I'd also like to argue that in a democratic system, no policy decision is really top-down. If a policy decision is made by the elected representatives and leaders of the people and these officials are subject to removal through the democratic political process than its not really top down. Even in the case of sweeping court decisions there is enough democratic pressure that its not top down.
A lot of people are going to hate this but I think that you need to view Reagan-mania through the same lens of Kennedy-mania or even Obama's popularity among African-Americans. Most informed people today know that Kennedy was a bit of a "meh" as a President and had many flaws personal and in his leadership abilities. At the time Kennedy was elected, he seemed like a Godsend to the children and grandchildren of what used to be called the ethnic whites. An Irish Catholic President was a sign that they arrived and were really American. Its probably how a lot of African-Americans felt when Obama won in 2o08.
Reagan-mania is kind of similar but its tinged by a return to the way things should be. He was seen as providing relief from all the ceaseless, hectic change that seemed to besot America from the mid-1960s onward. A lot of people from our socio-economic status and geographic area see the mid-1960s to early 1970s as a time of great and important social change and experimentation. Many view them more negatively. Nearly everybody sees everything after Water Gate to 1980 as a very bad hangover. To many Americans Reagan was a sign that things were going to be the way things should be.
Walmart was not the first chain store. Chain stores and franchises were well-established phonemona before Mr. Walton was conceived. Woolworths is a predecessor of Wal-Mart and existed since the late 19th century. People didn't buy local either. The Sears catalog was the predecessor of internet shopping and it existed in the late 19th century.
Walmart, Amazon, and company just took already existing trend to their natural conclusion.
I'd argue that its the former. Romance novels were one of the few openly sexually explicit media aimed at women for a long time. It was also one of the only sexually explicit media that was considered acceptable for women to read. This gave them the function of telling women that its fine to be sexual as opposed to the prevelant "good girls don't" message that existed up till the mid-1960s. It told women that you can enjoy sex to and you to have a right to dream about being with a tall, dark, and handsome man.
Morat20, I didn't think of it that way but you're right but only partly. Breach of Promise disappeared because the courts stopped enforcing them or really limiting them, not because women stopped filing them.
I have no idea what your last two sentences mean. If homosexuality comes from biology than the percentage of homosexuals should constant regardless of the sexual culture.
Romance novels are only soft porn? They might be text based rather than visually based but the porn part is really explicit.
I'm not really a fan of "women getting swept off their feet" fantasy, mainly for reasons of self-interest. There is no way I can fulfill those fantasies anymore than most women could fulfill the the porn-filled fantasies of men. I'm short, hairy to the point where clean-shaven is an oxy moron, and stocky. Definitely not the romance hero type.
Abortion was legal and fairly common in the United States till the mid-19th century. It was how middle and upper-class couples practiced birth control. Anthony Comstock was a driving force in the campaign to make abortion illegal.
I think doing "the honorable thing" was in decline long before the pill was even in development. It started to decline when women lost the right to sue men for breech of promise when they got cold feet about marriage. This took away a major incentive for men to go through hastily thought out marriage proposals. I'm pretty sure that by the time the pill appeared, very few men thought that they really had to marry a girl if they got her pregnant.
Yes, it is. Till recently, Jews seemed to do the "no sex before marriage" ideal better than their Christian neighbors. Jews had much lower rates of illigitimacy and once records started, had very few early first births, which is used as evidence to show rates of pre-marital sex. Christians seemed to have another practice.
I think the pill merely made public went on in private before hand. The official message might have been no hanky-panky before marriage but there was a lot of it before the pill. It just came with the assumption that if you got the girl pregnant than you did the honorable thing and married her. Even when the official message was no sex before marriage and good girls don't, we had an unofficial but not subtle assumption that men should seek and get sex as much as possible and any man who doesn't is not really a man. The pill just made all of this public rather than private.
