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* Sarcasm, not to be taken literally.
The vast majority of us Catholics have essentially decided to try to ignore the Snappers of the world and hope they go away... it has not been a very effective tactic.
I'm pretty much with you snapper. To think that people actually believe a single parent is as capable of raising a well-adjusted, moral child, as is a mother and father is really silly. Of course there are many exceptions, but the decline of the traditional nuclear family is a bad thing.
Later tonight I will try to write something up.
Well, you guys can't have it both ways. The same people who scoffed at the allegations of the polls being skewed also told us the debate would matter little or not at all.
What?? Are you too proud to ask forgiveness? Although I'm far from Catholic, I'm not being facetious. If you don't think you've been a good person, man up and make the change. Its literally as simple as that.
This is a little overstated, except for maybe the Unitarians, speaking as a member of the Mainline Protestants. The Episcopals are pretty liberal too.
No, I go to confession regularly; I ask for forgiveness all the time. But, I'm a sinner, like everybody else. I'm a lot better than I used to be.
But, still, even after your sins have been absolved, a debt remains. Confession removes the spiritual guilt, it doesn't remove the temporal guilt. Purgatory is still necessary to purge us of the sins and attachment to sins we committed in life.
To use a trite example, if you get mad at someone and threw a brick through their window. If you feel bad, and apologize, and they accept, you're forgiven. But, it's still your responsibility to fix the window. Purgatory is "fixing the window" for our sins.
Obviously, there is a lot of variation across denominations, and even parish to parish within denominations.
Some Lutherans are very biblicaly conservative. Some High Church Anglicans are more conservative than the average Catholic, though many of those have been rejoining the Catholic Church recently.
I'd be interested in which denomination you belong to, and what the specific teaching you hear is on issues like abortion, fornication, homosexuality, divorce and remarriage, etc.
Well, except when you look around at the many, many, many adults you know who were raised by single (or re-partnered) parents. Seriously, I think of a random swath of my friends and co-workers, and I see no correlation between well-adjustedness and death-do-us-part parents. And death itself plays a role even today, when fewer parents die young; quite a few people are still raised perfectly good and functional by single and/or stepparents after widowhood.
the fact that she ends up with SPOILER ALERT! her step-brother should have clued the viewer in that it was adapted from an era with slightly different cultural norms
In Emma, Mr Knightley is not a stepbrother, but a brother-in-law. The translation to late-20th-century in Clueless is I think pretty clever in making him into a stepbrother; it's the best analogue for the story. Still one of the best high-school-literary movies, of which there are many good ones.
What if I actually fix the window?
Yes. Good works, prayer, fasting, the prayers of others, even the much maligned "indulgences" (no, you don't have to pay for them) can reduce your time in purgatory.
That's why Catholics pray for, and have Masses said for the dead, to reduce their time in purgatory. If they are in Hell, we can't help them, and if they are in Heaven, they don't need our help.
The confusing part is that there are actually 2 judgements you face. When you die, you face your "particular" judgement; Heaven, Hell or purgatory. Then, at the end of the world, there will be the "Last Judgement" when the fate of every person is revealed to everyone.
What if I actually fix the window?
Then you don't serve time for that sin in purgatory.
The idea tbat single parents of either sex are entirely to blame for their partnerships - legal or otherwise - disintegrating is stupid. The idea that a couple with one or more crappy human beings in it is somehow superior by default to one good, responsible, caring parent is also stupid. (And, anticipating the response, the idea that a single parenti s better by noble default than two good parents is also stupid.)
Maybe then what I was getting at was the single parent (mother, 90% of the time) families that seem to be a direct product of their environment. I think there is a lot more leeway in terms of parent quality for single parent kids who grow up surrounded by good neighbours, go to a decent school, etc., than there is for kids growing up with a single mother in the hood. And it seems a disproportionate amount of single mothers live in the hood.
It's not that every single parent did something blameworthy, or that every child does poorly in a single parent home. We're talking averages, and society wide effects.
