You’re allowed to express your disagreement and your offense, but while you’re posting in this forum, you can’t call another poster a liar or say he is lying. Don’t do this again.
Are you really arguing that you should respond in any other way than “thank you?”
Of course there is nothing wrong with pointing out irrelevancy. Just seems to me you could have been more gracious, especially for someone who takes issue with a lack of civility.
I’d have said thanks for acknowledging your claim was unfair, but then again, I do not think that society is as impolite as you do.
Saturday night a week ago I went to a rock concert with about 17000 people present. I did hear a couple people being rude but I thought it was pretty polite for the most part, people saying excuse me and sorry and the like, rather than ‘get the fuck out of my way you fat pig,’ and I haven’t heard anyone being impolite since. But maybe living in a town of 9000 people helps.
People do tend to project their own thoughts onto others, but even if you do not it couldn’t hurt to practice being more civil yourself, would it?
My mom, who grew up in the fifties, taught me long ago if I wanted to get along with people that when someone is rude, just pretend they weren’t and respond accordingly. It works wonders. Maybe that is part of why you see a rude world and I do not. I’m not perfect, of course, and fail sometimes, but still my basic worldview is that people are fairly decent for the most part.
“By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the customs of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably, though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into, without extreme bad conduct. Custom, in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England.”
– Adam Smith
No, David42, that wasn’t what I was talking about. You didn’t answer the question.
Have you ever lived with eight strangers in a studio apartment and had your “needs” satisfied?
Adam Smith can have his opinion. Personally I shun many thigns that are customary in our society, and do not feel embarrassed or shamed or lower class in the least. By this argument, Ipads Ipods and Playstation 3’s are all necessities, as are the latest cell phones and fancy cars. This argumant may be more applicable to societies without as much excess as ours, but even then I doubt I’d agree with a keeping-up-with-the-joneses theory of “need.”
If I volunteer facts from my life, fine. If you pry, I’m likely not to answer.
At any rate, suspecting that you are defining “need” in a manner strange to me, I couldn’t answer until I was sure of what you meant. If you care to define what you mean by "needs"I will consider answering the question.
BTW if your question is going to be accurate in its relevancy to my statement, you also need to eliminate the “strangers” part of it. My statement did not contemplate strangers, and I do not see why your question insists on it.
I certainly do. Bridget Burke is a woman who has insulted me on many past occasions and called me a racist, a sexist, and a liar in this very thread. She also strongly suggested that I was a “chicken-hawk” - i.e., a person happy to see others go off to fight and die in war but not willing to do so oneself. I do not think that merely acknowledging it when I set her straight on my military service in any way suggests that she is due a polite thank you.
You might notice that I was still civil to you despite the fact that you appeared to have misunderstood the nature of the post in which she apologized to tomndebb but not to me, and then criticized me accordingly.
Most generally, if people are civil to me - as you were - I will be civil in return.
MaxTheVool - I stayed out of the thread for quite a while as I felt that you were primarily using my arguments as the basis for your uncle’s analysis and response, rather than addressing your comments to me. Also I felt that you had failed to grasp the overall nature of my complaints and had siezed upon the least consequential of them - the lack of politeness - as the major focus, and therefore that was all you asked your uncle about. In light of your statement that you haven’t been following my posts on this subject that closely, this is understandable. But at the time I just felt: “What’s the use?”
I am pretty much talked out tonight and have a few errands to run and tomorrow I have a rather busy day ahead, but I will try as soon as possible to gather my thoughts and explain my views as to just how I view liberalism to be at the root of most of today’s societal ills. It’s a subject that is complex and multi-faceted, with many threads and subjects running through it which intertwine in various troublesome ways. I’ve thought for a long time that I need to do something like this but frankly I’ve put it off because it just seemed like too big a job for too little result.
However, now that you’ve asked (;))…I’ll see if I can whittle down what would otherwise be a dissertation-length post into something that hopefully will tie up the loose ends without resulting in a TLDR post that no one will want to read. It may be a day or two or three, but I’ll see what I can do.
I want to qualify the foregoing statement after thinking it over a bit.