I live among the Satmar in Williamsburg. A street that I walk through to get to the subway is populated mainly by Satmar families, Puerto Rican families, and a few Hipsters. The Satmar kids see a lot of very inappropriate and immoral behavior from the Satmar viewpoint; people dressing immodestly, openly sexual behavior in public, etc; and mainly seem to stay in the community.
I think that we should start teaching people that there should be assumption of no consent rather than an assumption of consent and the assumption of no consent only disappears with explicit verbal manifestations of consent. As in "lets have sex" or "I want you to (insert sex act here) the sh*t out of me" or something like that. Its going to kill a lot of seduction and romance but its going to lead to a safer society.
The other thing is that people need to really invest in sex bots and that sex bots need to be made freely available for public safety reasons. If people could bleep sex bots, we might have fewer rapes and other sexual crimes. The ideal is fewer sex crimes because of better people but we have to deal with people as they are not as we want them to be.
This is an interesting issue. Its obviously in the interest of a business owner for his or her customers to enjoy themselves at his or her establishment. A customer that has a good time is more likely to become a regular. The business owner has good reason for employees to act in a cheerful manner. Yet, is this something that can be required or is the most a business owner can expect is politeness?
I disagree, the cult of Jewish weakness did not help us. At best we were tolerated and allowed to exist with benign neglect but never really included. At worse, our persecutors went about merrily killing us anyway. We do not have to tolerate this sort of behavior.
I also disagree with your earlier post about Jews in the Middle East being tolerated and I have ancestors who were from there and Eastern Europe. The Dhimmi system was a system of second-class citizenship. At best, Jews had to pay more tax/protection money for being Jewish. If heterosexuals were to impose a tax/protection money scheme on homosexual in exchange for allowing them to be homosexual; nobody would call it tolerance. At worse, Jews were subjected to additional forms of humiliaton and persecution and there were porgroms in the Middle East like the Damascus Blood Libel. They might have been rareer but they did happen.
Even the most symbolic form of second-class citizenship is not to be tolerated.
Shazbot5, its pretty easy to find examples of what Jaybird is talking about. The entire BDS movement, practically any anti-Israeli editorial on the net, etc. I'll give you some recent examples from the net. None of the bellow is subtle but it is typical in the anti-Zionist circles in my experience.
b-psycho, Zionism only arouse as a political idea in the late 19th century because the European and Middle Eastern nations refused to treat their Jewish nationals as equals. We were defined out of the places of where we lived. Its a response to persecution, no persecution of the Jews means no Zionism.
If we can truly get rid of the concept of all X states at once than I'd agree. However, I really doubt that all the other ethnic and religious states are going to disappear if the Jewish state does. Why should Jews have to give up their state first? If there can be other ethnic and religious states, if their can be entire organizations of such states like the Organization of the Islamic Conference; than the world can handle one small Jewish state.
I actually disagree with this to an extent. They aren't self-hating but a lot of Jews on the Far Left are apathetic towards the concerns and needs of their fellow Jews. Its been way since Marx penned "On the Jewish Question." See my quote from Rosa Luxemberg, this was said in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution when the Jews in the Ukraine where being slaughtered by the tends of thousands, mainly by her ideological enemies, and she still didn't care.
Just because you can find Jewish critics of Israel doesn't make them right, it just makes them Jewish critics of Israel. I can find Muslim criticism of Palestinians but it won't make their criticism more right simply because they are Muslim.
"I have no room in my heart for Jewish suffering - Why do you pester me with Jewish troubles?" - Rosa Luxemberg. See also Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question.
Its not very hard to find people who say that Israel shoul go away. In large swathes of the world, its actual a popular political position. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian regime, and numerous other organizations are open in saying that the only just solution to the Israel-Palestine crisis is the destruction of Israel or the Zionist entity to them.
Their allies in the West tend to over look this or actively endorse this and imagine a future where Israel disappears and is replaced by a "secular, democratic Palestine", which is something that the Palestinians don't even want.
Yes, this. The only reason we avoided Holocaust II right after Holocaust I was because Stalin died just before he could carry out his plan to send all the Jews to labor camps in Siberia. Without Israel, the viciously anti-Semitic governments of Eastern Europe would simply have hundreds of thousands more Jews to persecute.
