All of these things objectively happened. A conservative might argue that they weren't all Reagan's fault/responsibility, but that's bullshit.
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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A modern conservative would take credit for every bit of this.
Even the deficits prevent future spending
Modern conservatives are stating to call this worthless, horrible man a fucking RINO. Regan is too far left for the modern republican party. We are heading down a terrifying road.
It took congress and a nation full of assholes to allow it. Every adult that was alive and able to vote at the time is responsible to some degree. Same as now.
People that voted against the assholes that did those things are not responsible.
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Just before he was elected, his campaign conspired to prevent the release of US hostages, a move they made to make Carter look bad. This is one of the reasons he won. The man worked directly against the benefit of US citizens for personal gain.
It's a shame that Carter gets the blame for failing to reach an agreement to release the hostages, instead of Regan getting pinned for the much worse behavior of deliberately delaying their release.
Where did you learn that?
This is one report about it. It's fair to ask for sources of course but also literally all I had to do was do one web search.
I did not see repealing the fairness doctrine mentioned.
This is what is basically allowing media like fox "news" to spout straight up lies and made up news, while selectively not mentioning, twisting or brushing over actual news.
It's also what allowed Sinclair to start their buying spree and create a hidden broadcast network of similar right-wing propaganda and lies. John Oliver had a very good episode on them: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc
For me this is the biggest sin of Ronald Reagan. Without this change to content quality control, there wouldn't be so many Americans who live in an alternate reality, which is also what is allowing the republican party to not even try to govern & is allowing them to be as despicable as they are. Those rightwing "news" channels will after all just brush over their gaffes & instead conjure some made up scandal again over something democrats or one of the designated out groups has allegedly done.
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Deregulation of rails also had massive effects down the line. There was a lot of consolidation that just made everything significantly more expensive and caused us to be more dependent on oil thanks to the massive rise in the trucking industry
The deregulation was kind of inevitable. It was a bad time for railroads before it and it was a slightly less bad time for railroads after it.
I strongly suspect that in the long run the solution will be to nationalize the rails and signaling then license private companies to run on them
He also started the path to end the fairness doctrine, which directly leads to rush limbaugh, which leads to fox "news" which leads to the tea party which leads to sarah palin as a major ticket vice presidential candidate which leads to a trump presidency which leads to how fucked we are today and in the future.
There was once a union employee. When Reagan fired the air traffic controllers for striking “illegally” the big companies did hardcore union busting. This employee, young and with a family, was suddenly thrusted into a world with wages racing to the bottom. People being fired for any or no reason. Strike? Say hi to your scabs.
I know this is vague, but it’s real. Edited for privacy, but real nonetheless. Fuck Ronald Reagan.
Edit:
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/788002965 Some context for my anecdote. Sorry :(
US workers are too tribal, each industry thinks they're different than others.
See what happened with the nordic unions, uniting against Tesla across different industries? This is what the American unions should have done to the US government after Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. Automotive, public servants, train drivers, every union should have walked out until the controllers were reinstated. Instead they looked on as if it didn't apply to them.
Ronald Reagan is such a scab himself, he once led strikes as the head of the SAG, then look what he did to Unions.
Almost all mental health institutions were either run by the state or country and relied on very little federal funding. Their popularity collapsed after the 1975 movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest that depicted such institutions in negative light. Reagan may be to blame for the other items but not this.
Thanks for your comment but in this community we always like to see sources.
Could you provide some citations to back up your claims?
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with JFK's movement for deinstutionalization? If there was a serious cut in federal funding, it happened then. Reagan didn't bring it back, but it was already mostly gone by his time. A good book to read is "American Psychosis: How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System" by E. Fuller Torrey. Many historians who discuss the decline in public mental health in the US specifically site the book (and later the movie) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as a principle cause for the shift in dollars. And really, the institutions were bad. Very bad. The attempt to replace them with something else ended-up being replaced with ... nothing else except crime, homelessness, and police.
They were called State Houses for a reason. However, they did rely on no small amount of federal funding, even indirectly. Carter started a bill (MHSA1980) that was supposed to help mental health institutions like these, Regan killed it, and the promise was that the states would rework how these mentally ill were handled. Nobody ever got around to it. Taxes = evil, and there was also a study that was pushed hard by anti-tax types to “mainstream” mental patients. More cost cutting by closing State institutions and booting the patients into the public and like I said, the help never materialized. That’s the quick and dirty version.
