I was about to recommend a stylist whom I go to regularly for my hair, but upon reading the first post, never mind.
If you don’t have the stomach for the battle you shouldn’t involve yourself in it.
Despite the times I’ve tried to be nice or at least respectful of you and gotten little but insults and vulgarity for my trouble, I still find myself liking you on some odd level. It doesn’t please me to say things that upset you, but if you’re gonna engage me you need to be prepared for an honest answer.
You mean during the Reagan years.
Out of the approximately 180 million people who comprised this country’s population at that time, just how many do you think raped their wives? How many do you think attended, much less organized, a lynching? How many walked around with guns?
You are attempting to paint an entire population with the behavior of a very tiny, tiny minority.
That is one of the primary reasons I get so cranked at the way people portray pre-1968 America around here.
I don’t think there’s anyone who would argue that increased civil rights for blacks and a decrease in racism is anything but a good thing. But I’m not sure all the changes since the 50s have been entirely positive.
There seems to be more individuality nowadays…there’s the attitude, it seems (and I might be wrong), that individual happiness is more important than the community good. On the personal level, there seems to be the attitude that, as long as you’re not directly hurting anyone, you should be able to do and say whatever you want, no matter how many people are offended by it. Along with that, there seems to be the attitude that there isn’t such a thing as corporate responsibility. If a company can save money by shutting down a factory, the attitude is that they should, even if it ruins the community.
So, I don’t know if things are universally better. Things have been gained but things have also been lost.
That you did not have access to the music of the underclass at that time does not mean that they were not discussing similar topics. You really need to dig out some Delta Blues or out-of-Nashville Country from the eras you enjoy to note that few of the themes have changed. (I agree that some of the language has, although if you had paid attention, you’d have noted that much of the shock stuff really was for shock value and that once the shock was gone, most of the language tempered back, as well.)
Funny, I don’t have any TV showing any similar program. Maybe you should change the channel or tell your housemate how inappropriate their viewing habits are. On the other hand, TV was also prohibited from showing interracial love stories or had to bowdlerize a lot of fairly mild literature to show it in the 50s. (Read a good biography of Rod Serling to see how much serious drama with no offensive language or themes was simply excluded from TV as “inappropriate” in those years.) The vulgar stuff is what people want to watch–with huge audiences in “Red” states–so you appear to be complaining that there is not enough of the previous government babysitting and wish that we could prevent our fellow (conservative) citizens from making bad choices in entertainment.
I suspect that you have supported all the mandatory drug use sentencing that has overcrowded the prisons and forced the government to turn loose “minor” criminals to become worse criminals. (I would not be surprised to discover that you have done nothing to support rehab programs for convicts, as well, although there is a remote chance that you might have.)
Straw man. I have never worked in a company where my English was not the best in the building and I have had to correct many memoes issued by managers who graduated high school and college in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. In the 1960s, my Dad, who was a great and clear writer, was being sent by GM, along with all the engineers in his department, to remedial classes, just as you have described IBM’s.
Such crimes have routinely been unreported when they occurred after a certain time of night in certain parts of town. The difference is that now we have TV reporting some of it, even among the poor, causing you to believe that society has changed dramatically when it is simply that TV went through a period of “report everything” and then went back to reporting only “white blonde girl’s shoes scuffed in crowd” stories.
Well, when we only started keeping records for such things in the 1960s and 1970s, any numbers are going to be “record” numbers. Drug related crimes are pretty much a direct result of the effort to impose a new Prohibition on the country, just as liquor related crimes were rampant throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. As to druggie break-ins, my current neighborhood has suffered the same number of break-ins in the twenty-three years we have been here as the neighborhoods where I lived in the 50s and 60s suffered in the five and eleven years I lived in them.
which is pretty much a direct result of the misunderstood popularization of Kinsey’s works (1948, 1953) and effects of the Birth Control Pill (1964) on society, regardless of Left or Right ideology.
Note that even if all the previous errors in your rant were not there, the reason that this theme gets tied to racism, (actually Civil Rights), is that you always post in absolutist terms about the golden years of your oblivious youth and you make the association to “liberal” politics vs civility. Since you set up the straw man argument, it seems unfair that you then insist that we not play by your rules, noting how the "civility’ of the 1950s was pretty seriously offset by a lot of uncvil practices enshrined in the culture–and Law.
As are you, of course.
I have plenty of stomach for it. You piss me off, so I waste time and energy trying to reason with you, which I know is futile. I don’t care if you wish to mischaracterize me as insulting and vulgar, as I find your accusations towards liberals, of which I am one, far more vulgar and insulting than anything I’ve ever said to you. If I thought you were a rational person, I’d be happy to do battle with you. But you’re not. You’re a blowhard with no ability to think critically about your own positions.
That said, I still like you too on some odd level. I wish I could figure out why, because I find the vast majority of what you say abhorrent. Weird.
Good ol’ Ecclesiastes 7:10 - Ask not, “Why were the former days better than these?” Because it is not from wisdom that you ask this.
Or Hesiod: I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words. When I was a boy, we were taught to be discrete and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of restraint.
Smart bunch, they were back then.
In the past you have come charging unprovoked into a thread I was in and accused me of behavior regarding Barack Obama that I had not engaged in, and when proven wrong you steadfastly refused to recant and apologize. Further, you recently insulted me as a poster in the forum you moderate, and then when I insulted you back you instructed me as a mod to take it to the Pit.
You have shown yourself to be singularly lacking in character and I see no percentage in engaging you.
Mutual sincerity mixed with an honest but ultimately futile effort to come to terms, maybe?