What would the fate of the Middle Eastern Jews be without Israel? Nothig good. At best they would be treated with benign neglect and simply allowed to be while not really being viewed as part of the nation. At worse, they would be actively persecuted. Many of them would have to face the same damned if you do, damned if you don't choices that other minorities in the Middle East had. Do they support the secular dictator for paper equality and marginal protection or face the reality of majority rule and hope for the best? Either choice isn't good.
Yeah, maybe if the Anti-Zionists would stop resorting to obviously anti-Semtic troops when criticizing Israel and think of why possibly we Jews might want our own state and ponder what would be our fate without Israel than we can move forward. Maybe if they stopped presenting Israel as the source of all evil and trouble in the Middle East because its rapidly clear to anybody capable of thought that its not. Maybe if they look slightly more closely at their allies and all the madness and hatred spewed against the Jews in the Muslim world. Maybe if the anti-Zionists can approach this with even a modicum of seriousness.
At best, the anti-Zionists express nothing but antipathy towards us Jews. They are the type of people of reacted to the progroms that occured after the Holocaust with the reply, "progroms, there have always been progroms" before going back to sleep. They say they feel compassion towards all the oppressed but when we need help, we are ignored while demanding our help because we are persecuted. At worse, the anti-Zionists are painfully obvious Jew-haters that are struggling to find away to express their perverted fantasies and bigotry without looking bad.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Social Conservatives: The Republican Party’s Dilemma”
I'd also like to argue that in a democratic system, no policy decision is really top-down. If a policy decision is made by the elected representatives and leaders of the people and these officials are subject to removal through the democratic political process than its not really top down. Even in the case of sweeping court decisions there is enough democratic pressure that its not top down.
On “Think of the Children. Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Children.”
A lot of people are going to hate this but I think that you need to view Reagan-mania through the same lens of Kennedy-mania or even Obama's popularity among African-Americans. Most informed people today know that Kennedy was a bit of a "meh" as a President and had many flaws personal and in his leadership abilities. At the time Kennedy was elected, he seemed like a Godsend to the children and grandchildren of what used to be called the ethnic whites. An Irish Catholic President was a sign that they arrived and were really American. Its probably how a lot of African-Americans felt when Obama won in 2o08.
Reagan-mania is kind of similar but its tinged by a return to the way things should be. He was seen as providing relief from all the ceaseless, hectic change that seemed to besot America from the mid-1960s onward. A lot of people from our socio-economic status and geographic area see the mid-1960s to early 1970s as a time of great and important social change and experimentation. Many view them more negatively. Nearly everybody sees everything after Water Gate to 1980 as a very bad hangover. To many Americans Reagan was a sign that things were going to be the way things should be.
On “Time to Be a Bad Liberal Again”
Walmart was not the first chain store. Chain stores and franchises were well-established phonemona before Mr. Walton was conceived. Woolworths is a predecessor of Wal-Mart and existed since the late 19th century. People didn't buy local either. The Sears catalog was the predecessor of internet shopping and it existed in the late 19th century.
Walmart, Amazon, and company just took already existing trend to their natural conclusion.
On “Canadians, Men’s Rights and our Problems with Rape”
I'd argue that its the former. Romance novels were one of the few openly sexually explicit media aimed at women for a long time. It was also one of the only sexually explicit media that was considered acceptable for women to read. This gave them the function of telling women that its fine to be sexual as opposed to the prevelant "good girls don't" message that existed up till the mid-1960s. It told women that you can enjoy sex to and you to have a right to dream about being with a tall, dark, and handsome man.
On “The End of Absolute Sexual Morality”
Morat20, I didn't think of it that way but you're right but only partly. Breach of Promise disappeared because the courts stopped enforcing them or really limiting them, not because women stopped filing them.
On “Canadians, Men’s Rights and our Problems with Rape”
I have no idea what your last two sentences mean. If homosexuality comes from biology than the percentage of homosexuals should constant regardless of the sexual culture.
