The Starving Artist plan to restore America to its former glory!

The BBQ Pit
61

Um, I thought that an entire movement had sprung from the loins of liberalism whose sole purpose was the elimination of “objectionable” language…uh, what was the name again…oh, yeah, “Polical Correctness”.

Of course all that goes out the window if it collides with higher ranking liberal cause: racism. So niggas and bitches and hoes and popping caps in people’s asses in just peachy-keen (and yeah, Sleeps, that’s one from the generation before mine too ;)) as long as it’s coming from a black guy, huh?

It’s one thing to push the envelope of acceptibility; it’s another entirely to denigrate people in vile and vulgar ways and to promote behavior and a lifestyle that victimizes people. Nobody died because of Elvis’ hips.

62

I can just see him now, plastic cup full of beer, Beach Boys T-shirt, fiercely arguing with a hippy-type chickita that, really, if this “free love” thing doesn’t include guys like him, then its not really “free”, is it? And if she doesn’t jump his bones right now! then she’s just another liberal hypocrite…

Look Starkers, without the freedom to do something, there is no responsibility. If there is no way for me to get something like, say, heroin, then the fact that I’m not doing any heroin is not because I’m abstaining, its because I can’t.

A large scale movement for liberation in many directions is bound to have some problems, some people are permitted a freedom they are not equipped to handle, since they never had it before. A lot of the feverish sex of the time was founded on nothing more than that, because we could, and before, we weren’t allowed to.

And you want to know what happened. Nothing much, we paired off just like humans do, made babies, raised kids, got jobs, etc. As Zorba the Greek said, “the complete catastrophe”. Except! we had the choices, our decisions to be responsible were made with the option not to. There is no responsibility if the choice isn’t free, there is only oppression.

As far as drugs go, the number one killer drug in America is the same as it always was, alcohol. If people feel a compelling need to mess around with the chemicals in their brains, as they often do, doesn’t it make more sense to have available chemicals that don’t kill your liver, or cause you to believe you are eight feet tall and bulletproof. Remember the words of Willy Nelson: “I gave up whiskey for weed in 1975, may be the only really smart thing I ever did.”

(Not saying a pot hangover isn’t brutal, heaven knows, what with the cookie crumbs and peanut butter…but I never had to call anybody up and apologize for something I did or said because I was too stoned…)

If you are not at liberty to do stupid things, the fact that you do smarter things isn’t because you are a better, freer person. You are simply constrained, oppressed. I’m against that.

63

That’s what I suspected to be the case, now it’s been confirmed.

You do realize it’s possible to be liberal without endorsing the excesses of the hippie movement, right? FDR and Truman were pretty darned liberal. Remember that your idyllic childhood was in the immediate aftermath of their policies. Eisenhower signed into law a 90% top marginal tax rate (which was a slight reduction from the 92% during the war).

64

For fuck’s sake dude, I am going to personally buy you a copy of ‘A People’s History of the United States’. Consider this bit by Frances Wright, writing in the mid 1850’s:

What were you saying about women’s rights not becoming an issue until the 1960’s? Turns out it was an issue going all the way back to the founding of the country. There is a whole chapter on it too- this is not merely one isolated radical speaking here. I wholeheartedly recommend that you read it.

65

and yet, oddly, the 60-year old conservatives in the 50’s felt the exact same way about Elvis’ hips and the youth listening to it as you do about Gangsta rap. Imagine.

66

That’s right, the women’s liberation movement was a fad, people. How interesting. And in no way insulting to American women! You know us females, hardly a serious thought in our brains, ha ha! The idea that we can do a job as well as a man, well, it’s just a passing fancy.

67

Political correctness, so far as I know, is a bogeyman stereotype wholly invented and maintained by conservatives. Name a single self-professed liberal who actually supports political correctness. Even if you can name such a person, such people don’t include me, so knock it off with trying to claim this is some sort of universal liberal tenet.

Name a single self-professed liberal who actually thinks that drive-by shootings and abuse of women is peachy-keen. Even if you can, such a person doesn’t include me, so knock it off with the broad brush.

Which self-identified liberals are doing this, exactly?

