BWAHAHAHAHA!
I could have written these responses myself, so predictable and dishonest are they.
But, correcting them will have to wait til later. Being a conservative and all, I have work to do and money to make.
Chow!
:: waits to see which dumas takes the bait ::
Whatever trips your trigger, I suppose, and I do admit to mildly enjoying reading while far brighter and far better people than he will ever be rip his disingenous ass a new one. Don’t feel it necessary just for me, though; only do it if it amuses you. 
Ooooo, a snark detector, that’s a really useful invention. :rolleyes:
[/comicbookguy]
Oh, what a thing of beauty. Are you looking for Alexandre, or a different one?
Five bucks on Fils; Père, like SA, is too enamored of the past.
“Ciao!” D’Artagnan hailed the three musketeers.
“Chow?” frowned Porthos, “There is much more meat on a spaniel.”
Once more into the breech, then I’m out of here. Yeah, he ripped me a new one all right.
SA: Libs oppose laws banning the Crips and Bloods.
Lib poster response: The LAPD deals with it.
SA: I was talking about laws, not police policy.
Svin: (in superior and haughty high dudgeon): Clever the way you move the goal posts there, SA.
:rolleyes:
Some woodshed!
ETA: Were I looking for Alexandre, Hector, I would have used a capital d.
And now, I’m out. Have a good day!
Correct me if i’m wrong, but it seems like one of **S&I’s **links does suggest the police are using methods which involve the law. Can’t use gang injunctions if there’s no legal system behind them.
I certainly agree we should have higher standards of public officials than of those of us in ‘everyday’ jobs.
What I consider lame is excusing one’s own behavior while claiming to be morally superior to a pol you hate who’s committed the same behavior. Such too-loud protestations are often less about upholding high standards than they are about lowering one’s own.
Sorry, I guess I was taking for granted that everyone would know I was talking about federal laws as those are what I’ve seen proposed. This assumption is also supported by the fact that the Crips, Bloods and similar gangs have infested cities and towns all over the country.
I suspect that most here know that and are just being dishonest.
Cite?
Also, I’d love your response to the evidence that conservatives used funding from the drug trade they promoted to fund the Contras.
It seems to me reasonable to have local laws rather than federal on this issue; having a different legal response to a group, as with gang injunctions, seems like something that could be far too easily abused as a country-wide, standard set that probably wouldn’t be specific enough to help in all cases. Aren’t you a conservative, anyway? I thought one of the main tenets of conservatism over there was small government, laws only where they are necessary.
This is entirely opinion, but it doesn’t seem particularly reasonable to both claim that other people aren’t merely wrong, but wrong with malice, whilst simultaneously rolling your eyes at other people claiming what you see as the same at you.
Why would we take that for granted? What you said was:
There is no mention of federal laws. And again, this stipulation is a totally ad hoc move on your part to defend against contrary evidence. If, as you suggest, liberal influence is so pervasive and destructive, then we wouldn’t see successful legal interventions at the local level, either.
Take off the tinfoil hat and maybe we can all read your mind better.
So you’re in *favor *of federal laws to address local issues? That’s not very conservative of you.
Cite?
And I’m curious; is such a law even necessary? The United States already has federal laws that can be used to prosecute someone engaged in a criminal enterprise, e.g. the famed RICO statute. There are, of course, laws in the State of California prohbiting all the specific criminal acts the Crips and Bloods are engaged in. What other laws do you think would be useful, that would pass the muster of a court challenge? Are you going to outlaw wearing red or blue? Sure would suck to be a baseball fan in LA, huh?
I mean, it’s pretty goddamned sad, dude, when you’re deny black-hating was commonplace in 1955 (when, in fact, it was very commonplace, and it was considered socially acceptable to abuse black people) but claim anyone today cares for the Constitutional rights of the Bloods and the Crips, aside from themselves. Where is this outcry over the rights of street gangs? I’ve never heard of such a thing.
But then, you also think long hair leads to the downfall of society.
But I think you’re onto something there. Look at all the goddamned long-haired hippies in this picture. Can you imagine these long-haired goofballs accomplishing anything of importance?
Hentor:
It does seem a mystery, at first, but I think Bob Altemeyer pegs it. SA displays all the characteristics of a classic, High Right-Wing Authoritarian.
