It’ll be a while before we can overcome that he is no longer President.
No, only the Republicans. I’m not deeply impressed by him, other that psyching the Soviets out with the fake StarWars program and firing all the air traffic control workers on strike… which was single handidly the most harassed and liberating thing a president in peacetime ever did… but that isn’t enough to keep him even on my monthly radar. I barely have memory of that era, and I’m in my early 30s. He matters more to the 40+ crowd, it us all heresay.
If I’ve learned one thing from Kropotkin and his Raygun rant, which made him look like a crazy imbecile, is not to talk about the easily forgetably partisan politics of political figures 20+ years out unless they be on the currency, or it is highly specific to the topic.
I won’t be mentioning Obama, unless he starts a nuclear war or defects to China, in the year 2037. I don’t care how formative his presidency ultimately becomes, the present and future matter more. It is a massive turnoff to be informed what Gerald Ford, or Hoover in some political squibble that has long since passed and unlikely to resurrect in the future.
Uncle Ronnie was one of the worst presidents in American history,
period, end of discussion…I would rate him bottom 5 with bush
Jr. as being the single worst president in American history and
I suspect history has already marked him as such…
but why was Raygun so bad?
Oh, so many ways… from his blowing up the debt to his attacks
on the middle class and working poor which is haunting us today in
a far weaker, indeed a moving toward extinction middle class which
Uncle Ronnie began. His ongoing crippling attacks on government
which has damage government in a real and ever present manner.
His love of cutting taxes which has damage America.
Uncle Ronnie has damaged America in a way
that would make Bin laden jealous and in a way that has hurt
us every single day since and will continue to damage America
until his idea’s are gone in America…
If you were going to mark the end of America, that point
would be the election of Raygun…
Kropotkin
Reagan ruled the US in its most fertile time. New York in the 80’s was The place on Earth. LA was crazy too.
I remember a Dutch film director being interviewed about heading to Hollywood to direct Robocop, arriving in the US for the first time in his life, walking some Boulevard at night amidst the crackheads and prostitutes and seeing flashes of the news where the Space Shuttle was exploding… to a guy coming from a quiet northern European nanny state country… I forgot what he aid precisely about how he felt but it made a hell of an impression.
During the 80’s, I was living where I am now, south of
San Francisco… having lived through those times,
I believe the 70’s, even the 60’s were far more interesting
and important years… the 80’s were just the beginning of the end…
the end of America will be dated from 1980…
Kropotkin
Really? What were you doing if I may ask… in the 70’s there?
Sounds actually pretty interesting, like stories.
Ive bene to SF twice. It had turned into the dirtiest city Ive seen maybe in the west.
South of San Francisco isn’t San Francisco, if your seeing a unobstructed sun, your not in the city.
I’m not joking, I liked for a while at the third to last stop on the T Line, and would hike between San Bruno and San Francisco all the time… the fucking fog clouds stay within the city lines, I’ve sat there many times amazed as the sea fog rolls in, will not go over. Just the topography coupled with the ocean. Does get cold and dreary in Pacifica too.
It is indeed a dirty, dirty place.
K: My family moved to south of the city, in 1973. I was 14, 15? from the Midwest,
Minnesota and it certainly was culture shock…It is a very dirty city, I don’t mind
that too much…In high school, say, 1975,76, I was in the city a far amount
especially in golden gate park as I was going up there every weekend to
a place where I would practice my juggling and there was a whole group
of people who was there also practicing… I met some really interesting
people there…in the eighties, friends and I would go to the city for comedy
stuff, saw Robin Williams several times in various clubs.
It is a far different city today then it was in the eighties…
Good or bad, couldn’t tell you…
Kropotkin
Given Robin Williams couldn’t take it anymore and strangled himself so as not have to face that shithole anymore, I would say bad.
Honestly, the crime and segregation is absurd. Only American city I’ve found with a obvious caste system in place.
Reagan may have won the Cold War, but he legitimized a view of government that has contributed to the deep corruption of “conservatives” ever since. His deep cynicism about government is not something that can be easily overcome… These hyper-conservative pessimistic crypto-anarchic types end up creating the very problems they protest against, like inefficiently functioning government.
Question: if you don’t believe in government then why do you want to run to be the chief executive of… the government? It’s absurd all these Republicans who spend most of their time ripping govrnment programs and public spending to shreds and then they ask you to vote for them to be in charge of government programs and public spending. But this narrative is especially popular here, especially among uneducated people or the super-rich (gotta wonder what the poor think they’re going to get when they’re voting along the same lines as billionaires are voting; that’s something I know people in Europe who laugh about, US conservative poor or lower class who vote for billionaires as if they have anything like the same priorities as them).
Two things Reagan did that were terrible: 1) he started massive deficit spending for non-war concerns (basically to just meet the basic needs of social spending and services) rather than pay for this with revenue, resulting in the continuing massive gap between what government spends and what it takes in as revenue that has ended up expanding the public debt by trillions, and 2) demonized the IRS as the reason for low treasury revenues when in fact the reason was that he cut taxes to top earners while taxes on the lowest earners actually increased. Then in line with his demonization of the IRS he cut their funding sharply as a political move to score points with stupid voters, only to exacerbate the problem by making the IRS even more inefficient and unable to do their jobs. This helped out many rich people who use clever tricks and fraud to get around paying their right amount of taxes.
Yes, Reagan was the beginning of the end. He is the beginning of the triumph of Ideology over Intellect, now we see the culmination of that triumph in Trump and the modern GOP.
Europeans are laughing at us because we dumped hundreds of billions on them for non-mutual military spending. They don’t have a place for the most part to mock us in terms of debt to GDP, not much difference between the US and the Euro average.
Major difference actually us that the US can much more easily fund it, given we are one state in control of our own currency, look what happened to Greece when it couldn’t pay it’s bills. Our economy is still, as bad as it is, doing better than Europe for the most part. They can laugh, but they would be fucking idiots to do so, given they managed to land in a even worst boat.