But, many single-parent families exist due to bad actions by one of the parents (abandonment, adultery, abuse, etc.), and many could have been avoided by not choosing a particular mate.
Also, on average, children of single parent families do worse on pretty much every achievement and development metric.
The "traditional nuclear family" existed more or less from 1945-1975, plus/minus MOEs.
I've never committed a sin in my life.
I don't know what MOE's are, but how do you figure? Up until the last 20 years, and especially the last 10, the vast majority of western families were made up of married mother and father, and kid(s). Having extended family in the household never affected that definition, at least not my interpretation of it.
I guess you can throw the first stone then ;-)
Uncoincidentally, roughly the overlap between modern medicine and stringent divorce laws: just talking about this country, mind you.
I look just at my own ancestors – granted, a frightful bunch of bohunks on the one side and hillbillies on the other :) – and before my own death-do-us-part parents duly married in 1957, there was every possible arrangment: widows and widowers, kids raised by grandparents and aunts & uncles, miscellaneous attached orphans, children conceived well beyond the vicinity of wedlock, divorces, longterm mistresses and boyfriends, gay & lesbian cousins, you name it. The baby-boom nuclear family is a temporary and often imaginary construct.
MOEs = margins of error.
Your last sentence is doing a *lot* of heavy lifting for you. You're basically saying "the nuclear family has always been the nuclear family, even before it was the nuclear family because I've arbitrarily decided to write my definition of "nuclear family" backwards into time even though there's no historical alignment between the concept as understood in common usage and what existed prior to the post-War period."
The idea of the Daddy-Mommy-children single unit family - the "nuclear family" - evolved in post-War America. It's called "nuclear family" because the idea of the thing developed in the "nuclear age" - post atom bomb and all that.
The conceptualization of family prior to that was far different - extremely extended in agrarian cultures, going back to feudal conceptions of kith and kin before that.
I disregard your attempt to conflate pre-nuclear family standards with nuclear-family standards. You can't just hand-wave away all of history prior and then pretend you've established a "nuclear family" in replacement of that previous history.
It wouldn't be the *first* stone, mind you.
-Every person ever in the history of the world.
Methodist (there are also variations and denominations within this general sect)
Abortion- Fairly strongly against, not as absolute as the Catholics
Fornication- Against. Not a "you will go to hell" prohibition though. Good thing for me.
Homosexuality- Against. Really against. Out of favor now to preach against it though.
Divorce- Against, but again they are not absolutists. You can be divorced and be in the church. Again, a good thing for me.
Then you need counseling.
From a state representative, i.e. someone with real power in this country:
You're too late, he's already threw hundreds of stones before moving on to neck stabbing.
No, prior to the nuclear-family boom of the mid-20th century, most families began as contractual arrangements where daughters were sold to other families and children were bred as either 1) laborers or 2) potential heirs or 3) potential trade chits for other family connections.
The concept of a "family" such as you are nostalgically reifying didn't really pop up until after the Wars. It just didn't. You're writing your preferred conceptualization onto all of history rather than looking at what history really was.
Exactly my meaning.
The key factor was the large majority of children being born to, and raised by a married couple, even if there was death and remarriage in the mix.
Interestingly, when they study children of widow/widower single-parent families, they do just about as well as children of intact married families. Children of never marrieds do the worst, and children of divorce are in between.
I'm pretty sure the "puritans" believed in the idea of the Daddy-Mommy-children single unit family- in fact they saw that as the smallest acceptable household- as far as they were concerned people were not meant to live alone- not even bachelors
It would be wrong to accuse them of racism, naturally.
Abortion- Fairly strongly against, not as absolute as the Catholics
Fornication- Against. Not a "you will go to hell" prohibition though. Good thing for me.
Homosexuality- Against. Really against. Out of favor now to preach against it though.
Divorce- Against, but again they are not absolutists. You can be divorced and be in the church. Again, a good thing for me.
Thank you. So, that's pretty conservative for Methodists, right?
