Beren wrote:Trump awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom for a reason, he was a pioneer and paved the way for Trumpism indeed. Maybe we should thank Ronald Reagan for that (the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine), I wonder if it's the next stage of his revolution actually.
The Fairness Doctrine presumed that there were only two points of view. It needed to go.
Potemkin wrote:Indeed. Most people don't seem to realise it, but we're still living in the 1980s. What Reagan and Thatcher started is still on-going....
We're definitely not living in the 1980s. Much has changed, some for the better, and some not. For example, I think popular music today is pretty lacking in creativity by 1980s standards--both musicianship and composition have suffered; yet, production quality is fantastic. Sadly, quantization and pitch correction stamps out any human feeling in much of today's music as a result.
In the last decade, the ability to create a decent screenplay has seriously degraded. Everything is pretty much propaganda in the media. So today, we have these remarkable big screen TVs with 4K resolution and high dynamic range, but much of what is produced isn't worth watching unless you enjoy pablum and propaganda, which it seems is the main thing the millennials can produce. There isn't a Norman Lear like standout at this juncture.
Economically, dynamism will always be a factor. Yet, in the 1980s, the big fear was Japan taking over. Today, that's China; however, their crazy inclination to build cities with no people in them to keep GDP up hides the one-child policy, and what is to follow.
Beren wrote:Oh, what a wonderful decade it was, Robocop and Terminator ruled the screen!
Indeed. In some ways, low budget. In others, it was a creative time. What rules the screen today? Pretty much Marvel. The Indiana Jones series was quite popular. ET. The Empire Strikes Back. Das Boot. Ghandi. Scarface. Poltergeist. Back to the Future. Rainman. When Harry Met Sally. The Right Stuff. The Color Purple. The Killing Fields. A Passage to India. Driving Miss Daisy.
What can we say was good in the last 10 years? 12 Years a Slave. Zero Dark Thirty. The Revenant. The Wolf of Wall Street. Drive. Life of Pi. Hacksaw Ridge. It's a bit more of a struggle.
Look at the Billboard top 40 between 1980 and 1986, for example. There was so much groundbreaking music at the time, and it just seemed normal. How often do you tune in to the radio today? My mother would stop to listen and watch Michael Jackson's Thriller. Who do we have like that today?
It's amazing that we can have conversations like this--people otherwise anonymous to each other--in completely far flung areas of the world. Impossible in the 1980s, except for the odd few that did the "pen pal" thing.
Potemkin wrote:However, living and sticking to the past is the gist of both Conservatives and Reactionaries, and the 1980s must be their favourite if they happen to be right-wingers.
The fascist model of the 1930s and 1940s came to an end for many industries--coal, steel, automobiles, airlines, telecommunications, etc. That we have this conversation at all has a great deal to do with the deregulation of telecommunications firms, which preceded the US opening the internet to the public in the 1990s. It also has to do with the invention and mass distribution of the personal computer which also took root primarily in the 1980s.
Potemkin wrote:When Trump ran for President in 2016, I had a strong sense of deja vu. Trump had been one of the iconic figures of the 1980s - in fact in many ways he epitomised that decade - and now here he was again, as large as life and twice as ugly.
Reality has some ugly to it. It's ideology that has difficulty coping with reality, because it wants reality to be an idealized subset of itself. What is inspiring about Nancy Pelosi? What is inspiring about Mitch McConnell? Trump was dynamic, as were Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. The vision of the future from people like Pelosi or McConnell is dystopian. There is a general void of human spirit in today's establishment. For what it's worth, Limbaugh offered an excellent critique of it--sometimes painfully pointing out why liberals like Kate Spade or Anthony Bourdain end up taking their own lives.
"We have put together the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics."
-- Joe Biden