Sadly, I don’t think he’ll ever let go of his notion that everything in this world is about “liberal vs. conservative”. (That I should probably give up on him providing any cite other than his own personal experiences)
Unfortunately, we tried making it illegal. That, to put it mildly, didn’t quite work out all that well. (And note: I did not say it was soley feminists. Don’t twist my words)
Good for you – my experience says otherwise. It also says you shouldn’t be speaking for everyone your age. I know quite a number of people the same age as you, who never joined the whole counter culture, yet came to the exact opposite conclusions. Quit acting like the sole authority on what is right and what is wrong. Again, it’s not merely liberal vs. conservative, left vs. right, etc. People are much more complex than you give them credit for. (Whatever their political leanings)
As usual, your own personal assumptions and experiences are not a reliable guide to the factual evidence. In the world of factual evidence, RickJay is exactly right that the overall impact of alcohol is far more destructive than that of other recreational drugs. Citing some statistics on drug and alcohol abuse:
Note that that’s nearly twice as many Americans addicted to alcohol alone as the number addicted to drugs either with or without alcohol.
And when it comes to non-alcohol drug addiction, abuse of recreational drugs actually kills fewer people than abuse of prescription medications:
I’m not trying to argue that illegal drug abuse and addiction isn’t a serious societal problem. But when you assert your unsupported speculative “doubt” that “alcohol has been more destructive to more lives than drug use”, you’re just plain factually wrong.
:dubious: Interesting how the ubiquity of, say, racial segregation laws in the period you’re idolizing doesn’t lead you to question your description of it as more “civilized” or “safer” or “saner” or “less destructive” than nowadays. If you had been a black person in that era accidentally ending up some evening within the limits of one of the thousands of US “sundown towns” that prohibited nonwhites in their territory after dusk, I doubt you would have found the environment particularly “civilized” or “safe” or “sane”. Especially with the posted signs announcing, for example, “N****r Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You Here”. Such civilized, much sane. :rolleyes:
Well, as you keep making clearer every time you post, just because you personally don’t know something doesn’t mean it isn’t true. There are a lot of radicalizing factors in many schoolchildren’s personal experience these days, ranging from school shootings and authoritarian crackdowns on students to larger-scale effects of decreasing class mobility, such as unaffordable college costs and a dearth of the good entry-level jobs that unionized industries used to provide to more young people.
Millennials and teens are also much more racially and ethnically diverse than older generations. Whereas somewhat more than three-quarters of you 55+ Americans are white, that percentage drops to under 52% for today’s “post-millennials” under 18. Today’s teens are more likely to have personally experienced anti-minority bigotry and discrimination, and much more likely to be aware of their peers’ personal experience of it.
I don’t know what specific instances of teacher “left-wing radicalism” in your rightwing-media clickbait-feed you’re fuming over, but I think you’re kidding yourself if you imagine that there’s “no other reason” for kids these days to get “politically impassioned” for progressive causes, other than alleged nefarious ideological manipulation by their teachers.
Still a very dubious assertion, as I noted above. The fact remains that a lot of behaviors that we now consider crimes or substance abuse were simply concealed or ignored. Marital rape, three-martini lunches and heavy-drinking dinners, child sex abuse by clergy, “mother’s little helpers” prescription barbituates, etc.: all kept under wraps for fear of scandal, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t happening.
I have zero confidence in the ability of government or anyone else to determine accurate numbers on drug or alcohol abuse due to the vast amount of it that goes unadmitted or undetected, and which can also include or omit any number of variables that may or may not be germane to the claims I’ve made.
And from here on I’m going to stop reading a response the instant I see racism brought up to counter mention of the superior values and practices of people in the 50s and 60s. Racism was not integral to their existence and rejecting them was not integral to combatting racism, and claims to the contrary are nothing but fodder to excuse the hugely damaging effect upon society that liberal influence has had over the last 50 years.
Who knows? There’s no way of telling what criteria are used, what gets included and what gets left out, how much alcohol use is damaging and to what degree, etc. And while there’s certainly women who’ll trade sex for a night of booze, I’ve never known of the term ‘booze whore’ to become a thing. I’ve never known of people breaking into homes to get money for their bottle for the day, or running sex rings or killing people in booze sales gone bad, etc. There’s simply no way alcohol has been more damaging to society or to its victims as drugs have been.
And now I’m out for the night so knock yourselves out. You’ll be uncontested, at least for a while.
There are literally millions of Americans your age and older who strongly disagree with you about liberalism, including large majorities of various demographic groups who overwhelmingly feel that life is better now.
Why on Earth would you expect a young fella like me to just take your word for it, when there’s so many other older Americans telling me pretty much the opposite of what you’re saying?
What’s the point? Read any three random posts, max, and you’re already privy to all of his “thoughts.” Yes, he continues churning out new sentences with a superfluity of words, but it’s all variations on the same theme. And not in a cool way, like jazz improvisation— more like and now, here’s “Smoke on the Water” played on an orange kazoo!
This isn’t a flickering fireside and nobody wants to hear about your onion belt.
You could be here 24 hours a day and your opponents would be uncontested. I don’t think you’ve ever won an argument by any standards other than your own self-serving ones, and even they must seem hollow and empty to you.
