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> I hold out very little hope for any of this to change, but we as citizens need to keep resisting anyways. Gut some government agencies, cut the budgets, stop the revolving door of lobbyists.

I don't like this idea but I respect it. I might even support it. Problem is that evil people will use this sentiment and turn it around to say they want to cut taxes so these agencies have less money to spend which leads to smaller government. Evil people like Ronald Reagan have argued that with starve the beast and we know how that worked. Please do not support tax cuts in an effort to gut government agencies. If you want to gut government agencies, do so directly.

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Partisan flamebait takes threads on partisan tangents. Please don't do that here.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13632981 and marked it off-topic.

"evil people like Ronald Reagan"

I guess it's true that every opinion exists, and they just need a person to have them.

You mustn't spend much time on US conspiracy forums

I might have a nonstandard interpretation of the word "mustn't". I have generally assumed that it means roughly "oughtn't" or "shouldn't", instead of fitting in any place where "must not" would go.

I don't know if my understanding is the common one, or if I just made up a rule by mistake that other people don't use.

Your understanding is the same as mine, and I had to read that sentence a couple times to figure out that "musn't" should really read "must not". So far as I know, "musn't" only means "should not" and is not a general replacement for all instances of "must not".

My intuition is different to yours: "mustn't" made perfectly good sense to me in that context. Just a data point.

The usage is correct, but very rare; I observe it more among non-native speakers, who generally are less intimately familiar with the farrago of special cases that constitutes so much of English usage rules in practice, including that which has "mustn't" by convention only used in the imperative mood.

What is all this? As a native English speaker, I view mustn't as a contraction of must not; other examples include cannot and can't, should not and shouldn't, and do not and don't.

So the usage of mustn't should be exactly the usage of must not because that's literally what it is.

"You must not spend time on US conspiracy forums."

"Must" is an imperative or a command. "Should" is a recommendation.

I mean you're not wrong in the narrowly denotative sense, but there's a distinction to be made between the way words are defined and the way they're conventionally used. I'm describing my observation of the latter. (So are you! But you observe differently.)

Long time after the fact, but this was my understanding of contractions also, and was my intended usage of "mustn't". English is a crazy language, especially when we all seem to have been shipped with different compilers.

I think I am unusually permissive about where I allow contractions. I'm always tickled by that E E Cummings poem that just barely pulls off a rhyme with "year" and "appear" in its last line, "...and April's where we're.".

In this case one suspects OP wanted both meanings...

Not that witty :P

I doubt he was evil, but his economic policies did nothing to help the American people.

Ever heard of Nicaragua and Iran Contra?

Even if it can be largely attributed the Bush Sr, Reagan was still President and ultimately responsible.

The strikers banned for life?

Every movement produces its leaders.

The bubble has to be very small and strong for that opinion to seem fringe.

Here's one on the front page https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13635593

> Reagan, just eight months into his first term in office, treated the strike as a challenge to his authority. By his deadline, August 5th, only thirteen hundred striking controllers had returned to their posts. The President made good on his threat, fired the truant eleven thousand three hundred and forty-five controllers, and banned them from federal employment for life. (Bill Clinton lifted the ban in 1993.)

Re https://archive.fo/FsZ01

To use the words of Marco Rubio as he talked about Obama, Reagan knew exactly what he was doing. He was not a well meaning idiot. There's been easy to much astroturfing and "correcting the records". I'm ashamed that people honestly believe he is one of our best presidents. I hope, with time, truth will prevail.

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