FWIW, at the end of the mini series “Chernobyl“ they included a quote from Gorbachev in which he states that he believed the disaster was a major component in the break up of the USSR.
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Ultimately it is time to stop using humor and satire with Trump. He will float the name Trump the First soon enough.
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Maybe not the disaster per se but being able to discuss it. If it hadn’t been that it would have been something else. The problem with stifling dissent for decades is when you finally are allowed to speak up, complaints ring harder.
The USSR had a lot of problems, same as the US did does.
I just worry that we’re heading down the same path - constitutional convention / constitution rewriting, followed by unrest. Pick where you live carefully, I think people who wake up as citizens of Alabama may regret it deeply.
Not out of the realm of probabilities, especially with the current regime in place.
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Even if China “called it in” it’s only 9% of total US debt. They’ve already been reducing their US debt holdings since 2011. Total foreign owned US debt is only 28%. There aren’t a lot of other places for them to store wealth at such a low risk level. That’s why the US gets away with paying shitty low interest on its debt.
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Why isn’t Trump in that picture (alongside Mitch the Bitch).
Thank you. It’s already there. USA is ruled by the 1% party it just has two wings. Neither is working in the interest of the people, they work for corporate lobbyists and donors who buy their loyalty.
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Not really, we’ve pretty much always (apparently between the late 1750s and 1780s we had no organised political parties) had two major parties who were in with a chance at getting into power and a whole bunch of ‘others’ making up the numbers with no real chance of getting into government.
Which two parties those have been has changed. Whither the previously mighty Liberal Party? Or the Whigs?
Our system is pretty much geared up to support that. For example the SDP-Liberal Alliance won 25.4% of the vote in the 1983 General Election and got a whopping 23 seats as a result.
To put that into context, the Labour party got 27.6% of the vote and 209 seats.
I’d say the difference in our experiences is that the UK electorate is a bit more fickle than the US.
As an outsider at least it doesn’t seem that US political thinking changes much, certainly not radically. Perhaps your parties are also better at co-opting new movements.
It might of course have something to do with being isolated/insulated from outside political influences.
And being a bigger country, it’s always going to be difficult to find anything that a sufficient proportion of the electorate cares enough about to disrupt the existing power blocks.
An issue like Brexit is going to significantly affect every inhabitant of the UK whatever their view on it might be.
What issues could unite someone in Alaska and someone in New Mexico - that don’t already do so?
I’d say the UKIP/Brexit Party/Faragist phenomenon is essentially the British version of the Tea Party. It’s a radical faction of one of the major parties. That goes one of three ways, either the radicals eat the host and inhabit its shell or they split off and then eat the host or they split off and wither and die.
I’d say the Tea Party is currently dancing around wearing the GOP. The Faragites are still in the process.
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Yeah, no. You can’t seriously claim that the present-day moderate Democrats are comparable to the Republicans of 2009. That sounds pithy and world-wise, but it’s just plain wrong, and repeating stuff like that doesn’t help anyone except, possibly, the Republicans.
And this sort of “bothsame!” stuff is not just inaccurate, it fosters cynicism and defeatism. If you want to argue that the Democrats should do more for the interest of people, that’s fair game. But any kind of fact-based comparison of what the Republicans on one hand, and the Democrats on the other, have been saying and doing when they’re in power shows that there’s a massive difference, and that Democrats definitely act in ways that are in the interests of the American people, whereas the Republicans don’t.
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That debt is in the form of fixed-term bonds. It’s not subject to being “called in” like a short sale.
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Watching the change in opinion on whether Russia is an ally of the US over the summer of 2016 among Americans who are Republican really made me think we really might always have been at war with Eurasia.
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Proportional representation gets discussed a lot here lately 
WRT the situation in the US: I can remember in the late 1980s, when there were elections in the USSR and East Germany, a frequently used expression in the press here to mock the situation was “one-party democracies”. And I remember that I thought to myself: Is the US really that much better, where you can choose between a right-conservative and a right-liberal party (which they were IMHO at least at that time)? If a voter has only two realistic choices, and feels not represented by any of them, it’s no wonder the political system is in decay.
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One of the great triumphs of minority rule is to convince the majority of potential voters that there is no meaningful difference between their available choices. If the leftmost half of the voting population stays home, WHAT DO YOU THINK CANDIDATES WILL BE?
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I believe making the perfect the enemy of the good is a much riskier road to take, and tends to lead to folks like Trump stepping in the void. Case in point: HRC was not any progressive’s idea of a perfect candidate, but if she’d been elected, our country would simply not be in the danger is currently is. Roe would not be in danger, the EPA wouldn’t have been gutted, etc. etc.
Brother, you said it. I would have thought the whole “not a dime’s worth of difference” bullshit that Nader brought to the table to the delight of oh-so-clever and above it all contrarians in 2000 would have been relegated to the scrap heap after, you know, the goddamn Iraq war, but it’s incredible to see it mutate and live on. Despite seeing with our own eyes what the real differences are.
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I agree that this administration is blatantly breaking laws on numerous fronts. But it would be a disservice to our history to forget that Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush/Rice are/were just as evil but not in a reality-show kind of way.
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Why give up two of the best weapons against dictatorship? Especially against a thin-skinned, image-obsessed dictator-wannabe? SMH.
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Autocrats will gladly accept being hated and feared, but they will not countenance being mocked and laughed at.
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That’s what I meant by “obviously”.
That administration was less “obviously” evil than the current one; they made an effort to hide their actions. But yes it was also evil as was evidenced by the constant lies about WMDs existing in Iraq, Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, and countless other crappy things that I can’t call to mind thanks to our current shitshow dialed to 11.
This administration just wears its evil openly instead of hiding it away, like it’s a point of pride.
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