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There was an American soldier who defected to North Korea in 1965. He was held there until his release in 2004. After his return to the U.S. he was shocked to see how much things had changed in 40 years. He recalled being shocked that a man had landed on the moon, there were black police officers, and how much civil rights had come along, among other changes.
Last time I checked, most women I have met had functioning brains. Using a misogynist shielded pejorative against half the population doesn't help your cred. "Liberalism" is a broad political term. By breaking away from England, George Washington and the founding fathers were - by definition - liberal. Relate that to your above statement and cancer however you wish.
My wife voted for Obama in 2008. Since then, she has realized how stupid and ignorant she was four years ago. In the meantime, she has studied what Democrats usually stand for, and has paid very close attention to Obama's antics. Every time she tells people that she voted for him in 2008, she prefaces it with something like "I was stupid in 2008".
It's not just women who vote for liberals who have malfunctioning brains. The same is true for men.
Modern liberalism is a cancer that is destroying America. George Washington and the founding fathers were, compared to today's politicians, super-conservative. So if the conclusion is that things are getting worse and worse and worse, well... I agree.
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Originally Posted by harry chickpea
There has been an increasing claim that liberalism is the cause of more government. That again gets into the territory of politics and away from history. Lincoln used the government to hold the U.S. together, not because he was liberal, but because he held that the Union was more important than the rights of the individual states. He used anti-slavery as a rallying tool and justification for military action, while at the same time suspending the common rights of the citizenry. Homeland Security is a massive program and not liberal. The majority of the U.S. budget is spent on the military. Do you define that as a liberal priority? I merely point out that BOTH liberals and conservatives grow governments. Finger pointing is merely a distraction.
I never said that it has to do with being a Democrat, Republican, Whig, Federalist, etc. Some Democrats in history have been more conservative than any Republican is, today. An example of this is Grover Cleveland. Read more about this in Glenn Beck's book "Arguing With Idiots"... an EXCELLENT read, for sure. (And he cites all of his sources thoroughly.)
It is true that both Democrats and Republicans grow governments. I never said that Republicans were true conservatives. The closest thing we have today, to true conservatives, is what is somewhat informally known as the "Tea Party".
No true conservative would grow government. A true conservative wants as little government interference in his life as possible. Get a REAL conservative in there as President, and I guarantee you that the National Guard will have to form a protective barricade around the political offices of Washington DC for a one-mile radius to ward off the armada of wrecking-ball-wielding heavy machinery that'd be ordered in there to demolish the abhorred governmental largesse that has ruined this country.
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Originally Posted by harry chickpea
Again, your veiled diatribe against blacks is made from a very sheer fabric. Pre-civil-rights is not a cut and dried block of time and location. In some areas of the country, the excesses of Jim Crow had continued to grow, to the point that a civil insurrection was becoming not just possible but probable. That is not a good thing to have happen while the Soviets are trying to take over the world. At best, it is a major distraction. At worst, it is a game changer. Would resolving that be considered liberal extremism or prudent action by a conservative? A President alone does not make major laws.
I have known some very intelligent, productive, upstanding black people. Being black is not a crime, nor should it be a sentence to be a second-class citizen. But if you look at the statistics, black people tend to choose deviant, criminal, alternative, and/or destructive lifestyles in greater proportions than people of other races. Numbers never lie.
If this weren't true, why is it that so many people of all races (not just whites) try to avoid blacks generally? You don't hear anyone going "aw man, I don't wanna buy a house in THAT neighborhood... it's fulla Asians!" Or "Stay out of that place, dude... that's where all of those Native Americans hang out!" Or even "Go to the Wal-Mart in the next town... the one in this town is overrun by whites!"
The blacks who are on the "upstanding" side of this argument recognize this problem and they hate it more than any person of any other race ever could... because it puts them at a disadvantage where public perception is concerned. People have to get to know them in order to recognize that they're really good people... and that's not as likely to happen for a black as it is for a white, Asian, et al. because of the widely-held belief in the significant risk that they could actually be one of the miscreants referenced earlier.
So, the fact is that I am not a racist, nor am I making any diatribes against any race. I am stating facts, which is something that liberals absolutely hate because facts ruin their argument every time. To avoid having to hear facts, they spew words like "racist", "phobe", "intolerant", etc. to silence those of us bold enough to speak the truth in a time period when the First Amendment has never been weaker. (That's one thing that someone from 1912 would notice right away. They all hated the Sedition Act when it was enacted in 1918, so much so that it was repealed two years later... most likely by EXTREME popular demand. Why else would a law be repealed in two years? These days we practically accept free speech being a relic of history. They'd be horrified at that!)
