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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.
You forgot Warren G. Harding, elected 1920, died in office.
Silly me…
Of course, if you keep going, we would have President Harris right now. Ick.
So Harris is a big ‘ick’ but President Dick Cheney would have been cool beans?
No, that also would have been terrible. More than one thing can be terrible.
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.
I can’t think of a more traumatic way to die than Alzheimer’s. You get to witness your own sense of self, your own identity unravel slowly, and witnessed by those you care about most. Cancer hurts, torture hurts, but its happening to you. Alzheimer’s is losing yourself in front of yourself every moment, leaving you in a worsening state of fear and confusion until there isn’t enough of you left to know your own name anymore. Then a blank slab sits in your place painting water colors until the slab forgets how to chew and eat and even breath until the slab of your vacant husk finally expires long after any you that you would recognize was cognitively dismantled a piece at a time.
Couldn’t have happened to a bigger garbage person than Reagan.
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.
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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…
Reagan, on the other hand, was competent evil
At first, anyway…
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The sad part is that some of those kids probably grew up to vote for Trump.
It’s Oklahoma they absolutely did.
Source: lived in Tulsa for a few years. That whole state can just get sent to the shadow realm and nothing of value would be lost.
Send a warning first but use plain English and add in a random LGBT or democrat slogan.
Bernie Sanders presents
The WOKE-A-PALOOZA
Located just over the border
All Democrats/liberals/leftists and Antifa get in FREE
Oklahoma is merging with Outworld so bring your whole family! Quick! For reals.
Sprinkle in some acts and features that would make fashies skin crawl so they stay away and hey one big ass party while OK implodes into non existence. Then we add Puerto Rico as a state so we don’t need to update anything.
I think they need to have their own special land - some place reserved just for the far right. They can have their own laws there, and have a treaty with the federal government to give them special rights, but only on their reserved land. Well have to give it a special name though. Something catchy that gets the idea across. I’m open to ideas.
Hmmm… if we’re reserving it, it could be like a table? Hey, “mesa” is Spanish for “table,” and you know how there’s that Black Mesa area in the southwest that that one video game got named after or whatever? We could put them there, except rename it White Mesa after the only color they like.
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.
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.
Yeah he did more damage, IMO, than can be literally calculated.
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.
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.
Do you really think anything would be different with an early HW Bush administration?
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.
These are children.
What excuse do modern Republicans have? When they made jokes about Pelosi’s husband getting beat with a hammer?
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:
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Republicans openly make calls for political violence and then take no responsibility when it happens.
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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?
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.
I hope he’s gotten over Jodie Foster.
Based
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It’d be nice to get back to that level of civility where we can disagree and not cheer the death of other.
Thick irony when talking about the guy who quite literally cheered as AIDS wreaked havoc on gay people
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guys.
Guys.
GUYS!
Reagan didn’t literally text me the party popper emoji when freddie mercury died so he must be a friend to the lgbt spectrum
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you’ve been provided evidence of reagan’s attitude on the aids pandemic
you just haven’t addressed it because it’s easier to pretend it hasn’t been provided than confront the fact that gop daddy might not have been the second coming of christ
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we could argue until we were both blue in the face and your position would still be that because he didn’t literally crack out a fortnite dance that it doesn’t really count as cheering and that therefore he was as sympathetic as it was possible to be
the fact is he abused his position to cause more gay people afflicted by HIV to die than had to, and entirely because it suited him to do so
I don’t think “He was just indifferent towards the death of entire sectors of the population based on their sexual identity” is the solid refutation you think it is
“Cheered” doesn’t necessarily mean getting up and doing a cheerleader dance while yelling. It can also mean encouraged.
He was in a position of power to ease the suffering of victims of a pandemic. He didn’t act until he couldn’t avoid it anymore. It doesn’t matter if his intent was apathy or hatred. His actions are what matters and for the leader of a nation to refuse to act on a public health crisis is abhorrent and inexcusable behavior.
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.
How many deaths does Reagan get to cause before it exceeds “Agree to disagree” territory?
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I mean… Reagan not only cheered on the death of LGBTQ+ people, he actively caused many of those deaths because of his policy decisions during the AIDS crisis.
Civility is out the window. But it was Reagan who threw it.
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His administration, and his press secretary, used to refer to AIDS as “the gay plague” that only affected “fairies”. And because it only affected the undesirables, they dragged their feet on addressing the issue. Reagan’s actions were genocidal.
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Pedantic little wanker, aren’t you?
I never wish death on anyone. It what keeps us human.
So, you wouldn’t wish death on, say, Hitler? Would you say those that did in WW2 were no longer human?
Hey! Say what you want about Hitler, but he did kill Hitler. Show some respect!!!1!!
