The kids were alright
The kids were alright
101 comments
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The sad part is that some of those kids probably grew up to vote for Trump.
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His presidency was probably the single biggest inflection point in this country's history in the last 50 years, second only to 911.
Shame that JHJr wasn't a better shot.
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Having been around during 9/11, Reagan was a bigger inflection point. He was directly responsible for ramping up the arming of the groups that would go on to form al Qaeda. But, that's a small contribution compared to overseeing the decoupling of productivity from pay and his war on labor.
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Yeah he did more damage, IMO, than can be literally calculated.
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Eh. I tend to view him as a symptom, not the disease itself.
Better he died more obviously brain-rotted and feeble than martyrd after he did all the damage anyways.
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Just because it's not the underlying cancer, a tumor will still kill you. Had he croaked earlier, he might have caused a lot less damage to the US and by extension the world that it's not given premature Bush Sr would.
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Do you really think anything would be different with an early HW Bush administration?
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1000% yes.
Reagan was shot only about a year into his 8 years in office. If he was taken out then and Bush Sr stepped up, then the total reign of that awful administration would have been many, many years less. Plus Bush didn't even come close to having the same pull as Reagan. Reagan was charismatic. He was a POS, but he knew how to talk to people and get them to agree with him - he was an actor for Pete's sake, so he had all the "soft skills" to connect with both Republicans and Democrats. Bush Sr was nothing like that. He was just another "generic" politician who couldn't even get reelected.
Our country would be vastly different today if JH Jr was a better shot.
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These are children.
What excuse do modern Republicans have? When they made jokes about Pelosi's husband getting beat with a hammer?
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I mean, for a given value of vileness, I don't see anything wrong with being privately amused about a person in a position of power getting some form of suffering inflicted upon them, though calling for it is nothing less than a plea for civil war. The problem with the whole Paul Pelosi incident was:
- Republicans openly make calls for political violence and then take no responsibility when it happens.
- Paul Pelosi wasn't a politician or anyone of serious note. He simply had the sheer gall to be a member of a politician's family.
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Why do I have to pretend to be sad when people I hate die?
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Fun fact: John Hinckley is out of prison. He has a YouTube channel where he records cute little love songs and he sells art on eBay.
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I hope he's gotten over Jodie Foster.
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Based
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Flip side, it would be real nice if the regressive right hadn't systematically assassinated every left leaning leader through the 70s, and then used public policy to murder thousands of other "undesirables," and then come in and tone police and try to use civility to circumvent criticism.
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Hello, Trolley
Well hello, Trolley
It’s so nice to have you back where you belong…I think it’s fine to wish that no one has to die, ever. It’s expected to wish that no one ever gets murdered, or eaten by wild tigers, or starves to death in the midst of plenty.
You can let your trolley run over and kill six people, or you can divert to a siding and kill a single person. And that single person is also Hitler in 1932, and instead of six people it’s six million. Or, rather, 11 million total victims of the camps. Or around 80 million deaths in total.
If we could, for the purposes of the thought experiment, save 80 million lives by killing Hitler in 1932, would killing Hitler be a moral act? Is it mandatory, meaning that choosing not to kill Hitler, knowing for certain what was about to happen, would be an immoral act?
The surgeon problem is a fun inversion of the trolley. You have Hitler on the operating table, and the only way you can save his life is to harvest the organs from six otherwise healthy patients. You have to kill six random people so that 1932 Hitler can love and go about his business with WWII and the holocaust. Except instead of six people, it’s 80 million. You can see it’s the exact same dilemma as the trolley problem but made more - forgive me - visceral.
If we don’t high five the surgeon who chooses to let 1932 Hitler die rather than harvesting the organs from 80 million people, it’s only because the decision is so obvious that it doesn’t even seem to need congratulations. It’s not that we’re avoiding celebrating because we would have preferred a scenario where you are a vampire and could hypnotize Hitler to give up politics and return to art school, and then fly around the world hypnotizing the other world leaders to not punish the German people over the decisions made by their government. You could hypnotize US leadership to let Japan pursue economic development, and hypnotize Japanese leadership to be a liberal democracy rather than a militarized autocracy. But those scenarios don’t seem appropriately serious enough for the discussion.
The thing is that you can’t agree to disagree with a Hitler. James Baldwin wrote
We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.
