The Glade 4.0

Oh nos! Oral sex! The children!

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Show it to your children, then.

The fact that today's parents can be reasonably certain their children won't be drafted into a war or face nuclear annihilation should be all you need to say your kids will be better off.

Really? I'm wrong? Oh, this is going to be glorious ...

First, both Noonan and you display a horrible understanding of the term "culture"; indeed, your definitions and usage are so general and unconstrained as to be useless. There is no American Culture; there has never been an American Culture. The term itself is a misnomer that attempts to aggregate a wide variety of social, ethical, political, and spiritual mores into a single uniform set of values that never has and never will exist. Unlike the majority of other nations in the world, the United States never has been and never will be composed of a dominant ethnic majority with a homogenized value set. In fact, it will never composed of two pluralities with their own homogenized value sets. The assume that was the case; that his line between left and right is all that separates the two cultures of America; is foolish in the extreme.This quote summarizes that false dilemma of cultures in the United States. There's no "cultural left" to be opposed to "social conservatives"; rather, the United States honestly is a melting pot in this regard. Culture in the sense both of you WANT to use it happens to be emergent and not readily observed by any one person. As I said before, it is a gross generalization of attributes that are not shared betwixt groups or even within the groups she describes.

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And that, to you, is the sum of things that can go wrong?

If that is glorious to you, then you have my sympathies. It is a fact that there are Americans who have that exact compromise, and feel it is breached when certain things show up in America. If there was not, then there would have been no protests over the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction. No one would have batted an eye at Adam Lambert's display. The fact that some people feel assaulted and wronged by such shenanigans is ample evidence to demonstrate the social compromise.

Unless you wish to argue that Peggy Noonan and I, and people like us, do not exist.

You may convince some people that you are right, Khross. In my opinion, it's an epic fail.

first.. on the OP. Meh suck it up lady.

second.. on Adam Lambert; hey america voted him to the level of runner up on American Idol. Therefore... they get what they asked for.

I have a problem with him because he is a no talent shitsucking American Idol prick.

American Idol is all about pushing an image, not talent. American viewers chose what they wanted.

Why does every emo little **** lately seem to be trying to outdo George Michael and Prince for stage audacity?

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

The article is really about that Lambert guy and gayness. He talks very little about culture in any specific way. Television has affected communication negatively imo, but that's another topic.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Those two things kind of top the list as far as things that man can change go. Sure it's not worse than something like a superflu pandemic or an asteroid strike, but nobody can predict or avert that anyway, and it could happen tomorrow or 50,000 years from now.

Neither of those things can be ruled out at all.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

I addressed the misuse of the word culture, Beryllin. You can address what I posted, or you can answer some post that I didn't make. Epic fail is your reading comprehension.

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Oh, well, in that case I apologize. I didn't realize you wanted to argue semantics.

Exposing a child to a thing does not necessarily lead to a child going on a crazy bender involving said thing. In fact, I'd rather have an open, rational discussion with my kids about that sort of thing, should they see something like this, instead of trying to shield them from it. A teaching moment, if you will.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Because it's landing them American Idol votes, and thus, record deals.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Eh, it's not semantics; it's actually pretty substantive since it seems you and Noonan believe in a progressive culture.

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I'm still not precisely sure how you think anything is being forced on anyone, or how exactly that's a social compromise. That's just one person (the author) and people agree with her saying how they think things should be. While obviously there is not going to be a written, definite social compromise with precise terms (nor does there need to be in order for a social compromise to exist) this sounds to me like the author dictating terms to people she disagrees with and then appealing to popularity that may or may not exist.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

While I agree with your general sentiment here, there's a great deal of room for concern between "crazy gender bender" and "teaching moment." A child's eventual sexual preference is not likely to be affected by what they see on TV, but their ideas about what behaviors within that preference may well be affected, concerning things like what is safe, how sex affects us emotionally, etc. and these are cause for concerns as well. Especially as they approach the teenage years, many children are likely to sieze on what they want to hear to feel ok about satisfying these urges they're feeling, as opposed to what's going to keep them safe. By safe I don't just mean not abused, raped or pregnant or having a disease, but also safe from slipping into a mentality that exposes them to those things in the future because they don't understand the relationship between a healthy emotional relationship and a healthy sexual one.

