Thanks, TVeblen

The BBQ Pit
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Scylla:

Nice to see you as well. Hope all is well with you and yours.

That was really something with the waterboarding. You got quoted on a lot of blogs I was reading at the time. Pretty cool. And gratifying to see a member of the right concede that yes, waterboarding really is torture.

So you’ve now conceded that the party you support freely lies and in order to start wars, and tortures people it considers dangerous. Yet still you support them. Hmmm…

Are you sure you’re an American? At the risk of sounding old-school, you’re beginning to sound like a member of the Politburo to me.

No, what I’m saying is that many of us are just getting fed up. Completely fed up. Maybe I should speak for myself, my own journey. I really gave you, Sam, SA, and many others the benefit of the doubt prior to the invasion of Iraq. I even came to Sam’s defense on occasions when he was being denigrated by other posters. I did believe he was sincere in his arguments, even if he was transparently wrong.

The problem was that no argument or amount of counter-evidence ever did anything to change his mind. How long am I and my fellows required to maintain a civil tone in the face of such obfuscation and intransigence?

TV works for the government. She’s made it clear in other posts that she’s being forced to lay off people because she no longer has the funds to continue running her department. She blames it directly on the mismanagement of the Bush administration, coupled with the local state administration (which is Democratic, by the way). She’s fed up with both, but particularly with Bush.

I am. Because you, and people like you, are Bush’s enablers. Without your unwavering support over the last 8 years, sumbitch would have been voted out, or impeached, by now. So yes, you do indeed share the responsibility for what has happened during the Bush administration. And people are sick as shit about it, already. You made your bed. Now it’s time to lie in it.

Deal.

Or think of it as an example of the us lefties employing your “Big Dawg” theory of politics. Sometimes you just can’t reason with people, so you’ve just got to pick out a couple of them and bitch-slap them in order to create within them the proper attitude of respect. We tried being polite and respectful, and all we got for that was sand, even after our opponents admitted we were right all along.

?

I don’t see the contradiction. As I tried to make clear, he wants “rational debate” on issues that no rational person would consider worthy of serious debate: like a Klansman expecting me to debate him, “rationally,” about his views on the racial superiority of whites. I just wouldn’t do it. That doesn’t make me irrational, and certainly not more irrational than the Klansman.

Yes there is. When the politics they espouse have visibly led to suffering, torture and death, and they have over a long period of time proven themselves immune to reason, then yes, treating them like the shit they are is a viable option. I’m not sure if it has any effect over the long run, or leads to a better resolution, but you and others like you have clearly demonstrated that no amount of rational discussion or evidence will sway you. Endlessly farting merry-go-round discussions with conservatives of a certain stripe are a waste of time, energy, and bandwidth. They’re clearly not going to change their minds until they’ve driven this fucking country over a fucking cliff. The Republican convention was ample evidence of that: faced with a tough situation, electorally, they doubled down and nominated a Christian pit-bull as their VP candidate. More of the same.

No, it hasn’t gone far enough.

Look, Scylla, I like you, I really do. But you are going to have to begin to understand that these are the actual consequences of the politics you and your friends espouse. Eight years ago we could talk about the issues in an abstract, dispassionate, and friendly sort of way. Nobody was really suffering because of them, and who knows! – I could have been proven wrong. Iraq might have been full of WMDs, Saddam might have been actively planning to attack the US, the invasion might have resulted in a free, democratic government in the Middle East (and paid for itself), waterboarding might not have been torture, tax cuts might have been good for the economy, etc., etc. But, after watching Bush and his followers operate since they came to power, we’ve had our chance to taste the pudding. And the pudding was shit.

Anybody who can’t see that at this point is willfully blind, and sorry, as far as I’m concerned, they deserve what they get. As ye sew, so shall ye reap.
PS: Hiya, Red! Good to see you, sir. Congratulations on winning EM: ya’ll played some brilliant football.

PSS: For the record, I have not accused SA of being a racist, nor do I think he is one – especially not in light of what he’s written in this thread.

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Today is St. Crispan’s day?

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Perhaps I am. Let me try to walk through it slowly. First, you make a snarky comment about Red and his location. Then, you try to portray that later as an example of being civil. When I call you out on that inconsistency, your response is essentially “ur dum.”

Is this the height of civil discourse that your maturity has led you to? To help you out, let me explain that people of conscience might feel a sense of what is called shame when engaging in such pathetic behavior.

Mr. S., I had forgotten about the Big Dawg theory of international relations, AKA the Big Swinging Dick theory. Shall we dispassionately discuss the merits and effects of this strategy?

