Tolerating dissent

[Wokko]

[stui magpie]

[Mugwump]

I took from it that the liberals (and their newspaper, the NYT) disliked and jeered at Reagan, but I am not convinced that this made him “anti-establishment”. His candidate Goldwater, after all, was actually the republican nominee in 1964. When Goldwater was roundly defeated, it’s not unreasonable to guess that his principal cheerleader would also be beyond the pale. And maybe Reagan was beyond the electoral pale in 1964. It was only after the 1970s economic crises that Reagan’s preferences had much currency across the US..

I thought the article interesting, even if it clearly had an angle. Just not sure I buy the argument.

Incidentally, it is worth watching Reagan’s speech at Goldwater’s nomination in 1964. It is one of the great political speeches, and still used as a case study in politically-neutral classes on rhetoric and communication.

[Mugwump]

[Wokko]

[Pies4shaw]

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2009/06/03/ronald-reagan-worst-president-ever

https://www.npr.org/2011/02/06/133538934/Reagans-Legacy-Too-Much-Credit-Criticism

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/09/us/40th-president-opponents-critics-see-reagan-legacy-tainted-aids-civil-rights.html

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2004/06/not_even_a_hedgehog.html

[Wokko]

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=121806&page=1

https://news.gallup.com/poll/146183/americans-say-reagan-greatest-president.aspx

https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/reagan-obama-voted-best-presidents-past-40-years-trump-worst-2017-10

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/presidents-day-poll-lincoln-seen-as-best-president-reagan-as-best-since-world-war-ii-300411823.html

[Pies4shaw]

As I've come to expect from you, those are just links announcing that there are other people who have the same extraordinarily misguided opinion you do. Each of the links I posted was to an analysis by an author of what Reagan was said to have done well and what badly.

Don't forget to let me know if any of the words in any of the things (I nearly said "articles" - but, hey, there's a three-syllable word, right there) are too big for you.

Especially Hitchens, some of his contain a couple of syllables. "Stupid", for example. That, as it happens, is the first word that comes to my mind when I think of Reagan. A man of very low intelligence who managed to implement lowest-common-denominator policies and get lots of "likes" for it.

[Skids]

[Mugwump]

I think it’s usually (but not always) wrong-headed to turn something as complicated as an eight year presidency into a pantomime of good and evil. Most presidencies of that duration will have successes and failures. Short of constitutional impropriety or impeachment, or an unequivocal self-initiated disaster like the Iraq War, presidential achievements are always mottled and very debatable.

Epitaphs in any very big job tend to have three check boxes :

1. Avoided huge and obvious own goals.
2. Left a policy legacy that will be widely discussed in fifty years
3. For whatever reason, something mighty changed in the direction sought by his or her policy during the period.

Reagan ticks enough boxes to be classed a success. So did Obama, perhaps. GW Bush did not. Nixon did not. Lincoln yes (with other unique virtues). Grant no. Thatcher yes, Blair no. Hawke and Menzies yes, Abbott no. Etc etc.

By the way, Christopher Hitchens’ great cause, the Iraq War, makes the attached diatribe against Reagan more than a little ironic. If his bloated ego had ever permitted him to apply a tenth of the criticism to himself that he applied to others, he might have been a great intellectual, rather than a prodigious talent debased to a pompous performing seal.

[David]

Bumping this old thread to post about this incident on Q&A last night, in which a pro-Russian audience member who asked a question was told to leave the studio:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-03-03/stan-grant-tells-audience-member-to-leave-qanda/100880520

I find this decision pretty disturbing. To be clear, I have no sympathy for the questioner's position, and his question did contain misleading claims that Stan Grant was right to correct (i.e. that the 13,000 deaths in the Donbas include soldiers and civilians killed by both sides). But the reason offered for ejecting him was absurd – if we consider even the most vague and general endorsement of an ongoing war or military campaign to be "advocating violence", then that's a new standard that would see a great many politicians and op-ed columnists over the years sent packing, to begin with – and I think it really reveals a growing intolerance of dissenting viewpoints of any kind.

That this should happen on a show that supposedly functions as a mode of communication between politicians and the general public is particularly ironic. There's all this talk about "vetting" and whether his question was pre-approved (which it apparently was); isn't the bigger point here that, as adults in a liberal democracy, we're big enough and intelligent enough to be able to hear a wide range of viewpoints – including ill-informed ones – and consider them on their merits, with or without preparation?

A deep irony here is that, at the same time, one of the few independent TV channels in Russia – which has covered the invasion of Ukraine fearlessly – was forced to shut down this week. The reason the Russian government has given for closing this network down? "Calling for violence" and spreading "false information". Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-dozhd-tv-suspending-operations-ukraine/31734451.html

Most of us believe that free speech has limits, and many of us may think that these are two valid reasons for curtailing it. But when we allow definitional goalposts to be shifted, and when "advocating violence" no longer means encouraging someone to commit a specific violent act but merely saying that you support a war – which, to be clear, is what all of us who aren't calling for Ukraine to surrender but to fight back are also doing – it becomes very easy for a lot of speech that was previously protected to no longer be considered acceptable in public spaces, just as is now the case in Russia. And that's bad news for anyone who thinks we shouldn't just accept mainstream views unquestioningly, or that we benefit from being exposed to a diversity of views and ways of seeing the world.

[#26]

Yes. I saw that bit on Q&A last night. I thought the way they cut him off and didn't give him the right of reply to their reply was pretty shabby But to hear that they then asked him to leave just for asking a question if that's all it was, seems pretty thin skinned to me. It's pretty much the same for dissenting voices about covid and vaccines. I think if there are heavily pushed theories online getting spread about, it would be better for the mainstream media to address them, rather than suppress them. I feel the same about internet echo chambers, that delete any comments that go against the grain of said echo chamber.

[stui magpie]

I haven't watched Q&A for years.

While you don't want to give someone a medium to spread false propaganda, they responded to him and corrected him, no need to ask him to leave.

[David]

I think there was something particularly crappy about Grant's wording: "I'm not comfortable with you being here." For goodness sake, he's running a (supposedly robust and fearless) political debate show, not a crochet club. What on earth relevance does the moderator's personal feelings about a situation have?

[stui magpie]

No argument from me.