Thank you, I’ll be here all week.
Try the veal(with as nice chardoney).
You’ve had a tad too much, haven’t you? 
hic
You know, I spent quite a bit of time attempting parse that statement, particularly the bolded part, convinced that *no one *could possibly be *that *stupid, or *that *much of an asshole. I eventually had to give up. I certainly don’t believe that conservatives are generally bad people, but I’m now convinced that you, personally, are a seriously toxic human being.
Well, if you were really all the smart, you would have put a period after “boasting” and left it at that. The fact that you felt the need to explain what was already clear, doesn’t exactly point to brilliance.
Proceed.
Fair point in that I wasn’t around for the sixties in this country. But when I look at the stuff you post about that I have been around for, I can’t help but notice that… well, let’s just say the calibration on your perceptions seems to be more than a tad off kilter. I don’t have much reason to expect that your recollection of what things were like forty years ago to be any more accurate than your recollection of what things were like four years ago. Which is not to say that you’re in anyway dishonest. It’s just that you’ve got an observer’s bias that’s bigger than some of Jupiter’s moons.
TVeblen, if you missed Miller’s post 62, it’s worth going back to read.
I don’t much like Bricker, but Miller sets out a damn near irrefutable argument that, regardless of how douchey the man is, he is nevertheless intelligent and principled. These are rare qualities that we should respect, at least a little bit, whenever they appear. After all, it’s a helluva lot more than we can say about people like Starving Artist, who’ve got no better than a fifty-fifty chance of getting their shoes on the right feet every morning.
Really? That’s what you’ve got? That’s your contribution?
Well, proceed, i guess.
It actually fits perfectly with the Starving Artist interpretation of history.
For him, history is encapsulated in personal experience. If it didn’t happen to him, if he didn’t see it at the time, then it didn’t happen. If he didn’t personally know any blacks who specifically told him that they felt “put upon in the pre-sixties era,” then the notion that African Americans felt marginalized and discriminated against is probably just another conspiracy promulgated by liberal professors and their cronies in the national media.
I remember having a long, involved debate with Starving Artist a few years ago about the death penalty, in which his historical worldview became clear to me. I wasn’t horrified with the idea that he supports the death penalty—plenty of people do—but with his consistent refusal to look at facts, statistics, and evidence regarding its use. He even explicitly stated, at one stage, that he chose not to deal with such things because they can be interpreted to support any argument, and that instead he preferred to rely on emotions and personal experience to guide his understanding. He even presented a single anecdote as if that constituted some sort of evidence.
The nub of his argument was that, because he FELT safer back in the 1960s than he does now, then Americans must have actually BEEN safer back then. And because they had the death penalty back then, it logically follows that the death penalty made America safer.
As an exercise in sheer irrationality, it was certainly instructive.
I’m sure you can find the thread quite easily with a search.
Oh, get off your high horse. I’ve said repeatedly that things were terrible for black people back in those days and that that needed to be corrected.
I’ve also always been in favor of women’s rights.
I’ve also said around the board here many times over the years that I’m fairly often in agreement with liberal goals but rarely in the way they are pursued.
Yes, racism was very bad and it needed to be overcome. And women have every right to live as freely and pursue careers and sports and everything else that men do.
However, I doubt very seriously if the blacks of that era and the women of that era would have chosen to have things end up the way they are now. I believe they would have preferred, as would I, to have things done in a more sensible, step-by-step manner that would have left the things that were good about that era intact.
But there has always been a very strong throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater element to the way liberals have pursued social change in this country, and what I am saying is that our society is worse off as a result.
And my primary complaint about the liberal attitude goes to exactly the type of behavior that you’re exhibiting above: Agree with us and everything we’ve done and want to do in toto or you’re an asshole.
Which is more than can be said for this little diatribe of yours.
That post is so full of lies and distortions and verbal sleight-of-hand that I’m not gonna honor it with a response.
I know I must have embarrassed you pretty badly upthread for exposing you for the immature, ill-tempered crybaby that you really are, but given the amount of time you’ve had since then to try to come up with some sort of revenge, I would have thought you could do better than this.
I believe that Republicans honestly think that they are right. I just don’t think that they are thinking things through. Maybe they’re not considering all the facts. But no one is driving them away. If they leave, it is their choice.
Starving Artist has been one of the kindest and most interesting people that I have gotten to know away from the Message Boards themselves. He is enormously talented and has interests that he never talks about here. We agree to disagree on politics and in those times when we have talked about issues, we have done so without any problem at all. He has a mighty big heart…when he’s not losing his temper.
