SA:
I’ll ask again: Do you remember who it was that established the PMRC and got the record companies to agree to label music with adult content?
If I were you, I wouldn’t be holding my breath waiting for a dialog between the two of us. Your credibility and your integrity are shot and I have no inclination to engage with you further.
But for the record and the edification of others who may happen upon this, I could certainly answer but there would be no point as it would neither prove nor disprove anything I’ve said here.
I would say nice try, but just like your impotent backtracking from the comments you made attempting to link me with Klansmen, it’s too thin and obvious to be believable.
In other words, you don’t know.
You’re really an ignorant dipshit, aren’t you?
Okay, assface. Let’s say it was someone on the liberal side of politics. Let’s further say it was a woman. Now, would that completely disprove my allegations as to the effect that liberal influence (including its defense of gangsta rap) has had on this society over the last 40 years? That one lone liberal could possibly have that much impact? Does the exception truly disprove the rule?
And you have the nerve to call me a dipshit after that silly, immature schoolboy taunt?
Seriously, you are not doing any favors to the reputation you’ve enjoyed around here up to now.
I’d just like to point out to the home audience, or to those of you keeping score, that one of the main pieces of evidence SA has deployed in this argument is the following:
When confronted with the fact that it was Tipper Gore, wife of the reviled liberal Al Gore, who was instrumental in getting the music industry to set standards and label music with adult content – a fact which totally undercuts his argument – he responds:
?
This is what I mean about being immune to reason or matters of fact.
No doubt the empirical facts cited by **Tamerlane **, with regard to the prevalence of STDs in today’s “liberal” society, as opposed to the 1950s, is equally irrelevant to SA.
His argument appears to be, “I’ll believe what I want to believe, facts be damned!”
Before Bush, we could indulge that, admittedly with a certain amount of exasperation. But now we have seen exactly how damaging and perfidious the views of SA, and millions of conservatives like him, really are.
Perhaps most exhausting is the constant projection. I mean, seriously, whose been the biggest liar in this thread? SA’s entire argument is based on a mountain of lies and willful misrepresentations.
Sure is. 25% of teenage females didn’t have STDs in the 50s and that’s the fact that’s significant. The mere fact that STDs existed proves nothing insofar as this thread is concerned.
I didn’t challenge Tamerlane on it because I was about to leave when I saw that post and it got lost in the crowd by the time I returned.
And for the record, I also view the statistics that certain STDs were widespread in Manhattan or wherever in 1909 to be similarly irrelevant.
Those are liberal facts. They’re the kind of elitist facts you get at fancy-pants colleges, they’re not real facts. You don’t have to prove real facts, thats how you know they’re real.
SA:
Once more into the abyss, dear friends.
I understood that you thought I was implying you were racist. That’s why I posted a response in which I clearly stated that I do not think you are racist. I also clearly explained why I chose the metaphor: not because I think you are a member of the Klan, but because you share certain characteristics that are also common among Klansmen, Nazis, and members of the Bush administration. I’ve come up with another one in the meantime: it’s kinda like Mark Foley posting on the SDMB and expecting to have a rational discussion of the importance of family values and the sanctity of heterosexual marriage.
Or how about: it’s like a dumbass posting on the SDMB with fact-free, idiotic arguments and expecting to have a rational discussion of them.
Dumbass ≠racist. All racists are dumbasses, but some dumbasses aren’t racist. You fall into that latter category.
Is that clear enough for you?
Give it a rest. You’ve already shown your ass and now you’re just digging yourself in deeper.
As for me, I’m done.
Later, all.
I’m a wee bit confused here. I see a quote in Svin’s post wherein ** Starv** addresses me, but no such post appears in the thread! Whats this then, a post from Shrodinger’s Cat?
Taking our ball and going home, are we?
So long, snookums!
Try SA post #269, last sentence.
In the midst of all this fascinating discourse, Scylla dropped a little bombshell that seems to have gone unnoticed.
This was about the Swiftboating of Kerry in 2004, and Scylla provided some background.
Kerry wasn’t the only one who testified, but whatever.
Scylla made me do a double-take with this…
Wow! Wow wow! Here’s proof positive that conservatives CAN look at actual facts and change their point of view to align with liberals. Blow me over with a feather! Well done Scylla!!
