Posted on 07/22/2004 12:25:03 PM PDT by robowombat
Hockey would be boring to watch if played in low gravity on frictionless ice, even if both teams were manned by comic book superheroes.
Basketball, on the other hand, is fun to watch even when it's just girls playing.
Just my opinion.
They haven't lost it at all, they have simply changed the religion behind it. What Sowell called the "vision of the anointed" is alive and well.
To some degree, this was because the U.S. military has almost always been dominated by southerners.
The reason for the collapse of Cold War liberalism in the Democratic Party was not Vietnam but the transformation of the party's base. Even if there had been no Vietnam War, the Democratic Party probably would have become more isolationist in the 1960s and 1970s as its demographic base moved northward. Many of the antiwar activists and politicians came from backgrounds or regions formerly associated with Republican progressivism and anti-interventionism.
These regional differences reflect the divergence in moral systems between the post-Calvinist Puritanism of Greater New England, which shuns violence as a means for resolving disputes, and the cultures of honor of the Scots-Irish Highland South and the Anglo-American Tidewater South. The two southern cultures are quite different. But compared to Greater New Englanders, both Highland and Tidewater southerners approve more of violent retaliation for insults. Southerners are not indiscriminately violent. The difference between northern and southern homicide rates stems almost entirely from the violent responses of southerners to personal offenses: arguments, insults to women, lovers' quarrels, and family disputes. The researchers Richard E. Nisbet and Dov Cohen discovered that, at the same university, white southern students were more likely to respond aggressively than white northern students to the same set of insults and provocations. The same researchers have pointed out the similarities between the culture of honor of white southerners and that of inner-city African Americans, most of whom are descendants of southern migrants.
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Uh - hum . . not to take anything away from Southerners, but ther are exceptions. .
NYC/LI non-dove bump.
If memory serves me correctly, Armey's district was pretty much in Plano, which is closer to Dallas than Denton, but still.
However, I continue to maintain that the South I know (the Protestant Upper South, though I am Anglo-Saxon rather than Scots-Irish) has more in common with old New England than most people insist. I also do not believe that contemporary New England liberalism is the unvarnished continuation of Puritan theocracy that its opponents often brand it.
One example of an area which both the author and many FReepers miss the boat is the assumption that Southerners are/were opposed to alcohol and tobacco prohibitionism. Many contemporary conservatives prefer to forget the Prohibition Era, which saw the greatest solidarity between New England and Southern Protestantism in American history. It was the South and West, the rural areas and small towns, who (like the New England "radicals") supported Prohibition while urbanites and Catholics opposed it. Prohibition remains America's forgotten era (at least so far as ideology is concerned). I must also attest (contrary to the general perception) that conservative Fundamentalists are now, and long have been, opposed to the use of tobacco as a moral vice. How is advocacy of the outlawing of vice "liberal?" After all, would we not all like to see our traditional laws against homosexuality (another and far greater moral vice) reinstated? I fail to see why so many conservatives who support laws against so many vices (ranging from sexual immorality to narcotics to gambling) suddenly become libertarian when it comes to tobacco. This most certainly opens us up to charges of hypocrisy and misses an opportunity to explain our advocacy of "legislating morality" in contexts our enemies can understand.
I again feel the necessity of defending the Federalists who were, after all, the original conservatives (as opposed to the radical pro-Jacobin Jeffersonian Republicans). Federalist opposition to the War of 1812 was based partly on interest (the war disrupted trade with Britain, the region's greatest trading partner) but also partly on traditional Federalist Anglophilia and hostility to the "French atheists." Ironically (and in one of those gems of historical irony) it was anti-war Federalists who championed loose constructionism and states' rights at that time, though this was a reversal of their earlier (and later) ideology.
I also wish to point out that many of the most "radical" abolitionists (such as Thaddeus Stevens and William H. Seward) got their political starts in the Anti-Masonic movement, which served as the "halfway house" between conservative anti-Illuminist Federalism and radical abolitionism. I used to be a John Bircher, and I have always resented their dishonesty in ignoring the inconsistencies in their conspiracy theory (ie, their tortuous support of the early anti-Jacobin Federalists and the Confederacy, and their ignoring of the fact that the originally anti-Illuminist Anti-Masonic movement was part of the loose constructionist "national bank" wing of American politics, which they also attack). In actual fact the anti-Illuminist Federalists morphed into the national bank loose constructionist ideology while strict constructionist anti-bankism is descended from the pro-Jacobin "democratic societies."
A similar point seldom pointed out is the similarity in the ideologies of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, both of whom advocated both domestic and foreign interventionism. Conservatives have a congenital hostility to these policies in FDR while ignoring the similarity those of Theodore (who was also anti-German and anti-Japanese and who was an extreme interventionist during World War I).
I appreciated the comment on then similarities in "Southern" and urban Black culture (an obvious fact ignored by the partisans of both groups). The almost bushido-like philosophy of the duel is totally foreign to me and I could never react to it other than to lable it barbaric. Does that make me a "New Englander?" Actually, what many political scholars identify as "Southern" is alien to me (what with my Fundamentalist moralism which does not advocate "tradition" per se but rather submission to the Law of the True G-d; in fact much of the calls for "tradition" by rightwing "civilizationists" sounds to me identical to the worship of the ways of "indigenous pipples" by the Left). The South I grew up in and am familar with is not particularly violent or obsessed with "honor" and is as stern and puritanical as Jonathan Edwards (what, ain't you ever seen our prune-faced preachers on television?). While I am not a pacifist (because I regard wars an inevitable part of human life so long as the true G-d is not acknowledged and His Will is made manifest in all things) I most certainly represent the puritanical, anti-secret society, anti-gambling, prohibitionist strain of Federalism/Whiggery/Republicanism.
I wonder where Pat Buchanan fits on the author's ideological map???
YANKEE FREEPERS WELCOME!!!!!
thulldud, you are making my point. Of course Greater New England still has their self-annointed self righteous zealotry, but in (many) years past the BASIS for this attitude was Judeo-Christian morality with its absolutes of right and wrong. THIS is the BASIS they have lost. As you said, they replaced it with their present religion (and it's probably been at least 60-100 years since this happened) of secular humanism and relativism.
Outgunned, outmanned, and with dismal financial backing General Lee and his general corp (the majority being former Union Army officers) came critically close several times in defeating their far superior foes.
During the Civil War, Union soldiers were given the option to "buy out" of their inscription by paying the Union $100 and having their names removed from the draft rolls. This bit of information gives one a glimpse into the luxurious resources the Union had as compared to the ragtag Confederate Army that almost bested General Grant.
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