Hitler took away the greatest prize of WWII so Russia could not have it and frankly that’s a monumental disgrace that he did that
The title of “the guy who killed Hitler” is now a moot reward
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I find that a fundamentally ridiculous point of view, that human life is something so valuable that, paradoxically, no amount of human lives ended could ever justify wishing death on someone, but props for consistency, I guess.
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I choose not to dehumanize people.
That presumes that wishing for someone’s death dehumanizes them.
If Hitler had been captured, what would killing him have done? I am against the death penalty as well.
Created an example and a precedent that rulership is not a shield against punishment? Removed a vile human being from existence? Avenged the literal millions of helpless innocents he ordered slaughtered?
Just wish for a solution to the problem,
Death is often a viable solution. Oftentimes more viable than the alternatives.
All other options having failed, sometimes that means they’re no longer breathing.
I just love (/s) how tone is policed harder than literal stochastic terrorism from the right.
They can tolerate killing people, but they draw the line at uncivil words!
(Unless of course those uncivil words are said towards the people being killed, then they conveniently didn’t hear them.)
No, I would wish for his rule to be ended.
Hard to rule when you are dead. Thats probably the reason why people cheer and not for the death itself.
We can as soon as “the other side” stops calling for our extermination.
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Idk how to take “Transgenderism must be eradicated” other than as a statement of extermination or destruction of an identity as their goal.
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Michael Knowles is responsible for that quote. However it’s a very common mainstream right wing tactic to say things in the same spirit of “transgenderism must be eradicated” stopping just shy of blatant calls to violence or genocide. Here’s a full breakdown of this tactic using this exact quote. Here’s what it looks like when you take this line of reasoning to it’s full conclusion. Here’s what genocide actually means since it’s often just thought to be mass murder, which is inaccurate. Here’s an example of a US state seeking to enable a form of trans genocide. Here’s a breakdown of 37 US states taking steps towards trans genocide. Here’s an example of Jordan Peterson engaging in blood libel a tactic largely used against Jews that has been applied to other marginalized groups to dehumanize them. A tactic popular among Nazis. There’s plenty of examples of right wing pundits and politicians making thinly veiled endorsements of trans genocide out there if you look for them and are willing to recognize their dog-whistling for what it is
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Trans people don’t find? Fit? I’m assuming fit. cultural genocide refers to the erasure of a groups cultural identity. Which absolutely fits their current situation.
I never said they were currently victims of genocide, but we are not far off from it at all. The bills regarding children and hormones are to cause enforced detransitioning. If you’re broader with your definition of genocide, and there’s good reason to be; these bills if passed and enforced, could reasonably be considered acts of genocide.
SB 254 was the bill from Florida I linked in my above comment was an example of the more rigid definition of genocide. It would allow children to be forcibly moved to Florida into the custody of their parent who lives there. A state that recently banned gender affirming care (hormones), relaxed death penalty restrictions, and a separate bill that allows for the death penalty of child sexual assault. An act thag the right wing is more than happy to accuse trans people of.
Just because it isn’t happening right now doesn’t mean it isn’t a serious threat to a very marginalized community. If you’d read that bit about dog-whistling or watched the video linked on Michael Knowles, you’d know that politicians dont have to say the quiet part out loud. They’re able to communicate their position through coded language and apeals to the more extremist demographics in their party. Desantis is running almost exclusively on an “anti-woke” platform. A part of that platform is pushing anti-trans sentiment and legislation. Trump has included gutting trans rights as a part of his platform. Their intent is clear.
Peterson and Knowles both have a clear and obvious effect on political discourse in the US. Particularly about things like LGBT rights, racism, misogyny and plenty of other hot button topics right now. Their part in all of this is obvious
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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in your hypothetical situation, a bomb being dropped on Hitler and the war being over are inexorably linked
so it seems like what you’re saying is that you’re not quite on the ball enough to understand your own thought experiement?
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my sweet baby boy there is no difference
if you cheer the end of a war because a bomb was dropped on somebody’s head, you’re cheering the fact that a bomb was dropped on that person’s head, whether you realise it or not
Fake story. Everyone knows that only Republicans hate the other side enough to support political violence.
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…
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.
Remind me what power MLK had that could make tens of millions of peoples’ lives worse just because he was a selfish asshole
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.
>makes bad analogy
>analogy gets challenged
“that doesn’t follow”
classic.
Just in case you were curious why everyone is down voting you, failed leaders have been held mortally responsible throughout human history. Democracy has reduced the amount that we need to behead our leaders so I would call that success, not failure. But when a mf needs to get beheaded it is only the ‘failed state’ that refuses to behead. Oh, and if you can only understand this in terms of bad analogies then instead of MLK you should substitute in Hitler and ask if you would support violence as a resolution to your “political differences” again.
I don’t believe in killing anyone, anytime
I just thought your comparison was terrible and the only thing they had in common was they’ve given political speeches. One had all the power in the world and one was a guy at the bottom begging for change
Aside from that, cry more, bud