Back to the point you made. Let's assume you're correct, and without intervention, there'd have been a civil insurrection which would have damaged America's ability to govern itself and defend itself just enough for the communists to get in and ruin us. In such a situation, it would indeed be prudent to remove segregation laws and allow everyone to be equal. However, the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction with "affirmative action". That isn't equality. If there was to be a very short-lived movement at the time to achieve that equality quickly by giving black people a boost that'd help them over the widely-held beliefs of the time that blacks were inferior to whites, fine... but that wouldn't have had to last very long. It sure doesn't need to exist now, for example.
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Originally Posted by harry chickpea
Blacks were given civil rights on one hand, while the government worked to break-up the family units through refusing aid to children if there was a father in the house. The sociological impact of disenfranchising black males and focusing any demonizing upon them, while aiding blacks as a group de-fused the racial bomb, at the expense of social ills a few years down the road.
Why did they have to render aid? Let 'em get jobs and make a living. Not long ago, I located an article that referenced a letter written by an emancipated black slave to his former master, when said master located him in Ohio after he was freed by law. This guy was very well-spoken and had a well-paying job. If blacks could get well-paying jobs immediately after slavery was repealed, surely they stood even better chances of such in the 1960's.
(Side note: He was a slave his entire life, prior to being freed by law. He was more eloquent in his letter than almost anyone could be today. Therefore... was his slavery entirely a bad thing? Evidently, he got a thorough education, the likes of which few people in America receive today. Maybe this discussion of slavery is best continued elsewhere... though I'm sure there were plenty of people alive in 1912 who lived through the Civil War and remembered Emancipation. They'd be shocked that Americans of today still support slavery, albeit in other countries, through the purchase of products made in basically slavery conditions.)
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Originally Posted by harry chickpea
As for those elders in Africa, there are all sorts of additional factors you are missing. Europeans had a very difficult time even surviving the sub-tropics, due to malaria and other diseases. That ruled out extensive colonization, as happened in the Americas. The Musselmen, or Moslems were a primary religious force in the area, and mixed Arab heritage is mentioned in writings of the time and even up into the 1930s. Religious and genocidal wars provided slavers with their "product." An interesting speculation is how many of those made slaves would have been killed in Africa otherwise.
Let's assume there were many. If you were an African and your choices were "run a significant risk of being killed in the crossfire of a war in your homeland very soon, or be sold into a situation where you will work at hard labor all the days of your life and may be beaten if you don't work hard enough, but you will have a place to live, you can have a spouse and a family, you will be educated, and you will be in a safe country where stray bullets won't happen your way"... wouldn't that make you think? ("Well, what could it hurt? I'm strong, I don't mind working, and if it protects my life, great!") I guarantee some of the Africans, if given their choice, would've chosen slavery. At the very least, they may have thought that if they hung on long enough, they'd be able to escape or otherwise win their freedom. Any chance of that, in a wealthy country not battered by constant war, is worth risking. After all, prison inmates chance escape all the time even though they know it's difficult to pull off, it puts their lives at risk, and even if they aren't shot and killed upon trying to escape, if they're caught, they're put back in jail for even more time than they'd have had to serve if they hadn't tried to escape. Never doubt the human spirit.
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Originally Posted by harry chickpea
The real force behind slavery was the textile mills of England, which were having a boom, while the cotton growing in India couldn't keep up with demand. When the U.S. STOLE the mill technology and mills sprang up in the northeast, the problem was exacerbated. You cannot separate the very republican and conservative mill owners from the issues of slavery and slavers, no matter which pundit tries to explain away or justify their actions.
You know, I don't agree with slavery. But Americans, on the whole, do agree with slavery. They prove that every day by buying cheap Chinese-made crap which is produced in child-labor factories under slave labor conditions where people are making wages measurable in "cents per hour". How is that any different from slavery? Slaves may not have earned money but they got a free place to live, free food to eat, free clothing, free medical care, and often free education. People working for "cents per hour" have to pay for a place to live, food to eat, clothing, medical care, etc. Surely that'd eat up what little money they make... because they're not in America where they could just whine and complain to the government and receive handouts. Those cents-per-hour laborers in China, Malaysia, Mexico, etc. may not even be as well-off as American slaves of old.