Here is a quick summary of the theory; here is Altemeyer’s online manual. I understand his research is highly respected: it’s one of the most rigorously tested theories in psychology, which holds up with a much higher level of statistical correlation than one usually sees in the social sciences. (You doubtless know better than I do about that.) Anyway, if you haven’t stumbled across him, I really recommend his work. I find SA much easier to grok after having read The Authoritarians. Be sure to check out Chapter 3, How Authoritarian Followers Think.
In fact, here’s a small sample, relevant to the question of who has been more detrimental to the state of the country (or the world). Altemeyer set up an experiment whereby he could compare the behavior of “low RWA” personality types against the behavior of “high RWA” personality types. He engaged two groups of college students in a “sophisticated simulation of the earth’s future called the Global Change Game”, in which between 50 and 70 participants simulate the world’s population and follow a set of rules governing international relations. (There are a number of fairly common versions of this sort of game out there, and anyone who’s taken a Poli Sci or International Relations 101 class has probably played something similar.) What the two groups didn’t know was that they had been carefully screened prior to the exercise and sorted according to their score on Altemeyer’s RWA scale.
When the first group of low RWAs played the simulation, it went like this:
So: how did it go when Altemeyer ran the same simulation with a group selected for high RWA traits?
That’s just a sampler. I really recommend the entire book.
Frank:
Absolutely. It’s something I do to dawdle the time away. SA, taken on his own, is definitely not worth worrying about; the only real problem is that high RWAs make up between 20 and 25% of the population in the US – a very large voting block that, as we have seen, can have a devastating effect on the course of US history.
Speaking as a liberal, and on behalf of virtually every liberal I know, I’m very much opposed to the idea of “outlawing” the KKK. As a known haven of terrorist activity, I think the authorities should keep a very close eye on them, just as I think that they should keep a close eye on street gangs with a reputation for violence and criminal activity. But outlawing any of these organizations would be a fundamental violation of the core principles of liberalism.
The only thing that blacks had accomplished (with a significant amount of help from liberals) was Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That act did not sweep through (an almost all white) Congress based on a desire by conservatives to respond to the clear racism of society as demonstrated by numerous acts opposing equal treatment of all persons. I also find it quite interesting that you believe that everything was “in place” to grant Civil Rights when the battle–literal battle–was still being fought. The riots of whites, including police, against the marchers out of Selma occurred nne months after the aforementioned Civil Rights Act. (That march was a response to the fact that despite the new law, blacks continued to be denied the right to vote.) The only significant judicial ruling in support of the Civil Rights movement that was not tied to the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act was Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka from 1954, the implementation of which was still being resisted in the courts at least as late as 1974. Having the “wheels in motion” (with unenforced judicial rulings) hardly counts as having the black community actually be granted full citizenship. (And you never have explained how the “liberals” actually hurt the country by supporting Civil Rights.)
Leaving aside your silly and false attempt to claim that “liberals” tried to outlaw the Klan while defending the Crips and Bloods, the reality of the gangs and the crimes has far more to do with the clash between a society–liberal, conservative, and unconcerned–harshly repeating the mistake of the 1920s attempt to suppress alcohol than to any “liberal” promotion of drugs or the Constitutionally protected rights of the accused. The imposition of or special enforcement of laws to make a commodity illegal is the strongest contributing factor to the creation of gangs.
Again, the personal misery caused by drugs in the U.S. has tended to be relatively constant from mid-1800s to the present, varying somewhat by the channels of distribution and cultural popularity. Societies that accept a certain amount of drug use, aiming to regulate it without prohibiting it or actually handling it through prescribed distribution have suffered far less damage than those societies that have attempted to eradicate it. And, as noted, the criminal element has more to do with the attempt to prohibit drugs, as well.
Probably not that many, actually. The actual crime rate has pretty consistently followed the demographics of males between the ages of 15 and 35, rising as their numbers rose and falling as their numbers fell, regardless how many people were incarcerated. Three-strikes rules are simply a simplistic over-reaction to the situation that trumped the more intelligent “habitual criminal” laws that they replaced. Incarcerations have risen as we have outlawed far more drug-related actions, but those numbers appear to be irrelevant to the actual incidence of violent crime.
I find your opinion, supported only by a rather skewed view of history, to be unpersuasive.
I will grant youa bit of leeway that the coareseness of day-to-day language might have arisen on the Left (although it has certainly been embraced wholeheartedly on the Right).
