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Jimmy Carter has died

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Jimmy Carter has died

#241

Post by hindsightbias »

macrocosmos wrote: post #76

I wasn’t alive for Carter’s presidency, so can someone explain how his handling of the hostages in Iran was positive at all for the United States? To me as an American even this many years later and as a young person who didn’t see it, ending your presidency while another nation holds your citizens seems extremely embarrassing. And all I see is extreme praise of the man. I’d honestly like to see some discussion here.

A real man would have gone to war and sacrificed the hostages. I’m sure the $200/barrel and gas shortages would have been patriotically acceped as every port and tanker in the Gulf burned.

Re: Jimmy Carter has died

#242

Post by syndicatedjelly »

macrocosmos wrote: post #222
syndicatedjelly wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does being alive in the 1970s qualify someone to speak intelligently on that subject?

If I live in a desert and 1000 children who have never seen the ocean tell me it’s ugly, should I believe them over the one older man who has actually seen it and says it’s beautiful? First hand accounts are inherently more valuable than secondary ones. Failure to see that is frightening. Just because something gets echoed over and over doesn’t make it true. And that’s exactly what I see. I see my generation saying h…

It's kinda like saying that anyone who witnessed the Twin Towers collapse must have a more valuable and refined opinion on the War in Iraq

Re: Jimmy Carter has died

#243

Post by BenFranklin100 »

readthenotes1 wrote: post #71
jmclnx wrote: post #20

Looking back, to me he was a much better president then people believed in the 80s. I believe if he got re-elected in 1980, the US would be in a much better place. One thing, it could be argued real work on Climate Change would have begun in 1981 as opposed to where we are now, which is just watching the average probably blowing past 3C in around 70 years from now. For his loss in 1980, I still blame Kennedy. RIP, he…

Look a little harder. The people living through the 1970s knew how bad he was and chose to put him out. He had bad staff, bad relations with the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress, and we got the Mayaguez, iran hostage, stagflation, and other troubles too many to list. He was a bad president, a good man, and a great ex-president.

“He was a bad president, a good man, and a great ex-president’ sums up Carter perfectly.

- Someone who lived through his administration.

Re: Jimmy Carter has died

#244

Post by zizee »

Terr_ wrote: post #187
bb88 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Three Mile Island and then Chernobyl kinda killed that dream. Both had bad actors trying to cover up the leak, and caused the nuclear scare to go even worse. France also has majority ownership of the nuclear plants, something that would never fly in the US (because Socialism!). Even when I was an intern at a power company, the leaders there saw the nuclear power plant the company owned as an "albatross around their n…

Over in Washington, the Hanford nuclear site is a big demonstration that we haven't really solved the holistic problems of nuclear waste. (Technical, financial, legal, political.) Even just trying to ship it elsewhere for processing gets blocked by other states and cities.

Most of the storage challenges are political, rather than engineering.

There is so much fear around this stuff, but it's usually based on the incorrect notion that radioactive wastes is both super dangerous, and lasts forever. But this is not true. The super dangerous stuff doesn't hang around that long, whilst the stuff that does isn't that dangerous.

The super-duper dangerous radioactive waste has a relatively short half-life, and volume. The vast amount of waste is fairly benign.

It's a solvable problem.

Re: Jimmy Carter has died

#245

Post by Naijoko »

linguae wrote: post #68
hylaride wrote: post #50

One could argue he set the stage for the 1980s economic boom by making short term sacrifices that cost him re-election. It was his administration that did market-oriented deregulation around airlines and trucking industries (meaning you didn't need to have a licence to ship goods across state lines and go through monopoly trucking companies to get your goods to market) as well as appointed Paul Volcker as Fed chair w…

For these reasons, Jimmy Carter is my third-favorite president of the 20th century, behind my favorite, Calvin Coolidge, and my second-favorite, Dwight Eisenhower. I am a very big fan of Paul Volcker and I’m glad Jimmy Carter nominated him as chair of the Fed. I wish Reagan kept Volcker as chair during Reagan’s second term.

