Trump Derangement Syndrome - Orange man bad. Read the OP! (ᴛʜɪs ᴛʜʀᴇᴀᴅ ɪs ʟɪᴋᴇ ᴋɪᴡɪ ғᴀʀᴍs ʀᴇᴠɪᴇᴡs ɴᴏᴡ) 🗿🗿🗿🗿

[The Pink Panther]

Ever since Obama got elected, the left (who for years scapegoated LBJ for Vietnam, in part to avoid talking about how Kennedy started that clusterfuck) tried to memory hole the entire "Hey Hey LBJ! How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?" blaming of Vietnam on LBJ.

Part of this is due to the left wanting a right bastard like LBJ as President who does whatever he wants and bullies his political allies and enemies to make them his bitch boy slaves, due to the butt-hurt the left had after 8 years of Bush making them his bitch. They wanted Obama to be like LBJ and that meant an extensive rehabbing/revising history to make LBJ being a monster a feature everyone should love and be glad for as far as wondering how we ever lived without it, and not a blue screen of death bug. They even arranged for classified audio to be released showing Nixon tampering with the Vietnam peace process to erase the "Hey Hey LBJ! How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?" narrative and whitewash things by claiming LBJ would have ended the war before leaving office if not for Nixon. This was even reflected in the media; as far as House of Cards openly saying LBJ was the chief inspiration for the Americanization of Francis Urquhart and Bryan Cranston fronting a big budget Broadway show turned TV movie, lionizing Johnson as bigger than Kennedy and Clinton and trying to focus only on the Civil Rights Act as though that and not turning Vietnam into a slaughterhouse of a hellscape was his chief legacy.

The three horsemen of the Dempocalypse.

Woodrow Wilson
LBJ
Barack Obama

 

[AprilRains]

Three three horsemen of the Dempocalypse.

Woodrow Wilson
LBJ
Barack Obama

Wot, no FDR?

 

[The Pink Panther]

Wot, no FDR?

LBJ finished what FDR started.

 

[MirrorNoir]

No, it wasn't a huge hit; but it was reasonably well known among dystopia and alt-history circles. Same with Man in the High Castle. They wouldn't have gotten adaptations if they were flops.

Actually it was. Handmaiden's Tale was a huge hit, making Atwood a household name in terms of being her breakout hit and the novel's never fallen out of print.

The chief problem though, which Atwood has bitched about over the years, is that reviewers consider it sci-fi or dystopia which means it often gets confined to the sci-fi section.

The TV show's first season was a huge hit (IIRC it even won best drama Emmy; a huge thing as far as being the first streaming service show to win that honor) and even in spite of critics and fans disliking the second and third seasons (which was entirely original content), Hulu is happy with the show and has consistently renewed it. With Atwood herself basically writing a sequel due to the success of the show.

 

[Кот Бегемот]

Actually there was a movie made back in the late 1990's starring Natasha Richardson as a handmaid and Robert Duval as the rich impregnator. She did end up getting pregnant but Duval wasn't the father. Hee, hee, hee.


I remember in high school, one of my classmates came in the day after Reagan was elected. She was hysterical. She kept stating, through tears, that Reagan was going to outlaw birth control and make women wear long dresses again to keep their ankles covered. She's still liberal to this day and still spouts off gibberish (nowadays it's on FB, not a school hallway) about what is going to happen now that Trump is president. Some people never learn.

It's kind of amazing how the "stalwarts of consevatism" always use their "firmly standing behind" position to fuck 2A in ass?

Reagan signed '86 law on MGs. Trump has already banned bumpstocks and from looks of it, something Red Flag based is likely coming. Compare this to 8 years of Barry who did basically squat in terms of destroying 2a.

View attachment 967561

It's the state with the largest Somali population in the U.S., accounting for about 1/3rd of the total Somali population in the country. So... Yeah, actually kind of racist lol

That map got to be at least 20 years old. Maine started to get major infusion of Somalies in early 0's, like tens of thousands, but the map says 0.

 

[Buttigieg2020]

It's kind of amazing how the "stalwarts of consevatism" always use their "firmly standing behind" position to fuck 2A in ass?

Reagan signed '86 law on MGs. Trump has already banned bumpstocks and from looks of it, something Red Flag based is likely coming.

Compare this to 8 years of Barry who did basically squat in terms of destroying 2a.

The only reason the Bumpstock Ban happened was because the chickenshit NRA advised him to do it. Now that the NRA is collapsing I doubt we’ll see as much on that front. Notice how nothing happened when Congress reconvened, despite all the buildup and supposed gun control hype. Trump is weak as hell on 2A, but he wouldn’t have done anything either way if it wasn’t for the NRA.