There's also the fact that children of different ages are different and children of the same age are not all the same either. I have a 16 year old and a 3 year old. Do you think I can really have a teaching moment about Adam Lambert with both of them? One of them (I'll leave it to you to figure out which) is still too scared to get all the way through How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

You may or may not feel that you'd want to start taking with a 3 year old about sex, but that's your decision to make when and if you have one. For my child, it's mine, and that applies to everyone else as well.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

No, they can't, but he did say reasonalby certain, not absolutely certain.



Obviously he doesn't. He's cited these as areas that have improved, nto areas that are perfect or that every conceivable thing that has a potential for problem.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Argue definitions and terms all you wish, it does not detract from the point of the article. There are people in America who view trends in certain segments as a coarsening of American culture. We see vulgar behavior in public and on broadcasts that we would not have seen earlier, and we see a lack of concern for our sensibilities. It seems to some people that too many want to celebrate the freedom to do whatever, without considering whether they should.

And I would not think this line of thought is confined to Peggy Noonan and myself, if I were you. Like it or not, such activities increases the level of pessimism for our future well-being. Each incident increases the pessimism, and are they likely to come to an end? It would be a pleasant surprise if they did, but I have no hope of it happening.

I have said it before, there are things coming down the track that I expect to happen in American society that I am glad I won't live to see. By nature, I am an optimist, but I am not optimistic about America's future. Actions have consequences, and I think America will discover that only when it is too late. Even the reaction from some on this board is telling: don't address the issues, just dismiss the pessimism as though it doesn't exist. Whistle while you walk past the graveyard.

You're just appealing to popularity that may or may not exist.



This all just comes down to tautology. All actions have consequences. So what? We have seen no reason to think your predictions of the specific consequences are meritorious.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

He did. I believe that both of those could reasonably happen in my lifetime.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

You will admit they seem far less likely to happen today than they seemed 30 years ago.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Not at all.

We've had liberal Congressmen promoting for years a re-institution of the draft. We have a president in favor of mandatory service to country, simply a varied version of the draft. I therefore find it only slightly less likely today than in 1979, when no wars were going on; indeed the only threat of a draft at that time of which I'm aware would have been in a war with the Warsaw Pact nations, in which case we'd have all been dead from nuclear war anyway.

As to nuclear annihiliation, I find it less likely but still quite reasonably feasible, given the number of "rogue states" acquiring nuclear materials and working unhindered towards weaponization.

Furthermore, Xeq didn't state: "less likely," although that was implied.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

Diamondeye:

I am not appealing to popularity (If I'm making an appeal at all, it would be to individuals), I am pointing out that such sentiments exist, and pessimism is usually not a good thing.

Btw, second time I've seen you use the word "tautology". it's good to see people working to improve their vocabulary.

Beryllin:

Really? You seem adamant on refusing to improve yours in this very thread. Indeed, you're rather dismissive of my commentary on Noonan, and your own, shortsightedness and misunderstanding of culture and what constitutes culture. I think it's rather emblematic of your failure to grasp that the things you see wrong with this culture are ... in point of fact ... merely manifestations of the localized culture to which you belong.

What's more disturbing, however, is your endless need to use the actions of individuals at portholes into a future that abandons the Christian ethic of the Anglo-Saxon diaspora. It terrifies you that the majority of people on this planet might worship your god; might believe that sex is a beautiful thing; might believe they actually DO have free will. You're so terrified that people WILL choose differently than you that you MUST make an issue out of things no one will care about in a week.

Adam Lambert, Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake, and whatever other objectionable broadcast content you've groused over in the last decade is NOTHING and symbolic of NOTHING. There's no cultural divide in the United States. It doesn't exist, because Peggy Noonan and her commentary are trenched in a false construction of reality that doesn't have ANY understanding of what culture really is. There's probably a multitude of cultures in your own church, and you expect there to be some implicit bi-factional cultural and social compromise on the National Level in an immigrant nation of 330 million people?

You, like Montegue, need to read "Against the Populist Temptation" by Slavoj Žižek (Click Here). It's a little dense; it might require some use of a dictionary and wikipedia and a few other sites to get through, seeing as how a lot of the words probably have field specific meanings.

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