I note the Mr. Smith discusses a need which I of course also include on my short list of needs. His statement goes to a minimum standard. I might still feel fine in England in his scenario wearing some other shirt or shoes, and do not conform entirely to Western dress ideas today–but I’d never run around in a loin cloth, either. But I’d have to really be filthy and near naked to really feel bad about it. I just happen not to care much about clothes beyond function. Yeah, my momma dresses me funny.
I can also see that other people somewhat reasonably put more importance on clothes than I do. But the more they do, the more superficial they seem to me. And I certainly can remember conforming for the sake of work. (I swear I’ll never wear another suit! never ! never!)
Adam Smith’s view isn’t as unreasonable as I may have first made it seem.
Irrelevant. There did not need to be laws prohibiting such actions because the social norms permitted colleges to discriminate based on their own prejudices. A few women and ethnic minorities were able to beat the system by finding an educational institution that would allow them to attend, but the vast majority had no way to get past the in-house restrictions. Having graduated, of course, the same people were not protected from discrimination in hiring, so even if they got their education, they often had to take jobs that were below their level or outside their area of study.
It is not necessary to have a law prohibiting an action to prevent it from occurring.
Ah, my point is more about the use of overgeneralized absolutes.
It is indeed irrelevant that there weren’t laws against it. But the statement “weren’t allowed” might imply there were. And of course “good” job is subjective.
Your original post never explicitly stated whether the studio apartment dweller knew one another.
My viewpoint comes from seeing Mexicans crammed six to eight in a room via a dorm on a farm or house. They’ve told me it’s no paradise. I worked in lemon and avocado orchards 30+ years ago and more recently know of those worked in the tobacco fields in NC.
The “needs” (and “wants”) aspect comes from the fact that each roommate can be a source of comfort or danger. Does your roomie steal your lunch? Your money? Did someone forget to buy your favorite brand of taco sauce? Did you drink so much that your snoring kept awake two of your roomies the whole night? Which is the “need”? Which is the “want”? It becomes situational at that point.
So, pointing out that women and ethnic minorities and homosexuals suffered serious discrimnination in the workplace, in society, and even in law are “hyperbole and distortion” while your rather silly claim that “We can no longer educate our children.” is merely a “generality.”
I’m sorry, but you are simply providing evidence that you are willing to fight “hyperbole and distortion” with your own brand of the same.*
First, you may think that 50% of kids are not being educated, but I see no reason to believe you. In any event, your claim implied that no kids were being educated. I accepted that as a “generality” and simply pointed out that such a claim that a majority or even some large plurality were not being educated was nonsense.
There are areas–typically large cities–where education is failing, but throughout the vast majority of the country it is doing what it needs to do. As to your claim about kids being prepared for college, there are two separate issues: First, far more kids are shoved through college, today; it is no longer the domain of the elite, so overall performance is going to drop in the same way that we no longer see .400 hitters in baseball, these days. Second, even the previous generations were, frankly, not that good. My Dad graduated in 1949 and spent most of his career lamenting the fact that he had to correct his bosses’ spelling and grammar. Similarly, I found myself becoming the go-to guy for writing in English among most of my (older) superiors throughout my career. Since they were all educated in your golden era, I submit my anecdote that you simply put on rosy glasses when viewing them. (Further note that your complaint was in regards to kids entering college while my Dad and I were talking about the college graduates.)
You must have a really bad method of picking housing locations. I have been in my house for 25 years. On one occasion, a kid went down the street ripping off CDs and tapes from cars he found unlocked in driveways. (He got about six cars.) In other words, my neighborhood is so crime infested that on a street with fewer than fifteen houses, six different families left their cars outside and unlocked based on a complete absence of property crime in the previous decades. (There has been no repeat of the incident.)
Drug activity? You still have failed to provide any evidence that the drug plus alcohol numbers are actually worse than the numbers for alcohol alone before the 1960s. (Although the fact that the government foolishly attempts to restrict everything, from heroin and meth all the way down to pot, tends to force people who prefer a drug different from alcohol to be involved in illegal activities by definition, not by a desire to be criminals.)
I can name a lot of neighborhoods besides my own where criminal activity is nonexistent and I can point out a lot of alcohol problems from the period prior to 1968, so this is simply more special pleading that you don’t like today’s problems even when they are not much different from your golden era.
