Why?
Shhh. I’m still trying to get SA to offer his policy recommendations for what we, as a nation, can do to improve civility in society. (Presumably discouraging the use of the word “dipshit” will not be among them.) You’re not helping.
I’m beginning to feel, I admit, that SA doesn’t actually have any ideas or solutions. I am - and I’m not being sarcastic at all - disappointed. I thought maybe we could have an actually interesting conversation for once, instead of the old “but people were racist in the 50s!” vs “you liberals are all discourteous dipshits, not like us polite conservatives!” routine that we’ve already had umpteen times.
This is anecdotal, but my parents both went to school back when uniforms were commonplace (1950s). Both of them talk about how ‘rebellious’ dress simply became more narrowly defined - certain groups would wear brightly coloured socks, for example, or do their hair in certain ways, or some girls would pull their skirts up to show their knees. I know all this sounds tame to todays ears, but the fact is that you’re just moving the goalposts. My moms parents were just as shocked by their daughter showing some thigh as parents today are by their kids wearing their baggy pants and backwards caps. There have always been people who want to rebel (especially teenagers), they just find the defined edge of society and stake their place there.
Well, based on magellan’s earlier post, I immediately googled for some studies on the effects of school uniforms. It does, in fact, appear that school uniforms do have a slight positive effect on high school students’ test scores (although not on elementary students). The effect is stronger with girls.
I’m not logged into my university’s library system right now. I’ll look up some more later, when I am.
It isn’t just whether or not **Starkers **wants the 50s back in its entirety (although he clearly states that he would gladly tolerate the downsides of racism etc. as an acceptable tradeoff) but his outright rejection of considerable evidence showing that his fantasy version of that halcyon time didn’t actually exist. **SA **routinely handwaves citations and substitutes his own “beliefs” and “feelings”, and then posters call him ugly names.
When the subject was hijacked into music, posters suddenly became polite and reasonable with Starkers. Why? Because in music appreciation, everything is subjective. There is no objective “correctness” to be cited authoritatively declaring that one or another style of music is more “true” than another. Beliefs and feelings are completely acceptable. Shortly though **SA **will return to his usual dismissive fantasy world of liberal condemnation, vigorously rejecting objective reality. Most everyone will go back to calling him nasty names again. All will be right with the SDMB.
I would move the date back to 1933, except that modern conservatives truly believe God created the universe at about the time of Pearl Harbor.
I’m just really shocked by the rose-colored glasses being used on the earlier days by some posters, and not just SA. Not everyone was civil back in the day, not even the “well-bred” people. Ever read The Age of Innocence? When Martin Scorsese made the film, he said that it was the most violent movie he’d ever done, and it’s filled with people being modest and very polite to each other. Granted, it’s set before the first half of the twentieth century, mostly, but still. So polite people may not have used the kind of words that are acceptable nowadays, but that hardly made them more civil. At least now you know where you stand with people, rather than getting an uber-polite “bless your heart” treatment.
This view of politeness is completely ignoring actual behavior in favor of a few words. And words always change meaning and emphasis; our language is living. Were lynchings polite? Was it civil to send homosexuals to jail? Was it nice to ostracize anyone who didn’t conform to a narrow definition of “acceptable”? You’re completely ignoring every interaction except those between nice, well-educated, middle class white folks with 2.4 kids and a dog living in suburbia. It’s easy to be nice to people exactly like you. This is probably why people keep bringing up racism and sexism.
Oh, and we wore uniforms in my middle and high school, and we still acted like rebellious, stupid teenagers. People did hardcore drugs, there were a few abortions that I knew of, and teachers didn’t get any more respect than they got in my brother’s public high school. Yeah, there weren’t many fights, but you’d not expect that out of our economic group anyway. We were able to do plenty of violence with just words, thank you.
