Though I think the real dicks under discussion here aren’t your casual noncompassionate conservative casually opining on how the hippies should go get a haircut. It’s the frothing mad ones that seem to be running the party now.
Umm yes they have. There are not affirmative action programs to lift them out of poverty. That is racial discrimination, BY definition. You have to be of the appropriate race to receive that sort of benefit.
Overwhelmingly affirmative action programs have benefitted the middle class. I’ve not seen a lot of evidence of the poor of any ethnicity being particularly helped by AA.
It’s one of the reasons I support affirmative action based on socio-economic stratification.
Oh, I see, mswas. You’ll be amending your rant against Giuliani to reflect that he wanted police to get homeless people off the streets, i.e.
"(Police Commissioner) Safir said the homeless would first be offered services. If they refuse, he said, ‘‘We will either summons them or arrest them. If they’re blocking people’s access to property, we’ll move them along.’’
Plus he got some nightclubs shut down (at least temporarily), and during his administration some cops brutalized an arrested man (in stark contrast to other administrations, where police misbehavior was unknown).
Doesn’t read quite as forcefully as your original rant, but hey, accuracy is costly.
As I said, I’m not a fan of Giuliani, but having grown up in NYC and lived there into the mid-70s, it doesn’t appear to me that the city was in vastly worse shape during his time in office as mayor. A case could be made that the place became quite a bit more liveable.
I have to agree with Der Trihs on this one. Conservativism isn’t a nice ideology. Its focus is mainly on getting itself into power by promoting slogans they don’t believe in such as personal responsibility and smaller government, at least that’s what it seems like in the last few decades.
And conservatives have always, ALWAYS been on the wrong side of morality.
Their dickishness, to me, reflects a systematic collective fear of losing power that causes them to lash out. They know the world is getting more liberal; I’d be shocked if most Western civilizations still have anti-gay laws on the books in 50 years, or stringent policies over fairly harmless drugs like pot. This causes anxiety and increases their bigotry by making them band together in like-minded groups. Whereas a single conservative may be easy to talk to, open-minded, and not a dick, get a group of them together and you’ll be sure that they’re going to yell at you.
I like to look at the positives of this conservative dickishness. Its a sign that their ideology’s in danger and that is a positive thing.
Has it occurred to you that this might be because there doesn’t need to be?
Not a lot of people are pulled over for “driving while named Bubba.” A poor person can put on a shirt and tie and look middle class. Poor people move out of their socioeconomic position all the time. Black people do not become white.
The party out of power carps about the part that is in power. One group isn’t any more dickish than the other. The Democrats dragged Palin’s kids through the mud, for crying out loud.
I wasn’t just talking about the big night clubs that grabbed headlines that you are talking about. I am talking about lots and lots of parties. But hey, don’t discontinue your views on my account. You could do the research if you wanted and find out about how much it affected nightlife in New York. We’re talking about regular shutdowns from loft parties to east village bars who had a couple of people get up and dance spontaneously.
Well you’d need to actually do even the most cursory of research into things that happened twenty years after you left. I can off the top of my head name half a dozen clubs that were shut down and put out of business.
Limelight, Tunnel, Palladium, Coney Island High, Lunatarium.
Twilo and Sound Factory were shut down but they came back to life. Twilo eventually got shut down because the Draconian laws led to a tragedy. Someone overdosed on XTC and they got taken to a secret room and died there. They were shut down because the room wasn’t on the plans in the city’s records. This of course wouldn’t have happened if they didn’t make a law that said that clubs were responsible if their patrons OD’d on drugs as though the club has any power to stop people from taking drugs. I of course loved being strip searched whenever I wanted to go out on a Friday or Saturday night, that was great.
Sure, there was some excesses and I kind of understand why they went after Limelight and the Tunnel and Palladium all Peter Gatien’s establishments.
Yea, that’s true, he made it more livable in some ways but that doesn’t mean he didn’t do some nasty and underhanded shit to achieve it. He made the city much more liveable for the wealthy. For the poor they had to move further and further out, and the neighborhoods they still live in are about the same as they always were. I know A LOT of people who lost their jobs because of the anti-club hysteria.
Don’t get me wrong though, I am happy I am not getting mugged on the subway.
Ah, one of the conservative Old Standards. “The Republicans aren’t any worse than the Democrats”. Which fails both because it’s practically an admission that the Republicans don’t have any virtues worth mentioning, and because it’s wrong. We’ve had many years worth of lessons of just how much worse the Republicans are the Democrats, and it’s still going on.
Thugs, bigots, fools, religious fanatics, warmongers, greedy pigs; those are who the Republican party represents, and the kind of people who make it up. The Democrats are just another political party; the Republicans on the other hand are a collection of the scum element of American society.
Saying that doesn’t make it true. The Republicans cater to bigotry and religious fanatics, just spent years demonstrating how corrupt and incompetent they are, and are full of people who threaten and indulge in violence. Pretending that both sides are just as bad won’t make it true, no matter how hard you try.
I don’t know what world you live in, but that’s not the world conservatives live in. The birther conspiracies - well, nutjobs abound on both sides. We had 8 years of lib nutjobs whining about how Bush was AWOL, even though that was thoroughly and completely debunked.
But come on…town hall shout downs? Get real. I got your shout down, right here.
Cries of socialism? Do you have a problem with the truth being spoken? It’s a given fact that Obama is a socialist. We’ve known it from the day after his name was first floated as a Presidential nominee, and his actions as President have more than proved it to be correct.
Equating Obama’s healthcare plan to the Final Solution? I haven’t seen that. What I have seen is how Obama’s healthcare plan is massive idiocy that will completely torpedo healthcare and our economy, so in that sense, it’s a final solution, I guess.
And Rush and Glenn. My, my, how you liberals do hate those two. You just can’t stand the fact that you can’t refute what they say, so all you can do is attack them personally. And then you accuse us of being dicks. What a skewed, skewed world you libs live in…