Nov 2023 Mod notice:
There may be other, more specific, threads about some aspects of US politics, but this one tends to act as a hub for all sorts of related news and information, so it's usually one of the busiest OTC threads.
If you're new to OTC, it's worth reading the Introduction to On-Topic Conversations
and the On-Topic Conversations debate guidelines
before posting here.
Rumor-based, fear-mongering and/or inflammatory statements that damage the quality of the thread will be thumped. Off-topic posts will also be thumped. Repeat offenders may be suspended.
If time spent moderating this thread remains a distraction from moderation of the wiki itself, the thread will need to be locked. We want to avoid that, so please follow the forum rules
when posting here.
In line with the general forum rules, 'gravedancing' is prohibited here. If you're celebrating someone's death or hoping that they die, your post will get thumped. This rule applies regardless of what the person you're discussing has said or done.
Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
![]()
Also Iran-Contra, stealing Carter's debate notes, Star Wars, and negotiating with terrorists to release hostages only after he beat Carter in order to make Carter look bad and himself good.
edited 12th Dec '16 1:44:53 PM by TrashJack
"Cynic, n. — A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be." - The Devil's DictionaryRonald "Facts are Stupid Things" Reagan is probably the one American who singlehandedly did more damage to the nation than any individual since Jefferson Davis/Robert E. Lee/Strom Thurmond and their satanic spawn. It is a criminal shame that this man was made into a hero to the extent that even Democrats have to praise him, charlatan that he was
.
As poorquentyn says:
And lest we forget, this all happened w/in the context of the Southern Strategy. Reagan never missed an opportunity to filter his policies through the lens of racial revanchist rage: the man supported tax breaks for segregated schools, added “welfare queens” and “young bucks” to the Black People = Lazy Moochers lexicon, and declared his support for “state’s rights” in the same damn town where three Freedom Summer activists were murdered in 1964. Reagan’s defining move was to make his followers feel better about the holes the ‘60s and ‘70s poked in their conception of America, papering over the contradictions exposed in those years, establishing the notion that the real problems were liberal elites imposing their will and black folks getting all uppity. He linked, even more consistently and emphatically than Nixon did, taxes and regulations and social spending to racial and cultural resentment, using tribalist appeals to systematically roll back benefits and representation for working people. Young Republicans watched and learned, and that’s why someone as truly, breathtakingly radical as Paul Ryan is not only in charge, but frequently considered moderate. Reagan pushed the Overton Window dangerously to the right, and after he stepped aside, his proteges stepped up and kept on pushing.
Above all, though, Reagan was a crook, in ways that again would make even Nixon blush. Iran-Contra was the worst of it, the epitome of all that was cynical, myopic, and blood-soaked in the Cold War, but that’s far from the whole story.The sheer amount of Reagan senior officials who left office under an ethical cloud…he transformed the executive branch into a racket, a hustle, a looting of taxpayer resources, taking Nixon’s singular model and turning it into the way the White House does business.
Finally, there’s the way he ignored AIDS even as it ballooned into an unimaginable horror. For that alone, I wished I believed in hell so I could imagine Ronald Reagan there. (“Moral Majority,” what a sick fucking joke!) His Administration, his movement, and his worldview made my country a dramatically worse place to live. “Morning in America” was a lie; Reagan’s election represented night falling on the postwar promise, the gears of government turning fully against the not-rich and the not-white, as the smiling sleaze in charge told the crowds this was how America was always meant to be. To borrow Hunter Thompson’s encapsulation of his writing on Nixon: “I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.”
This article by cracked is also spot on
. Remember Reagan's campaign slogan in 1980 was "Let's make America Great Again". As an actor he did one good performance, Don Siegel's The Killers, where he played the villain, a Corrupt Corporate Executive who slaps around his mistress. Reagan hated that movie because he played the bad guy (whereas real actors enjoy playing villains) but the truth is he revealed himself in that movie.
I was born in the '80s, so I'm a bit young to remember the Reagan era. But watching old Johnny Carson reruns from the '80s has been really enlightening. LOTS of jokes were made about the Reagan administration, including how the economy wasn't doing so hot (heck, one sketch about "children's letters to Santa" concerned a kid who told Santa that they didn't have enough money for gifts that year!), the aforementioned scandals, and the corruption/incompetence. Sometimes, in order to avoid the Nostalgia Filter, you have to go back and look at what was actually said at the time.
edited 12th Dec '16 2:08:09 PM by speedyboris
Documents contemporary with whatever president you're talking about are always illuminating. Turning someone into a hero or a villain usually comes later than the period they were in charge. I'm just glad we have better and better technology for recording this kind of thing.
