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Once When We Were Free

Posted by UncommonSense 9 years, 10 months ago to Culture
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Happy New Year Gulcher's. This article sums up my thoughts nicely. Enjoy.

All Comments

  • Posted by RJSchimenz 9 years, 9 months ago
    While some criticize the article, it does have a lot of truth. The nanny state has grown and people are fitting in, behaving like children who crave the parental nature of modern government.
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  • Posted by plusaf 9 years, 9 months ago
    Read my comment there...
    Although you've seen my position here, before.
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  • Posted by freedomforall 9 years, 9 months ago in reply to this comment.
    I agree with much of what you say here, Mike. The media was manipulated. I think the public wasn't controlled by it as thoroughly as it is today. More people could think for themselves because fewer people were exposed to the propaganda. There were a higher percentage of independent businesses, fewer enslaved to big mortgages for McMansions (now required mostly by the woman of the family) and lower percentage employed by big gov and a few big companies. Education curriculum wasn't as uniformly propagandized, and students were encouraged to excel with more challenging courses instead of frustrating the achievers by sticking them in classes with politically correct failures.
    Lots of things were changed (under the false goal of equality) combined to result in the mass failure we have been warning of for decades and are now experiencing.
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  • Posted by term2 9 years, 9 months ago in reply to this comment.
    I say the what the government wants is for people to sit at home and not move until permitted by the bureaucrats. All that a person makes goes to the state, and they then refund to your debit card an allowance to live.
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  • Posted by term2 9 years, 9 months ago in reply to this comment.
    One think I notice is that "all bets are off" when it comes to the government's solutions to issues that come up. There seems to be nothing off the table now, whereas 50 years ago they seemed to be restrained in the new laws they could pass.
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  • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 9 years, 9 months ago in reply to this comment.
    What's that got to do with wishes of the government? They control the elections. The allowed to be cast will still be 95% in favor of the Government Party. Rino or Dino in the White House is still win win for the leftist coalition. All they need is another fortuitous or manufactured crisis. The only wild card is unacceptable as he's the worst kind of Socialist Corporatist Statist the other form of their two extreme versions. Right now at least for the primaries the effort is Dump Trump. All the Dinos need to do is transfer enough of their troops to the Republican Party registration long enough to pull a classic raid and that won't be hard. Screw the polls and public opinion. When the time comes....it will change the more leftist the easier to get change. the Republicans may be the lapdogs of the left but the left has the most unthinking slavish boot lickers.

    Another thread developed this thought ...the country has not a two party but a bipolar system on the surface. But underneath it is a hypocritical single party system with assigned role playing in a national charade of street theater.
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  • Posted by $ MikeMarotta 9 years, 9 months ago in reply to this comment.
    In ancient Athens, the voting age was 30. That was also the traditional age for a man to be married to a girl of 18.
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  • Posted by $ MikeMarotta 9 years, 9 months ago
    There never was a golden age. That is the Eden Myth, retold even in Hesiod's "Days" and echoed in Plato's Dialogs. It is the narrative of the True Believer: Once there was a golden age, but the Evil One(s) stole it from us, but if we all work together, we can build a new world, not for ourselves, but for our children."
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  • Posted by $ MikeMarotta 9 years, 9 months ago in reply to this comment.
    I am 66. Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged was rooted in that world of the 40s and 50s, when President Truman seized the steel mills and nationalized the railroads.

    In fact, when World War One was launched, President Wilson seized all the radios, and nationalized the railroads. The 1916 Dime has a fasces on the reverse.

    It was the "Trading with the Enemy" Act of 1917 that later President Roosevelt used for Executive Order 6105 seizing all the gold in banks.

    When we were kids in the 1950s, we watched Our Gang / Little Rascals shorts on television. Some of them were even silent and the kiddie show host read to us. We understood a continuity in the culture of childhood. That early life of the 1920s and 1930s was not "the Pepsi generation" or the "Me Generation" -- but it was an indication of changes to come. World War One destroyed more than "stuff", it ended the century of capitalism, 1814-1914.
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  • Posted by $ MikeMarotta 9 years, 9 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Franklin D. Roosevelt had been Assistant Secretary of the Navy for seven years in the Wilson Administration. Like Richard Nixon and Watergate: "What did he know, and when did he stop knowing it?"

    As for the media, it was traditionally an "alternate reality." Louisa May Alcott was a "penny-a-liner" making up lurid stories for New York City newspapers. She was not alone. It was a way for writers to get by. Joseph Pulitzer engaged William Randolph Hearst in the same medium of lies and inventions. But Pulitzer left a bequest to Columbia, which created a School of Journalism, which set higher standards. Now, we expect the truth in the news.