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I have no idea what the hell you are talking about here. I don’t think liberals are championing the cause of misogynist gangsta rap. I think it would be safe to say that you just don’t get it and therefore are demonizing it due to ignorance. I also think your discomfort with rap is the same discomfort old white people feel when they listen to the music of “kids these days.” The same was said about Elvis Presley and rock n’ roll. Rap music is not a social ill. It is not caused by or propagated by liberals. Railing against it and making it a primary reason you long for the idyllic 1950’s is petty.

Yet there are women firefighters. Why not just let anyone who’s qualified do the job instead of saying, across the board, “Women can’t do this”? That is the point of the whole thing: giving people opportunities, not giving them whatever they want. Your depiction of what feminism was trying to do is an inaccurate mischaracterization.

Maybe it’s black people who don’t want to be thought of that way, and are saying so. Blaming this on liberals is just looking for shit to hang on them.

I don’t see the dishonesty. I think you’re looking for excuses and ways to blame liberals for everything in society that you don’t like. It’s ridiculous.

AND YET, there are women cops who do the same jobs as men, just as effectively. So you think that women shouldn’t be cops who deal with violent criminals, now? I’m getting that right? Wow. Impressive.

So if I say I don’t think there’s a problem with rap music, or that women could be successful beat cops, you will accuse me of dishonesty instead of, oh, I don’t know, just realizing that I disagree with you and that your POV maybe isn’t actually fact-based? Because I do think rap music is OK and that women can be beat cops, and I think people who say otherwise are displaying ignorance. I am not being dishonest. I am just disagreeing with you.

I

Please show where I yelled racism.

AND YET, the black people I know DID feel that way. So which of us is right? Anecdote =/= evidence. And I think there’s plenty of evidence that black people DID feel like there was a foot on their necks.

How quickly you resort to name-calling. Nice! I’m not belittling you, but you have mischaracterized my arguments, accused me of being dishonest, and called me a dipshit. Way to maintain YOUR moral high ground.

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Rubysteak:

Touché.

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STDs are not a new phenomenon, nor was the “sexual revolution” the cause of them. Back in the day they were called VD and “good” people got them. Sure, syphilis and gonorrhea were the two biggies, but make no mistake: nice boys and nice girls got them. Of course, with the blanket Gag Rule in place regarding sex and all its um, surrounding issues, no one talked about it, so it was assumed that the problem only existed in red light districts etc. And those loose women deserved them. Never mind that those loose women were frequented by those nice upstanding pillars of society who spread the damned shit to their wives.

AIDS is “newer” on the scene, but chlamydia, trich, and PID have all been around for some time. Most of these are “silent” in the male, which is potentially problematic for him. I have no immediate, direct cite, but here is the CDC’s website on STDs:

The CDC has been compiling stats on VD/STDs for decades now. VD was rampant in Victorian times, but nothing was said in polite company. AFAIK, STDs are still not a topic in polite company, but if the subject is raised, the initiator would not be socially ostracized (unless they went into detail about their own or something). Just like other sensitive topics, such things are not bandied about, They are recognized to occur–such is progress.

You cannot blame women’s lib for STDs. You cannot blame the sexual revolution for them, either. You can praise our public health nurses and doctors for the ad campaigns and programs at colleges and other places for spreading information and awareness of the risks.
Unlike the 1960s, people can get educated about such things. People should be–anyone of sexually active age should be. Sadly, there are many children who have STDs due to sexual abuse–they need a different kind of information and education. Would it be better to go back to those times when Johnny couldn’t tell his mother that Father O’Brian touched him “down there”? Would it be better for the newly seuxally active Brittany to not see a doctor about that burning when she pees? And that weird red thing on Jacob’s cock–it’ll go away by itself, just like it did when America was a bunch of colonies. I don’t think so…

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The funny thing about conservatives complaining about things like rap music and such is that it puts them squarely up against the pedestal upon which “market forces” stand.

I’m still at a loss to understand why it was that Norman Rockwell had to get tossed out, right along with racism. Was that something that liberals agitated for? In actuality, I don’t think the link between those two societal changes is as cartoonishly clear as all that.

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blinks

Who are you, and what have you done with Scylla?

:smiley:

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Sigh There’s no hope. :rolleyes:

Where did I say rap music was a primary reason? It’s merely an offshoot of what has happened since the 50s. And where did I say liberals ‘championed’ it? I clearly said they defended it. Not the same thing.

