Oprah 2020?

We’ll have to agree to disagree then. And I want to be clear, I was in no way comparing Trump and Reagan. Although I hate them both. The AIDS issue is more complex than that one paragraph. Between him and Nancy there was no attempt to speak on the subject at all. He didn’t have to cure it. He needed only to speak about it. To show solidarity with the victims. To be the fucking leader of the fucking country. But at that time the victims were all gay men, so that wasn’t going to happen.

I know Reagan is condemned in many published works for being slow to speak out on aids, and he was pretty much in denial about it, even after his friend Rock Hudson died of from aids.

Now this is from wiki so I offer it with a grain of salt…

Social action groups such as ACT UP worked to raise awareness of the AIDS problem. Because of ACT UP, in 1987, Reagan responded by appointing the Watkins Commission on AIDS, which was succeeded by a permanent advisory council.

Supporters of Reagan past and present have pointed out the fact that he declared in the aforementioned September 1985 press conference that he wanted from Congress massive government research effort against AIDS similar to one President Nixon had overseen against cancer. Reagan said, “It’s been one of the top priorities with us, and over the last 4 years, and including what we have in the budget for '86, it will amount to over a half a billion dollars that we have provided for research on AIDS in addition to what I’m sure other medical groups are doing.” He also remarked, “Yes, there’s no question about the seriousness of this and the need to find an answer.” Annual AIDS related funding was $44 million in 1983, 2 years after he took office, and was $1.6 billion in 1988, an increase of over 1000 percent.

There is no indication that increase is government funding but I assume some of it is. Now I am not a big Reagan fan, but I do think most of society was very slow to react in the early aids days.

Leaving aside her total lack of political experience, that article should disqualify her all by itself. You can bet the Repubs would suddenly become ardent supporters of evidence-based medicine.

Funny thing are all those complaints against her look more like a savvy politician able to see the big picture (although in this case the big picture were popularity, cultural momentum and ratings).

Unfortunately there is a strain of quackery that appeals to and is directed towards women that Oprah helped enable, essentially; but it neither started nor ended with her. Right now the hot thing is some kind new-astrology kick where teenage and young women can discern their own mercurial emotions through the lens of planets going into third houses and whatnot and validate each other’s feelings about this on social media. I’d actually suspect she’s smarter about that junk than she lets on.

So, she’s aware she’s pushing bullshit to her audience, she just doesn’t care? I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be a point in her favor, but it sounds pretty cynical, frankly.

The thing is, and this may skew my perception, that I knew people who were sick and dying from it. I had friends whose family members died from it. I had friends who wrote for gay publications like Blue Boy magazine who were devastated by it. The gay press at the time knew what was going on as early as 1978. Everything done by the government at that time was way behind them. It was a gay thing. And so not important. That ‘society’ as a whole was slow to react is not a positive thing. And that the actual government did nothing, even though I think they must have known more; at least more than gay magazine and porno stars, says a lot. In my opinion it goes to the top. Ron and Nancy were both the average homophobes of the time. Their silence spoke volumes to the people who knew.

Why are we talking about “Chicago Welfare Queen”, race baiting racist president Reagan in Oprah’s topic?

I’m also pretty sure Martha Stewart so loved taking her shoes off and putting on an apron and cooking for her husband before he got home that she just accidentally made a career out of it.

She was a talk show host. That’s a pretty low bar there, even being one of the “good” ones. I don’t really expect her to be a policy wonk, even if she encouraged people to read (indeed, she might be in part responsible for women vastly outnumbering men as readers today; over 70% of fiction and traditional literature is purchased by women now). She was on for decades. I’m also sure that in decades worth of talk shows she said one or another thing that you can pull apart and jeer at. She knew her audience, knew/knows they like to be emotionally validated even if or when it’s not logical.

All that being said, i’d have to see who she picked for potential staff. If she actually picked Dr. Oz to be … anything… in her administration, then, yea, egg on my face. I would strongly suspect she would not, but who could say? It’s all speculation right now. If she were to actually declare let’s see what kind of people she surrounds herself with first.

Perhaps it has something to do with a list of Great Presidents upthread. Where people didn’t understand what ‘great’ meant. Or even President, for that matter. There were a lot of comparisons where Reagan was considered for a ‘great’ President. Even when we know that he was the beginning of the death of a serious Republican party. What with his wife planning things around her astrologer’s charts. And the fact that he seemed to be a figurehead for the worst people in his party. Maybe the fact that he was a glad handing figurehead that had no clue that he was a scumbag lead around on a leash by the worst people that existed at the time.

Maybe because a lot of Republicans see him as a sort of Conservative Jesus when he was just as stupid as Trump but held up more strongly by his puppeteers.

Because she was a TV star and he was a movie star, I presume. Wait, but he was also governor of California. Wait, are we talking about Swartzenegger?

Sad that you have to be a ‘policy wonk’ as opposed to an educated citizen to call out shit-science, but I guess that’s where we are. See also: Gwyneth Paltrow

Putting eggs in your vagina is totally legit science.

How dare you say otherwise, sir.

How dare you.

I suppose strictly speaking you can just lump a ton of stuff under ‘placebo effect’ and call it a day…

I guess Oprah learned from the best!

Apparently, the new thing is to shoot coffee up your butt.

Well perhaps it’s time we allow Darwin Award nominees to claim their prize.

Wasn’t there something about honeycombs or bees in your business a while back?

Look, Gwenyth, you do you and if that’s some weird shit, it’s between you and the ER doc. Maybe chill on the telling fellow idiots to do obviously stupid shit though, thanks.

Someone’s not woke.

But then they won’t buy her vagina eggs.

This makes me think of that alien egg laying fetish thing, that I’m not going to google for the article about because I’m at work.