Honestly? Not especially. A lot of the 90s passed me by – I didn’t have reliable access to the news then. I just Googled him though.
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I remember Perot stating he enjoyed campaigning for president but didn’t realize how hard the job would be. Déja-vu.
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I do wonder sometimes if they confused middle managers in corporations with the sharks that tend to rise to the top and run them. The neighbor who works for AT&T has a bigger house and car than me, Trump will put a stop to that!
As Nassim Taleb has pointed out, more unhappiness is caused in people by comparison with their neighbors than abstract ideas like inequality. (He mentions in one of his books, I believe, the therapist who suggested to a family that was unhappy and living in a very rich area but one where they were near the bottom, that they should move back to where they were in the upper quartile.)
I do! I remember our then director of research remarking to me that Perot’s problem was that he didn’t understand that nobody ever talks about “great world managers”.
Trump too is not a leader, though he’s at the shark end of business rather than the management end.
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I haven’t heard that before, but it makes total sense to me. About two years ago I casually mentioned I worked in banking in a comment, and was shocked by the pile-on that followed, and which continued even after I explained I worked in IT, not investments or mortgage approvals, and that I was in Canada, not the US. I’d held onto my job and home while others were losing theirs, and that made me evil.
I wish I could have made them understand how the rank-and-file Americans in banking I talked to felt about the 2008 crisis.
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Yet the fact that it can seen to be antisemitism does have an impact.
Maybe. We can’t know what was in Stalin’s head, just what he did.
I’m aware, thanks. 
I’m probably one of the few people who thinks this isn’t just more of the same as with the CW.
Yes, we meddled in Russian affairs, doesn’t mean they are helpless victims. Just like in the CW, there are no innocents with regards to seeking to undermine the other. Both sides are guilty. Even Ukrainian themselves played a role in this whole mess.
I think that’s a good thing to get uptight about, actually. It’s given us an authoritarian minded president, which is no small thing.
I live here. My daughter lives here. Our rights are being eroded. Sorry if I’m not supposed to care about my daughter’s future, because our government has done many, MANY shitty things. I thought I can and should care about both, actually.
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Can I finish!
Sometimes I miss Dana Carvey on SNL, only slightly less than Phil Hartman.
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I’m sorry. I do understand that and how you feel. But I also know you’re an actual historian and are supposed to weigh all these things, whereas other people reading my post may not be aware of some of the points of contention. You and I know the difference between the RF and the Soviet Union but you’d be surprised (perhaps) how many people really don’t; I encounter people who think that the RF is still nominally socialist (“communist”) rather than a somewhat autocratic kleptarchy.
I’m currently reading a recent book by Max Hastings (yes, I know…) in which he makes the point very clearly for what, I’m sure for a number of his readers, will be the first time; that the British government and Churchill made many tactical and even strategic errors before the US entered WW2 because they did not understand that for Hitler the war against Britain was merely a sideshow and his strategic focus was on Balkan oil and the defeat of the Soviet Union. But, given our national love affair with myths, it’ll probably be another hundred years before school history gives a proper perspective on that.
I appreciate your feelings, but you have to understand that we have feelings too, and at the moment I feel that people on the Right in the US have fouled up our country. People are starving and dying because of neoliberalism, and I am not exaggerating. The US needs to get over its experiment with idiocracy and pseudo-aristocracy*, and it won’t do that, I fear, before things get a lot worse. Only then will the UK have a chance. Quite honestly if Trump went all out protectionist it would be good for us because it would be clear that our politicians are not going to get some mythical “trade deal” outside the EU. I have children too, and grandchildren, and I worry about their future as potentially part of a larger Puerto Rico being exploited by neocons.
We can’t understand what Stalin thought but there is a great deal of evidence, since no Soviet Union official would ever go against Stalin and there are records of their activities prior to mid-1941. Stalin went to a lot of effort to persuade Hitler that the USSR was of more use as a supplier than as a conquest. But the development of heavier tanks than Germany was known to possess and which would have superior defensive qualities in the region protecting Moscow and Leningrad is suggestive.
*cf. @AndyHilmer; this is my opinion, not advice. I’m not presuming to tell a massively nuclear-armed State of 300 million people what to do. Winston Churchill after all said that the US could be relied on to do the right thing - after failing at every other option.