Then you have no business making assertions that drug abuse rose steeply in the 1960s, or any other claim about this issue that purports to be based on factual data. You don’t get to declare that social-statistics data are accurate when they’re saying something you agree with, but completely unreliable when they’re saying something you’d prefer to deny.
Well, if you manage to stick to that vow it will certainly cut down on the work of rebutting your constantly reiterated speculative blather about fanciful assertions you never provide any actual evidence for. But going by your past performance at managing to refrain from things that you repeatedly proclaim to the board you’re going to refrain from doing, the prospect does not look likely.
More unsupported what-iffery on your part. Whether or not 1950s America could have managed to exist without being pervasively and persistently racist (and I for one certainly wish that it had, and that you and your cohorts at the time hadn’t failed so miserably at making that happen), the historical fact is that 1950s America was pervasively and persistently racist. Especially in a number of ways which are outright illegal nowadays.
Your personal nostalgia doesn’t entitle you to cherry-pick which historical facts other people should consider important in understanding history. You don’t get to decree that the hat-wearing and door-holding and high-heeled vacuuming and so forth somehow defined the soul of the 1950s, while the racism and bigotry and discrimination and abuse and so forth were merely its unimportant trivia.
Sure, you’re lucky that your own personal experience of that era was so pleasant. But that doesn’t entitle you to deny or dismiss the experiences of the many other people whose suffering and mistreatment you were comfortably oblivious to at the time.
He doesn’t care. He’ll believe what he wants to believe. We’ve shown him countless cites. We’ve had people who lived through the same damned era tell their experiences, which were vastly different. Nope nope nope, it doesn’t matter. My parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles and cousins – none of their stories matter. He’ll just keep sticking his fingers in his ears and chant, "la la la la, “I can’t hear you!” Liberals are evil, liberals ruined everything, it’s all the fault of those damned hippies!!!
So why do I bother to post? Because it’s fun to poke him with as stick.
Also, he’s not the only one reading. Even though intelligent conversations about history and society can’t be held withStarving Artist, they can frequently be held around him.
OK, let me try to enlighten you as to why you’re getting so much negative feedback here. It’s not the L word. It’s because we value facts over opinion.
You are making your points based on opinion, and not backing up with supporting material. Do you have any articles, news sources, measurement, cites, ANYTHING to prove your opinion that liberals are brainwashing students? Just your own personal observations are not enough.
Speaking from my own personal experience, I don’t recall experiencing any attempt on behalf of my professors to influence my political opinion. Then again, I was in Engineering and didn’t take much in the way of humanities. Maybe it’s the Liberal Arts majors you’re talking about, because of the L word again. Don’t fret, “liberal” in this instance refers to the Latin liberalis, meaning “worthy of a free person.” <— See that? That’s a cite! We want these from YOU!
In some occasions, actual research and fact-checking show that claims some conservatives make aren’t true. It’s not an attack on conservative morals. It’s not contempt for Christianity, America, patriotism, or any other conservative value. It’s seeing a lie, mistake or error exposed in the light of truth. That’s all. Skeptic intentions are apolitical. The only agenda is TRUTH.
I get it. Nobody likes to be told they’re wrong. Nobody likes to be accused of lying. You’ve lived a long life based on your principles and don’t care to have them challenged. But things change in 69 years. The old rules don’t apply any more. FUCK ADAPTING! You realize that you’re rebelling against the system? Just like the hippies did. You have something in common with them.
It makes me laugh. My dad, born in 1923, Holocaust survivor, immigrant, soldier, small business owner was the most ardent natural feminist I ever met. He didn’t even know the term. He just instinctively understood feminism, lived it, taught it to his four daughters and his wife, without even knowing that he did.
Had no problems with the gays either.
He learned his feminist and liberal ideals from watching the inequality he saw around him, first in Poland and then here.
So don’t tell me about being brainwashed. I was taught liberal morals like empathy, compassion, work ethic, inclusiveness, and others by my dad. My beliefs are just as sincere and deep felt. The sheer arrogance to say “my feelings are real but yours aren’t”. What a complete ass.
In generations previous to yours, less people actually WENT to college. That was one thing my grandfather* was extremely proud of, that all five of his children were able to do so.
Now you’re talking about MY generation. And I can tell you once again, you’re full of shit.
*Funny thing, my grandfather was a registered Republican who voted for Eisenhower, but after that voted mostly for Democrats. He saved most of his ire for Reagan. In fact, the way Starving Artist talks about liberals reminds me of the way my grandfather used to talk about Reagan. I wasn’t a fan of the guy either, but it could really grate on your nerves after awhile. That’s what you’re becoming, Starving Artist. The grumpy old man ranting about “kids today”. Tell me, how many times have you yelled “get off my lawn!” lately?
Any chance we can move Starving Artist and the discussion of belief that Leave it to Beaver was a documentary to another thread? Yes he’s wrong, so very wrong and its fun to poke him and his argumetn with a stick to see what he does next, but it has a tendency to hijack threads into oblivion. And is he hasn’t learned his lesson in 60 years it unlikely that anything you say will convince him.
Conservatives support child rape and child murder. Enough said.
Sooner or later, maybe the “Der, duh, um, like both sides do it,” fucking middlers in this country – like when enough of their children are raped, drugged, and murdered.