Jubbergun wrote:
Because most of LBJ's "War on Poverty" policies are/were the type of out-of-control social spending that's helped contribute to our current socio-economic mess
This is an ignorant viewpoint. America has the least social spending relative to our economic capacity of any first-world country and atm we are in the most tenuous position financially of any.
Before the Vietnam War, social spending was much higher. Public education was cheaper and less influenced by the private sector. The government spent a great deal on civil RnD and healthcare. Then again I bet you think that polio and smallpox were wiped out by HMOs. Amirite?
France and Germany are taking over Europe in large part due to their aggressive social programs. And I and everyone else who reads this knows that you will respond with a "NO U" response consisting of vague generalizations/fallacious cliches about European laziness/dependency and Googled statistics sans understanding of factual reality.
The mess we're in began during LBJ's time due to:
1) diminished social investment (privatization of health, R&D and education)
2) military bloat (devouring capital, talent and resources)
3) the Vietnam War (which monopolized the nation's attention to the exclusion of social problems and destroyed hundreds of thousands of young American lives)
4) the waning of unsustainable American economic dominance as the EU and Japan finished recovering from WWII
5) exporting of jobs to former EU colonies that had built enough primary infrastructure to support factories
6) excessive capitalization resulting in stagflation
7) fundamental changes in the economy due to automation, factory farming and diminished natural resources (why "40 acres and a mule" or "get a job at the widget factory" don't work anymore)
The "social spending" bullshit is propaganda blared from the TV sets at useful idiots whom the fat cats want to continue to press more concessions from. Useful idiots like simple answers to complex problems because it lets them be lazy and ignorant rather than read a book and educate themselves, and are willing to vote against their interests if doing so allows them to be lazy.
Jubbergun wrote:
and because that was the most blatant smear-by-loosely-associating ad I've ever seen. They must not have invented subtlety until the 70s.
Half right. Voters actually tried to think about things back then.
Jubbergun wrote:
Not to mention that judging a political platform from...what, 50-60 years ago...by today's moral/ethical standards is silly.
What you really don't get is that the ad wasn't aimed at white audiences, it was aimed at blacks, and its only purpose was to scare people into voting for a given candidate
I have a bunch of posters and other materials like this, propaganda aimed at Northerners or even (as in this case) Europeans who hated the KKK not because they're bigots but because they represent an entire way of life that is offensive to civilized people (of which bigotry is a part).
So what's your basis for saying that? You're provably wrong.
Is there something you saw or read that gave you the idea that's true, or did you just begin with your ideological ideas from television and then reconstruct the history etc of which you're 100% ignorant (and by 100%, I mean "you have never touched a book written by or about that period that isn't purely political, so you have absolutely no facts at all on which to base anything you might believe") assuming that it would JUST HAVE TO BE what would corroborate the beliefs you get from TV and the army?
And I'm going to make you look REALLY stupid here. Get ready. Southern blacks couldn't vote in elections at the time, and Northern blacks wouldn't ever vote for Goldwater. Not to mention that black voter turnout, then as now, was so low as to be utterly insignificant. Losing a fraction of white voters was (and is) infinitely worse than swinging any plausible number of black voters.
You focus on the "BLACK PPL" part of the advert but you ignore that the speaker (who is not the individual quoted) disdains "Catholicism" and "Judaism". In fact if you listen to the video again you'll notice his intonation suppresses his mention of blacks while calling out the latter two groups more loudly. What HAS changed since the 60s is that the discrimination between WASPs and Catholics/Jews is no longer a social force.
So yes, the target of the advert (were it shown) would have been white Jews and Catholics.
We're digressing from the point I made by linking the video. You can't detach a movement from the policies it advocates.