Being the "smallest acceptable household" doesn't make it the *preferred* household. In the 1700s it would have been odd for multiple generations of kin to not live together. The idea of a single Mommy-Daddy-me household would have been as odd and improper to them as the idea of a single mother apparently is to some around here.
Most? OK, I see what I'm dealing with now.
And apparently the debate preps left Obama's staff worried. (from a Ta-Nehisi Coates (piece) From what I gather from the piece, Kerry anticipated Romney's overall style pretty well and Obama seemingly didn't handle it very effectively.
Yes, the human emotion of love only developed in the 20th c. Do you really know that little, or think human emotions change on a dime? For ####'s sake, the ideals of romantic love were commonplace in the Middle Ages.
You're describing the mating behavior of an infinitesimally small population of nobles. The average person throughout history fell in love with some other peasant in the village, got married, and loved their children. Human nature doesn't change like that.
I haven't said a word about "love," jackass. We're talking about "marriage."
Right, but that was arguably the best era in American and world history, coinciding with a far more fair and balanced economy (the "Great Compression" is the term often used), and a more optimistic society with brighter hopes for the future.(*)
Essentially no one thought it wasn't a massive improvement over the decades before, with its nationalisms, extremisms, wars, and genocides -- so it's kind of pointless to say that certain institutions only popped up or thrived from 1945-1975.
(*) Our jaded, cynical, snarky, polarized age is a lesser era, by any serious measurement.
None of which was, typically, consecrated as "marriage" by a church or noted as such by any state.
the average person throughout history fell in love with some other peasant in the village, shacked up, and loved their children.
Children who quite frequently were sent away to work, to live with strangers of extended family, things were very, very often less than nuclear.
I'm sure it's because of something like nuclear-family concepts, or maybe car culture. It couldn't possibly be a random 30 year fluctuation in the million-year history of humanity on the planet. I mean, it was *30 YEARS,* amirite?!
It was no such thing and the suggestion is laughable as history.
"world history"
you do know that the US represented just some 5% of the world's population?
Far more people were living under Communist dictatorships then than now
If you polled the Chinese and Indians, I'm sure you'd find that most would say NOW is better than the 50s-
China may still be a "communist" dictatorship in name, but political repression has not gotten worse- and the economy is far freer now than then- and standards of living fro most has risen
Eastern Europe is far better off now than then
But nobody cares, because no one is interested in reviving that nonsense. They spent the years 1945-75 getting rid of it and celebrating the fact that it had been gotten rid of.
The parties to marriage were supposed to at least like each other and to demonstrate at least enough sexual compatibility to crank out the next generation, but there was also a very strong property aspect to them. I think that to argue the primacy or love or property is to view the Middle Ages through an inappropriate modern lens.
Maybe. But the world will be, and is, worse off with the sunset of the 1945-75 West and its leadership role.
Of course not. It was clearly G*d's will and ####. Silly me.
That's your typical move -- be called on your ########, then smear the people that called you on it as Jesus freaks and God nuts -- even though they haven't said a word about God or Jesus.
Not working.
1: A good chunk of the world still operates that way
2: There are groups (mostly Islamist) who want to re-institute that type of social arrangement in areas where it has... lapsed...
You think? But... IT'S HUMAN NATURE! We know it's human nature because that's the only way Snapper has ever conceived of humanity, and thus, that's the only way humanity has ever existed. It's like, divine and ####.
Actually I am in the United Methodist Church, which is kind of the garden variety Methodist denomination, I think the second largest. Wesleyan influenced. They are relatively liberal, socially, as compared to say, the Baptists.
2: There are groups (mostly Islamist) who want to re-institute that type of social arrangement in areas where it has... lapsed...
And now, because the West has lost its way since 1975, it's more susceptible to that claptrap. We should suspect that things will get worse as the economic ills of our time continue apace.
You haven't called me on anything, son. You haven't even made a cogent argument yet.
Neither of you were actually discussing the issue, rather you were each descending into
No you're wrong it's X
No you're wrong it's not X
### for tat "argument"
Yes, the United States from 1945-75 was just a random historical accident. It was either that, or living like the Australian outback Aboriginals.
