ronald reagan just died

BD, you make a good debater and a simple man like myself could never keep up with arguemnts. But I think your political beliefs have clouded your view of history.

A great article here... excerpted below. http://www.thebody.com/encyclo/presidency.html

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For Reagan, AIDS presented a number of potentially serious political risks. As a presidential candidate, Reagan promised to eliminate the role of the federal government in the limited American welfare state, as well as to raise questions of morality and family in social policy. When AIDS was first reported in 1981, Reagan had recently assumed office and had begun to address the conservative agenda by slashing social programs and cutting taxes and by embracing conservative moral principles. As a result, Reagan never mentioned AIDS publicly until 1987. Most observers contend that AIDS research and public education were not funded adequately in the early years of the epidemic, at a time when research and public education could have saved lives.

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This larger conservative climate enabled the Reagan administration's indifference toward AIDS. The administration undercut federal efforts to confront AIDS in a meaningful way by refusing to spend the money Congress allocated for AIDS research. In the critical years of 1984 and 1985, according to his White House physician, Reagan thought of AIDS as though "it was measles and it would go away." Reagan's biographer Lou Cannon claims that the president's response to AIDS was "halting and ineffective." It took Rock Hudson's death from AIDS in 1985 to prompt Reagan to change his personal views, although members of his administration were still openly hostile to more aggressive government funding of research and public education. Six years after the onset of the epidemic, Reagan finally mentioned the word "AIDS" publicly at the Third International AIDS Conference held in Washington, D.C. Reagan's only concrete proposal at this time was widespread routine testing.

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Reagan and his close political advisers also successfully prevented his surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, from discussing AIDS publicly until Reagan's second term. Congress mandates that the surgeon general's chief responsibility is to promote the health of the American people and to inform the public about the prevention of disease. In the Reagan administration, however, the surgeon general's central role was to promote the administration's conservative social agenda, especially pro-life and family issues.

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Care to guess how many lives could have been changed and/or saved? It took the administration nearly 5 YEARS to do anything substantial!!!?

hehe XStr8 I dunno if I'm all that great a debater. Fitting for a Reagan thread, my debate teacher once told me "You have this amazing ability to ever so eloquently and convincingly say absolutely nothing at all." lol. That's a good article, XStr8. I'd read it for the first time awhile back.
Although I don't fully agree with all of what its author says, it does bring up some good points, especially in talking about the politics of the situation rather than trying to suggest the policies of the administration came about through some kind of personal hate or disdain for homosexuals.

There's no denying, as I mentioned a couple pages earlier in this thread, that politics go in to every decision a president makes. We set ourselves up to be nothing but bitter if we ignore that reality. Political concerns. Political decisions. Public opinion. Advisors. Congress. Constituent support. It's from all of that policies are written and implemented. Again, the context of the times and circumstances of the situation have to be looked at in trying to understand why people did, what they did and when. It's neglectful to apply modern day context to the events of 20 odd years ago and wonder why we can't make sense of it all.

I think the most telling phrase in that article is where Reagan is quoted as saying he believed AIDS was like the measles and would go away soon enough.
He wasn't alone in that belief. And he can't have been expected to have a revelation-inducing understanding of the disease or its implications when no such understanding was possessed by anyone at the time.

As far as my personal politics, I consider myself to be quite passionately liberal with respect to social issues and am not the least bit fond of the right wing conservative movement. I appreciate lower taxes just as much as the next guy and enjoy the idea of smaller government, but I haven't sold my soul for a bigger refund check come April. So I don't think my politics really have much, if anything, to do with my view of Reagan.
I'm a young gay liberal male who attended an almost revolutionary liberal arts college, votes Democrat, and has been politically active for causes termed "liberal" and "left wing" for a long, long time.

My defense of Reagan doesn't come from the need to rationalize some existing political ideology because the political ideology rationalized through that defense doesn't even exist in the first place!

I could go back in time and condemn our Founding Fathers for being elitist slave owners. I could condemn FDR for sitting idly by while war waged around us and not taking action to defend freedom and liberty until we had no choice but to. But I don't see much point or value in going about condemning those of the past armed with the knowledge gained through years since passed.

Just because we rightfully call "hero" those that are willing to break the mold, challenge the status quo and revolutionize the world in which we live doesn't mean that everyone else is a villian.

I think we have every right to wish Reagan had done more to address the spread of AIDS in those early days. And the animosity some have towards him is an understandable emotion. But I think it's a bit much to have expected the world and the President to have shared some of our perceptions of events as they unfolded.

When I sit back and look at and study this country and the world as they were before he was president and as they were after he left office and see the degree to which he touched so many people, I fail to see why his failure to act in the early years of the AIDS epidemic is reason enough to rule his entire presidency a failure or his entire life a shameful one. I as much as the next man would love a perfect president but quite frankly don't expect one anytime soon or blame those of the past for not achieving that status.
And when looking at his accomplishments compared to his failings and the degree to which such an overwhelming number of both Americans, Europeans, newly fee Eastern Europeans and others adored the man, I see no reason why his death shouldn't be mourned and his life should be celebrated.

Applying fallicy methodology is not very impressive. In fact, the only people who use that line of argument are attorney's who know their clients are guilty and can't present a factual argument so they must rely on systematically picking their opponent apart by arguing:

if (a) is this, then (b) must/must not be this. It's basically a technique, an exercise, that can be applied to any statement. It's used to sway opinion for a guilty/not guilty verdict but it speaks nothing about right or wrong, ethical or unethical, and does not go to the essence, the heart of the matter.

I was surprised to see your opinion on Ronald Reagan and for me, the reward, the (heart of the matter) was "where is this guy coming from". It was not to be in competition to win an argument. In fact, I thought to myself "this is the viewpoint of a child", my instincts were correct. Your viewpoint is the viewpoint of a child. Just as valid any 30 year old of that time period, but very unquestioned and naive. But then I thought, how could you question it without first hand knowledge as an adult ?

So if you won your argument, that's great because I got what I needed. I needed a context for your words. I needed to find the framework of your thoughts and I accomplished that. I have no doubt that you will try to come up with some sort of fallicy argument to invalidate what I've just said. But that's ok, because when you become fascinated by the process of questioning the world around you, that's when your intellectual curiosity takes you to whole new level of thinking without the rigid boundaries of semantics like fallacy methodology. I believe that's what your teacher was getting at.

lol see, you're doing it again! Can't present a real argument so instead you try and mold the conditions of the discussion itself to leave no one but yourself the ability to be right.

Can't attempt to dispute the things I said an so instead go off on some tangent about how the logical fallacies you tried to use to cover yourself are, themselves, above criticism.

For someone who tries to look like the big, bad adult here, you sure can't present an argument like one.

You're attempting to dictate on account of age alone your correctness here. Say not that someone's points are invalid on account of their own merit, but that their age alone makes their entire argument unworthy of consideration.

That's a copout ploy, plain and simple. And then, when called on it, you use the exact same fallacy to defend that! If anything, you're good for a laugh. I'll give you that much.