was not (apparently) consistently adulatory - they mentioned, mixed in with the pro-Obama spin, some unfortunate facts not necessarily redounding to Obama’s favor. But even one unpleasant truth cancels out (apparently) two pieces of pro-Obama spin, at least in the cited example. We don’t know if this is the case for McCain - they give no examples. But assuming it is, it means that one study found that for a couple of months, after Obama had wrapped up the nomination, the press was mentioning facts that Obama would prefer to ignore in stories about him more often than they did for McCain.
Now this could be due to a lot of factors. One reason could be that the media is biased against Democrats. As I said, this would be a trend completely unprecedented for the last twenty years at least. Or it could be that the press likes a horse race, and therefore they want to build up excitement by pushing an underdog. Or it could be that they don’t expect McCain to win, and therefore want to establish their credentials as neutral, and feel confident that their preferred candidate will win anyway and so don’t need their cheerleading.
Now Obama has fallen behind McCain in the polls. It would be interesting to see how “neutral” the press coverage of Obama will be under those circumstances. That is why I wondered about how the press coverage will stack up after the election is over.
I don’t think, IOW, that a study of two months after the end of the primaries, where one candidate gets the lion’s share of the publicity, good and “bad”, where even the mention of one unfortunate fact counts as a slam, tells us that the MSM is biased against Dems.
You’re saying it was necessary to have 25% STD rates, rampant drugs and their associated crimes, criminals walking the streets with dozens of arrests on their record, an utterly crappy school system, and a crude, irritable and occasionally combative society in order to achieve these freedoms and equality?
I don’t think so.
IMO, it was simply a case of too many people jumping on the perceived do-gooder bandwagon in lots of other areas and shallow-mindedly fomenting change without regard to (or, as was often the case, refusing to acknowledge) the inevitable consequences.
And now that I’ve been at this all night, I’m afraid I must bid you adieu.
So you yet again ignore inconvenient facts to bolster your worldview. Yet I am the one deluded by a lie. How very interesting.
Let me give you one more try (athough why I bother I can’t figure out). Previous to the Civil Rights act of 1964, the Southern US was predominantly Democratic. After, it switched dramatically to be Republican through and through and has stayed that way pretty much ever since. And there is little doubt that the Southern States were the hotbed of resistance to Civil Rights in the decades before and after 1964. So you’re now saying that the population of the Southern States, which voted overwhelmingly and repeatedly anti-Democratic because it was a Democratic President (Johnson himself, on signing the Act, said ‘We’ve just lost the South for a Generation’) who pushed through the passage of the Civil Rights act, but that’s just a vocal, racist minority in the Republican Party?
And yet again you cast asperisions that I am so weak-minded I can’t make my own determination of slant and evaluate facts all by myself. As well as make up lies out of whole cloth that a cabal of left-wingers controls the media in the US.
The point is I didn’t make up my mind 5, 10, or 40 years ago that ‘this is the best it’s ever gonna be, everything’s downhill from here’ and ignore current events that disprove this idiotic pose. My ideas can still evolve, based on changing situations, changing facts, or new knowledge to which I was previously not aware. Which apparently isn’t the case with you.
Note the graph for syphilis and the 1950 rate of 25 per thousand. Note also that the rises in gonorrhea began in the 50’s and changes in rates are connected with government cuts in prevention programs, not nebulous crap like ‘liberalism’. Which to me sounds like just the sort of conservative blame the sinner nonsense we still have going.
Might I take this opportunity to direct you to the Contact email facilities. Perhaps the SDMB will set up a Bullshit I Made Up in My Head forum for conservatives. You can’t debate with people who just make crap up on the basis of their own prejudices.
Anyone with half a functioning brain cell knows that STD rates have varied enormously over history and were enormous up until technology got to grips with things and public health became a state responsibility in the late 19th century.
I know conservatives don’t like to hear this - but people fuck. They always have and they always will. The only question is - what actions as a society - are we willing to take to deal with the consequences.
If that is limited to wagging fingers censoriously then you will have disease and unwanted pregnancies.
Blaming ‘liberalism’ is just the kind of no-nothing bullshit that makes ‘Starving Artist’ a synonym for ‘Jaw-Dropping Ignorance’.
I couldn’t get the link to work. Even after attempting to correct the URL, I got an error message. You should also be aware that your link, from what I can figure out, leads to a German site, and that’s in the centre of extreme left Europe.
You’re right; we should discount everything from Europe because they are all extreme lefties!!1!one! I guess that easier than, you know, dealing with the actual data and arguments cited in **tagos’ **post. When come back, bring intellectual honesty.
But nice illustration of the Extreme Right debating technique though Sophistry. :rolleyes: But on the plus side the SDMB Synonym bank has been topped up.
No doubt digging will uncover other statistics but to point remains - only the stupid, the deluded or the outright liars could assert that ‘liberalism’ is responsible for STD rates.
Given the “sexual revolution” that occurred in the late sixties; the premature sexualization of children and teenagers in the drastically more permissible culture (television, movies, music, etc.) that liberals have championed since the cultural revolution of the late sixties; the fact that feminists and magazines such as Cosmopolitan essentially evangelize for sexual promiscuity on the part of females so as to “be the same” as boys; and the almost complete breakdown of reviled “family values” since the counter-culture revolution of the late sixties…I would assert that only the stupid, the deluded or outright liars could assert that ‘liberalism’ was not responsible for current STD rates.
You clearly are uninterested in honest discussion or intelligent debate, and instead choose to polish your turd ever more obsessively. YOu refuse to even read statistics and studies that flatly disprove your premise, and instead trot out the same old bullshit lines that Liberals are anti-family, anti-god, and then insinuate that liberalism can be roughly equated to pedophilia.
Go back to the fifties, fuckstick. We don’t want your kind in our modern world, thanks.
You really are a Fact-Impervious Zone and a perfect illustration of the Right-Tard’s hatred of fact over ideology. I would say you are just making a fool of yourself now, but I guess God did that.
But you’ve taken their word on the results of their other studies, and you certainly seem to hold them as being authoritative. They come from the same people, and they have the same methodology. I don’t have any problem with that, and you need no reason to take no side on it, but your initial post certainly seemed to suggest you felt that there was bias in favour of the “Perfect One”.
Indeed you did. But you also said;
You based your opinion that their judgement is suspect on information you did not know; you do not know either whether those positives were overlooked for Obama, nor do you know whether they would act similarly with respect to McCain. You concluded that their judgement was suspect, which requires you to not just entertain the possibility, but agree with, the notion that they treated Obama and McCain stories and evalutations differently. Likewise, later on in this post, you suggest that the centre did not consider the publicity sufficiently adulatory for Obama - apparently. But apparently doesn’t mean “we cannot tell one way or the other” it means “it appears that this is the case”. This is not concluding, but without knowing the relevant facts, it cannot “appear” one way or the other. I could, with very much the same information, suggest that it appears as though they did not look at McCain results at all, and merely made them all up. They gave no examples, after all. But I would need more information for it to appear that way.