We can disagree on tax policy and agree to debate and take it to the court of public opinion.
When people talk about the ethics of murdering Hitler, it’s not about tax policy.
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Fake story. Everyone knows that only Republicans hate the other side enough to support political violence.
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the idea that you have to choose a side to hate an asshole only got started in the 90s.. now there's a whole "side" of nothing but assholes.. you figure it out..
only little assholes liked Reagan.. ask Robert Downey Jr..
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Downvote as your country is dismantled by people who think their own political positions are more important than the will of the people, and who will break whatever laws they want to advance them. Cheer the people who do it. Cling to your failed state.
America today is the direct descendant of the America which cheered the attempted assassination of a president whose policies they disagreed with. And all of you here who cheer the resolution of political differences with violence are cheering living in a failed state.
Do you support James Earl Ray's choice to resolve his political differences with violence?
Your country has become a joke, and you're all supporting that.
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Remind me what power MLK had that could make tens of millions of peoples' lives worse just because he was a selfish asshole
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And here is the expected non-sequitar. Your country is a joke and you just try to deflect.
Go make a difference, stop rubbing yourself against Lemmy posts to get off.
Do you or do you not support people who resolve disagreements by assassinating people? Or is it just the people who you deem worthy of death that should be assassinated?
Maybe we could democratise this, maybe vote on who should be assassinated to keep it fair, so it's not just one guy on Lemmy deciding?
Maybe we don't need to assassinate people at all.
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101 comments
If I could wave a magic wand and undo a Presidency, it would be Reagan's.
Trump was a big loud stupid animal, but almost completely ineffective at legislative work. McConnell carried all the water of his few cruel "accomplishments." All Trump wanted to do was hear/see himself talk/tweet. He thankfully got in his own way a lot.
Reagan, on the other hand, was competent evil, and his malice towards American peasants is felt by most of us every day whether we realize and acknowledge it or not. One of the few people I can say without an ounce of guilt or shame deserved the traumatic way he died and far worse.
I see a lot of comments posted about Reagan, like this one, that infer that he was the mastermind behind reaganomics. The evidence though suggests otherwise. It more likely that Reagan was the perfect headpiece to the administrators that pulled the levers.
There’s a great story that was told by former Australian Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, about how on his first trip to the USA he had dinner meeting with Reagan to talk about economic matters globally, and domestically between the US and Australia. Hawke told of how once the pleasantries were over and they started to talk shop, Reagan handed the conversation to the advisors, who were also present, whilst Reagan sat there munching on his steak. Hawke said Reagan looked oblivious and was uninterested in the discussion.
Destructive president, absolutely. Evil genius, not so sure. I think that title silts squarely on Maggie Thatcher.
James Garner was Reagan's Vice President when Reagan ran the Screen Actors' Guild. Garner said that Reagan could barely handle that job, when he was much younger.
There's no suggestion. He was almost certainly demented already save on several occasions referred directly to his "handlers" about speech and question preparation.
My favorite is the televised address where he was asked a question and they turned out the lights and shuffled Reagan offstage but not before he says something to the effect of "my handlers have told me not to answer that".
Perhaps that's where this timeline went off the rails.
He wasn't supposed to survive.
There was a urban myth called the Zero Theory. Lincoln was elected in 1860, died in office. 1880 President Garfeild died in office, 1900 McKinley died in office, 1940 President FDR died in office, and 1960 President JFK died in office. The 1980 President should have died in office...
edit...skipped Harding, elected 1920 and died in office.
That comment made me wonder if I did skip time lines, I don’t think dying at home at 93 with your wife by your side is particularly traumatic.
Don't forget the AIDS crisis.
Oh, my friend, I never did.
I made a point of not itemizing his innumerable sins against humanity, because I have in the past, and I didn't feel like taking an hour on my reply.
I'd say Nixon, without the Southern Strategy, the republican party wouldn't have been basically taken over by the subsumed Dixiecrats.
Andrew Johnson. He reversed the reparations that were starting to happen, and put the former slaveholders back in power in the south. By the time Grant got into power, the slaveholders were firmly entrenched again.
All the problems of the modern day conservatives date back to not finishing the civil war, and Andrew Johnson is the reason why.
Reagan and certainly Nixon are two we could have done without. Pretty much every ill and evil of the modern conservative movement can be traced back to one or the other, or both.
Same
Well well well...
At first, anyway...