Obama tried a ton of stuff to undermine the second amendment: operation choke point, Russian import ban, the family tax stamp trust change, and numerous little red tape changes. He just focused on a thousand cuts strategy instead of anything major that would get shot down by congress or the courts.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

Wot, no FDR?

Can't Ride a Horse if your legs don't work.

 

[MirrorNoir]

Really?

I wasn't around for it, but Ive never really seen this sort of Reagan Derangement Syndrome. The only times I hear of RDS is when my family complains about how Reagan is the antichrist for black people.

Reagan's a funny thing in that people hated him but given how much of a downer the second half of the 70s was, Carter's failures, the humiliation of the Iran Hostage Crisis, and the still lingering hangover of Vietnam/the 60s/Watergate, that Reagan was able to masterfully get the entire media on his side in so far as pushing his optimistic "Morning In America" message to push a lot of the anti-Reagan sentiment to the fringes. Getting shot helped, but Reagan was able to outplay just about EVERYONE on the PR level that you had SNL under Ebersol giving Reagan a free pass.

Reagan did have screw ups (like mishandling the AIDS epidemic due to his own biases until one of his friends, Rock Hudson came down with the illnes) but he was one of those charming bastard types who you loved to hate.

As for Bush II and the religious right; it was entirely a mercenary thing where Bush pandered HARD to the religious right to get them to vote him into office and give him a GOP controlled Congress. This was cultivated by Rove and Cheney, who spent their years in exile when Clinton took office, cultivating formulas to exploit the religious right to create a voting block to get a Bush spawn elected AND get the GOP a majority in both the House and Senate.

See Genesis's "Land of Confusion" video for prime 80s RDS. The difference is back then you only got derangement syndrome in things like music videos (musicians were always politically exceptional) but now its 24/7 in all MSM and social media.

To be fair, Land of Confusion was by the same people who made "Splitting Image"; a British political satire show that shitted on both sides of the political aisle. And Land of Confusion itself was quasi-right wing in the way that it portrayed a narrative for Reagan to get his shit together and fight the evils of the world and portrayed him as being loyal to Nancy in his fevered dream and celebrities as glorified chorus singers (mocking "We are the world").

 

[The golden neckbeard]

It's kind of amazing how the "stalwarts of consevatism" always use their "firmly standing behind" position to fuck 2A in ass?

Reagan signed '86 law on MGs. Trump has already banned bumpstocks and from looks of it, something Red Flag based is likely coming. Compare this to 8 years of Barry who did basically squat in terms of destroying 2a.




That map got to be at least 20 years old. Maine started to get major infusion of Somalies in early 0's, like tens of thousands, but the map says 0.

Main has a huge population of Somalis

All they do is sell heroin and knock up everything that walks. Fuckers are worthless..they survive on scams. Scum of the earth.

The population outside of Lewiston is missing an entire generation because of heroin. It's all black babies being raised by gen Xers and boomers. But its still 95 % white..so plenty yet to plunder

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

The only reason the Bumpstock Ban happened was because the chickenshit NRA advised him to do it.

The thing about the GOP is that they always fold against the issues the moment certain walls hit, this is why the Tea Party completely failed. It didn't have to do with them being "Crazy Right Wingers" and had everything to do with "If you wanna cut spending in any significant way..you gotta cut Social Security and Medicade" and Boomers don't touch that shit because "I PAID INTO IT SO I DESERVE IT REEEEEEEEEEEEEE"

 

[verissimus]

Three three horsemen of the Dempocalypse.

Woodrow Wilson
LBJ
Barack Obama

FDR is infinitely worse than Wilson.

 

[The Pink Panther]

FDR is infinitely worse than Wilson.

I mean...Wilson started a pattern, and while FDR managed to continue it, LBJ really stuck to it, and then BO fucking finished it.

I know Japanese Interment camps and the New Deal was shit, but I think what came after from LBJ kind of made the fuckshow even more fucked despite the fact that LBJ hadnt done something as morally backwards as the camps, LBJ still had a big part in making the country shit today in a similar way Reagan did (in terms of war and country relations).

 

[HumanHive]

Actually it was. Handmaiden's Tale was a huge hit, making Atwood a household name in terms of being her breakout hit and the novel's never fallen out of print.

The chief problem though, which Atwood has bitched about over the years, is that reviewers consider it sci-fi or dystopia which means it often gets confined to the sci-fi section.

The TV show's first season was a huge hit (IIRC it even won best drama Emmy; a huge thing as far as being the first streaming service show to win that honor) and even in spite of critics and fans disliking the second and third seasons (which was entirely original content), Hulu is happy with the show and has consistently renewed it. With Atwood herself basically writing a sequel due to the success of the show.

