I thought I had the gist from skimming it.

I never claimed to have read the whole thing until after my second reply. If this hurts my credibility in your mind, so be it.

This article was pretty worthless IMO. Generalizations, spurious causation, and logical leaps run amok.

The guy sounds like a cynical, bitter old man on a wild rant. If you identify with his thinking....I'm sorry for you.

__________________

Congratulations President-Elect Obama

Bullshit and fear-mongering.

Patriotism doesn't belong to certain "areas" or "regions".

A contempt for militarism and war used to be conservative values. They were elected to end the Korean War, and end the Vietnam War.

Obama's stance on Iraq was the correct one.

The 5 Secretary of States who were featured in a special last week all agreed that their should be high level talks at the Sec. of State level with Iran. I'm sick of Palin and others continuing to misconstrue one bad soundbite Obama gave 8 months ago, which he cleared up immediately after that debate. I want someone to ask Palin, on the spot, "Name a precondition? What is a precondition?". She'll stand there blanked-face as usual.

Lawrence Summers got the boot after suggesting that maybe it was because women had "smaller brains than men", which is the stupidest argument ever made to back up a subtle prejudice that does not hold up to scientific scrutiny.

This whole piece is just more subtle hate-mongering from yet another whitey who is insecure about a black man who's about to win the Presidency.

The only thing to fear is fear itself, losers.

I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at. Is the implication here that I've been so brainwashed by my far left education that I don't even realize I'm far left? In response to that I would argue that (1) That argument probably doesn't apply to me personally because a) a large part of my education was Catholic and b) I basically held the education system in disdain for most of my life and was determined to form my opinions based on my own intellectual efforts rather than by listening to someone who I didn't believe was as smart as I was, it wasn't until I grew up a little that I realized how little I actually knew, but I digress. (2) Describing something as far left doesn't make it so, like it or not the entire spectrum has shifted to the left and the moderates of today would have been the far left of fifty years ago.

Let's also be clear on one point, this is not an economic line we're talking about. The 'cultural revolution' that began in the 60's was overwhelmingly about social issues, now this may go hand in hand with a shift in economic thinking I'm not really interested in arguing that here because I don't think that it's what the author is talking about. That's why I don't think the argument can be made that this cultural shift was not a positive one, because the social changes were right (correct), it's like arguing that the cultural climate of the 1950's was not backwards, well, by today's standards, yes it was.

Well, I named myself for Tiberius Gracchus, not for Cato the Censor. The fact is, a lot of the problems that Romans experienced in the late Republic arose because they failed to upgrade their institutions and customs to deal with the changed material reality that came with empire. That's why they kept having to go outside the law and the unwritten constitution. The Gracchi were maybe the first to see this, the way the enrichment of the Senatorial class and the richest Knights had driven a lot of small farmers off their land and created a class of urban poor, and they proposed unprecedented actions to deal with this unprecedented situation. After them, the system kept breaking down and having to be patched, with Marius' multiple successive consulships, Sulla's dictatorship, Pompey's repeated special commands and privileges, the First Triumvirate, Caesar's dictatorship for life, and finally the transformation into a disguised monarchy under Augustus. If the Romans had been less conservative, more willing to change, the Republic might have survived in altered form.

Unless they're particularly into history, why should they be? Really, it's axiomatic that the previous crisis era gives no clues as to how to deal with the current one, or what changes should be made. Imagine that you were a young man facing the Depression in the 1930s. Maybe a Brain Truster in FDR's administration. The crisis era before that one was the Civil War and Reconstruction. How many lessons could arise from that period that had any relevance to the economic breakdown followed by global war that people faced in FDR's time? Slavery wasn't an issue, nor were states trying to secede, sectionalism still existed but it was under control and hardly the main problem. One problem the Civil War solved was that the forces of industry had been partly shackled in the interested of protecting the planter class against the rising commercial elite -- but since the problem in the Depression arose from capitalism run amok, setting industry free was hardly the right approach.

I guess I can understand feeling like young people today don't understand the struggles we faced back in the day, but surely every generation feels that way. I know I heard plenty of that from my parents and uncles and aunts when I was young.

Only 48, eh? Still a baby . . .