I don’t think that Dawkins is obnoxious. And yes, I agree he is called obnoxious. But he is also not what I am talking about in the way of a political leader. Dawkins isn’t doing much about political and social rights. He is proselytizing. The movement, to the extent there is one, needs one or more leaders who are out there presenting a decent human face to the community about why atheists rights matter.
You’ve got to be kidding me-you think changing a religious holiday to a secular holiday would be easier than changing wordage on coins? Remember the hysteria of the “War On Christmas!” that never actually happened? A real campaign to drop a religious icon from a holiday would be a public relations disaster of the highest magnitude.
At any cost?
As an atheist, I have no interest in a war on religion. I don’t care in the slighest what religious convictions others may hold, so long as they aren’t enshrined into law.
I’d much rather fight for a fully secular government than against the public’s religion of choice.
So it was the fashion statement of a young non-conformist generation that dragged out the War in Vietnam?
Wow? Let’s see all that happened in the year from the First major anti-war protest to the election of one Richard M. Nixon.
October 1967 the first major anti-war demonstration with many badly dressed hippies takes place on the Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
November 1967 Eugene McCarthy, nicely dressed, announces bid for Presidency against LBJ the sitting President. Dr MLK annouces oppositon to the war.
January 1968 - TET Offensive Begins…
February - Nixon declares run for presidency. George Wallace announces Independent Party run for the presidency. Walter Cronkite questions war on 6:00 PM evenving news. Gallop Poll reports 50% now do not support LBJ’s Vietnam war policy. Lots of those are nicely or conventionally dressed folks I am sure. Kerner Commission releases report on Race Riots, “US is moving toward two societies” One Black One White separate and unequal.
March - J Edgar Hoover orders Civil rights and Black Militants to be neutralized. McCarthy nearly beats LBJ in New Hampshire. Senator Bobby Kennedy enters presidential primary; also nicely dressed. LBJ announces he will not run for re-election. This opens way for Hubert Humphrey his VP to enter the Democratic Primary.
April - Dr. Martin Luther King is assassinated. Tens of thousands of troops called up in a hundred US Cities to quell riots/protests. Not sure of what the rioters and protesters were wearing. Strudens take dean of Columbia hostage to protest the Draft. Yes, they were not dressed as Mr and Mrs Cleaver would prefer. Humphrey declares run on Democrat 8 year record including the War in Vietnam.
May - US and Vietnam agree to start peace talks. Kennedy wins Nebraska Primary. His first. McCarthy wins in Oregon. Nixon wins GOP race.
June - Kennedy wins California… Is ASSASSINATED at victory rally the next day.
August - Riots break out in Miami… Nixon calls the urgent need for LAW and ORDER. How the Sixties generation dressed during all this would seem to me to be quite trivial at best. NIXON/AGNEW win GOP nomination. Nixon appeals to the SILENT MAJORITY. Humphey wins nomination in Chicago. wallace campaign gains momentum by appealing to White Voters and returning schools to local control in appeal to those opposed to forced busing. But Wallace also picks General Curtis LeMay (bomb Vietnam back to the stone ages) and his campaign begins to falter.
October - LBJ announces peace talks are moving forward and halt to bombardment of North Vietnam.
WHAT WE KNOW NOW.. for less than a month:
November - Nixon and Agnew are elected by 50,000 vote Majority. Wallace takes 5 states in the South.
I think Bobby Kennedy’s death and Martin Luther’s Death both paved the war to Nixon’s election more so than anything else.
It is nonsense to blame bell bottom courduroy, ragged blue jeans and long hair - some with flowers in it, as the reason the war was prolonged.
That is fighting against the public’s religion of choice.
The US government could and should save a billion dollars a year by getting out of the money manufacturing business.
If it did, Americans would mostly switch to credit and debit cards, and, to a lesser extent, checks and gift cards. This would greatly reduce crime. Sticking up a liquor store for the liquor becomes a much less attractive proposition when all you can get are heavy bottles of booze – no cash. And then when you tried to sell the bottles, what is the fence going to give you? A traceable check?
Anonymous money would still exist for those who strongly desire it (gift cards, foreign cash, numismatics). Criminals could move to those to some extent. But because they are harder to value than current US cash, this would make criminality much more difficult.
If an oddball bank wants to put In God We Trust on their VISA card, let 'em.