I find that very amusing, becuase the book should be in the fantasy section for being utterly delusional and spreading outright lies about pretty much every Christian denomination under the sun. And I don't say that out of butthurt concerns, I'm no friend of Southern Baptist types. Rather, I challenge anyone to find a Christian fundamentalist group who is both reactionary enough to want to repeal women's sufferage and legal status WHILE ALSO being a-okay with courtesans and sex outside marriage. Which religion is she warning us about exactly? Christianity, or Islam? And then there's the mysterious infertility that justifies it all. No real explaination, no attempt to cure, it's just a tool to make the patriarchy seem less ludicrous and unbelievable.

All in all, it's just another example of feminist malthusianism. "One day, if we are not vigilent; those damn republicans will rise up, overthrow the government, and turn the United States into Iran! The minute the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, it'll happen!"

 

[XYZpdq]

I find that very amusing, becuase the book should be in the fantasy section for being utterly delusional and spreading outright lies about pretty much every Christian denomination under the sun. And I don't say that out of butthurt concerns, I'm no friend of Southern Baptist types. Rather, I challenge anyone to find a Christian fundamentalist group who is both reactionary enough to want to repeal women's sufferage and legal status WHILE ALSO being a-okay with courtesans and sex outside marriage. Which religion is she warning us about exactly? Christianity, or Islam? And then there's the mysterious infertility that justifies it all. No real explaination, no attempt to cure, it's just a tool to make the patriarchy seem less ludicrous and unbelievable.

All in all, it's just another example of feminist malthusianism. "One day, if we are not vigilent; those damn republicans will rise up, overthrow the government, and turn the United States into Iran! The minute the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, it'll happen!"

Look, just because cyberpunk, Robocop, Demolition Man, Brave New World, and 1984 all managed to simultaneously become real doesn't mean EVERY grimderp future can be so lucky.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

Reagan did have screw ups (like mishandling the AIDS epidemic due to his own biases until one of his friends, Rock Hudson came down with the illnes)

Yeah, I'm not entirely sold on that. The gay community wasn't listening to ANYONE when it became clear the bathhouses were a focal point for infection. But no, the stupid butt-fuckers had to have their gay old time instead of keeping their pants on for a while.

The title of the book may be 'And the Band Played On' but it's not a reference to government inaction -- it's a reference to how the community blew off all the warnings.

 

[Syaoran Li]

I find that very amusing, becuase the book should be in the fantasy section for being utterly delusional and spreading outright lies about pretty much every Christian denomination under the sun. And I don't say that out of butthurt concerns, I'm no friend of Southern Baptist types. Rather, I challenge anyone to find a Christian fundamentalist group who is both reactionary enough to want to repeal women's sufferage and legal status WHILE ALSO being a-okay with courtesans and sex outside marriage. Which religion is she warning us about exactly? Christianity, or Islam? And then there's the mysterious infertility that justifies it all. No real explaination, no attempt to cure, it's just a tool to make the patriarchy seem less ludicrous and unbelievable.

All in all, it's just another example of feminist malthusianism. "One day, if we are not vigilent; those damn republicans will rise up, overthrow the government, and turn the United States into Iran! The minute the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, it'll happen!"

To understand The Handmaid's Tale, you've got to realize that the original novel was not about Christianity at all and was only using a warped form of Protestant Christianity as an allegory. The book was entirely about Islam and the horrors of Sharia Law.

Keep in mind that the book was written in the early 80's, and while the Religious Right was first starting to gain ground in the country around this time, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 was still well-within recent memory and the infamous hostage crisis that resulted from it was all over the American news media and helped play a role in Reagan's victory in the 1980 Election. Plus, there were a lot of horror stories coming out of Iran by women who managed to escape to the West.

Iran under the Shah was a fairly modern Western country despite its Muslim heritage and was a major American ally in the Middle East. The only other nation with an Islamic majority that would be comparable would be Turkey after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

While not a liberal democracy, Iran was a lot more egalitarian than any of the countries that surrounded it and then the Iranian Revolution happened and the country became a despotic theocratic oligarchy that had a medieval morality and a modern arsenal. It was one of those shocking moments in the American public consciousness at the time.

Knowing that The Handmaid's Tale is an allegory for Islam helps explain a lot of the weird inconsistencies in its portrayal of Christianity such as the sex slaves. The whole "mass infertility" is just a plot device to explain why a Protestant society would have Islamic-style harems.

 

[XYZpdq]

Iran under the Shah was a fairly modern Western country despite its Muslim heritage and was a major American ally in the Middle East.