I think it is pretty silly that I have to point out that they are not as widespread as you routinely claim they are.
= = =
- In this discussion, I would tend to agree that several of your opponents also resort to hyperbole; I doubt that spousal rape, for example, was ever as prevalent as some would imply. But your hyperbole elicits that sort of comment since you begin from a postion of such extreme exaggeration of some issues and denial of others as to open the gates for similar responses.
(And, of course, attributing all evils to “liberals” while ignoring or denying the problems arising on the political Right–even accusing “liberals” of things which actually come from the Right, such as hating other groups–simply indicates an attitude that does not arise from any “honest assessment of reality.”)
Well, there are two points on that count.
The first is that we really don’t know since it wasn’t something that was going to be reported in many cases, so we could only guess. The second is that whether or not it was prevalent, it was legal. So when someone claims that everything was better and society was much more civil, pointing out that you could legally rape your wife if you felt like it is a valid data point, even if few people took advantage of the opportunity.
Opium den count?
Yeah it does become situational and certainly I am not suggesting its anything near paradise, but in many cases it is voluntary. The only ones I saw their living situation closely, I doubt anything serious was not being met unless it was medical care, which they did not speak of. They were very friendly as I treated them as other friendly neighbors. Food and clothing were well met, but I have to comment that they had a community approach to clothes. They used to want to share food with me all the time, so I am pretty sure they stayed fed.
Of course this experience has not much to do with worse situations you describe which I am sure exist.
The fact that my premise did not eliminate the possibility of strangers does not make it fair to limit your question only to strangers. Its kinda strawmanish.
I think it’s pretty clear that at least one big cable in his “intertwined” web of liberal awfulness will be Feminism, which will be blamed for legions of fatherless, ill educated drug addicted children. And there’s little question that feminism is considered a liberal idea, although as we’ve all been reminded lately, Betty Ford campaigned for the ERA.
Great quote. But the part that I find most telling is “..that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into, without extreme bad conduct.” Indeed, this is the underlying belief of the vast majority of conservatives whose beliefs on the subject I’ve been exposed to: that poverty itself reveals some kind of “badness” on the part of the one laid so low.
Of course, I suppose one would have to believe that in order to continue to make policies that have so little regard for them and still manage to look at oneself in the mirror.
I think they also take advantage of the fact that, just as tomndebb pointed out, just because there isn’t a law against it doesn’t mean it isn’t otherwise achieved.
I’m not going to be able to cite it probably, but I have heard of instances where a woman’s family or friends or even the community in general gave a bad husband a sound beating, or maybe even killed him. Not to say that all bad husbands were suitably punished, but some women did get a type of justice. But this wasn’t spoken of in polite society either.
Some would point to a lack of a law and claim that means that everyone approved of spousal rape. I don’t believe it.
Whoever claimed that “everything” was better? Certainly not me. Many is the time when I’ve said that problems existed back then which needed to be addressed and should have been addressed, but in a different way. I did that exact thing in this very thread when I suggested that issues of women’s rights could have been resolved through demonstrations and legislative efforts a la the sufferage movement which resulted in women gaining the right to vote.
I’ve found that my opponents here often resort to these exaggerated sorts of claims (“everything was better”) because they’re easy to mock and to refute. Naturally the usual suspects tend to pick up such claims and run with them and the meme is born, but the reality is that neither I nor anyone else I can think of on this board has ever claimed that everything was better in pre-counterculture America.
Thats a funny position if you mean american conservatives who identify with Christianity. Its a part of my reasoning in not feeling bad if I am not dressed in finery.
But I know of snobby liberals too who will look down their nose at someone not properly dressed in their opinion. I hardly think tis a purely conservative position.
It is actually a fairly standard theme for adherents of the Protestant Work Ethic: success indicates that you have pleased God while poverty indicates that you have failed in that relationship and that you are not, now, blessed. (It is, at one (small) step removed, the basis of the theology of “the Gospel of Wealth” or “The Gospel of Success.”)
That noted, while it may be true that it is the view of “the vast majority of conservatives whose beliefs on the subject [stoid has] been exposed to,” we do not have, (in this thread) any serious numbers regarding how many people actually subscribe to that belief.