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edwest2
Guest
Sam Kinison? The rant-rave man? Gosh, I could not stand that guy. Give me Rodney Dangerfield any day. The old Rodney.
Peace,
Ed
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Peace,
Ed
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Rascalking
Guest
Worlds might be colliding, and a I might hear a trumpet of doomsday.
Edwest2 and I agree on something.
I love Rodney Dangerfield as well.
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faithfully
Guest
BLECH!!! He makes my skin crawl…
Yeah… Sam was a really crass guy… I’m really blown away he died at 38. I thought he was a lot older! Did you google his last words? I just thought the story was interesting…
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havana1
Guest
Interesting you should say that. Rodney Dangerfield gave Sam Kinison his big break: in “Back To School” (which was rated PG-13.) He was pretty much unknown up til that point: then came his SNL gig, then his stand-up gigs, then the “It’s a Wonderful Life” parody on Married…With Children. And so on. The guy was legendary. And Sam Kinison, by championing kids with muscular dystrophy (very famous bit at one of his Las Vegas shows), helped get the MDA to change the phrase “Jerry’s Kids” to “Goodwill Ambassador.” I love Jerry Lewis, I know he’d do anything for those kids, but Sam’s the one who helped get the MDA to change their name to “Goodwill Ambassador.”
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Rascalking
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faithfully
Guest
Rodney…Rodney Dangerfield or Edwest2?
(just kidding Edwest2)
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LittleSoldier
Guest
When was this country (I assume you mean the U.S) a decent and moral nation?
If you are referring to the time period during which “what passes for entertainment these days” would not have been shown, may I please remind you, with all due respect, that during those times blacks, Native Americans, and other “minorities” were considered to be second-class citizens (if they were lucky), blacks sat at the back of the bus, schools were segregated, and if a black person walked into Woolworth’s and sat down at the counter to order a hamburger and a cup of coffee he/she would be kicked out, cruelly.
This country has never been decent and moral. Americans have stolen land, moved the indigenous people onto land the new “Americans” didn’t want, people were bought and sold and considered property, women couldn’t vote and could be legally raped by their husbands, movies such as Gone with the Wind and The Birth of a Nation were horribly racist and inappropriate.
So, please tell me because I really want to know: when was this country a decent and moral nation?
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LittleSoldier
Guest
It’s simple to you, Ed. You seem to simplify everything. I’m still rather upset that you told me that people who need medical marijuana can just take Marinol. It’s not that simple.
“Anyone suffering from any condition.” OK. Are you going to pay for my doctor visits? I could ask my pharmacist buy you know what? He is going to tell me to go see my pcp. A pharmacist is not a physician and makes no claims to be. I’m wondering if you’ll pay for my doctor visits because I have a couple of things bothering me and I think I have some “conditions” and my medical insurance has a deductible of $5,000 per year (scripts not included so that throws out the Marinol even if it were prescribed for chronic pain).
You see, Ed, not everyone in the U.S. has the insurance or the money to run off and see their physician each time they develop a “condition” or a disease. I lost half of a finger due to a bone infection because I couldn’t afford to see a doctor. When I fell and cut myself and needed five little stitches to sew me up I received a bill for over $2,000. And I’m still paying it off, after well over a year.
Your philosophy ignores about 90% of what is going on.
It’s not “simple” at all. It’s extremely complex. Extremely, extremely, extremely complex.
Who “decides” which ads are appropriate? You? The federal government? A state agency? Big Brother? Obama? The FBI? The Supreme Court? Just who decides?
And how does this hypothetical agency or whatever decide what is appropriate? By poll? By following the Constitution and deciding what free speech means? Please outline how the appropriateness of an ad should be determined.
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LittleSoldier
Guest
(just kiddin’).