You are an animal lover, and I honestly think you believe what you say. That, and some weird humor thing, and your bizarre habit of pretending you’re leaving a thread when you’re not freakin’ cracks me up every time you do it. You’re a crotchety old bastard who is daft as hell who pisses me off all the time, but I don’t think you’re an evil person. I might even like you if we met in person. You and my dad have similar worldviews. He’s just a lot quieter about his than you are.
Get a room, you two!
Except of course, I’m not 
So that should probably be “He’s not but you are.”
Actually you’re responding to my point with a strawman, and it’s getting kinda annoying. It’s not admirable behavior.
You distort and ignore my points on several counts. The first is that I didn’t mention racially motivated murders specifically (which you’d like to argue instead) but that blacks were, de jure, second class citizens. It doesn’t matter if it was a “tiny minority” that supported that (and get real, if it was then segregation would have ended without much of a fight). And yes, women could legally be raped by their husband. Of course we don’t have reported statistics on that because it wasn’t a crime. But who cares? Is it honestly your contention that a nation that legally allows the rape of women is just fine as long as not that many men choose to avail themselves of that ability? If you had a daughter, you’d be fine telling her husband 'Now, son, if you want to force yourself on my daughter, feel free. Don’t worry, just rape her till the sun comes up." you’d be behaving decently as long as he didn’t go ahead and do it?
And, of course, ‘equal pay for equal work’ wasn’t even on the table back then. It doesn’t matter how many women were raped by their husbands, the fact that our nation enshrined that ‘right’ of a husband, in law, is part of what makes it disgusting. That and, of course, that it was just the tip of the ice berg and there was massive sexist discrimination.
When faced with the clear, undeniable fact that the law of the land supported and encouraged racism, you’d prefer to talk about lynchings.
When faced with the clear undeniable fact that the law of the land supported and encouraged barbaric and discriminatory of women, you admit that sure that’s true, but how many men really took advantage of their legally enshrined ability to rape the hell out of their wives (and you don’t discuss any of the other legally enshrined sexist policies of the time).
If today the US instituted a law that made it mandatory to pay Asian people 1/3 the rate of everybody else for the same jobs “But not everybody supports the law!” would be an absurd counter to the fact that our country would be making discrimination the law of the land.
And that would make this country a morally repugnant beast no matter how many people secretly, quietly (politely) objected to the law.
You’re arguing an irrelevancy
That our society legally allowed this sort of evil conduct (and yes, many many blacks were discriminated against even if comparatively few were lynched, for example) makes it an evil period in our nation’s history. Yes, even if people were so polite that they didn’t bother to try to change things.
Democrat =! liberal, especially not in the South prior to Vietnam.
Oh, and cite for the IBM claim, please. Or is that another, “I heard somewhere…”
(Oh, and I believe when december was banned for being an asshole in general, some of his defenders would cry, “but he was so POLITE!!!” as if that made everything okay)
If Starving Artist and I were in a room, I guarantee what would happen would be far different from whatever is transpiring in your sick, twisted imagination. It would probably entail me taking away SA’s walker and forcing him to watch MTV2, or maybe Friday.
Translation:
After I lied about tomndebb and insulted him on several occasions without provocation while refusing to respond substantively to any correction he posted regarding my rants, I took extraordinary exception to a mild comment of his about my posts, supporting my position weakly, (if loudly), while he supported his about about as weakly, and I have since made a point of refusing to engage him in any way other than to hurl insults. When he recently responded to one of my claims for having demonstrated the evils resulting from liberal actions, reminding me sarcastically that I had failed to provide evidence of my many accusations against liberals, I responded with a personal insult, then got bent out of shape when he suggested that such insults would be better suited to the Pit.
= = =
That’s OK, Since you have failed to ever support your claims in the past, I am content to demonstrate their errors without caring whether you repeat them once more (with the same lack of evidentiary support).
SA, if you take a look at this graph from the US Department of Justice, Statistic Division – violent crime has gone down - waywaywayway down. Not sure where it was at in the 50’s, but I have to cast doubts that it was lower than it is now. Either way, this is by far the most peaceful American society since at least 1973, and given the trend the graph shows, probably some time before that as well.
Take it or leave it. Though I will agree that pop-culture in general has gotten a tad… harsh as of late.
I don’t think I have ever had someone miss my point SO many times.
I am not saying that the 1950s were better than 2009.
I am saying that SOME THINGS in the 1950s were better than how it is in 2009.
I am not advocating a return to the 1950s in their entirety. I am not saying that everything that happened in the 50s should happen now. I am saying that SOME THINGS that happened in the 50s should happen now.
You know the expression, a broken clock is right twice a day? Well, I hesitate to use that here because I have a very hard time thinking of one of the most prosperous periods in America’s history as a “broken clock”, despite the racism and sexism that (many people apparently believe) automatically invalidates everything else, even all of the good things. But if you want to think of the 50s as a broken clock, at least realize that it was still right twice a day. There were still good things in it.
There are bad things in every decade. You could just as easily call the 1960s a shameful, morally-repugnant period in our history because of what we did in Vietnam, bombing the hell out of hundreds of thousands of civilians for basically no reason and getting tens of thousands of our own troops killed in a war that really did not have to happen at all. I think hundreds of thousands of civilians getting their skin burned off by napalm and innocent villages being destroyed is, in fact, much more morally repugnant than Jim Crow laws. But does the Vietnam War make the 1960s an “evil” period in time?
SA, we’d respect you a lot more if your arguments weren’t always so shitty. I often (perhaps usually) disagree with Sam Stone, but I never think that he’s pulling stuff out of his ass or arguing in bad faith.