Donald J Trump

99 or 92 :who cares ? it is the same .

 

And in november 1933 ?

 

Actually he would probably be about the worst for handling the militant Islamist. His rhetoric plays right into their hands.

 

Trump is sort of a Neo Con or at least he's giving the impression he is at this point. He's already pretty clearly shown though that his main ideology is Narcissism.

I notice that the reoccurring violence and hate speech directed towards those who don't support him isn't gaining a whole lot of attention either while his supporters are very incensed at any anti Trump demonstrations.

 

Good point, yet the question is: Are nice words alone good enough to defeat the militants or even to make them better? I doubt.

 

For the liberals ,one can use only nice words,because the ISIS scum will listen to nice words .

The truth is that it is killing time :a big clean-up is needed;if this had been done , the victims of Paris and San Bernardino would still live .

 

I agree that more than "nice words" are required. That doesn't mean that you have to fall into the traps tat Daesh sets. The trick is to help the locals destroy the terrorist. That's really the only way they will be destroyed. Trump would turn whole countries (or at least the majority of their citizens) against us and drive many into the hands of the extremist. IMO our current administration could have done a much better job than it has but that doesn't mean that we couldn't do worse and Trump again IMO clearly illustrates how we could do so.

 

Cruz is currently winning in the 'pulled a face most like a Blobfish' stakes.
As meaningful a measure as any...

 

The problem is that rhetoric assumes the other side is thinking similarly to you. The Reagan scared the hell out of the Soviets and it wasn't a good thing. Their paranoid thinking was problematic. Reagan never bothered to listen to his own team's analysis of Soviet thinking. Yes, it seemed to turn out alright (maybe not for Soviet citizens in general), but in some ways WW3 was closer to reality than over Kennedy/Cuba.

 

Actually Reagan scaring the Soviets was very much a good thing. It was the straw that broke the back of the USSR. and it was good for Soviet citizens in general. Not sure I've ever seen any evidence that we were at all close to WW3 during his presidency either.

 

I think bombers were scrambled on his verbal gaffe...

 

We were and in my travels, I got to know some people who knew. We can agree to disagree about Reagan. The Soviets were going to collapse regardless of Reagan. Much to the chagrin of many people, it was actually Carter who should get the credit. The grain embargo had a very serious impact on citizen attitudes and unrest. Caused real problems in a culture highly dependent on the meat industry. He really did shove things in their face.

I know a lady who was on the Soviet 400 meter team for the 80 Olympics.

Reagan gets way too much credit for the Soviets. They were a paranoid bunch of thugs (the Soviets). When the computer glitch happened in 83, they really thought Reagan was putting things in motion and they believed he'd do it and was doing it. The way the Soviets collapsed created a very dangerous situation that easily could have had a different end.

What happened to the everyday Soviet citizens the way it went down was a travesty. In the end the "Soviets Leaders" became businessmen a.k.a gangsters. Not sure we are any safer. What has occurred in smaller cities and rural areas is really sad. No hope.

We like cowboy John Wayne stories.

Btw, I voted for Reagan each time.

 

I am not convinced that Reagan was mentally competent at the end of his presidency or even earlier. However he did have a good set of advisors and listened to them. The Soviet system was in trouble and that was predicted a decade earlier with considerable accuracy but that doesn't mean that a collapse was inevitable or that the collapse would be as peaceful as it was. Much of the credit for that goes to the Soviet leaders at the time by the way. There were certainly incident but they happened throughout the cold war. I remain unconvinced that the risk of WW3 was higher at any point in Reagan's presidency than it was during the Cuban missile crisis by the way. "knowing people who knew" is not convincing.

As for post collapse it could indeed have been better for the citizens of the former USSR but it could also have been worse and IMO they are better off for the most parts than they were under the USSR. I had hopes that things would be better yet and indeed in the immediate aftermath thought they would be.

 

Yes and no : US under Reagan increaser its military spending, but this did not cause the collaps of the SU ,neither did the actions of Carter ; the collaps of the SU happened independently of what did US ,because the SU was not forced to increase its military spending : a NATO attack was out of the question .

The reason was simple : SU tried to modernize its economy,and the leaders noticed that this could only happen if the social-ecomical structure was changed thoroughly,which means if communism was abandoned :this was the reason of the implosion . The leaders of the SU were pragmatici and almost all did no longer believe in communism . They gave up .It was impossible to modernize communist society .

 

About 1983, just read. It's there. Your opinion on it's own for sure is not convincing.

For the 1% it is better. Most of them were managers who were Party thugs who became thieves and stole public/collective assets. Most of the rest it is far worse. Just look at longevity tables and population declines. Get out of Moscow and Kyiv and look around. It's very apparent. If you take the time to look or travel there it isn't hard to find. Party corruption for the most part was predictable. They current situation is not. I've been on a number of USAID projects and work related business that gets me off the beaten path. Then again my opinion on it's own is no more valid that yours.