How did Lyndon B Johnson not make your list? Beside the Vietname war he seems like the best President for innerpolitics.

Re: Jimmy Carter has died

#246

Post by CalChris »

consumer451 wrote: post #206
jmclnx wrote: post #20

Looking back, to me he was a much better president then people believed in the 80s. I believe if he got re-elected in 1980, the US would be in a much better place. One thing, it could be argued real work on Climate Change would have begun in 1981 as opposed to where we are now, which is just watching the average probably blowing past 3C in around 70 years from now. For his loss in 1980, I still blame Kennedy. RIP, he…

Blaming Kennedy is a take I hadn't heard before. I always gave the folks behind Reagan a lot of credit, as it is a historical fact that they conspired with a foreign power to hold the American hostages until after the election. > A Four-Decade Secret: One Man’s Story of Sabotaging Carter’s Re-election > A prominent Texas politician said he unwittingly took part in a 1980 tour of the Middle East with a clandestine age…

Blame John Anderson as well.

Re: Jimmy Carter has died

#247

Post by kortilla »

bdangubic wrote: post #230
lapcat wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For his loss in 1980, I still blame Kennedy. I still blame Carter for killing single-payer health care. Almost 50 years later, we're still stuffering from that. Consider the recent murder of the United executive, and the public glee over it. The public despises our current health care system. Of course Obama had the chance to remedy the situation but instead chose to give government subsidies to the very health ins…

The public despises our current health care system. if this is true, “the public” has a very funny way of showing that. you just mention a different health care system to 1/2 of this country and see where that takes you (will guess you will hear socialism during those rants…) :)

The public likes the immediate access to healthcare, they just don’t like it when the bill comes due.

That’s why you get complaints about healthcare wait times in Canada and the UK when people propose adopting fully nationalized systems like those.

Those complaints come from people with decent to good insurance that have never been bitten by a denial, which unfortunately is the majority of the employed population. People are very bad at voting for something that hurts them directly (lack of abundance of immediate healthcare) to solve an issue that hasn’t directly impacted them.

Re: Jimmy Carter has died

#248

Post by convolvatron »

llm_trw wrote: post #202
xattt wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the US would be in a much better place This would have been the case with Gore (2000) and Clinton (2016) too.

Gore was a bigger warmonger than Bush in the 2000 election. I don't see how we would have had a better outcome with him in power. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6nW2Uow-zk&pp=ygUeQnVzaCBub... In case you don't believe that.

nothing of the kind was said in that video

Re: Jimmy Carter has died

#249

Post by thomassmith65 »

rayiner wrote: post #99
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m really worried that we just elected a president who clearly fixates on short term gains rather than long term planning. Biden did not mess that up, even if he is a one term president like Carter. It is nice to have adults in control, even if that is increasingly politically untenable.

Restricting immigration is a long term investment in America’s future. The golden age Americans remember from the mid 20th century is partly the result of the 1924 immigration act, which cut the foreign born population from almost 15% to under 5% by the 1960s. As relevant here Carter proposed to make it unlawful to hire illegal immigrants and to impose penalties on companies that did so: https://library.cqpress.com/c…

Soon after that act passed, America experienced the worst economic depression in its history. That seems inconvenient for the argument.

Re: Jimmy Carter has died

#250

Post by kortilla »

bb88 wrote: post #181
acdha wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big one I wish he’d been able to do was getting a U.S. nuclear network going like France has. It’d be nice to have now but they’re so slow to build that a 40 year head start would’ve been invaluable.

Three Mile Island and then Chernobyl kinda killed that dream. Both had bad actors trying to cover up the leak, and caused the nuclear scare to go even worse. France also has majority ownership of the nuclear plants, something that would never fly in the US (because Socialism!). Even when I was an intern at a power company, the leaders there saw the nuclear power plant the company owned as an "albatross around their n…

> France also has majority ownership of the nuclear plants, something that would never fly in the US (because Socialism!).

Socialism is a red herring. 3 mile island and Chernobyl showed that state owned and private owned can equally be fucked up.

France owning their plants is completely orthogonal to safety.

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