The movie had nothing to do with it.
You are only partially correct about Reagan. He isn’t entirely responsible, but he absolutely had a hand in it. Cutting a bunch of the MHSA and the failure was also the State’s unwillingness to maintain public Institutions, but that ties in with the deregulation during the early ‘80s (Reagan’s doing) as well as fixing Medicare prices to hospitals so that hospitals had to look elsewhere to make money, and that means you and I paid more.
So yeah, loss of mental health care facilities and health care costs in general are directly tied to the Reagan administration’s actions in the early 1980s.
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with JFK's movement for deinstutionalization? If there was a serious cut in federal funding, it happened then. Reagan didn't bring it back, but it was already mostly gone by his time. A good book to read is "American Psychosis: How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System" by E. Fuller Torrey. Many historians who discuss the decline in public mental health in the US specifically site the book (and later the movie) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as a principle cause for the shift in dollars. And really, the institutions were bad. Very bad. The attempt to replace them with something else ended-up being replaced with ... nothing else except crime, homelessness, and police.
He also further spread anti-government sentiment which has made society far worse as people question everything about government and how it can help people.
Why is questioning the government a bad thing? Shouldnt we have questioned the government more when we were looking for WMDs?
Difference between holding government accountable and outright saying government is always the problem. The latter only creates apathy among voters.
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Are you aware that the worst atrocities committed by any group of humans have been committed by governments?
It’s good to question government. Governments’ relationship to their subjects is one of domination. That can go bad very quickly because it’s nothing like a relationship between equals.
A number of people replied about Reagan's work ending state mental institutions, and made a lot of good points. One interesting aspect of that was https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation. In the 60s and 70s, mental health professionals were advocating for moving from a institution-based model of care (a la "One Flew Over the Cookoo's Nest") to a community-based model (groups like https://www.reachinc.org/ basically follow this model). The basic thrust: ensuring that individuals are a part of a community, and care is tailored to the individual. It's very well-meaning at its core. By the lat 70s, deinstitutionalization had (to some extent) become doctrine with experts working with disabled individuals. And for good reason! A number of early studies showed promising results! So come the 80s and Reagan. Reagan has an easy excuse for closing down institutions: experts in th field even recommend it! There's one really important caveat, though: experts recommended diverting the funding the institutions had received into community-based support (again, see the link above for Reach as an example of how they imagined this funding being dispersed). Reagan...just cut the funding. So really, he did a "No Child Left Behind" 20 years earlier! Which, as I type it out...is even shittier. He gave false hope that he was actually going to do something great for mentally disabled people, and instead threw them on the street. Man. Reagan really sucked.
Side note: there are groups like Reach all over the US and the world, and they all could use help. Volunteers, funding, etc. A quick bit of research and you may meet some incredible people in your local community.
“Reagan”, not “Regan”
Thanks. Updated.
Being out on the street is undoubtedly bad but you should not be clamoring to return to the days of stuffing homeless people into mental institutions. Indefinite involuntary commitment without trial or appeal is barbaric and that's setting aside the kind of "treatments" they used and what they considered "disorders".
Please, just give them homes.
I'm with you that the state should provide housing for them.
But schizophrenia is a serious disease and is prevalent (20%) in this group. Those people need psychiatric help. Only a home won't fix it.
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This is not to mention how the war on drugs lead to massive effects on vital industries such as hemp
That reminds me I wanted to look up if the non drug use parts of marijuana plants can be processed into fabric too or if it's any different. Like 20 years ago when google still worked. I forgot though. Also if marijuana seeds are the same food wise as hemp seeds. probably not worth the price though
Although the two plants are of the same species, hemp plants grown for fiber used to make rope are different from marijuana plants grown for flowers that produce THC (the "drug part") in many physiological and practical ways. As different as a wolf from a shih tzu, or a crabapple from a honeycrisp.
For the most part, THC is produced in the flower of the cannabis plant. Most cannabis plants are either male or female (not both), and only female plants produce flowers.