And that right there is why you are universally derided as a flaming asshole and an intellectual laughingstock. Every one of those assertions is a stereotype that you invented, and are no more universal attitudes and behaviors among liberals than they are among conservatives.

In any event, what have you ever done to mitigate any of these things, other than to bitch about them endlessly on a message board?

68

My take on it is that it’s a good thing to be abstained from heroin. Not only are you not using it, but most other people, having never been exposed to it to begin with, aren’t even thinking about it.

You say that in the wake of the counter-culture revolution nothing much happened. What about all the stuff I’ve been railing about? You know, like jillions of kids growing up in single-parent homes, often being raised by absentee parents who could pass for their big sister or brother, and who go to schools filled with drugs and drug users and walk streets rife with gangs and crime? We have a great many laws on the books whose purpose is to keep us from harming ourselves and others. Outlawing and/or making unavailable drugs and types of behavior that cause crime, kill people and ruin the lives of others is not oppression, it is common sense.

And for what it’s worth, I agree with you about liquor, and as much as I loves me some hooch, I’d still give it up willingly in order to see it off the market. There is no question that alcohol, like other drugs, has ruined and taken a great many lives and condemned many family members and loved ones to lives of misery.

Still, just about any street drug apart from marijuana causes every bit as much trouble. How many times have you watched on TV or read about someone who’d been killed by someone high on drugs and out of their mind? How many times have you read about women becoming prostitutes or trying to sell their babies to get drugs. And how many times have you known someone whose children fell into the drug life or had their homes broken into by druggies looking for stuff to steal in order to buy drugs?

In my mind “oppression” relates to the quashing of behavior that people have a rational and reasonable right to expect to be able to indulge in, like travelling freely or speaking their mind. And yes, people can feel oppressed when they are prohibited from doing what they want, but when it comes to behavior that is harmful, and especially when it’s harmful to other people, it’s prohibition whether societal or by force of law, does not equate to oppression except in the minds of the people who want to engage in that type of behavior.

(And thanks to you and Miller for your comments to Sampiro. Sampiro long been one of my favorite posters and I was happy to learn subsequent to your posts that he didn’t view me as having the racist views that his post seemed to imply.)

69

Maybe no one died because of Elvis, but people certainly died during Prohibition, which featured the popularity of black music and dancing as well as the rise of the mob and gangster culture.

I also love the boogah-boogah political correctness thing. First off, no one’s tried to outlaw any words, beyond hate speech that incites violence. Personally, I’m all about letting the KKK do their thing (more people who know what idiots they are, the better) while coming down hard on anyone calling for people’s deaths. Secondly, what’s so horrible about being aware that language can hurt people not like you and avoiding using hateful terms? Is it really so hard? Is your vocabulary so stunted that you must use hateful speech?

Gangsta rap, by the by, is bought by and marketed by a lot of white people. I can’t comment on black people’s culture, being not black myself, but from what I see, there’s a lot of stuff there that has more to do with how white people view black people than anything else. Saying that gangsta culture is purely because of black people, without understanding the context from which it comes, is ridiculous. No, those guys shouldn’t be such jerks, and I think they are, but I’m not going to go all Nice White Lady on them and clutch my pearls and ignore institutionalized racism and poverty, especially since they’re hardly alone in horribly objectionable, misogynistic, and violent crap.

Finally, yeah, feminism totally has only existed since 1969, and only because us ladies wanted to get on the Whine Train. It hasn’t been a thing for centuries before our country was even established, and the whole “2nd Wave” moniker is just silliness, not an indication that it’s been around for awhile and has had previous uprisings. Yeah, life was great when date rape was just boys being boys and being sexually harassed in the office was just how life was.

70

You know that the teenage birthrate was higher in the 1950’s than it’s been any time since then, right? Cite! (Hope I did that right; I’m a newbie). Especially interesting to me is the large dip starting in the 1970’s, post-The Summer of Love. Actually, probably post-Roe v. Wade. Also, the percentage of people who are sexually active before marriage remains about the same as it was in the 1940’s. Cite! .

71

Isn’t SA pretty much a standard issue libertarian, except that he thinks that all that unfettered competition would not only make everybody (or everybody who deserves it) wealthy, but that it would also make them polite and deferential? I think his solution to everything is “get the gubbimint out of everything” (which has little to do with the 50s, when taxes were sky high and government programs were rapidly expanding).