Ok, first of all I have to admit it’s quite amusing being lectured about that era by someone who knew so little of it that he thought that the ARVN fought for the North Vietnamese government which is more than a little like claiming that the French resistance were Nazi stooges.
Second of all, Kennedy was not going to beat Humphrey or at least the odds were heavily against it.
Third, in your long chronology, one can’t help notice that you completely ignored the chaos at the Chicago convention which while it may have primarily been because of the Chicago Police, at the time was blamed by the overwhelming majority of Americans on the anti-War movement.
And yes, had the anti-War movement behaved differently, I don’t think Nixon would have won and that Humphrey would have pulled us out of Vietnam long before Nixon did.
QUOTE]August - … NIXON/AGNEW win GOP nomination. Nixon appeals to the SILENT MAJORITY.
[/QUOTE]
Y’know once again, for someone who claims that he knows a lot about this time period and is very interested in it you make some pretty glaring mistakes. Nixon made his appeal the The Silent Majority in 1969 nearly a year he’d already been elected and they had nothing to do with the Liberty City Riots of 1968, but were in response to the the publicity the counterculture and the anti-War movement and middle America responded to it.
That being said, thanks for mentioning Nixon’s reference to The Silent Majority even though you apparently didn’t know much about it since it’s quite illustrative of just how much most Americans came to despise the counterculture and the anti-War movement.
There’s a great book on this subject called The Anxious Years, by Kim McQuaid, that I highly recommend for anyone interested in the subject.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Anxious-Years-America-Vietnam-Watergate/dp/0465003907
One of his major focuses is how the anti-War movement learned the wrong lessons from the Civil Rights movement because they didn’t really understand it. The Civil Rights movement was largely a case of black people trying to break into the mainstream, while the anti-War movement largely consisted of well-off students who wanted to be out of the mainstream.
McQuaid pointed to a number of polls that showed how starting in mid to late 1960s, every single year the disapproval rates for the anti-War protestors kept going up and how vastly unpopular they were in stark contrast to how through the 1950s and the earl 1960s the approval rates for the Civil Rights movement led by Martin Luther King kept going up.
Most damning of all, he pointed out how in 1968, not only were the disapproval ratings absurdly high for anti-War protestors, but according to polls even most Americans who favored a “complete and immediate with-drawl of troops from Vietnam” disapproved of the protestors.
He also pointed to how every single year starting in 1968 just as polls showed support for the war dropping, they’d show a corresponding uptick in the disapproval rates for the anti-war protestors because they engaged in behavior that most Americans found to be rude and obnoxious.
That ARVN thing was a typo. Your Bill Clinton misquote of what he said on the Letterman Show was not a typo. The rest of what I wrote on was clear that I know quite well the North Vietnamese were not ARVN. I acknowldged that was a mistake. Move on.
I’m not sure how your reference to the ARVN could have been a “typo” and I never misquoted Bill Clinton.
Anyway here’s your comment that I don’t see how it was a typo. How exactly does one accidentally type ARVN instead of NVA?
Bill Clinton was a huge supporter of the Iraq War and insisted that it wouldn’t last more than a few weeks or month.
Beyond that, I noticed how you completely dodged the fact that you thought Nixon made his appeal to The Silent Majority prior to being elected in 1968 which was a mistake that no one familiar with the time period would have made.
If you’re interested in that time period I recommend reading McQuaid’s book.
I don’t think Dawkins is obnoxious, either. And you’re right, he’s not in any sense a political leader even in the UK, much less in the US. But he is one of the favorite go-to guys for folks who want to bitch about atheists.
It’s funny, though, that you see a lot more co-mingling of government and religion (most ceremonial, like IGWT) in Europe than in the US. I think a lot of Europeans are comfortable identifying culturally as Christians even if they are atheist, agnostics, or just “don’t really think about it” wrt religion. Obviously, we have a lot more of the real thing (religious people, that is) in the US than in Europe generally.
I don’t think Dawkins is obnoxious, either. And you’re right, he’s not in any sense a political leader even in the UK, much less in the US. But he is one of the favorite go-to guys for folks who want to bitch about atheists.
It’s funny, though, that you see a lot more co-mingling of government and religion (most ceremonial, like IGWT) in Europe than in the US. I think a lot of Europeans are comfortable identifying culturally as Christians even if they are atheist, agnostics, or just “don’t really think about it” wrt religion. Obviously, we have a lot more of the real thing (religious people, that is) in the US than in Europe generally.