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I’m well aware of people’s ignorance, too.
I’m inclined to agree with that assessment. The Eastern Front is ALWAYS the real deal in both world wars and far more critical in understanding the war. But again, that says nothing about Stalin’s views. In addition to wishing for a buffer zones, he might have also seen the pact with Hitler as freeing him up for a free hand in Eastern Europe (Poland and the Baltic especially). Stalin was the worst of the worst, the most violent and blood thirsty, of all the communist leaders in Russia. This is the point that Hannah Arendt makes as well as the point that Timothy Snyder makes in Bloodlands (essentially speaking). But we can’t know what Stalin was thinking, other than by his actions (and by whatever was released at the end of the SU before Putin reclosed the archives). I’d suspect that when Stalin died, there was a pretty effective purge in the aftermath, meaning there is lots we can’t know about Stalin. The secret speech told us a good deal, but not everything, Stalin’s motivations included.
Have I ever done or said anything to make you think I don’t know or appreciate that, that I’m somehow unaware of problems, caused in part by the actions of the US government (now and historically)?
Again, I’m well aware. Does that mean I’m not supposed to care about what’s happening here, too?
Yes, I’m aware. What do you precisely, want me to do or say to fix this? I can vote, protest, or join a revolutionary movement, but there isn’t much else I can do except educate young people.
Have I ever made you think that I don’t care about that?
Sure. But again, I’d suggest that this wasn’t just about him wanting to deflect Hitler, and was also about giving himself lattitude in eastern Europe to do as he pleased. His postwar behavior indicates that. Aligning with the allies, and taking down Germany, being part of their dismemberment allowed him the time to be able to build up and dominate the local communist parties across Eastern Europe. We also know that because the Red Army wasn’t in yugoslavia, that he couldn’t do it there, giving Tito the space to tell hm no (getting him kicked out of Cominform in the process). Stalin was a totalitarian, there is no two ways about it.
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Right now, the entire so-called civilized world seems to be going through some sort of gastric pains, with lots of bloating, gas, irritability, gorging and purging, to use a rather disgusting metaphor. And it seems to be something for which there’s no ready cure, even if we could get everyone to open up and swallow it.
The only positive I can find is that, from what I’ve learned looking into the past via lots of books, after a period like this comes an Age of Reason.
Look, that’s what keeps me going sometimes, okay? I might not be around for it, but so what? At least things’ll be better for my son and everyone else who outlives me.
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Disgusting, but entirely apt, I think!
Yeah, that’s true. The 20s and 30s and the depression gave us serious economic reforms that leveled out the economy for most of the 2nd half of the 20th century, and the second world war helped to create serious reforms with regards to many of our isms as well.
I sure as hell hope so.
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So the revolution will be put down, but little more than twenty years and a few wars later those in power will give us a twisted version of what we wanted on their own terms.
You really know how to cheer people up.
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I don’t want you to do anything(!) - I just want to say that while we may have divergences of opinion (and OK your are more likely to be right than I am) I hope we are basically on the same side.
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It was that thought that kept a lot of Soviet (and British) soldiers going in WW2. Now I’m not sure where that’s leading.
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My description of myself is “I am no fun at parties.”
Edit - remember that history repeats itself as tragedy then farce? I think we’re in the farce era.
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I think it’s what kept a lot of people going, without having a name for it, throughout human history.
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I think of it as our combined legacy and obligation to generation n.
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You really do not accept the concept of the difference between the rulers and the ruled. Until you take it on in a less hand-wavey way, your “advice” isn’t useful at all.
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of a sort. at least on the face of things trump said he was anti-wall st, and anti-globalization.
my read is: oil, gas, coal, steel - all the rallying cries - are blue collar, manufacturing type jobs. that’s different (for his voters) than the faceless forces of globalization.
where the left is on surer footing is in recognizing that all capitalist endevours can be harmful and therefore, at times, will need regulation.
the right seems to believe as long as the companies are in the trusted social network then the companies are by definition good and decent. once you’re in that zone, anything goes. buyer beware.
so, for his voters companies, by and large, are okay: so long as they put american, and especially white, christian, american interests first.
another way of saying it is: wall street is where republicans and democrats overlap, and manufacturing is where the tea party and progressives overlap.
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Of course we’re on the same side. Doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything, though, yeah? 
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