I was very young for the 80s- the Stranger Things kids would have been "the big kids" to me- so a great deal of it happened- in some cases literally- way above my head. I was mature enough to be aware of Reagan's presidency, and processed the subsequent fall of the Soviet Union in the 90s as a teen through the very vague lens of what the Cold War had been.
Long after the fact, I studied his presidency and his performance thereof quite a bit, and hung a lot more facts on the memories of a guy talking on TV. He is one of my most-respected and liked former Presidents.
I remembered my parents talking about Iran Contra, and I remember the pop culture that was able to filter down to a preteen kid: Star Wars, the video game revolution, the advent of home computers, the incredible pride and success in our space program (and with it, watching the Challenger disaster live in school).
It was unquestionably a tumultuous time for the world, but I don't remember a sense that it was a tumultuous time for the future of the US. There was no sense in the air, to me, that any sort of apocalypse loomed beyond war with the Soviets or that we were impossibly divided in any clearly visible way.
Anyway, those were my thoughts when I watched that. I see it now through adult eyes, and it all weighs very differently than it did.
Very well said. I feel like I didn't really start to feel the "us vs us" insanity start in full throat until right around the late 90's. The internal war and unrest has been growing exponentially ever since. We had differences and problems for sure, but it seems like it was on a more human level somehow. Racism has always been incredibly dehumanizing and terrible. Still, I feel there there was some sense of decency and morality overall that we've long unhinged from.
At the same time, the "war on terror" to open the 2000s brought a sense of impeding doom externally. Even though we've always had external threats, those 80s years always seemed to me that those threats and problems were, well, half a world away.
I'm sure my feelings might be naive to older people who were adults then and understood the complexities far better, and I acknowledge that. Still, that's how I felt and still feel, looking back now.
Last, I saw your comment about doing a podcast. I thought that was the most Guttermouth response possible. I respect that. Lmk if you do want to go forward with a discussion, but obviously no pressure.
Re: podcast, I am honestly mulling it over. It's something I've literally never done before so there's a high discomfort factor. It's not that you're a bad dude. :)
It will be easy to say "yeah, you're this age but you're going to say this" but I loved the 90s, and Brothermouth who is significantly older and had a deeper experience of the 80s agrees. The issues that are presently wiping their ass with the social fabric of our society just WERE NOT actually apocalyptic or toxic in this way 20 years ago: for the postmodern progressive rhetoric to be objectively true, we would have had to get MORE, rather than LESS, racist/sexist/homophobic in the intervening years and it's fucking obvious that didn't happen.
Look, when I examine my heart of hearts, I'm probably still a "classical liberal" in a lot of ways when you get down to it- I had friends of every race and sexual persuasion growing up and into young adulthood and was a pretty weird kid and young adult myself, without remotely holding a candle to what goes on now.
I didn't feel impending doom at 9/11 after the dust had literally (for me in NYC) settled a few days/weeks later. The creeping authoritarianism was the far more obvious threat from the very beginning- I never imagined the US faced a real existential threat from Islamism (or, at least, that such a threat would not manifest in a perpetual siege of terror attacks by Islamists). The Patriot Act and subsequent explosion of the surveillance state was a lot scarier than an incredibly remote chance of being killed in a bombing- I was all for punitive and preventive action but not against the United States itself. At some point we gave the government permission to view us all as "bad guys" until proven otherwise, and I think the loss of that privilege of citizenship was a big part of the beginning of the end: government and governed are now in a fully adversarial relationship with no assumption of trust, and those standoffs literally never go back to the way they were, whether interpersonally or societally.
"Look, when I examine my heart of hearts, I'm probably still a "classical liberal" in a lot of ways when you get down to it- I had friends of every race and sexual persuasion growing up and into young adulthood and was a pretty weird kid and young adult myself, without remotely holding a candle to what goes on now."
I spent much time in the 90s going to Phish shows and other "hippy" jam band festivals, and these always are packed with incredible diversity of thought. I always have appreciated how so many different types of people could come together and celebrate an event together with very little drama or animosity. It still gives me hope.
I personally am pretty libertarian. You live your life how you want. I'm probably not going to agree with the totality of who you are or what you do. Hell, I don't even agree with the totality of who I am or what I do all the time. We're all on our journey, and who am I to judge that journey or demand you walk a certain way. Just don't be an asshole that causes harm or injury to another, and do your best to follow set law and live within a socially acceptable standard of some type of morality.