It's hard to undersell how big a change this was. Like when they were making EPCOT Center one of the countries in the running was Iran to the point there's a decent amount of development art about how an Iran pavillion in World Showcase would look.

 

[Syaoran Li]

Look, just because cyberpunk, Robocop, Demolition Man, Brave New World, and 1984 all managed to simultaneously become real doesn't mean EVERY grimderp future can be so lucky.

You forgot to mention Animal Farm (and Idiocracy to a lesser extent) but otherwise you're dead on the money.

Yeah, I'm not entirely sold on that. The gay community wasn't listening to ANYONE when it became clear the bathhouses were a focal point for infection. But no, the stupid butt-fuckers had to have their gay old time instead of keeping their pants on for a while.

The title of the book may be 'And the Band Played On' but it's not a reference to government inaction -- it's a reference to how the community blew off all the warnings.

The AIDS epidemic was caused by both government inaction and gay apathy. To understand why the gay community was as foolhardy as they were during the initial epidemic, you've got to understand both the hedonism of 1970's gay life that allowed the AIDS pandemic to happen in the first place and the bitter repression of the pre-Stonewall era that came before that.

Before Stonewall, there was no real organized "gay community" for the most part as homosexuality was considered a crime in most states and even in the few places it was legal or quasi-legal, it was severely stigmatized.

There were small communities and illegal gay bars in major cities if you knew where to look, but even if you were living in somewhere like San Francisco or New York City, you might not know where these places were as there was a lot of secrecy and it was all about knowing the right people. A lot of gay men back in the 1950's and 1960's were alone and isolated, and you had a lot of gay teens around that same era who felt even more alienated.

Even the gay nightlife that was there in the 50's and 60's was fairly mundane and sedate. Your average gay bar would be like a normal bar, save for the occasional drag queen or leather dude. Even the fucking leather community were just gay bikers and veteran associations back in those days (the so-called "Old Guard") and the Stonewall Tavern itself was seen as one of the seedier gay bars in New York back in the 60's. Gay bathhouses were even fewer and farther between than gay bars and were actually looked down on by the gay community in the Post-WWII/Pre-Stonewall era

When the Stonewall Riots happened, it actually was a big deal for the gay community. Similar organizations appeared for the lesbian community and the transgender fringe, and this all sort of coalesced into the modern LGBT Community in the early 70's.

Another thing that happened in the early 70's that was even more important than Stonewall was the DSM-III removing homosexuality and bisexuality from the list of mental illnesses. This was more important than even Stonewall was, since it led to a lot of states and localities decriminalizing homosexuality.

Naturally, you saw the rise of bathhouses and gay bars became a lot more shady and party-hardy. The bathhouses went from being a dark place of ill repute to the centers of the gay community in major cities during the 70's.

Of course, this all tied into a wider cultural phenomenon of hedonism and sexual promiscuity in the 1970's. There was the Sexual Revolution, The Golden Age of Porn, and the "Free Love" of the 60's counterculture finally going mainstream.

The gay community in the 1970's was basically a distillation of the wider sexual culture norms of the time.

Since gay men don't get pregnant, nobody wore condoms. It was the norm to go bareback since most STD's known at the time were often easily cured with antibiotics. If you caught syphilis or the clap at some bathhouse, you'd just go to the doctor, take some antibiotics for a few weeks, then go back to the bathhouse to have sex with anything that moved.

Because HIV has a notoriously long dormancy time with no real symptoms, a lot of people in the second half of the 70's were infected and didn't even know it until they were showing the symptoms of full-blown AIDS, and by then they had spread it around to everyone they were sleeping with. AIDS was one of those black swan events that nobody on either side was able to predict with the knowledge at the time.

Remember, this was also before the internet. Even after AIDS started getting noticed in the early 80's, there was still a lot of misinformation, misconceptions, and downright confusion even after the virus and its modes of transmission were discovered by the CDC.

AIDS was often referred to as "gay cancer" in the early days because the earliest known victims were developing rare skin cancers seemingly out of nowhere. A very common misconception from that time was that the cancers came from overuse of certain party drugs such as "poppers" and the virus still spread like wildfire.

Nobody wanted to believe that the party was over and that AIDS meant that they couldn't keep clinging to the hedonism of the 70's. It didn't help that Reagan was president and was popular among the Religious Right. A lot of gay men often dismissed the warnings of government officials because they were either in denial or thought there was some ulterior motive to closing down the bathhouses.

The history of the AIDS pandemic in America would be a comedy of errors were it not so tragic.

