tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304928500646903522.post8024828353130949983..comments2024-03-18T15:45:32.866-04:00Comments on bensozia: Obama's Optimism vs. a Crisis MentalityJohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01037215533094998996noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304928500646903522.post-3758654466376994412016-08-18T15:27:19.147-04:002016-08-18T15:27:19.147-04:00"by Zack Beauchamp"
-The most worthless..."by Zack Beauchamp"<br /><br />-The most worthless writer at Vox. Unintelligent, uninteresting, and wrong on everything.<br /><br />Of course Obama is happy: he created ISIS (as admitted by the Republican nominee for President), and still probably controls it. He is an evil, sick person. He should be tried for his crimes and shot on the White House lawn.<br /><br />"Their main goal is to keep the boat from being rocked."<br /><br />-Which explains their support for ISIS in Syria and Iraq, their overthrow of Gaddafi, their get-out-of-jail-free-cards to millions of illegals, and their support for Ukromaidan. No, their main goal is to keep rocking the boat, so their Sunni-Islamist-Illegal-immigrant conspiracy can triumph. They are evil people. And they should answer for their crimes.<br /><br />"But to Obama and Rice the main point is to make sure that our responses to those things don't just make things worse."<br /><br />-Wrong. They're smart people. They're evil people. They know what they're doing. And they love making things worse.<br /><br />"People who take a long view will recognize that things are actually pretty good."<br /><br />-Relative to six years ago, they're not, except maybe in China.<br /><br />"They buy into the cheery veneer that age decorated itself with, and fail to recognize that underneath that flimsy facade reality was pretty ugly for a lot of people."<br /><br />-Crime was low. People generally trusted each other. The government was too big, and there wasn't sufficient political opposition, and that was a problem, but, adjusted for the level of technology, the 1950s really were better than today in the U.S., except maybe for southern Blacks.<br /><br />"domestic abuse, routine neglect, flagrant adultery"<br /><br />-Got any stats on that? I suspect they're higher now than they were in the 1960s, at least partly due to the rise of interracial marriage.<br /><br />If you were a typical Jew in the 1950s US, your status was much higher than that of the typical White person, and that continues unto this day. Things weren't as good for atheists, sexual deviants, or Asians, but, despite government persecution, they were better for Bol'shevists, as a hugely disproportionate number of smart Jews bought into Communist doctrine in the 1950s. They have since switched to Neoconservatism or Social Justice, which aren't nearly as powerful. Things were probably better for women, as they were not nearly as stressed by work as they are today.<br /><br />Notice, Verloren, your post have no statistics. That makes me suspect strongly that you are mostly making stuff up.pithomhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13997094225496018110noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304928500646903522.post-25737903030377334692016-08-18T13:33:09.084-04:002016-08-18T13:33:09.084-04:00The problem is one of perspective. People who take...The problem is one of perspective. People who take a long view will recognize that things are actually pretty good.<br /><br />But many people aren't capable of taking the long view - they're either not adequately educated, are distracted by misery and stress, or are actively misled by others. It's hard to have a realistic sense of the world when no one has ever taught you anything about it, you're too busy and tired from work to learn on your own, and your primary sources of information about the world have their overt political and ideological agendas paired with a willingness to distort reality and ignore the truth.<br /><br />If you don't have a real understanding of what things were actually like 50 or 100 years ago, you can't properly contrast those time periods with the present day, and it becomes easy to think things are worse than they were before - especially if other people around you keep telling you that without any way for you to verify it easily. And what catches people's eyes are the most visible differences, not the most significant ones.<br /><br />So people look back at the post-war period and see all the pop culture representations of picket fenced suburbs full of smiling nuclear families and think <i>"Boy, life sure doesn't look like that anymore! They sure had it good! The world today is a far cry from how it used to be!"</i> They buy into the cheery veneer that age decorated itself with, and fail to recognize that underneath that flimsy facade reality was pretty ugly for a lot of people.<br /><br />They're shown adoring women and children gravitating toward deific father figures, but other aspects of the old patriarchy like rampant domestic abuse, routine neglect, flagrant adultery, and all the rest are conveniently swept under the rug. They're shown happy, ethnically and culturally homogenous communities free of strife, but receive no hint of the actual extreme dischord that often existed at the time. People recoil at the awfulness of terrorism in the modern day, but forget that the entire world lived under the constant threat of impending nuclear war for roughly half a century.<br /><br />If you were a white, Christian, heterosexual male who was native-born, spoke English fluently, and bought into capitalism and the American monoculture, then sure - things were pretty okay for you in the post-war period.<br /><br />But if you were black? If you were a Jew or a Muslim or an Atheist or something else entirely? If you were bisexual or gay? If you were a woman? If you leaned toward Communism or Socialism? If you were an immigrant, particularly from places like Russia or Germany or Japan? If you spoke with an accent, or deviated in personal dress or customs, or even just expressed an open interest in other cultures or ways of life? Then things weren't going to be nearly so rosy for you.G. Verlorennoreply@blogger.com