For me, the problem comes when you start making those demands on me or judging me according to a standard I haven't set for myself. We can discuss our differences, but don't predetermine a framework that I have little interest in following, demand I accept and embrace that framework, and then demonize or criminalize me when I don't, which is what's happening at - warp speed - today.
I really feel that after the 80s, the true enemies of freedom - not just US freedom but universal human freedom itself - looked at the American 80s, got together, and said "this is a big problem. We can't let this exist. We have to take down this American standard, because they're spreading it across the world. We can't have a free globe if we want to control everything. In order to do this, we must destroy this trend. We can't outright attack the United States. 1. They're too mighty physically. 2. It would only fuel the fires of freedom and liberty. So we must divide the house, from the foundation to the very last brick and pillar, and then it will fall. When that happens, the world is ours to own, shape, and lead."
From that time, the deep state, the shadow governments, the corporations, and all the other master planners went to work, turning the US population against ourselves. It always starts ideologically, and what better place than the universities? Get those young minds, and get them early.
At the same time, fully capture every institution. Buy them, influence them, infiltrate them, and then change them. As I mentioned on my podcast with Sim. Commander, the 60s radicals realized they couldn't change the system they hated through standard violence or protest. They had to BECOME the systems. The 80s were a time of very subtle but very intentional non-hostile take-over of these institutions, and by the 90s they began to have the internal infrastructure and influence in place to fully begin the shift.
What we're seeing today, in my opinion, is the blooming of these efforts. They've completely turned common citizens, who previously generally accepted each other and lived relatively peacefully and respectfully next to each other, into warriors, robots, and Manchurian candidates. They have succeeded in dividing this house, and now it's primed for a complete, internal collapse.
The Patriot Act, Covid, Woke ideology, manufactured racism and other "bigotry", and political demonization, working in concert with a propaganda and censorship machine have us pointing the weapon back on ourselves. Us, our common, fellow citizens, are now on predefined "teams", and while we run around on this level destroying each other automatically, "they" are free to continue building their bigger machines for world domination. They don't have to worry about any countries, any constitutions, any laws, any borders anymore, because they've already moved past that.
All they have to do is introduce the flashpoint event and then finally push the "teams" over the threshold. At that point, it's game over for us. They can formally dissolve the old systems, governments, religions, ethical and moral structures, and technological and biological barriers and introduce a new time of peace under a world governing structure.
Freedom and liberty hang by a mere thread. The 80s were the last true glimpse of a free, independent, and individual empowered world. Everything from that point on has been infrastructure.
Yep. You accurately and succinctly described the Long March Through the Institutions, and it was a resounding success.
"Liberalism" is a complicated topic- one I could discuss for hours- because it contains the seeds of its own suicide and its own destruction from without. If all values are equal, you have no values; if you must tolerate everything, you must tolerate your own undoing.
I'm no fan of organized religion, but throwing some commonly held framework of morality and standards out the window in search of "your truth" is never successful foundationally. I wish someone smart would have warned us...wait...
“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”
I honestly don't know of any successful society that labored under any notion that shared values or even just shared culture was unnecessary.
Humans don't work that way, and if you drill down far enough, there ARE objective moral values (at least for humans), and it gets increasingly dangerous to pretend for policy's sake that there aren't as your society scales up and out.
It was in the 90s that I watched Cspan and saw a round table discussion led by Bill Clinton. They were trying to figure out how to control world population with a global issue and were discussing global warming as the issue of choice. Clinton’s comments were very interesting as he thought there was not enough fear associated with that issue. The 90s brought about so much of what has happened with COVID and the global reset.
Was in the military stationed in Germany when Reagan said, "Mr Gorbachev, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL!". We were all cheering and some of us had tears in our eyes. I still get chills when I think about it to this very day. Yes, Reagan was a flawed human just like all of them are, but even if it was in rhetoric only, I never felt like he wanted to destroy America like most of the other so-called "leaders" we've had since.
What an amazing moment for you to be in! I can't even imagine breathing that air that you breathed at that time, how incredible that must have felt. Thanks for your service, and thanks for the comment.
