RIP fairness doctrine.
I can’t fault this logic.
And if it wasn’t Reagan, you have pretty good odds it was Nixon.
btwn the two of them (correct me if I’m wrong, just going from memory): raised housing costs, stopped social benefits, criminalized drugs, were against worker’s rights & minimum wage, against universal healthcare, overall made life harder for everyone except the upper class
Casual reminder that Nixon set his federal minimum wage at something he considered unreasonably, insultingly low, and that was $12 per hour adjusted for inflation.
They gave us EVERY. SINGLE. PROBLEM. that they said socialism would cause.
And if it wasn’t Nixon just choose literally any other (former) Republican president.
* Former in parentheses for future reference
Any post-Nixon one, anyway. The list before him is fairly non-objectionable. Lincoln. Grant. Roosevelt. Hoover. Eisenhower. I guess Taft through Coolidge were fairly forgettable, by today’s standards.
I don’t know about that. Woodrow Wilson was a major factor in the regression after reconstruction. It’s important to remember that democrats before the 1930s were the conservative party.
While it wasn’t popular at the time, Wilson’s decision to enter WW1 was actually the best thing for American interests in particular and worldwide democratic reform in general.
People really don’t understand exactly how fucked in the head Kaiser Wilhelm and his allies were. Absolute monarchies could very well still be the world wide norm without the decisive, undeniable loss of the Central Powers to the liberal nations.
Does that decision undo all the harm he did? Who knows?
Fun Fact: Kaiser William handed Russia over to Lenin.
I’m not talking about Wilson entering the war. I’m talking about how he had the showing of Birth of a Nation, giving legitimacy to the Klu Klux Klan leading to their resurgence. He was also president during the Palmer Raids, and refused to join the League of Nations
Wilson was literally the architect of the League of Nations, and by far its greatest champion in America. He, however, was only President in the first place because the Republicans had split their party on the national stage despite having a strong Congressional majority and his hope of drumming up public support for the League was dashed when his failing health lead to a series of strokes he suffered campaigning for its acceptance.
I don’t think you can blame him entirely for the resurgence of the KKK, especially since at its heart it was, and still is, a pyramid scheme first and a terrorist organization second (I’d suggest listening to the Behind the Bastards episode on them for details), but he’s such a weird figure in American history precisely because he combined such disastrous internal policy with an objectively good global legacy, a mirror of his democratic idealism tarnished by personal bigotry.
Hank’s Law
What is Hank’s law, no charcoal bbq-ing?
Hank’s law is when you die in the middle of nowhere by Nazis because you got pranked by your brother-in-law.
That sounds worse than Cole’s Law.
I rewatched Ozymandias a couple of weeks ago. Still painful to watch because Walter is being such a dumbass and because Hank and Gomez…
Man, the acting is good though.
On the other hand you’ll be left way more often than you’ll be right
This was a much more confusing statement when I misread it as “Ronald McDonald”.
Also Thatcher if you’re from the UK
Or, now Boris (Maybe Cameron)
Thatcher : Reagan :: Boris : Trump
But Cameron should not escape blame
Yeah, I actually think the lasting impact of Cameron’s Brexit will be more damaging than Boris’s tenure.
For sure. Brexit was in large part Cameron’s attempt to court UKIP votes
The dog shat on the rug, much that we’d both love to that’ll be a bit of a challenge to pin on Ronnie boy.
I’d take it a step further than Reagan, and point the finger directly at Jerry Falwell. A lot of his money paid Reagan.
Reagan and Bush Jr. If it wasn’t for Bush Jr. then we’d have started on climate change, and stem cells would be much farther along in research
Climate change inaction is actually pretty firmly in the laps of corporations. ExxonMobil knew climate change was being caused by human use of fossil fuels, but instead of continuing their research on biofuels during the oil crisis, they fired all the researchers and hid their scientific research.
Yes but their propaganda campaign worked a lot better when the VP was an oil executive and the President was spreading it for them.
Don’t know why you got down voted though. You’re right.
Also, a certain multi-trillion dollar war that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and incredible damage to US moral authority.
Not like anyone should have a moral authority.
Moral authority simply means the reputation of being in-line with one’s morals.
Yeah that’s a given though
Trump was a big dumb animal.
Reagan knew how to fuck shit up. Competent malice.
Reagan was a dumb animal too. He just was less hostile towards his handlers.
I’d argue that incompetent malice has been pretty effective at fucking shit up too.
Trump made the culture worse with his rhetoric, but was thankfully a legislative failure. He passed all of 1 piece of meaningful legislation, a hand out to the rich. His SCOTUS appointments were McConnell’s achievement.