But then, to my great disappointment, he goes and ruins everything.
So he deserved lies and scorn and very likely the loss of the presidency because of the Winter Soldier Investigation, which had happened 33 years years earlier? The Swiftboaters didn’t take on his testimony, they just made shit up about him because of it. And that’s ok with you. He “had it coming” even if the Swiftboaters were full of crap. And that’s ok with you.
See, this is the kind of thing we’re talking about.
Irony, I assume.
In the UK, we have a political party called the Brutish National Party, who are thinly disguised relatives of the KKK in their beliefs. Are you telling me they deserve civility and respect, while they are trying to demean others? As far as I’m concerned, they are due hostility or ridicule everytime they raise their voices.
To clarify, when I said this, I specifically meant the hypocrisy of right-wingers/some conservatives. If a group of people made up lies about McCain that hurt his campaign, accusations that could be proven false with some digging and thought, but that made a publicity splash that caused your average person to believe it, and then it came out that the people who made the false accusations held a grudge against McCain for something he did 33 years earlier that they didn’t like, would the Scylla contingent shrug it off because McCain “had it coming” to him?
Somehow I doubt it.
I’m not teerribly impressed with Scylla’s conclusion that Kerry served honorably. Kerry’s not running for president.
Besides, the real question was never whether Kerey served honorably, but how long could we leave his honor an open question. Long enough to where we have to get out maps of Cambodia? Could we muddy the water enough so that NPR was even referring to his service in Viet Nam was “controversial”?
The answer, of course, was absolutely. And the end result was referred to by Bush as his “accountability moment.”
The people who facilitated that must be held to account.
Mr. Svinlesha, I know you’re trying hard, and I don’t mean to discourage you, but there really isn’t a loster lost cause than Starving for Attention. As hard as it is to make a tpyical conservative hear you, making a conservative with an IQ of 90 hear you is never going to happen.
Hate to make it three in a row, but I just saw this timely op-ed on the “horrors” that liberals have unleashed upon America, and also touching on the theme of liberals being cowed into submission by modern conservatives.
Hold your heads up, indeed.
Hentor:
You’re right.
And I’m only diminishing myself by wasting my time on him.
I’m going up to GD to see if I can get a breath of fresh air.
You DO realize, I hope, that the Southern Democrats (known as Dixiecrats not too many years previously) were on the political Right, not Left. It was their beliefs and attitudes that prompted the creation of the Republican “Southern Strategy.”
Without falling into a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, I think a strong case may be made that the one led directly to the other. Drawing an imaginary line through a decade and declaring the the hostile actions of one group that preceded the hostile actions of an opposing group had nothing to do with the latter’s actions would appear to me to be stretching belief past a reasonable breaking point.
At any rate, if you will recall the timelines and activities, you might consider that the original anti-war demonstrations were extraordinarily peaceful with lots of calls to make love, not war and so forth. The preceding college confrontations had been between the Free Speech movement and the college administrations in which the colleges often used force to suppress the demonstrations. However, if you will recall the point at which the Left truly went hostile, you might pay note that it began with the demonstrations in Harvard Yard and at Columbia that were much less civil than anything that had preceded them–indeed, they were pretty close to violent. When did they occur? In the autimn of 1968, following the police riot in Chicago. This conforms exactly with my memory that a lot of my classmates departed for the summer of '68 as peaceniks and returned in the fall as firebreathing revolutionaries.
Actually, it appears to me that you are looking at it from exactly 40 years (pretty much to the month) while finding some trick of memory to simply omit all the provocation and similar actions from the Right that occurred prior to the campus rebellions of the fall of '68.
I do not hold that the lack of civility from the Left was a responsible or correct response to the provocation that they perceived. I simply find that placing all the blame on one side of the fence is a bit like watching two kids escalate from teasing to taunting to shoving to fighting, then arbitrarily saying that the kid who first happened to ball up his fist was wholly responsible for the fight.
This, of course, explains why “conservative” ministers burned books and records, why “conservative” coaches browbeat and mocked athletes who wanted to wear longer hair, why “conservative” school administrators punished kids for their hair styles or clothing, and why “conservative” preachers railed at their congregations (as many still do) that every idea or action that came out of a “liberal” person was simply Satan speaking, trying to lead people astray, and, finally, that every politicain who wanted to appeal to the “conservative” voter portrayed “liberals” as being mean, nasty, brutish demons whose only goals were to destroy the family and steal everyone’s life savings.