72

It would only end up here almost immediately anyway.
I’m pretty sure if SA were deposited back in Cleaverburg, he wouldn’t have any trouble hooking up with a connection for some coke or heroin, or a gay blowjob. And there’d still be a ton of “broken families” in his neighborhood, along with pregnant teens and battered wives who wouldn’t have had nearly as much ability to do anything about it.

But he was a kid then; he really doesn’t know that Peyton Place was much closer to a documentary than was Ozzie and Harriet.

73

I seem to remember that in the 50’s we didn’t have heart, lung, liver or kidney transplants, we still had people stuck in iron lungs.

Despite what people say about single parents, very many families had both parents working full time for a lousy wage, and the children were what were called ‘latchkey kids’.

I also remember that smoking was far more prevalent, back then a heavy smoker was a 60-80 a day person, not a 20 a day person as now.

What was our expected lifespan back then? sure wasn’t the 75-80 that it is now.

What percentage of our young adults went to university and obtained degress, nowadays is upward of 40%, back then it was less than 5%. Perhaps all these educated people will make changes to our world using the power of their intellects, rather than the current lot of idiots who work on fear mongering and bias, and were laregly born in the early 1950’s.

You’ll notice that it was perfectly acceptable and normal for adults to assault children yet not acceptable for one adult to assault another.

When were the Ted Bundys of this world born?

We don’t have a cold war, or the genuine threat of complete annihilation. We don’t have that inquisitional procedure of flawed rumour mongering called the McCarthy years.

Who got us into Korea, Vietnam etc, and which generation of dolts took us into Iraq etc - here’s a clue, they were born and spent their formative years in the fucking glorious 20’s through to the '50’s.These idiots have not changed mindset in over 70 years, 'cause they are still doing it now.

We don’t seem to hang black men from trees quite as often these days, and you want to go back to those values? Your comment of the '50’s having some problems is an understatement of immense proportions, it’s rather like saying that it’s quite a long way to walk from the east coast to the west.

You also forgot to mention the labour reforms of the 1960’s whereby people cannot be indentured, and it is now considered to be unacceptable to compulsory work people for 15 hours or more a day.

We seem to forget about the incredible rate of industrial death and disease back in the 1950’s, or have you forgotten the asbestos scandal, and we don’t seem to hold child molesting priests in quite the same high esteem as we did.

You seem to believe that divorce is a cause of many ills, yet you fail to mention the misery of being held in a dead or abusive relationship.

74

Of course. But it’s modern day liberals that are the problem and most of them, as we see on this very board all the time, are quite defensive about the problems that the excesses of the hippie movement caused and very quick to defend what they’ve become. They’re also big on belitting anyone who brings them up. I imagine FDR and Truman would be pretty disgusted by a lot of what’s going on these days. JFK too, for that matter.

You are right, of course. I’ve said as much myself in pointing out how both women and blacks managed to get the vote and make other advances throughout the preceeding decades without turning society inside out. I was speaking of what mostly came to be known as “women’s lib”, which took the angry and adversarial position that men were deliberately out to oppress and mistreat women and deny them their rights, and which was quick to call anyone who disagreed with it or questioned some of its more ridiculous stances - such as there be absolutely no difference in the sexes save for reproduction - sexists and so forth. The anger and stridency and hatred toward men that characterized the women’s movement of the early seventies is what I was referring to with that comment.

And yet, oddly, none of them were complaining about people being denigrated and mistreated and shot and killed, were they?

You misunderstand. Agitating was the fad. Women had made advances up to that time without the rancor and name-calling and, frankly, ridiculousness that accompanies the women’s lib movement. I’m as much for equal rights as anybody, and even though liberalism is embraced by women more than it is by men, I wouldn’t begin to try to abrogate your right to assert that view through the polling booth. In other words, I believe the beliefs and concerns of women and men are equal, and that even if I don’t agree with your ideas I recognize that you have just as much right to them as I do to mine.