    In Russian, Isvestia means "news" and Pravda means "truth." They used to say there was no news in the truth and no truth in the news.
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  • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 9 years, 10 months ago in reply to this comment.
    It certainly supports the case for paying attention to the 9th and 10 Amendments and supporting the 50 separate and different solutions methods. Especially since the national government withdrew. All that's left are some interstate trade issues with out undue interference under the full faith and credit section of the Constitution.
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  • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 9 years, 10 months ago in reply to this comment.
    No you get to answer my question first. It requires basic English and personal opinion. Hardly rocket science. What you want a thesis on pork barrel politics? You stated your opinion I stated my opinion. Balls in your court. 'what makes you think...."
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  • Posted by $ CBJ 9 years, 10 months ago in reply to this comment.
    I was talking specifically about the marijuana legalization issue. Proponents of the drug war are slowly losing this battle.
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  • Posted by $ CBJ 9 years, 10 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Please elaborate. What person or group is "orchestrating" both major parties? Are Hillary and Trump following some controlling entity's script when they attack each other?
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  • Posted by $ CBJ 9 years, 10 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Public support for reintroduction of a military draft was only 18% in 2007 and is probably similar today. As recently as 1980 a majority of the public supported the draft. Higher levels of distrust of government probably contributed to this change of sentiment. http://www.gallup.com/poll/28642/Vast...
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  • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 9 years, 10 months ago in reply to this comment.
    What makes you think an orchestrated effort no different than christmas tree pork barrel earmarking is fighting for control? It's a charade, an act with a script. Like any play or movie you watch it then return to reality OR you put on costumes and go to Star Trek conventions.
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  • Posted by $ CBJ 9 years, 10 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Two gangs fighting each other for control of the same turf are not a coalition, even if their viewpoints and methods are similar to each other.
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  • Posted by Flootus5 9 years, 10 months ago in reply to this comment.
    The old house that I grew up in in suburbia Massachusetts only had radiators. Man, that clanging of the pipes with trying to get that hot water up through 3 stories of living space was something memorable. The house was at least as old as 1890, but that is a minimum age because that was the known date it was hooked into the city water system.

    When my parents bought the place and moved in in 1960, the hot water was driven by an oil burner. But the old coal burning furnace replete with muscovite windows was still there in the basement as well as a pile of coal.
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  • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 9 years, 10 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Once there was a poltical cartoon that showed a forested land with one side all clear cut and the other marked Citizens there little blurb said It will never happen here. Will it?

    In the center was a recently felled log with two loggers wielding a cross cut saw one said to the other when I push you pull and when you push I'll pull ...Each had a button on their jacket one marked Democrat and the other marked republican.
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  • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 9 years, 10 months ago in reply to this comment.
    The two major parties are the left and right wing of the same major philosophy Government Controls People if not a party then a working Coalition ...same thing.
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  • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 9 years, 10 months ago in reply to this comment.
    how can you say all of that and believe the 'in force ready to go with registered lists draft will not be used ever...Do you know what a hollow reed is? that's the belief that A is B and it will never happen here. But it did the people gave the despots the power they didn't take it on their own. Distrust is higher than 50 years ago? You can't have it both ways.
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  • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 9 years, 10 months ago in reply to this comment.
    An attempt but they wanted it legal. Only applied to the other side so only the leftists complained. The idea tagged along more support from left than right though they are loathe to admit it.Bush II went full tilt. I've often thought of Clinton, Bush, Obama as a quarter century of failure Clinton well enough said about that, Bush t be somewhat fair inherited a deficit an unbalanced budget when viewed by competent book keepers and a war. He did the rest on his own and seriously unbalanced the economic structure using the Clinton era plan of free housing for everyone skippered by Dodd and Franck, and the ethanol scam. If the debt didn't sky rocket he certainly set it upright o the launch pad. Much of his debt increase was absolutely unnecessary and turned pork politics into a combination of swine flu based on the mainstay of Clintonomics - Pork Bellies. Along comed the third eight year trimester with a POS ham'n'egger who had no math skills, no economics skills, no employment skills, no military skills, no leadership skills, no ethics skills, a complete enigma, cipher, zero ethanol powered pig trough on wheels klutzmobile who managed...so far.... to double the national debt and made proof of the aphorism never send a boy to do a mans job. They could have elected Hillary and put Klutzcake in as VP and then matched him up against the Seig Heiler champion of the neo Nazi socialist media Donald Duuuuuuuuu Trump. The promised over the horizon and tired old leftist mantra of boys home by Christmas turned into a middle ages enactment of the 14 and counting years war 2002 to 2016 at least count. With no tunnel much less light at the end of ...But my war materials investments DID skyrocket. faster than the economy tanked and the budget blundered, stumbled and growing tired Pelossified awaiting it's own re-enactment coming soon to a bank near you.
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