Wherever you look in history, the world's most damaging decisions have all been made by conservatives. Conservatism is at the root of every major problem humanity faces.
It's in the name, conservatism is the opposite of progressivism, progress is a natural state, nothing stays as is forever, the only way to stop progress is to go against nature.
"Change" is the natural state, and not all changes are "progress".
Conservative used to be "want to take things slow to see which changes are good and which are bad".
Stagnatives and Retrogrades should be separate categories.
Honest question since I consider myself insufficiently informed on the topic. How do you account for the various Communist dictators over the last century, and the genocides or famines or other things caused by them? I know a lot of those honestly come back to US interventions, but not all of them?
Communism is not inherently left-wing. While there have been left-wing supporters of communist styles of governance, right-wing authoritarians have also adopted communism. China's leadership is one such example.
In the case of Marxist-Leninist "tankies" supporting communism, remember that authoritarianism and dictatorships are antithetical to leftism/progressivism by definition, making these tankies right-wing/conservative by definition (as right-wing ideology supports authoritarianism and dictatorships).
When a conservative equates communism with leftism (or makes any other illogical comparison), it's important to remember that every word uttered by a conservative is misinformation, deception or manipulation. Conservatives are always either victims of misinformation or are the intentional spreaders of misinformation. Always.
That is just the nature of conservative communication. Conservatives lead other conservatives by manipulation, which includes using misinformation to create fear and confusion. This leads to profound misunderstandings of concepts like communism, socialism or progressivism.
The amount of harm caused by Reagan and specifically engineered to be possible after his time in office is immense. The man was a rat to his fellow actors, informing on suspected socialists and commies. He only got worse from there.
Reagan helped destroy 'The Fairness Doctrine.' Back when there were only a limited number of TV and radio channels available for broadcast, the government had strict rules, One was that any time a station ran an editorial it had to provide equal time for a response. Another was that no one could own more than one TV station in an area.
Yeah that last bit would clip Sinclair's wings a bit, but if we brought the Fairness Doctrine back in it's old incarnation it wouldn't cover cable or internet productions.
US 'democracy' ist just fundamentally broken. All my life I've heard shit that dates back to Reagan, people always complain about it, yet neither party ever cared to fix things he broke. You guys really need more parties, but of course neither party is willing to change the system enough to make that viable since they'd give up power. That alone should call for mass protests.
Democracy is a progressive idea. It tends to work in spite of conservative opposition to it. Conservatives have ham-strung and sabotaged it since the beginning in the U.S. If they are ever able, conservatives will remove democracy entirely and replace it with whatever causes the most harm to the most vulnerable people.
Nothing good in human history has ever come from conservatism. Nothing at all.
They're (most are) willing to let one genocide facilitator carry on because other one might be worse. Like, the solution is not of try and stop the genocide, it's about their fear of the other guy being worse. So basically wait and see if anyone even survives till the election and then forget anything ever happened.
They have been so accustomed to choosing war criminals and such as their president, you can kill all the brown people out there for all they care. There's literally no consequences so the psyche is why give a fuck now.
Nothing logical gets through their thick skull about fixing things they've brought onto themselves. And if you even dare to critisize them, you're part of a tankie/rusky/north korean psy ops. And that's the end of it. The cognitive dissonance is just beyond logic.
They're just so afraid of the status quo changing that they might have to deal with shit, which is fine when they cause it on the other side the world.
They are never the problem, everyone else is out to get them. Even when they're in the very wrong side of the history. They're winning. The brainwashing is real.
I think the thing we got wrong isn’t democracy, but the fact that EVERYONE gets to vote. I just watched a YouTube video where these answers popped up:
There are 4 moons
3x3x3=9
There are 13 states and they don’t know what the 50 stars on the flag are for
Can’t answer which two countries border the us
Thought the us gained its independence from france
Didn’t know when the war of 1812 was
Thought there were multiple civil wars
These people vote. These people are manipulated to support parties and candidates that are terrible.
There should have been a test before we earn the right to vote. Like the number of moons, the earth isn’t flat, and ignoring the antivax shedding/autism crap.
THAT’S the problem with the US. Man we got some stupid people living here…
Hard disagree. Yes, there are a lot of uneducated people out there, but the solution should be to improve the education system itself.
If we start excluding people, who would actually decide the questions on such a test? We all are biased towards something. You might as well end up being quizzed about the bible or even worse, get excluded because you don't believe in certain conspiratory crap.
The above comment is by someone promoting fascism. They are cloaking it in down talking the right, but what they want is for you to accept that some are subject to others.
If I could go back in time and say "you will unrionically be thrilled to hear from Mitt Romney and Liz Cheny, and watch heads explode...". Like to be clear, this isn't a both sides, those folks have blood on their hands.
But what I wouldn't give to go back in time and be like: "so... Listen... It gets pretty ugly..."
Eh, this I don’t agree with. It’s the exact same concept as regular stock ownership, just in reverse. The only time it’s a problem is if you have reasonable foreknowledge of the stock price change, or have some sort of conflict, same as stocks.
It's not the same. In one case you actually buy a stock and hold it because you believe it will go up. You are free to sell if you think it'll go down. On the other side you must borrow a share and sell it with a promise to buy it back in the future. The outcomes and mechanics of them are not equal but opposite, and shorting has many pitfalls, is damaging to the market, damaging to bid/ask, a conflict of interest for institutional lenders, and a number of other issues.
Reagan and Nixon's administrations really do feel like the US' modern original sin. So many of their policies have had catastrophic long-term negative effects.
Just look up "what the fuck happened in 1971". There's a website with tons of graphs and charts all changing for the negative during the Nixon administration
He did sabotage the Paris peace accords which ultimately extended the Vietnam War by many years. Also, he created the HMO system that kept the US from having Universal Healthcare. He also authorized G Gordon Liddy to wire tap his Democrat opponent (very much making him a crook). So... yeah. Bad president.
Used to be a lot more dividends. Stock buybacks are essentially the same thing as dividends, but dividends are taxed at the marginal tax rate and buybacks are taxed at capital gains rate. It's all a tax dodge for the super rich.
The more I read about this Reagan, the more it seems he was not fit to run as president, probably Trump did less damage to the country than him, and that's a very low bar.
Most of the problems in the world can be traced back to the general attitude of Thatcher and Reagan. Any time travellers looking to maximize their impact on the timeline would be well served by preventing the backsliding those economics-koolaid-drinking sociopathic liars forced upon society.