Just like I got up this morning, walked around, hopped on some trains, and happened to arrive at work -- in lieu of randomly shooting three people dead.
Well, *you* can't.
It is?
The reason the Islamist are getting so fanatical about re-instating old social norms
is because they are, in fact
LOSING
India has over a million people, for most of recorded history, family relations in India could fairly be described as
"contractual arrangements where daughters were sold* to other families and children were bred as either 1) laborers or 2) potential heirs or 3) potential trade chits for other family connections."
that has only really begin breaking down for most of India within the past 30 years, after your 1945-75 time frame.
Look, whether or not the "West" has lost or will lose its leading role in the world is almost immaterial, we've already corrupted/infected the rest of the world with ideas like democracy, free speech, religious freedom, the scientific method, etc etc etc- oh sure there has been and will continue to be pushback, but the genie is out of the bottle and it's not going back in.
*Actually in India families had to pay other families to take the girls off their hand, but you get the idea.
Sam is not the only person here.
And the Enlightenment is a direct result of caffeine, imported as Tea and Coffee from India and other colonies.
As for the rest of this Snapper-Drive-By. Correlation is not causation, and the reason single parents have it bad is because they don't have the RESOURCES to devote time to both raising their families and providing food for them. Back in the Nukular Family era - you still had teenagers knocking each other up. The difference is that they got married, stayed married, unhappym bitter and abusive (abused). Not that great on the kids either, but hey that which does not kill you...
A Funny time USA 1945-1975. Really... that last 7 years or so doesn't really count - it's of course the anti-war protests and feminist movement that cracked this egg wide open. But a rotten egg is a rotten egg. You want to be Black or Latino in 1967? Or a woman? Or gay? Hell, just go watch Mad Men -- or even Dolly Parton in 9 to 5 (early 80s). Is Snapper's point just the inverse of "Hitler was good at the beginning, but then he went too far" -- Freedom and Equality were good at the beginning -- until the great enlightened christian ideas culminated in the perfection that was 1955 Topeka Kansas, but now they've gone too far.
If society / western civilization must be destroyed to prevent forcing these (now) protected classes to live as second-class citizens, then it deserves a painful death.
Who are you, Dr Evil?
Sure. You had every reason to believe the future would be very bright, for yourself and for your "group." You would have been correct.
Freedom and Equality were good at the beginning -- until the great enlightened christian ideas culminated in the perfection that was 1955 Topeka Kansas, but now they've gone too far.
Christianity -- the fundamentalist wacko kind -- is a much bigger part of political life today than it was in, say 1965. Measured by susceptibility to nutjob ideas, we've declined dramatically since then. Look at the wide swaths of people who are anti-science and who affirmatively avert their eyes from science now, and compare that to the mid-60s and the faith in science and progress that prevailed.
Hell, just go watch Mad Men -- or even Dolly Parton in 9 to 5 (early 80s).
Go watch Compliance today.
This is a very common sentiment. And wrong. Very very wrong. For white heterosexual males living in the US it is perhaps true, but for pretty much every other demographic it is really wrong.
Are you suggesting Blacks, GLBTQ, Hispanics, Asians, and Women (Even in the US) would rather live in the 1945 to 1974 time periodf than today? You do realize that world wide violence is pretty much at an all time low right? Technology at a high?
Income, productivity, overall life expectancy, education levels, literacy rates, infant mortality and availability of porn all are MUCH higher than in the 1945 to 1974 time period. It takes some rose colored glasses (and being a white heterosexual male in the US) to think that time period was better than today.
So I have listed plenty of measurements where today is better than then - are they all unserious?
The Post WWII era was a historical anomoly (The rest of the world recovering from WWII being a big part of it). The US was king of the hill and it was great to be a heterosexual white male from the USA then. This is not news, but it does not make that time period some golden age.
Consumerism. You forgot consumerism, which is one of our greatest "gifts" to the world. It is the most successful 'isms' ever.