However,
This is silly. Failure to dim lights and tailgating are the marks of the wealthy “I own the road” personality–people typically moving in so-called “conservative” circles–far more than something that arose among those who wished to ensure that all citizens were treated equally. I do not doubt that you perceive an increase in such actions or that you believe that such things were the result of the general coarsening of society, but the first is confirmation bias and the second is merely projection. (The “me” generation did not actually arise on the Left, but among the folks on the Right in the 1970s with their Robert Ringers and other Right wing gurus of greed.)
Sorry. You are just being silly, now.
I really hope that you are being facetious, here. The only thing the Beatles did was give martinets on the Right the opportunity to make up bullshit rules to enforce about hair length. If teens reacted against idiotic rules from the “Establishment,” then that would seem to indicate a larger problem among the rule makers than the people against whom such rules were enforced.
At any rate, the Beatles were only a single blip on a continuum of changes that had begun in the 1950s and would have proceeded regardless of their appearance. There were lots of calls for the suppression of “race music” long before anyone gave it the sexual name “Rock and Roll” with condemnations of “Elvis the Pelvis” for his blatant sexuality ten years prior to the arrival in the U.S. of the Beatles. There were constant complaints against the “lewd” and “lascivious” dances such at The Twist and The Mashed Potato and others four years prior to the Beatles’ U.S. debut. Throughout the 1950s, there were all sorts of calls for censorship based on the ideas that music and movies and even comic books were corrupting American youth. If you actually believe that the Beatles were the cause of social disruption, (as opposed to simply imaginative beneficiaries of it), then I am not sure what to say to you, beyond saying that you are clearly wrong.
At this point, I begin to doubt that you actually were there in the 1950s or 1960s (or else you have an amazingly selective memory). Opposition to the U.S. involvement in Vietnam began (somewhat slowly) during the Kennedy administration when people began to question why we were supporting a regime that was so corrupt that its own citizens were committing suicide by self-immolation to protest our puppet. At the time that the earliest anti-war protests began, there was no serious understanding among the U.S. populace that the war was being mismanaged. By 1968, when many aspects of societal cohesion were crumbling, I would agree that the war was widely perceived as a bad thing, but blaming war resistance on Johnson’s mismanagement ignores the actual events in the manner in which they occurred.
Aside from your distorted chronology, you seem to have mixed up a lot of things, imposing ideologies and events in retrospect that were not present at the times you need them to have been occurring.
Flower power was a silly slogan that never gained a political following as the anti-war movement morphed from one of “war is bad” to “this war must be stopped, violently if necessary.”
As noted, the anti-war movement actually had separate phases with the first beginning long before Johnson came to power.
The sexual revolution had rather little to do with calls for the rise of the libertine state by those on the Left and everrything to do with the development of the birth control pill that allowed people, Left, Right, Center, and uncommitted, to engage in sex with few worries about pregnancy. There may have been louder spokespersons for free love (a concept that dated to the 19th century) on the Left, but the actual revolution was going on with or without the rhetoric.
Democrats did not jump on the anti-war bandwagon as soon as the anti-war movement began; they were dragged into the anti-war camp as the result of the intransigence of the Republicans in the face of the mounting casualties being shown on TV every night. A couple of the most prominent political opponents to the war were Democrats, but the Democratic party did not embrace that position until it became a rallying cry against Nixon after his second election and shortly before the U.S. began to withdraw.
The idea that Democrats began appointing activist judges in response to political movements in the late 1960s simply falls apart on any review of the evidence. You might get away with claiming that “liberals” were responsible for activist judges, generally, but that charge would have to go back to the 1930s to bear any correspondence to reality.
I also decry the name-calling that has become the hallmark of many on the left. However, pretending that such name-calling did not actually begin in response to “commie,” “pinko,” “nigger- lover,” “un-American,” “traitor,” “fag,” “race traitor,” and ultimately “liberal” is simpy not historically accurate. It was no liberal who told her child, following the Kent State massacre, that she wished that her daughter (who had not been involved in the student protests) had been shot, as well.
I am befuddled. How should we go about outlawing street gangs? Should Congess pass a bill that explicitly mentions the Bloods and the Crips? The antisocial behavior that street gangs engage in is already illegal, but the right to free assembly is Constutitionally protected. What more could we, as a society, do to express our disapproval about street gangs?
This is a serious question.
Since when was the KKK outlawed?
-Joe