[Links]
[links] Link salad goes shopping for stillsuits
Colon cancer resources — A very helpful list if you, a family member or friend is facing this.
A second Laplace resonance — [T]he Galilean satellites of Jupiter constitute the original exoplanetary system. Awesome article. (Via @Exoplanetology.)
A legal defeat for the Institute for Creation Research — So for now, they can’t issue master’s degrees in nonsense? The funny part is the reasoning — nothing to do with the intellectual bankruptcy of Creationism, everything to do with the ICR’s lack of ability to follow a simple process. Which is apparently religious discrimination, according to them. (Via Bad Astronomy.)
For Jeb Bush, Life Defending the Family Name — An odd puff piece in NYT about Jeb Bush. Both Jeb and the reporter seem to have lived through a very different 2001-2009 Bush administration than the country at large did.
Reagan Revolution Home To Roost — In Charts — This jibes which what I’ve always thought of Reagan, and reinforces my lifelong bafflement with his status as a hero to fiscal conservatives. Much of what is said and believed about him is simply not true on the face of the facts. (Via Dispatches From the Culture Wars.)
?otD: Where must the spice flow?
6/24/2010
Writing time yesterday: n/a
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 9.5 (fitful)
This morning’s weigh-in: 223.6
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 9/10 (post-infusion)
Currently (re)reading: Dune by Frank Herbert
Posted: 5:32 am Thu June 24 2010 |
Where am I?
You are reading the blog of Jay Lake, speculative fiction writer and author of hundreds of short stories, many novels, and winner of the John W. Campbell Award.
Learn more here.
Stephen Watkins
June 24th, 2010 at 8:22 amWow. Those charts on the “Reagan Revolution” sure paint a stark picture.
In my “Republican” years (I’m better now, thank you) I, too, used to idolize Reagan. Of course I did it because, when you’re a Republican, that’s just what you do. I honestly can’t remember any good reason for doing so other than that’s what all my fellow “conservatives” were doing.
Cora
June 24th, 2010 at 3:52 pmWhat annoys me most about Reagan worship is the claim of Americans of a certain stripe that Reagan ended (those people usually say “won”) the Cold War, sometimes in collaboration with Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II.
What really ended the Cold War were the people in many Eastern European countries standing up against their governments, often at considerable risk to themselves. Mikhail Gorbatchev certainly contributed by relaxing Soviet politics and by not sending Soviet tanks to squash peoples’ uprisings in Eastern Europe like in 1953, 1956 and 1968. The Pope probably offered moral support, so I’ll give them that.
However, Margaret Thatcher was far too busy dismantling industries and annoying the British working class to bother with the Cold War (and I actually liked her at the time), while Ronald Reagan (whom I always disliked) not only did nothing whatsoever to support the people of Eastern Europe but also kept up his aggressive and unhelpful rhetoric against what he called the “Evil Empire”. We’re very lucky that idiot didn’t manage to start a war. So saying that Ronald Reagan “won” the Cold War is a slap in the faces of the people of Eastern Europe.
Jay
June 24th, 2010 at 3:54 pmYou’re preaching to the choir here. And I did live in the Soviet bloc, Bulgaria, for a while back in the 1980s, so I have some small amount of on-the-ground experience with the issues and realities of Eastern Europe in those days.
In the vein of Soviet invasions, have you ever read The October Circle? It’s a Bulgarian novel about Hungary in 1956.
Cora
June 25th, 2010 at 6:21 amThis was not a jibe against you (since you make it amply clear you never liked Reagan) but rather a general venting about the beatification of Ronald Reagan in certain conservative US circles. And the whole “Reagan won the Cold War” thing irks me in particular, because it denigrates the efforts of many, many civil rights activists in Eastern Europe as well as the many small local initiatives (city and school partnerships, exchange programs) that made the first cracks in the Iron Curtain before it fell completely.
Besides, speaking from a West German perspective, except for a few politicians pretty much no one took Reagan seriously while he was in office. He was generally viewed as a menace whose finger was far too itchy on the nuclear launch button. Besides, the NATO plans to station nuclear warheads in Western Europe, which were pushed by Reagan, led to huge protests in West Germany and even finished off the government in 1982. So pretty much no one liked Reagan (and our media did not even report the really nasty things he said about AIDS victims, though we knew about the enormous deficit he caused), which makes the Reagan worship in certain American circles puzzling.
Besides, while the whole monolithic “Evil Empire” rhetoric might have flown in the US, where there was hardly any contact with Eastern Europe (you are the big exception here), but it was a hard sell in West Germany, where there was a lot of interpersonal contact (officially encouraged) with East Germany and to some degree other countries. Many of us had relatives on the other side of the Iron Curtain, several of us had visited prior to 1989, we knew that there were no orcs there but people. Hey, I used to flirt with Red Army soldiers during the annual family visit to my East German aunt and went to a youth club/disco there.
Thanks for the tip about The October Circle. I hadn’t heard of it before.
Jay
June 25th, 2010 at 6:38 amOh, I wasn’t feeling the least bit jibed. All good. You and I are in substantial agreement on both Reagan in general, as well as the matter of the decline of the Cold War.
Stephen Watkins
June 25th, 2010 at 7:06 amEven someone like me, who did engage in “Reagan-worship” in an earlier life can’t really be jibed. Once you start sniffing the clean air, you start to recognize facts for what they are.
I blame my errors on the way I was brought up (in a conservative household) coupled with a youthful inability to think especially critically. By the end of my college years my critical thinking faculties had expanded… and thus began a long transition in point-of-view.
To your point, though, as long as the “Reagan won the Cold War” mantra remains in force here, there will always be Reagan worship. But what’s especially intersting about these graphs is that they clearly demonstrate, with factual evidence, that his economic policies were an unmitigated disaster.
Cora
June 26th, 2010 at 5:19 pmNo reason to feel bad about having liked Reagan once upon a time. After all, I actually used to like Maggie Thatcher.
Jay
June 25th, 2010 at 4:23 pmDuring the 1980 election cycle I was at boarding school (5th form, first trimester) and my primary access to media was newspaper and radio. I listened to the first Reagan-Carter debate on the radio. Carter stuttered, worked to pick his words, and tried very hard to address the moderator’s questions. Reagan had a warm, genial voice, answered virtually nothing he was asked, and spoke in confident platitudes that sometimes roamed straight into babbling. It was obvious to me from his words that to call Reagan an intellectual lightweight would have been overstating his capabilities. Yet the television audience (far larger and more politically important than the radio audience) rated his performance far higher than Carter’s, because of the confidence and fatherly demeanor. That really was the birth of the media presidency. I hated it then, and I hated it now. (Though to be fair, Bush 43 always read to me as an idiot in any media, yet he was very popular, too.)