 

An interesting mix of straw men and manipulation of the English language to try and force words to mean what you want them to in order fit your world view. You did get a few point right or at least close this time though.

 

My comment wasn't that Carter brought down the S U. If Reagan gets credit, then Carter should get more...

The leaders of the SU were not pragmatic. It just happened. It died. Most of the Party people were not ardent communists anymore than opportunistic and often thugs. That was apparent in the aftermath of how it went down, including the Gas Princess and her husband turned "the voice of freedom"...not.

Back to Trump and my original premise, a leader has to be smart and understand the enemy within the enemy world view.

Most Americans quite wrongly think Muslims hate us because of our "freedoms" and intimidation will win the day. That premise is so wrong in so many ways.

 

To greater or lesser extent all of the post war presidents had some hand in the eventual fall of the USSR. The strategy to contain and keep the Cold War "cold" perhaps having the greatest impact. Gorbachev and his ilk were pragmatic in at least some senses of the word. They saw the system falling apart around them and rather than destroying everything took a path that was relatively positive for all concerned. It is really too bad that things didn't continue to improve and the rise of the oligarchs and corruption was not avoided but that's another matter.

 

Gorby is seen as a reformer by some and an inept politician who couldn't make decisions by others. The corruption was always there. The original oligarch's were the Party officials. They saw a way to get filthy rich and they did it.

The system was going to fall even if the West left them alone.

There was never really an improvement. After the collaps of the USSR, there was slow motion collapse followed by financial collapse I think about 1998.

Could you imagine waking up one day and there are no police. No services? Only chaos?

What surprised me in my travels was the animosity towards the west for not stepping in. Just hope our new President is up to more than cowboy rhetoric to World problems.

Though wiki, this is a pretty good narrative: the economy sank into deep depression by the mid-1990s, was hit further by the financial crash of 1998, and then began to recover in 1999–2000. According to Russian government statistics, the economic decline was far more severe than the Great Depression was in the United States in terms of Gross Domestic Product.[5] It is about half as severe as the catastrophic drop borne out of the consequence of World War I, the fall of Tsarism, and the Russian Civil War.
Following the economic collapse of the early 1990s, Russia suffered from a sharp increase in the rates of poverty and economic inequality.[6] Estimates by the World Bank based on both macroeconomic data and surveys of household incomes and expenditures indicate that whereas 1.5% of the population was living in poverty (defined as income below the equivalent of $25 per month) in the late Soviet era, by mid-1993 between 39% and 49% of the population was living in poverty.[7] Per capita incomes fell by another 15% by 1998, according to government figures.
Public health indicators show a dramatic corresponding decline. In 1999, total population fell by about three-quarters of a million people. Meanwhile, life expectancy dropped for men from 64 years in 1990 to 57 years by 1994, while women's dropped from 74 to about 71. Both health factors and a sharp increase in deaths of the youth demographic from unnatural causes (such as murders, suicides and accidents) have significantly contributed to this trend. As of 2009, life expectancy is higher than at the nadir of the crisis in 1994, yet it still remains below the 1990 level, with men living to 59, and with women's life expectancy decreasing to 70.[8]
Alcohol-related deaths skyrocketed 60% in the 1990s. Deaths from infectious and parasitic diseases shot up 100%[citation needed], mainly because medicines were no longer affordable to the poor.
While Russia no longer suffered from the supply shortages of consumer goods that were so characteristic of the 1980s USSR (see Consumer goods in the Soviet Union), this was not only related to the opening of the Russian market to imports in the early 1990s but also to the impoverishment of the Russian people in the 1980s. Russians on fixed incomes (the vast majority of the workforce) saw their purchasing power drastically reduced, so while the stores might have been well stocked in the Yeltsin era, workers could now afford to buy little, if anything.

 

Well all systems collapse eventually but without the active opposition by the west the USSR would likely have lasted considerably longer and it might have morphed into something even more stable. Whether that was good or not is another matter.

From what I've read the corruption was always there although again my impression is things got better for a bit. The people have even today more freedom than they had under the Soviets and that's a plus in my book. Shortly after the fall of the USSR things seamed to be improving in that regard and even through the first of Putin's terms that seamed to be the case.

The question of whether we should have stepped in and how is a good one. It probably made sense to do so in some regards but how well received would it have been and would the oligarchs just used it to strengthen their position as some have elsewhere or could we have used it to weaken them? The Warsaw Pact countries seam to have done much better in that regard than the former Soviet ones, some of which are much worse off than Russia.