At least we don’t have a cross on our flag, which is extremely common in Europe!
I am amazed that you believe 50 percent of the silent majority (35 years plus adult white population) would have told the Gallup pollsters in February 1968 that they opposed the war versus the 50 percent of the silent majority that still supported it, had it not been for the attention the Vietnam War and draft protesters brought put in their silent establishment conditioned majority faces.
And furthermore I am amazed that you must believe the Sixties generation gap was all about the War in Vietnam.
And furthermore I am amazed that you must believe that some form of **non-radical **behavior by Wally Cleaver type College Students as war protest would have brought about a faster consensus by the older generation that the war was wrong and that sufficient anti-war sentiment would have been strong enough in November 1968 to overcome the turbulent racial domestic strife going on simultaneous with the bloody deadly war to defeat a Republican Presidential Candidate running on law and order and promising to end the war too, .
See this Nixon ad where he promises to end the war …
[quote=“Ibn_Warraq, post:170, topic:654633”]
I’m not sure how your reference to the ARVN could have been a “typo” and I never misquoted Bill Clinton.
Bill Clinton was a huge supporter of the Iraq War and insisted that it wouldn’t last more than a few weeks or month.
QUOTE]
you just misquoted Clinton again by leaving out what he said about supporting Bush’s September 2002 flip to go through the UN to try to get inspections going instead of going straight to war without giving Saddam a final chance to comply with the UN. .
perhaps it was a dyslexic typo.. thats all.
If you read my statement I said ‘we faced’ a non-uniformed guerilla insurgency" but we opposed a regular amy that maintained its supplies and direction and authority from the North Vietnamese Government. We did not face the Viet Cong and the South Vietnames Army that was getting its supplies from the North.
It was a typo. I said so. Decent debaters would let it end there.
Spring 1968… The Silent Majority as a political phrase was born.
Perlstein: Nixon went on the radio and decided basically to answer the people who felt like the liberals were claiming that it was their fault that America was going to pot.
Whalen: And the vital center becomes…
Archival Tape: “**The silent center, the millions of people in the middle spectrum who do not demonstrate, who do not picket or protest loudly…” **
Whalen: The audiences who listened to him were silent. These were people who were not ever going to demonstrate anywhere, who were never going to riot, white or black. But they were people whose weight at the center of the political spectrum could tip to the left or to the right.
Perlstein: Imagine if Richard Nixon’s soothing voice comes on the radio and says:
Archival Tape: “A great many quiet Americans have become committed to social problems that preserve personal freedom.”
Perlstein: All you people who feel humiliated and who feel talked down to by the liberals who feel like the world is exploding around you and you’re getting blamed for it – instead of the people who are rioting, you actually comprise a political constituency.
Political speech is not very different from poetry, and often it can just be about the resonances of how the syllables sound together.
Whalen: And “silent majority”… tumbled out of my typewriter in the attic in Washington one night. And I looked at it and I said “That’s a pretty good phrase.”
Perlstein: He hit the sweet spot: the “silent majority.”
Whalen: The majority – often silent. Disinterested. Never says “Thank you.” The silent majority. Says “Yeah, that’s ok. That’s great. OK, next.”
Perlstein: And as soon as he said that, it was like, you know, rainbows pushed through the clouds and the sun shined. And basically the "silent majority forever more would become known as the coalition that Nixon spoke to.
Whalen: We gave Nixon language that carried him forward to the “silent majority” and to the role that we saw for him in that election.
Perlstein: basically the blueprint for Republican politics for the next 40 years – this idea that the moral backbone of America are the ordinary middle American hard-working families. A new political alignment was coming into place in which what Nixon would eventually call the “silent majority.”
[quote=“NotfooledbyW, post:176, topic:654633”]
Spring 1968… The Silent Majority as a political phrase was born./QUOTE]
Heh, so now you’re claiming that Nixon’s famous “Silent Majority” speech took place in the Spring of 1968 after initially claiming that it occurred in August of 1968.
Sorry, but you’re entitled to your own opinions but not to your own facts.
Nixon didn’t make his silent majority speech in 1968 and it had nothing to do with him getting elected.
He made it on Nov 3 of 1969 a year after getting elected. Here’s a transcript for anyone who wants to read it.
http://watergate.info/1969/11/03/nixons-silent-majority-speech.html
For anyone who’d rather watch it, here’s a video from Youtube. People will notice he begins by talking about what had happened “since I was inaugurated in January.”