Holy crap.
This always gets conveniently ignored during all of these Archie "those were the days" lectures.
Plus it wasn't white heterosexual males living in the US. It was white middle class middle aged or older protestant males living in the US that had the good times from 1945 to 1975.
:-)
It does for White Hetero Males
Not that I agree with the premise (in fact, it's ridiculous), but I fail to see the point of this disclaimer. Do "white hetero males" not count? IS your methodology utilitarian ... or something else?
white middle class middle aged or older Catholic males living in the US didn't have it so bad either...
Well you still had hate groups like the KKK not being overly fond of you, but yeah, compared to someone living in Bombay at the time things were pretty swell.
Seriously. Wow.
The KKK was being progressively marginalized as the 1945-75 time frame rolled along, and I'm pretty sure they didn't really operate in areas that had large numbers of white (non-hispanic) Catholics
I have no idea if they are right or wrong and, as a man married to a professional woman and one who teaches a lot of women, I like today over that period. But women weren't oppressed in nearly the same way that minorities were.
The ####### ####### Catholic church routinely executed people, in dramatic fashion, for exploring and writing about taboo ideas (like math, physiology, and science). That's the opposite of an institution devoted to advancing human knowledge. Snapper's position on this is in that middle ground between religious zealotry and outright lying.
Nor were all blacks, latinos, or gays miserable in 1967 or 1974. That's a bizarre conceit constructed by people with ideology, rather than understanding, in mind.
1920s-1930s UK* had a very skewed male/female ratio (there was a reason for it, on the tip of my tongue), I'm not sure the 20s and 30s were more conservative there- in fact Labor gained the PM office for the first time ever in the 30s
*As did France and Germany, and even Italy... hmmm, there was some kind of reason for that...
Well, perhaps Bill Cosby enjoyed himself.
Yes, every single black American was perpetually and permanently unhappy until 2008. Since then, every day has been eternal bliss for every single one.
I don't think the standard is that a person must be always unhappy every single day of their life during a time period.
This really is a stupid argument.
Also, the conservative vs. liberal has nothing to do with our countries view that labor is a liberal political point. The author was not saying that it favored what the Democratic party stands for vs what the Republican party stands for.
I suspect that if participation in religious organizations declines, other social organizations will develop to take their place and serve the same social function. Caligula wouldn't have been such a bad guy had he had access to support groups, reality programming like 'Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew,' and the newsfeed from 500 Facebook friends.
For age 20-44, the male:female ratio was 96.2:100 in 1950 and 95.1:100 in 1970 (source), which doesn't seem to line up with anything.
Not all. But I'm pretty sure, like most times you talk about history, you're not drawing on empirical accounts of the people who lived through the era to inform your analysis. I think this is in the realm of "ignoring facts you find inconvenient". African Americans who had just left the segregated south during the Great Migration, for instance, weren't exactly met by thriving economic opportunities in their new homes, nor were they always welcomed by tolerant white folks happy to have more bodies competing for the same jobs. This was the high point for institutional racism, FFS. Why would you pretend it's otherwise?
Well, everyone's inflation adjusted salaries are worse now than in 1975. Doesn't mean it was Good Times for a ton of groups from 1945 to 1975.
I remember reading a piece (In the Atlantic I think), written by an American author who live din London fro a few years in the 50s, mentioned done thing he noticed was a huge number of childless middle aged single women, not divorced/widowed, but women who'd never been married, very active in clubs and "causes" and so on, he termed them busybodies, and thought it was very odd, wondered what had gone on in English culture to cause this- says he mentioned this to someone when he got back in the US, and noted that he thought it likely had to do with greater numbers of male homosexuals in the UK- except he hadn't really noted any more of them in the UK than in the US...
His friend stared at him, "single middle aged women????"
"yes"
"never married, no children?"
"Yes"
"and you think it may be because the men there don't like women?"
"Well, I don't know, but what else could it be?"
"Did you ever hear of a little dust up called World War One?"
The author then said he literally slapped himself in the head.
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