You're viewing a single thread.
don't leave out his destruction of the media as a balanced source of information when he signed the veto that killed the Fairness Doctrine. fuck that guy so hard.
Don't forget trickle down economics, we can also thank Ronnie R for that too! And ignoring the AIDS epidemic for years, because that only hurt "the coloreds and gays".
Pickle down rickonomics
It was the funniest policy I'd ever seen!
My understanding is that it only applied to broadcast networks and without serious reworking, we'd still have the misinformation we have on cable networks and the internet. I could see them maybe extending it to cable networks by now, had it stayed in place, but good luck policing it across thousands of websites putting out the tripe they do.
The Fairness Doctrine seems like it was potentially the right tool for the job at the time it was implemented, and perhaps killed way too early, but I'm not sure it would fit comfortably in the modern world.
(Oh, but yeah - fuck Reagan for nuking it when he did and the mountain of other shit he did to drag us onto this miserable fucking timeline, of course.)
I lived in a rural area in the the 80s and 90s, and much of the evil we have today began with Rush Limbaugh. We would be in such a better place today if the law had stopped that bastard.
I don't disagree. Like I said, perhaps it would have slowed things by keeping the old forms of media in check, but looking around in 2023, I don't think it would have had a chance to stem the flow of garbage juice leaking all over everything without massive reworking and the resources needed to do that.
Yes, and the way the Russian situation was handled by Bush was a direct contribution to what we see today.
The longer I live, the more the world’s situation today looks like the fall of Rome at 2x speed—no one thing caused it. It’s just a sand castle being washed out to sea by the tide.
But still, fuck Reagan and all the bastards that hastened it.
This is probably a flowery view of things, and I'm certainly not a fan of Bush Sr., but I heard an interesting take on the Bush "New World Order" speech where it was presented as Bush trying to have a conversation with the American people about staying deeply involved in Russian affairs to guide them closely to a proper democratic system. That perspective goes on to state that the American people simply weren't interested, likely fatigued by the Cold War and not wanting to be involved so heavily in international affairs.
It's a very simplistic, reductive take considering all of the variables and nuance required to take an honest look as US-Russia relations, but I think it's interesting to consider nonetheless.
After that they got Yeltsin who was "pro-West" and we decided on a more hands-off level of involvement hoping free market economics would lead them to liberal democracy. What we got, instead, was massive corruption, cronyism, and nepotism from Yeltsin that led to the post-Soviet economic and social collapse. Im under the impression that Russian people blamed "the West" and Yeltsin tapped Putin because Putin wouldn't prosecute him for his corruption.
I could be wrong, I'm no scholar on Russia-US relations, but this is essentially what I've gathered from reading stuff over the years. I think some of the PBS Frontline documentaries that cover Russia and Putin actually touch on some of this stuff, too