No, it isn’t. Many people, me among them, were castigated instantly for questioning the notion that women could do such jobs. Time has since shown that they can, and that’s fine. But many people who were in favor of women having these opportunities but unsure how they could fulfill them were instantly cast as ‘male chauvinist pigs’.

Maybe, though I’ve never heard that to be the case. But that isn’t the point. Again, facts are facts and honesty is the best policy. If they are better athletes, that’s all there is to it, whether they want that acknowledged or not. The way to deal with the ignorance that may follow is to meet that ignorance head-on with facts to disprove it; not to pretend it doesn’t exist and call people names when they perfectly reasonably contend that it’s so.

Well, if you don’t see the dishonesty inherent in insisting that everyone turn a blind eye to the perfectly obvious, and then calling them vile names when they don’t, then there isn’t much more I can say.

See? This is ex-fucking-actly like I said you people behave! I NEVER SAID WOMEN SHOULDN’T BE COPS! In fact I’m in favor of it. However, what I did say was just perfectly borne out by you, i.e. one can’t even raise a perfectly legitimate question about it without having their motives impuned.

At least you didn’t call me a chauvinist pig. :rolleyes:

No, I’ll accuse you of dishonesty (barring, of course, your dishonest appraisal of what I actually did say by the comment just above) if you, like many liberals I know, actually disapprove of rap music but feel obligated to defend it because you don’t want to think of yourself as racist…or perhaps even if you don’t mind it and you accuse others of racism because they don’t like it.

More dishonesty. I didn’t say you actually ‘yelled’ it, I said you mischaracterized my comments so as to give you a basis for doing so, something which many others of your political persuasion have been doing for decades.

Fair enough. It’s obvious that life for blacks in those days sucked big-time and something had to be done. It would have had to suck big time for the entire nation to have become involved in it. My point was that the blacks I knew and worked around and saw out and about when I was in the part of town where they lived seemed to be living a perfectly normal life; many were happy, funny, cool, and fun to be around. Others simply went through their jobs and daily routine in the very same manner that whites did in the areas where they lived.

That’s all I was saying.

Now, does it suck that they had to live those lives in segregated areas? Yes, undoubtedly. But they weren’t living lives of abject misery like has been characterized in this thread. (And in fact, given the state of society now, I’d bet that what with gangs, drugs, crime, etc. – all of which I believe have flourished under the liberal-dominated society that has existed since the late-sixties – many of them would feel that life in those areas was much better then.

I’m afraid you are the one who has been deliberately mischaracterizing arguments, and you’ve been doing so in order to imply I’m a racist and sexist and whatever other “ists” may occur to you.

I do apologize however for calling you a dipshit. I don’t believe you have outright called me a similar name, so I’ll retract. I do believe though, that the things you’ve either erroneously or dishonestly implied about me are far worse.

But, having said that it’s become obvious from your posts that the truth of what olivesmarch4th said about liberals and conservatives seeing things through completely different filters is right on the money. We conservatives are concerned about certain things you couldn’t care less about, and we couldn’t care less about certain things that you are concerned about (and please don’t use this statement to imply racism and sexism are two of the things we don’t care about).

So actually what is going on here is that we’re all just engaging in verbal masturbation as we’re never going to convince the other side.

Thus my first inclination is to just abandon the effort and say “Whatever…I’ll see you at the polls, libs!”, but then I realize this would also abandon the playing field to your side, which may give the impression to lurkers who may not yet have their filter in place that you’re side is the correct one because it’s the only one being championed.

So you can look forward to more of the same from me, and I’ll look forward to more of the same from you, and what will be will be. Okay?

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No, it isn’t the cause of them…but it is the reason that 25% of teenage females and who knows how many boys have them now.

I’m sorry that I don’t have time today to address your post in its entirety. Some of the points you raise are valid, and some I’d cast in a different light.

I do appreciate very much your attempts to discuss these issues rationally and without rancor. :slight_smile:

As much as I apprciate your saying that, and particularly the last part, I have to ask just what you did mean when your said of my remarks:

“Yeah, it’s sort of like a member of the Klan posting on the SMDB and expecting to have a dispassionate discussion about the racial superiority of whites.”

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Starving Artist, actually, many would consider the original sexual revolution to have occurred back in the Roaring Twenties, rather than the Sixties. You had speakeasies, women exposing their legs and ankles (shocking!), people going out alone in cars, suggestive dances like the Charleston, jazz, alcohol, despite Prohibition, was rampant, as was crime. We wax nostalgic about flappers, but back then, she was pretty much considered to be a whore.