I was very young for the 80s- the Stranger Things kids would have been "the big kids" to me- so a great deal of it happened- in some cases literally- way above my head. I was mature enough to be aware of Reagan's presidency, and processed the subsequent fall of the Soviet Union in the 90s as a teen through the very vague lens of what the Cold War had been.
Long after the fact, I studied his presidency and his performance thereof quite a bit, and hung a lot more facts on the memories of a guy talking on TV. He is one of my most-respected and liked former Presidents.
I remembered my parents talking about Iran Contra, and I remember the pop culture that was able to filter down to a preteen kid: Star Wars, the video game revolution, the advent of home computers, the incredible pride and success in our space program (and with it, watching the Challenger disaster live in school).
It was unquestionably a tumultuous time for the world, but I don't remember a sense that it was a tumultuous time for the future of the US. There was no sense in the air, to me, that any sort of apocalypse loomed beyond war with the Soviets or that we were impossibly divided in any clearly visible way.
Anyway, those were my thoughts when I watched that. I see it now through adult eyes, and it all weighs very differently than it did.
Very well said. I feel like I didn't really start to feel the "us vs us" insanity start in full throat until right around the late 90's. The internal war and unrest has been growing exponentially ever since. We had differences and problems for sure, but it seems like it was on a more human level somehow. Racism has always been incredibly dehumanizing and terrible. Still, I feel there there was some sense of decency and morality overall that we've long unhinged from.
At the same time, the "war on terror" to open the 2000s brought a sense of impeding doom externally. Even though we've always had external threats, those 80s years always seemed to me that those threats and problems were, well, half a world away.
I'm sure my feelings might be naive to older people who were adults then and understood the complexities far better, and I acknowledge that. Still, that's how I felt and still feel, looking back now.
Last, I saw your comment about doing a podcast. I thought that was the most Guttermouth response possible. I respect that. Lmk if you do want to go forward with a discussion, but obviously no pressure.
Re: podcast, I am honestly mulling it over. It's something I've literally never done before so there's a high discomfort factor. It's not that you're a bad dude. :)
It will be easy to say "yeah, you're this age but you're going to say this" but I loved the 90s, and Brothermouth who is significantly older and had a deeper experience of the 80s agrees. The issues that are presently wiping their ass with the social fabric of our society just WERE NOT actually apocalyptic or toxic in this way 20 years ago: for the postmodern progressive rhetoric to be objectively true, we would have had to get MORE, rather than LESS, racist/sexist/homophobic in the intervening years and it's fucking obvious that didn't happen.
Look, when I examine my heart of hearts, I'm probably still a "classical liberal" in a lot of ways when you get down to it- I had friends of every race and sexual persuasion growing up and into young adulthood and was a pretty weird kid and young adult myself, without remotely holding a candle to what goes on now.
I didn't feel impending doom at 9/11 after the dust had literally (for me in NYC) settled a few days/weeks later. The creeping authoritarianism was the far more obvious threat from the very beginning- I never imagined the US faced a real existential threat from Islamism (or, at least, that such a threat would not manifest in a perpetual siege of terror attacks by Islamists). The Patriot Act and subsequent explosion of the surveillance state was a lot scarier than an incredibly remote chance of being killed in a bombing- I was all for punitive and preventive action but not against the United States itself. At some point we gave the government permission to view us all as "bad guys" until proven otherwise, and I think the loss of that privilege of citizenship was a big part of the beginning of the end: government and governed are now in a fully adversarial relationship with no assumption of trust, and those standoffs literally never go back to the way they were, whether interpersonally or societally.
"Look, when I examine my heart of hearts, I'm probably still a "classical liberal" in a lot of ways when you get down to it- I had friends of every race and sexual persuasion growing up and into young adulthood and was a pretty weird kid and young adult myself, without remotely holding a candle to what goes on now."
I spent much time in the 90s going to Phish shows and other "hippy" jam band festivals, and these always are packed with incredible diversity of thought. I always have appreciated how so many different types of people could come together and celebrate an event together with very little drama or animosity. It still gives me hope.
I personally am pretty libertarian. You live your life how you want. I'm probably not going to agree with the totality of who you are or what you do. Hell, I don't even agree with the totality of who I am or what I do all the time. We're all on our journey, and who am I to judge that journey or demand you walk a certain way. Just don't be an asshole that causes harm or injury to another, and do your best to follow set law and live within a socially acceptable standard of some type of morality.