 

[Mrs Paul]

Iran MIGHT Have been a liberal democracy, if we hadn't helped Britain fuck with them in the 1950s. D'oh! (That's one of the biggest problems of supporting dictators -- it ends up biting you in the ass later on)

Yeah, I'm not entirely sold on that. The gay community wasn't listening to ANYONE when it became clear the bathhouses were a focal point for infection. But no, the stupid butt-fuckers had to have their gay old time instead of keeping their pants on for a while.

The title of the book may be 'And the Band Played On' but it's not a reference to government inaction -- it's a reference to how the community blew off all the warnings.

Except it wasn't just drug abusers and promiscuous gay dudes getting AIDS. At the time, that was the view, and why the Reagan admin ignored it. It wasn't as well known how it was spreading -- remember how many people got it via blood transfusions?
And straight people do get AIDS as well -- it's more common though I think in Africa, due to the whole "rape a virgin" shit. You also have HIV deniers, which doesn't help.

One of the first AIDS patients, Robert Rayford, was only 16 when he died, and it was determined that it was AIDS that killed him. Due to his age, he likely caught it from being molested, or as a child prostitute.

(AIDS probably goes back to the 1920s, and one source is probably from bush meat. Some dude may have cut himself while processing a chimp carcus that was infected with SIV, and the virus mutated. Or some shit like that.)

And that concludes your history lesson for today, Kiwis.

 

[HumanHive]

To understand The Handmaid's Tale, you've got to realize that the original novel was not about Christianity at all and was only using a warped form of Protestant Christianity as an allegory. The book was entirely about Islam and the horrors of Sharia Law.

Keep in mind that the book was written in the early 80's, and while the Religious Right was first starting to gain ground in the country around this time, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 was still well-within recent memory and the infamous hostage crisis that resulted from it was all over the American news media and helped play a role in Reagan's victory in the 1980 Election. Plus, there were a lot of horror stories coming out of Iran by women who managed to escape to the West.

Iran under the Shah was a fairly modern Western country despite its Muslim heritage and was a major American ally in the Middle East. The only other nation with an Islamic majority that would be comparable would be Turkey after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

While not a liberal democracy, Iran was a lot more egalitarian than any of the countries that surrounded it and then the Iranian Revolution happened and the country became a despotic theocratic oligarchy that had a medieval morality and a modern arsenal. It was one of those shocking moments in the American public consciousness at the time.

Knowing that The Handmaid's Tale is an allegory for Islam helps explain a lot of the weird inconsistencies in its portrayal of Christianity such as the sex slaves. The whole "mass infertility" is just a plot device to explain why a Protestant society would have Islamic-style harems.

I don't buy that, because there have already been plenty of science fiction settings that take Islam as an inspiration for its in-house religion and you can immediately tell that Islam was used as the source. Dune, for example, is all about Islam - from the uniting of desert tribes, to a messianic never-wrong leader, to predestination making free will and any hope of non-authoritarian government not only untenable but undesirable; and what's more why all of these things are maybe what humans would prefer to be true but would actually be horrible and frightening if they were and that one should never want to have or want to be a messianic figure. Probably the only thing that keeps Dune from being 'the story of Muhammad in Space' is that the Muhammad stand-in has the lifestory of Gaius Octavius before he became Emperor Augustus mixed in with Lawrence of Arabia to keep the story from seeming too based on the distant past to be possible in the distant future. And indeed, the idea of "past as prologue" is very much at the heart of Dune. A Handmaid's Tale, on the other hand, is about one thing and one thing only: that Christian fundamentalists are a threat to woman's "reproductive rights". It's set in America, its antagonists are Christian Fundamentals, and the book was written at the height of the Reagan administration; nothing about the Republic of Gilead resembles the Islamic Republic of Iran in any way outside of both are theocratic and were the result of revolution. And more to the point, what is the message of the miniseries being released today? That Christian fundamentalists are going to eliminate "a woman's right to choose". Same in 2019 as it was in 2000, which was the same as it was in the 1980's and early 90's. It's all about Roe vs. Wade, any assertion to the contrary is a smokescreen. All modern feminists can think about is getting abortion taken away from them and how economically liberating abortion has been for western women; and how TERRIBLE it would be for a woman to sacrifice her life or career to raise something as monstrous and voraciously all consuming as her own child. Never bat an eye at genital mutilation in Africa and the Middle East, never bat an eye at burkas or hijabs, never bat an eye at China's forced sterilizations to ensure compliance with one child policy. All of those horrors incomparable to the thought of a world without Roe vs Wade!

Which is where all the fears of a Christian theocracy come from. Because that's just a metaphor for a republican administration that has the balls to challenge their society-destroying hedonistic bullshit in court.