EVERY generation thinks that the ones before it were so much better, and that life is going to hell in a handbasket. EVERYONE has said that since the beginning of time. The Victorians said that about the Edwardians. The Romantics said it about the Victorians. And so on. Do some research before you start pulling things out of your ass.

Also, I seem to recall Rockwell painting a LOT of social commentary, not just happy, cutesy little scenes of suburban life. Was I wrong?
And for godsakes, not ALL rap is gangsta rap. Jesus. Expand your horizens a wee, would you?

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Surely it is not beyond your powers of cognizance to realize that gangsta rap is what I’ve been talking about. Of course it isn’t ALL rap, and I doubt most people who’ve read my comments take them to include all rap.

I have some rap music myself.

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I bet some of your best friends are black, too!

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Yes, and I very deliberately said so upthread.

You see, I don’t allow this kind of dishonest attempt to make me look racist when I’m not affect me, and I will very likely point out other things of this type in the future.

But thanks for playing, and thanks for illustrating perfectly the exact type dishonest tactics I’ve just been talking about with Rubystreak.

And now, I’m out. No multiple curtain calls today.:smiley:

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Dishonest tactics? There is nothing dishonest about straight-up ridicule, which is exactly what I was doing. If you want to point out every time someone ridicules you in the future, you will be a very busy man. You might have to quit your day job.

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SA:

I meant exactly what I wrote. You expecting people to dispassionately discuss certain political differences, at this juncture, is equivalent to a Klansman expecting to be able to have a dispassionate discussion regarding his views on racial equality. How is it equivalent?

Your views on politics are almost as irrational and destructive as the opinions of a Klansman’s are on matters of race. The last eight years have demonstrated that quite clearly.

Your views on politics are as immune to reason as those of your average Klansman’s are when it comes to matters of race. Exhibit A: your last response to Rubystreak.
You know, I could have written that you’re sort of like a Nazi posting on the SDMB and expecting to have a dispassionate discussion about the necessity of the Holocaust: only, 1) that’s really over the top, and 2) I didn’t want to Godwinize the thread. I honestly tried to think of a more innocuous comparison as well, but I haven’t come up with one yet. You’re like…a member of FEMA posting on the SDMB after Katrina and expecting to have a dispassionate discussion on how well the Bush government responds to natural disasters.

There are various flavors of conservatism, and some of them are more reasonable than others. But we can’t escape the fact that the Republican Party is, and has been, the only real political vehicle for the conservative movement over the last few decades. And even if we were to stipulate that all of your rather ludicrous, ahistorical generalizations concerning “liberals” were true, the sins of liberals would still be insignificant beside the sins of conservatives. Extraordinary renditions, secret prisons, illegal wire-tapping, lying to instigate a war, deficit spending, corporate giveaways, privatization of the military, incompetent response to natural disasters, sexual debauchery, moral hypocrisy…shit, the list is frikkin endless.

Just as an aside to your discussion of rap: you know, once upon a time music came without warning labels. Do you remember who it was that established the PMRC and got the record companies to agree to label music with adult content?

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Well…According to Cecil,

How exactly is that to blame on modern society?

Since we now have abstinance only education available here, VD rates are going through the roof in Texas. I think lack of real sex ed is more to blame.

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I think Emmett Till would disagree.

You seem to thing “gangs, drugs, crime” are all a recent phenomena.

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It would be a totally gratuitous use of my time and effort to defend **Rubystreak **from Starving Artist’s array of disingenuous and dishonest debating tricks, since she’s well capable of ripping him a new asshole any time she chooses, without even troubling to shut the TV off, but I do want to make one quick observation for the benefit of anyone who chooses (wisely) not to read the bullshit and bluster he posts above.
He says

In fact, he asked a direct statement that Rubystreak did yell “racism” and offered his explanation of her motives for yelling “racism,”, to wit:

**Rubystreak **responded

His whole long point-by-point tirade is no more honest or coherent than that, but that just about sums up his argument techniques and his argument.

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You might want to note that I was not arguing that Bricker is really a great guy deep down. I was specifically countering your accusation that he seeks to impose his religious views on other people. In my opinion, he does not. The rest of your diatribe against him is largely subjective, and I’m not particularly interested in convincing you not to dry heave ( :rolleyes: ) when you read one of his posts. I just wanted to correct the one objective mistake I saw in your post. He may be a bastard for any number of other reasons. Advocating a theocracy is simply not one of them.