It looks like the famous quote is of dubious providence, but this page goes into detail on various similar quotes from ancient philosophers that may have been its source.
I’m not clear on the wording either, but I’m pretty sure he was shouting it at a cloud.
O tempora! O mores! (Alas for the times and manners!) – Cicero
That one? Or was there one about hair and clothes and morals?
Fair enough. I ask only because I think there’s obviously little room for debate given that you think your opinions are not opinions and that they are undeniable. So I’m just trying to see where you’re coming from and what your background is.
If it makes you feel any better, know that I dismissed you as a cranky old man long before you told us your actual age.
I’m going to show my ignorance here - I’ve never heard anyone say that. Do people argue that? I mean, that ‘creating a vulgar society’ was necessary in order to eliminate racisim?
What I’m doing is trying to point out that liberalism has done a fair share of harm to this country itself, and that contrary to popular opinion, liberalism is not the wonderful sunshine and lollipops ideology that many posters around here seem to think it is.
Peoples’ lives are ruined and others are killed in this country every day as a result of liberal influence upon the courts, the corrections system, schools and society at large. I felt the time had come to make a public declaration of that.
I posted around here for years before bringing most of this stuff up, but I finally got fed up to the teeth with the “Conservatives/Republicans are teh EVIL” crap that gets spouted around here dozens if not hundreds of times a day, and finally it occured to me that for most of the posters around here, there has never been a time when it was brought home to them that their own ideology is not only less than perfect but that people die and others’ lives are made miserable by the direct consequence of liberal ideological influence in this country over the last several decades.
So yeah, I think this society has become needlessly crude, vulgar, and classless because of liberal influence, but I also think it’s done far more serious harm in terms of death and misery than any of the so-called conservative evils that people around here love to attribute to the conservatives of pre-1968 America.
It is probably also worth noting that comments about my age don’t bother me at all. **Equipoise, Zoe, EddyTeddyFreddy, Voyager **and several others around here are approximately the same age as I am, but when they talk about the fifties through the liberal POV or whatever no one challenges their recollections. The problem is that I’m a conservative, not that I’m old. So all that age crap is water off a duck’s back.
Dude, for real, when you say you are “going to be away for a while doing all sorts of shit” do you really mean you’re going to twirl in your leather Bacalounger? 'cause you do more encores than a hooker at a Republican Convention.
Just sayin’…
This board is rife with instances where some poster (often me) laments what has become of life here over the last fifty years, and poster after another responds either with how we had racism then so this society is better, or that the changes that have taken place in society since then were necessary in order to eliminate racism. I’m about to leave for dinner, otherwise I’d look them up, but I believe there are instances of this very thing in both this thread and in the Sarah Palin thread that spawned it.
No, the problem is that you offer no facts, only your anecdotal experiences, you scoff at cites, you paint your ideological opponents in the most stark terms possible, you knee-jerk defend those you see as your ideological allies, you see no nuance, and you accuse a large, ill-defined, and definitely not monolithic, group of people, of horrible things. You are inflexible in the face of ideas or facts that contradict your personally constructed worldview. And you’re unkind about all of it. Has little to do with you being a conservative per se.
One doesn’t like to be rude and leave posts unanswered, does one?
I said I was leaving for dinner and I’ll probably be havin’ a malt scotch too. Too bad you won’t be there. I got a feelin’ you’re a pretty good guy to have around at times like that. If politics never came up (or at least not in the way they do around here) you’d never know it was me. 
Thanks SA.
*I’m unkind about it? I’M UNKIND ABOUT IT??? *
Take a look around this place (mostly the Pit and GD, and for the last who knows how many years) and try for a minute to pretend that you don’t agree with everything you read and tell me how you think conservatives and Republicans are spoken of around here.
My diatribes against the left are baby poop compared to the way conservatives and Republicans are talked about around here.
Another fun thing about SA is that he does more farewell tours than the Eagles, the Stones, and Babs combined. I think that’s another old people thing.
Sure. Hope that was enough.
Well, you see that goes to what I’m talking about. Old people, raised during a better time, are more polite, hence my farewells and encores.
I wouldn’t want anyone to think I was a rude asshole like y…
Nevermind.
I knew it. I just KNEW you’d blame liberals for your own horrendously unkind comments. First of all, seriously, don’t be an ass-- I don’t agree with everything I read in the Pit or GD about conservatives. I’m not the one incapable of seeing shades of grey, babe, that’s you. You think liberals are being horribly unfair and wrongheaded about conservatives, so you figure you’ll be just as irrational, black and white, and broadly condemnatory? How totally you are letting liberals control how you communicate! Very sad. Do unto others, or you’re just as bad.
In fact, you’re worse, because I haven’t seen any liberals accuse conservatives of singlehandedly causing the entire AIDS crisis in the US, or the drug/gang problem, or STDs, or teen pregnancy, or abortion. You lay all of these horrors solely at the feet of liberals, but expect civility in return? Ridiculous. Your accusations are offensive and utterly lack substance, historical basis, or nuance. We’ve been through this before, and you know how it makes me feel. But you don’t care. You have your axe to grind and grind it you will, in the face of all reason, logic, or rationality.
Get off the cross, SA. The poor old conservative martyr act is getting soooo old.
Inasmuch as they are far more stench than substance, I emphatically agree.
Argent: think of the whole thing this way… the era under discussion was a shameful, truly morally repugnant era in our nation’s history. If we saw another nation behaving in such a manner today, we’d have no kind words for them. It wouldn’t be “Yah, they oppress blacks de jure and you can legally rape your wife and so on, but by gum, they’re pretty accepting of people walking around with guns!”
Just like to use a bright line example, people would look at you real funny if you wanted to talk about your massive admiration for how smoothly the train schedules ran under fascism.
The minor, and really they’re absurdly minor (clothing choice, lack of curse words in mass media, etc…) does not change the fact that it was an ugly, shameful, truly reprehensible time in American history.
Starving: what people keep pointing out and you keep failing to get is that nobody, at all, has said that rudeness was required to beat racism, but that your idealized time period sucked because we were a disgusting society that happened to have polite TV shows. Nobody has said that rudeness is required to stop racism, merely that liking such a vile period in our nation’s history that was on balance much worse in pretty much every area that matters… just because you didn’t hear the word “fuck” as often or have to deal with gangsta rap is… weird.
If you’re going, go. Whinging on about it doesn’t make your opinions any more realistic or valid.