Anybody talking to you, shit-for-brains? Huh? Now take this flower of peace before I ram it down your goddam fucking throat! Groovy!
What, you guys want more, eh?
Well, okay, then…
Or looked at society as a whole and didn’t cherry pick offenses.
For the thousandth time, I don’t want the fifties! But still, what are you saying? That I’m not allowed in your mind to look at what was good about that era (or on the other hand, what’s bad now that didn’t exist then) and resent how things have been fucked up needlessly by your ilk since then?
No, thanks. I prefer the broader view of life as it was experienced by the country in the main, rather than cherry-picking evils that most people never knew existed.
Again with the Beatles. I point out how liberalism in this country over the last forty years has led to death and misery from drugs, crime, AIDS (by dint of liberal-championed over-the-top promiscuity that would never have been condoned by heterosexuals), and abortion - and which far outweighs the death and misery caused by the Iraq war and/or racial lynchings - and aside from a few weak protestations to the contrary, what you guys choose to focus on is civility and the Beatles?
Typical, but I have a theory about that, and don’t you wanna know what it is?
It’s because the societal ills caused by liberalism are due to mostly to an unthinking knee-jerk activism that is all too ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater and turn a blind eye to consequence, whereas lynchings and the Iraq war (both of whose numbers pale into insignificance by comparison) were intentional…thus you can deny culpability and claim that these things ‘just happened’.
Well, they weren’t happening in this country prior to a bunch of drug-addled 18-to-22 year olds gaining sufficient numbers to have an impact on politics, and the consequences have been just about what one might expect.
And now, I really do have to get back to consequential life. Try not to make me come back here again, mmkay?
Sure, just one last question: can you provide an example of any mainstream, well-known liberal who believes that “crassness and vulgarity was [sic] necessary to end racism”?
Nah, it’s more fun watching you try to trumpet your sics (third time now, or forth?) to an audience that clearly doesn’t care.
Since we all know that SA can never admit error, I guess we’ll just have to take this as his admission that he actually has no such example, and was, in fact, lying, when he claimed liberals believe “crassness and vulgarity was [sic] necessary to end racism”.
Or else he has a very broad definition of “crassness and vulgarity”?
But now that you bring it up, Svin, I’m reminded of another important area where liberals have fucked things up - education.
:: Shakes fist at kids on lawn :: Back in my day, people knew the difference between they’re, there and their, and that not every word that ends in ‘s’ takes an apostrophe. And they could make change.
You know, back before the idea took root that giving kids Fs was damaging to their self-esteem (not to mention actually failing them), and that they should therefore be passed from grade to grade simply because their names were on the rolls.
I will admit I don’t know this as a fact although I do recall reading about it from time to time a couple of decades ago, and I’d be hard-pressed to account for the grammar and math skills of today’s young people if they truly had to learn things to pass. Perhaps someone could elucidate?
I do know, however, that at one point things got so bad that IBM was having to send its recent college new-hires to remedial reading classes just so they could read, write and comprehend company memos.
I’ll see what people have to say when I return, but for now I’m out.
I dunno, I’m thinking it’s more that the death and misery of the Iraq war and/or racial lynchings just don’t matter to you, what with you being neither Iraqi or black.
Oh, and just so you know, most liberals *are *heterosexual. About 90% of them, in fact.
How can you give us more when you haven’t given us anything in the first place?
Cite that that’s what’s actually happening out there?
:dubious:
I wish to advise those hanging on my every word that I will be away from the Boards for some unspecified length of time. Hence, there will be no further posts from me until such time as I return.
Totally gay?
Starving Artist is beginning to remind me of maatorc.
How do you feel about pineal glands, SA?
BTW, still waiting on an answer to my question.
[Mad Hatter]No, it’s how can he give us less. [/MH]
[cheap shot]Did they teach children the difference between “forth” and “fourth”? “Was” and “were”? “Dumas” and “dumbass”?[/cheap shot]
OK, bub, now you’re getting personal! My family and I were part of the British invasion that followed in the Beatles’ wake, the one made up of engineers, scientists, and other disrespectable types. 
On a more serious note, I grew up in the 1970s in a small American town which embodied the virtues you spoke of. The grocery stores got busy after church on Sunday, mothers stayed home to look after their kids, and you knew who your neighbors were. In my neighborhood, people got together and worked to get a park in their neighborhood so kids could have somewhere to play, although I’m not sure where that falls on the libera/conservative scale. One could argue it either way. People really did seem to believe that they and their kids were all above average and it was a better place and a better way to live. They believed there was no drug abuse, no promiscuity, no homosexuality, and tried to present that image to the world.