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LittleSoldier
Guest
What’s a “professional medical building”? This is a serious question. I honestly don’t know. Where I live we have a little hospital, a small clinic (with no pharmacists) and several pharmacies spread throughout the town. There is one pharmacist on duty at my pharmacy (and no, I can’t go to another one because my pharmacy actually dispenses opiates which I require and the other pharmacies don’t dispense meds like oxycodone or methadone as it “sends the wrong message” and “the only people who use those meds are tweakers”). The pharmacist is always a man. Is he going to know if paper applicators are more comfortable than plastic (or no applicator at all (which, as an environmentalist I believe is best)? His knowledge is limited by his gender and education.
Glass partition? I’ve never seen one in a pharmacy. I feel like I live on a tiny island which is 100 years behind the times.
Oh, but wait!
It’s good that I live on a tiny island that’s 100 years behind the times because that is when the U.S. was moral, right? Back when women couldn’t vote and the minorities were mistreated? 
Maybe you can answer the question I asked of Ed. Who should decide if an ad is appropriate? I’d really like to know.
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LittleSoldier
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LittleSoldier
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Wait a minute, Ed. You stated (in a post in another thread) that people who need medical marijuana can take Marinol. My physician had agreed to sign the papers which would allow me to be on the MM program. It was (and still is) his professional opinion that MM will help me. But you said I could take Marinol. So you are telling me what prescription I should take. And when I asked my physician about Marinol he said it would do me no good at all and it isn’t even prescribed for the chronic pain I have. He also had a few choice words for people (especially people who aren’t physicians) who think that Marinol is an acceptable substitute for MM but I won’t post those here.
Are you my physician? I don’t think you are. In fact, I am absolutely certain that you are not.
So why are you telling people here that they shouldn’t ask their physicians if a medication can help them? Asking their physicians is exactly what they should be doing!!
And as you are not a physician, why are you telling people here that “anyone who actually reads the side effect information for many drugs would have a better than not chance of wanting to take any drug in the first place.”? You do not know that. Your statement is dangerous. You are NOT a physician. I sincerely hope and pray that nobody pays the least bit of attention to your statement.
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livnlern
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This country has never been completely moral and decent, but has given people the chance to better themselves and their families. Why else would so many illegal immigrants risk their lives to come here if that wasn’t the case?
As for your premise that Americans have “stolen the land”,our nation is the product of British colonialism. There have always been land grabs throughout the history of the world. Here are links to information on a couple of these:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Empire
religionfacts.com/islam/history/caliphs.htm
And this, about one of the granddaddys of them all, the Romans:
historylearningsite.co.uk/roman_empire.htm
People thought differently in those times. They saw the world as having infinite possibilities, if it could be conquered. I’m not saying this was the right attitude to have, but you can’t judge them by today’s standards.
As for the other part of your post,it was wrong for blacks to have to sit at the back of the bus and undergo other indignities in earlier times. You mention other minorities as well. But you haven’t mentioned Catholics or Irish in your post. Or don’t you know about the discrimination aimed at them (us) in former times?
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TheMc
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RedRoseOfPurity
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About decent past: Mental hospitals were concentration camps in 1940´s. 
Old people had no pensions, etc.
However, world of entertainment has jumped backwards.
I don´t watch TV. South Park drowns it´s jokes in the sewage.
Horror movies are nowadays cesspool of torture porn. Gates of the sewer began in 1970´s.
Pottymouthed language and scatological imagery is nowadays commonplace in movies.
Old people had no pensions, etc.However, world of entertainment has jumped backwards.
I don´t watch TV. South Park drowns it´s jokes in the sewage.
Horror movies are nowadays cesspool of torture porn. Gates of the sewer began in 1970´s.
Pottymouthed language and scatological imagery is nowadays commonplace in movies.
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edwest2
Guest
The old, Look over there - poverty, racism! The list goes on!!
We still have poverty and racism. Detroit is the most segregated city (what’s left of it) in the nation.
Please stop telling people to look over there when the topic is, in fact, “what passes for entertainment.”
In the 1950s and 1960s. The film industry and television were under the review of the Catholic Legion of Decency.
ewtn.com/library/ENCYC/P12MIRAN.HTM
There were words that could not be said. This was trivialized in George Carlin’s act: Those Words You Can’t Say on Telivision.