Since hemp plants are cultivated for fiber, they usually have thick, strong, stalks. It's better to grow them taller as opposed to wider, to fit more plants in a field. Both male and female plants can be used for fiber. Female hemp plants do grow small flowers, and those flowers do produce small amounts of THC, but not enough to be worth harvesting. Legally, modern hemp plants grown for fiber have less than one third of one percent THC content.
Since marijuana plants are cultivated for flowers, they usually have multiple, branching stalks, and they often spread and grow bushy at the top. It's better to grow them wider as opposed to taller, so each plant can spread out and produce multiple flower stalks. The thin, branching stalks of these relatively short female marijuana plants could be used for fiber, but there's probably not enough material there to be worth the effort. Meanwhile, many producers claim their marijuana flower to have 25% THC content or more.
It's thought that cannabis flowers produce THC for at least two reasons. One is that the compound is sticky and helps hold on to pollen that might drift past from nearby male plants. Another reason is that it acts as a sunscreen for the flowers. The flowers produce THC to capture pollen, and also to protect themselves from the sun when they are wide open and waiting for the pollen to come.
Cannabis seeds don't contain any THC (except whatever small amount may be left over from the flowers that produced them). All else being equal, the seeds of a hemp plant and the seeds of a marijuana plant should have the same value as a food source or industrial resource. Seeds from marijuana plants are rarer, though not necessarily more valuable.
One reason marijuana seeds are rare is that cannabis flowers produce way more THC when they are left unfertilized. The plant is producing THC in order to attract pollen, so as long as there is no pollen around, the plant just keeps producing more THC. It is by far most efficient to keep THC-producing female plants isolated from male plants. But this means those flowers are never fertilized and never produce any new seeds.
Long ago, it was common for marijuana bud to have seeds. Cannabis flowers grown outdoors are much more difficult to keep from being fertilized. Seedless marijuana bud, "sinsemilla," was an uncommon treat for many illicit cannabis consumers in the '70s, '80s, or even into the '90s. More recently, relaxed legal regulation and technological advances have made controlled indoor marijuana growing much easier and more effective, and much more common. These days the paradigm has flipped, and it's highly unusual (and maybe a little insulting) to find seeds in any flower purchased for THC consumption.
Thanks. I only knew about THC difference between them and wasn't sure if the other details were as different as your examples or similar along the lines of the nutritional value of many cabbage plants being similar.
Given that homelessness rates almost directly correlate with cost of living, and not whether or not mental institutions exist, that's the wrong reason to blame Reagan for a rise in homelessness. All of the union busting under his presidency is a much better reason
What about all the homeless that are too mentally ill to even sign up for welfare? Not that welfare even comes close to cost of living. There are quite a few of them.
The only comment that even attempts to debunk anything while offering sources is buried by downvotes. This community is badly in need of moderation.
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You should be aware guys this is a pro trump thread. Negative Trump relayed comments have been removed (including mine) without reasons given. might be worth blocking this OP in the spirit of Lemmy.
Your comments were removed simply because they were off-topic or broke the civility rules, as did many others.
Apologies for not leaving a specific reason in each case, but there were a lot of comments that had to be removed and I've had a busy day.
Technically Reagan started closing mental institutions while he was governor of California. He promised to open up alternatives and never did. It was a popular action that started when "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" showed abuse in the mental health system and the new system was suppose to have fixed those issues.
This is the problem, is that mental health abuses still happen today in whats left of mental health system in america.
We don't need to tear it down, we need a federal oversight authority with balls and power to revoke licenses, issue massive fines, etc etc, with the funding and manpower to randomly inspect these facilities and interview patients at the drop of a hat, at any time of year, possibly multiple times a year.
and we need massive incentives to get hordes of new people, doctors, nurses, therapists, etc, into education to become qualified in their respective fields to do these jobs, and the fair pay for them.
My point was only that Reagan didn't destroy the mental health systems while he was president. If you try bringing that up to a supporter, they will try and gotcha you on it. The other stuff was just to give some context as to why he was able to get away with it. Republicans never let a tragedy go to waste.
California was the first state to start dismantling their mental health systems and other states followed their lead, so most of the blame is still on him.
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