Er… how was the reference to ARVN in this sentence a typo? It’s patently obviously not a typo. You just made a mistake about a fairly basic fact about a war you claim to know a lot about and care a lot about. Here was where you foolishly claimed the US was fighting against the ARVN and that the ARVN was the army of the North Vietnamese government.
It’s also a bit odd that you’re complaining about my not being a “decent debater” after you repeatedly insulted people on the Iraq War thread to the point that you were ordered to never talk about it again.
I haven’t insulted you or questioned your intelligence. I merely pointed out that you made two really massive errors about the Vietnam War and the US during the late 1960s which doesn’t inspire confidence in your knowledge or understanding of it.
The fact that you also strongly imply that Kennedy would have won the nomination were it not for Sirhan Sirhan doesn’t help either.
Had I said anything like that you’d have a point. I didn’t so you don’t.
Anyway, I’m done with this hijack because it’s not fair to the rest of the readers on this thread who don’t feel like reading a bunch of posts about events that occurred in the 60s.
Apologies to anyone confused by this hijack.
Der Trihs merely made some comments about Ghandi and MLK which seemed to suggest he didn’t understand their strategic behavior. I challenged him, pointed out how they made a point of not trying to outrage people but to win them over and contrasted them with the anti-War movement which did not in a variety of ways(amongst other things openly letting people at demonstrations carry NLF(Viet Cong) flags, openly call for the NLF to win, as well as engaging in other behavior which made them come across as elitists who made a party out of protesting a war mostly fought by working class kids).
NFBW decided to rehash this fight. Based on his summary of the anti-War movement, protesters against the Iraq and Afghanistan should have held aloft pictures of Saddam Hussein while alternately chanting “Osama, Osama, we love Osama” and “We support the Taliban”.
Thankfully, the anti-Iraq War protestors learned from the mistakes of the 1960s and did not do that.
Anyway NFBW if you want to continue this, do everyone else a favor and open a thread in the pit because this thread is about putting In God We Trust on the currency.
I was referring to what Nixon said in his acceptance speech in Miami in 1968 when he appealed to the quiet voice of the great majority of Americans; the silent majority. He also explicitly defined exactly who the silent majority were:
And Earlier than that:
So you were the one apparently not familiar with the fact that Nixon appealed to the Silent Majority in 1968 many times prior to the date that the phrase “Silent Majority” was coined in after the election.
But the fact is he ‘appealed’ to that group of people known as the silent majority. And that is what I stated.
[quote=“Ibn_Warraq, post:177, topic:654633”]
(A) I did nothing of the sort.
(B) That is not why.
(C) A typo is a massive mistake? Once corrected the discussion should have went on. It was not a main point in the discussion. I don’t know what the second ‘massive mistake’ might be.
(D) I never wrote anything close to that.
In light of the (A) through (D) does opening up a thread in the pit, mean you will explain where you came up with A B C and D and stick to defending how the the Sixties Generations behavior and dress if corrected, would have knocked four years off the War in Vietnam, by getting Humphrey elected…instead of Nixon?
That’s an extremely stupid comment since I never said he didn’t.
I merely pointed out that his famous “Silent Majority” speech wasn’t made until 1969 and it was only then that the phrase became popularly known.
That’s in stark contrast to your initial post on the supposed events of 1969.
Of course by your own admission, had you claimed in 1968 that Nixon appealed to “the Silent Majority” they wouldn’t have known what you were talking about because he didn’t make his “Silent Majority” speech until over a year later. The closest you come to is a reference to a “silent center” which never caught on.
You didn’t make a typo. You revealed that you thought that the ARVN was the army of the North Vietnamese government.
As already pointed to, you foolishly claimed that Nixon made his “Silent Majority” speech in 1968 when in fact, he didn’t make it until November of 1969, a year after he was in office.
Here is an excerpt from Nixon’s famous “Silent Majority” speech.
http://watergate.info/1969/11/03/nixons-silent-majority-speech.html
Anyway, at this point you seem to be in willful denial of reality and I think that it would be unfair to others on this thread to continue this silly hijack because you can’t accept the fact that you made some rather jaw-dropping mistakes about an era you claim to be quite interested in and know lots about.
Once again, I suggest if you want to continue this conversation, I recommend opening a thread in the pit and letting people on this thread getting back to discussing the use of the phrase “In God We Trust”.
I’ll be happy to discuss it with you there were we won’t be constrained.