The newspapers printed a beautiful editorial statement about the Birth of Christ every year.
The Federal government told the people that we were in a struggle against Godless Communism.
The Federal government reminded us about our Judeo-Christian Heritage.
There was a Nativity in front of the local City Hall before Christmas. Until the so-called American Civil Liberties Union freaked out in the 1990s and DICTATED terms. “You can have your creche but only if you surround it with plastic candy canes and plastic reindeer and a plastic Santa Claus. Becuase if you don’t, we’ll take you to court!!” Jesus was reduced to just another Christmas ornament.
The ACLU then decided to strip every public building of any religious monument, painting or reference. You know, to help “protect” our religious freedom.
There was a big fuss to get the word “damn” into Gone With the Wind. It was a very big deal. Movies were regularly censored.
People living in the 1950s and 1960s were more aware of God. They restrained themselves. The adults around me rarely cussed in public. It was not uncommon for women at parties to say the following to their husbands: “Don’t you talk like that around the kids.” And the men respected them.
As kids in the 1960s, we were taught:
Do not say bad words. Ever.
Respect your mother and father. And we did. WE believed they would not lie to us about something and we generally believed our parents were smarter than we were. By the time I was in my 20’s, there were only a few issues I did not agree with my parents on, but I respected them.
Dating meant ZERO sex. None.
Divorce was rare.
Abortion was unheard of.
A lady’s virtue was to be protected. Her reputation and good name mattered.
Dress modestly.
Be polite to everyone.
Don’t asociate with kids who stole things or acted contrary to what we were taught.
Respect your elders and those in authority.
It was important to be sensitive to sin, which meant an appropriate sense of guilt and shame.
I was there. I saw it. I lived it out the best I could. There was the Confessional for those times when you strayed from that.
Peace,
Ed
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Fone_Bone_2001
Guest
I think it does make a difference. A big difference. We should avoid works that glorify immorality, but thankfully this is often not the case.
LOST, for instance, occasionally portrayed but never glorified immorality. The stupidity and selfishness that characterized the sexual encounter between Sawyer and Ana Lucia in the second season, for instance, was part of a chain of events that led to that episode’s horrific and brutal ending (the murder of Ana Lucia and Libby, because Ana Lucia got Sawyer’s gun).
Now that said, the role of age-appropriateness is critical. Just because a portrayal of something isn’t intrinsically immoral doesn’t mean it’s appropriate for every age. I love LOST but would not let a child watch it. I love Harry Potter but would not let a child under 11 or 12 read it. And the list goes on.
And even your example of South Park is an intriguing one. That show is extraordinarily clever, and its satirical sting is a blessing for our society. One of my friends told me about an episode - I haven’t seen it, though, I don’t really watch the show myself - that brutally satirized the hypocrisy of embryo-destructive research, for instance.
Well said, Little Soldier, well said! I agree: we have never been a decent and moral nation. Whether it was persecution of the land’s native inhabitants, treating other people as property (slavery), ugly anti-Catholic and anti-immigration attitudes (past and present), racial segregation, sexual inequality, or the murder of the unborn, there has never been a time in our country’s history when we were a truly godly nation. The city of God will never be the city of this world, and right-wing Catholic Americans would do well to remember it: not because we shouldn’t fight for justice today, but rather so that we don’t plummet into the moral morass of blind nostalgia.
I agree completely. Our culture may have a lot of issues, but the United States of America is absolutely worth the trouble.
But the 1950s and early 1960s had their own problems as well. Racial segregation and the prevalence of racism’s social acceptability in many areas of the country is just one example.
And don’t forget that while fornication was less acceptable than it is today, people nonetheless often turned a blind eye to adultery - when a man committed it. Thankfully that is no longer the case.
Blind nostalgia is the enemy of moral progress. It is futile, foolish, and counterproductive to look backward. We must be looking forward. I am grateful for the Civil Rights movement, women being allowed to vote, and feminism’s effect on male adultery and women’s economic status.