@Julian: ok, seriously, please refrain from referring to anyone as "satanic" anything. I get that you're frustrated and distressed. But if you're going to double down on that kind of language you're going to fall into the same trap many conservatives do when talking about us. It also becomes very hard to take you seriously when you're referring to someone's satanic spawn. That kind of phrasing isn't legitimate commentary on whether or not someone was bad or good. It's language designed to elicit an emotional response, not a thoughtful, logical one.
edited 12th Dec '16 2:21:40 PM by AceofSpades
It was during the Reagan era that the whole nostalgia for the 50s...or a pretend version of the 50s...started. The '80s was just an all around terrible decade for the USA. The first time when American cinema started to truly suck and music became really bad...I actually was really puzzled when many people started talking about "80s Nostalgia" in the last two years. I mean 50s nostalgia is bad enough but it does make some sense because there was a lot of interesting things happening in that decade if you know where to look (50s Hollywood cinema which these days is considered the best era, Early Rock music, EC Comics and the Civil Rights Movement and early LGBT movements, and the rise of arthouse cinema), but I can't think of any silver lining in the 80s, aside from I guess, me being born at the end of that decade. Okay you had video games but that came from Japan while America's game industry ended in a landfill in New Mexico, and the Personal Computer Revolution kicked in during the 90s.
So many people died of AIDS (and somehow that doesn't get a single mention anywhere), the USA backed Apartheid on the last legs, and it was Cuba that came to save the day.For the folks in Eastern Europe, Poland, Czech Republic and Germany it ended on a bright spot with the end of the Cold War, and independence and reunification, but for the Russians, it was the beginning of their worst decade since the Tsarist days, the decade of Yeltsin and Co., where the mortality rate reached a million...Why We're Bummed Communism Fell is a trope for a reason. Then you have Chernobyl there and the disaster in Afghanistan, the Iran Iraq War...it's just awful.
Politically this was just an appalling setback that America never truly recovered from. Obama came close to trying and doing that, but now that Trump has arrived, the Reagan era will continue unperturbed. Obama will be a second Ulysses Grant who followed Andrew Johnson and tried to introduce a multicultural modern and advanced country, and as an Internal Reformist try and carefully back away from the American Empire, only to have his legacy and reputation tarnished by his enemies.
edited 12th Dec '16 2:20:08 PM by JulianLapostat
![]()
Damn false friends, those words sound basically the same.
In any case, we still need to refrain from referring to anyone as Satanic or other similarly demonizing language. We are perfectly capable of talking about the evils Republican politicians do without turning them into literal demons. We can't fall into the same trap we accuse the opposition of.
First off, there was nothing to "recover" from, really, just the march of time and the political pendulum swinging about. Shit happens, and we deal with it one way or another. And I very much doubt that Obama will become Ulysses S. Grant. For one thing, we did not just come out of a Civil War. Frankly, I find that comparison far less apt than the Civil Rights movement. Like, seriously, why do we immediately go to the fucking Civil War when the Civil Rights movement is both more recent and more relevant regarding the sorts of things we're going to have to do?
Although if you're hoping Trump gets impeached like Johnson did, well, we can all hope for that, I guess. Pretty sure the guy didn't lose his presidency over it though.
![]()
I think you need to brush up on your timeline. Computers and games weren't suddenly turned Japanese by the suicide of Atari.
Just consoles.
Also, you might need to do some digging into why Atari imploded in spectacular fashion and why there wasn't sufficient competition in either America, France or Britain (hint: it's called "badly run protective monopoly").
edited 12th Dec '16 2:29:29 PM by Euodiachloris
![]()
![]()
It was a good decade for Argentina, we kicked out our last dictatorship (and since that date it's been the longest period without military-backed interruptions of democracy) and we got our best president in history.
Well people who suffer from AIDS certainly do have to deal with it one way or another. That virus could have spread to fewer people if the government cared about people.
Jamelle Bouie and others have already made that comparison. Ulysses Grant was the President who shut down the Klan, promoting freedmen and the votes for African-Americans, who tried to form friendly relations with native tribes and reverse centuries of bad blood and honor treaties again, and his government has the tag of corruption mainly because he was a President who cared to clamp down on corruption regardless of partisanship and ended up getting Mis-blamed for it. He was no Reagan who went all "Aw shucks" over the Iran-Contra affair and walked away to kick another puppy. After Grant you had 1876, the worst year in American politics until the Reagan years and the end of the Glory Days of the Republican Party which became the first in a notorious line of ci-devant left parties willing to throw under the bus the same African-Americans whose rights they fought for the previous decade just to get the WWC vote.