Reagan got his grotesque agenda passed, and succeeded in getting his “opposition” party to take the corporate bribe money, abandon unions in all but rhetoric, and go full neoliberal into today.
We haven’t had an anti reaganomics, trickle down, rigged capitalist economic President from either party since. Now our 2 party’s largely align on the economic issues that exacerbate the social issues and fight over those.
That is Reagans legacy, setting the table for the owner class to siphon every last crumb from the peasants in perpetuity, both in legislative framework, and cultural acceptance.
Because in “turning the bull loose,” you just became a temporarily embarrassed millionaire, amirite?
I would argue all the judges nominated and confirmed will have implications lasting multiple lifetimes.
At least under Reagan, many of these policies had never been tested.
Republicans of today are several orders of magnitude worse. We’ve now witnessed the damage of trickle-down economics, of vilifying “pinko commies”, of ignoring a global pandemic… And yet they do it anyway.
It may be tempting to think that, but those policies all had precedent. Trickle-down just used to be called ‘Horse-and-sparrow’ economics. We had red scares before, and each of them were just as stupid, if not moreso (the one time we actually should have been wary, in the early-mid 40s, we were blithely complacent - go figure). And prior influenza epidemics and the spread of longer-term diseases had shown the danger of taking a lackadaisical approach to public health.
Reagan wasn’t the birth of these policies - he was just the one most successful in lodging them long-term into the rotting craw of American politics.
Reagan figured out that if you tell people what they want to hear, you can get away with anything.
Thank you for providing more historical context. It just shows how much worse it was / is.
Fuck… Politics just sucks in the US
My father was kind of a low level fixer in California politics.
He tended to vote Republican but regarded Reagan as a marginally literate moron.
After Reagantard reached the presidency in 1980, part of his obscene transfer of wealth to the rich brought on taxation of some of social security income.
One day I was talking to my father and kind out of nowhere he said, “Fuck Ronald Reagan.”
I don’t think anyone in the family voted RepubliKKKlan after that. For a lot of reasons. One of those reasons was his refusal to treat the rise of AIDS seriously.
Smart family. If only more in this country were capable of seeing the slow-motion disaster happening in front of our eyes.
I get that we are both if a certain age but can you please consider not using terms related to retardation when you mean stupid?
I feel like Americans online throw this word around a lot more than anyone else. It’s absolutely not an acceptable word to use here (UK) and I can’t remember the last time I heard anyone use it.
In 2008 while railing against political correctness Sarah Palin, the dipshit republican vice presidential candidate, popularized the idea that it wasn’t ok to use retarded as an insult.
Do brits still use spaz/spastic?
I haven’t heard anyone use those words for many years, no doubt there’s still people that do though.
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It’s about being respectful. Using someone’s condition they can’t control as a descriptor is (at least in my opinion) disrespectful.
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…which is made significantly more awkward by you pointing to the other side of the room you’re in
I mean, in a broad sense we can’t really control any aspect of ourselves. We live in a deterministic universe. The real reason to stop using ‘retard’ and related terms is because of how vilely they’ve been used in relatively recent history to denigrate people with genuine mental disabilities.
I miss those kind of conservatives. The ones with brains and principals.
That’s the problem with the modern GOP - it’s not compatible with having brains or principles.
…but if you like perpetually terrified dumb, bigoted culture war nonsense, have I got a bridge to sell you.
The GOP has been braindead my entire adult lifetime… So over 30 years AT LEAST. Some would argue it goes further back than that.
I personally think they went through a meaningful shift from being evil but effective in their own way (in advancing their own agenda not in solving actual problems) to transparently stupid, and - genuinely unhinged Jewish space lasers, nuking tornadoes, drinking bleach, buying Greenland, and staring directly into the sun.
They’ve gone from cynically exploiting culture war nonsense to advance class war to believing their propaganda and losing the plot - I think the rise of the tea party was the inflection point.
I’m more pissed at Nixon and Kaiser Permanente.
I don’t know about anything else, but I stubbed my toe last week and I’m going to blame it on Ronald Reagan instead of me not looking where I was going. From now on, anything bad in my life- Reagan did it. Like she said, that’s probably more likely true anyway.
But seriously… It’s all Reagan’s fault. Everything from now on. No more Trump’s fault, Reagan’s fault.
ClEvEr
If it wasn’t for Reagan, anti-toe-stubbing technology would be much further along than it is today.
He was going to invest in American anti-toe stubbing infrastructure, but he was too busy killing gay men.
I mean he does have a time machine and never died so he may have moved that object just to mess with you.
I knew it!