That’s sweet. He must be awesome. However, I don’t see any signs of temper in his second to last post before this one, yet anyone who looks at the history of racism in this country pre-1960’s, and our societal response to it, and uses the phrase “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”, just doesn’t have a fucking lick of sense.
And I love how he presumes to speak for African Americans and women, suggesting that in the face of injustice (to say the least), that they would have preferred gradual, incremental change! “Gee, it would be ever so kind of you to let me sit in the near-back of the bus instead of all the way back. Thank you kindly, good sir.”
The guy has the cogntive power of a lobotomised bonobo.
Do you understand why people have such a negative reaction to statements like this? Just because you would rather see them get their civil rights in a stepwise, long-term process, doesn’t mean that blacks also would have preferred such a process. I can’t speak for the people of that era, but if I were them, I would want change immediately. And that’s exactly what the civil rights movement wanted.
Isn’t this thread about respecting others to hold different opinions? So, respect the fact that you have a particular point of view that isn’t at all universal, and can easily lead you to incorrect statements such as above.
FWIW, I am very liberal, in a very liberal city, but I don’t know anyone who thinks that conservatives are evil people. Just people with views that are incomprehensible and illogical.
Do you *realize *that you sound like an addlepated old man?
There have always been criminals, and drugs, and sex, with all it’s attendant diseases. People just didn’t, ya know… *talk *about it. I’m pretty sure that there was some brouhaha over that filthy, vulgar rock music, but wouldn’t it have been lovely if it had been that era’s most notable example of misogyny? I’m not even sure what you mean by “overall decline in societal civility”, unless you’re defining it as “no one knows their damned place, anymore”.
And I believe that’s possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever read here. Congrats!
Do you really believe that people should go about obtaining their civil rights in a way that doesn’t inconvenience you? Well, fuck you and the Edsel you rode in on.
People think *you’re *an asshole because you’re an asshole.
I’ve not forgotten Dick Gregory’s line: “Get your foot off my grandmother’s neck! Now, godammit, not one toe at a time!”
I spoke with Dick Gregory once in Chicago.
Nice guy.
What Starving Artist doesn’t seem to realize is that, after having society’s foot on your neck for centuries, once that foot comes off, you’re angry, and you’re going to express that anger, sometimes in ways that, um, lack civility (oh heavens, no! you’re giving me the vapors!). Thus, the perceived cultural backlash, which, when directed at the oppressing society and the people in it who enjoyed the status quo, seems like scary, angry, destructive behavior. But it’s a natural consequence of keeping people down. Eventually, you have to pay the piper and relinquish your cultural dominance for the greater good. Frankly, I’d rather deal with vulgar rap music than have black people go to different schools. But that’s just me-- I don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
If you took your foot off their neck one toe at a time, I bet the backlash would be even worse. Regardless of how one might wish it would work, it seems that social changes do not happen gradually, but in sudden bursts. You can’t mandate such things, nor should you try. Maybe just be glad that we live in a society that at least nominally values equality, and not whinge about petty shit like the evils of rap music or illusory things like “more drugs and STDs.” Those consequences, if they are indeed even related to social change (debatable at best), are so minor compared to the gains, and complaining about them makes you sound like a cranky old white, middle class man who can’t see the forest for the trees.
All society’s current ills exist because liberals propagated social change too quickly? Really, that’s why America’s culture is fucked up? Wow, someone needs a history lesson, stat.
The changes that actually have taken place did so in a step-by-step manner. In some ways they’re still going on. I never said or even implied that it should have been a slow, long-term process, though it seems to me that’s what it’s been anyway.
But all this talk about civil rights is a smoke screen. It’s impossible to bring up the things that were good about life in this country pre-1968 without people around here turning it into accusations of racism.
The civil rights movement had already been going full-steam for several years at that point and it would have succeeded anyway, and contrary to the way people around here like to categorize the era, racial issues were far from in the forefront of the counter-culture movement
It was simply a time when the huge group of people known as the baby-boom generation was coming of age, and they decided all the old ways had to go and what was good about life in this country then got swept aside along with the bad.
I seriously doubt if a very significant percentage of people who were adults prior to the late sixties thinks the way people behave today is superior, and it’s the way people behave now as a result of the upheaval that took place then that I’m talking about.
But since that seems to be indefensible, flurries of racist insults become the defense.
Hi, Zoe! 