08-04-2022, 09:25 AM
(08-03-2022, 11:36 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Agree with all, except for letting Reagan off the hook. He did the same thing to AIDS as Trump did with covid. He instituted neoliberalism which has led to our current plight: climate breakdown, severe inequality, police assaults, rampant gun violence, you name it, it can all be put at the doorstep of the corrupt Ronald Reagan. He was an extremist, not a moderate. Trump is just Reagan with a bit of economic nationalism added, and racism TRUMPeted instead of just alluded to. Trump has taken Reagan's neoliberal assault on the environment to an extreme.
Flawed as Reagan was, he was much more rational than Donald Trump. He was a standing joke for environmentalists of the time for seeing trees solely as lumber and paper. Unpleasant as it may be to admit, he was in the mainstream at the time on homosexuality, still believing that most gays fit the pattern of child-molesting "chicken-hawks", people definitely to be avoided if one is a boy. guess what? Forty years later the child-molesting pervs are even more marginalized, as the homosexuals in fully-adult relationships have become the mainstream. Reagan was also a more adept politician.
Yes, he was a nightmare for the poor; he had come to the believe that Corporate America was the engine of economic progress without which social progress (which he defined as consumerism) was impossible. He was the bête noir of environmentalists who saw trees as more than lumber and paper. America is not what it was in the 1980's. The shopping-mall "culture" that peaked when Reagan was President no longer excites us. Let's not forget his attitude toward organized labor. By current standards, Reagan was the front-man for the trend of increasing disparities of economic results with the intensification of poverty as a norm. Reagan believed as did Corporate America in jobs -- just in not paying people adequately to live on those. The corporate solutions to inadequate pay on the jobs was for people to work two such jobs, which makes one as much a consumer but more a toiler.
Trump is Reagan's faults on steroids with none of the rationality, including the ability to back off when one sees dissent. Trump loves to hear people express grief and pain when hurt, and he turns up the pain-creating stimulus when he hears or sees such. Trump is a sadistic sociopath. He is far less astute than Reagan. He can never back down hen facts contradict him. He is responsive to only the anti-scientific, superstitious part of the American populace that got him elected.
The big problem with AIDS was that gays were still pariahs in much of America. The popular view was that they were "chicken-hawks" who exploited boys. The loudest ones of the 1970's were the NAMbLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association. The majority of homosexuals were men who could love men but not women... well, I can accept that. There but for the Grace of God go I, but if I were gay I would certainly never mess with boys. Gays had to change their behavior if they were to not be ravaged, and many caught on. Use a condom and develop monogamy... and stay away from street drugs. Medical transmission was easier to stop after people found that people were contracting AIDS from recklessly-discarded needles, skin grafts, and blood transfusions. Medical personnel changed their ways fast. The slowest to get the message were users of injectable drugs such as heroin. Many such people are prostitutes, obvious vectors of AIDS.
People had to change their ways to avoid getting a deadly disease. COVID-19 isn't AIDS, but much that medical science and public health have learned from AIDS has been applied to COVID-19, even if the methods of transmission are quite different. The hardest part was to compel people to do things that reduce the spread. None of it was easy, but that had to be done before the more definitive prevention was available (the vaccine). Trump failed to debunk the COVID-19 "truthers" who offered everything other than a rational response. Trump somehow felt their pain about wearing masks, frequent hand-washing, sanitary wiping, amd avoiding mass activities. Who says that reality is easy to deal with? That is all that we have.
I used Reagan in full knowledge of his faults -- and his ability to get a coherent message across. That difference is enough to suggest how horrid Trump was as President.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.