That image wasn’t reality in my experience. Adults may have been nice to each other; my best friend was teased relentlessly to the point where it did serious psychological harm because she was handicapped. I got that treatment as well for two reasons, as nearly as I can figure out: 1, I was an immigrant who was still getting the hang of American things, and 2, I was and remained her best friend until she had a nervous breakdown. The school district I grew up in had a reputation as being a particularly place for outsiders, going back at least as far as the 1970s. No one talked about drug abuse, but we had kids who did drugs. No one talked about promiscuity, but calling someone a virgin was an insult as was calliing someone a slut. If you were socially unacceptable like me, wanting to be friends with someone, let alone have sexual or romantic interest in them was an insult. As for homosexuality, while we didn’t know what it was, it didn’t prevent another good friend of mine from being gay.
Some folks may feel, consciously or subconsciously, that the loss of a few outsiders doesn’t matter and that they should simply learn to conform. I was certainly told that often enough, and I tried to, I really did. I just never succeeded. We’re talking about maybe 1% of the kids who go to a given high school who’ll probably move away from town and never look back. It could be seen as an acceptable loss, if it preserves the veneer of respectability and small town morals a town values. After all, you don’t have to do anything if no one ever complains and those who are different disturb our image and may imply something’s not right.
I wish I could embrace your vision of an America which resembles Lake Woebegone the way my hometown wants to so badly. I wish I could believe in a vision of small town America in which everyone’s nice to one another, problems are solved by consensus, and the only trouble in town is that which is brought in by outsiders. I sincerely regret that my experience has taught me otherwise.
When I was a teenager, I was molested by the father of a woman I took dance lessons from. I told my father and he did nothing about it because he didn’t want to create a stir in the town or damage someone’s reputation. Dad is rather conservative and he values politeness, courtesy, and conformity. I won’t ask if you approve of his actions, but I will point out that, in light of the things you say you value, they make sense. Much as I do still love my father, I cannot approve of them and I’m glad that people have spoken up against what they believe is wrong, even if it means we face skeletons in the closet rather than ignoring them. In this regard, I’m afraid it seems we must agree to disagree.
I’m probably reading this one wrong, but are you suggesting that the entirety of those lberals who championed promiscuity were homosexual or bisexual? And that heterosexuals are immune to that self-same promiscuity?
Again, I don’t mean to badger, but while you’ve mocked people for focusing on the Beatles, it seems to me you’ve selected those responses to respond to yourself. Granted, they’re not a minority, but there are a few people who’ve set out proper arguments (I flatter myself as being one of them), and your response has often been “That’s a good question - i’ll get to it later, if that’s ok”.
If you’re off, I do have a last thought. I think that you’re comitting many of the problems you’re castigating others for - you hold up your own experiences as valid, near- if not true factual evidence, the questioning of which is inherently foolhardy, while at the same time degrading the personal experience of others and calling it invalid. You claim that your own personal experience may be generalised to millions of American’s experiences; and I can only assume that your disregard for statistical cites means your basis for how things were and have been over the past 50-odd years for all Americans is your personal experience, and that alone. You just can’t generalise like that; for one thing, look at all the people disagreeing with you in this thread. Regardless of who is right, we can certainly see that the experiences that you have had must have been very different from the experiences they have had, otherwise you wouldn’t have such different, strongly-held opinions. If you and elucidator and Zoe and tomndebb as Americans can all find points on which you disagree and which your experience says are true or false, doesn’t that show that to base one’s ideas on what America is like on a single person’s experience is not the wisest of plans?
To go back to the questions subject, I asked you one a while back now (this thread moves fast!) that I feel is fairly important; by what means you use to judge whether another poster has integrity, that they can be trusted when they recount an experience or post an opinion that they are telling the truth? Who on the board, or even in this thread, would you say has credence with you? I’m concerned that you’re using agreement with your own experience as the base for that judgement, which is a rather self-fulfilling cycle.
‘Forth’ and ‘was’ were careless or in haste; dumas, for the humor impaired, was a play on words, as should have been obvious by the countdown that followed. (Should I have said ‘that’, or ‘which’? I’m never able to tell.)
Still, given the fact that I’m fourty plus years out of school and have endured decades of liberal-induced sloppiness of language, I’ve been told by at least two college students of my acquaintance that being around me is like being around an English professor. This despite the fact that my grasp of spelling, grammar and rules of sentence construction is tenuous at best.
Doesn’t speak well of the education students get by the time they arrive in college these days, does it?
Oops, now I’m out again. Company is on the way and I’m cooking.
P.S. - RT, I thought I’d already answered that. I’ll try to post more later.
Nah, knowing SA I’m betting he’s saying all liberals are fags. Or maybe all fags are liberals. I mean it’s only uncivil or vulgar if liberals are saying it. Why those poor, polite, upstanding conservatives in the 50s must have been driven to scream nigger and using profanities by dint of those liberals doing it first! When in Rome!
Yeah, these folks are obviously trying to bring down the Republicans from within. They couldn’t actually, you know, believe in conservative values.