So you are instructing me not to talk about a tenet that you don’t subscribe to because a.) you aren’t sure it exists; b.) you don’t know where it came from if it does; and c.) I shouldn’t mention it at all because it doesn’t apply to you.

When did you first learn the sun wakes up just for you, Kabongey? :smiley:

There are dozens if not hundreds on this very board who defend their breeding ground.

[Reagan] Well, there you go again. [/Reagan]

Everything I say isn’t directed at you, chum.

Where did I say self-identified liberals are doing this? Exactly?

“This just in! Members of liberal board denigrate and insult poster who disagrees with their views! Film at 11:00!”

Never said they were universal, only common.

And now, since I got chit to do and there’s no shortage of people around here wanting to split hairs and/or challenge me over things I never said (yeah, I’m lookin’ at you Kabong and random6x7, and that I’ve already devoted more time to certain posters here than they deserve, I’m out for now.

75

Yes, largely because ‘they’ knew their place, so well, in fact, we had hardly to participate, only look away from time to time. Ah, simpler times indeed.

This shtick is nothing new, truly. Go to any nursing home, it’s filled with persons of this ilk. Miserable and destined to be more so. No one wants to be around them as their answer to everything is, “kids today, it was better back when…”.

Strict adherence to patterns of thought, are for those too impaired to actually really think anymore. It’s much easier to just pine for a simpler time and frame every discussion around your pet peeve.

No amount of reason, facts, cites or information can make a dint in this kind of mindset. They only have the one view and they are going to cling to it with an iron grip, the rest of the world be damned. If you disagree with them, it’s because of your politics, never because they might be mistaken. Seriously, tons of the elderly and addled are just like this. The same people who wonder why no one visits anymore.

SA should be treated with the same kindness and compassion as any addled senior citizen.

It’d be funny if it wasn’t so sad, truly.

76

Maybe no one died because of Elvis, but people certainly died during Prohibition, which featured the popularity of black music and dancing as well as the rise of the mob and gangster culture.

I also love the boogah-boogah political correctness thing. First off, no one’s tried to outlaw any words, beyond hate speech that incites violence. Personally, I’m all about letting the KKK do their thing (more people who know what idiots they are, the better) while coming down hard on anyone calling for people’s deaths. Secondly, what’s so horrible about being aware that language can hurt people not like you and avoiding using hateful terms? Is it really so hard? Is your vocabulary so stunted that you must use hateful speech?

Gangsta rap, by the by, is bought by and marketed by a lot of white people. I can’t comment on black people’s culture, being not black myself, but from what I see, there’s a lot of stuff there that has more to do with how white people view black people than anything else. Saying that gangsta culture is purely because of black people, without understanding the context from which it comes, is ridiculous. No, those guys shouldn’t be such jerks, and I think they are, but I’m not going to go all Nice White Lady on them and clutch my pearls and ignore institutionalized racism and poverty, especially since they’re hardly alone in horribly objectionable, misogynistic, and violent crap.

Finally, yeah, feminism totally has only existed since 1969, and only because us ladies wanted to get on the Whine Train. It hasn’t been a thing for centuries before our country was even established, and the whole “2nd Wave” moniker is just silliness, not an indication that it’s been around for awhile and has had previous uprisings. Yeah, life was great when date rape was just boys being boys and being sexually harassed in the office was just how life was.

77

I was going to post something along these lines, but I got distracted by the flyer announcing a sale at Penney’s! And I also noticed my husband has ring around the collar. And that kitchen floor is not going to scrub itself!
Clearly, I have more important things to do than worry my lil Stepford mind over complex issues. That’s for the menfolk to figure out. Afterall, it’s my duty as a wife and mother to put my husband and children first in all things. In return, he gives me my allowance every week, and he doesn’t slap me around in public. We have such a great marriage…

78

Ah yes, S_A’s favorite ploy, the “I didn’t say that” defense. Those previous posts don’t just disappear into thin air, you know.

Anyway, don’t ever change. Where else can one get this much entertainment at such a nominal cost?

79

See? We let them vote and it’s been nothing but complaints ever since.

80

Sorry. I thought you were talking about what’s wrong with America’s progressives. What’s with this screed about Corporations, its welfare system and their objections towards regulatory agencies?