Well, technically it deosn’t because the OP is directed at SA. But that is a minor point.
This is hard to argue one way or the other, because it is very broad. What does Shodan consider the decline/destruction of the black family? I am not criticizing, I am just asking what exactly it is referring to. And then from there I need to know the connection between welfare and this destruction. Agina I may or may not agree, but I need a little bit more to go on than a proclamation by Shodan. Unles he is postiing it as a starting point of debate.
I always wonder - Does the OP PM the person being pitted so that they know, or do they just discover it when they vanity search their name?
In the 50’s they always PM’d the person. ‘Course, it was more difficult then, cause the internet was basically made of string with tin cans on th’ ends. Still, that’s how it was done.
And where did less emphasis on marriage come from? Liberalism!
And where did welfare and projects (crime factories) and the more babies you had the more money the government gave you come from? Liberalism!
And where did the idea come from that failing students gave them a poor self-image and made them feel bad, so we must pass them whether they learn anything or not, thereby rendering their diplomas meaningless and condemning them to lives of deprivation at the low end of the income scale? Liberalism!
This is the thing about people like lissener and Zsofia. They think the negative results of liberalism upon society are just the natural progression of things. It’s only when they think they can pin them on conservatives that society’s ills become the result of political activism. :rolleyes:
I could go on and on but I’m having a pleasant and enjoyable day today, Polycarp, and I don’t really feel like getting into all this at the moment. Perhaps later tonight or tomorrow. (But bear in mind that if you want to hear all the ailments I lay at the feet of liberalism you’d best be prepared to do some considerable reading.)
You may love it but I never said it. Any other dishonest aspersions you care to cast before I come back?
And so you see how it goes, Polycarp. I list problems of liberal influence on the breakdown of marriage and the family unit, housing projects which became little more than crime factories, and educational philosophies and practices that effectively ruin peoples’ lives and condemn them to lives of want and deprivation.
And the response? A snide (and never uttered by me) remark focussing once again on politeness and manner of dress.
The thing to do in cases such as is to ignore the crap, post your thoughts, and reply to the reasonable ones. This thread is your platform. If you feel there have been errors, you can correct them.
Have you ever heard the term “pissing in the wind”? That’s what happens around here. I post lengthy screeds wherein I condemn as many of the negative aspects of liberalism as I think I can get away with at the time, and the overwhelming and lasting image that people take from it is that I want to go back to a time when people were polite and racism was rampant. And reverberations of those false allegations echo for months because that is what people do when they don’t want to face - or answer for - the negative results that their own belief system has wrought. To do otherwise would upset their entire world and so they pretend (and contend) that I’m all about racism and politeness. I can and will answer Polycarp’s questions as to my view of what is wrong with liberalism, but don’t expect for one minute that a calm, reasonable, well thought out recitation of them is going to result in anything other than months of snide remarks about how SA wants racism and for women to wear pearls while vacuuming.
I would agree that it would be poisoning the well if that was my approach to begin with. But like Dr. Phil says, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, and numerous occasions like this where I have posted the problems caused by liberalism have shown me pretty clearly what to expect. It’s already going on to a certain extent in this thread. So I don’t think I’ll be proven wrong, though it would be nice if I was.
It did lead to a lot of people looking at their hands.
Just a tip. If you want people to respect you, starting a sentence with “Dr. Phil says” ain’t the way to do it.
And an honest tip. “They started it” wasn’t a good enough reason in grade school. Likely it’s not one when you’re an adult. If you want to preach about the value of civility, it falls to you to demonstrate it.
However, I think I’m gonna let this line of discussion drop as it’s only deflecting the focus from the OP and the examples that I’ve already mentioned. What if anything do you have to say about them?
They need meat. Skeletons such as those are easily brushed aside as opinion. To say more about them, there’d have to be more to talk about.
On a personal level, I’m not seeing the problem with less emphasis on marriage. I’m also questioning the ties to liberalism, but as I said there is little to discuss because there is little there.
What you do, SA, and what you’ve done once again in this thread, is you begin with a conclusion–liberalism is bad–and then you cherry pick isolated situations that you can interpret to support that conclusion. You refuse to consider, let alone concede, other situations–let alone other conclusions. You begin with the proof, and then you seek out the evidence, ignoring everything else. Even in the examples you give, you fail to acknowledge that many of these mistakes in social engineering, though they may have initially been championed by liberals, were also later subject to corrective measures which were also later championed by liberals. And which are still major items on the liberal agenda.
Leaving aside entirely, for now, that many of the items on your check list have in no way been planks in any kind of liberal political platform. You see a social trend that you don’t like, you label it liberal. You see a social trend you do like, you claim it as conservative.
You just don’t know the way things work. You make zero attempt at critical thinking. It’s no surprise to me that your views are characterized–even caricatured–as naive and nostalgic. You pine for a better time, but you refuse to acknowledge the dark side of that better time, and when it’s pointed out to you, you embrace these accusations of, for example, indifference to racism, like a martyr, and hold them up as shields against further discourse.
“You called me a racist! (Thanks for which, by the way, as I can use that as an excuse not to engage with you.)”
It gets very, very old. But somehow continues to be amusing.
Starving Artist does have a point; a thread specifically meant to address his ideas beyond the erosion of politeness quickly became about that very thing.
But to be fair to the other posters, it seems emblematic of a pattern. You (SA) seem to be saying that liberals are capable of independent action, and can therefore be held responsible for the consequences of those actions. You excuse similar behavior by conservatives by saying that they have no choice and are only responding to the liberals. The blame will always fall on liberals. That’s a poor argument, whether we’re talking about politeness of education policy.
I think that’s over-simplified, so let me provide the over-simplified counter-argument. Liberals are placing a strong emphasis on marriage. They are campaigning right now for there to be more marriages; to make the institution of marriage available to more people than ever before. conservatives are trying to deny that. They are telling certain citizens that they can’t get married, and shouldn’t want to.
Ah, but as I said above, this is classic SA logic. He’s talking about the free love baby of the sixties and seventies. Again, he’s isolating an island of time and refusing to acknowledge anything that came before or after it. And, again, he’s talking about how perfect the world was when he was a child, before the sixties came and fukxed it all up.
He traces every modern problem back to the post-Eisenhower liberal movement, and won’t look at them from any other perspective.
I would like to point out that Starving Artist is a habitual liar and wouldn’t cop to being wrong even when looking at the evidence with both eyes. He’s too old to learn new tricks at this point, he’s simply going to be a worthless moron until the day he dies.