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Originally Posted by harry chickpea
Tribe? A single TRIBE? I remind you that Pizarro and his force of just 106 foot-soldiers and 62 horsemen arrived and initiated proceedings for a meeting with Atahualpa of the Incas, captured the leader and defeated an army estimated to be 60,000 to 80,000 men. You grossly underestimate the effects of superior technology in military conflict.
My point is not to debate you point by point and get dragged into an off-topic political match. My point is that you would do well to read more history and listen to fewer media figureheads.
So I read up on this story and it was actually 5,000 UNARMED men. (WHO needs to read up on history?) They were lured into a feast in Atahualpa's honor, and when Atahualpa wouldn't accept Charles V as king, Pizarro's army opened fire on the unarmed Incans and easily slaughtered them quickly. (Sounds like what many people do today! Nidal Hasan, perhaps? That James whoever-he-is who killed all of those people recently in a movie theater? The Virginia Tech shooter? The Columbine shooters? Opening fire on an unarmed group of people is an easy way to lay waste to a lot of lives without fear of retaliation!)
To say that it was some great feat of military might for 168 armed soldiers to kill 5,000 panicking unarmed men in an enclosed area is a bit of a stretch. The best part of that plan was the strategy involved in setting up the scenario.
However, such would not have been the case in Africa. Even if a similar ploy had been carried out, the goal of the slave traders was not to kill all of the potential slaves - it was to profit by selling them into slavery. The Africans would've been of no use, profit, nor benefit to the slave traders if they were dead. Nothing stood to be gained if the Africans were killed. The point I was trying to make was that the Africans would have been fighting for their freedoms and their lives. The slave traders were not military generals and tactical geniuses. Even if they did have a few such people among them, there's a difference between a handful of slave traders and 169 trained and armed soldiers.
I'm positive that there is more to the slavery story than most of us read. It just doesn't make any sense that a few slave traders could go over on a boat or two, and easily overpower enough Africans to be able to capture hundreds of them at a time and put them on a boat bound for America, without complicity from the African authorities of the time and of the region.
I know that the good ol' days weren't always good. However, I can't imagine that period of time was all that terrible. I have a book of choir songs, which was once a textbook in the public school system of Meadville, Pennsylvania. It has a copyright date of 1930 and a stamp inside it from 1933. Of 78 songs, 8 have the word "God", "Lord", "Jesus", or "Redeemer" in the title. An additional 17 have direct references to God and many other aspects of Christianity / Catholicism in their lyrics. That makes for a total of 25 out of 78... nearly one-third of the total songs in the book. These days, we have "Winter Break" coming up. (Not "Christmas Break" as it always was in my younger days... which weren't that long ago.) If a choir does a "Winter Concert" or a "Holiday Concert" that includes even ONE Christmas Song, you can bet your boots that they're going to do a song about holidays in several other religions too (despite how those holidays are nowhere nearby on the calendar, and/or are very minor for those religions... unlike Christmas which is one of the two most important for Christians).
That isn't progress. Someone from 1912 would be amazed that store clerks these days don't say "Merry Christmas" before you depart their register, in the week or two prior to December 25th. I can see it now... " 'Have a happy holiday'?! Whatever happened to 'Merry Christmas'?"
(I still tell cashiers that it's okay to say "Merry Christmas" despite what all of the liberal leftist political-correctness hippies want them to believe.)
Last edited by RomaniGypsy; 11-04-2012 at 07:07 PM..
It seems apparent that you want to take this thread into a political bent. Sorry, I'm not going to play that game. For what little it is worth, I voted for Ron Paul last time, was stunned by how the party handled him this convention, so will probably vote for a write-in, just to make the statement. All that is irrelevant to the subject and thread at hand.
Once the politics are removed, your few debate points are mostly untenable. Just a few comments at random:
My point of the Atahualpa reference was to show that "might has right" and "shock and awe" has power, and in the face of superior weaponry and tactics, African tribesmen didn't stand a chance. If you don't believe that, perhaps you are on the wrong side of the aisle...
"Numbers Never Lie" r-i-g-g-h-h-h-t... and what Bernie Madoff did with numbers was impossible.
As for Christmas and founding fathers, you are aware that the Puritans abhorred Christmas as a heathen celebration and refused to give it credence? They had history on their side... Origin of Christmas | The history of Christmas and how it began Like the website or author or not, what is said there is easily cross referenced in writings written long before the politics of the 20th and 21st century. Christmas is simply money to retailers, who now are working on cashing in on Halloween and even Veteran's Day.