Look, all this stuff- violence, swearing, sex, drugs, disrespectful youth, gang behavior- has many, many causes. It’s insulting to both my profession and to human beings in general to assume that much of it would go away if people just dressed pretty and were polite to each other. People, and society, are a hell of a lot more complicated than that. If we’re not, then I don’t know why I’m spending so much money in grad school to learn about us. Even if you extend your solution to better America to routing out “liberal ideas” (and what are those, exactly? I’m pretty far left for the US, moderate to moderate left for Europe, and I look positively conservative next to my anarchist friend), you still haven’t offered any real solution. First, that sounds suspiciously like McCarthyism, and second, you’re being simplistic again. How, exactly, have liberal ideas ruined the US while Sweden and Switzerland seem relatively unscathed? What about issues of poverty and class and stress levels and institutionalized racism and sexism and all the rest?
You are correct. and people will always try to find a way to express themselves. But the more tightly defined the code is, the smaller the thing one must do to stand out, e.g. red socks. When their is virtually no code and one wants to stand out he, or she, must take more extreme measures. And the envelope of acceptability keeps getting stretched wider and wider, necessitating that one take even more liberties. So, fine, let the kids make their statement by wearing neon socks.
I suspect he was confused by a missing ‘not’ in the sentence where you set up your premise:
:smack: Thanks. And my apologies.
Actually, gang violence in the 50s was so hopelessly out of control* that when Link Wray appeared on “American Bandstand” to play his instrumental “Rumble,” Dick Clark’s intro omitted the title of the song out of fear that the mere mention of the word ‘rumble’ would set off fighting.
*Or, more likely, the Starving Artists of the day were so hopelessly overreacting to the level of gang violence that did exist
On this issue, I always think of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the Miller’s Tale in particular. “…Absolon hath kissed her nether eye…”
I’m sure I haven’t heard any references to kissing a woman’s nether eye in the popular music I’ve been exposed to.
Yeah, and I work with young people every day and I happen to think that wearing baggy pants and backwards hats and whatever is no more or less rebellious than wearing neon socks. You’re just redefining the edge - I know older people would like to see the edge pulled back to where it was when they were kids, but guess what? Your parents were saying the same thing about what you wore back then.
Kids push boundaries, that’s pretty much their purpose. Penning them in to a little artificial box is not going to stop the boundary pushing, if anything it will just make them more wild when they get out into the real world. Remember, if you treat people like potential criminals, they are likely to live up to your expectations.
Potential criminals? :eek: We’re talking about school uniforms. Or just a dress code even. Some perspective, please. Sheesh.
Now, according to your position, kids who have to wear school uniforms should have problems due to that, right. Well, do you have any evidence of that. hat kids in any community who must adhere to a dress code have any more rebellious problems than there dress-code-less peers? Any evidence that kids wearing school uniforms rebel more than kids who don’t?
In Meyer6’s defense, school administrators have long contended that school uniform policies result in better attendance and academic achievement, which would almost certainly lead directly to a reduction in crime.
However, it’s not true.
Well, there’s that, and then there’s the consideration that so far S_A hasn’t accused other posters of being complicit in the killing of millions based on the type of music they happen to listen to.
Okay, you want me to have perspective that it’s just clothing, but you still want uniforms because it will clean the kids up. Do you not see the hole in this logic?
Also, from Really Not All That Bright’s link (good find, dude)
Huh. You mean those such as Woody Guthrie, or Peter, Paul and Mary weren’t making “liberal” music?
As you say, “…so far…”.
<Shush! He’s coming!>
Yeah, but what if they were listening to the “Horst Wessel Lied”? Did you think about THAT?!?!?!
Anyway, let’s sum up Starving Artist’s philosophy in a few short points here:
- A lot of good things happened between 1959 and today. But none of these were the result of liberalism.
- A lot of bad things happened between 1959 and today. All of these bad things were the result of liberalism.
- In general, things are pretty good now. But they’d be a lot better if there hadn’t been any liberalism, which, by the way, is not at all responsible for the things that are better now. So, because of that, America is ruined.
4 If you are polite, that is better than being good or correct. Hence, the civil rights movement was a bad thing, not because of the end result, but because it was not polite. I’m not saying that blacks didn’t deserve civil rights, far from it. They just should have asked for them more politely. Of course us white people will be the judges of whether they asked for them politely enough. - I’m going to make little asides about women and racial minorities being “obviously different”, but I’m going to hem, haw, and patronize when I’m called on it. Or I’m just going to ignore it.
Virtually every word of that little screed is utter horseshit.
More later.