A different time
Many of my liberal friends like to tell me that I am behind the times. I have always taken this "accusation" as a real badge of honor. I am certainly not opposed to appropriate technological advances. Indeed, the very modern advancement of the internet enables me to use this weblog to get out a message, and has enabled a media revolution that has transformed the way we get information.This march to modernity, however, has come at a cost. The changes in social, political, and religious attitudes have destroyed the family, making marriage a matter of convenience instead of a covenant and children a mere matter of choice rather than a blessing from God.
There was a time in America when our kids did all of the things that the so-called experts of today tell us they should not do. Our world and our country was a different place. Today, we hear the left speak of that time hatefully. All I know of that time was what my Grandparents and my Parents shared with me about it-my Grandfather especially had pretty good recollection of the good, the bad, and the ugly.
I always believed it was a better time. When I was a little boy, there were still a few traces of that left. This song makes me think of the kind of world we could have with a few principles-maybe a little modern technology thrown in.
Labels: Miscellany, Music
posted by Deacon David Oatney @ 10:34 PM
17 Comments:
Hopefully, we are not just men behind the times, but ahead of them as well, as society has a way of swinging back and forth.
Brother Oatney, there is something else at work that has accelerated the modernity, and it's NOT technology, it's POPULATION.
I came into this world two days after Alaska came into the US in 1959. The population was roughly 175 million, and now it's just short of 300 million. The only land mass we've added is Hawaii, which is a drop in the bucket compared to the population we've added.
Some of it is immigration, some of it is improved medicine, but most of it is birth rate; people are dying at a slower rate than people being born.
The resources are shrinking and being misallocated, too often, to those who have more than enough.
There are more people to fight over smaller pieces of the pie, and when one is in a life-or-death struggle every day, it's often too hard to stop and think and pray to the deity of one's choice.
Leftie, it's true. Things were different, better in many ways, when there were fewer of us. The numbers were a factor -- only one factor, but a major one.
I remember. My children barely remember. My grandchildren won't remember at all.
In our case, I must wonder if part of the problem is that those of us who believe that a moral society is a better one have not had enough children-while everyone and their mother has immigrated here, and we have created an underclass of native citizens who have had children, and in some cases grandchildren out of wedlock dependent almost entirely upon the State.
We have also lost our collective sense of moral right and wrong. Now to call a spade a spade is condemned as being "judgemental."
We have squandered and ruined the America that our parents, grandparents, and great grandparents handed down to us.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/ st...1017546,00.html
A study funded by the US government's National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in "fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity".
The report's four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and the rightwing talkshow host, Rush Limbaugh, arguing they all suffered from the same affliction.
All of them "preached a return to an idealised past and condoned inequality".
"This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic cliches and stereotypes," the authors argue in the Psychological Bulletin.
One of the psychologists behind the study, Jack Glaser, said the aversion to shades of grey and the need for "closure" could explain the fact that the Bush administration ignored intelligence that contradicted its beliefs about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1017546,00.html
The url
Pam;
If you find The Guardian to be anything approaching an authoritative news or information source, you have truly given yourself over to the world of leftist psychobable and bazaar political views.
For a liberal to say The Guardian is balanced is roughly the same as a conservative saying Fox News is balanced. Its great stuff to bolster your own world view, and it may even have some basis in reality, but it is hardly an unbiased source.
Quoting it to me gets you nowhere. I read it frequently in order to see what the globalist and Marxist left is saying.
The Guardian is just the messenger. When all else fails, attack the messenger.
Yes, a clinical definition of conservatism. Very precise, true.
Ambiguity? You mean like "comprehensive immigration reform" -- translated, "it ain't over till the alien wins and the borders are erased"? Or "earned legalization," "regularization," and other euphemisms for amnesty for illegal aliens?
Or perhaps you refer to the multiple definitions of "is."
Or the stunning incongruity of Hillary's Southern black accent, which, of course, does reveal some congruity if one has observed her over time.
Oh, there's a lot of "ambiguity" that thinking people don't buy. Much of it positively Orwellian.
The Guardian, a pro-socialist paper that once sympathized with the Soviet Union, is to be seen as a reliable source of information about the definition of conservatism?
Very precisely false!
Leftie, because of the differences in fertility rates between U.S. natives and immigrants and the addition of a large number of new immigrants every year, immigration is now responsible for most of U.S. population growth. Fertility for American natives had dropped to replacement and slightly below replacement levels, ensuring population growth for many years to come, but RESPONSIBLE, PLANNED growth. This responsible choice on the part of Americans was wiped out/canceled out by unprecedented massive immigration, much of it illegal and chain migration (meaning Americans were/are not controlling who and how many come in), for the past 30 or 40 years, and especially since the 1990s.
Although immigrants were under 10 percent of the U.S. population in the 1990s, they were responsible for 54 percent of the population growth (counting births to immigrants as immigrant births rather than as native births) during that time. Massive, unprecedented immigration during that period continues to drive most of our population growth and will for decades to come.
You and especially your children will have a very crowded future. You simply have no conception unless you have spent some time studying the projections. The prognosis will worsen as Americans continue to do nothing substantial about the immigration situation.
Hello!! The Guardian was just reporting a US Government funded study. The study has nothing to do with the Guardian.
This study was originally published in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin.
You going to swiftboat them now too? Geez... you give me the impression you're a little ... ah . . . slow.
Pam;
You give me the impression you're a little..ah..Marxist.
Quoting a federal study isn't a guarantee we are all going to march in and believe it either.
A.)It is the federal government. (If they actually funded this-The Guardian has been known to print pure crap before.)
B.) The so-called study appeared in one of the most Leftist newspapers in the English-speaking world short of The Daily Worker. The APA is also notorious for having leftist biases in its own right, which is my many reputable psychologists don't agree with everything coming from the APA.
C.)The fact that you would use something printed in a paper like The Guardian as a reliable source tells us all we need to know about where you are coming from-kind of like those on the other side who quote Fox News and Rush Limbaugh exclusively.
What Pam says is true, I found it on a University research website.
PS... you might learn something if you read my blog. I know, it's easier to remain in denial and question the patriotism of those that disagee. Hey, it worked for the Nazis.
Liberals calling their opposition crazy and comparing them to Nazis, while their leftist allies on college campuses (the hub of most of the militant Marxism in this country) foster "studies" to bolster their position.
Sounds like the late 1960's.
There is truly nothing new under the sun...
As for Donna's idea's about responsible, "planned" growth, as a Catholic I believe in having as many children as humanly possible. Many of our Protestant friends are now seeing the wisdom in this attitude of generosity toward families and children. There are reasons for God's divine plan, and nobody (least of all me) will tell you that following it is easy.
We see the results when our culture fails to follow that plan...we are being over-run by those smart enough to have many children. Their people will survive, while I question seriously whether ours will if we don't get our act together.
For those
Yes, it's a statistical fact the Bush's base of support came from the least educated Americans, I agree with you there.
Nevermind my repeating that I do not support the President's war policy to these people for the 1,235th time-note that these people have revealed what they really think of those of us who are part of ordinary Middle America. This is, in fact, what the Left does think of Middle America
We're unedikated and stupid. We ain't smart people, are we?
I have a college education, by the way. When I was in school, even my liberal professors marveled at my arguments. What's more, I have remained friends with several of them-the ones that I didn't had the kind of mentality displayed here.
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