For me, the problem comes when you start making those demands on me or judging me according to a standard I haven't set for myself. We can discuss our differences, but don't predetermine a framework that I have little interest in following, demand I accept and embrace that framework, and then demonize or criminalize me when I don't, which is what's happening at - warp speed - today.
I really feel that after the 80s, the true enemies of freedom - not just US freedom but universal human freedom itself - looked at the American 80s, got together, and said "this is a big problem. We can't let this exist. We have to take down this American standard, because they're spreading it across the world. We can't have a free globe if we want to control everything. In order to do this, we must destroy this trend. We can't outright attack the United States. 1. They're too mighty physically. 2. It would only fuel the fires of freedom and liberty. So we must divide the house, from the foundation to the very last brick and pillar, and then it will fall. When that happens, the world is ours to own, shape, and lead."
From that time, the deep state, the shadow governments, the corporations, and all the other master planners went to work, turning the US population against ourselves. It always starts ideologically, and what better place than the universities? Get those young minds, and get them early.
At the same time, fully capture every institution. Buy them, influence them, infiltrate them, and then change them. As I mentioned on my podcast with Sim. Commander, the 60s radicals realized they couldn't change the system they hated through standard violence or protest. They had to BECOME the systems. The 80s were a time of very subtle but very intentional non-hostile take-over of these institutions, and by the 90s they began to have the internal infrastructure and influence in place to fully begin the shift.
What we're seeing today, in my opinion, is the blooming of these efforts. They've completely turned common citizens, who previously generally accepted each other and lived relatively peacefully and respectfully next to each other, into warriors, robots, and Manchurian candidates. They have succeeded in dividing this house, and now it's primed for a complete, internal collapse.
The Patriot Act, Covid, Woke ideology, manufactured racism and other "bigotry", and political demonization, working in concert with a propaganda and censorship machine have us pointing the weapon back on ourselves. Us, our common, fellow citizens, are now on predefined "teams", and while we run around on this level destroying each other automatically, "they" are free to continue building their bigger machines for world domination. They don't have to worry about any countries, any constitutions, any laws, any borders anymore, because they've already moved past that.
All they have to do is introduce the flashpoint event and then finally push the "teams" over the threshold. At that point, it's game over for us. They can formally dissolve the old systems, governments, religions, ethical and moral structures, and technological and biological barriers and introduce a new time of peace under a world governing structure.
Freedom and liberty hang by a mere thread. The 80s were the last true glimpse of a free, independent, and individual empowered world. Everything from that point on has been infrastructure.
Yep. You accurately and succinctly described the Long March Through the Institutions, and it was a resounding success.
"Liberalism" is a complicated topic- one I could discuss for hours- because it contains the seeds of its own suicide and its own destruction from without. If all values are equal, you have no values; if you must tolerate everything, you must tolerate your own undoing.
I'm no fan of organized religion, but throwing some commonly held framework of morality and standards out the window in search of "your truth" is never successful foundationally. I wish someone smart would have warned us...wait...
“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”
― Benjamin Franklin
I honestly don't know of any successful society that labored under any notion that shared values or even just shared culture was unnecessary.
Humans don't work that way, and if you drill down far enough, there ARE objective moral values (at least for humans), and it gets increasingly dangerous to pretend for policy's sake that there aren't as your society scales up and out.
It was in the 90s that I watched Cspan and saw a round table discussion led by Bill Clinton. They were trying to figure out how to control world population with a global issue and were discussing global warming as the issue of choice. Clinton’s comments were very interesting as he thought there was not enough fear associated with that issue. The 90s brought about so much of what has happened with COVID and the global reset.
Was in the military stationed in Germany when Reagan said, "Mr Gorbachev, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL!". We were all cheering and some of us had tears in our eyes. I still get chills when I think about it to this very day. Yes, Reagan was a flawed human just like all of them are, but even if it was in rhetoric only, I never felt like he wanted to destroy America like most of the other so-called "leaders" we've had since.
What an amazing moment for you to be in! I can't even imagine breathing that air that you breathed at that time, how incredible that must have felt. Thanks for your service, and thanks for the comment.