[extropy-chat] can't second guess history

[Mike Lorrey]

--- Olga Bourlin <fauxever at sprynet.com> wrote:

> From: Ned Late
> 
> > I don't think that the decade of the '50s was merely a repressive
> nightmare.
> 
> Well, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "repressive nightmare,"
> but widespread housing discrimination, so-called "miscegenation" laws
> (in some states), lynchings, outright discrimination against gay
> people (just about everywhere), unequal rights where women were
> concerned, prayers led by teachers in some public schools, de jure
> segregation in the Southern states, unequal access to law schools and
> medical schools (and the like), hardly any diversity in politics,
> movies, television, books (other than the WASP model), illegal
> abortions (out of necessity) - coupled with no really effective birth
> control, no real undertanding, concern or protection against corporal
> child abuse and sexual child abuse, no protection for women against
> sexual harrassment in the workplace, the McCarthy witch hunts ...
> will this do for a start?  Of course, not every family was
> "repressed" (especially if they conformed and/or were of the "innie"
> variety), but the repressions - and many nightmares - were cruelly
> real for many, many people.  

Outside of the McCarthyism, everything else you speak of existed long
before the 50's. In fact, it was the 50's when all of these things
started getting questioned.

As for McCarthyism, it is now a proven fact that all of McCarthy's
accusations were accurate. The release of the Venona files in the last
decade document who was and was not a Soviet spy, and documents the
fact that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations specifically
suppressed this evidence because it implicated their own people (Alger
Hiss and Harry Dexter White, among others). The only outrageous thing
about that issue was the fact that Democrats were able to get away with
their histrionics and treason.
> 
> > Besides we're second-guessing history, the '40s were even worse,
> what with WWII. Perhaps we should have avoided that big ugly war with
> a pax Germania & pax Nippon?
> 
> Well, I wasn't comparing decades - and I was talking principally
> about life in the United States (not what was happening in Germany,
> Japan or - horror of horrors - Stalingrad - all undeniably sad
> episodes in world history), but since you brought this up (and from
> the American perspective) - certainly, some things got better in the
> 1950s (e.g., desegregation of the military, polio vaccine was
> discovered), but some things got worse (women didn't work outside the
> home as much as they had done in the 1940s).  
> 
> Olga
> 
> > _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo/extropy-chat
> 


=====
Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                      -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=Sadomikeyism


		
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