You started out with a claim that it was the Boomers. themselves, who overthrew civility and started us on the road to perdition. I hope that reviewing my earlier post has allowed you to rethink that idea.
You appear to associate with a different bunch of high school kids than I routinely see. I keep running into kids with a deep hatred for “fags” and the “liberals” who want to force everyone in the country to take gay lovers. I continue to encounter kids in high school, (or older kids who never went to college), who rant on against the way “affirmative action” “holds them down” (even though AA is a rather silly claim in a county that is 99% white and they all have the best jobs available to their educational abilities and have all gotten in to the colleges of their choices). I do also see any number of high school kids who want to “stick it to the man” and embrace other stereotypical “left” leaning notions. I certainly do not see that political bias or hatred has failed to trickle down to their age brackets. Ironically, given your claim, of the college kids with whom I currently work (freshman to post-grad) every single one of them is more Right leaning than Left leaning (and most of them go to Kent State).
Regarding your second point, I suspect that you underestimate the power of the local pulpit and similar outlets propagating hatred and scorn–not to mention the rhetoric of any number of politicians. Were you out of the country when Reagan repeated his lie that he had witnessed people using food stamps to by liquor or when he repeated in various retellings the false story of the Cadillac driving welfare queen? That sort of demagoguery is every bit as corrosive as the generally “liberal” tilt of the entertainment industry. (I note, however, that the Dirty Harry and Death Wish series and related movies that reacted against “liberal” values earned lots of money, so it would seem that if the “conservatives” had wished to get their message out, they had just as much opportunity. I would also note that commentators such as Paul Harvey–who routinely blasted “liberal” ideas while pushing his little snippets of (frequently mis)information were always out where people could see them. And, of course, Country Western Music has always been a place for “conservatives” to express themselves in the media.
From the rebellion of Harvard Yard to the creation of the Moral Majority was only eleven years. Since that time, there have been any number of venues for the “conservatives” to get out their message. For some reason, however, that message has never included returning to civility. In fact, the greatest recent attacks on civility have come from the “conservative” side of the line: The loss of civility in Congress has actually been sufficiently noticeable that people have studied the matter–a loss that began when Gingrich and Lott began to “punish” Republicans who were perceived to be “fraternizing” with Democrats (in contrast to the days when a Daniel Patrick Moynihan or a Tip O’Neill could actually be friends with a Gerald Ford or a Ronald Reagan); the attacks on opponents of the War in Iraq as traitors, haters of Christians, and fools was encouraged by some “conservative” leaders and opposed by none.
In this case, I suspect that if we eliminate college protests, you might exactly reverse that ratio. At any rate, without actual numbers, either one of our claims can be accused of suffering from confirmation bias.
= = =
I will agree that some of the issues of apparent incivility probably arose on the Left. I do remember the calls of some people to value “honesty” over “courtesy” (which generally meant that they wanted to be able to call you an idiot while taking umbrage if you suggested that they might consider an idea from a different perspective). I remember silly assertions that it was wrong to be polite because politeness was the language demanded by the oppressor and that speaking the oppressor’s language gave the oppressor more power. I also recall that after a month or two, the disciples of such boosters of rudeness got tired of living in a world where everyone was always at each others’ throats and went back to being more or less polite. Some of the formality in the expresion of courtesy was, indeed, lost at that time. However, the basic courtesies that people extend to one another in day to day life were not really abandoned.
If we are going to insist that such silliness also gave rise to “hatred” against the political “Right,” we might recall that in the same forty years, we have heard people called “dirty” and “immoral” simply for having long hair, “Satanic” for listening to Rock and Roll, “Satan worshippers” for asking that their children not be compelled to pray in school–forty years after the SCOTUS had ruled such activities unconstitutional), and “traitors” for opposing two wars that had nothing to do with defending this country (regardless how one stands on the issue of whether they were justified). It also remains true that much of the race baiting that has occurred in the white community has emanated from the “Right” leaning side–regardless whether that hatred is not really a “conservative” value.