"
Romance novels are only soft porn? They might be text based rather than visually based but the porn part is really explicit.
I'm not really a fan of "women getting swept off their feet" fantasy, mainly for reasons of self-interest. There is no way I can fulfill those fantasies anymore than most women could fulfill the the porn-filled fantasies of men. I'm short, hairy to the point where clean-shaven is an oxy moron, and stocky. Definitely not the romance hero type.
On “The End of Absolute Sexual Morality”
Morat, in the US it disappeared around 1935 according to Wikipedia.
"
Abortion was legal and fairly common in the United States till the mid-19th century. It was how middle and upper-class couples practiced birth control. Anthony Comstock was a driving force in the campaign to make abortion illegal.
"
I think doing "the honorable thing" was in decline long before the pill was even in development. It started to decline when women lost the right to sue men for breech of promise when they got cold feet about marriage. This took away a major incentive for men to go through hastily thought out marriage proposals. I'm pretty sure that by the time the pill appeared, very few men thought that they really had to marry a girl if they got her pregnant.
"
Yes, it is. Till recently, Jews seemed to do the "no sex before marriage" ideal better than their Christian neighbors. Jews had much lower rates of illigitimacy and once records started, had very few early first births, which is used as evidence to show rates of pre-marital sex. Christians seemed to have another practice.
"
I think the pill merely made public went on in private before hand. The official message might have been no hanky-panky before marriage but there was a lot of it before the pill. It just came with the assumption that if you got the girl pregnant than you did the honorable thing and married her. Even when the official message was no sex before marriage and good girls don't, we had an unofficial but not subtle assumption that men should seek and get sex as much as possible and any man who doesn't is not really a man. The pill just made all of this public rather than private.
"
I live among the Satmar in Williamsburg. A street that I walk through to get to the subway is populated mainly by Satmar families, Puerto Rican families, and a few Hipsters. The Satmar kids see a lot of very inappropriate and immoral behavior from the Satmar viewpoint; people dressing immodestly, openly sexual behavior in public, etc; and mainly seem to stay in the community.
On “Canadians, Men’s Rights and our Problems with Rape”
I think that we should start teaching people that there should be assumption of no consent rather than an assumption of consent and the assumption of no consent only disappears with explicit verbal manifestations of consent. As in "lets have sex" or "I want you to (insert sex act here) the sh*t out of me" or something like that. Its going to kill a lot of seduction and romance but its going to lead to a safer society.
The other thing is that people need to really invest in sex bots and that sex bots need to be made freely available for public safety reasons. If people could bleep sex bots, we might have fewer rapes and other sexual crimes. The ideal is fewer sex crimes because of better people but we have to deal with people as they are not as we want them to be.
On “Time to Be a Bad Liberal Again”
This is an interesting issue. Its obviously in the interest of a business owner for his or her customers to enjoy themselves at his or her establishment. A customer that has a good time is more likely to become a regular. The business owner has good reason for employees to act in a cheerful manner. Yet, is this something that can be required or is the most a business owner can expect is politeness?
On “Rand Paul, the Confederacy, and Liberty”
I disagree, the cult of Jewish weakness did not help us. At best we were tolerated and allowed to exist with benign neglect but never really included. At worse, our persecutors went about merrily killing us anyway. We do not have to tolerate this sort of behavior.
I also disagree with your earlier post about Jews in the Middle East being tolerated and I have ancestors who were from there and Eastern Europe. The Dhimmi system was a system of second-class citizenship. At best, Jews had to pay more tax/protection money for being Jewish. If heterosexuals were to impose a tax/protection money scheme on homosexual in exchange for allowing them to be homosexual; nobody would call it tolerance. At worse, Jews were subjected to additional forms of humiliaton and persecution and there were porgroms in the Middle East like the Damascus Blood Libel. They might have been rareer but they did happen.
Even the most symbolic form of second-class citizenship is not to be tolerated.