Today, we have other problems: cultural acceptance of rampant fornication, abortion, homosexuality, and nativism; also, cultural aversion to personal moral responsibility. But the solution lies not in the past, but in the future. In fact, the true, ultimate solution is unavoidably eschatological.
And anyone who has on this thread belittled the past extent of racism and racial segregation in America should be ashamed of himself.
And yet the fact remains that racism is completely socially unacceptable today, whereas in many areas of the country it wasn’t sixty years ago. Likewise, formal segregation is now illegal. These are improvements, plain and simple.
Nice try. That was the topic, and it’s true indeed that the moral state of American culture sixty years ago was not relevant, but you’re the one who brought that up. You don’t get to have that be the topic when it supports your nostalgia and not have that be the topic when it doesn’t.
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edwest2
Guest
I work in the media and I can document everything I wrote. I don’t rely on nostalgia.
Immorality is a big problem today and don’t you dare suggest I don’t care about civil rights and other issues.
This was all planned and laid out in the 1960s. In a series of attacks, led by liers and deceivers within and without the Church, we have come to this point as a nation
Adultery is now no big deal. Sex and the City portrays Female Chauvenist Pigs. And that is the feminist way to get even with men? To act in the same piggish manner?
Women are degraded far more than they had ever been in history. In the 1950s and 1960s, women without anything on appeared in magazines. And even then, certain areas were airbrushed away. Then the perverts and sexual deviants started adding men to the pictures and soon after, they were having sex.
It’s gone too far. I’m not buying a lot of publications because of the hyper-sexualization of most media. I’m tired of looking at magazine covers on guitar magazines with scantily clad women on them. I have stopped buying a lot. I have stopped watching a lot. And, I’ve had to throw a few books in the trash for their unexpected trashy content. In one case, I had sent an e-mail to the author who begged off on some excuse. No more excuses.
I go to maybe two movies a year. Catholics, at least, should reject 90% of what passes for entertainment today. I suggest putting in your free time, if you have any, into pursuing things that are wholesome and Godly.
Peace,
Ed
Immorality is a big problem today and don’t you dare suggest I don’t care about civil rights and other issues.
This was all planned and laid out in the 1960s. In a series of attacks, led by liers and deceivers within and without the Church, we have come to this point as a nation
Adultery is now no big deal. Sex and the City portrays Female Chauvenist Pigs. And that is the feminist way to get even with men? To act in the same piggish manner?
Women are degraded far more than they had ever been in history. In the 1950s and 1960s, women without anything on appeared in magazines. And even then, certain areas were airbrushed away. Then the perverts and sexual deviants started adding men to the pictures and soon after, they were having sex.
It’s gone too far. I’m not buying a lot of publications because of the hyper-sexualization of most media. I’m tired of looking at magazine covers on guitar magazines with scantily clad women on them. I have stopped buying a lot. I have stopped watching a lot. And, I’ve had to throw a few books in the trash for their unexpected trashy content. In one case, I had sent an e-mail to the author who begged off on some excuse. No more excuses.
I go to maybe two movies a year. Catholics, at least, should reject 90% of what passes for entertainment today. I suggest putting in your free time, if you have any, into pursuing things that are wholesome and Godly.
Peace,
Ed
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livnlern
Guest
Ed, you make a lot of good points. And I remember when things were different in our country. When I was a little girl I had a friend whose parents were divorced. She wasn’t even allowed to talk about it with me and we were best friends. But divorce wasn’t nearly as commonplace or as accepted as it is today, which is really sad. Now, just in the news today they’re talking about whether the institution of marriage is obsolete. Can you imagine?
As for the way women are portrayed in movies and TV, it’s very shameful. And the worst part about it is that the women don’t even realize they’re being used. They think they’re liberated and that women that don’t approve of their actions are prudes.
Many things in our society are upside down. It all seems normal until you scratch the surface and see all the filth.
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LittleSoldier
Guest
Then please document it. I’ll be watching for the post.
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