Obama similarly tried to end and reverse the Bush and by extension the Reagan era...including mass incarceration (the seeds for which were planted in St. Ronnie's term), police assaults on African-Americans, defusing the American Empire via Cuban Thaw and the Iran N-Deal, climate chang and generally trying to uphold a clean era of governance. That ends with Trump on the scene. 2016 is another 1876, 140 years apart.
The fact is the Civil Rights Movement is part of the continuum of the the struggle which began with the Civil War. Modern America was born in the Civil War/Reconstruction/Jim Crow...the political struggles we have today are more or less still couched in the rhetoric and language of that time. The Civil Rights era definitely was.
![]()
And the Back to the Future trilogy. And the original Indiana Jones trilogy. And ET: The Extra-Terrestrial. And The Secret of N.I.M.H.. And The Land Before Time. And Dragon's Lair. And The Blues Bros. And Commando. And Predator. And Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
edited 12th Dec '16 3:14:45 PM by Shippudentimes
The first Stars Wars came out in 1977 and the second one came out in 1980, which to be really specific was a 1978-1979 production released in 1980...the one truly Stars Wars 80s film is...Return of the Jedi. So my point stands. I started as a cinephile and film scholar as my list of pages reveals here: Julian Lapostat, and among film scholars the idea that The '80s was a generally a terrible time for American cinema is damn near consensus. For more details see Dork Age/Film. Actually even European cinema was bad, this was the decade when the arthouse went East...Iran and Taiwan and Hong Kong were the places where the really good stuff was coming from.
I don't want to get another off-topic warning, so I'll focus on the policy of culture. Politically speaking the 80s was a bad time for culture because this was the era where the Republicans and conservatives stopped caring about art. Richard Nixon for instance gave tax breaks to Hollywood and the entertainment industry to help them out in the 70s, which led to the creative explosion of American cinema in the New Hollywood. Reagan however wanted to gut the National Endowment of the Arts, which he finally backed off from doing when Charlton Heston was sent to appeal to him. Reagan also passed laws that made it easier for multiplexes to come in, and this swallowed up independent theaters, and his AIDS policy (or rather the lack of it) wreaked havoc on the American Theatre and Broadway.
This fact came up with the Pence/Hamilton incident
, everyone noting how fitting it was that a Republican was shamed by the very culture that suffered for his policies and moreover the lead being an actor who has AIDS.
As I say, Reagan ruined America and America remains a ruin. If we want to make America great again, we have to return to the time before Reagan, for a start...
![]()
He'll accuse Back To The Future of propagating 50's nostalgia.
A proto-Nixon figure?
edited 12th Dec '16 3:24:26 PM by FluffyMcChicken
Breitbart Calls out Trump's Secretary of State and Education Picks... for Supporting Common Core
.
Wow.
Words fail me.
This is what makes the people at Breitbart not support Trump's Picks?!!!
And Betsy DeVos (the Education Sec. Pick) had to publicly come out against Common Core because of Breitbart. I think Rex Tillerson (the State Sec. Pick) still supports Common Core.
edited 12th Dec '16 3:24:09 PM by DingoWalley1
Day by day, Batman Begins and Ra's al-Ghul's spiels about the futility of trying to reach out to the corrupt seem to grow Harsher in Hindsight.
"When a forest grows too wild, a purging fire is all but ineviable."
"One must be truly cynical to even believe that these people have lives."
Thing is, they do have lives. Which is why the Aerys Targaryen approach to difficult sociological snarls is rightly considered bonkers. :/
Also, ineffectual. Randomly breaking out the wanton destruction of what you don't like works no better in real life than it does in Game of Thrones. <_< It's History 101.
edited 12th Dec '16 3:49:15 PM by Euodiachloris
Batman opposed Ra's in that he believed that even the most deplorable have a chance at being redeemed. However even as genocidal that Ra's was, he actually had understandable and clear-cut motivations for Batman to appeal to. When Batman is forced to face off against an opponent who is every bit as deplorable as Ra's described, and without a clear goal or motivation asides from being an agent of chaos, he is left completely blindsided as a result.
Ra's al-Ghul = Pence
The Joker = Trump
I've been re-playing through Deus Ex Human Revolution since yesterday, that game's plot is a lot less comfortable now, as in its far more believable that the world is going to crash.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

Yeah, the dogwhistles got more pronounced under Reagan. Also, while Republicans like to romanticize his eight years in office as having a great economy, it wasn't always the case. The '87 stock market crash occurred under his watch, for example.
There are some parallels between then and now, too. Mainly, that he scared the crap out of his own people. As Lewis Black put it, people in the Reagan era would wake up and go, "What the fuck is he gonna do TODAY?!"