"
Shazbot5, its pretty easy to find examples of what Jaybird is talking about. The entire BDS movement, practically any anti-Israeli editorial on the net, etc. I'll give you some recent examples from the net. None of the bellow is subtle but it is typical in the anti-Zionist circles in my experience.
http://hurryupharry.org/2013/05/15/massad-on-zionism/
http://daphneanson.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/professional-east-europian-sic.html
http://hurryupharry.org/2012/05/29/ben-white-look-at-howard-jacobsons-face-boycott-other-jews/
http://hurryupharry.org/2013/03/01/puppetmasters/
"
b-psycho, Zionism only arouse as a political idea in the late 19th century because the European and Middle Eastern nations refused to treat their Jewish nationals as equals. We were defined out of the places of where we lived. Its a response to persecution, no persecution of the Jews means no Zionism.
"
If we can truly get rid of the concept of all X states at once than I'd agree. However, I really doubt that all the other ethnic and religious states are going to disappear if the Jewish state does. Why should Jews have to give up their state first? If there can be other ethnic and religious states, if their can be entire organizations of such states like the Organization of the Islamic Conference; than the world can handle one small Jewish state.
"
I actually disagree with this to an extent. They aren't self-hating but a lot of Jews on the Far Left are apathetic towards the concerns and needs of their fellow Jews. Its been way since Marx penned "On the Jewish Question." See my quote from Rosa Luxemberg, this was said in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution when the Jews in the Ukraine where being slaughtered by the tends of thousands, mainly by her ideological enemies, and she still didn't care.
"
Just because you can find Jewish critics of Israel doesn't make them right, it just makes them Jewish critics of Israel. I can find Muslim criticism of Palestinians but it won't make their criticism more right simply because they are Muslim.
"
"I have no room in my heart for Jewish suffering - Why do you pester me with Jewish troubles?" - Rosa Luxemberg. See also Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question.
"
Its not very hard to find people who say that Israel shoul go away. In large swathes of the world, its actual a popular political position. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian regime, and numerous other organizations are open in saying that the only just solution to the Israel-Palestine crisis is the destruction of Israel or the Zionist entity to them.
Their allies in the West tend to over look this or actively endorse this and imagine a future where Israel disappears and is replaced by a "secular, democratic Palestine", which is something that the Palestinians don't even want.
"
Yes, this. The only reason we avoided Holocaust II right after Holocaust I was because Stalin died just before he could carry out his plan to send all the Jews to labor camps in Siberia. Without Israel, the viciously anti-Semitic governments of Eastern Europe would simply have hundreds of thousands more Jews to persecute.
What would the fate of the Middle Eastern Jews be without Israel? Nothig good. At best they would be treated with benign neglect and simply allowed to be while not really being viewed as part of the nation. At worse, they would be actively persecuted. Many of them would have to face the same damned if you do, damned if you don't choices that other minorities in the Middle East had. Do they support the secular dictator for paper equality and marginal protection or face the reality of majority rule and hope for the best? Either choice isn't good.
"
Yeah, maybe if the Anti-Zionists would stop resorting to obviously anti-Semtic troops when criticizing Israel and think of why possibly we Jews might want our own state and ponder what would be our fate without Israel than we can move forward. Maybe if they stopped presenting Israel as the source of all evil and trouble in the Middle East because its rapidly clear to anybody capable of thought that its not. Maybe if they look slightly more closely at their allies and all the madness and hatred spewed against the Jews in the Muslim world. Maybe if the anti-Zionists can approach this with even a modicum of seriousness.
At best, the anti-Zionists express nothing but antipathy towards us Jews. They are the type of people of reacted to the progroms that occured after the Holocaust with the reply, "progroms, there have always been progroms" before going back to sleep. They say they feel compassion towards all the oppressed but when we need help, we are ignored while demanding our help because we are persecuted. At worse, the anti-Zionists are painfully obvious Jew-haters that are struggling to find away to express their perverted fantasies and bigotry without looking bad.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.