I could, if I had the time and inclination, take your post point by point to refute those points, or show how your points actually work against your own greater theme. However, that has nothing to do with what someone from 1912 would think of the present time. Going back to that original theme, there are writings from Taft, Alexander Graham Bell, and many others that provide their views on progress in general, and to some extent their world views. Taft would likely be impressed with the military advances, Bell with electronics. To suggest that all people from a particular time period would have similar responses makes as much sense as saying Limbaugh and Moore think alike.
It seems apparent that you want to take this thread into a political bent. Sorry, I'm not going to play that game. For what little it is worth, I voted for Ron Paul last time, was stunned by how the party handled him this convention, so will probably vote for a write-in, just to make the statement. All that is irrelevant to the subject and thread at hand.
Honestly, I think Ron Paul got a lot of stuff right. He goofed on a few major points which turned me off to him, but I definitely liked his "stick to the Constitution" mentality. His major problem was trying to be an establishment candidate when his views are definitely anti-establishment.
That's another thing that people from 1912 would wonder about... why third-party candidates aren't viable. That was around the time when Teddy Roosevelt did a third-party candidacy for President and won a huge chunk of the vote.
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Originally Posted by harry chickpea
My point of the Atahualpa reference was to show that "might has right" and "shock and awe" has power, and in the face of superior weaponry and tactics, African tribesmen didn't stand a chance. If you don't believe that, perhaps you are on the wrong side of the aisle...
You've never played Starcraft, have you... and if you have, two words should strike terror into your heart: ZERGLING RUSH.
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Originally Posted by harry chickpea
"Numbers Never Lie" r-i-g-g-h-h-h-t... and what Bernie Madoff did with numbers was impossible.
Oh, the numbers didn't lie. Madoff lied. Behind the scenes, the numbers told Madoff the absolute truth. He merely massaged them for other people so that he would profit.
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Originally Posted by harry chickpea
As for Christmas and founding fathers, you are aware that the Puritans abhorred Christmas as a heathen celebration and refused to give it credence? They had history on their side... Origin of Christmas | The history of Christmas and how it began Like the website or author or not, what is said there is easily cross referenced in writings written long before the politics of the 20th and 21st century. Christmas is simply money to retailers, who now are working on cashing in on Halloween and even Veteran's Day.
Christmas is questionable by a lot of people but most people have no idea about the pagan origins of lots of the Christmas symbols. Christians generally take it as a celebration of the birth of Jesus. If that's their mentality, there's really no way to say that they're goofing up by celebrating Christmas.
Quote:
Originally Posted by harry chickpea
I could, if I had the time and inclination, take your post point by point to refute those points, or show how your points actually work against your own greater theme. However, that has nothing to do with what someone from 1912 would think of the present time. Going back to that original theme, there are writings from Taft, Alexander Graham Bell, and many others that provide their views on progress in general, and to some extent their world views. Taft would likely be impressed with the military advances, Bell with electronics. To suggest that all people from a particular time period would have similar responses makes as much sense as saying Limbaugh and Moore think alike.
Indeed, but you have to admit that there was a larger degree of homogeneity across the mindsets of the general American populace in 1912 than there is today. After all, Americans are very sharply divided on a number of issues which never would've merited a second thought in 1912... such as:
-prayer in school (even after 50 years!)
-gay marriage
-legalization of dangerous hallucinogenic drugs (bear in mind, it was ~100 years ago, or so, that these drugs were OUTLAWED due to being found to be dangerous and hallucinogenic)
-race relations
-capital punishment
-government handouts for those who can work but choose not to
-war
-freedom of speech
-religious tolerance, even of religious groups known to be a dangerous security threat to America
If a Time Travler were to show someone in 1912 what life was like in the year 2012 from his laptop what would they think of it? Or if a person from 1912 were brought into the year 2012 what would they think of it in terms of:
Society
Fashion
Technology
Arts
Music
Arcitecture
Entertainment
I think the first thing that they would find amazing are airplanes. Yes, they were invented, but just barely, and there weren't 5000 at a time flying over the US!
They would be shocked just by what we call
everyday clothing. People wore suits, ties and
dresses back then just to go buy groceries. I can
just imagine what they would think if they were in
today's world and saw a man walking down the
street in a T- shirt and some blue jeans, with
basketball shoes on.
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